I choked down my salad as fast as I could. Meghan and Bick started tickling each other. A few of the senior girls rolled their eyes and stood up to leave. I took their cue and got up myself.
I hooked up with Kim and Nora on the quad, where I gave them a blow-by-blow of the whole weird lunch. We speculated about whether Meghan was still a virgin.
Two weeks later, not even Meghan was talking to me.
I took my raisin salad over to the table where Hutch sat listening to his headphones. We didn’t speak. I read my H&P homework while I ate.
1 Leper: Leprosy is a supercontagious disease that rots your body so badly that bits of you actually fall off. In the Tate Prep universe, a leper is someone with no friends.2 I know there are people who don’t have access to clean water and toothpaste and that my life is super privileged. Mr. Wallace talks a lot about poverty and the way it’s a cycle of problems that stop people from being able to get or keep high-paying jobs; they can’t clean up and dress up to get the job that they could do if they only had it—that kind of thing.
But this was not the case with John Hutchinson aka Hutch. He lives in a huge house in a gated community; I know, because it’s right near Jackson’s house, and I’d see him go by sometimes, his mom driving a Mercedes.
He was choosing to have dirty hair.3 For your edification, I related the Nora/Hutch conversation to my dad, and he explained it: Hutch was quoting a line from a 1980 song by a metal group called AC/DC. The scene of my dad singing this song (he knew all the lyrics) and playing air guitar is just too horrible to describe, so I’ll leave it to your imagination.4 That was so Hutch. His heavy-metal quote is not even heavy metal that other metal people are listening to, so there’s literally no one in his entire generation who could possibly have a clue. He’s into retro metal.5 More on that later. Right now, I just want to say again: Never throw anything away in a school garbage can that you want to keep secret. Never.6 Re: the lacrosse girls. The ones in my grade form kind of a sporty clique that I’ve never been part of. Maybe because I swim in the fall, and most of them play soccer. Or because I’m goalie, so I’m not out on the field with them. Or because (now) I’m a famous leper/slut. Anyway, they’re nice, but they’re serious; they’re on leadership committees and honor rolls. Not a lot of opposite-sex action is going on. They just don’t make me laugh, and I don’t make them laugh either.
They’re very team-spirity.7 Bick: His real name is Travis Schumacher. But have you ever seen the movie Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro? Scariest thing ever. De Niro plays a kind of sad, likable psychopath named Travis Bickle. If you ever hear people going, “You talkin’ to ME?” they’re imitating Taxi Driver. Anyway, Travis Schumacher… Travis Bickle … Bickle… Bick. There you go.8 Some more complaints against Meghan:
1. She’s always rubbing the back of her neck and moistening her lips with her tongue like she’s in a porn video (not that I’ve ever seen one). Whatever. It’s practically indecent, and very annoying, and boys seem to like it. At least, they stare at her when she does it, even if she’s only asking them about a homework assignment.
2. When people are sitting around in a hot tub (a very Seattle thing to do at parties), she’s always in a bikini. The rest of us wear T-shirts and boxers.
3. When we were reading Othello for Brit Lit, our teacher was trying to point out to us that it’s basically impossible to know anything for sure and certain, and asked if there was anything anyone in class felt we absolutely knew for sure. Meghan was the only one who raised her hand and this is what she said: “I know my boyfriend loves me.”9 I don’t think the senior girls like her much either. They eat lunch with her, but you never see her leaving with any of them, or sitting with any of them on the quad unless Bick is there too. After all, Meghan is a sophomore making time with the punk-rock-loving, rugby-playing, crew-rowing spiky-haired seniorness of Bick—and in a school as small as Tate, that seriously reduces the number of old-enough, hot-enough potential boyfriends for the senior girls.10 Except for one time, when her Jeep broke down just as she was dropping me off. She came in and called the tow truck. After that, she went into our bathroom, did whatever in there, came out and asked me, “Where’s your bathtub?”
She seemed almost freaked out when I told her we didn’t have one. Just the shower. I mean, it’s a houseboat. There’s not a lot of room—hello? Kim, Nora, Jackson and Cricket have been in my bathroom a million times and none of them ever said anything about it, and Meghan’s comment definitely gave me one of those moments that I have every now and again at Tate, where I think: I am not the same as these rich people.
But after the weirdness of that one interaction died down, it was actually okay having Meghan over. We watched some goofy stuff on after-school TV until her mom picked her up.
4. Gideon (but it was just from afar.)
Gideon Van Deusen is Nora’s older brother. He graduated already and took a year off, driving around the country visiting unusual places like the world’s only corn palace and the museum of surgical science. Then he’s going to Evergreen, deferred admission.
I liked him starting in sixth grade, when he was in ninth. He had intense eyes. It began when I was over at Nora’s house playing video games. Gideon must not have had anything better to do, because he was hanging around with us. He told a funny story about how the week before, his youth group leader from church brought in two loaves of banana bread for everyone to eat. One loaf was nice-fluffy and sweet; the other was all sunk in and weighed like a pound. The leader said the second one had been made with the exact same ingredients as the first —only they were put together in the wrong order. He told the kids that the wrong order made the whole banana bread taste gross, and it was the same thing with sex. If you had sex before marriage, you had done it in the wrong order. And you would turn out gross. But if you did everything in the right order, meaning not having sex until your wedding night, you came out wonderful, fluffy and sweet. Angel material. So all the boys and girls should save themselves for marriage.
I thought this story was exotic because (1) my family doesn’t go to church, and before Gideon told this story I
