by Jen Klein
An underclassman with a trombone case steps off the curb in front of us and Oliver slams on the brakes, a little too hard. “Watch it,” I tell him.
“I’m watching it.” He waits for the underclassman to cross. “I’m watching everything. I care about every single minute, because I know that everything here does matter. It has to, because otherwise what’s the point, June?”
There we go. My first name again.
Oliver steps on the gas and we pull through the lot and into a spot. I turn to him. “You know what’s sad? Pretending is sad.” I hop out and slam the door.
Final word. Suck it, Oliver.
Except Oliver is an athlete with lightning-fast reflexes, which means he’s by my side before I’m ten feet away. “I’m not done—”
I groan out loud. “What do I have to say to end this conversation?”
He catches me by the arm and swings me around to face him. Those overly hyped brown eyes peer earnestly into my own. “Say you know that something, anything, about this year will matter!”
I stare up at him and notice that the outer rings of his irises are dark. They’re gray—close to black, even. They almost match his pupils. I am once again acutely aware of all the girls who would want to stand in the grip of Oliver Flagg’s strong fingers, to gaze up into his remarkably gorgeous face. I’m about to throw him a bone, give him just an ounce of agreement, when we are interrupted by the voice I enjoy least in the world.
“Does Ainsley know you’re getting a little Rafferty in the mornings?” Of course it’s Theo, and of course he’s hulking right up on us with his sneery smile.
“Ainsley knows I drive June to school.” Oliver says it evenly.
“Yeah, but why?”
“Because she needs a ride.”
“I’m right here,” I remind them both, and then speed up even more. I really don’t want to go down this particular road with either of these particular guys. They don’t try to keep up, but I hear Theo’s question before I’m out of range.
“Why can’t she drive herself?”
Jerks.
• • •
Other than homeroom, Itch and I don’t have any classes together. However, we’re in the same building for third period, so it’s easy to meet during break. We barely have any time between all our other periods, but they give us ten glorious minutes between second and third. We’re supposed to go to the bathroom or eat a healthy snack—most of us use that time to socialize. Just like last year, Itch and I spend it huddled together in a stairwell, kissing.
“When can I come over?” he asks.
“You could have come over yesterday, but you opted out.”
He slides the tip of his finger under the hem of my screen-printed T-shirt and I push it away. “This is an institution of education. Hanky-panky is not permitted within these hallowed halls.”
“Education is overrated,” he says, and dives in for another kiss.
I briefly allow it and then pull back, unable to shake my morning conversation with Oliver. “Do you think any of this matters?”
Itch squints at me. “What do you mean?”
“This.” I make a wide, sweeping gesture. “School. Traditions. Us.”
Itch’s lips curve upward and I notice there’s a sliver of dark dots along the left side of his mouth that he missed when shaving. “Tell you what. I’ll come over this weekend and show you what matters.”
This time when he kisses me, it’s with tongue.
• • •
I’m heading into my third-period class—physics—when I feel a nudge from behind. It’s Oliver. “Looking forward to all the nonessential information we’ll learn today?”
“I’m just here to collect my A.”
“Only an A?” He grins down at me, so I nudge him back, since apparently he’s not still mad about our argument.
“Make that an A-plus.”
Oliver looks like he’s about to say something in return, but Ainsley Powell squeezes between us and our conversation is over. She rises on her toes to kiss him before gifting me with a brilliant smile. “Hi, June.”
Ainsley smells like summer peaches, and her hair, thick and curly and wild, is the color of beach sand. Her wide emerald eyes gaze into mine, and even though I’m painfully straight, I almost want to kiss her myself because she’s so damn gorgeous. Instead, I manage a smile and a “Hey” before heading to a lab table in the front row.
Itch thinks I’m insane for taking two sciences during my senior year, when I should be slacking off, but this is the only one that feels like work. Environmental science, which I had right before the break, is super interesting. Plus, because of our school’s partnership with the University of Michigan, it qualifies for dual enrollment, so I’m getting college credit for it.
Physics is another story. Today, for example, I’m having a tough time paying attention to whatever Mrs. Nelson is saying about the subdisciplines of mechanics, because I keep replaying things I should have said to Oliver. I sneak a furtive glance toward the back of the room, where he’s sitting with Ainsley. They’re holding hands and Oliver is looking straight at me.
I whirl back around and start scribbling notes about translational motion and oscillatory motion and rotational motion until I make the ironic realization that I am—quite literally—going through the motions.
Why did I look at him, anyway?
The next morning, I’m on a mission when I get into Oliver’s car. “I have an idea,” I inform him, tossing an empty water bottle from the passenger seat into the back as he pulls us out onto the street. “A way to make this drive much more tolerable.”
“Twenty questions?”
“No.”
“The license plate game?”
“That’s for little kids.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” says Oliver, “but you’re not very big.”
I sit up a little straighter, even though I’m 100 percent normal size. It’s Oliver who has a skewed perspective, because he’s so tall. Just like his girlfriend.
“We’ve been going about this all wrong,” I tell him. I flip my backpack around on my lap so I can unzip the front pocket. “We obviously both have deep-held convictions that support our individual life philosophies.”
“Huh?” says Oliver.
“What I mean—” I start, but he interrupts.
“I’m kidding. I know what you mean.” He shakes his head and I can’t tell if he’s amused or annoyed.
Right.
“I don’t think these morning drives have to be…like this.”
“Like what?”
“All fighty and crabby.”
Oliver’s head tilts. “I thought we were making conversation.”
“I think…” I pause, formulating exactly what I want to say. “I think we are very different from each other, and we don’t see the world the same way, and that’s okay. But it’s also no reason for us to start every day miserably.” Oliver keeps his eyes on the road ahead of us. “I have a solution.” I pull my phone from the backpack. “After a brief exchange of pleasantries in my driveway, we can stick to music.”
“Music.”
“Loud music.”
“Loud music?”
“Really loud.”
Oliver considers before nodding. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
“Then okay.”
“Good.”
“Lovely.”
Satisfied, I scroll through the playlist I made last night after coming up with this stroke of peacemaking genius. I think I’m in the mood for something classic—the Clash or maybe a little Ramones—but then I see Alesana and know that’s it. I hunt around on the console for a speaker wire like in my mom’s car, but I don’t see one. I flip open the middle compartment lid only to find it empty. “Hey, where’s your—”
Unfortunately, the rest of my sentence is drowned out by a rush of piano chords. My hands drop the phone and fly up to cover my ears.
“Where is that coming from? How are you—” I stop as a man’s voice throbs through the behemoth’s speakers. It’s earnest and it’s passionate and it’s loud and…“What is this, Bon Jovi?”
“Survivor!” Oliver yells over the lyrics.
“It’s terrible!” I scream at him, frantically searching the dashboard for a way to turn it off.
Oliver brandishes his phone. “Wireless connection!” he shouts.
“It’s killing me! Turn it down! Turn it off! Make it”—the song abruptly cuts off—“stop!” I clear my throat. “Thank you. No offense, but that was the worst.”
Oliver grins like it’s a giant joke. “You clearly have no appreciation of fine music.”
“What are you, a twelve-year-old girl?”
“It’s a power ballad, June. They were wildly popular.”
My eyes widen. “Are you a twelve-year-old girl in the eighties?”
He laughs out loud and I can’t find the humor, because I’m so shocked that Oliver Flagg likes awful hair-band power ballads.
He reaches over to pat my bare knee. “It’s okay. Not everything fits into one of your neat little boxes.”
My mouth drops open. “What is that supposed to mean?”
But Oliver isn’t bothered. “What do you listen to? Share.”
“I don’t know how to jack into your system,” I say, still offended.
“Just play it from your phone.”
“Fine,” I say, and touch my screen. It’s not as loud, since it’s not connected to the speakers, but my phone packs a punch. The opening drumbeats reverberate fast in my ears, scrubbing away the pulsing banality of Oliver’s terrible music.
Yeah.
That’s more like it.
Beside me, Oliver’s right hand sails off the steering wheel. It lands on the compartment between us and opens the lid. Scuttles around inside.
Still empty.
We stop at a red light, and he reaches across me to open the glove box, which is crammed full of napkins and ketchup packets. “What are you looking for?” I ask over the music.
“Aspirin!” he yells back. “This is breaking my brain!”
I glare at him before touching my screen to kill the song. The light turns green and we cruise through it. “Ha-ha,” I say. “You’re hilarious.”
“No.” He says it with yet another of those smiles. “You’re hilarious. What is that screamo?”
“Screamo?” He knows nothing—nothing—about what constitutes good music…or good friends…or good anything. “It’s Alesana. Pop-metal out of North Carolina, and they’re actually amazing.”
“Amazingly shitty,” Oliver says. “It hurts my ears. It hurts my soul.”
“Their sound is rough, but that’s the point. It means something. It’s real—”
“Real awful. How do you even find stuff like that?”
“My dad turned me on to it.”
Oliver looks surprised. “Your dad listens to screamo?”
Of course it would be weird to someone who looks and lives like everyone else. “Yeah, he taught me not to just scratch the surface,” I tell Oliver. “It’s easy to find mainstream music. You don’t even have to look. It’s just there, in your face all the time, on the radio and TV. There’s no thought to it. No discovery.”
“You make no sense,” Oliver informs me. “Try getting beneath the surface of my music. Look a little deeper, be a little less obvious and you’ll see what’s underneath.”
“Underneath?” I practically explode. “There’s nothing underneath. Your music is overly produced and overly cliché!” I point a finger at him. “It totally makes sense.”
“How’s that?” Oliver still doesn’t seem mad. Only amused.
“That you would be into that. It’s manufactured and it’s fake!”
Oliver’s lips press together. He doesn’t look amused anymore. We drive a few more minutes and then he says, “Maybe we shouldn’t listen to music after all.”
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll suffer in silence.”
• • •
The next morning the score is as follows:
Suffering = 1. Silence = 0.
We haven’t even gotten to the highway yet and Oliver has made (almost) every sound a human body can make. He started with humming and moved on to whistling. After a little of that, he switched to clicking his tongue. It went on for at least a full minute and now he’s singing one of those power ballads under his breath.
I’m not sure why Oliver is trying to torture me, but he’s clearly enjoying the process. I close my eyes and breathe slowly. In through my nose, out through my mouth.
I hear a pop and my eyes fly open. Oliver is cracking his knuckles, one by one. He gets to the last and then looks at me. I scowl and he grins big.
Really big.
I might kill him.
I close my eyes again and lean back against the seat, trying to envision myself anywhere but here. A snowy mountain. A desert at night. A sunny expanse of beach.
I hear a chomping sound and I can’t stop myself from peeking at Oliver. He’s chewing a piece of gum. With his mouth open.
I glare at him and decide I don’t even need the mountain or desert or beach. I could be happy in a pit of burning coals as long as Oliver isn’t there with me.
Oliver slides a second piece of gum from the pack. He pops it into his mouth. Chews. He glances over before adding another piece. And another. And another.
Killing. Me.
There’s one piece left in the pack. Oliver holds it toward me—an offer of faux generosity. I snatch it out of his hand and shove it into my backpack. I don’t want his stupid gum, but I surely don’t want to hear it in his mouth.
That only makes him smile more widely before turning back to the road.
Oliver cracks his gum. He blows a bubble. It pops and he reaches up to swipe the gum off his upper lip and shove it back into his mouth.
I turn to look out the window.
Thank God it’s Friday.
• • •
Even though I already know our planet is unique in the solar system, that it is nearly magic how we have water and oxygen and creatures that evolved from tiny one-celled organisms, I still feel awestruck in environmental science when Mr. Hollis takes us through the process of its creation. Since there are only twelve of us, we move along quickly and have plenty of time for discussion and questions. We get all the way through the Proterozoic era before we’re dismissed for break.
I’m heading toward the stairwell where Itch is waiting for me when I hear Oliver’s name squawked from the family sciences room. I guess if a class has “science” in its name or uses open flames, this is where the school puts it.
I slow down to make way for the kids trickling out the open door. Oliver is standing before Mrs. Alhambra’s desk. She wags her finger at him. “All you sports-minded boys are the same.” Oliver’s shoulders droop. He shuffles his feet. He doesn’t say anything. “You think you don’t have to work at anything. You think you can skate through life on your looks,” she continues. “Well, not here. You need a brain to pass family sciences. You need to use it!”
“That’s what I’m—”
“Salt is not the flavor. It’s the flavor enhancer.” Mrs. Alhambra holds up a red plastic bowl—like the kind you buy for a picnic—and shakes it at him. “You’re going to give someone a heart attack with this!” The bowl and its contents make a loud chunk when they drop into the trash can.
“Yes, ma’am,” Oliver says. He heaves a sigh and turns in my direction. I jerk my gaze away, speed-walking past the classroom and down the hall.
If today was the first day of school, I would probably be on Mrs. Alhambra’s side right now. But I’m not. Sure, Oliver surrounds himself with helmets and muscles, but it doesn’t mean he’s exactly the same as those Neanderthals. He seems different.
At least, a little different.
Three minutes later, I’m in the stairwell with Itch, whose hands are again trying to tease
beneath the hem of my shirt. I kiss him before pulling away. “I have to get to class.”
He frowns. “Don’t we still have time?”
“I don’t want to be late to physics.”
“You and your good-girl ways,” he murmurs.
I reach up to ruffle his shaggy hair. “I’m not a good girl about everything. Are you still coming over tomorrow afternoon?”
“Is your mom still going to be out?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then I’ll be there.” He drops a last kiss onto my mouth before heading for the steps. “See you at lunch,” he calls back over his shoulder.
• • •
I am already seated when the bell rings and Oliver rushes in at the last minute. Even though I’m staring straight ahead at the whiteboard with my hands folded primly before me, I can see him trudge past in my peripheral vision. Mrs. Nelson pushes up from her desk and asks us to take out our books. There’s a rustle of paper and the creaking of chairs as everyone does what she asks.
This time, I don’t need to risk a glance back to confirm that Oliver is looking at me. After all, I know that when he arrived at his lab table, there was something sitting in the very center of it.
Something I placed there.
A peace offering.
Or rather a piece offering.
It’s Oliver’s last piece of gum. The one he gave me this morning.
• • •
“I was wrong about the prank,” says Itch. We are sitting in our place on the bleachers—all of us but Shaun, who is eating onstage with the theater kids—and watching what’s happening on the field. “This is the stupidest tradition at our school.” I have to agree with him.
“This is the stupidest tradition at any school,” says Lily.
Darbs and I both nod vigorously as a hundred upperclassmen cheer and pump their fists in the air from the center of the bleachers. The graduating football players are busy marching five younger guys into the center of the field for what’s affectionately known as shearing: when the senior football players cut the hair of their newest varsity teammates, who—this year—are all sophomores.
A row of chairs has been set up, and the cheerleaders are showing off their supremely helpful skills by placing buckets of soapy water by each one. Ainsley settles one of the sophomores into a chair before squeezing a sponge over his head. Water drips over his hair and darkens his shirt. We can hear Ainsley’s laugh all the way up here. It sounds high and sweet and clear. The wet sophomore even laughs along with her.
