You are the most exotic thing in our crappy excuse for a town. A rock god abandoned by cruel fate to an outpost of suburbia, where it’s at least twenty degrees hotter than hell. I like to think that as an LA girl forced to move here I could somehow understand you more than the others. I know what it’s like to hear car horns and helicopters and music all hours of the night. I know what it feels like to zip down neon freeways and find street art in the most unlikely places. I know what it’s like to feel alive. You want all that, I can tell. You look at everything around us the same way I do: with quiet desperation.
Birch Grove has a newness that only towns in Cali can manage—shopping centers popping up like mushrooms, schools and housing developments where once there’d only been a strawberry patch or cornfield. Even though we have a Target and a Starbucks and all that, it’s the kind of place that has an annual rodeo. There is only one vintage store and the mall is the opposite of Disneyland: the Saddest Place on Earth. The worst part is that everything here is the same—the houses, the people, the cars. There’s no grit. No wild abandon.
I hate Birch Grove with a passion.
One of the few things I do like about it, though, is our school: the drama program, the dance program, my French teacher, who’s half Egyptian and smokes long, thin cigarettes behind the gym. And I actually like the school itself, like, the buildings. It has a certain coziness to it, a human scale that makes it feel like a second home. I love how the open-air campus is drenched in sunshine, the huge grassy lawn in its center, the outdoor arena with its covered cement stage that looks like the Hollywood Bowl in miniature. It’s an idyllic California school, although sometimes I wish I were at an East Coast boarding school with bricks covered in ivy. If I were, I’d wear a sweater set and have a boyfriend named Henry, who plays lacrosse and whose father is a world-renowned physician. That’s a pumpkin spice latte kind of world I’ll never be in, though.
When Miss B chose me to be her stage manager and chose you to be her lead for The Importance of Being Earnest, I ran home and had a dance party in my room. I wanted to cling to you just like the girls in the play and say, Earnest, my own! That’s how happy I was to be just a few feet away from you every day after school for six weeks. It was too much, those feet. I wanted them to be inches. Millimeters. You gave me a hug once, laughed at one of my rare attempts at a joke. You accepted pieces of gum I offered you. Smiled at me in the halls. Do you know you are the bestower of the perfect half smile: part smirk, all enigma? Of course you do.
I asked you once why a rock god at night is a drama guy by day and you told me you auditioned for Singin’ in the Rain (that was way back in my freshman year) on a dare and then you got the lead and your mom made you take the part. And you loved it. I wonder if rock stars are all secretly mama’s boys who like to tap-dance.
I love you, Gavin. And maybe it’s in the most superficial way, like how I can’t stand it when you take off your fedora and run your fingers through your hair. Or how you keep those hands shoved into your front pockets when you’re walking to class. I wonder, if you took them out and placed them on my bare skin, would I feel the calluses from all those hours of you alone in your room, playing guitar? Would your fingers be warm or cool? I want to know what it feels like to have your palm against mine, like Romeo and Juliet: Palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
I still can’t believe that when you see me in the halls you say hi. You think it’s cool that I want to be a director, so I never had to endure that separation between cast and crew that normally happens. It helped that my best friends were in the show, too. We talk about movies and who my favorite directors are (Julie Taymor and Mike Nichols). We talk about music and who your favorite bands are (Nirvana and Muse). I breathe you in like you’re air.
I don’t see you on the way to first-period French, which I take because how am I going to speak to my future French lover otherwise (Fran?ois, Jacques?). Natalie and Alyssa think I’m a weirdo. My best friends are taking Spanish, which, as The Giant says, could be used in the real world (as if France is not part of the real world). I have a bit of trouble concentrating on what Madame Lewis is saying, though, because it’s Valentine’s Day and even though I dressed up in my Je t’aime shirt, pink poodle skirt, and red tights, I have no valentine and am thus depressed as hell.
“Bonjour, Grace,” Madame says to me. “?a va?”
“What? Oh, um. Oui, ?a va.”
You should probably know that I’ve never had a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. Either I break up with them before or get together with them after. And by them I mean the one boyfriend I have ever had, which was Matt Sanchez freshman year. It’s becoming more of a problem now than it used to be, this not having a boyfriend on V Day. Before high school, it was enough to pig out on heart-shaped stuff with my friends and watch Shakespeare in Love for the millionth time, but Natalie is getting over that guy she met at her church camp last summer and anything lovey makes her super depressed so she’s abstaining from the holiday this year. Alyssa refuses to participate in my celebrations because she says Valentine’s Day is a capitalist ploy invented by soul-killing corporations that prey on women who subscribe to the romantic ideal.
Whatever.
If you were my boyfriend, I bet you’d write me a song or, I don’t know, maybe do something homemade. You don’t seem like a flowers-and-chocolate kind of guy. You’d make cookies that are burned but I still love, or maybe write a ten-page letter filled with all the reasons you adore me. These are both totally acceptable, by the way.
I’m sort of dying to know what you got Summer. What she got you. You’ve been together for a year, so I bet it’s something special. She’s a senior like you, a va-va-voom redhead who somehow makes being in choir sexy. I’d like to believe that if things were different, you might pick me, but all it takes is one look at Summer and I’m quickly disabused of the notion. Mom says I have an interesting face, which is just a nice way of saying I’m not pretty. Sorry, she says, you take after your dad’s side of the family.
The bell rings and I’m off to second period—AP Comp with Mr. Jackson. The halls are packed as students bleed out of their classrooms. I walk on my tiptoes, looking for your fedora even as I tell myself I’m not really stalking you. Usually I’m guaranteed a Gavin sighting on my walk to Comp because you’re in the classroom across from mine, but nope, you are nowhere to be found.
I sink into my chair just as the final bell rings, resigned. You are likely with Summer, ditching and in love. I am stuck in English, trying not to think about you ditching and in love.
Mr. Jackson turns off the lights so that we can watch the conclusion of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, which we started a couple days ago. It’s a pretty badass version, with a young Leonardo DiCaprio who could seriously give you a run for your money in the hotness department. You win, though, hands down.
By the time the credits are rolling, half the class is pretending not to cry as Romeo and Juliet lie dead. It’s like, we knew it was going to end badly but, even so, it guts us to watch it happen.