Be More Chill (5 page)

“What’s the deal?” Michael asks as I leave math. “You okay?” Michael’s sitting cross-legged in the hall; I’m looking for a place to
update my sheet.

“Yeah.” I stoop down. I try to slap his hand, but miss.

“Redo,” he smiles. We connect.

“All right. Take a seat.”

“Why? I hate sitting on the floor.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

I do.

“Anything new happen with Christine?” Michael prods.

“Nope. Today’s been really crappy.”

“Well it’s about to get good.” Michael absently picks at his headphone cord. “Take a look.”

We are in the absolutely choicest position for spying girls’ knees and calves in the hall. I figure that’s what Michael plans to do, and then, across the way, a par
ti
cularly
fine parade of knees and calves emerges. They belong to Katrina, Stephanie, and Chloe—the Hottest Girls in School.

Michael is admirably calm as the three of them slink out of whatever class they were in (Human Sexuality, I think—seriously) in triangle formation with Katrina at the lead. I’m the
one with the motor control problem, sitting like a tormented puppet, my wrist twitching and my neck grinding against itself as the legs pass by. My heart tightens and the whole lower half of my
body aches in a sudden, silly way that reminds me of last night on the Internet.

“Guh…”

It’s
unfair
that I should have to go to school with Katrina, Stephanie, and Chloe. They cover all the bases of things that you might possibly be attracted to if you think girls are
attractive in the slightest bit. Katrina is blond, Stephanie is brunette, and Chloe is a redhead (dyed). Katrina wears bright, preppy stuff; Stephanie wears Goth things with collars; Chloe does
raver clothes. All their outfits are tight and imaginative, as in: it’s easy to imagine them not being there. The Hottest Girls in School came to Middle Borough together in my grade and have
been inseparable since, a force to be reckoned with, discussed, analyzed, and penetrated by the upper echelon of Middle Borough men.

They do not react to Michael or myself in any way as they pass.

Then again, we are on the floor.

“You should go for one of them, man,” Michael suggests.

“Shut up.” Then: “You think I could?”

“Sure…You could do whatever you want. I mean, you’re still going to that dance, right?”

I hadn’t thought about the dance. I’d just been kind of talking about it the night before, in the abstract. Here in the light of day with real females present, the dance is more
terrifying. I have not had good experiences with dances. I wasn’t even good at those super-hippie modern dance “movement” classes I took in fifth grade. I couldn’t be a
spider right.

“I was kinda…”

Christine walks out of math. Maybe she was in there talking to Mr. Gretch, or one of her friends. She strides past me and I’m at eye level with her legs and calves and I think they might
just be the most beautiful calves I’ve ever seen, better than the Hot Girls’. Then I think about how when computer imaging guys are making special effects for movies, one of the hardest
things they have to do with CGI light is to get it to reflect off complex surfaces the right way, but if any of those CGI guys ever needed a model for how light should bounce off a girl’s
leg, pixel for pixel, this is it.

And the two forces that battle for real estate in my brain—fear and lust—they reach an agreement and I turn to Michael.

“Yeah, I’m going,” I nod.

“Really?” He stands up.

“Yeah. You still not going?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Then could you give me a ride at least? After school or something? After play rehearsal, actually, down to Halloween Adventure sometime. So I can buy a costume.”

“You’re getting a costume and the whole deal? Who are you gonna bring to the dance?”

“I guess nobody. But”—I watch Christine fade—“I have to get there somehow.”

I grab the seat next to Christine’s for our second
Midsummer
read-through. (A girl named Jessica gets Mr. Reyes’ Hot Pocket today, while we males construct a
haphazard circle of chairs.) I don’t know why; I’m just setting myself up for heartbreak, but I have fast reflexes and go with my instincts.

My arm shifts as we begin the reading. It inches so close to Christine’s that static electricity pulls our armhairs together, my dark ones vs. her sunburned ones. If we both were to sweat,
the beads would join up and form a little Bering Strait for microbes to swim across from her skin to mine. All I have to do now is pull a phrase out of the air, a phrase among all the trivia and
trends and hot items in the world, that’ll make her start talking to me like she did yesterday. A phrase like,
Wow, I heard this thing about Tupac’s mom
or
I really like
Picasso over Matisse
, but that might not be it. When I think about it, probably only one tenth of one tenth of one seventeenth of things are it.

“Hey, Christine, I heard this thing that human beings aren’t evolving anymore.”

“Wheh?” She turns with a mix of annoyance and bafflement. But what could I expect? It’s a start.

“Yeah, seriously…” I glance over at Mr. Reyes; he’s dozed off. “I heard about it on, uh, the Discovery Channel. We’re totally evolutionarily
stagnant.”

Christine turns her pupils toward the sheet of paper on her lap. “‘Through the forest have I gone But Athenian found I none, On whose eyes I might approve…’”

Right, I forgot. She has lines. When she finishes, she turns to me and says the most wonderful thing: “Actually, I heard that too.”

“Really?” I almost forget to whisper.

“Of course not, Jeremy.” Her lips curl beautifully. “Only you would know stuff like that. But it, uh, sounds interesting.”

There’s conspicuous silence around the circle. Christine pokes me (with her pen, not her actual flesh): “Your line.”

“
Mrph
…‘Fair love, you faint with wand’ring in the wood.…’”

“Talk when rehearsal is over, okay?” Christine says.

I smile so wide that I check myself, because I know wide smiles make me look bad. Christine flicks her pen back and forth between her teeth.

I brush my arm against hers. Now that I’ve rebroken the ice, I knew I could rebreak the ice.

When the read-through is over, Christine and I chat. We put away chairs together. I give her the rap about people not evolving pretty much exactly as Michael gave it to me the night before.

“…And so it’s like we’re evolutionarily flat.”

“Wow, that’s crazy.” She’s not betraying much. Her lips are pursed and that’s a good word for it, because they look like a purse, an upside-down pink purse designed
for a kangaroo rat or vole. “Don’t you think that people are evolving to become
smarter
?”

“I think,” I pontificate, “that women are naturally selecting males who are more successful and rich, but that has not much to do with whether they’re smart.”
Heh-heh.

“Oh, no,” Christine says, motioning with her hand for me to follow as she gathers her things. “Successful people are always smart.”

“My dad’s pretty successful. He’s an idiot.”

“That’s not nice. What’s he do?”

“Divorce lawyer. What’s yours do?”

“Executive ride supervisor at Great Adventure.”

“Oh, well, that must be a great adventure for his career!”

“Um…funny. He got fired, okay. He used to work for AOL—”

“No! No…I was just, you know, trying to think of something witty to say, like a pun or whatever.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorry.” Pause. “I’m not a great conversationalist.”

“But you were just having a conversation. We were.”

“Yeah. Well. We’re not. Now.”

“This is true.” Christine scrunches up her face. “You know what? I
hate
boys who are bad conversationalists.” She shakes her head. “It’s
insurmountable.”

Dur
. Now she has her bag in her hands, but something’s missing from it that perturbs her. She bends over a theater seat looking at the floor. I want to find the missing item
desperately and be helpful. I think I’ve spotted it—a padded, white nub of material by her ankle. I reach down to pick it up; she leans back at the same time, sitting on my neck.

“Ow!”

“Hey!”

“Gimme that!” Christine streaks down, pushes me away and grabs the item off the floor.

“Sorry.”

“Hgggg,”
she chortles, putting the thing in her purse. Then she looks at me as if under a new light (an angry light, not a good light). “Jeremy, you shouldn’t
touch girls’
stuff
.”

“I was just trying to help.…”

Christine walks away, so I walk with her; we pass through the doors of the theater together, separated only by the metal doorframe. “So I guess if your dad works at Great Adventure you
don’t have to worry about lines, right? I mean, lines at the rides. Not lines in the play. Heh-heh.”

“Well…” Christine says. “First of all he’s a ride supervisor, not a ride operator. Which means he works in an office, not on the ride.”

“Okay.”

“But yes, they do have this policy, if you’re employee connected, where you walk up to the back of a ride and show them the special Great Adventure Friends and Family Card and then
they give you this slip of paper that tells you the approximate ride wait time—”

“So?”

“So don’t interrupt. So instead of waiting in line for forty-five minutes, you can do whatever you want for forty-five minutes and then come back and get right on.”

“That’s awesome! How do I get one of those cards? Do I have to marry you?”

Oh, shit. What did I just say?

“Uh…” Christine looks at me like I grew out of the base of a tree. “You could develop leprosy and lose half your face—that would work. Then you could get a
handicapped pass.”

We’re halfway down the hall, heading toward the exit. I’m thinking of some witty final statement to make up for the marriage thing (did she say something about leprosy?) when I spot
a figure at the doors: Jake Dillinger. He looks all Czechoslovakian-model-banging and student-governmental. He cups his mouth.

“—Jeremy—” is all I can make from down the hall; he must be saying hi to me. Jake parcels out whole tenths of a second when he sees me. Then he looks at Christine. He
doesn’t need to say anything to her.

“Gotta go!” Christine says. “Talk tomorrow!” And she skips down the hall to meet Jake, like Puck would skip, as if he had worked some magic on her yesterday that went
completely over my head. I swivel around quickly so I don’t have to see them hug or tongue or dry hump, greet each other in whatever way they’ve picked. Then I walk out the back door of
Middle Borough.

Michael’s there, in the school parking lot. He managed to borrow the car from his parents and have it waiting for me the day I asked for it. I hug him.

“What’s up?” Michael’s got a handball—he was probably playing for money while I was in rehearsal. He tosses it lazily against the mural in the back of school.

“Same crap is up,” I say. “Christine, who I thought was at least available, is with Jake
Dillinger
.”

“That’s messed,” Michael shakes his head. “But you gotta give other men credit, y’know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

Michael tosses the handball at me. I try to catch but it bounces off my fingers and chin. “C’mon,” he says. “Throw the ball at the wall. See the wall?”

“Shut up.” I rear back and throw pretty hard; the ball rebounds and Michael lunges to hit it, seemingly with his wrist—there’s a
pop
. I look over, but he’s
grinning, not hurt, as the ball comes hurtling back toward me. It hits my skull and careens off under some school administrator’s car. Michael and I laugh.

“C’mon,” he says, “We got like twenty minutes if you really want to go to Halloween Adventure.”

“Okay.” We head to Michael’s car.

I’ve never been entirely sure what Michael’s driving status is; he probably has a learner’s permit that doesn’t allow him to drive by himself, but since you can’t
violate any laws in a huge brown Buick going 25 mph, we stay out of trouble. I slip inside—it smells like burned peanut butter and ham.