Mr. Bock, a body-double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, jogged around the gym, blowing the whistle in time to his footfalls.
“I’m Chad.”
“I remember.” I reached up to feel the crystal heart and bike lock key that hung from a guitar string around my neck. I hadn’t taken it off in weeks. “I like your shirt. With the tie on it.”
“Less talking, more walking!” Mr. Bock shouted. “Arms up. And out. And up. And down.”
We looked like a bunch of orchestra conductors circling the gym.
“So, how come you moved here?”
Geez. Get right to the point, Chad.
“Sorry. I mean, I just wondered.” He looked straight ahead, as if fascinated by the victory banners on the wall. “Usually when someone changes schools, it’s because they got kicked out or something. But that can’t be you.”
“Why not?”
He laughed. “Because you won the Academic Olympics.”
“Brainiacs can’t get in trouble?”
“We usually don’t.”
I didn’t want to tell him I wasn’t actually a brainiac. But I did want to tell him every shocking thing I’d ever done. Like getting caught in the woods by the police after an illegal party, and running away from home on a train.
“So?” Chad asked again.
“My parents divorced. We had to move.”
“That sucks.”
I checked out the banners on the wall. Ian Callaghan held a lot of athletic records. “Yeah. It kind of does.”
Mr. Bock blew his whistle again. “Now run! Three laps! Impress me, or I’ll make it five!”
“What happened to your arm?” Chad asked.
Without a long sleeve to pull over it, I couldn’t hide the twisted, lumpy scars all over my right forearm. Almost two months after the accident, the skin still blotched with red and purple bruises.
“Did you get burned?”
“Road rash.” That’s what Adam called it, anyway. He had a couple of his own.
“Geez.” Chad’s eyes followed my arm as it moved in unison with everyone else’s. “Did you get thrown out of a car?”
“Motorcycle.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“All right, chickens,” Mr. Bock barked as we finished our last lap. “Line up against the wall and count off by fours.”
Mr. Bock broke us into four teams and assigned us places on both sides of the two volleyball nets. Chad got put on team two, while I ended up on three. Teams one and two went to opposite sides of one net while we faced off against four across the other. I didn’t know anyone on my team. But Mai Yung, from my homeroom, and Bobby Russell stood on the court across from me.
Their team served first and lobbed it easily over the net and into the back row of our team. I turned around and kept my eye on the ball till it bounced off someone’s fingertips and into the front row, right to me. I wasn’t tall enough and couldn’t jump high enough to actually spike it, but I whammed it with the inside of my wrist and it arched over the net at Mai Yung’s head.
Mai Yung squealed and ducked.
“Sorry!” I called to her. Geez, I didn’t hit it that hard.
“It is okay,” she said, and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I am not very good at sporting games.”
The ball came back over to our side, bobbed around four times then came back to the front row. The guy next to me spiked it hard, right onto the floor. It bounced up into the second row, straight into Bobby’s hands.
“Point,” our server called.
Bobby threw it back with one arm.
“Serving one to zero.”
The padded white ball skimmed the top of the net, aimed right at Mai Yung again. The guy beside her reached for it, and knocked her with his shoulder in the process. She fell down onto her hip, and her glasses dropped to the floor.
The guy who ran into her only grazed the ball with the side of his hand, and it rose just a few inches before it fell again.
Bobby dove right at Mai Yung. I figured he’d plow her over to keep the ball in play. But he didn’t. Instead, he crashed down onto one knee right behind her, scooped up her glasses with his right hand and flicked the ball just enough with his left hand to get it back to the guy in the front row, who then flipped it up and spiked it into the middle of our team.
“You okay?” Bobby asked Mai Yung, and offered her his hand to help her stand up.
Mai Yung took it, stood up, and reached for the glasses he held out to her. She put them on and stared up at him, this tiny little porcelain doll next to tall, rugged, blond Bobby.
I knew that look. I’d felt that look.
Mai Yung just fell hard for Bobby Russell.
“I am okay. Thank you.” I could almost see the stars flit out of her eyes like bedazzled butterflies.
He grinned at her and jogged backward to his position. His eyes went back to the ball, still going, and he hit it my direction.
I lobbed it back and watched Mai Yung and Bobby. She stole glances at him every chance she got. Bobby never looked away from the ball.
He had no idea. No idea at all.
Are all guys so completely dense?
* * * * *
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a whole apple and a Ding-Dong made an okay lunch, but my mouth watered at the trays of hamburgers, French fries, applesauce, and buckeyes that Grace, Kari Ann and Mai Yung brought to the table. I never thought I’d be jealous over school food.
“How’s your first day so far?” Kari Ann asked as she popped the buckeye in her mouth first.
“Okay.”
Aisha walked by with a girl who looked just like Heather Locklear. “Hey, chicas,” Aisha lifted her chin at us as they went over to a table in the center of the cafeteria.
“Eesh,” Grace muttered.
“What?” I asked.
“Heather.”
“Aisha?”
Kari Ann shook her head. “The other one.”
“Her name is actually Heather?”
“Heather Moody.” Kari Ann bit the end off a fry. “She’s hideous.”
I unwrapped my sandwich. “How so?”
“She just is. You’ll see.”
Heather and Aisha sat down with a girl in a cheerleading uniform.
“Aisha seems nice.”
Kari Ann nodded. “Yeah. She’s cool.”
“Maybe a little too cool,” Grace muttered.
“It’s just Heather. She’s so…”
“Yeah. I think every school must have a Heather,” I said.
Grace cut her hamburger down the middle and picked up half. “Were you the Heather at your old school?”
I almost choked on my sandwich. “Me? Hardly.”
“So who are you, then?” Grace asked.
Mai Yung squinted. “She is Julie.”
“You’re so cute,” Grace said to Mai Yung. She looked me up and down. “I mean, where do you fit in?”
Just then Bobby Russell walked past our table, without a glance at any of us. Kari Ann and Mai Yung stopped eating and followed him with their eyes until he sat down at a table of guys near Heather, Aisha, and the cheerleader. I recognized two of the guys as the paper airplane pilots from science class.
I glanced at Grace. She looked at Kari Ann and Mai Yung and shook her head.
“Julie’s an artist,” Kari Ann said, once she got her mind back to our table. “You should’ve seen what she did in Hap’s class. Hap said it was show-worthy.”
“Happernetzger is such a freak,” Grace said.
“He’s cool,” Kari Ann argued. “He’s the best teacher.”
“He made us finger-paint last year. In seventh grade.”
Mai Yung giggled.
“Seriously,” Grace said. “I did a tree with a rainbow over it. Just to be stupid.”
“Hap called it ‘aggressively minimalist’.” Kari Ann bit into her hamburger.
What would Grace say if she knew a whole school of professional artists practiced fing
er-painting as a serious art form?
Mai Yung’s hamburger made her hands look even tinier. “You are very good at sporting games, Julie.”
“Not really,” I said. “Volleyball is okay. Maybe hockey, too. But otherwise I have two left feet.”
Her eyes ballooned. “Your feet are both left?”
“It means she isn’t good at sports, Mai Yung,” Grace explained.
Mai Yung nodded. “Very sorry,” she said, mixing l’s with r’s. “My English is very weak.”
“Mai Yung moved here last year,” Kari Ann said.
“In China my English is very good. Here, not really very good.”
“How do you like America?” I asked.
A smile lit up her face. “Very well. I like American TV, and McDonald’s. And American people.” Her eyes flicked over to Bobby’s table again.
Though I’d kind of made up my mind to try to help Kari Ann with Bobby, Mai Yung’s expression made me second-guess myself. I didn’t want either one of them to get hurt.
But if only one girl could have Bobby, all the others had to get hurt, didn’t they?
“I feel like I know you already,” Kari Ann said.
“How come?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Kindred spirits or something, maybe.”
“You’re so flaky, Kari Ann,” Grace said.
“That’s kind of harsh,” I told her.
Grace put a spoonful of applesauce in her mouth. “I meant it in a good way.”
There’s a good way to be flaky?
I looked over Grace’s shoulder and saw Chad, at a table all by himself. He held his hamburger in one hand and a paperback in the other. When he flipped a page he took a bite and glanced over at me. I bit into my apple and turned back to the girls at my table.
“What do you have after lunch?” Grace asked.
“Study hall. Then math and social studies.”
“That’s cool. I have social studies seventh, too. Honors, right?”
I nodded, but didn’t tell her I planned to get out of it if I could.
“I go to math in sixth hour,” Mai Yung told me. “I hope you will sit beside me.”
No, I could not do anything to hurt sweet little Mai Yung. Kari Ann would have to get Bobby Russell all by herself. “Sure. Thanks.”
“We study multivariate operations.”
Oh, crud.
“It is very so interesting.”
The bell rang and everyone rushed to put their trays on the cafeteria conveyor or to throw their trash away in the tall, wide cans spaced at regular intervals around the room.
“Where’s your locker?” Grace asked me.
“I haven’t found it yet. It’s 745.”
She nodded. “That’s in the science hall. It’s close to mine. Come on, I’ll show you.”
I followed Grace out of the cafeteria and around two corners into a short hallway that seemed almost sound-proofed.
“There’s nothing down here but the science rooms and supply closets,” Grace explained.
I pulled out my schedule and locker combination and twisted the dial several times.
Grace’s locker stood just a few down from mine. She opened it, pulled a lip gloss out of a magnetic bin inside the door and checked the mirror to put it on. “I saw you at the Academic Olympics, by the way.”
“You did?” My combination worked and the locker swung open.
“I was there. We lost our first two matches, but Mrs. Houser made us stay for the whole weekend, since we already had a hotel room and everything.”
“You watched the finals?”
Grace nodded.
“That’s cool. It was really fun. A lot more fun than I expected, actually.” I stacked the morning’s books on the top shelf and stowed my coat on a hook.
“The guy you sat next to—the one who picked you up and hugged you when you won—was that your boyfriend?” She closed her lip gloss and tossed it back in the bin.
The thought of Damon reopened that hole in my stomach, the one that reminded me of home, and him, and the fact that I’d moved away from both of them forever. I glanced up at the clock. Twelve twenty-two. Damon would be in science. I would have been in art.
“Yeah,” I said.
“He looked a lot older.”
“No. Damon was fourteen.” I tried to slur the word was. Grace didn’t need to know about his time in juvie, and that it put him back a year in school. Or that his fifteenth birthday had been just a couple of weeks after the Olympics.
“Really?” she asked.
“He’s just tall.”
“And hunky.”
I grinned and shut my locker.
“Are you still going with him?”
“Uh-huh.” I steeled myself to hear the same thing everyone else said: You can’t expect a long-distance relationship between teenagers to last.
“That’s cool.” She closed her locker and leaned against it. “How are you going to get to see each other?”
Not one other person had ever asked me that.
I pushed my locker door shut and twisted the dial on the lock. “I’m not sure. Bikes, maybe. But it’s a long way. They have a snowmobile, but that only works if there’s snow, right?”
“Cool. I’ve never been on a snowmobile.”
We started back down the hall, toward the cafeteria. “It’s fun. He’s totally into bikes and that kind of stuff. His brother, too.”
Grace hugged her books against her chest, then took a breath and held it.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve got to get to get to math.”
“Don’t you have honors math sixth hour?”
“No. I’m really bad in math.”
I nodded. “Me too.”
“Guess I’ll see you in social studies.”
“Okay.”
She headed up the stairs to the second floor and I turned the corner back into the cafeteria for study hall. Kids filtered in, sat down here and there, and took out homework.
“There aren’t assigned seats.”
I turned around to find Aisha and Heather right behind me.
“You can sit with us, if you want,” Aisha offered.
Heather looked me up and down, then looked at Aisha.
“She’s cool,” Aisha told her.
“Aisha,” Heather said. “Always taking in the strays.” She sat down and flipped her long, blond waves behind her shoulders.
Why do all the snotty, popular girls have such great hair?
I sat down opposite Heather and Aisha and pulled out a piece of loose-leaf. I wrote Honors English 8, Christmas Essay, and my name on the top two lines.
“Is that for Mrs. Shively?” Aisha asked. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t put the word Christmas anywhere on it. It’s Winter Break.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she’ll have a total cow and lecture you on the stupidity of religious mythology.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”
“Totally serious.”
I turned my pencil upside down and laid the pink eraser against the capital C.
Don’t erase it.
That voice came, deep inside my head, still and small, but ever so clear.
After all I’d seen and all that happened, I knew. I needed to leave it. I needed to be who I was. I needed to claim the truth of what I’d lived.
But still, despite everything, I felt so small and alone and untethered. I needed friends, and a place to fit in. I didn’t want to be the weird one, the outcast, the doesn’t-quite-fit-in girl.
Heather and Aisha both watched me.
And I rubbed out Christmas.
[Read more Deo Volente.]
* * *
About the Author
Maria Keffler lives in Arlington, Virginia, with Prince Charming and three smallish people who are causing her hair to silver. Maria is working on her next novel; walking into the basement storage room to purge it, then walking right back out again; and
inventing a smoke alarm that can distinguish between Maria Keffler cooking dinner and a four-alarm house fire.
* * *
Other Books By This Author
Deo Volente
Juliet Brynn’s life looks nothing like it did a year ago. Her parents separated, split up her family, and moved. Suddenly poor, alone, and shattered by the fallout of other’s choices, Julie has only Damon Sheppard to bridge the two halves of her life. But when her one safe grounding is ripped away, Julie must confront alone the power that grants her The Gift of Artistic Prophecy, and which demands her loyalty even as it seems determined to destroy her future.
Daemonia
Juliet hasn’t seen Damon in nearly three years, or heard from him after the devastating letter his new ‘soul mate’ sent her. When the chance of a new life in Chicago appears, free of her shattered family and haunting memories, Juliet resolves to let nothing get in her way. But whispers of love resurface and she must choose between her heart and a destiny that something doesn’t want her to find.
The God of Mists and Shrouds
An orphaned Hebrew princess disguises herself as an exiled peasant. A Babylonian slave chooses between the courage that could save her and despair over the love she has lost. A sorceress discovers the truth behind the origins of her dark power. The consequences of the masters they choose will reverberate through generations.
Year-In-Review: the Entirely True Histories of a Perfectly Wretched Family
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/150425
Concussive diaper explosions and aircraft lavatories. (The Mile-High Club just isn’t the same thing after kids.) Death, destruction and debt. (How can a child be born $1800 in the hole?) Sibling rivalries of biblical proportions. (“I’m telling God!” “Oh yeah? I’m telling Mom!”) Sometimes the experience of training up kids seems more akin to experiencing a train wreck.
* * *
Connect with Me Online
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MariaKeffler
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Blog: https://www.wastingmyeducation.blogspot.com
Email:
[email protected] DRAWN SERIES Website: https://www.drawn.bravesites.com