“I type the letters and numbers in boxes on the computer screen. I move the papers from one pile to another pile. I refill Mrs. Poole’s coffee cup sometimes.”
“Do you do anything with student e-mail addresses?” Erin can’t tell if Slatterly’s on the verge of screaming or the verge of crying.
“Are those the words with the A in the middle with the circle around it?” Erin says.
Slatterly’s face is red and bulging. Erin suspects her anger is contributing to a serious medical condition. Hypertension. Heart disease. Ulcers. Erin wonders what Slatterly eats, if her diet consists of foods low in sodium and refined sugars and high in fiber and antioxidants, as it should. Mom could probably help her with an appropriate nutrition plan to reduce inflammation.
Erin’s smile is not part of her act. She is not scared. She feels too much of something else, something close to triumphant. Playing dumb has made her feel pretty damn smart.
“What do you want to talk about now?” Erin says, looking Principal Slatterly in the eye for almost a whole second. “I have a special interest in fish. Would you like to talk about fish? I can tell you all about hagfish. They are spineless and jawless and covered in slime.”
“No, I would not like to talk about fish.” Erin can almost hear the word “retard” at the end of Slatterly’s sentence. She can feel her want to say it. “You can go now, Erin.”
So Erin goes back to her desk in the back of the office, where she could do so much damage if she wanted to.
*
“We’re partners!” Otis Goldberg says as he pushes his desk toward Erin’s in AP American History.
“I hate group projects,” she tells him.
Today the hair tie around his boy-bun is purple. The classroom is noisy with moving desks, which would normally make Erin agitated, but she still hasn’t come down from the high of her meeting with Principal Slatterly. She is less annoyed with Otis than usual.
“This is going to be great,” he says. “What luck, huh? The two smartest kids in the class get to be partners.”
“I don’t believe in luck.”
He scoots his desk closer. His desk is practically on top of Erin’s now.
“Do you believe in fate? Like, destiny?” he says.
Erin scoots her desk three inches away from his.
“So what have the Nowhere Girls been up to lately? Anything cool planned, like some kind of subversive action? Can I come?”
“You talk too much,” Erin says.
“All right, class,” Mr. Trilling says. “Let’s stay focused on the task at hand.”
Otis pushes his desk against Erin’s again. He doesn’t even seem aware that he’s doing it. It’s like he has some deep, subconscious need to always be touching someone. He is the exact opposite of Erin.
“Do you have any ideas for our project?” he says. Erin shrugs. “Because I was thinking we could do something about Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, how if you analyze the ideology in psychological terms, it’s like certifiable narcissism, probably borderline personality disorder, maybe even sociopathic.”
“I don’t think that’s the kind of project Mr. Trilling wants us to do,” Erin says.
Despite today’s events, Erin feels surprisingly unagitated. Lying to Principal Slatterly wasn’t nearly as hard as she thought it should be. The noisy classroom. The group project. And now this, whatever it is. This talking to Otis Goldberg that is not completely unpleasant. She does not have to look him in the eye to notice the pleasing symmetry of his face. And even though he talks far more than is necessary, his voice is not as grating as most people’s.
Today is a strange day. Erin feels strange. But maybe strange is not necessarily the same as bad.
Erin feels so many things, but she doesn’t know how to classify them. When she asks herself what Data would do, all she hears is silence.
US.
A yellow construction-paper poster reads WE BELIEVE LUCY MOYNIHAN! Someone has written SLUT across it in thick red marker.
Another sign reads FIGHT RAPE CULTURE AT PHS! Someone has added WHORE to that one.
“That is so fucked up,” a guy says next to Elise Powell as he stares at one of the defaced posters. Benjamin Chu. He’s in Elise’s calculus class, perpetually late, but possessing a smile that consistently convinces the teacher to not punish him. Elise waits for him to arrive every day and fills with relief when he falls panting into his seat across the aisle from her.
“What’s fucked up?” Elise says, ready to either get defensive or fall madly in love.
“What some assholes wrote on these signs,” he says. “What is wrong with people?”
“You like the signs?” Elise says. She has pitched tied games in the fourteenth inning. She has pitched the state semifinals. She has pitched games that were regionally televised. But she has never been so scared as right now.
“Hell, yeah,” Benjamin says, smiling his detention-evading smile. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Elise says. “I do.”
Elise feels her face burn and she knows it’s red, she knows her freckles are popping out like they always do when she’s embarrassed. But this is a different kind of embarrassed, a different kind of being seen, and it is not entirely horrible. And the not-horribleness of it turns her desire into a brief, giddy moment of courage.
“Hey, um, Ben?” Elise says. “Do you maybe want to hang out sometime? With me?”
He says yes way too quickly. Elise waits a moment to give him time to realize he made a mistake. But instead he smiles, his face almost as red as hers.
*
The bell rings in Grace’s homeroom. Connie Lancaster rushes in, breathless. “Holy shit!” she says, falling into her seat. “You guys totally just missed a major fight.”
“What happened?” Allison says.
“I don’t know all the details,” Connie says. “I got there just as the security guards were breaking it up. But Elise was there and said she saw the whole thing. She said Corwin Jackson was talking to this girl in the hall and she kept trying to walk away but he wouldn’t let her, then these two freshmen guys totally stuck up for her and started telling him to stop bothering her, and Corwin got up in their faces and shoved one of them, and then the girl hit Corwin with her purse, and then shit got crazy and they all ganged up on Corwin, and that’s when I heard everyone in the hall yelling and ran over to see what was happening, but by then everything was pretty much over, but Corwin had his hand over his eye and his lip was bleeding and he was totally crying.” Connie fans herself with her hand. “It’s like a war zone out there.”
“I wish things didn’t have to get violent,” Grace says.
“They already were violent,” Allison says.