Where It Began(57)

I want to tell Billy, just to see him cock his head and raise one eyebrow and be amused by this bizarre turn of events, but it quickly becomes obvious that that isn’t going to happen. I might be the one, but not so anybody else would notice.

I keep looking for him, sensing his presence across rooms when he isn’t there, glimpsing someone else’s shoulder sliding around a corner and thinking it’s his shoulder, getting a scent of warm salt and Cuban tobacco and turning, but no one is there.

The first time I actually spot him is when I see the back of his head walking down the hall toward the language lab between classes. When I am sure he has to feel my presence and somehow know that I’m there, and he will have to stop.

But he doesn’t.

I feel like the cheesy heroine trying to find her boyfriend in a crowded railroad station in an old-timey World War II movie, only when Cheesy Heroine sees Dashing Boyfriend, he’s already on the train and it’s rolling away down the track and out of the station and he doesn’t even know that she’s there. The Cheesy Heroine who racks up offers of monogrammed cloth hankies and faints into the arms of total strangers because she’s such a pathetic loser cow whose boyfriend can’t even get it together to look out the train window and find her for Pete’s sake.

And I say to myself: Oh Gabby, you are such a spiffy, not-pathetic loser cow, you can totally do this. You can so totally avoid him and not have to deal with this until you stop being such a cringe-worthy whack job. Only perhaps you should stop lurking behind pillars and staring at the back of his head. Like now.

And it isn’t as if I have to skulk around to avoid surprise encounters with him either. He and the Andies and the Slut-muffins still hang by the fountain in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden; I don’t.

They go to their lockers during the long breaks; I haul so many books around, it feels as if my right shoulder is going to fall off.

In stupid track chemistry, which is the only class we have together, Dr. Berg had already made us stop being lab partners back at the beginning of fall semester because we talked too much. So Billy and Neil Chun are in the back row and I am in front with Lily Branner, who is for some reason so highly motivated to get an A in stupid track chemistry, she couldn’t have cared less if I’d turned into a werewolf over spring break as long as I could still use my hairy paws to do the experiments right.

All she wants to know is whether I studied for SAT IIs over vacation, and it’s embarrassing to admit that Vivian just got me a prep book like a week ago, as if there isn’t a lot of point to me prepping for SATs. When I tell Lily I didn’t, she kind of mutters that it figures, and loses all interest in anything other than whether I’m pouring the right amount of solution into the beakers she has all lined up.

And Billy is just busy busy busy with his Bunsen burner, too busy to look over and see me sneaking looks at him. Which is good because that level of being a pathetic stalker cow has to show and I don’t want him to notice.

“Aren’t you making a lot of new friends?” Huey says at lunch, when Lisa and Anita are nowhere to be found and I’m not about to text them and make them eat with me, and I’m standing in the cafeteria trying to figure out where in God’s name I’m going to sit. Huey walks me to an empty picnic table on the deck above the ordinary people’s lawn and snaps what turns out to be a photo of Roy Warner looming over me adjusting his crotch while I sit there looking like I just swallowed a live mouse.

Huey says, “Hey, Roy. Did you do the Latin yet?”

Roy mutters something about Virgil and shuffles away.

“Are you all right?” Huey says, just kind of staring at me.

Yes, boys and girls, as if things weren’t bad enough, now Jeremy Hewlett III is finding me lunch tables and feeling sorry for me. Ever so briefly, I wonder how I’d look in a Holy Name plaid jumper, and how short they let you wear it.

“My parents are paying hundreds of dollars an hour for professional dimwits to ask me that,” I say. “Could we possibly talk about your athlete’s foot or something?”

“I don’t know,” Huey says. “I noticed that suddenly you’ve become friendly, so I was worried about you.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, taking a sip of the cafeteria lemonade, so sweet and cold the first hit gives you sugar shock so bad it makes your head ache. “I was always friendly. I can’t help it if everybody wants to turn themselves inside out in front of me all of a sudden.”

“Friendly! You’ve only ever spoken to half a dozen people in the past four and a half years. Now you’re gabbing it up with the masses. Gabbing. Gabby. Get it?”

I got it.

“Yeah, well I got mashed on the head. I can’t help it.” Huey is just staring at me and it is spectacularly weirding me out. “Stop it, Huey. I always talked to anyone who talked to me, such as you.”

Only we can’t continue the conversation because Jenna Marx and her whole stick-like band of girls who, now that I notice, are pretty much eating only lettuce leaves for lunch, sit down near us and seem to want to stare at me sympathetically in between calculating how many calories there are in a level plastic teaspoon of fat-free cottage cheese. Ashley Haas, who is too skeletal even for extra-small Juicy Couture tube tops, looks deeply into my weirded-out eyes and tells me that they all support me.

Huey doesn’t even look up, but you can see his face getting flushed. And then he snaps a picture of five girls with 2% body fat.