“Oh.” I shake my head like an instinct, pulling the scratchy blue sleeves of my uniform sweater down over my hands. “No, that’s okay, you don’t have to do that.”
Bex shrugs. “I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t mean it,” he says easily. “Pretty soon it’s going to be just you and Mr. Lyle rattling around this place.”
Mr. Lyle is the janitor, who’s seven feet tall and almost as wide in the shoulders. Everybody calls him Hodor behind his back.
“Grab your stuff.”
I glance out the window, at the dusk falling purple-blue behind the pine trees. Back at Bex. “Okay,” I say finally, swallowing down a thrill and reaching for my backpack. “Sure. Thanks.”
I text my mom to let her know I’ve got a ride and follow Bex down the empty hallway and out into the teachers’ lot, explaining where I live as we walk. He drives a beat-up Jeep with a peeling Bernie Sanders sticker on the bumper. Inside it smells like coffee; there’s a gym bag slouched on the back seat. As he starts the engine the car fills with sad, guitar-heavy indie folk—Bon Iver, I think, although possibly that’s just the only artist like that I could name.
“I’m a caricature of myself, I know,” Bex says, nodding at the stereo as we pull out of the parking lot. “All I’m missing is the mountain-man beard.”
“No, it’s fine,” I say with a smile. “I mean, I like to stand outside and weep in the pouring rain as much as the next girl.”
Bex lets out a loud laugh. “That’s what my ex-girlfriend always used to say,” he admits. “She used to call it sad-man dead-dog music.”
I laugh too, even as the word ex-girlfriend sends a tiny electric shock through me. I wonder what she was like, if she was pretty. Most of all I wonder why they broke up.
Bex has always been strangely easy to talk to for a teacher, and he keeps up a pretty steady conversation as we head for my neighborhood—about DioGuardi and the dress code, yeah, but also about a concert he just went to in Boston and a series of author readings at Harvard Book Store that he thinks I should check out.
“So you and Jacob Reimer, huh?” he asks, turning the music down as we cruise along the VFW Parkway, passing the Stop & Shop and the PetSmart. “He seems like a good dude.”
“Oh!” I don’t know who told him that, and it must show on my face, because Bex mirrors an exaggerated, shocked expression back at me, wide eyes and his mouth a perfect O.
“I know stuff,” he says, breaking into a grin. “You guys think teachers are, like, deaf, blind dinosaurs, like we shuffle around with no idea what’s going on.”
“No, that’s not what I think!” I protest.
Bex’s lips twist. “Yeah, yeah.”
“It’s not,” I insist, giggling a little. “But yeah. Jacob is awesome.”
“Good,” Bex says, glancing over his shoulder before switching into the turn lane, long fingers hooked casually at the bottom of the wheel. “Most high school guys are basically walking mailboxes. You’re right to hold out for someone great.”
A pleased, unfamiliar blush creeps up my chest, hot and prickly. I’m glad I’m wearing a scarf. “Thanks,” I say, fussing with the sticky zipper on the outside pocket of my backpack, yanking ineffectually at the pull.
Bex shrugs. “It’s true.”
I nod. “Um, this is me up here,” I tell him, nodding at my parents’ tiny colonial. “Thanks again for the ride.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“See you tomorrow,” I say, unlatching the door handle.
“Hey, Marin,” he says, laying a hand on my arm as I’m getting out of the car; I feel the zing of it clear down my spine, my whole skeleton jangling pleasantly. “Just to be safe, uh. You probably shouldn’t mention to anybody at school that I drove you.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised. “Okay.”
“At the last place I worked it was different—it was a boarding school, so I drove students around all the time, you know? I had students over to my apartment for dinner like once a week. But here . . .” He trails off. “DioGuardi runs a different kind of ship.”
“No, no, I totally get it.” I didn’t know he worked at a boarding school before he came to Bridgewater. I’m instantly, weirdly jealous of all the students he ever cooked dinner for. “I won’t say anything.”
“Thanks, pal,” Bex says, grinning a little bashfully. “Have a good night.”
“You too,” I say, shutting the passenger door gently and lifting my hand in a dopey wave. I stand on the darkened lawn until the Jeep disappears out of sight.
Two
Emily’s party is two nights later, so Jacob picks me up in the Subaru his parents got him for his seventeenth birthday and we swing by Chloe’s house on the way.
“Hey,” I say, turning around in my seat as she settles herself in the back, unwinding her fuzzy scarf from around her neck.
Ancient Whitney Houston croons on the stereo, the air in the car heavy with the scent of the cologne Jacob swears he doesn’t spray on the heating vents.
“Where were you this afternoon? I thought we were going to do layout stuff.”
Chloe shakes her head. “Covered a shift at work,” she explains. “Rosie had a doctor’s appointment. Sorry, I meant to text you. It was super last-minute.”
Chloe’s parents own a Greek restaurant called Niko’s; we both started working there in eighth grade, first busing tables and now waiting them.
“Bex wasn’t there either,” I complain, pulling one leg up underneath me and reaching out to turn the heat down. “It was just me and Michael Cyr in there, which meant I had to listen to him talk for like a full hour about how he just discovered Breaking Bad and Walter White is his new hero.”
“Just you and Michael Cyr, huh?” Jacob asks, glancing over at me from the driver’s seat. “Should I be jealous?”
“Only if you feel threatened by a guy who met all his best friends on Reddit,” I say, reaching out to poke him in the rib cage.
Jacob grabs my finger and squeezes. Chloe rolls her eyes.
Emily’s house is a sprawling ranch in a midcentury development full of identical sprawling ranches, all of them painted in different pastel colors.
“Once, when I was in second grade, I got off the bus and walked right into the wrong one,” Emily says, leading us down the hallway and pulling a couple of beers out of an iceless cooler near the back door. “This old lady Gloria sat me down at her kitchen table and made me soda bread, and then she was my best friend for like three years until she died.”
Right away Jacob gets absorbed into a crowd of his lacrosse buddies—Joey and Ahmed, plus Gray Kendall and a few other dudes. The rumor is Gray got kicked out of his fancy prep school last year for throwing the kind of wild parties where people wind up in the hospital for eating Tide PODS. In barely two months at Bridgewater he’s fooled around with what seems like basically every girl at school, an unending parade of hopeful-looking underclassmen hanging around outside the locker room on game days. It’s deeply embarrassing for everyone, although I can admit he’s ridiculously cute.