She gestures towards her bulging backpack. “Hardly. This thing weighs a metric shit-ton with all the books I’ve brought home. Will they lighten up on us with all the homework? We haven’t been in school for a week yet! It’s madness!”
“You wanna hear the truth or do you want to hear what’s gonna make you feel better?” I reply.
She considers her options. “Definitely lie to me.”
Poor Simone’s in for a real treat when midterms roll around, if she thinks this is a lot of work, but I’m not into scaring her or encouraging her to become one of the other grade-obsessed automatons up here. Seriously, I don’t get all the fuss about academics. For me, when I receive Bs on my tests? I’m stoked, I’m celebrating. Anywhere else in the world, Bs are pretty good.
I tell her, “Then you can expect smooth sailing over calm seas.”
“Outstanding,” she replies.
“Trick is, you’ve gotta pace yourself,” I explain. “Everyone gets so bunged up about their classes that they never take time to, I don’t know, give themselves a minute. Smell the roses. Just be. Like Ferris Bueller says, ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’”
I love John Hughes’s movies. He’s my favorite director, even above Kurosawa or Scorsese. He doesn’t always get the respect he deserves in my film classes, so I just smile and nod when the instructors dismiss his work. The man defined my parents’ generation, you know? The film-snob teachers can’t take that away from him.
I tell Simone, “Way I see it, we’re never going to be seventeen again. We’re never going to have less responsibility. I say we milk it.”
Simone looks at me like I’m a unicorn or something. “You don’t have your entire future mapped out with every single thing you’re going to do and be between now and age sixty-five?”
I don’t get that compulsion, either. Why would I pre-plan the next seventy years right now? I’m sure I have something that I’m meant to do, but I’m under no obligation to figure it out right this second.
Even if I did know my purpose, who’s to say I wouldn’t be into entirely different stuff in the future? I mean, around my bar mitzvah, I went through a phase where I kept Kosher because I wanted to be a rabbi. Another time, I was on a huge burrito kick, and now I barely eat them anymore. I was all about fiction last year and now I want real life in my movies. I’m not about to lock in the GPS coordinates until I’m sure of where I’m headed.
I say, “Definitely not. Like, some days I want to move to Colorado and be a whitewater rafting guide or maybe live in the Caribbean, scraping together a few bucks by tending bar and playing guitar. And sometimes I want to go to college and major in philosophy. I’m all about the examined life, you know? Thing is, I have time to decide. If I want, I can do everything. As for right now, girl, I don’t even know what I’m doing for lunch.”
Probably not burritos, though.
She glances at me from under a sheaf of hair that’s the same color as Buckeye, this big ol’ seal-brown stallion I used to ride when I was into show jumping. “That’s an extraordinarily refreshing perspective.”
I shrug. “I’m an extraordinarily refreshing kinda guy.”
“How come you’re hoofing it to school, too? Can’t seniors drive?”
I have my own car and a Vespa, too, I just don’t use ’em much. “Why burn fossil fuel when these work perfectly well?” I point to my feet.
“You remind me so much of my friends at home,” she says.
I raise an eyebrow at her. “That a good thing?”
“Absolutely.” Her cheeks get all pink when she says this. I can’t tell if she’s flirting with me. If so, cool. If not, that’s cool, too. I’ll hang with her however it shakes out.
She twists a piece of her hair and then becomes real interested in looking at her cuticles. “Owen...” she starts, before hesitating. I give her the space to find her words. I’m in no rush. “Um...would you ever want to get together to study or something?”
“That would be badass,” I reply, nodding. “Just gotta know when and where.”
She tucks her chin into her neck, but I can still see her grinning under all her hair. “Then it’s a date!”
With her happy aura, she looks like she’s making me feel. I get real good vibes coming from Simone and I kind of wonder if she means it’s a date or it’s a date.
Either way, I can’t say that I’m worried about a thing.
9
STEPHEN
I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.
I thought I was making inroads with Simone, like she was starting to consider me as more than just a friend. I’ve been my best self. I’ve put it all on the line. I’ve been wittier and more outgoing than ever before. I’ve stretched, I’ve left my comfort zone, I’ve taken chances.
I let her see who I really am.
Thought that was good enough, that I’d finally be good enough.
She hugs me way more often than Kent and she’s always finding reasons to touch my hair. She says it’s because it’s so spiky and that she’s amazed at how immobile it is. She’s always trying to mess it up.
In my mind, my sad, mistaken, pitiful mind, I figured this was her way of signaling she might be open to something else.
Nope. Not even close.
At lunch today, she asked Kent about Owen. Was trying to find out if he had a girlfriend. Admitted she might “fancy” him.
I wanted to throw up my fish sticks and Tater Tots.
I can’t tell you what happened in my afternoon classes; they went by in a blur. Like it was Charlie Brown’s teachers up there lecturing, all “Waun waun waun waun waun.”
I felt my pulse throbbing in my head, and each beat of my heart pounded out the question WHY?, every thump increasing the pressure until my brain was going to explode. Was like a black cloud blew in and took away the color from every part of my life.
I didn’t even go to my Robotics Club meeting, normally my favorite part of the week. I came straight home.
I need to decompress so I put on my black Compton hat with the white Gothic lettering, turn up the speakers on my computer, and play the one song that can always make me feel better, that soothes my soul.
Before Tupac can even get to the chorus about laying him down in a bed of roses and sinking him in the river at dawn, my mother busts into my room. She says knocking’s a consideration for people who pay the mortgage.
“Ugh, no, this is the worst,” my mother says. On the outside, she looks like all the other women in the neighborhood, her statement jewelry and sleeveless dresses and hundred-dollar yoga pants. She’s always going to Pilates and playing tennis and drinking wine with her girls. But unlike a lot of the absentee parents up here, she’s totally a Helicopter Mom.
“Sorry, Ma, I’ll use my headphones.” I grab my Beats by Dr. Dre and go to plug them into my laptop, but she stops me.
She glowers at my computer, as though it’s personally insulted her. “How about not playing it at all? This music has a terrible message. No one says you have to go all Taylor Swift, but this stuff is garbage.”
I don’t argue with her.