“But when nuclear waste disposal sites leak radioactive material, which they always do eventually, thousands of people can die.”
“—of any energy source, it doesn’t produce emissions that contribute to global warming—”
“Is reducing global warming more important than preventing people from getting cancer? Or making it easier for nuclear weapons to blow up the planet?”
“—and the water that nuclear plants use is never polluted, so—”
“It’s not worth the risk.”
“Be logical. How can you not agree with nuclear energy?”
There’s no way you’d ever guess that Sandra is only in eighth grade. She acts, talks, and dresses older than me. And she’s a lot more mentally stable. How fair is it that she got all the advanced genes?
The thing about Sandra is, she’s the most confrontational person I know. She loves to debate. She’s even in the pre-debate program. So by the time she hits ninth grade, she’ll be like this crazy verbal attack monster unleashed. A monster with a really good vocabulary.
Sandra’s been compiling evidence on alternative forms of energy because that’s the topic the mini debaters are doing now. Which is how this fight with Jack got started.
Dad gives Sandra a warning look. Too bad he’s not looking at Jack that way.
Jack’s like, “So . . . your mom tells me that you’re on the debate team?”
And Sandra goes, “Do you even know what uranium 238 is?”
Okay. Sandra just crossed the line. Having a “debate” with a dinner guest is one thing. Implying that the guest doesn’t know what he’s talking about is something else.
“Jack is our guest,” Dad informs Sandra. “You’re excused from dinner.”
“But I—”
“Now.”
Sandra pushes back her chair so hard it almost falls over. “This,” she huffs, “is so not fair.”
I swear, she’s such a drama queen.
Sandra stomps off to her room. Her door slams.
I glance over at Mom. She takes another bite of salad, looking at Dad.
He notices her looking. “What?” he says.
She just shakes her head. Then: “Can I offer you some more wine, Jack?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
“I’d like some more wine,” Dad says.
My parents hardly ever fight. They’re always cracking jokes and laughing and holding hands like they don’t realize how old they are. Except when they’re not. Which is only in extreme situations. And even then, they make an effort to get along.
Mom has always kept more to herself. Like with those faraway looks she gets, or how sometimes she “needs a minute,” which is code for going to her room and reading or watching TV alone. Which ends up taking way more than a minute. I guess it’s just a personality thing. She needs a lot of alone time, while Dad is the complete opposite. The more people around, the happier he is. You’d think that a marriage wouldn’t work with two people being so different and all, but somehow it does. They just have this extrovert-introvert yin-yang thing going on.
Jack smiles at me. I don’t smile back. There’s something about him I’m not liking. What kind of person would argue with a thirteen-year-old girl about nuclear energy like that?
Jack goes, “I hear you’re into photography.”
“Yeah.”
“You use a Nikon?”
I nod. “My dad gave me his old one.”
Jack glances at Dad. “That’s cool,” he says.
Part of me wants to ask Jack why he was giving Sandra such a hard time. I mean, he’s the adult. She’s just a kid. But that’s part of my anxiety problem. I keep all this bad stuff in and it makes everything worse. I just hate fighting. Sandra is crazy confrontational and it makes me want to avoid arguments whenever I can.
I’m expecting another lame question from this guy who obviously doesn’t know how to interact with teens, but Jack just goes back to eating. We all do.
On the way to my room, I pass Sandra’s door. Signs are plastered all over it, like READING MAKES YOUR BRAIN SMART and MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR and I ROCK AT PISSING YOU OFF. I think about knocking to see if she’s okay, but I walk on by. We all need a minute sometimes.
6
Sterling and I do something together every Saturday night. It’s our thing. It helps us feel slightly less pathetic that we don’t have boyfriends. In our world, the ideal boyfriend would take us out every Saturday night. And the ultimate Saturday night date would be dinner and a movie. It’s classic.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we sit around complaining about not having boyfriends or anything. Getting boyfriends is part of our reinvention pact for this year and we’re determined to finally make it happen. I feel like if I don’t get kissed soon, I seriously might explode.
“Don’t look,” Sterling warns. She’s blocking my view in case I refuse to follow directions.
“At what?”
“Tabitha is totally scamming on some random boy over there.”
The Notch is the only good place to hang out when it’s cold, so we usually come here a lot in the winter. But we haven’t been here since June and I guess we missed it in some warped way, so we decided to make an appearance tonight. Until I went to camp this year, summers were all about lying on the beach (technically just this sandy area along the river) with Sterling. Which was probably really bad for us, even if we always used sunblock.
I love the beach. My dad and I go for beach walks and collect these polished stones that you can find if you look hard enough. I collect the white ones and he collects the black ones. On my win dowsill, I have a glass bowl filled with all of my white stones. I also like to walk to the lighthouse and watch it in the twilight, glowing strong and bright. And a lot of people around here have boats or do windsurfing or waterskiing, so you can always get someone to take you out onto Long Island Sound.
The Notch has a big fountain in the middle of everything with four branches of shops sticking out from it. So the whole thing looks like a big X from overhead. There’s a pizza place that plays movies on a big screen and has pool tables in the back. There’s a gelato bar with a bocce-ball court. There’s a movie theater with four screens. There’s Cosmic Bowling and Happy Mart and Shake Shack, plus some chain stores.
A lot of kids from school are here tonight. Everyone likes to loiter near the fountain because you can scope out people walking by from all directions. We’re sitting on the edge of the fountain and, from the way Sterling is blocking me, I guess Tabitha is probably sitting on the other side.
“She’s not going to see me if I look,” I tell Sterling.
“Just wait.”
I open my bag from the music place. It has two CDs that I can’t wait to play. The Mat Kearney one has at least one song from Grey’s Anatomy on it. Scraping my fingernail along the edge where the industrial-strength packing tape is doesn’t help it peel off. One time I was so impatient trying to pry a CD case open that it cracked. So I’m going for the calm approach this time.
“Okay,” Sterling says. “Now.”
First, I look the other way. I scan a group walking by, pretending to look for someone. Then I casually turn around, and there’s Tabitha. Sitting on a cute boy’s lap. Why does she always have to wear such tight shirts? But if you’re pretty like Tabitha in a way where everyone agrees you’re pretty, I guess you can get away with stuff like that.
“Who’s she sitting on?” I ask.
“Maybe he’s a junior?”
“Maybe he doesn’t go to our school.”
“How avant-garde.”
The truth is, I’m jealous. Tabitha gets attention from boys all the time. It’s like it’s not even hard for her to talk to them. She just does it naturally. Where did she learn how? Or was she just born that way? If it’s genetic, my DNA is definitely lacking that segment.
I want that. Not just to be popular with boys. I want a boy to love.
Julia and Evan come over and sit next to us.
We’re in the same group for global studies, so I say hey, but Sterling and I aren’t really friends with them. I think Julia’s mad at me. We kind of got in a fight the first week of school. It wasn’t my fault. I was just shocked that Julia doesn’t like to read.
When she told me that, I was like, “How can you not read?”
“It’s boring,” she went. “No offense.”
“Have you read Speak? Or Girl?”
“No.”
“So that’s probably it, then. You’re not reading good books.”
“Like I said. They’re boring.”
“But good books aren’t boring.”
“To you, maybe. But not everyone has the same taste. There’s other stuff to read besides books. Like magazines.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Why not? It’s still reading.”
“Yeah, but books are . . .” How do you explain how books are nothing like magazines to someone who doesn’t even read them? “Forget it.” I had to give it a rest because she was obviously not interested in reading and that’s just the way it was.
Julia’s telling Evan about this webcast she heard last night.
“This guy comes on most nights at eleven. He’s totally hard core.”
Evan’s like, “Who is he?”
“He’s anonymous. But he knows stuff about the school.”
“Like what?”
“He totally shouted out this senior. She told everyone she had the flu, but she actually got a DUI.”
“Maybe he just made it up.”
“I don’t think so. He knows.” Then Julia tells him everything that was on the show last night. And how this guy’s claims are legit and he has evidence and all. Apparently, he knows a lot about our school. “He obviously has, like, access to inside information.”
“But how?”
“Maybe he hacked into e-mail?”
“You can’t know all that personal stuff just from e-mail.”
I’m getting bored with spying.
Then Sterling goes, “Hey, isn’t that Derek?”
We both look at someone down by Shake Shack. He’s far away, but I can still tell it’s Derek. If I had a choice, I’d be sitting on his lap, just like Tabitha with her boy adventure.
But life’s never easy when you need it to be.
Usually when we’re here, Sterling makes me pick out a boy I think is cute. There’s a decent selection of them because kids come over from other towns, since this is pretty much the only mall-type situation within a thirty-mile radius. Then she tries to get me to talk to some boy I don’t even know. Sterling looks at it like this: If I want to make new friends and eventually have a boyfriend, I have to put myself out there the way she does. Not that being super friendly has helped her get a boyfriend. Sterling has as much experience with boys as I do. Which is approximately none.
Everything’s easier for her, though. Sterling makes friends all the time. She does stuff outside of school, like cooking classes and yoga, so she’s constantly meeting new people. She always has friends over. I try not to be jealous of her life, but it’s hard. Sterling’s all sophisticated with her social life beyond school, where there’s freedom to be who you want. So she knows this whole group of people she actually wants to be friends with, instead of being restricted to the same wingnuts we’re forced to live with year after year.
“Oooh, he’s cute,” Sterling says.
“I know.”
“Not Derek. I mean, Derek’s cute, but—” She points to another boy getting cookies at Mrs. Fields. “What about him?”
“That guy at Mrs. Fields?”
“Um-hm.”
“He’s like ten years older than us.”
Sterling stares at him longingly. Then she’s like, “Let’s go try on jeans.”
I groan. She’s so tiny that trying on jeans is easy for her. For me, it’s a whole different experience.
“You always think nothing fits you,” Sterling goes, “but you’re wrong.”
“Which is why I only have three pairs of jeans?”
“You only have three pairs of jeans because you don’t put enough time into building your wardrobe.”
That’s easy for her to say. If I were five two and skinny (but curvy at the same time), jeans would look as fabulous on me as they do on her. But I’m four inches taller and my hips do this weird puffing-out thing and my thighs are too fat and my butt just looks wrong. So finding jeans that actually fit me is a miracle.
I struggle to cram myself into the first pair of jeans I picked out. “Who designs this crap?” I complain. Sterling’s in the next dressing room over.
“Yeah, really,” she says. Just to be nice, I’m sure.
“Why does the waist always stick out so much in the back? Seriously. How hard is it to make jeans with a normal waist?”
“And why does my butt crack always have to be hanging out?”
“Maybe it’s some obscure trend we didn’t hear about.”
“Uuuh! These jeans are corroded.”
“They don’t fit?”
“They’re too tight.”
“Maybe Tabitha would like them.”
Sterling does her snorting laugh. When she laughs really hard, the snorting gets out of control.
I yank the jeans down over my hips and kick them to the floor. I’m not even bothering with the four other pairs. Nothing ever fits. There are some things I can’t control and that’s just the way it is.
7
Darius is a hard-core nerd.
You know the type. He’s the kid who sits in the front of every class, raising his hand to answer every question. He wears glasses that are too big for his face. He has zero product in his hair. And don’t get me started on what he’s wearing. He’s one of those overachievers who signed up for too many clubs during orientation week. If you say something wrong in class, he shouts out to correct you before the teacher can. He’s the complete opposite of laid-back.
Darius is totally on the Harvard track and he’s only fifteen.
I have mixed feelings about doing group work with him. It’s good because he always takes over and does most of the work. But it sucks at the same time. Because, you know. He’s Darius.
We’ve been working on this global activity for ten minutes. Everyone else is out of ideas. It’s this project called Pay It Forward, where you have to think of how you can change the lives of three people you know. Then you have to write down your plan for how to help them. The idea is that they’re not supposed to pay you back, they’re supposed to pay it forward by changing the lives of three other people. If the chain works, it gets huge, and eventually thousands of people’s lives could change. Ideally, the whole world would improve in major ways.
Of course, Darius is just getting started. So while he’s writing down his ideas (and probably crossing out what the rest of us did), Julia starts talking about other stuff. She just had some bad highlights put in her hair. The highlights are so bad that I’m having a hard time focusing on what she’s saying.
“Oh my god,” she goes to me. “Did you hear it last night?”
“Hear what?”
Julia sighs all dramatically. “The show.”
“No. I haven’t heard it yet.”
“Here.” Julia writes something at the corner of her paper and rips it off. “This is his website. You have to start listening.”
“Thanks.” I take the scrap of paper. She’s not the only one who’s been talking about the show, so maybe I’ll check it out.
Then Julia complains how she got no sleep last night. “My parents were fighting until at least three,” she says. “They think if they go in their room and shut the door, it automatically sound-proofs whatever they do in there. Like, don’t they know I can totally hear?”
“At least your parents still live in the same house,” Evan says.
“That’s nothing,” Julia says. “Mine don’t even talk to each other. The fight was an improvement.”
“I’d
rather have that than joint custody,” Evan challenges. “Doing the room shuffle every weekend is so lame.”
I stay quiet.
Everyone’s looking at me expectantly. Except Darius, who’s still frantically scribbling.
“That’s harsh,” I say to everyone in general.
Since it’s glaringly obvious that my parents are normal, they dismiss me and go back to comparing whose parents are the worst.
I don’t usually think about it, but when stuff like this happens I realize how lucky I am. My parents have a great relationship. They’re my role models for what I want when I grow up. I don’t know what I’d do without my dad. He’s the one who always makes me feel better. He’s the one who’s there for me, no matter what.
My mom tries in her own way, but it’s different. Like, she insists that we eat dinner together every night, which I know most families don’t do. Apparently, I’m weird for having a normal family that does normal family things. But that’s cool. I’d rather be weird and happy than normal and miserable.
On my way to psych, I see Derek with Sierra in the hall. My heart speeds up and I get all twitterpated, the same exact way I get every time I see him. It’s especially severe when I run into him randomly like this, when I don’t expect it. He’s so cute. I spend a lot of time imagining what it would be like to be his girlfriend. But Sierra gets to be the lucky one.
Derek totally caught me staring at him in art the other day, which was potentially mortifying. Especially since he already caught me staring at him at Andrea’s pier party. So now he probably thinks I’m a deranged stalker. But he was all sweet about it and just smiled at me.
That was a really good day.
Today, however, is majorly sucking. My homework took forever. It took me, like, three hours just to do the reading and questions for English. My brain is totally fried. I need to unwind or I’ll have noisy brain all night. So at three minutes to eleven, I decide to hear what everyone’s been talking about.
I get out the scrap of paper where Julia wrote the webcast guy’s site. The site doesn’t give any clues about who he is, though. It just says that he’s called Dirty Dirk and it gives the link to his show. There’s a backlog of listings starting in August. It’s kind of amazing that kids were already talking about this guy when school started.