The other kids, with surreptitious glances at Justin, slowly drifted away. But when Justin finally turned to leave as well, he came face-to-face with the one person he dreaded seeing almost more than Billy.
Megan.
“Your old girlfriend,” the voice said.
Justin didn’t need the reminder—as if he could forget.
She was standing with her two best friends, Tina and Jenny. They were flanking her—like geese arranged in V formation, Justin thought. “Hey, Megan,” Justin said, trying for a casual tone but not quite achieving it.
Megan looked him up and down in a slow, deliberately insulting way. Then she announced, as if it were some kind of verdict, “You know, you’re pathetic.”
Justin shrugged to look as if he didn’t care.
She looked at him a moment longer, and her lip curled in disgust. Then she turned to her friends and said, “We’d better get out of here. He might decide to beat us up too.”
The other two laughed. Then, as if choreographed, they all turned and flounced off down the hallway.
But as Justin watched them go, he noticed that Tina—who was shorter than the other two, a little plump, and sometimes the victim of the other girls’ moods—glanced back with a sympathetic look.
5
“What are you going to do now?” the voice asked.
Justin was still standing where Megan and her friends had left him, but the hallway was almost empty now—a sure sign that the bell for class was about to ring.
Justin snorted. What do you think?
He knew the drill. Everyone in high school had experienced it at one time or another; your soul could get crushed, but you still had to go sit in class. That’s how he felt that morning—like he’d been beaten up on the inside. But he still had to go to English lit.
In all his classes he had chosen to sit as far back as he could get. When he was lucky, he could sit for weeks without the teacher calling on him. But today was not one of his lucky days.
The radiators were clanking and the whole class drowsed in the overheated room as the teacher droned on: “…So to sum it up, the novel is essentially about a pedophile’s affair with a twelve-year-old girl. Can anyone tell me what device Nabokov used to tell this story?”
One of the students whispered under his breath, just loud enough for the kids around him to hear, “Yeah. A fucking pencil.”
There were a few snickers.
When no one volunteered, the teacher looked around the room. Finally she said, “How about you, Justin?”
Justin had been staring out the window, watching the faintest trembling of the leaves on the tree outside. The movement was so slight, he wondered if he was imagining it.
When the teacher called his name, he jerked as if poked awake.
All the other students turned to stare at him. Megan was in the class as well. He glanced over and saw her smiling at his obvious discomfort.
Justin looked down at his desk.
And that’s how his morning seemed to go.
In math when the teacher asked, “Who can tell me what the root of the equation is?” and no one responded, he looked around and said, “What about…Justin.”
There was also the struggle to stay awake. In history he put his head down, pillowed on his arms. He was just so tired. He closed his eyes—for only a second—and when he opened them again, he saw something that sent a jolt through his body. He saw his brother’s face in the square pane of glass in the closed door. Mark was making faces, pulling the skin beneath his eyes down and sticking out his tongue. Then suddenly he stopped, his expression turned serious, and he said, “You’re not paying attention!”
Justin blinked.
“Justin!”
Now the voice was coming from a different direction. Justin glanced away from the door and looked up at the teacher.
“You’re not paying attention,” the teacher said again.
Justin looked back at the door, but Mark was gone. He must have been dreaming.
“Well?” the teacher demanded.
“What was the question?” Justin asked.
“If you want to take a nap, I suggest you find someplace other than my classroom to do it,” the teacher replied.
“Sorry,” Justin said.
The teacher crossed her arms and said, “I mean it. I want you out.”
“Yeah, okay, I’m leaving,” Justin muttered.
He closed his book, tucked it under his arm, shouldered his bag, and left the room, with all the other students watching silently.
Once outside the classroom, Justin shuffled along the hallway, head down, staring at the linoleum. It was marked with the streaks from hundreds of sneakers being dragged along the floor, just as he was dragging his own now.
He heard footsteps behind him and turned around…to see Megan, walking down the hallway toward him.
She stopped a few feet away. She was holding a lipstick case, which Justin knew she used not for lipstick but to stash her cigarettes. When they had been together, he’d managed to persuade her to quit, but she had obviously started up again.
She stood in front of him, holding the lipstick case in one hand and tapping it against her other palm. He wondered if she was doing it on purpose, to show him that she was smoking again. Rubbing his face in it. And he figured her smoking had probably gotten worse. Before, she’d only gone to hang out in the girls’ bathroom to smoke when she was with a bunch of other girls. Now it looked like she was starting to duck out of class to grab a few puffs alone.
After a moment of silence, with her standing there staring at him, Justin said mildly, “Did you want something?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I want to know why you’re such an asshole.”
She still had the power to get to him. He literally felt a pain in his chest, as if she were stabbing him in the heart. He wondered why people felt like they had to hurt you all the time. It made him want to lash back, to try to hurt them as well.
“I don’t know,” he retorted. “Why do you have to be such a bitch?”
But he didn’t seem to be able to get to her in the same way. She just smiled and said, “I guess you just bring out the best in me.”
Then she brushed past him and disappeared into the girls’ bathroom.
Justin turned away, his sneakers squeaking in the silence, and was about to continue down the hallway when his English teacher, Mrs. Elmeger, emerged from a classroom.
“What are you doing here, Justin?” she asked, looking around at the empty hall.
“I got kicked out of class,” he said.
“Well, go study in the library. You can’t hang around the hallway.”
Mrs. Elmeger started to walk away, but after a moment of hesitation Justin called after her.
“Mrs. Elmeger?”
She stopped and turned around again. “What is it, Justin?”
“Um. Do you smell that?” he asked.
“Smell what?”
He sniffed, as if testing the air. “I think it might be cigarette smoke coming from the girls’ bathroom.”
It was a serious thing to get caught smoking in school. The administration had such a problem controlling it that they’d issued a “three strikes you’re out” policy: If you were caught smoking three times, you got kicked out. It didn’t seem to make kids smoke any less, though, Justin had noticed—sort of like in states where they had the death penalty and the murder rate wasn’t any lower.
Mrs. Elmeger eyed him suspiciously, but turned and pushed open the door to the bathroom.
Justin walked quickly down the hall. This would be Megan’s second time getting caught. But maybe she’d be different and it would make her stop and think. He’d never considered smoking, because he was an athlete: soccer in the fall, swim team in the winter, and track in the summer. Though of course he had quit in the middle of soccer last year and hadn’t done any of the teams since. The strange thing was that he used to love playing sports more than anything, but now he barely mis
sed it at all.
He glanced over and saw that he was passing the glassed-in trophy cabinet. He stopped to look at the trophy the soccer team had won two years ago. He’d only been a freshman, but he had scored the winning goal in the championship game. He remembered how completely and ridiculously happy he had been. He supposed that was why adults always reminisced about being kids. They somehow forgot about all the awful stuff and just remembered that sense of being made so happy by something so small.
While musing, he had been staring into the trophy case, then suddenly he stiffened. He thought he saw something reflected in the cloudy mirrored backing of the cabinet.
“What is it?” the voice asked.
He peered closer. It looked like a figure—there seemed to be a man standing behind him, but when Justin whipped around, there was no one there.
6
“What is the difference between reality and illusion?”
The class was seated in the front rows of the auditorium. The drama teacher, Ms. King, stood in front of them, chalk in hand. Ms. King was considered one of the “cool” teachers. She was young and hip and very sarcastic (at times she bordered on downright mean), but all of the kids—even the jocks who pretended to hate theater—still tried to impress her.
She had pulled a rolling chalkboard out right in front of the first row of seats. Now she turned and wrote the words “Truth” and “Illusion” on the board.
“Anyone? Come on, what’s the difference?”
Only one girl, Barbara, raised her hand and waved it wildly, as if dying to be called on.
But the teacher ignored Barbara’s frantically waving hand and gazed out over the class, searching for another candidate.
“Okay,” she said when no one else volunteered. “Let’s start with something simpler.”
Barbara lowered her hand reluctantly.
“Drama,” the teacher said. “What is drama?”
Immediately Barbara’s hand shot up again.
Ms. King waited a long moment, then sighed.
“Yes, Barbara?”
Barbara took a deep breath. “Drama is…well, it’s like when someone’s being dramatic. Like, you know, like—like when you accuse someone of being dramatic or…or like when you just feel things more than other people. And then they accuse you of exaggerating and they say that you’re, like, being…”
“Dramatic?” Ms. King suggested.
“Yes. I mean—”
Ms. King cut her off before she could go on. “What do you think, class? Has Barbara captured the essence of drama?” she asked, looking around.
One of the football players, sitting slumped at the back of the class, muttered, “Friggin’ theater lesbo.” But he said it loud enough for everyone to hear.
And Ms. King pounced. “Jake! My goodness! Good job. Now that was dramatic!”
The class laughed.
Seriously now,” Ms. King continued. “Before you do your scenes, I want to talk to you a little about acting and how you can tell good acting from bad acting. Let’s see if you can tell the difference between when I’m really feeling something and when I’m acting.”
She stood a moment considering, gazing out at the class. Then her eye lit on one of the girls sitting in the front row, and she seemed suddenly struck by something.
“You know, Sharon,” she said, speaking to the girl, “I really like that sweater.”
Sharon looked down at her sweater as if noticing it for the first time, obviously pleased. It wasn’t often that Ms. King complimented someone.
Then the teacher looked at the girl sitting next to Sharon and said, “And your hair looks really good today, Rachel.”
Rachel beamed. “Thanks, Ms. King.”
Ms. King looked out at the class and asked, “So?”
There was a moment of silence. Then Sharon asked hesitantly, “So…what?”
“So…which time was I acting?” she asked.
“How can we tell? There was no difference,” someone else said.
The teacher snapped her fingers. “Exactly. That’s the thing. That’s good acting. You can’t tell the difference.”
“So which time were you lying?” Jake, the football player, called out from the back.
Ms. King smiled. “Both times, actually.”
There was another wave of shocked laughter, but she just continued right on. “Now let’s see those scenes I asked you to prepare. You all remember this assignment, right? You were supposed to pick a scene from Shakespeare that explored the boundary between reality and illusion. Any volunteers?”
Barbara’s hand shot up.
Ms. King ignored it, scanning the class for another victim.
Justin sank down in his seat. The way things were going for him today he was sure she was going to call on him. But he was lucky. Instead she said, “What about you, Megan? You did well last time with your reading from The Glass Menagerie.”
Megan looked terrified but pleased at the same time. “Okay,” she said, getting up from her seat and joining Ms. King at the front of the class.
“Which play did you choose from?”
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Wonderful. Which part?”
“I play Titania, and it’s the scene where Oberon sprinkles the fairy dust on her eyes, and she falls in love with a donkey.”
Ms. King nodded approvingly. “See, class, here’s a perfect example of what I was talking about. Everything is illusion—especially love. I’m sure you’ve all heard the old saying—that love is in the eye of the beholder, right?”
“Especially with Jake’s girlfriend,” Barbara called out, and she managed to get a big laugh from the class. Even Ms. King smiled.
“Right. As Barbara points out, what’s attractive to one person might be repulsive to another. Not everyone sees everything the same way. That’s natural. But with Titania, the problem is even bigger. She’s gotten sprinkled with fairy dust. Now the trouble is, in addition to the normal differences, she’s seeing the world through a distorted lens.” Ms. King turned back to Megan and said, “Any time you’re ready.”
7
Justin crouched over, tense, staring down at the undulating reflection in the water of the swimming pool.
The crack of the starting pistol went off, and all the boys who were lined up on the blocks launched themselves into the water. Justin—whose specialty when he was on the team had always been his ability to get off the block before everyone else—was a half second late. But once he was in the pool, his arms cut through the water and his legs churned up a plume of spray. By the time he reached the far wall, he was half a body length ahead of the closest competitor.
He came up, shaking the water out of his eyes, and breathing hard. The other boys reached the wall in a staggered fashion and draped themselves, panting, over the lane dividers.
The coach walked down to the far end of the pool and stood over them. “You had a terrible start off the blocks, Justin,” he said. Nothing about how well he’d swum. Nothing about the fact that he’d won anyway. The coach hadn’t seemed to put it together as to why Justin might have developed a problem with the starting gun, and Justin certainly wasn’t going to spell it out for him.
Justin just nodded.
“Okay, boys, out of the pool,” the coach called out. “The girls’ heat is up.”
Justin heaved himself out of the water and padded over to the concrete bleachers where he’d left his towel. He pulled off his fabric swim cap and rubbed the towel over his hair. Then he glanced up and saw that Tina, Megan’s friend, was sitting a few rows up in the bleachers, watching him. She wasn’t wearing a bathing suit—she was still dressed in her jeans and sweater.
Self-consciously Justin wrapped the towel around his waist, but Tina managed to catch his eye. She smiled and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” Justin replied.
There was an awkward silence. Then Justin asked, “Why aren’t you swimming?”
Tina looked down at her clothes,
almost as if she were surprised to find herself in regular clothes rather than in a bathing suit.
“Oh. Um. I’m allergic to chlorine,” she said.
“Oh…”
There was another pause.
“What happens to you?” he asked.
“When?”
“When you get allergic?”
“I get, like, little blisters all over.”
“Gross.”
There was another awkward silence.
This time Tina spoke. “That was a nice race.”
“Thanks.”
“Didn’t you used to be on the team?”
Justin shrugged.
Tina was about to speak, but the starting gun cracked again, cutting her off. Justin jumped nervously at the sound.
Why did they have to use guns to start races, he wondered.
“I’d better go,” he said.
“See you later?” she called after him as he turned and walked away.
“Well, at least someone likes you,” the voice commented wryly.
Yeah. But that just means there’s got to be something wrong with her.
8
Lunchtime, Justin told the voice. It’s the worst. It makes me feel like I’ve got the plague or something. He was standing on the lunch line, but there was a significant gap around him, as if no one wanted to get too close.
He shuffled forward in the line and finally got his food: a slice of pizza (not the real kind but the square kind that came frozen in big boxes with fifty slices to a box) and french fries. Then he walked with his tray down the center aisle of the cafeteria, looking for an empty table. He always hurried to the lunch room so he would get there in time to claim an empty table.
“But don’t other people come and sit down with you?” the voice asked.
No, Justin said. Never.
But he was about to be proven wrong. He found an empty table, sat down, and proceeded to force himself to eat the food. He was about halfway through when Tim—one of Billy’s gang—slid into a chair beside him.
Justin paused with the piece of pizza halfway to his mouth, then he took a bite, chewed slowly. He reached for his soda, took a sip, and without looking up he said sarcastically, “Did you come to steal my lunch money?”
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