What to Say Next by Julie Buxbaum (14)

I am no longer invisible. Eighty-three percent of the people I have walked by this morning stopped and stared and then whispered to their friends. The other seventeen percent did actual double takes, the kind I’ve heretofore only seen in cartoons where necks are bendable. I look different. My hair is short and choppy instead of hanging long and in my face. My clothes look more like what the popular guys in school wear.

I try not to think about the random fold by my left shin or that the denim feels tight and bends in all the wrong places. With each step, I miss my old khakis, of which I have three identical pairs that I’ve rotated on a daily basis for the past two years. I can smell my new hair putty, which is coconut-y and not altogether unpleasant, so long as I don’t dwell on its sticky texture. Miney applied it this morning, using a dose the volume of two quarters, and I filmed the process so I will be able to do it the exact same way once she goes back to school.

“Holy crap, Little D. I can’t believe you didn’t let me do this sooner,” Miney said this morning over breakfast, after I came downstairs and, at my mother’s insistence, stood still so they could get a look at the new me.

“You’re going to have the girls eating out of your hand,” my mom added.

As I walk down the hallway now, I think of all those montage scenes in teen movies where the main character, invariably a girl, tries on a plethora of outrageous dresses and hats, closes and opens dressing room doors in keeping with the music’s beat, and then finally emerges supposedly transformed by something as mundane as a new hairdo and a skimpy dress. What I’ve never understood is why the boys are always shocked when they get their first glance of their newly made-up date, as if the girls weren’t already beautiful despite their penchant for androgynous clothing. Do screenwriters think teenage boys lack all power of imagination? At least for me, the opposite is true. I’m pretty confident I already know what Kit looks like naked.

Despite Miney’s best efforts, I do not feel transformed. I cannot imagine Kit at the bottom of a staircase looking up at me with a slack jaw. And certainly, the thought of anyone eating from my hand like a goat at a petting zoo grosses me out. Is that really a thing?

“Wow, smokin’, Señor Drucker,” Abby says as I walk into AP Spanish. My headphones are on, but my music is off in case I see Kit, who wasn’t in the parking lot at 7:57 as I had hoped and has so far missed our morning classes. This is the second time in my entire high school career that Abby has spoken to me, the first being four days ago when I bumped into Jessica and she called me a freak. I don’t understand if she’s making fun of me, so I just ignore her. Also, I cannot communicate with anyone who wears that much perfume.

“He looks like a different person,” Willow says. Does she think I can’t hear her because of my headphones, or does she just not care? “I mean, dude.”

I practice her inflection in my head, the way she emphasizes the dude, to run it by Miney later so she can translate. I mean, dude.

“Lo siento,” Kit says to Señora Rubenstein when she finally slips into class thirteen minutes after the bell. “Car problemos.”

Today, Kit’s again wearing that big white button-down shirt, and her hair is pulled up in its Monday messiness, though it’s looped into a bagel-shaped bun instead of its usual ponytail. Her face looks puffy, like she woke up only moments ago. I’m four seats behind her, so I study the back of her neck. She has a small round mole at the base of her nape, and it sits right there, primly, like it’s the perfect ending to an exquisite sentence. I don’t trust myself to remember its exact dimensions later, so I reach for my notebook and start drawing.

“I see you’ve gotten a haircut, Señor Drucker,” Señora Rubenstein says in Spanish, apropos of nothing I can decipher, and at first I don’t bother looking up. I’ve just sketched the two swerves of Kit’s collar, and I want to get them right. “Señor Drucker. Presta atención, Señor Drucker.”

“Sí,” I say, and lift my head to find the entire class staring at me. I ignore Señora Rubenstein and her tapping foot and all those curious faces and look to Kit to attempt the impossible and read her expression. She raises her right eyebrow approximately one millimeter, keeps her lips in a straight, grim line, and then turns back to face the front of the room. Her eyes are bloodshot like Miney’s. Maybe conjunctivitis is going around. “Sí, tengo un corte de cabello.”

Señora Rubenstein somehow uses my haircut to transition to her unit on Spanish customs and culture, a clunky and illogical connection, but no one else seems bothered. Kit faces forward, her neck straight, and she doesn’t turn around for the rest of class.

Clearly she hates my new hair.

Maybe she hates me.

I keep drawing. That way at least I’ll have some small part of her to save for later.

After class I end up walking beside José, and before I can slip on my headphones, he starts peppering me with questions.

“What are you wearing?” he asks. I guess since we’re now teammates he assumes we must adhere to social niceties, like chitchat. I wish I could politely dispel him of this myth.

“Clothes.”

“Where did you get them?”

“The mall.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Why?

“Because I think I should get some. Girls are actually talking about you.”

“My sister picked them out.”

“Your sister is hot.”

“Not sure how that’s relevant.”

“Well, could she pick some clothes out for me?”

“She could, but I don’t think she will.”

“Don’t forget we have the decathlon meeting tomorrow after school.”

“I don’t forget things.”

“Me neither. Well, obviously, I don’t remember everything, but almost everything. My earliest memory is from when I was two years and five months old. What’s your earliest memory?”

“I have to think about it.”

“Were they expensive?”

“What?”

“The clothes.”

“Define expensive,” I say, and then José surprises me. Because he does. He defines the word expensive with impressive specificity.

I told myself I could secretly start calling the lunch table ours if we made it to a second week of sharing and here we are: week two, day one.

“Muy guapo,” Kit says, and points to her own head. I force myself to make eye contact, but there’s too much going on in her pupils. Attempting to unravel it and at the same time hold still makes my processing speed slow down.

“Huh?”

“Your haircut. Muy guapo.”

I don’t need Miney to translate this one. Muy guapo, is of course, Spanish for “very handsome.” I’m so glad I didn’t take Latin, which I had considered, since it would be helpful if I decided one day to go to medical school.

“Thank you. I mean, gracias.” Her pupils seem to be pushing and pulling at once, like a resistance exercise. I give up and look at her clavicle instead. The circular constellation of freckles.

“How does it feel?” she asks.

“How does what feel?”

She doesn’t answer but motions from the top of her head down to her toes.

“I mean, it feels weird having so much less hair, and I miss my old clothes. These are a little stiff. But Miney says it was about time and that change is good. I’m not sure if I agree with her on that latter point.”

“You look so…different,” Kit says.

“Really?” I ask, which is stupid, since I already know I look different. What I want to ask is: Do you like it?

“I almost didn’t recognize you. You look like a totally different person. Not that you looked bad before. I didn’t mean that.”

“I didn’t take it that way,” I say.

“It’s just you look…good. Really good. Like, totally different. Never mind. I’ll stop talking now.”

I look up at her again and our eyes catch, and this time I decide to push through the discomfort and hold on. She smiles, but I’m pretty sure it’s a sad smile, because I want her to stop doing it. Her face is all closed up again.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” she says. “Also, I forgot to pack my lunch.”

I push forward two of my small plates—a cookie and an apple—before it hits me. This is the opportunity Miney has been talking about. I should ask Kit to grab some food after school. That would “keep up the momentum,” which Miney claims is necessary if I ever want Kit to press her lips against mine. Which I do want. Very much.

“Do you care to—?” I don’t get to finish my question—I don’t get to say, Do you care to go to the diner with me after school?—because Justin hurls himself across the cafeteria and lands in the chair beside Kit. His arrival is like an alien invasion. No, worse. A nuclear bomb.

“Holy crap, you scared me!” Kit says. I don’t say anything, because I don’t like to talk around Justin. Past experience has demonstrated that nothing good can come from that. Not a second later, Gabriel is here too, because the two of them have some strange symbiotic relationship. A sea anemone to a hermit crab. One cannot function without the other.

“Nice haircut,” Gabriel says, and reaches out his hands toward my head. I flinch and bend away. “For a second there, I thought you were your sister.”

I’m about to say thank you, because my sister is universally acknowledged as an attractive person, but then I catch myself. Of course he’s not complimenting me. I hear Miney in my head: Remember who you are talking to. Always stop and examine the context.

“Leave him alone,” Kit says, and leans over and grabs my apple. She takes a big bite, as if she is proving some point. Maybe that she and I share food sometimes.

“What is this, Extreme Makeover: Retard Edition?” Justin asks, and then gets an overly enthusiastic high five from Gabriel.

“You guys are idiots,” Kit says, and I don’t like how this is going. I don’t want her to think of me as the kind of person who needs defending. I am not.

After the Locker Room Incident, again irrelevant to present circumstances, my father hung a leather punching bag in our basement and taught me how to box. He said that it was obvious that I was like him, that school would be hard for me, that at some point I was going to be forced to defend myself. Since that day, I’ve dedicated fourteen hours a week to physical exercise and self-defense training and have dabbled in various martial arts. I know if I had to, I could easily kick both of their asses. I mean that both literally and figuratively. When I studied kung fu, I learned how to do a swivel kick and pin my opponent to the ground, face down.

“Would you please excuse us? We were having a conversation,” I say, turning my attention back to Kit, hoping that what my mother used to tell me when I was little would finally hold true: If you ignore them, they will go away.

Nope, nothing has changed. Didn’t work then. Doesn’t work now.

“Would you please excuse us?” Justin says, imitating me but in a fake British accent, which makes no sense. I’m obviously not British. We’ve gone to school together since kindergarten. In New Jersey.

“Go away, guys,” Kit says. “I really can’t deal with your crap today.”

“Relax. We just wanted to say hey. We miss you, girl,” Gabriel says, all smiles. Like he and Kit are best friends. Which I don’t believe they are, despite the fact that they held hands on at least eight separate occasions for two weeks last year.

I’ve thought about how Kit’s hand would feel in mine. I have concluded it would feel like the exact opposite of that fold in my new jeans.

A few more words are exchanged—Justin says something to Kit and she says something back—but I’m not listening. I study the back of my water bottle. Demote them to background noise. I think back to middle school, all those times I did whatever Justin asked. Snapped a teacher’s bra. Pulled down my own pants. Other things I won’t mention. In seventh grade I was flattered by his attention, by the fact that when I was with him, we could make people laugh. I thought we were best friends.

I thought a lot of things that weren’t true then.

I reach for my notebook and put it next to my plate. Rub my hands over the cover. I will not open it here, but having Miney’s rules set out and nearby helps. Justin and Gabriel are at the top of the Do Not Trust list. That’s all I need to remember.

Miney put it in there three times, rendering it even more important than her latest edict not to talk to a girl about her weight.

Finally, Justin pops up as if he is ready to leave our table. I feel something release in my chest. But I should know better. My Notable Encounters list will tell you that I’ve never left a conversation with Justin unscathed. He leans down to whisper in my ear, his hand firmly planted on my head.

“You may have gotten a haircut, but you’re still weird as hell,” he says, his tongue so close to my ear I can feel his wet, disgusting breath. I clench my fists. I want to turn around and punch him right in the face.

He has no right to touch me.

I know that if I hit him, there will be consequences, as there always are with Justin. Suspension or detention, notes on my permanent record. The kind of stuff that could hurt my chances of getting into a good college. Before Kit joined my lunch table, that’s all I could think about. That one day I would get to leave Mapleview and hopefully go to a school where I could start over. Where no one knew about my mistakes.

And also there is this: If I were to hit Justin, there’s a good chance I’d break his nose, and if I broke his nose, I’d get his blood and skin cells and DNA all over my knuckles. I do not want to have to wash Justin off. Disgusting.

I focus instead on Kit. Ignore my instincts and stare directly into her eyes.

I talk to her without talking: Please tell me you know I’m better than them. Pick me. Pick me.

She stares right back, though I have no idea what she’s saying. I never know what anyone is saying.

It is only later, during AP Physics, that I realize exactly what that eye contact cost me. While I was busy staring at Kit, Justin swiped my notebook.