This is a story of desire, madness, and murder.
—St. Ann’s theater company program, on their autumn production of Macbeth
The next day, the faint glimmer of hope that Z would talk to me again ignited into a burning wildfire when I dropped my backpack beside my desk. He was already sitting in his seat, hunched over his phone. He was so beautiful that it seemed a sin for him to be surrounded by so much dullness. I slid into my seat with my newly covered vocabulary and grammar textbooks and began fishing around for a pencil.
The next thing I knew, he thrust his phone in front of me. I looked over at him, wondering why he needed to spread himself out over two desks.
He said, “I got home and realized I didn’t have your number.”
I startled. “You…want to call me?”
“Text, mostly,” he said, wiggling his thumbs. “I’m big on texting.”
“Oh,” I said. I took his phone in my hands and tried to remember my phone number. Keying it in was as hard as inputting a random string of nine numbers that had been recited to me once. It took three tries. Finally, I handed his phone back, sure I’d greased the screen with my sweaty fingertips.
He looked at the screen and nodded, then stuffed the phone in his pocket. “Want mine?”
“Uh, OK,” I said. I rifled around in my bag for what felt like four hours because my cell phone was at the very bottom. Before, the only people who called me on it were my parents. Your mom wouldn’t let you have one, so I only used mine in case of emergency. And really, Duchess is the safest town in the world. Nobody texted me, so I sucked at texting. I had no idea how to use most of the features, and I wasn’t sure how to enter a new name into the contact list.
I stared at the screen, pressed a few buttons, and found my contacts list. My very empty, very pathetic contact list. “Um…”
My phone dinged with a notification. He’d texted it to me.
Just then, Reese walked in. I swallowed and wished I’d taken an Ativan. My face began to overheat. Z had to have noticed because he whispered, “Let me guess. Cell phones are a big no too?”
I nodded and slid mine into my bag.
He leaned over, picked up my pencil, and wrote RELAX on the cover of my notebook. Really big, so I wouldn’t miss it. So that every time I went through my bag, there it was. Unavoidable. Unforgettable.
Not that it helped.
I never could have predicted how much this seemingly innocent exchange would come to mean. It quickly snowballed into the Affair of the Cell Phone. I went from barely caring about my phone to checking it casually—and then to checking it four thousand times a day. I would spend every moment in the shower in absolute torture, wondering if I’d missed a beep signaling a new message. Whenever you played your piano, I’d hear that beep mingling with the notes. And whenever I was faced with a blank screen, I’d wonder what Z was up to. It was just the first of many ropes he’d throw around my neck, tying me to him.
Mrs. Reese turned her scowl toward the board and scrawled something with chalk. When she stepped away, she had written Jorge Luis Borges. “Today, we’re going to study two short stories by Borges,” she announced. “Turn to page two-twenty-seven.”
We all opened our textbooks. Except Z. His stayed closed on his desk. I looked at him from the corner of my eye. He was leaning back, phone in his lap, thumbs working furiously.
He was texting. In Mrs. Reese’s class.
She started talking about Borges’s life in Argentina or Bolivia, or wherever he was from, and walking down the aisle, tapping on desks as she went, as usual. Every tap echoed my heart in my rib cage because she was getting closer and closer to Z. I’m not sure why I cared so much, why I wanted to protect him, but I did. But did he glance up? Did he care about Reese? No. He just kept thumbing away.
I shouldn’t have worried. Of course he didn’t get caught. Though all eyes always seemed to be on him, for some reason, at the moment he was doing wrong, Reese had turned and started down a different aisle. His luck was impeccable.
“Does anyone know what the Aleph is?” Reese asked.
As I’d expected, the room was completely silent. Noses buried in textbooks, people were doing their best not to be called on. Even Gerri O’Donnell, our resident Harvard-bound genius, looked perplexed. As you might have expected, Andrew, I thought the Aleph was an artifact Indiana Jones found on one of his adventures, but I wasn’t about to volunteer that.
Z’s hand poked up. He was still holding his cell phone in his other hand. Reese had to have noticed it. But despite her hatred of such technology, Mrs. Reese beamed at him. Beamed. Her beam turned fluorescent when he said rather unenthusiastically, as if it were common knowledge, “The Aleph is a point that contains all other points. Anyone who looks at it can see everything else in the universe from every angle at once.”
A moment of stunned silence followed, during which every person in the room surely realized the inequity of it all. Z was not only gifted physically, but mentally as well! The notion sucked the air out of the room. Gerri’s once-superior brain was no longer. Her dark-blond corkscrews quivered as her face contorted with anger. Parker licked her lips and smiled at Z again.
The rest of the period went along as usual, with Reese talking about the symbolism of whatsit and the cultural implications of whoosit, while I stared at her, trying my best to listen. My thoughts kept going back to the intellectual giant beside me who was, infuriatingly, still toying with his phone. How could he skip classes, pay zero attention, text like a madman, and have known what an Aleph is? I never missed a class and wrote down practically every word the teacher said, afraid I might miss an important study point, and yet I didn’t even know how to spell Aleph.
Five minutes before class ended, Mrs. Reese had us all close our books. My head was still swimming with questions about Z.
Mrs. Reese said, “I wanted to call your attention to the flyers you might have seen around school this morning.”
I had seen them. They were red with MACBETH printed big on top. I’d stopped reading there. As you know, Andrew, tryouts for the school play were of no interest to me. Back then, I had an equal abhorrence for the stage and for anything Shakespeare. The thought of being in front of an audience made my insides turn to jelly. Add in Reese as the play’s director, and I found it about as fascinating as influenza.
“We had a poor showing last year for our production of Oliver,” she said.
That was no shocker. No one wanted to be near Reese for longer than forty-five minutes every day. The only person who could stand her was Quincy Laughlin, a senior. He’d been Oliver, George Gibbs, Daddy Warbucks…pretty much all the male leads since eighth grade. When he graduated, future theatrical productions at St. Ann’s would be screwed. Tryouts were merely perfunctory for him; this year, he’d be Macbeth.
“This time, we’re giving you plenty of notice so that you can think it over and practice your auditions. We’re doing something new this year,” Reese continued. “Anyone who is awarded a major part in this year’s production will get extra credit worth one entire grade on his or her final average.”
Everyone started whispering. The concept was definitely gossip-worthy. Reese never gave out As. Never. I could see visions of that elusive four-point-oh dancing in Gerri O’Donnell’s big, fat brain. Her hand shot into the air. Gerri was also the class interrogator. Most teachers knew that if they were going to give an assignment, they needed to leave plenty of time for questions, all of which would be asked by Gerri. I think she did us a disservice for later in life. None of us even bothered to think of questions because we all knew she’d take care of them. “To clarify, what do you mean by ‘major’ part?”
As much as I disliked Reese, she had come up with an ingenious way of shutting down Gerri’s quizzing. She always answered with a question of her own. “Well, Geraldine, you read Macbeth last year. Can you answer that?”
“Macbeth?” Ian Cummings, the resident joker, quipped as Gerri opened her mouth to speak. She cast a glare in his direction. Gerri started listing all the main characters, but I really wasn’t paying attention. If Gerri wanted to be Lady Macbeth and make out with Quincy Laughlin for an A in English, Godspeed. Quincy was about three inches tall and spoke like a jaunty English fellow, using words like hence and thusly in normal conversation. Once I’d seen him at the mall wearing a dorky bowling shirt with a hamburger print, Keds, and white sport socks pulled up to his knees. Strangely enough, he was still popular at St. Ann’s, mostly because he didn’t really care what anyone thought of him.
The bell rang. Finally. I opened my bag to put away my books and found the display on my phone glowing. I pulled it out, wondering and knowing at the same time. The text said: Eat lunch with me. Have something to ask you.
I turned to Z. He was staring at me.
“Um, you could have just asked me that,” I said.
He grinned. “I’m shy.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, really. What if you said no? My whole day would be ruined.”
The idea of his day being shot to hell because I told him I couldn’t eat lunch with him was ridiculous. There was no possible way anyone could say no to him. He got what he asked for. End of story.
“Fine.” I tried to say it like I was doing him a favor.
You might not realize this, Andrew, but eating alone in a packed cafeteria? It sucks. The thought of being seen eating with someone, anyone, thrilled me to no end.
And what did he have to ask me? Concentration during the rest of my morning classes was blown. I came up with every scenario, from Z wanting to go out with me to wanting to borrow my chemistry notes. That is, If I had chemistry notes. We’d only had one class, and much of our time had been spent taking attendance, getting books, and reviewing lab safety. So by the time lunch rolled around, I was flummoxed, which is what, I now realize, Z wanted. He’s a master at making people wonder about him for hours on end.
I took my brown bag lunch with me to the cafeteria, wishing I’d brought something cooler. Tuna fish was gross. It smelled, and the presentation was less than stunning. I was sure that Z would probably buy lunch, and I was right. Somehow, his shriveled gray burger and soggy french fries managed to look more glamorous than my lunch. I waited for him at the end of the lunch line, and he grabbed a seat at a table with a bunch of other random kids, not even scoping out whether it was OK to sit. I guess you don’t have to worry about that when your mere presence makes a place cool. He motioned for me to sit next to him.
“Look, what I’m going to say to you is really hard,” he started. He looked around surreptitiously, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Can I trust you to keep this a secret?”
As I’d sat down, I’d noticed how every set of eyes in the cafeteria was trained on us. The strange girl and the new, hot guy. On the surface, we made an odd couple. People must have thought he was talking to me on a dare. I confess, the thought had crossed my mind too. But when he spoke, all of that fell away, and we were the only two people in the room. I leaned forward instinctively, and the word came out as barely a breath: “Yes.”
He swallowed. “I-I have three months to live.”
There he was, joking again. But the longer he kept his gaze on mine, the more I thought that maybe he wasn’t pulling my leg. All he had to do was catch my eyes, and even the improbable seemed possible.
Then he smiled. “Kidding.”
“Oh…kay.”
As annoying as his “kidding” would have been from anyone else, why was I still fastened to the seat across from him with absolutely no inclination to move? He was used to getting his own way, so I should have walked away. Simple. Looking back, I could have stopped everything so easily. Instead, I stupidly hung on his every word. Because Z was offering something I’d never had: a chance to belong. With Z, up became down and right became wrong.
“No, look, here’s the thing,” he said, gnawing on a french fry. “What’s the deal with this Lincoln dude? I’m getting the feeling he’s the kind of guy who will screw me over.”
“Lincoln? You mean chemistry?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’m getting a vibe from him.”
Mr. Lincoln’s nice and kind of cute. A little goofy, but cute. He’s only twenty-five or so. Last year in biology, most girls in class developed crushes on him. I was no exception. He’d been my favorite teacher. There’s something charming about a guy who can make goggles and a lab coat look good. He’s the epitome of geek chic. And he liked me a lot too because he’d recommended me—and only me—for science camp last summer at USM. Remember that, Andrew? It didn’t work out because my parents didn’t want to send me to Portland on my own for a week, but it was supposedly a big honor to be accepted, and you were very proud of me. “What kind of vibe?” I asked.
He looked from side to side again. “Inappropriate relationship vibe.”
My jaw dropped in horror. “What? Lincoln would never—”
“Kidding again,” he said, still grinning. As irritating as it was, he was a kidder. If I wanted to spend time with him, I’d best get used to it. “But you do think he’s hot, don’t you?” His stare weighed on me.
“What? No!”
“Listen. Lincoln won’t pair us by the roster or whatever. He’ll let us choose our own lab partners, right?”
“Right,” I answered, remembering last year, when everyone else had paired up, leaving me alone. I’d had to sit with Parker and her best friend, Rachel, who gabbed about how far they’d gone with their boyfriends while giving me the honor of doing the entire frog dissection on my own.
“So. You. Me. Partners?” he asked.
I coughed. What did that mean? Did that mean we were friends? “Really?”
“You seem like a sciency girl,” he said. “I suck at chem, and I really need at least a B if I’m going to haul my ass to college with a scholarship and make something of myself.”
Oh right. I was good at science. Of course he’d want to buddy up with the girl who could get him an A. Still, it was loads better than listening to Parker and Rachel drone on about the wild parties they went to. “OK.”
“Awesome.” He looked down at the unopened brown bag in front of me. “You eating?”
I shrugged. “Not hungry.”
And I wasn’t. Remember how you mentioned a few weeks later that you thought I was losing weight? Remember how I had to use that massive safety pin so my skirt wouldn’t puddle at my ankles? I’d always been kind of round and soft, with breasts that seemed to disappear into my body and no distinguishable hips or waist. I liked to eat, and I wasn’t keen on exercise. But the more time I spent with Z, the less of an appetite I had.
So later in the afternoon when Lincoln asked us to partner up, I didn’t have to shrink down in my seat in embarrassment. Z and I just looked at each other, and the deal was done.
It was the first of many deals that I wish I’d never made.