“What’s up?” Laila asked.
After a silent moment, Leo said, knowingly, “Is it your dad?”
“Nah,” Felix said. “Sebastian. He says Samuel Marquez is trying to come to my birthday party and fight.”
“Like, fight you?” Laila said. Then she realized Leo and Hannah were both looking at her. They did this whenever Samuel Marquez passed their lunch table, too. Her temperature rose a half-dozen degrees. “Don’t look at me,” she squeaked.
“Sorry, cabrón, you’re not getting through the door,” Felix muttered, thumbs darting across his screen. A cheerful bloop announced the arrival of another message from Sebastian, and Felix sat forward, making Hannah’s sofa creak. “All right, that’s bullshit.” Felix looked around at them. “She dumped him like a month ago, and he’s telling me to back off, can you believe this guy?”
“Ah,” Hannah said, taking a long swig of beer. “Imani.”
“Just don’t escalate, Felix,” Laila said tiredly.
Hannah snorted. “You’d have a better shot telling a literal escalator not to escalate.”
“I’m not starting anything. It’s Marquez,” Felix said. “He’s acting like I’m making Imani go out with me. She’s going out with me because she wants to.” He smoothed back his dark curls to punctuate how ridiculous it was that he would have to make any girl go out with him.
“Well,” Leo said, “good thing somebody here is dying to talk some sense into him.”
They were all looking at her again. “What are you talking about?” Laila said. “I’ve never even spoken to the guy.”
“Might I remind you,” Hannah drawled, “of sophomore year in April, when he, I don’t know, asked you for a pencil or something, and I had to listen to you talking about how making eye contact with him felt like getting set on fire?”
“Hannah!”
Felix cackled. Laila shoved Hannah, who let the momentum throw her back against the sofa arm. “God, why do I tell you anything?”
“Why do you tell me everything,” Hannah corrected, with a wicked smile. Whenever she talked about Samuel, she used a tone of blistering irony that made everything twice as humiliating. She lay down on the sofa, her knees hooked up over the arm now, crown of her head nudging Laila’s thigh. “Whatever. We’re entitled to tease you after watching you do nothing for three years. Right, Felix? Leo?”
“Hmm?” Leo said, face obscured by his phone. “I mean, yeah. Yeah. For sure.” Laila snuck a look at his screen. Angela had texted him a photo of herself with an Australian Shepherd puppy, whose pink tongue was lapping her dimpled cheek. Sometimes the pair of them were so sickeningly cute that Laila wondered if the whole thing was staged.
“Drop it, okay?” Laila pleaded. “Just hire a bouncer or something, Felix. You’re not going to brainwash me into making an idiot out of myself in front of him.”
“Did you say ‘brainwash’?” Felix turned toward her, making the oaken sofa whine. “Hang on,” he murmured. Felix had long eyelashes that made his deep-set eyes look absurdly dramatic whenever he showed the slightest hint of worry. “Wait.”
“What?” Laila said.
“They’ve . . . they’ve deleted the files.” He broke into the voice of the quartermaster aboard the USR Washington, nasal and high-pitched. “Her brain, it’s washed. Her memories! They’re gone!”
“Dude,” Hannah said.
Leo dropped his phone for once, leapt up from his pouf, and donned the pilot’s thick Southern accent. “And all that’s left is . . . good God and damnation! Switch to live view. The Raveners—they’ve got her!” He staggered toward the sofa with his hands forming claws.
“Leo,” Hannah warned him. “Leo, d—”
“Aaaaagh!” Leo clamped a hand to his chest and toppled onto the sofa. His back impacted directly into Hannah’s stomach. Her breath thumped out, her mouth popping open so wide that Laila could see the dark aperture of her throat, the rosebuds of her tonsils.
“Dammit fuck,” Hannah wheezed. “Oh my God, I think you cracked my ribs.”
A helpless, high-pitched giggle. Laila clapped her hand to her mouth to strangle the sound, but Hannah was already staring up at her in comical betrayal, and Felix started hooting, too, sliding down his side of the sofa until his back went flat against the seat cushion. Laila’s laughter began to tug down at her stomach, to steal her breath, and she keeled over until Leo’s wrist slid across her back, Hannah’s head shifting in her lap, her own legs buried densely in the soft velveteen, bare ankle against somebody’s denim. “Y’all are so fucking weird,” Felix said, muffled, from somewhere in the mass of them locked together. “You know that, right?”
“The mind collective has fearsome patterns,” Hannah croaked. She couldn’t even hold the boy prophet’s accent until the end of the sentence. They dissolved again. Laughter formed coils around them, thick rings between their bodies and the world. The galaxy drew in and in until its entire contents were this room, hardwood to crown molding, this light, gold splashes from low iron cages, and the feeling of this proximity, heat, and security. The timeline had broken like a seal and let loose something weightless. For a crystal instant, Laila was borne up on its back and was invulnerable and immortal, and she was never going to let them go.
8
“Hey. Laila. Laila.”
Her nose had been buried so deeply between the pages of In the After Path, volume XIV, that a muscle in her neck pulled when she looked up. Peter Goldman had materialized six inches away, angled toward her in a way that forced his feet to shuffle sideways in a crab walk. He palmed his phone into his jacket and then snaked one freckled forearm into his backpack to sort through a clutter of chewed pens, all while keeping pace and watching her intently, because Peter Goldman never did only one thing at one time. There was a weird grace to the kid’s simultaneous movements. For somebody with the bodily structure of a Pez dispenser, he operated with shocking confidence.
Rubber soles whined behind them. Now Laila did stop walking. The quintet of basketball guys from their class trailed behind Peter, expectant, much like a school of scavengers might trail a shark. This felt off to Laila. The basketball team was known to be cool, and Peter Goldman was known to have the popularity of gonorrhea, but spatially speaking, Peter Goldman was clearly the ringleader of whatever was happening here. A semicircular one-foot margin separated him from his—what, cronies? They looked like cronies.
“Hi, Peter,” she said, not looking at Samuel Marquez. Leo’s voice nagged at the back of her mind, telling her to do it, bite the bullet, swallow the cyanide, talk to him. She was convinced that if she ever spoke words to him, a chemical reaction would catalyze somewhere in her lower torso and she would burst into flame. She kept picturing Hannah’s scornful expression. Clearly Hannah thought there was no chance.
“Hey, what are you up to,” Peter told her. That was the thing about Peter. His questions sounded like suggestions. His suggestions sounded like declarations of superiority.
“I’m going to the cafeteria,” Laila said. “Because, you know, it’s lunch.”
“No, hang on,” Peter said. “I want to talk about Nazarenko.”
Her face must have let involuntary interest show, because, looking satisfied, Peter opened the nearest classroom door. The room was dark and vacant. Peter flicked the lights, and the basketball guys slouched in behind him. Laila considered running, but curiosity overpowered her sense of reason, and she followed.
“Okay.” Peter shut the door. “What’d you get on that paper she gave back yesterday?”
“Wow. That is so far from your business.”
“Look, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. Actually, none of this matters to me, I got into my school early decision.” (Dartmouth. Everyone knew he was going to Dartmouth.) “But everyone got an F on what we turned in, and it’s going to mess with people’s class ranks and GPAs, so for people who aren’t accepted yet, it’s a problem, so I’m just looking out for everybody, and obviously she doesn’t know
how to teach. Right? It’s obvious, right?”
The basketball guys’ heads bobbed, except Samuel Marquez’s, because he was checking his phone. A safe window to look at him. Laila took advantage for a blissful instant. He was tall and crooked, hip angled, head tilted perpetually, one hand always twisted into a pocket of his jeans, so secure in his ungainly composite parts that he seemed older than everybody else in his grade. Hannah was the same way.
Laila looked back at Peter. She didn’t want to agree with any of what he’d just said, especially the implication that he was investigating this for anybody but himself, but the fact remained that she’d had a dream last night about a faceless Bowdoin admissions officer transforming into Nadiya Nazarenko and blowing up her application with a nuclear weapon, so maybe there was something worthwhile in hearing him out.
“I got an F, too,” she said.
Triumph drew him upward. “I knew it,” he said, and shuffled out his assignment. “Like, look at this! Madison gave this a 99.” He flipped it to the back page. “And she—” 22/100. Laila shouldn’t have been so satisfied that she’d beaten Peter’s score. That wasn’t an achievement.
“What are you planning on doing?” Laila asked.
“Getting us a new teacher, obviously.”
She stiffened. No—he couldn’t get Nazarenko fired. Laila hadn’t proven herself yet. “Greene won’t replace her,” she said. “There’s no way.”
“You don’t know that,” Peter said. “If everyone tells their parents, they’ll make Greene get rid of her.”
The basketball guys traded looks. Clearly Peter hadn’t pitched the parent section of the plan to them yet. Laila hated the idea of asking her parents to fix her school problems, as if she were some red-faced seven-year-old running off a playground to tattle. Some furious coalition of parents going over a teacher’s head to the administration would be even worse. It seemed so entitled, like complaining to a hand-wringing store manager that an employee charged you an extra dollar.
Of course, telling their parents raised other problems. One of the basketball guys echoed her thoughts. “Bro,” he said, “if my mom sees this thing, she’s not making any calls for me. She’s locking me in my room until I’m twenty-five.”
“At least you got a two-digit number,” said one of his friends.
“Also,” Laila said, “first you’d have to make sure it is everybody who got an F.”
“It is,” Peter said. “We left you for last.”
Laila frowned.
“We thought she might’ve given you something else,” explained a second voice behind Peter. Laila scanned and experienced an imploding sensation. Samuel Marquez was looking at her. He’d had a previous thought about her. She comprised a fragment of his consciousness. That was ridiculous. Laila choked a little bit on her saliva.
“But now that we know it’s everyone,” Peter said, “we have ironclad proof that she’s just an atrocious grader, so.” He gave her a mocking salute. “Thanks for failing, too.”
“No, hold up. She hasn’t even been here a week. You have to wait.”
“Oh, do I?”
“You were excited when she got here.”
Peter looked half betrayed and half taken aback. “I mean, yeah, hello, because that was before she was a sadist.”
“But this grade is going to change,” Laila said. “She told us it would, so there’s not a case yet.”
“What is this? What’s your point? Do you want her to stay?”
Laila was a terrible liar, so she asked with as much scorn as she could manage, “Do you think I want to keep getting Fs?”
Nobody answered. Good.
She looked around at the others. “I’m just saying, if we wait and she doesn’t give out better grades after a couple weeks, then she doesn’t have the easy excuse anymore. You know she’s going to say she’s training us to edit if parents make calls. We’re all going to look oversensitive, and it won’t change anything.”
The mood of the basketball hivemind was shifting her way, nod by traded glance. Of course they were seduced by the idea of hiding these grades from their parents.
“Okay,” Peter said. “Fine. Two weeks. But I don’t see why she would change our grades when she isn’t giving anybody notes. She’s supposed to, you know, teach, being a teacher, but she hasn’t put a single word on anyone’s stuff.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Nobody else got any comments, either. I asked everyone.” Peter was filled with unstoppable momentum now, his weight shifting from neon sneaker to neon sneaker, one hand fanning the air wildly as he flipped through his assignment. “Look at this. Look! This is eight pages. It’s like she didn’t read it. Nothing.”
Laila watched Peter’s work flash by in grayscale animation, but the shuffling flip of it, the piercing crack of his indignant voice, faded until a fast-growing whine of excitement drowned everything else. Those few red words she’d received. The space they occupied in her mind expanded and pulsed and hissed for her attention. Not a mark on anybody’s pages, except hers.
As the others trailed toward the door, she felt fearless. “Hey,” she said, before she could stop herself. “Samuel.”
Samuel turned back to her, and she was pinned like a butterfly to corkboard. Then they were alone.
“What’s up?” Samuel asked.
Oh, this was a mistake. She watched his lips curve around the words, and a kaleidoscopic burst of possibilities clouded around that tiny, boring phrase. She imagined him looking at her with the same casual consideration and asking other questions, quandaries about the meaning of life, unending what-ifs, ones she’d dreamed up for the both of them to ask and answer, the sorts of private, ridiculous questions she and Hannah traded at 3 A.M. during sleepovers. The idea that he could look at her for more than an instant and remain unaware of her fascination was mind-boggling.
“You, um,” she said, and flooded back into her body, and realized she had nothing coherent to say. “I heard you told Sebastian—I’m friends with Felix, is the, yeah.”
Samuel’s mouth formed a stubborn line. “What about him?”
“Don’t fight him. Please. He’s an idiot. You can figure this out without hitting each other.”
“If he’s an idiot, why are you friends with him?”
“What, none of your friends ever act like idiots?”
Samuel considered her for a long moment. Then a smile broke his surly expression. She felt like she’d grown three inches taller, but she had to look away. How could somebody have teeth that white and skin that smooth without digital enhancement? Did he even have pores?
“Look,” he said, more calmly. “I got no problem with you. I don’t want to fight, but tell Martinez to leave Imani alone. If he doesn’t, I can’t make any promises, I’m happy to get into it, you know what I’m saying?”
Laila nodded. She didn’t actually know what he was saying. Most of that had seemed contradictory. But she’d had fifteen functional seconds of conversation with Samuel Marquez, and that deserved some sort of affirmative gesture.
“Sorry about Goldman, by the way,” he said. “Dude said he had a plan, he didn’t say he meant telling our parents. My dad would kill me.”
“God, same,” Laila said, and unspoken understanding passed between them. God bless Latin parents, bringing people together. “Hopefully Nazarenko’s trying to help us.”
“Maybe.” Samuel put his shoulders back so he seemed a little taller, a little broader. “You know,” he said, “she wrote something on my paper. I didn’t want to say anything ’cause all the guys were so mad she didn’t even underline anything on theirs.”
“Wait.” Laila yanked her story out. “Me, too. What’d she put on yours?”
He showed her. From what she skimmed, Samuel’s story was about a guy trying to sleep with his best friend’s sister. Nazarenko had circled a description reading, “The way she touched him made him feel on fire down there,” and had written, “Sounds as if he may need medical attention.
” Laila tried so hard not to laugh that she wound up blinking tears out of her eyes. God, and now all she could imagine was Samuel Marquez feeling “on fire down there.” She didn’t know where to look. His face was definitely off limits. All she could think was how hysterically Hannah would laugh when she heard about this.
“You think she’s trying to say something?” Samuel asked. “Like maybe we didn’t actually fail?”
Laila took a slow breath to deflate the bubble of hysteria. She considered the possibility that these were throwaway comments, but this was Nadiya Nazarenko. The way she walked, the way she spoke, the way she turned her head—every fraction of every movement was dangerously precise. She pictured this woman who met a reporter having calculated his thoughts so extensively that she could address his biggest question before he’d even said a word. She didn’t think Nazarenko could do something careless if she tried.
“I hope that’s what she means,” said Samuel. She could tell from his inflection that he was surprised to find himself saying any of this aloud. “The guys talked me into taking the intro class, but I actually like this. I don’t know. I thought I was okay at writing.” He shrugged his big shoulders, looking self-conscious.
Laila knew she was taking too long to reply, but over years of keeping subconscious tabs on Samuel Marquez’s behavior, she’d never once suspected he might be in Mr. Madison’s class because he wanted to be there. Did that assumption make her judgmental? Unobservant? Also, if she’d thought he was just some basketball player who didn’t care about writing, or reading, or school, why had she been fascinated by him?
No, she knew why. Because he was a pipe dream, and they’d seemed to have nothing in common, and he was beautiful and distant and she wanted to strive for the beautiful distant things her entire life. She had no idea what to do now that there was something between them, some tiny fragment he’d seen fit to share with her. Her thoughts were accelerating dangerously. If he’d shown her a pensive side of himself he never let slip in class, soon enough, they could both be sharing vulnerabilities. She would learn a hundred thousand things she could never have guessed about him. Maybe he had an athletic older brother in whose footsteps he’d unwillingly followed, but secretly he longed to be the next Junot Díaz. Maybe he had a childhood memory he’d never revealed to anyone—the huge, terrifying feeling of looking up into the white-painted strut ceilings of a Home Depot and realizing he had no idea where his parents were, and he’d squatted by the 3/8-inch zinc-plated hex nuts waiting for them to call his name over the intercom—the sort of microscopic fiber in the fabric of his life that Laila ached to know, that she was sure nobody else would ever have sought from him. Maybe Samuel Marquez, the blank slate of her imagination, was actually as kind as Leo, as loyal as Felix, as brilliant as Hannah, and maybe he would decide the same things of her, and then as graduation approached, a sudden, unplanned first kiss would turn into a first date would turn into first everything, and it would all feel like a stream of high-octane adventure rather than reality. Some heightened version of the truth. They would brush hands, and it would feel like the end of the world.
Final Draft Page 7
