From What I Remember

by Stacy Kramer, Valerie Thomas

  “We can’t all be as hip as you,” Max says with a smile, though I think I sense a hint of annoyance in his voice, which surprises me. Max and Lily are so sickeningly enamored with each other all the time. I’m probably just projecting.

  “No, baby, we can’t,” Lily snaps back, with bite. And then she takes Max’s face in her hands and kisses him, long and hard. Charlie just stands by, the lonely job of the loyal third wheel. I guess this is part of Max and Lily’s very public game of romance. I have to look away. I’m afraid I might gag.

  I clear my throat. I need to say my piece and get the hell out of here.

  Max, Charlie, and Lily turn to me, bemused.

  “Let me guess: you want to talk about Murphy’s assignment,” Max says, laughing in my face.

  “Uh, yeah. I do,” I say, holding my ground.

  “Dude, you called it,” Max tells Charlie.

  “Give it up, Kylie. Grades don’t matter anymore,” Charlie tells me.

  “They do to me. I don’t want an F in English. I’m doing the assignment, and since it requires a partner,” I say, turning to Max, “you’re going to have to do it with me.”

  What I don’t say is that because I’m not sporty or arty or a theater geek, the one thing that distinguishes me at Freiburg is my valedictorian position, and I’m not about to lose it. I happen to know that Sheldon Roth is a mere .02 points behind me, nipping at my heels, and Patrick Bains is on Sheldon, and Lily is right behind Patrick. (As much as I’d like to write her off as an idiot, I can’t. She hit the jackpot: rich, beautiful, and smart.) My name may be printed on the graduation ceremony program as valedictorian speaker, but the numbers can change at any time. With one bad paper in English, Sheldon could pull ahead. This is a war and I intend to win it.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Max says. “Murphy can go to hell.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just, I’ve got an academic scholarship to NYU and I really need to keep my grades up.…” I wish I didn’t feel the need to apologize. I wish I could drum up a genius comeback that would shut them up. Tragically, I’ve got nothing. My wit goes into hiding with these people. It’s not like I care about their approval; it’s more like we’re different species and I’m not sure how to communicate with them. Popular people are from Mars. The rest of us are from a distant galaxy that no one has ever heard of.

  The great irony here is that I can write a brilliant character. I just can’t play one in real life. In the world of my screenplay, the one that earned me a full scholarship to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I created the most kick-ass female protagonist ever, one who nails the perfect line every time. One who never finds herself in situations like this, flush with humiliation, begging Max Langston to find a shred of decency somewhere inside the cavernous, empty space that is his soul. You’d think I would have picked up a few tips from her. Sadly, that’s not the case.

  Lily rolls her eyes. “Oh my God. You are such a geek, Kylie. Just blow it off. One stupid paper from Murphy doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. She’s just trying to freak us out because she knows it’s her last chance to mess with us.”

  Lily’s right. Mistress Murphy’s threat is empty and baseless. My scholarship won’t be affected; I’ll still be valedictorian. But I can’t ignore an assignment. I didn’t achieve an Ivy trifecta (Brown, U Penn, and Princeton, all of which I rejected for NYU and their star-making film department, much to my parents’ chagrin) by blowing anything off. Ever. I’m not going to start now.

  “Seriously, Kylie. No one’s doing it,” Max adds, flashing his pearly whites. I stare at the floor, afraid I’ll lose my courage if I have to look at him for a second longer. He’s too hot. It hurts the eyes.

  “I have time after sixth period. We can meet then. It shouldn’t take long. I, uh…can write yours, if you want.” I am getting this done. No matter how low I have to go. And frankly, with the offer to do Max’s assignment, I’ve hit the floor. Hopefully, NYU will be more of a meritocracy. “Ten minutes. That’s all I need and I can write both papers at home tonight,” I say.

  “Okay. Cool. Write my paper,” Max says.

  Whatever. I’m never going to be friends with these people. I’m here to graduate first in my class and get the hell out of Dodge.

  “Later,” Max says. And then he throws his arm around Lily, pulls her close, and they kiss again. This time with tongue. Thanks so much. Once just wasn’t enough.

  Forty-eight hours and counting…

  ylie doesn’t even see me as she rushes down the hall, staring at the ground. She’s wearing her daily uniform of gray jeans, white T-shirt, and that lame-ass ratty knit scarf her grandmother made her, like, a million years ago. Girlfriend needs a makeover. I’m so the guy for the job, if Kylie would just give fashion a chance. But all the beautiful clothes I’ve given her over the years are marooned in her closet, tags on, waiting to get off the island and back into civilization. At least she’s not wearing those Uggs anymore, which look like huge suede foot tumors, as far as I’m concerned. I tossed them in the garbage last time I was at her house. Saving Kylie from herself is a full-time occupation, let me tell you. I was born for the job. Too bad I can’t do it professionally.

  “‘Hey, girl,’” I call out. “‘If you’re from Africa, why are you white?’”

  Kylie looks up at me. “‘Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white,’” she says.

  Mean Girls. We know the script by heart. That movie and about a million others. The number of hours we’ve logged together watching films is appalling. There have been times when we’ve watched the same film four times in a row. There have been lost weekends when we’ve barely come up for air. I would say this is because we are ardent film lovers, but I know it’s more than that. Both of us, for our own reasons, would prefer to live embedded in the silver screen than in the real world of high school. At least, that’s what my therapist says. Kylie is going to be a screenwriter and I’m going to be a…who knows? I’ve got time and money, so I’m not particularly concerned, unlike Kylie.

  Kylie keeps walking. I rush to catch up with her. A few stray curls poke out from her signature ponytail. Girlfriend wears her gorgeous fro so tightly slicked back it looks like a helmet. She needs to embrace those kinky Latina curls. With her bronze skin, her golden eyes, and those massively long black lashes, she could look like a movie star. Sister is hot even in an outfit that could make Marilyn Monroe look neutered. Sadly, she doesn’t have a clue. She thinks she’s ugly. It kills me.

  “You’ve totally outdone yourself today,” Kylie tells me, giving my ensemble the once-over. “Are you trying to push Alvarez over the edge?”

  “You know he secretly lives for it.”

  I’m driving the headmaster crazy. Freiburg is a straight-ass school in a straight-ass town, and my dresses and skirts do not please Headmaster Alvarez. He talked to my parents last year, but he’s kind of given up at this point. Just like my parents.

  “Hot or not?” I ask Kylie as I spin around in my vintage platform black patent heels (purchased on eBay). I am wearing lime-green skinny jeans with a gorgeously tailored Marc Jacobs black dress, borrowed, without permission, from my sister. I know. It’s so out there. I was kind of born out of the closet. Way out. Every year I’ve taken things a little further in my insatiable need to push this conservative crowd to their limit. And this year I went all out. Full-frontal fashion. I’m about to blow out of town; might as well do it in style.

  I’m not an idiot; I’m aware of what people say about me. I know they think I’m a screaming queen, which, oddly enough, I’m not. I’m just a regular gay boy. I’m not insatiably drawn to women’s clothes or anything, but this is one way to distinguish myself at Freiburg. I don’t have many other marketable skills. I mean, I tried the volleyball team, at my dad’s insistence, and it was…a freaking nightmare. Large, hard balls coming at me from every direction at high velocity.

  But this cross-dressing thing has been kind of a boon for me, a solid ex
tracurricular, with all the Internet shopping, studying of fashion blogs, and even learning to sew. It’s been a good distraction and a résumé builder. People still tease me about my voice and my boy crushes, but it’s died down as I’ve amped up the fabulousity quotient. My outrageous outfits allow me to take center stage in character, which is far better than being the lone gay guy in the corner.

  “Yeah. You’re rocking it. Even in this hideous fluorescent light,” Kylie says. Kylie is the one person who has always accepted me just as I am.

  “I have a gift. Speaking of which, I’ve got a little something for Charlie Peters. A graduation present. I just need you to help me get him into the boys’ room.”

  Kylie and I always call Charlie Peters, Charlie Peters. We could just call him Charlie, but it’s another one of those things that stitches our friendship together.

  “Shut up. You are all talk. Besides, Charlie Peters is so not gay,” Kylie says. “You think everyone’s gay.”

  “Most people are. They just don’t know it yet.”

  “Okay. Whatever. Listen, Will, I’m kinda in a hurry. I’ve got to get to the library.”

  She’s not in the mood to play.

  “The library? We’re done, baby. Stick a fork in us.”

  Kylie is such a grind, it worries me. Who’s going to make her kick back and watch Modern Family and Fringe at NYU? I may have to fly in from Berkeley and physically force her to chillax.

  “Mistress Murphy gave us one last assignment.”

  “Please tell me you’re not going to do it. It will build character not to do it. I promise.”

  “I am going to do it. And I’m doing Max Langston’s as well. We’re partners.”

  “Kylie, Kylie, Kylie.”

  “He won’t do it if I don’t do it for him. I can’t not do it. I can’t. I’ll be better at NYU. I promise,” Kylie offers.

  “Doubt it.” Maybe New York City has the answers for her. God knows San Diego only had questions.

  “Yeah. You’re probably right. I need to get to the library. I’m meeting Max there.”

  “Oh, we get to meet Max Langston at the library?” Mortals like us don’t normally interact with the Max Langstons of the world.

  “We?” Kylie says, shooting me a warning glance.

  “I’m coming with.” No better view than staring at Max from a neighboring carrel.

  “Will, don’t you have anything better to do?”

  “Sadly, no.”

  “C’mon, this is only going to make things more difficult.”

  “You’ll barely notice me.”

  “Impossible.” Kylie sticks her tongue out at me.

  I stick my tongue out at her. It’s an interchange we have about seven hundred times a day. I love her. I would give her a lung and a leg if I had to. Hopefully, I won’t have to.

  “Okay. Here’s the plan. You have sex with Max over in biographies, and then I can go down on him by the microfiche,” I suggest.

  “Gross. I wouldn’t touch Max with a ten-foot pole. I have no interest in sex with Max, at all.”

  “Um, hello…you have no interest in sex whatsoever. It’s a problem.”

  “Not everyone thinks about sex twenty-four seven,” Kylie says.

  “I beg to differ, darling. Most seventeen-year-olds are not only thinking about sex, they’re actually having it, unlike us.”

  I think about sex every single minute of every day. Not that it’s getting me anywhere. Kylie and I are both virgins, but for very different reasons. It’s not normal for a seventeen-year-old girl to turn that whole part of herself off. She’s going to explode one day. I just hope I’m there to pick up the pieces.

  We take a seat at a table in the library to wait for Max. I reach into my pocket, pull out a fabulous pair of long, gold chandelier earrings, and offer them up to Kylie.

  “You have to wear these for graduation. You need something that’s going to stand out on the podium. These will look major with your hair all wild, and—”

  “Will, you promised me you wouldn’t steal any more of your sisters’ stuff.”

  “You’re the valedictorian, darling. You need some kind of something. Annie will never know they’re gone. She has gobs of them.”

  “The thought is sweet, and I love you for it, but I won’t take your stolen goods. I’m sorry.”

  Damn Kylie and that moral compass she wears around her neck. My sisters have so much stuff, it’s embarrassing. I’m just trying to share the wealth.

  “At least let me buy you a dress for graduation.”

  “Will, seriously, drop it.”

  I do drop it. But I vow to pick it up again before Friday. Kylie deserves a slamming dress when she stands up there at the podium and blows us all away with her speech. Of course, no one will see it under her gown, but it’s the principle of the thing that counts.

  Kylie and I are an unlikely pair. I’m one of the richest kids in a school filled with La Jolla’s most moneyed families, while Kylie is one of five scholarship students. We met on the first day of seventh grade, in the far north corner of the cafeteria, having both been pushed out of all the prime real estate. Kylie was new and I was, well, me. We ended up at the same empty table, along with Justin Wang, who just sat there, in a trance, communing with his Nintendo.

  Neither of us spoke for about ten minutes. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I turned to Kylie and said, “‘Did you know without trigonometry there’d be no engineering?’”

  Without missing a beat or even glancing up from her pizza bagel, Kylie said, “‘Without lamps, there’d be no light.’”

  “No way,” I said. What were the chances the new girl could quote The Breakfast Club?

  “Way,” Kylie said. And then she looked up and smiled at me. Girlfriend has an amazing smile. Her whole face lights up. “Breakfast Club is one of my favorite movies of all time.”

  “It’s a masterpiece,” I concurred. And we’ve been best friends ever since.

  Our family’s relationship, unfortunately, is a whole different story. Our parents have only spent one miserable evening together in the past six years, and it will never happen again. Kylie’s mother insisted on having us over. She made spaghetti with meatballs. It was, how do you say en anglais? An unmitigated disaster.

  My sisters and my mother are all vegans, so they just nibbled on salad. (You’d think with all our money they’d fill up on lobster, caviar, and filet mignon, just because they can; but no, they spend their money on dried lentils and tempeh.)

  Since only beer was on offer (which is to say, there was no wine served, a crime worse than murder in my parents’ opinion), only a handful of words were exchanged all evening, unless you count my incessant blathering, which filled the silence but annoyed everyone to no end, including me.

  At some point, toward the end of the long day’s journey into night, Jake, Kylie’s little brother (who I love more than my own siblings, and who is challenged in his own special ways), launched into a thirty-minute exposition on the San Diego bus schedules. I think it was right after that that my parents made some pathetic excuse about a previous engagement they’d forgotten. They were out of there so fast the wind shook the shelves. I stayed and played Yahtzee with Jake and Kylie, rather than head back to Cloudbank (that’s right, our house has a name).

  Kylie is staring at the clock in the library, twirling her hair. She’s pissed. We’ve been waiting here for thirty minutes, and still no Max. I’m so not surprised. Kylie springs up from her seat and bolts for the door. And she’s off. Uh-oh.

  Kylie’s temper is not something to mess with. She looks like she’s going to blow, in a big, operatic way. I live for these scenes. As we’re getting precariously close to graduation, this could be Kylie’s final performance. I race to catch up with her, no small task in these crazy platform shoes. I seriously need to get some sneakers.

  hate when people are late. It’s at the top of the list among my many pet peeves. I am also infuriated by selfishness, narcissism, and stup
idity. Hard as it is to believe, Max appears to have all of these traits in spades. He cannot get away with this. I don’t care how hot or popular he is. A force beyond my control seizes me, and before I know it, I’m running toward the sports center. For anyone else it would be social suicide, but I was dead on arrival years ago. I’m working hard at controlling my anger, but it has been sorely tested at Freiburg. Just this year, I’ve had minor eruptions at least three times: when Isabel Tornet cheated off of me in AP Calculus and then tried to pin it on me when she got caught; when Oscar Mezlow taunted Will for being gay; and when I saw Jemma Pembolt teasing Anna Salington about being overweight.

  I rush across the quad, pretty sure I’ll find Max on the squash court. Will weaves and bobs behind me in his ridiculous shoes. I hope at Berkeley he will feel less of a need to display his sexuality like a merit badge. I know for a fact Will loves tailored suits and his old worn-in Levi’s. Maybe someday he’ll feel comfortable enough in his skin to wear them. Or, at the very least, choose more sensible shoes.

  A Frisbee slams into my head. A bunch of kids stare at me, pissed. I realize I’ve just crashed the Ultimate Frisbee championships. I apologize and veer off, out of the line of fire. I know I should appreciate the beauty all around me, but something about the blazing green lawn and the stately brick buildings, surrounded by towering palm trees, makes me want to hurl. I watch for a beat as Lauren Jacobs leaps into the air to snatch the Frisbee. She’s wearing such short shorts I can see her butt cheeks, and a pink T-shirt so tight her nipples are practically visible. Why must Lauren constantly dress like a stripper? She’s hot. I get it.

  Lauren tosses the Frisbee back to Chase Palmer, whose white-blond hair glistens in the sun and whose perfect teeth sparkle like diamonds. All these happy, shiny people. I will never adjust to this world, ever.

  “Hey, Kylie, wait up,” Harriet Zoles yells to me. I pretend not to hear her and pick up the pace. Harriet Zoles is one of the precious few people at Freiburg who relentlessly seek out my company. Her and a few other Crofties. Crofties are so named because they spend their time in the undercroft, an inside archway beneath the main building. Will and I tried to hang with them for a while. As it turned out, aside from being unpopular, we had very little in common with them. They’re kind of extreme geeks. I’m sure they’ll go on to create the next Facebook or Google, and I’ll be kicking myself that I didn’t cozy up to them more when I had the chance. But as much as Will and I tried, we just couldn’t make the connection happen. Talking to Harriet Zoles is like torture, or “water-boring,” as Will would say. And, unlike Franklin Peterson, I don’t build elaborate, historically accurate structures out of Legos competitively. Nor do I think Mandarin is the only way to get ahead in this “global rat race” we now live in, as Sheila Nollins insists, every chance she gets.