by Blake Nelson
Still others seemed eager to cash in on the privileges of being at the top of the pecking order. These were mostly the socially frustrated types, the people who had been bullied or harassed as underclassman. Now it was their turn to do the bullying and harassing, and they couldn’t wait.
The more earnest types—like Emma Van Buskirk, editor in chief of the Evergreen Owl—were energized by the responsibility of being a senior. Emma was already hard at work changing the design of the Owl. Not that anyone cared about things like the magazine, or the yearbook, or the winter theater production of Grease. But for some people that was the point of being a senior: taking charge, treating teachers as equals, bossing people around.
• • •
Another thing about senior year, it leveled the playing field socially. Claude and Petra, who had been the most closely watched couple at our school, were suddenly not so closely watched. Nobody cared if they had a fight. Nobody was interested if their love would stand the test of time. Obviously, it wouldn’t. Obviously, in eight short months every one of us would walk away from this place and our high school careers would disappear into the past, dust in the wind.
And anyway, most people had their own dramas now. They had their own boyfriends or girlfriends. Love, sex, romance: It wasn’t just for the popular kids anymore. Everyone was doing it.
• • •
I managed to keep Antoinette out of my mind. But after two full days of her not making any attempt to hang out or text me or otherwise acknowledge me, I started to feel frustrated.
On Wednesday she actually ate lunch in the cafeteria, which was a rare thing indeed. She was sitting by herself and I hurried to join her, but two other girls got there first. Then Kai came, and within a minute or two the whole table was crowded with girls. I eventually had to slink off without getting any sense of what was going on. I suspected nothing was.
So I didn’t text her. Or call her. Or look for her in the hall. If this was what she wanted, this was what she would get.
The hard part was Kai. She had become one of my main friends over the summer, if not my best friend. But now that Antoinette was back, Kai’s loyalties were with her. I kept starting to text Kai. What’s up? Why are you guys ignoring me? What the hell is going on with you two? But I never sent them. I had to be cool. I had to be. I could not make a fool of myself with Kai and Antoinette.
44
So I retreated back into my own crowd. This meant sitting with Claude, Logan, Petra, and the others at lunch. Where Hanna was in these first weeks, it was hard to say. Sometimes she was around. Most of the time she wasn’t. She didn’t seem to mind that Petra and Claude were together. She also didn’t seem to want Claude back. Sometimes she’d be sitting with some random person, or talking to someone from her French class. It kind of didn’t make sense. Hanna had social standards. She didn’t hang out with just anyone. Now it was like, Why is she talking to that guy?
At the same time, Bennett Schmidt was on the rise. It didn’t hurt that every year he seemed to get better looking. He was now about six foot two, with high cheekbones and a certain bad-boy scruffiness. . . . On the first day of school he pulled into the parking lot in a ten-year-old BMW with tinted windows and custom rims, which he’d bought over the summer—probably with drug money. He’d been quite the chick magnet at Agenda over the summer and he seemed destined for the same status at Evergreen, especially among the sophomore and junior girls. They didn’t know his past or what a creep he had once been. They just knew he was a hot senior with a BMW and cocaine if you wanted it. And a lot of them did.
Not that I was going to be friends with him. I still remembered him chopping up ants in science class. But being seniors made anything possible. It wasn’t as important who your friends were anymore. There were no rules. You could hang out with anyone.
For that reason, when Bennett stopped me in the parking lot one day and asked if we could talk, I did something I never would have done as a junior: I said yes.
We walked to his car. One of the other reasons Bennett had become so popular was because he didn’t make stupid mistakes socially. For instance, with me, he never assumed we were friends. Even when we saw each other at Agenda over the summer, he never tried to talk to me. He stayed within his limits. Maybe it was a drug-dealer thing. He never came to you. You had to go to him.
He unlocked the BMW and we got inside. Unlike Claude’s BMW, Bennett’s car was old and not in the best shape. The passenger seat had a rip in it. And the interior had the lingering aroma of pot smoke.
“I only have a few minutes,” I said to him, as I spotted some old french fries that had fallen down between the seat and the door.
We both shut our doors. Bennett settled his tall frame in his seat. For a moment we just sat there.
“So what did you want to talk about?” I asked.
Bennett didn’t move. His hands rested in his lap. “Hanna,” he said finally.
“Hanna?” I said, almost laughing at the thought of it.
Bennett was not affected by my reaction. He reached into his coat and brought out a small pipe. From somewhere else came some weed. He filled the bowl and offered it to me. I declined.
He held the pipe in his lap. “I’m in love with her,” he said.
“Yeah?” I said, grinning at the absurdity of this. “And when did this happen?”
“Over the summer. The last month or so.”
“You saw Hanna over the summer?”
“She wanted some weed. She called me.”
I watched Bennett more closely. He wasn’t kidding.
“She came over. Got what she needed. We hung out.” He looked down at the pipe. “We kinda hooked up.”
“What do you mean, kinda?” I asked.
“We hooked up.”
“Like hooked up, hooked up?” I asked.
Bennett nodded.
“Like you guys had sex?” I said, to further clarify.
Bennett didn’t say anything. He was still holding the pipe and a lighter in his lap, staring out the front of his BMW like a sea captain facing a great storm.
“Wait,” I said, to make absolutely sure I was understanding this. “So you. Had sex. With Hanna Sloan?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow,” I said.
“The thing is, I love her,” he said. “But I don’t know how to deal with a person like that.”
“Have you told her you love her?”
“No,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t think I better.”
“So you and Hanna,” I said, because I still wasn’t absolutely 100 percent sure I had it straight. “You guys had sex. Together. Like in a bed.”
Bennett stared out his window. “It was incredible. Like nothing I’ve ever—”
“Okay, okay,” I said. I didn’t want to hear the details. “So what do you want from me?”
“Could she actually like me?” asked Bennett, turning in my direction. “Could I be with her? I mean, I feel like I could. But I don’t know. She’s so tricky.”
“Oh yeah, she’s tricky,” I agreed.
“The way she talks. You can’t tell if she’s serious or not. Sometimes I think the whole thing’s a joke. And the joke’s on me.”
“It might be a joke,” I said. “And it might be on you.”
“I can take it. I mean, who cares, right? She’s worth it.”
“Yes. She is.”
“But if there’s something real there, how do I tell?”
“I don’t know how you tell.”
“But you know those people,” said Bennett. “They’re your friends.”
“They are my friends. But that doesn’t mean I can read Hanna.”
For a long moment we both stared out the windshield of the BMW like two sea captains.
“I really like her,” said Bennett. “I think about her all the time. She has this hold on me. . . .”
“I know.”
I began to feel a nee
d to not be sitting there anymore. I looked at my watch. “I gotta go,” I said. “I’m sorry. I wish I could help you more.” I reached for the door handle. But before I pulled it, I turned back toward Bennett. “Can I ask you something?”
“What’s that?”
“How did you get with Antoinette?”
He shrugged. “I sold her weed.”
“And then what?”
“And then we hooked up.”
“But like . . . ,” I started. But I probably didn’t want to hear the rest of the story. And he didn’t seem eager to tell it. I pulled the door latch and got out.
“Good luck with Hanna,” I said. And to myself I thought: You’re gonna need it.
45
Henry Oswald arranged for me to meet his brother, William, who’d gone to Cal Arts twenty years before. William Oswald lived in Tacoma, outside Seattle, so I had to drive up there. I spent the night before the trip with Richie at Passport Photos. He’d changed his attitude about art school now that he’d had some success. He thought it would be fun for me, and helpful for my career. “You’ll make contacts. You’ll know the right people,” he said. “And you’ll learn to speak all that mumbo jumbo. You’ll be able to explain your artistic vision.”
To meet William Oswald, I went for a relatively normal look: a new shirt, my cleanest jeans, and Nikes. I even got a haircut the day before. I drove to Tacoma on Saturday. I had a dozen of my best prints in a leather portfolio Richie had lent me.
William Oswald’s house was on a wooded hill, next to a small creek. I’d been to Henry Oswald’s house many times over the years, for Christmas and birthday parties. They were our closest family friends. William Oswald’s house wasn’t half as big as Henry’s. It didn’t have a pool. The driveway was gravel. He didn’t have a Mercedes. He had a Nissan Pathfinder.
Inside though, things got a lot more interesting. For starters, it was totally open space. The main room had a ceiling that went all the way up to the roof. There were big windows and expensive lighting and huge posters high up on the walls, some from movies, some from commercials. One poster had a giant eye, with something about Swedish TV written underneath it.
William offered me something to drink. I could see the resemblance between the two brothers. William had that same intelligence in his face. But he looked more childlike and more fun. His hair was mostly gray. His glasses had a little chain around them and rested on his chest. It was hard to imagine him naked, on peyote, running among the cacti at Cal Arts.
His wife might have been older than him. She had long silver hair and beautiful dark eyes. She was very warm and welcoming. She seemed smart and was probably very good at whatever she did in her own career. I had the random thought: That’s what Antoinette will look like when she gets old.
I had come for dinner, so that’s what we did; we ate dinner. At first it felt pretty awkward. I didn’t know what to say or how to be. I’d never met a real artist before. They got me to tell the story of Elliot Square, which they seemed to enjoy. I showed them the scar on the side of my nose, which was still pretty noticeable, though everyone told me it would go away.
After dinner I got out the prints. William brought them into his office, which had special lights and drafting tables and every kind of tool or gadget you could imagine. Along the walls, books and files were stored on shelves that went up ten feet. I noticed an old paint-splattered boombox sitting on the windowsill. I wondered if that was from his days at Cal Arts. It probably was.
William placed my prints on a worktable and turned the light on them. He studied them closely. I stood beside him. He looked for several minutes, pointing out a few things, telling me aspects of the printing process I didn’t know. Then he turned off the light. He said they showed promise. But he didn’t gush over them like Richie did. William Oswald was a pro in a different way. Richie was about attitude and excitement. William Oswald was more about details and getting things exactly right.
We talked a little about what I wanted to do, photojournalism or fine-art photography. I told him I didn’t know. He showed me a book by a contemporary photographer I didn’t know. These were very ordinary-looking photographs of suburban streets or department stores or people walking in an airport with their rolling suitcases. They weren’t like Robert Frank. They didn’t capture the sadness of an old man or the bored life of a waitress. They didn’t seem to capture anything. They were blank and sort of empty in a way.
“I don’t understand these,” I told William Oswald, flipping through the book. For a second I wondered if I’d blown it by being too honest.
“Well, of course you don’t,” he said, smiling. “You haven’t been to art school!”
• • •
On the drive home I called Kai. We still hadn’t had a real conversation since school started, but now that seemed ridiculous. She must have been thinking the same thing because she picked up after one ring.
“Guess who I just had dinner with?” I said.
“Who?”
“The guy who’s going to recommend me to Cal Arts.”
“Oh my God! What was he like?”
“He was a serious dude,” I said. It was a relief to be talking to her again.
“Well, you gotta be serious to make a living as an artist, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I guess so. He was so pro. His office, it was like, the best stuff, the best of everything.”
“What did he say about Cal Arts?”
“He seemed to think I would like it there. I guess he did.”
“Did he like your photographs?”
“He didn’t really say.”
“Wow, how scary!”
Kai was also deciding which colleges to apply to that fall. She had confessed over the summer her secret life of being a good student. She had a 3.5 grade-point average. And good test scores. Also, she had been sending her writing to different websites over the summer. One place wanted her to write a weekly column about being a senior in high school.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you writing that column?”
“No. They wanted it to be about the party scene,” she told me. “Since they thought I was such a wild girl.”
“And you didn’t want to do it?”
“No. It was too weird. These thirty-year-old dudes wanting me to write about high school make-out parties? And anyway, no college wants to see that. They wanna hear about volunteering at the senior center or digging up artifacts in Mexico.”
“Yeah, you kinda have to play the game,” I said. This was a strange sentence to hear coming out of my mouth.
“I know,” said Kai. “It’s lame, but it’s true. You have to tell them what they want to hear.”
46
After my conversation with Bennett, I felt a new urgency about my situation with Antoinette. If guys like Bennett were getting with girls like Hanna, it was time for me to do something about Antoinette. I deserve to know where things stand, I told myself.
She was, as usual, elusive at school. So I texted her, asking if we could talk. She didn’t reply. So I called her. Her phone was turned off. So I drove over to her house. I knocked on the front door. Her mother answered.
I said hi and did the polite-friend routine. I asked if Antoinette was there. Her mother said yes and called up the stairs. We both waited. A minute later, Antoinette appeared in sweatpants and a hoodie.
“Hey,” she said. She seemed surprised to see me. “What’s up?”
“Can I talk to you?” I said.
She seemed a little worried by this request. But she walked outside with me and shut the door. It was a warm night, still September, so we walked across her front yard to the street and sat on the curb.
“So what’s going on?” I said, I still hadn’t quite caught my breath.
“Nothing,” she said. “What’s going on with you?”
“I called you, but you never called me back.”
“I know. I keep forgetting to charge my phone. Sorry.”
So sh
e had an excuse for that. But now what was I supposed to say? I had promised myself I wouldn’t bring up Berlin. But what else was there to talk about?
“It seems like I’ve barely seen you since school started,” I said.
“I’ve been really busy.”
“It’s almost like you’re avoiding me.”
“I’m not avoiding you.”
We sat there. Crickets chirped in the grass around us.
“How was the rest of your time in Germany?” I asked.
“Fine. I was only there another day or two. And then my dad got mad, because he thought I was leaving the next week, and so then he was complaining that he barely got to see me.”
I nodded. She was staring at the house across the street with a faraway look. That wasn’t good.
It occurred to me there wasn’t any good way to do this. And anyway, it wasn’t going to matter what strategy I used. So I said the exact line I had vowed not to say. “Are we going to continue what we started in Berlin?”
She exhaled softly. She looked down at her shoes. “I thought that was more of a friends thing,” she said quietly.
I swallowed. I took a long breath. I gathered myself and then said with a steady voice: “Could we at least try?”
“Try what?”
“Being together.”
“We have tried,” she said.
“When have we tried?”
“This whole time we’ve been trying,” she said.
“This whole time? Like starting when?”
“Starting when you came here the night my brother died.” She pointed across the street at the spot I had stood with my bike.
This was a blow. “I didn’t know that,” I said, my voice faltering again. “You should have told me that. If I’d known we were trying, I would have tried harder!”
Antoinette sighed. “Gavin. C’mon. I like you so much.”
“No. Please. Don’t start with the ‘friends’ thing.”
Antoinette let a few seconds pass. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to mislead you. I thought since we were in Berlin . . . and it was so fun to see each other. . . . It was like a perfect moment.”
