On the way to English today, Dorin asked if I wanted to come to the pet shop on Wednesday. “Since Sienna’s going to that party,” she said. “I thought you’d be free.”
“Oh,” I said, wondering how she even knew that. “Thanks! But I can’t. I have to . . . I told my mom I would do a . . . a thing, help her.”
“Oh,” Dorin said, smiling. “Okay. Maybe some other time.”
“Definitely,” I said. “Thanks. That would be fun, hanging at the, you know.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I love your necklace. That’s new, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, touching it. “Thanks. Birthday present.”
“From your parents?”
I was just going to lie and say yes, since I was in a lying groove already, but that seemed weird, a lie for no reason, so I said, “No, Emmett got it for me.”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s . . .”
“That’s what?” I asked.
“That’s really romantic,” she said.
“No, not at all,” I explained. “It’s just . . .”
Riley lunged forward and yanked Dorin close enough to whisper to her. I couldn’t hear what Riley asked.
“Emmett,” Dorin said to Riley, her voice definitely loud enough. “Why?”
Riley shhh’d Dorin, raised her eyebrows twice, then smiled at me.
“What?” I asked her.
She chuckled to herself and then turned to whisper something to Beth, whose eyes flicked up at me and then quickly away. Ms. Valerian told me to sit down at the table in the back. When Emmett showed up, she sent him to the back table too and then handed us facedown quizzes on Brown Girl Dreaming. She explained that assuming we both passed the quiz—“Don’t worry; I know you both will,” she said, winking—we could work alone together on the extra project, since we didn’t have to do the nightly reading of twenty pages and then answering five questions about it. I had thought we’d get assigned some cool other book, but this was even better.
We flipped over our papers when Ms. Valerian said to, and quickly filled in the answers. It was an easy quiz, just confirming that we’d read the book, no big deal. Except that everybody kept glancing over at us. Every time I looked up, heads whipped away.
As if it meant something about us, that we were segregated at the back table, both taking a quiz on a book, just the two of us plus my necklace, which, why did I wear it to school, two days in a row? Or, worse, that I thought it meant something about us, about Emmett and me, as if I wanted it to be, well, more.
Come on. Obviously not. It was just Emmett and me, forced to take a quiz and then work on a project together. We just both happened to have read a particular book already. Plus, we’re friends. We do stuff together all the time, always have.
I would never want to mess that up, or take a chance of messing that up.
We’re friends. No subtext.
It’s just Gracie and Emmett, you guys. Not, like, Michaela and David, or Sienna and AJ or Beth and Ben or something. Yikes. Look away, look away. It’s just two not-super-popular, kind-of-brainy regular kids, discussing quietly whether it would be more fun to make a diorama or a triptych poster board or do a short scene with reading aloud some portions of Brown Girl Dreaming or if that’s not culturally okay because I am a white girl and he is an only somewhat brown boy, being half-Filipino and half-Israeli. But still, we could both relate to so many of Jacqueline Woodson’s poems—and even with the ones we didn’t directly relate to, we felt like, Yeah—so maybe reading them in some kind of organized or dramatic way, or memorizing them and presenting them to the class, would be okay, or even good?
It was cool, working on that, fun and almost relaxing, just doing schoolwork for a change—until I accidentally glanced up again and saw so many eyes flicking away from us. I groaned so Emmett would know I wasn’t thinking anything other than what a bunch of deluded losers they all were, to think this was anything. He did the same, and then we looked back down at our books. His book was in much nicer shape than mine. It looked practically new. I should be less brutal, gentler with my books, I decided. And then, hallelujah, it was time to go to Spanish, so we made a plan to get together later and work on the project more after he got home from opera class.
Anyway, that felt like the big drama of the day, until I got home from school. Well, that and the continued plotting about how and whether the Sienna-AJ kiss would happen Wednesday on the roof of Michaela’s building: Would they go off alone behind the storage shed? Or go down to Michaela’s to get more food and kiss in her kitchen? Or just be holding hands and accidentally start kissing in front of everybody, like Michaela and David sometimes do but they’ve been going out for months and also have both kissed other people before so they know what they’re doing and are unlikely to faint or miss like Sienna fears she might?
I walked home alone in the bright sunshine of the afternoon, since Sienna and the rest of them had practice for all their sporty things, and Emmett had left school a little early for an opera rehearsal (so I guess that’s what he meant by after he got home from opera—not class but rehearsal). I walked home, thinking about that, about how you can think you know a thing, but then it turns out you’re wrong—usually just little things, like if a person has opera class or rehearsal, or, like, if a person (a different person from the one in the opera example) definitely wants to kiss your best friend, or maybe in fact he’s scared too, or unsure if he really likes exactly her in a kissing way. If it can turn out that your assumptions are sometimes just flat wrong, doesn’t that make even the hard concrete of truth feel alarmingly spongy beneath a person?
I said hi to the homeless woman outside the bank and assured her that, yes, I was keeping up my studies, and said hi to the jewelry/hat guy on the corner, but I didn’t point out my necklace to him. I wasn’t wearing the hilarious hat, which would have been more noticeable. I just said hello and he smiled with his mouth but not with his sad, sleepy eyes. Some people have sad eyes even when they’re smiling. The rest of the way down the block toward home I wondered what might have happened to the jewelry/hat guy in his past to make his eyes so sad all the time, and also thought about the fact that there’s very little likelihood I’d ever find out.
You can’t just go up to people and say, Why do you seem so sad? as if you were asking, How much does that amazing hat cost? You just have to wait and wonder.
Usually.