One Lonely Degree

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “So what’s your name?” the new guy asks. He’s in no hurry to get the words out, and I’m immediately suspicious. Why does he want to know my name?

  “Finn Kavanagh,” I tell him. He breaks into a toothy grin that makes my stomach churn. Did somebody put him up to this? I glance over at Jasper, who is taking it all in like a silent movie, and telepathically command him to stay where he is. “What’s yours?”

  “Jersy,” he says happily, smiling wider than ever. “Jersy Mikulski.”

  Jersy. A familiar feeling ripples through me. Like eating ice cream on your front porch in summer. I say his name over and over again in my head, waiting for a lightbulb to switch on. He’s waiting too, and we stand there facing each other, feeling the moment stretch back into the past.

  “Yeah,” I say slowly, memories jogging back to me in frustratingly small pieces. “Okay.” I bob my head and shift my books to my other arm. It’s a weird feeling, remembering something you didn’t know you’d forgotten in the first place. My brain doesn’t know where to put the fragments at first. “Your mom was at Eastman’s, right?” My mother still works in their marketing department. Our moms were pretty good friends back in the day. “You guys moved to—”

  “Kingston,” he says. “Yeah. It’s weird. When I saw you in there, it didn’t really click, but there was something …” He motions vaguely towards my body. “You look different. You’re so tall.” He doesn’t say that like it’s a good or bad thing, just a fact.

  “Well, six-year-olds are usually shorter,” I joke, beginning to relax. “Hair’s the same, though.” I grab a chunk with my free hand and he laughs. “So what’re you doing back?”

  He shrugs, his smile beginning to disappear. “What’s this place like anyway?” He’s two inches shorter than me and his blue-green eyes have to look up at mine. It makes me want to slouch, and because of that I stand even straighter.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. The kind of information he wants is no good coming from a stranger. The answer’s completely dependent on who’s asking and who’s answering. “But then I have nothing to compare it to, you know?”

  Jersy nods like that’s just the answer he was expecting. The boy I remember wasn’t afraid of anything. He got a concussion somersaulting into the pool at a company barbecue. The next time I saw him, both his arms were bandaged. He’d scraped them something fierce trying out a stunt on his bike, and his mother shouted at him, without raising her voice, when he unwrapped one to show me.

  “It all looks the same from here,” he says, staring up the hall. I follow his eyes. Kids. Lockers. A sea of uniforms in motion. My eyes zoom back to the spot where Jasper was waiting. He’s deserted me, but this time I can’t blame him. Lunch never lasts long enough. I concentrate on my kilt, ignoring my own silence. “So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jersy continues. “Don’t worry, I won’t sit in your chair.” He blinks at me like he knows he’s cute. All the cute guys at St. Mark’s know they’re cute, but there’s not one genuine Beautiful Boy in the entire population.

  “Ha. Ha,” I say sarcastically. God, I’m an absolute genius. I turn my back on him and point my genius self in the direction of the cafeteria.

  “Finn,” he shouts after me.

  My head whips around to find him. “Jersy,” I shout back. My palms are sweaty and I can’t explain why.

  “Where the fuck’s the cafeteria in this place?”

  Jersy doesn’t sit with us at lunch. He disappears into the crowd the second we step into the cafeteria. I buy chicken nuggets and fries and plop down next to Audrey. Everyone else is already seated: Jasper, Maggie (who isn’t quite smart enough to be a brainiac but too quiet to be anyone else), Teresa (Audrey’s friend from drama class), and her boyfriend, Edwardo. It’s not a pack the way other people have them. We don’t do group activities together outside of school. We don’t exclude people.

  “So what’d the new guy have to say?” Jasper asks, plunging his fork into a plate of macaroni and cheese. “Did he tell you his name?”

  Audrey, Maggie, and Teresa stare optimistically over at me. “New guy?” Audrey repeats.

  We’re all so starved for variety that I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad. “Our moms worked together years ago,” I say dismissively. “His family just moved back.” I don’t want any of them getting too excited, because I know exactly how this will go. He won’t be the new guy for long. He’ll be just like everyone else, and then we won’t even mention him.

  But Maggie’s already fired up. “And he remembered you,” she says. “That’s sweet.” Maggie’s big on “sweet.” She uses that word a lot—mostly in relation to romances she reads about in Us magazine.

  I shrug and shake my head a little. Whatever, Mags. That girl needs to get a life. I pop a chicken nugget into my mouth, suddenly feeling too bitchy for words. It’s better not to expect too much to begin with. I shouldn’t let myself forget that.

  Audrey bumps her shoulder against mine, sensing my slip into bad-mood territory. I don’t know what I’d do without her. Would I have to start reading Us magazine and haunting Blockbuster Video so that I could communicate meaningfully with Maggie and Jasper? “Are we still hitting the mall later?” she asks.

  “For sure,” I say gratefully.

  Jasper’s macaroni makes a squelching noise as he stabs it. Audrey and I giggle with our mouths closed. Jasper smiles too. “It lives,” he jokes.

  “And dies,” Audrey says, pointing to the impaled elbow noodles on Jasper’s fork.

  The six of us are staring down at Jasper’s murdered macaroni and smiling like idiots at the lame joke. “It’s actually not bad,” he says, holding out his fork. “Anyone want to try?”

  “I will.” I reach in front of Audrey and take the fork. He’s right, it’s not bad. Macaroni is one of those foods that’s hard to ruin. Jasper smiles at me as I nod. Sometimes it seems so easy to make people happy that I wonder why I don’t do it more often.

  AuDreY anD I try on nail polish in Shopper’s Drug Mart, a different color on each finger, and then shuffle around clothing stores, laughing at all the hoochie outfits. We stuff our faces with flavored popcorn and flip through ridiculous magazines we’d never pay for—magazines that promise to reveal “The Seven Sex Wishes He Wants You to Grant,” “The Even Bigger O: What You Need to Know,” and my favorite, “Rock Star Sex: How to Turn a Good Girl Bad.”

  It’s hard to believe anyone could take a word of them seriously, but they do. Not the people that I’ll know in London or New York, but almost everyone I know by name right now. Without Audrey I’d be laughing at the idiocy of it all practically solo, and how unfunny would that be?

  There are times I’d swear that I don’t know the actual difference between funny and unfunny or wanting to think about the opposite sex and not wanting to think about them. The gaps between the viewpoints blend and shift in my mind only to yank themselves apart and shift again.

  The part of me that still thinks about Record Store Guy wants to swing by HMV and flick through CDs. He might come and stand beside me, look over my shoulder, and say something like “Buy their first album instead. I promise, it’s much better.” He’s at least four years older than me and a good few inches taller, probably around six foot two. Long sleeves would be hiding his Celtic armband tattoo, but I’d know it was there. I’d look up at him and imagine tangling my fingers into his curly black hair.

  “The first one,” I’d repeat thoughtfully. “Really?”

  “Mmm, definitely,” he’d say. “They completely changed direction after their lead guitarist left the band.”

  And all the time my mind and body would be memorizing him for future reference. To take out and play with whenever I want. Only I can’t do that properly anymore, even when I think I want to. It’s been that way for months, and I tell myself it doesn’t make any difference but I can’t make myself believe it. I don’t want to walk into HMV wishing everything could feel as easy as it used to.

  “We should catch the n
ext bus,” I tell Audrey. “You told your mom you’d be home for dinner.” Her stepfather is strict about those things, which means her mother is too. It’s a pain, but at the same time there are certain aspects of his strictness that I can understand. When you’re a cop, you must be hyperaware of all the bad and dangerous things people do. It’s like when something nasty happens to you, and the potential for it to happen again stands out in a hundred different situations where you wouldn’t have noticed it before.

  We pass by HMV as we walk back through the mall, and the part of me I was telling you about before glances inside hoping to catch sight of Ryan. “Is he there?” Audrey says, her eyes following mine.

  “I don’t know.” I see him the moment the words are out. “Oh—yeah, he is.”

  “And you’re sure—” Audrey begins.

  “I don’t know,” I say truthfully, tearing my gaze away from the record store and looking at Audrey. “I don’t know.”

  Neither of us stops walking.

  The atmosphere at home isn’t much tenser than usual. My parents are quiet and look tired. Dad asks how Audrey is and I tell him she’s fine. Mom’s always saying that I need to expand my circle, but Dad just keeps asking about Audrey, like I’m not a complete freak for having only one true friend.

  “I almost forgot,” I say suddenly. For once I actually have news Mom will want to hear. “There’s this new guy, Jersy, at school. Jersy Mikulski. You used to work with his mother, like, ten years ago.”

  “Anna Mikulski.” Mom’s eyebrows fly up towards the ceiling. “Did you get her phone number? I’d love to give her a call.”

  “I barely spoke to him.” I can see where this is going, but there’s not a thing I can do about it. Mom won’t understand why I don’t want to ask Jersy for his home phone number. “I didn’t even recognize him until he told me.”

  “Well, you can pass on our number tomorrow,” she says, her voice loud with excitement. “I was thinking of her not too long ago, isn’t that funny? You two were just the same age.” Mom beams at me. “You and her son. He was a real handful. Made me feel lucky that you were so quiet and well behaved.”

  “Too bad you don’t feel the same way now.” I say it like I’m joking, but Dad pushes his chair away from the table.

  “Come on, Finn,” he says. “Give your old man a hand with the dishes.” I know this tone. He’s trying to head off an argument between Mom and me, but I’m not in the mood to argue anyway.

  I help Dad with the dishes, walk Samsam, finish my homework, IM Audrey, and then climb into bed. At first I’m afraid that I won’t be able to sleep again, that I’ll repeat last night’s performance, but then I hear my parents’ bedroom door open. My mom’s voice is low and strained. Dad says her name like he’s reading a police report: “Gloria, enough.” There’s no feeling behind the words, and I shiver under the covers and keep listening. I listen to the silence for so long that the effort of it makes me want to close my eyes. And that’s the last thing I remember.

  I pass Adam Porter in the hallway nearly every day. His perfect skin and razor-sharp cheekbones make him look like an actor playing a seventeen-year-old. Most of his friends look like actors too—or sports stars. They walk and talk like they’re putting on a drama for the rest of us, and for the most part it works. People watch them. People talk about them. Lots of people want to be them.

  But not me. I don’t even look at Adam Porter, and he doesn’t look at me. When the overcrowded hallways force us close together, he turns his face away from mine like it offends him to look at me. I feel queasy when he does that, but it doesn’t show on my face. I’m tough. I’m solid steel. Nothing he does can affect me.

  I tell myself that every time, but I still break into a sweat. My underarms are damp by the time I get to art class. I’m glad that Jasper won’t shut up. I listen to him as I sketch, nodding at all the right moments. This is all right, I think. I can do this. I’m tough. I’m steel. My lines on the page are definite. I know what I’m doing.

  Then somebody rushes by me, bumping my back. I jump, sending my pencil skidding across the page. “Whoa,” Jersy says, casting a glance behind him as he continues hastily on towards his seat. “Sorry.”

  The period is already half over, and Mr. Ferguson shakes his head and grabs the attendance sheet. “Jersy,” he says, calling him back. “Don’t make yourself comfortable yet.”

  Jersy slides irritably out of the seat next to Abel’s, strides back across the room, and leans down over Mr. Ferguson’s desk. Their conversation is a whisper and I practice lipreading while flipping my eraser between my fingers.

  “It’s not too bad,” Jasper says, pointing down at my polluted environmental campaign and breaking my concentration.

  “I know,” I tell him. “It’s just pencil.”

  By the time I’m through with the eraser, you’ll never know it happened. If it was that easy to erase bits of my life, I’d be a different Finn.

  My eraser streaks recklessly back across the page, leaving rivers of absence that gleam like fork lightning. I can do better than this. My first thoughts are never right; my first thoughts are pure me. Second thoughts aren’t much better.

  Jasper coughs as he studies my anti-masterpiece, and right then Jersy swings by behind us again, biting his lip. This brainiac-turned-stoner guy named Billy mutters something to him and Jersy nods, his blue-green eyes looking fed up to the teeth. He manhandles the chair before collapsing into it with his arms crossed.

  I didn’t intend to pass on our phone number anyway, but now I don’t have to feel guilty about it. Jersy needs to be left alone.

  “It was good,” Jasper says, tapping my page. “What’d you do that for?”

  I shrug. “Maybe I’m feeling destructive.” Sometimes I can’t control what I think or feel. Other times I think about Adam Porter just to prove to myself that I can handle it. He doesn’t really have any power over me. How can someone who won’t even look at you have any power over you?

  Across the room Mr. Ferguson is patting down his gray hair. He messes with his hair so much that it’s amazing he still has any. It’s so annoying that I want to charge across the room and pin his hands down by his side. I do the next best thing—I watch him until he catches my gaze. His hands float down to his desk as his cheeks tighten. The second he does that I feel bad for him. Why stop on my account?

  Sometimes I think so hard that it’s a wonder my head doesn’t fly off. Like before, when Billy Young made that comment to Jersy, I started remembering all these details about Billy. He was the smartest guy in my seventh-grade class, although he never raised his hand. He threw up before the annual public-speaking contest and then won it by a mile with his speech on Nelson Mandela. This dork girl, Tamyra, used to follow him around the schoolyard, but he was never mean to her. In fact, he used to be equally nice to everyone—before he turned stoner and gave up on the rest of the population.

  I sneak a look at Billy, wondering why he changed so much, but Jersy catches me. He mouths something, but I’m already dropping my gaze, pretending that I can’t see.

  Jasper elbows me and motions towards Jersy. “Your buddy wants something.”

  By now half the table is watching me, turning my face warm, and I force myself to stare at Jersy straight on, but by the time I do he’s already turned away. When the bell rings a few minutes later, the entire class moves in slow motion towards the door. No one’s ever in a hurry for art class to be over, and that makes it easy for me to wait for Jersy without being obvious. I don’t even know why I’m bothering—unless it’s for my six-year-old self.

  I feel like an idiot the second I step into the hall. My legs want to rush to civics, but Jersy’s right behind me and he’s saying, “Hey, Finn, hold up a second.”

  “Hmm?” I stop and face him, casual as anything.

  “You owe me big-time,” he says, grinning like a kid trying to hold a secret. I’m completely clueless and it must be written all over my face because he tilts his head and add
s, “For not stealing your chair again. The guy next to me thinks he’s a fucking Mormon—and here I thought this was Catholic school.” He motions to my civics textbook, which is thicker than the Bible but even less interesting. “Can I write in this?”

  “Write in it?” I repeat.

  “My home phone number.” Jersy has his pencil ready and is flipping over the cover. “I told my mom about running into you— she wants your mom to get in touch.”

  “Okay.” I stare down at the digits appearing on the page. “Thanks.” I’m so hung up on reading the magic numbers that the burst of laughter from across the hall nearly makes me drop my book. I’d know that laugh anywhere; it’s the laugh of a high school superstar, and it makes me sick to my stomach.

  I don’t look up but I see Adam Porter anyway. He’s in my peripheral vision for the second time today. Maybe if I didn’t have to look at him all the time I’d be better, or maybe I’m just too weak to get past it. I don’t know anymore. My saliva’s bitter in my mouth and my fingers jerk, just like Samsam’s paws do when he’s dreaming.

  “Thanks,” I repeat, carefully closing my textbook.

  “Sure.” Jersy gives me one last glance before he ambles off down the hall. He’s still too much of a mystery for me to understand what the look means, but if I had to guess I’d say he just figured out that I’m the freakiest girl at St. Mark’s.

  MOm DOeSn’T WaSTe any time calling Mrs. Mikulski. A couple of days later they’re drinking herbal tea in our living room, all smiles and cheerful voices. Dad pops his head in to say hello and then excuses himself to grade history papers for his senior class at Archbishop MacNeil. Dad’s not the most sociable person in the world. For the most part he’s happier spending time with homework assignments than with people. My mom thinks that’s why I turned out how I did, not that she’s ever said it out loud.

  I have to admit I’m a little curious about Mrs. Mikulski, though—and not just because she happens to be Jersy’s mother. You can forget a lot in nine years, but I remember her sitting quietly next to her husband at an Eastman company picnic. At the time I wished my mom could be more like her instead of flitting around from group to group, thriving on being the center of attention. It embarrassed me to watch her, and as soon as I realized that, I went and stood beside her, feeling guilty for something she probably hadn’t conceived of.