There’s a collective hiss from the crowd in the hall. I hear “Luke! You didn’t answer your phone, dude. You have to check this out.”
I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop myself. I turn and see Luke surrounded by a clot of guys, one of them brandishing a phone.
“What is it?” Luke says. He takes a long, lazy pull on the milkshake he must have bought at lunch.
“Just look at it!”
Luke shrugs and takes the phone. One of the rockheads points at the picture helpfully. “This has got to be Audrey Porter,” the rockhead says. He says it loudly and clearly. He doesn’t care if I’m only metres away. He doesn’t care if I hear.
Luke suddenly stops walking and the rockhead rams into him. Luke blinks at the picture, his brows beetling as if he’s annoyed. Then he thrusts the phone back at the rockhead. “You don’t know who that is.”
“Come on! That’s Porter. Gotta be. Is that you with her?”
Luke walks quickly down the hall towards me. He’s not looking at me and Ash at all. His eyes are trained straight ahead at the doors at the end of the hallway. “You can’t see their faces,” he says. “That could be anyone.”
“No way,” says the rockhead. As the group passes by, he jerks his head towards me. “Look at the hair.”
“Whatever,” Luke says. He doesn’t turn my way, just keeps walking. He flicks a hand at the phone. “You guys can find way better stuff on the Internet, if that’s what you need.” The group floats down the hallway, around the corner and out of sight. I can still hear the gurgling sound of Luke’s straw as he polishes off his milkshake.
Pam Markovitz saunters over, with Cindy Terlizzi bringing up the rear like an overeager Maltese. Ash tenses up, waiting for one of them to say something, anything, so that she has an excuse to cut them down. But Pam tips her head, sucks on one of her incisors, and smiles with her kitty-cat teeth. “That was cold. Kind of makes you wish you were a lesbian, doesn’t it?”
Oh, yeah, I wish I were a lesbian. An away-in-the-closet, never-had-sex, never-admit-it-to-myself lesbian. Instead, I’m me in calculus, where we are doing limits and continuity. One must be able to calculate limits for the integers x and y. Ms Iacuzzo’s drone could put a coke fiend to sleep, but our calc book is enthusiastic. It has exclamation points. Pick values for x and y! Guess what you think the limits might be! Test your conjecture by changing the values! The book says calculus is fun! And! Useful! It is useful today, to the uncloseted unlesbian. I’m so busy picking values and testing my conjectures that I can’t think about who took a picture of me going down on Luke at Joelle’s party; I can’t think about Luke himself, his lips so warm when he kissed me and his face flat and frozen when he passed me in the hallway. x is 2 and y is 3. x is 19 and y is 40. x is -435 and y is zero.
In English, Mr Lambright hands back the first drafts of our Much Ado About Nothing papers and there is much ado when the people see all the red marks tattooed on them. No fair! I can’t even read your handwriting! I worked for two weeks on this draft! Ron Moran, our probable valedictorian, sits smugly at his desk, looking out of the window, his paper branded with the customary “EXCELLENT!” Mr Lambright likes my ideas but thinks I need to work on smoother transitions; I need to link this thought to that thought, one foot in front of the other, like when I walk down the hallway from English to history and I see the faces staring and the mouths snickering and Pete Flanagan shaking his hips and sloooooowly unzipping his fly.
History class. I sit in the back of the room, but I’ve forgotten about Chilly sitting right next to me. See Chilly snicker. See Chilly stare. See Chilly clap his hands to his cheeks in pretend shock. Hear Chilly say, “Who knew you were such a ho?”
I know what I should say: With anyone but you. But I can’t bring myself to do it, my mouth is too dry. I don’t look at him or look at anyone else; I focus on the amendments, one, two, three, four, five. I sing the Preamble in my head, the way it was sung on the old Schoolhouse Rock CDs my parents bought me when I was a kid. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility-e-e-e.” After the bell rings and Mr Gulliver passes out the tests, I start scribbling. The answers come hot and fast, filling my head. I write until my hand cramps, till the bell rings.
Chilly says, “Ho, ho, ho!”
Chilly says, “Saved by the bell.”
Chilly says, “Girls gone wild!”
Chilly says, “Oh my goodness! What will your parents do when they find out?”
I fling my test on Mr Gulliver’s desk and run.
I don’t wait for Ash. This little piggy runs all the way home, the whole mile, pack banging into my back with every step. I know what I’ll find when I open the door: my mom, sitting at the kitchen table, laptop in front of her, staring off into space or staring into the screen.
But this is not what I find. I open the door and my mom is standing by the kitchen sink, frowning into it.
I should say something. I say, “Hey.”
“Look at this,” she says, pointing down. “Is that a cricket? Or a grasshopper?”
I look down. Brown bug, big eyes, long legs made for jumping. “Why doesn’t it jump out of the sink? Why is it just sitting there?”
“I don’t know,” my mom says. “It’s dumb?”
“Maybe it’s dead.”
“Poor bug. We’ll leave it in peace for a while. A little monument to nature.” She pats me on the head—I’m taller, but she still pats—and opens the fridge. She pulls out a Fresca. She lives on Fresca. Grapefruit soda with no calories. I tell her about the carbonation causing bone loss in menopausal women (hey, I watch Dateline NBC), but she says that since she can’t smoke or drink caffeine, what’s a little osteoporosis? She tries not to take me too seriously. She tries not to take anything too seriously. She says we have one life and we need to celebrate every day. Her new book, called Do You Know the Muffin Man?, is about a cheerful but murderous baker. She’s been researching all sorts of muffin recipes and tries them out on us.
She holds out a plate. “Cranberry-orange-oatmeal,” she says. “A little gritty, but good.”
“No, thanks,” I say.
She breaks off a bit of muffin and pops it into her mouth before setting the plate back on the counter. “Are you OK? You look a little peaked.”
“I’m fine.”
Mom raises her brows but says nothing. She’ll wait me out. That’s what she does best. Waits. It took her ten years to get a book published, but she never seemed to mind. I like them, she’d say. Maybe someday someone else will like them. And then someone did. Small publisher, but good enough. Patience is a virtue, she says, but I’m not like her. I can’t wait for anything. I’m sixteen, but I’d rather be twenty-six or even thirty-six, free and out in the world, a place where you could sue people for taking pictures of you, a place where people pay for what they do. But then, maybe I am already.
She takes her Fresca back to the kitchen table, which is strewn with papers and books and Cat Stevens. “Anything happen at school today?”
I think about my mom’s books. No one has ever done more than kiss in any of them, and that was only once. “Not much,” I tell her. “I had a test in history. The Constitution, amendments, blah blah blah.