Ask the Passengers (7 page)

Kristina isn’t even thinking about it. All she can talk about on the way to school is her double date tonight and how cute Donna is and how she thinks she might love her.

“The real deal,” she says. “She
gets
me, you know?”

“That’s awesome,” I say.

I wish I could tell her about me. About Dee. I feel like every minute I spend with Kristina is a lie. I’ve been practicing a sentence in my head.
Kristina, don’t kill me, but I’m gay. I
think. I mean, I think I’m gay. I mean, I think I’m in love with a girl. I mean…
The sentence isn’t quite worked out yet.

Ever since European history last week and those damn pink triangles… it’s as if quitting trig opened up a channel of thinking I was pushing away. I freed myself of something I was faking, and now I want to free myself of all my faking.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Sure.” I’m not, though. I’m a little angry or sad or something. Impatient. I am sick of it not being Saturday. I want to fast-forward to tomorrow morning, please. While I’m at it, I want to fast-forward to next year. College. Leaving Unity Valley.

“You don’t look it.”

My eyes dart to the rearview, where I can see a pickup truck full of senior boys speeding toward me.

“I always wonder if the people driving behind me are texting and are about to kill me. That’s all.”

“They’ll outlaw it soon,” she says.

“That never stopped anyone from driving drunk, did it?”

I can tell Kristina is looking at me with that face. “What’s your damage?”

I shrug. I pull over to the curb and let the truck pass me.

“Come on. Don’t be pissed. It’s Homecoming Day! No matter how the day ends, I’ll be a princess or maybe even—could it be possible—your
queen?
” She forms her hands into a finger tiara and pretends to place it on her head and says, “What they don’t know will never hurt them, right?”

My replacement for trig, fourth-period study hall, is pleasant. No one all that recognizable in here. Stacy and Karen Koch, twins, sit next to me and smile occasionally as if they know something I don’t. Probably Homecoming results. As if I care.

I read a little bit of Plato’s
Republic
as well as the chapter in our textbook about the trial of Socrates.

Can I admit I’m a little freaked out that Socrates only has one name? I know that’s how it was done in those days, but it bugs me. I can’t tell if it’s his last name or his first name or what. And it can’t be shortened—except to
Sock
, which is completely stupid. I want him to have a more familiar name—something laid back and modern, so I can relate to him better. So I stare at the picture in my book of the curly-bearded guy with the pug nose, and by the end of study hall, I name him Frank. Frank Socrates. Makes him more huggable.

Makes his clothes easier to label for summer camp. F.S.

After sixth-period lunch is over, the entire school population empties into the football stadium. The band plays soft numbers down in the band area.

Without Kristina and Justin, I don’t have anyone to sit with. I know a few people from classes, but most of them play in the band. I’d rather sit by myself anyway. I pull out Plato’s
Republic
, but the minute I do, Jeff Garnet sits down next to me and stares, nervously, until I look up.

I know he’s nervous because Jeff is always nervous. He’s a
leg shaker—you know, the bouncy kind that rattles entire rooms and makes you want to toss up your lunch? I see his knee bouncy-bouncy-bouncing there until I close the book around my bookmark and look at him.

“Do you know who won?” he asks.

“No.”

“Do you want to know?”

“Not really,” I say. Jeff bounces his leg so much, I want to put my hand on it and make him stop. I want to tell him to relax.

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough,” he says, acknowledging the band director giving the signal for the band to fade out.

“Yeah.”

Jeff has been staring at me for two months. Every day in third-period AP lit, I feel it as sure as I feel him shaking the whole room with his leg, making the heating unit jangle.

“Astrid?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“You want to go out sometime? I mean, nothing big deal or anything, but you know—just you and me?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, yeah, sure, maybe. I’m pretty busy at the moment, but I guess I’d like that.” I have no idea why I said that. I do not want to go out with Jeff. Not because of the leg thing, but because I’m—uh—
taken
already.

“No pressure,” he says. “You can get back to me about it.”

“Sure. I’ll get back to you,” I say.

And hour later, all is right with the world—the football captain and cheer squad co-captain are crowned Homecoming
king and queen. The cars drive the losers and winners out of the stadium while we applaud their collective greatness, and then we’re all sent back into school before final bell.

Kristina calls me at seven because she already heard Jeff asked me out.

They say:
Why would she snub a nice boy like Jeff Garnet? It’s not like she has other options.

They say:
She’s just like her mother. Thinks she’s better than us.

“Why didn’t you say yes?” she says. “You
do
want to get Claire off your case about dating, right?”

“I didn’t
not
say yes. I said I’d get back to him. That I was—uh—busy for a while.”

“Oh, sure. All that Plato and Aristotle.”

“Seriously, Kristina. He’s not my type.”

“You really should hook up with someone this year, Astrid. It’s depressing. Plus, I feel guilty. You spend so much time with me and Justin, I feel like it’s our fault.”

“How’s it your fault?” I ask.

“How can you date anyone if you’re so busy keeping our secrets?”

She has a point. Except she’s missing the biggest piece of information in the equation. My secret is bigger than her secret, because nobody knows it yet.

Not even me.

At dinner, the subject comes up again. Me and Jeff Garnet—talk of the town.

“I don’t know,” I say when Ellis asks me if I’m going to say yes.

“I hear he’s a really sweet boy,” Mom says. “I hear he’s at the top of your class, too. Do you two share some classes?”

“Just lit class. And lunch,” I say.

Ellis says, “You know, if you don’t start dating again, people will think you’re still not over Huber. Or they’ll probably say you’re gay.”

I smile at her and give her death-ray eyes. And anyway, I already had my gay rumor. Tenth grade, December. Right before Christmas vacation.

I think if we kept a calendar of who gets called gay in high school, there would be a new person on every single day of the 180-day school year. Gay, dyke, fag, lesbo, homo, whatever. Every single one of us has heard it somewhere along the ride. It’s more common than the flu. More contagious, too. Nobody gossips about whether you have the flu or not.

Then, as if on cue, Claire blurts out, “That reminds me. I was at the printer today, and Luanne said that there are only
lesbians
on the school hockey team, which I took to be an ignorant attempt to insult Ellis. What decade are these people living in? I mean, that might have been true back when I was in school, but in the twenty-first century, all kinds of girls play sports. Why do these small-town people have to have such small minds?”

Ellis looks at Mom as if she’s reading from the wrong script.

“I knew plenty of girls who played sports when we went to school who weren’t lesbians, Claire,” Dad says. “My sister, for one. Hell, my mother played sports in the fifties. Last time I checked, she wasn’t a lesbian, either.”

“Well, it’s no big deal to us, girls. Your father and I lived in New York for a long time. We knew plenty of gay people.” That’s Mom. Friend of the Gays. FOTG. Wait. Her FOTG badge is around here somewhere. Let me find it. “I just don’t understand why people here talk about it like it’s leprosy,” she says. “I hope you’re nice to them, Ellis.”

Ellis gives her an insulted look. “Of course I am! Geez, Mom. Stop being so weird.”

“Some people around here think you can catch it, you know.”

All three of us look at her as if she has just landed from space.

“Well, they do!” she insists. “I’ve heard them say you can catch gay off gays. Isn’t that ignorant?”

We keep looking at her. She drinks more wine.

I’m happy to see that Ellis is as annoyed as I am, but I’m working really hard not to get paranoid about why Ellis said anything about people thinking I’m gay in the first place.

I look at her. “So you’d rather have me dating Tim Huber again than happily single?”

“God!” she says. “No!” Then she chews and swallows. “Anyway, he doesn’t talk to you anymore, does he?”

No. Tim Huber doesn’t talk to me anymore. Not since I completely fell for him and Ellis and Mom started bugging me to break up with him because he’s fat. Then, when I wouldn’t, somebody (most likely the somebody to my right, or to
her
right) started the rumor that broke us up.

They said:
She’s only dating him because he’s fat.

They said:
It’s a pity thing.

“No,” I answer. “He doesn’t talk to me.”

“But Jeff Garnet is a nice kid,” Ellis says.

“I know. Look. Why can’t you all just butt out of my life?”

Claire holds up her wineglass. “If we butted out of your life, you’d still be in diapers.
And
dating that fat boy.”

“YOU’RE GOING TO CALL JEFF
, and you’re going to get him to cover for you,” Kristina says.

“Were you talking to my mom?”

“No, why?” she asks. She’s not lying. I can tell when she lies, and she’s genuinely clueless about the rally cry at dinner last night about how badly I need a boyfriend.

We’re in my room, and until she started talking, I was completely blissed out after a morning at work with Dee where we worked side by side and spent the entire time pretending to talk in our own language of clicks and weird robotic animal sounds until we cracked everyone up and I nearly peed my pants. We spent a half hour “taking inventory”
in both walk-ins (fridge and freezer) for a huge job we have next week. Some big reception and open-house event for the Hispanic Center in town, the biggest job Maldonado Catering ever got.