Tradition Page 15

  “Why?” I said it aloud.

  Javi glared at me. “What? Are you even listening to me?”

  “Yes. Of course. It’s so messed up.” I took a deep breath, tried to look up, not hide so much inside myself. “There are so many assholes,” I began, but he looked away, toward the language building.

  “Oh, wait,” he said, stepping ahead. “There he is. If I can catch him before class . . .” He sprinted ahead. “Lunch,” he yelled over his shoulder as he ran. Max hadn’t seen him coming yet. He was still outside, speaking with a teacher on the steps, but as soon as he noticed Javi, he began to lead the conversation into the building.

  I spun away and curled back alongside the admin building. My hands shook, and I flexed fists to try to calm them, but my fingers wouldn’t stay still. Nothing made sense, and I felt more alone than I had the entire year—like I might suddenly burst into tears if the wind picked up again and blew too hard in my face. Screw Politics in Prose class. I could skip it. I had to see Ms. Taggart. I needed to speak. I couldn’t talk to anyone until I said what I really needed to say. Everything else just felt like a lie.

  I cut back across the academic quad toward the health center. I was barely in dress code: I had on a skirt, a long one at that, but it was denim—no one I know had tried that. I only owned it because I’d used it for a costume the year before. I’d hated it. Until now. Now it felt like a cocoon swaddling me. It covered the laces of my boots when I stood. I’d thrown on my hoodie over my shirt so I could block out the world and not even see if people were looking at me. I could hear them all whispering behind my back as I walked down the diagonal path. Slut. Whore. Skank. Not literally, but their voices as I heard them in my head hurt just as much as if I’d really heard them all around me.

  I pushed open the glass door and walked right past the reception desk without saying hello. It wasn’t like me, and I know I looked weird, but I’d been there so many times I figured they’d let me slide by this once.

  “Julianna!”

  I didn’t stop at first. I couldn’t talk to Mrs. Nichols at the front desk. I needed to get to the back office. Even if I could just nap on the couch, like other girls did. A cup of tea. A voice I could trust.

  “Julianna, I’m sorry. Ms. Taggart isn’t here today.”

  I knew what I’d heard, but I tried Ms. Taggart’s outer office door anyway. It was locked. Never mind the couch. I couldn’t even get into the waiting room. Couldn’t see the plant I’d picked out. The posters I’d hung. Even get a cup of water from the cooler. Please, I thought. I can’t do this today. I can’t pretend. I felt so dry in my throat, all through me, like I’d been hollowed by the wind.

  “Julianna, I’m sorry.” Mrs. Nichols had come out from behind the desk. Her scarf, a riot of colors, was a tropical bird slowly flapping toward me. “She’s out for the next couple days.”

  “Why?”

  I must have snapped at her. Mrs. Nichols stopped moving. Her head tilted to the side, she was all glasses and helmet of blond curls that never grew or shrank, remaining exactly the same like so many other things during the decades she’d worked at Fullbrook. “She’s home today. Her son is very sick. Actually, she had to take him to the doctor.”

  I felt dizzy, my head squeezed by invisible hands. I was slipping away, or breaking away, like a crumbling glacier cracking from the continent and drifting out to sea.

  “Julianna, are you okay?”

  “I was just trying to stop by and see Ms. Taggart.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

  “I thought I might . . .” I couldn’t finish. There was a flood in my head drowning all the words. So much flooding. My lip trembled. I sucked in air and tried to hold myself rigid. “So sorry. I must have my days mixed up.”

  “Do you need to see Dr. Hammersmith?”

  “No. Thanks,” I said as sweetly as possible. I might have only squeaked it. “I really just have the wrong day. When is she back, again?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  I took in air in little sniffs as I walked past her, and as I walked all the way back across the quad to class. I was late, but only by a few minutes, and Mr. Hale let it slide. I was one of the best students in class. He frowned as I slipped in, but kept on with his lecture. “Lucifer,” he was saying. “The name is from the Latin. ‘Light-bringing.’ ‘Morning star.’ More literally, ‘bearer of light.’ What a strange name for the character we attribute as the root of all evil. Some have argued that it’s a mistranslation in the bible. But that came later. The word had all those meanings for Milton.”

  Everything was a cloud. Snapshots of Mr. Hale sitting on the corner of his desk, someone bending in her chair to dig out another pen from her book bag on the floor. Incomplete sentences. A phrase. Words. I’d read the Milton twice already, but I couldn’t keep a thought steady long enough to know what it was. Mr. Hale called on me and all I did was shake my head to indicate I had nothing to add, nothing to say. I couldn’t trust what might come out if I opened my mouth.

  I must have spooked him, because he ignored me for the rest of class, only glancing at me from the corner of his eye like everyone else was. Gillian, the hockey guys like Ryan Tucker, were they thinking slut, ho, skank? Bax and Aileen, too. They weren’t really looking at me at all, only at each other, nervously, like they knew. Bax tried to catch me after class, but I couldn’t bear him saying those things to me. I could see it. The hardness in his eyes. He looked more Fullbrook than he had all year. I was partway across the quad, and I peeked back—four guys from the hockey team had surrounded him at the foot of the stairs behind David Hall, sucking him into their swarm.

  I grabbed my lunch to go and ducked into the stairwell beneath the sit-down dining hall, and I remembered Gillian and Ethan in the same stairwell on the first day of school, where we’d all eyed each other uneasily and then agreed: We’re all cool.

  We weren’t, and for the forty thousandth time in the last two days, I went over it all again. I didn’t really do anything at the party. Nothing really happened. In fact, if anyone would know what had happened, it was Gillian, and even though she hated my guts, we had been friends once, close enough friends, and even though it felt like she was avoiding me as much as I was avoiding her, maybe she was the only person who could help me get my mind straight. And I’d see her again in my last class of the day.

  I slumped into calc after her, not making any eye contact at all, and taking a seat at the back of the class, so Gillian couldn’t even look at me from behind. Even though I had showered that morning, I felt a tacky film slicking my arms and legs. It was in my hair too—a matted mess of oily ropes. Maybe I was molting. Maybe I was transforming into some gruesome, slithering stage of weird. Or maybe they could all just kiss my ass and stare at the graphs Mrs. Attison had drawn on the SMART Board at the front of the room.

  “Julianna,” she said to me after the bell rang. She couldn’t hide the puzzled look on her face. “Why don’t you come up here and show us how you solved the first homework problem.” She stepped forward, gesturing to me with the SMART Board pen.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry,” I managed. “I mean, I can’t. I didn’t do it.”

  Mrs. Attison stared at me. “What?” She couldn’t say anything else. She just stood there in shock. Which I understood. That didn’t happen at a place like Fullbrook. Everyone did their homework—all the time. Even if I was in English class and writing about whatever the hell I wanted to, instead of the assignment, I was still doing something I could turn in. This was a first, even for an outlier like me.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “You had all weekend to do it. And yesterday’s study group?”

  I just shook my head. I had skipped that, too, of course.

  Mrs. Attison glared at me and then moved on. “Gillian?”

  Gillian got up and walked to the front of the room quietly. She looked at her
notebook, then clutched it to her chest and began graphing her answer on the board. Standing in front of class, checking and double-checking her notes, she looked much more hesitant than usual, not the queen out front, leading the field hockey team on their run, not poised like a boardroom executive at a table in the student center, doling out jobs for the Winter Ball committee. She pulled in her lips, as if she was going to chew them, and she looked so much younger. Like at the end of our first year, when we became friends, talking about our moms totally trying to act younger than they were and how weird it made us feel that they spoke like us and texted with emojis more than we did.

  Gillian paused. She stared at her notes for a few moments, brought the pen to the board, made a mark, then got flustered and made some notations in the white space beyond the graph, and tried again. She sighed, loudly, through her nostrils. She knew she was off track.

  Freddie snickered in the corner. He had bandages poking out from under his shirt collar. He moved with stiff, robotic jerks and swivels. The left side of his face was swollen, like he’d swallowed a balloon and it still floated beneath the skin. I hadn’t seen him all day. He was a mess.

  “Mr. Watts,” Mrs. Attison said. For some reason she’d called him that when she’d scolded him on the first day of class, and it had stuck. Mr. Watts. “I know you’re in pain today, but I hope the painkillers aren’t affecting your judgment. There’s no need to laugh. She’s doing well.”

  “I know,” he said. He straightened in his chair and stretched back, making a giant W with an arm up on either side of his head. “It’s just that we went over this in the study group yesterday. So I know she knows it.”

  Gillian turned to him and scowled. She glanced at me quickly and then back to him. “I know,” she snapped. “I have this.”

  “Let her finish,” Mrs. Attison said.

  We all waited, but Gillian was clearly disturbed. I wanted to jump up and help her because I had a vague sense of where I thought she was going wrong, but I couldn’t be certain because I hadn’t reviewed and I really needed to. None of it stuck unless I went over it a dozen times. Still, I thought I could help her. I raised my hand.

  Mrs. Attison shook her head. “You had your chance, Julianna. You’ll have to let today’s zero sit there with you for a while. Think about what one simple zero can do for your whole grade.”

  “I don’t need her help,” Gillian said. The acid in her voice hung in the air. Even Mrs. Attison knew something was up.

  “Okay,” she said. “We leave all that personal stuff at the door,” she reminded us. “What happened in the study group yesterday?” She waved her hand before anyone could respond. “I don’t mean, tell me what you all were doing, because I know you all were doing something, only it had nothing to do with calculus. That’s too bad. Because we’re less than a week away from our next exam.”

  “We studied,” Freddie said. “Look,” he continued, walking to the front of the room. He took the SMART Board pen from Gillian. She stood next to him. Too pissed to let him have the spotlight alone. “We were all trying to solve this quadric the same way, and then I realized we just had to invert the way we were looking at it.”

  He moved quickly, erased some of Gillian’s work, laughed when he took part of the grid out, made some notes in the white space, and reworked the solution. When he finished, he spun around and addressed the class, leaning back on one leg, waving his hands like he was making a speech in the locker room.

  “It’s all about predictions, right?” He nodded to one of his buddies on the hockey team. “I mean, we can predict a certain amount based on what we know,” Freddie continued. “Like, if I had a stack of pucks for every goal I scored.”

  I couldn’t listen to the rest. He was so smug. I knew exactly what he was talking about, and it had nothing to do with what he’d just done on the board. Right there in front of Mrs. Attison. Some people in the room were wide-eyed and quiet, two of his buddies snickered along, but I tried to catch Gillian’s eye. I wanted her to know how much I hated what was happening, but when she finally looked back at me, I knew it was me she hated, instead.

  After class, even though Gillian tried to rush out ahead of me, I caught her in the hall. “Gillian,” I said, holding her by the elbow. “Wait up.”

  She yanked herself free and ignored me, marching down the hallway and heading for the side door to the path toward the admin building.

  “Wait,” I said again. She paused. “Where are you even going right now?” I assumed she was heading toward the student center for her committee meeting before hitting the library. “Please. I need to talk to you.”

  “No you don’t. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “Gillian, come on.” There was something waking in me, something rolling over, lifting its head and beginning to crawl up and out of me. I felt it, a weight rising. A heartbeat. “Please. Listen to me.”

  “There’s nothing you can say that is going to make me feel better. You are such a hypocrite.”

  “No. It’s not what you think.”

  “Well, actually, you’re right.” She stuck a finger out in front of my face. “It’s what I saw. I saw what happened, Jules. There’s no pretending.”

  “That’s what I mean. No one else saw but you. And I really—”

  “Yeah, but everybody knows.”

  I could hear my voice shifting, ripping out of me, like I was fighting for breath. “I didn’t want any of that to happen.”

  “Guess what? It did.”

  “No.” I could feel them, the actual words I wanted to say, shaping. “No, I mean what he did to me.”

  “Oh God,” she said, stepping back. “Don’t even try to play it like that. I saw you. The two of you, all over each other. You weren’t even hiding. You were right there in the open.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah! And what would have happened if I hadn’t walked up? Maybe then you would have found somewhere to hide and who knows what else?” Gillian shook her head. “Total slut.”

  “We didn’t have sex.”

  “Grow up,” Gillian said. “You just screwed around with someone else’s boyfriend. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t have sex. You probably would have if I hadn’t broken it up.” She shifted her weight, put her hands in her coat pockets, and pouted, and I realized she was mimicking me. “ ‘I don’t need a boy this year.’ ” She sniffed. “Please. What an act. You gross me out.”

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even find a few words to block what she was saying.

  “Here’s what I want to know,” she went on. “Ethan won’t tell me. Plus he thinks he doesn’t remember what happened—blackout, he keeps saying—but he does. He knows.”

  “It’s not like that. I didn’t want that to happen.”

  “Here’s what I really want to know. How many times?”

  “What?”

  “How many times have you done this behind my back? The two of you.”

  “We didn’t.”

  “Yeah, right.” Her nose was wrinkled in disgust. “Well, he’s all yours again. I’m finished with him.”

  “You’re the one who was cheating with him on me last year,” I shot back.

  “Here it is. Finally.” She glanced around like she was making a speech to an invisible crowd. “This is why you’ve been a total bitch. You think I was cheating?”

  “I know you were.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with him. He’s an asshole.”

  “Yeah, well, guess you like assholes.”

  “I hate him, don’t you get it?” I pleaded.

  “You think you are so smart, Jules. You think you’re the smartest person here. So superior. You’ve got it all figured out. ‘We’re trapped in the system, man,’ ” she said in a horrifyingly perfectly exaggerated way. I’d said that to her the year before. “ ‘Lemmings,’ you called us.”

  “No. I didn’t mean it like that.”


  “No. Fuck you, Jules. You’re not superior.” She took a deep breath and smiled. Just like that, she was a wall of ice. Calm and smooth and collected.

  Fullbrook’s unspoken motto: This is how to grow up—eat shit and learn how to smile.

  CHAPTER 23

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  I was dashing out of the sciences building at the end of classes on my way to a hockey meeting, when I saw Jules coming up the path from the language building with her head down and her earbuds in. She nearly bumped right into me. I could have moved—she looked so burrowed into her own little world—but I was sick of us avoiding each other all week after the party. It didn’t make any sense. I’d told her what had happened with Vinny, and then she’d promptly ignored me—like she was holding it against me or something.

  I stood right in front of her, and she pulled up, then stumbled back, faltering. She squinted at me, and threw her head down, trying to walk around me. I grabbed her arm. “Hey,” I said.

  She yanked her arm out of my grip and yelled at me. “Get out of my way.”

  “I just want to talk. This is so weird.”

  She pulled one earbud out. “I’m not weird. I just have to get going.”

  “Hold up. What the heck is wrong?”

  She glared at my gym bag thrown over my shoulder. “You have a meeting to get to, don’t you?” She nodded, and continued before I could say anything. “You’re just like the rest of them, Bax, aren’t you? Deep down. You really are, huh?”

  “What are you talking about? I was going to ask you the same thing. Aren’t you now just like the rest of them?”

  She pointed at me as she made a wide circle around me. “Just leave me alone.” She’d lost the sting in her voice, and I could see her eyes, red rimmed and watery—like she was dehydrated or had just cried it all out for too long. I took a step closer, but she backed away.