Brandon. Brandon again. Brandon suddenly everywhere. He is staring at me when I push through the glass doors of the cafeteria, which is essentially a greenhouse filled with café tables and organic vegetables grown in waist-high poured concrete planters that alternate rows with the seats. He leaves the restaurant line and heads directly over to me. I resist the urge to dodge behind a tomato plant.
He skids to a stop and leans forward, his voice just barely above a whisper. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
I realize I’m staring instead of answering, and just shake my head no. He’s talked to me more in the past few days, at the party, this morning, than he’s talked to me since I asked him out. He had promised me we were great friends, but somehow we just stopped. Now I have the urge to confide in him, though I never have before. I found everything except what I was looking for, I could say dramatically. Sometimes I worry that I have poetry in me, the kind that makes you sentimental and sappy and vulnerable.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He hesitates. His eyes go soft. I’ve seen that look on boys’ faces and I think I’m panicking about it.
“Okay, bye!” I shout, and dodge around him, fast-stepping it to our regular table.
“Where’d you go Saturday night?” Hector says, dropping his recyclable organic corn-product tray on our little café table just as I sit in front of the latte Laura’s already gotten for me. The bamboo centerpiece wobbles and falls over, but Jolene catches it. Hector has stacked three slices of vegan pizza on top of one another, with extra soy sausage on the top. The chefs give him extra anything he wants. He just thinks they’re super nice and friendly. If he were more self-aware he’d be dangerous. If he were more self-aware, he wouldn’t be with—I stop myself in the middle of that.
He says, “You left your own party. I was looking for you.” When he hauls out his chair he knocks into the table behind us. The Rebus Club kids glare at him.
“I texted you,” I say. “The house was crowded. I had to go.”
“Yeah, but for the whole night?” he says. His eyebrows are all rumpled up and he looks puzzled. “You didn’t even find me before you left. And then you were gone for the rest of the party. I called you.” He looks sad. “You didn’t even text me back Sunday. I wrote a song about it.”
My heart squeezes. I rest my head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I needed to go.” I had ignored his calls and texts. I couldn’t have told him about weight-loss surgery. No matter how well I know him, how much I love his arms around me and his kisses on the side of my neck—I would have been afraid to see his face. A part of me, the part that understands how the real world works, might have been scared he’d agree.
“Skee ball is a dangerous sport,” Laura says. She leans forward and the tips of her scarf are dangling so close to her pile of greasy fries. “Dangerously addicting. We couldn’t stop. We sold all our belongings and camped out at Dizzy’s until closing and then we had to sleep in the ball pit because we couldn’t afford gas.”
“I would have come and got you,” Hector says.
“No one can save us from ourselves,” Laura pronounces solemnly.
Jolene is keeping a very straight face. She pats Hector on the hand. “You’re a good boy, Hector,” she says. Teasing Hector is too easy sometimes. We fall into it the way we fall into formation when we walk, the three of us in a line and our heels clicking in the same rhythm.
He looks at Jolene, and then at me. His eyebrows are pulled together and he looks kind of lost. “Okay,” he says. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“She tells you everything,” Jolene says comfortingly.
“She’s an open book,” Laura says. “She can be checked out of any library.”
“I wish you would have come to find me,” he says to me. I lift my head up. Before I can say anything, he continues, “Your grandmother was looking for you,” and then folds half his pizza slice into his face and chews with enthusiasm.
“That’s what Brandon said,” I say, and then glance at Laura. She doesn’t look surprised. She is squeezing a perfectly straight line of mayonnaise across her french fry, but she sets it down instead of eating it.
“Brandon found the note,” Laura says, looking at me steadily. I make a choking noise and she keeps going fast, not dropping her gaze, “He was looking for my car and he saw your name on the note and he picked it up because he thought it was important.”
“What note?” Hector says.
I close my eyes.
“He read it,” I say. Because of course he did.
“Well, he couldn’t help it,” she says. She is squeezing mayonnaise on another fry and lining it up next to the first one. It looks like she’s building a log cabin.
“What note?” Hector says again.
“The birthday note from my grandmother.” I say. This feeling in my stomach (the stomach my grandmother wants me to get sawed into pieces, I think) is humiliation. Exposed and without a way to defend your vulnerable, squishy parts that are suddenly available to judge.
Did you find everything you need, Brandon had asked so solicitously. Pityingly.
“Oh yeah!” Hector says. “The car, right? Are you getting a car? What’s she going to give you if you take her up on it?”
I shake my head. I can’t look at him.
“Tuition,” Jolene says.
“Tuition. Like for Harvard? Oh my god! That’s amazing,” Hector says. He takes another outsized bite, and he’s smiling so his cheeks bulge out as he chews.
“Yeah,” Laura says. “She gets to go to Harvard. In exchange for agreeing to her grandmother’s unacceptably controlling attempts at changing her for no good reason whatsoever.” She’s leaning forward and her voice is rising. Jolene is keeping her head down, but glancing over at the table next to us. The entire Rebus Club is staring at us. I have never been stared at by an entire Rebus Club before and I don’t like it.
“Laura, I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
“It’s not right,” Laura keeps on. Her cheeks are darkening and soon the color will start to creep down to her chest.
I say, “She is trying to help.” What I have always said.
“What?” Hector says. He’s finished chewing. His last pizza slice hangs from his fist. “What is she trying to help with?”
He looks at me as if we have never had this conversation. It is maddening.
Jolene says, “Her grandmother wants her to get weight-loss surgery.”
I groan. I want them all to stop talking now.
“What the hell is that?” Hector says before I can respond. He hasn’t stopped staring at me. I want to ask him to keep up with us, just this once. I shake my head. This never works to clear it.
“Hector,” I start.
My voice must not be clear of irritation because Jolene says, “I didn’t know what it was either, Ashley. It’s a fair question.”
“It’s mutilation!” Laura snaps. She slaps her hand against the table. Her rings clatter on the Formica. The Rebus Club is still staring. “Weight-loss surgery is a brutal maiming of the body’s natural digestive system.”
“What? You shouldn’t do that!” Hector yelps. He puts his pizza down and his eyes are huge. “Why would your grandmother want you to do that?”
“It will make her lose weight quickly and help her keep it off permanently,” Jolene says.
My friends have both done their homework, but apparently they used completely different Google searches.
“Please don’t talk so loudly,” I say. I’ve never noticed how crowded together the tables are in here.
“Right. Okay, so, what does Brandon have to do with this?” Hector asks.
“He knows about it,” I say.
“Why would you tell him but not me?” His voice is plaintive.
“I didn’t tell him, Hector. He found out.” The exasperation and anxiety is shimmering right there at the surface of my voice and I fight to keep it from bubbling up and spilling over. He gets so hurt when I snap at him.
“He told me he found the note because he didn’t want to make you feel like he was lying to you or something,” Laura says, quieter now.
“I might have preferred being lied to!” I say, and now I’m the noisy one. I suck in a breath and take a sip of my latte to distract myself from trying to see who is watching us. We’re a tiny school full of people who know everything that’s going on with everyone. This wouldn’t be a good thing to miss.
“He’s probably not going to tell anyone,” Jolene says.
“Probably?” I say, and I look at Laura.
“Who would he tell?” she says. “He doesn’t tell people things. You know that. I mean, besides me. I’m obviously a special case because I’m his sister.”
“Why does it matter if he tells anyone?” Hector says.
“Because it’s nobody’s business,” I say. And there it is, skipping over irritation and heading straight toward pissed off. I can hear the anger in my voice. A spitting, hissing kind of thing. I can’t stop myself from saying, “Do you really have to ask that?”
“Apparently,” Hector says, and pushes his chair back. His face is calm and he doesn’t meet my eyes. He bumps into the Rebus Club kids but does not look at them. He rises and shoves through the tangle of tables and chairs and now even more people are looking over at us. Not in the way you always unconsciously assume that everyone is looking at you. In an absolutely concrete, all-eyes-here sort of way.
I take another sip of my latte and realize I’m trembling. “Shit,” I say.
“He’s mad, but he won’t stay mad for long,” Jolene says.
“I’ve never seen him get mad,” Laura says. “I mean, I don’t think I could imagine Hector being mildly miffed. Or vaguely concerned. Or even sort of irritated before now. Wow.”
Never at me. He never gets irritated with me. “You are not helpful,” I say to Laura unsteadily.
“You could follow him and apologize,” Jolene says. “I think he’d appreciate the gesture.”
“Or you can let him go off and experience for the first time what it’s like to be emo! It’ll be good for him. He can write a song,” Laura says.
I don’t want to see the look on his face. I can’t talk to him right now. “I’m going to go to class,” I say. Guidance is next period. It’s the thing I would like to do least in the world. Thirty-five minutes of Positive Thinking and Visualizing the Future. It has finally happened—I’m tired of thinking about the future. And I don’t have my essay. And Ellman is going to scold me again and talk about my grades again and there is the chance that I can actually go to Harvard now if I finish my essay and I cannot, cannot think about that.
“I have to skip,” Laura says.
“Why do you have to skip?” Jolene asks.
“Drama club is dramatic. Wellesley wants me to come talk seriously to everyone about serious things and how we have to take everything seriously because art, or something like that.” She waves her hand around her head like she’s shooing away gnats, and then frowns. “I hope I don’t miss chi breathing this time.”
“I hate chi breathing,” Jolene says, poking through the edamame shells in the bowl in front of her.
“You’re good at it,” I say. I can never bring myself to close my eyes for very long. Jolene’s face is always serene and smooth and open and she is still. The only time I ever see her still.
Jolene shrugs and the chimes that signal the end of the period start to toll and it’s too loud to talk anymore, with scraping chairs and everyone yelling at each other. Jolene vanishes ahead of us instead of walking with me to class, Laura peels off to go out the side door and through the courtyard, and I am left alone to weave through the maze of chairs. I keep my head down. I make it to the main hallway and the first thing I see is Brandon. The second is Morgan, next to Brandon. Morgan turns her head slightly as I pass and smiles at me. It is her wide “I am totally sincere” smile with all the teeth. They’re going to be late to Guidance, I think, instead of worrying about how she’s looking at me, how he might be looking at me.
Speculation is worthless. Maybe my grandmother has told me that.
I take careful, measured steps, because I refuse to run away. I walk until I hit the lobby and then I burst through the front doors and I can feel myself getting ready to keep walking through the parking lot and out and all the way across town and off one of the jetties into the ocean. Walking along the bottom of the sea until jellyfish sting me to death.
I stop at the curb because I don’t retreat from things. And then tiny round Principle Simons is at my elbow, and hooking her arm through mine and saying, “Fresh air is always so good for the soul, isn’t it?” She smells like baby powder and incense and I have to try not to sneeze it out of my nose. She gestures her administrative assistant away. “Excuse us, Quincy,” she says. “I need to take a private moment here.”
“Oh sure,” Quincy says. He’s smiling at me kindly. “Anything for rock-star Ashley, you know that.” He pats my shoulder almost sympathetically and taps briskly back down the hall, shuffling through his stack of folders and never looking back. I watch his blond-and-silver head recede and my heart recedes right out of my chest when I glance back down at Principle Simons.
“Well then,” Simons says. “It’s a beautiful day to talk about beautiful things.”
“It’s too hot,” I say.
She throws back her head and laughs heartily. She’s got huge white teeth and short-cropped silvery hair and as always she’s draped in cloth—a fluttery tunic and a flappy cardigan and wide-legged pants in maroons and reds and blues and golds and purples and greens. She is about as wide as she is short. She looks like a series of soft round bean bag chairs stacked on top of one another, comfortingly yielding.
“Oh, Ashley,” she says. “Your spirit is a wildflower.”
She says things like that a lot. She pats my forearm. Her hand is tiny, and her feet are tiny too.
“Thank you,” I say. There is not much else to say except for that.
She swings me around and steers me back through the entrance doors. She stops in the vestibule, before the doors that open into the hallway, and the main doors close behind us. We’re trapped in a little airlock.
“Your grandmother says your birthday was a smashing success,” Simons says, releasing my arm and clasping her hands in front of her. “You have greeted your seventeenth year of life with great joy and new possibilities!” She smiles up at me, the skin around her eyes crinkling. The sun glints on her tiny round glasses and I blink. I can feel myself edging away from her.
“Yes,” I say. “It was very nice.”
“That warms my heart,” she says. She puts her hand on the spot where I imagine her heart is to indicate its location, and I guess to signal the warming of it.
“Thank you,” I say again, though I think I sound a little panicked this time. I step back slowly, saying, “I have to go to class now! Because my birthday is over, ha ha.” I sound like my father.
“Nothing ever ends, Ashley,” she says very gravely. She swings open the doors to the hallway and waves me ahead of her. “That is the nature of our journey.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I understand you have some big events coming up,” she says. She’s staring up into my eyes, unrelenting eye contact, and I flush all over, painfully too warm. She pats me on the shoulder. “Your life will change, Ashley. Your whole world will open up into a new one. Blossom like a rose or a similar flower that is yet still completely unique.”
She keeps me immobile with the barrage of words that I want to swat out of the air as they come at me and wrap around me and pull tighter and tighter so it feels like my skin doesn’t fit anymore and I can’t possibly get more uncomfortable.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I grit out. And I pray silently, Please don’t tell me she means what I think she does. My cheek twitches, and I curl my hand hard around the strap of my messenger bag.
She glances around us and pats my shoulder again. “Bariatric surgery.” Simons leans back a bit and peers into my face. She looks puzzled. “Or did I misunderstand Clara?”
“Many people do,” I say. I’m proud of my impression of a person who doesn’t desperately want to run shrieking down the hall away from this.
“Bariatric surgery,” Simons says. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity. It’s not too late for you. Think of what you could do.”
“I’m not doing it,” I say.
She doesn’t stop smiling. “That would be such a mistake.”
“It would be a mistake to do it.” I am trying hard not to let my voice get loud.
“You’re being shortsighted, Ashley. It’s my job to point out these things. To point out that it’s for your health.”
“It’s your job to run the school,” I say.
She doesn’t even blink at that. “And part of that,” she says smoothly, “is helping my students understand their life paths.”
“My life path is set,” I say.
“It is,” she says sadly. “But it’s not too late.”
I step back from her overwhelming smell and her teeth and her little silver glasses. She’s silent with her hands still clutched in front of her, her lips pursed. And then she smiles, bright and happy.
“Come see me in my lair!” She winks. “My office, you know. After school. Let my gift of healing be my gift to the very gifted you.”
“I’m fine,” I say because that’s the best I can do. I can’t take another step back. I’m still pinned into place by her eyeballs. The bells rings, finally the bell rings. She twitches slightly at the noise and turns her head and that’s when I flee, fast-stepping it down the hallway.
When I look back, I see of course that Simons hasn’t stopped smiling. She’s lifting her tiny hands in the air and all her rings are glinting as she cries out, “Oh, Tabitha! Tabitha you angel fruit, stop just a moment—” And I keep going, feeling sorry for Tabitha all the way to class.
In Guidance class we’ve already been broken into small groups. A more intimate way to nurture our growth as individuals and respect each other as human beings, we’re told. Morgan made it before me. She’s leaning into Brandon’s shoulder and looking at her phone. He is sitting right next to her but he’s got his hands in his pockets and is looking out the window.
Dr. Ellman does not seem to notice me gently easing the door closed. I think I’ve managed to sneak in, but then she spins and beams all her light at me.
I am tired of being looked at. I’m rubbed raw by it.
“You’re just in time!” Dr. Ellman says. “Find a group. We’re doing groups.” She points at a table. “Here. This one,” she says. She pulls out a chair across from Ace, who tries to high-five as I drop my books on the desk.
“No,” I say.
He shrugs and leans forward and shout-whispers, “You’re a goddess.” He winks, except he closes both eyes. He’s never been able to wink. “Ellman was just about to group with us.” He rolls his eyes over at Louis, sitting next to him, hunched over his page, his pen scratching. “Which would have been lively.”
To me, Ace looks just like he did when we were thirteen. I kept growing and he stayed small. He still wears Converse high-tops and skinny jeans and T-shirts. His hair always looks long, even right after he gets a haircut.
Louis doesn’t look up while Ace is being noisy. His hands are covered in Sharpie lines and swoops. I don’t think I’ve heard him say anything since the sixth grade. He is a math prodigy, happily lost in the calculations that describe the world the rest of us only live in.
I shake my head at Ace. “What are we doing?” I say. “Do not say groups.”
“In a group,” he says, grinning at me, “we are brainstorming our personal essays. We are coming up with five excellent subjects and then a topic sentence for each one.”
I stare at him. “Not again,” I say.
“Seriously,” he says. He points at the board. “It’s there. She wrote it down.”
“I believe you,” I say. “Why are we doing this? We’ve already written our essays. I mean, I haven’t written my essay but everyone has written their essays.”
He stares at me for a second. “You haven’t? I thought for sure you’d have it done by now.” He pauses. “I thought you’d have done it last year.”
“I didn’t do it last year,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “You can just make stuff up, anyway.” He tears a sheet out of his notebook and pushes it over to me. “Okay, write down ‘essay topics’ on the top line.” He points at me with his pen then prints in block letters on his own page, “ESSAY TOPICS ON THE TOP LINE,” and then grins at me when he turns it around to display it. My father has always liked him.
“Hey, this isn’t a big deal,” he says. “Don’t look so worried.” He’s another one not going to college right away, so he can say things like that.
“I know how to make lists,” I say to him.
“This is a snap then, right?” He gives me a thumbs-up.
Dr. Ellman is pacing around the perimeter of the room, her hands behind her back. She stops at the board and clears her throat. “I want you to let yourselves go for this one,” she says. “I’ve always said that this is the only part of your application that matters. That sounds irrational, doesn’t it? I know you’re thinking, ‘Doctor Ellman, stop being so irrational.’ Or maybe, ‘Doctor Ellman, it is so irrational to be coming up with more essays because we’ve already written a draft of our essays.’ But that’s the key here. That was for a grade. This is for your heart.”
“Oh god,” I say, and she pauses and looks around. Ace snickers.
“Your heart,” she continues. “Once you let go of your ego and write from the heart—write what really matters—you’ll find your real essay. Your true self. So many of you are so worried,” she says, conspicuously not looking at me or maybe it just feels that way. “I’m saying—you’ve tried to write what you thought I wanted to see. What you thought your college wanted to see. Now is the time to play. To experiment. To write about what you wish you could write. Let yourself go.” She throws both hands in the air and I can feel myself shaking my head so I stop.
Ace is grinning at me. “Let yourself go,” he whispers.
I pull my sheet of notebook paper closer and concentrate on tearing off the spiral bits on the edge. I underline the word essay. I underline it twice. I write the number 1 on the first line. This is ridiculous.
When I look up, Ace’s page is full. And he’s got another, which he hands to me. He leans forward and says, “So I think we’ve come up with some really good ideas for you. The first five are a little weak, but I think we really started to get somewhere toward the end.”
I look at Louis, who is still drawing and not looking at us.
“He was very helpful,” Ace says, nodding. He hands me the sheet.
IDEA ONE: Valedictorian.
“No,” I say.
“You haven’t even read them all!” He is mock outraged, bouncing around in his seat. He takes it back from me. He starts reading but I interrupt him.
“One, valedictorian. Two, volleyball. Three, doctor. Four, rescue dogs. Five, my dream is to be a valedictorian volleyball-playing dog-rescuing doctor.”
He looks at the page. “Well, not in that order.”
Dr. Ellman claps her hands. “Fresh air,” she says. “Switch seats with the person behind you.”
It is hard to make myself stand up and turn around, but Brandon has already switched seats with the new girl. Morgan’s still sitting there with her cheek resting on her hand, smiling up at me. “I had the best idea for you,” she says. Next to her Jessica is doodling flowers and hearts and stars and kittens.
I frown at Morgan. “I’m sure you think so,” I say. When I pull out the chair she reaches over and grabs my sheet of paper, snatching it out from between my fingers. I stop and hold out my hand.
“That’s mine,” I say pleasantly.
“We’re swapping, Ashley,” she says and pushes her laptop over to me. “I’m very helpful.”
Jessica looks up and tucks a blond curl behind her ear. “Oh, she really is! Brandon is helpful too.”
Morgan rolls her eyes at the same time I do and I spin her laptop around before we start giggling like schoolgirls and exchanging BFF bracelets. “Yes, super helpful I’m sure,” I say. On Morgan’s laptop screen, in curly font, she’s telling the academic committee at NYU exactly what they want to hear. She’s an athlete and so she understands drive and commitment. She believes in focus. She is a winner. She’s got more than five topic sentences that all say the same thing. I say, “You’ve got more than five topic sentences.”
She looks up from my sheet. “I’ve got a lot to offer,” she says. “I don’t need weight-loss surgery just to be normal. Which reminds me!” She slides the paper back. She’s added number six to my list, and it’s just that. She helpfully reads it out loud. “‘Six. Getting weight-loss surgery as an inspiration to fat and poor people everywhere.’”
It feels like a camera flash has gone off in my face—violent, bright, painful. I see nothing but red and black for the longest moment and I can’t hear Morgan’s drawling voice and I can’t make my mouth move or my lungs suck in air but I clench my teeth and I shake my head. My voice comes out rough and low. “How do you manage to be so offensive on so many levels in just one sentence?”
Morgan says, “The truth isn’t offensive. It’s just true.”
I can feel my teeth baring in a shark smile just like hers. “So did you hear a rumor and decide it was true, Morgan? Or are you just making shit up?”
“I have my sources,” she says stubbornly.
Sources. I glance one table behind ours. Brandon.
I stand up and hold out my hand to her. She flicks my paper back across the table, but I can’t catch it before it flutters to the floor and slides. Ellman stops it with her foot and picks it up.
“Would you look at mine too?” Jessica says to Morgan.
“That’s mine,” I say to Ellman, shuffling between the tables, my hand out. “It’s not ready to be looked at. I’d prefer if you didn’t look at it.” But she’s already glancing down the list, and then back up at me with her eyebrows raised.
“Is it true?” Ellman says.
“No,” I say.
“Because it could be powerful.”
“It’s not true,” I say.
“It is a visceral subject, fraught with a lot of fear and pain and anxiety,” Ellman continues. With every word she waves her hand, fear, and pain, and anxiety, like she’s conjuring it all out of the air.
“That’s not what I’m writing about.”
She smiles and pats my arm. “Let’s talk about it after class,” she says, and hands the paper back to me.
Morgan looks like she’s actually helping Jessica with her topics but I can’t go sit back down with them. I fold my paper in half, creasing it hard with my fingernails and I have to find another place to sit but then I see door swing open and Jolene’s face peering through the crack. I drop the paper on top of my bag and hurry over. She’s leaning against the wall when I open the door. I let it fall shut hard behind me.
“Can you drive me home?” she says, straightening up. “Please drive me home. I need to go.” She starts down the corridor ahead of me because she knows what I am going to say. I’ve left my bag behind but Dr. Ellman will hang on to it, or Ace will grab it. I imagine someone opening up that list of essay topics and I stop.
“Jolene,” I say. “Jolene, I need to get my bag.”
She spins. Her face does not look right. Her face does not look anything like her. “Your bag?” she says. “Sure, yes, please do get your bag. I’ll walk home. I didn’t mean to bother you in the middle of chatting with Morgan.”
She turns again and is walking away from me.
I fly inside. When I run back out of the classroom with my bag under my arm, she’s gone.