Seventeen
It was Cella’s turn to stall in my car before Monday’s first class, and it was my turn to indulge her.
I suggested we play hooky again, but she chickened out, remembering the glower we’d gotten from Mrs. Gangrene two Tuesdays ago.
The bell rang as we walked in, which seemed offensively symbolic alongside the tiny metaphorical bells that chimed in my chest the moment I opened the door and saw Mason.
It wasn’t a new feeling, just reframed. It was the magnetism that drew my eyes toward him in every room, but now it wasn’t something to suppress or escape.
Now I could admit to myself that the tug went much deeper than my eyes, to some shrouded core inside of myself.
My whole body searched for him, a compass finding the North Pole or a plant growing toward the sun.
It was so gross it made me angry.
I channeled that rage as we reached the table, interrupting Mason and Cella’s stilted morning greetings to look down at Mason and say, “You’re an idiot,” punctuating it by dropping my bag to the floor.
“Oh no,” muttered Cella. On the way to class, she had made me agree four different times to be cool around Mason.
“Good morning to you too, Sunshine,” Mason said emotionlessly.
His back seemed so wide in his trucker jacket.
His hair was still damp from a morning shower, and the wind outside had chapped his lips.
He drank from his ridiculous gallon water bottle.
It had been weeks since I could take a long look at him at school.
“You’re going to drink all of that water?” I said. “Sure it won’t be too long of a commitment for you?”
“Why, you want some?” Mason set it heavily on the table. “You’re looking a little pale.”
Mrs. Gasoline instructed one person from each table to collect today’s supplies from the front of the room.
“Go fetch,” I said to Mason. We held a hard glare.
His mouth twitched at the corner. I glared even harder, silently ordering him to focus.
“Table in the back, please!” Mrs. Gabapentin called out sharply.
“I’ll just get them,” said the fourth student at our table with a sigh. It was maybe the third time I’d ever heard him speak. “Anything but this again.”
Stunned—and for my part, mildly impressed—we behaved for the rest of class. We’d put on a good enough show anyway.
***
Halfway through third period, I got the text:
equipment room??
11:01 a.m.
It wasn’t a hard choice. My raisin-faced literature teacher paced the front of the room, close reading the longest paragraph I had ever seen. We were discussing A Tale of Two Cities. He didn’t even notice when I crossed to the front of the classroom and left.
I wasn’t sure Cella did, either. She was reading fan fiction on her phone, concealed inside her open copy of the book. She loved lit, so I knew I wasn’t missing anything if even she wasn’t paying attention.
On my way to the gym, I responded,
Looking for another fistfight?
11:01 a.m.
more like mouth fight
11:02 a.m.
Turning back
11:02 a.m.
(I was not.)
noooo cmere lemme romance u
11:02 a.m.
The smelly closet where we hit each other is not romantic
First a shed, now this, what’s next? By the dumpsters?
11:03 a.m.
i was thinking inside them actually ;)
its time we admit that fistfight was just an outlet for our sexual tension
11:03 a.m.
PE was in session. The gym was a battlefield. Aside from a dodgeball rolling into my Dr. Martens, nobody noticed me slinking along the wall to the equipment room. I had barely opened the door when I was dragged through it, then pushed against it.
My hands scrabbled for purchase, finding it in Mason’s belt loops as he devoured my cut-off, “Shit—”
The gym outside sounded like a stampede, but it was quiet where Mason touched me, hands sliding along the sides of my torso, up my neck, settling on my cheeks. He held me softly, like he was cupping water in his palms. It was a jarring contrast from the roughness of his mouth on mine.
I kissed back just as mean. It was a fight after all.
Mason’s hands finally caught up, flying down to grip my waist, then shoving under my shirt to grasp bare skin.
It was strange to me, the way he always sought out skin-on-skin despite mine being perpetually cold.
I couldn’t wrap my head around his wanting to touch me even though I felt like a corpse.
The thought made me falter, and Mason claimed victory with his tongue, finding his trophy behind my teeth. He covered my neck in sharp kisses. I stretched against the wall to give him room.
“Miss me?” I taunted. He answered by sucking beneath my jaw. I scolded him, “Needy.”
“Can you really say that right now?”
Even as he scoffed, I was pushing his head back toward my neck.
I grabbed Mason’s hands as they snuck toward my ass and flipped us around. His eyes flew open as his back hit the door, hands pinned above his head. He started to protest, and I stole it right out of his mouth, turned it into a sweet sigh and stole that too.
“I missed you, too,” I confessed, quiet enough to get lost between kisses.
Mason heard it anyway; I could tell when his hands went slack beneath mine.
For someone so prideful, he gave himself over easily.
“But not enough to get hot and heavy in a room that smells like onions and piss. Go to class. You’re bad enough at algebra as it is. ”
Mason’s eyes opened slowly this time, reluctant. “How do you know I suck algebra?” he asked.
“You do your homework in art. Cella’s always helping you with polynomials.”
“And here I thought you were tuning out my existence that whole time.” He sounded exceedingly smug.
“I tried to. You’re loud.”
Mason grinned. “You were listening. You like me. You have a crush on me.”
I ignored him. “I’ll come over after school.”
“And we can make out more?”
“We can go over the quadratic formula.”
Mason sighed.
“I have practice. Come after that.”
I frowned. He’d be back at six at the earliest. This time of year, the sun would already be setting. And after the sun set, Cedric could move around as he pleased. The possibility of being found out by him, however unlikely, raised bumps down my arms.
“I can’t tonight,” I said, thinking. Mason practiced every day except game day. I knew this like I knew about his math homework, because Mason was right, I couldn’t ignore him if I tried. “Let’s just do it Friday.”
Mason whined into my neck.
“You’ll survive, you big baby.”
He nipped at the curve of my jaw. “Call me ‘baby’ again, and I’ll forgive you.”
“That is super not what I just did.”
“It’s what I heard.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Then tell me what flower you were drawing earlier, during the shape lesson.”
“It’s called lupine. Why?”
“Just testing my theory that you can make anything sound hot.” He nodded gravely. “It’s proven.”
“I’m going now,” I said, because I still felt helpless against Mason’s barefaced attention. “Friday at three. I expect a pencil, notes, and a calculator—scientific or better.”
“Yes, sir,” Mason said by my ear, biting the lobe. He was insatiable, and I was not going to survive him.
“You’re blocking the door,” I said.
“Should we leave minutes apart like they do in movies?” asked Mason, wiggling his brow. “Like a real grown-up love affair?”
We probably should. This part, the sneaking around—I was starting to understand why people kept putting it in those movies. I felt tingly all over.
“Do you want to leave first?” I said. He definitely needed to be in his class more than I did. But Mason shook his head, cheeky smile going sheepish.
“I’m gonna, uh—finish cooling down.”
I almost told him to forget class. I almost told him to sit his dopey-eyed self on the ground, right over the otter painted on the middle of the floor.
He probably wouldn’t even question it; he’d just sit, and I’d climb all over him.
I hurriedly reached past him for the doorknob, startled by the force of my desire.
Mason scooted aside but stopped me when I had the door, looping his arm around me.
“Wait,” he said. “ ‘Lupine’ like lupus? Like wolf in Latin?”
“I don’t know where the name comes from,” I lied. As I shouldered through the door, I heard behind me,
“Oh, you so have a crush on me.”
I so did. I floated down the halls. I stared off into the distance.
When my dad came home from work and found me standing in the kitchen, shirtless after a shower and squinting at the wall, he rubbed my back and said, I’m always here if you need to talk.
It was the exact tone he had used when I was thirteen and showing him my so-called emo playlist. I told him, Thank you, I’ll let you know, because that was simpler than explaining that I was not having a crisis but studying the tape measure glued to the wall, trying to determine someone’s precise height by memory so I could compare it to my most recent mark at six one and a half.
I wanted to know how Mason and I looked standing next to each other.
It seemed like the kind of thing a person ought to know.
I was debating between centimeters when I got a text from him, a voice message this time. I was up the stairs in record time, digging through a flowerpot on my desk for my earbuds, afraid someone would be listening at my door. Having a crush makes you feel naked.
I sat at the window and listened.
“Check this out. I’m teaching Godzilla English. Godzilla, say, ‘hello.’ ”
I winced when a grouchy mehhh came through my headphones, way too loud like Mason had held his phone right up to the lamb’s mouth.
Next, he commanded the lamb to say, “What’s good?” and “Yummy” and “The fuck?!” Godzilla let out an identical bleat each time. The recording ended after Mason had the lamb wish me a good evening (Baahhh).
I curled up in my window nook with my hand over my mouth and listened to the message again. The background was noisy with distant bleating and shuffling. I imagined Mason standing in the pasture, surrounded by fluff. I texted him,
Show me.
6:42 p.m.
The picture he sent in response was terrible.
Mason looked down into the camera, his head taking up the bottom half of the frame.
He must have been crouching, because the top half of the photo showed the underside of a sheep’s chin as it chewed on Mason’s hair.
Mason was crinkling his face, looking annoyed.
I gazed at it for so long, it was a while before I noticed a second voice message.
“I looked your flower up. It’s pretty. I don’t know why, but the colors surprised me.
I was right about the name, though. Lupine, or wolflike, because people thought they were depleting the soil, kind of like wolves devouring sheep.
But guess what, they’re actually nitrogen fixers.
Which, okay, I don’t know what that means, but I remember learning about it in bio, and I’m pretty sure it means good things for soil.
Those poor flowers were so misunderstood. The injustice of it all! ”
I was still listening when another came in.
“Now you’ve got me thinking about that sculpture, La Lupa.
The She-Wolf. Do you know the myth? It’s like a bedtime story for us.
Romulus and Remus were abandoned on the bank of the Tiber by their uncle, who saw them as a threat to his rule.
The She-Wolf found them, and she sheltered and nursed them, and they went on to found the city of Rome.
Or Romulus did—Remus was dead, classic Roman fratricide—but that’s not the point.
The point is, I’ve always hated that she doesn’t have a history.
The story makes it seem like her life began when she heard two babies crying in the woods.
“And then she just—vanishes. The boys get adopted by some shepherd, and if she’s mentioned again, it’s because some asshole classicist thinks the boys got their warrior spirit from suckling a wolf, like they absorbed her beastliness through her breast milk or something.
Like her only purpose was to set up someone else for greatness.
No one looks at it from the other end. Somehow, no one has any questions about how essentially human she had to be to see two immobile lumps of meat beside a river and decide to bare her stomach instead of her teeth.
She let those babies grab her with their human hands and put their mouths on her, and all we have to say about her is that the boys she gave life to built a city and killed each other.
Who cares? Everyone in classical mythology was building cities and killing each other.
I want to know if she was by the river because she was thirsty.
I want to know why she was lactating when she found them—did she have pups of her own?
Were they dead, and if so, how, and was she grieving?
When she heard babies crying, did she run to them hoping they were her own?
Is it dumb to take a myth so seriously? Sorry, I’m tired. Coach made us do duck walks.”
The bleating persisted in the background the entire time. Smiling beneath my hand, I responded,
I think everyone else is dumb for overlooking her
6:47 p.m.
I also think you should explain duck walks to me, in detail, since I’m unfamiliar. It’ll help if you list all activated muscle groups and also describe what you were wearing
6:48 p.m.
The next message from Mason caught the tail end of his laugh, directly into my ear, heavy with sleep even though it wasn’t even seven. I wondered if he’d been counting the sheep.
“This isn’t going to be the wet dream material you’re looking for . . .”
He was definitely sending audio notes because of what I’d said about his voice. He was just awful that way.