by Rachel Vail
It put me in the best mood, seeing that woman with the greasy croissant waiting like a comma on top of the pile of tea-stained napkins. It gave me such a jolt of hope about my future.
“You are so psyched,” Sienna whispered.
“Fully,” I said.
“Same.”
“Class trips are the best invention ever, and also did you see that woman—”
“Right?” Sienna agreed. “The best! Screw electricity.”
“Who needs antibiotics?” I agreed.
“Oooh, too soon.” She had missed a few days for strep last week.
We spotted the albino peacock as we passed the cathedral grounds. “Hey! Look! They mate for life,” Sienna said, pointing. She was quoting my little cousin Shane, who told me that peacock fact last weekend, so I told Sienna. We tell each other everything, Sienna and I. We had decided instantly that that was the most romantic peacock fact ever. It made us love the peacocks (and my little cousin Shane) even more than usual.
“Who mates for life?” Emmett asked.
“Peacocks,” Sienna and I answered together.
“Really?” Emmett asked.
“Well, with peahens, I guess,” I added. “Usually.”
“No judgment. Whatever,” Sienna agreed. “You be you, peacocks!”
“They do?” AJ asked, next to Emmett. “Is that true? Peacocks mate for life?”
“According to Gracie’s eight-year-old cousin,” Sienna said. “The genius.”
“Who’s a genius?” AJ asked. “Gracie or the cousin?”
“Or the peacocks?” Emmett asked.
“All,” Sienna said, “but mostly Gracie.” She locked her arm through mine.
That made me so happy, I guess I was smiling pretty huge. AJ tilted his head at me, like he was considering me, seeing me fresh.
And that was when the weird thing happened.
My face was instantly hot like a fever. I suddenly had to concentrate on how to breathe. I honestly could not remember how do it. Which is a problem, because, breathing. Such a good activity to stay involved in.
I had to figure it out fresh like I was inventing the process: breathe in, and then out. As a series of actions, instead of doing both at once and choking right there on my own air, halfway up the cathedral steps.
People in comas know how to breathe.
What just happened to me?
AJ and I have been friends since kindergarten, but for the first time it hit me that AJ is weirdly good-looking. It was actually erasing all my skills, how attractive AJ looked, loping up the cathedral steps next to me. Not that I have so many skills, but normally breathing is among them.
“You okay?” Sienna asked.
“Fhytuynfdts,” I said.
“Ah,” she responded. “Good point.”
Plus AJ is on travel team for, I don’t know. Every sport? Not that that’s a big sales pitch to me, but still. You can’t ignore that that is generally considered key, even if not particularly by my parents or me. Also, wow. He is very not unpleasant to look at. When did this happen to AJ and why was I not informed?
He was never taller than I was before today, was he?
It occurred to me that I could be having some sort of weird allergy attack. I had never had an allergy attack before, so maybe that was how it felt. Or a seizure. Or, like, it could be a mental breakdown. Or maybe this is how the zombie apocalypse begins. In which case, I should warn somebody.
Breathe in, then out. Left foot, then right foot. So many things I had to keep track of, to maintain my own survival.
I would not even make travel breathing team.
“All peacocks mate for life?” Riley asked, turning up beside me suddenly. “Or just the albino ones?”
“Racist,” I said.
Sienna laughed and then AJ laughed too, a short chuckle but still. Not a sympathy chuckle, though. Kind of a rumbly chuckle. An approvingly rumbly chuckle.
Oh no. I tripped on a jutting piece of cathedral step. Sienna kept me from face-planting, yanking me up by the elbow. “Seriously, Gracie. You okay?”
Everybody, take turns! Feet: right, then left. Hales: in-, then ex-.
The inside of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine is cool even in the finally warm springtime of early April, and dark even in bright squinty Tuesday morning daylight. Luckily, because I was damp from sweat.
When nobody is laughing in a rumbly way about a funny thing I just said or considering me with his distractingly cute head tilted slightly to the side, I still run the risk of drowning in my own sweat. So, just imagine the dampness right then.
While our eyes adjusted to the dark, we all had to bump into one another for a while. Sorry, sorry, we kept saying, bonking into somebody else. Oh, sorry, so sorry.
“Check out the dragons,” AJ said, pointing up.
There were dragons hanging from the ceiling of the cathedral, like this was Shun Lee. Shun Lee is a kooky restaurant across from Lincoln Center that I go to sometimes with my grandparents for dim sum brunch before a matinee at the Vivian Beaumont, my favorite theater in the whole city.
There are white papier-mâché dragons and monkeys in Shun Lee. Always. There aren’t normally dragons hanging from the cathedral ceiling. It made me crave dim sum.
“You know what I need?” I whispered to Sienna.
“Dim sum?” Emmett responded, right behind me.
“Yasss,” I said, spinning around. “How did you . . .”
Emmett pointed up at the dragon overhead.
Mr. Phillips snapped his fingers at us and then explained that the artist, whose name is something, made the dragons, which in fact were actually phoenixes, not dragons, using industrial scrap materials, to signify something.
Some kids wrote down the facts. I did not.
Because, nothing. No excuse. I just didn’t.
“I could totally slay those phoenix-dragons,” Emmett whispered to us.
“Good to know,” I said. “Sit next to me. In case of an attack.”
“Okay,” Emmett said. Thank goodness for Emmett. My weird dizzy spell was stabilizing. Emmett and I have been buddies forever, since before I can remember. He lives four floors down from me in the same building. I totally love him.
“You brought weapons with you?” AJ asked him.
“I have them at home,” Emmett said.
“Still,” I defended him. “At least he has them. And we live only, like, a block from here, so . . .”
“What weapons do you have?” Riley asked him, her eyebrows arching.
“All of them,” Emmett answered. “They’re all Nerf, but . . .”
“That’s not even—” Riley started.
“Perfect,” I interrupted, slinging my arm around Emmett’s shoulders as Sienna laughed. Her laugh sparkled off the ceiling and walls. The cathedral has that churchy sound-effect thing: every noise echoes, and then you yank your head down between your shoulders. It’s just like what the tortoise in the funky pet store down past Ninety-Ninth does when people walk too near it.
“Shhh,” Mr. Phillips hushed, because the concert was about to begin. We followed him through the center aisle in two unstraight lines to our seats. I took deep breaths to try to calm myself down. Maybe I’m allergic to AJ and his sudden cuteness?
We’re not allowed to have phones out, so I couldn’t Google the diagnosis.
I am not a fan of jazz music, so what happened next kind of surprised me too.
I had a book when I was little called Mysterious Thelonious, by Chris Raschka. That’s how my dad always started the book—“Mysterious Thelonious, by Chris Raschka”—and I’d open the cover greedily to get to the story. I remember the book said there were no wrong notes on Thelonious Monk’s piano. I was fully in love with that idea. I still love it. That book really made me want to like jazz and also t
o play the piano with no wrong notes, but I have so far failed completely at both ambitions.
The truth is, jazz mostly sounds to me like all wrong notes.
But today one of the acts in the concert was this guy playing the jazz trumpet, just the one guy onstage alone. He’d puff a note up into the air and let it hang there above his head, and then he’d float a different note up to meet it. So it was like he was playing a duet with himself, and then, counting on those two notes to continue hovering together there in the air above us all, he’d let another note, a slightly weird note, a little off, waft up there to dance around with those earlier notes.
So it was like he was playing with time just as much as with sounds.
“Trippy,” Sienna said when I tried to explain that on our way back to school.
“Wow, Gracie—you’re really deep,” AJ said, nodding at me. “I never knew that about you before.”
“Right?” Sienna said. “I told you. Gracie is seriously deep-dish.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, in a voice that sounded much squeakier than my usual husky grumble. “I am the deep end of the swimming pool.”
“You are,” said Emmett quietly.
And then we had to settle down, settle down, and write a recollection of our class trip, using all five senses.
Taste? Seriously? What is there to say about how a concert tasted?
Still, even if I don’t like recollections, I do love class trips. Class trips are the bomb. I love class trips so much, I can practically taste them. And they taste like hot chocolate. What? Whatever. The end.
I didn’t write about the woman who might’ve actually been future me reading a novel at Hungarian. I didn’t say anything about how AJ looked at me more during this class trip than the whole year so far combined, or about the time-machine trumpeter. Not even the albino peacock. Those aren’t the things to write in recollections. You have to fill in the facts you should have written down at the time, like the trumpeter’s name was Something and the cathedral was built on Specific Date.
Eyes on your own paper, please, everyone.
But I was in a great mood anyway, because: class trip day. And it was awesome and fun and also AJ said I was really deep. AJ. And he smiled at me . . . four times.
At least four times. Maybe more. Might have been five times.
The good mood lasted all the way until tonight, when I got the text from AJ. Or, well, until right after that.
3
NOTHING ELSE
AJ: Hey Gracie
me: hey
AJ: Is the math test tomorrow?
me: no Friday
AJ: Phew
me: yah srsly
AJ: Well see you tomorrow
me: kk
AJ: That was so funny today what you said
me: which thing?
AJ:
And then nothing else.
He started to write a response and then I guess changed his mind and deleted it and nothing.
Ugh. Cut off my thumbs, because why does anybody let me have thumbs? All they end up doing is texting two words too much. Did I actually text him: which thing?
I checked my phone, and yes, indeed, I did.
Why is there no delete key in texting?
Why is there no backspace in time?
Okay. But the thing is? He is actually really into math. Almost as into math as I am. And math tests are always on Fridays. So . . .
No. Come on. It’s not like he was just making up an excuse to text me because of, like, liking me, or anything. Obviously there must have been another reason I’m not thinking of. I am clearly having a simple brain fart. Think, Gracie.
There are a thousand reasons AJ might have texted me. Like . . .
Math panic! Anybody could have a second of math panic. Or test panic. We’ve had so many tests this year that we’re all a little brain-fried. He probably was having a panic of some kind and tried Emmett and Ben and Harrison and maybe Sienna and nobody knew if the math test was tomorrow or on Friday, so he tried me.
Eh. Not convinced. AJ is not a panicky person. And everybody knows math tests are always on Fridays, so.
Okay, or maybe he just felt like texting me because we’re friends. I should just enjoy that. Let that be enough. Because, come on.
It is enough.
But just for one second: maybe he was thinking that I was so awesome today and he was noticing that for the first time. It’s obviously possible to notice something new about a person you’ve known forever. Ahem.
Right, so maybe he thought, Gracie is kind of interesting. She’s, like, fun. Maybe I’ll text her! But why? So he came up with the lame and obviously nothing of: Is the math test tomorrow?
Okay, that actually makes sense.
Well, more sense than that he was suddenly plowed into stupid by my blinding beauty and wit. Obviously.
Unless . . .
Unless nothing. Have I met me?
No. Nope, nope, nope. Not going there. That’s sexist and misogynistic and shallow. Besides, I mean, I actually am awesome. I love me. I’d like me. But obviously . . .
And I’m not saying that AJ is shallow or anything. At all.
Just . . . realism.
But that’s fine. I am completely fine with that. More than fine. I’m great.
I am. So what if I typed which thing? and AJ stopped responding? That’s nothing. I’m still good. I don’t care. I have so much to love in my life. Boys? Eh. I don’t need to love boys, or any boys in particular. I love lots of things. Generally. And specifically! Like, I love, well . . . I love the color yellow. That’s something. Also cookies. Post-it notes. I love that a croissant with one bite out of it looks like a comma, which means pause, which is the completely perfect thing for a croissant to mean. Especially a croissant in the midst of being eaten, slowly, on a warm spring Tuesday morning—because it is a comma, in another form. A bitten croissant is the pastry equivalent of a comma. I love that!
Who needs boys?
I love tortoises! Whoa, calm down, me.
I love tortoises. My parents say tortoises have diseases so I can’t get one. There is a reason against every pet because, I think, they are (understandably) phobic about dealing with death, and all pets die eventually.
I even love my parents, despite that.
And I love how I look. I do. I totally do.
Well, I’m trying.
No, I do. I look awesome. I have cute toes. It’s important— I read somewhere on the Internet, so it’s definitely true—to pick out a thing about yourself that looks nice and focus on that whenever you start thinking nasty stuff about how you look. My toes are pretty cute.
So, so what about my nose? It’s big? Oh, boohoo. Who cares about a nose?
Or my too-tall height, and probably I could lose a few pounds and . . .
Stop. Cute toes. I am beautiful. It doesn’t matter who else, if anyone, thinks so. I know I am beautiful.
I am.
Well, maybe. Maybe really not. Whatever. I don’t care. Doesn’t matter.
Smile time. Otherwise known as dinner.
What I actually am is my parents’ sunshine.
4
THE HANDPRINT-SHAPED BRUISE ON MY HEART
My mom sometimes, like tonight but not that often, serves cookies for dessert on the yellow-and-blue plate my sister, Bret, painted with Mom at the paint-on-pottery place that was near where they lived then, outside Boston. Bret made it when she was six, a year before she died. So four years before I was born, because I was born almost exactly three years after she died. She painted her name, BRET, with the R just a circle on top of two spindly legs, in blue paint on the yellow, next to a handprint. Her handprint. I guess Mom smooshed Bret’s little hand onto some blue paint or maybe she just painted Bret’s palm with a blue-dipped paintbrush, which I bet wo
uld have made Bret giggle (not that I ever heard her giggle except, often, in my imagination), and then flattened her painted hand against the plate. When I was little, I’d measure my hand against Bret’s print. I remember mine fit on hers when I was five, though Bret was six when she made it. By the time I turned six, my hand was bigger than the blue handprint, and now my hand is almost as big as the whole plate. Not quite but almost. My massive paw. I have huge hands and feet. Could a boy ever like a girl with such huge, sweaty hands and . . .
Cute toes.
I never made a handprint plate at a paint-on-pottery place.
Maybe Mom was superstitious about that.
Or maybe she just already had one. How many handprint plates does one mom need? Obviously nobody wants a plate with a huge almost-fourteen-year-old’s handprint painted on it; that’s just gross. It would be weird. So now it’s too late anyway.
Mom doesn’t put Bret’s plate in the dishwasher with the other plates. She washes it carefully by hand and then dries it slowly with a soft towel and then puts it back in its spot in the cabinet above the refrigerator.
I try not to touch the handprint plate because they didn’t let me touch it when I was little and I got used to not touching it. I am still a little clumsy. Fine, not a little. If that plate ever broke, Bret’s handprint would be gone forever and Mom would, just, I don’t even know what.
5
REALLY SHOULD GET THUMB AMPUTATIONS BECAUSE, UGH
RILEY: Hi, Gracie!
me: hi!
RILEY: Quick maybe weird question—who do you like?
me: everybody!
RILEY: Srsly.
me: oh. srsly? nobody. I hate us all.
RILEY: Do you think AJ is cute?
me: yah. sure. fact.
RILEY: And sweet?
me: you like AJ?
RILEY: Dunno. Thinking about it. But yk, maybe Sienna does too, so, awk. ??? Or not? So, do you know if Sienna likes him?
me: well, I flgtjhwe
