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I hurried to unlock the window and lifted it. He helped open it from the other side.
I stuck my head out. “What are you doing up here?” I whispered. “How did you get up here?”
“I’m glad to see you, too.” He grinned at me, his blue eyes lighting up. “I brought you something.”
“It couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
He passed me something soft. I took it from him. He sat on the flat part of the roof while I unraveled it. It was the dark t-shirt with foreign writing on it I had borrowed to wear the day I went swimming.
“I thought you wanted it,” he said.
I smiled, touched that he risked breaking his neck to bring it to me. “I didn’t win the races. Any of them,” I said.
“Consider it a consolation prize. As many times as I won, you’ll be sitting next to me in every class all the way through med school.”
I held a couple of fingers to my lips to help suppress my giggling. “Until I beat you at another race.”
“That’s not gonna happen, peanut.”
The shirt smelled clean. I smoothed my palm over the foreign lettering. “What’s this shirt say, anyway?”
“It says girls are stupid. Throw rocks at them.”
I reached out to punch at what I thought was his arm but he dodged a little and I hit his chest.
“Hey,” he said, feigning being hurt when I only barely brushed his chest. “I’m sitting out on a roof, you know.”
The house creaked and we both froze. I held my breath, listening. When nothing else happened, I looked at him. His eyes focus on my face.
“I’ll go,” he whispered. “I just wanted to say hi. I hadn’t seen you all day.”
“Where were you?”
“I had training.”
“Jujitsu?”
His smile was gentle on his face, a contrast to the harshness of his masculine jawline. “Yeah. Jujitsu.”
The way he answered me, it felt like it wasn’t the whole truth. “All day long?”
“I’m tired,” he said. “You should get some sleep. We’ve got registration tomorrow.”
It was late and I didn’t want to press him. I bit back my questions. Who was I to privy into his life when I just met him? “I guess I’ll see you then.”
He nodded and then moved away from the window. He crawled on his hands and feet to the edge. He swung his legs down first and held the roof with his hands. He dropped down out of my view. With my heart in my throat and holding my breath, I waited by the window until I spotted him dashing across the front lawn and out into the street.
Nathan the ninja.
DR. GREEN
I dreamed of my old school with people I didn’t know who had turned into zombies. They chased me. The doors were locked. I was trapped.
The phone woke me that morning. I had forgotten to put it back into the attic. I was in bed with it, and it had slipped to between my stomach and the sheets. I felt it vibrating and it tickled me out of sleep. In my dream, it was a zombie biting.
Silas: “I’m sorry if I made you mad.”
It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.
Sang: “I’m not mad.”
Now that I had slept, what I felt before with him seemed stupid. It was wrong of me to get angry with him when from what I remembered of the conversation, he was trying to be nice.
Sang: “Forgive me for being a meanie?”
Silas: “You’re not mean, Sang.”
I smiled, my heart flutter and flipped around in my chest.
Sang: “You’re too nice to me.”
Silas: “Ditto.”
I took my time in the bathroom later. I showered, shaved my body, dried off, used a blow dryer on my hair and dug out a barrette to pull back locks of hair from my eyes without using the clip. It was Gabriel’s suggestion. I wasn’t sure why there was such an emphasis on what to wear. It was just registration.
I put on my blue skirt and modest white blouse, and my sandals. I had a notebook and a pencil with me, Kota’s list was tucked into the notebook along with the paper that I had filled out for registration. We were supposed to bring it to be approved and entered into a computer.
There was a tall mirror hanging on the inside of my bedroom closet. I checked myself out in my reflection. Dirty blond hair. Green eyes. Light skin. Decent clothes. Average across the board.
Marie opened my bedroom door, letting it swing until the knob hit the wall. “Hey,” she said. “Let’s go.” She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with sneakers. She had heavy makeup on her face, her eyes looked darker with the eyeliner around it. She picked up makeup leftovers from her friends at her old school. She only wore it on rare occasions to save what she could. “You look like you’re new to school,” she said.
“I am new.”
“Yeah, but you look it. And that notebook makes you look like a nerd.”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to say something about what I thought of her makeup. Sometime in the past few years we had grown distant. We saw each other. We worked alongside each other. We had argued a lot, too. Mostly our arguments focused on who would do which chores. Eventually it became a general need to simply exist without getting involved in what the other one was doing. The feeling around her was that of what I imagined a co-worker would feel. Friendly sometimes but we were just as happy not talking to each other. Why hadn’t we bonded like I read of other siblings doing in books? It struck me as odd but I could only guess we were simply different from each other. Something happened between us. I couldn’t explain and we were now so far apart from each other it felt impossible to become what I imagined real sisters were like.
“Get going,” she said and she walked out to rush down the stairs.
My dad was waiting for us out in the car. I rarely saw my father unless there was a school event or on Sundays. Any other day he worked and made it in time for dinner and I usually skipped dinner. He was tall, lanky and most of the time he was cheery around the family. He had curly dark hair, high cheek bones. When he was around my mother, his posture sagged more and he looked tired.
“Hurry up,” he called to us. He waved his big hand at us. “You’re going to end up in all the leftover classes.”
Marie got in the front passenger side of the small, five-year-old sedan. I climbed into the back. I locked my seat belt in even if my dad and sister didn’t. We rode in silence in the car.
The lot at the school was already full. I wasn’t sure we would find a parking space but there were people pulling into part of the lawn. My dad found a spot near the back.
“Remember where we’re parked,” he said. “If we have to split up, just come back here.”
I fell behind them as we headed toward the side door of the school. It looked about the same size as my old school. Gabriel had been right about it being ugly. The building was two stories, brown, drab, no windows except for a handful along the second floor. The grounds were flat, with only a handful of trees along the border of the grounds. Square hedges grew along the outside walls between sets of doors. The hedges looked like they needed to be watered three months ago. There was a football practice area off to the left, a baseball diamond and some tennis courts beyond it. Each were well worn with holes in the mesh guards and the benches looked warped. Beyond that I could see the trailers Kota had talked about. The number amazed me. I counted at least thirty and they extended out from the school. I wondered how anyone managed to get from one of those trailers to classes inside on time.
“I don’t want a class in a trailer,” Marie said. For the moment, I agreed with her on that point.
The entryway was crowded. The off-white tiles inside the doors were cracked and uneven. Students coming and going made it difficult to navigate and many of them stopped to talk to each other without concern of who they might be blocking. Most of the parents looked tired and were leaning up against the walls and out of the way.
It took five minutes just to get through the side door. I scanned the
crowd for one of the guys. I wondered if they expected me to come in through another door.
From what Kota described of how dangerous the school was, I tried to make myself small and uninteresting. None of the other students seemed particularly interested in us. Most were concerned with either getting in line or finding old school friends to talk to. I couldn’t imagine a fight breaking out when so many teachers and parents were standing right there.
Once we were in the main hallway, the crowd thinned out a little. There were tables lined up near a large glass window that overlooked the center, open aired courtyard. There was one large staircase in the middle of the hallway with parents sitting on the first few steps. Further down the hall there was a line of vending machines and along the opposite wall was a trophy case. I didn’t see any classrooms.
“We’ll have to split up,” my dad said. “The tables are divided by grade level.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “There’s my table. You go with Marie.”
“He can go with you,” she said. Her eyes were on a group of girls crowding around her grade table.
“Fill out your form and come back,” Dad said to me. “I’ll have to approve and sign it.”
I nodded to him. The line to my table was long. I moved to the end of it to wait my turn. I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around.
“Hey!” Luke called into my opposite ear, scaring me.
