The Bermudez Triangle (15 page)

She reached out anyway. She started randomly pulling things off the shelf and skimming the pages. It was strangely liberating, standing in the corner of the bookstore reading a gay and lesbian travel guide to Istanbul.

“Hey,” came a voice behind her. She turned to see Avery, holding her ground on the edge of International Cooking and Dietary Concerns. Avery looked at Mel and then at the books. “Come listen to something,” she said.

“What?” Mel said innocently. Normally she gave in when Avery got nervous that they were doing something too obvious. Today she was determined not to move. She was only reading, after all. It wasn’t like they were making out against the
Harry Potter
display.

“Come on,” Avery said, more insistently this time.

“I’m reading.”

“Well, don’t.”

“Calm down, Ave.”

“I
am
calm,” Avery said in a low voice.

“Couples counseling works.”

They turned to see Devon Wakeman, wearing his signature tie under a heavy hooded sweatshirt. He had just turned the corner of the aisle.

The remark probably didn’t even mean anything, but neither Avery nor Mel replied. Avery, in fact, was staring at Devon with a look
of horror, like he had just crawled out from under her bed wearing a hockey mask. Mel took refuge in her normal rabbitlike defense tactic: when confronted, stand still and believe that you blend into the surroundings.

Devon looked at each of their faces, then at the shelf, then at the book that Mel’s hand was still resting on. A thought bubble practically appeared over his head, showing the equation that was quickly drawn, checked, and confirmed.

“So,” he said, leaning back against the local interest shelf. “What are you guys doing?”

“What do you normally do in a bookstore?” Avery said.

Devon held up his hands, as if to say that he was only making conversation.

“Gay and lesbian studies,” he said, nodding. “That’s cool. What are you guys working on?”

“Something for English,” Mel mumbled.

“Oh.”

The conversation fell dead to the ground. Devon had no reason to stay, anyway. He had all the information he’d ever need about them.

“See you guys around,” he said.

The moment he was gone, Avery turned and left the store. Mel shoved the book back on the shelf haphazardly and followed her. By the time Mel got out the door, Avery had cut across traffic and was on the other side of the road. Out of the corner of her eye Mel noticed Devon and two other guys conferring. They glanced over in her direction and watched Mel’s pursuit.

Mel caught up with Avery on the opposite side, just as she was about to turn the corner and storm down Philadelphia Avenue, probably on her way home.

“Wait up!”

Avery stopped but didn’t turn. She patted her pockets down nervously, searching for her cigarettes.

“Why did you have to do that?” Avery said as Mel caught up to her. Now that she’d found the cigarettes, she was struggling with her lighter in the misting rain. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?”

“All I did was stand by some books,” Mel said.

“You didn’t stand by
some
books.”

“I’m not allowed to read?” Mel’s voice got embarrassingly high when she got angry.

“Well, now Devon thinks I’m gay,” Avery shot back.

“It’s fine. Who even cares?”

“Mel …” Avery’s voice cracked, and she almost laughed. She managed to light her cigarette, and she held it tight between her teeth as she squeezed her face with both hands.

“It’s hard,” Mel said calmly. “I know. It’s kind of weird when people know.”

“Weird?” Avery said, a note of slight hysteria coming into her voice. “It’s not weird. It’s
beyond
weird.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not gay,” Avery said, sticking her free hand into her pocket.

“Ave—”

“I’m not gay.” Avery said it again, very clearly and sternly.

“Okay,” Mel said, trying to be conciliatory. “You’re bi.”

“Stop trying to tell me what I am!” Avery snapped.

Mel stepped back in shock. She could understand that Avery might not feel comfortable being labeled gay—Mel still had trouble with this sometimes—but being bi wasn’t exactly something she could deny.

“This isn’t the same as other people,” Avery went on. “The bi girls, they go back and forth. We’re just … together.”

“So?”

“It’s more serious with us. We act like lesbians. Real ones.”

Avery was shaking her head as she spoke, as if the concept of “real lesbians” wasn’t something she could quite comprehend.

“I am a real one,” Mel said. “But you can be whatever you want. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does.”

“Why?” Mel’s voice was high again, but this time out of a rising panic. “You’re the one who always says that labels are stupid.”

Avery took a long drag on her cigarette. She started running her hands over her face again, over her eyebrows, along her nose, up her cheekbones—like she was trying to rub her own face off.

“I’m just going to walk home,” she finally said, putting her car keys in Mel’s hand.

Mel watched Avery walk away. Her shoulders hunched against the rain as she walked down the sloping street and then around the corner. It wasn’t until Avery was out of sight that Mel realized that she was cold, wet, and strangely alone, right in the middle of town.

On Monday morning
Devon came into the council office and said, “So.”

Except he didn’t just say, “So.” He said, “Soooooooooo.” It lasted for about three minutes.

Nina looked up from the sheets of elaborate pumpkin-shaped tickets she’d designed for the hayride. (Oh, they had laughed when she was a kid, but years of watching Martha Stewart were finally paying off.) Devon sat down at the table across from her and looked down at her little pumpkin patch.

“I didn’t know your friends were gay,” he said. “How long have they been dating?”

Before Nina could even react, Georgia came into the room. She threw down a box of muffins, extras from the buffet her parents put out every morning.

“Who’s gay?” she said. “What did I miss?”

Devon was playing it very close to the chest now. He took a muffin, tore off a chunk of the top, and popped it into his mouth, eyeing Nina all the while. Georgia looked to Nina for her explanation.

“Come on,” she said. “I had a shitty morning. A big branch fell on my car. It dented the trunk. Tell me something good.”

“I don’t know,” Nina said. It came out clumsily. “Devon was just talking….”

“About who?”

“I think he’s joking or something,” Nina said, narrowing her focus to her pumpkins. Even as she spoke, though, she knew that this was a bad thing to say. The “think” and the “or something” implied uncertainty. Or worse yet, they seemed to confirm what he was saying. Unless she flat-out lied, everything out of her mouth was suspect.

From the look in his eye, though, Nina knew that Devon had already gotten the confirmation he wanted.

“What?” Georgia said. “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“I have to go to the photo lab,” Devon said, getting up.

“Well?” Georgia prompted as Devon left the room.

“I don’t want to say who it was,” Nina said.

Georgia’s eyes went wide.

“Why not?”

Because if Georgia knew, somehow, that information would spread. She just had that effect. Rumors lived in her blood cells. She was the universal Patient Zero of AHH, spreading information through her touch and her very breath.

“I can’t,” Nina said.

Nina could almost hear the file drawer in Georgia’s mind opening, ready to receive the knowledge. She would find out somehow.

“What’s with you and Tieboy?” Georgia asked. “With the secrets and the pictures?”

“Pictures?”

“Didn’t you see it?” Georgia asked.

“See what?” Nina said warily. She wasn’t in the mood for another surprise.

“The picture.”

“What picture?”

“Come on.”

Georgia waved Nina out into the hall, just a few steps down from the photography lab, where Devon was working. She pointed into a glass case.

“There,” Georgia said.

There was a collection of pictures of body parts—an earful of studs, a bare foot, the back of a guy’s neck, a hand. A hand with long fingers with several chunky rings on them and, farther up the wrist, the shadow of a white bracelet. It was Nina’s hand.

Georgia was gaping at her wide-eyed, as if to say, “Well?” Nina pushed her along back in the direction of the office.

“He’s taking pictures of you,” Georgia said.

“Of my hand.”

“Still.”

“Boyfriend. Got one.”

“In
Portland
. Tell me who’s gay.”

“Georgia …” Nina sighed. “I have to go to class. See you later.”

Doug and Jean were intensely interested in Mel today. All the mental vibes were directed onto her, not through her. Mel stared down at Doug’s massive black cowboy boots with the white stitching and tried not to notice.

Maybe she was imagining it. She was very tired, and everything was a little foggy. She’d sat up half the night, wondering what Avery meant by “not gay” and looking at Web sites about bisexuality and sexual identity, trying to get some kind of understanding of what Avery was trying to say to her. She spent hours reading about femmes and butches and transgendered people, bouncing from page to page, topic to topic. In the end her mind was so muddled that she couldn’t remember what it was she’d been trying to find out in the first place. What little sleep she got, she’d spent dreaming about those little bouncing icons people put next to their mood and current music selection in their blogs.

Parker was tapping a rhythm into the back of his head with a pen. Zimm was attempting to explain essay structure by drawing an upside-down triangle, a square, and a right-sided triangle on the board. Everything was fuzzing out. Mel reached up and unleashed her ponytail in preparation for making a hair shield to close her eyes behind.

“It’s like a top,” Zimm was saying as he pointed to the upside-down triangle. “The weight of the introduction rests on this one point, the topic sentence. The weight of the entire essay really rests there. You can put a lot on one point. Medieval scholars used to debate about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.”

Mel scrawled the picture into her notes and wrote,
Everything here. Angels
. She hadn’t really been listening and didn’t know what the
angels
part was supposed to mean. It sounded meaningful, though.

“Am I completely losing it, or was Vampire Douglas sniffing your head?” Parker asked the second they walked out of class.

“Sniffing my head?”

“It looked like he was leaning into you. I thought he was going to bite your skull.”

As they walked down the hall, one of the guys she’d seen talking to Devon passed by. He looked at Mel and smiled. Parker noticed this as well. He didn’t say anything about it, but he swung around and watched the guy as they walked in opposite directions.

They stopped at Mel’s locker. It took her a moment to remember the combination. She shook her head, trying to get her mind back on track.

“Is there something really weird happening today?” Parker asked. “A full moon, perhaps?”

Instead of facing out toward the hall and giving a mumbled running commentary on the people who passed by like he normally did, Parker turned in and faced her. He didn’t exactly box her in, but the exhaustion was hitting her again, and everything felt close.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“Huh?” Mel backed up a step.

“You seem a little out of it.”

“I didn’t get much sleep,” she said.

She could tell he didn’t believe her, but he didn’t press the issue.

Avery was nic-fitting right now, in the middle of lunch. But the school rules prohibited anyone from leaving during the lunch period, so there was nowhere for her to go for a cigarette. She drummed her fingers on the table and ignored her tuna fish sandwich.

Gaz and Hareth, her lunch companions, were oblivious to this. At the moment they were preoccupied by the loss of Angry Maxwell’s bass player, Margo. She had stormed out of Gaz’s basement the night before, citing some specific issues with Hareth’s rhyming style and the general “suckitude” of the band.

“If I’m rhyming,” Hareth was saying, “I need a heavy beat under me, you know, to hold me up. We have to stay together, you know? Behind the rhyme. And if I’m rhyming …”

“It wasn’t you,” Gaz said as he sucked down a long swig of soda and rolled his upper lip toward his nose in thought.

“That’s what I’m saying. I’m rhyming for all of us. And the beat has to stay with me. So if I move, the beat has to follow me. The beat’s gotta be like
on my ass
the whole time. I need it that tight. And Go wanted her own beat, and you can’t have that.”

“It wasn’t you,” Gaz said again. “It was Go.”

“You can give him a strong drumbeat,” Avery said.

“I’m not the drummer anymore,” Gaz said. “I’ve been playing lead guitar since Mike went to Mass Distraction.”

“When did that happen?”

“About a week ago.”