The high school was about a mile away from my house, and I was used to the trip by now, standing up on my pedals and pumping my calves to make it up the hill on the way to school, and coasting all the way home at the end of the day (Feel free to read a fucking metaphor into that if you want). And as I started out that morning, underneath a clear blue sky on a day that stillfelt like summer, I was at least a little bit glad that I only had a hundred and eighty more days, a hundred and eighty days until I could get the fuck out of here. And I was pretty sure that senior year was just going to be one more pile of the same old shit, tally marks on the wall of my cell, day in and day out.
Boy, was I fucking wrong.
I got my first indication of justhowwrong in my first period calculus class, where a small group of girls I had known since kindergarten were comparing notes in giggly whispers.
“Did youseehim?” Courtney, who started a rumor in seventh grade that I still believed in Santa Claus, leaned in conspiratorially. “He’ssohot.”
“He looks like Jackson Rathbone. You know, fromTwilight?” added Melissa. When she had her birthday at a laser tag place when we were ten, she invited everybody in the class except me.
“He doesnot.” Hannah rolled her eyes, crossing her arms across her chest. I never really had a problem with her. She liked to write goth poetry and she never made me feel like I was a waste of space like so many of the other kids did. For a while I thought maybe I had a thing for her, but how do you really know? “He actually smiles occasionally, for one thing. And he doesn’t have a Southern accent only when it’s important for the narrative.”
“You know I think he lives with his grandmother?”Melissa mused. “She’s lived across the street from me my whole life, and I saw his parents dropping him off last week. It’ssoweird.”
Courtney’s eyes danced. “Should I ask him why he moved here? Maybe we could make him sit with us at lunch —”
The three girls’ voices dropped to whispers, and I turned my attention back to the course syllabus. We hadn’t had a new kid in our class since Peter Jordan in the tenth grade — and his family only stayed for a year before they moved on. But I figured it wouldn’t affect me at all, since nobody ever talked to me anyway.
I had my chance to see the new guy for the first time in my third-period history class. I had chosen my preferred seat, tucked away along the wall where I could be out of the way, and I had my face buried in my copy ofThe KIller Angels, so I wasn’t watching the door. But when I sensed the frisson of excited energy from my fellow classmates, I lifted my head to see what had caught their eye.
And when I did, my stomach dropped out of my chest cavity and made itself a new home somewhere in the vicinity of my knees.
The new guy was tall and lean, certainly taller than I was, and he was wearing a pair of skinny jeans with holes in the knees and a short-sleeved blue button-down that hugged his narrow chest. I guessed I could see what the girls meant about the sparkly vampires,what with the new guy’s wavy blond hair, cut just above his collar, and his high cheekbones. Butthisguy was clearly full of life, radiating an energy that I would never be able to match, with smiles for everyone in the room. And I couldn’t understand why it made my head swim just to look at him, why it suddenly hurt to breathe. So I dropped my eyes back down to my book, concentrating on the scratchy texture of the paper between my fingers, the smoothness of the worn cover, the scent of old books that I could just make out if I tried hard enough. There was no reason to be this rattled.
At the front of the classroom, the teacher cleared his throat, and I tucked a scrap of paper between the pages of my book. Good, a distraction.
“Good morning, everybody! I am Mr. Ortiz, and this is AP U.S. History, so if you’re not in the right place, now is the time to fix that.” He was a dark-haired man, probably in his mid-thirties, wearing a red Oxford shirt and a pair of chinos. “We’re going to go over the syllabus today and talk a bit about why we study history, but I want to start with an icebreaker so that I can get to know you all a little better.”
There was a collective rumbling in the room and I understood why. After so many years together, there wasn’t much left for us to learn about each other, and yet our teachers were still putting us through this at the start of every single class. While Mr. Ortiz gave an unnecessary explanation of the rules of Two Truths anda Lie, I let my gaze wander back over to the new guy. He was doodling in a notebook, his chin in his hand and one leg tucked up awkwardly underneath him in his chair. And he must have felt me looking at him, because he caught my eye and fuckingwinked.
As we went around the room, the truths and lies were just about what I would have expected after years with these people. But when it came time for the new guy to speak, we all sat up a little straighter.
“Hey, uh — I’m Cole.” A little wave and a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “Um, I just moved here, and — well, that’s not part of the game, because obviously you can see me.”
There were a few titters, evidence of just how badly we all wanted to see a new face among us.
“So, uh — let’s see. My dad took a job in Paris for the year and my mom went with him, but they thought I should stay in the country for my last year of high school, so that’s why I’m living here with my Gram. Um, I saw Imagine Dragons this summer, and I had backstage passes, so I got to meet them. And, uh — I have a girlfriend back home and I miss her.”
A flash of blue eyes, and Cole stared us all down. “So, which is the lie?”
“The girlfriend?” Courtney leaned forward a little too eagerly.
Cole grinned and shook his head, his cheeks turning a little pink.
“Paris? That sounds farfetched,” Drew scoffed.
“Quel dommage, c’est vrai,” Cole replied with a laugh. “So that leaves —”
“The concert —” Melissa supplied.
Cole shrugged. “Yeah, it wasn’t Imagine Dragons, it was Green Day. So, you know, technically a lie. Anyway, enough about me, right?” And he sat back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head and giving us all an appraising look.
The game continued, and as I waited for my turn, I could feel my palms sweating. Coming up with answers in games like this was always hard for me. I knew if I said anything too personal or revealing, that it would end up getting twisted on me. I definitely didn’t want to say anything about Mom. So when the game passed to me, I blurted out the first ideas that came to mind.
“Uhh, I’m Ezra, but you guys already know that.” I could feel my face burning, and I shifted in my chair. “Um, I don’t like chocolate. I’ve never been on an airplane. And, uh — that’s it about me. You’re never going to find out more about me playing a game like this because there isn’t anything interesting to find out.”
Silence.Fuck. Then —
“You’veneverbeen on a plane? Not even to go to Disney World?” Melissa took a break from examining her fingernails long enough to give me a withering look.
