Picture Us In The Light(61)
The new school is enormous and ugly, all gray cement and darkened windows, an island of a city block on a street made up of long flat houses and a faded medical complex. There is nothing on this street worth looking at, no surprising colors or trees that twist up into the sky or building angles that demand a second glance. At MV I always loved that view of the hills, how out on the fields for PE they rose up like a backdrop behind you and made you feel like you were out on the edge of the known world.
My anger at my parents is a hard lump in my throat. My mom’s already at the Lis’ for the week, and my dad was still on his night shift when I left this morning. I would’ve had nothing to say to either of them anyway. There was a note placed carefully on the table and eleven creased one-dollar bills (Daniel, approximately three-quarter of a mile from here is Q Baguette, which is close enough for you to walk. Go only there after school to purchase banh mi and then come directly home. I will be home by nine). It was still mostly dark when I woke up, and I took a shower with the door open because it felt safer to keep close by to any alarming noise from outside. The whole way to school I kept checking over my shoulder. I’d thought maybe the feeling would break open when I actually got here, that the place would carry that bland bureaucratic reassuring schooly feel schools sometimes do even when they aren’t yours, but this one doesn’t. Even the mascot (a mustang baring its teeth in a giant mural painted on what’s probably the gym) looks menacing. I’ve never trusted horses.
I keep hoping to hear something, anything, from Harry. Last night I finally gave in and texted him thanks for helping me pack, but he never wrote back. My stomach’s been in knots all morning.
I didn’t text Regina. I started more than once, but every time I lost my nerve.
A bell rings, the sound tinny and sharp compared to our bell at home. I make my way down the hallway toward where I think the office is, hating everything about this place. The other kids here feel different, too, all blurred into that indistinguishable mass of thousands of people utterly indifferent toward you.
“Yo homo,” someone calls across the hallway. Something in my heart seizes, some fist clutching all the chambers of my heart. I tell myself not to turn my head. Then in my peripheral vision a slim white guy in fitted jeans ducks his head and tries to walk faster. He passes me.
“Hey, come back, I’m talking to you.” It’s another white dude, one with a casually merciless grin. His voice is pitched unnaturally high and cruel, a mocking lisp inserted like a skewer. “Come back.” The other guy walks faster, toward an open classroom door.
“Come—dammit—” The guy’s already gone in. He yells toward the door, “How come you never call me back, huh? How come you never pick up my calls?”
The people around me kind of laugh. Mostly not, though—mostly, in a way that tells me everything I need to know about this place, everyone ignores it. Something cracks in my resolve. Maybe it’s because everyone I know is too stressed out about actual things that matter, or maybe it’s because I go to school with two thousand people who are probably considering running for president someday, who knows, but the people I know are better than that.
Unexpectedly—this is embarrassing—my eyes well up. I think on some level I always had some idea that living in Cupertino and going to a school like MV was a bubble—that if you whisked any one of us away and plunked us down in some high school in, say, Indiana, the rules would be so different that all the things we’d worked so hard to build ourselves would crumble. You felt it sometimes at away games if you went to go watch and you could feel all the ways you wouldn’t belong there, that hyperawareness of how to an outside eye you’d look exactly the same as everyone you were there with, that same feeling I remember getting sometimes when my family would take road trips and we’d drive through Podunk middle-of-nowhere towns and I’d feel that same mix of superiority and self-consciousness, that simultaneous need to prove my separateness from my family and also my belonging to it, that sense it’s the group of you versus the world. But I’ve never felt all that so keenly as I do right now. It’s difficult to breathe.
The office is at the end of the hall, its windows looking out into the hallway. When I go in the person at the front desk doesn’t look up. I stand there in front of her desk for five minutes, watching them play out on the clock, trying to psych myself up to hand over my forms and consign myself to a life here. My heart is pounding and I feel that pressure behind your eyes you get when you’re about to lose it. She never glances up.
And right then, just as I’m about to say something, my phone buzzes and I get a feeling and I know without even checking it’s Harry. I’m right. It’s a selfie of him making a sad face, his lower lip jutting out, and he’s written: this sucks. Fyi.
A rush of pure, euphoric relief. All the worry that’s been coursing through me lifts. There’s a tingling feeling that runs up my legs. And—here in this god-awful place I have no business being in, this stupid detour my life has taken—some part of me zooms back to that day in my dad’s lab and how I watched all those people’s atoms revolting against their own aloneness, leaping into a tandem existence with the people they loved. And that’s what this is. I was thinking of him, and he felt it. I was terrified I ruined everything, but we’ve been through too much together. I’m forty minutes and however many miles away, but he still felt me. And I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life: I need to figure this out between us. I need to see it through. I can’t just fade out of his life like this, not in these last months we have before the future. Whatever it is with us, whatever it’s going to be—I need to be there for it. I am not trashing my best shot at happiness for this shitty building full of shitty people.