by Brian James
“So,” she says to get my attention and I look over at her. I cross my fingers again, praying my face doesn’t turn bright red as she looks me over carefully. “So, like what are you?” Meredith finally asks.
I open my mouth but no sound comes out.
No one has ever asked me a question like that before and I’m not sure how to answer. I’m not even sure I know what it means. “Um . . . ,” I stutter and my tongue feels a few sizes too big as I stumble to come up with an answer.
Meredith laughs. It’s not a mean kind of laugh, though. It’s a misunderstanding sort of laugh as she changes the question around. “I meant, like what are you into? You’re not like one of those girls who writes creepy poems about drowning or anything like that, are you?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“No,” I say and I can see a faint sense of approval like a flash of lightning in the blue storm of her eyes.
“So what do you like?” her voice asks in the slow sound of a warning.
“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging my shoulders. “Normal things, I guess.”
“Good,” Meredith says. “I like normal things, too.”
Then we both grin a little at how stupid we sound and things get easier from there now that we don’t feel like strangers. She asks me what classes I have. I hand her my schedule, which I still keep close in my pocket to peek at before each class is dismissed so that I know where I’m going. She looks it over. Making faces as she reads the teachers’ names. Making slightly more dramatic faces to let me know which teachers are truly awful and which are just the regular kind of annoying.
I keep silent and nod in agreement at everything she says. That seems to please her enough to keep talking. Listening is just fine with me. It’s better than being ignored.
School attendance duties put an end to our brief friendship, though. Our homeroom teacher narrows his eyes and grunts at the class for us to get quiet. Meredith and I shuffle our feet around to face the front of the room instead of each other as he calls out the first few names. The growl of his voice already seems less threatening than it did yesterday, simply because Meredith is sitting next to me. Because she talked to me.
Our teacher goes through the list without looking up once. Coughing out last names like they’re something that makes him sick. He doesn’t care to know any of the faces, just so long as they’re here. I look over at Meredith and she rolls her eyes to let me know Mr. Edwards, our homeroom teacher, is one of those who belong in the truly awful category.
Everyone gets up at once, gathering up things when the bell dismisses us to first period. I toss my bag over my shoulder and step out into the row. I hesitate for a second, wondering if I should leave or wait for Meredith.
I decide to wait and she seems fine with it. We step into the hallway together but that’s about as far as we get. She’s met right away by a group of blondes who look nearly identical to her. I can still tell one of them apart from the rest, though. Because no matter how closely they resemble one another, Morgan stands out.
She doesn’t bother to hide the evil look on her face as she squints at me, either. “Why are you talking to her?” she asks Meredith, saying it like I’m some kind of disease that needs to be avoided.
Meredith shrugs. “I wasn’t really,” she says.
I feel my stomach sink and my face blush. I lower my head and continue walking, hoping they don’t notice. It’s not like I really expected her to stick up for me or anything, but it still makes me feel like crap. It’s my fault, though. One stupid conversation and I let myself think we might actually become friends.
“You better not,” she sneers, “that girl’s a freak.”
I glance behind me just in time for one last nasty look from Morgan before they disappear into the tide of kids flooding the hallway.
So much for my day-two theory.
Lukas is waiting for me when I walk into the lunchroom. I see him sitting at the same table I sat at yesterday. But he’s clever enough to try to hide it. Keeps his head down, buried in the bend of his arm like a kitten covering its face with a paw as it sleeps.
He’s not fooling me, though. He could’ve sat anywhere else if he wanted to sleep. He sat there for me.
“Great,” I sigh.
“I guess we’re lunch buddies again?” I say, dropping my books on the table. The impact causes his body to jolt upright and he rubs his eyes to keep up the illusion that he’d somehow fallen sound asleep in the less than two minutes before I got there.
“Oh . . . hey,” he yawns, stretching himself awake.
I roll my eyes at him and shake my head as I sit down in the seat next to his. “You know, it’s pretty immature to fake like you weren’t expecting me,” I snap at him. I meant for it to put him on edge a little, but Lukas isn’t bothered by it. He actually laughs and I wonder how such an outcast can be so confident.
“Well, I wasn’t sure,” he says. His eyes shine softly behind the greasy strands of his shaggy hair and he slouches over again to fold his arms across the table. “You never know. . . . I mean, they could’ve already made you into one of them,” he says, nodding in the direction of Maggie Turner and her cheerleader clan.
I squint my eyes and look at him, trying to tell if he’s teasing me or not. That’s when I realize who he reminds me of. He’s just like this character in a movie that I saw who sort of goes crazy and kills his best friend. I don’t know why, but in a weird way it makes me like him a little more than I did before. I guess maybe because it makes him sort of interesting and since he’s interested in me, that makes me sort of interesting, too.
“Nope,” I say. “I’m still plain old me.”
“I bet they’ve already scouted you out, though,” he says. “Making sure you’ll fit in if they decide to brainwash you.”
“Brainwash me? Give me a break,” I say. I try my best to make it sound like I’m annoyed, but I can’t help but glance over at the popular table where Meredith is gabbing away with the other girls. Our conversation plays back in my head, especially the part about her asking me what kind of things I was into.
Lukas doesn’t miss it, either. “I’m right, aren’t I?” he asks.
“Maybe,” I say like it doesn’t matter much. Secretly, though, it kind of makes me smile on the inside. What if she was scouting me? It would mean that I at least have a chance of not ending up at the loser table for the rest of my days in Maplecrest. Of course, that daydream only exists if I make myself forget about Morgan.
Lukas makes a snide sort of huff and grumbles that he knew it would happen. “I told you,” he says. His hands curl up into fists and he glares over at them like he’s lost a game that no one else even knows they’re playing. “Look, you got to stay away from them,” he growls.
I can’t figure out why it makes him so upset or why he even cares.
“Why?” I ask playfully. I can’t help myself from teasing him a little. It’s too easy. “What? Are you in love with me or something? Afraid they’re going to steal me away and then we’ll never be allowed to talk again?”
I watch his face turn all shy. Blinking his eyes. Glancing away so that I can’t see how embarrassed he is. So I can’t see that there’s some truth to it. There’s something cute about it, though. Something sweet about him when he’s not being a total freak.
“It’s not that,” he says and exaggerates with a deep breath before and after he says it. Saying it like he thinks it’s silly of me to even think it, but the way it comes out proves just the opposite.
“Well, what then?” I ask, not because I really want to know. I just feel a little bad about teasing him. So I twist around in my chair to face him. I give him my full attention and do my most sincere impersonation of someone who is listening carefully.
“It’s just . . . they’re dangerous, okay?” he says.
“Really?” I glance over at their table where the cheerleaders are sitting like delicate birds on a telephone wire and I wrinkle my forehead. “They don’t l
ook so dangerous.”
Lukas pushes his chair back and stares into his lap instead of looking at me and I’m not sure what I did to get him so frustrated.
“I was just stating an obvious fact,” I explain.
“Just forget it,” he snaps.
“Whatever,” I say. “It’s forgotten.”
He refuses to look up again. Twisting the strings of his sweatshirt around his finger over and over. Letting it drop and unwind before doing it all over again. I wait for a minute or so, waiting for him to come back to reality but he doesn’t. He just sits there like a little kid who gets angry when no one wants to know his secret, only to go quiet when someone actually asks.
Fine with me.
I was only asking to be nice, anyway.
At least I can eat my lunch in peace now. That is, until he stops sulking and decides to tell me anyway. Tells me that Maggie and the rest of them are some kind of zombie cult and I nearly spit out my drink laughing because he’s actually able to keep a straight face.
He doesn’t say anything else.
He doesn’t try to explain what he means.
He doesn’t laugh along with me.
He doesn’t do anything but sit there and start playing with the strings of his sweatshirt again. I make my face as serious as I can and watch him. Trying to get him to admit it’s a joke, but he won’t look at me.
“You might be the strangest person I’ve ever met,” I tell him and he peeks over at me. I smile to let him know I mean it in a good way. And I do. Without him around, I’d probably die of boredom.
THREE
Meredith is standing at her locker as I walk over to mine at the end of the day. Our lockers are only two away from each other and no one is at either of the ones that separate them. Only a few feet of empty space between us. It feels endless, though. Like the distance between oceans or the space that keeps years from running into each other. And like those things, it feels impossible for me to make the distance any smaller.
After this morning, I’m not sure I even want to.
But if I don’t talk to her, maybe it’d seem rude.
Besides, it wasn’t like she was mean to me or anything. I just overreacted to what she said to Morgan, that’s all. Morgan’s the one who hates me for no reason. Not Meredith. She was nice in homeroom. She’ll probably be nice now, too.
But it doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself that, my stomach still starts to get nervous as I walk up to her. A belly filled with butterflies as the empty space between me and her goes from two lockers to one. Then from one to none.
“Hi,” I say.
It comes out of my throat sounding like a scratchy whisper and I wish I could take it back right away. The silence that comes from her makes me wish even harder that I’d kept quiet myself. Shifting my weight from foot to foot, standing there like a dork, counting the seconds going by, wondering how many I have to wait before I can walk away.
I’m only able to count to three, though, before Meredith turns around.
“Oh, hey,” she says, putting the last book in her hand carefully on the shelf in her locker. “Hannah, right?” Squinting her eyes as she asks, but even though she says it like a question, I can tell she knows the answer.
“Right,” I say. Then I bite my lip to hide the corny crooked smile from my face. She must think I’m so stupid. That’s why she turns back to her locker, pretending to check if she needs anything else before she leaves.
“So?” she mutters, sounding slightly annoyed. “Good day?”
“Okay, I guess,” shrugging my shoulders.
The afternoon sun drifts to our corner of the hallway and lingers on her for a moment as she turns back to me. Her features vanish in the glare. Her pale skin erased white so that her eyes burn blue. It makes me feel so imperfect standing next to her.
“Well, I have to go practice,” she says, closing her locker.
“Yeah,” I say. Not for any reason except that it seemed right to make some sort of sound. I turn my back and step over to my locker, relieved to get away.
“Hey?” Meredith says as I’m turning the combination on the lock. I glance over my shoulder and raise my eyebrows. Her blue eyes shine like a spotlight over me, moving up and down, looking at the way I stand and the way I dress, and I can’t help but feel weird and shy. But then she smiles and it’s like giving me approval, like saying I’ve passed some kind of test or something. “Have you thought about trying out for the squad?” she asks.
“Me?” I answer and she smiles. I shake my head. I hadn’t thought about it. And I really don’t think I would want to, but still I can’t help but feel curious and also a little bit excited that she asked.
“Why not?” Meredith asks me, raising her voice in surprise. I suppose every girl in this little town has wanted to be one of them at some point. I guess if she waited a few days to ask, maybe I would have, too. “You should,” Meredith says with a smile. Then she says she’ll see me tomorrow. Turns around and I watch her disappear down the hall.
On my way out the building, a girl from one of my classes catches up behind me. She taps me on the shoulder and greets me with a friendly smile. “Hey, wait up!” she says and I begin to think that second-day stuff isn’t such crap after all. “I think we’re in sixth period together,” she says.
If I wasn’t still a little perked from Meredith’s invitation, I’d most likely be defensive. Pretend I didn’t know the girl tapping me. Act like I didn’t remember that she sits behind me in history class. Pretend I didn’t care. I’m glad I don’t do any of those things, though, because she looks nice. A first potential best friend.
“Yeah, I think we are,” I say. She holds up her hand, half waving as she’s about to tell me her name’s Diana. I interrupt her and tell her I already know. “I was cursed with a good memory,” I tell her, borrowing a line from my dad. He’s always said that he passed it down to me. A memory like a computer that can’t forget things even if I wanted to. Most people forget half of everything they hear or see. Sure you lose some good times, but let’s face it, most memories aren’t so great and I think it might not be such a bad thing to be able to empty them every once in a while like the trash.
“I heard you talking to Meredith,” Diana says and asks if I’m thinking about joining the squad. “It’s none of my business, I’m just wondering.” Her fingers move nervously inside her pocket like tiny spiders under her clothes and it slowly starts to come together.
The pink eye shadow that circles her dull green eyes.
The powder brushed on her face, poorly hiding a bad complexion.
A skirt not quite short enough. Hair not quite yellow enough.
She’s a wannabe. One of the legions of them who wander the halls trying to copy Maggie Turner but don’t quite pull it off. Never accepted by the It Girl, but never willing to give up their fascination with all things Maggie Turner, either. Lurking on the outside to take in every scrap of information. Anything that is even remotely connected to The Blondes makes them happy. Makes them feel closer to being on the inside.
That’s why she wants to know about me.
She wants to know if I’m a new recruit. A potential It Girl. Someone worth talking to. Maybe it should bother me knowing it’s the only reason Diana cares to get to know me. Lukas would think it should bother me. But somehow it doesn’t. When you move around as much as I have, you take advantage of any way you can to make friends.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
Diana gasps like an actress in an old movie. So overly dramatic that I can’t imagine that she’s being anything but serious. “But you have to,” she says. “It’s not like they ask everybody.” From her tone of voice, I can tell that everybody really means her, that they’ve never asked her to join.
“I guess, but it’s not really my thing,” I admit. “I’ve never seen myself as a cheerleader.”
“But you’d be perfect!” Diana tells me. “Everyone’s
been saying you’d be perfect. I mean, all the prettiest girls end up on the squad eventually.”
I slow down and stare at her. Something about the way she says it, as if there’s nothing strange about it, gives me a chill. Almost the same thing Lukas has been saying to me, that they would try to make me one of them.
“Who’s everybody?” I ask. The excited feeling that I had when we met a minute ago is replaced with a twisting inside my stomach like butterflies being squeezed to death.
Diana looks embarrassed for the first time. Blushing under her makeup and smiling nervously as if she let something slip that she wasn’t supposed to. “The whole school,” she says in a whisper. “Everybody could tell the first time they saw you. I mean, you’re just as pretty as any of them,” she says as we exit the school and step into the cold breeze blowing down from the hills on either side of town.
“Thanks,” I mumble, not sure what else to say without sounding totally paranoid. Wondering if Diana is part of some great high-school conspiracy and knowing it would sound ridiculous if I ask. Besides, it’s probably nothing. I’m probably just being stupid and she’s probably just being nice.
I blame Lukas.
It’s his fault for filling my head with all those warnings.
We take a few steps over the grass together before Diana tells me she’s got to go the other way. Says good-bye but doesn’t walk away. She waits for a second with the wind blowing against her face. “You know, you should really think about it,” she tells me.
“Maybe I will,” I say because it seems so important to her and for some reason I don’t want to let her down. Not when we’re just becoming friends.
It’s the answer she wanted to hear. She smiles wider, facing the sun. Then she waves and hurries off in the other direction. I stand where I am for a minute and shake my head. No matter how many times I move, some things never change. Small towns being filled with strange people is certainly one of those things.