Authors: Ruth Baron
B00B9FX0F2 EBOK
For Margot Baron, with love and gratitude.
“It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.”
— John le Carré
S
o bored I think I might be dead.
Jason wrote the imaginary status update in his head as Ms. Rowen droned on about the properties of iron. He thought about sneaking his phone from his pocket and posting it to Facebook, but Ms. Rowen had hawkish eyes and no patience for rule breakers. Broadcasting the monotony of chemistry to all 248 of his friends wasn’t worth the risk of getting the phone confiscated for the week.
Two hundred forty-eight friends. Two hundred forty-nine if you included the request from his aunt Sally that he’d been ignoring. The list was like a tour through his utterly pathetic middle and high school career. There was Rachel Keller, the curly-haired saxophone player he had slow danced with at Jacob Cooper’s bar mitzvah. Sadly, that was pretty much the most action he’d had in the past four years. Alex McCoy, a bespectacled kid he’d bunked with at summer camp, flooded his newsfeed with creepy photos of frogs and other unwitting specimens. Sometimes someone like Suzy Garz popped up, though the charismatic captain of the field hockey team hadn’t exchanged actual words with Jason since the fourth grade. Not that he was so unhappy about that — he was pretty sure the inspirational quotes she was posting were from a ’90s edition of
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul
. Either there or the back of a cereal box at Whole Foods.
Jason’s eyes wandered around the room. To his surprise, his best friend Rakesh’s face was frozen in rapt concentration. It took Jason a minute to realize it was a phone cradled carefully in his hands that had captured his attention. Rakesh could afford to get his iPhone confiscated — he kept a spare one in his locker for just such an occasion. One of the perks of being among the most popular students at Roosevelt High was that girls (and boys and maintenance staff and teachers) were happy to help Rakesh out on the rare occasion he couldn’t charm his way out of a punishment. He had 892 friends last Jason had checked. His wide smile and princely cheekbones populated almost as many photos. Jason knew because he was featured in many of them, but he’d untagged any where you could see light reflecting off his glasses or his hair looked floppy. Which was pretty much all of them.
Jason forced himself to concentrate on Ms. Rowen as she explained the process of oxidization. He couldn’t afford to get anything less than a B on the approaching midterm. One of the few advantages to leading the world’s quietest social life was that his mother allowed him to do pretty much whatever he pleased so long as he made good grades, but if she had even the slightest inkling he was lying to her, it was only a matter of time before she’d take his car — or worse, his laptop — away. He wasn’t intentionally deceiving her. He’d sit down at his computer intending to focus on schoolwork, but when Lacey was online everything else had a tendency to fade into the background.
Lacey. His stomach flipped just thinking about her. She had changed everything with two words. “Hey” and “Jason” were things he heard almost every day, but they weren’t usually
featured next to a profile picture of a gray-eyed girl with beachy blonde hair. And Lacey was so much more than that, too. Since the first time she’d messaged him six weeks ago, they’d barely gone a day without e-mailing or chatting online, and each time he heard from her he could barely believe his good luck. Like him, she was a nut for indie rock, sending song lyrics or links to old Pitchfork posts on bands he thought only he knew about. She was even learning to play guitar, something Jason spent a lot of time wishing he could do. He’d gotten as far as the cheapest Fenders at Strings, the guitar store in the city, before the tiny tattooed clerk with huge round eyes that made her look like an anime character scared him off by picking up a Gibson and banging out a punk rock riff he didn’t recognize, probably because she’d written it herself. Lacey didn’t seem like the type to frighten easily, and she had a warmth that was conspicuously absent from the ferocious girls who hung around Strings. She was funny — comparing her spacey English teacher to Ms. Frizzle and calling her friends by rapper nicknames like J Money and Funky Dash. Best of all, she seemed to genuinely like Jason.
He knew he shouldn’t exactly be composing the playlist for their wedding — or even changing his relationship status — but it was hard to contain his excitement now that he finally had something to think about in chemistry other than whether the clock was broken.
Suddenly, he felt his hip vibrating and was so surprised he bolted to attention. A few of his classmates swiveled in their seats to see what had startled him, and he sat stone still until Ms. Rowen turned back to the whiteboard. His phone rarely rang during the day. He’d sent Lacey his number a few weeks
before, and since then, every time his cell buzzed or beeped his heart leapt into his throat. Unfortunately, a sidelong look to his left confirmed it wasn’t worth the excitement. Rakesh did his best to suppress the smile beginning at the corners of his mouth, but when you’ve been friends with someone since you were both in diapers, you get pretty good at recognizing when they’re messing with you.
Jason’s pocket buzzed again, and he glared at Rakesh before slowly sneaking his phone into his lap.
Rakesh Adams:
Admit it — you think ms. R is sexy when she talks about chemistry like this.
And then the second:
U dream about her reciting formulas 2 u
He was about to respond when Ms. Rowen turned back from the board. He shoved the phone out of sight about half a second before her eyes settled on him. “Is something funny, Mr. Moreland?” she asked sharply.
“Um, no.” His voice cracked as he answered. As if opening his mouth in front of his entire class wasn’t bad enough on its own.
“So that smile on your face is a product of your general delight to be alive? A celebration of how great it is to be Jason Moreland, boy wonder?”
His cheeks burned, and he kept his eyes trained carefully ahead, but he couldn’t block out the snickering around him. “I was just, uh, happy I finally understand the formula.” Jason prayed she wouldn’t ask him to explain — he had no idea what the notes she had copied there meant. She frowned suspiciously, but before she could humiliate him further, the bell rang. Mercifully, class was over.
Jason and Rakesh both made a beeline for the door. “Dude, why didn’t you answer my texts?” Rakesh, with his artfully rumpled gray backpack slung over his shoulder, ran one hand through his wavy black hair and used the other to greet kids they were passing in the hall, all of whom parted as they passed.
Like Miss America
, Jason had observed on more than one occasion. And really, if Roosevelt High had its own pageant, Rakesh would be a front-runner for the tiara. He’d probably even manage to pull off faux crystals and inspire half the guys in school to start wearing sashes. It’s not that Jason was jealous — if he had his way, he’d be the one making fun of the contestants from home — but he sometimes marveled at the fact that his parents’ choices in early childhood playdates had somehow condemned him to a life as sidekick to the most popular guy in school.
“I can’t get my phone confiscated just because you got bored in chemistry.”
“Oh, do you need it in case you get an important call from Laney?”
“It’s
Lacey
,” Jason said defensively. They made their way to their lockers to drop off their oversize chemistry textbooks. As they swung the doors shut, Rakesh plucked a tissue paper flower that had been tucked into the vents at the top. Jason raised an eyebrow. “Did I forget your birthday?” he asked.
Rakesh shrugged. “Oh, you know, every day’s your birthday when it comes to Amy Kastle.”
They made their way toward the cafeteria, pausing so Rakesh could bump fists with a group of basketball players wearing suits for game day. Jason awkwardly slapped hands with the
overly eager Dan Greene and wished them luck against Mason. School spirit, another ritual he would prefer to sit out.
They took their seats at their usual table, and Rakesh steered the conversation back to Jason. “So you and Lacey have graduated to the phone?”
“Not exactly.”
“Yo, you need to get on that.”
Ignoring him, Jason unwrapped his sandwich. Turkey, provolone, mustard on one slice of whole wheat bread, mayo on the other. It was the same sandwich he’d eaten for as long as he could remember. He bit into it. It tasted like yesterday.
In theory, Jason liked English fine, but then Katie Leigh would open her puckered mouth and say things like “I feel like the identity metaphor of the green light is really prevalent here,” and Dave Jordan would cut her off to add his own analysis of the spectacles from the billboard even though they were both supposed to be talking about Shakespeare. Jason wished they had never been assigned
The Great Gatsby
over the summer because it was proof that other people could ruin anything, even a great American novel. But the silver lining was that as long as Katie and Dave’s “Who wants to be a Princeton student?” pseudo-intellectual battle continued, Jason could tune out and scribble lyrics in his notebook under the guise of taking notes.
It was all turning gray
It was all turning black
Then you were there
And you keep coming back
These things tend to get ugly
Or so I am told
But now that you’re here
Everything’s coming up gold
Drive out, see the stars, in the car, we’re falling hard
Wake up, feel the sun, touch your hair, see your heart
He’d been writing songs over the past year, but he usually got frustrated and gave up before he could finish them. A day or two after he started, Jason would go back to his work and cringe, crumpling up loose leaf or dragging the docs to his trash for that satisfying springy sound. This one was different, though. The song wasn’t ready yet — still too sweet, too tidy, and only half done — but it didn’t make him want to burn the notebook he’d scrawled it in. He was going to keep writing until it was perfect, and then he would show it to Lacey. Maybe she would even write the music for it.
He looked down at the page in front of him and drew a box around the line “Everything’s coming up gold,” tracing the edges several times until the ink bled through to the next sheet. It was a good note to end the song on. He could hear it, repeated several times, in his head. He half listened as Mrs. Granger highlighted relevant themes from the
Hamlet
reading he hadn’t done, while one eye rested on the clock. He watched the seconds tick by and waited for the day to end. Like he had yesterday, and the day before that.