Ryan Cork was suspended for two weeks for saying what he did. And April was suspended for four and nearly expelled.
April didn’t come back to our high school after that. Her mother quit her job at Georgia Tech and took her old position at NYU. They said they didn’t want to live in a place like this. And it wasn’t like there was a line of people jumping at the chance to become my new best friend. We write letters sometimes, and April says she wants me to visit, but we both know I don’t have the money for something like that.
The week after April left, I sat down at Alicia Howard’s table. Her brother sometimes hung out with Marcus and Aaron, so I thought that might be enough for us to get along.
“Girl,” she said, looking me up and down, “we didn’t invite you to sit with us.” As I walked away, keeping my head down so they couldn’t see my expression, I heard one of the other girls say, “Isn’t she from China?” and someone else said, “Nah, I think it’s Japan.” “I thought Japanese girls were supposed to be all little? Wing’s ass is bigger than mine.” Their laughter chased me across the cafeteria.
Lunch really isn’t my favorite time of day.
After lunch, I have ceramics. I’m not very good at it, but I’ve got to take something to get an art credit, and there was no way I was going to take drama or chorus or dance or anything where someone has to look at me. And I don’t mind ceramics. There’s something relaxing about molding the clay, even if everything I make comes out ugly. And it’s better than gym, which was my other option for this year. I’ll have to take it eventually – my school requires two years of some kind of athletic activity – but I want to postpone it for as long as possible. I don’t want to have to deal with Heather Parker in the locker room.
The ceramics studio is down past the track, away from the main campus. As I walk, I hear loud laughter and instinctively freeze, sure that it’s directed at me. But when I look toward the sound, I relax. It’s Eliza Thompson, striding out onto the track like she’s strutting on a catwalk. Three girls flank her.
Eliza Thompson is so fast and so fine that sometimes I think maybe she should be with Marcus instead of Monica. She’s not just the fastest girl at our school but in our whole county. She’s all long brown limbs and slender neck and sleek short hair, and I can hear her laugh bubbling up from the track as she stretches, leaning this way and that. All grace and power.
She bends down and touches her toes, the movement so smooth it is like watching a river bend down over a cliff and make a waterfall, then she snaps back up, so quick it makes me blink. She takes off running in a burst of speed, and my own feet tingle.
I watch and I wonder what it feels like. To be so fast you can get away whenever you want and to be so sure of yourself that you don’t care who is watching.
CHAPTER 6
I’m not invited to Trey’s party.
Everyone has been talking about it all week. Everyone is going. Even people like Heather and Laura who normally wouldn’t dream of going anywhere as sketchy as Trey’s neighborhood. I overheard Heather today in history. “Everyone slums occasionally. Come on, it’ll be a riot. And I heard he’s got two kegs.”
Her minions nodded their heads like those Chihuahuas you see on truck dashboards.
But nobody thought to ask me if I wanted to go. Not even Marcus or Monica or Aaron. It isn’t that I want to go. I’ve never been to a party like this, and I don’t think I’d enjoy it. But it does hurt a little bit to know that I’ll be home with my grannies while everyone else at my school is at the same party together.
Trey has the “hookup” when it comes to booze. That’s what I hear, anyway. And he also has a gun that his cousin or his uncle or someone he isn’t even related to got for him. Probably Jasper, now that I think about it. It makes me anxious to think about Marcus, Monica, and Aaron at a party with a gun.
They probably already have been. There’s so much I don’t know about their lives. And my whole life is them. It’s like we’re kids again in the swimming pool and they can come hang out with me in the shallow end and it’s great, the best ever, and we play Marco Polo and spider and dolphins and pirates and all my favorite games, and then they swim in the deep end and I’m not a good enough swimmer to go, so I sit on the stairs, because swimming in the shallow end by yourself isn’t fun, and watch their heads bob up and down as Marcus dives and Aaron cannonballs, and sure, I can tell you that it looks fun, but I can’t tell you if it actually is fun.
I don’t tell my Granny Dee this when she asks me why I’m pouting like a trout. I also don’t tell her trouts don’t pout. I don’t even think they have lips. There is no point arguing about anything with my Granny Dee. I know she’s trying to be nice, though, especially when she pushes a plate of cookies toward me.
“Where’s Marcus tonight?” she asks, and I sigh.
“Out.”
“That boy always out.”