She lifted her shoulders, a tiny, delicate shrug. “I can’t remember what I was going to do.”
“Get lunch?” Cas suggested.
“Baby’s not hungry,” she said.
“Is Marabelle hungry?” Cas’s face was deadpan, but his eyes were shining. He thought Marabelle was funny.
“No.” She stood there for a moment and then reached up suddenly and grabbed her chest as if checking to see if it was still there. “I’ve got breasts now. Have you seen?”
“Yeah.” Cas bobbed his head, unable to keep from grinning. “Yeah, they’re nice.”
I kicked out at him under the table as she took a seat.
“I don’t like them,” she said.
“Does Baby’s dad like them?” Cas asked.
Marabelle just looked at him. I, on the other hand, swung out harder and connected with Cas’s leg under the table. Marabelle and I weren’t great friends, but I had sort of a soft spot for her.
I first met her at the library—the town branch just a few blocks away from school. I went there pretty often, and I’d always see Marabelle in the stacks. Thumbing through a periodical or pushing a cart around, shelving books. She was two years younger, and we didn’t have any classes together, but we coexisted at the library pretty nicely. I would say hi, and she would nod, or she’d check my books out and comment on what I had chosen.
“Do you like working here?” I asked one time as she was leading me to a copy of Hamlet for class.
“Well, technically, I don’t work here,” she said. “But they let me help out.” And she promptly found me four different editions of Hamlet—“You don’t want that one, though. They try to translate it all into normal words and it totally ruins it. The annotations in this one are better.” I learned that when it came to information, Marabelle was better than Google.
She was also singularly odd. I guess she reminded me of Foster in some ways. They both seemed to operate on their own wavelength. But whereas Foster excelled at being conspicuous, Marabelle was just … quietly eccentric. I wasn’t sure if she didn’t realize stuff sometimes—like Cas poking fun at her—or if she just didn’t care.
“How’re your classes going, Marabelle?” I asked as Cas dove back into his lunch.
She wrinkled her nose. “Trigonometry is awful.”
“Ah, yeah. Trig sucks. Sorry.”
She blinked. “For what?”
“I love that girl,” Cas said as we headed to class after lunch. Marabelle had drifted off in the direction of the foreign-language hallway with one arm wound around the bump swelling beneath her baby doll dress. “Like, I seriously love her. She’s the funniest person I’ve ever met.”
“She’s not trying to be funny, you know.”
“That’s why she’s hilarious.”
“She’s a teen mom. Have some sympathy.”
“Oh, so you can have sympathy for teen moms but not for abandoned children?”
I gave him a shove. “You’re a great big giant asshole, you know that?”
“Just like Ezra Lynley?”
“Worse. You’re not as good-looking.”
Cas grabbed his chest. “That’s a terrible, horrible lie.”
“Come on.” I glanced at my watch. “We’re gonna be late for Calc.”
He clapped his hand to his chest again and stopped dead in the middle of the hallway.
“Oh, stop it, you know I think you’re pretty.”
Cas shook his head, massaging his chest like some great pain was brewing under there. “It’s not that.”
“What is it?”
He grimaced. “Senioritis.”
I hit him in the arm. “Get to class.”
“Good one, right?”
I couldn’t help but grin. “Go.”
3
Foster was awake by five thirty every morning. School didn’t start until eight, and I was still trying to shake my summer sleep schedule, so I wasn’t the most receptive to his early-morning clattering.