“Who ever said it wasn’t okay? And the car is old.” It used to be my dad’s, made in the nineties. It was vintage when he got it, and he drove it until I turned sixteen. When he couldn’t bear to get rid of it, I told him I’d still drive it if I didn’t have to deal with the maintenance. He was so thrilled, he couldn’t say no to that.
“It’s vintage,” Duke says, as if he’s reading my mind. “Look at this console—it has a tape deck!”
Something my dad is entirely too proud of, considering no one listens to cassette tapes anymore. I didn’t even know what they were until he showed me his old collection. Another thing he can’t part with.
“My family isn’t rich. They just prioritize education.”
“While mine decided to send me to Hooligan High, huh?” he asks, reaching for his seat belt.
I let out an exasperated sigh. “Are you going to keep doing this all day?”
“Maybe. It’s fun. You get so flustered.”
“I’m not flustered. And what if it was the other way around?”
He stops fiddling with his seat belt for a moment. “Huh?”
“I mean, what if I were the one teasing you about going to public school?”
“But why would you do that?” He looks at me like I’ve sprouted another head. “It’s clearly a dick move. People with money have the upper hand.”
“My parents are Black,” I say in a voice that comes out a little too snippy. “They don’t have the upper hand on a whole lot of things. Did you not get into Salinas Prep or something?”
“Ouch.”
I know he’s looking at me, but I’m a bit embarrassed by what I just said—and how I said it—and I don’t look back.
“Did you ever think maybe some people like going to public school?” Duke says.
I don’t respond. He continues.
“My sister and I went to private school in our old town. Julian gave my parents shit about it all the time, but they were afraid to send us to public school. Even though he got out of there alive, I think they thought we were too soft to handle it. Before we moved here, we looked at all the schools in the area, but I told them I wanted to go to Flores Hills High and Ida said the same about the middle school.”
“Oh,” I say in a quiet voice. I trace the edge of the steering wheel. We need to go, but I still haven’t started the car. “It was that easy? Convincing them?”
“Julian had just died and we’d moved to a new town and their marriage was basically in the shitter. It wasn’t too hard.”
He’s the one who brought it up—and kept bringing it up—so I’m not sure why I feel like such a huge jerk right now. I wonder if I should apologize, but when I look over at Duke, he doesn’t seem mad. His face seems the same as always: vaguely content, and amused by something I can’t figure out.
I look back down at my phone in my lap, trying to quell the embarrassment spreading through my body in waves. Finally, I swipe Alec’s text open to see if there’s more than the preview showed.
There’s not. It’s just three words that manage to infuriate me way more than they should:
Where are you?
I HEARD ABOUT ALEC BUCKMAN AT MY SALINAS Prep orientation a full week before I actually saw him.
He’d attended the lower school, so everyone knew him. Even the new kids who were starting freshman year, like me. I heard about how he was so cute and so charming and so smart, and this was according to just about every other girl and several guys I met.
I won’t lie—they weren’t wrong, from what I could tell. He was in honors courses, and I guess he was kind of cute. A white guy with a mess of brown curls, gray eyes, and a wide smile. We had three classes together, but I didn’t talk to him, so I couldn’t confirm the charming part. I was almost certain that dimple in his right cheek had something to do with it.
Freshman year was…not my best. I usually do well at whatever I set my mind to, and that was true with academics. My grades were impeccable. But I couldn’t seem to crack the code for fitting in at Salinas Prep.
I wasn’t on scholarship, but I’m sure everyone thought I was. The lack of brown skin at my new school was more than noticeable, and even though I kept my head down those first few days, trying not to draw too much attention, I’d seen a few of the sympathetic looks cast in my direction. And I hated that. My parents do all right between Mom’s job at the hospital and my father’s position as a marketing executive, but I was well aware that most of the kids I went to school with were in a different tax bracket than my family.
I was friendly with a few people in my classes, and I ate lunch with the same small group every day, but nobody ever asked me to hang out after school or on the weekends. Everyone seemed to have their groups. Salinas Prep starts at kindergarten, so some kids had been going there their whole lives, moving up through the lower school like Alec until they reached the upper school freshman year. Even the other freshmen who were new to the school seemed to fit in almost immediately, as if they’d been prepping for years.
I still had my friends from my old school, but things were a little weird with them, too. My two best friends, Ryan and Georgia, kept making jokes about how bougie I was for going to the fancy school, but soon the jokes stopped and then the texts tapered off and then we were barely seeing one another. Even after we’d promised on the last day of middle school that nothing would change.
It hurt seeing them online hanging out when I wasn’t invited, so I finally muted their accounts and started following people and things that made me feel good: politicians fighting for legislation that meant something to me, Black academics who always managed to teach me something new, and accounts featuring nothing but adorable animals.
I hadn’t thought much about Alec until I noticed these long, thoughtful comments on several posts from politicians I followed. I looked at the profile and was shocked to see ABuck1 was actually the Alec Buckman from Salinas Prep. He didn’t have many posts on his own page; a few photos from middle school and one or two since I’d started there. But he was a prolific commenter, and he seemed tuned in to the rights of others who didn’t look or live like him: Black people, girls and women, poor people.
I ran into him in the hallway the week before our midterms. I’d been studying in the library during lunch and was headed to drop off books at my locker before my next class. I don’t know where he was coming from or where he was going, but I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone walk down a hallway like that who wasn’t a teacher. So comfortable, so sure that they belonged.
I think I was staring at him, because he looked at me curiously, then slowed down until he was standing in front of me with a grin. I should have looked away, or at least turned around to busy myself with my books. But for the first time ever, I was truly face-to-face with ABuck1, the brain behind all those smart posts online. So I just stood there. Staring like I’d never seen a guy before.
“Hey, Marva,” he said in a warm voice. In fact, everything about him seemed warm. His eyes, his smile—I guess this was the charming part people talked about. I just hadn’t experienced him turning it solely on me.
“Hey,” I said.