Tell Me Three Things(4)
“And you? What’s your name?” said the teacher, who I later found out was Mr. Shackleman, the gym teacher SN warned me likes to stare at girls’ asses. “I don’t recognize you from last year.” Not sure why he had to point so the whole class looked at me, but no big deal, I told myself. This was a first grader’s assignment: what did I do with my summer vacation? No reason for my hands to be shaking and my pulse to be racing; no reason for me to feel like I was in the early stages of congestive heart failure. I knew the signs. I had seen the commercials. All eyes were on me, including those of Caleb and Liam, both of whom were looking with amusement and suspicion. Or maybe it was curiosity. I couldn’t tell.
“Um, hi, I’m Jessie. I’m new here. I didn’t do anything exciting this summer. I mean, I…I moved here from Chicago, but until then, I worked, um, at, you know, the Smoothie King at the mall.” No one was rude enough to laugh outright, but this time I could easily read their looks. Straight-up pity. They had built schools and traveled to foreign locales, interned at billion-dollar corporations.
I had spent my two months off blending high-fructose corn syrup.
In retrospect, I realize I should have lied and said I helped paraplegic orphans in Madagascar. No one would have batted an eye.
Or clapped, for that matter.
“Wait. I don’t have you on my list,” Mr. Shackleman said. “Are you a senior?”
“Um, no,” I said, feeling a bead of sweat release and streak the side of my face. Quick calculation: would wiping it bring more or less attention to the fact that I was excreting a massive quantity of water from my pores? I wiped.
“Wrong class,” he said. “I don’t look like Mrs. Murray, do I?” There were outright laughs now at a joke that was marginally funny, at best. And twenty-five faces turned toward me again, sizing me up. I mean that literally: some of them seemed to be evaluating my size. “You’re inside.”
Mr. Shackleman pointed to the main building, so I had to get up and walk away while the entire class, including the teacher, including fantasy-worthy Caleb and Liam, watched me and my behind go. And only later, when I got to my actual homeroom and had to stand up and do the whole summer vacation thing all over again in front of another twenty-five kids—and utter the words “Smoothie King” for the second time to an equally appalled audience—did I realize I had a large clump of grass stuck to my ass.
On reflection, the number of people who may have sensed my desperation? At least fifty, and I’m estimating on the low side just to make myself feel better.
The truth is SN could be anyone.
Now, a whole fourteen days later, I stand here in the cafeteria with my stupid brown sandwich bag and look around at this new terrain—where everything is all shiny and expensive (the kids here drive actual BMWs, not old Ford Focuses with eBay-purchased BMW symbols glued on)—and I still don’t know where to go. I’m facing the problem encountered by every new kid ever: I have no one to sit with.
No chance of my joining Theo, my new stepbrother, who, the one time I said “hey” in the hall, blanked me with such intensity that I’ve given up even looking in his direction. He always seems to hang around with a girl named Ashby (yep, that’s really her name), who looks like a supermodel mid-runway—all dramatic gothy makeup, uncomfortable-looking designer clothes, blank wide features, pink spiked hair. I’m getting the sense that Theo is one of the more popular kids at this school—he fist-bumps his way down the hall—which is weird, because he’s the type of guy people would have teased in Chicago. Not because he’s gay—my classmates at FDR were not homophobic, at least not overtly—but because he’s flamboyant. A little much about muchness. Everything Theo does is theatrical, except when it comes to me, of course.
Last night, I ran into him before bed and he was actually wearing a silk smoking jacket, like a model in a cologne ad. True, my cheeks were smeared with zit cream and I reeked of tea tree oil, looking like my own ridiculous parody of a pimply teenager. Still, I had the decency to pretend that it wasn’t strange that our lives had suddenly, and without our consent, become commingled. I said my friendliest goodnight, since I can’t see the point of being rude. It’s not like that’s going to unmarry our parents. But Theo just gave me an elaborate and elegant grunt, one with remarkable subtext: You and your gold-digger dad should get the hell out of my house.
He’s not wrong. I mean, my dad’s not interested in his mom’s money. But we should leave. We should get on a plane this afternoon and move back to Chicago, even though that’s an impossibility. Our house is sold. The bedroom I slept in for the entirety of my life now cradles a seven-year-old and her extensive American Girl doll collection. It’s lost, along with everything else I recognize.
—
As for today’s lunch, I considered taking my sad PB&J to the library, a plan that was foiled by a very stern NO EATING sign. Too bad, because the library here is amazing, so far the only thing I would admit is an improvement over FDR. (At FDR, we didn’t really have a library. We had a book closet, which was mostly used as a place to make out. Then again, FDR was, you know, public school. This place costs a bajillion dollars a year, a bill footed for me by Dad’s new wife.) The school brochure said the library was donated by some studio bigwig with a recognizable last name—and the chairs are all fancy, the sort of thing you’d see in one of those high-end design magazines Dad’s new wife keeps strategically placed around the house. “Design porn,” she calls them, with that nervous laugh that makes it clear that she only talks to me because she has to.