AN HOUR LATER, I’M STILL THINKING ABOUT HER EYES and her attention, lying back and letting that glance loop in endless repeat.
She looked at me. The thought of it keeps turning, replaying, spinning like a mobile or a galaxy, and it feels even more impossible now that I’m this high.
When you’re high, getting stares usually feels fine, because unless you’re having a bad high and feeling paranoid as hell, the staring person seems like just another citizen of the world, and that’s chill. But even if I weren’t high, I’d be freaking out over Olivia Scott giving me the eye. I sit three rows behind her in English, and I spend about 108 percent of that class staring at the back of her head, wondering how she gets her hair that rich and straight and glossy. Everything I’ve heard her say is hilarious, and when she smiles, it’s so high-voltage, I start a little, every damn time. Olivia Scott is magnificent.
Sometimes I can’t help resenting her raucous laugh and her sexy, poised, confident body and her blaze-blue eyes, because she only notices assholes like Dan Silverstein, and I have no idea why. But then I remember that if by some miracle she noticed me instead, I’d feel super-awkward, because we don’t have any friends in common. I don’t even know if we’d get along. From what I’ve seen, she’s one of those semi-geeks who likes school enough to do well but not enough to try. Who even knows how that works? It’s like . . . I don’t know, but if you’re going to not give a shit, at least devote yourself to not giving a shit, right?
But what the hell do I know? I’ve never spoken to her. She could be totally different from what I’ve seen and heard.
Still. She looked at me, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I pick up the joint from my car roof and play around with the smoke, sniffing it, licking it up, rolling it across my tongue and through my teeth. It’s not sanitary, letting the thing sit on my roof like that, but I’ve done worse, and I know Burke’s done worse. He picked a joint up off the sidewalk one time and took a drag for shits and giggles, and he didn’t get sick, even though I insisted for a week that he was going to get oral herpes or some shit. Then again, Burke has the immune system of a god.
My watch hits five o’clock. The drama geeks pour down the hill from the auditorium, trickle into their scattered cars, and drive off.
I take a hit and stare up at the clouds, those plumes of cotton and Marshmallow Fluff, their underbellies pinkened by the dying sun. It’s crazy that they’re so huge, and crazier that something so colossal is so temporary, that they’ll never be the same as they are now, and as soon as they turn heavy and cry themselves down in sheets of rain, they’ll be gone, as if they were never looming a mile above the crown of my head. This day is lost already. This hour is as good as going, going, gone.
I shut my eyes and flush out the thoughts, and new ones float in like breezes, like the sound of chimes. Minutes swirl around me, and seconds fall across my skin with the tingle, the prickle, the itch of dying sunlight, and Jesus, have I ever been this relaxed in my life?
Then a familiar voice splinters my nirvana with an “Hola, Mateo,” and I keep my eyes closed and slur out a “No hablo Spanish,” and the voice says, “Yeah, sure, Mr. Half-Mexican,” and I say, “Please, man, I’m, like, six hundred percent American,” which Mamá would kill me for saying, because it’s probably an Insult to My Cultural Heritage or something.
I peer off the side of my car at Burke. In the red light of sunset, and with my head tilted sideways, he looks like something out of a horror movie, his nose and ear and eyebrow piercings glinting, a sleeve of black-and-purple tattoos twisted up his left arm like an injury. He’s wearing his bleached hair in gelled spikes today.
“Yo, man,” I say, and as he climbs up the back of my car onto my roof, he grunts, “You been out here smoking, huh?” and I’m like, “Yeah, nothing else to do. You?”
“I was reading. Waiting for one of my sculptures to cool.” He waves a book at me. When Burke’s not welding metal sculptures out of abandoned hubcaps and steel rods, he spends all his time reading, which people never guess, because he looks like every gang-member stereotype ever conceived. In reality, he’s probably the most well-read, intelligent person at this school—not counting Valentine Simmons, because I refuse to count that pretentious dickhead—and no one knows it, because Burke’s way sneaky about the whole smart thing.