Top of the Class (3 page)

“Hey,” I said, smiling. “Don’t worry. Just start at the triangle again.”

He guided me through the tying of the tie, and then the shaving of the jaw, which was particularly difficult, given that the mirror showed my reflection as Abby Grace.

“Just close your eyes,” he said. “Do it by touch.”

I was skeptical, but I shut my eyes and felt around my cheek for the sharp, pointy hairs, then dragged the razor down, wetting it after each swipe. It was embarrassing to be doing this in front of Will, but he was surprisingly tender.

“Go slower,” he said. “You’ll knick yourself.”

I dragged the razor more gently, my eyes closed. I could feel the numbness where Will’s shoulder brushed mine.

“Do you see Eric,” I asked, “or Abby?”

“I can see both,” he said. “It depends.”

“Depends on what?” I said.

“On what I want.” He cleared his throat. “Usually I see you. Abby, I mean.”

I nodded, finally opening my eyes. There I was in the reflection, a short girl with my white linen smock, with Will standing next to me in his school uniform.

We both smiled.

“Well, you didn’t cut an artery,” he joked.

“Thanks.”

Mom poked her head into the bathroom, and Will vanished. “I’m going to work now, Eric. You’re cuttin’ it a little close. Better get in the car.”

I rifled around Eric’s night table until I located a set of car keys, and then I hopped into the driver’s seat of a Honda Civic.

No GPS. Perfect. I was going to make Eric late. I banged my head against the headrest and sighed heavily. Would the rest of my life—if “life” was even the right word—consist of flying by the seat of my pants?

I looked to the passenger seat and saw Will sitting there. “I did a little research,” he said mischievously. “I know where your school is.”

Will guided me toward Pembroke Hall—or so said the crest on my jacket—and I pulled into a space in the student parking lot.

“So, what am I doing here?” I asked.

“Secrets, secrets, are no fun. Secrets, secrets, hurt someone!” he said.

“Your quotes are
not helpful
,” I whined. “Why do they send you here if you’re not going to tell me anything useful?”

“Did I not tell you how to tie your tie, shave your face, and drive to your school?”

He had me there. “Thank you, Will. You are
quite
useful.” I opened the driver’s side door and climbed out.

“Oh, and Abby!” he yelled from inside the car. “Don’t forget to act like a boy.”

“Right!” I nodded.

I slung my messenger bag over my left shoulder and sauntered toward the front entrance of the school, with what I thought was a manly smirk on my face, swinging my arms casually, and trying my best to keep my center of gravity low, which translated into keeping my knees slightly bent.

I was walking like the Pink Panther.

Suddenly, I looked up from the ground and saw the raven-haired secret girlfriend I’d woken up next to the night before.

Sure, she’d told me to keep a code of silence, but it would be rude to ignore her, I thought. If I was in someone’s bedroom and told him I loved him, I’d want him at least to acknowledge me the next day.

I tipped my chin up, the way smooth men do in the movies. Or, at least, the way Joey Tribbiani did in
Friends
.

“Hey, sweetness!” I called.

The color drained out of her face. She looked around, then stomped over to me. “Are you insane?” she whispered. “What are you doing?”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, genuinely confused.

Before she could answer, a dorky fourteen-year-old ran over to her, waving a sheet of paper in one hand while holding twenty pounds of books under his other arm.

“I’m sorry to interrupt but I wanted to give you this now. I have an allergist’s appointment at ten, so I’ll be missing class.”

She took the paper and smiled. “No problem, Reggie.”

“Thanks, Miss Rogers,” he said, and hurried away.

I struggled to form words. “
Miss
Rogers?” I gasped, incredulous.

She smiled with the corner of her mouth and winked at me. “Code of silence,” she whispered, then whipped her head around and sauntered away.

Jumping into these bodies, it’s sometimes tricky to figure out who these people are. Eric, however, is pretty simple.

He’s the teacher’s pet.

Chapter
3

Thursday, 8:22 AM

D
uring first period, I learned that Eric is usually very good at basketball—the operative word being
usually
. During second and third periods, I learned that when I get back to my old life, if I ever get back to my old life, I should stay away from organic chemistry. And during fourth period, I learned that I don’t know anything about the Hapsburgs.

The teacher, a reptile-faced man with two tufts of gray hair on either side of his otherwise bald head, passed out a four-page test packet labeled, “Mr. Koch’s History of the Hapsburgs.”

“1) Name three domestic policies of Joseph II,” read the first test question.

“I can’t even name one,” I wrote in pencil, then quickly erased it. Instead I guessed and wrote, “Religious Freedom. Social Reform. Centralized Government.” Monarchs are always centralizing things, right?

“2) What two countries gained their independence as a result of the Peace of Westphalia?”

The Peace of Westphalia? Why hadn’t I heard of any of this? Had I ever been to school?

Westphalia sounded like another name for…Spain? “Spain
.
” And if Spain was independent, maybe its next-door neighbor was too. “Portugal,” I wrote.

I sifted through the rest of the multiple-choice questions for something I recognized.

The conciliar movement. War of the Spanish succession. Charles II and inbreeding.

Inbreeding? I resolved to google Charles II when I got home from school, just out of curiosity, but there was no rescuing me at the moment. I filled out my Scantron sheet with an even distribution of A, B, C, and D that looked random enough, and spent the rest of the period glancing around the room at my new classmates, all bent studiously over their papers, the gold crests on their blue blazers catching the fluorescent light overhead as they shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

I used the time to ponder why I was here and how I was going to make it out. Yes, Eric was dating his teacher. But he was eighteen, and she looked like she was still in college, so it wasn’t as if I’d been sent to rescue Eric from the clutches of a pedophile. Miss Rogers had sensational legs and a movie-star face; and what a coup, to be in high school and to date an adult! Eric had scored, big time, and there was no reason to get in the way of that.

So what was my job, then? Eric’s life seemed charmed—even if his mom, whose name I still didn’t know, was a zealot of the organic movement, or, as my own mother used to say,
a
food snot
.

Wait.
My
mom? Where had that thought come from?

I sat up straight at my desk and tried desperately to retrieve the thought, smell her shampoo, hear her laugh, picture the quality of the light pouring through the window of the living room or car—wherever she had said it—but the memory had flown away entirely. Maybe it had never been there at all. What had I achieved in this mission thus far, besides learning to tie a tie and failing a test on the Hapsburgs?

The bell rang, shaking me out of my reverie. The girl sitting in front of me turned to the girl sitting across from me and groaned, rolling her eyes back into her head.

“Oh. My. God!” she huffed dramatically. “Too hard. I hate this school.”

The girl across from me just let her forehead thump against the desk in silence.

“I know!” I chimed in enthusiastically, glad I wasn’t the only one whom the test had slapped like a wet blanket. “I just got killed.”

The girl in front of me turned around. “AP classes proving too much for your God-given scholastic abilities? I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re graded on a bit of a downward curve, Loverman.” She giggled maniacally, and I laughed along, without a clue about what she meant.

After class, I followed a herd of blue jackets toward the cafeteria, hanging my head, clutching the padded straps of my backpack. One of the worst parts of being borrowed was having to constantly experience the humiliation of not knowing anyone or anything. Most people are new kids only a few times in their life—once a year, at most, if their parents are in the military. I had to be a new kid every three days.

To say nothing of my new gender.

I got in line at the serving station and my stomach turned at the sight of a steaming tray piled high with hamburgers—sad, flabby patties of gray meat nestled between two unnaturally yellow buns.

“Burger?” said the cheerful chef, her flaming red hair tucked up in a net.

My gaze shifted to an adjacent tray piled high with iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Not the most appealing salad I’d ever seen, but it had to serve me better than that questionable, flaccid “meat.”

“Just salad, please,” I smiled.

I coated my salad with Italian dressing and sat at an empty table.

Where was Will when you needed him? I remembered his words: “Secrets, secrets hurt someone.” What did that have to do with anything? The only secret I’d seen so far was the relationship Eric was having with Miss Rogers, and that didn’t seem to be hurting anyone.

Two boys plopped their backpacks down on the table in front of my salad. They looked nice enough—one had a goofy grin that showed just one of his teeth, and the other had bushy black eyebrows that looked like caterpillars.

“Dude, we were waving to you,” said Tooth.

“Yeah, why are you sitting here?” said Caterpillar.

“I didn’t see you guys,” I said, truthfully.

I picked up my tray and followed my new friends to a long table filled with boys yelling animatedly at one another.

“Okay. Kesha, Lady GaGa, Lea Michele,” one yelled.

“Lea Michele is an
actress,
not a singer!” another yelled back.

“She’s both. Whatever, it doesn’t matter.”

I took an empty seat at the table and sank my fork into the crunchy lettuce.

“Eric,” said Caterpillar, with faintly disguised disgust. “Why are you eating salad? Salad is lunch for a hamburger. Go get a hamburger.”

There was no mistaking it. These were bros, and it was time for me to bro out. I squinted my eyes and pushed one corner of my mouth up in that signature bro smirk, self-satisfied and curious at the same time.

“No, man, it’s like, I already had two hamburgers. Dude.” I topped the whole thing off with a pair of fake pistols that I made with my hands and shot at Tooth’s face.

Tooth stared at me, confused, like he suddenly didn’t know who I was. Then a moment later, to my great relief, he feigned a bloody death by gunshot wound, falling back onto the ground and gagging.

“Fine. Eric: Mila Kunis, Natalie Portman, Emma Stone.”

“What?”

“Screw, Marry, Kill, man. Your favorite game.”

I wasn’t sure who those women were, let alone which of them I would marry, so I turned toward my lunch. “Pass,” I said, then I turned back to my salad quietly.

“What’s with you, dude?” whispered Caterpillar.

“What?” I replied.

“You usually have so much to say, you know? Are you okay?”

Uh-oh. I wasn’t doing as well as I thought. I felt like running to the bathroom and eating alone in a stall. Everything about this situation was overwhelming: the bizarre new body, the guy conversations, the secret affair with a teacher, the urinals.

“I’m just thinking,” I said. “About stuff.”

Caterpillar patted me on the back. “It’s cool, man.” He turned to the group. “Well, I would screw Kunis, marry Stone, and kill Portman.”

There were gasps around the table.

“Portman is gorgeous, duh, but she has
crazy
eyes. I bet she’s a handful. I’d rather be with someone who’s laid-back and makes me laugh than someone who’s gonna be all twitchy all the time.”

Then Caterpillar stiffened as he stared out past the table. “Yo, why are cops here?”

I turned and saw two policemen standing in the hallway. They were talking to a man in a suit with a bad comb-over.

The bros all stared in silence at the cops, and I stared with them, until a girl with a platinum-blond braid tapped me on the shoulder.

“Ummm, Eric? We’re going to be late.”

“Late for what?”

“Ummm, student council.”

“Oh, right. Yeah. Coming.” I grabbed my backpack and my empty tray.

“The president can’t really be late, so…we have to hurry.”

I gulped.
The president?

Chapter
4

Thursday, 12:48 PM

I
t seemed I’d been transplanted into the body of Superman. But I, Abby Grace, was not Superman.

As I followed Platinum-Pigtails down the hallway to the student council meeting, I tried to think of how to fudge my way through it with no idea what the topics of discussion were.

“Do you…have the agenda?” I asked, while we continued to power walk through the hallways.

“No, you do!” she said.

“Right,” I said. I felt like I was in an episode of
The West Wing
.

I unzipped my backpack and rifled through the folders. AP calc. AP Euro hist. AP chem. AP French.
Eric sure loves his AP classes.
Student council.

Bingo.

I found a typed sheet with that day’s date and a list of bulleted items. I’d barely had time to skim the sheet when we reached the meeting.

Inside a sunny, modern classroom with one wall made entirely of windows, twenty or so students waited at their desks. I stood at the front of the room with the agenda in my hands and cleared my throat.

Everyone fell silent, and so did I.

When I glanced up from the paper, I saw Miss Rogers in the back of the room, her hands folded over her chest. She winked at me while no one was looking. What is she doing here?
I thought. I looked down again at the agenda, adorned with a fancy header: