“Of course I want to — I want — Jesus… Please just listen for two seconds.” He trots in fronts of her, momentarily stopping her. She glares at his blond lashes and red cheeks. She thinks: Why do I even care?
“I want to be with you. Of course I want… you know. But I also want more than that. I don’t want to just… screw around.” Now he’s blushing, his face a dark, bruised color. “We’re more than that, Felice — we’re for real. I’ll take care of you and we’ll watch each other’s backs.”
Felice can barely hear him, thinking, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you… a tattoo in her head. She doesn’t want to hear any more. She forces herself to lower her voice, to contain herself enough to say, “That’s just wonderful for you, Emerson.”
“Please, just, let’s try to—”
“No.” Her voice is scalding. Thoughts open in her mind, a thin white band, widening: he wants her to go backwards, to do things in that stupid, weak way. She will never be that way again. “No, Emerson. You aren’t listening right. I think you’re a big fake loser and Derek is a scumbag. Okay? Do you hear me yet? Are you getting that? That whole thing about Portland and strongman stuff — it’s never going to happen. We both know the reality. Just stay the fuck away from me.” She turns her back on his stricken face. Gets on her board and kicks away as hard as she can. A big silence behind her. She’s so furious she can’t tell the difference between the vibrations of her board and the powerful quaking that’s broken inside her body. As she rides, the unwanted image comes back to her: a girl’s face — streaked, hollowed out by shadow — she seemed to be crouching on the sidewalk. Even though Felice knows that isn’t right, it’s the way she remembers it.
FELICE FIRST NOTICED the starry spill of the girl’s hair when she appeared in French, the way it trembled with light when she answered questions or gave a toss of her head. The girl always had her hand up and knew more French than the rest of them — including Madame Cruz — actually correcting the teacher’s accent—“That’s tre-s”—gently crushing the r in the back of her throat. “Not ‘trres,’” a Catalan roll off the tip of her tongue. The rest of the class tittered but the girl stared at Madame Cruz because, Felice realized, she was simply right.
Hannah was a year and a half older than Felice, in ninth, but the eighth and ninth graders took electives together. Felice ran into her in the hallway. It was easy for her to be bold — she was so pretty everyone wanted to be Felice’s friend. But Hannah was shy and self-possessed and even a little stuck-up, which attracted Felice. Not as easy to conquer as the other kids. Felice started sitting in the front of French class as well. Afterward the two girls walked to lunch together and Felice asked questions which Hannah answered in a low voice — hard to hear over the din in the corridors, her head lowered, books hugged to her chest.
“Where did you come from?”
“Litchfield.”
Felice lifted her eyebrows: almost everyone in her school had started from someplace else — usually their parents’ country.
Hannah said, “Before Litchfield, other places.”
“What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s a surgeon. My mom is an ophthalmologist.”
“Why did you move here?”
Hannah scrutinized Felice a moment before she replied, “Dad thought it was too white. In Litchfield.”
Hannah’s hair was lighter than Felice’s but her skin was dark, a deep, rosy tan. She had a softly curved nose and a sloping chin that almost spoiled her looks. But there were her lucid green eyes, pale as windowpanes, startling and ghostly in all that dark skin. After a week of hallway conversations, the girl entrusted Felice with the information that her real name wasn’t actually Hannah Joseph but Hanan Yusef. That she hadn’t been born in the States — her parents had moved them from Jerusalem when Hannah was two. That her father had changed her name when they moved to Miami because he was sick of putting up with anti-Arab bullshit.
A frisson ran through Felice’s arms and spine. Thrilled, she asked, “But don’t you hate that? Hanan sounds beautiful. Don’t you hate having a fake American name?”
“No, I was glad,” Hannah said curtly, and looked away.
Bella, Marisa, and Yeni made room for Hannah in their coterie, a little infatuated with her. “She just has this way about her,” Jacqueline said. “Yeah, like, she knows what’s cool and what isn’t without even trying,” Court said.
Felice also sensed an adult weariness about the girl — her comments adroit, funny, often bleak. She seemed to have a kind of cold insight verging on telepathy into people — especially adults — their lives like transparencies before her eyes. “Dottie over there?” she whispered to Felice. “She wants to get with Charleton Baker.” Felice cracked up, a hand cupped over her mouth. “No way!” Charleton was sweet and tall — a thyroid case, as Hannah put it. But he was twelve, stringy and chronically broken-voiced. She realized that a doting light came into the social studies teacher’s powdered face whenever she called on him: Dottie Horkheimer’s smile deepened and she looked, fleetingly, pretty. Knowing something forbidden about Ms. Horkheimer made social studies bearable.
All that fall, through Hannah’s funny, scorching way of looking at things, school itself seemed more tolerable. Hannah seemed to know a lot about other kids: she warned Felice that her friend Coco was a fake, jealous of Felice’s looks, that she whispered behind her back. Felice and her friends had known each other since kindergarten. As soon as Hannah told her this, Felice thought it must be true: she began to distance herself from Coco. Later she realized she wasn’t sure if it was true, or if it just seemed so because of the supremely certain way that Hannah said things.
Felice and Hannah fell into rituals of endless email and phone calls — messages raveling together, switching from one to the other at whim. By October, they snuck out of P.E. on a regular basis. They sprawled in the east field and watched the boys’ soccer team running wind sprints and snapping through calisthenics. Hannah would gossip with Felice about teachers and other kids for a while, but then she’d start to say things like, “Isn’t it weird that everyone has to die? Like, everyone on this field right now? Someday they’ll all be dead. Everyone in this whole school. Gone.”
“I guess.” Felice squinted so spangles of colored light glittered inside her eyelashes. Off in the distance, there were moving vistas of palms, their enormous shaggy fronds seemed to swim and undulate against the sky. Felice loved listening to Hannah say her crazy stuff. She had decided never to introduce her to her mother. Avis would come out — she always did — with plates of cherry cookies, their chocolate icing like lacquer, or lemon cream scones coruscated with sugar crystals — her friends fought for the morsels of her miniature éclairs. “Your mother is a god,” Bella once moaned.
Hannah didn’t like to talk about her parents either. “My dad is a big boring freak and for some reason my mom married him.” She flopped back in the grass, swishing her arms back and forth, the way Felice had seen kids make snow angels on TV. “I hate Arabs. I hate Israelis. I hate soldiers. I hate Saddam Hussein. I hate George Bush. I hate politics, I hate words that begin with p. So don’t ask me about any of it.”
“Fine,” Felice said, laughing and rolling her eyes. “I wasn’t going to.”