Read Between the Lines (5 page)

I smile confidently and I flip them all off.

For me, and for Ms. Lindsay too.

Up in front of the room, her eyes finally settle on mine. I watch as they move to my hand and settle on my finger.

“Finger Boy!” someone whispers loudly.

I watch the realization come over Ms. Lindsay’s face.

I smile at her.

She smiles at me.

And then I burst out laughing.

LIAR.

That’s what I see in the reflection of the huge glass doors at the front of the school. We stand there, not moving. Me and my reflection. Hating each other.

I clutch the likely germ-infested handle but can’t seem to push it. Reflection me is trapping real me. Pushing in while I push out. We are at a standstill. Not coming or going. I would probably still be trapped here if not for the man who appears on the other side of the door and pulls it open, ripping mirror me out of my grasp. I step aside. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He looks angry and impatient. A trail of cigarette smoke swirls around me in his wake, forcing me out into the fresh air. The door slowly swings closed behind me.

Now what?

Home. I’m supposed to go home because I have cramps.

Only I don’t. That was a lie.

I’m fine. At least, in that department.

So . . . what now? What should this liar do?

I’ve never been good at being bad.

I usually blush when I lie. I fidget. I fumble. And then I usually come clean.

But that’s because the only people I’ve ever really lied to are my parents. Tiny lies. Like about whether or not I have homework. Or who will be in the car when I ask if I can go to a movie with Grace and the girls. But I always end up feeling guilty and confessing, and then my parents tell me they appreciate my honesty and forgive me.

But today I lied to one of the nicest ladies I know.

I blame the girls.

This morning, at our usual meet-up spot before classes, they were all there before me: Grace, Sammy, and Lacy. They were in the huddle. Usually when they see me, they open up and let me in. They give me a hug and tell me they love whatever I’m wearing, even if they don’t. That’s a white lie, so it doesn’t count.

Only when I got close, they didn’t open up. They said, “Hey, Claire,” and instead of making space for me, broke up the circle and walked away.

I went to class alone. I don’t have first period with any of them anyway, so it’s not that unusual, but it still
felt
unusual. All through class, I sat there, fake-listening to Ms. Yung talk about Web design and the importance of HTML something-something-something, wondering — and then remembering — why my friends all hate me now.

“Claire,” Ms. Yung had said, walking over to me, “are you listening?”

I looked up at her and noticed that she had a poppy seed between her front teeth.

“Sorry,” I said, trying not to stare.

She turned and went back to talking about the magic of coding, and I sank deeper in my chair, trying to figure out how I could just go home. I couldn’t face the girls again. They had every right to hate me.

So I went to the nurse’s office and made my escape.

But now what?

I walk to the bus stop and study the map and various routes the buses go. The red line leads to my neighborhood. The yellow breaks off to another part of town. The green goes to the city center. I reach out and trace it with my finger.

Behind me, a bus rolls up. Without thinking or even looking for which number it is, I get on. I will go where it takes me. I told the girls I wanted more to life. Now I guess I’m going to find out what that means.

The driver smiles at me when I slide my pass card through the reader. He has a giant silver front tooth. I like it. I don’t know why. Maybe because I can hear Grace or one of the other girls thinking,
Gross.
And today I am feeling the opposite of one of the girls.

We pull onto the street, and I wait to see where we end up. The usual packed bus of high-schoolers is mostly empty. I glance around and take stock of who’s here. A mom or nanny with a little kid. A few businesspeople. A few more old people. I play the game I always play, making up who each one is. Who’s happy. Who’s sad. Who’s bored. I imagine their stories based on how they’re dressed and what they do to occupy themselves. The guy obsessively checking his phone for messages clearly wants a girlfriend to text him. The old lady with the paper who keeps huffing and puffing angrily is obviously a liberal who used to go on protests in the sixties and now is diminished to public grunting. She takes a pen from her enormous purse and madly scribbles out a face in a photo. I strain to see whose. The headline says something about the Republican senator from Arizona. I smirk and the lady winks at me.

“Makes me feel better,” she says. “I’m not really violent.”

I nod agreeably, suddenly feeling a partnership with her.

Let’s change the world
, I want to say to her.
I know you don’t know me, but let’s hijack this bus and go protest something. I don’t even care what. I just feel like yelling. I just feel like caring about something.

Anything.

But the lady has gone back to her scribbling. And now she’s humming a sweet tune while she does so. And I realize the scratching out of faces is as far as her commitment goes.

I lean my head against the dirty glass and stare out the window.

It was like this last weekend, too. Me, with my head against the window, wanting to get out. Wanting anything but the right then of the endless night.

I was in Grace’s car with the girls. I hate that name for us. But that’s what everyone calls us. That’s what we say. Or did say, anyway. “The Girls.” Like we all make up one living mass instead of being individual people. First, it was Grace, Sammy, me, and Leslie. But Leslie moved away and was recently replaced by Lacy. I don’t know the rules for who gets to be one of us. I don’t even know how we became an us. We just always have been. Ever since we were little.

We were driving around in Grace’s car, looking for the party Grace’s boyfriend, Ben, was supposedly at, which he said was for “guys only.” He goes to a lot of this kind of party.

We were driving for what felt like hours. The conversation never veered from each of us sharing our thoughts on where this party might be, who might be there, and what they might be drinking and saying and eating and playing and listening to.

Question: How much time can a group of supposedly smart and interesting girls spend talking about all the possible places a girl’s boyfriend might be (hiding)?

Answer: An unbearably long time.

The better question and discussion should have been: Why is Grace dating such a jerk?

I didn’t talk much. I never do. But the more they talked and the less I did, I began to fantasize about unbuckling my seat belt, opening the door, and falling into the street.

Instead, I stared out the window. At streetlights. Through windows of houses with lights on but shades not drawn. A hopeful glimpse of a life less mundane. But all I saw was a man eating dinner alone at a table. A family sitting in the TV light, staring at a flat box containing something more interesting than their entire darkened house. Than their entire neighborhood, entire city. Surrounded by the world, but focused on a box.

It was getting more depressing by the minute. But it was still less depressing than the back of Grace’s head and the nonstop chatter of the other girls in the car, which I’d been trying to tune out for miles.

Why don’t people come with mute buttons?

And when did I become such a horrible friend?

“Don’t you guys ever want to talk about something meaningful?” I finally blurted out after what seemed like the seven hundredth time Grace had said, “Oh my God, why isn’t he replying to my texts?”

The car grew silent.

“What do you even mean, Claire?” Lacy asked, all clueless.

“I’m sorry my love life isn’t meaningful enough for you, Claire,” Grace whined.

Inside, my stomach was curling in on itself. I felt like I was going to throw up.

It’s not love
, I wanted to tell her. But instead I said, “Just forget it.”

I rested my head against the cold glass window. Beside me, Sammy just sighed. She’d been a bit more quiet than usual, too. I suspected she might also be looking for more meaningful discussion but was afraid, or didn’t care enough, to say so.

“I’ll talk about something meaningful,” Lacy said, mostly under her breath.

“What did you say, Lacy?” Grace asked.

But it wasn’t really a question.

“Nuh-nothing,” Lacy said.

I didn’t know what she was so afraid of. Not until this morning, when the girls didn’t welcome me into the circle.

Now I know.

Before today, I had this life. This predictable life. This bored life. This life in which I was a small part of something only slightly greater called “the Girls.” This life I wanted more from.

Now my life has shifted. But instead of feeling glad or excited, I feel lost. I didn’t realize how
alone
alone would feel.

I wonder, are any of the people on this bus guessing my story the same way I guessed theirs?

Here is what I think they see:

An average girl living an average life. Every day she experiences the same meaningless thing. She goes to school. She attends classes. She eats lunch at the same table with the same friends. They eat the same thing every day. Lettuce with fat-free ranch dressing. Don’t feel sorry for them. They’ve gotten used to it. They attend more classes. They pass each other in the halls and roll their eyes like this is the most agonizingly boring, torturous, unfair life. After school, they go to cheerleading practice. In the locker room, they talk about who looked at them the wrong way or in an interested way or any way at all. They practice their cheer routines. They go home. They do their homework. They eat dinner. They call each other until their parents tell them to stop. Then they text each other from under the covers and stay up too late, gossiping about things they should never put in writing. But they trust each other not to share. They finally drift off to sleep. They get up the next day and do it again.

If that is the picture these passengers see when they look at me, then they are right. Can anyone really blame me for wanting more?

Here is what they don’t see:

Nothing.

I lift my head from the glass when the bus stops. I realize now that we are headed into the city. More people climb aboard and we move on, picking up larger clusters of passengers as we go, until the bus is packed and we are in the heart of downtown. I look out the window and wait for something interesting to call me off this ride.

It’s a bookstore café that finally lures me. I don’t normally go to cafés. At least not alone. The girls sometimes drag me in and try to act cool like they know how to order a venti latte half-caf something or other, but it is all foreign to me. I bet it is to them, too.

I don’t even like coffee.

I don’t drink tea, either. It makes me need to pee every ten minutes.

But today, especially, I like the idea of going inside and sitting at a table all by myself. Without Grace, Sammy, and Lacy.