Noteworthy

by Riley Redgate

  We looked over at Jon Cox, who was leaning deep over the table, giving Anabel his confident grin. “Hey. How’s it going? You’re Anabel, right?”

  A supremely bored look spread across Mama’s round face. “Oh, God, not this again,” he muttered.

  I looked toward the road, and freedom. “Sorry, bro, I really have to go, but I’ll see you at reh—”

  “He always does this,” Mama said tiredly. “Don’t abandon me. I spend 90 percent of my life third-wheeling.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek and stayed put, giving the table a cautious glance.

  “Sucks that you have to work this thing,” Jon Cox was saying, giving his glasses a nudge up his nose with a knuckle. “How long are your shifts?”

  “Not too bad,” Anabel said. “An hour each.” Her attention flickered over his face, from his blue eyes to his even smile.

  Watching Jon Cox’s performance was kind of fascinating. With his balanced, patrician features and the way his golden hair caught the sun, he was hard to look away from. He also had it, whatever it was—the charm some guys have that radiates out like a gravitational field. Michael had had it, too.

  “Jon,” Mama said loudly, “you’re holding up the line.”

  Anabel came back to herself. “Right,” she said, glancing down at the box and back up at him. “That’ll be a dollar.”

  “Yeah.” Jon Cox pulled his wallet from his pastel-yellow shorts and paid. “Thanks. I’ll see you around.”

  As he backed away from the table, I drew the guys toward the exit. The line flooded up, hiding Anabel from sight, and the tension unknotted from my shoulders.

  “What the fuck,” Jon Cox said, battering Mama around the torso with the lamp. “She was like an eight.”

  Mama swatted the lamp away. It swung toward a tiny freshman girl with a messenger bag who dodged it with a squeak. “My bad,” Mama called after her and turned back to Jon. “I’m doing you a favor. Remember Laura?”

  They pulled identical grimaces.

  “So, yeah,” Mama said. “Leave theater girls alone.”

  “Not everybody is gonna be Laura.”

  “All I’m saying is,” Mama rumbled, “maybe something would go well if you spent less time picking up random girls, and more time, I don’t know, making friends with girls, so you can find someone who actually makes sense with your terrible personality.”

  Jon Cox grinned. He didn’t even seem to hear the insult. “The Internet disagrees,” he said. “Pickups work. They make you look like an alpha. Women love alphas. It’s a real thing.”

  I couldn’t contain myself. “Oh my God it completely is not a thing,” I mumbled.

  Jon Cox elbowed me. “Back me up here.” I rubbed my bicep, scowling at him. We reached the entrance of the enclosure and slowed, waiting for the crowd to clear.

  “Well,” Mama said, “not to sound like a sixty-year-old, but—”

  “You always sound like a sixty-year-old.”

  “—but maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

  Jon Cox flicked the lamp over his shoulder. “I officially like this lamp more than I like you.”

  “I’m just trying to help,” Mama said. “It’s sort of sad watching you bounce around from girl to girl like a hormone pinball, just so you can pretend you’re not pining afte—”

  “I’m not pining,” Jon Cox said as we passed the teachers who manned the entrance. “I don’t pine.”

  Mama looked skeptical but stayed quiet. As we reached August Drive, Jon Cox nudged me. “Julian, what’re you up to? We’re gonna go for a drive. I texted the group—we’re picking up Isaac in a second.”

  “A drive?” I said. “You have your license?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aren’t you a sophomore?”

  Red tinged his cheeks. “Yeah, but I, um.”

  “He’s old for his grade,” Mama cut in, sounding strangely protective. “So, you coming?”

  I hunted for excuses. This didn’t fit the whole become-a-hermit-and-hide-forever plan. “I don’t know, guys. I’ve got this essay to write, and—”

  “Aw, come on,” Jon Cox said, his composure re-forming. “Look at this.” He waved at the volumes of blue sky overhead. “It’s not gonna last forever.”

  Don’t tempt me. I never got the chance to go off-campus. It didn’t take long for Kensington to start feeling like a room whose walls were steadily moving inward.

  Also, I felt a little gratified that these two wanted to hang out with me. At some point, it had become hard to tell if a boy genuinely thought I was cool and wanted to be friends with me, or if he wanted something different and wouldn’t admit it for fear of rejection. This made for the worst kind of twilight zone. You didn’t want to assume a guy was into you, but you had to have a plan lined up just in case, because what if he sprang feelings on you out of nowhere in a guerrilla attack and you were unprepared to deflect them in a tactful way? Also, it made a shitty foundation for a friendship, the constant worry that someone would stop caring about you overnight if you didn’t want to date them. It was all very stressful.

  But in disguise, this was not an issue. When I wasn’t a girl, I could be sure that guys liked me for me, not for some hypothetical person they thought I could be to them.

  It took a moment, but I shook off the gratification and the campus claustrophobia. I had to focus.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have so much work.”

  Jon Cox scoffed. “Don’t be sorry, just do it later.” He slung an arm around my shoulders, and I tried not to tense. “Everyone has work, it’s fucking Kensington.”

  “Think of it as a study break,” Mama added.

  “Yeah,” Jon Cox said. He and Mama split off from me, heading up toward the parking lot. “We’re going to drive by the theater quad in like ten minutes,” Jon called, “and if you’re not there, we’re gonna come in and find you.”

  “But—” I called back, but they’d already turned their backs and started jogging away, perfectly in sync as always.

  I watched them go, helpless.

  I snuck in through my bedroom window. I’d glued the latch back into place—when I’d studied the broken handle, I’d spotted traces of old glue. I wasn’t a wizard. It was already broken when I broke it. Half reassuring, half disappointing.

  I flicked my hair into place in the mirror and fastened my baseball cap back on. It wasn’t surprising that Jon Cox had a car. With Kensington’s limited parking, permits were pricey as hell—you could usually tell on sight which people could afford them.

  The issue of wealth at Kensington was built into the walls, and not just in the sense that all the portraits on the literal walls were of old rich guys. This was true, but it wasn’t really a concrete problem. The problem was the money this place asked us to drop on textbooks and supplies, even those of us on financial aid. A lot of other boarding schools were adopting full-ride scholarship options that paid for books, travel, laptops—the whole deal. Kensington hadn’t caught up yet. Every semester, I calculated my textbook costs, usually three or four hundred dollars, and prayed it was offset by the money my parents weren’t spending to feed me.

  I put away my new clothes and headed down to August Drive. As I waited at the curb, my nerves slipped toward anticipation. I could stay at arm’s length and still let off some steam. Didn’t I deserve it? I’d made it through a whole week of my charade with no slipups. I’d just looked my own prefect right in the eye and fooled her. I, Jordan Sun, was pulling off the most outlandish acting performance in Kensington history, which was saying something, since a couple years ago, the School of Theater had put up an adaptation of Macbeth set on a space shuttle in 2405. (Half the roles had been turned into malevolent AIs.)

  I wasn’t just pulling it off, either. I was enjoying it, maybe too much. I liked the invisibility of being a boy, inhabiting a bigger and broader space. I was feeling less apologetic about it by the day.

  Lately, I’d been eyeing the male ro
les in The Greek Monologue and Character and Humanity with envy, too. The parts girls workshopped in classes were usually filled with flirting, swooning, seducing, or heartbreak, only one of which I’d ever been any good at. I found myself wishing I could switch into being Julian. He could dig into some of those guys’ roles, powerful or stubborn men, stoic or genius men, authoritative men—parts I would’ve loved to play for wish fulfillment, if nothing else.

  I’d started asking myself: What had I ever gotten out of being a girl, anyway? What did I even like about it? Femininity had always felt inaccessible to me—my best attempt at it had always been putting on makeup and pretending to be more patient and graceful than I actually was, mostly for my mom’s sake. Sometime in middle school, feeling awkward had become my default. Because I wasn’t patient. I wasn’t graceful. I was prematurely tall, I wasn’t skinny, I wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t care about any of it as much as I was supposed to. Square peg, meet round hole.

  Maybe, I’d thought for a while, the sense of not fitting was part of the package. But I didn’t know if other girls felt this way. I’d never talked about it with anyone, even Jenna, Maria, or Shanice; and so many girls at school had seemed completely at home with girlhood that for me to admit the weakness—it would have felt like giving up control.

  The only thing stranger than being a girl was turning into a woman. “Such a talented young woman,” an aunt visiting San Francisco had said about me last summer, and at “young woman,” I’d felt a pang of confusion. Had I alchemically morphed from a girl into a woman without noticing? When had that happened? Sometimes you heard that getting your period meant you were becoming a woman. But I’d first gotten my period when I was ten, the only one of my friends to walk up to fifth grade with tampons stuffed in my backpack, and nobody had called me “young woman” then. I’d been a kid—a surly, reclusive kid, a little too used to fending for myself.

  Maybe the idea of turning from a girl into a woman freaked me out because I still didn’t understand what it meant to become one. What was the woman origin story? What were we, and how did we get there? It was funny, because for boys, it seemed simple, in a way. The world had told me what becoming a man looked like: conquering one thing or another, one way or another. Becoming a woman, as far as they’d told us, looked like blood.

  When Jon Cox pulled up a minute later, I stared rudely. He drove a steel-gray convertible, sleek and low to the ground, keypads on its silver door handles. The aerodynamic curves that formed the car’s wide hood emphasized the checkered BMW logo embedded above the grill.

  “Climb in,” Jon Cox called from the driver’s seat, one hand lazily resting on the dark curve of the wheel. Isaac lounged in the back, his guitar in his lap. Mama sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the bumping radio.

  “Climb?” I repeated. No way was I putting my dirty shoes on a car that had probably cost what my parents paid for five years’ rent.

  “Yeah, I mean, within reason,” Jon Cox said.

  After a second, Mama snapped his fingers at me. “Maaake haaaste,” he sang, a rumbling operatic sound.

  I braced my hands on the door and vaulted in. My elbow buckled a second too soon, and I barreled into the neck of Isaac’s guitar. He snatched it away, instantly inspecting it, fingers skimming every inch of the wood. It was a beautiful instrument, sleek and rosy.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, settling in the soft black leather of the backseat.

  “All good. She’s intact.” Isaac peered at me through narrowed eyes. “But watch it. Damage my baby, and I will ship you back to California in my guitar case.” His face lit up. “Did you guys know there was this girl who tried to ship herself to the Beatles in a box? Apparently she forgot to put air holes in the crate, which was, like, amateur mistake. If I was going to—”

  Mama turned up the music, drowning him out. Isaac gave him the finger, Jon Cox laughed, and we revved down the street and through campus.

  I kept one hand on my head, holding my baseball cap on. The film houses passed by, identical dollhouses, square black windows shielding musty-looking curtains. We rounded a corner and slid between the two biggest dorms on campus, Wingate and Ewing, which faced each other down as if in a Western standoff. Finally, we passed through Arthur’s Arch, leaving campus behind, framed by that imposing iron A.

  Instead of continuing through town toward its array of shops and restaurants, we headed down a side street and out into the open countryside. Jon Cox accelerated until the wind started to billow around us, heavy waves of air. The woodland that encircled Kensington was assuming the tinge of autumn yellow, worn out by a long summer. Every so often, a peeling clapboard house cropped up on the side of the winding road, or a clearing dipped into the woodlands, fields rippling with tall grass and wildflowers.

  The breeze tasted like loam and the coming fall, and it made the golden tassel of Jon Cox’s hair ripple. “Hey,” he told Mama, “can you Insta this?”

  Mama sighed. “Like I said. Slave to the Internet.” He picked up Jon’s phone, entered his password, opened Instagram, and snapped a stupidly photogenic picture. “You should pay me for doing your branding,” he grumbled.

  Isaac glanced at me. “Jon Cox has, like, eighty thousand Instagram followers,” he explained.

  “Ugh,” I said, involuntarily. He laughed.

  “What can I say?” Jon Cox said, sounding satisfied. “Insta girls love me.”

  “It’s probably 90 percent bots,” Isaac shot back. “The spam algorithms love you.”

  “Follow me,” Jon Cox called back to me, ignoring Isaac. “Join the crowds.”

  “I don’t do social media,” I said, which was true. If I’d had it, I would have deleted it to stay under the radar, anyway.

  We were far off-campus by now, and the music faded out. After a second, a plucking guitar riff rang through the speakers. “Love Me Forever.”

  “Yes,” Jon Cox yelled, turning it up, summoning the bass to thud against my back.

  “Here we go,” Mama groaned, sinking in the passenger seat. I glanced into the side mirror. He’d sunk so low, all I could see were his thick eyebrows hiding beneath the chaos of hair over his wide forehead.

  Jon Cox and Isaac were already singing along at the top of their lungs. Isaac was strumming along on his guitar, too, the strings vibrating inaudibly under the crisp envelope of the sound system. “Last night you said you love me,” he and Jon wailed. “You said you can’t stop, can’t stop thinking of me—”

  In front of me, Mama started to sing an octave down. His voice cut through the song like a bassoon. “Baby, I hope it doesn’t tear you apart . . .”

  Jon Cox cracked up. The persistent bray of his laughter was infectious. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning, and as my smile spread wide, a warning chimed in me. Arm’s length. Keep your cover. Don’t get in too deep.

  As the chorus approached, Jon Cox turned up the volume even more, drowning my thoughts. That huge, splashy hook blared out, and before I knew it, I was singing too, yell-singing at the top of my lungs. “And you asked, ‘When you gonna tell the truth?’ and I said, ‘Never’ . . .” The sound of our voices dissipated instantly, whisked away in the rush of the wind barreling through Jon Cox’s car. Lost out in the world. “’Cause you’re looking for somebody who can love you forever, and I can’t do that—I can’t do that—I can’t do that, oh no, no, no.”

  The sun glowered down at us. The wind rose. We rushed by a house where a pair of middle-aged women sat on the lawn in plastic chairs, reading yellowing novels, dressed in florals. They glanced up as we passed, and their deep-set eyes tracked us until we were gone. The woods around us broke into rough waves of grass as we headed for a steep hill, and when the car crested and plunged down the incline, my stomach lifted. My heart lifted. Everything lifted, and I looked around at the guys in the car, laughing now, laughing about those dumb lyrics, all love and yearning, and I thought, This is wonderful, this is wonderful, this is never going to last.

  Nothing last
s. I knew that, and I spent half my life repeating it to myself. Only Michael had ever managed to make me forget. He lived in the moment so much, he threw away everything other than the world in his immediate orbit. Sometimes I could’ve sworn he had no past and couldn’t give a damn about the future, that he was some temporary blessing that flickered in and out of existence exactly as he wanted. You had to grab Michael by the shoulders and bully him to wring out any information about his life back home: Seattle and his three little brothers. His parents’ calm suburban life did not interest him, and neither did Kensington kids’ usual obsessions with what was coming next, colleges or conservatories or auditions. All Michael wanted was the wildness of the present, and he wanted it all at once. It was exhilarating, right up until the point that it became selfish.

  I sat in the back of that glimmering car with its purring engine and I let myself think about him without anger, without longing, without anything. Michael wasn’t perfect, which I’d known, but maybe he wasn’t even perfect for me, which hadn’t occurred to me. It seemed a little clearer to me now. It wasn’t enlightenment to live like you had no history and no consequences. The world wasn’t just made out of instants—it was made out of plans, too, and the ability to learn from your mistakes. I wished he’d learned.

  The song reached its bridge, falling back in order to build into the final chorus.

  Isaac wedged his guitar securely between seats. He grabbed the shoulders of Jon Cox’s seat and maneuvered himself to his feet, craning his long body over the driver’s headrest. The wind clawed at his hair, clearing the straggling locks back from his forehead. My throat tightened—if we hit anything, or even braked too fast, Isaac was getting pitched straight over the windshield—but Jon Cox and Mama didn’t say a word. It wasn’t until Isaac leaned forward to fiddle with the bass levels on the sound system that Mama smacked his hand away, shouting over the music, “Sit down, moron, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Isaac yelled, sitting back down, “and the lyrics to this song kind of suck. I told Trav we shouldn’t do it. People are gonna think we’re dicks.” He put his legs up over the side of the car, crossing them at the ankles.