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“Mind if I join you?” he asks.
“Actually, we do. We’re having girl talk here.” I don’t know why I’m like this with boys, especially boys like Peter. Bad habit, I guess. Worse than smoking. But I don’t want boring old Peter to ruin our conversation.
“No. We don’t mind.” Maggie kicks me under the table.
“By the way, I don’t think you’re fat,” Peter says.
I smirk, trying to catch Maggie’s eye, but she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Peter. So I look at Peter too. His hair is longer and he’s shed most of his zits, but there’s something else about him.
Confidence.
Jeez. First The Mouse and now Peter. Is everyone going to be different this year?
Maggie and Peter keep ignoring me, so I pick up the paper and pretend to read. This gets Peter’s attention.
“What do you think of The Nutmeg?” he asks.
“Drivel,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says. “I’m the editor.”
Nice. Now I’ve done it again.
“If you’re so smart, why don’t you try writing for the paper?” Peter asks. “I mean, don’t you tell everyone you want to be a writer? What have you ever written?”
Maybe he doesn’t mean to sound aggressive, but the question catches me off guard. Does Peter somehow know about the rejection letter from The New School? But that would be impossible. Then I get angry. “What does it matter, what I’ve written or not?”
“If you say you’re a writer, it means you write,” Peter says smugly. “Otherwise you should go and be a cheerleader or something.”
“And you should stick your head in a barrel of boiling oil.”
“May
be I will.” He laughs good-naturedly. Peter must be one of those obnoxious types who’s so used to being insulted he’s not even offended when he is.
But still, I’m shaken. I grab my swim bag. “I’ve got practice,” I say, as if I can hardly be bothered with this conversation.
“What’s the matter with her?” Peter asks as I storm out.
I head down the hill toward the gym, scuffing the heels of my boots in the grass. Why is it always like this? I tell people I want to be a writer, and they roll their eyes. It drives me crazy. Especially since I’ve been writing since I was six. I have a pretty big imagination, and for a while I wrote stories about a pencil family called “The Number 2’s,” who were always trying to get away from a bad guy called “The Sharpener.” Then I wrote about a little girl who had a mysterious disease that made her look like she was ninety. And this summer, in order to get into that stupid writing program, I wrote a whole book about a boy who turned into a TV, and no one in his family noticed until he used up all the electricity in the house.
If I’d told Peter the truth about what I’d written, he would have laughed. Just like those people at The New School.
“Carrie!” Maggie calls out. She hurries across the playing fields to catch up. “Sorry about Peter. He says he was joking about the writing thing. He has a weird sense of humor.”
“No kidding.”
“Do you want to go to the mall after swim practice?”
I look across the grounds to the high school and the enormous parking lot beyond. It’s all exactly the same as it always was.
“Why not?” I take the letter out of my biology book, crumple it up, and stick it in my pocket.
Who cares about Peter Arnold? Who cares about The New School? Someday I’ll be a writer. Someday, but maybe not today.
“I am so effing sick of this place,” Lali says, dropping her things onto a bench in the locker room.
“You and me both.” I unzip my boots. “First day of swim practice. I hate it.”
