School is a process, a series of hoops to be jumped through, set at the appropriate heights for whoever the jumper is. Mine are high, and while there are days that I resent the mental acrobatics necessary for me to clear them, I also realize that they’ve been positioned there for a reason. It has been determined that I am capable of performing at that level. All I have to do is prove it.
Senior year has been no more taxing than the others. Assigned novels are longer and the equations more convoluted, but nothing has set me back yet. Colleges have been courting me since I was a junior, but my sights have been set on Oberlin since I picked up a pamphlet from the band director as a sixth grader. I can get a degree in psychology as well as a performance degree from their conservatory, something that Dad thinks is hilarious. He told me if my goal was to drive people crazy with my constant playing, I’d already accomplished it.
That’s when Mom bought him the earplugs.
Dad tried to steer me toward an economics major, telling me that music might be my passion but I needed to think rationally about employment. He said taxes only sound boring and can provide a reliable income. I sat through an hour lecture about how there’s a sense of calm to be found in columns of integers, and that numbers never lie. So I found a copy of our cell phone bill and highlighted all the calls from his account to an unfamiliar number that always happened right around the time he got off work. I mailed it to his office with a Post-it attached that said, “You’re right, Dad! Numbers don’t lie. Love, Sasha.”
He left me alone after that. Like pretty much all the time.
My fingers fly through my locker combination without thought, my mind idly following the junior high band as they murder our fight song, its agonizing death floating down the hallway. They’ve pounded through the first sixteen measures, and I’m bracing myself for the bridge when my locker is slammed shut, my index finger two inches from losing some length.
“What the hell?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Isaac Harver says as he leans against the wall.
My heart hits at least a hundred beats per minute as I glance up and down the hall, but there’s hardly anyone here this early. Just me, the sixth-grade morning class using the shared band room, and the only person in the world I know who actually owns a black leather jacket.
And somehow Isaac wears it like it’s any other coat, as if he could take it off and still look like a badass. I glance at the tattoo trailing down his neck into his white T-shirt and the scabs on his knuckles from where—the word is—he punched out Jade McCarren’s dad last week when he shorted him on weed.
Intimidating or not he almost took off one of my fingers, and I need all ten if I’m going to Oberlin.
“Thinking,” I say. “Not your normal mode of operation is it?”
He smiles and I stop breathing for a second, either because he might be about to stab me or because he has dimples.
“So, what?” he says. “You came over to the dark side for a minute when you gave me your number?”
I yank my locker open for the second time. “I did not give you my number,” I say between clenched teeth, and my anger makes him take a step back. People are always surprised when roses have a few thorns, like the girls who wear khakis and live with our natural hair color aren’t ever going to bite.
“Yeah . . .” Isaac’s eyes narrow as he watches me fish a copy of Great Expectations out of my locker, even though I have no idea why I need it, since English isn’t until after lunch. “Except you did.”
It’s my turn to slam the locker, and I’m about to say something nasty when there’s a hand on my shoulder, heavy, cool, and calm.
“Everything okay?” Heath asks, his voice as steady as his pulse.
Isaac doesn’t look at my boyfriend. I can feel his eyes on me even though I’m staring at my locker.
“Yeah, man,” Isaac says. “Everything’s peaches.” Then he flicks a strand of my hair over my shoulder as he walks away.
Heath’s grip on me tightens. “What was that?”
I turn into him, switching my view from the numbers on my locker to the steady, sensible third buttonhole on Heath’s shirt. It’s Tuesday, so he’s wearing his blue oxford.
“Nothing,” I tell him, my eyes slipping slightly upward to the collar of his new tee, crisp and white, barely stretched. I remember that Isaac’s was worn out, with the tiniest drop of rust on the edge that was probably blood.
“Just a psycho being a psycho,” I add, because Heath hasn’t let go of my shoulder, and I can feel the tips of his manicured nails through my sweater.
I head toward the band room, Heath in my wake as the sixth graders spill out to get to their wing before the rest of the high schoolers fill the halls. I swear I can feel the strand of hair that Isaac touched burning right through my clothes.
Which makes no sense because we’ve barely exchanged ten words our entire lives, even in a school this small. The only memory I have of him is from third grade, when he wrote the f-word in red crayon on the bottom of the tube slide, and we all dared each other to go look at it.
He’s at the end of the hall, headed for the back door where smokers sneak one before first period. I watch him take the turn, part of me hoping I never see him again and another part willing him to look back at me. Then he’s gone, and my heart stops.
It actually stops.
I make the oddest noise, the slightest oooh, as I lose the beat, my hands clamping to my chest as if I can reset the metronome there with my fingers. Heath is at my side, hands tight on both arms now, forcing my arms deeper into their sockets, my collarbone protesting. I can’t speak, can’t tell him to stop. My heart has left me. I felt it go, slipping down the hall to follow Isaac. Like a rubber band stretched too far it comes back to me, slamming into my rib cage just as I crumple to the floor.
One beat.
Two.
A thread of regularity.
“I’m fine,” I say to Heath, who came down to the floor with me. “Not enough to eat this morning, I think.”
He digs in his pocket and pulls out a package of granola, which should be some kind of heroism in this moment but instead all I can think is that he’ll be a great dad and somehow that’s unsexy as hell right now.
“Just get me off the floor before anybody sees me,” I say, waving away the granola. He’s a gentleman, hand on my elbow, counting to three, saying “careful,” as I come to my feet.
Heath holds the door to the band room open for me, and I get to my chair without falling, snapping together my clarinet and trying to reclaim the steps of this day, the ones that need to accumulate to get me through the week, the month, the year. Everything that needs to pass to land me where I deserve to be—the first clarinet chair in a bigger room than this, surrounded by real musicians.
Isaac Harver is not going to distract me from that.
And if my heart stops first, I’ll find a way to keep going without it.
I monitor my pulse throughout the day, slipping my fingers onto my wrist and counting, well aware that if I collapse again Heath will call 911 and I’ll spend my evening explaining that my heart travels with Isaac Harver now. Which is just as ridiculous as it sounds, even taken symbolically.
How he got my number I don’t know, but I definitely didn’t give it to him, I reassure myself as I pull the cuff of my sweater back down over my wrist in sixth period. My pulse is right where it’s supposed to be, my heart behaving instead of traipsing toward certain doom. Lilly flops into the seat next to mine, her hair ballooning up into a mushroom cloud that carries nothing more lethal than an overdose of lavender vanilla.
“Hey,” she says. “When you get a chance I need a baby picture for the yearbook.”
I’m still counting heartbeats, so she clarifies.
“The senior baby pictures?” she goes on. “Cole Vance gave us one of him in the tub, but you could totally see his dick. I had to photoshop some bubbles in. They were really small bubbles. But I guess he was a baby then, so he gets a waiver on that one. Although, maybe it matters even on babies? Do some boy babies have bigger—”
I stop her with my hand in the air.
“You need a baby picture of me?”
“Yes.”
“For the layout of senior baby pictures?”
“Yes.”
I nod. “Got it. Stories of Cole Vance’s prepubescent penis not necessary.”
“Brooke thought it was funny,” she huffs.
“Brooke would,” I shoot back. “Just give me the bare minimums of what I need to know. I’m operating on overload as it is.”
And while this is certainly true, I don’t know why it’s suddenly getting to me. Pressure is my environment, like a creature three miles underneath the sea. If you took all the expectations away, the shock would kill me, my lungs flattening and refusing to reinflate.
“You okay?” Lilly asks.
I’m not used to hearing this question. I am always okay. That’s when I realize both my hands are to my chest, shielding my heart from an unseen threat.
“I’m fine,” I snap, dropping my arms to my side.
I love Lilly but Charity Newell is her cousin, and I can’t say for sure that she was entirely happy for me when I defended first chair successfully. She might actually care if I’m okay. She might be checking for cracks in my veneer.
“Did you finish?” I ask, waving Great Expectations in the air to change the subject.
“You bet,” she says, flashing her phone with highlighted SparkNotes.
“Nice,” I say. “Slacker.”
Lilly shrugs. She’s always been this way, smart enough to skate by but not really caring. She’ll be married in five years, have three kids before thirty and call herself happy.
Great expectations, indeed.
Her eyes are glued on Cole as he walks in the room, and I’m guessing her mind might still be on baby pictures, but probably not mine. I roll my eyes and schedule a reminder in my phone to ding the second I walk in the door. If I don’t grab Mom as soon as I get home, I’ll forget. There are bigger things on my mind, and the last thing I need is Lilly hassling me about it if it slips through the cracks.
Heath comes in and gives me a smile, but takes his usual seat at the front. I study the back of his shirt, the precise cut of his hair—always even because he gets it trimmed on schedule. Next to me, Lilly is teasing Cole about bubbles. Legs crossed, body at an angle, eyes cast upward, fingers twisting in her hair. Everything about her is screaming at him to notice her and it’s working.
Meanwhile I’m ramrod straight staring at Heath’s back, well aware that he’d be irritated if he knew his tag was sticking up.
I don’t tell him.