Fearless (3 page)

He wasn’t in the nearest bathroom. And I hadn’t run into him on the way. I looked down several corridors, but there was no sign of his black ski cap. Passing period was speeding by with no sign of him. That’s when I realized I should have just left the backpack with Ms. Warner. Now I didn’t have time to go back. I had to get to get to my Physical Science class.

This was my absolute favorite class of the day. No, it’s not because I’m a science nerd. I almost wish I were. I mean, I was already a social outcast. It would have been nice to be a brain too, so that I could invent something and be set for life. I would have liked to get something out of being a freak. But no, I just barely scrape by.

The reason I love Physical Science is because that’s the class where I sit next to Zach Beal. He’s a senior, having to retake the class to graduate. How do I describe him so you get why he’s just so, (well, if I can’t use “awesome” then I’ll go with “amazing”) to be around. It’s not his sun-kissed blond hair or his dimpled chin, though those are features etched into my memory. It’s not even his perfect cheekbones or the dimples he shows when he smiles with his perfect white teeth. And though his eyes, which are glacier blue, are worthy to be stared into for hours, they aren’t what set him apart.

It’s the entire sum of Zach that makes him special. Sure, he looks like a Greek statue that got turned human, but he was also just the best guy in the world. He never made me feel like a loser. Most people, when told they were to be partnered with me, looked like they’d been handed a diagnosis for a terminal disease. But not Zach. He plopped down next to me at our lab table once the seating arrangements were handed out and greeted me with a big, friendly smile.

“How’s it hanging?” he asked when I rushed into class.

I smiled. It was his usual way of saying “hi.” The first time he’d asked, I just about fainted dead away from embarrassment. Every day, I resolved to turn the greeting back on him and every day I just barely managed to get out a, “Hey.”

When you’re in the presence of a god, it’s hard to think of something worthy to say. “Please just let me follow you around and stare at you” is a lot of words, you know. And it’s sort of creepy.

A lot of times, I wondered why it was that some people could be so cool and funny and charming all the time while the rest of us were lucky if we just matched up the right nouns, verbs and adjectives. I hoped it wasn’t yet another genetic thing. I wanted to believe it was something you could learn. That meant that I had a chance, however slim, of being cool one day.

 “You ready for the quiz?”

I shook my head. I was never ready for the quizzes or the tests. I thought I had most of the information in my head, but the moment I saw the questions, it was like I’d never read anything at all.

“You?”

Zach showed me his dimples, which caused my bitter, black heart to dissolve into goo. “I fell asleep trying to get through the chapter.”

The image of Zach curled up, snoring and drooling with his textbook in his hands made me feel very itchy. He had that effect on me.

“I’d hate to ruin my solid C average,” he told me.

That made me laugh. My good mood was quickly soured as the forewarned quiz was handed out. I was sure of about a third of my answers. Another third were total guesses.

Part of the problem was that I was distracted by my Liam problem. I mean, it wasn’t like I was all twisted up inside by it. It was really just that trying to figure out what the deal was with the scary stoner was a lot more interesting than a quiz. So I found myself rereading questions over and over, not really absorbing the words, while I thought about Liam.

Why had he stormed off? That was what I really didn’t get. If I had pissed him off, why hadn’t he just found another partner? Then he could’ve laid in wait for me after class and beaten the crap out of me like a normal bully.

Was calling him a stoner really that offensive? He smoked weed. Even if I hadn’t seen him doing it, then I could smell it on him. I mean, if he was one of those pot activists who want to make it legal, he’d be proud of his habit. And even if not, he couldn’t be ashamed of his habit, could he? That didn’t make any sense.

I didn’t see why he would be so sensitive about it. Even if he didn’t like being called out for being a stoner, was that any reason to run off and pout? And why would he care what I thought, anyway?

The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I became. He had no business laying this guilt trip on me. Even if maybe I had overreacted, I have my reasons and I don’t have to justify those to anyone. This was high school. I was fighting to keep my head above water. So what if that made me a little prickly?

But I couldn’t get his face out of my mind. That look when I’d called him a stoner sort of haunted me. Because while he’d clearly been pissed, there had been a moment where I saw hurt in his eyes.

As I ate my lunch, sitting in a quiet alcove away from the throng of my peers, I found myself facing a question I didn’t like one bit:

What if he really had just been trying to make friends?

I couldn’t imagine a universe where that was true, but it was hard to ignore the evidence. If I was being completely honest with myself (something I try to avoid) I had been a lot harsher to him than he had been to me.

I had to stop asking myself why he would be trying to make friends with me, because there was just no answer which I could think of that made sense. So I moved on to the question of whether or not I really wanted a druggie for a friend. Was that really the absolute rock bottom I felt underneath me?

I reminded myself that I had promised myself to not bother with the friends thing at all. It was a really exhausting Merry-Go-Round that I had ridden too many times. I just didn’t want to go through it all again. Sure, I’d never tried hanging with a stoner and there was a chance that he would be so baked most of the time that he wouldn’t notice he was chilling with a complete freak, but was it worth the effort?

Sitting in the quietest part of the quad, by myself, was a keen reminder of what it meant to go it alone. It wasn’t that I
liked
working so hard to stay invisible. It was just the easiest path I knew of to keep bad things from happening.

Yeah, that made me a coward. I accepted that.

I finished my juice box and grabbed the blue backpack that had become kind of an anchor dragging me down and went searching for stoners. They had a few favorite haunts. There was under the bleachers, there was the parking lot and there was this little closed off area near the vending machines. They aren’t hard to find, after all—you just have to look for the smoke. Sure enough, I found a whole pack of them near the bike rack in the parking lot.

I felt a lot like a very stupid lamb walking up to a pack of wolves with an “Eat Me” sign around my neck. This was definitely their turf. I was an outsider. Obviously, there wasn’t an adult anywhere in sight. I tried hard not to imagine how many bones could get broken before help arrived. If Liam were actually planning to lynch me, I’d just gift-wrapped myself for him.

He froze when he saw me, the silly grin on his face fading at the sight of me. The cloud of smoke around him confirmed my accusation, the one that had pissed him off so much. So I understood how my arrival would seem like I was making him eat his words.

Liam, as if in defiance of me, took a hit off the joint he was sharing with his friends. His eyes remained fixed on me as he passed the joint to the nearest stoner. Then he walked over to me and stood right in my face as he blew sweet smoke into my eyes. His expression was dangerous, full of barely-contained hostility.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

I stared at him, my mind completely blank. The terrible consequences of my very bad idea were about to be shown to me. I winced and looked away, bracing myself for the first hit.

Chapter 3

L
IAM’S UNFRIENDLY EXPRESSION DIDN’T WAVER.
I felt sick and dizzy. But I didn’t do anything. I should have just run, but sometimes I just refuse to listen to the parts of my brain in charge of keeping me alive. So I stood there like I was daring Liam to punch me. I don’t know why. Maybe I figured if he did, I could prove I had been right about him all along.

“Well?” he demanded. His breath wasn’t very pleasant.

“Uh, you, uh….”

“Spit it out.”

As pissed as he was, I noticed he wasn’t calling me fag. I didn’t understand why not. It was such an easy, obvious slur. And now he was here with his gang of losers, so surely this had to be the time to pull out the ace he had been holding all this time.

“You forgot your stuff in class,” I told him, opening one eye.

I held the bag out to him. He took it, his eyes still flashing with anger. “Did you go through it, looking for my stash?”

That idea hadn’t even occurred to me. “No.”

Since he wasn’t going to beat me up, apparently, and my good deed was done, I figured it was about time to make a strategic withdrawal. I turned around and headed in the general direction of my locker. I could feel him staring at me, though, like his eyes were burning a hole in the back of my skull.

“I wasn’t fucking with you.”

I stopped and looked down at my clumsy feet. I didn’t need or want friends. It was just too much pain and disappointment. Loneliness wasn’t so bad. Like my dad used to say about other crappy stuff, it’s like hanging—you do it long enough, you get used to it.

But if I ignored Liam and kept walking it would be hard to hold onto the belief that I was standing on the high ground. He was reaching out. If I ignored him, then I would be the jerk. And that didn’t sit well with me.

I turned around again and chewed on my thumbnail. Liam was watching me. The anger had been replaced by a wary hope in his eyes. For no good reason at all, I now noticed they a pretty green color. He completely confounded me, and I don’t like being confounded. Some think that people are all different, like snowflakes. I tend to believe everyone fits into one of a very few boxes. Liam was a stoner who didn’t care about school or his future or what anyone thought of him—that was his box and I didn’t like that he refused to stay inside it.

I looked past him to his stoner buddies. None of them were paying us any attention. I guessed, since we weren’t holding the joint, we didn’t matter to them. At least they didn’t look like they were ready to jump me.

Liam stepped closer, though he didn’t get in my face like he had before. The way he cocked his head to one side and looked at me sidelong gave the impression that he was worried I was going to blow up at him again. That almost made me laugh, the idea that he could be afraid of me.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. It was a total surprise to me to discover that I was. “Look, every day it’s something new from someone. Gwen and her friends mock the way I dress. Kevin and his football buddies trip me—like I need any help in that department—and throw my backpack in the trash. Isaac, this guy I used to be friends with, one day he came up and started talking to me at lunch. Then he grabbed my sandwich and spit on it and laughed.”

“Dude—”

“No, I don’t need any pity. That’s not why I’m saying this. Shit happens. I don’t even care anymore. I just want to get through his crap fest with as much of my skin intact as possible. So, yeah, I guess I’m paranoid. Or whatever. But after the locker room, I was sure you were coming after me.”

Liam relaxed a little. “Dude, I don’t care that you were checking me out.”

I felt like he had hit me after all; a solid punch to my gut. I stared at him, trying really hard to keep from shaking. The way he just laid it out there, casually putting into words what a total perv I was, it knocked the wind out of me.

I guess my panic was obvious, because he held up his hands for peace. “Dude, I don’t care, really. If I had a chance to see Gwen naked, you can bet I’d take it. We’re dudes. We’re wired that way, even the gay ones.”

I wasn’t a sexual deviant? That blew my mind. “Really?” I asked in total disbelief.

Liam actually laughed, which startled me and made me take a step back as I prepared for the Big Reveal on the great joke he was playing. Then I noticed something strange. He didn’t have that beady look in his eyes I noticed people got when they were being vicious. And his lips weren’t curled in that way that suggested malice.

He just thought my being such a naïve twit was funny, it seemed. I was okay with that.

“Dude, it’s just looking. You don’t think straight dudes check each other out too? We need to be sure everything we got is as good or better as anything anyone else has got.”

I knew I was blushing but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “So, if it’s something all dudes do,” I began, stumbling my way through the subject. “How did you know I…? I mean, what made you think….?”

Liam shrugged. “I watched you in class. You were checking out the guys in their clingy wet trunks. And you couldn’t keep your eyes off my junk.”

Holy shit, am I that obvious? Does
everyone
know?

“Sorry.” It was all I could think to say.

Liam shook his head. “Dude, it’s fine. Fish have to swim, birds got to fly and all that crap. Besides, no one’s ever looked at me with any interest before. It was kind of flattering.”

I let my heart know that it could start beating again. “Uh, okay.” I was still stuck on the idea that I wasn’t some kind of sick troll for scoping out guys in the locker room. “So why did you ask for me to help you with your classes?”

Liam slid his backpack onto his shoulder. “I thought maybe we could both use a friend.”

I really had been teleported into Bizarro World. “Why would you want to be friends with me?”

“My instincts tell me you’d be a cool friend to have.”

“You have bad instincts. Trust me, no one would ever use the word ‘cool’ and me in a sentence without a ‘not’ involved.”

Liam just smiled, like I was being funny. I wasn’t. I know, I was being a self-pitying, self-sabotaging moron. But I didn’t want him having the wrong impression about me. That would only speed up the process of him cutting me loose.