A clear-eyed earnestness overtook Melissa’s face as she looked beyond me to Mrs. Turner. The guidance counselor had been out to get her since last year’s Planned Parenthood/Suicidal Tendencies incident, because Melissa had illustrated exactly how out of touch Mrs. Turner was with, as she would say in a singsong voice, “today’s young people.” Mrs. Turner always reminded me a little bit of a long-haired hamster, with round dark eyes whose pupils were indistinguishable from her irises, and brassy dyed-blond hair that surrounded her round face in a puffy halo. She always acted warm and friendly, but like those cute, furry rodents, her cuddly exterior hid the fact that she could bite you.
“Athena needed a feminine hygiene product.” Melissa pulled a box of tampons from her backpack. Between cigarettes and tampons and fake IDs, Melissa barely had room for her books.
Since Mrs. Turner couldn’t see my face, I narrowed my eyes at Melissa. No one said “feminine hygiene product.” And it was massively unfair that I had to be the one who was supposedly on my period.
Still, it was a stroke of genius. I turned to see Mrs. Turner’s reaction.
“Now, Miss Lemoine and Miss Graves,” she said, her brown eyes widening with sympathy. It was her favorite trick and served her well when she was trying to get people to cry about their problems in her office. “I understand the urgency of the situation, but you really must hurry on to second period.”
I almost choked at hearing her emphasis on the last word. Did she intend that as some double meaning? I didn’t stop to think about it, because she could easily change her mind about letting us go if she saw cigarette ash in the sink. I darted out of the bathroom to the hall, Melissa trailing behind me, as the bell rang.
“Athena, wait up!” Melissa said, grabbing my shirt. “Close call, I know, but Mrs. Bonnecaze is, like, the most lenient teacher in school. In terms of lateness anyway. Tell her you had to stop in the guidance office, and you’ll be fine. She won’t ask for a note, and it’s true enough that you saw Mrs. Turner.”
I slowed so she could catch up with me, and as we passed the glassed-in walls of the guidance office, I almost stopped completely. The Cute Boy slouched in one of the waiting room chairs, reading a book. He must have been waiting for Mrs. Turner to return and help him pick out his classes—standard procedure for transfers.
“Oooh, new eye candy,” Melissa said, following my gaze. “Do you want dibs?”
“Dibs? Are we in fifth grade?”
“Yes,” she said, pausing for dramatic effect and nodding. “I think you should have dibs. I’ve never seen you look at a boy that way.”
I didn’t think I ever had, either. He was so incredibly cute, with his hair just falling into his eyes as he read. He even made chewing on a pen cap look good, because it made me notice his full, kissable lips. Though he didn’t have much competition at our school, which wasn’t exactly awash in the finest specimens of the gene pool. Except for Sean, who had the most perfect dark brown skin and friendliest smile I’d ever seen. But while I recognized Sean’s attractiveness, it was in a way that you could objectively know your brother was the best-looking guy at school, but feel instinctively turned off at the same time.
Melissa looked me up and down, her brown-green eyes appraising me. “Yep, you have dibs. Besides, I have a date with Jason on Friday night.”
I knew it. She wasn’t being magnanimous—she already had a date with someone else. But if it worked out for me, did it matter?
I stole one last glance at the guidance office and nearly jumped out of my skin, like a startled cat. The Cute Boy was looking back at me. He smiled, just like he had earlier, and I blushed furiously before hauling a cackling Melissa with me down the hall and out of sight.
3
Sean slouched back against the cast-off floral love seat that his mom had let him drag up to his room when she’d redecorated their living room, his dark brown eyes fixed on his issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Nothing could come between him and Peter Parker, not even me being annoying and asking every five minutes or so whether he knew the Cute Boy. I described him in detail, but “sun-kissed light brown hair,” and “gorgeous brown eyes,” and “chiseled nose,” and “sculpted shoulders and the butt of a Greek statue,” and “the most perfect boy, ever” only made Sean roll his eyes at me.
“For the last time, I don’t know the guy,” Sean said to his issue of Spider-Man. “You forget—I’m not in those smart-ass classes with you. I take biology with the rest of the normal sophomores. Now, if you’ll excuse me, this is the thirtieth anniversary issue of Spider-Man. It’s the most important story of our lifetime.”
He put the comic back up to his face like I wasn’t there, though I knew he was half joking. But only half. Spidey was serious business, albeit serious business that Sean revealed to a select few.
Sean’s school world was a lot different than mine, and not only because I was in honors everything. People always thought our friendship was a relic of growing up next door to each other in the crappy, boxy townhouses on the edge of Shenandoah, a sprawling neighborhood filled with streets named after Civil War battles and Confederate generals. Or else they thought it was the result of him needing some kind of help from me, like when I’d tutored Sean’s ginormous linebacker friend Trip Wilson last year. But that was because no one knew about Sean’s comics fetish or the hours he spent scouring flea markets for Star Wars toys. If they bothered to look past his football player exterior, they would see he was an even bigger nerd than I was.
And in our private nerd world, it would take a lot more than me pestering him about the Cute Boy for him to put down his comics.
“He’s only in my physics and calculus classes,” I protested. “I don’t know what else he’s taking, or his grade! I just thought—”
“You just thought he looked like a football player, right?” he asked, giving me the most annoyed look possible over his comic. “But from what you’ve told me, he’s built like a quarterback. And that’s my job, dude.”
He said the dude in a Bart Simpson voice, so I could tell he wasn’t actually offended. Also, Sean wasn’t the type to say dude for real, under any circumstances. But he was right. They were both tall and lean and broad-shouldered. I hadn’t thought of that as a quarterback’s build, but of course Sean would.
I suddenly regretted bringing the Cute Boy up. Last year, Sean’s promotion from JV to varsity had been viewed as controversial. Or, one could say, laced with a flavor of racism, hidden under a thin patina of suburban-polite questions about a (black) freshman’s ability to compete. The absurd controversy finally died down once we started winning for the first time in our school’s history. This year, people had started mentioning our school along with the word championship, and they weren’t being ironic.