Snark and Stage Fright (14 page)

“Hey, George,” he said. “That looks great! When’s the next Pigs gig?”

“Next weekend, at Club Razorburn in Ashworth,” Dave said, wiping a paint-y finger on his Dead Kennedys T-shirt. “You got something for me to read, sir?”

Michael nodded and handed over his notebook.

“Written in pen and ink.” Gary laughed through his bite of the experimental batch of cranberry orange oatmeal bars I had brought over. They marked my first attempt at making up my own recipe and not following someone else’s and they had obviously passed the taste test, with Gary at least. I wondered if Michael would like them. He wasn’t a huge fan of oatmeal. “That’s revolution old school.”

Michael laughed and hunched down next to me to examine the goofily angry pig I was outlining over a big anarchy symbol, the letter A in a circle with a line through it. I could smell his hair he was so close.

“You really are good at this stuff, George,” he said. “Are you still applying to art schools, too?”

I sat back on my heels and wiped my bangs with the back of my hand, getting red paint on my forehead; Michael grinned and wiped it off with a paper towel from the roll I’d left sitting on the grass. I could neither exhale nor inhale with him touching me again, even through a paper towel, remembering how close I’d felt to him when I’d told him my college plan. I managed to say with as careless a shrug as I could muster, “Guess I’ll know when I retake the SATs this month. Art schools are going to be more forgiving of my math scores so the decision might be made for me … It may be art school by default.” I didn’t tell him about all the different sketches of his face I’d done over the past few weeks when I couldn’t sleep. I would never include them in my school application portfolios, even if I was getting better at portraiture with all the late-night brokenhearted practice and extra art classes during study hall. And he would never see them if I could help it.

With Dave busy reading Michael’s first official article for the
Alt
and Gary fiddling with his iPod shuffle, Michael moved closer to me than he had been in weeks; I swallowed hard and concentrated on not reaching out my hand to touch his knee. And then he nudged my bent arm with his elbow, slightly. I almost toppled backward into a paint can.

“I’ll still help you practice for the SAT,” he offered quietly. “I promised to before and the offer still stands.”

“Uh … ” I exhaled enough to blow the bangs off my forehead. If merely sitting beside him in Dave’s driveway had reduced me to the intellectual equivalent of a quivering blob of protoplasm, how could I sit with him, our heads bent together over a test prep book, my brain cells buzzing and dying like moths hitting a bug zapper on a porch? By the time I got to the testing site weeks later, I would barely be able to write my name on the form. “I don’t know … ”

He looked surprised and a little hurt. But how could I tell him that sitting here next to him on Dave’s front lawn was hard enough? That I couldn’t imagine him in my house again, or me in his, or even sitting together at a table at the public library without my wanting to stroke his neck or to brush a curl behind his ear or to lean in close enough to take in the smell of him once more?

He nodded and shifted his weight, finally settling on sitting cross-legged beside my work, saying, “Well, if you change your mind … Hey, Diana said she called your house a few times and finally left a message this morning. She got the part in the musical and wanted to thank you and Leigh.”

“
I
didn’t do anything. She’s the one with the great voice and the perfect looks to play a sixteen-year-old Austrian ingénue.” I could see by his frown that that had sounded ungracious so I added, “I’m really happy for her. She deserves it.”

He snorted a little at that but didn’t respond. All of a sudden the silence between us fell heavily, like when Wile E. Coyote drops an anvil on the Road Runner and misses and a cloud of sand rises up and obliterates everything. The awkwardness must have been thick enough for Dave to sense it, because he cleared his throat really loudly like he was interrupting something before saying, “This is really good,” indicating the article in Michael’s notebook with a few taps of his finger.

“Yeah?” Michael actually sounded surprised and pleased. He’s such a good writer I couldn’t imagine that he’d been worried about what Dave would think about it, but a pleased look warmed his face then, like he was seven and had just made the Little League team.

“A couple of places where you use the passive voice could be punched up,” Dave amended, “but, yeah, you got it.”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks,” Dave said, and when I hesitated, he smiled and explained that a former National Security Agency employee had leaked information about how the NSA was listening in on all kinds of private phone conversations between all kinds of private citizens.

“They even tapped Angela Merkel’s phone,” Michael said, then smirked and added, “She’s the German chancellor, George,” and I felt my face color with embarrassment because I hadn’t known who she was. And Michael had known that.

“Well, after they read this, people around here will know a lot more about this. You’ll make them care,” Dave said, giving Michael a thump on the back.

“Everyone around here cares about their cell phones,” I conceded.

In wild anticipation, Gary hopped a little from foot to foot in his Doc Martens, saying, “I bet we get another complaint from the school board!”

“That’s a goal?” Michael laughed, tilting his head in question toward Gary as he looked at me.

“Gary doesn’t consider an edition successful unless we get at least three complaints,” I replied, catching myself before adding that half of those complaints were often lodged by his grandmother, who seemed to follow every issue of our little alternative paper. Maybe she had stopped, though, now that I no longer posed a personal threat to her values—or her grandson.

“What are
you
working on for the next issue?” he asked me.

I blinked at him a few times, confused by why he was suddenly so interested in what I was doing and why he wasn’t over at Diana’s celebrating her imminent local stage debut. Then I began cleaning off my brush like the future of the free world depended on it.

“Not much,” I admitted. “A short, lame article about how the school has reneged on its veggie lunch options. I’m kind of … uninspired right now.”

“It’s hard to imagine you not having something to be angry or upset about,” he said, and I ducked my head because I didn’t want to see his smirk.

“But she’s gonna do a cartoon or something for this issue, too, right, Georgia?” Dave reminded me. “Plus an ad for the Pigs show.”

“When is it?” Michael asked as he stood up to leave.

“Next Saturday—starts at eight.”

“I’ll be there,” Michael promised as he walked back to his car, then turned and added, “unless being a writer with
The Alt
means some undercover agents pull me out of class and beat me with a phone book or something. Then I might go into hiding.”

“No better place for
you
to hide than a punk show,” I said.

“You have a point there,” Michael acknowledged as he got into his car with a laugh. “Then I’ll definitely see you guys there.”

We waved goodbye and I watched his car drive away until it turned the corner before I got back to work, wishing he hadn’t left before I had said something nicer, or funnier, or even remotely likable, then wishing that I didn’t care what I’d said. Or not said.

Dave hunkered down next to me and asked quietly, “So it’s really all over between you guys?”

“Yep.”

“Oh.” He grabbed an old crusty paintbrush and began picking dried paint bits off of it. “Listen, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on you guys, but I can help you cram for the math SAT if you want. I mean, Michael’s not the only guy who can do math.”

I kind of laughed. “Plenty of
girls
can do math, too, you know. I’m just not one of them.”

“Well, I’m available if you want me,” he offered.

I paused in my daubing horrid fluorescent pink onto my pig’s jowls. I looked at his face and noticed for the first time that he had a faint splattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose, right below his glasses. Dave had been a good friend to me since last year and SAT math cramming seemed like a more productive use of my time than wallowing in misery, so I said, “Yeah, thanks. That would be great.”

“Okay! Well, let’s start next week. How’s Monday after school?”

“I think so. I have to see what my ‘von Trapp keeper’ duties are first,” I said, and then had to explain how I’d been hired by the theater department to corral all the little fake Austrians in the production when they weren’t onstage.

“Dave and I might be in the pit orchestra again,” Gary said as he adjusted the bass and treble ratios on his boom box. “Ms. Parris asked us last year to play with the stage band—they needed a bass and guitar. It was fun, actually, even though it’s not exactly our kind of music.”

“I remember! You guys were great. Did they make you cover this with a top hat,” I teased, running my hand across the top of Gary’s fading purple faux-hawk, “or was it your idea to wear one?”

“My idea. Did you know Ms. Parris wears a nose ring when she’s not on teacher duty … She said she might come to a Pigs show sometime.”

“We’re lucky to have a music teacher with superior taste.”

“Hey, Georgia,” Dave cut in. “Should I let my hair grow a little? How would that look?”

I thought about it for a moment because it seemed oddly important to him to get an answer—important enough to interrupt me and Gary, which I’d never seen Dave do. Though why he—or anyone else—would want to consult me on a fashion issue was beyond me, unless he was just trying to distract me from my post-breakup depression.

“Longer could be good,” I said. “But I like it when you make those hard little spikes for the Pig shows.” I mimicked with my hands how I imagined he took fingers full of his hair and twisted them with lots of gel to get this creepy horned look like he works part-time as a minion of the devil. It’s perfect for a punk rocker.

When he got to my house on Monday to study math, Dave had copious amounts of gel in his hair, which was standing at attention in neat little upright spikes like a newly mown lawn. When I told him it looked good, he grinned like a little kid who has just ridden his bike three whole feet without training wheels. But I’m sure his pleasure ended when he tried to get me to understand sines, cosines, and all that other crap I will never ever use outside of math class. I did my best to keep his spirit up by pouring lemonade and feeding him peanut butter brownies from a new recipe. But after barely an hour and a half, I thought my skull would start to emit black smoke, so I said, “That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. No. More. Numbers.”

Dave shook his head but laughed. “I think you’re
kind
of getting it,” he assured me.

“I doubt it. But thank you. Really. I’m not an easy tutee, I know. But you were very patient.”

I walked him to the door and thanked him again. It really was super nice of him to help me out, especially since I can be really dense about anything involving numbers—sometimes I even misdial when I’m calling home because I get the numbers out of sequence—so it can’t have been fun for him to have to pry my skull open with a crowbar and dump some knowledge into it. I’m so lucky to have a friend like Dave.

And yet, as he drove away, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what it would have been like to have Michael as my math tutor. He definitely would have given me a hard time about my ignorance, but he can also be surprisingly patient. I’ve seen him teach his swim class at the Y and the kids love him. He makes even the smallest, most water phobic kid feel safe in the pool. I should have remembered that when I was in his bedroom at the Cape.

This thought made me feel even more disconsolate than the math review had, so I walked into the kitchen, picked up the vegan cake cookbook I had gotten from Leigh for Christmas last year and decided to thank Dave by baking something awesome and multilayered.

***

When I walked into history class on Tuesday, Michael was there waiting to ask me, “How’s the SAT prep going?”

I frowned in confusion, wondering again why he was so interested in the trivia of my daily life. “What do you mean?” I asked as I took my seat. “I didn’t sign up for Kaplan or Princeton Review.”

“But
Dave
’s helping you with the math, right?”

I just blinked at Michael a couple of times because he actually looked irritated with me. And this time for no reason.

“Yes, he is helping me. And this bothers you because … ?”

“I told you
I
would still help you.”

Why was he being so petulant when he’s been encouraging me since last spring to get some help with math instead of raising the white flag of surrender and imagining a world free of numbers?

“I thought you would be relieved to not have to force-feed three years’ worth of math into a brain that rejects numbers like a bulimic spits out food.”

He shook his head and opened his textbook to look over last night’s reading, dismissing me and the conversation. But moments later he said, “At Cameron’s party that night, when I said I needed a break, I didn’t mean that I would never see you again, that I would never speak to you again. I could still help you with math like I offered to.”

I took in a breath, set my book down on my desk, and turned to the front of the room. I couldn’t look at him when I said, “This is too weird for me, Michael. I don’t know what we are anymore. Friends? You want be my math teacher? My study buddy? When you decide what the rules of engagement are, maybe you can text them to me.”

He opened his mouth to respond as Mrs. Parker began talking about an upcoming group project and what we could choose for topics. I think I groaned out loud. What is it with teachers and group projects? In English class last year, Michael and I had been forced together in a group project that started this whole emotional tsunami ride of a relationship, whatever its current status.