We must have been the last homeroom to arrive in the auditorium. The student body was catching up after summer vacation, saying Omigod and How’s it going? to the kids next to them, behind them, several rows away. As I looked down at the crowd I was staggered and overwhelmed by the endless varieties of girls: Girls who were going for cute and girls who were going for sexy and girls who were going for normal. Soccer players in shorts and sweatshirts and future English majors in long Laura Ashley skirts. Girls with big breasts who were trying to hide them and girls with big breasts who were trying to show them off. Christian girls in button-down sweaters and nerd girls in overalls and rocker girls in black T-shirts with elaborate heavy-metal iconography. Groups of pretty girls, groups of almost pretty girls, ugly girls in ones and twos. It was an impossibly rich and complex zoology. I froze momentarily, and the people flooding in behind me pushed me forward and I stumbled and nearly fell.
I began by gathering data. Accounting for overlaps, my seven classes plus homeroom contained forty-six distinct girls. I listened for their names during roll and wrote them in a notebook, along with a quick notation indicating something about their physical appearance to remind me who was who. Once I’d got the names I started pruning. I wasn’t picky. To the least desirable girls I applied a litmus test: Would I prefer to be involved with her or to graduate high school without ever acquiring a girlfriend? That knocked out seven and left Rita Bambrick, whose head looked like one of the Easter Island statues, on the borderline.
And so I started tracking thirty-nine girls: their friends, interests, cliques, extracurriculars. After two weeks of fieldwork I had compiled a fairly thorough ethnography of the freshman class’s female population. I identified the groups, the pairings, the loners, the girls with steady boyfriends and the girls who dated around and the girls who were concentrating on their schoolwork. I rated them on a few crucial axes: studiousness, athleticism, sociability, sexual maturity (at one end of the spectrum was Erica Watterson, who was famous for her promiscuity; at the other was Pamela Beal, who was obsessed with horses), and social status. I was certain that this data would be useful to me, and that when I had accumulated enough of it I would know what to do with it.
As I walked out of history during the second week, Tara Pulowski fell in beside me. “How’s it going, Eric?” she said, and I was thrilled to hear her call me by my name. My left hand instinctively reached behind me to verify that the zipper on my backpack was secure. Inside the backpack was the ring-bound notebook in which Tara’s name was written next to the words “curly brown hair” and the glyphs for pretty and rich.
“So what do you think of this class?” she asked me. I cast about frantically for the correct answer, until she stepped in to help me. “It’s OK, I guess, but there’s way too much homework.”
“Yeah,” I said. We were walking through the hallway to the cafeteria, having a conversation.
“So where do you live, Eric?” she asked me.
“Sheridan,” I said.
“Neat,” she said, waving hello to Becky Busch without breaking stride. “So, I’m running for student council.”
“Oh,” I said.
“The election’s in eight days,” she said. “Yikes!” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers in a little pantomime of anxiety.
“Wow,” I said. There must have been a better response but I was unable to imagine what it might be or how anyone might be able to calculate it in the time allotted.
We had arrived at the cafeteria. It seemed that we were about to sit together, and it occurred to me that by the end of lunch I might have thought of something better to say than Oh or Wow. “So where do you want to sit?” I said. I had neglected to inhale for a few minutes, and my voice came out sounding strangulated and glottal. Tara’s eyes scanned the room, then lit up as they landed on Michelle Kessel and Louise Treadwell, over by the big windows.
“So wish me luck in the election, Eric!” she said, then hurried off, smiling and greeting people. I waited in line for lasagna, found a seat alone, and took out my notebook. Next to Tara’s name I drew a little asterisk to signify that I had talked to her.
I voted for her, of course. She came in a very respectable third, after Dean Hoestetler, who had locked up the endorsements of the after-school clubs by sending pizza to their meetings, and Heidi Weir, who was immense and wore headgear and was the subject of a sarcastic write-in campaign.
From there my notes on Tara expanded to take up most of a page. After her defeat at the ballot box she began an equally vigorous campaign to become Michelle Kessel’s best friend. For almost two weeks she and Michelle and Louise were together constantly — in the cafeteria, in class, going into the girls’ bathroom — but Tara’s place in the group was never secure. She was more earnest than the others, and she lacked the talent for exclusivity: during her abortive political career she had made too many acquaintances.
And then one day in biology Tara’s eyes were puffy and red, and she sat apart from Michelle and Louise and stared straight ahead. Mr. McCallum called on her, and when she gave the correct answer—“To increase surface area?”—Michelle and Louise broke into a laughing fit, pitched just below the threshold of acceptable classroom noise. At the end of class they left without her, whispering. Tara took her time assembling her belongings and walked out alone, her back stiff, like a finishing-school girl balancing a book on her head. I followed her out and caught up with her.
“Are you OK?” I asked her. She looked away, with an expression so vulnerable that, for the first time since Bronwen Oberfell had awakened me to the strangeness and terror of love, I was able to talk to a girl without feeling nervous.
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “It’s totally fine.” She hauled a smile into place as if by powerful hydraulics, but as the corners of her mouth reached the apices of the parabola the whole arrangement collapsed and she began to sob. I had never seen a girl cry, but I’d seen my mother cry many, many times, enough that Tara Pulowski’s tears were a lodestar. In uncharted territory I could use them to navigate.
“It’s all right,” I said. “You can tell me about it.” I felt a thrill of sincerity as I spoke, as though the feelings I’d had in the past were a child’s toys and Tara’s grief the first harbinger of adult life. We were standing by the bulletin board, in front of flyers announcing auditions for the musical and meetings of the Italian club. Students flowed past, parting around us, their voices and footsteps bouncing off the cinderblock walls.
“Why are people so mean?” she said, and I had to lean in to hear her. “It’s like, how is it that you can feel so close to someone and then all of a sudden find out that you don’t really know them at all?”
I had no idea what the answer was, but it seemed that what was called for was wisdom, and so I did my best with what I had. “Sometimes people are really mean,” I said. “Some people don’t care about anyone but themselves, and are just out to see what they can get.”
She nodded at me, her eyes wide. She was waiting to hear what I would say next, and it seemed important that I somehow shift into a higher register. “But sometimes, when people act in a mean way, what it really means is that they’re scared,” I said. I don’t know where that came from. Probably TV.
She took it in humbly, as though it were really valuable. “I want to talk to you more,” she said, and inside me something leapt in the air and punched the sky. “But I have to go to math.”
“I could meet you after school,” I said. It did not occur to me that my mom would be waiting for me after school.