Forever for a Year

by B. T. Gottfred

  Peggy whispered to Katherine, “That’s him,” but I couldn’t look anymore. I had to turn away. Just let this be over, please. Please, please, please.

  What felt like an hour later, Peggy finally said to me, “He’s inside, Carrie.” I didn’t even care she used my wrong name.

  Katherine said, “He is hot. You really think he likes you? Never mind. You can be his Facebook friend, but don’t talk to him until I find out more about him.” Then Katherine left.

  I looked at Peggy, wanting her to tell me that her sister was mean and crazy and I should ignore everything she says, but Peggy just shrugged and went inside biology. I hated Peggy for one second, even though I knew she had to live with Katherine’s insanity everyday.

  I just felt so small and invisible. Like I could get sucked into the crevices between the lockers at any moment and no one would even remember I existed.

  Biology was horrible because Trevor was there and I didn’t even get to sit next to him. I tried not to think about him or look at him but that was impossible. Then Mr. Klenner called on me when he must have known I had no idea even what my name was or what planet I was on, and so I said, “Huh?” and the class laughed, or at least it felt like it, and then he asked the question again, except I still had no idea, and then he gave the answer and gave me that look that says, “Don’t be a bad student,” which I had seen teachers give to so many other people but never to me.

  I wanted to die and never come back to school, though I suppose if I was dead I couldn’t come back to school anyway. The embarrassment did make me pay attention, so I guess teachers embarrassing students must work, but it is a horrible thing to do and should be against the law.

  Trevor didn’t sit next to me in history either, which was fine. Just fine. I was thinking of him less by the minute. Lunch was fine too, though near the end, when I was talking to Kendra about our game Saturday, Peggy got up without telling me and went over to talk to Shannon Shunton and those popular girls. When I finally found her, she was walking away from their table.

  “What were you talking to them about?” I asked as we walked to algebra.

  “About the party Friday,” she said, and suddenly my throat felt like it was swelling because I wondered if Peggy would become Shannon Shunton’s best friend and not mine, then I realized that would never happen and just smiled so she wouldn’t know what I was thinking.

  * * *

  In math class, Henry McCarthy sat behind me, which I didn’t think about because everyone has to sit somewhere. Except then, when the teacher had his back to us, writing some weird math equation on the whiteboard, Henry leaned up and whispered into my ear. I jumped a little, but maybe only in my mind, because no one turned in my direction.

  What did he whisper? This: “I heard you were going to the Darry party Friday.” Darry was Peggy and Katherine’s last name. But he also said, “You should come to the freshman game first. It starts at three thirty. I’m the quarterback. I’m going to throw touchdowns.” And then he stopped talking. I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. Had Henry McCarthy just invited me to come watch his football game? He had, which was almost as weird as when that junior Alexander Taylor, with his tie and his odd eyes, stopped me in the hall yesterday. Boys in high school were already much different than they were in junior high.

  When the bell rang, Henry said, “You better come,” which maybe he meant as charming, because he tried to smile, but it felt like a threat because Henry had always been mean to me before and it was hard to rewire my brain to accept that maybe he was being nice to me now.

  I was telling Peggy about this in the hall after class, and she was saying how amazing it was, though I’m not sure if it was amazing or just really confusing. Then we saw Shannon Shunton and Wanda Chan, and they stopped us by stopping right in front of us.

  Shannon spoke directly at me, which I don’t think she had ever done before. “Do you want to borrow some of my clothes?”

  I wanted to cry and I didn’t even know why, but I didn’t cry, which was a relief.

  Then she said, “For the party.”

  “Okay,” I said, only I didn’t know if I meant it. Shannon Shunton always dressed in short skirts—because she had these amazing thin, thin, thin legs—and tank tops or very, very tight T-shirts, usually black or gray ones. My favorite colors were green and yellow and I liked to wear baggy clothes and pants because my body was horrible. Just horrible.

  “Cool,” she said, “I’ll bring some stuff to Marguerite’s house.”

  “Do you still like Henry McCarthy?” I asked her. Peggy looked at me like I was from Mars for asking Shannon this, but I didn’t understand why this was a bad question, and aren’t we supposed to be friends with her now? And I still didn’t know why Henry was asking me to come watch his football game.

  “Uh, no,” Shannon Shunton said, and then, “he’s a freshman.” Except she might as well have said, He’s a squirrel, and her voice suggested she might even have dated a squirrel before she’d date a freshman.

  Then Wanda said, “We hung around some seniors this summer and it’s just hard to relate to freshman boys anymore.” Then they both smiled, but cool smiles that didn’t feel like real smiles at all, and then they both left.

  “You shouldn’t ask Shannon questions like that,” Peggy said after we had started walking again.

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. It just feels like we shouldn’t,” Peggy said.

  I didn’t know what else to say about Shannon Shunton, so I said, “Trevor hasn’t talked to me at all today.”

  “My sister said she was going to talk to him at lunch about you.”

  Whaaaaaaaaaaaat!

  Huh?

  No.

  Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

  “What?” I said after my brain stopped being a huge giant fireball.

  Peggy said, in a calm voice that annoyed me, “Katherine talked to him. At least she said she was going to.”

  “What was she going to say?” Oh my GOSH! My heart was beating really fast. So fast.

  “Just ask him why he liked you. I don’t know.”

  “BUT WHY WOULD SHE DO THAT?”

  “Shh! Don’t yell, Carrie!”

  “My name’s Carolina!” I sort of yelled. Because I was so mad. So mad I couldn’t breathe! I couldn’t see! I couldn’t exist one more second without EXPLODING!

  “I’m sorry. But shh. Katherine is trying to help. She knows more about boys than we do.”

  “I can’t go to health class.”

  “Why not?” Peggy asked, even though she’s my best friend and she should know why and obviously I WAS HAVING A HEART ATTACK.

  “Because Trevor’s in my health class!”

  “Will you stop freaking out?”

  “I just can’t handle this. It’s too much. I can’t—” I stopped walking and sat down. In the middle of the hallway. Oh my gosh, why did I do that? Peggy pulled me up to my feet and pulled me over to the side so I wouldn’t get trampled.

  And then she said, “Guess what? You’re amazing. And if he’s smart, Trevor will like you. And if he doesn’t like you, then he’s stupid and you won’t like him.”

  This felt like it should make me feel better, but I didn’t feel better. Then because I thought I should, I think I did, a little. Peggy hugged me, and I hugged her back.

  Then Peggy said, “I have to go to history now,” and she walked off. I wanted to tell her I loved her, maybe not out loud, but maybe just by telling her she was amazing, but by the time I turned to say it, Peggy was already with Shannon Shunton and Wanda Chan and then all three of them disappeared among the crowd.

  Gosh.

  Anyway, I repeated what Peggy said in my head, decided I probably wasn’t going to have a heart attack, and went to health class. I was the last one to arrive, and there was only one seat left … next to Trevor Santos. As I walked from the door to the desk, my face turned so red, I mean, it must have, and my skin itched, but I
was also excited, with the good butterflies in my stomach, so I sat down but didn’t look at him.

  Again, I had the weirdest sensation during the whole class, being close to him like that, which was that we knew each other. I started to believe we knew each other from a past life, except I think past lives are silly. It’s just that there’s always been, like, this separation between me and other people. I didn’t ever think there was, not really, until right now, when I thought that this separation that I never realized was there wasn’t there with Trevor … it was like I had always lived in my own bubble and no one else had ever been in my bubble until him.

  EXCEPT I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HIM! And I’m crazy and I’m so tired and I don’t know who I am anymore. But I couldn’t convince myself to be sane so I thought I just had to speak to him. The last twenty minutes of class I only thought about what I could say, and I had fifty different ideas but I didn’t pick one until the bell rang.

  I said, “Did Katherine say something to you?”

  And he said, “Yeah,” except it was more like he said, You and your friends are horrible, disgusting people, never talk to me again, all in that one little “yeah” and then he walked out of the classroom.

  I kind of did die of a heart attack then, but not from it going too fast. Instead it just stopped and dropped into my stomach, where it shattered and turned into nothingness.

  I didn’t really die, obviously, but you understand. So even though we get in big trouble for using our phones in school, I took mine out and signed in to Facebook, which I never do at school because school is important, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to accept his friend request because I was sure that would make up for whatever Katherine said and whatever bad things he was thinking I was.

  Except, you know what? When I signed on and looked for his friend request, it was gone.

  Like it never even existed.

  Don’t cry, Carolina.

  Please don’t cry.

  12

  Trevor wakes up burning

  My chest burned when I woke up Tuesday morning. All my muscles felt wrenched an inch closer to my bones. What was strange is I liked it. Liked the ache. Liked the pain. I must be screwed up in the head to like pain.

  Dad didn’t have to wake me up. Whether it was my body or my brain that did it, I don’t know, but I was up at 5:40 a.m. First thing I did was check Facebook. Hated that’s what I did, but I can’t lie and say I didn’t do it.

  Carolina still hadn’t accepted my friend request. Not a big deal. But … never mind. Just not a big deal. But then I started looking at her pictures. Didn’t do it yesterday because, well, it’s a stupid thing to do, but now it was so early and she hadn’t become my friend and, I don’t know, I just wanted to look at her pictures.

  The truth was she didn’t look that great. She dressed mostly like a boy, never stood up straight, and always smiled like taking photographs was torture. This might be another reason she wasn’t popular. Because of stupid Facebook and iPhones, how good you looked in pictures mattered as much as how pretty you were in real life.

  But then there was this one photo of her playing soccer. Carolina was concentrating so intensely on the game, she couldn’t tell anyone was taking the picture, so she didn’t know to be uncomfortable. Instead she looked like an Olympic athlete that would be in commercials because she was beautiful and amazing at sports. She was striding across the grass, two opposing players behind her, anguished they couldn’t catch her. Her eyes were so sharp you had the feeling she could see right through you and the ground and into whole other worlds. The muscles in her arms and legs were tight, reminded me of how I felt right this second, and for that second I thought again we were soul mates. You know, like the one person that would make me feel not so fucking alone.

  Then I stopped thinking that because I don’t believe in that crap. But maybe I didn’t stop thinking it as much as I wanted to.

  * * *

  Carolina acted strange as I walked toward biology. She looked at me, so did her friend and some older girl, but then she looked away. Suddenly I felt like she was annoyed I had sent her that friend request. So I sat in the back of class, far away from where we sat yesterday. I did it to punish her, but it probably only punished me.

  At lunch, the older girl who was with Carolina before biology marched over to our table, pointed at me, and said, “You, come here,” like she was a teacher disciplining me. I wasn’t going to move. I didn’t know this chick, and I certainly didn’t like being told what to do.

  But then my cousin Henry said, “Dude, that’s Katherine Darry. She’s, like, the hottest girl in the school. Go, go.”

  “Thanks for telling the new kid here what’s up,” Katherine said, winking at Henry like he was her best friend, only to turn her gaze cold as it descended back on me.

  Screw it. I got up, followed her out of the cafeteria into the hall. Not sure why Henry thought Katherine was that attractive. Yeah, she knew how to walk so that her butt moved back and forth and she knew how to wear makeup like girls on reality TV, but there was nothing pretty about her at all. Her face was puffy and angry, her eyes small and panicked.

  “Do you like my sister?” Katherine asked after she stopped, spun, and shoved her head six inches from mine.

  “Who’s your sister?”

  “Oh. My. God. You retarded or are you just retarded? My sister is Peggy. She looks like me, but not as, you know, mature, except her boobs are huge, which is why you like her, don’t lie!”

  “She’s Carolina’s friend?”

  Katherine opened her mouth but didn’t say anything while her brain tried to catch up. “Listen, new kid. I know how stuff works. You’re super hot, but nobody realizes it yet because you’re new. Not even you, apparently. So you can’t like Carolina. It just won’t work. So you can like Peggy maybe, because I don’t want her dating any of my friends. So you think about it, and I’ll talk to Peggy. But leave Carolina alone. She’s not your type.” Then she tapped my ear with her hand two times. “Okay?”

  But I didn’t say anything. I sure as hell wasn’t going to agree with her, but I didn’t have the balls to tell her off either. Then she left and I just stood there, not quite sure what this really meant. When I turned around, Henry was standing there, Licker and baby-faced Jake behind him. They stepped fast into my space before I could do anything about it.

  “What did she say? What did she want?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie! Just tell us!” Jake whined.

  “Something about her sister, Peggy. Wanted to know if I liked her.”

  Licker said, “Katherine must think you’re going to be cool, which means you probably will be.”

  Henry’s face scrunched up when Licker said this. Then my cousin said, “You can’t go out with Peggy because I was going to go out with her. Sorry, Trev.” Then he walked away, Jake and Licker following after him.

  This. School. Sucks. For the next minute, all I could think about is how much I hated my mom for making us leave California and come to this crap-hole place because she’s so malfunctioning in the head. Then, I don’t even know why, I decided to take out my phone and take back my friend request to Carolina. It wasn’t until after I did it that I realized why: For at least a few minutes this morning I thought she was my soul mate. I thought she was different and I was different and we could be different together, but then with all this Katherine and Henry BS, it was clear that she was a part of their game. She wasn’t different like me. She was the same like them.

  * * *

  After health class, Carolina tried to say something to me. I’m not even sure what—I was concentrating on ignoring her—but I let her know with one look that I knew she and her stupid friends were trying to manipulate me and I wanted nothing to do with any of them.

  Except, after I walked away, the look on her face kept creeping back into my memory. It wasn’t the look I expected. What did I expect? I don’t even know now. Maybe for he
r to roll her eyes or give me a wicked grin like Katherine, or something that would have made it easy for me to think she was one of them.

  But her look was so vulnerable, and deep—like her whole being could see me, not just her eyes—that I left wondering if maybe I should have listened to what she had to say.

  No. No. No.

  Trevor. Listen: Nobody will ever understand you. Nobody will ever make you feel you’re not alone. Stop trying to trick yourself into thinking anything else. You’ll be a lot happier when you accept that you’ll always be miserable.

  13

  Carolina makes some important decisions

  So, like, study hall on Tuesday … yeah, okay, remember that I have study hall last period on Tuesday and Thursday because we have club soccer practice the other days? Anyway, so I was kind of excited about study hall because, you know, it’s not a real class, and we could get homework done, and it would be Peggy and Kendra and maybe some new people but people just like us. It would be this society of student-athletes. I would belong to something, you know? All summer Peggy and I talked about how amazing study hall would be. It sounds stupid to think study hall would be amazing, but we thought it anyway.

  But after Peggy sat between me and Kendra, right away she said, “I’ll be right back,” told the teacher she needed to go the bathroom, took sooo long, and then when she came back she sat next to this sophomore volleyball boy named Thomas something. Peggy and this Thomas kept whispering to each other. I knew this because I was staring at Peggy the whole time. I mean, I was having a major crisis with Trevor caused by HER sister and she was talking to some boy I didn’t even know she knew existed? Huh? What?

  About halfway through study hall, the teacher said, “Shouldn’t you be getting some work done?” Right! To! Me! I was mortified. Oh my gosh. Mortified. I mean, Peggy was flirting with a boy, I wasn’t saying anything, and I get in trouble? Oh my gosh. Everything was ruined.

  So I pretended to do work, but I couldn’t concentrate, so it wasn’t real work. It was just me writing a long letter to Peggy that I knew I would never give her even before I finished.