Lindsay springs to her feet and steers me outside. I’m still speechless, but I love her for not laughing. I love her for not complaining about how vile she must find this. I love her for helping me scrub the sweater as best we can with generic pink soap and school bathroom water that has two temperatures, cold and ice-cold.
“Thanks for helping,” I say.
“Always.”
Lindsay has some spare clean clothes in her gym locker, though her long-sleeved shirt stretches too tight across my too-big breasts.
“You look fine,” Lindsay says as I tug at the shirt in the locker room mirror. “I know you hate them, but I wish I had your boobs.”
“Take them. Please.” My curves aren’t something I’ve ever been comfortable with—and sometimes I think it’s because my body looks so much better on Adina.
Lindsay’s phone buzzes with a text as the bell rings. “Troy’s heading to the parking lot. Lunch at Mario’s?” All seniors with at least a B average can get off-campus passes.
“Oh.” I’m not feeling supersocial at the moment, so I lie: “I have some work to finish up before fifth period.”
She’s giggling at something on her phone, no longer paying attention. “Sure. Okay.”
Lindsay’s mine until her boyfriend comes along, and then I’m microscopic.
I bundle myself in a peacoat so the shirt looks a little less obscene. I’m not hungry, and I don’t feel like facing the cafeteria. The table of student council reps, where Lindsay and I usually sit when we don’t go off campus, is always the loudest. This year I’m a senior rep, which means I have to go to a couple scintillating faculty meetings a month and report back to the rest of the council. It isn’t glamorous, but I needed a leadership role on my résumé.
I roam the school. Near the math wing, I scoop up a discarded copy of our student newspaper, the Roar. I pause before pitching it into the recycling bin. Next to Troy’s article about our football team’s “devastating loss” last week is a photo of Adina.
It’s part of a series the paper does highlighting student achievements. She never told me she was being interviewed, but that doesn’t surprise me. The piece calls her a “prodigy,” which isn’t news. In the photo, she’s wearing her usual Adina smirk, this look plenty of guys reading the paper have likely said lewd things about. Though I’m sure few of them give a shit about classical music.
She gets all this praise because she has this innate talent, this natural musical ability. I know, because I don’t have it. I’ve had to work for every bit of my success in high school: studied for hours for the PSAT and SAT and ACT, campaigned for a seat on student council, fought for a volunteer position at the hospital.
Not for the first time lately, I wonder if waiting for the test results would be easier if we could talk. But there’s no way I’d initiate that conversation after everything that
’s happened between us.
I ball up the newspaper and toss it in the bin.
Eventually I wind up in the art hallway. Most of the student work on the walls is pretty good, though I don’t know anything about composition or color theory.
“Admiring my work?”
The voice makes me jump, and I spin around to face Zack Baker-Horowitz. He’s wearing my favorite jacket of his, a tweed blazer with elbow patches, over a faded green T-shirt that makes his hazel eyes more jade than brown. He’s holding a cardboard plate and a slice of cafeteria pizza.
“Which one’s yours?” I ask.
“These three.” All of them are mixed media with various random objects that go off the edges. They’re imperfect but interesting. He props an elbow on the wall next to his work, his body less than a foot from me.
I examine each piece, aware he’s watching me, waiting for my verdict. It makes me wonder if he craves a compliment from me, though he’s the one applying to art school. An agonizingly logical part of my mind wonders, How will he make any money doing that?
“I don’t get it,” I say finally.
A little wrinkle appears between his brows as he frowns. “There’s nothing to get.”
“Isn’t art supposed to have some deep meaning?”
“I don’t think it always needs to.” With his free hand, he points at one of the pieces. “I like to draw connections between ordinary things. I’m experimenting with different ways of telling stories using paint and found objects I’ve been collecting. Receipts, grocery lists, stuff like that. It’s an exploration of the mundane.”
“So your art is mundane?”
He cracks a smile, exposing a small gap between his two front teeth that I find adorable, and moves his elbow off the wall to nudge my arm. Though my jacket is so thick I can barely feel it, my stomach does backflips. I wonder what it would feel like to touch him longer than a split second. “Exactly.”
Really, my crush on him is more of an admiration. In the spring when we both run track, he pushes back his hair with neon sweatbands and strikes dorky, flashy poses at the finish line that make me laugh. I can’t date him, so I’m resigned to appreciating him: his confidence and his jokes and his long eyelashes. And his vintage jacket, of course, because he has his own style and I can appreciate that, too.