“How much does all this shit cost?” Lucy asks out loud. “Have you ever considered that?” She scowls. “Last I checked, the Bunsen burner in the chem lab runs on coal or something, it’s so ancient.”
“What the football team wants, the football team gets,” Claudia says. “It’s so dumb.”
“Totally,” agrees Lucy, and I relish this moment where my best friend and my new friend are in harmony with each other. Since bathrobe day I’ve been trying to pay extra attention to Claudia—sitting next to her at lunch, waiting for her by her locker in the morning before history—even while I’ve been sucked into long periods of texting with Lucy after school where we talk about everything from what Moxie might do next to music we want to share with each other. (Unbelievably, she’s never heard of Bikini Kill or any of the Riot Grrrl bands, and after I make her a playlist, she’s hooked.)
After the rally is lunch, but I eat quickly so I can leave a few minutes early and go to the main office to drop off my permission slip for Driver’s Ed next semester. As I walk down the nearly empty hall, I catch Principal Wilson approaching the office from the opposite direction, barking into his cell phone. I’m the only other person in the hallway, but he doesn’t smile or even nod. I’m a student at his school, and I was in his mind-numbing Texas history class way back before he became Mr. Muckety-Muck at East Rockport High. But I’m not his son or on his son’s team or a cheerleader like Emma Johnson or even a member of the pep band. I’m a nothing on his radar. His jowls quiver a little as he speaks in his thick Texas twang, and he brushes right past me as he enters the office, zooming by like I’m a mosquito or fly.
I scowl at his back and revel in the tiny rush it gives me. He continues through the labyrinth of secretaries and assistant principals as he heads back to wherever his lair must be.
After I turn in my permission slip to one of the secretaries, I head back toward my locker to get my books for my next class. At the end of the hall, I spot Seth Acosta, leaning up against a wall, fooling around on his phone. My heart skips.
“Hey,” I manage as I walk by, wanting to stop but not sure I can or should. So I just slow down a little.
He looks up. There are a handful of other students at their lockers way down at the other end of the hall. The bell to end the lunch period is a few minutes away.
“Hey back,” he says, sliding his phone into his back pocket and standing up straighter. All signs that make me think it’s cool if I stop. That he really does want to talk to me.
“So…,” I start—because I’m the one who should be speaking next, I realize—“… thanks for not saying anything. About … you know.” I raise my eyebrows like we’re in some movie about the Mafia or a government conspiracy, and I immediately feel like an idiot. But Seth just nods and grins. I love that he’s taller than me if only by a little. Ever since those sweaty, awkward middle school dances where I loomed head and shoulders over all the guys and no one ever asked me to partner up, I’ve always been self-conscious of my height.
“I wouldn’t say anything,” Seth says. “Not even if you covered me in fire ants or forced me to listen to, like, I don’t know … smooth jazz.”
I grin. “What’s smooth jazz?”
“Garbage,” Seth says, not missing a beat.
We stand there for an awkward moment, and when Seth speaks again, he looks down at my feet.
“Hey, do you feel like … I don’t know … hanging out tonight or something?”
My heart is beating inside my throat. I hope Seth keeps looking at my feet because if he looks up, he’ll see it just below my chin, all four chambers pulsating at an astonishing rate of speed.
“You’re … not going to the game?” I finally manage. Great. Now I sound like Suzy School Spirit.
Seth frowns a little. “No, I’m not. But … you’re going, I guess?”
“No!” I answer, louder than I’d intended. Of course, I had been planning on going to the game. What else is there to do? Even Lucy was going to come. But that was before Seth Acosta turned my life into an episode of a television show I would totally binge watch.
“So you’re not going, then?” he asks, confused. He brushes his hair out of his eyes with one hand.
“I wasn’t really, like, sure what I was doing tonight. But if you want to hang out, that would be cool.”
I’ve never hung out with a boy or gone on a date with a boy or been asked to a dance by a boy or kissed a boy. Nothing with boys. Ever. And now this. It’s too astonishing to be real.
But it must be real because Seth is saying something about coming by my house around 7 p.m. and maybe going to get something to eat, and then he is typing my phone number into his phone and saying he’ll text me later.
“Cool,” I say, like this has happened to me every day of my life since sixth grade.
Just then the bell rings. I mumble out a goodbye and Seth says goodbye, and as I make my way to my locker, I am totally positive I’m not walking but floating.
*
Claudia has to be the first person I’m going to tell about my … is it a date? A hangout? A … what? When I find her at her locker at the end of the day, she squeals at my news, gripping my hand and literally jumping up and down with excitement.
“I hope you don’t mind this means I won’t be going to the game with you,” I say.
“Screw the game!” Claudia answers, tugging me along after her. The entire walk home she helps me plan what to wear, what to do with my hair, whether I should wear lipstick. (I normally don’t, but it might be fun to this time, maybe.) Claudia has more experience with boys than I do. She kissed a few in middle school—I think her pocket-sized self and her adorable ski jump nose made her nonthreatening to boys in early puberty—and she dated this guy Colin O’Malley for a few months last year before he moved to San Antonio because of his dad’s job. In late night phone calls and texting marathons, she’d told me how she let him touch her under her bra and that it hadn’t felt particularly great—only like he’d been trying to squeeze the air out of a deflating birthday party balloon.
The difference is Colin O’Malley was just ho hum. Even to Claudia.
Seth Acosta is not ho hum or meh or vanilla or blah.
He’s a stone fox.
“What about your mom?” Claudia asks as we approach my house. “Hey, isn’t that her car in the driveway?”
I frown. “I thought she’d be at work.” My mom is not something I’ve considered until Claudia mentions it. Since I’ve never had any interest from any guy, this isn’t a topic my mom and I have ever had to navigate.
“I’m sure she’ll be cool with it,” Claudia says, and I hope she’s right. I mean, isn’t that who my mom is? The cool mom?
After Claudia hugs me and practically makes me take a blood oath promising to tell her everything that happens immediately after it happens, I walk in and find my mom in the kitchen, making a sandwich.