CHAPTER ONE
“Marina, come back to earth,” Christy said.
“Hmm?”
“You’re doing it again, staring into space.”
I straightened up and pushed away my lunch tray, the untouched macaroni and cheese having congealed into a yellow science experiment gone awry. “Sorry. I’m listening, go on.”
“You sure?”
“Totally.”
Christy glanced around the cafeteria at the hordes of teenagers stuffing their faces. We were sitting together at the edge of the stage rather than at the tables, a privilege reserved solely for seniors who were “academically excelling and consistently not absent,” as Miss Farghasian was fond of reminding us. We were now at the start of the second semester, and those of us who qualified had dwindled from roughly forty to just seventeen.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Christy continued. “Which of the following is the correct formula for the ratio of cosecant? Opp over hyp, hyp over opp, hyp over adj . . . Macy Traper is pregnant, by the way.”
“Hmm?” I brought my attention back to Christy from where it had landed: a spot on the stage that used to contain the words Going down, down, down, to DW but that now sported a brand-new floorboard, its shiny goldenrod color not quite matching its neighbors. “Oh, hyp over opp.”
Christy slammed the book shut.
“What?”
“You’re not listening.”
“I am. It’s hyp over opp. Wait, did you say something else?”
Christy just laughed, plopping the book back in her bag and shoving another bite of spinach salad into her mouth from a perfectly proportioned bento box, lovingly prepared with a real cloth napkin. “Never mind, it was a joke.”
“Oh.” I felt embarrassed by Christy’s tone. She was right, I never seemed to be able to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes anymore. I figured a change of subject was in order.
“What’s today’s note?” I asked.
Christy hummed a sort of “I don’t know” tone and dug into her flowered lunch bag for the note her mother included every day. She straightened her neck and assumed a deep, rhythmic voice that I’m sure was meant to emulate her mother’s. “‘If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Maya Angelou.’”
“I like that one,” I said, as always feeling a vicarious surge of affection by hearing Mrs. Allen’s motivational notes and imagining, if only briefly, that they were intended for me.
“We’ll see if she changes her attitude when I tell her I’m not applying to Harvard.”
“Berklee’s an amazing college.”
“It’s a music conservatory. She’ll disown me.”
“Tell her Quincy Jones went there.”
“Yeah, well, Michelle Obama went to Harvard, and that’s all that matters. Did I tell you what my mom did at Christmas?”
“What?”
Christy gritted her teeth. “The woman printed out the Harvard application and left it under the damn tree like it was a shiny new bicycle.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “She’s proud of you.”
But Christy just shook her head. We’d had this conversation almost every day for two months now, and it always ended the same way: a dead end.
“Hey, have you seen the new history teacher?” she asked.
“No, I don’t have history till seventh,” I reminded her, as though we didn’t have each other’s schedules memorized. But there had been buzz about the new teacher throughout the school.
Mrs. Appalitz, who had been teaching AP World History for about eight gazillion years, had abruptly retired in the fall after her husband had had a heart attack. The class had been tossed around from sub to sub ever since like a dirty napkin, nobody wanting to hold it for more than
a couple of days.
But over Christmas break, the position had apparently been filled.
“Why do you ask?”
Christy laughed silently to herself in response, a coy smile spreading over her cheeks. “You’ll see.”
“What?”
“You’ll see! Listen, I’m so sick of this salad. I’m going to get pie.
You want?”
“No thanks.”
“Be right back.”
I pushed up against the wall on the side of the stage as Christy hopped down and headed to the dessert line, my eyes betraying me by falling back onto that shiny yellow plank of wood laid out before me, indecently bare.
° ° °
I understood what Christy had been getting at the moment I stepped into the history classroom. A few months ago, we had been having a movie night at her place, and she’d insisted I watch the original Indiana Jones movie, as I’d never seen it.
About the time the movie made it to the Cairo scenes (when I was well into the extralarge tub of popcorn), Christy had leaned over and said, “You know, I don’t usually go for white guys, but young Harrison Ford was fine.”
“Agreed,” I’d said. “It’s something in his eyes.”
“Like he knows a secret,” she’d added.
The words young Harrison Ford had become a bit of a code to us ever since, as in, “He’s not quite young Harrison Ford, but I’d let him buy me a coffee.”
So here I was, sauntering into seventh-period AP World History, and there was a young man at the whiteboard writing out his name in bloodred ink: “Mr. Martel.”
When he turned around, I saw the resemblance immediately, and I had to cover my face a moment to hide a smile.
It was something about the crinkle of his eyes or the way his dusty blond hair flopped a bit over his forehead. Maybe it was the fact that his tight khakis revealed he hadn’t skipped the gym in a while. In any event, he was a more welcome sight than most of the teachers at this school, who all seemed to share the same predominant physical attribute: looking really, really tired.
I found my desk and busied myself with taking out pens and notebooks, trying to hide the smirk that still sat on my face over Christy’s apparent teacher crush.
“So, that’s the third time I’ve written out my name today,”
Mr. Martel announced out of nowhere, causing the general hum of commotion in the room to ins
antly die down.
“The first time it was defaced with a lovely arrangement of blue hearts.”
Some of the girls chuckled at this.
“The second time it was a unicorn pooping out a rainbow onto the M. ”
I glanced around the room to find that even the toughest of the crowd—the football players who sat in the back—were laughing now.
“I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in the effort. When I went to this school, we would have already hazed the new teacher with an open stamp pad on the desk chair or maybe a superglued filing cabinet.”
Some general groans and laughter emerged from the peanut gallery, everyone instantly awkward at an adult trying to crack jokes.
“When’d you go here?” asked Angela Peirnot, her eyes falling to his feet and slowly making their way back up to the top of his head in the most obvious way possible.
“Oh, it was a fascinating part of ancient history known as six years ago.”
Mr. Martel turned back towards his desk, and I heard Jackson Spartam, the biggest of the football players, whisper slyly to Adrian Washington, “How old is this guy?”
“Twenty-three,” Mr. Martel answered from the whiteboard, apparently using his supersonic hearing abilities. “Which means that either I’m a total genius or the school was just super desperate for someone to fill the position. I’ll let you guys decide. Now . . .”
He picked up the mammoth textbook we’d all gotten at the beginning of the year and waved it in front of him, indicating that we should take it out. “Who wants to talk about Alexander the Great?”
A grand total of nobody raised their hands.
“Oh, you’re gonna make me call on you? That would be super embarrassing, for . . .” His eyes scanned the room, and I felt myself shrink into the official not me, not me position. Those crinkly Harrison Ford eyes, which I could now see were actually a rather striking green, landed directly on . . . “You.” Damn it. “Your name?”
“Marina,” I answered in a voice that came out squeakier than I would have liked. Getting called on in class was the sort of thing that used to make me wither into a self-imposed cocoon, but I had come a long way since starting at this school two years ago.
“It’s your lucky day, Marina.” The green eyes twinkled at me.
“You get to read us pages one-forty through one-forty-four.”
A general chorus of sympathetic groans rose up around me as I opened the imposing tome and began reading.
The text was pretty standard-issue world history: entitled white guy murdering millions of strangers in a quest to take over the world. I had trouble reading it w
ith much enthusiasm.
AP World History had not been not my idea, it had been my guidance counselor’s. “It would balance the AP Trigonometry and AP
Physics beautifully!” she’d declared when I’d had my obligatory meeting with her at the end of junior year. She’d then fluffed her already poofy beehive of graying hair and popped a stick of minty gum into her red-lined mouth. “Gum?” she’d asked, offering me a piece.
“No, thank you,” I had answered. “It’s just that I’m going to be really busy with trig and physics, and I’m starting an after-school job teaching kids coding, so—”
“Perfect, perfect,” she had choked out, coughing a bit on a glob of spit that had formed from chewing the gum too quickly. “MIT will love that!”
“I think I’m going to state school,” I had meekly interjected, knowing that anything else would be out of my father’s budget.
“Marina, you’re a Latina engineering major! Schools are dying for you!”
“I want to be close to home.”
“Will you fill out the scholarship form, at least?” she’d asked. I’d cleared my throat, realizing she wouldn’t consider the meeting done until she’d convinced me to pack my bags for Boston.
I had nodded in a half-committed way before grabbing my backpack and clearing the seat as another girl, head buried in her phone, entered and took my place.
Reading aloud now from the textbook, I was really beginning to regret that I’d let the woman talk me into it. History repeats itself, they say (and the story of Alexander the Great and his supersized ego was proving no exception), but science, at least, always offered something new. Maybe that’s why I loved it.
“‘By the time Alexander was twenty-three,’” I droned on, wishing Mr. Martel hadn’t assigned me such a large chunk to read, “‘he had already conquered the known lands of Macedonia, Northern Egypt, and Persia.’”
I looked up at Mr. Martel, expecting to find him zoned out at his desk, the primary directive of most teachers who still force kids to read aloud to the class because they clearly didn’t prepare a lesson plan long enough to fill the period. But instead, he stood front and center, his eyes trained directly on mine.
I cleared my throat to indicate that I was done, looking around sheepishly for someone else to have a turn.
“And what do you think of Alexander the Great, Marina?”
Mr. Martel asked.
“Honestly,” I sighed, not wanting to insult Mr. Martel but also not terribly interested in the subject matter, “pretty typical white dude, if you ask me.”
I heard Adrian Washington laugh behind me, whispering loudly enough for me to hear, “Nice one.”
I blushed a bit, but Mr. Martel’s face was unreadable as he looked around the class. It occur
red to me that he was the same age as Alexander the Great. Was he mad that I’d dissed his hero or something?
Thankfully, I didn’t have to figure out the answer to that question. Mr. Martel turned away and began writing some homework on the board, providing a view in so doing that elicited an audible “Mmm” out of the mouth of Angela Peirnot.
° ° °
Okay, I see it, I texted Christy as I left the school after the final bell and headed to the bike rack. I’d had my driver’s license for months, but my after-school job didn’t pay enough to buy even the humblest of used cars. Honestly, I didn’t mind. I still preferred biking, even now that it was January and the air would bite at my cheeks as I rode. It made me feel alive.
There’s a resemblance to Indiana, for sure, I added to the text before pressing Send. I put the phone away and slipped my hands into my winter gloves for the ride. As it was Tuesday, I didn’t have work, so I headed home. By the time I’d made the fifteen-minute trek to my housing development and started punching in the garage code to put the bike away, she had already written me back six times.
More than a resemblance, said the first text. Like a clone, said the second. The third through fifth texts were just extra adjectives describing the new history teacher’s assets, as Christy tends to
send a new text for each individual thought that pops into her head.
The sixth text, however, was simply: I’m telling Mom tonight.
Wish me luck.
Good luck!!! I immediately replied, followed by a heart emoji, a winking emoji, and finally the blowing-a-heart-kiss emoji. I was still typing when I made it into the kitchen and found my stepmother, Laura, sitting at the dinner table in front of her open laptop.
“Hey,” she greeted me in her warm-honey voice, distracted temporarily by something on her screen before shutting the computer and giving me her full attention. “How was school?”
“Good,” I said, smiling, always conscious of letting her know I appreciated how kind she was to me. Even after more than a year of living in this reality, a plane in which my real mother was living in Oregon with my brother, Robbie, and I was here with Laura and my dad, it still sent a small shock wave through my system to see her at the kitchen table.
She worked from home, copy editing websites for a couple of different legal firms, and this was her favorite place to sit, probably because the light was the best. It had been my mother’s favorite too, when she had been here.
“You want a snack? I made butterscotch cookies.”
I didn’t really like butterscotch, to be honest, but I knew she had only made them for me. Laura was a thin, willowy blond woman with a nervous habit of skipping meals when she felt stressed.
“Not an eating disorder,” she had insisted once when I’d asked her about it, “just nerves.” I’d nodded in agreement. But privately, I was pretty sure not eating was the definition of an eating disorder.
Laura had never had any children of her own. She’d tried when she was younger, with her ex-boyfriend Jonathan. But it just didn’t happen. She had told me once, in confidence, that the infertility was part of what had caused the breakup. Each of them silently resented the other; each wondered whose flawed biology was to blame.
“Thank you,” I said through a mouthful of butterscotch. “It’s delicious.”
Later, in my room, I lay on the bed before my own computer, my trig textbook open by its side. I found my mind wandering. Trig wasn’t really my thing. I knew it was a prerequisite to the physics I would want to take in college, but it felt like a pit stop on the way to the city I actually wanted to visit.
My finger lingered on the keyboard, itching to toggle over to the site I had promised myself I wouldn’t go to anymore. The ruby ring my parents had given me for my tenth birthday glistened against the caramel-colored skin of my pinkie—the only finger it could still fit on.
I glanced up from my computer and caught my reflection in the vanity mirror across the room. A face that looked more and more like my mother’s every day stared back at me—her thin nose, her full lips. My half-Irish skin wasn’t quite the same shade as her Mexican complexion, and my eyes were more hazel than brown, but other than that, it was like I had become her.
I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that, just like I wasn’t sure how I felt about my mother in general these days. Had I forgiven her for leaving? Had I really moved on at all?
I rolled my neck and took my fingers away from the keyboard, chiding myself to focus on the work before me.
But then my fingers found their way back.
Just once, I thought. Just one more time. Then I’ll stop. I know I have to stop.
All I had to do was type I into the search window, and Instagram was the first suggested location. Screw it, I figured and hit Enter.
Kieren didn’t post much, but his girlfriend did, and she would tag him in the pics. Her name was Stephanie, and she worked with him at his dad’s cell phone store in town—the one I had strategically avoided going to the last time I needed a new phone.
She was very tall, ethnic in a way I couldn’t quite place. Maybe Armenian? Very athletic. She ran half-marathons several times a year and posted pictures of hers
self and Kieren at the finish line.
Once or twice, she’d even gotten him to run with her, and from those pictures I could see how much he’d filled out in the fifteen months since I’d last seen him—or rather, since he’d last known who I was.
He was tan in the pictures, proudly displaying his running bib, bulking out his now fuller chest so it rubbed against hers in a way that still killed me. Why did I keep looking at these pictures?
There was a new one since the last time I’d allowed myself to check the site: the two of them kissing over a small chocolate torte at what seemed to be a nice Italian restaurant. On the cake, in white icing: “Happy One-Year Anniversary!”
I slammed the computer closed.
Stop doing this to yourself, Marina, I repeated in my head like a mantra. Let him go. Just let him go. You have to let him go.
And yet, the following morning, as I biked to school in the chill morning air a full half hour before the first bell, I knew there was no stopping myself.
Just for a minute, I told myself. I’ll just do it for a minute. No one will have to know.
I made my way through the labyrinthine hallways, once so shockingly foreign to me, now so familiar. The school was devoid at this early hour of the throngs of teenagers who would soon fill it. I weaved this way and that until I got to the boiler room door, remembering, as I did every time, how nervous I had been the first time Brady had led me here.
I checked over both shoulders to make sure the coast was clear and then slipped through the door, closing it silently behind me again.
Down I went, past the long-gestating furnace, past the termite-eaten workbenches covered in long-abandoned tools, now all interred in ancient shrouds of dust. I took the wooden key from above the door and let myself in to the most secret part of the school: the twisting, turning hallways left over from when East Township High was still Fort Pryman Shard, a military base decommissioned after World War II.
Through those dimly lit corridors I made my way, finally reaching the science room with the small army tent. I climbed down through the tent, spiraling down farther still on the corkscrew stairs, the darkness near total until the comforting faint purple light met my anxious eyes at the bottom.
As I strained to focus, searching out the three doors that had come to represent for me the final resting place of the girl I had once been, of the people I had once loved, of the dream I had once had of rescuing my lost brother, Robbie, I froze in shock.
Because the room was not empty.
And the doors were not all closed...
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