Zan nodded. “I do, too.” He glanced at my coat, motioned toward it. “May I?” Before I could nod, he was buttoning it, starting at the bottom, fingers moving nimbly to the top. His eyes met mine. “Warmer now?”
I still couldn’t nod, or speak, but I knew he knew. That I was warmer, that I wasn’t like the other Haven girls. That I was in love, and he was falling for me, too. I knew he knew I knew all these things, in just one glance.
“That one, there,” I said, regaining control of my body. “That’s the best sign here.” I walked toward it, and Zan followed like I knew he would.
The guy holding it was just a guy, just a youngish man in a blue parka standing there alone, apparently not affiliated with any group pro or anti. He was just a plain, ordinary guy with a sign in rainbow lettering: I SUPPORT THE RIGHT TO BE FABULOUS.
“I love your sign!” I told him.
He and Zan nodded at each other, maybe exchanging a look over my enthusiasm, but I didn’t care. “We should find a reporter or something, because seriously, this sign says it all.” True, I might have said it loud enough for the nearby reporter to overhear. So what? It got her attention, didn’t it?
The reporter was identical to the first one we’d seen—same sleek hair, same sleek suit. She asked us a few questions and her photographer arranged us around the sign, like he was taking a family portrait.
The picture never made it into the paper, not that I saw at least. But the image in my mind is sharper than a newsprint photo could ever be. In my mind I see that prenight sun lighting us up from behind, making Zan glow, making me glow.
With him, being fabulous wasn’t just a right. It was a privilege.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HAVEN HIGH
Mr. Daniel’s office
is decorated in a style that falls somewhere between the Hard Rock Café and the tail end of a car. I stare at a poster that says “God could only make so many perfect heads—the rest he covered with hair!”
“You wanted to see me?” I hand him the note one of the office aide kids just delivered to my last-period class. I hate this day. I don’t want to be living this day. I want Zan.
“Yes, sit, please.” Mr. Daniel sifts through my file page by page then looks up at me.
“So.” His face is earnest. “Where do you want to go from here?”
There’s no real answer to a question like that, and Mr. Daniel doesn’t care, anyway. He’s all about catchphrases, like “keep your options open” and “anything is possible,” but he knows little about the actual workforce and even less about post-secondary education. College counseling here is a joke. If a school is out-of-state or doesn’t have a big-name football team, it might as well not exist.
To say I don’t take this guy seriously doesn’t even begin to describe it.
“Where do I want to go from here? I’m still trying to come to grips with the fact that I
am
here.”
“Don’t tell me you still haven’t adjusted to life at Haven?” Mr. Daniel has been my counselor since I moved here and became the dreaded New Girl. He’s always calling me into his office to “see how the adjustment’s going.”
“That’s just it. I adjusted fine, then everything changed and I’m trying to adjust to that. I’m not ready to adjust to what may or may not happen in the future.” My voice goes up a few notches.
“The future is now,” he says. It sounds like he’s reading something you’d find in a mass-produced fortune cookie. “I have your college prep work sheet right here. The one you were supposed to fill out in English class?”
Ah, yes. The work sheet. I can explain that. But trying to explain it to Mr. Daniel is like playing a guessing game. I want to make him understand, but there are certain words I just can’t say.
“Your top three college choices are left blank. Thing is, you had three top college choices when you moved here. Back then you wanted to go to . . . uh . . .” He checks the list. “Scripps College, Pomona College, or Pitzer College. I mean, I’ve never heard of these schools, but I’m presuming you didn’t just make them up. Right?”
Right. “They’re legit,” I say. “All real, high-quality colleges in the same town: Claremont, California. Where I used to live?”
“Okay, great,” Mr. Daniel says. “But they’re no longer your top choices because . . . ?”
Because I convinced my boyfriend to go there. Because I don’t know why he left so suddenly. Because I don’t know why he went without me, and it hurt too much to try to fill out some stupid work sheet. Because maybe the future is now, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m at Haven High and he’s at Pitzer College and the space between us is so immense it might as well span several oceans, not a mere 664.08 miles.
It is at that moment the idea comes to me, the way sometimes you come up with the perfect thesis statement for an essay while just standing in the shower. I can fix this. It’s so simple.
“You’re right,” I say, earnest, giving him the eye contact “authority figures” around here really like. “I need to reexamine my priorities. I need to see if the Claremont colleges are still the place for me. I need to make some campus visits.”
“Excellent idea,” says Mr. Daniel. “Seniors are allowed three school-excused absences for college visits, you know. Plus, UEA break is coming up.” UEA is the Utah name for fall break—and the long weekend is supposedly for educational purposes.
“Looks like I have my work cut out for me, then,” I say, standing up. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Daniel.”
He beams. “Glad to be of service.”
COLLEGE BOUND
Zan and I
were going to get out together.
Late last February it was almost warm enough for evening walks, and we would roam the streets of Haven because there was nothing else to do.
“Winter is like this back home, right?” Zan said, almost smiling. “You’re used to this kind of cold.”
“No, but I like it.” I did like it. And it was a cold I wasn’t used to, a brisk wind to make your blood curdle but not so much that you had to bundle up. The air smelled like smoke.
“You
like
it?” I could tell from his tone he wasn’t talking about the weather.
“I like that you’re here,” I said. I watched my breath come out in wispy, white bursts, delighting me more than it probably would have on a night that wasn’t this night, this night that I was on an evening walk with Alexander Kirchendorf.
Zan stopped walking. He looked at me and smirked. “You like that I’m here. But what if I weren’t here?” We were beneath the industrial glow of a streetlight, and I looked up into his eyes. Was he going to kiss me now?
It hadn’t taken me long to learn that kissing at Haven High wasn’t like kissing at other schools. Kissing at Haven High was a
big deal
, emphasis added. Victorian-era big deal. I Love You big deal. You saved your kisses for your one and only. Period.
But I was ready for that kiss. I was so ready.
I smiled at him and bit my lower lip lightly, hoping I looked kissable. “You’re here right now, aren’t you?”
“Someday I won’t be.”
With Zan, there was so much subtext. He rarely said what he meant, and I loved how figuring him out was like reading
Ulysses
; how understanding one little part made me feel so much smarter. But right now I wanted him to be like a beach read that I could skim and get to the good part. I wanted to get to the hookup.
“Someday I won’t be either.” I kept my voice light, flirty. “I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life here, you know. I’m going back to California soon, for college.”
I wasn’t sure if I should mention it, but I looked up at him and his eyes were so beautiful and his hair fell so soft against his face and I was reckless with him like I wasn’t with anything, or anyone, else. So I said, “Did I ever tell you why I moved here?”
He shook his head.
“My dad’s a professor. Philosophy.”
“Oh, really?” He said it all blasé, but I could tell he was impressed because his voice got slightly louder and he lifted his head.
“He took a position as a visiting professor here, but he’s always taught in Claremont. It’s a college town, where I’m from. Not just one college, either. There are five campuses, all running into one another, all distinct but all close to each other. I’ve wanted to go to Scripps ever since I was a little girl.”
“Scripps?” said Zan.
“You should see it. Colleges there look nothing like the ones here.” I paused, but it wasn’t a long pause because I already knew I was going to say it. “Scripps is a women’s college, but it’s next to a lot of other good schools. Coed schools.”
“Yeah?” Zan was looking at me with this teasing smile, a smile that made me forget how to walk straight. Zan’s smiles were so unexpected, such a gift. It was better than a kiss.
Okay, not really. But there was promise in that smile, and a promise from Alexander Kirchendorf was as good as a kiss.
“I think you’d be a good fit there. At, say, Pitzer.” My face said everything my words didn’t.
“Pitzer, huh?” Zan raised his eyebrows. “Pitzer College.” He smiled at me, the realest, biggest smile I’d ever seen him give anyone. And he’d given it to me.
Me and Pitzer College.
YET ANOTHER TREK OUT OF THE PARKING LOT
Mattia and I
aren’t exactly neighbors, but we both live too far from the school to walk, so she drives us to and from school in her piece-of-trash, older-than-I-am white Rabbit, which we refer to as the White Rabbit. Each morning when Mattia picks me up for school, I feel like Alice going to Wonderland.
I meet her out in her B-lot parking space, a coveted spot reserved for students with the seniority and money to get it. “Finally,” she says when she sees me. “For a girl who hates Haven High so bad, you certainly take your time getting out of it.” She slides into the car and opens my door, which only unlocks from the inside.
“Sorry, I had a meeting.” I toss my backpack into the backseat. There’s no room for it up front.
“Meeting?” Mattia’s puzzled, but not for long. “Did Noah catch up with you?”
“Let me guess. He was looking for me at lunch, and you told him I was in the library.”
This is so Mattia: doing what she thinks is best for everyone, even when it isn’t. It’s the therapist in her, all
communicate, communicate, communicate!
“I had to, Joy. It was just getting too pathetic. So, what happened? Is Zan coming back?”
“He’s not coming back.”
“Okay.” Mattia sounds relieved. Like most people, she doesn’t like Zan. Unlike those people, she makes no effort to hide it. She wedges the Rabbit between two Toyotas. There’s already a megaline to get out of here. “So what did he want? A guy like Noah Talbot doesn’t stalk someone for no reason.”
Nobody stalks someone for no reason, but I know what Mattia means. Noah’s a Soccer Lovin’ Kid, and Soccer Lovin’ Kids don’t need to go around begging for friends. They automatically have the friendship of everybody in school, if they want it.
Almost everybody, that is. I want nothing to do with the Soccer Lovin’ Kids, especially this one. Still, the whole thing’s so unlikely I can’t help but blow Mattia’s mind a little bit. “Oh, it was nothing much, really. He just wants to be my new best friend.”
“Whoa, hold up.” She brakes too hard for a kid darting across the street. Gotta be a sophomore. “New best friend? For real?” She looks at me, and I know she’s picturing me and Noah, BFFs, texting about weekend plans. I know she’s picturing me happy again. The girl doesn’t get it.
“Yep. Get this. Before Zan left, he gave Noah specific instructions to pal around with me from time to time.”
Her face goes immediately dark. Noah and I will not be BFFs. Noah is obligated to be my pity friend, and it is Zan’s fault. Even when he is gone, Zan has messed up. She sighs. “Jeez, that’s so tacky and weird. It’s like some cowboy in an old Western asking the sheriff to take care of his missus while he’s off having some grand adventure. Zan sucks. Seriously. He just sucks.”
Why isn’t this line moving? Some moron is probably trying to make a left-hand turn. I gaze out the window. Haven High, Home of the Huskies, looks like a prison. There are so few windows it doesn’t matter there aren’t any bars. The school must have been built back when people thought prisons were attractive, like maybe during the Reagan administration.
“Non sequitur.” Ever since Mattia learned about non sequiturs in English, she’s been using the term every chance she gets. “About Homecoming.”
Great. This routine again. “What about it?”
“You should go.” I still haven’t figured out why Mattia cares so much about my social life. I spend time with her. Isn’t that enough?
“No one’s asked me.”
“No one’s asked you because they know you’re still hung up on Zan.”
“I’m not ‘hung up on Zan.’ He’s my boyfriend.”
“He
was
your boyfriend. Big difference.”
“We never broke up,” I say, miserable.
Mattia sighs. “Listen, all I know is what you told me. And what you told me is that the night before he left, Zan told you he ‘had to get away from this.
All
of this.’” Mattia loves making air quotes. I guess she thinks they make her look more intellectual, but she always bends her fingers so many times it ends up looking like a failed dance move. “Joy, you were part of the all.”
I lean my head against the window. Nobody understands. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m part of the “all.” The point is I’m not part of the “this.” “This” is Noah and his merry band of Soccer Lovin’ Kids. “This” is every female crafting on Super-Saturday. “This” is überconservative nutjobs. I am not part of the “this.”
“Alexander Kirchendorf is the world’s biggest cliché,” says Mattia. “He goes off to college, breaking all his high school ties in the process. He reinvents himself as some hotshot linguistics-loving atheist. He’ll end up a washedup has-been, and he’ll beg for you back. You better not take him back when he comes crawling, Joy. I’m warning you: I will kick your butt if you do that.”