Part VII #2
“Forget…who?”
She scoffed. “I don’t know.”
“But isn’t it your desk?”
“Yes, but it’s not like—I don’t own the desk. The message might have been meant for someone else.”
He crossed his arms. “But the detention room is only used for detention. Everyone knows that. Were you in there yesterday? Was it there then?”
She swallowed hard. “Well, no…”
He put his chin in his hand. “Who do you think this message wants you to forget?”
She looked away. Everyone wanted her to forget Connor—including Connor himself. Vi wished it were that easy. If only she could just snap her fingers and all the pain would vanish. All the betrayal and heartbreak and doom—poof!
“Maybe it’s a message from the universe,” the guy went on. His voice was a little wistful. “Maybe the detention room is where you go to get answers to important questions. Like a Magic Eight Ball.”
“A…Magic Eight Ball?” She goggled at him.
Then she realized something else. I’m in your study hall. Hang on a minute.
She pointed at him. “My only study hall is right now.”
“Okay,” he said. “Why aren’t you there?”
“Because I’m in detention this week. I already told you.” Apparently, this was always when in-school detention was: during classes that didn’t matter.
“What’d you do to land in detention, anyway?”
She scoffed. Like she was going to tell him. “Why aren’t you in study hall? How’d you get to skip?”
The guy turned his shoulders in and gave Vi a haughty look. But before he could answer, the fire alarm started to blare.
IV.
It was raining, but that didn’t stop the school from making everyone stand outside so they could check if the fire alarm was for real or a hoax.
Vi spotted Cassidy, Ramona, and Lila in line near the big oak tree that the indoor track team sometimes had to do laps around for sprint repeats.
They waved her over so she could stand under Ramona’s golf umbrella.
“Why’d you come out the east door?” Lila asked, looking at Vi suspiciously. “Don’t you have study hall in the language wing right now? Isn’t the west door easier?”
“Uh…” Vi cursed her friends for knowing each other’s schedules so intimately. Also, she couldn’t get the weird interaction with the poet out of her head. That was how she’d begun thinking of him: the poet.
She decided to change the subject. “Did you guys know that we have a repairs department that fixes graffiti and stuff? And it’s in a little room near the cafeteria?”
Her friends gave her a strange look. They had been giving her a lot of strange looks lately. Vi knew they thought she’d been growing increasingly mercurial since Connor broke it off with her. Weepy. Dramatic. A hoarder of all things Connor. Just get over him already, she knew they wanted to say.
They said they wanted to help her—they just didn’t know how.
She didn’t know how to guide them, either.
One minute, she wanted them to show up on her doorstep with face masks and vanilla hand cream and pints of mint chocolate chip for all of them.
By the time they showed up, though, she often didn’t want them there anymore.
One time, they came over to cheer her up and she spent the whole time in the bathtub. They were really annoyed after that.
“It’s in this weird little closet that’s almost like a darkroom,” Vi went on. “And this guy in our grade volunteers there, I guess. Maybe for school credit—or maybe they pay him? I didn’t ask. He does everything on a typewriter.”
“A student volunteer cleaning up graffiti?” Cassidy shook her head. “It’s not something student council approved.” Cassidy was president of the student council.
“Actually, I think Ms. Carlson would have had to approve that, and I didn’t see anything come across her desk,” Lila jumped in. She was the president of the school’s Administration and Leadership Club.
“We didn’t raise money for it in basketball,” Ramona piped up, not one to be left out. She was team captain.
“But wait, who was this boy, and why did he have a typewriter?” Lila asked, perking up. “And, most importantly, is he cute?”
Vi said nothing, instead scanning the schoolyard for the poet.
She didn’t see him anywhere, which was strange, because she thought his tall head might poke above the student body.
How could he be in her study hall? It was a big class, and she usually didn’t pay much attention to the people around her unless they were being really annoying about something or watching loud TikToks on their phones.
Still, she thought she would have noticed him.
She saw someone else in the crowd, though. His dark, poufy hair. His clear-framed glasses. His smirk. She’d been with him when he bought that blue hoodie at the sporting goods store. He was wearing her least favorite pair of high-tops.
Her stomach twisted. Please don’t cry.
Connor’s friend, Really Annoying Freddie Diaz, noticed Vi looking. He nudged Connor and started to whisper. Connor said something back to him, shook his head, and kept his gaze averted as if to say, Not going there.
“Vi,” Cassidy suddenly said, and Vi was grateful to swivel away. Until Cassidy said what she said next. “What’s that weird ruler thing you’re holding?”
“I have to go,” Vi said.
V.
There were still twenty minutes of detention left after the fire drill was declared a nonemergency and everyone returned to school.
Vi knew she should head back to room 303 right away, but she didn’t want to.
Not yet. She wanted to see the poet again.
Their conversation was unfinished. She wanted to know why he got to skip class—study hall, but still—to work on his typewriter in Repairs.
Also, she wasn’t sure if he’d actually finished writing her report to clean up the desk.
It was the excuse she was telling herself, anyway. Maybe that was a red flag: finding reasons to see a person again. She’d made that mistake with Connor.
She’d liked Connor so much. He was literally her dream boy, the spitting image of the Ideal Boyfriend she’d doodled in her journal with the leopard-print cover when she was eleven.
She and Connor flirted all through track season last spring.
Typically, their flirtation took place on the high jump mat.
Since the team didn’t have any high jumpers, they treated the mat like a trampoline, egging each other on to see who could jump higher until Coach made them stop.
Vi thought Connor liked her, too, but was shy, so finally, right after his two-hundred-meter championships final, she told him she was into him and that they should hang out.
It was great timing, because Connor was already pumped; he’d gotten third place overall.
“Oh,” Connor said, still breathing hard. “Wow. Cool. Okay.”
Vi liked him a lot, but Connor just wasn’t that into it.
Or so that’s what everyone said after the fact.
Everyone could tell, apparently. Well, Vi couldn’t freaking tell.
She thought they were cute together. She thought he liked coupledom.
He always answered her calls and texts. She thought he liked it when she helped him shop for clothes and asked him to scratch her back during assemblies and kissed him dramatically in public.
If he was so blasé about her, why would he have kissed her back?
She stomped down the stairs to the tech wing, wondering why she was thinking about this.
The little door was ajar, but Vi knocked anyway. The poet was just settling back down.
“Oh,” he said, looking up. “You came back!”
She scowled. He could see right through her, maybe. Then she sighed. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“You seriously have no idea?”
“Sorry!” She felt defensive. “It’s a big school. I don’t know everyone’s name.”
“It’s Max.” He said this hurriedly, as if he suddenly had other customers to get to. “Anyway. Where were we? There’s a note written on your desk in the detention room.” He continued to type. “Was it done in marker? Pen?”
“Pen, but kind of etched into the wood, too.” Max. That was a nice name. “So, do you get to work in here as some kind of independent study? Where’d you get that typewriter from?”
“How big would you say the message is across? Several inches? A foot?”
“Gosh, not a foot,” Vi said. She felt a little wilted. She liked it better when Max was playful. Maybe she shouldn’t have scowled. “Probably a few inches? And…I think the message is about my boyfriend.”
His fingers bounced. He still didn’t look up. “I thought you said the message wasn’t for you.”
“Well, I thought about it more. Maybe it is a Magic Eight Ball sort of thing.”
“I highly doubt there’s some kind of oracle in the detention room.” Max rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why I told you that.”
“Oh.”
Vi suddenly felt a peppery sensation in her nose. She tried to ignore it. She tried to think about happy things, like the Labrador puppies that were for sale down her block. But then she felt the tears coming. One dripped down her cheek. She tried to hide a sniff, but Max looked up.
“Oh,” he said.
“Sorry.” She ducked her head. “It’s just that the message is right. I do need to get over him. He wasn’t even that great. I don’t know why I care.”
He slowly laid his fingers across the keys and waited.
“He complained about the birthday gift I got him, for one thing,” Vi went on. “Who does that?”
“What was the gift?”
“One of those birds from the science center that tips over like it’s drinking water.
I thought it was cute. The bird wore a great top hat.
It’s based on a principle from physics—he and I studied for the AP exam together.
Apparently, though, he wanted AirPods knockoffs from .
He said he’d sent me a link and I should have just gotten him that. ”
“That’s boring,” Max said.
“Also, he used to make fun of the music I listen to. Called it whiny-girl music.”
“He sounds kind of annoying.”