Chapter 5
F
ifteen hours goes by fast, 'cause now I'm starting my second day of hell. I still can't believe this is where I go to school, a place that looks like something from a Hollywood film lot. I can totally see an ad for a Lamborghini or Ferrari being shot hereâred car, green grass, gray stone, and a woman leaning against the car sipping champagne. Or maybe one of those rich-prep-school shows on the CW. That's what I'm thinking as I make the walk from the bus stop, until I see Marco sitting on the bench under the tree where we first met yesterday. How could I forget my silver lining?
“Hi, Marco.”
“Seems like only yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
My goal for today is to talk to this boy in sentences with more than two words. I swear.
“I thought I'd hang out here in case you and Bethanie, you know,” Marco says.
“I know. The first day, right? We should compare schedules. Maybe we have some of the same classes.”
There. I knew I could do it. But I cannot be smooth no matter how I try. The minute I take my schedule out of my backpack, the wind snatches it out of my hand.
“I'll get it,” Marco offers.
“No, I have it,” I say, but I don't. But what kind of second impression would I be making to have the guy run all over campus chasing down my schedule?
I try to step on it, but it gets away again. Now I'm running after it, wondering which is worseâlooking like an idiot chasing a piece of paper across the windy quad, or missing out on the chance to sit way too close to Marco while we look over our schedules. I decide it's too early in our relationship to make him think I'm a complete moron and let the wind have my schedule.
“Do you think this planet is your trash can?”
I turn around to find someone who I can only guess is a teacher walking toward me, holding what looks like my schedule.
“Excuse me?”
“Mother Earth is not here to accept your refuse,” she says and shoves the schedule against my chest. “Treat her like the goddess she is.”
All righty then.
“Hey, that lady caught your schedule. Cool,” Marco says when I get back to the bench.
“You mean the psychotic hippie?” I feel some attitude coming on, but I let it pass because I'd rather get all worked up over Marco than some crazy teacher. “So what do you have first period?”
“Maybe we should wait for Bethanie. She might have some of our classes, too.”
“I don't think Bethanie will be showing up.”
“She already dropped out?”
“Hardly. She'd kill to stay here. I don't think she'll be showing up to meet
us
. I think she's already ditched us for new and improved friends.”
I'm about to tell Marco about yesterday's adventure when Bethanie appears, proving yet again that when it comes to her, my superpowers of observation are no good.
“I didn't expect to see you here. I thought you'd be part of Lissa's crew by now. How'd the ride home go?”
“It was great. She was telling me about a back-to-school party one of her friends is having next weekend.”
I give Marco a look that says
I told you so
. “So she invited you to a party?”
“Not in so many words, but why else would she tell someone about a party unless she wanted them to come?”
“Because she's Lissa. From what I know of her, sounds exactly like something she'd do.”
I'm about to explain to her how the haves treat the have-nots when we notice Mildred from yesterday's vacuuming incident dragging a bookshelf across the quad, and having a hard time with it. She drops the bookshelf, falls to the ground, and grabs her foot. We run over to her since it appears we're the only people to witness this out of the hundred kids walking around and across the quad.
“Are you okay?” Bethanie asks. “Should we call someone ?”
“Why are you trying to drag this heavy bookshelf by yourself?” Marco asks.
“Because it's my job, even if I don't get paid nearly enough for it. Oh, my foot is killing me.”
“Seems like a two-person job, at least. You think you can grab the other end, Chanti? Or should I grab one of these guys?”
“You mean one of the guys who don't even seem to notice we need help over here?” I say the last five words loudly, in the hope someone might care, but no luck. “Sure, we can carry it together. Where were you taking it?”
“Over to the administration building. Headmistress Smythe's office.”
Of course.
“Do you think you can put pressure on your foot if I help you?” Bethanie asks. She'll never fit into Lissa's crowd, lucky for her. I noticed Lissa and her entourage had walked right past us.
Once we get the bookshelf into Smythe's office, Mildred tells us where to place it. Marco is about to go find the nurse's office when Smythe arrives.
“What are you doing in my office? Who let you in here?”
“I did,” says Mildred. She's lying on the sofa, out of Smythe's view from the door. “They helped me get the bookshelf you wanted moved from the library.”
“Mildred, we do not ask our students to help our custodial staff with their duties.”
“She didn't ask,” Marco offers. “She was trying to drag that heavy thing across the quad by herself, and dropped it on her foot.”
“If she needed help, she should have asked one of the other custodians, not our students.”
“But you just called me on the Nextel and told me to get it over here ASAP,” Mildred is saying. “I tried to tell you I needed to wait for . . .”
“That's neither here nor there. You children should get to class. First bell will ring any second.”
“We were going to help Mildred get to the nurse,” Bethanie says.
“I'll see to Mildred.”
I doubt it. I imagine poor Mildred still here on this sofa at the end of the day, thirsting to death and Smythe laughing at her while she sips a glass of cold lemonade.
Just as we're leaving the office, Smythe stops us.
“Since you're all here, I can ask you about my Montblanc. It went missing yesterday.” She's looking directly at me when she says this. “You remember, Chantal, the one you almost walked off with. I've had it for years and have never misplaced it.”
I look over at Bethanie, waiting for her to confess so I don't have to narc on her, but she gives me a blank look. I guess she's going to let me take the fall.
“As I told you yesterday Mrs. Smythe,
I
didn't take it,” I say, and walk out.
Â
If my life had a soundtrack, the shower-scene music from
Psycho
would be playing right now. When I walk into my next class, I see the psychotic hippie at the whiteboard writing her name. Ms. Reeves. My biology teacher. I grab a seat at the back of the class. As soon as she turns around, Ms. Reeves's eyes lock on mine, and I can no longer hope she doesn't remember me. She comes straight back to my desk, her long tie-dyed skirt billowing behind her, bracelets tinkling. I can't believe Smythe lets her dress like that. It's so un-Langdon.
“And you are . . . ?”
“Chantal Evans. New girl.”
“Since we last spoke, have you reconsidered your treatment of Mother Earth?”
Last spoke?
We didn't speak. She made an accusation, shoved my schedule at me, and went off in a huff, as I remember it.
“I wasn't polluting. My schedule blew out of my hands. I was chasing it in the wind, but it got away.”
“What I saw was you giving up the chase.”
She walks back to the front of the room, tinkling and swooshing. That's going to be really annoying on test days.
“Welcome, class. I'm Ms. Reeves, a new teacher here at Langdon. This is an environmental science class, but it will be taught from the perspective of Earth and your place on this planet, rather than from your perspective and what the Earth can do for you.”
From the sighs and groans around the class, I know I'm not alone in thinking the woman is a little off. Now I get why she's at Langdon. They've gone green. Langdon is trying to be environmentally aware because everyone knows green is the new black. I think I know who convinced the board to replace the Smythe Botanical Garden with sagebrush and limestone.
“Take a look around this room at all your . . .
stuff
.”
I know what she really wants to say.
“Your
stuff
is your carbon footprint, and I can look around this room and see that the twenty of you will likely leave a footprint the size of a landfill. Just look at the number of plastic water bottles I see on the desks. It breaks my heart.”
It's true. I think she's tearing up. Some girls sitting two seats over from me don't seem to notice our teacher's pain, though. They're too busy oohing and aahing over something one of them has taken from her bag. When I stretch to get a better look, I find it's Lissa and a clone. I must have missed them when they walked in, since I was busy licking my wounds after Smythe accused me of being a thief.
“What's going on back there?”
Uh-oh. Busted. Here she comes, swooshing and tinkling down the aisle.
“What is this?” she asks, snatching a small pink box from Lissa's hands. Then she starts opening it, and I'm hoping it's something embarrassing like a sex toy or a colonic kit.
“Face cream,” Ms. Reeves announces, which is a little anticlimactic. “And look at the packaging. An excellent example of carbon footprint. We have the cardboard box. Inside that, we have the plastic platform the bottle rests in.
Plastic!
Now the bottle itself. A bottle within a bottle, just to make it pretty. Do you know how long it will take the earth to break down this bottle?
Never!
”
Ms. Reeves reassembles the cream in its packaging, but instead of giving it back to Lissa, she takes it to her desk.
“Hey, what are you doing with my cream?”
“I'm confiscating it. Langdon policy. A teacher can confiscate anything a student brings into class that is not germane to the class or is causing a disruption. This abomination fits both categories.”
“But that's a brand-new, unopened bottle of
Il Mare
.”
“How ironic that it's named for the sea, because that's exactly where the packaging will probably wind up.”
“But that cost me twelve hundred dollars.”
Ms. Reeves almost passes out after this news. Seriously. She has to brace herself against the whiteboard.
“Twelve hundred dollars?
Twelve hundred dollars!
Are you kidding? Do you realize how many acres of rain forest that could save? Do you know how many trees could be planted in the Northwest forests to stop soil erosion? I can't believe you people. I just can't!”
She throws the cream in her bag and walks out of the classroom, but before we can all start talking about what just happened, she's back. She calmly goes to the lectern at the front of the class, opens her teacher-copy textbook, and says, “Please turn to page three.”
Seriously. Cue the music from
Psycho
.
Chapter 6
A
fter spending an hour with crazy Ms. Reeves, my mood can't even be improved by the cheery French café music playing in the background or the delicious scent of galettes Madame Renault is cooking on a waffle iron while she teaches verb conjugation. French class is my favorite, though even when I'm here, I still hate Langdon. When I should be listening to Madame Renault running through verb tenses, I'm mentally cursing everything that is Langdonâthe long bus ride to get here, the crazy teachers, and the clueless kids who wouldn't know real life if it smacked them upside the head. At least I do my mental cursing in French, though that puts some limits on me because I only know two French swear words. It isn't the kind of thing they cover in class.
Right now, it's just two minutes before the bell and I'm focused on trying to finish the short story I should have written last night instead of hanging out on Tasha's porch, listening to the latest gossip that I miss by not going to North High. Another reason to hate Langdon.
I smell the faintest hint of familiar cologne mixed with something else that makes me weak every time, and I don't have to look up to know Marco is standing within a few feet, and suddenly every part of me is warm.
“Has anyone claimed this seat yet?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Way to make a guy feel wanted,” he says, pretending to be crushed but smiling in that way that gets me all hot and bothered.
Oh, you're wanted all right.
That's what the Chanti in my head wants to say, but all that comes out of my mouth is, “No one ever sits there. It's your seat now.”
The first lie of our relationship. A girl who chose
Fifi
as her French name has been sitting there. That's what she gets for giving herself a name reserved for poodles and strippers from old black-and-white movies.
“Good. It's mine now. I just did a drop/add into this class.”
“Wasn't it hard to get a schedule change?”
I imagine Marco in the registrar's office begging the man to change his schedule so he could be in a class with me. When the registrar says it's against the rules, Marco finally admits that he's crazy about this girl but doesn't know how to tell her, and if he could only take French class with her, he'd figure out how to tell her his true feelings. French being the language of love and all.
“I was in Spanish because I thought it would be an easy A, but the teacher caught on to me. My advisor told me to find another language, one I wasn't already fluent in.”
Or that could have been what was said in the registrar's office. But he had Russian or Mandarin (Chinese) as options. He chose French, and he chose the seat next to me.
“Ãtudiants d'attention. Nous avons un nouvel ami joignant notre classeâMarco.”
His name sounds even better with a French accent.
Marco.
It sounds all powdery soft and sexy. From now on that's how I'll say his name, which I can get away with since we're both taking French. Otherwise it would just sound stupid.
“Merci, Madame Renault. C'est mon plaisir.”
He speaks French! The way he just said
It's my pleasure
kills me.
“You speak French, too?”
“I took a year of French already. Why do you think they let me into French II?”
I don't knowâto make it impossible for me to ever focus on verb conjugation again? Maybe because God is making up for all those times I asked him to send me winning lottery numbers in a dream, or a new bike on my tenth birthday, and He ignored me both times. But it's okay now. Having Marco sitting next to me in French class, speaking in that accent, makes up for everything.
Fifi arrives two minutes after the bell and heads toward us like she's about to tell Marco he's in her seat. I work up the most evil eye I have ever given anyone, and shoot her a look that says, “Unless you want a beat down, you'll take that seat in the back corner.” Lucky for her, old Fifi gets the message and changes course. That's one benefit to the scholarship-girl stereotype Langdon kids have of me. They assume I'm dangerous.
When Madame Renault asks if anyone would like to work with Marco to help him catch up with where we are in the French book, I knock my notebook onto the floor trying to raise my hand before anyone else can. Smooth. Can I look any more eager? But when Marco reaches down to pick up the notebook, gives me that smile, and says,
“Merci
,
”
being smooth isn't all that important anymore. I just got myself a reason to talk to Marco about more than the lunch menu.
Â
After school, I'm standing on the edge of Langdon's football field wondering why I never got into the sport before. It's a gorgeous afternoon and buff guys are running around in uniforms that only accentuate their buffness. What's not to like about this? Maybe it's just more interesting when I'm watching my future boyfriend wrap up practice. Marco suggested I meet him after practice so I could give him a copy of my French notes, but I'm hoping to turn this opportunity into a full-blown study session at the coffeehouse, if I can come up with an invitation that sounds casual and not at all desperate.
A man who I assume is one of the coaches starts talking to me.
“That kid is pretty good. Never seen him before. Do you know who that is, number seventeen?”
“Marco Ruiz,” I say, because the only player I've been watching is number seventeen. I don't know if he's any good in terms of football, but I know he's good to look at.
“Is he new? He can't be a freshman. Not with that game.”
“He's a junior. He and I both just started Langdon Prep this year.”
“Are you two part of that scholarship program?”
Uh-oh. Here it comes. The pity/fear/disgust that Langdonites have for anyone whose parents make less than a combined income of a quarter million a year.
“Well, thank you, scholarship program. That kid is good.”
He's the first person I've met around here who is happy to have us. Well, he's happy to have Marco, and I'm going to take that to include me since Marco and I are practically a couple.
“He is good,” I say, hoping he won't ask me to explain why I think this since I don't know a thing about football.
“Friend of yours?”
“Yes. I'm just waiting for him to finish practice.”
“Name's Mitchell,” he says. “That's my son there, the quarterback who acts like he's never seen the playbook.”
“Justin Mitchell?” Mr. Mitchell seems like a nice enough guy. Too nice to have spawned Lissa.
“That's the one, though the way he's been playing, I'm not sure I want to claim him.”
The coach whistles to end practice, and Marco runs over to me.
Runs
, as in eager to see me. Justin is dragging behind him, as though he knows his father has been discussing his suckage on the field.
“Son, that was excellent scrimmaging,” Mr. Mitchell says to Marco, not his actual son. “You've got hustle, something Justin here has been lacking lately.”
Well, I wouldn't have much hustle either if I'd smoked a joint before practice. One look at Justin and I can tell that was his problem, or at least one of them. He's stoned. Surely his father sees it, or the coach.
“Lay off, Dad. Why are you even here?”
“I'm here to check out my investment. I'm the biggest booster this team has. I'd like to see where my money is going, and I'm glad to say that some of it went to that new scholarship program. You don't step up, Justin, and this young man might be our next quarterback.”
“Him? He's a junior.”
“A junior with an arm. Precision, too. Marco, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Between calling Mr. Mitchell “sir,” shaking his hand, and having a lot of hustle on the field, I think Justin's father is more crazy for Marco than I am.
“I like your style, Marco. I could use someone like you at my company. Are you looking for a job, by any chance?”
Oh, I am. Pick me. I'm so broke I'm willing to take a job without even knowing what it is. But then I remember it's Marco's style he likes, not mine.
“Yes, sir, I am. What's the job?”
“I own a moving company,” he says, producing a business card out of thin air, as far as I can tell. “Mitchell Moving and Storage, the . . .”
“. . . the largest minority-owned moving company in the state, started from the ground up when he was just eighteen years old with a beat-up old van and fifty dollars in his pocket,” Justin says, completing his father's sentence. “Yeah, we've all heard it before.”
Actually, no,
we
haven't all heard it before. I'm beginning to think Justin is Lissa with a Y chromosome.
“My son has no appreciation for hard work. Can't get him to work a week at the business he'll one day take over.”
“What kind of work do you have available?” I say, trying to move the conversation away from awkward dysfunctional family moment to something more important, like me and my bank account.
“I need movers. Are you Marco's agent?” He smiles at this, and I realize Mr. Mitchell takes Marco and me for a couple. I like this guy even more.
“No, but I could also use a job.”
“There's some heavy lifting involved so I like two guys on the team. But my teams work in threes. Two men and a project manager.”
“I can do that, the project managing part,” I say. “What is it, exactly?”
“I think you might have a little hustle in you, too. Call that number on the card, talk to Paulette to set up an interview. She'll want to meet both of you so she can figure out the second guy to team you with. She'll explain everything, including the project-managing part.”
“So we have jobs?” I say, excited a job has just fallen into my lap.
“Paulette will put you on this weekend. No weekday work for students, but she'll keep you busy on Saturdays and Sundays.”
“Thanks, Mr. Mitchell. You won't be disappointed.” Marco and Mr. Mitchell shake on the deal.
“You two will be my first employees from Langdon Prep. Seems like this school has been trying to build leaders of the future out of people who don't see fit to do any hard work today.” He's looking straight at Justin's bloodshot eyes when he says this. “I'll see you at dinner. Don't be late.”
“Whatever,” Justin says, giving a dirty look to his father's back and to Marco's face. “My old man's crazy. I'm sure you'll be great at moving mattresses, but don't think you're ever playing quarterback as long as I'm at Langdon.”
When he walks past us, he rams his shoulder into Marco's arm.
“Excellent. We have jobs,” Marco says, as though he didn't notice any of that family drama or Justin's threat. “I totally needed one. My pops had his hours cut last week. Now I can help out a little.”
“What about him hitting you just now?”
“That's just football stuff. Nothing to worry about. Coach won't put a junior in to start.”
If Marco isn't worried, I suppose I shouldn't be, but I don't think Justin's threat was empty. He and his father have some serious issues. Even if you're Justin and it can't be helped, it must be tough to have a father so disappointed in you. Maybe I'm the only one who sees it, but Justin's eyes were filled with something more than dilated blood vessels. There's some rage in that rich boy.