Chapter Auggie
Auggie
“SO ARE WE FAR ENOUGH PAST THE POOL PUKER DRAMA THAT YOU CAN show your face in public again or is Heather going to have to keep pretending she knows sports?” Selena asks.
“Hey!” Heather says.
“I don’t know,” I say, tossing my pencil in the air. “You guys tell me. I didn’t even know I had that drama before you all revealed it to me.”
“I haven’t heard it in a while,” Peter says, then nods at Cici. “You?”
“Nada,” Cici says.
“And technically I have shown my face,” I say. “It was just… very… disguised.”
“Then, Heather, you get to go back to student life. Auggie, you’re back on your specialty. No disguises needed.”
I sit up. “I really don’t know that much about sports. I keep trying to tell you.”
Heather sighs. “But you know Janko Carter.”
Everyone in the room swoons at the sound of my best friend’s name.
The bell rings, signaling the end of the period, and everyone begins to pack up their things.
“First of all,” I say, “knowing Janko does not equal knowing sports. Second of all, Janko is so in love that he probably hasn’t seen a single other person in this school, so none of you have a chance.” I sling my backpack over my shoulder. “I barely have a chance,” I mutter under my breath.
Janko used to be at baseball practice, with his family, or with me.
Now Janko is at baseball practice or with Leo.
Of course, I’m happy for him. But I also feel a little like I’ve been dropped.
I don’t think I realized how many eggs I had put in the Janko Basket, and now I’m starving without anything left to make an omelet.
The metaphor made more sense in my head.
“Auggie.” Selena taps me on the shoulder and then stands with her arms crossed over her chest.
“What now?” I ask.
“When’s the Fast & Furious review coming in?”
I sigh. “Honestly, I have tried so many times to watch this movie.”
“What do you mean tried?” she asks.
“It’ll be in by Friday. I swear.”
I know that’s probably not true, but I don’t want to talk to Selena any longer than I have to. Before she can say anything else, I speed walk from the room and to the library for my free period.
I pull up my story and stick in my earbuds, which barely cancel out any of the noise from the passing period.
I watch the crowded hallway over my laptop screen, just in case I can catch Mayte before she heads to her next class.
Not that I’m stalking her or anything. I just know she walks this way to her next class because we usually give each other a quick wave, but I don’t see her this time.
She’s probably blended into the crowd, walking on the other side of the hallway.
Speaking of Mayte, I’ve gotten somewhere in her story.
Her essay about her grandmother’s cancer carries so much of her in it.
This tension between familial fealty and personal freedom.
The guilt weighing down on her for feelings she can’t shake.
Mayte was born to be a fictional character, to drive a story, to create intrigue and compassion and excitement.
I’m about three pages in so far, capturing a vulnerable, heartfelt scene between her and her grandmother during “Abuelita Duty,” which mirrors a following scene where she appears at school polished and made up, one of those popular girls whose popularity you actually understand—she’s gorgeous but also nice but also cool but also interesting.
Not just this flat, two-dimensional protagonist. Someone whole.
I sit for about half an hour trying to finish the scene at school.
I write 117 words, eat one of those granola bars that crumbles when you touch it, get on my knees to pick up as many of the crumbles as I can, and then become fixated on my desert of a tongue whose moisture has been absorbed by said crumbles.
At which point I congratulate myself on getting any words down at all and head into the hall to fill up my water bottle.
My footsteps echo in the emptiness of the hallway, something I hate desperately because of the way it announces my presence.
But they’re not the only sound bouncing off the walls.
I hear quiet sobs and quick breaths coming from around the corner, and I try to silence my shoes as I tiptoe to catch a look.
Mayte is sitting beside a trash can. Her knees are curled into her chest and she’s wrapped her arms around them, her face buried in the crook of her elbows.
“Mayte?” I whisper, and she starts, slowly lifting her head up.
“I’m fine,” she says, wiping her eyes, but her mascara is smeared and tears continue down her cheeks.
“What happened?” I ask, walking toward her.
She scoots over so I can sit beside her, and then she leans into me, crying into my shoulder. My body tenses and I try to relax it, wrap my arms around her. She doesn’t say anything, just continues to cry.
“Mayte,” I say again. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she says between sobs.
I realize I’m stroking her hair and stop.
“Did someone do—”
“No one did anything,” she says. She wipes her eyes again and repositions herself. Her head is still against my shoulder, but her face is unburied. “I was in Lit & Comp one minute and then I was running out sobbing the next. I literally have no idea what happened.”
“I guess you don’t have to know,” I say. “Sometimes you just cry.”
“I know you’ve seen me cry a lot lately, but—”
“Sometimes humans just cry,” I say.
“But that’s stupid. Save the tears for actual sad things. For being beat up, for being hurt, for bleeding, for—whatever.”
I realize I’m running my hand through her hair again, and this time I don’t stop myself because her breaths seem to be coming slower. “I think your heart has been pretty beat up lately, Mayte,” I say.
I can literally hear her swallow. “That’s such a writer thing to say.”
“Writers aren’t liars,” I say. “Except for sometimes.”
She kind of nose-chuckles and sits up, wiping away tears. I pull my hand from her hair, and she turns to me, a soft smile on her face. “I can’t go back to class, Auggie. They all saw me run out crying.”
“I guess that’s fair.”
“Why aren’t you in class, anyway?” she asks.
“Free period,” I say.
“So you have a class next period, then?”
“What are you asking?”
“You wanna get out of here?”
I sigh dramatically and then stand up, taking her hand and pulling her up from the floor. “Are you about to make me skip my second class in all of high school?”
“Holy crap, you’re such a Goody Two-shoes,” she says. “And I’m not making you do anything.”
She follows me to the library, and as I start to pack my bag, she sits down in front of my laptop. My stomach drops and I turn, slamming the screen down.
“What the hell?” she asks, laughing. “What were you doing on there?”
“Naked pictures of Teletubbies,” I say, grabbing my laptop and sliding it into my backpack. “Research.”
“You’re so weird,” she says.
And it’s not that I’m hiding the story from Mayte, per se.
It’s for her, obviously, and for the colleges, and so I’ll tell her about it.
Eventually. But that doesn’t mean she has to know now.
I think there’s a time and a place and a way for her to find out, and I don’t think it’s after she’s run out of class sobbing.
Maybe it’s after I get into college.
And I don’t know why I’m panicking about it anyway.
I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not, like, actively deceiving her or lying to her or anything.
Just because my desire to support my friend lines up with Mr. Ashwood’s “Rules of True Writing So You, Too, Can Get a Piece in The New Yorker at Thirty and Also a College Acceptance” doesn’t counter that desire.
It’s just… kind of convenient that they line up.
I’m not doing anything wrong.
Of course I’m not.
I put on my backpack. “What about your stuff? You left it in class?”
Mayte pulls out a scratched, gray flip phone and starts typing away. “It’s fine. I’ll just ask Leo to grab it and give it to me later.”
“What’s with the relic?” I ask.
She waves the phone in the air. “It was my dad’s old phone. Just using it until I can get a new one.” She stands up. “So, where are we going?”
I shrug. “I thought you’d have an idea.”
“I picked last time, so it’s your turn.” She walks backward through the hall so she can keep looking at me. “I can’t do all the planning in this friendship.”
“Apparently the new Fast & Furious movie is streaming now,” I say.
“You’re still on that stupid movie?” she asks. “It probably sucks anyway.”
“I know,” I say. “I have to write a review for the newspaper.”
“Whatever,” she says, spinning back around and following me to my car. “Anything’s better than staying here. Even visiting wherever it is you spawned from.”
So, it turns out whoever told me it was streaming was a liar because it’s not.
It’s still only in theaters, which is not a surprise, and at this point I’m convinced I will never write this review, and that doesn’t really upset me all that much.
Mayte’s sprawled on the couch beside me, scrolling through Netflix.
“You must watch some weird shit to get these recs,” Mayte says.
“I share the account with the rest of my family,” I say. “So it’s not all my fault.”
She flips over onto her back and drops the remote on the carpet. “Your house is nice.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I obviously work very hard to afford it.”
She tosses one of the white throw pillows at me and I dodge it. “But for real. My house is in a kinda shitty part of town and definitely isn’t this clean. Or this big.”
“My mom is into interior design stuff. My dad said she always wanted a house with a high ceiling and big windows like this. She used to cut all these pages out of magazines for inspiration until Kate showed her Pinterest.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Mayte says. “It looks like it came out of a magazine. Or, like, some home store display. Everything is all classy and matchy and, like, minimalist.”
“Yeah. She’s not obsessive or anything, but she likes to keep it clean.”