Never Enough (3 page)

Purely out of nerves, I opened my sandwich and scarfed it down as though I was watching a really good movie. But I couldn’t get what Josh had said out of my mind. He had a gift for me.
Seriously?

Claire scrunched her nose at me and I realized how rude my gorging probably looked. A couple of the other girls at the end of the bench were also raising their eyebrows.

“Did you forget your lunch again?” I asked Claire, to divert the attention from me. Claire forgot her lunch on the kitchen counter so often I’d started counting on it for my after-school snack.

“No.” She concentrated on the paper she’d pulled out to doodle on. I could dazedly daydream for hours, but Claire couldn’t let thirty seconds go by without doing something with her hands. “I have a big history test after lunch. Nerves,” she said.

As the girls started talking again, I felt a nudge to my arm.

“I love a good sandwich with lots of protein,” Josh said, as if to make me feel better. “Makes me strong and fast.” The football player in him clapped his hands together and rubbed them like even lunchtime was a competitive sport.

I was tempted to push the rest of my turkey sandwich in
his direction so he could enjoy it, or inspect it for protein levels, but thankfully caught myself. He had a full plate of shepherd’s pie in front of him. And besides, passing a half-eaten sandwich to someone you barely know is just weird. “It’s good, too!” I said, cringing inwardly at my overenthusiasm.

Claire slid her golden-brown hair behind her ear as she doodled. It wasn’t a picture, just her name in big, embellished letters. Her full name first: Claire Isabella Rochester. Then just her middle name with a loop from the last
a
all the way around to the
I
. Then just “Claire” in letters so ornate I decided someone should name an opera after her.

My name wasn’t nearly as pretty. Loann Rochester. No middle.

Lo, as in low—the story of my life. Low man on the family totem pole, low grades in school, and a full six inches shorter than Claire. Then there’s the second half: Ann—aka ordinary. Take everything flashy in the world: metallic eye shadow, sparkly clothes, red sports cars—Claire—and wipe it all off the face of the earth. Basically, I’d be what’s left. I’ve always wondered if people grow into their names or if it’s just one big coincidence when someone like me ends up with a name like Loann.

As if Josh could sense my insecurity, I swear his foot touched the top of my sneaker. Nibbling at my crust, I waited a second to see if he’d do it again.

A little blond Superman curl fell onto his forehead and I had the urge to reach up and twirl it in my fingers.

He caught me looking and, pulled on the curl, letting it spring back up again, like he was teasing me with it.

Then. He winked.

I breathed in through my nose slowly and convinced myself I’d misread it or it was nothing or maybe he was just being nice because it was my birthday or sandwiches and shepherd’s pie gave him a homey feeling and I reminded him of his sister. Or maybe, oh, I don’t know, maybe he was just way too nice, and why couldn’t I stop thinking about my sister’s boyfriend?

My stomach started to bulge with a turkey sandwich and about a million acrobatic, caffeine-overdosing butterflies. The girls at the table all laughed at some joke I missed. I took one deep breath after another, trying to bring my body temperature down from a boiling point.

Laz stood, saying something about wrestling practice and a coach and something else I didn’t hear. Jasmine gathered her things and said she’d go with him.
To wrestling practice? Whatever. They were pretty much Siamese twins.

But Laz obviously had the same thought. “You can’t come into the locker room, hon. You know that.”

She gave him a pouty look, so he leaned in to wipe it off with his lips. Josh got up too, and seemed to have a silent, nodding conversation with my sister.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, as he followed Laz out of the cafeteria. As sad as I was that he’d left, I was glad he’d be back. And that I’d have a chance to catch my breath.

“So, I wasn’t going to say anything yet,” Jasmine said, watching the boys walk away, “but I’m just way too excited! I got into the U!”

This grabbed the attention of the entire table. There was a pause while no one reacted. I admit, I felt a little stunned. Jasmine could barely think her way through a traffic light and it was hard to picture her walking the grounds of the University of Wisconsin.

“Seriously,” she added.

This seemed to kick everyone into excited banter. The girls at the end of the table let out squeals of excitement. Comments flew so fast I couldn’t place any of them. “No way!” “I got in, too!” “When did you find out?”

Claire smiled with her own congratulations. But even though she had gotten early acceptance to the same university, I could see something else in the way her eyes drooped slightly and didn’t light up with the rest of her face.

Was this one area in which Claire thought she’d trumped Jasmine, and now she was sad because Jasmine had caught up? Or did Claire, for some strange reason, not want to go to college with her bestie?

Claire met my eyes, blinked a few times, and then her
whole face brightened. I had the feeling she wasn’t
that
happy to see me. She just didn’t want me to read her right now.

And that was one thing we had always been good at. She’d succeeded in distracting me from Shayleen’s outburst, the same way she’d realized I needed help talking to our parents when I got a D in math last year. I didn’t save her the way she did with me, but I at least understood.

And right now I understood she didn’t want to talk about this.

“Josh’s back,” I blurted, and then gave an inconspicuous slap to my chest to kick-start my heart again.

He walked toward us—toward me!—a gold-wrapped, toaster-size box with flouncing purple ribbons in his hands.

Josh placed it in front of me, then sat down again, leaning in even closer.

I hesitated, a little afraid to get fingerprints on the wrapping.

“I came up with the idea myself.” Claire beamed.

So the gift was from both of them? Even though another twinge of jealousy hit at the idea of them doing “couple things” like this, my foot bounced under the table. I’d never even dreamed that Josh would give
me
a gift.

I dug a blunt fingernail along the tape and yanked at the ribbons. All eyes at the table stayed on me and my shaky hands. Eventually the wrapping came free and I pried open the cardboard box inside.

At first I couldn’t tell what was inside, and I had to pull the heavy object all the way out of the box to see it.

“It’s a camera,” Claire confirmed, clapping her hands.

A camera? Okay. But this wasn’t the miniature digital kind of camera Mom had. It was a gargantuan fossil of a thing with a large, round lens sticking off of it like the cannon on a tank.

“Do you . . .” Claire ducked her head down to try to meet my eyes and I realized I was grimacing. I forced a quick smile.

“So cool!” I said, looking between Claire and almost at Josh.

“It’s used,” Josh said with a shrug. “But Claire saw it at my place and thought it might be your kind of thing.”

It was
his!
My cheeks warmed. I rotated the camera, staring at the zillions of buttons and sliders and gizmos to adjust. When I held it up and pressed the button on top, the mechanics inside sprang to life, surprising me and making me nearly drop it.

“You’ve always been so artistic,” Claire said, scratching her nail into a dent in the table. “Those paintings you brought home last year, and with drama.”

Okay, true, I’ve always taken art and drama, but only in an attempt to make up for my waning academics. Still, my face felt like it was about to catch fire with all this attention and compliments.

“Here’s some instructions from the Internet,” Claire went on. “But I don’t know, they seem pretty complicated.”

“I might be able to help you figure them out, if you need.” Josh nudged me with his elbow again, and in three seconds I pictured our entire lives together: taking pictures in our yard, hanging them in our house, inviting our couple friends over to see.

The others at the table had lost interest quickly after I’d opened the gift, and I could tell by the way Claire kept picking at the table that she felt unsure of whether to keep focusing on me or turn her attention to them.

I gave her a nod to let her know it was okay if she ignored me now, but instead she said, “I know you don’t like being in front of the camera, or onstage . . .” She flipped her hair and that garnered the attention of the girls at the table. “But you’re the perfect person to meld into the background and capture everything around you.”

My hand slipped on the edge of the camera box and I gave myself a paper cut. Sucking on my finger, I tried to process her words.
Did she really just say I might as well just fade into the background? In front of everyone? Okay, I knew I was no match for her talent and grace and beauty, but was I
that
unimportant?

I looked over at Josh and he was nodding, but I couldn’t tell if it was at me or at Claire or at the story Jasmine had just started telling.

The bell rang, and I swallowed my embarrassment. I didn’t want Claire’s words to end my birthday lunch. “Thanks for the camera!” I said, forcing some volume as they all stood and the din in the cafeteria rose. “And for saying I was creative,” I added, practically shouting, but I don’t think a single one of them heard me.

Before I could think of another way to get their attention, they were gone.

When I arrived at my locker, the quiet guy assigned the one next to mine was
hunched over, struggling with his lock. I knew of him from my drama class, but he was one of those quiet nonparticipators who always sat at the back.

It seemed he’d slipped his padlock on backward and was having an awful time with it. Something about his tall, lanky frame bent over, his tongue wedged out to the side, and his big hands fumbling over the small lock made me smile. He looked like a little kid trying to untangle the chain on his first two-wheeler. An exceptionally
tall
little kid.

“Here, let me try,” I said, placing my camera box at my feet. “I’m short. I can probably get right underneath it.”

He laughed, but at five feet nothing, it wasn’t much of an
exaggeration. He gave me the combination one number at a time, and it occurred to me as I dialed to the last number that he was putting a fair amount of trust in a stranger. I was the opposite. I kept things private, never even giving Shayleen or Deirdre my combination, and we’d been friends for years.

I popped off the lock and passed it to him.

“Thanks.” He took it and met my eyes, but only for a second.

“No problem.” When he slung the lock through the open latch, I saw the 1492 stamped above it. I sang the little Columbus rhyme I’d learned in elementary school in my head. “You must be Christopher,” I said playfully.

He hesitated, looking lost. “Uh, no. Marcus.”

“Mmm. I think I’ll call you Christopher.”

Marcus studied my poker face, furrowing his brow slightly, then nodded.

“I’m Loann.” I slid the camera into the bottom of my locker and reached for my books for next class.

I didn’t expect a reply, so his voice surprised me. “Yeah, I think I’ll call you . . . Curly Fries.”

I suppressed a cringe. My übercurly (read: frizzball) hair was the most noticeable thing about me. Shayleen avoided talking about my hair but she often glanced up like there was something really wrong with it. Marcus’s blunt recognition of the state of my hair—I didn’t quite know what to do with that. But I shot him a grin anyway. He seemed nice, and I wondered
why I’d never talked to him before. Well, besides the fact that I rarely talked to boys.

“So is that yours?” He motioned to the pink tank top draped over the camera box.

“Um, it was a gift.” Even though it was folded and he couldn’t see the Kleenex size of the thing, my face flushed.

He scrunched up his face, looking between me and the tank. “Hmmm. Pink? Really?”

A small part of me loved the fact that this total stranger could figure out this one thing about me:
No, pastel pink is not my color—thanks, Mom. And Shayleen. Maybe you should take lessons from Marcus here.

He finished with his things and shut his locker. “See ya, Curly.”

As he fed his lock through its hole in the proper direction, I replied, “Going to sail the ocean blue, Chris?”

I tapped his locker number, and suddenly the 1492 registered. He coughed out a laugh and walked away.

Art class was next, and since I didn’t want to run into Shayleen quite yet, I cut through the cafeteria to the electives wing. I hoped to ask Mr. Dewdney if he’d marked my portfolio before class started.

Eagerness to check my grade may give the impression that I’m Artiste Extraordinaire. I’m not. I mean, I try. I’ve always loved the way the slightest change in shadow and light can
give drastically different effects, but I only seem to recognize this in other people’s projects. I can’t accomplish it myself. Besides, a few of Mr. Dewdney’s tightly structured projects this year have killed my creativity.