EMILY DICKINSON
On Tuesday, Ms. Ringgold returns our literary time periods tests. I earn a ninety-eight and a note in purple glitter pen saying how much she enjoys having me in class. Chatham receives a ninety and a pat on the back.
“I got an A—a ninety. A big, fat nine zero.” He waves his paper in the air, and the entire class cracks up.
“Seriously, dude? You’re making me look bad,” Derek complains, but he’s smiling as he flips his messy brown curls off his forehead.
Chatham winks at me, and the trembly feeling I’ve come to associate with being in the same room with him flickers in my belly. He hasn’t confronted me about another tutoring session this week or about a date this weekend. If he does, I don’t know what I’ll do. One minute, I think I should just do it. The next, I know the risk is too great.
“Your grades were good.” Ms. Ringgold pauses. “So good, in fact, I’m going to let y’all have the rest of the period to review for another class or work on your annotations and analysis essays.” She beams as she rotates a pot of violets in the windowsill. The woman must have two green thumbs, because the flowers are plump and cascading over the sides of their mismatched pots.
A few people get up to go work with their partners. Chatham slides his desk up to mine, his knee grazing my leg. We’re both wearing shorts, hanging on to the last days of warm weather before the wind off the Atlantic rushes in with her biting teeth.
“So, partner, thanks for tutoring me.” He drapes an arm across the back of my chair while I try not to stare at the ropey muscles in his forearm.
“There’s no need to thank me.” I open my notebook, flipping pages, looking for my Dickinson quotes.
His hand brushes the back of my neck as he removes his arm, placing a palm on my papers, stopping me mid-page turn. “Sure, there is. Making an A is huge.”
“Why? You seem really smart.” I glance around the room to see if anyone’s watching us.
“I am pretty smart when it comes to playing basketball, or even with math and science,” he says, picking up my pen and doodling a picture of a lighthouse in the margin of my paper. “Not so much with reading.”
With his head bowed, I can’t see his eyes.
“When I was in first grade, I had a hard time learning to read. My mom took me to all these doctors. We found out I had tunnel vision.” He stops drawing for a second to study my face. “It sucked being the only kid reading those little phonics books when everybody else had moved on to Magic Tree House.”
I can’t help smiling. Jack and Annie were my best friends in first grade, the year before I was diagnosed with epilepsy, back when I still believed magical tree houses packed with books could transport me to faraway lands.
He goes back to his sketch, filling in the horizontal black bands around the lighthouse.
“But you didn’t give up on reading.” I’ve only known Chatham for a few weeks, but a few weeks is long enough to know he’s not a quitter.
“Nope, and look at me now—making As, hanging with the smartest girl in class.” He’s writing something under the lighthouse sketch.
I tilt my head to read his words. Bodie Island Lighthouse? Please?
“Oh. Uh . . . I have that family-day thing with my mom.” I shove my hands under my thighs.
The thing is, I really, really want to say yes. On one hand, all I ever do is wish for normal. Cute high school boy, plus crush, plus fun outing, sounds pretty normal. On the other hand, saying yes is opening myself to serious physical and emotional peril. I’ve weighed the consequences, and no amount of normal is worth the risk of humiliating myself in front of Chatham. It would be bad if we were at school and I seized. It would be worse than horrible if we were alone somewhere without any adults trained to handle a seizure, and he had to care for me while I puked or worse.
“Which day?” He watches my face as he leans over to pull an orange out of his backpack.
“Saturday.” I pause. “My mom’s super strict about stuff like that.” A burst of citrus invades my nose when his thumb punches through the thick skin and into the heart of the fruit.
“What about Sunday?”
“I have plans on Sunday too.” I draw a dark cloud above his lighthouse without explaining that my unofficial plans involve an eight-year-old and a game of Monopoly.
He crosses his arms, his brow creased.
Somehow, I doubt Chatham has much experience with rejection. I open my mouth to apologize, but before I can, Derek lumbers over.
“What’s your secret, dude?” He props himself on the corner of my desk, smiling. “I thought we had this unspoken agreement to maintain the status quo, the mediocrity, to not stand out academically.”
“You’re looking at it.” Chatham gestures toward me with both hands, like one of those TV hand models on the Home Shopping Network Mom loves to watch even though she never has the money to buy anything.
Derek sits up, his eyes wide. “Really?”
I flip a page, trying to look focused, and wish his voice weren’t quite so booming. When I look across the room, I notice Jules and the girl sitting beside her watching us, like they’re studying us for a piece of creative writing or maybe a nonfiction piece on dating rituals.
“How about you share the love, man?” Derek slides off the desk, squatting so he’s eye level with us. “My GPA could use a boost.”
“No can do. She’s all mine.” Chatham grins, but his jaw is set, his eyes firm.
Derek throws up a hand in quick surrender—like he doesn’t want to mess with bowed-up, ready-to-spring Chatham.
Chatham’s last three words thaw the frost around my heart a little. She’s all mine. She’s all mine. She’s all mine. I feel like that bacon-craving dog on the Beggin’ Strips commercial—panting, Bacon, bacon, bacon.
When I look up, Ayla’s watching too, smiling from ear to ear. She wiggles her eyebrows like she can read my mind, and I laugh.
Chatham and Derek turn in unison to face me.
“What’s funny?” Chatham asks, squinting, obviously trying to read my thoughts.
“Nothing.” I uncurl my spine. My shoulders rise higher than usual. Chatham and Derek couldn’t appreciate the irony of the situation. Maybe Ms. Ringgold could, if this were a scene in a book. She’d probably say it was a cliché, though—the two cutest guys in the class vying for the awkward, bookish girl’s attention. Or, in this case, her tutoring abilities. It’s like my own strange little version of a fairy tale, and I want to freeze it in time to smile over once I’ve left this place.
When the bell rings, the fairy tale continues. “I’ll walk you to class,” Chatham says, grabbing my hand.
I breathe slowly, picturing a brown bag expanding and deflating in front of my mouth, so I won’t hyperventilate. “Cool.”
The one-word response doesn’t sound cool at all. I make a mental note to work on my vocabulary. Thankfully, the hall is too loud and too crowded to carry on a conversation.
As we approach the door to my next class, Chatham squeezes my hand, stopping me in my tracks. We’re pressed together against the lockers by a river of bodies.
Chatham studies my hand. “You don’t seem like the kind of girl to play hard to get.” The corners of his mouth turn up in a half smile.
If the situation weren’t so unbelievably insane, I’d laugh out loud. Me play hard to get? “No, it’s not like that at all.” I glance toward my class. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“How do you know?”
The scene unfolds like a movie in my head. I’m having this whole out-of-body experience, watching myself from above as I interact with the cutest boy in eastern North Carolina. Except I don’t know what my next line is. Though I can tell you it’s definitely not “I can’t go on a date with you because I have epilepsy.”
The bell interrupts us. “You’re going to be late. I’ve got to go.” I pull away, telling my feet to move, but they ignore me. It’s like the few times I’ve braved standing at the water’s edge. A wave washes over my feet, warm and frothy. I freeze, standing perfectly still. Even though I know I’m not moving, it feels like I’m slipping forward toward the sea when the wave recedes, sucking at the sand around my feet. Chatham’s like that: an invisible current, a swell of floodwater threatening to wash out my foundation. If I don’t reinforce the levees around my heart, I’m going to float away. Or drown.
“It’s just my mom’s crazy protective.” I tell myself it’s not a total lie and avoid his skeptical gaze. When my science teacher pokes his head out in the hallway, shooting us the evil eye, my feet decide to cooperate, dragging me into the lab and away from Chatham. I mouth the word “Sorry” as I slip inside the classroom.