Black. White. Black. White. White.
Will watched with steely determination as the soccer ball careened in a near-graceful arc toward his head.
“Get it!” Nathaniel shouted from behind him. “Head the ball!”
As if in slow motion, Will aimed his head at the ball, thinking about how awesome he was going to be at soccer tryouts in the fall.
Then an image of Luella popped into his head, and instead of heading the ball with grace and athleticism, it smacked Will in the side of his head and he went down.
“Oh my god.” Nathaniel came running over. “Dude. I’m so sorry. I thought you saw that! Are you okay?”
“Ow,” Will mumbled.
“You have to stay focused, always watch the ball,” Nathaniel said, kicking the ball up and bouncing it from knee to knee.
Will sat up and rubbed his head.
“You’re really good. Remind me again why you’re not going to try out with me?”
Nathaniel grinned. “No time. I’m creating my own independent study on geophysics. Plus, I had to beg and do an extra credit research paper to get into advanced earth science. I’m going to be superbusy.” He dropped the ball and rested his foot on it. “Besides, I have a fundamental skepticism of the whole team mentality. I don’t believe in organized religion or sports.”
“Right. I bet that makes Bubbe Spencer thrilled.”
Nathaniel’s grandma was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her dream in life was for Nathaniel to marry a nice Jewish girl and have Jewish babies and one day start an all-Jewish medical practice. Every time he went over for family dinners, Will had to watch Nathaniel explain to his Bubbe that just because he was into science, didn’t mean he wanted to be that kind of doctor. He also wanted to be able to marry whoever he wanted. That last part always made Will laugh, because the thought of any girl getting over Nathaniel’s awkwardness enough to marry him was absurd.
“Look, I’ll drop it if you tell me to, but are you sure you want to be part of this whole team thing? Some of those guys on their own are nice and stuff, but when you get them all together in a pack, it’s like—”
“A well-oiled machine?”
“I was going to say a bunch of hyenas, but okay. I just don’t get why this is so important to you.”
“One day, when you want to win a girl, Nathaniel, you’ll understand.” Will said this sagely, like someone who had won a lot of girls, when in fact he had won no girls and Nathaniel knew it.
Nathaniel threw the ball at him, and Will caught it with both hands.
“You sound like a giant douchebag,” Nathaniel said.
“‘Douchebags are hygienic products; I take that as a compliment. Thank you.’” He quoted Wet Hot American Summer and stuck his tongue out.
“Who is this girl you’re trying to impress, anyway?”
“Anyone. Any girl, Nathaniel. I’m just tired of people looking at me, and my weight being the first thing they see.” That was a lie. There was a girl, one girl, but Will wasn’t ready to talk about her yet.
“No one sees that first but you.”
Will threw the soccer ball back at Nathaniel, who kneed it gracefully and let it rest in the grass. “We’ve been indoor kids our whole lives. We’re starting high school now! We have the chance to be completely different! Look. I’m a different person than I was in June. And I don’t want to go back to the way things were. I have to keep moving forward.”
“Okay.”
“Like a shark cutting tirelessly through the dark waters of the ocean.”
“I get it.”
Will clapped a hand on Nathaniel’s back. “It comes down to this. High school will be different than middle school. Do you want to go through the next four years being defined by the last four?”
“I guess not,” Nathaniel said.
“I just want to be happy,” said Will. “Can you let me do something I think will make me happy?”
Nathaniel kicked up the ball and headed it toward Will.
“As long as we’ll still be friends when you’re a hotshot soccer star,” he said.
Will watched the ball sail over his head and roll through the grass a few feet away. Nathaniel groaned.
“I was distracted!” Will said. And he was. Because standing at the edge of the field, watching them and laughing, was Luella.
* * *
This was how the whole thing with Luella had started.
It was back at the beginning of the summer. The first day of his summer math enrichment program, which met on the Hunter College campus. Luella was the last person he had expected to see in the cafeteria. It looked like she had managed to make the cereal dispenser explode, and now she was wading in an ankle-deep sea of Rice Krispies.
“Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap,” Luella muttered as she dropped quickly to the floor, trying to scoop as many handfuls of the tiny rice puffs as she could into her empty standard-issue, cafeteria-size bowl.
Will didn’t know anyone else quite like Luella. She was a force of nature. Most girls were just confusing and scary and kind of foreign. They eyed him up and down, always making sure to linger on his extra chub and his glasses. They made him nervous.
But, man, not Luella, with her bangs and skinny elbows and chipped nail polish flailing all over the place. She was really something else. She had black hair and olive skin and green eyes and looked like a cat, like the kind of cat who might squirm around a bit but who’d snuggle up to you eventually, and not the kind that might maul you to death when you stopped paying attention (like Melissa Sissler, who had been in his class since second grade and who was definitely the secret-mauling type). Any other girl, and he wouldn’t have cared so much if she embarrassed herself in the cafeteria. Besides, girls didn’t ever really embarrass themselves anyway, right? They were, like, impervious to that kind of thing. They were all just so shiny and happy and giggly that they never seemed to care.
“Hey, Luella,” he said, helping her up. “Are you okay? Have you drowned in the sea of Rice Krispies?”
“Nah, I’m wearing floaties.” She looked up at him and cracked a sly smile, full of braces. She suddenly reminded Will of one of those little elves on the Rice Krispies box.
Will grinned. “I should call you Keebler from now on.”
They were standing up now, and Will had already taken a clean bowl from the stack and traded it for the one with the floor-cereal. The line behind them was backing up.
“So,” Will said. “What are you doing here? You’re not doing nerd camp too, are you?”
“Nerd camp?” Luella looked dubious.
“Uh, yeah. Isn’t that why you’re here . . . ?”
“Oh, no,” Luella said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I’m taking acting classes this summer, and we use the Hunter theater.” She grinned. “Nerd camp?”
“It’s a summer math enrichment course,” Will mumbled.
“Well, listen, I’m sure you have all kinds of exciting numbers to get back to.” She grabbed an apple, tossed it coolly in the air, and then dropped it.
“You meant to do that?” said Will. “Is juggling part of your summer curriculum?”
“Shut up, math geek.”
“See ya, Keebler.”
“Yeah, see ya never.” Luella picked up the apple, rubbed it on her shirt, and skipped off toward a group of kids wearing lots of black. “Also, wrong elves!” she called over her shoulder. “Those are the cookie elves! You mean Snap, Crackle, Pop.”
“Too hard to say,” Will called without missing a beat. “You’re Keebler—deal with it.”
After that, they hung out all the time. It was weird; usually they hung out in a group of the four of them—Will, Luella, Tiny, and Nathaniel—but this was the first time Will could remember when he and Luella had actually hung out alone.
One afternoon in particular, they had been standing outside the Hunter College theater. The parts had just been announced for Luella’s theater program’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
“Yeeeeeeeeees!” she cried, pumping her fist in the air. “Maggie the Cat! Maggie the Cat!”
“Is this a good thing?” Will asked, dubious. “Are we happy about this? The cat sounds like a small part.”
“The cat,” Luella said breathlessly, “is the best”—breath—“part”—wheeze—“in”—cough—“the modern. Literature. Canon.”
“Wow.”
“Arguably.”
“And you don’t even have to memorize any lines. You just get to meow.”
Luella smacked him on the arm. “Shut up. It’s not a real cat.” She jumped up and down and squealed. “I am happy!”
“Uh,” said Will. “I bow out at squealing.” He paused. “What are you doing?”
Luella’s body was twitching and convulsing in the most ridiculous way. She dipped her hips to the right and then to the left, rotating her fists in a counterclockwise direction. The bottom half of her legs seemed disconnected from the top half.
“What,” Will said as they began walking outside, “was that?”
“What?” Luella said.
“That thing you just did?”
“My happy dance?”
“Was that that thing with your hips and your knees?”
“My happy dance,” Luella confirmed.
“Your what now?”
“Come on—don’t you have one?” They turned a corner and walked out the door and into the daylight. Luella smiled wide, her braces glittering like small diamonds in the sunlight.
“Uh, no.”
“That’s so depressing. You have to have one! What do you do when you’re happy?”
“Uh,” Will said. “I smile? I laugh?”
“No, no, but what do you do when you’re, like, so happy you’re going to burst?”
“Umm . . .”
“I mean, so happy that all your happiness just has nowhere else to go?”
Will thought for a minute, chewing absently on the inside of his cheek.
“Yeah, I don’t really get that way so much.”
Luella flipped her hair over her shoulder. “What? You seem happy sometimes.”
Will felt himself turning red. “Well, now, I guess. I mean, when we hang out.”
She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to look at him. He took an involuntary step back. She cocked her head and looked him square in the eye. She looked like she was thinking really hard. Will felt like she was maybe trying to guess how many folds were in his temporal lobe.
He suddenly felt self-conscious. He shouldn’t have said anything.
“We’re really going to have to work on this,” Luella said finally.
They flung themselves down on a shady patch of grass in the park. Luella stared at him.
“Now?” Will asked.
“Oh sorry, does now not work for you? Are you too busy whining about how depressed you are, like you’re the star of some black-and-white French movie, to have time for trivial things like, I don’t know, self-expression?”
“Fine, I—”
“Because I can take out my iCalendar and figure out a time that works for both of us. You know, maybe next Tuesday . . .”
“Okay, okay, shut up. Now is fine.”
They got to work. Luella was a demanding coach.
“What’s up with your arms there?” Luella was asking. “It doesn’t look like you’re happy; it looks like you broke your shoulder.”
It was lunchtime, and while the rest of the kids in their respective programs were crowded around tables in the cafeteria, Will and Luella had fallen into the habit of bringing their lunch to the park. Secretly, Will was relieved to have a friend like Luella. He was glad to not have to sit with the guys in his program every day, listening to more jokes about his “wiggle in the middle.” They thought it was hilarious. They had even made up this absurd dance about it. At first it was kind of funny, and Will joined in, humoring them, doing the dance with his arms up over his head just so he didn’t have to ask them to stop. But soon the dance got old. It made him feel like he should lose weight or something. It was a relief to hang out with Luella, who didn’t seem to notice. Or care.
“You said to get height,” he said.
“Yeah, height as in the soaring heights of bliss, not popping your shoulder out of its socket.” She made a sucking noise with her mouth. “It was a metaphor.”
“If I popped my shoulder out of its socket, it’d be dislocated, not broken,” Will shot back. “Plus, you have chocolate pudding stuck in your braces.”
Luella made the sucking noise again. “Shut up.”
“That doesn’t sound like the attitude of someone who does happy dances on the reg.”
“Look, I can’t help it if my braces are like a magnetic strip for food and other things.”
“Other things?” Will sat down, his legs splayed in the grass.
“Yeah, like toothpaste and stuff.”
Luella sat down too.
“Toothpaste is a food.” The corners of Will’s mouth were telling themselves to behave, not to curve up too much.
“Uh, no. Do you eat toothpaste?”
“Well, no,” Will started, “but—”
“Do you rely on it for vital nutrients?”
“I guess not, but—”
“Then it’s not a food,” Luella said, waving her hand dismissively.
A bird walked between them, beat its wings, and then flew a few feet away to where the remains of a cookie lay, unsuspecting. They looked at each other and grinned. Then stopped very suddenly, as if embarrassed that they both thought to do that at the exact same time.
“I gotta get back,” Will said, standing up, his stomach sinking for reasons that were beyond him. “I have important numbers to crunch.”
“Yeah, hop to it, math nerd!”
“Oh, I will, drama geek.”
“Get your ass in shape, Kingfield,” she said, standing up and brushing off her jeans. “You have to just let go, you know? Forget what other people think and just allow yourself to look a little dumb.” She sucked on her braces again, and this time when she smiled at him, all the chocolate pudding had vanished. “You’re too uptight, is what your problem is,” she said. “You think too much.”
“And you’re a lunatic,” Will shot back, annoyed.
“And you,” Luella said, “are my favorite.” She kissed him on the cheek and ran off ahead of him.
* * *
Will blinked away the memory. “Yo!” Luella was yelling now, laughing as she made her way across the field to where Will and Nathaniel were kicking the ball around. “Don’t let me distract you!” Too late. Will knew for sure he was red. But somehow he didn’t care.