“Okay, everyone, let’s get started. We’ve still got quite a few plant cell notes to get through, so take your notebooks out and get started on the warm-up on the board.”
It’s Thursday.
We’re not even entertaining the idea of labs anymore. Mrs. Shepler’s notes run up through Wednesday. Study guide/review packets on Thursday, check them on Friday and take a quiz.
Repeat on Monday.
It’s boring as shit, but at least it’s easy.
In front of me, Tabby stretches her arms above her head, and for a moment I hold my breath as she arches her back over her chair. And out of habit—and hope—I put one hand over my books and grip my pencil with the other. But her arms drop to her sides. She leans forward over her notebook.
I look at the stupid death grip I have on my pencil and feel my ears start to burn.
Tabby hasn’t done the reach-back in over three weeks. Not since we came back from Thanksgiving. We haven’t spoken since that night.
When Mrs. Shepler hands out study guides a few minutes later, Tabby turns partway round in her chair to hand copies to me and my table partner, Evan Walko, without looking up at me.
I reach forward to take them, and I want to keep reaching, grab her wrist and tell her I’m sorry. Sorry for being a jerk, sorry for losing it, sorry for being such a perverted loser. Even if it just got me a Tabby lecture. Fuck, especially if it got me a Tabby lecture.
Instead, when her eyes flip up and meet mine, I drop mine to the pages in my hand.
“Oh boy. Another packet.”
She gives a weak smile in return and faces forward without a word.
“You may work on your study guides with your partner,” Mrs. Shepler says from the front of the room. “And use your notes. I’ll be around for help if you need it.” At which point she retreats behind her desk and sits down, where she’ll likely remain for the rest of the period.
Tabby doesn’t turn around again.
The rest of the period goes the way it’s gone since Thanksgiving: I work on my study guide in silence, keeping the answers visible for my partner, Evan. I think Evan’s got some serious learning disabilities, so this is kind of our unspoken agreement. I give him all the answers on the study guides and review packets, making it look like we’re working together. So when Evan invariably tanks the quiz on Friday, he’s got enough points from the completed packets to keep him at least passing.
We’ve never really discussed it, this arrangement of ours. It just kind of happened. After I saw his first two quiz grades at the beginning of the year, I started making sure my packets were in the middle of our lab table and that my arm wasn’t blocking his line of vision. One time, he muttered, “Thanks, man,” and I nodded, and that’s the only time we’ve spoken of it.
I suppose it’s not the best way for him to learn science, but I don’t think that’s my job to worry about. And really, what’s Mrs. Shepler going to do, anyway? Tell him to find the answers in his notes and lecture him to study more? Yeah, sign me up.
At least this way, Evan passes and we both get to feel human.
So as Evan scribbles down my definition for eukaryotic cells, I have a moment to torture myself and watch Tabby.
Her thick hair is pulled back in one long red braid that falls over a soft, pale yellow sweater. She taps the back of her pencil absently against her exposed neck just below her ear as she talks quietly and laughs with Rebecca Gaskins.
I watch the two of them work, looking from one to the other, trying to make sense of things. In my head, it’s like the side-by-side QB comparison that flashes on the screen during halftime in a football game, their pictures at the top, their running statistics stacked up underneath for easy, objective comparison.
Yeah, Rebecca’s not bad-looking. She’s way taller than Tabby, and really, now that I’m thinking about it, she’s got a pretty fantastic body. She’s smart and friendly and all that. Would I be interested if she asked me out, picking up where our torrid, three-day relationship left off in fifth grade? (Not going to happen.)
She was on my list. Tabby knows it. But that’s not really the same thing. That list was stupid and perverted and degrading—all the things Tabby thought about it and all the things I feel so much shame over—but that was kind of the whole point of the rankings, the point of this stupid-ass exercise right now: to ignore the blatant perversion, to ignore the shame. To take the shit that makes no sense, that I can’t seem to control, and factor it out.
Isn’t that what sports analysts do? Isn’t that thinking like a scientist, Mrs. Shepler? I mean, I could have called it Freshman Class Physical Attractiveness Rankings (FC-PAR) and avoided most of this trouble. It might still seem a little degrading, but it doesn’t connote the involvement of my dick—rhetorical dick—the way Do List does.
But what can I say? I was hurt and angry, and Matt’s List of Prettiest Girls didn’t feel right.
Not that it matters now.
But so what if Rebecca Gaskins did ask me out? She’s attractive. She’s nice. Say we went to the movies and started making out (putting me in double digits in that category. Minus nine.). Can you just do that with people? I mean, how do you share that kind of closeness with someone—to show her she’s the one you want—when deep down you really want someone else? I’d feel like even more of an asshole than I already do.
Yeah, I could make out with Rebecca Gaskins, and it would probably be pretty awesome. But at the end of the night, I’m still going to be wishing it could be Tabby.
As the bell rings and Evan finishes copying the last answer onto his packet, Mrs. Shepler reminds us of tomorrow’s quiz.
“Remember to study,” she says from behind her desk as we file out her door.
Which leads to the other daily occurrence since we’ve come back from Thanksgiving break: Liam Branson is waiting for Tabby outside the door. I’m right behind her, like always, and I see his face light up when she steps into the hallway, and even though I can’t see it, I know hers is doing the same.
“ ’Sup, Matt,” he says, and gives me a fist bump over Tabby’s shoulder, where his arm subsequently lands. He’s been extra nice and supportive in practice since Thanksgiving. Awesome.
“ ’Sup, Liam,” I reply, and turn to walk the other way.
Even though we spent the first three months of the year walking the same way—literally arm in arm some days—Tabby never asks why I’m going the other way and never calls for me to walk along with them.
And it hits me, deep in the gut, that I’m Rebecca Gaskins. Well, the hypothetical wanting-to-ask-me-out version.
I could have my moment. I could lean in and kiss Tabby with everything I have—hands on her face, in the rain, sound track rising in the background—and maybe she’d even kiss me back.
But at the end of the night, she’ll still be wishing it could be with Liam Branson.