Lauren lowers her eyes. But she’s not fast enough.
“Oh my god, Lauren! You are so lucky! Do you even know how lucky you are?” The girl puts on a big smile. Huge, even. And she runs on tiptoes over to Lauren’s desk.
Lauren lifts her head. “Excuse me?”
The girl ceremoniously places a piece of paper on top of Lauren’s open notebook. “It’s a Mount Washington tradition. They picked you as the prettiest girl in our grade.” The girl talks slowly, as if Lauren spoke another language, or had a learning disability.
Lauren reads the paper. She sees her name. But she is still completely confused. A different girl pats her on the back. “Try to look a little happier, Lauren,” she whispers sweetly, in the same way one might discreetly indicate an open zipper or food stuck in her teeth. “Otherwise people will think something’s wrong with you.”
This throwaway line surprises Lauren most of all, because it completely contradicts what she’s already assumed.
Sarah Singer’s plan is to break it to him fast, so there’s no scene. Forget dressing it up, explaining things. That’s only going to make it worse. She’ll just say something like, I’m done, Milo. Our friendship, or whatever the hell you want to call it now, is over. So go ahead and do what you want. Live your life! Become best bros with the captain of the football team. Feel up the head cheerleader, even though everyone knows Margo Gable stuffs. I’m not gonna judge you.
That last part will be a lie. She’ll totally judge him for it.
Sarah sits on her bench, nibbling the edges off a strawberry Pop-Tart. The tangy smell of smoke on her fingers sours the sweet. She forces down what’s in her mouth and chucks the pink frosted center — her favorite part — into the grass, because all this sugar clearly isn’t helping. Let the squirrels eat the crack; she needs to calm the hell down. She moves a tangle of tarnished necklaces off her chest and feels for her heart. It flutters like a hummingbird’s, so fast the individual beats blur together and make a steady, uncomfortable hum.
She rips the cellophane off a new pack of cigarettes, lights up. A lift of wind carries away the smoke, but she knows Milo will smell it on her when he gets to school. He’s like a police dog, trained to sniff out her vices. Last night, when she was hanging half out of his bedroom window, she smoked the third-to-last cigarette in her old pack and told him, after his depressing play-by-play of his aunt’s final days of lung cancer, she’d seriously think about maybe quitting.
Remembering that now makes her laugh, puff out smoke signals. Both dissipate into the chilly morning air.
Last night, she talked a lot of shit.
But Milo … apparently he’d been talking shit since the day they met.
Whatever. Let him bitch about her smoking. It would be a relief to replace her anxieties with something simple and clear, like being annoyed with him.
Sarah watches two junior girls scurry along the sidewalk. Sarah knows who they both are, but what she thinks is: All the junior girls at Mount Washington look the damn same. The shoulder-length hair with highlights, the stupid shearling boots, the little wristlet purses to hold their cell phones, lip glosses, and lunch money. They remind her of zebras, keeping the same stripes so predators can’t tell them apart. Survival of the generic. It’s the Mount Washington way!
The two girls stop in front of her bench and huddle, shoulder to shoulder, each clutching a piece of paper. The smaller one hangs on her friend and chokes out a series of high-pitched laughs. The other simply sucks air in and out, a rapid fire of hiccupping wheezes.
Sarah’s nerves can’t take it.
“Hey!” she barks. “How about you ladies hold your little powwow someplace else?” She uses her lit cigarette as a pointer and jabs off in the distance.
It seems like a fair request. After all, these girls have the entire school to roam undisturbed. And everyone at Mount Washington knows that this is her bench.
She discovered it freshman year. It had always been vacant, because it was positioned directly beneath the principal’s window. That didn’t bother Sarah. She wanted to be alone.
That is, until Milo Ishi came along last spring.
He’d been adrift on the sidewalk one random day, a new boy tossed around between currents of students who looked nothing like him. He folded his arms and tucked them tight underneath his chest, the chosen defensive posture for skinny vegan half-Japanese boys with shaved heads. Milo didn’t look like Sarah, either, but maybe a more-evolved version. His sneakers were only available overseas. His headphones were expensive. His black eyeglass frames were crazy thick and probably vintage. He’d even gotten his first tattoo already — a Buddhist proverb scrawled on his forearm.
After a few minutes of watching, Sarah took pity on him and called out, “Hey, New Boy!”
Milo was terribly shy. Almost cripplingly so. He hated talking in class and broke out in hives whenever his parents argued. It was hard to get him to open up, but when he finally did, Sarah felt like she’d found a kindred outcast. She liked begging Milo to torture her with stories of his former life in West Metro, what going to an arts-focused high school in a city had been like. Milo said West Metro was a third-tier city, but to Sarah it could have been New York for how it stacked up against Mount Washington. At West Metro High, field trips were to fine art museums, there were no sports teams, and the drama club wasn’t just a showcase for girls who aspired to be another Auto-Tuned voice sugaring the radio.
The bench is where they wait for each other before and after school each day, where they do their homework and split a pair of earbuds for the right and left sides of an illegally downloaded song. An oasis where two kids who once kept to themselves suddenly keep with each other.
Once, Sarah tried to carve their names in the bench, but discovered the wood was that new space-age treated stuff and broke the knife she’d nicked from the cafeteria after the third stroke. So she makes sure to have a black marker in her book bag to trace a fresh layer of ink over their initials whenever they begin to fade.
As Milo’s bus pulls in, Sarah tucks the long front pieces of her inky black hair behind her ears. Milo had shaved the back of her head for her a few weeks ago, after he’d finished shaving his own, but it’s growing in fast. That hair, pure and healthy, is soft, like a puppy dog’s, and a golden brown that totally clashes with the dyed-black front. Her natural color. She’d almost forgotten what it looked like.
Milo, all lanky bones and sharp angles, walks toward her with a manga split open in front of his face. His knobby knees pop past the army green fringe of his cutoffs with each step. Milo claims he wears shorts no matter the weather. Sarah says that’s because he’s never lived through a winter on Mount Washington. She will give him such shit the first time she sees him in jeans.
She catches herself smiling and quickly resets her mouth with another drag.
“Yo,” she says when Milo reaches the bench, and gets ready to let the ax fall.
Milo looks up from his manga. A grin spreads across his face, so deep his dimples appear. He says, “You’re wearing my T-shirt.”
Sarah looks down at herself.
Milo’s right. This is not her black T-shirt. There are no white spots from bleaching her hair. She always strips it before she dyes it, so the new color sets as pure and saturated as possible. It’s the only way, really, to make sure what’s underneath doesn’t show.
“You can keep it,” he mumbles coyly.
“I don’t want your shirt, Milo.” In fact, if Sarah had other clothes with her, she’d change out of it right now.