One Lonely Degree

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  Jersy says roughly the same when he hears. He doesn’t show up for art, but he catches up with me in the hall the next day, looking windblown and smelling like a carton of cigarettes. “You’re really helping us out,” he says. “Without you we’d be stuck.”

  “Her stepdad sucks,” I say, breathing in the smoke still clinging to Jersy’s uniform.

  Jersy leans back against the nearest wall. “You know, I don’t think he’s ever even smiled at me.”

  “He doesn’t smile that much anyway,” I say. “He’s like a military type. He just does the basics—no small talk or unnecessary facial expressions. He probably took an oath to save all his energy for 911 calls.”

  Jersy smiles and pushes himself away from the wall. “Are you gonna be in art later?”

  When am I ever not in art? I begin to smile back, but then I see Adam Porter. He’s sauntering up the hallway like we’re invisible, and I freeze for a millisecond, damaged all over again. Adam doesn’t care about me. I’m no one and nothing, and he’ll never come near me again, but he still makes me shiver. He makes me sick with him and sick with myself. It’s the worst kind of sickness; it sticks to everything.

  Adam walks towards us and I stare down at the wall, counting the seconds until it’s safe to look again. One-one thousand. Go away. Two-one thousand. I am steel. “Finn,” Jersy says, forcing me to look up. He’s got this weird expression on his face. I can’t tell whether he’s about to say something serious or not. “What is it with you and Adam Porter?”

  I gape at Adam’s back as he fades into the distance, my heart pounding with relief. “Nothing,” I reply, my voice shaky.

  Jersy opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, but I speak first. “I have to go to my locker. I’ll see you in art, okay?”

  Jersy pulls both his hands inside his sleeves like he’s physically incapable of keeping still. “I’ll be there.”

  I turn before he can say another word, rushing down the hall on my way to nowhere, my lungs sucking in air like an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner, like I could never in a hundred years get enough. And for the first few seconds, I can feel Jersy’s eyes on my back, wondering about me, possibly even noticing that if I walked any faster I’d be full-out running.

  MY LITTLe WHITe lies are simple and painless. I don’t feel guilty in the least because Audrey and Jersy are as sweet as ice cream and almost as mushy. In fact, with all their PG-13 making-out-in-the-hall scenes and soulful stares across the cafeteria, they’d make me cringe if I didn’t like them both so much. It’s worse when they come over to my house after school, because it’s obvious how much they want to touch each other. Being around them is like standing next to an electric fence; you don’t know quite where to put yourself.

  If it weren’t for Daniel, they’d want to take over my bedroom for hours at a time, but everyone knows he can’t be trusted to keep that kind of secret. With all the reality TV he watches, he’d guess what was going on in an instant. The best I can do is ten minutes’ privacy here and there—fetching snacks and taking extended pee breaks in the upstairs bathroom. Even then I knock at my own door before entering. One time Audrey was still straightening her kilt when I walked into the room. My face turned as red as a cherry tomato, and Jersy sat up on my bed and said, “Can we just have five more minutes, Finn?”

  I don’t blame them, but it’s hard for me too. If I thought God would listen, I’d be tempted to pray for Steven to change his mind. Maybe Audrey and Jersy would calm down if their relationship was allowed into the open air again. Then again, maybe they’re just “Crazy in Love” like Jersy’s number one goddess.

  The best times for all of us are when the two of them go to Jersy’s house after school. In some ways it’s equally stressful, because Audrey tells her parents she’s at the mall with me and then I have to switch my cell off and either hang out at the mall solo or screen landline calls (thank God for caller ID) at home, in case they decide to check up on her via me. The bonus here is that I don’t have to catch sight of them getting horizontal. Her mom and stepdad call to check up on her about a third of the time, and Audrey regularly complains that she feels like she’s under surveillance. “You must be getting so tired of this,” she says apologetically. “All the stupid phone calls to your house and us coming over to invade your bedroom.”

  “You’d do the same for me,” I tell her.

  “I would,” she says readily. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a drag.”

  There she goes again, thinking so much like me that we might as well share the same brain. “Steven’s gotta change his mind sometime,” I say. “You’ve been proving yourself for a month.”

  “Yeah,” she says ironically. “I’ve been some angel lately.”

  I laugh, but I have no idea exactly how much of an angel she’s being or not. I haven’t asked for any details since that day at the drugstore, and Audrey hasn’t offered. It’s as though we’ve both decided it’s better for me not to know, which is strange because Audrey and I talk as much as ever. Once the dinner hour hits, the presence of parents makes it nearly impossible for Audrey and Jersy to see each other. Our lives go back to normal until the following day at school, when the two of them are all over each other like a virus again.

  I know how that sounds, but I really do like them both a lot. Sometimes I just wonder if maybe I like them better separately than together. Constantly covering for them makes me feel like an accomplice who isn’t getting her cut. It’s not the kind of thing a friend should think, but I do, and every day I get just a little happier with thoughts of summer.

  I’m not a bikini-on-the-beach girl like my mom would want, but I’m happy that the breeze is warm these days, and when I’m out with Samsam, I grin at the other dog walkers, glad to be in the sunlight. Everything feels better in the sun, even when you have red hair and singe in ten minutes without a hat. Partly it’s because I know my after-school covering days are almost over, and Adam Porter, the person who turns my stomach on a daily basis, will soon graduate and go away to university. Partly it’s because school is mostly useless anyway and a summer job will net cash for my growing CD collection. It’s every single thing really. I have two years of high school down and two more to go. London and New York are inching steadily closer, and after graduation I’ll get on a plane and find a flat/apartment there I can barely afford. I’ll take art courses part-time and work in a secondhand record store that still sells vinyl. My free time will be spent strolling through Hyde/Central Park, and the people I don’t know there yet will comp me tickets to their fringe-theater/Off Broadway plays. After a year or two, when I’ve gotten enough of London or New York to tide me over for a while, I’ll come home and do a graphic design degree. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll eventually be able to work my way back to either of those places and design theater posters, CD covers, and cereal boxes.

  Summer’s a step closer to the future. That’s a big enough reason to like it, even without the heat.

  Audrey’s equally enthusiastic about the season but for different reasons. She’ll be able to jump Jersy’s bones at his house all summer long while his parents are at work. There are plenty of ready alibis she can use during the day while their parents are out of the picture—her future job, the mall, random bike rides, and long walks, you name it.

  “Just don’t lie about being with me,” I remind her. “My dad could answer the phone at home and spoil everything.” Dad usually spends summers carting Daniel and me around to various attractions, but this year Daniel’s going to day camp with two of his friends. Dad says he plans to spend hours sitting under the umbrella on the patio, catching up on his reading.

  “I know,” Audrey says. “The main thing is that we have to get out there and find jobs before school’s out. University students have probably snagged most of the good ones already.”

  So I design résumés for both of us on my computer. Neither of us have much to put on them, seeing as we’ve never been employed before. I could practically
fit the info onto a business card, but Audrey uses her drama skills to pad them out. Between our two creative minds, the finished products look and sound quite respectable. We even use each other’s parents for references— who could be more respectable than a history teacher and a police officer?

  Afterwards we complete the first wave of our find-employment crusade, flooding the mall and surrounding area with résumés. If none of our first choices get in touch, we’ll do another circulation run and keep on going until we hit the bottom of the barrel— fast-food chains. One of the last things I want to do this summer is sport an ugly orange uniform with matching name tag (the look would clash with my hair, and I’m pretty sure the smell of sizzling fat would make me nauseous within two days), but I’ll do it as long as Audrey does.

  Unfortunately, our working-together plan quickly proves shaky. Play Country, a warehouse-size toy store across from the mall, calls Audrey two days after we submit our résumés. She did practically all the talking to the assistant manager, so that doesn’t surprise me. I just tell Audrey to put in a good word for me when she has her interview in ten days. Play Country employees wear green rugby shirts with the Play Country logo emblazoned across the front. On chesty girls it looks like a dirty joke, but maybe that’s just my freaky mind working overtime. It’s not the coolest place in the world to work, but not the lamest. There’s zero chance of encountering sizzling fat and an equally small chance of colliding with Beautiful Boys.

  The more I think about it, the more ideal it seems. No commission stress and no remotely cool guys hanging around, making me nervous. And my boobs are probably too small to make their stupid logo look perverted; you’d hardly notice them in a big old rugby shirt.

  By the time Play Country finally gets around to calling me nearly a week later, I’m convinced it’s the perfect, hassle-free summer job I’ve been looking for. The manager and one of the assistant managers want to interview me on the exact same day they’re talking to Audrey. My interview is two hours later, meaning Audrey can spoon-feed me all the questions beforehand. It feels like everything’s falling into place, and the feeling scares me by getting my hopes up. I get more anxious in the car, thinking about how I’ve never had an interview before and how on the rare occasions that I go to confession I never know what to say except that I never go to church on Sunday.

  Mom appraises my nervous presence in the passenger seat and advises me not to worry. “It’s a nothing summer job. It doesn’t matter whether you get it or not. Just be yourself.” She takes another look at me and revises her last statement. “Be confident. People like confident people.”

  Even if they lack confidence themselves? “I’m okay,” I tell her. “Just wait in the parking lot in case it’s over really quickly.”

  “I’m getting my nails done at the salon,” Mom says. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”

  So what am I supposed to do in the meantime—wander through the aisles like a confident reject? But it turns out there are two people ahead of me waiting for interviews—a gangly guy with the face of a thirteen-year-old and a girl named Nishani who was in my French class last semester. The guy keeps picking at a humongous pimple on his neck, and Nishani and I exchange subtle glances of revulsion, afraid he’ll begin to bleed or ooze at any moment.

  His interview is over in less than ten minutes, and then they call Nishani, who’s gone for at least twenty. At first the waiting makes my nerves worse, but then I’m just bored. I’m still bored when a twenty-something-year-old woman calls me into the manager’s office, smiling like she’s a department store catalog model. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,” she says. “We’re running a bit behind.”

  “It’s okay,” I lie. I enjoy watching people perform minor surgeries on themselves. “It looks like you’re interviewing lots of people today.” My sucky attempt at small talk.

  “We have a few different positions to fill.” The woman’s smile eases up. “Are you more interested in stocking or being a cashier?”

  “Uh …” God, I’m stuck already. My nerves are back full-force. “Stocking, I guess.” It sounds marginally more independent than standing in the same spot for three or four hours at a time.

  She leads me into the manager’s office, where a bald man in his thirties is reclining in his chair, feet up on the desk and everything. He jerks his feet off the desk as the woman sits down in the chair next to his. “This is Fionnuala Kavanagh.” She points to the bald guy. “Gerald Goldmann. And I’m Suzanne Eckebrecht.”

  “It’s Finn,” I say, pointing to myself. “Everybody just calls me Finn.”

  “Finn,” Gerald repeats, reaching across the desk to shake my hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever in my life met someone called Finn—or Fionnuala, for that matter.”

  I smile, figuring I’m supposed to. “It’s an Irish name—my grandmother’s.”

  Suzanne isn’t one for small talk after all. She purses her lips like I’m wasting their time. “We have a few short questions for you, Finn. Our aim here is to try to get an idea of how you’d fit in with the Play Country team.”

  My mouth drops a little, dismayed at the suggestion. I don’t want to fit in with the Play Country team; I just want a hassle-free summer job. Then Mom’s advice pops back into my head, and guess what? She’s absolutely right. This is a nothing summer job. It doesn’t matter whether I get it or not. Sure, the money would be good and it’d be cool to work next to Audrey for the summer, but whatever, it’s not life and death.

  That makes it easier, and I manage to answer all of Suzanne and Gerald’s questions without looking like a total anti-socialite. Gerald puts his feet back on the table and tells me they’ll be in touch in a week. I don’t know whether I should shake his hand again or not, so I don’t.

  “Thanks,” I tell them. Audrey would probably smile and say something witty, but trying to impress people takes a lot out of me and I’m already spent.

  Mom’s car is in the parking lot when I go outside, and she gives me a hopeful look and asks how it went. I repeat Suzanne and Gerald’s pseudo-corporate questions, and as soon as we’re home I call Audrey. When she picks up, I put on a fake business tone and tell her I want to discuss our future bosses and roles on the Play Country team. Audrey laughs and says, “What I remember most was that Suzanne looked like she was dying to knock Gerald’s feet off his desk. All through my interview her eyes kept zooming over to them with this pissed-off look.”

  “She didn’t seem too happy in mine either,” I tell her. We promise to give each other a call as soon as we hear something definite, and I hang up and swallow the daily vitamin that I forget to take every morning.

  Later we do our family-dinner thing, and afterwards I help with the dishes. My hands are in the sink when the phone rings and Dad picks up. “She’s not here at the moment,” he says, eyes narrowing as he listens. “Not as far as I know,” he adds. “Would you like to speak to Finn?” I grab a towel and dry my hands, staring pensively at Dad. “It’s Steven for you.” My throat dries up as he hands me the cordless. “He’s looking for Audrey.”

  “Steven?” I say into the phone. Audrey’s mom is always Mrs. Lepage, but Steven, for some reason, is just Steven.

  “Finn.” I hear his firm military voice in that single syllable. “Audrey said she was riding her bike over to your place. I take it this is the first you’re hearing of it?”

  My brain’s jammed. I can’t invent a lie fast enough. “Well … I’ve probably just forgotten,” I stammer. “But I’ll tell her you’re looking for her when I see her. I bet she’ll be here any second now.”

  “She left over an hour ago.” He sounds like he’s reading a police report. “Where would she have gone instead?”

  “I don’t know.” I’m so afraid to say the wrong thing that my lips barely move. “Maybe she bumped into someone from school.”

  “I have a good idea who that could be,” he says. “Is there anything you want to tell me, Finn?”

  “No.” I sound ba
ffled, and I am. I can’t believe Audrey would use me as an excuse without mentioning it. Is it possible she’s really missing? “Can you let me know if you find her?”

  “I’ll find her,” he says confidently. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  I tell him goodbye and hang up. Goosebumps are popping up on my arms, and I stand next to Dad, who wants to know what’s going on. I give him the official version of the story, same as I gave Steven, my voice thick with genuine worry. If Steven finds Audrey and Jersy together, she’ll never have another chance to prove herself. Her parents will ground her for the entire summer, possibly longer. They’ll confiscate her computer and take the phone out of her room, and that could be just the start.

  I can’t imagine a summer without Audrey, and I feel panic bang at the inside of my chest. It grows stronger with every hour, until I can’t stand it anymore and dial her house, my mouth full of marbles.

  “I’m sorry?” Mrs. Lepage says. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Finn,” I blurt out. “Is Audrey home?”

  Mrs. Lepage sighs into the telephone. “She’ll speak with you at school on Monday, Finn.” The dial tone hums into my ear, telling me everything but the details.

  I was wrong about this summer.

  Freaky girls don’t have good summer vacations.

  THe LasT WeeK of classes rushes by in a blur of tears and hushed voices. Audrey and Jersy disappear every lunch hour and return looking flushed and frustrated. I hardly have a minute to speak to Audrey alone, and when I do, she won’t stop talking about Jersy and how she doesn’t know how she’ll get through the summer without him. “Or you,” she adds hastily.

  Or me. Yeah, I’m an afterthought. I’d be angry if I wasn’t missing her so much already. What am I supposed to do with two empty months of sunshine without her?

  We have the same conversation every morning in homeroom, until Friday when I lose it and say, “What were you thinking? You would’ve had all summer long to be with Jersy, and you had to go and mess it up. You never even warned me that you were using me as an excuse to go over to his place. And my entire family was home! There’s no way I could’ve covered for you anyway.” I’m practically shouting, and the guy in front of me swivels around in his seat and raps on my desk with his knuckles like he’s calling a courtroom to attention.