Chapter Nine
OfficialEndeavourHigh: Campus police are now offering a reward for the missing traffic cones.
Have you considered that there might be another explanation for all these big feelings?
It’s possible I’ll never be able to forget that one sentence.
It’s echoed in my mind all weekend, and as I try to go about my Monday with all of the vigor and energy I usually possess (ha), it follows me around like a ghost.
“What is with you today?” Esha asks, struggling to keep up with my stride.
I didn’t realize my feet were pounding against the floor so hard, and now that I do, I realize they actually kind of hurt.
My chunky loafers look like they’re made for stomping, yes, but they’re more fashion than function.
Esha catches up with me as I slow my pace.
I really must have been booking it. Her legs are way longer than mine.
I asked her to come to Lowry’s office hours with me because I didn’t want to go alone.
She grabs my elbow, pulling me to a stop at the end of the hallway, where it opens up into the cafeteria.
“Are you going to tell me what’s up, or am I just going to have to follow you around campus all day?
” She still has a hold of my elbow. To be cute, we showed up in matching old Endeavour shirts, moss green.
She’s wearing hers with baggy low-rise jeans, a thick white Y2K belt, and chunky sneakers, and I’m wearing mine over a tight black dress that hits just above my knee.
(I would absolutely get dress-coded without the T-shirt.)
I look around, making sure there’s no one within earshot.
“What is it about boys that makes girls lose their good sense?” I ask, looking away from her face and down at the broken skin on the fingers of my left hand.
It’s happened to me often enough—losing my good sense at the hands of a boy. Boys, actually. One after the other. Those wounds are still healing. Some are at that stage where they’re uncomfortable and the new skin is itchy.
“I don’t know,” Esha replies, her voice lightening up an octave. “But whatever it is makes me glad I’m gay.”
Esha laughs, but I don’t, and then her face shifts.
“Is this about Hayes?” she asks, gently. I don’t know if the gentleness is because she doesn’t want to upset me, or if it’s because she doesn’t want anyone else to hear.
“No,” I say, even though yes is on the tip of my tongue. “It’s about her, actually.”
Discreetly, I hope, I point to where Piper sits alone at a high-top table near the edge of the cafeteria.
Before yesterday, I would’ve walked right past her without a second thought.
I would’ve assumed she wanted to be alone.
Wanted her own space and a moment of peace in an increasingly chaotic life. She’s entitled to any and all of that.
Today, I don’t think that’s what she wants, though. She seems … lonely.
“Oh, yeah.” Esha sighs. “She should’ve ditched that asshole a long time ago.”
I nod. Her language in public leaves something to be desired, but it’s an entirely true description, so I don’t say anything. “I just don’t know what she sees in him.”
“Well.” Esha leans against the wall beside me. “Maybe it’s not what she sees in him. Maybe it’s what she doesn’t see.”
I’m about to respond when I hear someone walking in our general direction.
“Hey!” Not someone, then. Something. Hayes. I don’t turn around or respond because I don’t think he’s talking to me. Mostly because I don’t want him to be.
“Nova …,” Esha says, cajolingly.
“Hey!” he says from directly behind me. Okay, so he is talking to me.
“What?” I ask, looking over my shoulder at him because I refuse to turn around.
Rolling his eyes, he steps around, standing in front of me and Esha so I can see him. So I have to see him.
“Are you headed to Lowry’s office?” He’s looking directly at me, barely paying Esha any attention. That’s rude. He’s wearing a dress shirt today, like always. Off-white, kind of worn. Sleeves rolled up to his forearms. Black jeans. I wish it all didn’t look so good on him.
“How did you know that?” It occurs to me that I could’ve asked him to come with me, rather than Esha. Only I think I’d rather punch myself in the face.
“Don’t bother. She’s not there. There’s a sign on the door that she’s not doing office hours this week.”
“Damn it,” I mutter under my breath. But cursing in front of him feels like a weakness, like he just saw some vulnerable, imperfect side of me he shouldn’t have. Future Beta Club presidents don’t swear in public.
“Yeah …,” his voice trails off, and for a moment, his usual confidence just … vanishes. Now I feel like I’m seeing some vulnerable side of him I shouldn’t be. “Listen, I think we’re gonna have to do something about her.”
I don’t even know what do something about her means, but it reminds me of those vintage country songs where people end up dead in lakes. I don’t think that’s what he’s planning, though. I hope that’s not what he’s—wait, I really don’t like this ambiguous we he’s talking about.
“We?” I ask, my voice rising an octave.
“Yeah, we. Me and you. I don’t know what to do; I just know that she’s royally screwing all of us over by refusing to teach us, and I know none of us can risk the hit to our GPAs from a random C in her class. Do you trust her to grade your work?”
I find myself shaking my head.
Everything he says is true.
“We have to deal with this together, Nova,” he says, holding my gaze with an intensity I’ve never seen in him before. “You’re smart, and you understand how to handle teachers. Together, we can figure out what to do.”
“I’m sorry, but who are you? The Hayes Collins I know would never willingly admit to me being competent at something.”
“Admit? Like this is court? What do you want, a signed declaration?” He leans against the wall behind him, as if suddenly this conversation is wasting his precious time.
“Maybe. Would you be willing to submit to a video deposition to the judge?”
Esha snorts.
“I know you’re having fun hating me,” he says, brow curved, “but can we be serious for one second?”
“Absolutely.” I nod like I’m getting my head in the game. (I’m not. I’m still having fun.) “So, just to recap the situation. You don’t know what to do, and you just … assume that I will?”
He nods. “I mean, yeah. This is what you do. Solve problems. Specifically school problems. English-class problems should be your specialty, right? You basically had this class mapped out day by day in your head. You know how it’s supposed to go, and it’s not supposed to go like this.“
He looks oddly serious. And so certain about my ability to fix this.
My mind starts to whir. Soon enough, my brain is literally buzzing, and I can’t keep up with the nonlinear thoughts bouncing off its walls, so I just let myself jump around with them.
I used to fight myself during moments like these, try to flatten out those nonlinear thoughts into something resembling a “normal” mental process.
I gave up that fight a long time ago. What does it matter?
I am smart. I can figure things out. The way I reason works.
It’s moments like these when I realize I’m not normal, but I’m not supposed to be.
“Well, we could talk to the department head or the dean … but Lowry is the department head. And she’s tenured, so it’s not like they’ll fire her.
I’m not even sure I want them to fire her, you know?
Like, she’s supposed to be the best English professor here.
Or she used to be, anyway. I’ve been wondering about what happened to her.
Burnout, maybe? Burnout can be really serious.
And it can hit women so hard, because we’re expected to be overachievers at work and at home, and there’s a limit to that—overachieving.
It’s doesn’t seem like she’s exhausted, exactly, although I guess I wouldn’t know.
More like she actively doesn’t care. Like she resents us, almost. I don’t really understand what the problem is, but yes, you’re right, Hayes—much as it pains me to say that—it’s affecting our education and that’s not fair.
Who else can we talk to at the college about this situation?
Probably not the registrar’s office. I mean, that’s just scheduling, right?
And the president’s not going to get on the horn with a student.
Especially a high school student in the accelerated program.
Like, come on. Maybe this is more of a DIY situation.
Maybe we just have to brute-force the material independently and learn it so well she has to give us amazing marks. ”
I look up at them as I stop to take a breath, expecting to see wide eyes and slightly terrified looks. They’re … not terrified. Esha, I understand. I spout off like this at her all the time, but I don’t think Hayes has ever been on the receiving end of one of my famous streams of consciousness.
I figure this would be the moment he uses to make fun of me forever. I figure he’d stop me, give me the Hey, weirdo, please shut up response I get from basically everyone else. At least the look that’s the nonverbal equivalent.
He doesn’t, though.
“Keep going,” he says. “It sounds like there’s a pot-of-gold plan at the end of this word rainbow.”
I laugh.
No one’s ever said my words were a rainbow before.
“I don’t know if there is. I mean, she’s a tenured department head. She’d have to commit some heinous act of academic violence to get fired, and even then, that doesn’t always happen …” My voice trails off as I keep thinking, keep bouncing off the walls within my own head.
“I never said anything about getting her fired. You said that.”
I did say that. So much for her being my idol. You don’t try to get your idols fired.
“Are you really saying she can’t get fired for not doing her job?” Esha asks.
“It’s a long shot. I snuck into a faculty senate meeting last year—”
“You snuck into a faculty senate meeting? Why? How?” Hayes asks, leaning in.
“I wanted to see what they were like! And they’re really boring. I don’t know how I got in, really. I guess I just give off student-teacher vibes.”
“Nova, you’re seventeen.” Hayes rolls his eyes.
“Yeah, but you know that one history professor who’s like twenty-four? I sat next to her the whole time. I just blended in.”
They look suitably impressed. It’s satisfying. I should sneak into more things.
“They were talking about disciplinary action for the geology teacher,” I say, thinking back to the meeting. “You know the one? His entire class failed that semester, and obviously that raised concerns. Well, he talked his way out of it, and people are still taking that Godforsaken geology class.”
Now Esha’s eyes are widened too. “I remember that!” she exclaims. “We had a bunch of people in the Beta Club tutoring program asking for help, but no one was qualified to tutor because he hadn’t had a student make an A or a B in years. Years!”
I nod. “So … even if we all fail … that just kind of becomes our problem.”
“Okay, well, then we won’t fail.” Hayes shrugs his shoulders like he made an easy decision.
Like the idea of us succeeding in this class is easy, when I’m not even sure it’s possible.
He’s right: We can’t trust her to grade.
She arrives late, leaves early, screens random movies, and barely deigns to notice us.
When she wrote feedback on a freewrite we did—the only real work we’ve done—she criticized me for “leaning too much on the reading.” What does that even mean?
So I scoff. I don’t share his optimism. “How do we do that?”
“I don’t know yet, but we will. You’ll figure it out.”
He bumps his shoulder against mine, so quickly I don’t have time to analyze the fact that he’s touching me. I don’t even know how we got this close. When he turns to leave, I stick my tongue out at the back of his head.
“Really, Nova?” Esha says, crossing her arms and looking down her nose at me. “Student leaders don’t stick their tongues out at people in the hallway.”
She heads in the direction of Piper’s table, and I stick my tongue out at her too.
Then, I follow.