How to Be Brave(3)

“Well, it’s a cute dress, anyway.” Avery broadens her fake smile. “It just would look better on me, that’s all.”

I stop in my path. What a bitch. I feel the tears start to well. I can’t cry. I just can’t. Not now. Not in front of them. Not today.

I hear a voice call out from ahead: “Hey, Avery, nice camel toe.”

Liss. My savior. She’s walking toward us, away from the school. For me.

Avery looks down at her crotch, horrified.

“Hey, Chloe,” Liss continues. “Did you finally get that nose job this summer?”

Chloe’s eyes widen in terror. “Well, no! What makes you think—”

“Oh, too bad. Maybe next summer,” Liss says. “It’ll look nice on you. Once you get it smaller, it’ll finally fit your beady little eyes.”

Chloe grabs her face.

Liss locks elbows with me and pulls me toward the front door, leaving Avery and Chloe to examine themselves with their camera phones.

“I love the dress,” she says, whisking me forward.

“Not too fast,” I whisper. “The shoes. They’re more excruciating than Avery Trenholm’s hideous voice.”

The last bell rings. We’ve made it.

*

I’ve been assigned Locker #13. Well, that can’t be good.

Sorry, I forgot: positive thoughts.

I look around. We’re in a new section, the senior floor up top, but it’s all the same faces, just a little bit older, a little less pimply. Everyone’s scrambling to jam their shit into their lockers. Liss is way down the hall, Locker #47.

Okay. Think, Georgia, think. Be brave.

And then I see it. Positive Thought #3: Daniel Antell. There he is. Cute Daniel. Tall Daniel. Totally sexy Daniel with those übersharp scapulae (oh, what a back) and that thick, slightly mussed-up hair. Daniel, who I’ve been staring at for three years, who trips me up every time we talk (we’ve had all of three conversations); his smiling eyes fixate on me, and the words in my brain become a jumbled mess. All otherwise intelligent, organized thoughts crumble in his presence.

He’s at Locker #10.

Three doors down.

So close to me.

He sees that I’m staring at him, so he smiles and waves. And what’s the first thing I do? I look down, at my schedule. (Smile back, damn it!) I force myself to look back up at him, and I muster out a “Hey.”

That’s it. Just “Hey.”

“What’s your schedule?”

I look behind me. He must be talking to someone else. Only quiet Steve Westerman is there, and he’s busy overthinking the organization of his one-foot-by-five-foot locker space.

I look back at Daniel. “Oh, um … Let’s see.” I fumble with my schedule. “Um, AP history, with Springfield—that should be fun; chem, with that nut-job Zittel…”

“Oh yeah, they call him Zitzoid. Good luck with that.”

Daniel’s just so nice. He’s not part of any subgroup, but instead he navigates them all fluidly. Always has. I mean, he’s not especially interested in being part of any one group. And Liss doesn’t get why I like him so much. He’s too lanky, she says, and too sensitive. She’s had a bunch of AP science classes with him and even got to be his lab partner in bio last year. She said he had a hard time during dissection, that he didn’t want to be the one to cut open the frog. I don’t know why that’s so bad (I couldn’t have done it, either), but she says she just can’t think of him as anything more than a brother. If only that were my problem, I could talk to him like a normal person.

“Thanks,” I force out. “I’ll need it.”

He walks to my locker and looks over my shoulder to read my schedule. “What else you got?” I can smell him. Like pine or rosemary or some dark scent.

“What’s the rest of your schedule?” he asks me again. But I’m solid stone. No, really, I’ve turned to actual granite. I’m a boulder in a giant orange dress. My legs are heavy, my shoulders heavy, my blood heavy, and everything is still. Except that I can feel the pounding of my heart inside my brain. I hope he doesn’t hear it, too.

He takes the paper from my shaking hand and reads it aloud: “Let’s see there. Oh, cool, AP English with Langer, math with Keynes, and art with Marquez. I’m taking art too.” (Swooon.) “And I had Keynes last year.”

I force out actual human words spoken in English (though they come out sounding more like mouse squeaks). “Is she hard?”

“Yeah. A total hard-ass. And nuts, too. She stands outside the classroom during quizzes with one of those little dental mirrors and pokes it around the corner to see if we’re cheating.”

He laughs. Those eyes. Those smiley, half-moon, beautifully creased, kindest-eyes-I’ve-ever-seen. Oh God. Stomach. In. Knots. Mouth. Frozen. Cannot. Speak.

I move my lips into a smile. At least it feels like a smile. I wish I weren’t frozen. Then I could laugh, too. A nice, hearty human laugh.

He breaks what has now become the Most Awkward Silence Ever. “But that’s cool, you know. It looks like we have one class together. I heard Marquez is cool.”

I nod.

“So I’ll see you fifth period, then.” He shrugs and hands me the schedule. His fingers graze mine.