“Oh. Uh, sure, thanks. Um, I have Spanish. Spanish III with . . . Reyes.”
“Cool! Same as us! Come on, we can go together!” Elaine’s enormous eyes light up, and she actually claps her hands. I feel like if we were six years old instead of sixteen, she’d offer one of those hands for me to hold, and ask if I wanted to be her best friend.
I finish packing my backpack, and we start threading our way through the desks toward the door. Elaine is already throwing questions around like confetti: What’s Wisconsin like? Is it cold? Is it full of white people? Where do I live now? What’s my class schedule?
Caleb, just walking out the door, turns and mouths, “I told you,” and disappears.
Walking to Spanish is a totally different experience than walking to trig. The fog has burned off, the chill has lifted, and the weather is California-perfect: sunny, warm-but-not-hot, a cloudless and faintly blue sky overhead. I’m feeling a little sheepish because Caleb seems to have been right about the Asian thing, but mostly I’m feeling glad to be part of a group as we stroll to our next class.
Hanh is the tall, thin one, and Reggie is the one with the round cheeks and fancy braid. As we walk, we listen to Elaine talk about Jimmy Tran, who was assigned to sit next to her in trig and is walking several paces ahead of us. “He has the most beautiful eyes. Don’t you think he has gorgeous eyes?” she asks me.
“You say that about every guy you ever like,” says Hanh, pulling out a mirror to touch up her lip gloss.
“I so don’t. You’re such a— Shhh!”
Jimmy has stopped to talk to someone, and we’re coming right up on him.
“Hi, Jimmy!” Hanh trills as we walk by. Jimmy nods at us, confused. Elaine stares straight ahead, and once we’ve passed him, she starts sissy-hitting Hanh and hissing, “Omigod, I can’t believe you!” Hanh just flips her hair, bats her eyelashes, and coos, “Oh, Jimmy, you have such gorgeous eyes!” Reggie smothers a laugh and Elaine flits around Hanh like a squirrel, scolding and shushing and smacking her arm. I’m enjoying the show when I happen to look away for a moment, and something way more interesting catches my eye.
It’s Fascinating Store Girl from Bed Bath & Beyond.
6
SHE’S WALKING DOWN THE BREEZEWAY TOWARD us. Her hair is down today. She’s wearing skinny jeans and a navy blue T-shirt that says ANDERSON CROSS-COUNTRY on it in sky blue. A sea-star pendant dangles from a silver chain around her neck. Not that I care what she’s wearing or what she looks like. She spots a couple of guys beyond us and heads over to meet them, so she doesn’t see me. Which is a good thing because I’ve just realized I’m staring at her. Jeez. Stop.
When I drag my attention back to my new friends, Hanh is still fake-gushing about Jimmy and his eyes and Elaine is still trying to make Hanh shut up. But Reggie looks at me and shakes her head. “These two,” she says, like she’s their babysitter. “Sometimes I just can’t with them.”
“Yeah . . . Hey, Reggie, see that girl over there, with the cross-country T-shirt? Talking to those two guys?”
“You mean that Mexican girl?”
“Uh, I guess. How do you know she’s Mexican?”
“I dunno. Most of the Latino kids around here are Mexican. I mean, some of them are like, Nicaraguan or whatever, but mostly they’re Mexican—Mexican American,” she corrects herself. “Though, actually, everyone just says Mexican. Kind of like how we say Asian instead of Asian American. Ethnic pride and all that, right?”
“What’s her name?”
“Jamie Ramirez. Why?”
Jamie Ramirez.
“Hey, Sana, why do you want to know?”
I pretend not to hear the question, and Reggie doesn’t get a chance to ask a third time because the bell rings and we have to go to class.
Lunch. There are rows of lunch tables in the “multipurpose room,” but everything else is outside—the hot-lunch line, the snack bar line, the vending machines, and most of the kids, who are eating their lunches on the ground or at cement picnic tables scattered around the quad. All the school clubs and sports teams have set up tables in the quad as well, to recruit new members. We sit behind the Vietnamese Student Association table, but after gobbling down their lunches, Elaine and Hanh have to go and register new members. Reggie stays and finishes eating with me before leaving to hand out flyers and recruit freshmen for the Volunteer Club.
“Don’t worry,” she says apologetically, “lunch tomorrow’ll be more chill.”
It’s not so bad being alone with nowhere to sit, though, since half the school seems to be wandering from table to table anyway. I start at the Volunteer Club and make a slow circuit around the quad. Water polo. Dance team. Queer Straight Alliance. Poetry Club. Animé Club. Polynesian Student Union.
“Hey, Sana.” It’s Caleb the goth. Where the heck did he come from?
“Oh, hey.”
“Your friends abandon you already?” he asks, falling in step with me.
“No, they all had to work tables for their clubs.”
“Oh, right.” He scans the quad, taking in the tables and the mobs milling around them. “Ugh. This is so pointless.”
“Huh?”
“All these clubs do is meet once a week to organize fundraisers. Or they get together and do the same boring hobbies they do at home. They get a faculty advisor and call it a club, and suddenly their hobby becomes important and they can be president of something and put it on their college applications: President of the Animé Club? Riiight. That’s significant.”
“Mm-hm.” This “everyone is a shallow hypocrite but me” act is getting irritating. I wonder if Caleb is just going to follow me around for the rest of lunch period.
“Anyway,” he continues, “I was with my friends over there—” He gestures across the quad toward a group of kids sitting under a tree, all dressed in black. “—and saw you alone, so I thought I’d ask you if you wanted to sit with us for lunch.”
“Oh. Um.” That was nice. But . . . “You know, I think I’m just going to walk around and check out the rest of the clubs and stuff. I don’t mind being alone.”
“Ohhh, okay. You don’t want me around.”
“No, it’s not that. I mean—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know when I’m not wanted.”
“No, I just really want to see—”
“No, whatever. I see how it is.”
That’s it. I do want him gone. “’Bye.” I wave him off, and his mouth and eyes open wide in mock outrage. I can’t help smiling a little. It’s kind of nice to joke around with someone, even if it’s a dork like Caleb.