When I was a freshman and stood in this same quad with Blake, I knew that it would never last between us. Even when I was enjoying the feeling of his arm around me. Even when I liked the way he looked at me, liked being his girlfriend. Because, even then, certain truths about myself were floating up from the depths of my heart. Standing right here, now, in the corridor outside of a class I don’t need to take, those truths flare up again. Because Mimi Park was what dislodged them in the first place.
Back then she always had at least one earbud in, and often she’d be looking into the distance, and her head would bob so slightly it would have been imperceptible to anyone who wasn’t riveted by her. Once she asked me if I’d heard a certain song, and I said no, and she took the right side out and fit it, gently, in my ear. It was Nirvana, “Come as You Are.” Kurt Cobain had been dead for almost twenty years, and I’d heard of him but never heard him, and now he was singing to both of us at the same time. Only us. His voice in her left ear, my right one. We listened through the whole song, right there in the quad, and I smiled and nodded early on so that she wouldn’t take it away, but after that I couldn’t look at her face anymore. Too much happened when our eyes met. I looked at my Converse and a gum wrapper. I looked at her Vans and a yellow flower growing through the concrete. The guitar sounded like it was being played underwater. The lyrics were confusing and contradictory, a lot like standing with your boyfriend’s arm around you while sharing earbuds with a girl you wished you were kissing.
When the song was over, she reached to my ear and took it out.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“It was good,” I said.
And now it’s the summer after junior year, and I’m remembering what it was like to be chosen out of a quad swarming with people to listen to a song. I’m remembering asking her if she’d be at homecoming, and how she’d said something about going camping. I’m remembering how hard I cried when I broke up with Blake, and how so much of the sadness was about losing those afternoons on the Potrero High campus and the riot of light that filled me each time I saw Mimi in the distance.
We’ve reached the classroom door. They cross the threshold ahead of me and head toward the back. If I had my bag still slung over my shoulder, I would stay in their group and sit back there, too, but my stuff is at the desk in the front, where I left it. I would have to cross the room, gather my things, and then go back to see if a desk next to them was still empty. I don’t know if they want me there, adding a fourth member to their group, so I sit where my stuff is. Maybe tomorrow can be different.
Mr. Trout stands at the whiteboard. I thought he needed to prepare for his lesson, but instead he used the time to draw a giant fish on the board, covered in scales. When he has everyone’s attention, he writes a “Mr.” right before the tip of the fish’s nose.
“Welcome to summer school,” he says, but the rush of calm I imagined from being here doesn’t come, because Mimi is also here, sitting five rows behind me.
* * *
No one is home when I walk inside. I go to hang my bag on the coatrack but stop when I see a Post-it stuck to it that says Leave. The coatrack is brass, each hook in the shape of an animal. I touch the rhino’s horn, the elephant’s trunk. I put my bag back on my shoulder and head into the living room, but everywhere I look are more Post-its. The clock on the mantle says Craigslist. The portrait of Granny has a question mark. The side table, its surface covered in faded rings from mugs of coffee and tea, says Goodwill.
I turn my face to the floor, step around more Post-its safety pinned to the rugs, and walk through the house and up the stairs to my room. I drop my bag. I step out of my sandals. I pull back my sheets and climb into my bed. I make myself small. I make myself sleep.
* * *
It’s Monday again. Mimi and Hope and Travis are standing by the open classroom door as I approach it, and I try to work up the courage to talk to them. I think I messed it up. I should have joined them on the first day, or at least on the second. Now too much time has passed, and they haven’t asked me to sit with them, and our conversations have consisted solely of heys and good-byes.
But I don’t need to find the courage, because Hope spots me and says, “Flora, come see Mimi’s tattoo!”
So I join them. It’s a life-size California poppy on the inside of her right forearm.
“I can’t believe your mom let you get it,” Travis says.
“What can I say? I’m the daughter of a rebel.”
“It’s gorgeous,” I say. “The petals—they’re so perfect.”
And I feel myself flush while I say it, because it’s so close to saying that she’s gorgeous. The truth is that the tattoo is beautiful, but even that vivid orange and green are no match for her face or her knees or the way she’s posed now, with her arm extended toward us, no hint of self-consciousness.
“I want to get a tattoo,” I say. “I have it planned out.”
I show them where, up the inside of my bicep.
“What of?” Travis asks.
“Words. A phrase. ‘The end of love.’”
Mimi squints. “What’s it from?”
“It’s just something in my head.”
It’s something that hurts, that I can’t seem to get out, that keeps me up in the early morning. I think that maybe if I could do something with it, write it on my body forever, I could get it out of my heart.
“It sounds like a song,” Hope says. “Or a book, maybe. I can’t really picture it as a tattoo.”
“It’d be like a warning sign to chicks, though,” Travis says. “All the girls would know to stay far, far away.”
My blush returns. I didn’t think I was significant enough to be gossiped about at Potrero High, but turns out that I am. I glance up, see Mimi watching me.
“You guys,” Mr. Trout calls from the classroom. “This may blow your precocious young minds, but class is held inside the classroom.”
I almost follow them to the last row, but before I do, I see that there are only three open desks back there, so I take my usual spot at the front.
Today Mr. Trout is introducing polygons, though he hasn’t announced that yet. I can see it from the shapes he’s drawn on the board. I know all of their names. Triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, decagon …
“What do all of these have in common?” he asks us.
“They’re all shapes?” people murmur. “They have straight lines?”
“Yes,” Mr. Trout says. “What else?”
I write down everything I know about polygons in my notebook. How they are bound by a finite chain of line segments. About all of their edges, and the points where two edges meet. How the space inside is called the body.
I write about convexity and nonconvexity, about simple polygons and star polygons. I write about equality and symmetry, and each word steadies my heart. Mr. Trout is talking about all of these things I know already. Most of the time he sounds a little bored, but it doesn’t matter. His words leave his mouth, carry across this room, and I’m filled with wonder because she’s listening to them, too.
* * *
My parents are in the dining room when I get home, stationed in front of the china hutch with their Post-its.
“Look at this,” Mom scoffs, holding up the serving platter. “What were we thinking?”
It’s the platter they’ve used my whole life. I don’t see anything wrong with it, but Dad scoffs along with her and throws up his hands.
“What can I say?” he says. “It was the nineties.”
“Goodwill pile? Unless you want it.”
“Oh, Goodwill for sure,” he says.