Catalyst

by Laurie Halse Anderson

  I head for our table and stop. It has been taken over by football players, an entire squad of shoulders and thick forearms. Not my cup of tea, football players, though a few of the lads have lovely tight ends. They smell showered, and they’re eating French toast fingers. Showered men and French toast—quite an olfactory combination. My pheromones moan. Down, girl. Concentrate. Be alert. Where are my people? I squint and scan, looking for recognizable life-forms. I can’t wait to get my contacts. These glasses are useless.

  A red flannel figure hunkers at the far end of the table, a slumped shape I’d know anywhere.

  Teri Litch.

  Teri Litch reading People magazine, eating her federally subsidized breakfast. Every school has a Teri—the kid who peed her pants in fifth grade and sat in it all day. The kid who wore only two different outfits in seventh grade. Our Teri put on one hundred pounds in ninth grade, then stopped eating in tenth. The ugly girl, the one who smells funny, studies carpentry at vo-tech, stomps around with sawdust in her hair, and has fists like sledgehammers. Teri beat me up every year in elementary school, fall and spring. I turned the other cheek for a while, then I learned to run. Intelligent life pursues self-preservation.

  Teri turns the page and glances up at me, her glasses glinting in the sun. Uh-oh, don’t disturb the bear.

  A purple football jersey grunts at me. “Malone.”

  I turn away from Teri to Brandon Figgs, my favorite tight end. We hooked up for a while last year, but I always wanted to say shut up, can we please start kissing now because you are so dumb I want to scream. Unfortunately, he kissed like a vacuum cleaner. It didn’t last long.

  “Have you seen Mitch?” I ask.

  Brandon shakes his head. The player next to him says something rude. It involves Teri and his jockstrap. Do I have to give details? His buddies crack up. Brandon laughs, chokes, and dribbles milk out of his mouth, which makes everyone laugh harder. So attractive.

  A flush creeps up Teri’s neck.

  This is where I should stick up for her. I am Kate Malone, after all. I’m the preacher’s kid, Rev. Malone’s skinny little girl. I am supposed to practice all that love-your-neighbor stuff.

  Teri gives me the finger.

  All righty, then.

  2.5.1 Bonds

  “Kate!”

  The shout comes from the back of the room.

  I leave Teri and the boys behind and walk to where my friends are sitting. Sunshine blazes through the glass wall that fronts an unused courtyard, backlighting them into shadow puppets. I have to shade my eyes to look at them.

  “You’re late, what’s up?” Sara asks.

  “Sunglasses, somebody, anybody? You have chosen the absolute worst table, you know.”

  “It feels good,” Sara says with a wiggle. “Think Cancún, think Miami, think L.A.”

  “Think about the sun frying my eyeballs.”

  Sara slides her sunglasses across the table. I take off my glasses and put them on. The room mellows to a golden, SPF-protected glow.

  “Thanks.”

  They are out of focus now, but as with Teri, I’d recognize these shapes anywhere. Sara Emery, my I, is a self-described Wiccan Jewish poet. This would send most parents screaming to the therapist’s office, but the Emerys are totally cool with it. I’ve been asking them to adopt me for years.

  Travis Baird is to Sara as water is to fire: opposite and necessary. Trav is a freakazoid good guy with a taste for body art. The vice-principal in charge of discipline has been aching to bust him for four years. He refuses to believe that good things can come in colorful packages.

  A warm hand snakes its way around my waist. My knees buckle and the hand pulls me down into the very familiar lap of Mitchell A. Pangborn III—my friend, my enemy, my lust.

  “I missed you,” he whispers in my ear. He kisses my neck gently and I get dizzy all over again. I look around quickly—the authorities here spaz about physical displays of affection, even if you get good grades. No adults in sight. I toss Sara’s sunglasses on the table, tilt my head, and kiss him good morning. He shifts a little in his seat. His lap is very happy to see me.

  Mitch and I started fighting in sixth grade. It was a Clash of the Titans for years: Scientific Genius (me) vs. Humanities Nerd (him). Weapons: report cards, GPAs, SATs, and AP scores. For a while we used to arm wrestle, too, but that stopped after eighth grade because he grew five inches and gained an unfair amount of leverage.

  Last September we made a bet. Whoever got accepted into their top school early decision could make the other person do whatever he or she wanted. Anything. No limits. Harvard welcomed Mitch with open arms. MIT deferred me.

  I thought for sure he’d make me do something humiliating in front of the entire student body. Instead, he took me out to dinner. I still don’t know which was more shocking: the fact that I got deferred, or that Mitchell “Obnoxious” Pangborn was a flame-throwing, heart-quivering, jeans-creaming, phenomenal kisser. It was a good date. It was a very good date.

  So after six years of hating him, why did I start liking him? He’s smart. He gets my jokes. He has black hair and gray eyes that remind me of the ocean after a storm. And he has freckles, though I haven’t told him I think they’re cute. He understands about my dad and all the crap at my house. He even congratulated me when I wound up with a higher class rank. And like I said, the boy knows how to kiss.

  And kiss . . .

  And kisssss . . .

  The kisses are necessary. When we’re kissing, we can’t argue. He still thinks that science is the root of all evil. I think that going to an Ivy League college to study history is sort of like winning the lottery and giving away all the money. What’s the point? His parents agree with me. They want him to be practical, to study something that has a career attached to it. But they’ve been getting kind of harsh, so I’ve decided to argue less and kiss more.

  “Should I get you kids a hotel room?” Sara asks.

  I pull back, then grip Mitch’s shoulders as another wave of dizziness crashes over me.

  He studies my face and frowns. “You have raccoon eyes. What time did you get to bed last night?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look at the clock.” I move off his lap and onto the seat next to him and put the sunglasses back on. Sara pushes a steaming cup of coffee to me and slides over the little cardboard box of coffee fixings.

  “You do look wicked tired,” she says. “You’re going to get sick if you keep this up.”

  I tear open two blue packets, pour them in the cup, add dairy creamer, and stir with a thin wooden stick. I blow ripples across the surface of the coffee and sip. Aaahhh; aspartame, gelatin, caffeine, and hot, melted Styrofoam.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “It’s not a big deal.”

  Mitch snaps his coffee stirrer in half. “You went running last night, didn’t you? Late.”

  Falling in love makes you stupid. You say things that you should probably keep to yourself. A couple of weeks ago, Mitch thought that running at night was cool.

  He points the broken end of the stick at me. “It’s not good, Malone. It’s not safe.”

  “It’s perfectly safe. You worry too much, Pangborn.”

  Mitch breaks the coffee stirrer again. I reach across him for the doughnut bag and my pec twangs again. Damn, that hurts. There are two doughnuts left—plain and glazed. Glazed is an indulgent doughnut, breakfast for spoiled rahrahs. I take the plain.

  Sara cuddles up to Travis and kisses his skull. “Wake up, stud boy.”

  Travis has been snoring quietly, his shaved head reflecting the sun. He pulls the overnight shift at Superfresh a couple of times a month. It’s good for his bank account, but makes staying awake in school next to impossible.

  Sara sets a coffee cup in front of his nose. His nostrils twitch, then he groans and sits up. After a gulp of coffee, he blinks and focuses on Sara’s face, Sara’s lips. He groans again. This boy has it so bad for her, it’s a thing of beauty. They’ve been going strong for four
years. This worries me. What are they going to do in September? It’s not like Trav can move into her dorm room (though I probably shouldn’t give him the idea). Shouldn’t they be cutting their losses, closing doors, getting ready to pack it up and say good-bye?

  They don’t care. They R IN LUV.

  Sarah scrapes chocolate frosting off her doughnut and applies it to Travis’s lips. Then she sucks it off.

  “Do you have to do that in public?” Mitch asks.

  Sara unsticks herself from Travis’s face. “Yes,” she purrs, before going back to work.

  Mitch steals Travis’s coffee stirrer and breaks it in half. I keep my eyes on my cup. “Mariah got into Stanford,” I say.

  “She’ll burn out.”

  “Yeah.”

  He slips his arm around my waist again and squeezes once. “Don’t worry. You’re in. The letter is on its way. And if they screwed up and didn’t admit you, you’ll just go someplace else and transfer. Chill, Kate. It’s going to be okay.”

  I dunk my doughnut in my coffee. They’re letting me in. They will. The end of my doughnut crumbles and sinks to the bottom of the cup. They have to.

  At the front of the cafeteria, the football players explode in laughter. The red-checked flannel Teri Litch shape rises and walks to a different table. She sits. The team rises and follows her. It’s a game. Tease Teri.

  The team chants quietly.

  “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”

  The good news is that they aren’t harassing me or my friends. The bad news is that they are harassing Teri. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. We are looking at a situation here.

  The noise causes Sara and Travis to come up for air.

  “I don’t know what kind of bug is up their collective butt . . .” Sara says.

  Travis mumbles something.

  “. . . but they’ve been dogging Teri all period. Three times she’s changed tables and they keep following.”

  “So you’re going to run to her rescue?” I ask.

  “Please. Do I look mental?” Sara sputters. “But still.”

  “They’ll get bored,” Travis predicts. “Picking on Tubby Teri is a middle school game.”

  “She’s not tubby anymore,” I point out. “She’s all muscle. They should be recruiting her for the defensive line.”

  The team chants quietly so as not to alert the cafeteria monitors gossiping in the kitchen. “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”

  Teri has had enough. I tense, waiting for her to throw one of the morons into a trash can. I hate days that start with cafeteria fights. But wait. . . . Teri is walking away. She pauses only to drop her orange juice carton in the garbage.

  “Wow!” Travis exclaims. “Excellent pacifist response.”

  “I bet she’s going to burn down the locker room,” Sara says. “Remember what she did to Amber?”

  Amber, a cheerleader, made the mistake of telling Teri she should bathe more often. They never proved who put the dead skunk in Amber’s pearl-white Jetta, but it didn’t matter. The message was scent.

  The clock is ticking down. We only have two minutes left. Mitch collects our trash and Sara puts the unused creamers in her purse. The cafeteria ladies cackle in the distance. I give the sunglasses back to Sara and put on my own nasty specs. Yuck—the world returns in cold, horrid focus.

  “She’s ba-ack,” Sara says, nodding her head toward Teri Litch, who is storming across the front of the room. “Forgot her books.”

  The second hand sweeps past the numbers on the face of the clock, rushing to the bell. The football team rises. Teri Litch walks over to them. It happens in slow motion, a ballet. Pas de duel. Teri lifts a thick history book and swings it in a wide arc until it smashes into the mouth of Art Smith, defensive tackle. Art flies backward. A tooth sails over the team and lands near the door.

  One freeze frame.

  “Fight!” bellows a bull.

  Action.

  The team goes nuts. Teri plows her meaty fist into the side of Brandon Figgs’s head and he goes down without a word. Then Teri goes down, not even her red shirt visible under the shouts and the arms and the legs of angry boys.

  We have to do something. We can’t walk away from a traffic accident in the middle of the cafeteria. Sara gets there first, screaming like a banshee, her black hair a flag waving behind her. It’s hard to tell who is fighting whom. The team is shoving, punching, pulling—each other. Sara wades in, plucking at sleeves with her long, pinchy fingers. Other people flow into the room, some fighting, some not-so-fighting.

  A girl wails in the corner. “You guuuys, cut it out! You guuuys, cut it out!”

  This is the suburbs. With the exception of Teri Litch, nobody knows how to land a real punch. A thought flashes by in record time, and I can’t keep it from unfolding—these guys are lucky she didn’t bring her daddy’s shotgun to school.

  Travis yanks on football jerseys, pulling the scrum apart one body at a time. I should do something, I know I should.

  The wailing continues, pitching up to a whine. “Cut it out, guuuuys! Guuuys, cut it out!”

  Teri Litch’s glasses skitter across the floor.

  Mitch, oh God, Mitchell Pangborn. He climbs up on the table next to the fray and raises his arms over his head to form a giant O. He looks like an apprentice mime.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I shout.

  “Making a statement,” he answers. “Zero tolerance.” He shakes his arms once for emphasis. “Get it? Zero?”

  Sometimes it’s hard to believe he got into Harvard.

  “Get down from there, Pangborn,” I say. “This is no time for performance art.”

  The security squad finally arrives, followed by the principal and all sorts of pink-faced adults. Teri rises up from the pack, cursing at the top of her lungs. They grab her arms. Her watch is ripped off and falls to the floor.

  The bell rings. It’s over. The fight is over. Sara flicks her hair out of her face and stalks past me muttering. “Oppressive bastards, think they own the place. I told them that karma’s going kick their asses. . . . ”

  Security hustles Teri out of the room. She’s screaming that they broke her watch, that somebody better buy her a new one. The football players fade into the crowd, except for Art, the guy who lost the tooth. He wants to file a complaint.

  I pick up Teri’s glasses. The nosepiece is grimy and the lenses are scratched. I fold the arms and set them on top of her books. Her watch has disappeared.

  Mitch hops off the table, stumbling a bit when he hits the floor. I look over at him and say, “This day has been really—”

  He grabs my face and kisses me. He tastes like coffee and doughnuts and toothpaste. I kiss him back until I have to breathe.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I needed that.”

  2.6 Boron

  Third period English. Hell. Smell the sulfur, feel the flames. English is worse than a waste of time—it robs valuable brain cells that could be doing something practical.

  I sit by the window. Mitchell slips into the seat in front of me.

  “Get out your texts?” Miss Devlin whispers.

  I am here under protest. I was promised that Mythology 231 would be a multiple-choice English class, with little “discussion” and no essays. I hate essays.

  “Please get out your texts, your notebooks, and something to write with? With which to write? You know what I mean.” Miss Devlin is a student teacher, exactly three years older than I am. She has nothing to teach me, null, nada, nut’in. A teacher (a good teacher) is composed of molecules of education and intelligence, bonded together by patience and passion. Miss Devlin breaks down into equal parts desperation, hair spray, and mints. Her bonds are not strong. She could fly apart at any minute.

  “Much better,” Miss Devlin says. “Now who wants to tell us the story of the birth of Athena?” She waddles down the aisle checking for contraband headphones and comic books. I bet her panty hose are slipping off her butt. “Athena? Daughter of Zeus? It was in last night’s
reading?”

  Mitch raises his hand. Of course he did the reading. He probably read it in the original Greek.

  I study the parking lot. Time in English class passes so slowly, I swear I can see the cars rusting. After about a million years, a dented gray van pulls in and cruises the aisles looking for an open space. I sure hope they brought their IDs.

  I blink. No way. It can’t be. It’s the Godmobile, my father’s church van. And it’s looking for a place to park. I lean forward, forgetting about Athena and Zeus and Mitchell, who can be absurd, but tastes good. The van hesitates in front of an open spot marked for disabled parking, then moves on. I sit back in my seat, flash-frozen. Why is Dad here? He hates coming here. We fight about it. He says it’s unnecessary because I “have everything under control” and other assorted garbage which really means I am on my own.

  Another layer of ice forms. Maybe someone is dead. Maybe it’s Toby, who is a perverted moron, but he’s my brother, and what if a bee stung him and he had a bad allergic reaction and his throat swelled closed and he choked to death in math class? He hates math. What a horrible way to die.

  Stop. Breathe.

  No one is dead, no one is dying. Get a grip, think happy thoughts. Dad has the letter. The Fat Letter. The fat letter from the thank-you-Jesus Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Salvation. Holy Mother, I’m going to Cambridge. I don’t need a safety school or a backup plan because everything is working out just the way I planned it. The ice shell around me melts, the sun comes out, and a rainbow streaks across the sky. The letter has details from Student Housing and Financial Aid and a note from the track coach welcoming me aboard and my summer reading list and advice to incoming freshmen (that’s me!). My temperature soars past 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. I am burning with joy one-oh-one, one-oh-two, one-oh-three. I fry this high school skin to a crisp and emerge from the ashes, a college student. Get me out of here, I’m free, I am so gone. What is the point of sitting here? Why waste Miss Devlin’s valuable time?