“So what are you, a famous actress? Headed to Broadway?”
“Oh, no—”
“I’m Charles Loren,” he said, as if revealing a secret.
Dad was a devotee of Sturdy Eye Contact, but what Dad never addressed was that staring directly into a person’s eyes was nearly impossible at close range. You had to choose an eye, right or left, or veer back and forth between the two, or simply settle for the spot between the eyes. But I’d always thought that was a sad, vulnerable spot, unkempt of eyebrow and strange of tilt, where David had aimed his stone at Goliath and killed him.
“I know who you are,” he said. “Blue something. Don’t tell me—”
“What on earth is that hubbub in the back there?”
Charles jerked back in his seat. I turned.
A stocky woman with sour orange hair — the same person who’d glowered at Dad shouting Byron when he dropped me off — had replaced Havermeyer on the auditorium stage. Wearing a turnip-pink suit that strained like a weight lifter to remain buttoned, she stared up at me with her arms crossed and legs planted firmly apart resembling Diagram 11.23, “Classic Turkish Warrior during the Second Crusade” in one of Dad’s favorite texts, For the Love of God: History of Religious War and Persecution (Murgg, 1981). And she wasn’t the only one staring. All sound had been sucked out of Love Auditorium. Heads were turned toward me like a troop of Seljuk Turks noticing a lone, unwitting Christian taking a shortcut through their camp on his way to Jerusalem.
“You must be a new student,” she said into the microphone. Her voice sounded like amplified heel scuffs along pavement. “Allow me to let you in on a little secret. What’s your name?”
I hoped it was a figurative question, one I might not be expected to answer, but she was waiting.
“Blue,” I said.
She made a face. “What? What did she say?”
“She said blue,” someone said.
“Blue? Well, Blue, at this school, when people take the stage, we give them the respect they deserve. We pay attention.”
Perhaps I need not point out that I was not accustomed to being stared at, not by an entire school. The Jane Goodall was accustomed to doing all the staring, always in solitude and always from a location of dense foliage, which made her in her khaki shorts and linen blouse virtually indistinguishable from the bamboo canopy. My heart stuttered as I stared back at all the eyes. Slowly, they began to peel off me like eggs on a wall.
“As I was saying. There are critical changes in the Add-Drop Deadlines and I will not make exceptions for anyone. I don’t care how many Godiva chocolates you bring me — I’m talking to you, Maxwell. I ask you be on time when you make decisions about coursework, and I mean it.”
“Sorry about that,” Charles whispered behind me. “I should’ve warned you. Eva Brewster, you want to lie low around her. Everyone calls her Evita. It’s a bit of a dictator situation. Technically, though, she’s only a secretary.”
The woman — Eva Brewster — dismissed the school to class.
“Now listen, I wanted to ask you something — hey, wait a sec—!”
I darted past Mozart, pushing my way to the end of the row and into the aisle. Charles managed to keep up with me.
“Hold on.” He smiled. “Dang, you’re really gung ho about classes — typical A personality, sheesh — but, uh, seeing how you’re brand new, a few of my friends and I were hoping…” He was apparently talking to me, but his eyes were already floating up the stairs to the EXIT. Goodnight Moons all had heliumed eyes. They could never be tied to anyone for long. “We were hoping you’d have lunch with us. We snagged a pass to go off campus. So don’t go to the cafeteria. Meet us at the Scratch. 12:15.” He leaned in, his face inches from mine: “And don’t be late, or there’ll be serious consequences. Understand?” He winked and dashed away.
I stood for a moment in the aisle, unable to move until kids started pushing against my backpack and I was forced up the stairs. I had no idea how Charles knew my name. I did, however, know exactly why he’d rolled out the red carpet: he and his friends were hoping I’d join their Study Group. I’d toiled through a long history of Study Group invites extended by everyone from the Almond-Eyed Football Hero Who’d Have a Son by Senior Year to the Rita Hayworth Sunday Newspaper Coupon Model. I used to be thrilled when I was asked to join a Study Group, and when I arrived at the designated living room equipped with note cards, highlighters, red pens, and supplemental textbooks, I was euphoric as any Chorus Girl who’d been asked to understudy the Lead. Even Dad was excited. As he drove me to Brad’s, or Jeb’s or Sheena’s, he’d start muttering about this being a wonderful opportunity, one that would allow me to spread my Dorothy Parker wings and single-handedly spearhead a contemporary Algonquin Round Table.
Once he dropped me off, though, it didn’t take long to realize I hadn’t been invited for my scathing wit. If Carla’s living room was the Vicious Circle, I was the waiter everyone ignored unless they wanted another scotch or there was something wrong with the food. Somehow, one of them had discovered I was a “geek” (a “cardigan” at Coventry Academy), and I’d be assigned to research one out of every two questions on the Study Sheet, sometimes the entire Study Sheet.
“Let her do that one, too. You don’t mind do you, Blue?”
The turning point came at Leroy’s. Right in the middle of his living room crowded with porcelain Dalmatian miniatures, I started to cry — though I didn’t know why I decided to cry on that particular occasion; Leroy, Jessica and Schyler had only assigned me one out of every four questions on the Study Sheet. They began to chant in high-pitched, saccharine voices, “Oh, my God, what’s wrong?” causing the three live Dalmatians to run into the living room, circling and barking, and Leroy’s mother emerged from the kitchen wearing pink dishwashing gloves, shouting, “Leroy, I told you not to egg them on!” I ran out of the house, all the way home, about six miles. Leroy never returned my supplemental textbooks.
“So how do you know Charles?” asked Sal Mineo next to me as we reached the glass doors.
“I don’t know Charles,” I said.
“Well, you’re lucky because everyone wants to know him.”
“Why?”
Sal looked troubled, then shrugged and said in a soft, regretful voice: “He’s royalty.” Before I could ask what that meant, he skipped down the cement steps and disappeared into the crowd. Sal Mineos were always talking in spongy voices and making comments that were as vague as the outline of an angora sweater. Their eyes weren’t like everyone else’s but had enlarged tear glands and extra optic nerves. I thought about hurrying after him, letting him know by the end of the movie he’d be acknowledged as a character of great sensitivity and pathos, an archetype of all that was lost and injured about his generation, but would be gunned down by trigger-happy police if he wasn’t careful, if he didn’t come to an understanding about himself and who he was.
Instead, I’d spotted the royaclass="underline" Prince Charles, backpack slung over his shoulder, a playful grin, was striding quickly across the courtyard toward a tall, dark-haired girl wearing a long brown wool coat. He snuck up behind her, threw his arm around her neck with an “Ah-haahhhh!” She shrieked, and then, when he jumped in front of her, laughed. It was one of those chime-laughs that knifed cleanly through the morning, through the tired muttering of all the other kids, hinting this person had never known embarrassment or awkwardness, that even her grief would be gorgeous in the off chance she ever experienced it. Obviously, this was his dazzling girlfriend, and they were one of those tan, hair-tossing Blue Lagoon couples (one per every high school) who threatened to destroy the bedrock of the chaste educational community simply by the muggy way they looked at each other in the halls.