Ridiculous/Hilarious/Terrible/Cool (16 page)

Maya, sitting next to him, does not look, though her right foot is circling so fast it could churn butter. Maya's foot stops churning when she reads aloud, the part where Raskolnikov whacks two old ladies in the head with an ax.

The class starts discussing whether or not Raskolnikov is crazy, and for the next forty-five minutes the comments shoot back and forth. Osama bin Laden's name is dropped into the argument.
Boom
. The discussion screeches to a halt, scurrying away from anything too controversial.

“I don't think we have to come up with a definitive answer to the question right now!” pleads Ms. Murphy, a little less peppy than she was at the beginning of class. “Can I bring us back to the text?”

But before that can happen, the bell rings and class is over, and Maya walks out with her new boyfriend.

Later that day, Maya is sitting outside the recital hall on the second floor. It's her favorite place at Payton. She's talking about her new boyfriend, Ben.

“I never thought of him in that way,” she says, taking a sip from a water bottle. Maya and Ben have been good friends since freshman year. He's funny and makes her laugh. He's always been cute.

“This year was different. I could feel
he
felt different. I guess I didn't really want to think about him. Would it change our friendship? When he mentioned it I thought he was kind of kidding. I laughed at first!”

Ben told Maya he liked her when she was at his house over break, just before they were planning to go to a movie. They never went. The relationship has been progressing ever since. They're hanging out after school, on weekends. They're hanging out all the time.

“It's been pretty great!” Maya smiles as she peels the label off her water bottle and starts tearing it into pieces. “We're a lot alike. It's so easy.”

Part of Ben's appeal comes from what he's not.

“With a lot of other guys here,” Maya explains, nodding at a pack of boys walking past with their pants hanging off their rear ends, “they're into different stuff. Partying, drinking, smoking. All that is so boring to me. They tell the same stories and they don't stop talking. I still like them for the most part. They're good people. But they think it's dorky to talk about a play, or music, or a book.”

Ben also seems to genuinely care about Maya. And he doesn't look much like a high school student: He may be the only boy at Payton with a five o'clock shadow.

“I see him differently now. It's really nice,” Maya says, turning a color not unlike the pink on the label of her water bottle, which is now in shreds. With that she finishes her water with a gulp.

Despite all the time she now spends with Ben, there are other things that require Maya's attention. She has her audition for NYU in a few days (her acceptance at Stanford has not kept her from exploring other options).

Maya has been rehearsing two monologues for the audition. To do so, she retreats to her room. Her bedroom in the Boudreau apartment has a window looking over Lake Michigan, a view so wide and expansive her room could be a glider above the water. The room is clean, its walls uncluttered except for a movie poster from
The Royal Tenenbaums
. Her desk is clean too, with a neat stack of textbooks, an autographed and framed photo of Owen Wilson. Maya's parents gave her the photo a few years ago, more so because Maya loves Wilson's director from
The Royal Tenenbaums,
Wes Anderson. Maya has always been a little obsessed with Wes. Lying next to Owen is a silver angel charm one of Maya's sister gave her to bring to auditions.

For her NYU audition, Maya chose one monologue from Neil LeBute's
Bench Seat,
another from David Mamet's
Speed the Plow
. Maya starts practicing by sitting on the quilt on her bed and memorizing the lines. Then she takes notes on the characters: how they stand, how they walk, how they see the world. Finally she says her lines out loud, playing with the characters as she goes. It's a solitary process, one she loves. She loves how something imagined in one's room eventually becomes real. It's the most beautiful transformation, how an inner world becomes realized in front of others on a stage.

“And for that amount of time,” she says, “you are completely someone else.”

FEBRUARY

One of the Cabrini Green towers is getting demolished this week. A wrecking ball, big as a small car, swings back and forth from a crane, slamming into the building, revealing exposed walls and jutting rebars, the gutted insides of apartments, the bent lives and years of those who lived here. Despite the winter cold, workers spray water on the debris to prevent it from igniting. Every few minutes, the wrecking ball connects, and in a plume of dust another part of the construction comes crashing down.

The sounds of demolition can barely be heard through the windows of the Payton library, where Daniel is playing with his Palm Treo 650, a phone that allows Daniel to make calls, text message, send and receive e-mail, surf the Web. Today he's using it to make a call, something he's not supposed to do in the library. He finds a carrel far away from the librarian, poking his head up every minute to make sure the coast is clear. The popping up and down makes him look like a prairie dog.

Someone important has been trying to reach Daniel. Someone from some company about some summer internship. The internship was set up by another someone who Daniel met during the Harvard interview process. Daniel answers the phone. Then he's disconnected.

“Oh,
Lord,
” Daniel mutters, which for him comes across as blasphemy. He frantically punches numbers with one hand, scratches his new sideburns with the other. The important someone calls back. Daniel hops to another carrel in search of better reception, pokes his head up, swivels his head, pops down.

“Hello. I dropped the phone,” he lies. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

After a few more polite inanities, Daniel says good-bye.

Daniel hasn't figured out how college will be paid for. He's been filling out forms for scholarships. His financial status is complicated by the fact that his mother, who works for the Social Security Administration, may retire. His father is a paramedic in the county jail. There's a difference between what his parents think they will pay, and what Daniel knows they need to pay. Where will the extra money come from? Daniel won't be making his shoe money, since he would stop working at Nordstrom if he got the internship. Maybe he'll write letters to mentors and ask for assistance.

“There
has
to be money available,” he says, tapping his palm with his Palm. Daniel says that after college he'll go to Wall Street, go into debt, do whatever it takes. He won't give up on his dream of being in politics, and for that he knows he must be connected, and for that he must go to the best college, and for that he must . . .

Before he gets too far ahead of himself, Daniel must finish planning for this weekend's winter ball. Does the president of the senior class have a date?

“I don't. I should ask somebody,” Daniel says. But before he can finish the thought he sees the guidance counselor walk past, and jumps into his office.

On the bench under the stairs where Zef Calaveras used to hang out, two boys are sharing the headphones to an iPod. One leans, the other lies flat. Ten minutes later the leaning student leaves. The other stays because he has fallen asleep.

Abandoned on the next bench is a paper bag with a soy banana smoothie inside. There's a note held to the bag by static electricity (accomplished by rubbing the note against a plastic folder):

There are times when Emily doesn't think about soccer. With the start of the season still a month away, she has been focused on tennis.

Emily has been watching the Australian Open late at night this week. She's a bit obsessed. There's a hierarchy of players Emily follows. At the bottom is Justine Henin-Hardenne (Henin-Hardenne and George W. Bush are her least favorite people on earth). When Henin-Hardenne plays, Emily yells at the television, especially during the game where Henin-Hardenne showed no sportsmanship and just
quit
.

Another player receiving Emily's scorn is Andy Roddick. Emily says he's overrated. And, she says, “He thinks he's cute. He's not cute.”

There is no middle to Emily's list.

At the top is Venus Williams. And Roger Federer.

“So good,
and
he's cute. I only like people that are good. I admire that. I like people that dominate. There was this
look
he had. He was so calm. Then, he just took over.”

Even when watching her idols, Emily has strong opinions. There's a right way and a wrong way. She has expectations about how other people should act.

She often feels this with her friends. She'll e-mail them about something meaningful she's been thinking about, but all they want to do is instant-message about boys. She thinks about boys too, but not to the same degree. Especially when boys are jerks, and don't deserve attention. Like that boy Emily had a crush on in the fall. He lost his cuteness. She's not interested anymore.

Sometimes Emily just wants to stop thinking about expectations. Let her hair down, break free. Over the weekend Emily is going to see the musical
Wicked.

The atrium remains
the
stage on which to perform for one's classmates. The winter season has had many compelling plays.
Romeo and Juliet and Melissa. Long Day's Journey Up the Stairs. What Proof?
One hit stands out. A tragedy entitled
The Homecoming King Breaks Hearts As He Must Go to Class,
a performance which needs no explanation.

Diana got a new job. She's a lifeguard and swim instructor at Piotrowski Park, a few blocks from her house. She couldn't be happier.

“It doesn't feel like work!” she exclaims, oblivious to some students wrestling on the floor behind her as she walks through the halls, looking more stylish than usual in a new red Ecko shirt. Her stud is shining in her nostril.

When Diana first got back in the pool, the stud hurt a little. It felt as if her nose was getting pierced all over again. But over time, the pain went away. Now, every afternoon after school, Diana is teaching toddlers to swim. She's in the water six hours a day, working in a Chicago Park Service bathing suit. She's making money blowing bubbles in the water, coaching kids to breathe. When she's not working she's swimming laps.

Sometimes her father comes by in the evening before his shift, to talk and drop off some food. Other nights Diana eats when she gets home. She comes home later than when she was working at the day-care center but feels less worn down. A month ago when she came home, she would nap and eat and worry and go to sleep. Now things are different.