“Great,” I say sarcastically. I feel sick. “Now the whole school is going to know that I couldn’t make a real friend. Dad! What is wrong with you?”
“They assured me it’s very discreet. And I would appreciate it if you didn’t talk to me that way.”
“Have you never met high school kids?” I ask him. “This is exactly the kind of thing everyone loves to talk about. My God, Dad!” I fold my arms across my chest and use my feet to push my chair away from the table. I think I’m going to be sick.
“You should eat,” says Dad. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
“I’m not hungry. I can’t go to school today. I’m sick.”
“Paski, don’t be like that.”
“Like what? Wanting to have a shred of dignity on my first day of school? God, Dad. Are they going to make me wear a special tag, too, something like ‘Loser new girl’? Or how about ‘Kick me, I’m new’? That would be perfect.”
“I’m sorry.” He looks so hurt.
I say, “I hate this. I hate being here, this apartment, this breakfast, this city, everything.”
“You don’t mean that,” says my dad. “You’re speaking in anger. Count to ten and let’s try to talk this out.”
I glare at him. “You’re wearing an earring,” I say. Dad’s hand jumps to his earlobe, and he blushes. “An earring,” I repeat, like an accusation.
“And?” he asks. “Your dad can’t ice himself?”
Ice himself? No, he didn’t. I stand up and turn toward my room. “Just do me a favor, ice man. Don’t try to help me anymore, okay?”
“Okay,” says my dad in such a small, sad voice that I instantly feel guilty. How does he do that? “I’m sorry, Paski. I was trying to help. I didn’t know.”
“Yeah.” I take the stairs toward my room so I can go get dressed for my first day of school, where, apparently, I have a date with my own doom. “Well, now you do.”
7
I’m wearing a pair of jeans and a simple black T-shirt, my usual outfit. I wear a pair of green Converse sneakers laced very loosely. I’ve got my hair down, a little messy, but messy in a styled way. I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard. Actually, I want to look like I’ve spent the day at the beach and I’m super-healthy and irresistible.
I ride the almost two miles to school, hungry but jumpy with nerves. I have a sick feeling about the peer mentor, but there’s something else I can’t pin down, a discomfort I can’t name. I have a feeling Ethan has someone else already. There are times in life where you don’t really want to know the whole story, like now. I don’t need to know in my gut that Ethan already forgot about me. I need to have the illusion that he’s still my boyfriend. Sometimes, being psychic sucks.
Basically, I don’t want this day to go badly. Dad offered again to drive me and help me find the school office, where I’m supposed to go to check in, but I was like, “No, thanks. I’ll find the office on my own.” It’s bad enough to have a peer mentor waiting to laugh at me. I don’t need to give my “peers” any other reasons to make fun of me, like a dad with a FUBU shirt and “ice” in his ear, who tries out every new slang word that bubbles up from the bowels of BET. I really don’t.
I get to the top of the hill on Wolverine Way and stop the bike to look down at the school. The parking lot is filled with cars, and my soon-to-be peers are walking toward the building, hanging out in clumps on the grass or sitting on low walls. So far they don’t look like they dress all that differently from the kids back home. The usual stuff. Jeans and T-shirts. Sneakers. I see a few girls hobble past in hoochie outfits, but every school has those kinds of girls. Las hoochies, we called them back in Taos. They usually have issues. I think my mom was one of them back in her day, which is a big part of the reason I have always gone out of my way not to be one of them, but not to be mean to them, either. I feel sorry for them.
Cars ease down the hill past me, filled with more kids. A few of them turn to look at me, and I avoid eye contact. My heart pounds. From this height, they look like kids at any other school, but when you look at them in their cars, you can see that this is not your average high school. Kids drive past in BMWs, Hummers, Mercedes-Benzes, and all sorts of luxury cars. Back in Taos, we actually had kids who came to school on horseback. I don’t want to be here. I don’t know how to navigate this place.
I take the iPod earbuds out of my ears and remove my helmet. I shake my hair loose and take a deep breath. Instantly I hear very loud, very guitar-heavy music. I recognize it: “Shut Up,” by Simple Plan, one of my favorite mountain-conquering songs. It’s blasting from a car behind me. I turn and see a bright red convertible, a Lexus, with the top down and a beautiful girl driving it. Ugh.
My heart races in competition. I don’t want it to, but it does. Law of the jungle. Two other pretty girls are in it with her, one in the front and one in the back. They sing along: “’It seems like every day I make mistakes, I just can’t get it right, it’s like I’m the one you love to hate, but not today, so shut up shut up shut up, don’t want to hear it . . .’”
The driver has a sweet oval face with very long brown hair cut in layers around her face, and it doesn’t look like she’s ever actually felt any of the things this song talks about. She wears a black ski-cap type of hat over her hair, which wouldn’t look all that good on most girls but does on her. Her hair has golden highlights in it. She appears to be Chinese or Vietnamese or something, with large brown eyes and really pretty, healthy-looking smooth skin that glows in a perfect tan. It looks like she spends a lot of time in the sun, a total California girl. Her eyes seem brave and confident as they survey the other cars and the neighborhood. She nods her head in time to the dirty guitar riffs of the alternative rock song. She’s an alternative chick, but a really pretty one. I can just imagine Ethan Schaefer’s jaw hitting the floor if he saw her, and right now I’m glad he can’t. Even if he is dating someone else already. I know he is. I feel it. Anyway, this is one of his favorite songs. It makes me hate her. It makes me hate him. I am filled with hate, and that’s a super-unhealthy thing to be filled with, so I try to think about something else.
Usually girls are either grungy or pretty, but rarely have I seen them be both at once. This girl with the red Lexus pulls it off. With her ratty sweatshirt and perfect makeup, she’s like the most beautiful tomboy in the world, and she looks like she knows it. Her eyebrows are the prettiest thing about her face, well tended, with a gentle arch in them. Her nose is cute, sort of round and small, and her full mouth curls up in a smile that looks like it could quickly turn into a snarl if you said the wrong thing to her. She looks like the kind of girl who bites. I know, without having to be told, that these are the girls Chris Cabrera warned me about. I feel it.
I don’t want to have a vision right now, but it comes anyway, the driver girl in a cast, like she’s broken her back or something. Suddenly I don’t hate her anymore. I feel scared for her. I try to think of something else. I don’t want to know things like this about people.
The other two girls in the car watch the driver closely and copy pretty much everything she does. They laugh when she laughs, sing when she sings. The one in the passenger seat has a colorful scarf wrapped around her head, with big wooden-looking earrings. Her hair is kinky, and her lashes might be artificial. She reminds me of Alicia Keys. The one in the backseat looks like she could be the long-lost sister of Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears, with tanned skin, big brown eyes, and straight blond hair that is so long I can’t see the end of it. Something tells me these three girls are the Aliso Niguel High version of me, Em, and Janet back home. I gulp, because I know that if the three of us were lined up against the three of them, like in front of a panel of hipness judges, we’d lose. Big-time. These girls are beyond glamorous, beyond cool. They’re like us on steroids.
I feel the clear, beautiful eyes of the driver turn toward me as she sings along to the song and beats time to the drums on the steering wheel. I try to look away be
fore she catches me staring at her. Girls like her want to catch people staring at them. They live for it. I don’t want to give her any more reasons to believe she’s perfect. But I’m too slow. She sees me and looks me up and down with a mocking smile. She whispers something to the Alicia Keys look-alike, and then all three girls laugh at me. Great. I put the earbuds back in, strap on the helmet, and blast my own song just to get hers out of my head; it’s a Gorillaz song that makes me think of home and Ethan. I take the hill in jumps and turns. It’s pathetic to show off like this, I am aware of that. But I don’t have anything else to defend myself with. That’s how I feel right now, like I’m under attack by the pretty, rich girl in the Lexus. I can’t afford a car like that, or clothes like that, or friends like that, but I can do this. That’s what I tell myself. Money doesn’t mean everything, does it? I’ve got other gifts. I try to smile like I don’t care if anyone is watching me. I try to act like I don’t care that I’m the new fish in this huge and apparently extremely wealthy pond.
I get to the bottom of the hill at the same time as the red Lexus. I remove the helmet, turn my head over, and shake out my hair. It’s almost as long and shiny as the driver girl’s. I stand up straight and look directly at the car. I will not look away. I force myself to keep looking. The Lexus has slowed to a crawl, and all three girls are staring at me. The two passengers seem worried; they look at each other like they’re trying to figure out what to do. The driver girl looks angry for a split second, her cheeks red with rage, and then she turns the car toward the parking lot and laughs like she doesn’t care.
Something tells me she does care.
Something else tells me that my life would be a lot better if she didn’t.
8
I find my way to the office and get my schedule, locker assignment, and a map of the school. The secretary welcomes me to Aliso Niguel with an insincere smile, and then I’m on my own. My first class of the day is an advanced-placement English literature and composition course with a teacher called Mr. Big. No, I’m not kidding. It sounds like a bad episode of Sex and the City. I can hardly wait. Not.
I keep my earbuds in as I weave my way through the bodies in the hall. Crowded. That’s what I notice first about this place. There are lots more people here than are at my school in Taos. I feel like a cow in a dairy. Except that the cows would have to be moving really fast. Everyone here moves a million miles an hour. They talk faster than they did back home, too. And for some weird reason, a lot of the kids look older than they should, or younger than they should.
I don’t want to look too closely at anyone, but I do notice right away that this is a much more diverse school than mine, at least in terms of skin tone. There are kids of all colors here, and they all hang out with each other. This is contrary to what they try to show you in movies about kids our age. But somehow the thing that seems to matter the most here is money. There are kids of all colors, wearing expensive-looking clothes, hanging out together in clumps, and kids who don’t look like they have as much money, hanging out together in clumps. At some point I’d love to sit back where no one can see me, and just analyze these people. I haven’t figured out who’s who yet, or who is popular, or whatever, but I will. Right now I’m focused on finding my classroom.
I can’t find it.
I walk the way the map told me to, but there’s no class there. The warning bell rings, and kids sprint past me in the quickly emptying hallways. Great. I don’t know where I’m going. So not only am I going to be the loser new girl, I am also going to be late to class. I stand in the middle of the hall staring at the map with a confused look on my face, and hear a familiar voice.
“Where you trying to go?”
I look up and see one of the twins from next door, in a pair of basketball shorts, with a T-shirt and tie, just like the first day I met him. I show him my schedule and the map. He takes the map and crumples it up to throw in the nearest trash can.
“This is crap,” he says. “I’ll take you.”
“Which one are you?” I ask. I can’t keep them straight yet. He calls out “Keoni” as he walks, without turning to look at me, like he’s used to answering this question. He walks without moving his arms, on the tips of his toes. His backpack is secured tightly over both of his shoulders, and he has Xbox 360 stickers all over it.
When we get to the room, Keoni stands to one side of the door and looks at the floor somewhere near my feet.
“This is it,” he says. “If you want someone to walk home with after school, me and Kerani can wait for you by the front wall, if you want.”
I thank him just as a tall, tan, gorgeous blond guy who looks like he just stepped off The O.C. dashes down the hall toward the room. Seeing Keoni, the guy goes out of his way to bump into him, pretending it was an accident. Keoni almost falls down.
“Uh, sorry, chess boy,” says the Chris Carmack–looking guy. Keoni looks away just as the guy says, “Not!”
Keoni shrugs in my general direction and slinks down the hall. I follow the good-looking guy in and hunt for the teacher. I can’t bear to look too closely at the students themselves yet. I really don’t like what I just saw. Keoni’s a geek, yes, but he’s a nice geek. He showed me my room, even though it probably made him late for his own class. He offered to walk home with me, just because. He didn’t do anything to that guy. Why did the guy push him?
I see a young-looking man sitting behind the desk, with brown hair and dimples. He looks like a Ken doll, or a recently retired member of a boy band. This is Mr. Big? Does everyone at this school have to look like a movie star? I’m starting to understand why my dad thinks he needs new teeth and an earring. Everyone in Southern California seems to try extra hard to look good.
I approach the desk slowly, trying to make sure this guy isn’t really one of the old-looking students I’ve seen around here. The man looks up and smiles at me, which instantly tells me he’s the teacher. No high school student would smile at a stranger like that. Besides, he has wrinkles around his eyes.
“Can I help you?” he asks in a boyish voice. I half expect him to say “dude” at the end. I explain who I am and what I’m doing here. He nods and tells me he’s been expecting me. For some reason he looks at my schedule to confirm that I’m in his class, then asks me if I have stopped at the book office to get my textbooks yet. I haven’t. I didn’t know I was supposed to, even though as he asks, it makes perfect sense. It’s just that the people in the office didn’t tell me to, and I was running late. The teacher doesn’t appear to mind. He seems laid-back.
“We’ll just find you someone to share a book with,” he says. He looks up at the class just as the final bell rings. All the other kids have taken their seats. I muster up all my courage and look at my classmates. Everyone is staring at me. Or at least it feels like they are. And they all — or almost all — look like models.
No! I instantly spot the girl with the red Lexus sitting in one of the rows near the wall, three seats back. She’s holding hands with the boy at the desk in front of hers. He has his back to the front of the class, facing her, and they seem very much in love. The guy wears Oakley sunglasses on the back of his neck, like he’s got eyes back there or something. I’ve seen this a few times in the halls here. I don’t think I ever saw a guy in Taos wear his sunglasses backwards on his neck, right on the nape like that. They do it here as a fashion statement, but I’m not sure what they’re trying to say, exactly. I get a weird feeling, like there actually are eyes back there. That neck looks familiar.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Mr. Big. “I want to introduce a new student. So if I could get your attention, please.” He cracks his knuckles playfully and clears his throat. “That’s nice teacher-speak for shut up and pay attention, wankers.”
The teacher has a way of speaking that is very youthful, like he’s one of us, or at least like he thinks he’s one of us. The weird part is that everyone seems to like and respect him. They all stop chatting and either take their seats or turn to
face us. Mr. Big stands up. His khaki cargo pants are fashionably ripped, like they’re from Abercrombie & Fitch or something, and I see that he, too, wears Oakley sunglasses backwards on the nape of his neck. What? Weird.
My heart does a somersault in my chest when the boy who was holding hands with the Lexus girl turns around and I see that it’s Chris Cabrera, the wicked-cute guy from last night. He’s wearing a black T-shirt, like me, with a beige zip-front hooded sweatshirt. The sweatshirt looks like it’s made out of a really expensive kind of cotton. He looks at me, and I can see his face drop with disappointment, like he’s embarrassed that I just saw him holding hands with that girl. Like he’s caught. I am only sixteen years old, but already I am tired of the way males seem to think it’s okay to have more than one girlfriend.
Okay, I supposedly have a boyfriend back in Taos, but I know in my heart I really don’t, that I’ll never be with Ethan again. I had a vivid dream last night about him and his new girlfriend. I even know her name. It wasn’t just a dream, because in the dream her name was Stacey; she looked like a beagle and she just started working at the bakery. She was a college freshman at the College of Santa Fe. I saw her face and everything, and then I woke up and called the bakery and asked if a girl named Stacey who was a freshman in college had started working there, and the girl who answered said, “Yes, this is Stacey. Who is this?” I hung up.
Anyway, I’m disappointed that this Chris Cabrera guy has a girlfriend. Disappointed he’s a jerk like Ethan. I don’t think I’m going to be able to trust another guy for a long time. This Chris guy was so stinkin’ flirty with me last night, and now he’s here doing the whole public-display-of-affection thing with that girl. That perfect, pretty, rich girl. He shouldn’t have started it with me if he was going to come to school and nuzzle up to some hottie the next day. That’s just plain tacky.
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