by MC Lee
IN HISTORY class I’d pretty much zoned out while Ms. Roberts droned on about the Revolutionary War. I was tired after following Dad to the front door about a million times the night before and turning him around to lead him back to bed, and I was only half awake when the door opened and a new student walked in.
Every head turned, and I wasn’t the only one doing a double take. Most of the girls sat up straighter in their seats, and more than one started smoothing down her hair or tucking strands behind her ears. My hand twitched, wanting to tug my messy mop into order, but I managed to stop myself.
Once the rich kids started coming to our school, we’d had a lot of good-looking faces turn up in our classrooms. They were all well-groomed and stylishly dressed, with perfect, even white teeth and hair that never looked like a haystack, with flawless skin and toned physiques that put our fast-food bodies to shame.
But none of the newbies walking through our classroom door compared to this boy.
Ms. Roberts glanced at the note he handed her, and then she turned to face the class. “Please welcome Noah Davis.”
There was a chorus of voices echoing “Hi, Noah,” and he gave a half wave and a smile that visibly melted some of the girls. Noah Davis was tall and broad-shouldered, with a body clearly toned by exercise and sports. His perfectly proportioned face boasted sculpted cheekbones, soft lips, and the most beautiful hazel eyes I’d ever seen, framed by long, black lashes. It was obvious he came from north of the tracks, not only because his warm brown skin seemed to glow with vitality but also because he wore the markings of his tribe—subtly expensive clothes, a gold stud glinting in one ear, and an air of easy confidence no townie could ever hope to pull off. When he reached up to rub a hand absently over his short-cropped hair, the gesture was so ordinary… and yet somehow so hot that I felt my groin tighten in response.
Ms. Roberts craned her neck, looking for an empty spot, and my pulse jumped as her eyes fell on me. She paused for just a fraction of a second before saying, “Emmett, could you take Noah under your wing for the next couple of days?”
I couldn’t even speak. I just nodded dumbly and ignored all the wistful sighs from the rest of my classmates.
Noah walked to the back of the classroom and stuck out his hand when he reached me. I don’t think I’d ever shaken hands with a kid my own age before, but I slid my palm into his, feeling a shock of warm skin.
“You might not want to get too close, Noah. You never know what you’ll catch.”
I wasn’t sure whether the disembodied whisper was referring to my poverty, the fact I’d been temporarily struck dumb, or my newly minted weirdness. Of course, it could also have been referring to the fact that most of the kids knew I was gay.
Noah looked down at me, and his hazel eyes swept me from head to foot. I held my breath, trying to figure out which of those things he’d see in me and how many of them he would despise. But he just smiled and slid into the seat next to me.
“I think I’ll take my chances,” he said softly.
My breath hissed out between my teeth, and I turned my head quickly to the front of the class so Noah wouldn’t see the gratitude I knew was written all over my face.
All through history class, I was aware of his presence beside me—the way he drummed his pencil lightly on the desk, the notes he made in his binder in big, bold letters, the words he underlined or circled, the way he smelled of aftershave and wintergreen toothpaste.
Twice he caught me watching, and a slow smile spread across his face as I blushed to the roots of my hair. He didn’t seem to mind. He was probably used to people practically drooling whenever he was around. I didn’t know if it made me feel better or worse to be just like every dumbstruck moron he’d ever encountered.
At the end of class, he turned his head toward me. I thought he was going to tell me to back the hell off, but instead his smile grew impossibly wider.
“My schedule tells me I’m in geography next. Any chance you’re there too?”
Despite the flaming burn of my reddened cheeks and the sudden hoarseness in my throat, I was able to croak out a yes. Noah waited patiently for me to get it together and offer to show him where the classroom was, but by the time I’d pulled my head out of my ass, Vanessa Bynes, resident senior year goddess, had materialized.
“Geography. Follow me, Noah.”
Nobody who received an invitation from Vanessa ever refused, and Noah was no exception. He gave me what I decided to interpret as a rueful look, though he might just as easily be wondering if I was a mental patient out on day release, and then he was gone, trailing Vanessa like the tail behind a bright, rich comet.
I didn’t bother to kick myself for the missed opportunity. People like Noah Davis were handcrafted by God for people like Vanessa Bynes. They never had and never would be interested in me.
I HAD been tasked with showing Noah the ropes at Whitmore High, but after that first history class, I hardly got a look in.
We had most of our classes together, but every time I started to offer to show him where to go next, some other kid would barge over and take the words right out of my mouth. The football team, the rich kids, even some of the townies muscled their way in and whisked Noah away before I could stammer out an invitation.
He was gracious to everybody, and it was obvious he was used to being treated like a Greek god slumming with the mere mortals. A couple of times I thought I caught him sliding a glance my way, but it was hard to tell if it was real or just wishful thinking.
At the end of the day, as I walked toward the bike racks, I saw him strolling in the direction of the car park, surrounded by a ready-made entourage. The rich kids always found each other quickly, as though they all had an inbuilt homing device that only locked on people with bursting bank accounts and ritzy cars in the driveway of their mansions. A few minutes later, a black Jeep pulled up beside me, just as I’d wrestled my brother’s battered bike onto the road.
“Can I give you a ride home? You can throw your bike in the back if you want.”
Noah was sitting behind the wheel, looking over the rim of the sunglasses that were sliding halfway down his nose, a faint smile on his handsome face.
I took a moment to mentally create the scene, Noah sliding his expensive car out of the parking lot and happily driving through the clean, neat streets that surrounded the school. Instead of turning right and rejoining his own flock, he’d turn left into The Junction, wincing as he bounced over the tracks. As he drove farther into my part of town, he’d frown at the changing scenery—the boarded-up buildings, the empty stores, the street corners where the unemployed and the illegally employed and the just plain shady hung out.
He’d make a right onto South Street and pull up outside my house. As I struggled to haul my bike out of his pristine vehicle without scratching the bodywork or tearing the seats, he’d have time to look my place over: the sagging porch with the broken railings, tattered shutters hanging off the windows, paint peeling off every surface, scrub grass and weeds that hadn’t been tended for months. I winced just thinking about the place, and my face burned with embarrassment.
“Another time, maybe,” I said, knowing “another time” would never come, not once Noah settled into his rightful place with the rich kids and forgot I even existed. “But thanks,” I mumbled.
He shrugged. “Anytime.”
I watched as he drove off, my pulse racing and my body flushed with longing—something I hadn’t felt in forever. I tried not to think it was anything special, which was dispiritingly confirmed when the Jeep stopped a couple of hundred yards away and Noah made the same offer to Neil Hamilton.
Hamilton lived two blocks south of me, on a street so run-down that even I avoided it, but he wasn’t stupid enough to refuse the ride. As I cycled past and caught Noah’s eye, my heart warmed by his sweetly blinding smile, I wished for the first time in months that I hadn’t withdrawn so completely from my life and turned into such a totally isolated moron.
Ch
apter Four
“CAN’T YOU take a joke, you queer?”
John Foster’s words weren’t directed at me, but I still felt them slicing through me like a knife.
Tom Delaney, the unfortunate recipient of Foster’s harassment, stood as tall and proud as he could, but it was obvious he was on the verge of crumbling. Ironically, he wasn’t a pansy or a fruit or a fag, or any of the other names Foster was dragging out of the cesspool of his brain. Actually, he was a pretty sweet, ineffectual dude who tried to mind his own business, and he’d successfully flown under the radar for a long time. But Foster liked to dole out misery wherever he could, and it was just Tom’s turn.
“Don’t be an asshole, Foster,” Tom said. His chin was held high, but it was already trembling. Tom’s friends had slunk away one by one until he was standing by himself in front of his open locker, with a used condom hanging inside the doorway, no doubt courtesy of John T. Foster and his warped sense of humor.
“What did you call me?” Foster growled. He took a menacing step forward, and Delaney flinched.
This shit had gone on long enough.
“He called you an asshole,” I said.
Foster turned toward me as I crossed the floor to stand beside Tom. He wasn’t my friend—I doubt he knew me from a hole in the ground—but Foster was a bully and a douche, and this had to stop.
“He called you an asshole. And I’m calling you a fuckwit. You have any more questions?”
For a minute Foster looked like a cartoon character. His face flushed deep red, and I could almost see steam coming out of his ears. His friends, Owen Jones and Oliver Tipton, who were silently backing him up, exchanged nervous glances.
“Fuck off out of this, Callaghan,” Foster said. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“It really doesn’t,” I agreed amiably. “But then, you have no business being such a disgusting pig.”
Foster’s backup boy band muttered to each other, but they began to edge away. They’d come up against the unwritten rule—you don’t fuck with your crew. Even though I no longer played on the football team, I’d once been one of them, and that was all but sacred.
“Come on, man, leave it,” Owen urged.
Tipton nodded a silent acknowledgment in my direction and took a deliberate step back, saying, “We’re out.”
A frown creased Foster’s brow, and he shook his head, but his face lost its belligerent sneer, and the aggressive tension drained out of his body.
“One day, I’m gonna kick your ass,” he mumbled.
“Sure. One day,” I said, still feeling pretty untroubled. The day I couldn’t take down a pussy like John Foster was the day hell froze over.
Foster spun around and walked off with his buddies, muttering something unflattering under his breath.
I turned to face Tom, but anything I planned to say died on my lips when he hissed, “Fuck off, Callaghan. I don’t need your help, you stupid piece of shit.”
He slammed his locker door and walked away, muttering the same insult Foster had, though it sounded a little more vicious coming out of his mouth.
“Are the kids here always so ungrateful?”
I turned toward the curious voice, my eyes widening at the sight of Noah Davis. He was leaning up against his locker with a ringside seat to my humiliation.
I shrugged. “I’m not exactly knight in shining armor material.”
“I don’t know. Taking on three dudes by yourself was a ballsy thing to do.” He inclined his head. “You’re either very brave or very stupid.”
“Flat-out stupid gets my vote,” I said. “Foster will be on my ass the rest of the day.”
“Sounds uncomfortable,” Noah deadpanned. “What did you ever do to him?”
I grimaced. “Who knows? Maybe he doesn’t like the color of my hair. It doesn’t take much to get on his wrong side.”
Noah straightened. “Let me know if you need any help next time. I hate bullies.”
I didn’t bother telling Noah that Foster was one of his people, a kid from north of the tracks, which meant no matter what he did, he would inevitably get a free pass. Noah was going to figure that out for himself soon enough.
I turned toward my locker. As Noah passed behind me he said, “For the record, the color of your hair is just fine.”
I didn’t turn back around, but I didn’t try to stifle the smile that twitched my lips.
NOAH DAVIS didn’t wear jeans with holes in them, artful or otherwise. He wore chinos or baggy khakis with bright polo shirts or stylish tees. His hair was buzzed short, his skin smooth and unblemished, his combat boots were unscuffed and well heeled. Everything about him screamed rich kid; everything except his attitude.
He was friendly to everybody—whichever side of the tracks they came from. His smile was permanent and inclusive, he talked to anybody who crossed his path and listened without judgment to everything they had to say. He was like a magnet, a lodestar, a planet around which the rest of us orbited. It didn’t take long for every boy and girl at Whitmore High to be just a little in love with him, from the straightest jock to the most desirable “it” girl, to me—once just plain Emmett Callaghan, now the kid who made the rest of the world feel uneasy and awkward.
Noah Davis was comfortable being himself when the rest of us worried about whether we looked cool or fit in or had friends or would ever be able to escape this shithole. In a school that was 50 percent entitled, confident, self-possessed kids who knew they ruled the world, and 50 percent scrappy, aggressive, spirited kids who pretended they didn’t give a damn, Noah navigated his way calmly and capably, admired by all.
So, four weeks after he started school, even in the deepest, most private, most unexamined place in my soul, I pretended I wasn’t hanging around the drafty hallway outside his homeroom hoping to catch a glimpse of him. The Noah Davises of the world were not for me, yet here I was, lying in wait. And it wasn’t the first time I’d stalked him either.
I’d watched him at every gym class and football team practice, aware that half the senior year’s eyes followed him as he sailed effortlessly through workouts and trials. His ripped body literally made some of the girls gasp, and I felt my own breath catch in my throat more than once while watching him. And in every class we shared, I found it impossible not to slide furtive glances his way, fascinated by his every expression and endlessly wondering whether the smiles he sent my way were real or imagined.
Still, this was way past crazy, even for me. I loitered for fifteen whole minutes, walking to the end of the corridor, then turning and trudging back. The classroom door opened once, and I held my breath, my heart fluttering wildly against my rib cage, but it was only one of the football team with a bathroom pass. He cast a look in my direction, saw who it was, and hurried on his way without speaking.
I resumed my pacing until finally the door opened and everybody came pouring out. Noah was almost the last person out of the classroom, and he was deep in conversation with one of the rich kids as he walked out. My heart turned over at the sight of him, and I stopped right in the middle of a step, coming to a complete halt. Though I’d waited all that time, I found I didn’t have the nerve to actually say anything to him.
I thought he was going to blow right past me, until his head turned and he scorched me with a smile.
“Emmett, right?”
I nodded wordlessly.
“Are you heading toward the art room?”
“Yes.”
The grin widened. “Mind if I tag along?”
“No.”
I couldn’t have sounded more like a jackass if I’d tried. Somehow Noah didn’t seem to notice. He fell in beside me, walking so close his shoulder brushed against mine.
“You like art?” he asked. “I’m kind of crap at it myself.”
“I like to draw,” I said.
It was about the only thing I liked about school this year. I’d lost interest in everything else, or more truthfully, I’d lost the ability to concentrate an
d couldn’t see the point of most of what I learned. I used to hold my own in all the subjects, but recently I didn’t have the time or the inclination to bother. Art was the only thing I was good at anymore. The only class I could get through without having to fight every minute against the overwhelming urge to stand up and walk out.
“You can draw?” Noah made it sound like I’d admitted I could do brain surgery or land a moon mission.
“Some,” I said. “I’d love to draw you one day.”
As soon as I said it, I realized what a total jerk I sounded. I wanted to suck the words back into my mouth and start this whole conversation again. But Noah just smiled.
“That sounds like fun.”
As we walked side by side, I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say. When I’d been waiting, I’d thought of a dozen different topics we could talk about: football, because he was trying out for a place on the team; Europe, because his mother was rumored to be from England; the new shopping mall, because his father was one of the managers brought in to conduct a feasibility study. Hell, I’d have talked about anything just to hear his voice. But I couldn’t think of a way to introduce any of the topics without betraying exactly what I was—a dork who had spent the morning rehearsing lines.
Thankfully Noah hadn’t lost the ability to speak. “Cal tells me you were on the football team.”
“Yeah.”
Jesus! He’d get more sense out of a kindergarten class. Football—I’d actually practiced this goddamned subject!
Noah threw a sidelong glance. “He said you were good. Really good. Why’d you give it up?”
“Personal reasons.”
Noah laughed. “You don’t give much away, do you? Textbook ‘mysterious stranger.’ Luckily, I like a good mystery.”
At that moment Hannah, his younger sister, walked around the corner, surrounded by a gaggle of adoring fans. She had the same coloring as Noah, the same flawless skin and beautiful hazel eyes, though her glossy black hair was a riot of curls where his was close-cropped. And, like him, she had soon become the center of the universe for all the younger kids.