He arrives, picks it up, glances around . . . even, I’m pretty sure, at me. He lays his book on the desk and gently places the pencil in the little vertical ridge along the binding. He doesn’t hold the pencil sideways and read it.
Mr. Braxley walks to the front of the room and tapes a paper to the wall. “This is the sign-up sheet for your presentations,” he says. “We’ll do two per week until we get through them all. And since the due date was always Monday, this shouldn’t put anyone at a disadvantage. Because you all should be ready to give your presentation on Monday. Right?”
A weak nod goes around the room. Nobody’s anywhere near ready, obviously. “Still,” says Mr. Braxley, “I’ll give a bonus ten points to the first group to make their presentation.”
People start getting out of their chairs to sign up, but Braxley shoos them all back to their seats. “I should mention,” he says, grinning, “that the opportunity to sign this sheet must be earned. By answering questions. Correctly.”
The class moans. All except for Lipton. He sits up straighter. If this were a quiz show and there was a glowing red button to be pushed when you knew the answer, his hand would be hovering over it. Twitching.
Meanwhile, I am paralyzed by the dueling fears of raising my hand to answer a question in class, and being left with the dreaded first slot on the schedule. Giving a presentation at all is terrifying. Going first? Just kill me now.
Mr. Braxley starts a review for our upcoming test. Every now and then he shoots out a question. “First Christian emperor?”
Lipton is caught off guard and doesn’t get his hand in the air fast enough, so Renee Prusso takes the first stab. “Constantine,” she says.
Mr. Braxley points to the schedule. She gives a squeal and briefly consults with her project team members, then skips up front and writes on the sheet. She takes the last slot, and everyone whines because they wanted to go last. I’m happy, though. Going last is almost as bad as going first. It means waiting and watching everyone else and realizing how bad your presentation will be in comparison.
I pull my attention back to Mr. Braxley, who is talking about a period of peace and prosperity that lasted two hundred years, around the first couple of centuries AD. “Anyone know what this period was called?”
Lipton’s hand is in the air before anyone else’s. Mr. Braxley gives him a nod.
“Pax Romana,” says Lipton, all breathless.
“Which means?”
“Roman peace.” He breaks into a grin and bolts to the front of the room, ignoring Jeremy Everling’s coughed utterance of “Socks!” Lipton pencils his project name into a slot somewhere in the middle.
The torturous process continues. Sometimes I know the answers before anyone else, but I can’t bring myself to raise my hand. By the end of class, I’m the only one who hasn’t signed up. Mr. Braxley eyes me and says, “If you aren’t on the schedule . . .” and points his pencil toward the paper.
I gather my things, and make my way to the front of the room as everyone files out. The emptiness of that first slot on the sign-up sheet taunts me. Monday. First presentation. For a project I haven’t even started.
My hand trembles as I raise my pencil and start to scrawl my project title onto the paper. But before I can spell out the word “Siege,” another hand, holding its own pencil, reaches over my arm.
It’s the pencil I etched “I’m sorry” into. It erases “Battle of Thermopylae” from the third to the last slot and writes “Siege of Jerusalem” in its place. I step back, stunned, as Lipton puts his own project into the first slot. Adam hovers in the doorway, shaking his head.
We are standing so close, Lipton and I. Closer than I’ve been to another human being in a long time. Lipton has the faintest beginnings of facial hair on his upper lip, but it’s blond. And there’s a dimple in his right cheek that is tweaked upward in a close-lipped, sideways smile. A side smirk.
I mouth the words “thank you” because that’s all I can manage in such close proximity to that dimple.
He shrugs, tucks the “I’m sorry” pencil behind his ear, and walks out.
19
I FLOAT THROUGH THE REST of the morning on that moment with Lipton, and the hope of his forgiveness. It’s almost like crowd surfing at a Foo Fighters concert, being lifted up that way. Or saved, at least, from falling flat on my face.
I know I don’t deserve it.
In the yearbook office at lunch, the brainstorming on “how to make the yearbook not suck” continues. Marissa wants something groundbreaking. She wants to write about it in her college applications. She wants to win awards.
“Could we not have eight pages of football?” says Marvo, flipping through last year’s book. “And why do the cheerleaders get two pages when the LGBTQ Club only gets one lousy photo? I guarantee there are more LGBTQ kids at this school than cheerleaders.”
“Yeah, but they don’t build pyramids wearing miniskirts,” Beth Ann says with a fake smile.
Marvo shakes his head. “Some kids aren’t in here at all. I was in five photos last year. How many were you in?”
Beth Ann says, “Three.”
Marissa cringes. “Sixteen.”
They all turn to me.
I shrug, as if I don’t remember that I was in zero yearbook pictures. I purposely hid in the bathroom when they took the freshman class photo.
Marvo turns to the index in the back of the yearbook where every student is listed alphabetically, along with pages on which they are pictured. My name is there, but no page numbers.
He looks up. “You weren’t in the yearbook at all?”
I shake my head.
“That’s just wrong.”
“It’s okay,” I say quietly.
“No, it’s not.” He flips through the book, stops at a two-page collage of the most popular kids with their friends—hugging, smiling, laughing. Marissa is in at least three of the pictures. The spread is titled “Friends!” but the obvious subtext is, “Don’t you wish you were us?”
Marvo points to an unsmiling kid caught in the background of one. “I want to know who that guy is.” He points to another. “And her.” He’s basically pointing out all the people I zoomed in on that day when I left the images open at my workstation.
The three of them argue for a while over how to identify the kids who are “hiding in plain sight” and “diamonds in the rough” and “the best-kept secrets.” Beth Ann suggests we cliché them to death until they come out. She glances at me and says, “Anyway, some people don’t like being the center of attention.”
Marvo chuckles.
“What?” She scowls at him. “Not everyone is as starved for attention as you are.”
He leans back in his chair again and smiles at her. “You’d be surprised.”
And I am officially freaking out.
“So, who do we feature in this not-the-usual-overachievers section?” Marissa opens her spiral notebook to a fresh page and writes a number one on the first line. “I need names.”
“Vicky Decker,” says Marvo.