My bagel dropped to the metal of the toaster. As I spread butter, it melted, and the smell of cinnamon made my stomach growl. Holding my takeout, I turned to go with one last look over the long tables.
“Hey. Elizabeth, right?”
I turned my head toward the familiar voice. Dumbass adrenaline junkie girl: Cleo Matthews.
“Yeah.” I would have smiled except that the speaker was more than mildly terrifying.
“Aren’t you in my dorm?”
Nod. I had seen her walking down our hall to the showers the night before: Cleo Matthews Now she was sitting less than twenty feet away from me with five other equally intimidating students, including, to some combination of my shock, horror and celebration, Devin from Acting, leaning one elbow on the back of Cleo’s chair.
“You have anyone to sit with?”
I shook my head and tried to smile, glancing down at the patterned tiles underfoot and the still-clean toes of my prescribed black flats.
“Come sit with us?” It wasn’t really a question.
“Thanks. That would be great.” My bagel became less and less appetizing as I wound through a couple of the red tables and fake wood chairs. The tables may have provided enough seating, but they left limited walking room. My stomach felt queasy.
I put my bag down next to an empty chair and slid into the seat, hoping they couldn’t smell my fear or the sweat that was trickling underneath my bra.
“Hey, you’re in my acting class.” Devin looked just as good against the bad lighting and dim linoleum of the dining hall as he had in the brooding shadows of center stage. Somehow, the fluorescent lights that washed out almost everybody else only emphasized the angular bones of his face.
I nodded again.
“I’m Cleo.” Her tall, thin body slouched in her chair in a way that invoked imperial purple, her dyed-black hair spread over Devin’s arm. The cafeteria lights glinted off a nose piercing so small that I had almost missed it. “Do you go by Liz? Lizzie?”
“Bizza.” I looked at the plastic red surface of the table and my cold and crunchy bagel. Thanks a million, Mom, for the most awkward nickname ever.
“Bizza? Like ‘busy’?” Cleo looked out of the corner of her eyes, through a heavy layer of mascara, at Devin.
The girl sitting next to me, a petite, curvy brunette with too many necklaces spilling out of the collar of her uniform button-down, took advantage of the silence to introduce herself. “I’m Amie.” She pointed to the boy next to her, slim with dark eyes and darker hair that fell across his forehead in a messy accidentally-on-purpose kind of way. “This is Alec.”
“Nicky.” A skinny blond with big eyes and a flawless tan—a real tan, not the orange glow of local beds—stretched her hand across the table.
“Scott.” He raised the hand not playing with the end of the loose ponytail over Nicky’s shoulder. His big watch looked like it was going to get caught any minute.
“Are you new?” The hand Nicky withdrew wound itself back into Scott’s fingers. “Dev, try not to prey on the freshman.”
He grinned. Closer, his smile was just self-deprecating enough to keep his arrogance on the attractive side of the line. He still assured everyone that he knew exactly how awesome he was. “I’m safe. Promise. She’s a sophomore.”
Cleo and Amie looked at each other and started laughing. They might have been laughing at me, but I tried to laugh with them.
Scott pushed back his chair and Nicky followed with an apologetic smile. “Nic’s going to help me with college essays before next period. See you guys later?” He didn’t wait for a response before he slung his free arm around her waist and walked away.
Cleo laughed. “You’d think they’d been apart for months instead of three weeks.”
“The eternal honeymoon is back,” Devin contributed.
“Two years is all. But it feels like five,” Amie told me. I thought I saw her give me a small smile, but it might have had nothing to do with me.
“And he spent half the summer with her too.” Cleo grinned. “Trust me: I went up there for a few days. I’ve never felt so single in my life.”
We all laughed. I smiled, very much on the outside. But it didn’t matter. To any observer, I was no longer on the fringe and that was a relief. The harder I laughed, the more I looked like I belonged, so I laughed until tears burned in the corners of my eyes.
Lunch left a hesitant smile on my face as I sat through English, AP French and last period Honors Bio. My teacher droned on about protists and phyla and I had stopped paying attention. He’d said everything he was going to say in the first five minutes, and spent the rest of class time repeating the same things over and over and over. With thirty minutes of class to go, orange flashing at the bottom of my laptop screen announced a new email: Cleo. We always communicated with email at school. It was fast and free and everyone always had their computer open.
pleeeeeeeease order with me and Dev tonight??? 3-for-2 calzone night the couples are ditching us.
I hadn’t realized Amie and Alec were dating.
The keyboard of my laptop clicked as I typed an answer. The minute hand on the clock moved from just before the seven to just after the eight before I hit send. We weren’t friends yet. Instantaneous replies might have looked desperate and I liked Cleo. Boarding school was a way to get out, to build my own identity and follow the myth of reinvention vaunted by brochures and bad TV shows. My bio teacher may have been droning on about evolution right now, but I didn’t have millennia. This was an opportunity, my shot, and I wasn’t about to blow it.
Devin and Cleo were already at the front gate at six to meet the delivery car from Italian Kitchen. I waved, holding a ten between my fingers. Her hair formed a half-halo with spiky tines behind her right ear: a Budweiser crown askew. She must have looped and flipped her hair into an elastic the same way I had, except that mine just hung awkwardly.
Devin and I hung back as she somehow slid to the front of the line of waiting students to get our food from the delivery guy. She leaned a little too far into his car to take the bag, her head slipping through the window. When she emerged, even I could recognize the satisfaction in her pursed lips, her lifted chin, the unordered can of Diet Coke in her hand.
We took our calzones to the library steps. Devin finished his and half of mine in the hour we spent there. I was glad to be in the middle. Their conversation still mostly happened over my head, but at least no one had their back to me. I didn’t mind smiling, nodding and laughing in the appropriate places.
Listening to the conversation was working for me. That is, until Cleo got bored gossiping about the rest of the campus and Devin’s summer at home in Los Angeles.
“Let’s play a game.” Cleo closed the container still holding half of her chicken Alfredo calzone, putting a last piece of cheese in her mouth. She glanced down at me. “Never Have I Ever.”
I had played “Never Have I Ever” all through middle school, asking about kisses and porn amidst the giggles of eighth graders too inexperienced to know they were inexperienced. Those games were usually won by the people who had kissed a boy, had a crush on a high school guy or walked in on their siblings hooking up. In other words, not me.
As I learned quickly, Cleo always brought a different set of rules, starting with her fingers behind her back.
Dev smirked at her. “Never have I ever done a Robo-trip.”
Someone had talked about it during Orientation: getting high off Robitussin.
Cleo rolled her eyes. “You’re an asshole. New rules.” Her voice rattled off black mark after black mark against my name, as my fingers stayed up and theirs dropped rapidly; never have I ever gone streaking, smoked pot, snuck into the guys’ dorms, hooked up in water, hooked up under the bushes on campus… Every time I thought there was no way, someone rolled their eyes and I knew a finger dropped. The only three I had done were pathetic in comparison: stolen from a parent, cut class, smoked a cigarette. And it had only been twenty bucks. In the end, Cleo was the first to signal defeat. I put down my remaining seven fingers and withdrew my hands. Dev had one finger up, which he displayed and thrust in Cleo’s face before putting it down.
Dev’s inappropriate finger gestures distracted me, so I didn’t realize Cleo had seen my fingers until she spoke and I spun around to face her.
“Someone’s still a virgin.” Her conclusion wasn’t cruel, just Cleo: blunt and snarky and not giving a damn what anyone else thought. The only good thing about that moment was that my back was to Dev. My cheeks felt sunburned from the inside out.
“Maybe.” The days of moral authority were long gone. Despite the kilts, the rules, the Sex Ed classes that warned about awkwardly timed babies and awkwardly placed warts, the scarlet letter of modern high school had become V. I had already been tried, convicted and branded.
Just great.
But as embarrassed as I was, it changed the flow of the conversation, and I stopped being the monkey in the middle, trying to catch the conversation flying over my head.
Dev just laughed, resting an arm over my shoulders. “We can’t all be like you, Cleo. Water? Really.”
She raised the crafted arch of one dark eyebrow. “And he was more a man than you’ll ever be, Kennedy.”
“So how far have you gone?” He turned to me, suddenly interested.
I figured this had to be one of those times they tell you is perfectly acceptable for lying. “I don’t kiss and tell.” I tried to sound flirtatious. I probably sounded about as sexy as a member of the Mickey Mouse Club.
But hey, if that was what you went for.
Dev leaned in, arm still around my shoulders. He was wearing that smile, the one that said that he had gone more than far enough. “I always make them tell.”
“Be nice.” Cleo stood up, grabbing the Styrofoam container that still held part of a calzone. “We should get out of here. Don’t want the RDs on my ass this early in the year.” I couldn’t decide whether I was thrilled to get out of there or disappointed to leave Dev at the door to our dorm. It really was too bad he was way out of my league. The pretty boys, the football jocks, the popular guys of the world seemed oblivious to girls like me who lacked double Ds, French manicures and perfectly hemmed kilts. Why we wanted those boys if they wanted that didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t going to change. Fortunately, there was nothing stopping me from enjoying this for as long as it lasted.
Instead of doing homework, Cleo and I watched a movie after Lights Out and I collapsed on the shag rug in her single around one in the morning. No one had singles except hall monitors, who apparently earned the boon of privacy with their contribution to dorm life, according to my counselor. How and why Cleo was in that position of authority was still a mystery to me.
My roommate ignored me the next morning as I stumbled in, grabbed my uniform, toothbrush and canned espresso shot, and stumbled out. Then again, Josie only ever showed a penchant for religious music and home-cooked lasagna in airtight Rubbermaid containers complemented by a total dislike of everything me. She was also preoccupied with not letting a centimeter of pale skin between neck and knee show as she changed into uniform. That didn’t seem to make much sense, since I saw her hot pink underwear before I left the room. It seemed more important that she always turned up the Jesus music, just for me.
Stiff and dry-eyed from leaving my contacts in overnight, I fit in well with the rest of the student body. Teachers began their endless task of shaking slumped-over students and I fell easily into the pattern of halfheartedly finishing my homework in class. Orientation replaced drama today, and Nicky and Scott were missing at lunch, thanks to a shared free period.
It hadn’t been a bad week. Still, my feet dragged coming up the stairs Thursday after classes. I was focusing very hard on the last five yards to my room as I turned the corner, past my counselor’s office into the home stretch.
“Elizabeth!” Crap. I turned around, fixing a smile on my face as I faced my counselor. For a woman who lived in a building with fifty high schoolers, she wasn’t half bad, and she was definitely several steps above and several decades younger than the RDs.
“Hey, Ms. Clemens.”
“Come on in.” She waved, barely visible behind the stacks of folders on her desk. I hated to think what kind of information about me was on that desk. My feet shuffled into her office and my arms dropped my bag on the floor with a relieved relaxation borne of carrying the forty pounds of it around all day.
“I’m trying to get to know all of the new girls.” She was still shuffling papers, looking up at me every few words with a big smile. “Talk to all of you individually. We’ve got a great group this year.”
“Yeah, for sure.” I don’t think it was too convincing. Our dorm had gotten the apparently standard collection of girls who were painfully shy and girls who weren’t quite shy enough, especially when it came to senior boys.
“I’m particularly excited we have such a smart group.” My heart sank at her last two words. “Two Ritter scholars, you and that freshman, Maddie? I don’t know if you two know each other. She’s very sweet.”
Maddie had practically run into the dorm when she saw me, Cleo and Devin walking back to the dorm last night. I could sympathize with that reaction to Cleo and Dev, even if I saw myself more as scared than scary. She was in a lot of classes with people in my grade, though. Focused, intense and book-smart, she was more what you’d expect from someone on the full-ride Ritter scholarship. She was also kind of my worst nightmare.
“Yeah, she seems really nice. I haven’t talked to her much yet, though.”
Worst nightmare might have been an exaggeration. Still, I was terrified of being Maddie.
Clemens smiled, probably seeing our dorm GPA rising in her mind’s eye. “I see you’ve been spending a lot of time with Cleo?”
I shrugged.
“She’s been such an asset to this dorm. I don’t know what we’re going to do without her next year.”
It was hard not to laugh at that. Cleo would never strike me as an authority figure’s best friend.
“I just want you to know you can come to me with anything.”