The How & the Why

by Cynthia Hand

  “Sure.” It’s been so great this year that seniors are allowed to go off campus for lunch. And so great that I have Nyla, who has never blinked an eye at paying for my lunch, and she’s never tried to make me feel like I owe her.

  She really is the best bestie a girl could ask for.

  I will never be able to pay her back, I realize in this moment, watching her walk away. I’m probably always going to have less than she has. Which doesn’t make me feel mad or jealous or anything. It’s simply the way things are. The truth. Whatever.

  That’s apparently what the universe has in store for me.

  9

  I’m in an off mood all day, trudging through on a kind of autopilot until I literally bump into Sebastian Banks in the hall outside the choir room.

  “Hey, watch where you’re going,” he says to me, but he’s smiling. He has a dimple in his left cheek, I notice. Dang. This guy could not get any more perfect.

  He just said something funny, it occurs to me. I should say something funny back.

  “You’re not in choir” is what comes out of my mouth.

  Total fail.

  He presses a hand to his chest. “I do believe that I have recently signed up for this class. So yes, I am in choir.”

  “Oh, good,” I say. “We could use you.”

  He arches an eyebrow. “Okay.”

  “I mean, we could use your voice. We’re painfully thin in the baritone section.”

  “Well, I am here to help.” He makes a show of holding the door open for me, and we saunter in together. People stop talking to stare at us—well, at Bastian, really, as I am old news. I glance around—Nyla’s not here yet. I wonder if she’s going to be pleased or annoyed that Bastian is joining our class.

  “Boys are over there,” I say, gesturing to the right side of the room.

  “Thanks.” He doesn’t go, though. And I don’t go to my section.

  “So I’ll see you at rehearsal after?” I try to remember if he was on the schedule for today. The baker’s wife and the prince don’t have a lot of real interaction in act one, which is what we’ve been blocking all week. My mouth gets dry and my chest gets all fluttery if I allow myself to think about act two. The very extremely kissy act two. I wonder if Bastian gets nervous thinking about it, too.

  “I’ll be there,” Bastian says, but then he touches my arm before I can leave. “Hey, I was wondering if you’d do me a favor.”

  Yes, please, I think. “Yes?”

  “I just found out about this state drama competition. And how there’s this amazing scholarship for seniors?”

  “Yes?” I mean, I was there when he found out about it. So I don’t know what he’s getting at.

  He smiles. Hopefully he thinks my utter stupidity is cute because otherwise I’m bombing. “Is that a question?”

  “No.” I try to snap out of it. “I mean, yes, there is a scholarship for seniors. I’ve never really paid much attention to it before because, well, I haven’t been a senior until now, but there is one. It’s like ten thousand dollars a year, even. To the school of your choice.”

  “Right, so I was thinking I should do the drama competition this year,” he says.

  “You should.”

  “And I was wondering, would you be my partner? I’m not in the drama class this semester, because I was late enrolling, and anyway, that’s all complicated, but the short version is that I know you have to have a partner to compete, and I thought I’d ask you.”

  I stare at him, completely dumbfounded for several seconds. My knee-jerk reaction is to say, Why yes, Bastian, of course I’d be your partner in the drama competition. I’d love to. We can rehearse at my house. When would you like to start? Tonight?

  But then I think, Down, girl.

  Because I remember Nyla. I am always partners with Nyla for the state drama competition. We’ve won in our age group every single year for the past three years. We’ve already picked out our scene for this year. We’re already rehearsing. It’s going to be epic.

  And I think, Friends before mens.

  “So what do you say?” Bastian asks, because I’m just standing there looking stricken. “The suspense is kind of killing me.”

  “I can’t. Be your partner. Because I already have a partner. So I can’t.” God, how am I this inarticulate around him?

  “Oh.” He sounds genuinely disappointed. “Can you maybe direct me to someone who might need a partner?”

  Normally everyone’s already paired up by this point in the semester. But I happen to know that Ben Monahan had to drop out last week. Who was doing that scene from Barefoot in the Park with . . . “Alice,” I say.

  “Alice,” he repeats.

  “Alice Hastings. Tiny blond, green eyes. She was at lunch with us the other day, remember? She needs a partner.”

  “Right. I know Alice,” he says more brightly. Of course he knows Alice. He plays the wolf in the musical, and Alice is Little Red. “Great. I’ll ask her tonight at play practice.”

  “Great.” The bell rings, and we both take our seats in the correct sections. Nyla slips in beside me at the last second before our teacher comes to the front to start our warm-up scales.

  “What’s up?” Nyla asks as the room fills with the sound of “me me me me me me me me meeeeeeeee,” and then “moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo mooooooo.”

  “Nothing,” I say. Which is true. Things are exactly the same for me right now as they were ten minutes ago. But Bastian did ask me for a favor, and I helped him. I mean, sure, I may have just directed him into the arms of another girl who also happens to think he’s hot. But he at least seemed grateful. And he wanted to ask me, specifically.

  That’s good news, on the Cass-gets-a-boyfriend front, anyway. I think.

  At this point I’ll take all the good news I can get.

  Dear X,

  I’m just going to lean into the letter thing. I hope that’s okay. I mean, if it isn’t, I guess you could stop reading these. If you even are reading these, assuming they’re not sitting in a dusty box somewhere. I don’t know.

  What I do know is it’s prom night tonight, and I’m thinking about all the girls at my old school with their dresses and their corsages and their dates, and that makes me think about Dawson. But I know I wouldn’t have gone to prom with him, even if I hadn’t ended up here.

  I hate that I’m thinking about Dawson, obsessing about him even though things are so over between us. It feels weak.

  Everyone’s moping around here today. I don’t know if it’s prom or something in the water. People have been giving me a wider berth than usual since I punched Amber, and I’m fine with that. She got a black eye, and I did feel a little bad about that until I remembered the way she asked me if I even knew who the father of my baby was. Which makes me want to black her other eye.

  Anyway. We’re all kind of down. Heather’s still gone. Brit’s especially moody—I could hear her crying from pretty much anywhere in the dorms this morning. It’s not her fault, though. This is not how she thought she’d end up. She bought into the myth where the prince comes and carries you off into the sunset. You grow up watching movies like The Little Mermaid, where Ariel is sixteen, and she’s even an entirely different species from the prince, but it all works out for her anyway. Happily ever after. Love conquers all.

  But here’s good old reality: if you’re in a relationship when you’re sixteen, everything is probably not going to work out. There’s too much after when you’re sixteen. Ever after really doesn’t have a chance. Happily ever after is a joke.

  I want to rewrite Little Mermaid so Ariel shows up on Eric’s doorstep and says, “Hey, you know that time when you ‘kissed the girl’? Well, I’m pregnant with our fish-tailed baby. So man up, Eric. My dad doesn’t have a shotgun, but he has this huge trident, and he thinks we should get married.” But then the next thing she knows, Eric’s on the fastest ship out of town. Poor poor Ariel.

  Clearly I’m jaded. I’m sitting here all knocked u
p, and there’s no Prince Charming in sight.

  Still, I want to emphasize: it’s not your fault, either.

  I went to the Sub that night. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? It turned out (and I can’t believe I didn’t automatically get this) that SUB stood for the Student Union Building at a college. I showed up at nine thirty, so he wouldn’t think I was too into it, and there were handmade signs directing me to the basement, where music was wafting up from a little theater. It was crowded—standing room only. I walked in and there he was, the blond guy from the Pearl Jam concert, sitting up on the stage with his guitar. His voice, which I didn’t get to properly hear at Pearl Jam, instantly gave me goose bumps, this slightly smoky, half-whispered melody, like Dave Matthews with a touch of Eddie Vedder. He saw me right away, caught my eye, smiled. He has great lips—I’ll give him that, this little smirk that once upon a time could make me weak in the knees.

  I’d had boys look at me that way before. I am, like I told you before, fairly average in the looks department—average height, average weight, kind of flat up top but then I’m only sixteen, right? But I have nice eyes, or so I’ve been told. I wonder if you’ll get my eyes or his. Like I said, you’d be better off if you end up looking like him. He’s boy-beautiful. He knows it, too, he knows every time he’s up there on the stage, crooning away, smiling that little smile, and he brushes the hair out of his eyes and glances out at some girl in the back of the room, she’s going to swoon.

  I wasn’t any different. My breath caught every time he met my eyes.

  The music was good. I wouldn’t have fallen for him if the music wasn’t good. At least I had some standards. And he was clever with the lyrics:

  You think you know what I’m about.

  You think you’re going to ferret me out.

  But you forget I’m the fox, girl, you’re the hen.

  From here it’s only a matter of when.

  You’re probably thinking I should have known, right? He wasn’t exactly trying to hide who he was or pretend he was something else. I liked that about him, actually. He seemed more mature than the high school boys I was surrounded by all day—more certain of himself. He seemed like he knew what he wanted.

  And right then, it seemed like he wanted me.

  I stood in the back and swayed to his music, smiled at him when he smiled at me.

  After his set was done he came over and stood in front of me, grinning.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “You came.”

  “Obviously.”

  “You liked it, right?”

  “You didn’t tell me it was your band.” I didn’t want to fawn all over him. I still had a shred of dignity. But I couldn’t stop smiling. It was embarrassing, how much I was smiling. My cheeks hurt with it.

  “Come on. You liked it.”

  “It was all right. You’re . . .” I looked up at him. More goose bumps. “You’re pretty good.”

  “You’re pretty.”

  Damn. Nobody had ever talked like that to me before. It felt like being in a movie, like something that was already written out for us to say. I was pretty sure I was blushing. But I tried to be confident.

  “You’re pretty, too,” I said. “And you can really sing, can’t you?”

  He took that in stride. “Among other things. You want to get out of here?”

  “Okay.”

  He nodded to his drummer and took my hand, and the next thing I knew, we were back at his dorm room, where he told me he wanted to . . . listen to records.

  “Records?” I repeated stupidly. “Like, vinyl?”

  He laughed this husky laugh. “It’s the best sound.” He gestured to where, crammed between the bed and his desk, he had this little table with a record player on it.

  That’s when my obsession with vinyl officially started. That night. He had this amazing collection—not just the alternative stuff like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, the White Stripes, Radiohead, but classics like John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix and Billy Joel.

  He was so hot. Sitting on his bed, listening to the music, he’d tilt his head back and sing along, and goose bumps would jump up again all along my arms.

  Here was a person who loved music as much as I did. I’d never met anybody like that.

  And, as I mentioned, he was hot.

  So. At one point we were sitting on his bed, listening to Leonard Cohen’s low, gravelly voice sing “Hallelujah,” the sound so completely pure pouring out of the record player. He was right about the sound. I had my eyes closed, letting the song wash over me. Then I heard Dawson make this pained noise, this sigh, and when I opened my eyes he was so close I could see the blond tips of his eyelashes.

  “Hi,” I murmured.

  “You have amazing eyes,” he said. “They’re so blue.”

  He kissed me. Then he kissed me again, harder, and kissed me again. And again. And again. He had this little bit of stubble, which was gold like his hair so you couldn’t see it unless you were up close or the light hit his face a certain way, but that night we kissed so much that his stubble scratched up my chin. It was raw and red, after.

  We didn’t have sex, if you’re wondering. Not that night. That night we listened to music. We talked, a little. He told me that he was a singer, yes, and he could play guitar (at one point he pulled a blue Stratocaster from underneath the bed and played me a bit of “Purple Rain”) and he had dreams of making a record of his own someday, but he was also an actor, a painter, and he wanted to try writing a screenplay about his life.

  Because his life so far was obviously interesting enough to base a movie on.

  “You’re a Renaissance man,” I said, which he seemed to like.

  I talked about concerts I’d been to. Because I couldn’t think of anything else that was comparatively interesting.

  But mostly we played records and made out. We might have gotten around to sex, actually, (it was getting hot and heavy) but at some point the door opened and another guy came in, an Asian guy with shaggy hair and a Star Wars shirt.

  I have to admit, the first time I ever saw him, I wrote him off as classic nerd.

  “Oh,” the guy said, frowning the second he laid eyes on me. “Sorry. There’s not like a sock on the door or anything.”

  Dawson sighed. “This is my roommate, Ted.”

  So no, no sex that night. I probably shouldn’t tell you about the sex, anyway. No one wants to hear about their parents getting it on. Even if we’re not your real parents. You know it happened. I know it happened. You’re the proof.

  It was my first time, though, that first time with Dawson. It was a few weeks later, on Christmas break, when most of the students were back home and the dorms were perfectly quiet. And we did use protection, that first time. Or at least I thought we did. I asked, “Uh, do you have a condom?” and he said, “Sure,” like I’d asked him to get me a glass of lemonade or something, like he was being a good host, and then he put one on. But when it was over, the condom wasn’t on anymore. And I was too busy trying to understand my own body, the way it had hurt (it hurt more than I expected it to, although my friends warned me it would hurt), how his bare chest felt against mine and the roughness of his hairy legs tangled with my legs, a whole new world of sensations, to ask him about the missing condom.

  Sometimes now I want to drive over and ask him: Where was the condom?

  I didn’t ask him. I kept going to see him, week after week, and for a while we were what I’d call happy. Dawson was like a drug, and I couldn’t stop taking him over and over. I went to one of his improv nights at the college, and he was the best actor on that stage—so clever, so quick on his feet. He snuck me into the art studio to see a painting he was working on. It was a self-portrait where there were two Dawsons, back-to-back, one painted in red and one in black. He wrote a song for me. It was called “Blue” and compared my eyes to the ocean and the sky when it storms and a chunk of turquoise and the wing of a mountain bluebird.

  I thought he w
as so imaginative. So cool. So perfect.

  I thought I was in love with him. I really did. I did that pathetic thing where I wrote our names together in the margins of my notebooks at school. I smiled when I thought about him. I started looking into applying to the same college, even though he’d be a senior when I was a freshman, but still. I wanted to be around him, however I could.

  But, for all that, we never talked about what was going on between us. We didn’t label ourselves. We didn’t make commitments. We made out. And hung out. I thought that meant we were together. I was his girlfriend. At least I thought I was. Which felt special. Which felt right.

  I had to pause to get lunch. Nothing sounds good these days. Sometimes even the idea of food makes me barf. I should be over the pukes by now, as I’m in week twenty-one of this sucktastic adventure called pregnancy, and morning sickness is supposed to peter off around week sixteen or so, according to the What to Expect book they gave me when I got here, but I still throw up pretty regularly. At home I stopped eating very much, but I can’t do that now. The people around here check in all the time to make sure we’ve received the proper nourishment. And snacks. They are all about snacks here. Melly has this theory that the way to ward off morning sickness is to eat a grape like every ten minutes. “The trick is to never let your stomach get empty,” she says. It worked when she was pregnant with her kids.

  Anyway, Brit was crying in the lunch room. I grabbed an apple and a hard-boiled egg and went to hide in my room so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. I wish I could help Brit. I do. Out of all of us, she’s been screwed over the most. She’s so young it’s shocking that she’s pregnant. I mean, when I was thirteen I didn’t even know about sex. Her baby daddy is a grown man. A married man. Her coach. A pervert. He belongs in jail. These people—the adults: the coaches and mentors and tutors and parents, they’re supposed to protect you. But they don’t. They always seem to end up doing more harm than good.

  It was quiet back at the dorms. The other girls were all at lunch.

  Sometimes when I’m hanging out here by myself, I think about the way these rooms used to be forty or fifty years ago, crammed with pregnant girls. I try to imagine four girls in this little room, four beds squashed into this space where now there’s only one lumpy twin bed and a built-in desk and a dresser. Four girls gathered around the little sink in the corner where I brush my teeth, which I hate doing lately, because my gums bleed. It’s like a horror movie up in here every morning and night. Four girls would be pretty crowded. But there’s strength in numbers, too.