“Where are you from?” she asked. “Hello? Can you hear me?”
It took me a minute to gather myself. “I can,” I said.
“I asked where you’re from.”
“Everywhere,” I answered.
“Excuse me?”
“Like the wind, you could say. Where do you want me to be from? Name a state. Go ahead.”
The tall girl didn’t name a state. She blinked warily, like I was a mission target. “Do you want to be left alone?” she asked.
“No. Sorry,” I said. “Have a seat. If you want.”
Surprisingly, she sat. Beneath the red-and-black letter jacket with a tennis racket on one shoulder and a giant C on the other she wore a tight, expensive-looking gray top that scooped low on her chest. Beneath that everything appeared appropriately shaped and in place—I checked. She checked me out, and her look said there was not much to check. That was fair.
Her name was Megan Rose. I introduced myself.
“Want to buy a raffle ticket?” she asked. “Five dollars for one, three for ten.”
So that’s why she was talking to me. Of course. “Pass,” I said.
“You can pay me later, if you need to.”
“Those things are always rigged. The best friend of whoever’s running it wins.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m running it.”
“Oh. Well. Good for you.”
“The raffle’s for prom.”
“I’m not going to prom.”
“Why aren’t you going?”
“I won’t be here.”
“Where will you be?”
I swept my hand through the air. “Everywhere, as I said. Where the wind takes me.”
Megan Rose grimaced. “Are you on drugs?”
“No. You offering?”
I cursed silently—I’d honestly been trying to not be aggravating. And I was failing hard, I could tell. It was unintentional. I was an unintentional aggravator. I blamed my father—pissing him off was often the only way to keep our conversations interesting.
I hastily explained that my father moved a lot for work and that I’d been to no fewer than fourteen different high schools. Had lived in twenty-two different states altogether, if you went further back.
“Twenty-two? For real?” asked Megan Rose.
I nodded. “A couple of them twice. And don’t ask me about Texas.”
“That sounds like a lonely life.”
“Well. There are some benefits. You develop a refined palate for Egg McMuffins. You save money on sports jerseys, because you’re never anywhere long enough to become a fan. You learn the actual names of interstates, not just their numbers. The Turquoise Trail. The Beartooth Highway. The Vince Lombardi Memorial Rest Stop. You see everything there is to see in this fine country. Nothing ever surprises you.”
Megan Rose’s eyes opened wide. “So you saw the trees?”
“The trees?”
“You saw them? What they’ve been doing?”
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” I said. “What are the trees doing? Changing color?”
Megan Rose twisted her lips, disappointed but unsurprised. “You haven’t seen everything. Not even close.”
Not knowing what to say, I took a nervous glance around. A lot of students in the cafeteria were watching us. All of them, pretty much. When I turned back, Megan Rose was staring down at her lap. A long minute passed, during which she didn’t look up once but appeared actually to have entered a place deep inside herself, a place too deep for conversation or even basic manners. It was like she was free-diving her mind.
That was a dangerous sport, I knew. Sometimes people didn’t come back.
What the hell was this?
Lost in worries that I had stumbled onto a hysterical person, I put a spoonful of the food on my tray in my mouth. It tasted like a road puddle.
Just then, a squadron of ten students in school colors trooped into the cafeteria. One of them did that fingers-in-the-mouth, ear-drum-busting whistle, and conversation zipped right up. “Fighting Poets!” she yelled. “Friday night is the homecoming game! We’re playing Big Rival! We’re gonna beat them like a drum! And know happiness! Meaning! And now we’re going to buy raffle tickets!”
They split up to work the room. Two determined-looking cheerleaders made a beeline for Megan Rose and me. Without saying hi, they detailed raffle-sales totals, quotas, and concerns to Megan Rose, who returned from her free dive, blinked several times, and responded. I had the sense, observing the way others looked at her and talked to her, that she was no less than the sun around which the North Homer student body revolved. When one cheerleader spoke to her, the other shot me a look of pure disdain. I said hello to them, but they’d lost their hearing, the poor things.
One of them, a compact girl with bulging deltoids and a rebar-tight blond ponytail, started pulling Megan Rose’s arm to leave.
Megan Rose put her hands on the table to stand. “It was nice to meet you, Wallace. I hope you enjoy your time here.”
“Okay, you’re good,” I said. “I’m creeped out. I’ll buy your tickets. How many for ten dollars?”
“I’m not trying to creep you out.”
“Okay. So what are the trees doing?”
“I’m sorry you came here.”
“Hey, I apologized. I promise I’m not always this annoying.”
“No,” said Megan Rose. Her features softened. “I mean, I’m sorry for you.”
My breathing stopped. “Let’s go, Megan Rose,” said her impatient friend.
Megan Rose turned to leave, but then she turned back. “Three,” she said to me.
“What?”
“Ten dollars gets you three tickets.”
I dug in my pocket for the money. She leaned way over the table to reach for it and, softly, so no one else could hear, spoke into my ear. Her breath was warm. I felt it in every nerve.
“Watch the trees,” she said.
THREE
LUNCH STILL HAD another ten minutes to go.
I looked around the cafeteria, more carefully this time. More than a few eyes glared back. It appeared to be the same clique-fest that constitutes every high school in America, including the schools that have been segregated by race, sex, or a belief in a God with a different, better shade than yours—geeks, jocks, stoners, America Firsters, etc., etc.—arbitrary tribalism is baked into teenage DNA right alongside phone addiction and body-shaming. Even the one-room schoolhouse outside Anchorage I passed some time in a couple of years back was as demarcated as Middle Eastern holy cities. It’s such a stereotype, this splitting of students into stereotypes, and they were all represented in the North Homer lunchroom.