“Exactly!” said Paul.
They kept talking. I was annoyed. It was like I’d lost my chance to participate because I’d made that one dumb joke, and now I had to trudge along and watch them bond via a cool intellectual discussion about identity and groupthink and nationalism and subsuming the one to the many. I would have been all about that discussion.
When we reached the junior parking lot, Jiyoon was flushed, neat circles high on her cheeks. “So,” said Paul, turning to me, “to what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Huh?”
“The favor? With Powderpuff or whatever?”
“Not Powderpuff. Even better. Prom.” I explained the Last Chance Dance.
“Ah,” he said. “And you want me to build the website.”
“Right.”
“That’s a terrible idea.”
“Do you even get it? Traditional dances force girls into passive roles, and—”
“The idea’s cool. But only a moron would put information like that into a website.”
“It’ll be a secure website.”
“Anything can be hacked. Anything can be leaked.”
“Nobody at Chawton knows how to hack.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Come on. Can you do it?”
“I can, sure.”
“Will you?”
He hesitated. “Maybe he needs a minute to think about it,” said Jiyoon. Reasonably enough, I guess. “How old’s your car?” It was the jankiest one in the lot, a maroon Honda Civic that would have been put down long ago if it had been a dog.
“Prudence?” said Paul. “She’s nineteen.”
“She’s been on the planet longer than we have,” said Jiyoon.
“I think about that a lot, actually. The impermanence of humans. Compared to things.”
“We think we’re so much more sophisticated than machines, but which lasts longer?”
They were at it again. God. I checked my phone just to have something to do. Under normal circumstances, I loved this kind of talk. Shooting the philosophical shit. “You’re that teenager,” Crispin had told me once—the week I was into Nietzsche, I think. But now it annoyed me, the way Paul and Jiyoon were so into it, so into each other. They were having an Intellectual Discussion Party and I was definitely not invited.
“Ideas, thoughts,” Paul was saying. “They last longer than anything. Us or cars. But they’re also the most insubstantial.” He did this quick, jerky shoulder thing. The two of them beamed at each other. When Paul smiles, he gets a whole mess of lines spooning his mouth. Maybe because he’s so superlatively skinny. Possibly malnourished. He has all these food allergies, so usually for lunch he has something weird from the salad bar, like an entire compostable plate of artichokes.
But Paul is cute. You look at him and think he’s a spindly nerd, and then you look again and see his gray-blue eyes, which always match the sky, and his foot-long eyelashes, and that liny smile. I watched him flash it at Jiyoon, and I watched her dimpled one shoot back to him, and I thought, They’re cute together.
It had never occurred to me.
“I have a great idea,” said Jiyoon. “You should teach Jemima to drive.”
“What?” Paul and I said at the same time.
“It’d be perfect,” said Jiyoon. “You need to learn and Paul has a car.”
“How about he teaches you to drive?” I said.
“It’d be pointless,” said Jiyoon. “I wouldn’t have a car even if I learned. You, though. If you knew how to drive, we’d be free. We could go anywhere. We could go to California.”
“Or the soft-serve place,” I said.
“Or there.”
It was indeed a great idea. How could we convince Paul? What was in it for him? Men love explaining to women how much they know about engines, right? “You’d get to mold me from raw clay,” I told him. “You’d be the first person in the world to see me control a motor vehicle.”
“You’ve never driven a golf cart?” he said.
“Never.”
“A lawn mower?”
“Nope.”
“A bumper car?”
“Yeah, but I kept crashing.”
“Nobody knows what’ll happen if she touches a steering wheel,” said Jiyoon.
“It’ll turn into a toad, probably,” said Paul.
“That’s if she kisses a steering wheel,” said Jiyoon.
“We’ll have to find out,” said Paul, and they both turned bright red.
There is something supremely awkward about watching your best friend flirt. Maybe even more so when it’s mutual. It’s like when your parents kiss. You want it to happen; you just don’t want to be there when it does. “Well, well!” I said, feeling like Old Great-Aunt Dorcas, taken aback by the coquettish habits of the younger generation. “Think about it, Paul. You’ve got a willing student if you want one. And meanwhile…” I hated to bring it up again, but Gennifer would eviscerate me if I didn’t get confirmation. “The website?”
“Fine,” he said, ripping his eyes from Jiyoon. “I’ll do it.” You could tell he still thought it was a terrible idea. “But I don’t want anyone knowing I’m doing it. I’m just a contractor. This is your thing.”
Once a week, though not on set days because Chawton goes by an insanely complicated rotating block schedule, the explanation of which I will kindly spare you, we had a Town Meeting for grades nine through twelve. Sometimes Triumvirate ran it and sometimes Mr. Duffey did, but we always sat on the stage.
The faculty chose the Mildred. That was the only position that was, in theory and practice, filled by both boys and girls. Social Committee elected their own president, who was and ever would be a girl because boys never joined Social Comm. And the Chawton School chairman, elected by the whole school, was always, always—as the name implies—male.
Always. Ever since, according to the aforementioned obelisk/penis, 18-freaking-92. Of course, no girls had attended Chawton till the merge with Ansel in 1978, but even in the past four decades there hadn’t been a female chairman. A few years back this super-cool senior named Maria Lovelace had started a petition to change the name to chair, but it was quashed. Rumor had it a few influential (read: deep-pocketed) alumni played the tradition card. “It’s like mailman, or man-made,” they said. “Everyone knows what it means.”