“Wisteria, can you please tell me what you heard?” I pleaded. I wanted to be patient, but it felt like Wisteria had an aversion to being direct. And while it wasn’t Wisteria’s fault that I felt so in the dark, I’d had enough of being the only one who didn’t know what was going on.
“Really, Red, I think I just got confused,” she said with a hesitant smile. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you!” She paused again, and her smile faded. “It’s just—I heard that you and your sister were more, like, involved with the protests than that. Like, you may want to talk with your sister.” She widened her eyes with emphasis, like I was supposed to understand.
“Oooh-kaay.” I shrugged my backpack up on my shoulder. I usually let Helen fight her own battles, but this seemed serious. After school, I’d check in with her to see if she was all right.
But right now, physics—and the Cute Boy—called.
* * *
I forgot all about Wisteria’s ominous mention of my sister within the first two minutes of physics, when Mrs. Breaux called the Cute Boy to the chalkboard.
“Kyle Buchanan, please work out problem three on page twenty-five.”
That’s it, I thought. That’s his name! I’d been trying to find it out since the first day of school, but had so far hit speed bumps during our two classes together. Neither Mrs. Breaux or our calculus teacher, Mr. Loring, took attendance, and since the other students were all at least a year ahead of me, I didn’t know anyone except Melissa well enough to ask. Now, finally, at the end of the third week of school, I knew his name: Kyle Buchanan.
Suddenly, the thought that he might be related to Pat Buchanan entered my brain, and my hopes deflated. He couldn’t be, though. He was too attractive to be related to that lumpy potato-faced man. I would die if he shared genes with a guy whose speech at the Republican National Convention made Mom so angry she actually stopped working on her book and went on a long, sputtering rant about how the Republicans were priming the nation for a fascist dictatorship.
There was no way this perfect guy was related to a fascist. I watched dreamily as he wrote out the physics problem on the board. His back faced the class, his face shadowed by his hair when he turned slightly to the side. Even from the back, he was the hottest guy I’d ever seen. His white uniform Oxford shirt hung perfectly off his broad shoulders. The shirt was tucked perfectly into the plaid uniform pants that outlined his perfect, callipygian derriere. Everything about him was perfect.
But I didn’t want to be caught staring when he eventually came back to his seat, so I looked down at my notebook. Then I became acutely aware of how weird and antisocial I must look with my nose two inches from my book, so I tried to look at him, but not too obviously. I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to catch his smile, but I also didn’t want to seem like a creep. I couldn’t seem to get the balance right.
“Where did you go to high school before?” Mrs. Breaux asked when he finished.
“I went to the International School in Brussels for the past two years.”
Wow. It wasn’t that weird to hear of someone who’d spent a few years in Brussels, but it was still intriguing. Brussels was the one international city that kids with parents who worked at Exxon might suddenly go off to, when their dad—and it was always their dad—got a promotion. Most of the kids who came back from Brussels didn’t go to St. Ann’s, though. They went to St. Christopher’s or St. Ursula’s, the all-boys’ and all-girls’ schools, respectively, or even Baton Rouge High. It was always some school with a better respected, Old Baton Rouge pedigree and not the School that Suburban White Flight Built.
“Well, they seem to have been adept at making you memorize formulae. You can sit down now. Caitlyn Comeau—” Mrs. Breaux called someone else to the board, but my eyes were still on Kyle.
He walked back to his seat, three behind my own. As he passed by me, he smiled, and I somehow managed to smile back.
I also blushed.
I told myself not to get excited, but my internal dialogue was in all caps. HE SMILED AT ME. The Cute Boy—Kyle—had smiled at me! Maybe he didn’t think of me as a complete weirdo after I grabbed his backpack and mistook him for a girl much shorter than he was. It was the best I could hope for.
A tap on my shoulder snapped me out of my reverie. I turned red, thinking for a second it could be a note from Kyle. Then I came to my senses. Melissa sat two desks behind me a row over, and the note was tightly folded into her signature sharp origami-inspired triangle.
As I pried opened the note, my hand slipped. The tearing sound of paper, much louder than I expected, echoed outward from my desk. I held my breath, hoping it couldn’t possibly have been as loud as I’d heard it in my head.
“Miss Graves? Please bring that note forward,” Mrs. Breaux said.
It was that loud. Shit.
Tendrils of heat crept up my cheeks. I walked toward Mrs. Breaux’s desk, my black Oxfords squeaking against the waxed linoleum with each step. I didn’t know if I imagined the sound, or if, like the ripping note, the shoes were magically amplified due to Mrs. Breaux’s presence.
“Would you like me to share your note with the class?” Mrs. Breaux’s eyes challenged me from above her oversize red plastic glasses, which took up more than half her face and stood out against her milky white skin and bright red hair.
“No, ma’am,” I said, remembering Mrs. Breaux required Southern politeness at all times. That note could say anything, from a report on Melissa’s date to plans for this weekend to more about this summer’s abortion protests. Fear and embarrassment bloomed in me at the thought of her reading it aloud, especially if Melissa had written something about Kyle.
“Then I hope that this won’t happen again,” she said. “May I please have the note?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Breaux unlocked her desk, metal grinding against metal as she pulled the top drawer out. I cringed, more from a sense of impending punishment than from the sound. She placed the note inside the desk and closed the drawer, carefully turning the key in the lock.
“Miss Graves, I will see you after class,” she said. “And you also, Miss Lemoine.”
I sat through the rest of class facing the ominous certainty of detention. Most teachers ignored note passing, but Mrs. Breaux was a draconian ruler. She didn’t like talking out of turn, note passing, whispering to clarify homework assignments, or quiz answers that deviated from the way she taught formula solving—even if the answer was right, and especially if you’d figured out a smarter way to find it.
I shouldn’t care about being punished. But the fact was, I did. I didn’t want to explain to my dad that I’d gotten into trouble for something trivial. I think he’d be fine if I got into trouble for standing up for my principles, but for passing a note? I’d get a long lecture about taking classes seriously, for sure.