Mr. Zimm only had one lung. Everybody knew this. No one knew how they knew it, because obviously no one could check, and no one had ever gone up and asked, “Hey, Zimm? One lung or two?” But there was something in the way that he held on to the middle of sentences, turned just slightly purple, and leaned against his desk that screamed one lung.
The rest of this apocryphal tale was that he lost the lung after being stabbed in the chest with a broadsword during a medieval battle reenactment. There were confirmed sightings of him buying chain mail at the Renaissance Faire, which seemed to give this story some credence. It was probably bullshit, but most people wanted to believe it, so most people did. What else was there to think about a forty-year-old single guy with a snowy white beard who obsessed over the English library and displayed his own decorative dragon bookends on his desk? Since he was also a notorious droner, there were always bets going that one day he would just try to keep talking and would die right in the middle of some interminable explanation of “what Tolkien was really trying to accomplish.”
Mel liked Mr. Zimm, mostly because he was familiar. He was the only teacher she’d had every single year. This was especially comforting on the first day of school since there was always something foreign and spooky about seeing everyone in their new clothes with their tans and their three-month backlog of stories. It was alarming to know that the rules for this year had yet to be established. Everything on those first days mattered a lot, like where you sat, and what you did over the summer, and how much weight you lost or gained, or who you saw.
It wasn’t like Mel could tell anyone what she’d been doing (or really, who). So having one class where she could kick back and completely slip out of focus was a good thing. She got there early to make sure she got her favorite seat—right in the middle of the room. Not too far back (Zimm watched those people), not too close (Zimm was a spitter).
Doug and Jean, the school’s gothic lovers, came in together and took two empty seats next to Mel. Jean was a tiny girl with a small head, which was crowned with several pounds of flowing ink black hair (obviously dyed) with a white skunk streak cutting through it. She wore a long burgundy-colored dress, black boots, and a spiked dog collar. Doug was a very tall, hulking guy with the same unnaturally black colored hair and a sharp widow’s peak. He wore a black cowboy-style shirt and black pants.
Just as the bell rang, Parker came into the room. He took the very last seat, which was in the front row, dead center.
“This is English four,” Zimm began. “I am Mr. Zimm. We’re going to be covering British liter—oh no.” He stopped short and pointed to Doug and Jean. “We’ve gone through this before. Doug, move over a seat. Melanie, you sit where Doug was.”
Mel took her place between the couple. They gazed at her as if this was her fault. She shrank down a little.
“We’ll primarily be covering English literature this year. We’ll be reading two Shakespeare plays….”
Someone dropped their bag in the back of the room and mumbled, “Oh, shit.” A pen slid by Mel’s foot.
“… along with some Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Wordsworth, a bit of Beowulf, a section of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which we’ll compare against a scene from the movie….”
Parker turned and smiled at Mel.
“In the spring we’ll be covering how to write a college term paper, so as you read throughout the year, you might want to think about which book you’ll be writing on and maybe begin keeping a list of potential topics. Okay, first let me go over, once again, how to check books out of the English lab library….”
Doug and Jean communed with each other by exchanging penetrating glances over Mel’s head. Mel checked out of the room completely and started going back over the schedules. She already knew Avery’s by heart. They had nothing together because Avery took Spanish and had two weird music classes that made her schedule very strange. If Mel was lucky and timed it just right, she would be able to catch a minute with Avery in the hall between sixth and seventh periods.
She flipped through her English textbook Zimm had apparently purchased a whole crate full of copies of The Hobbit from England and proudly explained the cover art right up until the time the bell rang. Parker lingered.
“Gotta love Zimm,” he said. “And now, assembly. Makes doing the jig seem a lot less painful, huh?”
Mel and Parker headed to the auditorium together, stopping at Mel’s locker, where Nina was waiting.
“Ready for your big speech?” Mel asked with a smile, expecting a return grin from her ever-confident friend.
But Nina’s anxiety-lined expression didn’t change. She leaned into Mel and spoke quietly into her ear. “I think you can see through this blouse,” she whispered. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I got dressed. With the lights it’s going to be like, hey, check out my—” She cut herself off and leaned against Mel’s locker, absently touching the buns on either side of her head. “I shouldn’t have done the Leia buns today,” she said lamely. “This isn’t a freaking Star Wars convention. Oh my God …”
Mel was still back on the thing about the blouse. Nina’s comments about her hair were totally ridiculous because she always wore her hair that way. Nina had changed topics because she didn’t want to say that her blouse was see-through in front of Mel. What was even worse was that it was kind of see-through. Mel directed her eyes down at the floor. There was no way she wanted Nina to catch her staring deeply into her chest, even if it had been Nina’s idea for Mel to look in the first place.
“The buns are good,” Parker said. “It would have been even cooler if you’d made a video recording of yourself and then projected it out of a little robot. You’d totally sew up the geek vote. But I guess you don’t need a vote because … everybody voted. Which is why you’re doing this. Feel free to jump in anytime….”
“I have to go,” Nina said. She pressed her bag into Mel’s arms. “Keep this for me?”
Mel nodded and clutched the bag tight to her own chest, as if covering herself could somehow make up for this whole mess.
“I could have said that she should have done the Leia-in-the-bikini thing,” Parker said with a smile as Nina hurried down the hall. “But I’m a sensitive guy. I hate it when girls beat me up in public.”
Mel smiled weakly. She didn’t want to talk any more about Nina’s chest or bikinis or anything like that.
“Why do you look like you’re going to puke?” he asked.
“I’m nervous for her,” Mel lied.
They were pushed into the crowd by the door. No one was making any kind of an effort to stream the mass of people into a line. Mel and Parker just got caught in the crush. Parker leaned down to Mel.
“Want to know a big secret about me?” he said in a low voice.
“Okay,” Mel said warily.
“Sometimes … when I’m all alone in the house … or when everyone’s asleep … I drink Tabasco, right out of the bottle. I just open the fridge and I see that little red bottle and I just get thirsty.“
He flashed Mel a grin, and she loosened her grip on Nina’s bag just a bit.
“Big secret,” he said as the clog by the door gave way and they were jettisoned into the darkened auditorium. “Tell anyone and I’ll have to … um, zero-tolerance threat omitted, but you know what I’m saying.”
He gave her a light bump with his elbow. Parker just had a way—things were a little bit more bearable with him around.
She’d only been in school for three hours, and already Avery had noticed several things that seemed to indicate how the year was going to go.
Omen #1: She got a basement locker. Seniors were never supposed to get basement lockers. For some reason, though, everyone with a last name from Cl to E had a locker at the bottom of the fire stairs. Nina, a B, was up by the front lobby. The F’s, including Mel, were right outside their homeroom. Avery, of course, was the odd woman out—the one who would need a passport and a visa to get to her stuff.
Omen #2: Here she was at the first lunch of the year, and they were already serving the peas and carrots—with tacos. No one ate the peas and carrots to begin with, but to serve them with tacos was nothing short of a slap in the face.
It wasn’t just the poor menu planning that bothered her; it was the ridges in the carrots. Was it supposed to be fancy? Was there a chef somewhere with a special knife and a pile of carrots mumbling under his breath, “For you, students, I will cut ridges …"? And if he cared so much, why did he allow them to be so ridiculously overcooked to the point of mush?
What made things worse was the fact that the tray she’d pulled from the stack (still hot, still moist) was one of those runt trays—the ones that popped up every twenty-fifth tray or so and weren’t gray or orange like the others. They were red and noticeably smaller and thinner. Getting one of these was a bad sign.
She pushed along and accepted a soft-shell taco, declined the peas and carrots, discovered that her fork had a seriously bent prong, and considered omen #3—the fact that she had just returned from an assembly where one of her best friends was the main speaker. She couldn’t just make fun of assembly now. Or the dances. Or the spirited bulletin boards, or the fund-raisers, or the idiotic coffeehouses where people sat around in the student lounge in their spare time, drinking donated Starbucks and discussing things like “fairness” and “diversity.” Making fun of those would be making fun of Nina, so Avery was now tied to the establishment, forced to keep a straight face and pretend like all of this stuff was important—like the council was actually some serious organization that might someday end up commemorated with its very own library or dollar coin.
It couldn’t be forgotten that life with Nina as she had always known it was over. Nina had been nice about what she’d seen—meaning that she hadn’t actually started screaming and crying or tearing out her hair—but there was a nervousness in the way she spoke. Not that Avery could blame her. The fact that she and Mel were together changed things, whether they wanted things to change or not. Mel never seemed ready to accept that fact, but Avery had known it all along.
Omen #4 was that Gaz and Hareth were sitting in the back of the cafeteria, which was why she was walking in that direction. They would obviously be her lunch companions for the year, which meant she would hear all about the exploits of Angry Maxwell.
But all of the above were overridden by omen #5—the little piece of triangularly folded paper that she had slid carefully into the front pocket of her jeans. It was a note, folded in the classic Triangle style, left for her by Mel. (She was, of course, using Mel’s locker as her own from now on. That went without saying. She wasn’t going to set foot in the basement if she could help it.)
It just said: You are beautiful.
Avery tapped her thumb ring against the edge of her red tray. She passed a table that had a few of the school’s deeply uncloseted students sitting around it, and it occurred to her that she could sit there now. She could sit with Jen Habett, the classic short hair, jeans, and pride chain girl. Or Felicia Clark, the outspoken “If you have a pulse, I’m interested” bisexual sex addict. Or Montgomery Allen, the geek-chic chick with the two male first names, who gave off an “everyone knows I’m a lesbian, but I’m not saying anything unless you ask me” vibe. They were part of a pretty tight group, which included a lot of guys whom Avery didn’t even know. Still, she was pretty sure that they’d take her in. Felicia would, anyway.
But Avery wasn’t looking for solidarity. In fact, she liked keeping her relationship with Mel a complete secret. She wanted to be the only one who knew what it was like to be with Mel—to be able to look at her and know that Mel was all hers, and she was all Mel’s, and no one else with all their posturing had any idea what that meant.
Well, Nina knew. About the relationship, at least. That hadn’t gone well. The whole event had replayed itself in Avery’s mind endlessly the entire night. But at least it was done.
Avery suddenly became aware of the runt tray and the peas and carrots and the locker and the assembly all over again.
Nina knew.