“You play lacrosse?” Jackson asks, nodding to a neon-pink ball. Jeez, Tyler, it’s not even the right season to leave a lacrosse ball on the table.
Sulky Tyler brightens up under the attention. “Yeah—do you?”
Jackson shakes his head. “When we lived in Virginia, I wanted to but we moved before the season started. I’ve played a lot of other things, baseball, soccer, swim team once, but the last couple of years I’ve mostly played tennis. Kind of depends on where we live. How ’bout you, Greer? What do you play?”
I brighten up under the attention, too. “Oh. I don’t play anything.”
I don’t explain that sports, unlike academics, require that your body cooperate with you, instead of bulging and jiggling and getting in the way. Just last night, Tyler stole my phone and I had to run after him with no bra on under my pajamas, and Mavis bounced up and almost gave me a black eye.
“How’d the first couple of days go?” I’d spotted him a few times, first being led around by one of the deans, then by a couple of well-meaning student council members. By lunch today he was in the middle of a pack of guys who walk down to the taco trucks every day. I’m not surprised he found friends so quickly, but I’m a little disappointed he isn’t going to need me to shepherd him through our adolescence.
“Pretty good. I haven’t gotten lost. I haven’t been beaten up. Nobody stole my lunch money.”
“Good thing. The taco trucks don’t take the student meal cards.” He cocks his head and I blush. I don’t want him to know I’ve been tracking him. “I saw you leaving with Max and those guys. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t stuck at the wistful poetry counter.”
“You should have come with us. The barbacoa was awesome.”
I try to picture the tear in the universe that would happen if I invited myself to the taco trucks with Maggie’s brother and the other upperclassmen who have adopted Jackson. “I had some poems to finish up,” I say as wistfully as I can.
“Nah-uh. Max said you always sit with his sister.”
Jackson talked to Max about me? Now I cock my head, but he doesn’t blush. He just smiles. I mean, it was probably “I hope that weirdo with the giant boobs doesn’t follow me to the taco trucks, because she’s been stalking me all day,” “Don’t worry, she always sits with my sister, and they never leave school property because Maggie is too lazy to walk anywhere,” but at least he was thinking about me.
“Well, if Max or anybody else tries to steal your lunch money, you know where to find me. First period, room one-thirteen,” I manage.
There’s a sick thump as a blond elf whacks Jackson in the back. He reaches around and grabs her arm before she does it again.
“OWWW!” she growls.
“Knock it off, Q.”
“I. Didn’t. Do. Anything.” My mom told me she was in third grade, but she’s tall for her age and wire thin. She could almost pass for a middle schooler if it weren’t for her outfit: pink Uggs—in Kathryn Walsh’s house! on Kathryn Walsh’s carpet!—and too-short leggings with a T-shirt that says YOU DON’T LIKE MY ATTITUDE? I DON’T LIKE YOUR FACE! in sparkly balloon letters. She jerks her arm out of Jackson’s grasp and glares at him.
Jackson doesn’t bother to introduce us to Quinlan. “Where’s Mom?”
“Being boring.”
“We’re being boring, too. Go find Mom.”
Tyler and I don’t like each other; he’s disgusting and I’m not. But it’s not like we hate each other. Not usually, anyway. I get mad when he leaves things that have touched his nads on the table, and he thinks I shouldn’t mention the constipation medicine he sometimes takes in front of his friends, but we can usually tolerate each other.
The tension between Jackson and Quinlan is different. Jackson’s usually kind of loose and lanky, like if you happened to bump into him, he’d sway a tiny bit one way then another, then wrap those long arms around you to make sure you didn’t fall. Once Quinlan showed up and belted him, it was like he turned to an iron beam. Braced. Tense.
“Did everybody meet everybody?” asks Mom, floating into the room. What she means is, “Greer Eleanor Walsh, I raised you to be a good hostess, even to violent elf girls, and I expect that you will have offered refreshments to the Oates children.” Her eyes glide to the contraband on the dining table and she flinches.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess.” She sighs to Mrs. Oates. “Boys!”
Mrs. Oates, tall and fair like Quinlan but perfectly tailored and comfortable like Jackson, smiles sympathetically, though I bet Jackson files his old homework assignments in folders like I do and puts his sports gear in labeled cubbies as soon as he’s done with it.
“Does anybody want something to drink? We have homemade sodas—raspberry or blueberry vanilla, I think,” I offer, too late.
“We’re out of blueberry,” says Tyler, and burps. Ever since we got the SodaStream, he is full of carbon dioxide bubbles all the time. Mom gives him an I-could-kill-you-with-my-bare-hands look, which is how we all feel about Ty much of the time.
“We have to get going,” Mrs. Oates says. “We’re picking up Ben. He’s been in Dubai for two weeks.”
“We’re not actually picking him up in Dubai,” says Jackson, but I am too distracted to be amused. Quinlan is standing in front of a bookcase with her back to us. She’s doing something on the shelf, but I can’t see what.
“I hope not!” roars Mom, as though it’s the funniest idea ever, rather than just a throwaway line. She glances over at me, presumably to see if I’ve noticed that Jackson is charming.
The Oateses leave, Mom starts in on Tyler about cleaning up his stuff (sounding an awful lot like me), and I head straight for the bookcase.
In front of the books, there sits a row of little glass Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs figurines, Mom’s from when she was a girl. They are handblown and very fragile. She gave them to me when I was seven or eight, but I could only play with them at the table, with a flour-sack towel spread underneath, not mixed in with any other toys or Legos, and none of the pieces were allowed to touch each other. So not really play with them so much as move them from the shelf to the table and look at them. Preferably without breathing.
I loved them. I still do. I love that they are tiny and predictable and perfect. This one is always falling asleep. That one is too shy to speak. The fellow on the end is pissed at everything all the time. Life would be less complicated if everything about you could be summed up so easily. If all you ever had to be was Sleepy or Grumpy or Happy. But even Tyler’s not Dopey all the time. Sometimes he’s Stinky.