The Mockingbirds (14 page)

It’s Carter and I’m paralyzed. This is what I try to avoid; this is why I don’t eat at the cafeteria anymore; this is why I take the long way to class; this is why I have wingmen.

“Hey,” he says in his library voice. “What are you up to?”

I consider darting down the reference aisle, hiding inside the tall, heavy, dark blue books. I’ll open the cover of a big,
fat one; curl up inside; tuck myself into the pages; and close the cover, away from him and from me with him.

“So…,” he says, letting the word hang out for a minute. I try not to look at him. I try to look disinterested, bored, busy, something. But I can still see him even when I try not to. His white-blond hair isn’t water polo–boy wet right now. It’s barely wet at all. I bet he has an umbrella. This strikes me as strange. A boy who’d rape a girl carries an umbrella. A boy who fucks sleeping girls totes an umbrella to protect himself from the possibility of rain, sleet, or snow.

“Why is it every time I see you, you look away?” he asks, taking another step closer. He reaches a hand toward me, as if he’s about to touch a strand of my hair.

“Don’t,” I say, barely audible. He doesn’t hear me but instinctively, I push my hair away from my face, pulling it back, holding on to it in a one-handed ponytail so he can’t touch it. I imagine an invisible wall between us, me on my side, he on his where he can’t reach me. From my side, I notice his sharp nose, his high cheekbones, his blue eyes. I don’t remember his eyes. My eyes were closed. He’s tall too, probably six feet. His shoulders are broad.

“I didn’t know your last name, so I couldn’t find you in the school directory. So I couldn’t call you,” he adds, his voice oily.

Liar
, I want to say. You didn’t want to call, you wanted to brag. That’s what you did in front of your dumb friends, you liar. Besides, you could have found me easily. I’m not hard to find. No one is.

“Because all I want is to see you again. Don’t you want to see me?”

How can he act this way, how can he talk normally to me? I look at him curiously, like a science experiment, at his blue eyes—slate blue, it turns out—and his strangely shaped nose, and I feel as if I’m floating above him, as if I’m a hospital patient flatlining. I separate from my body and hover above myself, dispassionately regarding the scene unfolding below me. I watch it play out, two people who shouldn’t be talking to each other
are
talking to each other and it makes no sense, so all I can do is watch it from above in my hospital gown.

Did you vote? Did you vote to make nonconsensual sex, like you had with me, a punishable offense? Did you, Carter? Did you did you did you?

“Why?” I ask.

“Why?” he repeats, taken aback.

“Yes, why?”

Because you leer at me in physics, you lie about me to your friends. Why are you asking me out?

Then I remember why he’s talking to me. He thinks I’m easy. He wants another screw he doesn’t have to work for. My chest burns, red and itchy and hot, and my heart wants to jump out like a karate-chopping, machete-wielding sort of kamikaze fighter and smack, smack, smack him into dust, just a big puff of dust and black smoke and cartoon stars in the air until—poof. He’s gone.

But he’s right here still, and now he’s smiling at me,
trying to look sweet, but I’m not fooled. He’s a wolf. “So, you going to let me have your number this time?” he asks again. “Besides, my birthday’s next month and it’d be a fun way to celebrate.”

I’m not a piece of cake.

“I have to go.” Then I turn around and leave. Forget the computer catalog, forget the research, forget the snow-turned-rain. I’ll get wet, soaking wet. I’ll run in the rain, anything to get away. I push open the library door, hit the slick concrete steps, and run. I run down the steps, little stabs of water hitting my cheeks. The sky is heavy, stuffed with dark clouds as I run across the quad, past McGregor Hall, and up the stone steps to my dorm, wanting to know, needing to know what had happened
before
I was wasted, before I passed out. I want to know why I’d talk to Carter, why I’d flirt with him, why I’d kiss someone like that. As I push open the oak door, my shoulder slams into someone.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“Hey, Alex!”

It’s Julie.

“I’ve been wanting to catch up with you,” she says, and then launches into her usual monologue on how good it makes you feel to help out underprivileged kids. Her blond ponytail bounces as she talks, and just like clockwork, like a door slamming shut, I’m back.

“Why does T.S. always make us do things we don’t want
to do?” I lean in and ask Martin as Julie dances nearby, her blond ponytail bouncing as she moves.

Martin shrugs. T.S. has just informed us we need to make nice with the water polo boys so we can break free of stereotypes. “I think that’s what your best friend’s girlfriend is supposed to do. I think it’s technically the definition.”

I laugh, a half-tipsy, half-not laugh. “Like if I looked it up in the dictionary that’s what I’d see?”

Martin nods sagely, but mock sagely. “Most definitely. I looked it up the other night.” It’s loud in here so he cups a hand over my ear as he talks to me. His hair tickles my cheek. It feels soft. His hair is light brown, a little on the shaggy side, but good shaggy. I have an impulse to reach up and touch his hair now that I’ve just discovered it feels nice on my skin.

The band plays louder. The sounds from the stage, the drummer, the guitarist, the Artful Rage singer with his crooning voice, pound against my chest.

“I wonder if the definition is the same for
best friend.
In my case, you know,” I say, this time close to his ear.

“How was your winter break?” Martin says, abruptly changing the conversation.

“Uneventful,” I say. “Yours?”

“Eventful. My girlfriend broke up with me,” he offers. “She was from my hometown. She applied to Themis as a midyear transfer but didn’t get in. So she went to some school in Virginia instead and said sayonara.”

“Are you sad? Did you want her to come here?”

“I thought I’d be sadder, but the truth is I was kind of dreading the possibility of her coming to Themis.”

“Well, it’s a damn good thing she didn’t get in, then.”

“You’re telling me.”

“Why were you dreading it?”

“I just think we grew apart. I mean, it’s hard when you don’t go to the same school. I’d rather be with someone at the same school, you know?”

“Totally. I dated a senior end of last year. He went off to Dartmouth and we didn’t even pretend to do that I’ll-see-you-on-weekends thing.”

“It’s too hard to be with someone miles away, especially when…,” he says, then his voice trails off.

There’s a pause. The music fills it, but it seems like awkward silence. I’m a little buzzed—a highly unusual state for me—so I place both my hands back around Martin’s ear again. My right hand on top, brushing against his hair, my left hand underneath, touching his cheek. “When what?” I ask. I’m whispering now, but he can still hear me.

He doesn’t answer immediately. It’s like he’s thinking of how he meant to finish his sentence when he says with a chuckle, “When she called me a science geek when she broke up with me.”

I crack up when he says that. I’m not sure why it’s so funny, I just like that he’s cool with who he is. So I say, “I think it’s cool that you’re a science geek.”

“Yeah, I’m not afraid to fly my geek flag,” he says, and he’s looking straight at me. I realize his eyes are regular
brown, like mine, but with hints of green that make them vibrant and soft at the same time.

“Maybe we should just date people from the same school,” Martin says.

He’s not buzzed like me. He sounds totally sober. I don’t think he’s even been drinking. And I like his suggestion. But before I can say anything, I realize I really have to pee. “I have to pee,” I say, then head to the bathroom.

When I return to our group, Martin’s not waiting for me. He’s talking to Cleo. I’m bummed, but mostly annoyed because I was liking talking to him. I turn away from them, toward the stage, and practically step on the person standing next to me.

“Sorry,” I say.

The boy I stepped on looks playful, mischievous, then he says, “My name is Carter and I play water polo.”

He says it as if he’s at an AA meeting, as if he’s confessing. Then I realize, he kind of is. Because we’re supposed to get over our water polo stereotypes, I’ve been told, I reach out a hand to shake his. He leans toward me. “I love this band.”

“Me too,” I say, and it comes out a little flirtatiously.

Then I hear the first note of my favorite Artful Rage song. “I love this song!” I shout, and grab Carter’s arm, rushing to the stage with him.

“Does that sound like something you’d want to do?” Julie is asking me.

“What?”

“Do you want to help out?”

“I gotta go, Julie,” I say, and take the stairs two at a time. I reach my floor, race down the hall, yank open my door, then slam it shut behind me and slump down against the inside of it.

It’s like how the shaken snow in a snow globe falls quietly down, revealing the scene. There’s Martin and me, he’s telling me he’s single, I’m telling him I like science geeks—
science geeks,
that’s what he was hinting at that time in physics class. Then he’s saying we should date people at the same school;
we
are at the same school. Then Carter’s there and Martin’s not and the music plays and suddenly Carter looks good.

I shake the snow globe again. The white flakes scatter, covering up the scene. But even though it flurries I can still see one thing clearly. I went back with the wrong guy.

Martin Summers.

Martin the science geek.

Martin with his soft brown hair.

Martin, the guy I’ve known since our best friends started going out, the guy I talk to in the caf, the guy I sit next to in physics, the guy who believes in the Atticus Finch–Boo Radley brand of justice.

Martin the Mockingbird.

Martin and I were flirting
that night
. Martin and I were talking and flirting and touching each other just barely, just the tiniest bit like you do when you first start to like someone.

I stand up, look in the mirror on the back of my door, and see a girl with wet hair, wet clothes, wet shoes. A girl
who had two choices
that night
. A girl who chose badly. If I hadn’t talked to Carter, if I’d had the guts to keep talking to Martin, I might be having lunch in the cafeteria today and tomorrow and the next day. I might be using points to have Frappuccinos with Martin off campus. I might have gone four years without ever needing to know more about the Mockingbirds than I knew the day Casey told me about stuff going down.

I grab a towel, flip my head over, and dry my rain-soaked hair. Then I do something I’ve never done at Themis. I ditch my next class. It’s French and Martin’s in it and I don’t know how to talk to him now. I’ll lose points for missing class, but I don’t care. I have nowhere to go, no one to go with. So I slip under my orange and purple bedspread and spend the next two hours finishing
To Kill a Mockingbird.

My absence at French does not go unnoticed. That afternoon while T.S. is punishing soccer balls and Maia is massaging words at Debate Club, there’s a knock on my door.

“Who’s there?” I ask.

“It’s Martin.”

“Just a sec,” I call out, and quickly run a brush through my hair and fumble around on my desk to find my lip gloss. But as I’m making my lips shiny, I feel foolish. Martin can’t possibly like me now that he knows I got drunk and stupid and went to Carter’s room. I’m damaged goods, and what
ever spark there might have been between us
that night
surely has been snuffed out. I drop the lip gloss on my desk and open the door.

“Hey there,” he says.

“Hi,” I say as he walks in.