“I read about how people type hate stuff into Google,” Nikki interjects. “Like, they actually type I hate Muslims after terrorist attacks. Can you believe it? I mean, what are they looking for? Other idiots who hate Muslims? It’s the dumbest thing ever.”
Mattie looks at her, flashes that someday-Oscar-winning smile. “Land of the free, home of the stupid.”
Nikki looks at the floor, beaming, flattered that Mattie’s validating her.
She’s been “in love” with Mattie for all of high school, and she’s been committed to losing her virginity to him since junior year. I’ve never been Mattie’s biggest fan, and as far as I can tell, he’s never wanted to hang out with Nikki before. But the way he’s looking at her now—maybe there’s hope for her. She joined the stage crew for the play just to get closer to him. Maybe it’s working.
I just hope she’s careful. Nik’s not one of those done-everything-but-It virgins. She’s been kissed a bunch of times, and she’s been to second base once. Something about Mattie gives me the feeling that she wouldn’t be his first.
Nikki looks up, and we make eye contact, but the smile melts right off her face. She turns back to Mattie without even a second glance. O-kay, guess that whole abandoning-me-in-the-cafeteria thing this afternoon wasn’t just a one-time event.
Buzzzzzz.
The room freezes, and everyone looks up at the loudspeaker installed in the corner of the lounge. “Attention, students.” Headmaster Nichols’s dull voice hangs in the air. “Due to a small glitch on the Prep for Today application, certain search data was accidentally…cached this morning, and some students in the computer science lab acted inappropriately by passing this information to the Prep contact list. Please delete the email immediately when you get home. I’d like to remind you that cell phones, tablets, and other unauthorized devices are not allowed to be used during the school day, and we will hold detention in the chapel, should we need the space. Thank you.”
When the announcement ends, the senior lounge returns to its usual hellish cacophony. People are laughing, mocking Nichols, comparing notes about this revelation, debating whether Nichols is telling the truth and this really was some kind of glitch, or whether the school IT guys don’t want to admit they got hacked.
“Not a mouse / Shall disturb this hallow’d house: / I am sent with broom before, / To sweep the dust behind the door,” Mattie performs for the room.
—
My favorite teacher, Mr. Touhey, has curly gray-brown hair and a mustache. He calls his favorites kiddo and keeps class pretty loose. All of us in Advanced Art actually want to be here, so he mostly just lets us spend the period working on our projects while he hangs out at the back of the room in a flannel button-down, Doc Marten boots crossed at the ankles and propped up on his desk, reading old issues of Artforum and Juxtapoz and eating from an enormous ziplock bag of trail mix, available if we have any problems or questions or just want to, as he refers to it, rap.
“Hiya, kiddo,” Mr. Touhey says as I enter the room. “How was your break?”
“Broke up with my boyfriend. So, you know, fabulous.”
He blinks a couple of times in rapid succession. “Hmmm. That Meeks kid?”
“Meade.”
“Well. Pain is the path to the sublime. Just ask…Van Gogh. You should just put the pain into your painting.”
I smile and roll my eyes at his pun. “I’m not really in pain, to be honest. I’m just kind of…numb.”
Touhey shrugs. “Oh well, you’ll have to find inspiration elsewhere, I guess.”
“My friends hate me. So there’s that,” I say.
A flash of actual concern spreads across Mr. Touhey’s face. Per Dr. Bechdel’s order, all my teachers know about my anxiety, though most of them treat me no differently from any other socially well-adjusted student. Thank God.
“Well,” he says, “channel that today, then. And I’m here if you need to talk.”
Heading to the wall hooks to hang up my backpack, I pass Kyle Cherski, already bent over a worktable and his trusty iPad. I guess I’d call Kyle a goth-dork hybrid, and that’s if I’m being nice. Right now he’s laboring over one of his patented digital drawings that he does using nothing but his eyes and an iPad stylus. The images on his screen look like things you’d see in a comic book, the porno-violent kind that disaffected teenage boys read: women with whips, guys with big muscles and bigger guns, gangs of roaming hooligans and greasers facing off on the rain-slicked streets of some nightmare cityscape. It isn’t for me, and hell on earth would be drawing only on a screen, but his skill is undeniable.
“Wow,” I say. “That’s crazy good, Kyle.”
He doesn’t lift his head, but he nods. “Yeah.”
“Imagine what you could do with actual ink.”
“But that wouldn’t be fair to everyone else.”
I snort and grab my three-by-five canvas from the storage cubby. I wish I had Kyle’s confidence. I mean, I did apply early to art school. Rhode Island School of Design is my top choice. But I haven’t heard back yet. Now my senior project, the one I’ve been working on all year and the one I’m supposed to be showing at the art show in two weeks, feels somehow…flawed.
Maybe it’s my subject that’s the problem.
It’s an oil self-portrait tentatively titled Antisocial. In it, I’m doing my best Kardashian pout, staring up and directly into the viewer’s perspective. The slightly elevated, close-up angle is a familiar one—same as with a selfie stick. When we play the Which celebrity do you most resemble? game, my friends say I look like a young Sofía Vergara, but I think that’s just because she’s the only Colombian outside of Shakira or Pablo Escobar any of them have heard of. I don’t actually look anything like her.
When I started this project, it all made sense to me. I wanted to say something about our narcissism, about how the value of the self-image has changed so much with our generation. But as I stare at the canvas today, I know there’s something not quite right about it. It’s as if, after a couple of weeks away, my selfie portrait suddenly feels painfully, horribly obvious. Like, yes, we’re all narcissists—what about it?
I’m unscrewing the tube of azure Sennelier, hoping inspiration will strike, when I catch a glimpse of movement inside the doorway in my peripheral vision.
Jethro took art last year and knows Mr. Touhey well, so he passes inside with a polite wave, and now he’s walking toward me. I can’t help but notice that the other girls in the lab look up. Jethro’s officially a babe. That postpubescent gawkiness? Gone. He moves comfortably, coolly, in his body. The longer hair suits him too.
I move toward him, quickly cutting him off from my station. No way am I letting him see my selfie portrait; I’m not in the mood to accept whatever compliment Jethro will inevitably give me, especially when I know the piece is crap and I don’t deserve it.
“Hey. Can we talk?” he asks gently.
“Of course. Everything okay?”
He ushers me into the empty hallway. As we stand face to face by the slate-gray wall, I tip my head back slightly to look up at him. My eyes wander to his lips, then to the slope of his neck where it meets his shoulders and disappears beneath his T-shirt.
Just when I think Jethro’s about to say something, he reaches toward me. His finger touches my ear. “I’m guessing this was supposed to go on the canvas,” he says, showing me a little blue paint he’s wiped off.
We both laugh.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you about,” he says now, suddenly serious again. “The Knock List, or whatever they’re calling it.”
Oh. I feel my heart sinking into a bottomless pit. “Yeah?”
Jethro puts his arms behind him and leans back against the wall, placing all his weight on his open fingers. “There was something on there,” he says, “and when I saw it, I thought I was being paranoid. At first I didn’t even really want to know, but I’ve been thinking about it all day, and maybe there’s someone else, but I can’t think of an
yone else in school who’d search that right now. So I guess now I kinda need to know…if it was yours. To get it out of my head.”
Of course I know exactly what he’s talking about.
“Avoid rebounding with a close friend?” Jethro continues. “Was it about…me? Sorry if I’m being paranoid; it’s just…no one else has broken up lately besides you…”
Breathing isn’t coming easily. Staring into those eyes, I don’t want to own up to it, but I can’t bear to lie either. All I can manage is a weird half shrug.
Jethro inhales. My silence says it all. He drops his head and closes his eyes for a moment. Then opens them. “It sucks that Rad and Nik are being so hard on you,” he says. “But they aren’t the only ones who weren’t psyched with the way things went down.”
“I just…,” I whisper as some JV hockey players pass us. “I wanted to make sure you and I can be friends again. I don’t want to…confuse things again. I know I wasn’t so good about that last summer. And I guess I was worried that when I saw you today, now that Palmer and I broke up…”
“What?”
I take a breath. I hate myself for not being able to look him in the eye as I shrug again. It’s that thing we’ve never acknowledged. That something-else part of our friendship that makes it so perfect and so complicated. It’s the closest either of us has come to saying it out loud, and I can’t do it.
Jethro’s face is unreadable for a moment. Finally he says, “You might not believe this, but after three years of whatever this is…or isn’t…I’m not sitting around on my ass waiting for you, Anna. I’ve hung out with other people.”
Has he?
“Okay,” I say.
“So anyway,” he says, “don’t worry about confusing things anymore. Not gonna happen.” He shakes his head and turns to go. “You can leave the rebounding to your basketball-star ex.”
It’s the first time I can remember in four years of friendship that Jethro’s walked away from me in the middle of a conversation.
—
“Here’s a crazy idea. How about we do everything at this paper, like, a thousand times better this semester and show people that print journalism is alive and well?”
I’m standing in an overheated room on the top floor of Ewing, at the home of the Xandria offices. Junior year, I did illustrations and cartoons for the newspaper, but I dropped it last semester. For the same reason I dropped everything else in my life. Now I need to show my most hard-ass friend that I’m serious about this comeback. So here I am after school, listening to Rad, early acceptee to Northwestern’s prestigious school of journalism, Miss Editor in Chief, address her staff: comma-splice concerns, excessive use of the first-person singular, some fund-raiser happening a few weeks from now, at which attendance is mandatory, directions she wants to take the paper in this semester…The good news is, listening to my old friend talk—hanging on her every word in order to begin to prove myself again—is helping me forget about avoid rebounding and the super-awkward weirdness with Jethro. Kind of.
Rad’s energy level picks up as she begins going off on “sleazebag upperclassmen” who have “zip minus diddly-squat passion” for journalism and are “barely coordinated enough to play Xbox” so can’t go out for any teams and just want to pad their “weak-ass applications” for colleges, and how their “ass-wipe antics” will no longer be tolerated at the Xandria.
A few juniors exchange nervous looks.
“So,” Rad says, looking at the crowd, “who’s here to apply for staff positions?”
A sour smile clouds her face when she sees that mine is among the tentative hands hovering in the air. Folding her arms across her chest, she says, “So, Anna, you showed your little weasel, turncoat face after all. I didn’t think you would.”
People laugh awkwardly, unaware of how serious Rad is.
“And I’m to understand that you’ve seen the error of your faithless ways and that you wish to come crawling back to the Xandria?”
I nod. “Yeah…consider me one of thy faithful.” Ugh, what am I even talking about? My guts twist from the room’s attention.
Rad’s smile turns smug. “Well. The Xandria is a beneficent institution. We’ll take you back without making you endure a groveling session. At least not publicly.”
Then Rad snaps her fingers, makes an aw, shucks face. “Oh, gee, I guess you should know that all the illustrator and cartoon spots are filled at the moment—darn. But you can point a camera too, right? And we need photographers!”
She stares right at me.
I can be as sorry as I want, but this is just downright cruel. Rad and I have spent hours talking about all the reasons why I don’t like taking photographs. Hours discussing why it is I’ve spent the past two years doing paintings that make fun of selfies in the age of narcissism.
“I can take some pictures,” I say with a level stare.
“I want our images to stand apart,” she says. “High-quality, professional-looking shots of the athletes, not the athletes fuzzy in the background with some geek spectator flashing a Miley Cyrus tongue in front. You’ll be covering the sports beat, by the way.”
I know immediately: Sports beat doesn’t mean I’ll be covering girls’ volleyball or coed fencing. I’ll be covering boys’ basketball and nothing but. She’s going to make me go to every one of Palmer’s remaining games.
So much for not seeing Palmer again.
But I can’t back down now, in front of everyone.
“Sounds great.” I flash a fake smile.
“Terrific,” she says breezily. “We’ll get you a press pass for Saturday’s game, then.” She holds my eye for one beat, two beats, three beats, then at last looks away. “Okay,” she says to the group at large, “so what are the rest of you covering?”
“If there are six hundred students, and this ‘glitch’ on the app lasted forty minutes, then we’re talking about a rate of three point seven five search queries per student, per hour, on average. Susan? Has our daughter ever asked us three point seven five questions in a day?”
My father leans back into his dining room chair with a smile, and Mom appears from the kitchen with a breadbasket and smile of her own. She has big, brown eyes that are perpetually wet and blinky, like a rabbit’s. My parents both have accents—my dad’s is Colombian, my mom’s is Southern belle.
“Someone searched ‘caffeine pregnancy’,” Mom says. “Do you think they’re asking if…caffeine causes pregnancy?”
“Also…what does Netflix and chill mean?” Dad asks with too much sincerity.
It’s moments like these when I wish I had a sibling. Someone to suffer alongside when my parents are being utterly embarrassing. Welcome to Soler dinner hour, which would be canceled on Funny or Die before the first ad. Alejandro and Susan get how crappy it is that everything we searched at school this morning was being recorded by the school app, but the Knock List is still tonight’s low-hanging teenage-comedy fruit. On a good day, when I’m in a good mood, their oh-so-witty banter can be a little bit funny. This is not one of those days.
“This chicken ain’t gonna eat itself,” Mom says, finally taking her seat.
Mom grew up in Georgia, and she’s been on a Southern kick for the past year, and I’m not one to complain about mashed potatoes. Dad works at the embassy—he first came here as a diplomat twenty years ago—so he eats Colombian food all the time at lunch and wants anything but ajiaco at dinner.
“I was relieved to see how little of it was…of a pornographic nature,” Dad says, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin. “Idiotic, yes. But gives me hope for the future.”
I scrape my fork across my plate. “Dad, it was nine in the morning on a Thursday. Who looks at porn then, anyway?”
“When I was in colegio, kids made out in the parking lot before the first bell.”
“There was a parking lot in the eighteenth century?”
Dad snorts. “We put our horses and buggies there.”
I have to say, I’m relieved my
parents haven’t asked me which searches were mine. This is the best thing about them: for all their jokes about high school drama, they don’t get all up in my business very often. I know they’ve secretly read a thousand books about raising a child with SAD. Maybe it comes from that. They know I have Dr. Bechdel to talk to (and they think I still have friends), so they usually don’t push. Dinner might be the best part of my day.
“Has anyone heard anything back from the colleges?” my mom asks lightly.
But I’m really not in the mood for that right now.
“Nope. Can I be excused?”
I promised myself I wouldn’t check the Internet again until after dinner, and I barely made it through. Technically, part of the SAD management I’ve worked out with Dr. Bechdel is that I’m supposed to minimize my use of social media. I don’t post anything anymore, and I have only anonymous accounts for the occasional lurking I still crave, like any normal person. Resisting Reddit for as many hours as I have is an accomplishment. So now I’ll just…take a little peek.
Late this afternoon, someone copied all the Knock List searches into a Reddit thread, and users started trying to match them to people. By six p.m., almost three hundred of the searches were matched to specific kids at school. Some are obviously right—no one had any doubt that jazz saxophone player Ian MacKinnon was the one searching for Ian MacKinnon Prep hot or that Ashley Keup’s idiot boyfriend, Steve, had done a search for Keup family net worth. It didn’t take long for Reddit users to figure out that Briana Texas Catfish was Seth Habel’s way of trying to make sense of the fact that his Twitter girlfriend, Briana, who asked him to send money to Houston last week, was a forty-five-year-old man in his underwear.
I’m lying on my bed now, laptop open. My bedroom is plastered with Lana Del Rey and René Magritte and Warhol posters. I haven’t gotten around to redecorating, so my fourteen-year-old self is still in charge of the walls.
Page eight of the Knock List stares back at me.
No name has been assigned to either of my stupid search terms. Thank God.
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