Snark and Circumstance (6 page)

“We just thought you should know,” she says tartly.

I frown, but I don’t say anything. I am pretty sure I don’t believe them, but I don’t want to make a big deal about it. Cassie has had a way-too-superior look on her face lately, now that she has seduced the town’s football hero. And if she thinks she has insight into Longbourne’s seamy underbelly as well, she’ll be insufferable.

“Do you or Brick actually know anybody who buys drugs from Michael?”

“No way! Brick is in training. He’s real into health,” she protests. “He wouldn’t mess with that stuff. And neither would I.”

It looks to me like Brick knows a thing or two about steroids but I check myself before I say it.

“So you don’t exactly have solid evidence,” I say instead.

Cassie sits down on the loveseat and picks up the remote. The TV comes to life with a snap.

“Why are you defending him?” she demands. “Do you like him or something?”

I can feel my face grow hot as I consider this for a second. This is the second person who has decided to warn me about Michael Endicott. Granted, Willow and Cassie seem about as perceptive as steamed clams, but still, it’s unnerving to think that people think I care about him. So I sort of rush to say, “I just think people shouldn’t go around saying things if they have no evidence. It’s a huge accusation. And it doesn’t seem like your boyfriend and Michael travel in the same circles anyway, so how would he know?”

“God, you don’t have to get all snotty on me, George.”

“I’m not!” I object, then sigh. “I’m just saying.”

She ignores me and flips through the channels until she gets a rerun of The Hills. I go upstairs to struggle with the night’s calc homework, and give up until Tori comes home.

I have to admit Cassie was right about one thing—I did sort of flip out on her in Michael’s defense, which is truly weird. Maybe it’s because this rumor is so obviously wrong, and not just because it’s being perpetrated by Brick the neckless wonder. It’s just wrong. Michael Endicott may be annoying, but he’s no drug dealer. He’s too straight and too worried about his grades for that. Which means the rumor is not just false but also plain mean. I wonder if he knows about it. Maybe that’s why he comes across as Mr. Glacier sometimes. He’s hard to take at times, but he’s not a bad person, even if Michael and I do come from different solar systems. Whole other galaxies. But sometimes, galaxies collide.

Hard.

Chapter 5: Is That a D-bag I See Before Me?

Michael’s barely civil to me in bio class. I guess I should be glad he doesn’t bother to talk to me because at least this way we’re not fighting, and he’s not asking me if lily buds feel pain when you slice them. During one lab, though, on the day the first issue of The Alt comes out, I glance over from my own project to see him erasing part of his drawing of a flower bud with such fury that he has to brush away a little avalanche of pink eraser shavings onto the floor. His bud looks so much more like a bomb or a hot dog than anything with pistils and stamens that I have to say something. It’s so pathetic, and he seems so frustrated sweeping away all of his eraser shavings. He even has the tip of his tongue stuck in the corner of his mouth, like a little kid does when he’s concentrating. I can’t just leave him suffering like that.

“We don’t have to do this completely separately, you know,” I suggest quietly. “I don’t mind doing the drawing . . .” I tilt my paper so he can see my rendition of the dissection, which, while I am no Picasso, at least resembles a form of plant life. “And you can do the labeling. Your handwriting is much neater than mine.”

He looks over at my drawing and smiles sheepishly. “Yours is a lot better,” he admits.

“So let’s do this fifty-fifty. For now, at least. We’ll figure out the animal half later.”

He extends his hand and we shake on it, and he watches as I finish the last bits of the drawing and makes sure I have enough room for the labels. We’re both sort of smiling at our work at the end of class when the principal, Mr. Dover, comes in and announces, “Georgiana Barrett. I need to see you after class.”

“That can’t be good,” Michael chuckles as the class shuffles out and he passes by me at Miss Grogan’s desk. Whatever happened, she’s not looking too happy about it, but at least Mr. Dover doesn’t look upset. When he does, the bald top half of his head turns the color of an eggplant and right now his liver spots are still visible.

“Barrett, I read your article in the alternative paper about dissections,” he says as Miss Grogan’s lips twist into pretzel form and she looks down at a stack of tests on her desk. “Barry Greenberg, a gifted sophomore, had wanted to take advanced biology this year, but apparently his doctor forbade him due to his excessive allergies. Apparently, if he even looks at a latex glove, he blows up like a puffer fish, and no one wanted to take a chance with the chemical preservatives. But your article posed an alternative that I think we’d be willing to try.” At this he looks over at Miss Grogan, who doesn’t look up. “You and Barry can run a pilot program of the dissection apps this year, with Miss Grogan supervising and reporting back to me about their suitability. You can borrow the school’s iPads if you need to, but they don’t leave the building, got that?”

I nod vigorously.

“And what I told you about Barry and his allergies—that’s confidential.”

I nod again, more solemnly this time.

“Okay then. Sounds good?”

“It sounds very good,” I assure him and I walk off to my next class with a sense of relief and accomplishment. I decide that since I just made a deal with Michael, I should stick to it because it’s the right thing to do and I don’t want him to be able to say, in any way, that I ruined his bio lab grade. So I plan to still be at dissections to draw the carnage for him and I’ll do my own labs during my study period.

Which seems pretty generous to me, but when I tell Michael this in homeroom the next day, he just shrugs, as if the thought of my relation to his bio lab grade had never even crossed his mind.

“Oh,” is all he says. “Okay.” Then the bell rings, he picks up his books, and walks out into the hallway while I seem to have been superglued to my seat.

I can’t believe it.

Doesn’t he understand how repellant—and how ethically wrong—it will be for me to sit there during every lab and watch him slice open some poor creature that did nothing wrong in this world, whose only crime was to be born a supposedly lesser being, born just to end up on a dissection tray reeking of formaldehyde or whatever they use to preserve its carcass? I am seriously going to have to keep from vomiting—and crying—every single lab period, but I decided to work with him anyway because I know Tori was right. His principles aren’t mine, and I shouldn’t expect them to be. But shouldn’t he at least acknowledge that I’ve accepted his, however morally retarded they may be?

I grab my books and hurry out into the hall, chasing after Michael’s retreating back until I catch up with him. I grab his elbow and he jerks around, startled, and I’m kind of panting from running and my heart is attempting to break through my rib cage.

“Look,” I sputter, “This lab thing—this compromise—is a big deal for me, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees, uncertainly.

“I mean, it’s going to be really hard for me to do.”

He looks around at the people pushing past us to get to class on time and sighs, then shakes his head.

“Then don’t do it,” he says, shrugging one shoulder and turning back down the hallway, where he disappears into a French classroom.

Dealing with him is like chipping away at a brick wall with a plastic spoon. At the end of a day, you think you’ve made progress. But when you look at it later, the wall seems thicker than ever.

I should just forget it. Forget about him. Leave him to his stupid smelly frog cadavers. Because he is impossible to work with. For instance, our English project group doesn’t get together the way other groups do. Shondra and I work together after school one day, and compare notes over lunch, but Michael never joins us and never suggests that we confer on anything.

But when the time comes to present our Chaucer stuff to the class, Ms. Ehrman says our work was “informative and eclectic.” That feels really good, and I have to admit that Michael’s part of the presentation packs a lot of information into a short and clear talk. He doesn’t read from a print-out or index cards, like lots of people do, in a dull monotone that would put a Jack Russell on meth to sleep. He speaks instead just as if he were having a conversation with you, like you happened to have asked him what he knows about the role of the clergy in the fifteenth century. He doesn’t need PowerPoints or to dress up, like some kids did. He just says what he has to say in this rich voice that, when it’s not sodden with sarcasm, makes you want to listen to it. It makes you want to climb into it, actually. Anyway, he did a great job.

So I catch up to him after class as we’re both navigating the hallways. It’s extra hard today because the cheerleaders are taking up way too much room decorating the football players’ lockers and hanging up spirited signs, a frightening portion of which contain spelling mistakes.

I tell him, “Hey, your stuff about the clergy was really good.” Then I joke, “I don’t know why you had to be so hard on the Prioress, though. She doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

He rolls his eyes and jostles past Cassie, who is affixing black and white crepe paper streamers to a drinking fountain, and makes a face at me.

“Of course you like the Prioress!” he sniggers. “Because she treats animals better than she treats people! Maybe you should make her the subject of your next vegan crusade in the Alt.”

“Look,” I say as I take a breath. “I’m complimenting you on a job well done. I’m not picking a fight.”

He smiles then, slightly, and takes a breath. As I’m turning to walk away, he says, “I just meant that the Prioress is a woman of the church so she is supposed to be interested in charity. Being charitable to people, but Chaucer makes it clear that she only cares about her little dog.”

I turn back to him. “I know. And I just meant that maybe it’s easier for her to get along with animals than with people. Because people can be jerks sometimes, right?”

He smiles for real then. It might be the first time I’ve seen him do that. We just look at each other for a moment like we’ve seen each other for the first time. And I smile back.

“Okay,” he says at last. “And a ‘job well done’ to you, too . . . Are you going this way?” he asks, indicating the related arts hallway with his black binder.

I shake my head.

“Nope. I have Spanish.”

He waves slightly then and takes off past two guys who are attempting to play lacrosse between the banks of lockers. Longbourne High needs to invest in a traffic cop. When he gets to the end of the hallway and is about to turn the corner, he looks back. I wave a little. He smiles, and then he’s gone. I stand there, letting people push past me, rethinking again my plan to wave goodbye to Michael forever as a lab partner. Now I’m not so sure I want to.

Maybe there’s a way we can salvage this partnership after all. Today’s work split was a pretty good start.

Things are definitely looking up. One sign of this is the fact that lunch is actually a bright spot in my day. And at lunch today, while I’m watching Gary try to sneak the chocolate coconut cookies I have just baked before Dave can, I sit back for a second and remind myself that as forlorn as I felt days before, things could be much worse—and were much worse last year. I am so grateful that I have Shondra and Dave and Gary now to eat lunch with. It feels good to sit with someone and not have to will myself to be invisible while I focus on a book, or worse—watch everyone else laughing and taunting and yelling, or whatever it is they are doing in the circus-slash-fashion show that is lunch at Longbourne High. Years ago, at other schools, if I were sitting alone, I would think that everyone was watching me, thinking I was a loser. Last year I could even feel their eyes on my back; I could practically hear what I imagined they were saying about me. But now I know better. Nobody was staring at me then. Nobody cared enough about me to do that.

As I count my blessings, as my mom would say, Shondra pokes me and asks, “So have you and Michael declared a ceasefire? I saw you two in the hallway after class.”

Dave looks up from his meatball sub, curious, and I shrug.

“I just thought he did a good job and I told him so. We all rocked it, I thought.”

“We did,” Shondra agrees, then grins wickedly and almost sings out, “Remember what Maggie said about you two? ‘Perfect for each other?’”

“I don’t think we’re destined to be together just because for the first time in weeks I don’t want to throttle him with a two by four.” I laugh, but I remember the smile he gave me right before he turned the corner and I feel my face grow warmer. Dave laughs until Gary goes in for the vegan thin mint cookies I had brought in my lunch bag. Gary always gets to the baked goods before Dave, who is usually too busy talking to snatch his share in time.

Right now I am unlike Chaucer’s Prioress, because I am feeling so generous toward humanity I wish I had brought more cookies for everyone. Including Michael Endicott.

Stephanie Wardrop