I leave Mom, Mrs. Oates, and the binder at the table. Jackson and I plop ourselves in a pair of coffee-stained leather chairs next to a fireplace that’s not turned on. He looks like he meets strange girls at Starbucks every day. I try to look like I do, too.
It turns out Jackson has questions—good questions. Instead of starting with “What AP classes are there?” because that’s on the website, or “Can you letter in making memes?” because he’s not one of my brother’s seventh-grade friends, he jumps right in with “Is it the kind of school where kids come and go all the time, or where there hasn’t been a new kid since second grade?”
“I don’t know exactly how many there are each year,” I say. He is leaning over the arm of the chair toward me, like I am the keeper of an important piece of navigational advice, which I guess I am. I try to remember how many new kids I had in classes last year, and wonder if I can consider them a representative sample, and extrapolate an overall figure from that, until I realize he doesn’t want data; he is asking a different question. A real question. He wants to know what he’s walking into, and he’s asking me. It’s October, halfway through first quarter—maybe not the best time to start at a new school. By now, people have pretty much staked out where they’re going to sit and who they’re going to talk to.
“Oh. You’re trying to figure out if you’re going to get lost or be instantly famous.” He nods. “I’m not sure. I’ve never actually been the new kid—”
“Never?!”
“Nope. Even when we moved, we stayed in the same school.”
“That’s amazing.”
I stop for a second, stuck on “amazing.” He’s not saying I am amazing. Immobility is amazing. Like bizarre mutations in nature are amazing. But for some reason, that amazing feels kind of nice coming from him. I shake it off.
“Yes,” I say, “never leaving the zip code is one of my proudest accomplishments. There’s not a lot of brand-new people, but there are three middle schools and only one high school, so there are tons of people I don’t even know.” He nods, like this is what he was hoping for. “I don’t think a new kid would stand out too much. Unless they wanted to.”
“What about lunch? If I don’t latch on to somebody before then, am I going to have any place to sit?”
I can’t imagine that Jackson is not going to find at least forty friends on his first day, because he’s adorable and super friendly, but he’s obviously had a lot of experience being the new kid and I haven’t, so maybe I’m wrong. “It’s probably safest to latch on to somebody from fourth period, unless they all seem horrible. Just in case, though, here’s what you do: there’s this long counter in front of the big window that looks over the track. People sit there if they have to finish homework or charge their phones. If you want to, you can sit there by yourself without looking like a loser. Everyone will just think you’re writing wistful poetry or something.” What I should have said was “Don’t be stupid, you’ll sit with me!” but I give myself partial credit for explaining about the counter seats.
“That’s perfect. My next question was going to be where I could go to write some wistful poetry.”
“Oh, man. I’m sorry to tell you this but they cancelled the Wistful Poetry Club last year. Budget cuts.”
“We should probably just go back to Cleveland then.”
I know he’s joking, but it reminds me that this is all new to him—well, Starbucks isn’t new, and according to my mom, moving isn’t new—but Kennedy is new, and his house is new, and all the people are going to be new. I’m new.
“What’s Cleveland like?”
“It’s kind of like everywhere else, I guess.” He shrugs. “We were only there a couple of years.” He has changed, just the tiniest bit. Still friendly. Still adorable. But the tiniest bit . . . sad, maybe. “My little sister didn’t want to move. Like reeeeally didn’t want to move.”
“She liked Cleveland?”
“Not especially. But she hates to move.”
“How about you?”
“I’m used to it,” he shrugs. “And there are Starbucks everywhere.”
“What?! NO! But at least this is the original one, right?” And we are back to where we were. I thought I spied a tiny sliver of something less than perfectly confident, but then it vanished. It makes me curious about him. More curious. I wish we were somewhere different. I wish I was showing him something he hadn’t seen a million times before.
We pull up our schedules to compare. We’ve got a lot of the same classes, but none at the same time. Plus he’s in German and I’m in Spanish, and he’s one year accelerated in math, but I’m two. I tip my face into my mug so he can’t see that I look disappointed.
“You must be pretty good at math,” he says.
Mid-sip, I snort. Not because I’m some kind of math god. I’m as good as you can be without being one of those kids who have to take college math because they’re too smart for high school math. Last year Mom offered me up as a math tutor to one of her clients when she heard they had a middle schooler who loved math but “needed to be pushed.” She’d have loved to list me in the binder under Academic Resources—or at least as a babysitter or something that got me out of the house. The kid turned out to be some kind of genius, though, who took the train to the University of Chicago twice a week to study ergodic theory. I don’t even know what that is. I’m just the top of the regular smart kids.
Being good at math—really, at any academics—is pretty much my entire identity. It’s funny to talk to someone who doesn’t know that.
At school, what people know about me is that I get good grades; I’m Maggie Cleave’s quieter, more agreeable friend; and that I wear clothes that are three times too big for a full-grown bear. That’s it. I don’t play a sport, I’m not in theater, I don’t get in trouble, I’m not a girl you’d ever think about going out with. I’m just Smart Girl. Smart Girl who keeps her arms crossed in front of her chest all the time.
But Jackson doesn’t know that. All he knows is that my mom tried to order skim milk in my hot chocolate. To Jackson, I could be all kinds of other things, too. Smart Girl plus. To the new kid, I’m also new. It’s kind of fun to think about for now, even though I know he’ll figure it out once he’s at school.
“You’re not in any of my classes? That’s weird because as a certified relocation advisor I thought you were going to introduce me at the beginning of each period on Monday. Nicht gut . . .” he adds in his German businessman voice.
He’s sitting in a lumpy, scuffed chair that a million customers have sat in before, but he looks like it’s shaped exactly for him, like however they stretched or slouched or fell asleep, it was all in order to make this chair fit him perfectly. One knee is half up the armrest, his head is propped against his hand, he looks like every muscle in his body is completely relaxed. Like he belongs there. Like he belongs wherever he goes.