A Taxonomy of Love by Rachael Allen (8)

I’m standing at the checkout line, typing in my code to pay for my chicken-finger meal and three skim milks, when I realize that Hope isn’t at our table. She’s perched next to Dean at a table full of juniors. I knew she went with him to get catfish or something, but I didn’t know that meant she was with him. Well, until now.

It’s finally over, I guess. I can take Hope out of the Maybe/Hopefully/Someday with Spencer column and file her under Girls Tainted by Dean. And it’s worse than I ever thought it would be because I forgot to factor in the part where she’s my only real friend. I stand there with my tray, every second that passes feeling like some huge horrible thing, a blinking sign over my head that reads This guy is a loser with nowhere to sit.

I could sit at our usual table. It’s not like Hope and I were sitting there alone. But I don’t really know any of the other people that well, and what if they were only tolerating me because of Hope?

I don’t have a better idea, so I walk over and sit down. No one tries to stop me, which I take as a positive sign. No one really tries to talk to me, either, though. Which is fine. I just need to keep my head down and get through this day. I try to open my milk carton, but I guess my fingers are shaking because I almost spill it. I set down the milk and take a slow breath. Not at school. Not here. A few seconds pass, and a guy sits down next to me. He’s in Hope’s chair, but I’m guessing she won’t be back for it anytime soon. I’ve seen him before. I think his name is—

“Hi. I’m Paul.”

Yeah, that’s it.

“I’m Spencer.”

Well, that wasn’t so terrible.

“Are you in Mr. Byers’s class first period?” he asks. His voice is deep and gravelly for how skinny he is.

“Yeah. You, too?”

He nods, and things get awkwardly quiet for a minute, so I get to work on my chicken fingers, which suddenly seem edible again.

“So, you play Magic?” It’s more of a statement than a question.

My hands freeze. How does he know?

“I saw a deck sticking out of your backpack yesterday.”

I relax, but only marginally. Is he going to out me in front of the entire table? Get me banished? I wonder if he’d believe me if I said they weren’t mine.

“I play, too,” he says.

“Oh. Oh, well, cool.”

“Not, like, at school, but if you ever want to hang out and bring your decks?”

“Yeah, that would be great.” This guy is rapidly shooting to the top of my Potential New Friends for Spencer list.

“Cool.” He grins, and I give him my number so he can text me, and we talk about Marvel movies for the rest of lunch.

First day without Hope, and I am owning this. I sit a little taller in my plastic chair. When the bell rings, Paul and I walk together to put away our trays. This could be really cool, this whole having-a-friend-who’s-a-guy thing. Hope hates playing Magic. I had to trade her watching High School Musical AND High School Musical 2 to get her to play last time. I can only handle so much Zac Efron.

I slide my tray onto the conveyor belt and back up. Well, I attempt to back up. There is a large mass standing behind me.

“Watch out.” It’s Ethan Wells. Ethan “I break people’s faces and make small children piss themselves” Wells.

“Yeah, watch it, Twitch.” His friend gives me a shove, but I stay standing.

I don’t want to look like a loser in front of Paul, and my mouth shoots off before I can help myself. Not a tic, just pure, zero to sixty annoyance. “Dude, chill. It was an accident.” And then, under my breath: “Lay off the ’roids.”

The friend has better hearing than I anticipated. “Are you gonna take that?” he asks Ethan. And then when Ethan doesn’t move: “E, seriously, are you gonna take that?”

Ethan looks back and forth between the two of us and sighs. He grabs his friend’s tray and slowly peels the top piece of bread off what’s left of a half-eaten PB&J. And then he claps me on the back. Not hard or anything, but the sandwich definitely sticks. “You should have kept your mouth shut,” he says in a low voice.

Paul watches with wide eyes, but he’s on the fringe—they don’t know he’s with me. And then Vice Principal Parks walks up.

“Boys, is everything okay here?”

I whip around so she can’t see my back. Ethan and his friend paste on big ole grins. “Oh, sure, everything’s fine.”

Everybody scatters. School administration has that effect on people. Then the bell rings, and everybody scatters more. I duck into the bathroom to take off my shirt. By the time I come out, Paul is gone.

I know he had to get to class. The bell already rang. It probably has nothing to do with not wanting to be friends with a kid who has a target on his back (literally). I can probably expect a text from him inviting me to play Magic, oh, approximately never.

I spend the rest of the day wearing my undershirt, my polo with its peanut-butter badge of shame stowed safely in my backpack. I don’t talk to anyone, and no one talks to me.

After school, I sneak up to the attic and look at pictures of my mom and wish I could just disappear. Or maybe jump out the window. I’m pretty high up. Ants can fall from practically any height and not die because they have a low terminal velocity or something. If I jumped, I don’t think I’d be able to walk away.

I shake off the thought, and step away from the window. I go back to the photos of Mom and will them to pull me in. There’s one of her at a church picnic—all these families, all the same, and then her. She pops out of every photo, more vibrant, more alive than all those regular people. Sometimes I think, Well, of course she looks like that to you. She’s your mom. But other times, I know it’s not just me. It’s her. Her smile is too wild. The violet streaks in her dark brown hair scream, “I don’t belong here.”

I flip to another photo. This one is of my mom holding a guitar—which makes sense. Sometimes I think about her singing us to sleep, and I wonder if I’m really getting her voice right. In movies and stuff, they’ll show a mom or dad leaving a kid, and whoever’s left wants to protect them, so they hide all the letters and birthday cards the other parent is sending, until the big climactic scene where the kid finds out their missing parent really cared all along, and here are the years’ worth of letters to prove it. They’re so glad they weren’t really abandoned, but also so very hurt that the other parent lied to them. You know what hurts worse than being lied to about the letters? The letters not existing at all. I used to tear the house apart trying to find them. And at first, when I couldn’t find them, I thought it was okay. My dad was smart. He was burning them or trashing them before I could ever get to them. So I made sure to be the one to check the mail. Every day for a whole year, I opened the box and reached for a letter that never came.

How am I ever supposed to figure anything out when such a big piece of me is missing? I barely even knew her, but that didn’t stop her from totally screwing me up. I kick the support beam in front of me like it’s to blame for everything that’s wrong with my life. Something falls from the rafters and clocks me in the head. After some swearing, I note that it is a big something (the knot on my head confirms). It is also a guitar-case something. And unlike everything else in this attic, it is completely devoid of dust. I don’t understand and then I do, all at once. This is Mom’s, and Dad keeps it here. Not only that, he takes care of it. He must, like, come up here and look at it and stuff. The guitar on the inside is beautiful, too. Old. Battered.

Before I know it, my cheeks are wet.

I hear footsteps on the attic ladder and rush to wipe my face. I wasn’t, like, full-on crying, so hopefully it won’t show. Hope appears at the opening to the attic and creaks her way across the warped floorboards to me.

My first thought: Thank goodness it’s not Pam, because I didn’t hide the guitar.

My second thought: She knows I’ve been crying. I can tell by the way her face is pinching together.

“Are you okay?” Her hand reaches for my shoulder, but I shrug it away.

“Dean’s not up here.”

She takes a step back. “I wasn’t looking for Dean. I was looking for you.”

I don’t say anything, just start putting the photos back into boxes.

“I guess you already know we’re going to the movies tonight.” Dean might have mentioned it on the way home from school. She is actually wringing her hands now. I didn’t know that was a thing people did in real life. “I’m still not even sure how it happened. Dean—he has this way of pulling people in. He’s like the sun.”

“Or a black hole.”

Her mouth curves up in a half smile, and the atmosphere in the attic feels 80 percent less toxic.

Then she has to go and make the pity face. “I’m sorry, Spence.”

“Why?” Why did she have to do that? Why couldn’t we just pretend I never liked her? It’s not like I ever told her. Now I’m permanently cast as the loser guy doomed to watch his brother date the girl he likes.

“Because.” She gestures between us like that will explain everything. More hand-wringing.

My eyes narrow. “You know what? I think you should go.”

Hope makes the I’ve-just-been-slapped face, but I don’t stop there. “I’m busy with a lot of stuff right now, and I don’t really want to talk about it. You should really just go and see Dean.” I inject his name with as much scorn as possible.

Whatever spell that was holding her frozen breaks.

“Fine.” She holds up her hands and backs away. “I was just trying to—forget it. Maybe I will go see Dean.”

She climbs back down the ladder, stomping on each rung as she goes.

Part of me wishes I could get a do-over, and the other part of me knows I will always ruin it no matter how many chances I get.