First & Then(7)

Kenyon was a particularly thick-looking boy with dark, bristly hair. If there was any person in this room you would peg as an up-and-coming human bulldozer, it would be this kid.

Ezra shuffled off to the back of one of the lines, and Gracie Holtzer made her way to the front, sticking out her bottom lip in an overexaggerated pout. As soon as she reached the front of the lines, however, her expression changed to one of horror.

“Ewwwwwww!” she crooned, pointing at something behind me.

I turned around. Foster was standing there, blood dripping down the front of his gray TS gym shirt.

“Dev,” he said thickly, two fingers clamping his nostrils together. “Dev, I think I’ve got a nosebleed.”

I sighed.




“So gym wasn’t fun?” Cas said at lunch, giving me a grin and then turning to his fish sticks.

I was still riled up about it. “I won’t make it through a year in that class. I can’t. It’s not humanly possible.”

“It’s kind of your fault for putting it off so long, isn’t it?”

I glared. “That’s not the type of sound bite I keep you around for.”

“It’s everyone else’s fault and you’re perfect?”

“Better.” I set about opening my carton of chocolate milk. “I don’t get why Ezra’s even in that class. You’d think the star player would’ve taken gym before senior year.”

“He needed an elective,” Cas said between bites, “so they’re letting him take it again. I heard him and Coach talking about it at practice.”

“Figures. I need an easy A, too, but no one’s going to let me take freshman English again.”

“You’re not an athlete. We matter more.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me. You love me so much you’re going to give me your chocolate milk.”

“We’re the only two seniors in the whole freaking school who still eat cafeteria food. You do realize that, right?”

“I like cafeteria food. It’s greasy, and more importantly, it’s cheap. No, more importantly, it’s greasy. Come on, gimme the milk.”

I took a long, pointed swig from the carton.

“You never mentioned how Ezra’s a great big giant *,” I said, abandoning the chocolate milk and turning to my pasta salad.

Cas laughed, nearly choking on a fish stick. “I thought it was common knowledge.”

“The star football player’s supposed to be all charming and winning and stuff. Not surly and mean-spirited.”

“The talented ones usually are.”

“You’d think they’d be grateful that they’re talented. It should be the really untalented people who get to be jackasses. At least they have a reason to be angry at the world.”

“Well, I guess it’s hard for Ezra with all those exciting and unexpected opportunities cropping up everywhere. Like he goes into the bathroom to take a piss and all of a sudden an exciting and unexpected opportunity jumps out at him from behind a shower curtain and scares the living shit out of him.”

“At least he’s in the bathroom,” I said.

“For when all the living shit comes out?”

I grinned. “Exactly.”

Cas grinned back and then glanced up at a spot behind me. “Hey, Marabelle.”

When I turned, it was to the sight of Marabelle Finch stopped a few feet away from our table. She looked lost in thought, but for Marabelle, that was pretty typical.

“Oh,” Marabelle said, looking at Cas vaguely. “Hello.”

“How’s it going?” I asked.

She lifted her shoulders, a tiny, delicate shrug. “I can’t remember what I was going to do.”

“Get lunch?” Cas suggested.

“Baby’s not hungry,” she said.

“Is Marabelle hungry?” Cas’s face was deadpan, but his eyes were shining. He thought Marabelle was funny.

“No.” She stood there for a moment and then reached up suddenly and grabbed her chest as if checking to see if it was still there. “I’ve got breasts now. Have you seen?”

“Yeah.” Cas bobbed his head, unable to keep from grinning. “Yeah, they’re nice.”

I kicked out at him under the table as she took a seat.

“I don’t like them,” she said.

“Does Baby’s dad like them?” Cas asked.

Marabelle just looked at him. I, on the other hand, swung out harder and connected with Cas’s leg under the table. Marabelle and I weren’t great friends, but I had sort of a soft spot for her.

I first met her at the library—the town branch just a few blocks away from school. I went there pretty often, and I’d always see Marabelle in the stacks. Thumbing through a periodical or pushing a cart around, shelving books. She was two years younger, and we didn’t have any classes together, but we coexisted at the library pretty nicely. I would say hi, and she would nod, or she’d check my books out and comment on what I had chosen.

“Do you like working here?” I asked one time as she was leading me to a copy of Hamlet for class.

“Well, technically, I don’t work here,” she said. “But they let me help out.” And she promptly found me four different editions of Hamlet—“You don’t want that one, though. They try to translate it all into normal words and it totally ruins it. The annotations in this one are better.” I learned that when it came to information, Marabelle was better than Google.