Chapter 2
Two
The New Guy
THE THING IS, I’VE NEVER really felt like I fit in anywhere.
I guess I was an okay baby — I mean, we all suck as babies, right?
I cried a lot and shat myself just like everybody else does.
But as we all got older, the other kids just figured it out, how to be in the world, how to make friends, how to survive.
Me, on the other hand? My earliest memory is my first day of preschool, when I spent the whole day standing in the corner holding on to my backpack like I was the new guy in the prison yard.
It wasn’t until the next day that they even convinced me to sit at a table, and two more before they got a word out of me.
I’ve never taken the easy road when making life hell for me and everybody else was also an option.
Mom was the only person who ever really got me.
Somehow, she could tell I was different, that the world was just a little too loud for me, and she figured out how to turn down the volume.
She cut the tags out of all my clothes and set aside plain pasta for me before she mixed the sauce in for Dad and Seth, and after school she would drive me over the bay and take me to sit on the beach, where the roar of the waves and the wind whipping my hair smoothed out the tension in my shoulders that came from sitting still in a hard chair all day, pretending I didn’t want to scream.
And when I asked her why I was different, why it was so hard for me when it came so easily to everyone else, she told me not to worry, that the world had a place for all of us and that I shouldn’t feel silly or wrong for needing a little extra space.
And then, when I was fifteen, they found the cancer.
Dad doesn’t know I’ve seen the records. Linda Callahan, age 46.
He doesn’t know that I read the words in her medical report, that when she went to see her doctor for routine back pain, they found tumors that had started in her breast and spread to her lymph nodes, then on to her lungs, her spine, her brain.
She was gone within six months — six months of home health aides who asked too many questions, six months of antiseptic and the smell of vomit, aggressive treatments that went nowhere, until Dad took the dining room table down one day, and then they came and set up a hospital bed in the middle of our house.
And that’s when I knew for sure that Mom was going to leave me and I was going to be on my own.
Seth tried, but he was already off at Harvard, the pride of our small town.
And Dad — well. Look, I know it’s not his fault, but he and I are just not the same.
The day they took my mother’s body out of the house, he turned on the TV, and it’s basically been on ever since, except for the precious hours when I was home from school before he got home from the latest job site, or when he was asleep.
When I think of those years after my mother died and before I left the house, all I can remember is noise — the walls pressing in on me, the crawling underneath my skin, the muddled ache in my head that always made my thoughts weave in on each other.
I think Dad means well. He works hard, and I know he loves me, in his way.
But it was never supposed to be like that — just him and me.
Mom was supposed to be there to cushion our sharp edges.
The first day of my senior year of high school was just like any other day with Dad and me — dragging myself out of bed, getting ready upstairs with my headphones blasting in my ears to drown out the drone of cable news from the living room.
When I pounded downstairs, Dad was sitting on the couch with a bowl of cereal and I saw his mouth move — probably Have a good day, son or Don’t be late for your first day — both addressing unlikely scenarios, since I already knew from experience that high school sucked ass and I hadn’t been late since I started taking my bike up the hill rather than relying on Dad to drive me in the van.
So I waved in a way I hoped was friendly and cut through the house to the kitchen, where I stowed my lunch in my backpack and then bolted out the back door.
Once I was outside, I shut off my iPod and looped my headphones around my neck.
Blessed fucking silence.
Well, not silence exactly. There was the everpresent wind, and the rush of cars making their way along Route 36, and the shrieking of laughing gulls coming over the bay, and beyond that, the ocean.
Someone up the hill was already running a lawnmower and our neighbor’s car was idling in the driveway.
But compared to the constant rambling of talking heads and advertising jingles inside my house, it was pure heaven.
The high school was about a mile away from my house, and I was used to the trip by now, standing up on my pedals and pumping my calves to make it up the hill on the way to school, and coasting all the way home at the end of the day (Feel free to read a fucking metaphor into that if you want).
And as I started out that morning, underneath a clear blue sky on a day that still felt like summer, I was at least a little bit glad that I only had a hundred and eighty more days, a hundred and eighty days until I could get the fuck out of here.
And I was pretty sure that senior year was just going to be one more pile of the same old shit, tally marks on the wall of my cell, day in and day out.
Boy, was I fucking wrong.
I got my first indication of just how wrong in my first period calculus class, where a small group of girls I had known since kindergarten were comparing notes in giggly whispers.
“Did you see him?” Courtney, who started a rumor in seventh grade that I still believed in Santa Claus, leaned in conspiratorially. “He’s so hot.”
“He looks like Jackson Rathbone. You know, from Twilight?” added Melissa. When she had her birthday at a laser tag place when we were ten, she invited everybody in the class except me.
“He does not.” Hannah rolled her eyes, crossing her arms across her chest. I never really had a problem with her.
She liked to write goth poetry and she never made me feel like I was a waste of space like so many of the other kids did.
For a while I thought maybe I had a thing for her, but how do you really know?
“He actually smiles occasionally, for one thing. And he doesn’t have a Southern accent only when it’s important for the narrative. ”
“You know I think he lives with his grandmother?” Melissa mused. “She’s lived across the street from me my whole life, and I saw his parents dropping him off last week. It’s so weird.”
Courtney’s eyes danced. “Should I ask him why he moved here? Maybe we could make him sit with us at lunch —”
The three girls’ voices dropped to whispers, and I turned my attention back to the course syllabus.
We hadn’t had a new kid in our class since Peter Jordan in the tenth grade — and his family only stayed for a year before they moved on.
But I figured it wouldn’t affect me at all, since nobody ever talked to me anyway.
I had my chance to see the new guy for the first time in my third-period history class.
I had chosen my preferred seat, tucked away along the wall where I could be out of the way, and I had my face buried in my copy of The KIller Angels, so I wasn’t watching the door.
But when I sensed the frisson of excited energy from my fellow classmates, I lifted my head to see what had caught their eye.
And when I did, my stomach dropped out of my chest cavity and made itself a new home somewhere in the vicinity of my knees.
The new guy was tall and lean, certainly taller than I was, and he was wearing a pair of skinny jeans with holes in the knees and a short-sleeved blue button-down that hugged his narrow chest. I guessed I could see what the girls meant about the sparkly vampires, what with the new guy’s wavy blond hair, cut just above his collar, and his high cheekbones.
But this guy was clearly full of life, radiating an energy that I would never be able to match, with smiles for everyone in the room.
And I couldn’t understand why it made my head swim just to look at him, why it suddenly hurt to breathe.
So I dropped my eyes back down to my book, concentrating on the scratchy texture of the paper between my fingers, the smoothness of the worn cover, the scent of old books that I could just make out if I tried hard enough. There was no reason to be this rattled.
At the front of the classroom, the teacher cleared his throat, and I tucked a scrap of paper between the pages of my book. Good, a distraction.
“Good morning, everybody! I am Mr. Ortiz, and this is AP U.S. History, so if you’re not in the right place, now is the time to fix that.
” He was a dark-haired man, probably in his mid-thirties, wearing a red Oxford shirt and a pair of chinos.
“We’re going to go over the syllabus today and talk a bit about why we study history, but I want to start with an icebreaker so that I can get to know you all a little better. ”
There was a collective rumbling in the room and I understood why.
After so many years together, there wasn’t much left for us to learn about each other, and yet our teachers were still putting us through this at the start of every single class.
While Mr. Ortiz gave an unnecessary explanation of the rules of Two Truths and a Lie, I let my gaze wander back over to the new guy.
He was doodling in a notebook, his chin in his hand and one leg tucked up awkwardly underneath him in his chair.
And he must have felt me looking at him, because he caught my eye and fucking winked.
As we went around the room, the truths and lies were just about what I would have expected after years with these people. But when it came time for the new guy to speak, we all sat up a little straighter.