“Oh my god.” Chloe pops a wedge of clementine into her mouth. “Are you sure that isn’t your fantasy?” she asks. “Maybe you should reconsider becoming a journalist. I feel like romance novels are your true calling.”
“This is journalism!” I protest, laughing. “Serious, investigative journalism into the never-before-seen love lives of America’s most important national treasure—our teachers.”
Chloe snorts. “You do that,” she says, tucking her clementine peel back into her brown paper lunch bag. “I gotta go though, I’ve got a dentist appointment this afternoon, so I’m leaving early. Are you good to run the meeting without me?”
Chloe and I are coeditors of the Beacon this year and spend basically every available moment in the office with Bex and the rest of the staff, hunched over the sluggish computers and sprawled out on the ragged, sagging couch.
“Yep, totally. I’ll text you tonight.” I wave goodbye and turn back to Jacob, who’s already finishing his second chicken sandwich. “Do you want to go to Emily Cerato’s party?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says with a shrug, opening a cellophane pack of Oreos. “Why not, right?”
“I don’t know.” I nibble at a piece of kettle corn. “I was also thinking maybe we could do that movie I was talking about the other day, the one about the sisters who inherit the house?”
“The historical thing?” he asks with a frown. “Wouldn’t you rather see that with Chloe or your mom?”
I raise my eyebrows pointedly. “By which you mean you’d rather poke out your own eyeballs than sit through it?”
“I didn’t say that,” Jacob protests, handing me a cookie in an attempt at a peace offering. “If you want to go we totally can.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I know he means it too—Jacob’s a good sport like that—but there’s no point in dragging him to something I know he’s going to think is totally girly and boring. “You’re off the hook, dude. A party sounds fun.”
Jacob nods, then gestures over my shoulder at Bex, who’s making the rounds through the cafeteria like a groom at a wedding, coaxing easy smiles out of everybody, from debate nerds to the toughest bruisers on the football team. “Your boy’s coming over here,” he tells me. “Should I ask him if he’s giving Ms. Klein the D?”
“Oh my god,” I say, tossing a piece of kettle corn in his direction, “that’s disgusting. And also emphatically not what I said he was doing.” Still, it occurs to me that if Jacob flat out asked Bex if he and Ms. Klein were dating, there’s a good chance Bex would tell us the truth. That’s one of the nice things about him—he’s not obsessed with maintaining some dumb veil of secrecy about his life outside school, like some of the other teachers. He’s an actual human being. Like, the other day in class he told us a story about getting a speeding ticket on the way to school after oversleeping because he was out late at a party in Boston for a friend of his who was publishing a collection of short stories. And on picture day he brought in his own senior yearbook so we could all have a laugh at his mid-aughts puka shells and spiky haircut.
Now he stops at our table for a minute, joking around with Dean and asking Jacob about a play from yesterday’s lacrosse game. It’s not even lacrosse season, technically, but the Bridgewater team is really good, so they have special permission to play in some indoor intramural league and still use the school buses for games. Everyone thinks the lacrosse guys are something special. Maybe I do too, though frankly it always annoys me that they seem to know it.
“You get your chicken sandwich?” I ask Bex.
Bex nods seriously. “Sure did,” he says, then reaches over my shoulder and picks up my bag of kettle corn, helping himself to a handful.
“Excuse you!” I protest, though it’s not like I actually mind.
Bex just shrugs. “School tax,” he says with a grin. “Take it up with your congressman.”
I reach for the bag, but he holds it above my head playfully, laughing at my pathetic attempts to grab it, when we hear Principal DioGuardi clear his throat up on the stage at the far end of the cafeteria.
“Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” he says, hands fisted on his hips like a cartoon bodybuilder. Mr. DioGuardi was a PE teacher before he got into administration, and he still kind of looks it, with beefy forearms and a torso shaped like an upside-down triangle inside his maroon button-down. He wears a whistle around his neck, which he uses to keep us from getting too rowdy at assemblies and pep rallies and also sometimes randomly pops into his mouth when he’s thinking, like a baby with a pacifier. Last year every single member of the lacrosse team went as him for Halloween.
“If I can have a minute of your time, I wanted to talk to you about your favorite topic and mine—the uniform code!”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Bex murmurs, quiet enough that only I can hear him, then gives my shoulder a quick squeeze through my uniform sweater before straightening up and heading back toward the front of the cafeteria. “Here we go.”
I look after him in surprise—it’s rare to get that kind of unfiltered reaction from a teacher, even one as chill as Bex. Then again, DioGuardi is notoriously ridiculous about the dress code. I’ve actually never hated wearing a uniform—there’s something to be said for not having to worry about picking a cute outfit every day—but lately DioGuardi has become obsessed, with new rules coming practically every week about everything from skirt length to makeup to how big our earrings can be. Not to mention the fact that the guidelines never seem to apply to the guys.
I glance over at Jacob, but he’s scrolling Instagram on his phone under the table, totally unbothered.
“Here we go,” I echo, and settle in for the long haul.
That afternoon I’m sitting on the ancient couch in the newspaper room working through a problem set in my calc book when Bex pauses at the open door. It’s after five, and our meeting ended a couple hours ago, but I’m stuck waiting for my mom to pick me up. “Hey,” he says, glancing at the clock above the whiteboard. “You got a ride?”
“Oh yeah,” I tell him. He’s wearing a buttery-looking leather jacket, his dark hair curling over his collar. There’s a rumor that Bex paid his way through grad school by modeling—supposedly some senior dug up the pictures online last year, though Chloe and I haven’t ever been able to find them ourselves—and right now I can believe it. “My mom’ll be here in a while. I mean, I have my license, obviously, but—one car. And my sister has a chess thing.” I shrug.
Bex raises his eyebrows. “A chess thing?”
“My little sister is a Massachusetts chess champion,” I explain, a little embarrassed. “She gets lessons from this crotchety old guy out in Brookline. Normally my dad would just come get me, but he had a meeting, and Chloe had a dentist appointment, so—” I snap my jaws shut, not sure why I feel compelled to bore him with the mundane logistical details of my life. “Anyway. I’m good.”
Bex just smiles. “Come on,” he says, nodding in the general direction of the parking lot. “I can drive you.”