Prologue
My mother believes there are two types of people: those who like to be the center of attention, and those who are too shy to want anybody to notice them. She thinks I am the second but should be the first.
What she’d never understand is that some people like to be noticed for some things but not for other things. Like to be noticed for being an excellent piano player, but not for being allergic to peanuts. Or noticed for wearing new shoes, but not for speaking with an accent. Or noticed for being the only Kennedy High student to score a 5 on the AP Human Geography exam, but not for being the only Kennedy High student whose breasts are bigger than her head.
Chapter 1
“Come on, Greer. Maybe you’ll make a new friend.”
I answer in annoyed blinks.
“It’s nice to help someone get settled in a new place. It’s a chance to give back.”
I blink at her harder, because she’s pretending like I volunteered for this.
“Half an hour. Forty minutes, tops.”
Mom’s half hours do not top out at forty minutes. Mom’s half hours can last hours. Especially if she has an audience.
We’re here for her work. She is a relocation advisor with Relocation Specialists, Inc. Big companies hire her to help settle new employees in the area. She leads neighborhood tours, arranges school visits, and recommends pediatricians, handymen, or Brazilian waxers.
She’s very good at it. It satisfies her constant need to share her opinions and justifies the over-the-top luxury SUV she leases, with its interior of baby-seal leather.
Sometimes, like now, if she has a client with a kid my age, she’ll drag me along to meet with them, like a junior re-lo advisor. I’m supposed to answer their questions about being a teenager in suburban Illinois. They never have any questions.
It’s always the same. It’s even the same Starbucks. I sit next to Mom and try to look extra welcoming. The new kid stares at their phone under the table so I know that wherever they came from, they had friends cooler than me. If the client is a mom, she’ll ask me the kind of questions she thinks her sulky kid would want to ask if they weren’t too sulky to ask them, and once I start to reply, my mom will interrupt with what she thinks I should answer. It’s completely uncomfortable for everyone, except Mom. Kathryn Walsh is never uncomfortable.
Believe it or not, there are times being a mild-mannered, high-achieving, generally agreeable teenager does not work for me, and dealing with my mother is one of them. If I fought with her more, like Maggie fights with her mom, or if I was embarrassing, like Tyler, she wouldn’t make me do these things. It would be too exhausting. But Kathryn Walsh exhausts me more than I exhaust her, so here I am. She isjust so. I am just so not.
It is why I go with her to meet the uninterested progeny of people cruel enough/important enough to make their families move during high school.
It is why I help my brother, Tyler, with math homework he could find the answers to online.
It is why I faithfully attend the yearly reunion of the moms and babies from her childbirth class, hosted by this very coffee establishment every May.
This branch of Starbucks is located on the path of least resistance. I follow her inside.
The kid I’m supposed to meet will be a sophomore at Kennedy, like me. That’s something. All I have in common with the Natural Birth and Beginnings crowd is being dragged out of the womb by the same midwife. Jackson Oates, whoever he is, is probably going to think this is as awkward as I do, so at least we’ll have that in common, too.
Mom greets Mrs. Oates with a hug and they introduce me to Jackson, who does not look like a sulky weirdo. He’s actually kind of non-sulky and non-weird. Light-brown hair, dark-brown eyes, and a big smile as soon as we say hello. He puts out his hand to shake mine, which makes me wonder if the place they just moved from was the 1950s. I’ve been taught to be polite, though, so I shake firmly. He seems pleased.
“Oh, good! Your parents must have drilled the importance of a good handshake into you, too.” He says it in a dad voice, with a glance sideways at his mother, who rolls her eyes. “I always feel like I’m closing a German business deal,” he adds in a normal voice. His hand is warm. Not sweaty. Just warm like a live body is supposed to be, and like I suspect the usual phone doodlers’ hands are not.
“We meet a lot of new people,” says his mom, as an excuse.
“Ich will buy zwanzig Apfelkuchens and ein BMW,” he says to me, and against all my instincts, I am charmed.
This is not going to be the kind of awkward I thought it would be.
This is a different kind of awkward.
There’s a quick negotiation while Mom figures out what everyone wants, orders for us (she is just sojust so), and pays. Because she basically views me as her assistant, she says to everyone else, “Let’s grab that table. Greer will wait for the drinks.” Mom and Mrs. Oates head to Mom’s favorite four-topper, the one closest to the outlet. Jackson stays next to me, though, watching the barista steam the milk.
This is the part where the new goon is supposed to slide in next to their mother and act like I personally made them come here. But Jackson is standing next to me, waiting for the drinks, like we’re in this together. I must look confused. He says, “You’ve only got two hands. For four drinks?” Like an idiot, I look down at my hands, as though I’m confirming the number.
“Oh. Right. Yes.”
“Hey, thanks for coming here today. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of things you’d rather be doing.”
I thought I did, but this is actually much more interesting than clipping my toenails after all. I sputter, “It’s no problem.” We stand there in silence for a minute, and I wonder if I’m the non-conversational goon in this arrangement. I add, “You realize you’re getting a serious insider’s tour right now. This place is kind of an underground favorite with the locals.”
He half grins. “Starbucks?”
“Oh, so you’ve heard of it?”
“Kathryn? Coffee ready for Kathryn?”
We carry the drinks from the counter. I set down Mrs. Oates’s café miel and Mom’s oh-what’s-that-is-it-French-I’ll-try-that-too at the table, where they’ve spread out the Relocation Specialists Resource Binder, where Mom keeps all her pro tips about this “uniquely welcoming and family-oriented community just forty-five minutes from downtown Chicago.” I’m pretty sure this Starbucks is in the binder (which is in the Starbucks, which might make it some kind of re-lo wormhole).
Jackson walks right past with my hot chocolate and his chai. “Those cushy chairs are open. Is that good with you?” he says over his shoulder.
Umm, yes?
I leave Mom, Mrs. Oates, and the binder at the table. Jackson and I plop ourselves in a pair of coffee-stained leather chairs next to a fireplace that’s not turned on. He looks like he meets strange girls at Starbucks every day. I try to look like I do, too.
It turns out Jackson has questions—good questions. Instead of starting with “What AP classes are there?” because that’s on the website, or “Can you letter in making memes?” because he’s not one of my brother’s seventh-grade friends, he jumps right in with “Is it the kind of school where kids come and go all the time, or where there hasn’t been a new kid since second grade?”
“I don’t know exactly how many there are each year,” I say. He is leaning over the arm of the chair toward me, like I am the keeper of an important piece of navigational advice, which I guess I am. I try to remember how many new kids I had in classes last year, and wonder if I can consider them a representative sample, and extrapolate an overall figure from that, until I realize he doesn’t want data; he is asking a different question. A real question. He wants to know what he’s walking into, and he’s asking me. It’s October, halfway through first quarter—maybe not the best time to start at a new school. By now, people have pretty much staked out where they’re going to sit and who they’re going to talk to.
“Oh. You’re trying to figure out if you’re going to get lost or be instantly famous.” He nods. “I’m not sure. I’ve never actually been the new kid—”
“Never?!”
“Nope. Even when we moved, we stayed in the same school.”
“That’s amazing.”
I stop for a second, stuck on “amazing.” He’s not sayingI am amazing. Immobility is amazing. Like bizarre mutations in nature are amazing. But for some reason, that amazing feels kind of nice coming from him. I shake it off.
“Yes,” I say, “never leaving the zip code is one of my proudest accomplishments. There’s not a lot of brand-new people, but there are three middle schools and only one high school, so there are tons of people I don’t even know.” He nods, like this is what he was hoping for. “I don’t think a new kid would stand out too much. Unless they wanted to.”
“What about lunch? If I don’t latch on to somebody before then, am I going to have any place to sit?”
I can’t imagine that Jackson is not going to find at least forty friends on his first day, because he’s adorable and super friendly, but he’s obviously had a lot of experience being the new kid and I haven’t, so maybe I’m wrong. “It’s probably safest to latch on to somebody from fourth period, unless they all seem horrible. Just in case, though, here’s what you do: there’s this long counter in front of the big window that looks over the track. People sit there if they have to finish homework or charge their phones. If you want to, you can sit there by yourself without looking like a loser. Everyone will just think you’re writing wistful poetry or something.” What I should have said was “Don’t be stupid, you’ll sit with me!” but I give myself partial credit for explaining about the counter seats.
“That’s perfect. My next question was going to be where I could go to write some wistful poetry.”
“Oh, man. I’m sorry to tell you this but they cancelled the Wistful Poetry Club last year. Budget cuts.”
“We should probably just go back to Cleveland then.”
I know he’s joking, but it reminds me that this is all new to him—well, Starbucks isn’t new, and according to my mom, moving isn’t new—but Kennedy is new, and his house is new, and all the people are going to be new. I’m new.
“What’s Cleveland like?”
“It’s kind of like everywhere else, I guess.” He shrugs. “We were only there a couple of years.” He has changed, just the tiniest bit. Still friendly. Still adorable. But the tiniest bit . . . sad, maybe. “My little sister didn’t want to move. Like reeeeally didn’t want to move.”
“She liked Cleveland?”
“Not especially. But she hates to move.”
“How about you?”
“I’m used to it,” he shrugs. “And there are Starbucks everywhere.”
“What?! NO! But at least this is the original one, right?” And we are back to where we were. I thought I spied a tiny sliver of something less than perfectly confident, but then it vanished. It makes me curious about him. More curious. I wish we were somewhere different. I wish I was showing him something he hadn’t seen a million times before.
We pull up our schedules to compare. We’ve got a lot of the same classes, but none at the same time. Plus he’s in German and I’m in Spanish, and he’s one year accelerated in math, but I’m two. I tip my face into my mug so he can’t see that I look disappointed.
“You must be pretty good at math,” he says.
Mid-sip, I snort. Not because I’m some kind of math god. I’m as good as you can be without being one of those kids who have to take college math because they’re too smart for high school math. Last year Mom offered me up as a math tutor to one of her clients when she heard they had a middle schooler who loved math but “needed to be pushed.” She’d have loved to list me in the binder under Academic Resources—or at least as a babysitter or something that got me out of the house. The kid turned out to be some kind of genius, though, who took the train to the University of Chicago twice a week to study ergodic theory. I don’t even know what that is. I’m just the top of the regular smart kids.
Being good at math—really, at any academics—is pretty much my entire identity. It’s funny to talk to someone who doesn’t know that.
At school, what people know about me is that I get good grades; I’m Maggie Cleave’s quieter, more agreeable friend; and that I wear clothes that are three times too big for a full-grown bear. That’s it. I don’t play a sport, I’m not in theater, I don’t get in trouble, I’m not a girl you’d ever think about going out with. I’m just Smart Girl. Smart Girl who keeps her arms crossed in front of her chest all the time.
But Jackson doesn’t know that. All he knows is that my mom tried to order skim milk in my hot chocolate. To Jackson, I could be all kinds of other things, too. Smart Girl plus. To the new kid, I’m also new. It’s kind of fun to think about for now, even though I know he’ll figure it out once he’s at school.
“You’re not in any of my classes? That’s weird because as a certified relocation advisor I thought you were going to introduce me at the beginning of each period on Monday. Nicht gut . . .” he adds in his German businessman voice.
He’s sitting in a lumpy, scuffed chair that a million customers have sat in before, but he looks like it’s shaped exactly for him, like however they stretched or slouched or fell asleep, it was all in order to make this chair fit him perfectly. One knee is half up the armrest, his head is propped against his hand, he looks like every muscle in his body is completely relaxed. Like he belongs there. Like he belongs wherever he goes.
He is smart and funny and just kind of comfortable, which I almost never am. I was wrong when I thought what we’d have in common was thinking this was awkward. That part is just me.
And somehow, this makes me start to unfold. I’ve had my feet on the chair, knees pulled up tight into to my chest, both hands around my mug. Now I unwrap one leg and then the other and drape them over the armrest. I lean back, just a little, adjusting my sweatshirt so it’s still baggy over my body. I hear myself say, “You’ll be fine. But your German room is in the same hallway as my math class, first period, so if you start to panic, yell for me. Greer! I’m lost!” His cheeks spread out with a big, real smile. “Greer! Helpen mich por favor!” I’m loud enough that Mom looks over, curious. Not annoyed; surprised. Jackson laughs out loud. “Say it in English, though,” I add. “My German is gesundheit.”
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