Finally, in Advanced Band, we had an extra-long practice in preparation for the homecoming game this Friday. It was mostly productive, except for the incident in which Wiley was exiled from the room for making fart noises with his tuba. After band, as he and I walked home, I warned him that if he kept getting in trouble, he might have his band citizenship grade lowered to a “Needs Improvement,” which, combined with his declining grades, could potentially threaten his graduation status. Wiley responded by telling me to take my flute and stick it up my—
“WILEY!” I shouted, surprising myself with how vociferous I could be.
He staggered backward and did not speak for several moments.
“Um . . . ,” he eventually said, rather weakly. “Thaaat’s meeeee!”
I took a breath for myself as we left campus and made the right onto Calaveras to start the mile-long walk to our neighborhood.
“Why must you say things like that?”
“I’m sowwy, Awwegwa,” Wiley said. “I was just being funny.”
“You’ll have to settle for me laughing at the other ninety-nine percent of your jokes. No more puerile comments about my flute, please. You know, I stopped going to band camp because of people like you.”
Wiley paused midstep.
“I thought you stopped going to band camp because that’s the summer your mom got sick and your family couldn’t pay for it anymore.”
Oh my goodness.
Was this boy born with a giant hairy foot in his mouth?
I walked away with brisk urgency, needing to get home for a little alone time.
“Allegra! Allegra, wait!”
I heard his footfalls as he scurried after me. I doubled my pace without looking back.
“I didn’t know what I was saying, okay? I suck! I suck so much!”
I still would not turn around, not when he should have known better.
“I’m sorry!”
I halted for just a fraction of a second. I heard his heavy breathing as he approached me, then felt it on the back of my neck. I turned to face my friend.
“I’m sorry,” Wiley repeated.
His face was pink all over. His eyes were half smiling, half distraught.
“I’m really sorry. I screwed up, you know? I can’t explain my behavior. I don’t know what’s been up with me. Or, well, I do have one theory. Do you wanna hear it?”
I took him in for a moment: the erratic, still-orange patch of peach fuzz framing his upper lip; the shaggy, brown-blond hair that hangs below his ears, which he won’t let me trim because he says it gives him Samson-like strength; the wolf T-shirt I bought for him as a joke two Christmases ago, a decision I have come to regret as he now owns twelve and wears them daily; the wide, toothy smile on his face as he leaned in toward me, a smile that was genuine to be sure, and even sort of adorable, but suddenly too close, unexpectedly centimeters from my face.
“Allie,” Wiley whispered.
“Hold on,” I said, grabbing my phone out of my bag. “I need to see something,” I said as I unlocked the screen and pretended to check it.
“But—”
“Give me two seconds.”
“Okay,” Wiley said. “Whatever you want.”
And that’s when I saw it.
The e-mail that would change the course of my existence forever.
Dear Allegra,
Congratulations! It is with great pleasure we announce that you have been awarded a Bright Path Scholarship for your collegiate studies. This year, more than fifteen thousand of the highest-achieving, low-income high school students in the nation applied to become Bright Path Scholars, and only twenty-five were selected, making your accomplishment truly remarkable.
In addition, we are pleased to inform you that through our College Match Program, you have been secured early admission to your top-choice college, Stanford University. As a Bright Path Scholar, you will be given a full-ride scholarship to Stanford, and
I blinked and read those words again. And again. And again. I read them until they weren’t words anymore, just random squiggles. Random, life-altering squiggles.
I couldn’t breathe. My phone dropped out of my hand. I put my hands to my face. I fell to the sidewalk.
“What?” Wiley said, crouching down next to me. I could barely hear him, my heart was pounding so loudly, my reality was shifting too quickly.
“What is it? Allie? Allie, is everything okay?”
“Oh, Wiley,” I said. I threw my arms around him. “I did it. I did it, I did it, I did it! Wiley, I did it! STANFORD!!!!!”
I squeezed him tight, and I kissed him on the cheek, and I looked up at him and it was so wonderful because he looked so happy for me, so truly happy.
“I’m just . . . ,” Wiley said, wiping the corner of his eye. “Oh my God, this is amazing. But how? What happened? You sure this isn’t, like, Cole pranking you somehow?”
“You’re right,” I said through frenetic breaths. “This doesn’t feel real. But remember that impossible scholarship I applied for this summer?”
I picked my phone off the ground, stood back up, and skimmed the e-mail.
“I guess I somehow . . . got it. And they’re giving me a free ride . . . and they matched me with my first choice . . . and look, it says there’s going to be a special reception at Stanford for Bright Path Scholars and other early-admitted students. . . . It’s this December, over winter break. . . . I can’t believe I’m going. . . . I really get to go. . . .”
I burst into tears, right then and there, only a minute from my house. Wiley put his arm around me, and without saying anything, and without having to say anything, he walked me all the way to my house in blissful, teary silence.
• • •
“Okay,” Wiley said. “Let’s dry those eyes. You don’t want to give the surprise away.”
“Right,” I said, dabbing my cheeks with my sleeve and cleaning off the leaky mascara.
“Hey,” Wiley said. “Is it cool if I come in with you? I want to be there when you share the big news.”
“Fine,” I said. “But you’re not allowed to give it away.”
“Come on,” Wiley said. “It’s not like I have a big mouth or anything.”
He made a tuba fart noise and grinned puckishly. I poked him in the chest and laughed.
“All right,” I said. “I can’t believe this is happening. Here we go.”
I opened the front door, and the first thing I noticed was that my entire family—my mom, dad, Alejandro, Augusto, and my abuela—they were all together in the living room. They were sitting on the big couch in front of the TV, but the TV wasn’t on. No one was talking. They were looking at me expectantly, like they’d been sitting there for an hour, waiting for me to walk in. Maybe they knew already. Maybe the scholarship people had sent my parents that joyous e-mail too.
“Hey, Reys,” Wiley said. “Um, Allegra has some big—”
“Wiley,” my dad said. “I’m sorry. We must talk to Allegra for a few minutes.”
“Oh,” Wiley said. “Should I . . . go home?”
My dad looked at my mom. She squeezed his hand.
“Yes,” my dad said. “Allegra will see you tomorrow.”
“O . . . kay,” Wiley said.
He closed the door quickly, without saying good-bye.
“Dad?” I said. “What’s going on?”
My dad didn’t respond. He stared down at the ground. So did my abuela and my brothers. Only my mom could look me in the eye.
“Mija,” my mom said. “I went to the doctor this morning, and she told me . . . they’ve found something in my ovaries again. I’m stage three, which means I could be fine, and there’s a very good chance I’ll be fine, but I’ll have to start treatment again and . . . please don’t cry.”
I wasn’t crying, so I wasn’t sure why she said that, but she was looking at me like I was six years old, and I didn’t know what to say. Actually, all of them were looking at me like that. My abuela even tried, I don’t kno
w, humming soothingly.
“Don’t cry,” she said in between hums, almost as if she were singing it. “It will be all right.”
“I’m not crying,” I said.
“You know what?” my dad said. “It’s okay. This is a hard day. We can cry. It’s okay.”
“But I’m not crying,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” my mom said. “Just let it happen.”
“I’m not crying!” I screamed out. “I’m not crying! Look at me, people! I’m not crying!”
As soon as I said it, I caught my reflection in the front mirror. I saw my eyes, and I realized that I hadn’t completely finished wiping them a few minutes earlier, when I’d learned about the scholarship, when I’d had the most euphoric moment of my life. My face was still completely covered in wet makeup. It was all blotchy and blue.
“These aren’t tears, Mama,” I said. “This is from before.”
“What?” she said.
“Never mind.”
I took a seat on the couch next to my mom, in between everybody else. Once I sat down, my mom tried to hold me, but I wouldn’t let her. I held her instead, and she began to sob, which made everyone else do the same. They cried and cried and they cried so much that they sounded like animals, and they kept crying, and I kept holding on to my mom.
I couldn’t cry. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I’d used up all my tears before, and now I couldn’t cry with the rest of my family.
I don’t want to go away anymore.
WILEY OTIS
In the first act of any great screenplay, the hero has a problem.
Indiana Jones has a bunch of precious stuff he wants to return to a museum. Luke Skywalker has an evil empire to worry about and some lingering daddy issues. Marty McFly has a mom who wants to incest him to the max.
And me, yeah, I’ve got my problem too. It might not be a Nazi- or mom-sex-level problem, but it’s pretty big.
That’s the other thing movie characters have, though. They all have a mentor or a best friend, someone they trust who can help them with their problem. Marty has Doc. Luke has Obi-Wan and fun robots. Indy has that kid with the hat who says, “Okey-dokey, Dr. Jones! Hold on to your POTATOES!”
But see, that’s my other problem. My person who’s the only person in the world I’d want to talk to about my problem, I mean, she’s also my problem.
So how is my movie supposed to end?
• • •
I was thinking about these things—and everything that happened on the walk home from band yesterday—this afternoon during math. I was spacing out and doodling during class, because come on, how is algebra 2 supposed to help me in my future career as a filmmaker, when Ms. Valdez marched right up and tore my drawing off the desk.
“Wiley,” she said. “This doesn’t look like a parabola.”
“It’s not,” I said. “It’s a guy.”
She held my paper closer to her face. Her eyes got all wide.
“Is that . . . a swastika?”
Everyone in class turned to look at me like I was the stupidest man boob in the world. Everyone always looks at me like I’m the stupidest man boob in the world.
“Well, yeah,” I explained. “That’s a Wehrmacht soldier. I was drawing that one part in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the dude gets his face melted off.”
Ms. Valdez clucked her tongue. “This is a no-place-for-hate school. I’m assigning you a detention.”
“It’s not what you think—”
“No talking, not unless it’s about parabolas.”
“That Nazi is like a metaphor for my life!”
“Detention, Wiley. Sixth period. You know the drill.”
• • •
I sat by myself in the library, wondering how Allegra’s walk home was going without me, feeling like I’d just been given ten-to-fifteen in prison. I looked around the room, examining my fellow detainees. Maybe someone in here could help me.
There was a lameness of freshman girls, sitting on the couches and subtly sexting football players. But they weren’t worth talking to. They were far too naive.
There was a Hot Cheetos bag of stoner boys at a side table, flipping through Where’s Waldo? books and laughing their asses off. But there was no way I could approach them. Allegra would never let me near people who lack ambition like that. Plus, those guys would just laugh at me. They’d point at my awesome mustache. They’d call it gay.
And, of course, sitting at her desk, there was the Bear. The Bear is this terrifying librarian who is as burly and savage as a North American grizzly with a salmon in its mouth. She has always had a special hatred for me, even compared to other teachers. I couldn’t go up to her, not unless I wanted to be drizzled in honey and devoured in a single bite.
So nope. No one could help me. No one was going to listen to my concerns and give me advice. Not here in detention, not anywhere ever. I was destined to be sad and lonely, for all of eternity. . . .
That is, until someone else walked through the front door. Until the universe opened up, and dropped the exact person I needed straight from the sky.
My guardian angel.
She was strikingly tall, like nearly six feet, with the longest, tannest limbs. She just moved here from Texas, where I heard her dad was a big-shot lawyer and her mom used to be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. She could be a sexy cowgirl right now if she wanted, or a lingerie model, or the lady who gets aroused while washing her hair in a shampoo commercial. Her hair was so shampoo commercial—all long and flowing, like a gushing brown river, which I realize sounds disgusting, but I mean, everything about this girl was intoxicating, from her lips to her lashes to her anime-size eyes to her delightfully shaped calves.
“Hi,” the girl said to the Bear, the slightest twang in her voice. “I’m Nikki Foxworth. Sorry I’m late.”
“Mfughh,” the Bear grunted, and pointed Nikki to her detention spot.
Which, as fate would have it, was the chair right next to mine.
I’m still not sure what gave me the nerve to talk to Nikki this afternoon. It’s very unlike me to make friends with anyone new. I can never convince people to find the decent guy buried deep inside this weird-smelling package.
But in all the best movies, and eighties movies especially—Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, The Breakfast Club—there’s this thing, this recurring trope, where high school loser dorks have this weird, kinda magical ability to form special friendships with popular chicks. The geek will always have a scene with the hot cheerleader in which she gives him great advice, and then she’ll kiss him on the cheek or something, and I know it seemed crazy, and that life isn’t a teen movie, but I mean, for all the loser dorks out there, I had to try.
“Excuse me, Nikki? I’m Wiley. From your first period. I have a question. About the econ homework.
“I’m asking about school,” I whisper-called up to the Bear, who flared her nostrils at me, but she didn’t yell at me to stop talking.
“What’s your question?” Nikki said without bothering to look my way. She was on her phone, secretly texting, clearly bored.
“It’s . . .” I looked down for a moment. I caught sight of her tank top cleavage by mistake. I glanced back at her face. I looked down again.
“Oh,” Nikki said. “So that’s how it is.”
She motioned to her chest.
“So you wanted to see my ‘econ homework,’ huh? I get it. Real classy. But not very original. No, sweetheart. No. I will not go to homecoming with you.”
“Wait!” I said. My voice cracked as I said it. “No, I’m not attracted to you—well, okay, it’s not that I don’t find you attractive . . . I mean, objectively speaking, of course you’re—but the reason—what I wanted to ask you was—I need your advice.”
Nikki continued to glare at me with her pencil eyebrows arched up all super-judgy, but she didn’t look back at her phone, and she didn’t get up and leave, so I kept going.
“I’m in love. But not with you. I just wan
t to make that clear. Although you do, uh, have very nice . . . econ homework.”
This was the kind of blurt-out that usually earns me a detention from a teacher, or a talking-to on the walk home from school, but Nikki looked at me and almost smiled.
“You’re funny,” she said.
Her half smile turned into a genuine laugh as she pointed to the center of her cleavage, right to the middle of her—actually, you know what, probably not her boobs. Maybe it was more like her heart.
“We’re in the same boat,” she said. “That’s why I’m sitting here right now. Because I’m in love and the world isn’t fair. But that’s another story, I suppose.”
She tossed her head back and flipped her shiny L’Oréal hair over her bare shoulder.
“Anyway,” she said. “Who are you crazy about, if I may ask?”
“I don’t know if you know her,” I said. “Allegra Rey?”
Nikki leaned toward me, her hand on her cheek. “Tell me about Allegra.”
I’ve gone over the story so many times in my head, it came out basically all in one breath:
“I’ve known Allie for ten years. . . .
“I’ve been in love with her for all of them.
“Her family moved next door in second grade. I knew she was cute, even then. I also knew she was smart. So smart she could be president one day, or at the very least a marine biologist.
“In fourth grade I remember her twin brothers were born. That was the same year my dad moved out. Same month, now that I think about it.
“Seventh grade was when Allegra and I started walking home together, which was when we really became friends. One day I truly noticed her—her springy hair, her freckly nose, her weirdly small hands—and I realized that day she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
“Freshman year her mom got cancer. It was a really hard year. Allegra and I cooked dinner for her family most nights. She helped me learn algebra too, so I wouldn’t have to repeat ninth grade. Even though she had to help her family. She helped me, too.
“These past few years, I’ve wanted more than anything to ask her out. I’ve even gotten close a couple times. Hell, I almost tried on our walk home yesterday. But at the last moment something always goes wrong, or I choke and chicken out.
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