Maybe I’ll talk to that Tate girl at school. Maybe I can see her alone. I felt when I went back into the new house like I wanted to see her again right away, like I needed to. I went up to my room and looked next door and wondered which window was hers. About an hour later I headed back to the garage and I thought I saw her standing in the big square cupola on top of their house, looking out over the harbor, over the tops of the giant pines.
She was like Helen of Troy, standing up there in the glass room beneath the blue sky with the clouds rolling in from the ocean. I wanted to be able to look at her always. Wanted a film of her just standing there. I could film her doing anything and it would be interesting. Just talking. Just saying nothing.
I could suddenly see how wars could be fought over beauty. And I wanted to film her for the rest of her life.
My locker was nearly side by side with Allyson’s on the second floor by the stairs, which meant she could easily leave yellow sticky notes on it reminding me about chores we had at home or just offering her usual sisterly good cheer. Like: “Hi, Cutie!” or just a picture of a talking cat with a bow on its head—I guess that was supposed to be Hello Kitty. She dotted her i’s with hearts and every time I saw one of these sparkly, bubble-written monstrosities I nearly barfed. Imagine having to listen to the Barney theme song on permanent repeat. That’s what it was like getting these notes. There was nothing wrong with them—they all said nice things—but somehow everything about them was wrong.
“Oh my God,” Becky said, pulling the latest one down, sticking it to the front of my sweater, and reading it. “Do you really have to meet your mom downtown at the historical society after school? I was hoping we could take the back way home and get in a little four-twenty action on the way.”
Becky was wearing her headphones, a red-and-gray flannel shirt, and black skinny jeans. She fiddled distractedly with her new nose ring, a small silver hoop that looked like it might already be irritating an infection. She had a wide mouth and full lips and small square teeth. And she polished her nails so that every other finger had black or red nail polish on it. Today she was wearing a gauzy scarf with little skulls all over it. Lockers were slamming shut all around us and voices were raised and slightly rowdy at the end of the day, just kids happy to be getting out, happy to have a couple hours of freedom before it started all over again.
Of course I wasn’t going to meet my mom downtown. Becky didn’t even need to ask. Mom wanted to get Ally and me some new shoes. She could get them for Ally. I’d just broken in my slip-on Vans and I had no intention of seeing what her idea of a fashionable pair of shoes looked like. I had a closet full of things my mom thought were so “me.” This is “so you!” she would say, holding up a pair of low pink wedges. Or: “This would look great on you!” holding a powder-blue silk blouse up just below my chin and taking a step back to nod approvingly. “Stunning.”
Ally loved this kind of thing, and she generally did look stunning in whatever Mom picked out for her. But these shopping outings weren’t my thing. I always felt like I was being dressed like a poodle. It was an outfit or shoes for my mother, not for me. It was an outfit or shoes that would make my mother look good because she had a daughter who had fancy clothes or looked pretty. Sometimes when I was out with her I felt like a bracelet she owned and not her daughter. And I always heard it when Ally was standing beside her: “She’s so pretty!” they’d say—right in front of Ally as if she didn’t exist at all. As if she was something my mother had bought for herself.
I pulled the yellow sticky note off my shirt and crumpled it into a ball, dropping it into the bottom of the locker where it landed on a pile of maybe two hundred other crumpled yellow notes.
“Yeah, four twenty sounds good to me,” I said.
“Hell yeah,” Becky said, and laughed.
I put my history and science books away and jammed that evening’s homework into my backpack, turning around just in time to see Declan Wells striding up the stairs two at a time, his bag over one shoulder, his board under his arm, and his wavy black hair falling around his shoulders.
“Speak of the devil,” I whispered to Becky. Though it was hardly by chance that he appeared. Declan met us upstairs at our lockers every day after school.
He stopped in front of us and bent his head to the side. “Aw, yeah. Does someone need a little mental vacation from the strain and stress of pretending all goddamn day that we are not really living in some tedious made-for-TV movie about the failure of the education system, the folly of youth, and the burgeoning surveillance culture? A little lift perhaps? A little journey to a softer world?”
Becky and I looked at each other, shook our heads, and grinned. Declan could never just say “Hey, homies.” Or “What’s up?” He loved to hear himself speak too much—but then again we loved to hear him too. That boy always made me smile.
I pulled my skateboard out of my locker and set it on the smooth gray tiled floor, then stood on it to make myself as tall as Declan, folding my arms across my chest. I looked right into his wide-set dark-brown eyes and then he laughed, almost to himself. “Yes? Ms. Tate? You have something to share with us?”
“I’m up!” I said, then pushed off and maneuvered down the hall on my board against the steady stream of kids headed out for the day. I turned and glanced back to make sure he was looking, then did a perfect, tight kick flip right in front of the upstairs office.
“She’s crazy,” I heard him say in that admiring tone—the one he had where he sounded excited, like he might almost laugh. I looked back just in time to see Becky nod in agreement and then watched as they both stopped short. Mr. Fitzgerald leaned out of his office and called my name.
“Tate! How many times have I told you not to skate in the hall?”
“Probably thirty,” I called back to him. “Maybe forty. But who’s counting?”
Declan and Becky stifled their laughter.
“Carry that board out of the building or I will confiscate it this time.”
I flipped the skateboard up into my hands and kept walking, ignoring him. Becky and Declan followed behind me.
“’Sup, Mr. Fitz?” Declan said as they passed. “Happy to go home after a long day as guardian of America’s future rocket scientists and Walmart greeters?”
Fitz said, “Watch yourself, Wells. Have a good afternoon, Becky. Oh, just a minute . . . Wells, we have a new student starting next week. He’ll need to shadow someone for a day and get shown the ropes, and guess who’s going to be doing the showing?”
“Aw, serious? Me? I’m not like Virgil or something, you know, guiding some newbie through hell. That’s really not the archetype I prefer, Mr. Fitz.”
Mr. Fitzgerald smiled and shook his head. “Nice Dante reference, Wells. You have such a good brain in there. Maybe your attitude could catch up to it, huh? And guess what? You are gonna be Virgil for a day or some of those missed detentions are going to magically multiply. The student’s name is Graham Copeland. Nice kid. Getting a little bit of a late start and I think he needs someone like you to show him around.”
“C’mon!” I yelled from the end of the hallway. I didn’t hear everything Fitz had said but I’m sure it wasn’t worth spending another two seconds of our lives at school. “Half pipe’s awaiting! And so’s the other pipe.”