Colin Fischer (8 page)

Colin sat alone
at a table in the cafeteria, his back against the wall with a view of the windows and doors. This was what his father called “the gunfighter’s seat.” He called it this because he claimed that gunfighters in the Old West would always choose the spot in the saloon where they could best see danger coming.
⁵
Colin fully endorsed this as a policy but calculated the probability he might encounter an actual gunfighter anywhere to be exciting but vanishingly small.

Although the seat had been chosen for its view, Colin kept his head down. This allowed him to tune out the cacophony of clanging tableware, shouting, and conversation that might otherwise have overwhelmed him. He focused instead on cataloging the lunch his mother had packed for him: stick pretzels speared through slices of deli ham, baby carrots, celery sticks,
and a whole apple. Leaving the apple intact prevented oxidization and meant it would not turn brown over the course of the morning.

As he adjusted to the noise, Colin ventured to look up from his food and observe his peers. Over the summer, Colin’s mother had rented a series of popular movies about high school from her teenage years, ostensibly to help him navigate this social minefield. He quickly lost interest in stories of gawky girls pining for popular rich boys and students from different cliques forming unlikely friendships while defying adult authority, leaving his mother to watch alone while muttering cryptic phrases like “I wanted a Blaine but ended up with a Duckie.” However, it had given Colin enough data to formulate what he considered a working taxonomy of high school tribal groupings.

Colin watched his classmates with the detached interest of an anthropologist, recording in his Notebook the movements of the nerds, the popular girls, the jocks, the goths, the emo kids, and the most curious of all, the gangsta-wannabes. He scanned the cafeteria, and as his eyes flicked toward the double doors, he saw Melissa enter. Colin stopped writing.

Melissa was alone but smiling. She carried a worn red backpack, the same one she had carried all through middle school. Colin realized he wasn’t the only one who had seen her—many people were looking her way. Especially the boys.

Melissa beamed as Emma and Abby opened a brown grocery bag and presented her with a round white chocolate birthday cake, topped with white frosting accented by pink frosting roses. She clapped when she saw it, then looked up at her friends. As she did, she realized Colin was staring at her. Melissa smiled at him.
WARM
. Colin felt a sudden burning sensation course through his body. He looked away, developing a renewed interest in his carrot sticks as Melissa excused herself and headed toward him.

“Hello, Melissa, how are you today?” he said as she reached his table, trying to end each sentence on a slight up tone to convey enthusiasm and pleasure.

“I’m good,” she said. Melissa’s pale, freckled face reddened even more as the capillaries in her skin dilated and filled with blood. Colin recognized this as the “blush”
⁶
response—it was unique to the human
animal and still poorly understood by scientists. “I was wondering if you’d like to join us for some cake.”

Colin studied Melissa’s open, wide-eyed face. He attempted to identify her expression on his own for six seconds before he gave in and consulted his cheat sheet. Melissa appeared
SHY
. He pondered the meaning of this in silence.

“No,” Colin said in a flat monotone. “I don’t eat cake.”

“Oh.”

Melissa had known Colin long enough not to be surprised by his brusqueness. Still, the corners of her mouth turned down slightly and a thin furrow appeared along the length of her brow.
EXASPERATED
.

“It can’t be because you’re counting calories,” she continued. “I’d kill to have your metabolism.”

Colin raised an eyebrow. Curious. Melissa’s body was lean and athletic. As far as he could tell, her metabolism was enviably speedy.

“It’s not the sugar that’s the problem; it’s the texture. Cake is slimy and mushy, and I dislike foods that are mushy.” Colin indicated the apple, pretzels, carrots, and celery arrayed in front of him. They were arranged
by color according to their position on the spectrum. “I enjoy crunchy foods.”

“Uh, yeah,” Melissa said. She pursed her lips. It was hard for Colin to decide what this meant. He pursed his own lips back at her, hoping this would invite a clue.

“Maybe next time I’ll get you some peanut brittle.” She smiled.
FRIENDLY
.

Colin perked up. “I like peanut brittle.”

“Thought so,” Melissa chirped, then turned to rejoin the impromptu party. As Colin tracked the graceful movement of her hips, he realized he rather enjoyed watching Melissa walk away. An unfamiliar, though not altogether unpleasant, flush of warmth bloomed through the skin of his cheeks.

To Colin’s surprise, Melissa made a sudden detour toward a table occupied by Josh and Sundeep—two academically inclined boys toward whom she had been friendly in middle school. The boys were obviously of lower social status than the students at the table with the cake, yet Melissa took time to speak to them. “That is very interesting,” Colin said to no one in particular, and opened his Notebook to record the moment.

The complexities of social groupings at West Valley High School were even more daunting than they had been at middle school, and Colin pondered strategies for untangling them. Perhaps, he thought, he could print out photos of the students from the school website and social networking sites, then pin them up
on the cork board in his bedroom in a sort of social map—much like the ones the FBI used to understand the inner workings of drug syndicates and Mafia families. It would be very useful because over time he could add to the map and make changes as appropriate.

Colin began to sketch a very rough version of what such a social map might look like based on the people he saw in the cafeteria. He arranged the groups horizontally, with the vertical axis representing the person or group’s relative position in the school’s pecking order. The higher on the chart, the more popular that person was. Colin smiled at his solution. He prided himself on making charts that were intuitive and easy to read.

Colin started toward the bottom left of the page, writing Josh and Sundeep’s names under the heading “
Nerds
.”

In the “
Jocks
” column near the top of the page, Colin immediately wrote Stan and Eddie’s names. He hesitated before adding Cooper, though, recalling that the tall, olive-skinned boy had a surprising talent for math. In fourth grade, Colin and Cooper shared a classroom, and Cooper consistently came in third or second in the room’s weekly “math minute” contest. Colin, who won every week, had once attempted to compliment Cooper for his math skills, but the other boy had muttered, “Go away, spaz,” and stopped speaking to Colin for the rest of the school year.

Emma the ace water polo player also went into the “
Jocks
” column. Beside it, Colin created a “
Queen Bees
” category to capture girls who seemed to have no talent or interests beyond the maintenance of their own popularity—a heading he took from the title of a bestselling book on the social anthropology of American high school girls. Abby went into that category. So did Sandy, with Colin drawing a line between her and Eddie to denote their intimate relationship (making a note to
use color-coded yarn when constructing the board at home
).

Melissa, Colin realized, would be a problem assigning to one group. As a cross-country runner and exceptionally intelligent student whose company was now seemingly in high demand, she had a foot in several different camps. Colin opted to table the Melissa question and moved on to Rudy Moore, whom he placed by himself at the top of the page.

Despite his presence in all the honors classes, Rudy was the only boy Colin knew who suffered none of the social demerits that accompanied extreme intelligence. Rudy had been popular for as long as Colin had known him. Colin wondered idly if there were some connection between Rudy’s popularity and his penchant for cruelty. The ability to inspire fear was common among alpha members of any social species. Yet Melissa, too, was now popular, and she seemed to show as much kindness as ever.

Colin frowned and held the Notebook at a distance away from his face. Perhaps he wasn’t designing this chart as well as he thought he had. As Colin pondered switching the
X
and
Y
axes or otherwise altering the chart, Emma and Abby suddenly thundered across the cafeteria, shrieking over each other in voices so high and so loud he cringed from the physical pain of listening to them.

“Melissa!” they shouted in unison. They looked at Josh and Sundeep the way a person might look at a friend’s very ugly pet. “Wayne Connelly is eating your cake! You have to stop him!”

Melissa shrugged. She raised her brows, rolled her eyes, and finally allowed herself to be pulled back to the center table.

Colin turned his attention across the cafeteria toward Melissa. Wayne indeed stood at her table, grinning as he cut himself a huge slice of cake with a plastic knife. Her friends looked outraged, uselessly pounding Wayne with their fists, but Melissa just looked
SAD
. Colin rose from his seat, barely able to hear Melissa as she asked in a quiet voice, “What’s your problem, Wayne?”

“No problem, Missy,” said Wayne.

“
Melissa
.” They stood there a moment, staring at one another. There was an odd stillness Colin could not identify. “Whatever. Just take your cake. Take it and go.”

Wayne didn’t move. They kept staring. Colin felt his heart rate accelerate and his breathing grow rapid and shallow. Without knowing it, he’d balled his hands into fists. Colin marveled at his body’s reaction as he realized something strange: He wanted to fight Wayne Connelly. This was odd because he had never wanted to fight anyone.

Before he could further analyze or act on this odd new impulse, Wayne finally broke eye contact and turned away from Melissa. “Where’s the love, huh?”

Wayne sauntered away with his prize. He settled in at his own table, where he made a big production out of tucking into the piece of cake and carefully disassembling it layer by layer before eating it in surprisingly small, dainty bites. Colin watched, fascinated, the urge to do battle forgotten. Indeed, he found the incongruity of Wayne’s fastidious eating so interesting he looked around the cafeteria to see how others ate.

Melissa darted at her piece like a hummingbird—small bites, methodically consumed. Rudy took a slice for himself but dumped it into the trash when he thought no one was looking at him. Sandy, still clad in Eddie’s overly large Notre Dame jacket, folded a piece with a generous frosting rose into a large cloth napkin with the skill and delicacy of an origami artist, then gently deposited it into her large faux Juicy Couture handbag.

Colin’s observations were interrupted by sudden movement across his peripheral vision, accompanied by rough male shouting. He whipped his head around, giving the impression of an owl spotting a mouse running across the undergrowth. His big eyes locked onto Stan, who—unwisely, Colin decided—clamped his hand down on Wayne’s arm. He dug his thumb into Wayne’s bicep, and Wayne winced in pain.

“This party doesn’t accept food stamps,” Stan said.

Colin puzzled for a moment:
Why would a party accept food stamps?
He abandoned this line of exploration as the fight escalated. Stan wrestled the piece of cake away from Wayne. Then Wayne regained his footing and shoved Stan into two of his friends, nearly toppling them. Colin flipped open his Notebook and uncapped his pen.