“He’s fine. Do you have lunch money?”
I bounce on my toes and flex my fingers. “Yes, your mom paid me last Saturday.”
Rei’s parents own a health food store down on Main Street, and Rei’s mom, Yumi, also offers yoga classes and Reiki, which is a hands-on healing technique. Yumi has a room set aside where I babysit the little kids while their mothers take yoga classes.
“Yeah, but did
your
mom give you any lunch money?” Rei asks as he hitches my backpack up higher on his shoulder.
“I have lunch money,” I assure him. “Go sit. I’ll be right there.”
I read through today’s menu: cream of tomato soup, garden salad, that foul-smelling broccoli comes with mashed potatoes and meatloaf. Nothing exciting. There’s always the infamous Byers High Mystery Meat Sub, which is tempting, but Seth will just steal the salami out of it. Even though we’re late, the line is still pretty long, which is good. It gives me time to settle into myself a little more. I bounce some more, roll my shoulders, jiggle my arms, and generally annoy the people standing close to me. By the time I help myself to a salad, garlic bread, and a bottle of water, though, I feel good. In fact, I feel great! I hand the lunch lady a five-dollar bill and stuff the change in my back pocket.
I emerge from the cafeteria line with my tray balanced high on one hand like a seasoned waitress, except now I have to sidestep Jason Trent, a senior football jock who reminds me of a Yeti. He stands right smack in the middle of the exit, why, I don’t know and I doubt he does either. Of course, just as I walk by him, he decides to move and bumps into me, nearly knocking the tray off my hand. I steady the tray just before it tumbles, but the water falls over the side. I am so pumped with volcano mojo that I manage to hang onto the tray and grab the bottle just before it hits the floor.
Jason glances down and has the audacity to wink at me. What a creep! I let a tiny hiss of steam escape as I stand, then hurry off to Rei and Seth’s table.
I put my tray down and sit, one foot curled up underneath me to give me a height advantage.
Rei reaches over and spears a cherry tomato out of my salad with his fork since he knows I don’t like them. “
Arigato
.”
“You’re welcome. Here, take this one, too.”
“Okay. Hey, did I just see Jason Trent wink at you?” Rei sounds amused.
I am not. “I don’t know, did you?” I shrug. “He must have had something stuck in his eye.”
“Trent is a tool,” Seth says as he helps himself to my garlic bread and takes a huge bite out of it before I can object.
“I was going to eat that,” I tell him.
Seth sticks out his tongue and makes a big production of licking the entire top of my garlic bread before he offers it back to me. “Here you go.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Mmm,” he takes another bite.
Rei doesn’t even bother to referee. Instead, he roots through his backpack and pulls out an orange, then a slightly bruised Granny Smith apple. “I have extra fruit if you want some,” he tells me as if this is something new and he doesn’t bring extra fruit with him every day. He sets them on the table in front of me.
I reach for the apple, but Rei intercepts my hand with his. Crud. He pushes the sleeve of my black hoodie up slightly and measures his thumb against a bruise on my wrist before he lets go of my hand.
“Where’d that come from?” he asks casually.
“I whacked it on the dishwasher last night.” Really. I did. We stare each other down until he’s convinced I’m telling the truth.
“You know, if you’d get a little more vitamin C, you wouldn’t bruise so easily,” he says. “I wish you liked oranges.”
“I like clementines better. They’re easier to peel.”
Rei glances at my chewed up fingernails, then rolls the apple toward me, along with a conceding smile. “Did you at least have juice with breakfast this morning?”
Did I even eat breakfast this morning? My mom was getting ready to leave for an overnight real estate convention, so things were kind of hectic. I think I ate some Froot Loops. Rei pokes his thumb through the rind of his orange, and the sweet citrus scent fills the air.
“I’m working today,” Seth announces randomly through a mouthful of the pizza he’s now eating.
“So you can’t run with me?” Rei doesn’t look up from peeling his orange, but I can tell he’s disappointed.
“Nah, I need gas money and Remy offered me hours.”
Seth works at Remy’s Garage up on Main Street after school a few days a week doing stuff like changing oil and tires. It’s a good job for Seth, who doesn’t care if his hands get dirty and who’d rather tinker with cars than study.
Rei doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty, either, as long as they don’t stay dirty. And unlike Seth and me, Rei enjoys learning from books. He’s a naturally smart guy who is in almost all advanced placement classes and who is consistently ranked in the top three students in our junior class. I don’t envy him for that.
It’s great that Rei is smart, but the pressure Yumi puts on him to excel is a little over the top, if you ask me. She’s always had her heart set on him going to M.I.T. or some Ivy League school, but now that we’re juniors, the tension between them is piling up even higher than the stack of college brochures that choke Rei’s mailbox each day. Every college wants Rei. He is smart, athletic, community oriented, gets ridiculously high scores on standardized tests, and there are no compromising photos of him on the internet. His parents have saved more than enough cash to cover the cost of his undergraduate and graduate degrees, plus I’m sure he’ll be offered all kinds of scholarships. The sky is the limit for his future.
The other two students who vie for those coveted top three ranking spots are Shawna Patel and Taylor Gleason. I like Shawna a lot. She’s even more brilliant than, dare I say, Rei, but she’s the good kind of brilliant, the kind that doesn’t make me feel stupid when she talks to me. Taylor, on the other hand, just never talks to me. Well, once in the girls’ room, she asked if she could borrow my lipstick, but I don’t even own lipstick and she made it clear she wasn’t impressed with my cherry Chapstick.
I haven’t quite figured out Taylor. She gets straight A’s, she dresses like she’s just stepped off a magazine cover, and rumor has it she’s a wicked party girl who’s faster than Rei’s high speed internet. I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to rumors, though, because if I did, I’d have to believe that I’m kind of a snob and that Rei and I have been dating since we were in second grade, while the truth is I’m kind of shy and Rei has been not only my neighbor since I was three days old, but he’s also my best friend and self-appointed ninja bodyguard.
Anyway, Taylor moved from Long Island to our quiet little town of Byers, Vermont, last summer. By the time school started in September, rumors were already flying that when Taylor was fifteen, she accused some twenty-one-year-old college guy of statutory rape. There are a dozen variations of this rumor, including one that her parents forced her to have an abortion, and there’s even a rumor that she started the rumors herself to launch her popularity in a new town, because what cool kid wouldn’t want to hang out with the scandalous new girl? Now she’s part of a clique of other pretty, shiny girls who like to drive into the city on the weekend to party with the college kids, which leads to even more rumors, most of which I ignore. Except for one rumor I know for certain is true … Taylor Gleason is crushing on Seth.
* * *
Seth and I have economics right after lunch. We walk Rei to his chemistry class, then take a right and follow the slow-moving river of students to the second floor. Taylor Gleason sits at a desk by the door, surrounded by a haze of musky cologne. While everyone else in the class is dressed in jeans and hoodies, sneakers or hiking boots, Taylor wears a tight, red mini-skirt and a low-cut black tank top that shows off her cleavage. She wears no pantyhose, but her legs are tanning booth bronze, and the heels on her shoes could be classified as lethal weapons.
I take my usual seat near Teri Barnes and Lisa MacNamara. Seth goes off to sit closer to the window, which happens to be as far away from Taylor as possible. He’s plugged himself into his iPod, just minding his own business, but I can hear trouble click-clacking her way toward him.
“Hi, Seth,” Taylor says in her sultry voice as she puts her books down at the empty desk beside him.
He responds by turning up the volume on his iPod.
She makes a big production of settling in and crossing one leg over the other. Once she’s all comfy-cozy, she sways her head dramatically to the left, sending her hair over her shoulder in a long blonde tidal wave.
Swish.
Her ear sparkles with a row of small diamond earrings.
“I like your T-shirt. Is that a skateboard logo?” She reaches over to smooth a fold of fabric with one of her long burgundy fingernails.
Seth flinches away and levels a nuclear glare at her, but this doesn’t faze Taylor.
“I’ve watched some of your wrestling matches. You’re amazing. Do you skateboard, too?”
Swish
. The hair goes back over the other shoulder.
Now she has Seth’s attention. Amazing or not, I see she’s lit a short fuse.
“No,” he snaps much louder than necessary. “And quit stalking me!” He focuses his attention back on his iPod, a dark scowl shadowing his face.
Everyone in the class, including Mrs. Watson, heard Seth. Teri and Lisa both look back at me with raised eyebrows and ‘O’ shaped mouths. I shrug my shoulders in reply. Hey, at least he didn’t drop the f-bomb.
Mrs. Watson ahems loudly. “Is there a problem over there, Mr. Murphy?”
“No!”
“Good, then let’s begin class.”
The hair swishes over Taylor’s right shoulder and I glance at her just before she turns to face front.
Surprisingly, she is smiling.
CHAPTER 3
Rei and I met Seth in kindergarten, where we had a rule called Do Not Interrupt the Teacher During Story Time. I have a very vivid memory of Seth sitting criss-cross applesauce on the linoleum floor next to me, his eyes frozen on the teacher and a puddle of light yellow pee growing rapidly around him. We all kept nudging each other as we tried to scoot away, but it wasn’t until there was a sizable moat of space surrounding Seth that the teacher finally noticed and hustled him off to the nurse’s office to get a change of clothes.
It’s always fun to remind Seth of this.
When anyone else made fun of Seth for peeing in his pants, though, Rei morphed into his ninja defender mode. Even in kindergarten, nobody wanted to mess with Rei. That was when the Anna and Rei duo became a trio, and I learned I’d rather share my cookies than my best friend.
* * *
Taylor was not a witness to the legendary Pee Incident, and I don’t believe she’s ever heard him burp the alphabet, either. This explains a lot. I suppose if she judged Seth by looks alone, he would be quite a catch: a six-foot-tall guy with dark, wavy hair and relentless blue eyes that girls whisper longingly about.
Pffft. Rei is just as tall, just as dark, just as handsome, plus Rei is half-Japanese, and his dark chocolate almond eyes are a welcome change in our little ethnically challenged corner of the world. Besides, my father has blue eyes. They are not my favorite.
If Taylor took the time to know Seth, she would realize he’s a complicated guy who has Unresolved Anger Issues, according to the school psychologist, or as Seth calls him, That Douchebag. About three years ago, Seth came home from school to find a note from his mother which basically said she met another guy, so goodbye. Seth’s reaction was to punch the nearest thing, which was a sliding glass door. This earned him seventeen stitches in his right hand and a required weekly visit to That Douchebag so he could discuss his Anger Issues.
Seth’s dad is a decent guy, and Seth has an older brother, Matt, who is now in college. They dealt with this crisis the way any three abandoned men would … with the help of ESPN and a steady supply of take-out pizza. Rei and his parents offered all kinds of support to Seth, and I knew I had to do my part and give him more time alone with Rei. Parents are supposed to love us more than anything—more than work, more than booze, more than the Champlain Spring Water delivery guy who never seemed to mind hauling those five-gallon jugs upstairs to Seth’s mom’s private office over the garage. Seth deals with his rage by channeling all that energy into stuff like wrestling, lifting weights, running with Rei … stuff that makes him sweat and forget.
Remy’s Garage is within easy walking distance from the school, so while Seth heads off to work, Rei and I ride the bus home together. It’s a beautiful spring day, now well into the sixties with a light breeze and puffy white clouds.
“Isn’t your mom at that real estate convention in Boston tonight?” Rei asks. Our backpacks are on the bus floor, doubling as footstools, and Rei is slumped next to me in the seat, his knees a full six inches higher than mine.
“Yup. She’ll be home tomorrow at around five.”
“So did she ask you to make dinner for your father tonight?”
“Yup. And isn’t that just a colossal waste of time?”
“Colossal,” Rei agrees as he browses through a playlist on his iPod. “So what gourmet meal do you have planned?”
“I’m going all out and making canned soup,” I tell him. “Because then he can just drink his damn dinner.”
“You’re always thinking, kid.”
“Always.” I am still a little restless from all that volcano energy, so I twist up onto my knees and open the window to let in the breeze.
“So how is he?” Rei asks.
“Who? My father? He’s fine.” I bounce back onto my seat and resume my slouchy position.
“Fine?” Rei looks so nonchalant, just scrolling through his songs, but I know what he’s thinking.
“Don’t worry about it.”
He doesn’t look at me, but he doesn’t have to; I know what he’s going to say. “So you really banged your wrist on the dishwasher?”
“I really did.” That’s two. He usually asks me three times before he’s satisfied.
I lean against his arm and stretch my neck to see what song he’s looking for.