“Won’t you be cold?” she calls. She’s holding the door open with one arm and wrapping the other around her waist. The collar of her pajama shirt flaps in the wind.
“I’m fine,” I shout over my shoulder as I throw my bag into the car.
“And you’ll be home for dinner?” she asks.
“That’s the deal, right?” I ask, sliding behind the wheel. It’s my day to pick up Kris.
“Right,” she says.
“Then I’ll see you for dinner.” I turn the key in the ignition.
She steps back and lets the storm door swing shut in front of her, but she doesn’t leave. She folds her arms across her chest and watches me, squinting, like it’s hard to see, even though the glass is perfectly clean.
I wave. Then twist around to back out of the driveway.
It’s not until I catch myself in the rearview mirror that I realize I never checked my reflection this morning. My hair falls in wisps around my face. My cheeks burn red from the cold. My mouth seems wider, my eyes darker. And the neck of Jake’s shirt—the cotton jagged where I cut it—slants across my collarbone, hinting at the bare shoulder under my jacket.
I look like someone else.
She smiles.
I follow Kris into the journalism room before first period, shrug off my jacket, and throw it on the heater by the window. If she notices Jake’s shirt or the way it hangs off my shoulder, she doesn’t mention it. She’s too busy analyzing the whiteboard in the corner of the room, making sure this week’s issue has enough article assignments. Our high school has one of the few weekly independent papers in the nation, and Kris takes it seriously. Not just because it’s an approved venue for criticizing Westfield, but also because she thinks it’s her ticket out of here. Editor-in-chief of a nationally award-winning newspaper isn’t the worst thing for your college application. Plus, being a staff member has its perks: passes to leave campus during school hours; keys to the room, so you can come and go as you please.
The week after I walked out of Jolene’s room with rope burns on my wrists, Kris made me a set. I’d told Jolene to leave me alone. She’d done one better. She’d stopped talking to me, and so had every other girl in our class except for Kris. It was like Jolene had cast a spell over them, or rearranged the facts until I was a stranger. So instead of growing gills at sleepovers, I built up my map collection and hung out with my mom on the weekends. At school I was stone—no stares, shouts, or shoves could penetrate me. At night I was wet cement, pouring myself out drip by drip to reset and harden again by morning.
That was the year we studied symbiosis in biology. We learned about the shrimp and the goby fish. How each has its strengths and weaknesses. The shrimp digs killer burrows but is basically blind; the goby has excellent eyesight but nowhere to hide. So when they get together, the shrimp provides the protection and the goby acts as lookout. Without each other, they can’t survive. That hit home. But it was the gutless marine worm that really got to me—the one that needs bacteria to substitute for its missing stomach. Because that was Jolene—the bacteria that crept under my skin and found a place to live. She was my guts, and without her I felt like I couldn’t eat, breathe, or sleep. Like I might not make it. Like I was dying a little, from the inside, just from being me again, in my small box of a world. But if that were true, wouldn’t Jolene be dying a little too?
I watched her in the hall one afternoon, laughing with Bella. She seemed fine without me.
So a week later, after lots of convincing from Kris, I started hanging out with the journalism kids. I didn’t know most of them at the beginning, but the longer I hung out with them, the less they seemed like the staff of the paper and the more they seemed like potential friends. I even started doing some work with them. Turned out my lifelong map habit was good for something—during those endless hours spent staring at lines and fonts and colors, I’d developed an eye for design. I suggested a few changes to the front page one night, and pretty soon I was laying out the whole paper. It was only four pages—six for a special edition—but it was mine. Eventually Kris gave me the honorary title of Design Editor, even though it didn’t mean anything—it wasn’t on the masthead. I wasn’t even taking journalism yet. But I was starting to feel better. Like less of a gutless worm and more of a human.
I pass between the round tables, find a seat at one of the large monitors, wake up the computer, and open the file for the current issue. So far the only finished articles are Kris’s op-ed on the New Jersey school rankings system and Jim’s cover story on insufficient funding for the independent study program. Usually this is my favorite time to play around with the layout: reset the text boxes, thin the lines above and below the pull quotes, make sure that the fonts match and the pages pop, but today I can’t seem to take it all in. For some reason, I can’t immediately see what’s off about it, what needs to be changed in order to make it flow and fall into alignment. It just looks empty: blank columns gaping like wide eyes and open mouths.
“By the way,” Kris says. I swivel in my chair and find the back of her fuzzy, chunky cardigan. Her red ringlets are held up by two pencils. Her blue, dry-erase marker squeaks against the whiteboard as she writes. “You’re giving Bella a lift home.”
“I am?”
“Yup. She doesn’t want to ride with Jolene after what happened at the party.” Kris caps her pen and grabs her bag.
“Jolene’s not here.”
“She wasn’t here yesterday,” Kris corrects. “She’s back today. According to Bella.”
My eyes dart to the door, but all I see is the bland, tan tile of the hallway and the banner that shouts Be Your Best Selves!
“So you invited her to come with us?” I get up from the computer and swipe my jacket off the heater. It’s hot where it covered the vent and stings my arm for a second before the heat releases. “You sure that won’t ruin your untouchable status as a Nobody?”
The bell rings. Kris holds the door open for me. “Bella told off Jolene at her own party. The social hostesses of the senior class aren’t speaking. I’m pretty sure nobody’s status is untouchable at this point.”
CHAPTER 17
HAVE YOU SEEN Jolene?
The whispers begin by second period. Behind cupped hands and locker doors, her name snakes its way from mouths to ears.
She looks pale. Sick. She has the flu? No, mono. No, Lyme disease. No, she tried to kill herself. Pills. She can barely move. She’s back in school, but only for a few periods. She doesn’t have the strength for a full day. Trust me. We’re friends. I sat with her once at lunch. She liked my bangs. And I’m telling you. She’s not okay. Yeah, she was beautiful. But now. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you too. I saw her near the wall, crawling into class on all fours. It’s so, so sad. How does that happen? I mean, for so long she was everything and then—well, Bella was the one with all the friends, I guess. Like I said, I sat with her once. I could do it again. But if she’s going to hit on me, forget it. I heard what happened at that party. No wonder Hudson dumped her for that new girl. Wait, you know her? Wait, I know her? Tell me!
Kris was right. Now that Bella and Jolene aren’t speaking, everyone else is.
By the end of the week Jolene is in the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the scrape of metal against linoleum, the scratch of chalk across boards, and the hissing, bitter wind that follows me out the door and back in again. And even though I held her hair back and tucked her in after Bella’s party, I start to wonder: What really happened that night? What did it do to her? Where has she been? Where is she
when Hudson presses me against the wall before physics, tips up my chin, and makes my lips wet with his—
when I give Bella a ride home from school. When she sits with me and Kris in the cafeteria—
when I leave lunch early—
when I spend afternoons in Hudson’s room, familiar now, with the feel of his hands on my jeans, the sight of my shirt on his floor, the temperature of his sheets (how they’re cool when I get there a
nd warm when I leave)—
when I abandon all other routes to trace the space between his freckles and the straight stretch of his collarbone—
when I ditch my phone in a pine-scented drawer, where I can’t check it for texts—
when I grow new skin where she’s been—
when I harden?
Has she seen me?
CHAPTER 18
I’M IN FIRST-PERIOD Spanish rearranging the desks for ¡Charlemos, Chicos!, aka Talk Tuesday—the day we play out these little skits. According to Señora, it’s the only way we can truly experience español. I lean over and push a metal desk across the room with both hands. It resists with groans and squeaks. On the final shove my shirt shifts, exposing my shoulder. Hudson’s shirt, actually. I grabbed it from his floor one afternoon. He told me to keep it. I didn’t ask before I slit its neck. I blow my hair out of my eyes and stand up, leaving my shirt where it is.
Señora’s long skirt blooms behind her as she walks with purposeful strides around the room, pointing to a corner there, straightening a desk here, examining the scene with puckered lips, squinted eyes, her hands on her hips. She’s always extra-energetic on Talk Tuesdays. It’s almost like she’s as bored with conjugating verbs as we are.
“¡Vamos chicos!” Señora says, surveying the room with a satisfied grin. “¡Hablemos!”
So far this year we’ve been to the market, made breakfast, introduced ourselves at a party, dumped our boyfriends and girlfriends, and ordered food in a restaurant.
Today we’re doing directions.
I spend half the period telling two girls in matching sweater vests to make a left and go straight to get to the bus station, then we switch places. The script says to introduce myself, explain I’m lost, and ask for help finding the nearest transportation.
I’m about to tell them I don’t know where I am when I feel it—a slight shift in the air. I stop midsentence. My eyes find the door. I see a flash of dark hair, chestnut on top, auburn underneath.
“¿Necesitas ayuda?” asks one of the sweater vests. Do you need help? I turn back to them. They look sideways at each other, then toward me. I adjust my shirt and smooth my hair.
I thought I heard the sharp crack of Jolene’s laugh in the hall this morning, too, but when I turned, it wasn’t her.
For the past week Jolene has been as slippery and scattered as the whispers. She came back to school, but it’s like she’s not here. She doesn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria anymore or linger by her locker. She’s not on my long or short routes to psychology. And she’s obviously not talking to Bella outside history, since she and Bella aren’t talking at all.
“Sí,” I say. “Estoy perdida.” I’m lost, I tell them. As the words leave my lips, I feel it again. I jerk my head up, and there she is: her dark hair hanging so straight it looks wet, her hazel eyes locked on me, her palm pressed against the square of glass, her scar darker than it should be. I blink my eyes, raise my own hand without thinking.
One of the sweater vests sighs in front of me, cocks her head. “Are we doing this or not?” she asks. I look at her, then back to the door again. Jolene’s gone.
“Or not.” I cut through the conversations of stilted Spanish and wrestle my backpack from the pile on the windowsill. The strap burns when I slide it over my bare shoulder, but I don’t wince. I don’t give a shit. The bell rings. The sweater vests split as I walk between them.
I steel myself in the hall on the way to history. I am not shiny and pink. Gym. But a scab on top of new skin. Psychology. I am sealed. Physics. She can’t get in.
I don’t see Jolene.
By the time I’m walking to lunch, I feel okay again—solid all the way through to my center.
Hard-core.
I toss my hair and hitch up my backpack, feel my shirt rise, showing an inch of skin along my stomach. I know it’s pale next to Hudson’s black T-shirt, not because I’m looking, but because they are; every backpack-carrying, book-switching, makeup-fixing kid in the hall pauses when I pass. Their stares blaze. But after a year of invisibility, it’s a warm, welcome weight. I wear it down the center of the hall and throw open the door to the cafeteria.
The air is heavy with meat and grease, burned bread and sweat, but today there’s something sweet mixed in.
“Mats!” Bella calls over the crowd, giving me the beauty queen treatment: tight-lipped smile, rotating wave. She’s spun halfway around in her seat, talking to a junior from the football team, arching her back, laughing. Across from Bella, bent over a messy pile of loose-leaf paper, her dark-red curls spilling onto the table and down the back of a fitted, striped sweater I don’t recognize, is Kris, in her old seat. I drop my backpack on the floor and sit down next to her, in mine.
“Hey.” We’re not phantom limbs anymore but the real thing, back in our original places, at our original table. Well, almost. One seat is empty.
As Bella air-kisses the junior good-bye, Kris looks me over—Hudson’s cut shirt, my low-rise jeans, the stretch of exposed shoulder where my split ends hit my collarbone—and raises her eyebrows.
I lift my chin in response.
Neither of us speaks. But that’s how it’s been lately. First because Kris was grounded and then because when her week-long sentence ended, my afternoons with Hudson didn’t. And with Bella joining us in the car and the cafeteria, the only time we have left alone is a few free minutes in the journalism room before the bell each morning, but for the past week I’ve been using that to finish homework. She doesn’t even know I gave up my phone, that I dropped it in the drawer Hudson offered and haven’t checked it in days.
Kris curls her hands around her Coke and turns back to Bella.
“I’d totally make up with Jolene,” Bella says, dragging her enormous studded purse onto the table and diving in with both hands and half her head. Tucks and folds of leather and gold expand and contract as she rummages through it and, finally, emerges with a compact. She clicks it open. “. . . if she’d just apologize. Hell, I’d probably even kiss her if she said pretty please.”
“Might not want to tell Cal that,” Kris says.
“Whatever,” Bella says from behind the compact. “We’re just hooking up. And anyway, he loves it.”
Bella and Kris banter like I’m not even here. It’s amazing to me how quickly they fell back into the old rhythm—Bella’s singsong laugh, Kris’s cutting commentary—and how quickly Jolene fell out of it. But then, that’s the answer, isn’t it: now Kris and Bella share a common enemy.
“I think you need to practice some anger encouragement,” Kris says to Bella. “Like, some people need anger management. And you need the opposite.”
“I hate fighting.” Bella blinks her eyes, blows herself a kiss, snaps her compact, and shoves it back inside her bag. “What’s the point? My mom’s angry enough for the whole world when she’s sober. Which Jolene totally knows. Which is exactly why I need the apology.”
“Which is why you need to get the hell out of here as much as I do.”
I let their voices recede into the banged plates, shouts, and shoved trays around us until it’s all a solid piece of sound. My eyes drift toward the door. The square of glass, just like the one in Spanish class. I see her hand again—our scar—pressed flat against the pane. I run my thumb over the raised line on my palm before folding my hand into a fist.
“How’s your list coming, Mattie?” Kris asks. I pry my eyes away from the door and toward her voice.
“What list?” I ask.
Kris pulls a yellow pencil out of the curls coming loose on top of her head and taps it against a sheet of blank paper.
“I mean, I don’t see what the big deal is,” Bella says, filling in the crack in the conversation. “My parents both went to Ivy League colleges, and look where it got them. They don’t even talk to each other. Make me a list of schools ranked by fun and then maybe I’ll consider one.”
Kris sketches something as Bella runs through the endless list of qualities she’s co
nsidering in a college: fraternities and sororities, parties, holiday celebrations (Hello! Halloween!), Division I sports teams (for cheering purposes), location (spring break opportunities) . . . Kris lifts her pencil and spins the piece of paper into the middle of the table. Bella twists her torso to look.
“You just did this?” Bella asks Kris. “It’s, like, an actual list of schools for partying you just pulled from memory?”
“Makes sense, since Kris picked a college in fifth grade,” I say.
“True.” Kris sticks the pencil back through her curls. “But I’m still considering all my options.” She pushes the paper all the way across the table. “Here. It’s yours.”
“Really?” Bella scans the page with her pointer finger, moving her freshly lined lips as she silently reads Kris’s notes, which are printed neatly across rows and down columns.
Kris presses her stomach into the table and seesaws toward Bella so she can glide her finger across the upside-down grid.
“I circled the safe schools, squared the average, and starred the reach.” Kris swings back until she’s sitting on her seat again.
“You really think I could get into Rutgers?” Bella asks.
“Why not?” Kris shrugs. “You’re captain of the cheer squad, and you won some of the drama competitions at the Paper Mill Playhouse last year, didn’t you? And even though you don’t try in school, you did decent on your SATs. Anyway, even if you didn’t have all those things, it’s a reach. Someone’s got to get in.”
“I’m totally someone!” Bella jokes.
Kris raises her Coke like she’s toasting.
My eyes drift toward the cafeteria door again.
“Which applications have you finished?” Kris asks. It takes me a second to realize she’s speaking to me—that Bella’s back behind her compact with her entire stock of eye makeup laid out on the table in front of her.
“None,” I tell her.
“Deadline’s coming up.”
“You’ve said.” For as long as I can remember, Kris has been waiting for this—December, our senior year—the month she can finally send in her applications and start disengaging for real.
Underneath Everything Page 13
