THE ROUND TABLES IN THE LUNCHROOM HAD SPACE FOR FIVE chairs—six, if you crammed, but most tables didn’t bother to cram. Only the tables with the most popular kids were crowded.
We only ever used four. We formed a perfect square, somehow meeting at the corners.
Deedee and Wolf met all the way back in elementary school—spending their recesses together, avoiding pickup kickball games and hiding behind the slides from bigger kids, trading Pokemon cards and splitting Oreos—but middle school jammed us together. Together we knew a little bit about just about everything. Bench had kissed a girl not on a dare. Deedee had visited Paris and India and had pictures of himself grinning in front of the Arc de Triomphe and the Taj Mahal. Wolf had hiked down into the Grand Canyon—though he said all he remembered was his parents arguing about who didn’t bring enough water. He’d also been stung by a jellyfish. I’d been to Disney World and already had my wisdom teeth pulled. Together we had already broken most major bones—legs, arms, fingers, toes, collar, ribs.
We filled in each other’s gaps. We sometimes completed each other’s sentences, but usually with burps and other gross sounds just to annoy each other. We spent most of our time together hanging out after school, playing video games, watching ridiculous videos, or seeing how many Sour Patch Kids Wolf could chew at once without drooling. Sometimes we’d grab a ball and play H-O-R-S-E in Bench’s driveway (he always won), or take our bikes and ride down to Mr. Twisty’s, our favorite soft-serve ice-cream place, where you could mix in whatever candy you wanted and where half of my summer allowance went. But most of the time, if we weren’t battling hordes of Deedee’s demonspawn, we just hung out and talked.
Not like, talked talked. Nothing serious. Just regular talk. About stuff. YouTube videos and homework and other kids. The lamest superpowers in the world (male Wondertwin’s bucket of water trick, hands down) and how to best make weapons out of rubber bands and paper clips. If you were having a thoroughly craptastic day, you’d be allowed to vent using all kinds of words that would never get back to your parents. But I wouldn’t say we really talked about feelings or whatever. It was okay to have feelings, just so long as you kept them mostly to yourself, which was fine by me.
Sometimes we talked about girls, but not often. More like how you talk about presidents and movie stars, with a kind of guarded detachment, careful never to admit too much. Not that we didn’t know any—girls, that is. Bench especially had a few he made a point of saying hi to in the halls and Deedee had several he admired from afar. Just that as far as our crew went, it was always just us boys. And there was kind of this unspoken promise that it would stay that way. Just us. Forever.
I know what I’m doing. I’m trying to justify what happened. How I acted. How we all acted, but me especially. You’re not going to buy it, though. Because it wasn’t just that Rose Holland was a girl, and that’s no excuse anyways.
It’s that she was who she was. And we were who we were.
And there had always, ever, only been four.
I didn’t see Rose in either of my next two classes. I heard her name whispered once or twice. I figured it was none of my business so I tried not to listen.
Right before heading to the cafeteria for lunch, I stopped by my locker to find another note from Deedee stuck to the door. The fourth one that morning, counting the one in English. All, presumably, from the same yellow pad. This one just said Breadsticks! Underneath was a smiley face, just in case the exclamation point didn’t give it away. Deedee only got school lunch on breadsticks day. He still showed up with his Lord of the Rings lunchbox, but he ignored the sandwich that was packed inside. He was a garlic fiend, and the butter the lunch ladies slathered those sticks in could slay a coven of vampires.
I stuck the note to Deedee’s forehead five minutes later as Bench and I sat down at our table. “If you leave me any more of these, I’m going to start demanding that you take my calls and fetch me coffee,” I said.
“He stuck one to my locker too,” Bench said.
Wolf held up six fingers.
“He wrote you six notes?”
“One of them just had a drawing of a whale on it,” Wolf said.
“It was an airplane. I was bored in math. Excuse me for sharing.” Deedee peeled the sticky note from his forehead. “I would text you, but . . . you know . . .” He held up empty, phoneless hands. Day Two of the Great Confiscation had gone only slightly better than Day One, with only one student—Becka Peachman—practicing a form of nonviolent protest and going limp in the hallway, having to be dragged to first period by her armpits. In his phone’s absence, Deedee was making do with what he had. “They make us buy four-packs of those stupid things at the start of every year and we don’t need them for any of our classes, so I figured why not put them to good use?”
“I think we need to define what qualifies as ‘good use,’” I said.
“And teach you how to draw,” Wolf added.
Bench elbowed me and I followed his eyes to the end of the lunch line. Rose Holland was standing there, tray in hand, surveying the landscape again. I felt bad for her. I’d been in that same spot. I watched as she approached the closest table of girls, then noticed Beth Strands from English—the one who’d scooted her chair away—look up. She must have had a nasty look on her face, because Rose immediately steered around and wandered toward the corner. That was Beth’s superpower—she could wither you with a glance. The Witherer. Some people were just like that. There were quite a few empty tables, though. Rose would find a place to sit. I turned back to Deedee, who was telling a story about a kid in band who got caught with his phone. He panicked when the teacher came in and tried to hide it in his tuba.
“Sounds like something you would do,” I teased.
Deedee pretended to be offended. “I play the trumpet, remember? A phone wouldn’t fit.” Deedee played in the school band mostly because his parents insisted on it. Wolf refused to play in the school band on the grounds that they sucked—though he would never tell Deedee that. Honestly, they sounded like a herd of dying giraffes being chased by a pack of howler monkeys.
Deedee wadded up his sticky note (Breadsticks!) and flicked it across the table. He was aiming for me. Instead it landed in my applesauce cup.
“Two points,” Wolf said.
“Actually, the other side of the table is three-point territory,” Bench corrected.
“It was a lucky shot,” I said, picking the dripping wadded yellow ball from the cup and flicking it back. This is what lunchtime usually looked like for us. Building towers out of milk cartons. Stuffing vegi-straws up our noses. Flicking things at each other. “You couldn’t do it again in a million tries,” I dared. It was a safe bet. Deedee made Bench look like Cam Newton most days.
“Fine. But if I do, I get your last breadstick,” he said, pointing at my tray. I agreed. Most of the time I ended up giving him one anyway.
Deedee lined up the wadded ball of paper, closed one eye, and gave it another flick. This time it sailed high and wide, up over my shoulder. I heard it hit something with a little wet slap.
“You got me.”
Deedee’s face went ash white, which was kind of remarkable, given his Indian heritage. I jerked around to see Rose Holland standing beside our table, looming over us, her tray sporting only a package of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers and a chocolate milk. There was a splotch of applesauce on her black sweater the size of a quarter, like a gunshot, just below her shoulder.
“Oh. Oh man. I am so, so sorry,” Deedee blathered, suddenly bug-eyed, trying to shrink behind his lunch box, probably afraid of that carton of milk being smashed over his head, which is exactly what somebody like Jason Baker or Cameron Cole would do. But Rose just looked at her sweater and shrugged, then rubbed the spot of sauce in with her thumb.
“Got it at a garage sale,” she said. “It’s seen worse.”
She was standing between me and Wolf and I could see now that the sweater was frayed at the bottom, her jeans worn at the knees, the laces of her boots equally ragged at the ends. She was even more imposing up close. Rose looked at the only empty chair at our table then back at her tray.
I flicked my eyes around the room, trying not to be obvious. There were still plenty of empty seats. In fact there was an empty table three down from us. That’s probably were she had been going when she got hit. Deedee and his terrible aim.
“You’re in my English class,” she said, looking at me first, holding her tray close. “Three of you, anyways. And you and I have history together.” She glanced at Bench. “It’s J.J., right?”
Bench nodded, lips tight. It was the face he used whenever other people’s parents tried to talk to him, a half smile barely hiding its phoniness. He looked over his shoulder at a cluster of tables full of other eighth graders twittering away. Deedee watched the pseudo-nacho-cheese congeal in his plastic cup. I looked at the empty chair. Don’t say anything, I thought to myself. That’s how it worked. Don’t say anything one way or another and you don’t have to take responsibility, one way or the other, and everything goes on like normal. She will just keep walking.
Wolf thought differently, though. He gestured to the empty chair.
“Wanna sit with us?”
Deedee coughed. Or choked. I couldn’t tell which. I suddenly became aware of all the sounds in the lunchroom. The cling-clang from the kitchen. The scrape of chairs along the floor. The constant buzzing of a hundred voices talking at once. I held my breath, waiting for the new girl to realize that Wolf was just being polite—because that’s the kind of person he is—and to do the equally polite thing and decline the offer. A casual No thanks, some other time maybe.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Rose said.
She set down her tray and pulled out the chair.
Suddenly we weren’t square anymore.
The strangeness of it hit me. Like how sometimes you’re on the bus taking the same exact route that you’ve taken a hundred times before, with every coffee shop and neighborhood sign memorized, but you look up and you are certain that the bus has taken a wrong turn because everything seems unfamiliar, and it takes you a moment to get your bearings. Bench and I looked at each other. For two years we’d sat at the same table together. Never once had a girl sat down next to us. But Rose Holland didn’t seem to care. She settled into her seat and proceeded to unwrap her crackers, the crinkle of the package much louder than it should have been. I tried to read Wolf’s face, to see if he thought he’d miscalculated, if his plan to do the right thing had backfired, but he didn’t give anything away, just went back to eating his lunch, maybe even smiling a little.
Deedee, on the other hand, couldn’t stop staring.
“Um . . . you know it’s breadstick day?” he mumbled after ten seconds of awkward silence, as if confirming that there was something abnormal about a girl who didn’t like garlic-butter-soaked lumps of bread stretched to look like some grandmother’s gnarly fingers.
“I’m on a strict diet,” Rose Holland explained. She had a raspy sort of voice. It seemed to fit her.
“Of peanut butter crackers?” Deedee asked.
“Of foods that stick to the roof of your mouth,” she replied, stuffing in the first of the crackers. She chewed in slow motion, it seemed, as if she were afraid of making too much noise, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Maybe she was nervous too. We all watched silently, like a girl eating crackers was the most fascinating thing we’d ever seen. Finally Rose cleared her throat and leaned across the table, the package in her hand.
“If you want one, all you have to do is ask.” She thrust the crackers at each of us in turn.
I blushed and looked down. Bench looked away as well, taking an interest in conversations at other tables that he couldn’t even hear. Deedee fiddled with his milk carton. Only Wolf managed to find the words “No thanks.” But even he could sense it. I could tell. The disruption to the natural order of the universe. After another twenty seconds of awkward-as-walking-in-on-your-dad-shaving-naked-in-the-bathroom quiet, Rose set her crackers down, leaned back in her chair, and let out a sigh.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m guessing you’re all new to this ‘girl at the table’ thing. How about this: I promise that I won’t bite or give you cooties or whatever else it is that you all are flipping out over. I won’t talk about my hair or blather on and on about celebrity heartthrobs or all the girls I hate, because, frankly, I’ve only been here for three hours, which isn’t quite enough time to hate anybody yet. I won’t discuss brands of moisturizers or lip gloss or use the word ‘crush’ in any kind of nondestructive capacity. And in return, you can stop looking at me like I’m some deranged lunatic. How does that sound?”
Rose Holland smiled and I noticed the freckles on her nose, so light and small, not like the constellations on Wolf’s cheeks. Her eyes really were kind of pretty. Not that I would ever say such a thing out loud. To anyone. Especially not her.
Surprisingly, Deedee was the first to speak up.
“We don’t really talk to girls,” he admitted. “I mean, we can talk to them. Just not . . . you know . . . about them to them . . . not that we do . . . talk to them. Not usually . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Don’t listen to Deedee,” Wolf said. “He lives in his own little fantasy world. We are perfectly capable of talking to girls.”
Then he proceeded to not say anything else.
I fiddled with my last breadstick.
“It’s really not that hard,” Rose said. “We’re just like you, only smarter.”
It was a joke. At least I was pretty sure it was a joke. But I was too nervous to laugh.
“You know, just talk about whatever you normally talk about. Stuff you’re interested in. Like, what do you do? What’s your thing?” She looked at me when she said it.
Our thing? Our thing was sitting here by ourselves. Being goofy and not self-conscious. Our thing was not having anyone ask us what our thing was, because, frankly, nobody else cared what our thing was, so we could do it, our thing—whatever it was—without worrying about it. “Um . . . ,” I said.
“Er . . . ,” Deedee added.
“Well,” Wolf said finally, “Bench here plays, like, fifty-seven different sports.”
“Three,” Bench said curtly, finally snapping back to attention.
“And he doesn’t really play them so much as encourage others to play them,” I added, which earned me the sharpest sideways glance from Bench.
“So you’re a cheerleader?” Rose prodded.
“He’s a looking-at athlete,” Deedee said.
Bench started ripping off little pieces of breadstick, squeezing the grease between his fingers then dropping the mangled nubs to his tray.
“It’s cool,” Rose said. “I happen to like male cheerleaders.”
This seemed to embarrass Bench even more. He pointed his finger across the table. “Deedee here thinks he’s the lord of the ring.”
Deedee wrapped his arms around his lunch box, drawing it close to his chest.
Rose’s eyebrows shot up. “You like Tolkien?” she asked.
“Yeah?” Deedee ventured. “I mean, kind of but not really . . . all that much . . . maybe?”
I laughed, only because I knew he had a shelf full of Lord of the Rings action figures and a replica of Sting hanging above his bed. But no—not all that much. Rose leaned closer to him. “Who’s your favorite character?”
Deedee looked down at his lunch box, at the picture on the lid. “Aragorn, probably. You know. If I had one. If I was, like, really into it. Which I’m not . . . really . . . into it.”
He also had a giant framed map of Middle Earth on his wall.
Rose nodded. “Yeah, Aragorn’s cool. Reluctant, brooding king and all that. But personally, I like Gollum.”
“Wait . . . the weird slimy guy who eats fish guts?” Bench dropped what was left of his breadstick, looking disgusted.
Rose shrugged. “What can I say? I have a soft spot for the tortured and misunderstood.” She smiled at Bench—a genuine smile, not a sarcastic one. He didn’t return it. “And what about you two?” She looked back and forth from Wolf to me.
“I like short hairy men,” I said. “So it’s Gimli for me all the way.”
Rose laughed, coughing cracker crumbs across the back of her hand. It was the first time I’d made a girl laugh that I could remember. It felt weird. “I meant what are you interested in. J.J. here plays sports. . . .”
“It’s Bench,” Bench said irritably.
“Right. Sorry. And . . . Deedee, is it?” Deedee nodded. “He’s all about the swords and sorcery. So what about you? What’s your deal?”
Wolf spoke before I could beat him to it. “Frosty here is a poet.”
“I’m not a poet,” I insisted. “I wrote one poem. Wolf here is an actual piano prodigy. He’s won, like, a million competitions.”
“Only eleven,” Wolf corrected.
I looked at him, impressed. I didn’t know it was that many. Seems like something I should have known, though.
“Frosty . . . like the snowman?” Rose asked, eyeing me.
“It’s just Frost,” Bench corrected again.
“Frosty’s better,” she said. She stared at me as if she expected me to agree with her. Or was challenging me not to. I felt warm all over, but uncomfortably so. For a moment I was afraid she could read my mind.
Bench pushed his tray toward the middle of the table and leaned over on his elbows. I could tell he was irritated. “What about you? What do you do? What’s your thing?”
Rose didn’t flinch. “What do you think I do?” she shot back.
We all glanced around the table.
“Softball?” I said with a shrug. It was either that or wrestling.
“Lacrosse?” Deedee guessed. Rose shook her head at each of us.
Wolf snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. Professional turkey wrangling.”
Rose snapped her thick fingers right back at him. “So close. It’s wombats, actually. And I don’t wrangle them. I groom them for professional wombat breeding competitions.”
“Really?” Deedee asked, eyes wide. It took him a moment. It sometimes does with him. “Oh.”
“No, seriously. You have to play some sport,” Bench insisted. “Or work out or something. I mean . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
I held my breath, waiting for Rose to take offense. To grab her tray and excuse herself, go sit down at one of the empty tables, but she shrugged it off.
“Nope. No sports. Though now that you mention it, I’ve recently considered taking up ballet.”
Silence.
Were we supposed to laugh? You couldn’t tell by her sudden stone-faced expression, taking each of us in, maybe even daring us to. I tried to imagine her on the stage, doing a pirouette or a pas de bourrée, but instead I got an image of her lifting Deedee up and twirling him above her head, then dropping him across her knee, snapping him in two WWE style.
“I’m totally kidding,” Rose said at last, breaking the silence. “Seriously? I mean, could you even imagine me in a tutu?”
Wolf shrugged. Deedee giggled nervously. I shook my head—a little too emphatically, maybe—then looked at the clock on the wall and calculated how many more minutes until the bell rang.
“Ballet,” Bench snorted.
Rose Holland polished off another cracker in one bite and brushed the orange crumbs from her sweater. “To each their own,” she said.
And for probably the third time since she sat down I became conscious of all the other students in the cafeteria who seemed to be looking our way, almost certainly getting the wrong idea.
After lunch Rose said she’d see us around. Her tone was casual, like she hadn’t just contributed to twenty of the most uncomfortable middle school lunch minutes in human history. Or more like she knew she had and she just expected us to get over it.
“That girl is funny,” Wolf said after she’d left.
“Yeah,” Deedee agreed, though he didn’t seem too sure. I looked at Bench.
“She’s different,” he said.
I couldn’t begin to get a handle on what all he meant by that. It was impossible to disagree with, though. There was something extraordinary about Rose Holland. I couldn’t put my finger on it yet, but Deedee gave it a shot.
“I mean, who doesn’t like breadsticks?” he wondered out loud.
“To each their own,” Wolf echoed. I wasn’t quite sure what he was thinking either.
“Not really into it?” Bench said, eyeing Deedee. He was probably picturing that map of Middle Earth too.
Deedee reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thin stack of sticky notes. He quickly sketched out a stick figure wearing a football helmet and holding a set of pom-poms and handed it to Bench. On the top he’d written Go Team!!! Bench promptly crumpled it up and stuffed it down the back of Deedee’s shirt, then threatened to find some real pom-poms and stuff them somewhere else. They tussled a little, until Bench got Deedee in a headlock and noogied him into submission.
They were just horsing around, I knew, same as always, but part of me wondered if it stung a bit, us teasing Bench in front of her. For a moment I considered the possibility that maybe he liked her—this new girl—and that’s why he’d gotten embarrassed.
I’d find out soon enough.