Tell Me Three Things(56)

In the morning, I wake up flushed, sad, when the feeling gets wiped away by the reality of day. When I wash my face in the mirror, see whiteheads, red splotches, round baby cheeks.

“Ms. Holmes?” Mrs. Pollack asks, and I wonder how long she’s been calling on me.

“Um, yeah?”

“Care to answer the question?” I remember suddenly that she’s been going around the room. I had ample warning, knew I was next up, but still I somehow got lost in thought. I look up at Mrs. Pollack; she’s attractive, might have looked a lot like Gem when she was in high school. I bet she’s never had a pimple.

“I’m sorry, I—” The whole class looks over, Gem and Crystal snicker in duet, and my face flashes hot. A bead of sweat threatens to streak down my right temple. I flick it away, try to calm my beating heart. Back in Chicago, English was my strongest subject. “I mean, I wasn’t paying—”

“That scene with Raskolnikov at his house with his mother and sister. How he’s able to act like everything is normal, even though he’s actually going crazy inside,” Ethan breaks in, and though I have no idea what he’s talking about, his comment satisfies Mrs. Pollack, who moves toward the front of the room to write something on the blackboard.

“Exactly,” she says, giving me one last look, which catches me by surprise. Because it’s not mean. It’s not even pity. It’s something else entirely. Empathy.

—

“Thanks,” I say to Ethan after class, once we are safely in the hallway. “You saved me.”

“My pleasure, Tuberlicious.”

“I hope I don’t ruin your grade with our project.” I fiddle with my bag, which feels too heavy on my shoulder. “Especially after I kind of made you work with me.”

“I’m not worried.” He smiles, so I force myself to look him straight in the eye, to bathe in the blue. No, not like a serial killer’s, like I first thought. More complex than that. Like a gathering. I hear Theo’s warning in my head and check for dilated pupils, but they look normal-sized to me.

“Good,” I say. Not clever. Not flirtatious. Not anything. Maybe in an hour, I’ll come up with a better line. Something funny and light to punctuate my exit.

But now: nothing.

Ethan rubs his head, as if trying to wake up his hair. Smiles again.

“Have a safe trip tomorrow.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t forget about us,” he says, and before I can even articulate a question—What does he mean by us? Wood Valley? LA? Him and me?—Ethan is gone, out the front door and halfway to his car.

—

I wait for Caleb near the school’s entrance, stand idly by the stairs. He said we should meet at three o’clock, and now it’s three-fifteen, and I pretend not to be nervous that he won’t show. I stare at the screen of my phone as if I’m deep in thought, as if my life depends on this text I’m typing. But I’m not really texting anyone, because the person I normally write to at times like this is Caleb. So I’m just thumbing over and over with my fingers: Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up. I wonder how long I’m supposed to wait and at what point it will become obvious to me that I’m an idiot.

Gem walks by, because of course if there must be a bystander to witness my humiliation it will be her. For a moment, my stomach drops with the thought that SN may be Gem, that he has been a joke all along at my expense, but then I catch myself and let the thought go. No, Gem has better things to do than to text me late into the night as part of an elaborate practical joke. My friendship with SN is real, even if Caleb is not yet ready to face me.

“I wish you’d just go back to where you came from,” Gem says as she skips down the stairs, words thrown over her shoulder as sharp as darts.

“Me too.” I say it low enough that she can’t hear.

“Me too, what?” Caleb says, and now he’s next to me, and I can’t help but grin from ear to ear. He didn’t stand me up. He’s here, car keys dangling from his long fingers, ready to go. We will have coffee and finally talk and it will be as easy as it is with my fast-moving thumbs. As strange as it is to trust him, I do. Three things, I start writing in my head: (1) You understand me. (2) Tell me about Kilimanjaro. (3) Were you scared up there?

“Nothing,” I say. “Just talking to myself.”

“Do that often?”

“It’s been known to happen,” I say. Caleb is so tall that I need to look up to talk to him, my neck arched back at an unfortunate angle. Maybe later I’ll take a selfie to see what I look like to him from way up there, the entire plane and slope of my face. All chin and eyebrows. It can’t be pretty. I’m not Barbie to his human Ken doll.

“Listen, about coffee,” he says, and the disappointment hits me full force, even before he says the words. This is what you get for being ballsy. Ridiculous of me to be so optimistic and open, to assume this was going to happen. I keep letting myself be lifted and dropped, like a stuffed animal in an old-fashioned claw machine. I’ll never actually be chosen, especially by someone who looks like him. “I think we shouldn’t.”

“Have coffee? Okay.” I want to pick up my phone again. IM SN. Write what is too hard to say: Why not? Why aren’t I good enough for you in person?