7
T his is kind of a weird question,” MC said to Gabby around a mouthful of chicken salad, “but do you ever talk to Nora Pike?”
“Not really.” Gabby poked her fork around a complex bean dish she’d tossed in a mixing bowl. They were sitting at the kitchen island. “I mean, we acknowledge each other if we’re taking out the trash at the same time. But other than that, you know how she is.”
“I thought maybe she’d softened up over the years.”
“If she has, she hasn’t bothered to let us know. Why do you ask?”
“I saw her today. At the library.”
“Did you guys reminisce?”
“No. She barely spoke to me.”
Gabby smiled. “She’s probably still into you.”
“Into me?” MC’s heart started hammering in her chest.
“Come on, we all saw how she looked at you in those Explorations meetings.”
MC wasn’t sure what Gabby was talking about. Any eye contact with Nora had usually involved glaring of some sort. “Somehow I missed that.”
Gabby seemed shocked. “Clearly you were the only person on the planet who could get her to participate in a group activity.”
“She said Ms. Kim forced her to be there.”
“How could Ms. Kim possibly do that?” Gabby was practically wiggling in her seat. “Do you like her or something?”
“What? No—”
“To be fair, you haven’t hung out with her in nearly a decade.”
“I think she’s dating Jen Turner.”
“Are you serious?” Gabby laughed. “Okay, this is perfect. Jen Turner is notoriously single, so it’s not an official relationship.”
“How do you know she’s notoriously single?”
“She’s the gym teacher at the high school—total player.”
MC was surprised.
“More importantly,” Gabby said, “this is confirmation that Nora’s gay.”
“I thought you already knew that.”
“I suspected it. But you know how teens can be. Flickers of romantic potential from every gender, no matter where you end up settling in.” MC wiped her face with a napkin to hide her expression. It was Gabby’s air of romantic potential that’d caused MC so much distress over those years.
It’d started when they were juniors, going out in the woods behind the deli to smoke weed on Fridays while the sun went down. MC didn’t smoke, but Joe had been getting into it, and MC had felt obligated to hang around in case he freaked out.
The group consisted of a dozen kids, including Gabby.
They huddled around in a clearing lined with initial-scarred trees, passing blunts and forties, Gabby sometimes talking to Joe about whatever they’d botched in chem lab that day.
By early winter, she was still showing up without a jacket, and on a particularly cold night, she announced, “I’m going to turn into Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining , fuck! ”
People laughed at her impression of his frozen face. But her teeth were chattering.
“Wanna take a turn with this?” MC said, shrugging off her parka.
“But then you’ll turn into Jack Nicholson!” Gabby snorted with laughter. “Wow, your coat is massive.”
MC blushed. She’d been struggling to figure out how to dress the way she wanted to look, without looking like someone she wasn’t ready for people to see.
“I love that it’s massive,” Gabby added soberly. “Very into the massiveness.” She paused. “Here, we can each take an arm.”
She pulled the right shoulder of MC’s parka down a little farther, then slipped it off and pressed the side of her body tight to MC’s, jamming her arm in the free sleeve. MC internally combusted.
But instead of choking up on conversation, as she tended to do when she was with a girl she liked, she was able to come back down to earth.
It was Gabby’s gift, keeping things calm and light, while also somehow giving off an intense warmheartedness.
They’d talked about classes and their parents.
TV and stupid things that’d happened that year.
MC had started drinking from one of the forties, relaxing even more once she realized everyone had become engrossed in their own private chats.
And at some point, Gabby was asking her who she was interested in. Like, interested in.
MC took a swig of Olde English. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the dark, maybe it was the way Gabby kept pressing a little harder against her side, but she said, “I think I’d feel too nervous to date.”
“What? Why?”
There was no way to be clever, MC told herself later, when you were wasted and horny. “I guess I’ve been starting to wonder if I might be into more than just... guys?”
Gabby’s eyes widened. Then she threw her head back and cackled. “Oh my god,” she said. “Finally. Something cool is happening here.” She schooled her face into seriousness. “Who do you have your eye on? I’ve always wanted to be a wing woman.”
“Definitely not drunk enough to discuss that.”
Gabby snuggled closer and tapped the forty in MC’s lap. “Better get to work, then.”
MC had replayed the memory in her mind a thousand times over the rest of that year.
She’d embellished, expanded, and, fine, pornographized it until she felt like her whole body was melting whenever Gabby was in the same room with her.
Then Gabby had joined Explorations the next fall.
MC had believed her destiny was on the horizon, at long last, after so long waiting in the wings.
She would tell Gabby the truth. The full truth. And then...
And then Conrad said Harvard was for assholes and moved back home.
“Well,” she said to Gabby, in the kitchen of the house she’d grown up in, the house that was now her brother’s and his wife’s, “whoever Nora’s into, I don’t think it’s me.”
Gabby wore a conspiratorial smile as MC changed the subject.
Twenty minutes later, MC headed out on her bike again, trying to clear her mind before she reached the high school.
Unfortunately, unlike yesterday, when the building had been empty and therefore approachable, the place was now crawling with kids.
Freshmen in giant backpacks. Sophomores talking loudly as the buses lined up in the traffic circle.
Braces, bad makeup—the details were different, but the spirit was the same.
A mass desperation out of which their troubled society continued to reproduce itself.
MC smoothed her hair and walked into the front entrance, signing in with the security guard and trying to ignore the brief stares coming from gaggles of upperclassmen, who had a sunken common area to themselves near the first hall of lockers past the main office.
MC remembered eating lunch—often a candy bar and a Gatorade—in that common area, Joe making fun of the kids in Gardening Club, who wore giant straw hats while tending cinderblock beds in the courtyard just beyond the big windows.
Ms. Kim had told her that Explorations would be meeting in their old space, a classroom stuffed with media equipment near the English Department office.
MC headed straight for it, ducking her head to avoid being recognized by teachers, custodians, and any of the other dozen staff members she’d been buddies with in the old days.
She had always gotten free snacks on the lunch line in the cafeteria, permission for Joe to park his chortling old VW in an empty staff spot senior year, and first dibs on renting laptops from the computer lab.
But she didn’t want to engage with that old self. Her sense of Nora’s portrayal of her in Girl Next Door had started to make her wonder if she’d been depressingly basic in high school, and still was. After all, she hadn’t even managed to end up a novelist.
Just a fake one.
“There you are!” said Ms. Kim. She was standing at the door to the English Department with Mr. Pryor, who’d been MC’s teacher junior year.
“Welcome back,” he said in his smooth baritone. He wore a bow tie and a crisp white shirt. “I think you’ll have a nice little group for the meeting this afternoon.”
“Great,” MC said. Her mouth was chalky. She hadn’t prepared for this. Why hadn’t she prepared for this? “How’ve you been, Mr. Pryor?”
“Splendid, splendid. I hear you’re finishing a novel.”
“I guess I am.”
“She’s always been so modest,” said Ms. Kim. “Come on, MC, let’s get you situated.”
They went over to the classroom together, and that was when it all became real: the posters of Toni Morrison and Shakespeare on the walls, the low shelves stuffed with beat-up textbooks, the rows of desks with their chairs fused on by metal rods over which Joe had often draped himself in petulant melancholy, him and MC opting for the farthest seats from the chalkboard.
Except now there was no chalk. The boards were white.
And MC wasn’t a teenager who could slink off to the back in her big cargo pants and hoodie.
“I have a meeting with Athletics,” Ms. Kim said. MC was reminded, not pleasantly, of Jen Turner. “But I’m going to come back to catch the end of this.” She flashed two thumbs up. “Have fun!”
As she rushed out, heels clicking, a few kids started filing in, staring at MC in open contempt followed by immediate dismissal.
MC busied herself with arranging the desks in a circle, like in the old days.
The metal legs squeaked and groaned over the linoleum.
But the physical task was steadying. Something to pour her nervous energy into.
It also gave her an excuse not to acknowledge the students that were growing in number around her.
“Hey,” said a gangly boy with tight brown curls. “Want a hand?”
She was so grateful she could’ve cried, but she tried to sound casual.
“Sure.” She’d forgotten that there were nice kids out there, who only put on the thinnest front of being cliquey as a gesture of acquiescence to the larger social structure.
“I’m making a circle of however many desks we think we’ll need. ”
“I’m Ben,” he said.
“MC. Just filling in for today. I used to be a student here.”
They worked for a few more minutes as people started to settle in. MC felt a burst of confidence, or maybe resignation to her task, which was now unavoidable. But as she was making her way to a seat at the top of the circle, she saw three kids talking over a book.
“You do realize it’s a rom-com about a literary magazine.”
“Obviously, that’s why I’m reading it.”
“I heard it’s overrated.”
“I heard it’s fucking hot.”
“Okay,” MC blurted, just as the teen reader of the Financial Times walked in and took a desk. “Let’s get started!”