When You Were Mine

by Serle, Rebecca

  “Absolutely,” he says. But he’s smiling. A different smile. A funny little smile like he’s going to laugh. Like he’s telling himself a joke and the punch line is coming.

  “What are you doing tonight?” he asks.

  “Dunno. Homework?”

  “Want to go to dinner?”

  “Yeah, sure. Come over.”

  “No, I mean go out to dinner.”

  I know what Charlie would say here. Charlie would toss her hair over one shoulder and singsong, “Are you asking me out, Mr. Monteg?” But I don’t have the nerve. Or the talent for such games. Instead I say, “Umm, sure.” Rob opens his mouth to say something, but Mr. Johnson, our principal, comes onto the stage, and everyone stops talking.

  “Good morning!” Mr. Johnson says in this fake boomy voice he uses for every single assembly. I know it’s fake because when you go in to meet with him for office hours or to tell him we’re out of sparkling waters in the PL (which, because of Charlie, we always are), he’s actually superquiet. Also, he looks a little like a rodent. Half-bald, pointy nose, and tiny beady eyes that look perpetually frightened. But who am I to judge? If I was a principal, I’d probably look the same way most of the time.

  “Good morning!” a few sophomore girls yell back. Mr. Johnson looks delighted, and does it again. This time a few more people join in on the return call but obviously not enough to warrant a third time, because he just holds his hands up like, Silence.

  “It’s a new year,” he begins, “and over the course of the summer I have been thinking about changes I can make here at San Bellaro so that we can continue to grow in the directions that we want to. I have thought about the way we structure our days here, how we fill our time . . .”

  And then, just as I’m about to completely zone out, something spectacular happens. Rob’s knee brushes mine and he doesn’t move it. He just leaves it there, against mine, so that our knees are touching. My face has already turned the color of a tomato, so I keep my eyes fixed on Mr. Johnson, but I can feel Rob glance at me.

  Then Rob’s hand moves across the back of my chair. Our knees are touching and Rob’s hand is on the back of my chair.

  I try to remember what my mom’s yoga DVD is always saying about hyperventilating. That it can be prevented by deep breathing. Inhale and exhale. Inhale and exhale.

  “I see you as a forest,” Mr. Johnson is saying. “We are all trees, and we compose a large wooded area. Without us, there would be no life.”

  Jake yawns next to us. Then he crosses his arms and closes his eyes. In two seconds he’s breathing loudly, his mouth open.

  Rob’s knee has been next to mine for a full minute, I think. So long that my leg is starting to sweat. I wiggle in my chair, careful to keep my knee steady. I don’t want Rob to think I’m purposefully ending our contact. The whole thing reminds me of the staring contests we used to have in middle school, seeing who could go the longest without blinking. Except I don’t want to win this one. I want to lose. I want Rob to keep his knee there forever. But just then Jake snores next to us, and Rob jabs him, breaking us apart.

  Jake sits up, startled, and wipes some drool from his mouth. It’s a good thing Charlie isn’t back here right now. 7:59—they’d definitely be off.

  Mr. Johnson finishes, and the students start clapping, although it’s mostly freshmen and a few very eager juniors who are quickly silenced by their friends. And Len, of course. He claps a few times, steadily, from the corner. Charlie and Olivia and a few other girls turn to look at him, but he doesn’t seem the least bit fazed. Then the auditorium erupts into a sonic boom of sound as everyone gathers their backpacks and heads off to first period.

  Charlie is waving her arms at me and pointing to her watch. Rob has gotten lost in the shuffle, and he gives me a quick, apologetic wave, following Jake out the side entrance.

  “He’s so cute,” Charlie says when I reach her. “We should totally double date.”

  I’m still sort of reeling from such close contact with Rob, and I don’t tell Charlie about our date tonight. I want to keep it my secret for just a little bit longer. Ben is tickling Olivia next to us, and she’s laughing, her tank top riding up. It’s actually kind of cute, if you squint a little. Charlie looks over at them and then declares, loudly, “I’m already over this,” before tugging me, arm first, out through the double doors.

  Scene Four

  We all meet in the courtyard at lunch. Olivia and I are coming from calc, where I’m pretty sure she was flirting with Mr. Stetzler. I mean she was flirting, definitely, but the part I’m not sure of is why. Mr. Stetzler is old. Like, forty. I mean, when she flirts with Mr. Davis, I understand, because he teaches PE and he’s just young enough to still wear his hair long. But Mr. Stetzler? Really?

  “You’re super,” she says to him before we leave class, tossing her hair over her shoulder. I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, and apparently neither does Mr. Stetzler because he just takes off his glasses and kind of blinks a few times in rapid succession. I grab Olivia’s arm and drag her out, and she waves and wiggles her shoulders the way she does with Ben. The way she used to do with the Belgian.

  The Belgian is this kid in our class who moved here from Brussels. This happened sometime around September of last year, and he and Olivia spent the entire fall together. She started eating a lot of brussels sprouts and eating Belgian waffles whenever we went out. She even chose them over bagels, which Charlie was not okay with. It was when Olivia and Taylor were on a break, so she never called the Belgian her boyfriend. She never even called him Jhone, which is his real name. He was just “the Belgian.” It’s still crazy to me that Olivia has managed to date three guys—Taylor, the Belgian, and now Ben—and not go too far with any of them. I think part of the reason I ended things with Jason is that I was scared that if he ever successfully unhooked my bra, we’d have to keep going. It’s not that I think you have to sleep with whomever you’re seeing. It just seems kind of difficult, after a while, to explain why you’re not. Especially if you don’t really know the reason yourself.

  “You are seriously disturbed,” I say to Olivia.

  “God, I’m like flunking,” she says. “Give me a break.”

  “It’s the first day of school,” I point out. “You aren’t flunking yet. We’re good students.” We are, it’s true. I don’t really have one subject I’m great at like Len and Lauren, who are amazing at science, or Charlie, who is a star history student. She likes to come over and ask my dad questions about wars I’ve never heard of. That’s how into it she is. But my GPA is pretty good.

  “You are,” Olivia says. “I don’t even know why I’m in calc. I should have taken stats like a sane human being.”

  We trudge up to the table where Rob and Ben are sitting with Jake. The three of them are pretty close, although Ben is more of a recent addition. He didn’t really join our group until sophomore year. Charlie tried her best to keep him away longer, but he and Rob became superclose. If you ask me, Ben is actually a really stand-up guy. Charlie gives him a hard time about being nerdy because he doesn’t surf like Rob and Jake. I suspected something was going on this summer, and I’m not surprised Olivia and Ben are together, but the match is still funny. I always saw Ben as one of those guys that would end up a writer living in New York, sitting in cafés drinking black coffee and owning old Moleskine notebooks. Olivia drinks iced chai tea lattes and owns a Louis Vuitton book bag with the word MIAMI bedazzled on the front. So you can see the disconnect there.

  We drop our bags down near them, and I see Charlie’s; brown leather, worn and classic—totally her style.

  “She inside?” I nod to Rob. Casual, cool. Like my heart isn’t beating three million miles a minute because we are going on a date tonight.

  “Yeah.” He tilts his head to the side and squints at me. Since this morning everything he does seems like flirting. “How are you?” he asks, like it’s the most important question in the world, like he’s asking me how to defuse a nucl
ear bomb. I shrug, and he picks up his sandwich, offering it. “Want a bite?” Turkey and mustard. No tomato. He’s been eating the same thing from the school cafeteria since we were freshmen.

  “Sure.” I take it and peer around the courtyard. Lauren is sitting with Dorothy Spellor. John and Matt are in a corner, playing Hacky Sack. Charlie is right. Everything is, I guess, in order.

  “Another year,” Charlie says, waltzing up behind me, “and they still don’t have the good peanut butter.” She smiles at Jake and sits down next to him.

  Olivia has collapsed herself down next to Ben and is complaining about the fact that no one cares about seniority at this school, which basically ends up being an argument for why she should be allowed to cut in line in the cafeteria. Ben puts an arm around her shoulder and gives her an affectionate squeeze.

  “I agree,” Charlie says, waving an apple around. “It’s totally absurd that we have to wait.”

  “Should we even bother getting food?” Olivia asks. She’s craning her head over me to look into the cafeteria.

  Sometimes we spend our lunch periods off campus, which is legal if you’re a senior. We used to do it last year too. I think the teachers knew, but I can’t be sure because we never got caught. Mr. Davis just used to make really pointed statements like “I could really go for a Subway sandwich right about now,” after we had just thrown the wrappers away.

  The way lunch works senior year is that you can go off campus for your free period or lunch but not both, and if your free period happens to be before or after lunch, so that they’re right up against each other, you can leave for an hour and fifteen minutes. It turns out this will happen to everyone once in the school week, so it’s fair, I guess, but it still makes no sense. Why wouldn’t you get to just take off two full periods? Why deny us those extra fifteen minutes? This is the stuff about high school that I don’t understand.

  I think that since we can legally do it this year, it holds less appeal, but it’s only the first day of school, and no one leaves on the first day of school.

  Rob’s sandwich is kind of soggy, and as I hand it back to him, a piece of turkey falls onto the table.

  Jake has Charlie in a headlock, and she’s squealing loudly, and Ben and Olivia seem to be immersed in conversation, although about what, I really couldn’t say.

  I look at Rob. His shaggy hair is falling down in front of his face, and he looks so painfully cute, I just want to put my arms around him right here in the courtyard.

  “I have to go,” he says, “but I’ll see you tonight?”

  I nod, and he smiles. He leans in, but then Charlie and Jake break apart and so do we. Was he going to kiss me? Not possible. No way. Not here. Tonight?

  “Later,” Rob says to the table, and then takes off toward Cooper House.

  “Dude, the cove, after school,” Jake calls out after him, and Rob turns around and gives a little salute. It’s not directed at Jake, though. It’s straight at me.

  “All you guys think about is surfing.” Charlie leans her head briefly on Jake’s shoulder and exaggerates a sigh.

  “That is not all we think about, yo,” Jake says, tickling her.

  I am still buzzing from Rob being so close and the promise of tonight that it takes me another minute to realize I’m actually hungry. “Come on,” I say to Olivia, and we both stand up and start walking over toward the cafeteria.

  “Can you get us sparkling water?” Charlie calls, and I give her the thumbs-up over my shoulder.

  The cafeteria is pretty small for a high school of our size. There are only about fifteen tables, given the fact that everyone, or at least upperclassmen, eat outside. When it’s raining, we usually take our food into Copper House or the PL. The inside of the cafeteria is depressing, and it’s basically all freshmen.

  Taylor is in line, and Olivia scoots up to him, shimmying her hips in between him and Dan Jenkins so she’s smack up against him. Taylor, I mean. Dan notices, though, and starts tapping Steve Gesher on the shoulder to get him to see that Olivia’s hip is touching Taylor’s hip.

  It’s not really all that surprising. She still flirts with Taylor a lot.

  “Grab me a veggie,” I say to Olivia. “I’m gonna go get the water.”

  Olivia is ignoring me, and Taylor. She’s just casually making her salad, seemingly immune to the hysteria she’s causing around her. At least she solved the problem of waiting in line.

  I turn around and head toward the vending machines, where I pass Brittany Fesner, who everyone calls Brittany Fester because she’s always had the most horrible skin. I think Charlie came up with that. I really hope Brittany doesn’t know.

  Brittany half waves at me, and I half wave back, and then I feed some dollars into the machine and stand around as San Pellegrino bottles dislodge and land with a thump. I pull them out and try to balance them in my arms, but there are six of them and they keep sliding.

  “You need some help, Rosaline?” I spin around, and the bottles scatter to the floor. They’re plastic, so they don’t break, but I’m still annoyed. I bend down to pick them up and squint upward to see who is talking to me. It’s Len, of course, and he’s got that stupid smirk on.

  “Is it your goal to just make life miserable?”

  “I make your life miserable?” He puts his hand over his heart. “I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “It’s the first day of school, Rosaline. Whatever happened to a fresh start?”

  “I’m not trying to start with you, Len.”

  He bends down and picks up a sparkling water, lining it up next to two others like little toy soldiers. “Why are you so hostile? Is it because you’re not getting any from that boyfriend of yours?”

  In a flurry of revolt my face flushes red. “Boyfriend?”

  “You two seem totally sexually frustrated.”

  “Rob is not my boyfriend.”

  “So what’s with the puppy-dog looks you two are constantly exchanging?”

  He picks up another bottle and tosses it into the air, then catches it and hands it to me. His thumb is covering the label, and I notice his skin is red. Crimson, actually. A mark like spilled paint runs from his thumb up to his wrist and then disappears under his shirt sleeve. I don’t remember ever seeing it before. He has a folder tucked underneath his arm.

  “What’s that?” I ask. Less because I care and more because I think he just caught me staring at his thumb.

  He looks amused. “What?”

  “The folder?”

  “Grass,” he says, shrugging.

  “Grass?”

  “Project for bio at the Cliffs,” he says. “It’s due the first of the year, so it’s not exactly a priority.”

  “The Cliffs?” Immediately my mind flips to Rob. The Cliffs have always been our go-to place.

  Len eyes me. “Do you run there or something?”

  I shake my head, pushing Rob out. “What? No. I’m just shocked you’d do any work of your own accord.”

  “Bravo,” he deadpans. “Senior year Rosaline has some spunk.”

  I take three of the bottles by their tops and stick the others against my chest. Olivia is waving to me from the doorway, informing me that she’s going back outside.

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  He moves to the side, letting me pass. “Great doing business with you, Rosaline.”

  I teeter outside and follow Olivia back into the courtyard, where I dump the San Pellegrino bottles onto the table. “You guys so owe me,” I say. “I’m going to need physical therapy from that. Regular therapy too.”

  “Poor baby,” Charlie says, sticking out her lower lip.

  “Why does it feel like Len has it out for me this year?”

  “He’s always had it out for us,” Charlie says. “He’s nobody. We’re popular.” She really will take any excuse to use that word.

  Olivia starts chomping on her salad, handing me a sandwich. She opens a bottle of sparkling water, and the entire thing explodes over
the table and all over Charlie.

  “For the love of God!” Charlie shouts. “This is, like, the fourteenth time today.”

  “Second,” Olivia corrects, grabbing napkins off Ben’s plate. She starts mopping up Charlie’s shirt, and Charlie swats her, and then they are tossing napkins back and forth, water flying everywhere.

  Jake leans way back in his chair and surveys the scene. “Goddamn, I love high school,” he announces.

  Charlie gives him a wilting look and drops the napkins onto the table. “What do you have after lunch?” she asks me.

  “Bio,” I say. “I have no idea why I’m even in this class. I should be taking physics.” Like stats versus calc, everyone knows AP Physics is way easier than AP Bio. Mostly because it’s taught by Mr. Dunfy, who is about eighty and forgets to show up to class half the time. He’s been at San Bellaro for, like, fifty years, so they’re not firing him or anything, but he gives As out like candy.

  “Yeah,” Charlie says, “weird move.”

  “I’ll see you guys at SAC, though?”

  “We have our first meeting today?” Olivia wails. “I wanted to see Ben.”

  Ben looks up from his sandwich and grins. “She totally digs me,” he gets out before Charlie throws her sopping napkin at him.

  Scene Five

  When I get to bio, most people are already in their seats. That’s the thing about taking AP classes. You’re forced straight up against all the other übercompetitive kids, so that even if you’re early, you still end up being late. Just being in the room gives me hives, and we haven’t even started yet. Lauren is already there, and Jon Chote and Stacy Tempeski, who have taken the SATs every year since the tenth grade. Jon is, like, a musical prodigy and is for sure headed to Juilliard next year. Stacy won a national essay competition last year and got to spend a week at the UN in Switzerland. That’s the kind of thing I’m dealing with here.

  Mrs. Barch, our teacher, is the kind of woman you don’t want to mess with. I think she actually used to be a research doctor. She’s probably in her late forties, and as far as anyone at school can tell, she doesn’t have a husband or kids or anything. So you can see why biology would be really important to her. If she likes you, you’re in, no problem, but if she doesn’t, she’ll make your life impossible. And I don’t think I’m exactly at the top of her list. I’ve had her before, and it hasn’t gone too well.