Happy Election Day, Eartha Kitty!
Cutest election kitty ever
Eartha Kitty, are you voting today?
I quickly close out of the app as Duke slides my cup toward me. “One Americano, two shots.”
“Thank you.” I do a double take at the mountain of whipped cream topping his mug. “What is that?”
He settles his long body into the chair across from me, knees jutting off to the side. “Hot chocolate.”
“Really?”
“You look like you’ve never seen anyone order a hot chocolate.”
“Well, I haven’t. Not anyone over the age of ten, anyway.”
Duke makes a face. “Should I get five shots of espresso so you’ll respect me?”
“You can start with three.” I smile so he’ll know I’m kidding. His face relaxes.
“So, how are we going to figure out where I’m voting?” he says, slurping at the whipped cream.
“Well, what’s your dad’s address?” I pull up the site for a polling place locator on my phone and push it toward him so he can type it in.
He stares at the phone for so long, the screen goes dark. I wave a hand in front of his face. “Hello?”
“Sorry, I…I don’t think I know my dad’s address.”
I blow on my coffee. “Did he just move?”
“No…I’m just not there a lot.” He clears his throat and digs his own phone out of his pocket. “Hang on, I can find it.”
I look around Drip Drop as he starts typing and swiping. I’ve lived here my entire life, but it still astounds me how many people who aren’t at work during the day are consistently decked out in designer clothes, climbing out of Teslas and Porsches. It’s a Tuesday morning and the place is packed. I check every single person to see if they’re wearing voting stickers. Only about half of them pass my test.
“Okay, got it,” Duke says, and types the address into the site on my phone. His face drops immediately.
“What?” I ask before I take a sip of coffee, hoping it’s finally cooled enough.
“It’s at Flores Hills Elementary…where my mom works.”
“SO?”
I look up at her. “So? I should be in homeroom right now.”
“Yeah, but you’re skipping for a good cause. And the elementary school isn’t too far. We could even have you back in time for Calculus if traffic agrees with us.”
I squint at her. Does traffic ever agree with her? But I can’t help feeling relieved that it’s this easy. I showed up to the wrong spot, we found the right one, and I might even make it back in time for my test. Even though that last part doesn’t exactly make me feel better.
“Why do you look like that?” she asks, tapping a finger against her coffee cup. Her nails are short. I wonder if she bites them like I do.
“Like what?”
“Confused.”
I shrug. “I think this might just be my face.”
Marva laughs, picking up her phone. She stares at the screen for a moment, then looks at me. “Should we check to make sure you’re registered? Just in case?”
“Nah. I preregistered a couple of years ago. I just showed up to the wrong spot, and now we got the right one.”
She nods and drinks more coffee. I don’t miss the skeptical look in her eyes, but I feel like that may just be her normal face, too.
“So, if you’ve been preregistered since you were sixteen, that must mean your family is pretty political.”
“Understatement of the year,” I mumble, swiping a finger through the hill of whipped cream in my cup and licking it off in one quick movement.
Marva cocks her head to the side. “Really? Are they, like, actual politicians?”
“Nah, but my brother probably would’ve been. If he…”
“What? What happened?”
“He died.” I say it like it’s a fact, because it is. But it’s still weird as hell to me that it’s something I say now. That it’s something I’ve been saying for two years, something I’ll be saying for the rest of my life: My brother died.
“Oh.” Marva looks down at her Americano, hands wrapped around the cup like it’s a cold winter day instead of the sunny, seventy-five-degree fall day that’s normal in our town. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right. It was two years ago.”
A slight frown pinches her face. “Two years? That’s, like, no time.”
“Yeah…well.”
“Were you close to him?”
We’re in the middle of a busy-ass coffee shop with moms and dads and strollers and people typing away on laptops, but it’s suddenly too fucking quiet in here. I wish I’d brought my drumsticks. At least then I’d have something to distract me.
“Yup,” I say quickly. “I was.”
There are very clear Before and After moments when someone hears about Julian. Before, they feel fine thinking whatever they think about me. Even if they don’t know anything at all. But after…that’s when all the backtracking starts. You can practically see it on their faces, the worry that they’ve done or said something that might be offensive to the guy who has a dead brother.
“I’ve never known anyone who died,” she says slowly. “I mean, nobody who was young and that I was close to.…”
“It’s a trip. Do not recommend.” I clear my throat and change the subject so I won’t have to see her slide too far into the After. “What about your family? They all take this stuff as seriously as you do?”
“This stuff?” Marva shakes her head. “Duke, this stuff is going to affect our lives for years. And our kids’ lives, too.”
My eyes almost pop out of my head. “Kids? Damn, you already thinking that far ahead?”
“It’s impossible not to! Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising way too fast, and droughts, catastrophic hurricanes, and epic floods are becoming normal. Not to mention the growing amount of unchecked bigotry and hate crimes and school shootings…I mean, honestly, I don’t even know if I want to bring kids into this world with the way things are going.”
I take a long drink of hot chocolate. It goes down thick and sweet, and I lick the whipped cream off my mouth before I speak again. “How long you been thinking about this stuff?”
“Forever, I guess? But the last election, when we were fourteen…that was sort of my breaking point. Like, I knew I had to start working to make sure things change, or I’d never be able to forgive myself. I can’t just sit back and watch this world go to shit, you know?”
Her words send a shiver through me. This is the same kind of stuff Julian used to say. Almost verbatim. It’s not like I’m dumb enough to think my older brother was the only person who cared about voting this much. I knew his friends, who were all involved in some type of activism. They used to sit around our kitchen table for hours, talking about these things while Ma listened—sometimes contributing and most of the time making way too much food for their unofficial meetings.
“Have you ever thought about being a community organizer?”
“Not really?” she says. “I mean, I’m planning to go to school, and I’m probably going to be there for a while.”
“I know you’re not trying to be a professional student.”
“No, but I’ll probably go to law school.”
“You really do have your whole life planned out, huh?”
She slurps down the rest of her coffee and pushes the cup away, standing up. “If I don’t plan it, who will?”
MY PHONE PINGS WITH A TEXT AS SOON AS I unlock the doors to my car.
“This is a rich-person car,” Duke observes as he opens the door to the passenger side.
I look down at my phone. It’s Alec. Finally.
“Truth hurts, huh?” Duke continues.
I look at him over the top of my car. “What?”
“That you go to a fancy school and drive a rich-person car,” he says, smiling before he ducks into the seat.
“What are you talking about?” I slide in next to him, my finge
rs hovering over the phone screen. Since when am I afraid to look at texts from my boyfriend?
“Volvos. They’re luxury vehicles by design.”
“You don’t even know me.” I roll my eyes. “Why are you so obsessed with what I drive and where I go to school?”
His knees knock against the glove box as he settles himself in the seat. “You seemed embarrassed by it earlier. You don’t need to be. It’s okay if your parents have money.”
“Who ever said it wasn’t okay? And the car is old.” It used to be my dad’s, made in the nineties. It was vintage when he got it, and he drove it until I turned sixteen. When he couldn’t bear to get rid of it, I told him I’d still drive it if I didn’t have to deal with the maintenance. He was so thrilled, he couldn’t say no to that.
“It’s vintage,” Duke says, as if he’s reading my mind. “Look at this console—it has a tape deck!”
Something my dad is entirely too proud of, considering no one listens to cassette tapes anymore. I didn’t even know what they were until he showed me his old collection. Another thing he can’t part with.
“My family isn’t rich. They just prioritize education.”
“While mine decided to send me to Hooligan High, huh?” he asks, reaching for his seat belt.
I let out an exasperated sigh. “Are you going to keep doing this all day?”
“Maybe. It’s fun. You get so flustered.”
“I’m not flustered. And what if it was the other way around?”
He stops fiddling with his seat belt for a moment. “Huh?”
“I mean, what if I were the one teasing you about going to public school?”
“But why would you do that?” He looks at me like I’ve sprouted another head. “It’s clearly a dick move. People with money have the upper hand.”
“My parents are Black,” I say in a voice that comes out a little too snippy. “They don’t have the upper hand on a whole lot of things. Did you not get into Salinas Prep or something?”
“Ouch.”
I know he’s looking at me, but I’m a bit embarrassed by what I just said—and how I said it—and I don’t look back.
“Did you ever think maybe some people like going to public school?” Duke says.
I don’t respond. He continues.
“My sister and I went to private school in our old town. Julian gave my parents shit about it all the time, but they were afraid to send us to public school. Even though he got out of there alive, I think they thought we were too soft to handle it. Before we moved here, we looked at all the schools in the area, but I told them I wanted to go to Flores Hills High and Ida said the same about the middle school.”
“Oh,” I say in a quiet voice. I trace the edge of the steering wheel. We need to go, but I still haven’t started the car. “It was that easy? Convincing them?”
“Julian had just died and we’d moved to a new town and their marriage was basically in the shitter. It wasn’t too hard.”
He’s the one who brought it up—and kept bringing it up—so I’m not sure why I feel like such a huge jerk right now. I wonder if I should apologize, but when I look over at Duke, he doesn’t seem mad. His face seems the same as always: vaguely content, and amused by something I can’t figure out.
I look back down at my phone in my lap, trying to quell the embarrassment spreading through my body in waves. Finally, I swipe Alec’s text open to see if there’s more than the preview showed.
There’s not. It’s just three words that manage to infuriate me way more than they should:
Where are you?
I HEARD ABOUT ALEC BUCKMAN AT MY SALINAS Prep orientation a full week before I actually saw him.
He’d attended the lower school, so everyone knew him. Even the new kids who were starting freshman year, like me. I heard about how he was so cute and so charming and so smart, and this was according to just about every other girl and several guys I met.
I won’t lie—they weren’t wrong, from what I could tell. He was in honors courses, and I guess he was kind of cute. A white guy with a mess of brown curls, gray eyes, and a wide smile. We had three classes together, but I didn’t talk to him, so I couldn’t confirm the charming part. I was almost certain that dimple in his right cheek had something to do with it.
Freshman year was…not my best. I usually do well at whatever I set my mind to, and that was true with academics. My grades were impeccable. But I couldn’t seem to crack the code for fitting in at Salinas Prep.
I wasn’t on scholarship, but I’m sure everyone thought I was. The lack of brown skin at my new school was more than noticeable, and even though I kept my head down those first few days, trying not to draw too much attention, I’d seen a few of the sympathetic looks cast in my direction. And I hated that. My parents do all right between Mom’s job at the hospital and my father’s position as a marketing executive, but I was well aware that most of the kids I went to school with were in a different tax bracket than my family.
I was friendly with a few people in my classes, and I ate lunch with the same small group every day, but nobody ever asked me to hang out after school or on the weekends. Everyone seemed to have their groups. Salinas Prep starts at kindergarten, so some kids had been going there their whole lives, moving up through the lower school like Alec until they reached the upper school freshman year. Even the other freshmen who were new to the school seemed to fit in almost immediately, as if they’d been prepping for years.
I still had my friends from my old school, but things were a little weird with them, too. My two best friends, Ryan and Georgia, kept making jokes about how bougie I was for going to the fancy school, but soon the jokes stopped and then the texts tapered off and then we were barely seeing one another. Even after we’d promised on the last day of middle school that nothing would change.
It hurt seeing them online hanging out when I wasn’t invited, so I finally muted their accounts and started following people and things that made me feel good: politicians fighting for legislation that meant something to me, Black academics who always managed to teach me something new, and accounts featuring nothing but adorable animals.
I hadn’t thought much about Alec until I noticed these long, thoughtful comments on several posts from politicians I followed. I looked at the profile and was shocked to see ABuck1 was actually the Alec Buckman from Salinas Prep. He didn’t have many posts on his own page; a few photos from middle school and one or two since I’d started there. But he was a prolific commenter, and he seemed tuned in to the rights of others who didn’t look or live like him: Black people, girls and women, poor people.
I ran into him in the hallway the week before our midterms. I’d been studying in the library during lunch and was headed to drop off books at my locker before my next class. I don’t know where he was coming from or where he was going, but I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone walk down a hallway like that who wasn’t a teacher. So comfortable, so sure that they belonged.
I think I was staring at him, because he looked at me curiously, then slowed down until he was standing in front of me with a grin. I should have looked away, or at least turned around to busy myself with my books. But for the first time ever, I was truly face-to-face with ABuck1, the brain behind all those smart posts online. So I just stood there. Staring like I’d never seen a guy before.
“Hey, Marva,” he said in a warm voice. In fact, everything about him seemed warm. His eyes, his smile—I guess this was the charming part people talked about. I just hadn’t experienced him turning it solely on me.
“Hey,” I said.
“I’m Alec. Buckman,” he added, and all I could think about was how ridiculous the moment was. Like there was any way on earth I didn’t know his name.
“Um, yeah,” I say. “We have some classes together.”
“I know. But we’ve never talked.” He cocked his head to the side, his smile never wavering. “Why is that?”
Then I did turn to my locker to slide my books on
to the shelf. “I don’t really talk to a lot of people here.”
“Salinas Prep is pretty insular.” He paused, like he wasn’t sure he should say what he was going to say next. “Kudos, because I don’t think I could handle starting here my freshman year.”
I zipped my bag, closed my locker, and looked at him. “I’m surviving.”
“Yeah,” he said, his smile growing so wide it made my skin flush. “You are. Mind if I walk with you to English Lit?”
And just like that, after a chance meeting in the freshman hallway during lunch, Alec Buckman became my first real friend at Salinas Prep.
“WHAT’S WRONG?” HER FACE IS SO DAMN EXPRESSIVE, it’s hard not to notice.
She shifts in the driver’s seat and sets her phone facedown on her lap. “Nothing.”
Now I feel bad. “Sorry about the car stuff. I was just being stupid.”
She looks at me, confused. “What?”
“I mean, looks like you just got some bad news, and I shouldn’t have been giving you so much shit.” I lightly drum against my thighs with my fingers.
“No, it’s not that. It’s just—” She breaks off, shaking her head. “It’s really nothing.”
“Okay. Doesn’t look like nothing, though.”
Marva sighs and leans her head back against the seat. “I can’t complain to a guy about another guy. You never understand where we’re coming from.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Who’s the we in this situation?”
“Girls. Women.”
“Try me.”
“It’s my boyfriend. Alec.” She spins the phone around on her knee. “He’s being a real jerk right now. Acting like…He’s acting like someone I don’t even know.”
Am I supposed to give advice about some dude I haven’t met? I’ve never even had a girlfriend. “What happened?” That seems like a safe response.
“Do you really want to hear this?”
“If you want to tell me.”
The Voting Booth Page 3
