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"Jamie. You gonna eat that? Jame. That bagel. You gonna eat it? 'Cause I'm really hungry, man. My mom threw me out before I could eat my cereal. And she didn't give me a dime."
Jamie slides the half bagel dripping with butter over to Angelo without looking up from drawing on the back of his notebook. Angelo is silent for thirty seconds, and then he's on the make again, looking for someone else's leftovers. The PA system screeches with feedback, and the din gets louder as everyone tries to talk over it.
"Good morning, Union High. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance." The brightly colored riot-proof seats welded to the cafeteria tables left over from the 1970s creak as period-one study hall drags itself to its feet to say words that we haven't thought about and don't understand—or can't make ourselves say. Jamie stays seated, his pencil slowly tracing the lines of his drawing.
"Forta, is that your assigned seat?" Jamie nods at Mr. Cella, the gym teacher who would probably rather be anywhere other than chaperoning first-period study hall. "Then get out of it and join the rest of us in pledging allegiance to this fine country of ours," Mr. Cella says kind of sarcastically as he moves on to the next table.
Jamie looks around and sees that people are in the middle of the pledge. By the time he stands up, everyone is sitting down already.
"Jame, you got any money? I'm still starvin', man. I just need another bagel or a piece of toast or something. I'll pay you back tomorrow. I just need, like, a dollar. You got that? Could I have it?"
Jamie reaches into his pockets for change, coming up with a quarter. He hands it to Angelo, who looks majorly disappointed.
"This all you got, Jame?"
"Here. Here's seventy-five cents." The slightly sweaty freshman girl in the blue cotton sweater at the end of the table, also known as me, reaches out three quarters, glad to have made it through another pledge to the flag without throwing up. I don't exactly feel like swearing my allegiance to America these days, and I probably won't for a long time, if ever.
Angelo looks at the quarters suspiciously. Maybe he's unsure why I'm suddenly talking to him after not speaking for the first three days of school. He probably thinks I'm a snob, but I'm really just afraid to look up from my books. I just survived the worst summer of my life, and I don't remember how to talk to people. Plus, I just started high school—this guy has probably been here for more than his share of four years.
The PA system squawks, "Have a good day," before shutting off. Angelo takes the quarters from me slowly.
"Thanks. Do I gotta pay you back?"
"Um, not if you…can't."
Angelo stares hard, keeping his eyes on me as he swaggers backward over to the pile of bagels on the counter. He picks one and then smiles at me. I quickly look back down at my books, thinking I might have made a mistake, being nice to one of the vocational-technical guys. Especially one of the older "vo-tech" guys. He pays and makes his way back to the half-empty table for six, sitting across from Jamie. His jacket is too small for him, and he wears a ratty Nirvana T-shirt that looks like it belonged to an older brother when Kurt Cobain was actually still alive.
"Good bagel," Angelo says to me, while I pretend to be lost in my biology textbook. "What are you reading?"
"I'm studying for a biology test," I say without looking up.
"You already got a test?" he asks. "We only been back a few days. You in those smart classes?"
I decide not to answer this time, but it doesn't do any good.
"Didn't you study at home? You look like a girl who woulda studied at home."
"I did. But I don't think it was enough."
"Want me to quiz you? I could quiz you."
"No, thanks."
Angelo slides over so he's sitting right next to me. He leans in. "I bet it would help," he says. I shift back slightly. He's got a ton of sharp black stubble, and he smells like cigarettes and Axe. He looks like he's at least twenty.
"That's okay."
"You sure?" He reaches for my textbook. "I know a few things about biology."
"Leave her alone," says Jamie without looking up from his notebook. Angelo turns, raising his eyebrows. "She don't wanna talk to you. She's studying."
"Fine, man. I'll leave her alone." Angelo gets up and moves toward another table. "See ya later," he says to me. "What's your name, anyway?"
I start to answer, but Jamie lifts his head from his drawing to stare at Angelo.
"What, man?" says Angelo. "What's the deal? She your girlfriend or something?"
I can feel the blush start at my collarbones and work its hot way up to my cheeks. Jamie looks directly at me for the first time ever, as far as I know, and I have to look back down at my book. The words blur before my eyes as I try to focus on something, anything but what's going on right next to me.
"I'm just tryin' to be nice. She gave me some money." Nobody says anything. Jamie studies the tip of his ground-down pencil. "All right. See ya in shop, Jame. Bye, Sweater," Angelo says.
Jamie goes back to his work. I can barely breathe. Tracy, my best friend since the beginning of time, is suddenly in the seat across from me. I kind of can't believe she's here—upperclassmen get to go where they want in study hall, but the freshmen are supposed to stay glued to their seats.
"Did you study last night? It's going to be so hard. Are you okay? You're all red." She brings a spoonful of yogurt to her mouth, studying my face in that weird, concerned way that I've seen a lot these past few months. Then she looks sideways at Jamie, at his construction boots and the ragged, dirty cuffs of his too-long jeans. "It's too bad you got stuck at this table. We're all studying together over there." She points to a big twelve-seater full of freshmen who are probably talking about the keg party that they won't get into at the nearby private school's polo fields tonight. Why they even want to go is beyond me. But I've been trained by Tracy not to say that stuff out loud. It doesn't do anything to increase my popularity, according to Miss Teen Vogue. "I study better by myself."
"Yeah, I know, you always say that. Maybe that's why you always get A's."
"I don't always get A's."
"Oh shut up. Have you thought about what we talked about?"
Tracy is referring to whether or not she should have sex with her boyfriend, Matt Hallis. We've been talking about this nonstop for the last few weeks, and it's become my least favorite topic ever—for a lot of reasons. At first I thought she was bringing it up all the time to distract me and give me something to think about. But now I realize that she's totally obsessed. It's like she decided that the second she started high school, she had to lose her virginity or she'd never fit in. Or be cool. Or be…whatever.
Mr. Cella materializes out of thin air behind Tracy, who notices me looking past her and freezes.
He consults his seating chart. "Ms. Gerren, would you care to go back to your assigned seat?"
"We're just talking about our biology test, Mr. Cella."
"You had ample time to do that last night via text, or cell, or IM, I'm sure. Back to your seat."
Tracy gets up. "You're okay, right?" she asks. I nod. "Sorry you're stuck over here," she says again, before Mr. Cella escorts her back across the cafeteria without so much as a glance at me.
It took only two days for the teachers to stop looking at me like some sort of pathetic freak. Which is exactly what Peter said would happen, when I was complaining to him about starting high school barely three months after burying our dad.
What was left of him, anyway.
I try to concentrate on biology and ignore the flush in my cheeks that is taking its time receding. I sneak a glance at Jamie. Jamie Forta.
I know who Jamie is. I know because of Peter. Jamie and Peter were on the hockey team together when I was in seventh grade and Peter was a junior. Jamie was a freshman then. Dad and I used to come to the games to watch Peter, but after getting a good look at Jamie in the parking lot after a game once, I mostly watched Jamie. The next year, Jamie got thrown off the team during the first game of the season for high-sticking a West Union player named Anthony Par-rina in the neck.
Although I hadn't seen Jamie in a year, I recognized him the second I was assigned my seat at this table. Even without the hockey gear.
I can hear the scratch of Jamie's pencil as he draws, grinding graphite down to wood. My gaze finds its way across the pages of my book, over the table and onto his notebook. It takes me a second to recognize the upside-down image as a house, a strange-looking house in the woods with a porch and a massive front door at the top of a wide staircase. I lean over the table to get a better view. And I realize he's no longer drawing.
I'm afraid to lift my eyes from the page. When I do, Jamie is looking at me, his pencil in midair. Again, the flush rises from my chest, up over my neck and into my cheeks. Before I look away, I think I catch the slightest, tiniest, most minuscule glimpse of a smile in his eyes.
"That's a really nice picture," I whisper, unable to get any volume.
He looks at the pencil and shakes his head at its wrecked point, dropping it next to his notebook. He reaches into his pocket and draws out a dollar as he gets up from the table and starts toward the food. Apparently he's learned to keep some of his money for himself, rather than give it all to Angelo.
"You should be studying," he says with that hint of a smile in his eyes, and walks away. I feel the heat intensify at the sound of his voice, making the skin on my face tight with imaginary sunburn. He disappears in the rush of upperclass-men who have just come in from the cafeteria courtyard to get food before the bell rings.
I close my book and put it in my backpack, hoping to spy a piece of gum at the bottom somewhere to erase the dryness that goes along with humiliation. I rifle through my new makeup bag, which Tracy put together for me ("You can't go to high school without a makeup bag") and find an old piece of partly wrapped gum stuck to a busted eyeliner (apparently I got her hand-me-downs). I take the eyeliner out with the gum and separate the two, deciding the gum looks clean enough to chew. Weirdly, it tastes like lipstick. I rifle a little more, searching for something to help me find solid ground again. My fingers brush the eyeliner sharpener.
I take the sharpener out and look quickly over my shoulder for Jamie, who's in line waiting to pay for a coffee. I grab his pencil and jam it into the sharpener, twisting and twisting and twisting, watching the yellow wood shreds peel off and fall to the table. I take his pencil out and look at its now-sharp point. The bits of eyeliner stuck in the sharpener have left a few electric-blue stains, but the point is truly perfect.
I quickly put it back where I found it, looking again just in time to see Jamie turning away from the cashier to start back to the table. The bell rings. I grab my bag and run.
