Ridiculous/Hilarious/Terrible/Cool (21 page)

“Time flies. It's amazing,” laughs Ms. Murphy, her growing belly ample evidence of the accuracy of her words. Class has separated into groups to check the answers to an AP practice quiz. Given that spring break is days away, it's a struggle to stay on subject. Only when Ms. Murphy is standing within earshot do the groups talk about what they are supposed to, giving the discussions a loopy interrupted quality:

“What's pathos?”

“Could you talk a little more quietly, José!”

“It has to do with style.”

“Don't mock me.”

“How was your party?”

“Cool.”

“We made it, but only outside.”

“Ooo. It was pathos.”

“That's what
she
said.”

“She's such a slut. She's had sex with like twelve people.”

“Is she our age?”

“They could put me on probation!”

“I digress.”

“Moving on!”

“The question is asking the function of a modifying adverb.”

“That's
so
awesome.”

“It's hard to get around Los Angeles.”

“Are you staying in your hotel room?”

“Her friend has a car.”

“We should chill!”

“He's a big dork.”

“Writer. He has no life.”

“It's gotta be hard. You've got to take one event and relate it to the whole world.”

“People. Who's sitting in this chair?” (Ms. Murphy, pointing at an empty chair.) “Okay, so the whole time, I thought someone was in the bathroom! ”

“How many people got number seven wrong?”

“You picked
D
?”

“Shut up, Drew.
Shut. Up
.”

“We were trying to do a volunteer show at a nursing home and it was like, booked. The place was classy.”

“Nursing homes and classy, aren't they, like, synonyms?”

Anais flew to Switzerland for spring break. Maya was supposed to go with her, but mono changed that. The trip was part of a Payton exchange with a Lucerne high school. There were strict rules. One rule was that, on the free day with their host families, the students could not leave Lucerne.

The boy in Anais's host family was named Dragon. Dragon was Czech, and suave. He'd just turned eighteen and had a brand-new Mercedes (which he had named Shannon after the actress Shannon Elizabeth). Dragon wanted to give Shannon a ride.

So he drove Anais to Italy. As they sped through rolling hills, Anais looked at the small houses tucked in the valleys and tried to imagine what it would be like to live there, so far away from anyone. They drove through a tunnel under the Alps and crossed the border.

Everything felt different in Italy. The architecture, the weather. Milan was muggy. Anais and Dragon walked around the Piazza del Duomo. It was Palm Sunday, and congregants with fronds in their arms were exiting the cathedral. Anais went inside. The interior was serene, and smelled of burned palms. A choir was singing. She sat in a pew and listened. She stayed there, listening and letting the feeling of the place wash over her.

Afterward she and Dragon shopped, and had lunch. Then they got back in Shannon and headed north, stopping in small Italian mountain villages on the way. The villages were captivating. Anais could have spent all day in them. But they kept driving and she fell asleep. She awoke in Switzerland, and never told her classmates or the Payton chaperone what she had done. It was a beautiful day.

The trip to Switzerland was the longest Anais had ever gone without dancing. Almost ten days. It was frustrating, but also wonderful to eat anything she wanted, to be free to drive through the mountains and experience something she never had before. Before she flew home, Anais tried to go to the ballet in Geneva but wasn't able to get tickets.

Spring has come to Chicago. Really, no joke. The buds have opened on the trees in front of Payton. Students break out clothes that were hidden in closets for months. Girls put on sandals, their toes released from their winter caves.

Like the first crocus of the year, the first girl shows up at school wearing a tiny T-shirt that shows not only her belly button but also her pelvic bones as they dip into her pants. This proves irresistible to the nearby boys, who, though they feign indifference, buzz around her like bees around a pistil.

Spring
is
here.

Inside the cafeteria, there's another situation with Anthony Johnson Jr. This one does not involve the girl who was pregnant, or the preaching girl whose rear end he squeezed, but a third girl, who is sitting across from him at his table, mouth open.

“That's not how it happened!” she shouts.

“This should be a
good
thing!” he shouts back.

Anthony is not slumping today. He's almost leaping out of his loose brown TEAM VOKAL hoodie.

“This is how it goes,” he explains to all the other girls at the table, smiling wide and chomping loud on his gum. “I'm in physics, doing nothing like I normally am—know what I'm saying?—and I wrote this letter, know what I'm saying. It was a playing-around letter, just a letter. I showed it to some girl and she took the letter and give it to
that
girl.” He nods across the table. “And she took it as a
love
letter!”

“I can't hear! I can't hear!”
mouths the girl in question, making a show of pointing with her purple fingernails to the headphones she has clamped over her ears.

“What I'm saying is . . . What I'm
saying
is!” Anthony smiles wider, hand reaching across the table. The girl stares at her Chinese language textbook and raises her eyebrows. When he sees she's not going to listen, he takes the opportunity to clear up some details about his situation with The Girl.

It turns out that the baby had been The Dude's. It's unclear how The Girl knows this, but that's what she has told Anthony.

“At first I was like,
uhhh,
” Anthony says, making a face as if he'd been told the Earth was flat. So the baby was never even his, after all that drama. Which also means that the whole time The Girl was telling Anthony she was getting pressured by The Dude to have sex, she was already having sex with The Dude. She was playing Anthony all along.

She wasn't playing her parents. When they found out she was pregnant, they kicked her out of the house. She moved near Anthony. Now she's been reaching out to him, calling late at night and telling him to come over, telling him she doesn't have clothes on. Stuff like that.

“I don't care no more. She took it about as far she could. She did everything she possibly could to me,” Anthony mumbles, his mood dimmed from a few minutes ago. He throws his hands out as if pushing away a plate of something that tasted bad.

There are other things he wishes he could push away. His classes, which he's still failing. Tutorials, which he's not going to. Then there are things he wishes he could pull close. His cell phone and his iPod, still impounded by his parents because they found more dope on him. A car, which he's been dreaming of since he turned sixteen.

Thinking about the disparity between what he has and what he wants gives him a headache. Anthony starts rubbing his forehead vigorously. No more headache. That was easy. With the headache gone he starts flicking a lighter under the table, and staring across the table at the girl with the headphones, trying to get her to look at him.

When the girl sees him staring she removes one earphone and yells, “You are such a fucking asshole!”

“But it wasn't like that!” he protests, glad to have finally gotten her attention. She looks up at the ceiling, pleading.

“I can't stand his ass.
I can't, stand, his ass!
”

“If nobody had ever—”

“My feelings was hurt,” the girl interrupts, pouting.

With that Anthony reaches his arm across the table, almost touching her hand, and says, “What I said to you is that what I said in the letter was the truth.”

But what was the truth? What he wrote, or what he's saying now?

Anthony nods.

Another girl walks up and she and the headphone girl start talking behind the textbook, which they have raised to hide what they're saying.

“I have people whispering about me!”
Anthony shouts so that the entire end of the cafeteria can hear. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that the girls are talking, and about him, and to Anthony the situation could not be better.

APRIL

Jonathan Safran Foer, the writer, has come to speak to Ms. Murphy's English class. Foer looks like the young male teachers at Payton, the ones who wear jackets and V-neck sweaters to make sure they are never confused for students. He's small. As he sits at the edge of the recital hall stage, his loafers dangle in the air and don't touch the floor.