Miney says: “Mom is a closet weirdo, and dad is a closet normal, and that’s why they work.”
I haven’t put much thought into their marriage, but I like that my parents are still together. I wouldn’t want to have to pack a bag every other weekend and sleep in some strange apartment and have to brush my teeth in a different sink. My mom claims my dad and I are a lot alike, which gives me cause for optimism. If he could get someone like my mother to love him—someone who is universally acknowledged to be all kinds of awesome—and not just love him but love him enough to spend the rest of her life with him, then maybe there is hope for me too.
Halfway through class, when Mr. Schmidt starts writing equations on the smart board, Kit stands up and walks out. No explanation. No asking for a bathroom pass. No excuses. She just leaves.
After the door closes behind her, the whispering starts.
Justin: That was badass.
Annie: She, like, needs to talk to us. She’s totally shutting us out.
Violet: Her dad DIED, Annie. As in dead, dead forever. Cut her some slack.
Gabriel: I’m hungry.
Annie: I have a PowerBar.
Gabriel: You literally just saved my life.
This is how it goes. Conversation swirls around me, and the words all feel disconnected, like playing pinball blindfolded. What does Kit’s dad dying have to do with Gabriel being hungry?
“Ladies and gentlemen, moving on,” Mr. Schmidt says, and then claps three times—clap, clap, clap—for no discernible reason. Before I realize what I’m doing, my hand is in the air. “Yes, Mr. Drucker?”
“Can I be excused?” I ask.
“Excused? This is a classroom, not the dinner table. Let’s get back to work.”
“I meant can I go to the nurse? I have a migraine,” I say, though this is a lie. Miney would be proud. She says I need to practice not telling the truth. That lying gets easier the more you do it. I consider making a moaning noise, as if I am in pain, but decide that would be overkill.
“Fine. Go,” Mr. Schmidt says, and so I stand up and walk out the door, just like Kit did a few moments before. It’s not like I’m going to miss anything here. I read the textbook last summer. The few questions it raised for me were answered with a couple of Google searches and expounded upon by a free online Stanford class.
Once I’m in the quiet hallway, my brain catches up with my body and I understand what I’m doing here. Although Mr. Schmidt’s class is boring and a complete waste of my time, I usually obey instructions. I sit through my classes. Mostly keep my mouth shut. Unless I want to bypass high school and get a GED, I don’t have much choice in the matter.
What I realize is: I want to find Kit. I need to know where she’s going.
I jog down the hall and decide to head out the front door, ignoring Se?ora Rubenstein, the Spanish teacher, calling out to me in her heavy New Jersey accent: “Adónde vas, Se?or Drucker?”
I scan the parking lot to my right, which is about six hundred feet northeast of the school’s entrance. No Kit. But her red Corolla, which is parked like always in the second row, six cars back, space number forty-three of the upperclassmen’s lot, is still here.
I walk around the school to the football field, which has high bleachers and a decent view of Mapleview. Maybe she’s sitting up there to get some fresh air. I don’t like sporting events—too noisy and crowded—but I’ve always liked bleachers, things ordered vertically from high to low.
“Did Mr. Schmidt send you?” Kit asks. She’s not in the bleachers, which is where I was looking, but in the concession hut. This is where kids from student government sell hot dogs and lemonade and candy at football games at inflated prices. The lights are off, and she’s sitting on the dirty floor with her knees pulled into her chest. If she hadn’t spoken, I don’t know if I would have noticed her.
“No. I lied to him and said I had a migraine,” I say, and force myself to make eye contact. It’s easier than usual, since it’s dark in there. Kit’s cheeks are red from the cold. Her eyes are green. They’ve always been green, obviously, but today they are greener somehow. My new definition of green. Green used to equal Kermit the Frog. And sometimes spring. But no more. Now Kit’s eyes equal green. An inextricable link. Like how when I think about the number three, I always, for no reason that I’ve been able to understand, also see the letter R.
“I wasn’t trying to start a ditching trend,” Kit says, and I smile, because if it’s not exactly a joke, it is sort of related to one.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t usually follow trends,” I say, and point to my pants, which are loose-fitting and khaki-colored and, according to Miney, a “crime against fashion.” She’s been begging to take me shopping for years, claims that I could look so much better if I put in just a tiny bit of effort. But I don’t like shopping. Actually it’s not the shopping I mind so much. I don’t like the new clothes afterward. The feeling of an unfamiliar material against my skin.
Kit looks up at me, and then over my shoulder to the school.
“So are you following me? This isn’t the nurse’s office,” she says. I can’t make out her tone. Can’t tell if she’s annoyed. Her voice sounds scratchy and her face doesn’t match any of the expression cards Miney once printed out for me.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” I hold up my hands, a signal to say no harm, like they do on cop shows.
“Everyone was talking about me when I left, right? I didn’t mean to make a whole thing about it. I just couldn’t sit there, suddenly,” she says.
“Clearly,” I say. “I mean, that you couldn’t sit there. Not the making a whole thing about it.” Now that I’m here, talking to Kit, twice in one day, when we haven’t really spoken pretty much ever, except our few Notable Encounters, I realize how off schedule I find myself. None of this was part of today’s plan.
Me following her outside.
Me electing myself the one to check on her.
Me suddenly redefining green.
I’m in the concession hut and David Drucker is standing outside. The whole thing is so weird. Surely he knows that when I sat at his lunch table this afternoon I was just looking for a place to be alone. I don’t want anything from him. Or for us to suddenly be besties or something. I don’t mean that in a nasty way. I’m not usually like this. I don’t abandon my friends in the cafeteria or walk out of class in the middle of the teacher’s lecture or have any trouble lying and saying “Your ass looks awesome in those high-waisted jeans.”
My dad’s shirt is filthy.
This place reeks of rotting hot dogs and old gym sneakers.
Everything is wrong.
It’s been one month.
I am still all wrong.
“I wasn’t following you,” David says, his eyes darting off the walls and then, finally, landing on mine. “I mean, I was. But just because someone needed to follow you. Does that make sense?”