Three
Back in the hall, Odette and Poppy huddle outside the door. They waited, of course. I answer their questioning looks with a shake of my head and follow the tide into first period on wobbly legs. I pack up the past ten minutes and lock them tightly into a box. I can pull out and analyze the contents later, but now is not that moment.
You did not just have your heart pulled apart (again) in a lab that smelled like ham sandwiches and cleaning supplies. You are not an emotionally crippled cyborg cosplaying as a human. You will pull it together and tackle one problem at a time.
AP English.
AP English with Josh.
I wouldn’t say English and I have a tense relationship. I’m literate, and capable of stringing any number of sentences together. I can read articles and textbooks all day every day, but fiction and I have a shaky truce. I just don’t get stories.
Is that a cyborg thing to say? I can’t help it, it’s true.
I watch Hallmark movies with Momma and Blue, but I’ll never understand, for example, the woman who gives up the career and life she’s spent decades building just to become a gingerbread artisan.
I mean, that sounds like an amazing career! I love gingerbread! I would love to walk around in a cloud of allspice and desire, dizzy from the attentions of the handsome volunteer firefighter from next door.
For maybe a weekend.
Then I would go back to my actual day job of being a biomedical engineer, just like I’ve always planned, and nostalgically think of that firefighter around Christmastime when I bite into some perfectly spiced cookies. It isn’t something you give up your life for.
God, maybe Josh is right—I don’t have a romantic bone in my body.
I pause in the doorway, regretting my ancestors’ decision to settle in this painfully small town so I have no escape from him all day. All year.
In the classes we’ve shared, Josh always preferred to sit in the second row, closest to the exit. I, on the other hand, am a solid front-row girl. My neurodivergent tendencies make sitting any ol’ where not really an option. I have to be right at the front, practically straddling the teacher’s lap, so their voice and materials are the only things that can catch my hyperfixation. I’d usually take the seat in front of him, so he could languidly slip my hair through his fingers and draw soft hearts on my neck with the pads of his fingers. I would sigh and shift with every touch—each micromovement a performance just for him.
Today, I almost trip over him on legs that are operating purely on muscle memory.
How’s this for a performance?
I glance down, frozen in place, a possum that has reached its limit for the day. He clears his throat, eyes not meeting mine, and shifts under the desperate spotlight of my attention.
Making an executive decision, I bolt down the first aisle, power walking past him like I’m in my meemaw’s fitness group. I blindly march to the back. To the darkest corner, where Josh couldn’t see me even if he wanted to. (Spoiler: I am almost certain he doesn’t want to.) I slide into a seat so far from the board I start to question my eyeglass prescription. Poppy and Odette close in on me as I white-knuckle the desk in front of me.
“Really, Marlowe?” Poppy asks. “The back row? Is any boy truly worth this?”
“You’re both free to sit wherever you want.”
Odette sighs, deflating into the seat next to me. “None of us are good enough at this subject to be sitting back this far.”
Poppy fidgets with her book bag, front-row to her core, indecision written in the movement of her hands. Ms. Chris closes the door to the hallway, and the murmurs slide into silence. The decision made for her, Poppy slides into the desk in front of me.
“Good morning, my lovely new seniors!” Ms. Chris beams at us, like some beautiful, eclectic aunt who only shows up on holidays, with handmade presents and a mason jar full of martinis in her purse. She’s draped in a fringed caftan, wearing earrings that I’m certain the art teacher sells out of the trunk of her car, and has laugh lines that spread like cracked glass across a face that knows what it’s like to be delighted. Delighted with her life, with her job, and somehow even with us.
“I know you’ve all heard this is going to be your favorite class this year,” she says, pausing dramatically. “I want you to know all the rumors are true.”
Odette snorts, but I relax a little under her warmth. Like clay that finds itself next to an unexpected heat source.
“You’re all on your victory lap this year.” She weaves between the desks, dropping packets in front of each student. “You’re looking at colleges, you’re focusing on the subjects you think you’re going to be pursuing when you graduate. You’re worried about that upcoming football game.” She moves past Josh and lays a deep brown hand on his shoulder. “But I want you to know that the skills you take from this class will help you in several ways after graduation. We’ll learn to dissect many important works of literature.”
Poppy slumps lower in her chair as Ms. Chris makes her way to the back row. She gives us a little smile as if to say I see you, and am pleased to have you, my little wallflowers.
“I’ll grade you on all the usual—reading logs, unit tests and quizzes, your final exam—and also… the unusual.” She spins around, a secret on her lips.
I rip into the packet, dreading the surprise. After the actual nausea that came with having to ingest Tess of the d’Urbervilles for the summer reading, I trust nothing.
“We’re going to work on a group project that will span the entire semester.”
I barely manage to hold in my groan, but other members of the class do not have the same reservations.
The clear negativity doesn’t even dim her smile. She slips up on the edge of her desk, legs dangling. “You’ll find our list of important works of literature on the back page of the syllabus. You’ll be working in groups of two, and you’ll select one of those works together to complete a project that is twenty-five percent of your grade.”
Odette’s hand shoots in the air, but she doesn’t wait to be acknowledged. “Can we pick our own partners?”
My stomach twists a little. The problem with being part of a triangle is that sometimes one of the angles is left out. I know they both love me, but I’m also aware enough that the past two years have, if anything, helped move us solidly into isosceles-triangle territory. They have grown solidly more similar, and I’m just up there wavering at the top on my own.
“Not a chance, Ms. Norman. I’ll be making my own random selections,” Ms. Chris says, smiling.
Poppy sneezes four times in a row, shuddering.
“This is why I hate English,” Odette mutters.
Ms. Chris looks out at us. “Oh, I know, you poor things. Working with people you wouldn’t expect to? How on earth would that translate to real life?”
She pulls out a roster, and I remind myself that it truly couldn’t get any worse. “You’ll be responsible for writing a paper together.” She adjusts her bedazzled glasses. “The criteria are listed in your syllabus, but you’ll be analyzing the major themes and devices of one of these works. You’ll also be responsible for a presentation to share with the class.”
Cue the moans again.
“Y’all are so dramatic,” she says, rolling her eyes. Her expression reminds me of my father trying to force cough syrup down my throat as a kid. I know it’s gross, but trust me, you’ll thank me later. “The paper will include the analytical techniques we’ll be learning in this class, but the presentation can be as creative as you want it to be. You want to teach us the assembly dances that they may have done in Pride and Prejudice? I’m here for it! You want to flex those makeup-artist skills and become Frankenstein’s monster? Let’s go! You want to build a diorama of TheHouse on Mango Street? Well, I can’t wait to see what you come up with!”
My thoughts are tumbling over one another, and I’m scribbling every word into the margins. The paper, I could handle. I could carefully lean over the words with a scalpel and slice out the plot, characters, themes, and literary motifs until nothing’s left but my dull, organized little boxes. But any kind of spectacle is going to have to be up to a hopefully creative partner.
“Our groups will start formally meeting in class over the next few days, but feel free to check in with each other before that. We’re not going to have any repeats, so if another group has already picked the book you want—well, that’s just too bad.”
She rambles off names and pairings, which display a complete disregard for personality and friend groups. Odette is paired with Tiffany, as in, Josh’s-number-one-fan Tiffany. Poppy is grouped with a guy I know very little about, aside from the fact that he wears cowboy boots that cheerfully clack down the hallway.
“Marlowe Meadows—” She pauses to check her list. “—and Josh Stallings.”
Whispers spread like wildfire, and my face is so hot I expect my clothes to start smoking.
“Dumbasses,” Odette seethes.
Josh turns back to look at me, no sense of the same amusement on his face.
Ms. Chris crosses her arms. “I assume someone is going to let me in on the joke?”
Tiffany leans forward from her place of honor at the desk next to his. “Well, that might be a little awkward for Josh here,” she says in a stage whisper I could hear from three counties over.
Yes, poor Josh. Josh who hasn’t had to deal with any awkwardness. He was inconvenienced with one brief conversation in a chemistry lab and got to walk away without a care in the world.
And yet, a part of me wonders if this is my opportunity to show him he was wrong.
Ms. Chris looks back at me, and I hope she (I hope all of them) can see more determination than devastation on my face.
“I can switch,” Tiffany offers. “I’ll be Josh’s partner, and Marlowe can work with her little friend.”
My little friend, Odette, glares at Tiffany’s perky ponytail with a vengeance that is palpable. As if we haven’t all been in the same school system for a lifetime. She knows Odette’s name, just like she knows she isn’t fooling anybody.
Josh clears his throat, not turning to include me in any of this. But he’s also not objecting. “It might be better for everyone.” His voice is apologetic, as if he’s so terribly sorry for this mess that he has no idea how he got involved in.
Ms. Chris is not impressed. “Tiffany, this is not an opportunity to try to keep your world as tiny as possible.” She sighs. “I don’t think—”
“I’ll switch.”
Twenty heads swivel to the other corner of the back row.
There, in unrelieved black, absorbing all the light and attention in the room, is Ashton Hayes.
He transferred here our junior year from someplace out west where people didn’t believe in pastels or saying hello when they passed you in the street. He’s held strong to those principles since his arrival, and most of his clothes have weird straps or spikes that I don’t understand the functional necessity of.
When he first showed up, I remember Josh walking over to introduce himself. He’s on almost every social committee and has been in student government since they let us start voting on popularity contests dressed up as offices. “Welcome to River Haven High,” he’d said, with a blinding smile and a hand thrust out for a shake. Ash had looked him over, taking every ounce of his measure, and promptly walked away.
“Sometimes trash just takes itself out,” Josh had said later as I kissed the frown off his lips, his biceps stiff under my hands.
Ash had fallen in with some other kids who also wore a little too much black, and I heard something about a band at one point, but he’d faded into the background of my attention.
Until now.
Now he’s staring at Ms. Chris, as if they were casually discussing the ownership of some wayward item nobody wanted to claim.
“You’ll switch with Josh?” she asks, looking for the catch. The part of the deal where this was the worse arrangement.
“What’s going on?” Odette hisses.
I have no answer, and Ash still isn’t looking at me, but he nods once in Ms. Chris’s direction. His ink-black hair is pushed back, the long ends curling over one ear like a question mark. Several small gold hoops in varying degrees of spikiness cascade up his ear, matching the thin gold circle interrupting the middle of his bottom lip.
“Marlowe,” Poppy whispers, turning back to me. “Why’s Josh staring at you?”
I look up, torn between two ridiculous outcomes. Josh is looking at me, as if affronted that there’s something about me that’s surprised him.
“Well, Marlowe, is that all right?” Ms. Chris puts me on the spot, and I use every remaining brain cell to keep myself in my seat. I want to say No, let me work with Josh. Let me show him that there’s still so much left between us. That he just needs to hear me out. To give me a chance.
I say none of that, though, because I can’t always read a room, but this is clear. He doesn’t want to hear that from me. He doesn’t want any more declarations from me today.
“The switch sounds fine,” I say, my voice surprisingly level. Am I sure? Not about anything. Do I think it’s a better solution than trying to pretend to be normal under Josh’s knowing gaze, or letting the class witness the flaming dumpster fire of my relationship in a public forum? Absolutely.
“Well, that’s settled. Ashton and Marlowe, and Josh and Beth,” she says, nodding at a supremely unbothered softball player who shrugs as if she couldn’t care less.
Tiffany puffs up in irritation, and I try to breathe without looking like I’ve forgotten basic brain-stem reflexes.
“All right, maybe now we can finally get to some English,” Ms. Chris says, walking to the board. “Everyone open your books to page eighty-one.”
I put my brain on autopilot, dutifully writing out notes, looking up when it feels appropriate, and smiling when Ms. Chris says something that I can tell she thinks is a joke. On the surface, I’m sure it all looks business-as-usual, but inside I’m one big crime board, full of red threads and unknown motives. Why did Ash step in? Is this some sort of attack on Josh? Did he not understand they were talking about me?
I close my notebook with the bell, the dolphins offering sympathetic looks, and struggle to follow the last few threads.
I know my reputation in this school. You win a few math medals and have questionable social skills, and people assume school is your life. That you’d be happy to do the majority of the work because you have nothing better to do. Well, not this time.
I grab my bag and march over to Ash’s desk with my head held high. He’s scribbling the last of his notes in elegant cursive when I clear my throat. He tilts his face up, almost resigned.
“I’m not doing this project alone.”
A single eyebrow bisected by a shaved line creeps up his forehead.
I put my hands on my hips. Nope, too aggressive. I pull them across my chest, before finally dropping them and trying to hold eye contact.
“I know it might seem like I would do something like that,” I start again. “But English is not my strongest subject, and… I’m not going to do it all.” He doesn’t move. “So, you can just forget that now.”
He stands up, and he’s taller than I remember. Josh didn’t love it when I wore heels, because it would make us the same height, but I feel my neck craning up, up, up, as Ash stares at a spot over my head.
“Are we… clear?” I ask, despite desperately needing some clarification myself.
He gives me one last look, worrying the ring in his lip with his teeth, before stepping around me and marching out the door.
I look from his desk to the doorway, trying to calculate what just happened.
“Now, this is interesting,” Poppy says, grinning as wide as the cats on her skirt.