Another Little Piece (10 page)

LUNCH

SCHOOL COUNSELORS SHOULD

School counselors should

have offices with doors

and walls.

Not cubicles

made of flimsy gray fabric.

School counselors should

be better prepared

for appointments

not running off to

find files

and leaving students

to overhear.

School counselors should

think of who might

be listening

when one of those students

is a boy

talking about

his father leaving

and mother working two jobs

and his dream

to be the first

to go to college.

School counselors should

see someone peering

over their inadequate divide

and recognizing

the football hero

of the school

on the verge of tears.

School counselors should

know that this is how

girls fall in love

with boys

they never ever

would’ve

considered before.

—ARG

OFF CAMPUS

I found another one of Annaliese’s poems wedged into a fold at the bottom of my backpack. Funny how those words made Annaliese more real than all the framed pictures scattered throughout the house did. This was a part of Annaliese that no one else had ever seen. She had wadded up her poems and hidden them away. It was telling that she hadn’t simply trashed them. It was as if she’d known to preserve this small part of herself for later.

And now, along with everything else that was once hers, they were entrusted to me. I wanted to have the words tattooed across every inch of my skin. Except even that didn’t feel permanent enough. Bodies were too disposable.

These were the thoughts that occupied me as I sat at a cafeteria table completely alone. I’d gotten there early, fleeing from the redheaded boy, who I’d seen approaching as I retrieved my lunch from my locker. Now the tables around me filled up, making mine seem even larger. And emptier. I could feel myself shrinking into Logan’s hoodie, hoping people might see only that and forget about the girl inside.

Next to me a chair screeched. Peering around the edge of the hoodie, I watched Logan sit down.

“Hey,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud, as the entire cafeteria went silent.

“Hey,” I replied, my own voice so low, I could barely hear it.

“So I wanted to say I’m sorry. For the thing on your locker. And the thing with Kayla too. Just so you know—we’re not together anymore, but we were dating when you and I . . .”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“Oh.” Logan glanced down at his empty hands and then back up at me. “Well, sorry. Again.”

I shrugged. Logan nodded. We stared down at the table.

He jerked his head toward my lunch, still packed away. “You brown-bagging it?”

I nodded.

“All right. Let’s get out of here then.”

Grabbing my lunch bag, he stood and headed for the doors, leaving me to follow. I didn’t like his way of doing things. Telling me to have lunch with him. Telling me where to have it. The way he assumed that not only would I want to be with him, but alone with him as well.

I followed him, though. I didn’t have any better options.

Logan stopped in front of the hall monitor stationed outside the cafeteria doors.

“Hey, Ms. Haley, can we get a pass? I left my lunch in my sports locker.”

Ms. Haley’s gaze went from Logan to me and back again. “What’s that in your hand?” she finally asked.

“Oh, this is hers.”

“Then why is she coming with you?”

Logan opened my lunch bag, and pulled out a Baggie with two of the mom’s oatmeal raisin cookies inside. “’Cause I’m trying to convince her to let me trade her something for these. C’mon, Ms. Haley, you know Coach doesn’t want us missing any meals.”

“Coach,” Ms. Haley muttered with clear disgust, but she scribbled something onto the stack of hall passes in front of her and handed one over to Logan. “If you get into trouble, you’re not leaving this cafeteria early until you graduate, and I don’t care what Coach says.”

“Thanks, Ms. Haley,” Logan called over his shoulder, already walking away.

“Thanks,” I said too, adding a little smile of apology for Logan forcing her to bend the rules and not even having the courtesy to properly thank her for it. And then I was annoyed with myself for doing it. Catching up with Logan, I jerked my lunch away from him. “I can carry this myself.”

Logan blinked at me in surprise. “Did I do something?” He shook his head, realizing he’d left that question a little too open. “Not before, but, like, now.”

“Yes.” I was exasperated. “You announced in a very nonprivate time and place that we’d had sex, you punched my locker, you dressed me in your hoodie and ordered me to have lunch with you, and when I didn’t show, you left a note in my locker. And when I did show, you told me we had to go somewhere else.”

Logan frowned. “I thought you’d want to get out of there.”

“I did. That’s not the point. Why are you doing any of this at all?”

Logan’s eyes fell away from mine, drifting down to his sneakers. “You hate me, don’t you? For everything. I mean, you should, it’s just . . .”

He stopped, shaking his head. His long hair fell forward, hiding his face, but I could see his throat working, fighting the tears.
Please don’t
, I wanted to say,
it’s not fair.

He held it together, though. I could see him physically working to shake off the urge to cry as he reached his hand up, behind his shoulder. His fingers worked, searching for something and finding only air. As he snatched his hand back, burying it deep in his jeans pocket, I realized what he’d been reaching for. The hood that was pulled over my own head. The hoodie was more than simply a piece of clothing to him, it was a second skin. And he’d given it to me, not just for protection, but as his penance and pound of flesh all in one.

I reached out and touched his arm. “I don’t hate you. I don’t even know what happened between us, except that we . . .” I trailed off, suddenly feeling embarrassed, remembering that I had watched him and Annaliese.

We stood there in the middle of the hallway, with my hand still on his arm, and if I hadn’t been that close, I might not have even heard his next words. “My mom said she’d never been ashamed of me before.” His voice cracked, and I felt the muscles in his arm flexing as he struggled to control his emotions once more. “I don’t want my mom to be ashamed of me. I gotta fix this.”

Now my own tears threatened. Thinking of Annaliese’s poem, and Logan’s mother with two jobs. Thinking of the mom, the way it mattered too much what she thought of me. The way I feared she’d know the worst and hate me for it.

“Then let’s fix it,” I said.

THE DEEP END

It turned out Logan didn’t have a lunch at all. Instead he led me to a vending machine tucked away in a corner between the pool and the main gymnasium. According to him, it wasn’t meant to be used during school hours, but everyone did. Feeding a few dollars into the machine, he chose a bag of Fritos, another of Doritos, pretzels, and a package of Starbursts. Popping open the Fritos, Logan pointed toward the door to the pool.

“Mind the smell of chlorine?”

I didn’t, and we settled in the poolside bleachers to eat.

Neither of us said anything at first. The silence was the kind you eyed nervously, trying to think of a way to make it go away, while the tiled walls created an echo chamber that multiplied every foot shuffle, bag crinkle, and crunch of a chip, effectively filling the room with the sound of us not talking to each other.

Sitting beside Logan as he methodically worked through his bags of junk food, I found my thoughts drifting to Dex. Admittedly, it wasn’t the first time. Ever since our meeting it was as if a new current had been created that wanted to carry me back to him. Remembering he’d said we were in the same class, I’d been looking for him at school. I hadn’t even known how much I’d been counting on seeing him here, until I realized either he no longer went here or he was avoiding me. I hated to think the latter might be true. And suddenly, I had to know the truth.

With what I hoped sounded like an offhanded casualness, I added my voice to the echoes. “Does a guy named Dex go here?”

The way Logan jumped, my question might’ve been a bullet ricocheting off the walls.

“Are you kidding? Someone already mentioned that creep to you? Shit. If someone showed you the—” Logan stalled, and I helpfully filled in what he didn’t want to say.

“The YouTube video?”

His mouth fell open, and then it snapped closed. “Who did it? If anyone at school is found with a copy of it, they’ll be expelled. Everyone knows that.”

“Nobody here has shown it to me,” I said, carefully sidestepping the question, afraid Logan might decide to punch another locker on my behalf.

He looked relieved, and I knew then that the little video clip I’d watched scared the hell out of him. “Well, if somebody does try and show it to you, walk away. You don’t want to see that.” His gaze was distant, and I could almost see the one-minute-and-twelve-second clip playing in his head. I wondered how many times he’d watched it. Maybe only once and it remained burned into his memory. Or, perhaps, he had made himself watch it again and again. Not like I had, trying to understand, but as another way of finding a path toward forgiveness.

“And don’t worry,” Logan added. “You won’t run into Dex. He left school in eighth grade, got homeschooled or something. I don’t know, I didn’t go here yet, but everyone says he was the same freak then. I guess his only friend killed himself, and he had some kind of nervous breakdown or something, and that was the last anyone saw of him. Well, until he started showing up at parties sophomore year. Always with his camera too. No matter how many times he got kicked out, or had beer dumped over his head, he kept coming, so everybody just started to ignore him.”

Logan’s fist clenched around his bag of pretzels. “I don’t know why he put that video online. I don’t know how anybody who was there and had seen it would want to do that.” His voice caught, and I watched him make another aborted attempt to grab for his hood.

“This is where we used to meet,” Logan said suddenly. He wasn’t looking at me, but at the smooth water in front of us. “Not during lunch, that would’ve been too obvious. We would skip out during class. Just for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. You used to be really nervous about it, but kind of excited too. Like you couldn’t believe you were doing it. You said you’d never skipped before.”

The words stumbled from Logan’s mouth in a halting kind of way that left me wondering if he was forcing them out, or had just been holding them in for so long that he now couldn’t quite release them.

“I don’t remember,” I said, not as a reminder, but to let him know he could let go of these memories—there was no one holding on to them anymore—except him.

“I know you don’t, that’s why I need to tell you.” He turned away from the water, facing me.

“Maybe you should try and forget it too.”

Logan shook his head. “Don’t you think I tried? The whole time you were missing, I tried. And it kinda worked, but then you came back and now you’re here and I can’t keep pretending. You ever hear somebody say something is eating them up inside? I never really knew what that meant—or I thought I did, like being stressed about a test or shit like that—but this, this is nothing like that. Knowing what happened between you and me, it feels like actual fucking teeth taking these, like, gigantic bites out of my guts and stuff.”

I wanted to make a joke. Tell him he sure put away a lot of junk food for a guy who was suffering from a parasitic guilty conscience. Except teeth. And bites. Those words recalled my nightmare vision of Annaliese’s white teeth closing around a dripping red heart. It was just a dream, I told myself. Or maybe an allegory. Annaliese’s life wasn’t the only one ruined. So many other lives had also had a bite taken from them.

“So how did it start?” I asked, wanting to give Logan this bit of himself back. “Where did the whole you-and-me thing begin?”

Standing, Logan stepped onto the bench below ours and started to walk along it with careful precision, one foot in front of the other, as if it were a balance beam perched over shark-infested waters. He should’ve looked like a hippo in a tutu, a big guy mincing along like that, but the natural athleticism that had made him a star on the football field transferred here. It was more than just gracefulness. There was a confidence and oneness with his body. He made walking look like something special.

“We were in Spanish together. Mr. Fields’s class. As a teacher he’s known for two things: the Mighty Taco parties he throws the last day before Christmas break, and his constant vocab pop quizzes. The Mighty Taco thing is cool, but those quizzes were brutal. And he was one of those teachers who would get all bent out of shape if you weren’t prepared. Like he would tell you to take out paper and a pen, and two seconds later be shooting these Spanish words at you, and if you missed one ’cause you were still digging around for something to write with, he wouldn’t go back and repeat any. So, I flunked a few of them, just because I’d missed half the questions, and they were like fifty percent of your grade or something. I couldn’t really afford to mess up anymore.”

Reaching the end of his row, Logan neatly pivoted and began moving back in the other direction.

“One day, I came in and realized it’d been a while since our last quiz. Before I even go to sit down, I start looking in my pockets for a pen. And I got nothing. That’s when I walked past your desk. You always sat like totally front and center, and I’m more of a last-row, near-the-windows kind of guy. I passed by your desk and saw you had all these pens lined up. The little clicky kind.”

He mimed a clicking gesture with his thumbs. “So, I grabbed one from the pile, and said, ‘Mind if I borrow this?’ You kind of stared at me and turned real red, and I figured, well, not to be a jerk, but you know, lots of girls like me, and I thought you were stunned speechless or something. But then you grabbed it back, and said, ‘Not this one.’ Then you took one of the other pens there, and honestly they all looked alike, and you did the weirdest thing. You unscrewed it, and kind of peered inside, like you were making sure all the parts were there or something.”

I wondered which of her poems had been inside that pen Logan had almost taken. If it had been one about him—and most of them so far seemed to be, even though he was never mentioned by name. She must have been mortified.

“Then you put the pen back together, held it out to me, and said, ‘You can keep it.’ And I said, ‘Nah, I’ll get it back to you at the end of class.’ Then I went to my seat, and it turned out there wasn’t a pop quiz that day after all. And I didn’t give your pen back, because I totally forgot about the whole thing. And I didn’t think about it until maybe three or four weeks later, when I was walking past your desk again, but this time I didn’t notice your pens. I . . . this is gonna sound nuts, okay?”

Having reached the end of the bleachers once more, Logan stopped. He leaned into the tile wall in front of him, letting his forehead rest against it. He looked exhausted or defeated, as if he had literally hit a wall. But then he was in motion once more, rotating 180 degrees so that his back was against the wall. Logan slowly slid down and then backward until he was lying on the bench, staring up at the ceiling.