You'd Be Home Now (54)

Good night, Em.

…

But you never know



In the dark, I smile.

You never know.





23


I SLIDE ALONG THE CAFETERIA wall to the far back, my usual place by Jeremy Leonard nowadays. Liza always comes, and I’m careful not to talk too much and make her angry, because I have nowhere else to eat lunch. They’ve closed the library for lunch hours now, to encourage “social interaction.”

Jeremy moves his backpack to his other side and slides over a little.

“Thanks,” I say.

“No worries,” he says, moving his notebook and pens out of the way.

He goes back to drawing. I open my Tupperware and he glances at my food. “Very healthy,” he says.

I look down at the carrots, pita bread, and celery. “My mom packs it. I can’t believe my mom is still packing my lunch.” Once, she said, If you start gaining weight, you’ll never take it off. Every diet ends up adding ten pounds. Then I think about how Joey told me I’ve been trained to always go along with whatever Mom tells me.

“Well, what would you eat if you packed your own lunch?” Jeremy asks.

I look at his lunch. “Doritos.”

He pushes the crinkly bag to me. I push the Tupperware to him.

He crunches on a carrot. “God, that’s loud. Sorry.” His face flushes.

    I crunch a Dorito chip in solidarity and we laugh.

Liza slides in on the other side of Jeremy. “Hey,” she says to him.

She looks at me. “Hey.”

I look up, mid–Dorito crunch, surprised.

“Hi,” I say tentatively.

She pulls out her peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the wax paper. “What did you decide to read for Watson’s class, now that he changed the syllabus?”

I actually look around the table, like she’s talking to someone else, before I realize that yes, Liza Hernandez is really talking to me.

“The Portrait of a Lady,” I answer. “You?”

“Nice,” she says mildly. “If a little boring. I’m doing Invisible Man.”

“Hey, I brought you something, Liza.” Jeremy reaches into his backpack and pulls out a comic.

“Excellent!” Liza thumbs through it. “I don’t have this one. Thanks.”

They start talking about comics and characters and artists and I start arranging leftover Doritos into triangle houses, one by one. This is not as easy as it is with baby carrots.

“Very creative,” a voice says. “Using foodstuffs as art. Mind if I sit?”

“Daniel W.,” Liza says. “Always a pleasure. Of course.”

Daniel slides onto the bench across from us, slipping a Dorito from one of my houses and examining it.

“If you aren’t going to eat that, give it back,” I say. “I’m hungry.”

He grins and gives it back to me.

I take the Dorito back and eat it. As I do, Gage passes by the table with some of his baseball friends. His eyes light on me briefly before slipping away and I look down, concentrating on my lunch.

    “Oh, wow. Interesting,” Daniel says, watching me and looking over at Gage. “Very interesting.”

My cheeks start to burn.

“What?” Jeremy says. “What’s interesting?”

“Nothing,” Daniel says softly. “And everything.”

I look up, meeting his eyes. I’ve never noticed how blue they are.

I look back at my pile of Doritos. Go back to making triangular orange houses. Anything to forget about the warmth spreading in my veins from looking too long at Daniel Wankel’s blue eyes.

Then Daniel says, “So, it’s the season of love. The first dance at Heywood Hell. Who’s headed to Fall Festival on Friday? My calendar must have been full last year, as I don’t remember attending, and perhaps I don’t want to miss it again.”

“Well,” I say. “I think you were a little busy with, uh, other things.”

“Cancer, Emory. You can say it out loud, and also, the dance?” Liza says. “Ugh. Typical high school bullshit. No thank you.”

“I certainly was busy, Emory,” Daniel says. “Not dying, which is quite an adventure, to tell you the truth.”

He meets my eyes.

If Daniel had died, he’d be a photograph in the memorial cabinet in the hallway, and not here across from me, stealing Doritos, or in Watson’s class, murmuring about West Egg, East Egg, why so many eggs.

He looks away from me then and grins at Liza.

    “Come on, Liza,” Daniel says in a teasing voice. “Don’t you just want to see what it’s like? How the other half lives? I’m kind of interested in observing, aren’t you? As a purely cultural experiment, of course.”

“Well,” Liza answers. “When you put it that way. Maybe you can jam the toilets like you did on the fifth-grade field trip to the natural history museum. Remember that?”

Daniel laughs. “My first act of civic rebellion. How could I forget?”

I remember that. The anticipation on the early-morning ride on the bus to the city, all of us sleepy but excited to be not in school, to be going somewhere. Sack lunches. The bouncing of the wheels. Liza sharing the blue-gray seat with me. And then Daniel, that’s right, skinny Daniel with the always-messy hair leading a bunch of kids into the men’s room at the museum to rip toilet paper from the rolls and stuff it into the water until the bowls were full and then flush them, all at the same time.