Chapter 10 #2
“That’s just describing what they do, not why or how they do it. We don’t even understand why electrons have a charge or where they are at any given moment.” Mr. Johnson, the teacher, had waxed on about this mystery.
I imitated his voice. “They are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. They know when you’ve been sleeping and know when you’re awake.”
Boden laughed. “You don’t need to worry about any of that. It won’t be on the test.”
“We don’t even know what light is.” We’d also spent some time covering wave-particle duality.
“Which is why it’s also not going to be on the test.”
I ought to say, Speaking of learning stuff for tests, how are you at trig?
But asking Boden to tutor me suddenly seemed like such a commitment.
Did I really want to pursue this guy as a homecoming date?
It was one thing to talk to him in physics class; what if he had no conversational skills and the whole night was filled with awkward silences?
Going to the dance would be so much more fun if I knew Selena could double with us.
If we went in a group, there would be less pressure and it would be easier to arrange things with Cooper.
He could just drop me off at Selena’s house and her parents wouldn’t think it was odd that the group was leaving from her house.
I could find out if Boden knew of a friend who would be a good fit for her and casually plant the idea of a group of us going together. She didn’t have to know I’d suggested it. “Do you know my friend Selena?” I asked.
“Yeah, she’s in AP Chem with me.”
“I should’ve known you’d be in at least one class together.
She’s smart like you.” This year, all of Selena’s classes had extra letters in front of them.
My only honors class was AP Lit. “She’s really nice too.
She’s a little shy, though. I’m always telling her she should talk to more people in her classes, but she worries about getting in trouble and ending up on the teacher’s bad side. ”
“That,” Mr. Johnson said, coming up behind us, “is something you would do well to worry more about, Ms. Seibold.”
I jumped and my hand knocked into the circuit board, causing it to skid across the table. Boden had to catch it before it tipped off altogether.
Mr. Johnson held his hand out for it. “Attempting to get rid of the evidence?”
“No,” I said. “You just startled me. We did it right.”
Mr. Johnson went about checking our circuits.
He was a middle-aged man with a drooping mustache and the sort of grumpy demeanor that made you think he’d never been young or happy and so resented anyone who was either.
“You wouldn’t have been startled if you’d been paying attention instead of trying to set Boden up with your friend. ”
Wait, what? “I wasn’t trying to set Boden up.” I glanced at him to see if he’d come to the same conclusion. His neck flushed red, and he stared at the table.
Mr. Johnson grunted. “Save your protests of innocence for drama class.” He picked up my lab book and checked off the assignment, then picked up Boden’s book.
The bell rang and students immediately headed to the door in their usual stampede form. Mr. Johnson called out, “Don’t forget to read the next section for your homework.”
How did I fix this with Boden? I couldn’t blurt out that I hadn’t been trying to set him up with Selena because I maybe liked him.
Boden didn’t give me a chance to say anything. Still blushing, he grabbed his stuff, made a beeline for the door, and was gone.
At times, I’ve joked that my love life is cursed. It was beginning to feel less like a joke and more like a valid hypothesis.
c c c
Throughout the rest of school, I thought about telling Selena what had happened with Boden. Then I thought about her yelling at me for trying to set her up with one of his friends after she’d told me not to. I decided she didn’t have to know about my latest disaster.
I would look for Boden at the game tonight.
If he was there, I’d excuse myself from my father for a few minutes and explain to Boden, in a chill, tactful way, that our physics teacher was insane and assure him again that I hadn’t been setting him up with Selena.
I’d simply been looking for a math tutor and had been about to tell him why my best friend—-despite being an awesome, smart person—wasn’t a good fit for the job.
If he wasn’t at the game, I’d tell him the same thing as soon as I saw him in class on Monday. Hopefully, we could laugh about it and then never speak of Mr. Johnson’s ill--informed accusations again.
At drama rehearsal, Harper, Kinsley, and I ran lines in the back corner of the auditorium. In the play, they were the shopgirls in Mrs. Molloy’s store, the other two big female parts.
Even though the school never gave enough money to the drama department to buy all of the costumes and set pieces we needed for our plays, you wouldn’t guess the administration’s stinginess from the size of the theater.
It was huge, with rows of comfy cloth chairs that Mrs. Russel was always yelling at us to keep clean.
We weren’t supposed to eat in the theater, but if you ran lines sitting on the floor in one of the back corners, she either didn’t see your stash of chips or didn’t care about you getting the floor dirty.
Harper was a fan of every designer-flavored chip there was.
Tomato and olive. Black bean. Sweet potato and avocado.
Kinsley brought Triscuits and string cheese.
I was a popcorn girl. Usually I brought the kind without much butter or salt.
Today I was eating kettle corn. It was one of those days where nothing but sugar would do, a substance that might be in shorter supply in the future.
During my dad’s last shopping trip, he’d only bought healthy food.
Thank you, new fitness instructor girlfriend.
I knew the pantry’s recent abundance of quinoa, oats, and organic protein powder was all for show. He hadn’t gotten rid of his old junk food, just moved it to the desk drawers in his study.
After I helped Harper and Kinsley go through their scene, the conversation shifted to Cooper. Neither of them was sufficiently horrified that my father was dating his mother.
“If they get married,” Harper said, “you need to invite us over to your house all of the time so we can hang out with him.” She fluttered a hand decked in silver rings.
“Pool party!” Harper had a flair for the dramatic and liked to wear vintage clothes.
You never knew which decade she was visiting.
Today she wore black-and-white checkered capris and a tight-fitting top that made her look like she’d wandered out of a fifties beach movie.
I put my script in my lap with a thud. “You want to hang out with my former nemesis? Harper, you helped me hide his books on the library shelves.”
She tilted her head, her brown curls bouncing slightly. “Yeah, but now you’ve put an end to your nemesis-ship, so it’s okay.”
I’d told them that Cooper and I had agreed to get along. I hadn’t said anything to them about fake dating.
Kinsley nodded in agreement with Harper.
Her long brown hair was pulled back in a French braid, and she wore red cowboy boots with her jeans.
Despite the fact that her parents owned a string of UPS stores, she was a cowgirl waiting to happen.
“It was time to end the pranks,” Kinsley said, ever the peacemaker.
“If you hadn’t, on opening night, your Dolly costume might have ended up superglued to the set. Nobody wants that.”
“Besides,” Harper added, “Cooper has hot friends. You ought to throw a get-together at your house—your friends and the football team. We’ll help you plan it.”
Nope, I couldn’t even imagine a world in which my home was invaded by the football team.
Kinsley elbowed Harper. “Put away your appetizer list. The girl is grounded.”
Harper deflated. “Can’t you do something to unground yourself?”
I wished. “Not while Cooper’s mom is still grounding him. She’s definitely a bad influence. And get this, when she has vacation time, she likes camping in areas that are so remote, she has to carry in all her gear for miles. She told my dad that we should try it.”
Harper clicked her tongue. “You’re going to have to start lifting weights in order to carry all your stuff.”
“No wonder Cooper is so tough,” Kinsley said. “His idea of a vacation is not dying.”
I nodded in agreement. “The whole thing is just a search-and-rescue mission waiting to happen.”
Kinsley picked up her script again, a sign she was ready to get back to practicing.
She pressed open the book to her next scene and shot Harper a glance.
“If you want to talk to one of the football players, I wouldn’t wait for Madeline to throw a party.
” She leaned closer to Harper. “We both know her truce with Cooper might not last, and then Madeline will pull something that gets her grounded through Christmas or sent off to one of those wilderness camps with Cooper.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.
“He isn’t the only one with cute friends,” Kinsley went on. “I could introduce you to some of Jonathan’s.”
Harper perked up at that, and our scene was forgotten while the two of them discussed how Harper could casually run into some of Jonathan’s friends. They decided the football game tonight would be a good place.
Harper was cute, bubbly, and had no problem talking to new people. She would probably have a date to homecoming in no time. I really ought to work on my bubbliness . . .
“Hey, why don’t you sit by us tonight,” Harper told me, obviously not grasping the nature of what it meant to be grounded. She was the sort who never got in trouble with her parents.
“I can’t,” I reminded her. “I’ll be stuck sitting with my father and Ms. Nash.”
“Bummer.” Harper gave me a sympathetic look. “But there will be other times.”
I wondered again if I would see Boden at the game tonight. If he was there, I’d have to pretend I needed to go to the bathroom and then figure out a way to bump into him. Might be hard if he was sitting parked in the middle of the bleachers.
I didn’t hear more of Kinsley and Harper’s plans because Mrs. Russel called me to the stage to run through one of my scenes.
After I recited several lines, she told me that my rendition of Dolly was too high-strung.
“You’re a successful matchmaker,” she said, hands circling the air for emphasis. “You should exude confidence.”
“I don’t think that’s how matchmaking works,” I replied. “Especially since you never know what men will do next.” Okay, I didn’t actually say that out loud. I just thought it.
I tried saying my lines more confidently, even though I figured that real matchmakers were always worried about men going off the rails.
Toward the end of rehearsal, while Mrs. Russel worked on a scene I wasn’t in, I gave Claire a bag with four shirts in it.
She looked at it in confusion. “What’s this?”
“You wouldn’t let me pay for the shirt I ruined,” I explained, “so I said I’d give you something of mine.”
Surprise flitted across her face. “You didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to.”
She glanced around to make sure no one was watching and opened the bag. “Which one are you giving me?”
“All of them. I think the olive-green shirt goes well with your coloring. The black one is sophisticated. The white one is more versatile. You can dress it up or dress it down. And the red one is for when you want to impress someone.”
She held up the black one. “I’ve never seen you wear any of these.”
“Right. That’s why I’m getting rid of them. I want to make room in my closet.”
I’d been trying to be nice without it seeming like a big deal, but she had another one of those You don’t live in the real world looks on her face. I might as well have been Marie Antoinette announcing to the starving peasants that they could eat cake.
For the record, I wasn’t the richest kid at our school.
A lot of people lived in bigger houses and drove cars that put my little convertible to shame.
The difference between me and the other rich kids was that my father donated more money to the school, so we seemed wealthier to people who didn’t know that a luxury-class BMW costs twice what my car did.
Claire stared at the bag, wavering. “You really didn’t have to,” she said again.
“I don’t have a little sister to give my clothes to, so what else am I going to do with them? If you don’t take them, they’ll just end up at Goodwill.”
The word Goodwill seemed to decide the matter for her. “Well, I guess if you’re just getting rid of them anyway . . .” She shoved the bag into her backpack. “I’ll see if they’ll fit.”
I knew they’d fit. I’d bought them with Claire in mind.