“Maybe he meant it metaphorically? Like it felt like his sister died,” Dri offers, but I shake my head. Caleb wasn’t at all vague. “Or maybe he just said it to connect with you, you know, about your mom?”
I take Agnes’s french fry, nibble it slowly and deliberately. I will ask Caleb later, if I have the nerve. I’ve never really wished anyone dead before, but it would be so not cool if he made the whole thing up. No, Caleb has lost someone close to him. We are a select crew, the dead family club, and I think I can tell who is for real. He counts the days, you know, since, just like me.
No one could make up counting days.
—
In English, Gem takes her seat without looking at me. I just see her straight back, her ponytail swishing its disapproval, the side of her arched brow. Her beauty is so classic, so generally agreed upon, that it’s almost impossible not to stare. I hate myself for it, but I long to look like her, to cast spells without even having to open my mouth. To have a body like hers, assembled from lean, proportionate parts, as if dreamed up and arranged by the fantasies of all the men.
I wonder if Ethan is staring at her too. If he can help it.
If, at night, Ethan thinks about Gem the way I think about him.
I try not to. Think about him, I mean. I’ve tried to do a bait and switch, put Caleb where Ethan’s face appears, but it never works. I may spend my evenings IMing with Caleb, but I spend my dreams with Ethan. In them, he’s awake, his hands eager, his eyes on mine. In them, I’m not scared of sex, of intimacy, of anything at all. In them, I don’t feel ugly or compare my body to Gem’s. I feel beautiful and strong and brave.
In the morning, I wake up flushed, sad, when the feeling gets wiped away by the reality of day. When I wash my face in the mirror, see whiteheads, red splotches, round baby cheeks.
“Ms. Holmes?” Mrs. Pollack asks, and I wonder how long she’s been calling on me.
“Um, yeah?”
“Care to answer the question?” I remember suddenly that she’s been going around the room. I had ample warning, knew I was next up, but still I somehow got lost in thought. I look up at Mrs. Pollack; she’s attractive, might have looked a lot like Gem when she was in high school. I bet she’s never had a pimple.
“I’m sorry, I—” The whole class looks over, Gem and Crystal snicker in duet, and my face flashes hot. A bead of sweat threatens to streak down my right temple. I flick it away, try to calm my beating heart. Back in Chicago, English was my strongest subject. “I mean, I wasn’t paying—”
“That scene with Raskolnikov at his house with his mother and sister. How he’s able to act like everything is normal, even though he’s actually going crazy inside,” Ethan breaks in, and though I have no idea what he’s talking about, his comment satisfies Mrs. Pollack, who moves toward the front of the room to write something on the blackboard.
“Exactly,” she says, giving me one last look, which catches me by surprise. Because it’s not mean. It’s not even pity. It’s something else entirely. Empathy.
—
“Thanks,” I say to Ethan after class, once we are safely in the hallway. “You saved me.”
“My pleasure, Tuberlicious.”
“I hope I don’t ruin your grade with our project.” I fiddle with my bag, which feels too heavy on my shoulder. “Especially after I kind of made you work with me.”
“I’m not worried.” He smiles, so I force myself to look him straight in the eye, to bathe in the blue. No, not like a serial killer’s, like I first thought. More complex than that. Like a gathering. I hear Theo’s warning in my head and check for dilated pupils, but they look normal-sized to me.
“Good,” I say. Not clever. Not flirtatious. Not anything. Maybe in an hour, I’ll come up with a better line. Something funny and light to punctuate my exit.
But now: nothing.
Ethan rubs his head, as if trying to wake up his hair. Smiles again.
“Have a safe trip tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t forget about us,” he says, and before I can even articulate a question—What does he mean by us? Wood Valley? LA? Him and me?—Ethan is gone, out the front door and halfway to his car.
—