OCTOBER 29, 2009
I cram my backpack under the attendance counter. There is already a swarm of students waiting on the other side.
“You’re late,” Miss Olivia teases. “Should I write you up?”
I shrug. “Go ahead.”
“How was the big college tour?”
“Fine.” I.e., effed-up, insecure, neurotic, and evil. Highly evil.
And then I am besieged by kids shoving notes at me from their orthodontists, pediatricians, marriage counselors. I don’t care. I am supposed to care, supposed to check, but I don’t. They could hand me a note cut out of letters from the newspaper telling me where to drop the ransom money and I’d write them out an excused absence slip. If Peninsula or, really, any college is what I’m supposed to be working toward, caring about, then I seriously, seriously do not care.
When Twyla’s old emo-stoner friend Miles Kropp, the chronic Jims ’n’ Jays guy, shows up with his eyes flaming red, he no longer seems like a giggling ass. He suddenly seems like the only person in my whole universe who has the tiniest clue. He’s figured out that Parkhaven High requires anesthesia. All the synonyms that Twyla was so fond of for getting messed up scroll through my brain, because, for the first time ever, I am overwhelmed by the desire to “toke up till I woke up.” I want to ask Miles to take me to his car and get me stoned, blazed, blitzed, toasted, tore up from the floor up, wrecked, high, ripped, buzzed, and then I can’t remember any more. Wasted? Wasted might be one of Dori’s.
Tacked under the counter is Miss Olivia’s latest list of all the students who aren’t allowed any more excused tardies. Miles Kropp is at the top of her list.
Miss Olivia has her headset on and is listening to messages using her supersleuth powers to decide whether the person calling in is a parent or a conniving student she must hunt down and punish. Possibly kill. As fast as I can, I write Miles a slip, shove it at him, and whisper, “Next time they’ll suspend you.”
The wheels turning very, very slowly, he finally nods in understanding and is about to leave when Miss Olivia rips her headphones off. “Aubrey, what are you doing? That’s Miles Kropp! Kropp is on the list. Aren’t you reading your list? No more excused tardies for Kropp.”
I grab a note off the pile in front of me and wave it at Miss Olivia. “He has a note from his doctor. See?”
Miles manages to fire just enough synapses to snatch up the slip and disappear. Miss Olivia, who is not a fan of standing or, really, moving her body in any way, rolls her chair toward me. “Let me have a look at that.” She sticks her hand out. “It’s probably forged.”
My doom wheels closer and I am oddly elated to discover that even then I don’t care. I wonder how many lines I’d have to cross to get suspended. “Suspended.” Why has that word ever held any terror for me? Suspended. Suspended animation. Not having to decide where to go to college and what to major in and, essentially, plan out the rest of my entire life. Just to completely freeze everything. Like Sleeping Beauty. Only not at Parkhaven High. Anywhere but Parkhaven. It sounds like the most blissful state I can imagine. I want to be suspended.
Miss Olivia abruptly stops dead in her tracks and looks up at someone behind me. A voice asks, “Hey, Pink Puke, how was Penn State? Awesome team. They recruiting you? Hold out for a car.”
As I turn around, Miss Olivia babbles at me, “He asked where you were. I told him Penn something and he knew right away what I was talking about. Didn’t you, Ty?” She giggles. Miss Olivia giggles.
The sun is angling in through the glass doors behind Tyler and sending beams of light shooting out around his head in a haloed, He Is Risen way so cheesy even I can’t take my pathetic fan-girl crush seriously anymore. A handsome, sexy quarterback? Could I be a bigger cliché? And it is so clear from the way he is acting that this happens all the time. It happens so much, in fact, that, like a celebrity, he’s learned to handle it gracefully. To be nice to the Little People.
I have to laugh at myself.
Tyler thinks I am laughing at his recruiting joke and the Dimple appears. OK, now he is being a gigantic cliché. It is so ridiculous that it feels like we are in some bad comedy sketch together and I have no choice but to treat it that way.
He drapes his hand over the counter for me to shake and says in this skeevy Rico Suave voice, “Tyler Moldenhauer. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
We joke-shake and he hangs on to my hand while gazing into my eyes and giving me the Dimple. Talk about cheesy. I cannot not call him on it. I bat my eyelashes in a flirty pickup way as corny as his soulful gazing and Dimple-dimpling and ask in my best Southern-belle accent, “Why, suh, are you one of the Savannah Moldenhauers or are you a Buh-mingham Moldenhauer?”
Tyler gets that I have busted him and drops my hand and the whole Señor Suavecito act. He leans down, rests his head on his hands, and points a finger at the official name tag pinned to my chest that Miss Olivia makes all the aides wear. Mine reads AUBREY J. LIGHTSEY. Tyler flicks the edge of the plastic tag. “So is that what you like to be called?”
He understands. He gets an entire life of defending a name I never liked to start off with. Correcting people, saying, “No, it’s Aubrey, not Audrey.” Then they call me Audrey anyway. Or the real smarties ask me if I know that Aubrey is a boy’s name.
“Actually,” I answer with no more thought than I’d give to my next breath, “my friends call me A.J.” No one in my entire life has ever called me A.J.
“What’s the J stand for?”
“That’s classified.”
“A to the J, I miss you. Why don’t you ever come to practice anymore?”
“I quit band.”
“You don’t go to games, do you?”
“Only if I have a clarinet in my mouth, and that is never going to happen again. Not in this lifetime.”
“Ty,” Miss Olivia breaks in with the false intimacy of a fan who would call Britney Spears “Brit.” “What do you need? You know Coach already has you automatically excused from fifth period.”
“No, I’m good, Miss Olivia.” He shoots her an extra helping of cheese complete with the Dimple and some kind of crinkling twinkling of the eyes that makes me wince and Miss Olivia wheeze like her asthmatic Chihuahua. “I just want to say hey to our girl here. See how the big college tour went. So how’d it go, A.J.?”
“It went.”
He nods as if I’ve just given the correct answer to the hardest question on the test. I know I am supposed to ask him about the schools he’s interested in and where he’s applied and what his first choices are. But I don’t care. Even if it is Tyler Moldenhauer, I can’t make myself care. So I say nothing. The moment gets awkward; he taps his fist on the counter and leaves.
The instant he is gone, Miss Olivia, her face bright and shiny as a kid on Christmas morning, asks, “A.J.?”
It is me and Tyler she wants to unwrap. To tear through the crinkly paper and pull us out and exclaim, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
But even if there is nothing inside the package—or maybe especially because there is nothing inside—it is my package, to unwrap when I want.
So, dry as toast, I answer, “Yes, Olivia, A.J. In the future, I’d like to be called A.J.”