Back When You Were Easier to Love (2 page)

He was sitting with his best friend, Noah, playing cards. And maybe it was the way the light from the windows hit his hair, making it look like satin. Maybe it was his eyes, eyes like chocolate pudding—the real kind—cooked over a stove until it almost boils.

But I think it was his smile. On that day, that day during second lunch on my second day at Haven High, I didn’t know just how rare a thing a smile from Alexander Kirchendorf was. But he smiled that day, that moment, because he had just won again. His teeth were perfect.

I could find myself in that smile, and that’s what I needed then—finding. So I knew it, like you know it when you’re getting strep throat. You can’t feel the full effect yet, but you know it’s unavoidable; that it will get much worse before it gets better.

I am infatuated by intellect. I fall for smart guys the way other girls fall for athletic guys or surfer guys, tall guys or blond guys. I fell in love with Zan, and maybe it was because he spoke fluent Esperanto that I was hooked. Or because he wrote my name in Tengwar, and it looked so exotic. Part of it was to spite the conventional Haven High crowd, who thought his habit of wearing khakis with tucked-in polo shirts was weird, not endearing. And he wore these old brown loafers, his grandfather’s shoes.

Zan wanted to be a linguistics professor at Berkeley and head up studies and publish in prestigious journals. He wanted the inner-city Northern California lifestyle: good public transportation, cheap Thai food, Telegraph Avenue, the whole shebang. He’d get it, too: he was ambitious like that. He would write me poetry in Estar, his constructed language. He’d put the translation in the margin.

Estar was like a code, and only together could we crack it.

I moved to
Haven midyear, midsemester, mideverything, including my life.

First impressions are usually right, and I got a pretty accurate sense of Haven High walking in to register. It smelled way too clean, for one, a weird fake-clean. There was Matchbox 20 music playing over the loudspeaker, so it felt like Rob Thomas was following you everywhere you went. The weirdest part was the smiley faces. They were hand-drawn on shiny yellow paper and taped all over the school.

“Are those here all the time?” I asked Mr. Daniel, pointing at one above the copy machine.

“Hmm?” he said, grabbing my schedule off the printer tray. He handed it to me and looked up where I was pointing. “Oh, no, those are for Happiness Week.” He said it like it was obvious this random week in January was made to celebrate happiness. Or encourage happiness. I’m still not sure about the actual point of Happiness Week.

“The layout of this school is pretty confusing,” he said, which I had already noted while trying to get to his office. “That’s why we give new students a Husky Ambassador to show them around the first couple of days.”

The whole Husky Ambassador thing sounded like a pretty humiliating setup, both for me and my ambassador. She was to show me around the school, take me to and pick me up from my classes, and even eat lunch with me until, apparently, after two days I made my own friends.

I also didn’t get the hard-core mascot love at HHS. Mr. Daniel had given me a list of extracurricular activities, including a drill team called the “Pup Club” and some school-spirit program called the “Iditarod.” But calling the ambassadors husky was a low blow.

Mattia, it turned out, wasn’t husky. She wasn’t embarrassed by her position, either. “This is the good bathroom,” she said, on our official Welcome Tour. “The rest don’t have doors for some reason. The SBOs are working on changing that.”

“Doors to the stalls?” I asked, disgusted. Now
there
was a lawsuit waiting to happen. And what were SBOs?

Mattia shook her head. “No, just doors going into the bathroom, thank goodness.” I liked the way Mattia talked quaint, but straightforward.

“On the left is the library. No one ever goes in there, but if you do, watch out for the librarian. Even the teachers don’t like him. This vending machine is more expensive than the one upstairs, so avoid it. The sign on that blue-and-white locker says NOTES FOR THE BIG DOG. It’s like a suggestion box. I don’t know if anybody reads them or not, because no students have the combination. So it might be the administration’s way of pretending like we actually have a say in anything.” She exhaled. “Okay, so any questions?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t worry, Joy.” She smiled at me—not fake. “It’s going to be okay.”

According to books
, movies, and TV shows, high schools give students school-sanctioned time for study hall—sitting in the library or an empty classroom and passing notes or painting nails or cramming for tests.

At Haven High, giving students this kind of freedom would give the faculty a collective heart attack. Here, there is no study hall. Home is for studying. School is for superstructured lessons.

I could live with that, back when I liked nothing better than studying in the serenity of my bedroom. I would sit at my desk and breathe in the calm and essence of intellect that lingered from that first day he was there. When I’m in my room now, just opening a textbook makes me hurt.

Homework has to get done somehow, though, which is how I get resigned to spending the remainder of my lunch period in the library. Truthfully, I don’t mind. “Sorry, guys,” I say, and check my watch for good measure, “I have some AP bio to finish up.”

“Want help?” asks Charlotte, cutting her spaghetti. We’re lab partners.

I shake my head. “Thanks, but I’m good. See you in class, okay?”

The library’s almost always deserted. I mean, seriously—it has a rude librarian, decades-old books, and no computers. Who’d want to hang there?

I take my usual table near the fat atlas.

I’m already deep into the textbook/work sheet groove, searching my backpack for my pink highlighter, when I see it. It’s tucked in the folds of fabric at the bottom of the bag, hidden to the untrained eye. But I see it. I know what’s printed on the pencil even before I pick it up: MISS THORPE THINKS YOU’RE SPECIAL. Gold lettering.

Swallow the scream, Joy. Swallow it.

Mattia refused to
believe it when I told her Zan had come over to my house exactly three afternoons after the initial sighting. “Zan
Kirchendorf
?” She specified, as though Haven High was crawling with Zans, particularly ones I would invite to my house. Her head shook hard enough that her waist-length, tawny-blond hair shook along with it. “Zan doesn’t go to girls’ houses. Zan doesn’t hang out. That’s not how he is.”

But that’s how he was with me.

“I hear you’re pretty good at French,” I’d told him. An understatement. He was fluent, knew more than the teacher. “I’m horrible at it,” I continued. Not an understatement. “Maybe you could give me some pointers?”

“You’re new here, right?” Zan gave me that smile, the one that first hooked me, the one that untied all the knots in the shoelace inside me. “Joy, you said your name was?”

I hadn’t said, which meant he’d been asking about me like I’d been asking about him, which meant it was supposed to happen when he said, “How about I come over tomorrow after school?” and then he did.

When Zan arrived I was unpacking books. Under normal circumstances a girl would stop unpacking books when a guy came by, but these weren’t normal circumstances; these were our circumstances. I told him I was unpacking books, and he asked if he could help, and I led him to my new bedroom. Technically, I wasn’t allowed to have guys in my bedroom, but my parents still owed me big-time for moving us to Haven, and I decided this would help them pay me back.

The two empty ladder-style bookcases gave my room a bare look, even though I already had a white desk with a pink Sony laptop and a bed made with linens from the Target designer I liked. I’d purposely waited until last to unpack my books. I loved my books too much to shove on a shelf willy-nilly. Books equaled permanence.

I was still working to convince myself this surreal Haven-existence was permanent.

Zan knelt over an open box of books, running his finger down the spines. His lips weren’t smiling, but his eyes were. He was wearing the loafers. And he sorted books the way I did: fiction by author’s last name; nonfiction by Dewey decimal. Not many people do that.

The shelves were nearly full, and I was organizing my old
Junie B. Jones
collection according to publication date. Zan started laughing. Quiet at first, then louder.

“What?” I looked over his shoulder, getting close enough to breathe in the smell of him. He had that good, washed-boy smell. He wore his grandpa’s shoes, but not his aftershave. He spoke European languages, but didn’t practice European hygiene. He was the best of everything absurd. “Why are you laughing?”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to. I could see. “That’s my ‘special box,’” I said, defensive. “It doesn’t need to be unpacked.” I tried to put the lid back on, but Zan lightly pushed me away. “What’s a special box?” he asked.

“A box of special things,” I said. “Duh.”

“Special things like writing instruments that tell you how special you are?” A smile tugged at Zan’s lips. He was holding a “pencil bouquet,” from my second-grade teacher. The six pencils were each a different color, with gold lettering: MISS THORPE THINKS YOU’RE SPECIAL.

“I was in second grade!” I plucked out a green one. “Didn’t people tell you how special you were when you were seven years old?”

“Sure,” he said. “Lots of people did. But it didn’t mean anything. Lots of people tell everybody they’re special here. That’s what this town is—a bunch of Mormons going around thinking they’re special, because since they’re Mormon they know how the world’s supposed to work.” He looked up at me. “In case you’re curious, the world’s supposed to be just like Haven.”

I nodded, because I’d already noticed that. People had a disbelief that places could exist where it was normal to see grocery stores selling wine and copies of
Cosmo
that weren’t hidden behind thick plastic “modesty screens.” Maybe it wasn’t a disbelief that these places existed, as much as a disbelief that someone would want to live in such a den of iniquity.

“But if the world becomes just like Haven,” I began—I looked into Zan’s huge eyes, stared into them without a hint of self-consciousness, and I smiled—“then Haven won’t be special anymore.”

“Exactly! It’s like putting everything you’ve ever owned into your special box.”

“Well, I think you’re special.” I tucked the pencil behind his ear, pushing back shiny, feathered hair. “And I don’t say that to just anyone.”

He picked a red pencil from the bouquet. “Neither do I,” he said, handing it to me.

Maybe this surreal Haven-existence was permanent.

But Zan was permanent, too.

I have never
been popular.

Not that I’m popular now. But I’m more popular than a girl who transferred to a clique-ridden high school nine months ago has any right to be. I know that. I know I’m lucky. I don’t feel lucky, but I know I am.

It was moving from the outside world that did it. Nobody knew that Claremont was just another boring city. Nobody knew that my thick brown hair that happened to be stylish in Haven wasn’t stylish anywhere else. Nobody knew that it only
seemed
like I was supersmart because I’d already studied
The Great Gatsby.
Nobody knew that back home I’d had exactly three friends, including my best friend, Gretel. And I’d grown up with her, so she more or less had to hang out with me. Nobody knew how uncomfortable I felt around popular kids, always like the one at the birthday party someone’s mom made them invite. Nobody knew I’d never been kissed.

People assumed I was a sophisticated city girl, and I let them believe it because I thought they’d figure out the truth soon enough.

Sometimes I think only one of them did.

I hear a
voice from somewhere over my shoulder. “Biology, huh? May I be of service?”

I shake the crumbs out of my head and look over into the face of Noah Talbot: blue-eyed, wide-smiled, completely delusional Noah Talbot.

For once, Mattia wasn’t exaggerating: this
is
getting pretty stalker-esque. Noah and I don’t talk. We aren’t friends. Zan left us both, and apparently, Noah thinks that means we have to have some kind of meaningful conversation.

But I don’t. Noah is king of the Soccer Lovin’ Kids—Haven High’s quintessential Golden Boy. He’s athletic enough to be on the varsity soccer team, smart enough to be in AP classes, and spiritual enough to make being Mormon cool. He even
looks
golden, with hair the color of sand when it’s hot, all shimmery-gold. His skin is naturally bronze even now, when summer is supposed to be over.

Most girls like Golden Boys, but they agitate me the way all popular kids do.

“Seriously,” he says. “I’m really good in this class.”

“Yeah?” I know I shouldn’t say it, but it’s too easy. “Do you know the average number of sperm in an ejaculation?”

I stare straight at him, and he starts rapid-fire blinking while his face grows pink. “Uh, I can’t remember.”

“Then you can’t help me. Thanks, though.”

Instead of walking away, Noah pulls a chair up to my table—another orange plastic one—and spins it backward before sitting down. “Listen, I’ve been trying to talk to you all week.”

“Yeah, I heard. What’s unclear to me is why.”

“Last night was Beverage Night. This week it was at my house, and I wanted to invite you. Maybe next time?”

What is
wrong
with this guy? You can’t even pick a fight with him. “Beverage Night?” I repeat.