Mr. Anthony continued with roll. I wasn’t really listening, but when he got to one name that I didn’t quite catch, there was a perceptible shift in the room. A new student. She sat way on the other side, near the bookshelves. All I could see was a sleeve of green sweater and a cascade of red hair.
The syllabus was nothing surprising, although Mr. Anthony apparently believed otherwise. He talked about what it meant to be in an Advanced Placement history course, as though we all hadn’t taken AP US History with Ms. Welsh as juniors. A lot of the guys on tennis didn’t care for Coach Anthony, because they thought he was a hard-ass. I was used to strict coaches, but I was quickly realizing that without any other athletes in the class, Mr. Anthony was just plain strict.
“You should have done the summer reading,” Mr. Anthony said, as though it was an accusation, rather than a fact. “Medieval Europe: From the Fall of Rome to the Renaissance. If you felt such an assignment was beneath you, then you’ll be rearranging your plans for the weekend. You might even consider your weekend plans to be, ah, history.”
No one laughed.
The Roman Empire: 200 B.C.—474 A.D., he scrawled on the board, and then raised an eyebrow, as though enjoying a private joke. There was this horrible stretch of silence as we tried to figure out why he wasn’t saying anything, and then, finally, Xiao Lin raised his hand.
“I am sorry, but I think 476 A.D. is correct?” he mumbled.
“Thank you, Mr.—ah—Lin, for displaying the barest level of competency in reading comprehension,” Mr. Anthony snapped, correcting the date on the board. “And now, I wonder if anyone here can tell us why the phrase ‘Holy Roman Empire’ is a misnomer . . . Mr. Faulkner, perhaps?”
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that was a sneer on Coach A’s lip. All right, let’s call it a sneer. I got that he was disappointed I couldn’t play anymore, but I’d sort of hoped he wouldn’t be a jerk about it.
“It only applies after Charlemagne?” I offered, inking over the letters on my syllabus.
“That’s a community college answer,” Coach announced. “Would you care to rephrase it and try for a UC school?”
I don’t know why I said it, except maybe that I didn’t want to take crap from Coach A for the rest of the year, but before I could really think it through, I’d leaned back in my chair and replied, “Yeah, okay. Two reasons: One, the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was originally called the Frankish Kingdom, until the Pope crowned Charlemagne the ‘Emperor of the Romans.’ And two, it wasn’t holy, or Roman, or even an empire. It was really just, like, this casual alliance of Germanic tribal states.”
I’d never really shot my mouth off in class before, and I instantly regretted it. I usually had the right answer when I was called on, and my grades were good enough, but I wasn’t what anyone would consider brainy. I’d just done a lot of reading and thinking over the summer, because there hadn’t been much else to do.
“Enjoy your weekend, Mr. Faulkner,” Coach sneered, and I realized that, instead of getting him off my back, I’d made him want to get back at me.
I’D NEARLY FORGOTTEN we were on Pep Rally Schedule until I was halfway out the classroom door, thinking it was break, and someone tapped me on the shoulder.
It was the new girl. She clutched a crumpled class schedule and stared up at me, as though I’d somehow given her the impression that I was the right person to talk to on her first day. I wasn’t expecting her eyes—deep and disquieting and dark blue—the sort of eyes that made you wonder if the skies opened up when she got angry.
“Um, sorry,” she said, glancing back down at her schedule. “First period is supposed to end at nine thirty-five, but the bell didn’t ring until nine fifty—”
“It’s the pep rally,” I told her. “Break is canceled and we go straight to third.”
“Oh.” She pushed her bangs to the side and hesitated a moment before asking, “So, what do you have next?”
“AP American Lit.”
“Me too. Can you show me where that is?”
Ordinarily, I could have. On the first day of junior year, I’d even stopped to help a few confused-looking freshmen in the quad, who’d stood gawking at the maps in the backs of their day planners as though they were stuck in some sort of incomprehensible labyrinth.
“Sorry, no,” I said, hating myself for it.
“Um, okay.”
I watched her walk away, and I thought about how most of the girls at Eastwood, or at least the ones worth noticing, all looked the same: blonde hair, lots of makeup, stupidly expensive handbags. The new girl was nothing like that, and I didn’t know what to make of the shabby boys’ button-down tucked into her jean shorts, or the worn leather satchel slung over her shoulder, like something out of an old-fashioned movie. She was pretty, though, and I wondered where she’d come from, and why she hadn’t bothered trying to fit in. I wanted to follow her and apologize, or at least explain. But I didn’t. Instead, I grappled with the stairwell near the faculty lot, crossed the quad toward the 100 building, and opened the door of AP American Lit several minutes in arrears of the bell.
I’D HAD MR. Moreno before, for Honors Brit Lit. He’d supposedly been writing the same novel for the past twenty years, and either he genuinely loved teaching or he’d never outgrown high school, because it was sort of depressing how hard he’d tried to get us psyched about Shakespeare.
Moreno hadn’t cared that I was late for class; he hadn’t even noticed. The DVD player wasn’t working, and he was on his hands and knees with a disc clutched in his teeth, prodding at the cables. Finally Luke Sheppard, the president of Film Club, arrogantly stepped in, and we all sat and watched The Great Gatsby—the original, not the remake. I hadn’t seen it before, and the film was old-fashioned and sort of bored me. The book had been our summer reading, and the movie wasn’t nearly as good.
What I hated, though, was the part with the car accident. I knew it was coming, but that didn’t stop it from being any less terrible to watch. I shut my eyes, but I could still hear it, hear the policeman telling the crowd of onlookers how the sonofabitch didn’t even stop his car. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel everyone staring at me, and I wished they wouldn’t. It was unsettling the way my classmates watched me, as though I fascinated and terrified them. As though I no longer belonged.
When class let out, I briefly considered the quad, with its harsh sunlight and café tables. My old crew sat at the most visible table, the one by the wall that divided the upper and lower quads. I pictured them in their new team uniforms, the first day of senior year, telling stories about summer sports camps and beach vacations, laughing over how young the freshmen looked. And then I pictured sitting down at that table. I pictured no one saying anything, but all of them thinking it: you’re not one of us anymore. I wasn’t class president, or tennis team captain. I wasn’t dating Charlotte, and I didn’t drive a shiny Beemer. I wasn’t king any longer, so it was only fitting to take my exile. Which is why, instead of gambling my last few chips of dignity, I wound up avoiding the quad entirely and decamping on that shaded stairwell out near the faculty lot with my headphones on, wondering why I hadn’t known it would be quite this bad.
THERE WAS ONLY one senior-level Spanish class, which meant another year with Mrs. Martin. She’d urged us to call her Se?ora Martinez back in Spanish I, but that was completely ridiculous on account of her husband being the pastor of the local Lutheran church. She was one of those cookie-baking, overly mothering types who festooned her sweaters with festive holiday pins and treated us all like second graders.
I was the first to arrive, and Mrs. Martin beamed at me and whispered that her congregation had prayed for me after the accident. I could think of so many more worthwhile things they could have prayed for, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her.