The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

by Michelle Hodkin

  Without thinking, I took his hand back. “Then I’ll put on my big-girl panties and deal.” I indicated the cafeteria. “Shall we?”

  Noah didn’t speak the rest of the way, and I mulled over what I’d said and what it meant. People would think I was a slut. They likely already did. And even though Noah was different—seemed different—from the person Jamie had warned me about, that didn’t mean our thing wouldn’t be over tomorrow. Was it worth it? Noah’s reputation didn’t seem to ruffle Daniel, and I thought—hoped—that Jamie and I would stay friends anyway. And for now, there was Noah.

  I decided that was enough.

  We were still holding hands when we arrived at the cafeteria. As he opened the door for me, I finally understood why Noah called it the dining hall. The ceilings were chapel high and arches spanned the length of the space, housing floor-to-ceiling glass windows. The stark white of the walls contrasted with the burnished walnut floors. Nothing could have been further from the image the word “cafeteria” normally conjures.

  “Any seating preferences?” Noah asked.

  My eyes scanned the bustling room, filled with uniformed Croyden students. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Noah led me through the hall by the hand, and eyes turned up and followed us as we passed. He caught the eye of someone he knew in the far back and waved, and the person waved back.

  It was Daniel. His eyes were wide with surprise and the table went silent as we wove through the chairs to meet him.

  “Oh my God, if it isn’t my baby sister. Here, in this very cafeteria!”

  “Shut up.” I sat down beside Noah and took out my lunch, too self-conscious to meet the eyes of the rest of the seniors assembled at the table.

  “I see you’ve brought surly Mara out to play. Thanks for that, Noah.”

  Noah raised his hands defensively.

  Daniel cleared his throat. “So, Mara.” I looked up from my sandwich. “This is everyone,” he continued. “Everyone, this is my sister Mara.”

  I mustered up some courage and looked around the table. I recognized Sophie but no one else. Noah slid into a chair across from my brother and I sat next to him, across from Sophie.

  “Hey,” I said to her.

  “Hey,” she answered, smiling mid-chew. She swallowed and introduced me to the rest of their group. Noah and my brother chatted away, Daniel’s friends were incredibly nice, and after only a few minutes, Sophie had me laughing so hard I almost cried. When I caught my breath, Noah caught my eyes, took my hand under the table, and smiled. I smiled back.

  I was happy. I wanted more than anything for it to last.

  36

  EXAMS WERE BRUTAL, AS EXPECTED. I KICKED ass in History and on my English paper, did not embarrass myself in Algebra, and dreaded Spanish, my second-to-last one.

  Noah tried to study with me the first night of exam week, but he was an abject failure of a teacher; I ended up throwing a package of flash cards at him after ten minutes. Thank God for Jamie. We studied every day for hours, and by the end of the week, he was explaining Algebra to me in Spanish. He was amazing and I felt amazing, despite the stress. In the past week on Zyprexa, the nightmares had stopped, the hallucinations were gone, and I walked into Spanish feeling prepared, but still nervous.

  The oral exam should have been straightforward; we were assigned list of topics, and we were supposed to be able to speak about any of them, waxing poetic with proper grammar and pronunciation until Morales was satisfied. And naturally, the second Jamie and I walked into the classroom, Morales seized on me.

  “Meez Dee-er,” she sneered. She always said my name wrong and in English. Annoying. “You’re next.” She pointed at me, and then at the blackboard at the front of the classroom.

  Jamie gave me a sympathetic look as I passed his desk. Vainly trying to calm my breathing, I trudged toward the front of the classroom. Morales was prolonging my misery, shuffling her papers, writing in her book, what have you. I braced myself for the coming onslaught, shifting my weight from foot to foot.

  “Who was Pedro Arias Dávila?”

  I stopped fidgeting. That wasn’t one of the topics; we never even mentioned Dávila in class. She was trying to throw me. I lifted my gaze toward Morales, who was sitting alone in the front row, her body stuffed unceremoniously into the student chair. She was poised for the kill.

  “We don’t have all day, Meez Dee-er.” She tapped her long fingernails on the metal surface of her desk.

  A tingle of victory crept into my bloodstream. I took World History last year, and it just so happened my final project was on sixteenth-century Panama. What were the odds? I took it as a sign.

  “Pedro Arias Dávila led the first major Spanish trip to the New World.” I responded in flawless Spanish. I had no idea how, and I felt giddy. Everyone in the room was staring at me.

  I paused to reflect on my genius, then continued. “He was a soldier in wars at Granada, Spain, and North Africa. King Ferdinand II made him leader of the trip in 1514.” Mara Dyer for the win.

  Morales spoke in a calm, cold voice. “You may sit down, Meez Dee-er.”

  “I’m not finished.” I couldn’t believe I actually said it. For a second, my legs threatened to bolt to the nearest desk. But as Morales quickly lost her composure, a juicy thrill coursed through my veins. I couldn’t resist. “In 1519 he founded Panama City. He was part of the agreement with Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro that allowed the discovery of Peru.” Suck it, Morales.

  “Sit down, Meez Dee-er.” Morales began to huff and puff, strongly resembling a cartoon character. In thirty seconds, smoke would start radiating from her ears.

  “I’m not finished,” I said again, delighted by my own audacity. “In the same year, Pedro de los Ríos took over as governor of Panama. Dávila then died at the age of ninety-one in 1531.”

  “Sit down!” she screamed.

  But I was invincible. “Dávila is remembered as a cruel man and as a liar.” I emphasized each adjective and stared hard at Morales, watching the veins in her forehead threaten to explode. Her corded neck turned purple.

  “Get out of my classroom.” Her voice was quiet and furious. “Senor Coardes, you are next.” Morales half-turned in the too-small chair and nodded at a freckled, openmouthed classmate.

  “I’m not finished,” I heard myself say. I was almost bouncing with energy. The room itself seemed sharp and alive. I heard the footfalls of individual ants scurrying to and from a prize piece of gum stuck to a bookshelf on my left. I smelled the sweat that trickled down the side of Morales’s face. I saw the individual dreadlocks fall in slow motion over Jamie’s face as he planted his forehead on his desk.

  “GET OUT OF MY CLASSROOM!” Morales bellowed, stunning me with the force of it as she rose from her chair, knocking over the desk.

  At that point, I could hold it in no longer. A smug smile lit up my face and I sauntered out of the room.

  To the sound of applause.

  37

  I WAITED OUTSIDE FOR JAMIE UNTIL THE EXAM WAS over. As he walked out of the room, I snatched the strap of his backpack and pulled him over to me.

  “How do you like them cojones?” My grin threatened to split my face in half as I held out my hand for a fist bump.

  Jamie returned it. “That was—that was just …” He gazed at me, awestruck.

  “I know,” I said, high on victory.

  “Stupid,” he finished.

  “What?” I’d been brilliant.

  Jamie shook his head and stuffed his hands into the baggy pockets of his pants as we walked to the back gate. “She’s going to try and fail you for sure now.”

  “What are you talking about? I nailed that answer.”

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. “It was an oral exam, Mara. Completely subjective.” He paused, watching my face, waiting for it to sink in. “No one in that classroom is going to back up your story except little old me. And my word don’t mean shit around here.”

  There it was. I was
an idiot.

  “Now you get it,” he said.

  Jamie was right. My shoulders sagged as if someone let all the air out of the smiley-face balloon that was my heart. Not so brilliant after all.

  “It’s a good thing I recorded you.”

  I whirled around. “No!” I said. Yes!

  Jamie’s grin matched my earlier one, tooth for tooth. “I thought you were going to freak out that you failed afterward, so I recorded an MP3 of your performance for posterity. Thought you’d want to dissect it later.” He held up his iPhone as his smile grew impossibly wider. “Happy Purim.”

  I squealed for the first time in my life, like a piglet, and threw my arms around Jamie’s neck. “You. Are. A. Genius.”

  “All in a day’s work, sugar.”

  We stood there hugging and grinning and then things got awkward. Jamie cleared his throat and I dropped my arms, shoving them in my pockets. There may even have been some shuffling of feet before Jamie spoke. “Um, I think your brother might be waving at you. That, or trying to guide a plane to safety.”

  I turned. Daniel was indeed gesticulating wildly in my direction. “I guess I should—”

  “Yeah. Um, do you want to hang out after school this week?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Call me?” I walked backward in Daniel’s direction until Jamie nodded, then turned and waved over my shoulder. When I reached Daniel, he did not look pleased.

  “You are in big trouble, young lady,” Daniel said as we headed to his car.

  “What now?”

  “I heard about your performance in Spanish.”

  How was that even possible? Crap.

  “Crap.”

  “Uh, yeah. You have no idea what you just stepped in,” he said as we climbed in. “Morales is universally reviled for a reason,” Daniel went on. “Sophie regaled me with horror stories after she broke the news.”

  I reminded myself to whine at Sophie for being a tattletale. My insides squirmed a little but my voice was collected when I spoke. “I’m not sure it could get much worse. The witch tortured me daily.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She made me stand in front of the class while she hurled questions at me in Spanish on stuff we haven’t even learned yet, and she would laugh when I answered incorrectly—” I stopped. Somehow, my arguments sounded less convincing out loud. Daniel looked at me sideways. “She laughed meanly,” I added.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And she threw chalk at me.”

  “That’s it?”

  I grew irritated and shot him a look. “Says the student who has never been yelled at by a teacher.”

  Daniel said nothing and stared blankly ahead as he drove.

  “It was pretty brutal. Guess you had to be there.” I didn’t want to think about Morales anymore.

  “I guess,” he said, and gave me a weird look. “What’s with you?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled.

  “Liar liar, pants on fire.”

  “That hasn’t been funny since you were five. Actually, it was never funny.”

  “Look, don’t worry so much about the Morales thing. At least you don’t have to apply to seven competitive internships for this summer.”

  “They’re all going to accept you,” I said quietly.

  “Not true. I’ve been slacking on my independent study and Ms. Dopiko has still not written my recommendation—and I might have overestimated my AP load, and I don’t know how I’ll do on the exams. I might not get into my top schools.”

  “Well, if that’s true, I don’t have a prayer,” I said.

  “Well, maybe you should work on that now before it’s too late,” Daniel said, staring straight ahead.

  “Maybe that wouldn’t be so hard if I were a genius like my older brother.”

  “You’re as smart as I am. You just don’t work as hard.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but my brother cut me off.

  “It’s not just about the grades. What are you going to put on your college résumé? You don’t do drama. Or music. Or the newspaper. Or sports. Or—”

  “I draw.”

  “Well, do something with it. Enter some contests. Win some awards. And rack up other organizations, they need to see that you’re well—”

  “God, Daniel. I know, okay? I know.”

  We drove the rest of the way home in silence, but I felt guilty and broke it when we pulled into the driveway. “What’s Sophie doing this weekend?” I asked.

  “Dunno,” Daniel said as he slammed his door. Fabulous. Now he was in a pissy mood too.

  I walked into the house and went to the kitchen to rummage for food, while Daniel disappeared into his room, probably to limn the contours of some exquisite constellation of philosophical nonsense for his internship applications and gasp in the throes of his overachieving OCDness. I, meanwhile, mulled over a bleak future starring myself as a New York sidewalk sketch artist living off of ramen noodles and squatting in Alphabet City because I didn’t have any extracurricular activities. Then the phone rang, interrupting my thoughts. I picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Tell your husband to drop the case,” someone whispered on the other end of the line. So low I wasn’t even sure I’d heard correctly.

  But my heart thundered in my chest anyway. “Who is this?”

  “You’ll be sorry.” The caller hung up.

  I broke into a cold sweat and my mind went blank. When Daniel walked into the kitchen, I was still holding the phone, long after the dial tone went dead.

  “What are you doing?” he asked as he passed me on his way to the fridge.

  I didn’t answer him. I checked the call history and scanned for the last one that came in. My mother’s office, two hours ago. No record of any calls after that. What time was it now? I checked the clock on the microwave—twenty minutes had passed. I’d been standing there, holding the phone, for twenty minutes. Did I delete the call? Was there even a call?

  “Mara?”

  I turned to Daniel.

  “Yeesh,” he said, taking a step back. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Or heard one.

  I ignored him and took out my cell on the way to my room. I’d taken my pill this morning, just like I had every morning since the art show. But if the phone call was real, why wasn’t it showing up in the call history?

  Freaked out, I dialed my father just in case. He picked up on the second ring.

  “I have a question,” I blurted before even saying hello.

  “What’s up, kid?”

  “If you wanted to drop the case now, would you be able to?” My father paused on the other end of the line. “Mara, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just an academic question,” I said. And it was kind of true. For now.

  “Okaaay. Well, it’s highly unlikely the judge would allow a substitution of counsel at this point. In fact, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t allow it.”

  My heart sank. “How did the other lawyer get out of the case?”

  “The client agreed to have me step in, otherwise Nathan would have been out of luck.”

  “And your client wouldn’t let you back out now?”

  “Doubtful. It would screw things up for him pretty badly. And the judge wouldn’t let it happen—she’d have me sanctioned if I pulled something like that. Mara,” he said, “are you sure you’re all right? I meant to ask you about therapy last week but I got tied—”

  He thought this was about him. About him not being here.

  “Yeah. I’m fine,” I said, as convincingly as I could.

  “When’s your next appointment?”

  “Next Thursday.”

  “Okay. I gotta go, but we’ll catch up on your birthday, all right?”

  I paused. “You’ll be home Saturday?”

  “For as long as I can be. I love you, kid. Talk to you soon.”

  I hung up the phone. I paced in my room like a wild thing, running over the phone call in my min
d. I was on antipsychotic medication for hallucinations and possibly, probably delusions. I’d been all right for the past week, but maybe the pressure of exams had gotten to me after all. If I told my parents about the phone call but there was no evidence for it, nothing to back me up, what would they think? What would they do? My father couldn’t drop the case anyway, and my mother? My mother would want to pull me out of school to help me cope with the stress. And not being able to graduate on time or go to college right away—that would not help me cope with the stress.

  I didn’t mention it.

  I should have.

  38

  nOAH PICKED ME UP THE NEXT MORNING, but I was unsettled and silent on the way to school. He didn’t push. Even though this had been our routine for virtually every day for over a week, all eyes were on us as we walked from the gate through the quad. Noah’s arm never left my waist, but he did leave me at the door to Algebra, albeit reluctantly. Anna and Aiden breezed past us, making faces like they smelled something foul.

  “You all right?” Noah asked me, tilting his head.

  “What?” I was distracted, thinking about the call last night. And the metal forest at the art show. And Claire and Jude in mirrors. “Just thinking about my Bio exam later,” I told Noah.

  He nodded. “See you later, then?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said, and walked into class.

  When I reached my desk, Jamie sauntered in and sat beside me. “You’re still with that prideful ass?”

  I dropped my head in my hands and tugged at my hair. “God, Jamie. Give it a rest.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but Mr. Walsh had already started class. But I was sick of listening to Jamie whine about Noah, and today we were going to have it out. I narrowed my eyes at him and mouthed lunch. He nodded.

  The rest of my morning classes flew by, and Jamie was waiting for me by the picnic tables at the appointed time. And for the first time I could remember, his eyes were level with mine.

  “Did you get taller?” I asked him.