My school is on the newer side, made of gray and beige stone. The two-story basketball gymnasium rises up on the right of the building, with the rest of the school sprawled out in one flat-roofed level on the left.
I park as close to the front doors as I can get—which isn’t very—and lug my leather backpack down the front walk and into the enormous cafeteria/locker corridor that’s just inside. The cafeteria space is a big pit in the middle of several walls of lockers. I stop off at mine, leaving my cell phone and backpack inside, and grabbing my books for homeroom, first, and second periods.
On the way to homeroom, I pass my friends Makayla and Sunny, headed to their room across the hall from mine.
“Cute shorts,” Sunny says. “Lookin’ good.”
“If you get bored,” Makayla calls as we pass each other, “draw me a diagram.”
“Ha, ha.”
The three of us have anatomy sixth period, and Makayla thinks it’s funny how good I am at drawing diagrams. We have a running private joke that I should be a dirty diagram drawer when I’m older—like, for penises or sex toys.
My own homeroom class is pretty boring. There are twenty other kids—none of them my close friends—and mostly we just do our homework and listen to intercom announcements while our handler, the sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Zorn, reads romance novels.
I take my usual seat on the second row and open my big, blue binder while Mrs. Zorn reads us announcements. In the binder, there’s a plastic pouch, and in it, there are gel pens. Some that smell, others that sparkle. I prefer the rich colors: eggplant purple, ocean blue, sunset pink, lipstick red. I blow most of my time in homeroom color-coding my day planner like the closet geek I am. That’s what I’m doing when someone knocks on our door.
Mrs. Zorn looks up from her paperback. “Come in,” she sing-songs.
The door opens, revealing a short girl with pink hair and teal green glasses; I recognize her as one of the seniors who works in the office in the morning. She’s holding a note.
“Could you come here?” she whispers loudly, smiling conspiratorially like she has some big news.
Mrs. Zorn sets her paperback on her desk and disappears into the hallway. When she re-emerges, there’s a tall guy on her heels. She moves aside, and my gel pen pauses mid-word.
The boy standing beside her is the physical equivalent of a secret, and in looking at him, I just heard it whispered straight down to my soul. His face…I recognize it: the stark jawline, the high cheekbones, the thick, romantic lips, those eyes.
Those eyes.
They’re slate gray, topped with strong brows, and when they settle on me, they make me feel like he can speak in blinks. He blinks—confirmation!—and my stomach does a slow roll.
“Students—this is James.”
A wave of murmured sound rolls down the rows of desks. The boy’s mouth tightens, and I think I see his shoulders tense. They’re really wide, I notice. Almost jocky, but he’s not a jock. I can tell because his face is slightly pale, making his cinnamon hair look more brown than red. There are smudges underneath his eagle eyes, and tautness about his body that says something different than “athletic.”
He looks like someone just threw a rock at him.
Standing there, two heads taller than Mrs. Zorn, in a plain white T-shirt and worn jeans, he looks skeptical and annoyed. Like he’s been led into our classroom by mistake. He has the sort of self-possessed, don’t-mess-with-me vibe some teachers have, but on him, it’s coupled with that tight-shouldered, closed-fistedness that makes him seem uncomfortable.
Mrs. Zorn touches his arm, and his thick brows tighten.
“Over here…” She points toward the empty desk directly to my left. I watch him move to it with long, quick strides. He fits his big, tall body into it, and I feel mesmerized. He rests one arm atop his desk and blinks at Carly Moore’s blonde ponytail.
Mrs. Zorn looks from him to me. “Evie, can you share…perhaps a sheet of paper and a pen?”
It takes me a second to pull my eyes away from his bent head and notice that she’s talking to me. “Sure. No problem.”
I take a piece of paper from my binder, and then decide he may need more and pull a whole stack out. I put a hunter green gel pen atop the stack and hold it out. Amazement glimmers through me as his bent head lifts. His gray gaze slides to mine.
Zoing!
I feel it in my belly, like I just swallowed a moving pinball.
He takes the pen and papers. I stare at his hand, then I realize I’m staring. My gaze rushes to his face, and then I’m blinking.
Startled. That’s the way I feel. Like I can’t catch my breath.
I try a smile. “Hope you like glitter pens.”
He looks down at the paper. Takes the pen. Finally, he glances my way and says, “Thanks,” in a voice that’s low and rough.
I smile. I don’t even have the wherewithal to speak.
Homeroom is mostly over, so I spend the next fifteen minutes pretending to make notes in my planner while I watch him. As he puts a thick arm on his desk and curls it around his papers. As he rubs a fingertip over the top page. As he takes the top off my pen and draws something.
I feel slightly strained. Like I’m waiting for something, except what would it be? Just when I really start to feel unnerved, the bell rings. He disappears before I even shut my planner.
I think about him during second period, and third. About the way his eyes made me feel. About the way his…everything—his whole body, demeanor, voice—made me feel…this sense of urgency. Like I needed something, and it was about to slip through my fingers. It’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever experienced. I’ve almost managed to convince myself I’m inflating things in my memory when I sit by my best friend Makayla at our lunchroom table, and I spot him at a table out in front of me.
She follows my gaze, and lifts her eyebrows. “Who’s he?”
“New guy. He was in my homeroom.” I watch his hands come to his ears and realize he’s sliding ear buds in.
“Who? What?” Our good friend Tia sits across from us, sliding her tray over the faux wood table. Her long, straight black hair swings as she leans over to cram a slice of pizza into her mouth. “I wanna know…”
I watch the new guy as Makayla points him out to Tia, and she turns to glance at him.
“That wasn’t obvious.” Makayla rolls her eyes as Tia’s boyfriend, Jake, sits down beside T, and then we have to fill him in. Jake is followed by Pax, Sunny, Luc, and Savannah, the rest of our lunch crew.
Unlike the new boy, with his pale skin and serious eyes, we’re at the jock table. I’m the least jocky among us—I only play soccer—but these guys have been my friends since grade school. Like me, they’re all from families who’ve lived in Asheville for a while. Our parents know each other. A lot of the kids further down the table fall into that same bracket.
I keep stealing glances between Tia and Jake’s heads, watching James as he bends slightly over the table. From where I’m sitting, it looks like his hands are under it, one of them maybe drumming on his knee. I think he’s moving slightly, too—maybe to some beat.
I feel a pang as I look around his table. The kids over there are mostly outcasts, either because they’re jerks or because they seem…unusual. CeCe, a pigtailed girl a few seats down from James, was my partner last year on an English project. She’s super nice, but also painfully shy. She really only likes to talk about the works of Chaucer. Which is fine, but makes her no one’s number one pick for conversation.