“Can you please stop?” I make an exasperated motion. My backpack slips off my shoulder and smacks the tile. “Why is everyone so obsessed with evaluating me?”
García’s heavy eyebrows rise. My head pounds. It’s quiet.
It sinks in fast: I just yelled at a teacher. As my voice fades from the air, my instinct is to run, but my feet are iron, soldered to the floor. “I’m sorry,” I say hoarsely. “I shouldn’t have—”
García raises his hand, and I fall quiet. He wipes the chalk dust off his palms with a healthy glob of hand sanitizer. “May I say something?”
“Free country,” I mumble.
“You’re, what, sixteen?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen. Okay.” He nods toward a desk in the front row. “Want to sit?”
I sit, looking down at my hands. They’re green-white in the fluorescent light.
He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. “So, Kat—and I’m not saying this is the case for you, but the main thing I remember from being your age was feeling trapped. There was so much I was ready to do. Move out, drive off, live alone.”
What he’s saying feels familiar, which is strange, since I hardly ever think about getting out of Paloma. It takes too much energy to want things like that, to think about the future as less than impossibly far away.
“They’ll let you go soon,” he says. “It’s less than two years before you’re through with Paloma High. And in the meantime . . . well, I’m not telling you to keep your chin up and put on a smile. I’m just saying, you’ve got a million possible futures waiting ahead. Maybe for now, you should focus on imagining what they might look like.”
My lips quiver. Then desperate words elbow their way out. “How am I supposed to focus on years from now? Half the time I barely have enough energy to hold on one more day.”
“So hold on one more day,” he says. “That’s all you need, is to wake up and say, one more. And once you make it through, you wake up the next morning, and you say it again. One more. You hold on for enough one-more-days, they’ll turn into months and years, and before you know it, you’ll have met so many wonderful people and discovered a million hidden things. All one day at a time.”
Without his glasses, García’s eyes are so dark, so compassionate, it hurts to look at him. The conviction in his voice stirs something thick and forgotten in my chest. How can you promise that? I want to yell, but I don’t allow myself another outburst.
“I just scare people off,” I say quietly.
“Really?” García says. “Hate to break it to you, but the cast thinks you’re cool.”
“They what?”
“Emily was telling me after rehearsal the other day that you inspire her. She’s only a freshman, you know—she looks up to you.”
I nearly laugh. Kind, quiet Emily thinks I’m something to look up to? How does that make sense? “It’s a matter of time,” I say. “Some people might want to try talking to me or whatever, but they’ll realize I’m not worth it eventually.”
“Why do you think that?”
I open my mouth to tell him how Olivia and I have grown apart, but I stop. It wasn’t that Olivia called it quits—I’m the one who’s gotten sick of people. Not her. Ever since Mom left . . .
That’s it, I guess. She’s the one who didn’t think I was worth it. A cold, familiar hand presses down on my chest, just as painful after two and a half years. You’re someone even a mother couldn’t love.
I look up at García. I’ve been quiet a long time. “I don’t know why I think that—I just do.”
“Kat,” he says, his voice soft, “you do not deserve to be lonely.”
I grip the sides of the plastic chair so tightly, it hurts.
García studies me for a second, leans back, and puts his glasses on again. A long minute passes. Eventually, I pry myself from my seat, lift my backpack, and go for the door. In the threshold, I glance over my shoulder.
“I’ll see you at rehearsal,” he says.
“Yeah.” I hardly hear the word drip from my lips.
My feet wander. They take me down the hall. I find myself out in the courtyard, dazed, standing in the beating sun and the icy wind.
Standing there, I feel overwhelmingly alive.
AT THE END OF LUNCH ON THURSDAY, I HUSTLE INTO Mr. García’s room ten minutes early to set up for our presentation.
Matt’s already moving desks into clusters for stations. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey.” I close the door. “Where’s García?”
“He had to go to some staff meeting.” Matt maneuvers the last desk into place, and he sets up a card that reads, Treachery: Ninth Circle.
“What for?” I say, thumbtacking our poster above the chalkboard.
“Apparently they’re going to start interviewing teachers next, which . . .”
“Doesn’t really make sense,” I finish. “What does Turner expect them to do, turn themselves in because they’re getting asked a few questions?”
“Yeah, I don’t know.”
I set my stuff at the Second Circle station with a sigh. If it’s only been a week and a half since the assembly, and they’re already dragging the teachers in for questioning, they’ll probably be planting bugs in our cars over the Thanksgiving break.