How (Not) to Find a Boyfriend

by Allyson Valentine

  “What happened?” Krista asks.

  I’m about to begin my tale of woe when a new wave of people rushes into the commons. And rushing in with them like he’s being carried by the wave?

  Adam.

  “Oh my god!” I shift in my seat so that my back is to the entrance and hide my face with my hand.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Krista.

  “See the guy who just came in? The one in the pink shirt?”

  She shifts in her seat. I grab her arm. “Don’t stare!”

  She gives me a don’t-be-pathetic look. “Give me some credit.”

  She looks over at the CUTTHROATS RULE! poster on the far wall, her gaze lingering on the crowd as she turns back to face me.

  “Do you mean the guy talking to the Teapot?”

  I risk a quick glance. Adam is in the burger line chatting with the girl Krista and I call the Teapot because of the part she played in last year’s school production of Beauty and the Beast. Appropriately, she is both short and stout.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen him before,” she says. “Is he what happened this morning?”

  Between spoonfuls of yogurt I tell Krista about Adam playing soccer with Joshie, and me stopping the ball with my head. I tell her about how good it felt talking to him—giddy, but at the same time totally comfortable. I tell her about my sleepless night of obsessive wondering. Will Adam be my boyfriend? Will we have kids one day? What’ll I do if he turns senile at ninety and I have to choose whether or not to have him institutionalized?

  “Jeez, Nora, get out of your head!”

  “I know, I know, and then this morning, I made a total fool of myself.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I gave him a ride to school—”

  Oops.

  “You what!?” Krista snaps. “You are such a loser giving that guy a ride. You don’t even know him. He could be a rapist. Or worse, you could lose your license! Over a guy! And why would you, Miss Picky, choose a guy like that when you could have Jake Londgren?” She presses the inside of her wrist to my forehead. “You, my friend, are sick.”

  Is that what it is? Did that soccer ball do something to my brain?

  Krista shakes her head. “Forget this Allen guy—”

  “Adam.”

  “Whatever. Forget about him and focus on Jake. Dex thinks you guys would be great together.”

  A burst of laughter erupts at the table as Jazmine and Gillian purse their lips, making their cheeks go gaunt like a particularly emaciated model wearing a dress that appears to be made of cutlery. Krista nudges me, encouraging me to look casually to the left. Adam, his tray heaped with a burger, fries and some apple slices, has just sat down at a table that is empty except for himself and the Teapot.

  “Who knows? Maybe your hottie has already found a girlfriend,” Krista says.

  “Stop it. I’m sure they just had a class together or something. I mean, he’s new, and you know how over-the-top friendly she is.”

  Adam and the Teapot? Well, she does have a killer Southern accent. And she is the very embodiment of school spirit, wearing purple, gold or both pretty much every day. It was the Teapot who first gave me the idea to try out for cheer last May when I saw her pass by a tryout poster, clutch her heart and exclaim dramatically to one of her fellow thespians, “I would give anything to be a cheerleader.”

  But Adam and the Teapot?

  Krista kicks my foot. “Look who’s here.”

  Jake has just entered the commons. There is an audible screech of chairs as girls turn to watch him saunter toward us.

  “See? Now that’s who you should set your sights on,” says Krista. She starts to get up.

  I grab her wrist. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m making a place for Jake to sit.”

  “No!” I pull her back into her seat. Meanwhile, Jake picks up a chair from the table where Adam and the Teapot have been joined by a guy in a loud striped polo shirt who’s shaped much like a pear.

  Jake is big, too, but he defies fruitlike description. He’s wearing one of those black, stretchy nylon sports shirts, and his muscles pop as he hoists the chair over his head and struts across the room. A girl at the next table sighs.

  “Always extra chairs at the loser table,” says Jake with a guffaw.

  The “loser” table? I happen to know from last year’s science class that the Teapot is no slouch in the brains department. Adam is a 4.0 shoo-in. And while I don’t know anything about the guy in the striped shirt, he certainly looks smart. At least, he looks like a guy my brother Phil would have hung out with. In short—I would fit right in at the “loser” table.

  Jake sets the chair down near me and Krista, spinning it so that he sits in it backward, resting his bulky forearms on the back of the chair as he leans in. “So how’s the first day going?”

  Krista launches into an animated story about her English class. Jake listens, but his eyes dart from Krista to me.

  And my eyes? They’re fixed on the loser table.

  Four

  MY DAYS AS A LARVA MAY BE behind me, but after English, I walk into math class and struggle against my inner nerd to avoid taking the empty seat front and center. Instead, I slide into a chair all the way at the back of the classroom. A steady line of people file in and I calculate the chance that Adam will be among them: zero. Sure, this is the math that most sophomores take, but with his head-of-a-research-division mother, psychiatrist father and breezy lock on a 4.0, he is almost certainly in the advanced algebraic functions class, or precalculus—right where I should be.

  I pull a fresh notebook and a mechanical pencil out of my book bag as the teacher, Mr. Bolger, rushes in and sets a pile of books and papers on his desk. He’s got a total Mister Rogers thing going on: grandpa pants and a cable-knit cardigan with a shirt and tie. The only things missing are canvas sneakers and a couple of puppets.

  The seats are about half filled when Jake enters like he’s walking onto a stage. He stops at the doorway and scans the crowd. He sees me and his face breaks into a smile. Krista is right—he’s stunning. He heads in my direction and I wish that I wanted him. I wish that my heart would get all kerthumpity, but it doesn’t miss a beat.

  “Hey, Jake!” a football player in the second row holds out his hand for a fist bump as Jake passes by.

  “Dude!” Jake pops him one in the knuckles.

  “Hi, Jake.” A girl with pink hair rolls her fingers at him. Jake winks and flashes a grin.

  “Yo, Jakey!” Nathaniel, the kid who played the Teapot’s son in Beauty and the Beast, gives Jake a thumbs-up. Little Nate is either twelve years old or has a serious pituitary issue. Jake struts past, appearing to neither see nor hear him. Little Nate slowly lowers his hand. Rejection stinks.

  “Nora!” Jake arrives at the last row and slides into the seat beside mine, shoving it a few inches closer to my chair as he drops into it. His teeth shine milk-white. He leans so close that I can feel the heat radiating off his body. “Saturday. You stoked or what?” he says.

  It takes me a moment to get there. Saturday? Saturday! The opening game—just two days away. I am three parts stoked and one part terrified. “I can’t wait,” I say. “Are you guys going to clean their clocks?”

  I can see from the look on his face that the idiom I tossed him went way wide. I translate: “Do you think we’re going to win?”

  Jake pretends to excavate wax out of his ear. Nice. “Did I really just hear you ask if we’re going to win?” He barks out a laugh and raises his voice. “We’re gonna kick their butts, and I’m going to show those losers what Jake Londgren looks like when he means business.” Jake pumps his fist. “Yes!”

  The Jake fans in the room clap and hoot. More people filter in. Elsa and Simone, some of the Cabbage White butterflies from the cheer squad, stop by to say hi to me, but mostly to Jake.

  “See you at practice, Nora.” Elsa waggles her fingers and they take seats a couple of rows up.

  At the front of the c
lassroom Mr. Bolger counts heads. He shuts the door and calls names off the roster. He’s only gotten to Carrigan, Heather when the door flies open and a guy rushes in out of breath.

  Hood, Adam.

  “Sorry. I’m still trying to find my way around,” he tells Mr. Bolger.

  What is he doing here? And who cares—at least he’s here! His cheeks are flushed from the race to arrive on time. He drops into an empty chair right in the front row. He bends forward to riffle through the book bag he’s dropped onto the floor beside his chair, and as he bends, his shirt hitches up, revealing the tiniest sliver of skin at his waist.

  Kerthumpity!

  Mr. Bolger sets down the roster. “Tell you what. I’ll finish roll at the end of class in case any more stragglers come in. For now, let’s get started. We’ve got a lot to cover.” He goes through about fifteen minutes of first-day stuff: where we can find an online copy of the book so we don’t need to bring it back and forth from home; what he’ll do if he catches someone using electronics in class; how we can access his website for assignments and to correct our work.

  Jake leans in and whispers, “Dude! The answers are online! Sweet!”

  Mr. Bolger passes out copies of a course syllabus and goes through it with us. He talks about some of the specifics we’ll be covering this year. There’s little that I haven’t seen before. On one hand, it’s nuts for me to be here because I’ll be bored out of my mind. On the other hand, with any luck Mr. Bolger will call on me to answer some seemingly gnarly problems, and when I rattle off their solutions, Adam will get that I’m not the half-wit I seemed to be by the end of the ride to school.

  “And now, for a little review,” says Mr. Bolger, and he starts tossing out questions to see how we rate on his smart-o-meter. I avoid raising my hand. That line between smart and smarty-pants is such a fine one. Here I am a mere three rows away from two other cheerleaders, and there are a handful of other football players in the room—the air is thick with popularity potential. Do I want to be that girl who reaches her hand toward the sky like she wants to pinch it? The girl who knows all the answers? What would Chelsey do?

  Who am I kidding? She wouldn’t know the answer, so it would not be an issue.

  Mr. Bolger scans the classroom. “The sum of the three angles in a triangle always equals . . . ?” His eyebrows are like little gray haystacks. “Come on. Somebody must know this.”

  Surely someone other than me knows the answer. I glance over at Jake, who is doodling a picture of the Heisman Trophy, which I can only make out because he has also written in large block letters, JAKE LONDGREN WINS THE HIESMAN TROFY!

  “Anyone?” says Mr. Bolger.

  Adam shifts in his seat and Mr. Bolger is on him like a square in need of a root. “Yes, you. Can you help me out here?”

  Adam taps the eraser of his pencil on the desk a couple of times. “Sure,” he says. “One hundred eighty degrees.”

  “Thank you.” Mr. Bolger heaves an exasperated sigh.

  Jake nudges me and nods toward Adam. “Loser.”

  I want to leap to his defense. He is not a loser! He is so not a loser! In fact, it won’t be long before that “loser” and I leave this classroom each day arm in arm, commiserating about radical functions. I can picture us, sitting out in the courtyard at lunchtime investigating the relationship between the graphs of functions and their symbolic representation. I can imagine Adam rushing to my house clutching a piece of graph paper, his hair wild and unkempt from having tugged on it while struggling to solve a complex problem—“Nora! Nora, check it out! I’ve graphed a system of linear inequalities in two variables.”

  I would reward him with a system of linear kisses, in two variables.

  Mr. Bolger continues asking questions even Joshie could muddle through, waiting for a volunteer, then picking some hapless student when no one responds.

  A basketball player raises his hand. “I don’t really see how any of this stuff will help me get a job as a physical therapist.”

  There is a murmur of assent.

  Mr. Bolger offers the usual explanation—that basic mathematics courses are building blocks for future mathematics classes. We’ve got to get through the boring stuff to get to the interesting stuff. Why doesn’t he tell everyone some of the coolest things about math? The stuff my dad kept me and Phil riveted with during car trips. How trigonometry tables were created more than two thousand years ago to chart astronomical events. How Christopher Columbus used his copy of the mathematically charged Regiomontanus’s Ephemerides Astronomicae to save his starving crew when he accurately predicted a lunar eclipse, thus convincing the indigenous Jamaicans that they’d better fork over some food for his crew, or else.

  I don’t realize how far I have zoned out until Jake nudges me. I jerk to attention, knocking my pad and pencil on the floor. As I pick them up, I bang my head on the desk. Mr. Bolger is looking at me. The other cheerleaders are looking at me.

  Adam is looking at me.

  Mr. Bolger folds his arms over his chest. “Surely you can answer that simple geometry refresher for us, Miss—”

  I swallow.

  “Fulbright,” I croak. “Nora Fulbright.”

  “Miss Fulbright? It’s one of the most basic principles.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t—I wasn’t—”

  “For crying out loud,” snaps Mr. Bolger. He slaps his open hand on his desk. “Would you people please pay attention? Or if you truly did not know the answer to that question, Miss Fulbright, I suggest you rethink whether you ought to perhaps be in a different class.” He waves an open hand at Little Nate. “Can you please help out Miss Fulbright?”

  Little Nate clears his throat. “The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.”

  Oh triangular crap! Really? All Mr. Bolger was after was the Pythagorean theorem? I could recite it in my sleep. For Phil’s ninth birthday he insisted on a cake in the shape of a right triangle with c2 = a2 + b2 drizzled on top in blue icing. He let me have the piece with the equal sign. Even Mom, whose strength is neither math nor hard science, can recite the Scarecrow’s famously incorrect version from The Wizard of Oz: “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh, joy! Rapture. I’ve got a brain!”

  Oh, joy. Rapture. I have, once again, demonstrated to Adam that I’ve got a football field of empty space where there ought to be a brain.

  The bell rings. I can’t even look up.

  “Hang on.” Mr. Bolger hurries to his desk and grabs the roster. “I need to check who’s here before I can let you go.”

  He rattles off the names, rapid-fire. Then asks, “Is there anyone here whose name I didn’t call?”

  Two hands shoot into the air. Mine and Jake’s. He tells us to stay for a minute, dismissing everyone else. I lift my eyes and meet Adam’s as he stands and hoists his book bag over his shoulder. I’m standing beside Jake, who is flanked by Elsa and Simone. Elsa’s hands are folded over Jake’s bicep and Simone giggles like a chipmunk. Through the miles of desks between us, and the wall of people racing to leave the classroom, Adam smiles. Then, his eyes dart to Jake, and he leaves.

  As Mr. Bolger approaches, Elsa and Simone beat a hasty retreat.

  “And you are?” Mr. Bolger asks, eyeing Jake.

  “Jake Londgren.” Jake says it with an implied “Duh?” at the end. Like who doesn’t know who Jake Londgren is?

  Mr. Bolger scans his roster again. “Are you sure you’re supposed to be in algebra two?”

  “Hang on.” Jake pulls a crumpled schedule out of his front pants pocket and scans it. He laughs. “No wonder nothing made any sense.”

  Shaking his head, Mr. Bolger checks his roster a final time. “Miss Fulbright, I don’t see you on here either.”

  “I just changed my schedule last minute. I was supposed to be in . . .” I hesitate. “I was supposed to be in a different class.”

&nbs
p; “Mmm-hmm,” murmurs Mr. Bolger. “And as I said earlier, perhaps you should be in a different class.”

  “Try algebra one, it’s not so bad,” offers Jake. “I should know, I’ve taken it twice.”

  Jake and I reach the hallway and Adam is nowhere to be seen. “Where are you headed?” Jake asks.

  “US History.”

  “Piece of cake,” he says. “All you need to know is that we beat the British, we voted to pay the slaves minimum wage, and that pretty much brings us up to today.”

  “Thanks, Jake. That’ll really give me an edge in class.”

  “Dude! No problem!”

  Jake takes off for wood shop. I finish up with history. And finally, brrriiing! It’s the last bell of the day, and I’m shuffling stuff between my locker and my book bag when Chelsey happens by.

  “Oh my gosh!” she says. “Was this just the best day ever?” She closes her eyes, leans back against the lockers and inhales deeply through her nose. “Ahhh. Don’t you just love this place? It’s so good to be back.”

  I follow her lead, pulling in a deep breath. All I smell are industrial cleanser and an overpowering mix of personal care products. Is it good to be back? In my mind I draw a line graph of the day. It is marked by euphoric peaks—I ate lunch with the Monarchs!—and dismal valleys—don’t get me started. But throughout it all, there was Adam. We breathed the same air. Our feet walked down the same hallways. There could be little Adam atoms nestling into my being at this very moment. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s good to be back.”

  As we head to cheer practice, the halls are nearly empty. It’s eerily quiet except for the buzz coming from a few classrooms where after-school clubs are having welcome-back meetings.

  “How are your classes so far?” I ask Chelsey.

  She groans and fishes for a book from her hot-pink book bag. She holds up a copy of Hamlet, one of my favorite plays of all time. “Did you know that this story has absolutely nothing to do with ham?” she says.

  I laugh, then stop when I realize she’s serious.

  “And I’m not only supposed to read this thing, I’m expected to write a paper about it! Isn’t that what college is for?”