Lorna wanted to try out for the spring musical, but Kate wasn’t sure she was the sort of person who tried out for things anymore. She had skipped basketball tryouts in November, because she didn’t think basketball went with her black boots or her guitar. She was sort of sorry about it now, especially since her dad worked with Marcie Grossman’s mom, and Marcie Grossman played power forward. Her dad was always dropping little tidbits of the girls’ basketball team news at dinner, giving Kate pointed looks while he did, like he was saying, This news should be about you.
Maybe. Kate couldn’t decide. On the one hand, she missed being around other girls who liked to play basketball, and she missed how she felt after a good game. On the other hand, could you really play basketball and write poetry at the same time? Could you really be the kind of person who was a jock and a guitar player? When tryouts came around, Kate had had a hard time putting the two halves of her life together, and so she decided to pass on basketball this year.
“If we try out for the spring musical, we’ll be expanding our horizons,” Lorna told Kate in Creative Writing Club while they waited for everyone to get there. “At least that’s what my mom says. She’s completely freaked out by my life right now because I don’t have two million friends.”
“You don’t need two million friends,” Kate said, pulling her poetry notebook out of her backpack. “She knows that, right?”
“But I only have one friend,” Lorna said. “Well, let me revise that: I only have one friend in real life, which would be you, by the way. I have hundreds of World of Warcraft friends, but to my mom, they don’t count because they’re computer friends.”
Lorna was obsessed with World of Warcraft and spent most of her Friday and Saturday nights playing it online with ten gajillion other people, although she wasn’t friends with all of them, just the ones in her guild. Kate had tried to get interested, but she just wasn’t a fantasy person. She liked to be involved with stuff that actually happened with real people or people who could be real if they didn’t live in the pages of a book.
“I just don’t get why it bugs your mom so much that you only have one close friend,” Kate said. “Isn’t that better than having ten so-so friends?”
“My mom’s deal right now is that all the stuff I like to do is solo—cooking, reading and writing, World of Warcraft,” Lorna explained. “Even though World of Warcraft isn’t solo. But according to my mom it is, because it’s me sitting alone in a room in front of a computer.”
Kate waved her arm to indicate the whole of the classroom. “But this isn’t solo. Isn’t she glad you’re in a club?”
Lorna shook her head sadly. “It’s not enough. But if I’m in the musical, that’s at least fifty people. And I have to pick one more activity besides Creative Writing Club or I can’t do World of Warcraft anymore, so I figure the musical is my best bet, especially if you’ll do it with me.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said, doodling a guitar on her notebook. “Can I think about it?”
“The auditions are Friday after school,” Lorna told her. “And the sign-up for auditioning ends tomorrow, so you have exactly one day to think about it.”
“Okay,” Kate said, and then her entire body went electric, which meant that Matthew Holler had entered the room.
To Kate’s disappointment, Matthew sat down at a desk on the other side of the room. It seemed to Kate that Matthew was always sitting on the other side of something from her—the cafeteria, the audio lab, and now here. She wished they sat together more, like at lunch or on the wall outside the school’s front entrance, where a lot of kids hung out before the first bell or after school waiting for the bus. She knew better than to wish for bigger things, like they’d hold hands when they walked down the hall together. Nobody at Brenner P. Dunn Middle School held hands, not even Marylin and Benjamin, even though everyone knew they were a couple. It was like it was against the law or something.
The last couple of weeks, Kate had had two main thoughts running through her head: Matthew Holler is my boyfriend! Or else, Is Matthew Holler my boyfriend? She really didn’t know, although sometimes, like after he’d kissed her behind her garage on the last Saturday of winter break, she was sure the answer was yes. But at other times, like now, when he was halfway ignoring her, Kate didn’t know what to think. Was that how a boyfriend was supposed to act? That wasn’t how Benjamin acted around Marylin, as far as Kate could tell. He was always sitting with her or making his way through a crowd to get closer to her. Except for the kiss, Matthew pretty much acted the same way to Kate as he always had, which was to say sometimes he seemed really excited to hang out and talk with her, and other times he acted distracted, even kind of mad, when Kate was around, like she was his little sister or something.
The only positive thing Kate could say for sure was that Matthew had broken up with Emily right after Christmas. She knew this because Emily had called her approximately five seconds after it happened to say the breakup was Kate’s fault. Since Kate and Emily had only spoken to each other maybe two times in their lives, Kate found this especially weird and sort of stressful, like maybe the next thing Emily was going to do was come over and sock Kate in the face.
“We were fine until you two started hanging out all the time,” Emily had complained over the phone. “After that, I wasn’t good enough anymore. I didn’t play guitar or know all the right bands like Miss Perfect Kate.”
Kate had had to choke back laughter. “Are you serious? You think this is me versus you? Is that even possible? Look at you! Look at me!”
Emily had been quiet for a moment, and then she had said, “Yeah, I know. It’s hard to believe. But what else could explain it?”
Kate had kept quiet, although she had a long list of things that might explain it, including the fact that from what she knew from Matthew, Emily was pretty boring, talked about herself all the time, and had never heard of Alex Chilton, Kurt Cobain, or Sufjan Stevens, not to mention a thousand other obscure but crucially important figures of the rock world. Kate and Matthew had a running list of who the most important rock-and-roll innovators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were. In fact, Kate’s dad told her if she didn’t start reading something besides The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll and Our Band Could Be Your Life, he was going to take away her library card so she couldn’t check them out anymore, which Kate didn’t believe for a second.
That reminded Kate. She took out a sheet of notebook paper and wrote Quiz on the top of it. Then she wrote out
Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly?
The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?
Nirvana or Pearl Jam?
Coldplay or the Shins?
When she was done, she carefully folded the paper into a small rectangle and then wrote Matthew’s name on it. Passing it to the girl beside her, she whispered, “Pass it down, okay?”
She watched as the note traveled the classroom and landed on Matthew’s desk. Matthew unfolded it with one eyebrow raised, as if he were thinking, Hmm, what could this be? As soon as he started reading, a smile broke out across his face, and he grabbed the pencil that was lodged behind his ear and began circling his answers.
Kate looked down at her desk and smiled. Her knowledge of music was the thing she had that no one else had, at least no other girl she’d ever met, and not many other guys, either. Matthew could sit on the other side of the room if he wanted, he could act cool and aloof, but the fact was, this stuff mattered to him as much as it did to Kate. He needed her.
Ms. Vickery rushed into the room. “Sorry to be late! Who brought copies of their work to share?”
The room suddenly filled with the rustling of paper. Lorna leaned over and tapped her pencil on Kate’s desk. “Think about it, okay? The musical? It’s the only way to save me from my mother.”
“I’ll think about it,” Kate promised, pulling out a sheaf of poems from her notebook. “I’ll let you know by tomorrow morning.”
But in her head she was thinking, Radiohead or Green Day? Bruce Springsteen or Elvis Costello? PJ Harvey or Pink?
She had a million of ’em.
“Sounds like the boys’ basketball team could take a few lessons from the girls this year,” Kate’s dad said at dinner that night. “The girls’ zone defense is really working out for them.”
Kate nodded. She’d discovered that if she tried to look interested in her dad’s basketball reports, he’d drop the topic after a minute or two. Once, she’d made the mistake of rolling her eyes, and he’d gone on for fifteen minutes about the importance of girls’ athletics and how girls used to have to wait till high school to play organized sports. Did Kate know that his sister, Tess, had been a great soccer player, which was too bad, since there were no soccer leagues for girls when Tess was growing up?
Kate hadn’t rolled her eyes since. She’d thought about trying to explain to her dad that she hadn’t given up sports for good, she was just dedicating this year to playing guitar. But she knew he wouldn’t like that, either. Kate’s guitar playing seemed to make her dad nervous, although he was acting a little more relaxed about it since she’d started playing acoustic. One afternoon last fall when she was still messing around on Flannery’s electric guitar, her dad had stood in the doorway to Kate’s bedroom and said, “That sounds nice, Kate, but are you sure that’s how you want to spend your time?”
Kate had put down the guitar and stared at her dad. “What do you mean?”
Mr. Faber had shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I was just thinking about how we used to spend Saturday mornings playing pickup games over at the Y. You were turning into a good little point guard, Katie. I played guard in high school. I’ve got a lot more tricks I could teach you.”
“It’s not like I’m never going to play basketball again, Dad. But right now I want to learn how to play the guitar.”
“You could focus on music later,” her dad had insisted. “Like when you’re old and your knees are shot. You have your whole life to play punk rock music, but the opportunity to play basketball? It’s a ten-year window at best.”
Kate suppressed her urge to giggle uncontrollably. Punk rock music? She’d been working out a riff from a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune. That was so pre–punk rock, it was practically ancient.
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t see playing the guitar as my path in life,” Kate had told her dad. “It’s just something I do for fun.”
Mr. Faber had taken a deep breath. “Sports are fun, Katie. If you want to have fun, play sports.” Then he’d turned and walked down the hall.
Kate had waited a minute before closing her bedroom door, and she’d waited for a few more minutes after that before picking up her guitar again. When her dad had knocked on her door five minutes before, she’d been happy, and now she felt terrible. Kate felt guilty that she’d stopped going to the Y to play basketball with him, but it had started feeling sort of weird. The guys she and her dad played with had begun acting differently around her, like she might break or cry uncontrollably if they fouled her.
Kate stretched her arms toward her toes. It was funny how her mom seemed to get Kate’s love of music and her dad didn’t. Her dad was always going on about the importance of girls playing sports, but didn’t he see that it was important for girls to play music, too? And not just pretty, I’m-so-sad-about-my-bad-boyfriend music, but music about being angry or excited, music about feeling crazy or weird or wild.
Now, sitting at the dinner table and listening to her dad talk about why man-to-man defenses were useless at the middle-school level of ball, Kate wondered if what she’d told her dad last fall was true. Had she really meant it when she’d said she didn’t see playing guitar as her path in life? Well, she supposed the question was, a path to what? Kate wasn’t thinking about becoming a famous rock-and-roll star or anything like that, though she could see putting out a CD on an independent label some day. But that wasn’t really a path; that was just something she daydreamed about on the bus to school.
Here was the thing about guitar: When Kate played, she didn’t worry about whether or not she was fat (she sort of thought she was, although Lorna insisted that Kate was perfectly normal), or when she was going to get her first period (her mom had been fifteen—fifteen!), or if she should try to fit in more and be like other girls. She didn’t worry about grades. She didn’t even worry about whether or not Matthew Holler was her boyfriend or a boy who was a friend who sometimes kissed her behind the garage. When Kate played guitar, she didn’t worry about anything at all, except making the chords sound as clean or as soft or as fuzzy as she wanted them to sound.
Playing basketball had been like that too, she realized as she took a bite of baked potato. Maybe sports and music weren’t so different. With basketball and guitar, you had to live precisely in the very moment you were living in. You had to train your mind not to wander off into the future or onto the topic of whether your zits were getting out of control.
“I’m thinking about trying out for the school musical,” Kate said suddenly, surprising herself, and by the looks on their faces, the rest of her family too. “I think it’s important to try new things. And besides, I like music.”
Mr. Faber nodded, looking pleased. “I think that’s great, Katie. Being in a musical is like being on a team, in a way. It’s about working together, cooperating.”
“Oh, Mel.” Kate’s mother sighed. “Being in a musical is about singing and self-expression. Enough with the sports analogies, honey.”
“Being in a musical is about hanging out with geeks,” Tracie offered through a mouthful of baked chicken. “The geekiest of the geeks. Computer nerds used to be the geekiest of the geeks, but now you never know if they might grow up to be billionaires. So now it’s the musical kids who wear the geek crown.”
“Good,” Kate told her sister. “I like geeks.”
“Enough,” Mr. Faber told his daughters. He turned to Kate. “I think it’s good you want to be involved. To be on a team.”
Kate just nodded her head and gave her dad a big smile, like she thought he was absolutely right. Maybe he was. Kate didn’t know. All she knew was she was tired of her dad looking at her like he wasn’t quite sure who she was anymore.
“So did you hear?” Lorna asked when Kate met her in the auditorium ten minutes before auditions started on Friday afternoon. “The musical is going to be Guys and Dolls. It’s about gangsters.”
“Like The Sopranos?” Kate asked, sitting down. “Isn’t that sort of bloody for middle school?”
“No, it’s about funny gangsters,” Lorna informed her. “Like from the 1930s or something. I don’t know anything about it besides that.” She turned to Kate. “Give me your honest opinion—should I try out for the lead? I’m not that great of a singer, but I think it would make my mom happy.”
Kate scanned the crowd of auditioners. “Well, I see Phoebe Washington, who has a great voice, and Ginny Woo, also great. The entire middle-school chorus is here . . . and . . . whoa!”
“Whoa what?” Lorna asked anxiously. “Somebody even better than Phoebe?”
Kate shook her head. “Flannery’s here.”
Flannery was sitting by herself in the back of the auditorium, and if Kate was seeing things clearly, she was knitting. What was Flannery doing at tryouts? And since when had she been a knitter? This was all too weird.
“Is her hair still pink?” Lorna asked, straining to see where Flannery was sitting.
“It’s red now,” Kate informed her. “She’s talking about doing purple next.”
“Well, go find out what she’s doing here,” Lorna said, practically pushing Kate out of her seat. “I’m dying to know.”
Lorna found Flannery fascinating. It was like Flannery did the things Lorna dreamed of doing but really didn’t want to do—like dye her hair purple. Lorna wasn’t really a purple-hair person, but she liked the idea of being a purple-hair person, and so she liked the idea of Flannery, even though when Kate offered to introduce her, Lorna had said no thanks. Flannery was a little too nervous-making, in Lorna’s opinion.
Kate thought Lorna and Flannery would hit it off, but she didn’t try to force them together. The fact was, Flannery was pretty cranky. Kate was used to Flannery’s crankiness, but Lorna might take it the wrong way.
Sure enough, Flannery’s expression was pure grouch when Kate reached her row. “I keep dropping stitches,” she complained, holding up a knitting needle for Kate to see. “It’s driving me crazy.”
“I didn’t know you even knew how to knit,” Kate said, sitting down. “Are you just learning how?”
Flannery nodded. “I’ve been reading all this DIY stuff online—you know, grow your own food, make your own clothes. Megan got me into it. I’m trying to make a sweater, but I royally suck at it.”
“My mom knits, if you need any advice,” Kate told her. “Mostly she knits socks and gives them away.”
“I totally want to learn how to knit socks,” Flannery said, looping a strand of yarn around a needle. “I want to be able to make all my own clothes, underwear included.”
“That’s cool,” Kate said. Onstage, some teachers had started to gather—Mr. Periello, the chorus director, and the drama teacher, Ms. South—and people had started to whisper, like things were about to get started. “So, are you trying out for the play?”
“No, I’m here to conduct a scientific study,” Flannery replied. “What do you think?”
Kate couldn’t tell whether Flannery was being sarcastic or not. Flannery was the sort of person who pretty much always sounded sarcastic or annoyed. “I think it would be hard to conduct a scientific experiment while you’re knitting.”
Flannery raised her eyebrows. “You’d be surprised what you can do with a pair of knitting needles.”
“Probably,” Kate said. “But really—are you auditioning or not?”
“Of course I’m auditioning. Why else would I be here?”
“To conduct a scientific experiment?”
Flannery laughed. “I’m taking drama for my elective, and Ms. South is giving extra credit to everyone who auditions. I can act, but I can’t sing, so there’s no way I’ll actually get a part. But I’ll get extra credit.”
It always surprised Kate that Flannery cared about her grades. Flannery seemed like the sort of person who wouldn’t care if she flunked out. But at the end of every quarter, when the honor roll was posted outside of the front office, Flannery’s name was always on it, no matter what color her hair was or how bad her attitude had been the last three months.
“By the way, it’s still big news about the Matthew-Emily split,” Flannery said, squinting at her knitting like she’d lost something inside of it. “Emily’s telling everyone it’s your fault.”
“That’s dumb,” Kate said, staring straight ahead. She didn’t know if this was something she wanted to discuss with Flannery. Flannery hung out with the same group of eighth graders as Matthew did, the ones with vaguely bad attitudes and lots of black T-shirts, so she’d know what was really going on. But sometimes Flannery was a little too honest for Kate’s comfort level. Sometimes Kate could live without Flannery’s opinion.
“Yeah, that’s what Matthew says too,” Flannery said. “He says you guys are just friends. He broke up with Emily because he wanted to be free.”
“He did?” Kate felt her stomach fill with butterflies, the bad kind, the kind with poison on their little proboscises. “He does? Want to be free, I mean?”
“Sure,” Flannery replied, poking her right-hand needle into a left-hand needle loop. “Everybody was totally amazed when he got together with Emily in the first place. Although now he says she was never really his girlfriend. But if she wasn’t, then why did he have to break up with her?”
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Kate said, her voice sounding hollow. “Well, it looks like things are about to get started.” She stood up, amazed by how much she felt like a zombie, someone who had been dead for a while now but had miraculously retained the ability to walk and talk.
“Hey, Kate,” Flannery said, and Kate turned around. She was surprised by Flannery’s sympathetic expression. “You know that the Matthew Hollers of the world always make better friends than boyfriends, right?”
Kate nodded, though she wasn’t sure she knew that at all. “I need to go try out now,” she said in a flat voice.
The walk back to the front row took Kate approximately five hundred years. Maybe it was because her legs had turned into rubber. Maybe it was because time had slowed down until every clock in the world barely budged. Maybe, she thought, it was because when you realize that you’re nothing, nobody, nada, just a silly girl who thought she might be someone somebody else could fall in love with, then it occurs to you that there’s no reason to get any place anytime soon.
When she finally reached her seat, Lorna leaned over and said, “What’s wrong? Your face is totally white. You look like a ghost.”
“I am a ghost,” Kate told her, and then Mr. Periello called her name, so she stood back up and walked to the stage, where she sang an old Joni Mitchell song her mom liked a lot called “Both Sides Now.” When she finished, everybody in the audience clapped and stomped their feet, and a few people whistled. Mr. Periello looked at her a long time before saying, “That was beautiful, Kate. I had no idea you could sing like that.”
The funny thing was, Kate couldn’t really sing like that. Or at least she’d never sung like that before. But then again, she’d never had a broken heart before. Maybe that’s what had to happen to you before you could really sing, before your song was more than just a collection of notes and words that came out of your mouth.
When Kate got back to her seat, Flannery was sitting in it. Kate sat down beside her and stared straight ahead. When Lorna leaned toward Kate to say something, Kate held up her hand and said, “I can’t talk right now.”
Flannery worked a few stitches of her sweater, which was beginning to resemble a piece of Swiss cheese. Then she laid her knitting on her lap and, without looking directly at Kate, said, “If I had to guess, I would say he really does like you. The problem is, it doesn’t matter.”
Kate nodded. She thought about kissing Matthew Holler behind her garage. She knew he’d really meant it, even if he didn’t act like it now. She wondered how a person could do that, feel one way and act another. Kate couldn’t. Her dad said she had no poker face, and it was true. If she was mad, she growled, and if she was happy, she laughed. Maybe she just didn’t have any interest in faking her life, or maybe she was just too stupid to figure out how to pretend like she didn’t care.
Although, hadn’t she been pretending the last two weeks like she didn’t care?
The kiss behind the garage. They’d been writing songs together at Matthew’s house, and when Kate said she had to go home, Matthew offered to walk her. A light snow had started falling when they were halfway to Kate’s house, and Matthew had launched into a loud rendition of “Let it Snow.”
“That’s a Christmas carol,” Kate had admonished him. “You can’t sing Christmas carols in January!”
“What does ‘Let it Snow’ have to do with Christmas?” Matthew had asked. “It’s totally about the weather. It’s a weather song, like ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ ”
Kate had cracked up. “ ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ isn’t a weather song. It’s a protest song.”
Matthew had slung his arm around Kate’s shoulder. “That’s what I like about you, Faber. I don’t know any other girl who would know that.”
“Lots of girls know that,” Kate had insisted, although she was secretly proud that among all the girls she personally knew, she was the only one who had a clue to what “Blowin’ in the Wind” was about. “Girls are as into music as guys are. At least some girls. And not all guys are into music. My dad is a total music dork. His big claim to fame is that he saw Bon Jovi three times when he was in college. But you know what’s cool? My mom saw the Clash. Twice.”
“Not to one-up you or anything, but my mom toured with the Clash.”
Kate had stopped in her tracks. “No way!”
“Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But she was friends with some sound guy’s girlfriend, and so when the Clash toured the Eastern Seaboard, my mom went with them for a few shows.”
“Maybe my mom should invite your mom over for coffee,” Kate had said, immediately liking the idea of her family and Matthew’s getting tangled up, making it harder for Matthew to untangle himself from Kate. Of course, if their moms got to be friends, and the Hollers started to feel like family, then Kate and Matthew might start feeling like cousins, which wasn’t the vibe Kate was going for.
I’m such an idiot for thinking like this, she had told herself, sticking out her tongue to catch a snowflake. I mean, get a life.
They’d reached Kate’s house by then. The sky had gotten dark, and there had been a layer of intensely pink clouds on the horizon. Kate had pointed at it and said, “I’m normally not a pink person, but I think that’s beautiful.”
Matthew hadn’t said anything, and for a second Kate had felt really stupid, but she’d stopped feeling stupid when he’d grabbed her hand and pulled her to the side of the Fabers’ garage. Instead of feeling stupid, she’d felt jittery and light-headed, and when Matthew had pulled her toward him and dipped his face toward hers, she’d thought she might possibly faint.
Matthew had brushed a strand of hair away from Kate’s face and said, “You are totally awesome. You are really, totally awesome.”
And then he’d kissed her, and his lips had been so soft Kate could hardly stand it. She’d put her hand in his hair, the way she’d wanted to ever since she first saw him, tangling her fingers in his reddish-gold curls.
She’d thought it meant something. She’d really thought it meant something, and so she’d tried not to care when he didn’t call the next day, and then on Tuesday back at school when he didn’t act like anything special had happened between them, she tried even harder not to care. And so maybe it wasn’t surprising that all her not caring (which was really caring more than anything in the world) had poured out in the song she’d just sung.
She just couldn’t hold it in anymore.
On Monday, the cast list was posted. Kate and Lorna were both in the chorus. Lorna was incensed. “You should have gotten the lead!” she told Kate at lunch. “You were awesome.”
Kate had gotten at least ten phone calls over the weekend, some from people she hardly knew, telling her how awesome her singing had been. She’d felt weirdly famous for forty-eight hours.
Now she turned to Lorna and said, “I’m really tired of the word ‘awesome.’ It doesn’t really mean anything. It’s like a blank word that people use when they can’t think of something real to say.”
Lorna frowned. “I’d be offended, except I can tell you’re in a bad mood about something, which probably has to do with Matthew Holler, who is totally not awesome, in my opinion. Which is something I think you need to tell him.”
“What are you talking about?” Kate stared at Lorna. “He hasn’t done anything.”
“Exactly my point,” Lorna said, chewing on a piece of biscotti. “He kissed you, and then—nothing.”
“It’s not like he stopped talking to me,” Kate pointed out.
“Really, Kate? Really? That’s really going to be your standard of acceptable behavior when it comes to guys?”
Kate shrugged. Maybe. Well, not all guys, but at least when it came to Matthew Holler. She would put up with anything—
And then she stopped. If Marylin had been saying these things to Kate about Benjamin, Kate would have been furious. She would have been telling Marylin to have some self-respect. She, Kate, would have marched right up to Benjamin and yelled at him about how he treated girls and other living creatures, and she might have even kicked him in the shins, although in general Kate preferred to be the nonviolent type.
Kate took a deep breath. She wrapped up her sandwich and put it back in her backpack. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I need to go have a talk with someone.”
“You bet you do,” Lorna agreed.
But when Kate got to the audio lab, she didn’t know what to say. Matthew was sitting in his usual seat, working on a track for a project he was calling World of Noise. He didn’t turn around when Kate walked in, and she thought maybe she wouldn’t say anything at all, maybe she would just throw a pencil at his back and walk out.
Finally she cleared her throat and mumbled, “Hey, Matthew.”
He turned around. “Hey, Kate! You’ve got to listen to the edits I’ve done. Totally awesome.”
And that was what pushed Kate over the edge. Completely, entirely, all the way over the edge.
“You will never be a songwriter if you can’t come up with a better adjective than ‘awesome’ to describe things,” she said, and she could feel the tips of her ears turning red, she was so mad. “Songwriters are supposed to find the exact right words. Precise words. Definite words. So quit calling everything ‘awesome,’ and quit calling me ‘awesome’ if you don’t mean it.”
“But I do mean it,” Matthew said, sounding confused. “You’re the most awesome girl I know.”
Kate stomped across the room and stood two feet in front of Matthew. She pointed her finger at him. “I am not awesome. I am not any adjective you can think of, since you couldn’t think of a decent adjective to save your life. You know why you say I’m totally awesome? Because you don’t have the guts to say anything real.”
She decided that was all that she had to say. What else was there? You kissed me behind the garage, but now you act like you didn’t, and that makes me mad? Stupid. It wasn’t something they could have a debate over.
But it was interesting, Kate had to admit, that Matthew’s face had gone all red, like he was coming down with a sudden case of the flu. Didn’t that mean he at least cared a little bit? His lips seemed to be twitching, like there were words inside his mouth that he was trying very hard not to let out.
But finally the words escaped. “I can’t marry you, okay?” Matthew said, pounding his fists on his knees. “I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is.”
Kate’s eyes widened. Her mouth dropped open as though her jaw had suddenly become unhinged. “What? What did you just say? Do you think I want to marry you? That’s crazy. I’m in seventh grade. You know that, right?”
Matthew waved his hands in front of his face, like he was trying to make what he’d just said disappear. “No! That’s not what I’m saying. What I mean is—man, I don’t know what I mean. It made more sense in my head. Like, you’re my best friend, okay? And if we were thirty or something, we’d probably get married and play guitar every night after dinner, and it would be totally awesome. But we’re not thirty, and I don’t know what to do about you.”
Kate just stood there. She’d always thought that the first time a boy told her he loved her, it would be all romantic, all starlight and birds singing, a voice whispering in her ear. She hadn’t thought the soundtrack would be World of Noise.
“Well, quit kissing me, okay?” she said. “Because I can’t deal with you kissing me and then acting like I don’t matter to you.”
Matthew threw his head back and laughed, sounding relieved. “Dude, you’re the only person who matters. Get a grip.”
Suddenly the door to the audio lab opened, and Kate turned to find herself face-to-face with Flannery.
“I thought you’d be here,” Flannery said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I made the cut.”
“You did?” Kate was confused. “I didn’t see your name on the cast list.”
“Yeah, well, Audrey Fischer just got suspended for skipping class for the third time this quarter, so I got bumped up. I guess I’m headed for Broadway.” Flannery peered over Kate’s shoulder. “Hey, Matthew, you’re an idiot,” she called out, and then grabbed Kate’s hand. “Come with me to get my script. I don’t think I have any lines, but I should check, just in case.”
Kate didn’t really want to leave. She wanted to spend the rest of the period listening to Matthew tell her she was the only person who mattered to him, even if they wouldn’t be kissing each other anymore. Maybe they could kiss each other again later. Maybe when they were sixteen. She thought it might be nice to spend some more time talking about how great Matthew thought she was, but she guessed there’d be time for that later. So she followed Flannery out into the hallway.
“Do you really think Matthew’s an idiot?” she asked, interested in Flannery’s opinion. If you’d asked Kate an hour ago whether she thought Matthew Holler was an idiot, she would definitely have said yes, but now she didn’t think so. Now she thought he was possibly extremely brilliant.
Flannery laughed. “Only in the ways that matter.”
They passed by the gym. Inside, a few of the girls from the basketball team were practicing free throws. Kate thought about going in and joining them, just to get that feeling you had after you sent the ball through the hoop without touching the rim. It was like you had control over gravity. It was like you could make anything happen that you felt like.
Flannery grabbed her arm. “Come on, slowpoke, let’s go sing really loud and be stars.”
Kate nodded. Singing would be good too. Maybe next year she’d do both, sing and play basketball. Not at the same time, of course, although thinking about it made her laugh. She wondered what her dad would think if she became the singing point guard. The rock-and-roll rebounder.
I don’t know if that’s the right path for you, Katie, her dad would probably say. But Kate didn’t care. She was pretty sure the right path was the path she was on this very second, walking down the hall with Flannery, in this totally awesome world.