by Amber Smith
SATURDAY MORNING, PROMPTLY AT TEN, the doorbell rings. I call from my bedroom, “I’ll get it,” but Mom beats me. I get to the living room just as she’s swinging the door open.
“Good morning, you must be Stephen! Come on in, please, out of the rain.”
“Thanks, Mrs. McCrorey,” Stephen says, walking through our front door cautiously, dripping puddles of water all over the floor, which I know is making Mom secretly hyperventilate.
I stand there and watch as Stephen Reinheiser hands my mom his raincoat and umbrella. Watch as this person who knows me in one very distinct way crosses this unspoken boundary and begins to know me in this way that’s entirely different.
“You can just leave your sneakers on the mat there,” Mom tells him, wanting to ensure he does indeed take his wet shoes off before daring to step onto the carpet. This is a no-shoes house he’s entering. Watching him stand in my living room in his socks, looking uncomfortable, I realize that he has boundaries too.
“Hey, Stephen,” I finally say, making sure I smile. He smiles back, looking relieved to see me. “So, um, come in. I thought we could work at the table.”
“Sure,” he mumbles, following behind me as I lead him to the dining room.
We sit down and Stephen pulls a notebook out of his backpack. I readjust the stack of Columbus books I’ve checked out from the library.
“So what are we working on, Minnie?” Dad says too loudly, suddenly appearing in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, holding a steaming cup of coffee. Stephen jumps before turning around in his seat to look up at my dad.
“Dad, this is Stephen. Stephen, my dad. We’re doing a history project on Columbus.”
I try to silently plead with him to just keep this brief. Both my dad and my mom were making such a huge deal of me having a boy over. I told them before he got here that it’s not like that. I don’t even think of Stephen in that way. I don’t think I’ll ever think of anyone in that way.
Stephen adds, “Hero or Villain.”
“Ah. Hmm. Okay,” Dad says, grinning at me before walking back into the living room.
“Who’s Minnie?” Stephen whispers.
“Don’t ask,” I tell him, rolling my eyes.
“So, you stopped coming to lunch this week?” he says, like a question. “Sorry.”
“What for?”
“What happened Monday. In the cafeteria. I wish I would have said something. I should’ve said something. I hate those guys—they’re morons.”
I shrug. “Did Mara ask you about the book club thing?”
He nods.
“Will you do it? We need people to come. At least six people. Miss Sullivan’s really nice. She’s been letting me stay in the library all week.” I try to make this seem cooler than it probably is. “I think she gets it, you know?”
“She gets what?”
“You know, just, the way things are. How there are all these stupid cliques, and rules you’re supposed to follow that don’t make any sense. Just all of it, you know?” I stop myself, because sometimes I forget we aren’t really supposed to talk about this. We’re supposed to accept it. Supposed to feel like it’s all of us who have the problem. And we’re supposed to deal with it like it’s our problem even though it’s not.
Still, he just stares at me in this strange way.
“I mean, you get it, right?” I ask him. How could he not get it, I think to myself. I mean, look at him. Total geek. Overweight. No friends.
“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Yeah, I get it. No one’s ever really said it like that, I guess.” He looks at me in this way he’s never looked at me before, like I’ve told him some big secret he never knew about himself.
“Well, consider it, anyway—the book club.” I pause and take a breath. “So, Columbus?”
“Right,” he says absently.
“So, what do you think?” I try to steer our conversation to our project and away from all this dangerous honesty. “Hero or villain?”
“I don’t know,” Stephen says, still preoccupied. “I was reading online that there were all kinds of people that got here before Columbus. I mean, Native Americans, obviously, were already always here. But also the Vikings. And then there were people from Africa and even China who got here first.”
“Yeah, I read that too.”
“It’s more like Columbus was the last to discover America, not the first,” Stephen says with a laugh.
“Yeah,” I agree. “And I’ve been reading all these books from the library.” I open up one and slide it across the table to him. “Did you know he kidnapped all these people and he would cut off their ears or nose or something and send them back to their village as an example?” I point to one of the illustrations. “They basically just took anything they wanted.”
Stephen reads along in the book. “Exactly: food, gold . . . slavery . . . rape. . . .” I flinch at the word, but Stephen keeps reading. “Crap, it says that they would make them bring back a certain amount of gold—which would have been impossible for anyone—so when they failed, they would cut their hands off so they would bleed to death! And when they ran away, they sent dogs to hunt them down and then they would burn them alive! Sick,” Stephen says, finally looking up at me.
“So, I think we have our position—villain, right?”
“Yeah, villain,” he agrees. “Why did we ever start celebrating Columbus Day?” He grins. “We should discontinue the holiday.”
“It’s true. Just because someone has always been seen as this incredible person—this hero—it doesn’t mean that’s the truth. Or that’s who they really are,” I say.
Stephen nods his head. “Yeah, totally.”
“Maybe they’re actually a horrible person. And it’s just that no one wants to see him for who he truly is. Everyone would rather just believe the lies and not see all the damage he’s done. And it’s not fair that people can just get away with doing these awful things and never have to pay the consequences. They just go along with everyone believing—” I stop because I can barely catch my breath. As I look over at the confused expression on Stephen’s face, I realize I’m probably not just talking about Columbus.
“Yeah,” Stephen repeats, “I—I know, I totally agree.”
“Okay. Okay, good.”
“Hey, you know what we should do?” Stephen asks, his eyes brightening. “We should do, like, Most Wanted posters for Columbus and all those guys. And, like, list their crimes and stuff on the posters.” He smiles. “What do you think?”
I smile back. “I like that.”
LUNCH-BREAK BOOK CLUB. I named it. The next week we have our first meeting. We bring our brown bags to the table in the back of the library by the out-of-date reference materials nobody ever uses. It is me, Mara, Stephen, plus these two freshmen girls. The one girl looks to be about ten years old and transferred from a Catholic school at the beginning of the year. She dresses like she’s still there, always wearing these starchy button-down shirts under scratchy sweaters, and embarrassingly long skirts. The other girl chews on her hair. She looks so out of it, I’m not sure if she even knows why we’re here.
“We’re one short,” I announce, hoping this doesn’t spoil everything.
Miss Sullivan looks at me like she knows just as well as I do that this is basically bottom of the barrel here. Then she looks up at the clock. The minute hand clicks on the one. “There’s still time,” she says, reading my mind. “Besides, it’s all right if we don’t have all six people the first day.”
Just then this guy I’ve never seen walks toward the table—this severe-looking guy—skinny, with pale skin and deep black hair with blue streaks that match his bright blue eyes. He wears these funky, thick-rimmed glasses, and two silver rings encircle his lower lip.
“Wow,” Mara whispers to me, grinning ear to ear.
“What?” I whisper back.
“Just . . . wow,” she repeats, not taking her eyes off him.
“Cameron!” Miss Sullivan greets hi
m. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”
“Oh,” he says, pulling out the chair beside Stephen. “I mean, yeah. Hi.”
“All right,” Miss Sullivan begins, clearly encouraged by our new addition. “Why don’t we get started? I thought maybe we could just go around the table and introduce ourselves, tell everyone a little bit about your interests and why you’re here. I’ll start. Obviously, I’m Miss Sullivan.” She laughs. “I’m your librarian. But when I’m not here, I’m actually a real person, believe it or not. I spend a lot of time volunteering for the animal shelter and I foster rescue dogs while they’re waiting to be adopted. As far as this book club is concerned, as I mentioned to Eden, this is your club, so I want each of you to shape it. I think this will be a great way to do some reading for fun, outside the usual classroom setting, where we can have discussions and debates, talk about issues we don’t normally get to address in your forty-minute classes.”
She waves her hand in my direction, as if to say you’re up. I sink into my skin a little deeper. “I’m Eden—Edy, I mean. Or Eden. Um, I guess, I just like reading.” I shrug. “And I thought this book club sounded like a good idea,” I mumble. Miss Sullivan nods her head encouragingly. I hate myself. I look to Mara, silently begging her to just please interrupt me, just start talking—say anything.
“My name is Mara,” she says sweetly, flashing her new smile at all of us. “I’m a freshman. I’m interested in music—I’m in band. I like animals,” she adds, so naturally. Why couldn’t I have thought to say something like that? I’m in band too. I like animals—I love animals. “What else? I really think this will be a great way to spend our lunches—it’s a lot nicer, and quieter, than the cafeteria.” She adds a little giggle onto the end of her sentence, and everyone smiles back at her. Especially this new guy. Mara kicks my foot under the table, like, Are you seeing this?
“That’s great, Mara—we could always use more volunteers at the animal shelter, you know,” Miss Sullivan says with a smile. And I really wonder how people get to be normal like this. How they just seem to know what to say and do, automatically.
“I’m Cameron,” the new guy says, skipping over the two other girls. “I’m new here this year. I’m interested in art. And music,” he adds, smiling at Mara. “I like reading too.” He breaks his gaze away from Mara to make eye contact with me. “And dogs,” he smiles, looking at Miss Sullivan.
Miss Sullivan smiles back at him like she means it.
“I’m Stephen,” Stephen mumbles. “When Edy told me about this, I thought it sounded like a good alternative to having lunch in the cafeteria. Oh, and I like art too,” he adds, looking at Cameron. “Photography, I mean. I’m on yearbook.”
“Awesome, man,” Cameron says, flashing Stephen one of those smiles. This New Guy stepping all over my territory—first with Mara, then Miss Sullivan, now Stephen. And he’s going to try to smile at me like he’s some kind of nice guy.
He catches me staring at him, trying to figure out what kind of game he’s playing. I don’t know what expression I must be wearing, but his smile fades a little, and his eyes look at me hard too, like he might be trying to figure out why I’m trying to figure him out. Somewhere, my brain tells me I should be listening as the two other girls introduce themselves, but I can’t.
“Thank you for the introductions—this is great. So, I think the thing to do at this meeting is establish some logistics,” Miss Sullivan says through the fog of my brain. Cameron redirects his attention to her, and I follow. “What sounds reasonable to you? Two books a month? One? Three? I don’t know. We can vote on which books we would like to read together—we’ll do the reading on our own time, and then these lunch sessions will be for discussion. Thoughts?”
“Two a month sounds good,” Cameron offers, just before I was going to say the same thing.
“Yeah, two sounds right,” Mara agrees, with this strange twinkle in her eye.
“Why not three?” Catholic Schoolgirl asks.
“I don’t know if I have time for three extra books, with regular schoolwork and everything,” Stephen says uncertainly, looking around the table for support.
“I agree.” I say it firmly, just so I have something to say. Stephen smiles at me. He had, after all, supported me on Columbus.
“All right. I think we have a majority then. Two books per month it is!” Miss Sullivan concludes.
“Edy, this book thing was the best idea you’ve ever had!” Mara squeals the second we cross the threshold of the outside world, as we prepare to walk home after school. “That guy today was, like, so cool.”
“You mean the guy with blue hair and all the piercings?” I ask in disbelief.
“It’s not blue. It’s black with little steaks of blue. It’s awesome—he’s awesome.”
Okay, I mouth silently.
“Things are about to get good, Edy, I can feel it,” she says, clasping her hands together.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is just the beginning—me and Cameron. We can only get closer from here on out, right?” She trails off, looking into the distance. And I know I’ve lost her; she’s gone into her obsessive fantasizing state: “Yeah,” she continues, finally looking at me again, her eyes wide. “We’ll get to know him now that we’re all doing this book thing. We’ll become friends first. They always say that’s better, anyway. It will be—”
I have to tune her out, though, because she could go on like this for hours, planning out how things will be.
“You noticed the way he was looking at me, right, like, looking at me?” I hear her say.
Sometimes I wonder if she gets it, like Miss Sullivan and Stephen—how they just get it. Most of the time I think so, but then sometimes it seems like we’re on different planets. Like now.
“Maybe I should dye my hair blue?” she concludes, after a monologue that’s lasted almost the entire walk home from school.
“What? No, Mara.”
“I was just making sure you’re listening.” She smirks.
“Sorry, I’m listening,” I lie. We stand at the stop sign at the corner of my street. This is where we part. I go straight. She goes left. Except I can’t force my feet to move in that direction. It’s like I’m in quicksand. She stands there looking at me like maybe she really does get it. Like she knows something is wrong.
“Wanna come over?” she asks. “My mom won’t be home until later.”
I nod my head yes and we start walking toward her street.
“Okay, so I won’t dye my hair blue”—she grins—“but I am getting contacts. I already guilted my dad into it. We’re going to the eye doctor next weekend.”
“Sweet,” I tell her as I push my own glasses back up over the bridge of my nose.
We have no choice but to walk past his house to get to Mara’s. Kevin’s house. It hardly matters that he’s not there. I can feel my legs weakening the closer we get. I suddenly hate this neighborhood, loathe it, despise the way we’re all so close that we can’t get untangled from each other’s lives.
I already see Amanda in the front yard as we approach their house. His sister. She always seemed so much younger than me—I always thought of her as this little kid, but as I’m looking at her right now she doesn’t seem so little. She’s only one year behind us in school. We used to play together a lot when we were little, before Mara moved here in the sixth grade and took her place as my best friend. Their youngest sister is with her, along with another little kid—probably a neighbor—bundled up in layers, playing in the snow. It looks like they’re trying to assemble a snowman, but it’s really just a big blob of cold white. Amanda stands next to it, winding a scarf around and around the place where the top blob and the middle blob meet, while the two little kids scream and throw snowballs at each other.
The kids are oblivious to us, but Amanda sees us coming. She ties the scarf in a final knot and then places her mittened hands in her coat pockets; she stands there watching us. She doesn’t say anythi
ng, which is strange. Even though we weren’t technically friends, not like we used to be, we still talked, still got along at the occasional family get-together.
When I don’t say anything either, Mara fills in the blanks: “Hey, Mandy!”
Mandy. It’s what we all called her after they first moved here. It didn’t stick. I remember that’s how they introduced her the first time we met. It was at my eighth birthday party, back when our two families started celebrating everything as one, because Kevin and Caelin were inseparable from the very beginning. Kevin was always included, and his family by extension. But I guess that was a million years ago.
“Hi, Amanda,” I offer, trying to smile.
She crosses her arms and stands up a little straighter. “Hey,” she finally replies, monotone.
“So, did you have a nice Christmas?” I try, anyway, to act like things are normal, but all I can think of is Kevin.
She shrugs slightly, staring at me. The seconds drag by.
The thing about the Armstrongs—the thing I never really gave much thought until now—is that when they came here, they weren’t just moving here. They were leaving something else. Something bad had happened wherever they were before. I’d overheard Mrs. Armstrong telling Mom about it. She was crying. And then later I was eavesdropping while Mom told Dad about it. I didn’t get most of it, other than it involved Kevin, and Mr. Armstrong’s brother, Kevin’s uncle.
“Actually”—I turn to Mara—“I think I am gonna go home instead. I’m not feeling great, honestly.”
“Really, what’s wrong?” Mara asks, her voice genuinely concerned.
“Nothing, I just—” But I don’t finish, because I’m literally backing away from them. I turn to look only once, and they both stand there watching me.
Mara raises her arm to wave, and yells, “I’ll call you!”
I start running after I round the corner, my head pounding harder and faster with each footfall, my whole body in this cold sweat. By the time I make it home I’m so nauseous I’m actually crying. I run into the bathroom and am instantly on the floor kneeling in front of the toilet, gasping for air.