by Brian James
I listen to everyone gossip about our teachers, the boys on the team, and the kids who they’re going to hate for the next few days. I join in with an occasional laugh or just to say yeah or something else to show them I agree with everything that’s said. But really I’m just watching the clock. Glancing over at it every other minute and hoping for a Cinderella kind of night.
The lights are on in every window of Greg’s house when I walk up the driveway. It doesn’t look like a real house. Not one that anyone lives in. More like a house out of an old painting. Large windows with matching curtains tied back neatly. A wraparound porch with two rocking chairs creaking in the wind, gently like they’re being rocked by ghost children. Spirals of smoke billowing from the chimney and silhouetted against the bright moon.
Picture perfect.
The complete opposite of every house I’ve ever lived in.
Dragging my feet up to the porch, my shadow grows suddenly long and thin as I step into the warm glow pouring from the front room onto the cold ground.
Everything seems so peaceful that part of me wants to turn and leave. Even the quiet tapping of my feet feels like an intrusion. I’ve never known how to behave in front of perfect people. I barely know how to act in front of a boy that I’m crazy about, let alone his parents. I’m afraid they’re going to hate me and make him hate me, too. So I just stand there on the porch with the door inches away. Stuck in the middle of the cold wind against my back and the warm light coming from the window above my head.
I hear Greg’s voice on the other side of the door, shouting from the top of the stairs so that his words get tangled up with the noises coming from the kitchen. The clatter of dishes and the sound of running water. The scraping of forks and the shuffling of feet over tile floors. Sounds that are the same in my house and I start to relax. Start to lift my hand and knock.
“Got it,” Greg shouts as his feet thunder down the steps as fast as my heart is beating. Opens the door in a fast, sweeping motion and the smell of food escapes into the air. Then I see his eyes. Eyes like snow falling at midnight. Full-moon eyes that have a way of making me melt when they meet mine.
“Hi,” I say almost in a whisper.
“Hey,” he says as normal as ever. “Come on in.” And when he steps aside and touches my shoulder, I know I’ve made a big deal out of nothing.
I blame Meredith and all the other girls for making me so nervous about this. They wouldn’t stop talking about us the whole time at the diner. They made it seem like this was some big test of our relationship or something. At least Morgan made it seem that way. And she also made sure to let me know she was certain I’d fail. Teasing me that I’d say the wrong thing. That Greg would be watching everything I said and did in front of his parents and would dump me for the tiniest mistake.
I knew she was full of crap. She was just trying to make me so nervous that I would embarrass myself. I know that, but still it isn’t until I see him smile for the first time that I start to breathe easier.
“Perfect timing,” he says. “I just finished eating.”
I try to think of something clever to say. Something funny about how I always have perfect timing, but nothing that I think up sounds funny at all so I just sort of nod and smile.
“Who is it?” his mother calls out from the kitchen. “Who’s here?” But she’s already poking her head in the doorway before Greg can answer. She’s pretty. She doesn’t look old enough to be his mother. Or maybe she does, but she doesn’t look as old as the mothers of other friends I’ve had. She has her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail but even from just a glimpse of it I can tell that Greg gets his loose blond curls from her. His eyes, too, and it makes me like her right away.
“This is Hannah,” Greg says. The way he says my name makes me smile because the way he says it is so familiar, like it’s been mentioned many times to her before.
“Hi,” I say, forcing myself not to wave like a shy little girl. “Nice to meet you.” Greg’s mother smiles politely and says the same back to me before disappearing again.
Greg rolls his eyes and apologizes for her. “Sorry. She’s boiling some kind of roast or something for tomorrow,” waving his hand dismissively through the air to make sure that I know he’s not really sure what she’s doing and that he doesn’t really care.
“That’s okay, I didn’t come here to see her,” I say, grabbing his hand and pressing my fingers between his so that the feeling of his skin rubbing against mine makes my breath weak for a second.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Greg says, nodding in the direction of the steps and pulling me there slightly.
“Okay, let’s,” I say.
He leads me there by the hand and I follow. Turning my head to the wall and looking at the photographs and plaques that show Greg’s life. The oldest pictures at the bottom and the newest near the top and I watch him grow up at a dizzying pace. The images passing like the pages of a flip book until we reach the top.
The door to Greg’s room is right near the stairs. The door is open and he stands to the side, letting me go in first. It’s not the first time I’ve been in a boy’s room. Not even the second or third, or even any number I can remember. But still every time is kind of like the first time. There’s just something different about boys’ rooms. The colors. The way the furniture is arranged. The things lying around. It takes a minute for a girl to figure out how to find her way around it. Sort of like walking into the boys’ bathroom by mistake. It always takes a minute to figure out where you are and what those things on the wall are for.
“I see you didn’t straighten up for me,” I say as my eyes travel from pile to pile of books and papers and clothes stacked in every corner. Greg laughs. He says he wanted me to see the real him. I laugh, too. Tell him my room isn’t much better.
“Sit down. I mean, if you want,” he says.
I lower my eyes at him and raise my eyebrows because the only place to sit is on his bed. That’s okay and everything. But I just want him to know that I know a trick when I see one.
He seems to know, though.
It’s not some kind of trick. He knows exactly what he’s trying to do and though it should piss me off, it doesn’t. I sort of like that he’s not playing a game or anything. Not like some of the other boys I’ve liked who always fumbled around the question, trying to act all innocent when we both knew what he wanted.
Greg sits down on the edge of the bed and places his hand next to him like an invitation for me to join him. His eyes drawing me closer and it surprises me how easy it is for him to convince me. I hold my arms out like a bird and let myself fall backward on the mattress. Then I let my fingers walk toward his until we’re holding hands again.
We both start to laugh and for the first time since I came inside, we both begin to feel normal. Like ourselves. Like we feel when we’re alone. Like we’re the only two people in the world.
“So tell me the truth, am I the only girl who’s ever been on your bed?” I ask, half kidding and half wondering. I already sort of know the answer. The girls have told me all about him. Told me how I’m the first girl he’s liked in forever. But that doesn’t mean anything. Not really. There could be some secret girlfriend somewhere that no one knew about. And when he answers no in a shy way, I know that there is someone and I perk up.
“Who was it?” I ask. I’m not jealous at all. I’m more excited than jealous. Excited to find out something The Blondes didn’t know. I guess since I started hanging out with them, I’ve gotten a little taste for gossip.
“Just some girl,” Greg says. “But we weren’t right for each other, you know. Besides, she didn’t live here long.”
“Oh,” I say. Another someone who came and went isn’t so exciting. Not in this place. And after my curiosity is satisfied, my jealousy starts to act up. “Was she prettier than me?” I ask.
“Not even close,” he says. I don’t care whether or not it’s the truth, it makes me happy just that he said it.
He r
eaches over and touches the soft hairs on the back of my neck. Leans closer and pushes himself against me. And I’m ready to kiss him when I notice the stain on the back of his shirt. A trickle of dots like a chain of islands on a map, colored in red.
Greg’s eyes follow mine and he pulls away when he sees that I’m looking at the blood just beneath his shoulder. “This is nothing,” he says before I have the chance to ask. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine.” He tells me it happened at practice. One of the guys got scraped up a little. Says it happens all the time and it amazes me sometimes how casual he can be about violence and still be so gentle with me.
“Is he all right?” I ask.
“Yeah, he’s fine,” Greg says as he stands up. He pulls the stained T-shirt over his head and tosses it to the floor. I’ve never had any boy undress in front of me and I can’t keep from staring. I can see every muscle in his back and chest when he bends to grab another shirt. I think about how easily he could wrap his arms around me and make me vanish. It sort of frightens me and excites me at the same time. So much so that I sit up, too, and end up standing on the other side of the bed from him as he pulls a clean shirt over his ghost white skin.
I run my finger over the top of his desk, brushing aside pens and pencils and anything that comes across my path. Barely looking at the things I touch, just trying to keep from looking at Greg until my heart slows down.
He walks around the bed. Comes toward me and I take a deep breath. Watching his faint reflection in the glass side of an aquarium perched on the far corner of a bookshelf. I point to it before he has the chance to say anything. “That’s not a snake in there, is it?” I demand.
“Nah, it’s just a grasshopper,” he says, laughing at the disgusted look that crept over my face when I still thought there was a chance he kept a snake only a few feet from his bed.
“Why would you have a grasshopper in an aquarium?” I ask, confused but relieved.
“Not just any grasshopper,” Greg says. “That grasshopper is undefeated in ten fights.”
“Fighting grasshoppers?” I wrinkle my forehead and make my voice higher to let him know I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“You’ve never made grasshoppers fight?” he asks. Showing his surprise by opening his eyes wide when I shake my head. Then he explains how it works. How you hold one in each fist and bring their faces close together. He says the stronger one will end up chewing the other’s face to bits.
“That’s gross,” I say, holding my hand up for him to stop telling me any more about it. He shrugs his shoulders. Says it’s no big deal. Tells me that the football team has tournaments every Friday before a game.
I turn my hips away from him because I don’t want to hear about it. That’s when he puts his hands on my sides and says he’s sorry. I feel his words against the back of my neck and feel myself giving in.
Forgiving him.
But later, when we’re making out on his bed, I wonder if I’m the only one still thinking about it or if his head is filled with the image of grasshoppers biting each other’s faces off, too. And if he is, does it scare him the way it scares me?
THIRTEEN
After a week of being on the squad, the drama that was swirling around me has gone away as quickly as it came. There’re no more rumors circulating the halls about me. I don’t get the silent treatment anymore in my classes. Even Morgan and Miranda aren’t really enemies anymore. I wouldn’t call them best friends or anything like that, but I don’t think they hate me, either.
The only person who seems to hate me now is Lukas.
He hasn’t talked to me since that night at my house when the sheriff chased him away. I tried to apologize to him. I told him how I swore to the sheriff that he hadn’t done anything and how I asked him to leave Lukas alone.
Lukas told me he didn’t need my help. Told me to leave him alone as he punched the locker next to mine. From where he was standing, Greg thought he was trying to punch me. He’d heard about what happened at my house and so he was already angry at Lukas. Greg charged at him like I’d seen him charge at opponents on the football field.
I covered my eyes as Lukas’s skinny body twisted and bent like the injured bodies strewn over the field during the game he’d taken me to. When I heard him get slammed against the floor, I screamed. I yelled at Greg to get off him. Begged until a teacher rushed into the hall and pulled them apart. Since Lukas is the outcast and Greg’s a football player, Lukas was the one to get dragged to the office. I thought about going there and explaining the whole thing, but I knew Lukas would just get angrier at me for interfering.
I tried but I couldn’t stay mad at Greg. From what he saw, I guess he was doing the right thing. It was sort of romantic in a brutish jock kind of way. And it only bothered me up till the moment he kissed me there in the hall, in front of everyone. It’s strange how the violence that seems to linger on him is always erased whenever our mouths touch.
But even though it’s been almost a week, I still can’t help feeling bad about me and Lukas. I feel like I let him down. I mean, I sort of did exactly what he said I was going to do the first time we met. I fell in with the Blondes and became one of the popular girls. Now I sit with them at lunch and watch him sitting alone. Every so often, I think I catch him looking at me with the same hateful look I saw in his eyes when he warned me to stay away from Maggie in the first place.
I just wish he’d talk to me so that I could tell him how wrong he was. I’m worried that he’s going to drive himself crazy with all his comics and outrageous theories unless I can get through to him. But that doesn’t seem likely. I’m pretty sure he never wants to speak to me again.
“God, will you just forget about him already?” Melissa says when she catches me glancing over in the direction of where Lukas is. “What is it with you and that freak? You’re going out with one of the hottest boys in school and I still see you looking at him once a day.”
“He’s not so bad,” I say. “Besides, Morgan was friends with him, too, once upon a time,” I add in my own defense.
Meredith laughs. “He said that?”
“Yeah, why? It’s not true?” I ask.
“Look, you don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Melissa says. “You’re cool now. You can forget about him. Let him disappear into thin air, okay?”
I laugh and try to make it into a joke. “Yeah, I guess. Just an old habit.”
“Like chewing your nails?” Meredith asks. Changing the subject to start me on the way to forgetting about him. Grabbing my hand and showing my bitten fingernails to Melissa. “Really, you have to stop that,” she says in a friendly enough way.
“I know,” I say, taking a closer look and wishing I could stop just like that. Maybe it’ll be easier once my dad gets back two days from now. I still get too nervous at night sometimes to quit. It’s really before bed that kills me. “I swear that I will soon.”
Meredith smiles. “I know you will,” she says, less like an encouragement and more like a threat.
It’s just part of being one of them, though. They’ll always demand that I change something about myself until I’m perfect. It doesn’t really get on my nerves. I guess that’s because I like who they want me to be more than I like who I am. I mean, they’re only trying to make me better. And I’m not so sure conformity is a bad thing in that case. Like my new diet. I only pack a lunch of carrot sticks, yogurt, and bottled water now like the rest of them. It’s much healthier than what I ate before. Even if my stomach cramps up with hunger every so often, I know that’s only because I was eating too much before. The rest of the girls only eat this much and they have more energy than most two people combined.
My clothes are better, too, now that nearly every girl on the squad has given me old outfits of theirs. Practically new clothes and all of them look great on me. And they’ve all been really good about not making it feel like charity. None of them has made fun of me for being poor or anything like that. They keep saying that we’re fam
ily and they don’t mind helping out one of their own.
My grades have also gone up.
They always say kids in sports do better in school—I just didn’t know that it happened automatically. I don’t study any more or anything like that, but I keep getting As on tests. My dad can’t wait to see those. He barely believes me when I tell him over the phone.
There’s only one thing that kind of makes me feel weird about being one of them. That’s the name-change thing. I don’t understand why they do it. I mean, not really. I get that it’s part of showing allegiance and all that, but it doesn’t seem necessary to me.
“Have you decided on one yet?” Maggie asks me.
“Not yet,” I mumble, trying to avoid the subject.
“Well, you have to soon. Your first pep rally is Friday and you need a new name by then,” she says, making it clear that it’s an order. No more stalling, I have to pick one of the three choices she gave me. Montana, Mackenzie, or Madison.
I sigh at the thought of being called by any one of those names. Name changes are for people in the witness protection program, not high school cheerleaders.
“Why is that so important?” I ask.
I regret asking right away as the conversations on either side of the lunch table go silent. All eyes turn to me and then to Maggie, who looks at me coldly. Her blue eyes narrow like the sky before a winter storm. I’ve seen Maggie get mad at Morgan before or at other girls when they mess up in practice, but she’s never given me that icy stare.
“It’s just . . . I like my name,” I explain.
Maggie blinks and keeps her patience with me. “But your name doesn’t begin with an M like everyone else’s. That’s why you need a new one.”
“Yeah . . . but I mean, so what?” I ask, almost in a whisper.
“ ‘So what?’ ” Maggie whispers back as she leans across the table. Her strawberry lips trembling as she lets the words slip from her mouth slowly so that I don’t miss their importance. “ ‘So what’ is that our job is to make sure every single person in this town supports the Death Squad. We need to show how completely loyal we are even if that means giving up part of ourselves. We do that by giving up our names, get it?”