“Can I just borrow a dollar?” said Marlena. Her bra straps were always showing—dirty beige ribbons that gaped against her skin.
I nodded and pulled a folded dollar from my pocket. Chelsea was saying something to Micah, but I couldn’t tell what. “Whores,” I heard again, so quiet she might as well have mouthed the word, and “gross.” “Tuna,” she said, or something that sounded like it. I suddenly felt like I might cry. Marlena kept chattering away, though she must have heard them too, and so I didn’t. We paid for our Pop-Tarts and went back to our table, whispers following us like eyes.
Probably, they all volunteered to join me for detention because I seemed upset. But when they did, Marlena offering first, and without missing a beat, Greg and Tidbit too, what Chelsea had said evaporated. It was replaced by a soaring and euphoric warmth. I’d never had so many friends.
*
The biggest surprise of the day was French III, a class of four, just two quiet girls in identical outfits of flared jeans and Tshirts, besides Marlena and me. Mrs. Lupin spent the entire hour moderating a getting-to-know-each-other conversation because she believed that without feeling “à l’aise” we would never progress to a “véritable compréhension” of French language and culture. I learned that Marlena’s favorite color was noir, that she loved Led Zeppelin, that she’d always wanted to go to Alaska, that Sal was her favorite person, that she thought marriage was a “manly” and offensive concept, and that she liked cats more than dogs. Mrs. Lupin talked only in French, and I could barely follow. But not Marlena—she spoke as fast as the teacher, cracking jokes, I think, going by her inflection.
“You’re fluent,” I accused her, after class.
“Ferme ta bouche, ma pêche. My dad is from Quebec. I’ve been speaking Québécois since forever. That’s why I’m such a crap speller. It’s the easiest class.”
“Mar,” I said, since we were finally alone. “I have Mr. Ratner for first period. He was so inappropriate.”
“Aren’t you being a little dramatic,” she said, after listening to my story, and so I dropped it, disappointed that she didn’t see it as something we could have in common.
*
Detention was staffed by the tennis coach, a toned old lady named Linda who barely registered that we were there at all. With Tidbit sitting on his lap, Greg pulled up a crappy-looking website with an all-black background. “Greg’s World,” the header read, in bright white Comic Sans. He clicked on a video in the middle of the screen, the one he’d made that day at the Mapletree. It took an agonizingly long time to load, the QuickTime player freezing and then buffering forever.
“Why don’t you put your stuff on YouTube?” I asked. Jimmy was into the site, which at the time was still a novelty—I didn’t hang out there, but I intuitively knew it was cool, and felt proud of myself for thinking to suggest it.
“I just feel like, people are coming to Greg’s World for something specific. Why would they go to YouTube?”
“Just post on both,” I said. “It’ll give you a bigger audience.”
“You’re smart,” Greg said. Tidbit slid off his lap and moved to the chair beside him.
We spent a while trying to help him come up with a username. Marlena voted for “Greg’s World,” a classic, but Greg thought it would be misleading. Tidbit suggested “GregIsHot,” but we all ignored her. “Michigan Jackass” was discarded for being too derivative. We went through dozens of possibilities—“BushLOVER,” “Chchchchanges,” “BombsAway14,” “GMantheCandyMan”—before, somehow, Greg settled on “NotYourSanta.” He made a long speech about how the key to getting attention online was to make yourself familiar and inaccessible at the same time, a combination that read as cool. Hence the Santa, hence the “not your,” hence the project in general.
“That is actually nonsense,” said Marlena.
“So says the girl who never even had a MySpace,” he snapped.
He pulled his camcorder and some associated cables from his backpack and connected them to the computer. Within minutes the video appeared, the quality far better than it’d been on Greg’s World. “Good thinking, Cat,” Greg said. “I’ll have to cut you in on the profits.”
Marlena and I pretty much lost interest the second the profile existed—Tidbit, sensing her in, edged her computer chair closer and closer to Greg’s. Greg replayed the video over and over.
Halfway through the video, Ryder appeared in the background. He opened the door to the little room, walked over to the TV to pick up a canister of acetone, and carried it back, not noticing that he’d left the door hanging open, so that his entire set-up was caught on camera—the cough syrup bottles and the unpeeled batteries, the empty two-liter and the feminine bottle of nail polish remover, the same kind Mom used, even the garden rock. Every time the hit counter ticked up, Greg grunted with pleasure. Nobody pointed out that most of the hits were from us, but Marlena met my eyes every time Greg made the slightest sound, so that I spent most of detention on the verge of cracking up.
*
Marlena hitched a ride home. Jimmy picked us up and I let her slide into the front seat, where she fiddled with the radio knob and he teased her for straying, always, back to the country music station that seemed to play the same four outdated songs on a loop—all barbecue stains and friends in low places and Jolene, Jolene.
“We can listen to country,” Jimmy said. “But only if you sing.”
She stayed for dinner, and after we finished eating—she hardly touched her food, but praised my mom so much it made us all uncomfortable—I helped her with her English homework. She was a sloppy writer. I basically just did it for her while she sat next to me, talking to Jimmy in a contented, directionless way. At one point he got up, disappeared into the bathroom, and came back with a tube of Neosporin and a cotton ball. He dabbed it against a cut on her temple that I’d barely noticed, looking at her with a reverence that annoyed me. “A bunny tail,” she giggled.