Gimme a Call (13 page)

“Hold on.” She sighs. I hear her scrambling to find it. The words appear on the page. “Done. Next?”

“Gym. Who do you have again? Zetner?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not too hard. You don’t get an A, but if I remember correctly, you don’t do too badly. It’s not like you have homework.”

“So what do I do, then? Nothing?”

“Just try harder. You don’t put much effort in. If you try a little, I bet you could get an A.”

“Will try in gym. Next?”

“SATs. Maya scored in the ninety-eighth percentile.”

“That sounds super high. What was your percentile?”

My cheeks get hot. “Not ninety-eight.”

“So I need to have a good GPA and a high score. Fabo. Can I worry about my SATs when I’m a junior, then?”

“Do Olympic athletes start training the year before they compete? Absolutely not. You need to start preparing now.” As I say this, my dad passes by my door—still in his bathrobe. Does he ever get dressed?

She really is going to have to focus on those SAT scores. Like Maya, I’m going to need a scholarship if I want to go to some fancy college. My parents can definitely
not
afford it.

“How do I do that exactly?” she asks, bringing me back to the present. Or the present-past. Whatever.

Hmmm. “Your weak spot was really the verbal. You know, those crazy words. Like ‘coagulate.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Exactly my point. Maybe if we start now, you’ll be a verbal genius.” If she memorizes one word a day, she could have the vocabulary of an English professor in time for the SATs. “Yes! Superb idea!”

“What is?” she asks nervously.

“Memorizing one SAT word a day. By the time you’re a junior, you’ll know the entire dictionary.”

“Starting when?”

“Today, of course. With ‘coagulate.’”

“What does it mean?”

“One sec,” I say, and go into Maya’s old room. On her bookshelf are about twenty SAT-prep books—none of which I ever opened. “According to my SparkNotes SAT-prep book, it means ‘to thicken, clot.’”

“Can you use it in a sentence?”

“The orange juice left in my glass has coagulated into a crusty mess.”

“That’s gross.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to drink it.” I sit down on Maya’s old bed and flip through the book. Why didn’t I even bother studying the first time around? I remember the day of the test, the burst of hope I felt that maybe I could ace this without any prep. I’d surprise everyone. Surprise myself. “Did you write that down?” I ask her.

“Yup,” she says, and I hear her scribbling.

“Now back to us. And getting into UCLA. It’s not just about getting A’s.”

“It’s not?”

“No,” I say with disgust. My little rudderless vessel doesn’t know anything. “You’re going to be busy.”

“What should I do?”

“Stuff. You need to do stuff.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Yes. You need a well-rounded resume. To get into a good college, you need to do some extracurriculars.”

“What do Karin, Joelle, and Tash do? As seniors, I mean.”

“Let’s see. Karin was a gymnast, but apparently she’s now a cheerleader with a nose job—”

“Sorry about that,” she says sheepishly. “But it’s better than an eating disorder. And I’m going to come up with a plan to help her.”

“No plans without consulting me,” I remind her. “Tash is in some of the science clubs.”

“Do they have boyfriends?”

“Karin does. A guy named Stevey she met at the mall. He goes to Florence East. He’s very cute. He’s his school’s top swimmer or something. But I don’t think Tash has gone out with anyone.”

“Really? No one? That’s sad. Is she still shy?”

“Yeah. She never talks about guys she likes. She’s focused on school. It’s not easy to get into Brown, you know.”

“And what about Joelle?” she asks.

“She’s yearbook editor,” I tell her.

“Oh, she just joined the staff this week! That’s so exciting. Any boyfriends?”

“She was with Jerome Cohen for a few months freshman year. But that’s all I know about.”

“Really? She is? I mean, she was? That’s so cool! She has a crush on him!”

“I remember,” I say. “I think we help fix them up.” As the words leave my mouth, I wonder if maybe from now on I shouldn’t be telling her so much about the future. In case the future ends up like Karin’s nose—under construction.

“Oh, fun! How?”

It’s not going to happen like it did before anyway. I guess I can tell. “He asks Bryan to ask me if she likes him. Who knows? Maybe without me and Bryan they don’t go out.”

“What? That’s so sad! She really likes him! I don’t want her not to get to go out with Jerome just because Bryan cheated on us. That’s so unfair.”

Right. Well. “We don’t know for sure they don’t go out. Maybe he asks someone else for the details. Let me find out if anything’s changed before we feel bad, okay?” Next time I’m keeping my mouth shut.

“Fine,” she says.

“Now back to you. You need some extracurriculars. Wanna try out for cheerleading too?”

“No. First of all, I am not so cheery. Or flexible. Second, the tryouts were today. I missed them. And I don’t want to end up with a nose job too.”

I spread my legs into a V and struggle to open them all the way. “Can you do the splits?”

“Um, no. Can you?”

“No! But I used to be able to. You sure you can’t? Try.”

She groans. “I really don’t think I—”

“Just try!”

I hear shuffling and then an “Ow!”

“No. I can’t,” she says.

“We used to be able to do them.”

“When we were six.”

“Still!” I say. “What happened to us? Six-year-old us could do it. I bet if six-year-old us did it every day, then we would still be able to do it.”

“Then call six-year-old us,” she grumbles.

I pause. “I would if I could.”

“What other extracurriculars can I do?” she asks. “Ones that don’t involve turning my body into a pretzel.”

“What about yearbook?”

“Sounds boring.”

“No, it’ll be like making a scrapbook.”

“I make scrapbooks?”

I made one. Once upon a time. In a world that no longer exists. “You could work with Joelle,” I say instead.

“I guess. I think sign-up was last week, though.”

“Trust me, they won’t mind if you join. It’s yearbook. There aren’t exactly tryouts to get in.”

“I think Joelle has a yearbook lunch meeting tomorrow.”

“Perfect! You’ll go too.”

“Good. Is that enough?”

“For today! Quick—coagulate! Use it in a sentence!”

She clears her throat. “My brain is beginning to coagulate.”

chapter sixteen
Tuesday, September 13
Freshman Year

When the lunch bell rings, I call to Joelle, “Are you going to yearbook?”

“Yup.” She breaks into a big smile. “Why, wanna come?”

“I was thinking about it.” Translation: Ivy is forcing me to do this.

She is also making me try out for the school play,
Beauty and the Beast
, in which I will most likely be cast as a dinner plate, since I have no talent.

“Fabo!” She clutches a silver folder marked
Yearbook
under her arm. “What made you change your mind?”

“Oh, you know,” I say. “College applications.”

She bursts out laughing. “Seriously? You’re thinking about those now? In the first month of high school?”

I guess it does sound kind of insane. I shrug. “Never hurts to plan ahead.”

She puts her arm around my shoulders. “I didn’t know you were such a go-getter.”

Me neither. “Where’s the meeting?”

“In the basement,” she says.

I didn’t know there was a basement. At the end of the hall, Joelle and I walk down the steps. Between the school newspaper office and the French club is the yearbook room. It is a square concrete room that houses a few computers and a lunch table–sized desk. There are about ten of us here, mostly sophomores. Joelle and I go to the back of the room.

“So, do you want to be yearbook editor someday or something?” she asks, flipping her hair.

“What, me? No. You’re going to be—” I stop myself in midsentence. She does not know yet that she’s going to be yearbook editor, so I probably shouldn’t tell her.

“I’m going to be what?”

I point to her folder. “You’re going to be the best yearbook staffer ever.”

“Yeah,” she says with a smile. “That goes without saying.”

“Will you show me what I have to do?” Or maybe I should just save time and ask my future self what I already did. Kidding.

“Joy will tell us,” she says.

Joy, the tiny blond senior sitting on the teacher’s desk, waves. “Hey, thanks for coming!”

“My pleasure,” I say.

“Why don’t you guys start by looking through old yearbooks to get ideas for some page spreads. Also, if anyone has any fund-raising ideas, let me know ASAP. We are poor, people, and we need to reach out.”

“Sounds good,” I say, and she hands us the last five years of books.

We dig right in. Most are divided up the same way—faculty, then a few pages for each grade, then about forty pages for the seniors. Each graduating student gets a quarter of a page to write his or her statement. Most of them are made up of quotes and sayings, like “Carpe Diem,” and song lyrics from “Lost in the Wind,” and cagey messages to friends, like “candle nightx8” and “GH—thankx4thePurple.” Or Erika Pallick’s five-year-old declaration to MX: “1st truelove. URevrything2me.” Or Lisa Viergo’s “To Kayla, my BFF. Thnx4lovngMeSoMch & NoingMebttr thn I no myself.”

I wonder what happened to Erika and MX. Does he still mean everything to her? Did they go to college together? And are Lisa and Kayla still best friends? Or did they lose touch when they went to college?

“Any great ideas?” Joy asks, crouching beside us.

“I wish we could do a follow-up on some of these people. See what happened to them,” I say.

Joy cocks her head to the side. “Can’t you just search for them on Google?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “But then I feel like I’m stalking them. And it would be cool to have it in print.”

Joelle taps her fingers against a book from last year. “If we include one page of Where Are They Nows, we could start selling alumni the books. As a keepsake. And maybe even get some of them to make donations.”

“Exactly,” I say.

“I love it!” Joy tells us, clapping her hands. “You two are going to be my rock stars. I can tell. I’ll get you guys an alumni list and you can start e-mailing to see who has news. That’s definitely a page worth doing.”

“Fabo,” I say, squeezing Joelle’s arm. Yearbook committee is pretty awesome. Who knew?

I flip back through the senior statements. I can’t wait to write mine. Who knows what—or who—I’ll be sad to leave behind? I guess I can always ask Ivy. The bell rings, and I slam closed the yearbook. Kind of takes the fun out of it, though.

chapter seventeen
Tuesday, May 27
Senior Year

“Hey,” I say, sliding into the empty desk beside Karin in world history.

“Hi,” she says, forehead wrinkling. “What’s up?”

I plop my pencil case onto the desk. “Not too much. You?”

“Nothing … do you have something to tell me?”

“Um … no? Should I?”

“Then why are you here?”

“Why am I in world history?”

She wraps a ringlet around her index finger. “Yeah. Shouldn’t you be in Draker’s AP world history right now?”

Huh? Oh! “Yes!” I say, bolting up and grabbing my books. “Of course I should be. I just wanted to ask you … what you were doing after school. Wanna come over?”

“Sure,” she says, waving. “See you at lunch!”

My head spinning, I run back to my locker. It’s weird how no one else seems freaked out by the instant changes in my world. For everyone else it’s just a normal day. Karin used to have world history with her former best friend. Then she had it with her best friend. Then her best friend was in AP history. La, la, la. She used to have a crooked nose. No more. La, la, la, la.

I stare at my class schedule, which is taped to the inside of my locker. I used to be in regular classes. Now? All AP. La, la, la, la, la.