Now That You Mention It Page 7

  At school, I started stealing dessert from the cafeteria, even though I was a cold-lunch kid. Pudding or Jell-O with fake whipped cream on it, the big hard cookies that spattered crumbs everywhere. I'd go through the lunch line, pretending I needed an extra napkin, and subtly grab a little bowl or cookie or Twinkie, then slip off to the gym, which was always empty at lunchtime, and swallow my treat in gulps, tasting only the first bite, shoving the rest in as fast as I could.

  I didn't have friends anymore. All those years of rushing home to see what Dad and Lily and I were going to do (because it was better than anything in the world) had left me outside the harsh world of junior high, where cliques were carved in stone, and cafeteria seating was more complex than the British peerage.

  At home, I helped myself to seconds of my mother's boring, unvarying dinners. Monday night: chicken, baked potatoes, carrots and peas. Tuesday night: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans. Wednesday night: pork chops, rice, peas again. You get the idea. But I ate and ate and ate.

  "You're getting fat," Lily accused. She remained elf thin. Soon, I knew, she'd start to become beautiful. "Stop eating, Nora. It's gross." She pushed back her own untouched dinner, superiority and disgust shining from her blueberry-colored eyes. One of our shared chores was after-supper cleanup. I always volunteered to do it solo. That way, I could eat her meal, too.

  "Go do your homework, Lily," our mother said, her eyes on me.

  My father wasn't the only one who'd left, it seemed. The day he packed up was the day my sister stopped loving me.

  I ate and waited out the year, trying to be as invisible as possible in school that year, counting the weeks till summer, when I prayed Lily and I would recapture the magical times we'd had with Dad. When she would love me again. When I'd once again have a place in the world.

  When summer finally arrived, I tried to re-create some of the things we'd done before--draw little maps in the dirt of the secret ancient Mexican cities Dad told us about or make birds' nests that a real bird might want to live in, shinny up the saplings that lined the rocky shore, make forts.

  It didn't work.

  Lily wanted nothing to do with it. One time, I brought up the subject of our father and put my arm around her to reassure her--I was the big sister, after all. She shrugged it off like my arm burned. "Get over it, Nora," she said bitterly and went back inside.

  In a lot of ways, Lily seemed older than I was. She had a sharpness about her, a complexity that I lacked. While I had hidden in sixth grade, Lily started the year off by talking to the prettiest, richest girls in our school without fear, without hesitation, as if she was one of them. And they accepted her.

  Everyone knew about our father leaving. In Lily's case, it made her edgy and badass. In my case, it made me a loser.

  My solitude continued into the next school year. I worked hard, because homework could fill up hours, because if I was hunched over a math work sheet at our kitchen table, I didn't have to see my younger sister, once so loved, glaring at me. I asked for extra-credit projects so I could spend more time at the library, sitting in the cool, dim stacks, reading, scribbling notes, so I didn't have to go home to the home where my father no longer lived. The one bright spot in my life was straight As every semester.

  I worried that our dad called Lily, that he was coming to get her, but he'd leave me with Mom. Every day when I got home, I checked the answering machine. Every day, a zero sat unblinking.

  One time, I screwed up my courage when my mother was driving me to the dentist. Somehow, talking in the car was always easier. "Do you think Dad will ever come back?" I asked, looking out my window.

  There was a pause, then, "I don't know."

  Thus ended our conversation.

  So I had homework, I had my secret food (which wasn't that much of a secret really). And then came puberty. Overnight, it seemed, the plagues of Egypt visited my body. I went from a chubby adolescent to someone with breasts and a beer belly, thick thighs that chafed, a butt that was both wide and flat. The hair on my legs was as thick as on my head. I had to shave my armpits daily, or the stubble would prick my skin. I had a 'stache. I had bacne. I got warts on my knuckles.

  There was no indignity too great. My first period--white pants. My second period left a puddle in my chair in math class. During that special time of the month, I would sweat like I'd just finished the Boston Marathon during a heat wave. I had inexplicable halitosis, despite flossing and brushing three times a day. A new clumsiness happened upon me when I grew boobs, throwing me off balance, causing me to trip and stumble more than anyone else in the world, it seemed.

  I started researching witchcraft to see who had done this to me.

  And as I had predicted, my sister grew beautiful.

  For a while I just existed, watching my sister live without me, even if she did sleep four feet away. My mother went to and from work at the hotel, did the books for her freelance clients in the evenings, made our dinners, packed our lunches. She didn't say anything about my weight gain. If she knew I was wretched, she didn't say anything. Told me I did well on my report card, resting her hand on my shoulder for a second, which made me just about cry.

  Every day, I prayed my father would call. Would come back. Would bring happiness back into our lives.

  Then came ninth grade, and I fell in love.

  It was ridiculous, really. There I was, a "husky" girl in a world of beautiful waifs, wearing my homemade jumpers (because jeans cut into the soft fat around my waist), my turtlenecks to cover up as much skin as possible, sturdy shoes and knee socks to mask the fact that the warts had spread to my feet. My hair was a horrible combination of frizzy, wiry, curly and straight, and because spitballs were good at hiding in there, I wore it in a ponytail most of the time. I looked like the definition of spinster, even at the age of fourteen.

  Of course, Luke Fletcher wouldn't notice me.

  But love is stupid, isn't it? My brain couldn't stop the free fall of my heart. I knew even the idea was a joke, but my insides leaped and wriggled when he walked by. He'd always been cute--the better-looking, funnier, more athletic Fletcher twin. Sullivan wasn't hideous or anything...just average.

  Luke, on the other hand, was breathtaking. My lungs literally stopped working at the sight of him. He had tawny blond hair, green eyes, dimples. A flashing, easy smile, and a laugh that echoed in the chambers of my swollen, empty heart.

  He was great at sports, already six feet tall, and had gone from lean to muscled over the summer. He was tan from working outside--his father owned Scupper Island Boatyard, and both boys worked there, and now Luke's skin was golden and perfect, hypnotic. He was on the soccer team, a starter his freshman year.

  My crush was horrible, absurd, embarrassing. I wished with all my heart that it would wither and die, but it didn't. It grew. It was a virus.

  If God hadn't already blessed Luke enough, he was smart. As smart as I was, smarter even, because my grades came from studying and reading, and his came from simply being. He and I were the only two kids from our class to take Algebra II as freshmen. The only two kids who got put into the Honors English class. The only two who got an A-plus on our biology midterm.

  He was nice, too.

  When it suited him, he was nice.

  I knew I'd never have a chance with a boy like that. Of course, I didn't. But my stupid, ridiculous heart lived for any notice, any opportunity just the same. Once, I sat next to him in assembly by some miracle and sweat and blushed for the entire hour, drunk with the smell of him--shampoo and sweat. His arm brushed mine, and my whole body clenched with lust.

  Twice a week, Mr. Abernathy, the English teacher, made us (like it was a sacrifice for me) stay after school to do college-level writing prompts. The math teacher wanted us to compete as a team in the Math Olympiad, and in the two glorious weeks leading up to it, we crammed together at the library, four nights in all. Sitting with him at the competition, scribbling notes, looking at each other with smiles when our answer was correc
t... It was magic. We took third in the state. When the principal broadcast our results in the morning announcements, I blushed so hard my face hurt.

  "Way to go, Fletcher!" Joey Behring called. "Too bad it had to be with the Troll."

  Did I mention my nickname? Yeah. My physical appearance wasn't unnoticed by my peers. Did I have some good features? Who cared at that age?

  "She's okay," Luke said, and my face burned hotter from the gallant defense.

  Sullivan Fletcher paused at my desk as homeroom let out. "Good job, Nora," he said.

  "Thanks," I mumbled.

  And so went high school. Study, savor every second my academic achievement let me have with Luke. More than college, more than the urge to do well, his presence was my motivation.

  The summer between freshman and sophomore years, I got a summer job at the Scupper Island Clam Shack, which meant I deep-fried a lot of seafood. Ate a lot of seafood, too. Working there was a relief; most of the customers were the summer nuisance, and I tried to be cheerful and sunny and pretend I wasn't fat when I waited on them. I gave my mother my paychecks--money was always tight--and she told me I was a good kid.

  Sullivan Fletcher worked at the Clam Shack as well as at his father's boatyard. He was not as blessed athletically as his twin, not particularly brainy, though not dumb, either. He wasn't mean, didn't talk much, and I might've liked him, had he not dated Amy Beckman, one of the beautiful Cheetos, one of Lily's pack. Amy went out of her way to mock me, and Lily pretended not to notice (or didn't mind).

  Lily...sharp-tongued, model thin, blue-eyed and graceful, carelessly sexual, an expert at conveying everything with a look. Her grades were in the toilet, but she didn't care. When Mom suggested I tutor her, Lily made a face of such disgust that tears came to my eyes.

  Worst of all, we still shared a room. Our little house only had two bedrooms. Every day, Lily would dress in front of me, totally unselfconscious about her body, her ribs striating through her skin, her vertebrae rippling as she pulled on pants. She was tiny and perfect, still so beautiful to me, as she had been when she was little. I tried not to look, but her body fascinated me. What would it be like to bend over and not have a stomach bulge? To not have to wear a bra? To have arms as long and slim as a ballerina's, an ass that was both round and shapely but still fit into size 00 jeans?

  At night, I'd cry sometimes, fully embracing my misery like any teenager worth her salty tears. I lacked my mother's ironclad pragmatism, lacked Lily's sense of self-preservation. Instead, I wrapped myself in melancholy, remembering when my sister and I were little, when we were close, when we were happy. I missed my father and hated him and loved him and hated him some more for ruining everything. Tears would slip into my ears as I listened to Lily breathe.

  Or listened to her sneak out, slipping open the window, out onto the roof, down onto the lawn, as light and silent and beautiful as a dragonfly.

  I missed her so much my bones hurt with it. The fact was, my sister had become a bitch, and it would've served me well to tell her that and show some gumption, as my mother would say...but that was the gift of hindsight. As it was, I yearned for her love, the friendship that I had never once questioned before our father left. "When will you be done in there?" was about the lengthiest conversation we had in years.

  So Luke Fletcher was my heaven and hell. Any excitement in my life came from occasionally being paired with Luke in school. Every time was a mixed bag--we'd do a calculus problem on the board, extra credit going to the person who finished first; me acutely aware that my arms jiggled as I wrote, that the whole class was pulling for Luke.

  But either way, if he won or I won, he'd smile at me, and it was everything.

  Until senior year, that was.

  Twenty years before I started high school, Scupper Island had produced a super genius named Pedro Perez, son of a fisherman, who was off-the-charts brilliant. He went to Tufts, then Harvard, then Oxford, then Stanford, and before he was thirty, he had three PhDs and had invented a computer algorithm that tracked consumer data and changed marketing forevermore. He had seventy-nine patents on all sorts of things, from agricultural tools to advanced rocket engines (and time-travel machines, if you listened to the rumors). Like any good billionaire hermit, he owned a ranch in Montana and moved his family out with him.

  But once a year, Dr. Perez came back to Scupper to show his appreciation to his hometown by sending the kid with the highest GPA to Tufts. This Scupper Island slot at the university may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Dr. Perez had given the school tens of millions of dollars. It might simply have been a testament to our good public schools, funded by the tax dollars of our summer residents. But each year, a Scupper Island kid went off to Medford, Massachusetts and never looked back.

  The scholarship covered everything. Tuition, room, board, books, a generous allowance that, rumor had it, covered everything from dorm-room furnishings to eating out. Dr. Perez's only requirement was that the recipient finish college; dropouts would have to repay him.

  No one ever dropped out.

  Scupper Island was so grateful they renamed a street after him--Maple Street became Perez Avenue, and every year at the start of the second semester, Dr. Perez left Montana, returned to the island and announced the winner. He asked that grades not be posted after December midterms, so the winner could be kept a secret until the first week of January, when the entire school assembled to see who the lucky senior would be.

  Most years, it was obvious who'd win, but occasionally, it would be suspenseful.

  Going into our senior year, Luke and I were neck and neck. I had a 4.115 GPA, thanks to the weighted grades from my AP classes (an A in those meant a 5.0, not a 4.0).

  Luke's GPA was 4.142, because he got A-pluses in gym... And every year, for that miserable semester, as if changing in the locker room in front of my slender female classmates wasn't punishment enough, I got an A-minus.

  I tried, I was a good sport, cheering on my classmates even if they ignored me. I sweat and ran and played volleyball, diving for balls, trying my best, and I still got an A-minus. I wondered if that had been deliberate; the gym teacher was also the soccer coach. If Luke went to Tufts, he'd almost certainly play soccer, which would be a feather in Coach's cap.

  "An A-minus is a good grade," Coach said when I meekly approached him freshman year and asked what I had to do to bump that grade up. His eyes scanned me. "For a girl with your physique, I'd say it's a very generous grade. You work hard. You're doing fine." The implication was clear. Only the really fit kids got As.

  Luke, of course, was a god.

  In the spring of my junior year, my mother sat me down and told me if I wanted to go to college, I'd have to get there myself, a fact I already knew. She didn't want me to get my hopes up that there was money "lying around for that."

  If I won the Perez Scholarship, I'd go for free. To Tufts! The name itself was beautiful, light and sunny, full of promise.

  Only 0.027 of a grade point average stood between Luke and me.

  And so, shit got serious...at least, for me. Luke and I took the same AP classes. If I could get even half a grade higher than Luke, I could erase my deficit.

  He didn't seem concerned. Luke was gifted at English and history; I had to sweat over those subjects to get my grades. But I had an edge in science, and it was a weighted class. AP bio was my chance.

  I pictured going to Tufts. I sent away for information, and Luke's mother, who ran the post office, snarled at me when I collected the fat catalog, knowing full well why I wanted it. She ignored me when I thanked her, but I barely cared, inhaling the sharp, rich scent of the catalog before going to the park bench to pore over the pictures and course descriptions.

  Oh, the campus! The brick buildings and unnaturally green lawns! I could see myself in one of the dorm rooms, a puffy white comforter on my bed, throw pillows and...and whatever else people brought to college. I'd be in the beautiful city of Boston (well, Medford, but practically
Boston). I could see my future self: slim and pretty with better hair, at ease, laughing with friends--friends!--treating them to pizza with Dr. Perez's expense account.

  I would get an A-plus in AP bio. I didn't think Luke could.

  But he pulled a rabbit out of a hat...or a human, more accurately. Xiaowen Liu was a Chinese girl whose family had just moved to Maine from Boston and lived in a big house on the cliff. On the first day of school, Luke asked her to be his lab partner.

  "Hey, Nora," he said with a grin. "Guess who got a perfect score on her biology SATs?" He gave Xiaowen a one-armed hug, making her blush. I didn't blame her. I understood. She had an accent; the Cheetos had immediately pretended not to understand her and didn't even try to pronounce her name--She-ao-wen, not terribly hard. But they insisted on calling her "Ex-Ee-Oh-whatever," the feral, skinny bitches.

  I said hi to Xiaowen on her first day, and she said hi back, but that was it for the "Outsiders Bonding" moment. I lacked the confidence to ask if she wanted to hang out sometime, and besides, her mother chauffeured her to and from school in a new Mercedes. The money thing, you see. I was an islander; she was a rich person from away. She had what I wanted to pull off and failed--quiet confidence.

  All three of us got an A-plus on the first big bio test.

  There went my edge in science.

  Then came the English class speeches.

  Luke knew he'd ace his. I was the Troll, after all; he was Apollo.

  Public speaking was my greatest dread--standing in front of my peers, their judgment and disdain enveloping me like a poison gas. I'd have to suck in my stomach. I'd break out in hives on top of acne. I'd sweat. My scalp would ooze oil. Seriously, I was cursed.

  But I needed every A-plus I could get. We were assigned topics; mine was the failure of the juvenile justice system in Maine. Luke's was on genetic engineering, an unfairly interesting topic.