You, Maybe (5 page)

Ten

FRANKIE CARO AND
Margo Van Deusen looked justifiably confused as to why a tenth grader, particularly an outlier alternative-type tenth grader, would be in their locker pod. Carson put his arm around me and whispered into my ear, “I told you I always get what I want.”

“Ew,” I said, but didn’t push him away too hard; it felt so nice, his mouth in my hair, near my ear.

“Come out to lunch with us,” he said, into my mess of hair. “We’re gonna get some pizza. Pick you up outside the main door?”

“I don’t have a pass,” I said, pulling back. Enough is enough, and my legs had to carry me the rest of the day. Phew.

“So what?” he countered.

“So I’m a sophomore.”

“So what?” he repeated with that confidence of a boy who in fact always does get his way. “We’ll have fun, I promise.”

I shrugged, walking away. “I gotta get to class.”

“Pick you up by the front door,” Carson called.

I didn’t turn back to him; I just kept walking, and almost literally bumped into Michael. “Hey,” I said, resisting the urge to look back and see if Carson was watching me. It is not his business!

“Hey yourself,” Michael said. “Did you go, yesterday?”

“Yes,” I said. “In costume.”

“And?”

“They were utterly charmed, I think.” I grabbed his arm and turned the corner. Truly it is nobody’s business what I do. Truly, truly. “Charmed into catatonia, even.”

We hurried down the hall together.

“I haven’t finished the lyrics,” I apologized.

“Don’t bother. I can’t get the music right, either. Maybe we’ll junk it for now.”

“I was planning to work on them last night, but . . .”

“You were studying for the trig test?”

“That’s today?” I asked.

Michael just exhaled. He’s a grind, despite his stoner appearance. He probably studied all day. Poor guy; he’s seriously tightly wound.

“SOHCAHTOA, right?” I asked. “Or Sacagawea? I always get those two confused.”

“You’ll probably ace it, as usual,” he moaned.

“Hey.” I stopped in front of him and he crashed into me. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

I gave him a Glasgow kiss, which is not a kiss. It is a rugby move where you smash your forehead into the other guy’s nose, breaking it, so you can—I don’t know—get the ball or just make the other guy bloody or something. Whatever it is you are trying to do in rugby. I am more into sports vocabulary than sports rules. Or, heaven forbid, playing the things. Ew, all that sweating and exertion. The thought of it made me woozy, right there in the hall. Well, that thought and also having missed Michael’s nose and slammed my forehead smack into his hard skull.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Wow, that sucked,” I said. “Rugby may not be my game after all.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Why are you even more depressing than usual today?”

“I’m not,” he muttered. “I’m always this depressing.”

The trig test wasn’t bad, but I glanced over at Michael a couple times during it and he seemed pretty stressed. He collected my work for me one time last year when I had strep throat and found out I usually get 100’s on quizzes. I’m not super-gifted like Tru; I’m just a test racehorse. It’s just one of those things, like some people don’t sink when they go in the pool, some know how to throw a ball so it goes toward the person holding up a mitt. I have no idea how people do those things; I’m good at schoolwork. That works out well because it frees up my time for my hobbies, like lying on the couch eating M&M’s.

I went into the cafeteria for lunch, and headed straight to the usual table. There was a time in middle school I used to pretend to be sick during lunch most days, so I could eat in the quiet of the nurse’s office, rather than endure the horror of the cafeteria. Hallelujah that high school is so much better than what came before. At least there’s a group for me, now. We’re the group a new kid with an odd haircut from a foreign country will approach and find sanctuary with. We’re the ones who know these are NOT the best years of our lives, these years when we have no rights of self-determination beyond how ridiculous we can make ourselves look.

It’s not, in other words, that I had nobody to eat lunch with if I decided not to do as I was told and meet Carson Gold and his Golden friends to go out on the town.

“You’re eating with us instead?” Zandra asked. “Are you ill?”

“Thanks a lot,” Tru said. “Maybe she likes us better.”

“If Carson Gold asked you out to lunch . . .” Zandra asked.

“Oh, I’d go,” Tru said, and picked up her book. “No question.”

Zandra looked at me, accusingly.

I shrugged. “It’s too late now anyway.” I unwrapped my sandwich. “I just, I don’t want to make a fool of myself, you know? Jump when he snaps his fingers.”

“Like every other girl.”

I nodded. “You never want to love somebody more than he loves you.”

“Absolutely,” Zandra agreed.

“He wants me to be his girlfriend,” I whispered.

“What!?” They dragged me to the girls’ room and made me tell the whole story, every detail. It was a relief to barf it out.

“So, judging from my reaction at his house and after, don’t you think it’s better if I just, you know . . .”

“Feign disinterest?” Zandra asked.

“Cultivate disinterest,” Tru said.

“Steer clear of him,” I suggested. “Maybe I’m allergic to romance.”

“Maybe you’re just scared,” Tru said.

“I’m definitely scared,” I said. “Terrified.”

“You really like him,” Zandra said.

Sadly, slowly, I nodded. They nodded, too, and sat close beside me on the floor of the girls’ room until the bell rang.

Carson didn’t come by my locker after sixth. Not that I expected him to. But still.

Eleven

ON THE BUS
going home, as Michael and I were discussing our plans for his birthday on Sunday, my cell phone rang. I scrambled to get it while dropping my books on Michael and the floor.

“All of them?” I was still asking Michael. “You want to watch the whole trilogy in one day?”

“Definitely,” Michael said. “Don’t you think? Take ten, twelve hours, including breaks?”

“Sounds good,” I agreed, flipping open my phone. “Hello?”

“Missed you at lunch,” Carson said.

I felt guilty, suddenly. “I told you I wasn’t sure. . . .” Also embarrassed, in front of Michael, who pretended he was reading his book and not eavesdropping. And also, God help me, psyched.

“I was in such a foul mood,” Carson said.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “I got in a fight.”

“You mean an argument? Or like a fistfight?”

Michael looked up. I shook my head, like no, I was wrong, and he dug out his iPod.

“A fistfight,” Carson was saying. “With Frankie.”

“Really? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Is he?”

Carson chuckled. “Yeah.”

“What were you fighting about?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“No way. I can’t.”

“Why? Where are you?”

“Locker room. But that’s not—I don’t want to talk about the fight. I don’t care about that anymore. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay.” Neither of us said anything for a minute.

“I was thinking about you all day,” he whispered. “Did you think about me? At all?”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“A little?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Good,” he whispered. “Did you find it?”

“Find what?”

“Check your pocket.”

I shoved my hand into my jacket pocket, and something punctured me. “Ow!”

Michael jumped.

I looked at my hand—my finger was bleeding. He booby-trapped my pocket? “What kind of weirdo are you?” I shrieked into the phone.

“What?” Carson asked, all innocent.

“My finger is bleeding.”

Michael looked, concerned. “Gross.”

“Your finger is what?” Carson asked.

I tapped the phone against the window. “Do we have a bad connection?”

“No, I just . . .”

“Bleeding,” I repeated, articulating. “I am completely not kidding. Actual blood is gushing out of my finger, hemorrhaging all over the bus.”

The girl in the seat ahead of us got up on her knees and looked over, to see.

“What happened?” Carson asked.

“Okay, well, maybe not hemorrhaging, but if I squeeze, a full round globule of blood forms there on the tip.” I stuck it in my mouth and leaned against the window, dizzy in my lightheaded, blood-lost state. “Did you know I am the one who organized the anti-violence peace rally last year? I am a pacifist, damn it! And now I’m bleeding. What is wrong with you, you sick sicko?”

“What are you talking about?” Carson asked.

“Just because I won’t do everything you ask, you do not have to assault me.” I hung up.

“Golden Boy?” Michael asked.

I nodded.

“The aggressively normal-looking ones are always the most deeply disturbed,” Michael said. “Especially the ones who are always out there tossing a ball around.” He gave a little shudder for effect.

“He is a little weird, I think,” I agreed. However, I am even more curious than I am hypochondriacal, so I carefully put my hand back into my pocket and pulled out a somewhat crushed rose. Thorn and all. A rose.

“Did he give you that?” Michael asked.

I shrugged as my phone rang again.

“Hi,” I managed.

“Don’t hang up,” Carson said.

I didn’t. I just sat there staring at the flower, the first flower a boy has ever given me.

“Assault you?”

“I am bleeding here,” I said, squeezing my finger. No blood came out anymore. “Hmm. I may have suffered such significant blood loss there is no more blood in me.” He slipped a rose into my pocket? “You gave me a rose.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“With a thorn,” Michael said, loud.

“I thought I’d dethorned it,” he said. “I’m sorry. Who’s with you?”

Not going there. “When did you put it in my pocket?”

“You’re not the only magician on Earth.”

Michael made a big show of picking up his book again. I sunk down, toward the window of the bus, and whispered, “Did you strip it off your mother’s rose bushes this morning?”

“No,” Carson said indignantly. “It’s January; they’re not in bloom. How did you know they were rose bushes?”

“You bought it?” I asked. Whoa. He went out and bought me a rose?

“No way,” Michael mumbled, without lifting his gaze from the page. I knocked my shoulder into his.

“No,” Carson said sheepishly. “It was my sister’s birthday, and she was home for the weekend so my dad bought her this arrangement, but she went back to school and . . .”

“You gave me a stolen flower?”

Michael snorted.

“Tacky, huh?” Carson asked. “You’re right, I guess. Sorry.”

“No,” I said. “I love it.”

“You do?”

The bus pulled up to our stop. Michael and I quickly gathered our stuff and I followed him down the bus aisle and down the steps, saying, “That’s not, I mean, that’s funny. A stolen flower. Nobody ever gave me a flower before, and this one’s stolen, which is just . . . I mean, thanks. Really.”

“Come to the movies with me Saturday night.”

“Um . . .”

“I’m paying. Come on,” he said. “It’s one night out of your life. How bad could it be?”

“Okay,” I said. I shrugged at Michael, who was standing there waiting for me to hang up or at least start walking toward home.

“Good,” Carson said. I heard something slam in the background. “So? Now that we’re going on a date, anyway, will you go out with me?”

“Are you coming to walk the dogs with me?” Michael asked.

“No.”

Michael grimaced and left me there, by the side of the road.

“No?” Carson asked.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Good,” Carson whispered. “Say yes to me.”

“Carson, why? Why are you doing this? I don’t get it. I’m like the one girl in the whole school who doesn’t want to go out with you. I’m perfectly happy just to hook up from time to time.”

“What do I have to do, Josie?”

“Nothing,” I whispered. “That’s the point. Nothing.”

“We have fun together, right?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “There are explosions when we kiss. Literally.” Carson didn’t say anything. I thought maybe my phone died or he hung up or had no idea what I was talking about, so I clarified: “I meant, when I burned up the eggs. Carson? You there? I wasn’t being metaphorical.”

“I got it,” he said.

I started walking toward home. Ahead of me, Michael was coming out of Annabel and Tom’s door with Fluffy and Sarge.

I closed my eyes. “So why mess with a good thing?”

“Because it could be a great thing.”

Michael passed me without a smile or a look, heading down to the footbridge with the dogs. “See you Sunday,” he mumbled. “Come before ten. Brunch.”

I nodded and smiled, but he was already past. I buried my nose in the rose Carson had given me, and imagined what it might feel like to walk around school with Carson the way Emelina Lee had last year, his arm across her shoulders, tucked securely under his wing. His girlfriend. His. No, I don’t want to be anybody’s. I pictured him looking at me the way he used to look at her, looking at me like he wanted to drink me up, like nobody else existed, like he was going to swallow me whole.

“Josie?”

“Still here,” I said into the phone.

“You know what we were fighting about?” Carson asked. “Me and Frankie? You.”

“Me?”

“That’s all I’m saying.”

“What did he say about me?” Now I was mad, though once again the chivalry thing was alarmingly appealing.

“Nothing,” Carson said. “He was just teasing me, how whipped I am, over you, and I . . . forget it.”

“What?”

“The thing is, he’s right. Frankie. I’m whipped. I think about you constantly. Go out with me, Josie. Be my girlfriend. Say yes. For once, say yes.”

“Sing for me,” I said. I don’t know what possessed me.

“Josie,” he groaned. “I can’t.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m in the locker room.”

I grinned, picturing him sitting there on the bench, whispering this conversation into his cell phone. In the background I heard deep boy-voices grunting.

“Coming,” he said. “One sec,” and then quieter, to me, whispered, “Josie?”

“Yeah,” I whispered back. It felt a lot more intimate than our unbuttoned afternoons.

And then I heard this very soft, slightly squeaky voice, completely out of tune, singing, “The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi-ho the derry-o . . .”

“Yes,” I said, and hung up.