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Samantha
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BACON!
Like some sort of zombie vampire in a bad teen novel, she’d been waking up craving meat. Refusing to admit it to her family or even Jamie, Samantha missed the fat, the salt, and, well, the blood. For breakfast she rammed down a granola bar slathered with an extra coating of organic peanut butter in hopes the oil and protein would stifle her rabid taste for murdered creatures. Lunch was easy, however, the grey meatloaf having no such kryptonite effect. She could eat mashed potatoes until they were scloiching out her ears.
That afternoon, Samantha skipped over to Jamie. The school buses were rolling in to pick up the kids and take them home for holiday break.
“Happy-happy. Joy-joy.”
“Tell me about it.” Jamie fist-bumped her. “No physics for two weeks. Rah.”
Her nose was pink and running from the cold, but other than that she looked good in her puffy blue parka and purple jeans. Since the braces had come off, it seemed to Samantha like all Jamie’d had to do was grow out her honey-blonde hair, poke it behind her ears and she looked like the average girl, albeit on the tall side. And being an average girl was more than enough for now.
Jamie had once been Samantha’s boyfriend James in grade school (the one Brace’s friend Maddox called Snowplow because before the braces his two front teeth poked forward and formed a perfect wedge) the boy who liked to come over and play dress up with all her princess gowns. When the two began their sophomore year as best girl friends, they expected their classmates to freak.
But something had happened in WBHS at some point. Maybe it was a punk or a trench coat that had gone before and who had inspired the guidance counselor, the principal, the teachers to take gender-questioning Jamie under their wing. And now Samantha can’t remember what Jamie was like as that gawky, shorthaired, wedge-toothed guy in cargo pants, even though Jamie still uses the boys’ restroom to keep the peace with some of the kids whose parents are not so pleased, even though she grows taller every month, even though her voice is cracking.
“Hey, I met the new choir director last night,” Samantha said. “You’ll never guess—”
“Lucy Veebee from Cake for Horses. I heard.”
“Oh. Well, isn’t it awesome?”
Lucy Veebee wasn’t exactly a star in a grand sense, more like a red dwarf or maybe a large planet like Saturn. Okay, maybe a comet. Still, she was an icon to anyone who dug the riot grrrl movement of the nineties and she’d run with the supermassive stars who’d gone full-on supernova like Courtney Love and Gwen Stefani. Next season was going to be a blast. Granted, Ms. Van Buren had become a born-again of the Grandma Larson variety. But no one was perfect. Besides, no one could be as hard core as Grandma. And Grandma was still a good person deep down.
“I told her about you. And how your voice hasn’t changed yet. She didn’t even blink.”
“You did what?”
“Sorry. Guess I was a little starstruck and babbling at that point. But listen, she said that castrato had sung soprano and falsetto for centuries and she would find a place for you this spring if you wanted. Course I told her that you wouldn’t set foot in a church but it was a nice offer, don’t you think?”
“Yeh. I guess so.” Jamie glanced over Samantha’s shoulder and her eyes widened.
Zev Cohen walked up to them, nodding at Jamie and smiling at Samantha. He opened with the ever-popular, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Samantha replied. The way his curly brown hair fell over his big chunky glasses made her feel all squirrelly inside. Maybe she’d eaten too many carbs.
“You guys want a ride home?” he asked, then under his breath. “I mean girls. Gals. Ladies. Oh, God.”
Jamie chuckled.
“Sure,” Samantha said and glared a plea at Jamie.
“Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”
Jamie climbed in the back of the old Ford sedan and Samantha got in the front.
This. Is. Huge. Samantha could feel the hugeness of the moment gathering in her belly. Brace’s other puckhead friend Maddox wouldn’t even talk to Samantha when she was around Jamie. Brace barely did either. But Zev talked to them both the whole ride. Asking stuff about their classes and laughing at the principal’s lame send-off over the intercom.
At the usual lift bridge backup, Zev turned to Samantha. “You wanna go out over break? See a movie or something?” Straight to it, a man of action. “Jamie you could come too.”
“Oh, thanks, I’ll be busy.” Jamie smirked at Samantha.
“I’ll need to ask my parents, but, yeah, that sounds fun.” Samantha turned away from them to grin cross-eyed out the window. Bacon!