Gemini (2 page)

My dad, from the driver's seat of the minivan, gave a honk and a wave. I knew he had been listening to our debate, but he'd learned years ago that it's better not to get involved. So he just called out, “Bye, girls. Have a good day!”

We all waved back.

“Anyway,” Hailey said to Juanita as we started walking toward the classrooms, “do you think wishy-washy hair is something you can work with?”

Juanita looked from side to side, as if she thought Hailey were talking to someone else. “What, me? Am I a hairstylist
now? What do you want
me
to do about Clara's hair?”

“No, I'm talking about the new guy. So his hair is a bad color. But is he cute? Do you think you might like him anyway?”

“Oh.” Juanita laughed. “No, I'm not in the market.”

“Come on,” Hailey said, “I've done the math. Not counting the new guy, there are forty-three guys in our senior class. You won't date anyone who's not in the honors track, so that brings it to thirteen. One is your cousin, three of them you've dated, four are jerks, two are idiots, Timmy still thinks fart jokes are funny, and you've lived next door to Keith forever, so he's practically a relative. That leaves Chris or the new guy, depending on his stats. But you know most of the other girls have done similar math, so when he shows up at school today, he's going to be like a marked-down game station on Black Friday. If you want in there, you can't sit around pondering the pros and cons.”

Oh, thank God,
I thought.
She wants him for Juanita, not for herself.

“Wow,” Juanita said, “is that the advanced math you were working on while Clara did your calculus for you? I mean, I appreciate it and all, but after that last fiasco, I'm done with boys for good.”

“Really?” Hailey perked up. “Why didn't you say so? I've been wanting to have a lesbian friend.”

Juanita grinned. “Actually, I just meant that I'm done
with
boys
, because at this point I'm holding out for a
man
. I'm done with all the high school crap. Like, when we're alone, he can look me in the eyes and talk to me about real stuff, but then we go to a party and he's chugging beer and laughing at his friends' juvenile jokes about my boobs? God, you guys, I am so done with that.”

I knew that Juanita had been briefly hopeful that her last boyfriend, Leif, had matured into a sensitive soul, rather than being the immature goofball we knew at school; and she'd been crushed when she'd realized the truth. Still, sometimes I had to work pretty hard at feeling bad for her. At least she had dated
someone
.

Hailey and I shuffled forward in our usual way, which is not the most graceful thing you've ever seen, but also not as bad as you might think. We have, after all, had years of practice, and we're able to walk pretty much side by side, though we're angled slightly away from each other. Luckily, everybody at school knows us, so we don't have to worry about them rubbernecking. As we approached the school's central row of classrooms, other students streamed around us like they would around anybody else.

“Anyway,” Juanita said after a moment, “maybe college will be better. In a lot of ways, actually.” She looked around at the school hallway, all the kids we'd known forever in their jeans and sweatshirts, laughing, pushing one another, a few of them mashed up against each other and
making googly eyes. “Sometimes I can't think about anything but busting the gates and getting out of this place, once and for all.”

My throat tightened.

Juanita stopped suddenly, looking at me. “Crap, no, I didn't mean it like that. I'll visit you guys all the time. And you should come visit me too, wherever I end up. Seriously, you can do that. Maybe even . . .” Her eyes swept searchingly across my face. My whole body felt tight and closed. “Never mind,” she said. “Don't listen to me. There's nothing wrong with Bear Pass. I'm just in a mood.”

She glanced at her phone. “Listen, I've got to try to catch Marina really quick before class. I'll catch up with you guys, okay?”

She ran off, while Hailey and I continued toward our first-period class and I tried not to think about the prospect of Juanita
getting out of this place, once and for all
.

We'd always known she would leave. It was just that graduation and college used to seem so far away, and now they were looming ever closer.

Up ahead a
Giganotosaurus
-size poster covered the side wall of the secondary bank of classrooms, where we were headed. It was decorated in big bubbly letters and in all the colors of the rainbow. I was angled to see it a little better than Hailey could, and I tried to keep us that way.

Ladies!
the poster shrieked.
Got your eye on a hot guy? Don't know how to catch his eye? Now's your chance! Get pumped for the Sadie Hawkins dance! Boys, sit back and relax. It's your turn to wait to be asked!

In the roundness of the letters, and in the size of the exclamation points, you could just hear some cheerleader bubbling over with forced glee, as if her life depended on it. Around the corner, I could see the edge of another poster, almost as big as the first. I wondered if the cheerleaders had stayed up all night making these things.

I hoped that Hailey would somehow not see it, but no such luck. “What do you think?” she asked, nodding toward the poster.

To the best of my knowledge, it was the first time our school had ever had a Sadie Hawkins dance. I wondered if I had some secret enemy who had come up with this idea just to spite me. If so, they were pretty smart, because this was perfectly designed to tempt my sister into humiliating us both. She had been known to flirt with guys, but she had never gone so far as to ask anyone out. But she'd never had an opening quite like this. And she didn't seem to grasp the fact that even if certain boys were maybe nice to us and friendly and even seemed to treat us almost like regular
people
, it did not mean that they would ever in a million years view us as actual
girls
.

So my instinct was obviously to knock Hailey
unconscious and keep her gagged and bound in a secret hiding place until after the dance, but with great restraint I responded, “I'm just trying to figure out whether the rhymes and near-rhymes were intentional, and if so, whether they shouldn't have tried for better meter.”

We arrived at our first-period class, AP English, and took our customary spot in the front left-hand corner of the room. Actually, it's not just our customary spot but the only one where we fit. Each of our classrooms has one extra-wide, deep bench, custom-made for us by the guys in woodshop, behind two desks that are almost side by side, but angled away from each other. The trick is to pull the desks out, slide-shuffle ourselves onto the bench, and then pull the desks back toward us.

Right next to us, Kim and Amber giggled and whispered, and occasionally one of them would cry out “No!” or “Yes!”

Hailey had the good fortune to be sitting next to the wall (she's always to my left, and by “always” I mean abso-freaking-lutely
always
), so I was closer and more vulnerable to getting sucked into the mindless void of their conversations, which generally flitted around among such topics as nail polish, cute animal videos, reality TV, and who had thrown up in the Taco Bell parking lot over the weekend.

I tried to focus on getting my notebook and
Invisible Man
out of my messenger bag. As usual, Hailey and I had
each worn a bag slung over our inside shoulders, so the bags hung on our outside hips. After sitting down, we pulled our bags in front of us to take out our stuff, but then we had to take turns leaning down to set the bags on the floor. We had to pay attention to each other's timing to avoid getting jerked around.

Kim turned to me. “Clara, have you and Hailey seen the new guy yet?”

“Nope. Heard about him, though.”

“Anything juicy?”

I thought about it. “Well, I mean, you know about the thing with his face, right?”

“What thing?” Kim pursed her cherry-red lips and raised her overplucked eyebrows all the way up to her bangs, leaning forward in a way that gave her serious cleavage. I guess just talking about this unseen, unknown guy was enough to put her into seduction mode. I've known Kim since kindergarten, and even then she was kind of a tramp.

Wait, let me unbitchify that statement. What I mean to say is, sure, Kim and I are friendly, and we've known each other a long time, but we've never been particularly close.

Yeah, that's much better.

Since I hadn't answered her question, she leaned forward even farther and stage-whispered it.
“What thing?”

“Well, the fungus?” I said, like I didn't really want to
mention it. “Not that I really know anything about it. I mean, it sounds like it doesn't cover his
whole
face.”

Kim and Amber looked at each other with alarmed expressions, and then they both started giggling in a nervous way, probably wondering whether this was one of those occasional-but-not-too-frequent times when Clara Cannot Be Trusted; and that was when he walked in.

Juanita's description had been completely wrong. He was tall, like she'd said—almost awkwardly so—but he wasn't “kind of cute.” He was Cute with a capital
C
. Cute in a sweet-looking, gangly, 97-percent-grown-but-still-3-percent-boy kind of way, with deep blue eyes like the sky before sunset, when it's just about to throw itself open and let in the stars.

Also, there was absolutely no visible fungus on his face whatsoever. Go figure.

I checked Kim's reaction first, and she was all attention. Amber's lips were parted, and her eyes were wide. Then I twisted to look at Hailey, though I could really see her only in profile. She shrugged and actually said out loud, although without looking in his direction as she said it: “Meh.”

Kim and Amber couldn't control their laughter at that, but because they were still looking at this tall, cute guy who had just walked in, you could tell he thought they were laughing at him.

Also, he didn't know where to sit.

Luckily, the teacher, Miss Young, walked in right behind him. She held out her hand to him and cried, “You must be Max!”

Was she actually batting her eyelashes at him, or was I projecting?

“I am,” he agreed, shaking her hand.

She introduced herself and told him where to sit, at the back of the class.

As Max walked in our direction toward his seat, he caught my eye, and I felt myself turning red. Two reasons: First, he'd caught me staring at him, and while half the class was probably staring too, I of all people should have known better. And second, in our small town I usually saw only people who were used to me and Hailey. In the presence of a new person, I couldn't deny being a spectacle. Or half a spectacle. But a gigantic one. Like a car crash on a freeway where a car is turned upside down and another one is wedged under a semi, and you can still see the smoke. I was half of that.

But for some reason I didn't look away from Max as quickly as I meant to, and maybe that was good, because he smiled at me. And his smile was like, I don't know, whatever thing would magically wipe away that huge car crash and turn it into some kind of stellar rock concert, and before I could even think about it, I smiled back.

“But it turns out he's really weird,” Bridget announced at lunchtime.

We were eating on a couple of picnic blankets spread out on the grass, as usual—me and Clara, Juanita, and Bridget. It's not exactly easy to plop ourselves down onto a blanket, but it beats the awkwardness of trying to sit at a picnic table with an attached bench, like the rest of our class.

I could feel Clara tensing up behind me right away, but I jumped in with what we surely all wanted to know. “Weird like fascinating? With an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure Norwegian comedians? Or weird like scary, with a private taxidermy station in his basement?”

Bridget gave me a blank look. “Are those the only choices?”

Bridget is a very sweet girl, but keeping up with a conversation is not her strong suit. It's funny, because she looks like one of those precocious little kids you'd see in a movie. She's tiny and dark-haired, with thick bangs and
black-rimmed glasses that hide most of her itty-bitty face. She's smart, too, but in a grades kind of way, not an on-the-ball kind of way.

“Never mind. What's weird about him?” Juanita asked as she bit into a baby carrot.

Bridget poked at her pasta with a plastic fork. “Well, for one thing, there's the fact that he switched schools during October of his senior year of high school. Who would even do something like that?”

“I doubt it was his choice,” I pointed out. “Something must have come up with his parents.”

“I guess so,” Bridget conceded, “but how do you explain the fact that he's, like, seven and a half feet tall but he claims he doesn't play basketball?”

Juanita patted Bridget on the arm. “Sweetie, he's not seven and a half feet tall. I'm pretty sure he's not even
six
and a half feet tall.”

Bridget shrugged. “And then also, he moved here from LA, right? But in history class Amber asked him if he had ever seen any stars when he lived there. She was thinking maybe he'd seen one of the Hemsworth brothers when he was standing in line at Starbucks or something, right? But he was like, ‘No, are you kidding me? There's way too much light pollution in LA to see many stars at all.' I mean, what does that even
mean
?”

My head whipped toward Clara, but I couldn't see her
expression. Because of the way we're conjoined, we can never look at each other's faces straight-on, unless it's in a mirror or a photograph. If we both turn our heads as far as we can, we can come pretty close to a full view. But mostly we just catch glimpses of each other—at best a profile.