The Other Way Around (2 page)

Alex is an excellent student
and
a superb athlete. At his old school he played soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, and tennis in the spring. It's obvious he excelled at all three. He sinks three-point shots with ease and has a fierce backhand that makes Mr. Beech, who also coaches tennis,
salivate. There is currently no use for his skills at St. Mary's since all the schools we play are other all-girls schools. Alex doesn't seem to mind. For being such a superior athlete, he's oddly uncompetitive. Whenever we scrimmage at anything in gym class he always goes out of his way to pass to everyone, even the least coordinated players. Win or lose, he doesn't seem to care.

Alex will tell anyone who asked the story of how he ended up at St. Mary's. An illicit affair with a student teacher led the public school system to politely ask if he wouldn't consider attending school somewhere else, on their dime, of course. I'm not entirely sure if I believe it, but if it's a lie, it's an entertaining one, so I'm willing to let it slide. Besides, my roster of friends at St. Mary's isn't exactly overflowing.

I don't mind Alex's floor-model theory. It's better than anything I've come up with on my own. Before I met Alex I chalked up my complete lack of any success with girls to something I referred to privately as the curse of Analiese Gerber. Analiese was the last girl to express any interest in me whatsoever. In fifth grade a posse of her giggly, gum-smacking, ponytailed friends accosted me in the lunch room.

“We need to ask you something,” Tracy Jennings, the ringleader of their small group, announced.

I remember being stunned. It was rare that one girl spoke to me deliberately, much less an entire gaggle of them.

“Who do you like?” she asked, pointing her small chin defiantly in my direction.

I knew what this question meant. I heard the popular girls asking it of each other all the time, but no one had ever asked it of me.

“I don't know,” I said. This apparently was an acceptable answer because it sent a wave of whispers and giggles through the small group. The only one untitillated was Tracy Jennings.

“You don't know, like you don't want to tell us, or you don't know like
you don't know?
”

“I don't know,” I said blankly. Here's where things began to go badly. The other boys I normally ate lunch with were scuttling to the side like so many crabs frightened by a shadow.

“Because Analiese likes you,” Tracy said.

“Oh,” I said. Over the course of the next few weeks I would contemplate a hundred other ways I could have responded to that declaration. Ways that would have continued the mystery of whom I might like, ways that might have granted me entrance into the popular kids' circle. It was a turning point, I know that now.

“So do you like her?” Tracy asked with all the subtlety of a police interrogator.

“I don't know,” I said, and this time I really meant it. I had never thought about Analiese Gerber in this way. She wasn't an unattractive girl. She had straight, brown, shoulder-length hair and large, brown, doe-like eyes. She always wore shiny pink lip gloss, and sometimes it ended up smudging above her lip.

“Because she likes you,” Tracy reiterated. She was starting to sound annoyed. Clearly this interaction was not going the way she had envisioned.

“Okay,” I said finally, hoping that the conversation might end so I could finish my peanut butter and jelly before our brief lunch period was up. Tracy and her posse walked away, a little deflated, but I was just starting to process the conversation that had taken place.
A girl liked me! This was great!

At recess I walked the perimeter of the kickball field alone, thinking about the implications of the whole conversation. I thought about Analiese and decided that the way she wore her lip gloss was actually pretty cute. I envisioned us going to the movies together, waiting outside when the movie was over for my mom or her dad to pick us up. The other kids would walk by us and give us knowing glances. I had never gone to the movies with anyone besides my mom.

At the end of the day, while we waited for the buses to be called, I walked nervously over to Tracy Jennings, who was tilting forward across her desk and blowing enormous bubbles with her gum.

“Yes,” I told her.

“Yes what?” she said, staring at me like I was a cartoon monster—weird but not really scary.

“Yes, I like Analiese too,” I said. I could feel myself blushing.

“Oh,” said Tracy. “Well she likes someone else now.” She gave me a look of feigned sympathy mixed with scientific curiosity. “Are you really sad?” she asked. “'Cause I could tell her that if you want me to.”

I couldn't even answer her. I walked away from her desk stunned. All my plans were destroyed. And I was sad, truly sad—or so I told myself. “You shouldn't mess with a girl's feelings like that,” Tracy called across the classroom.

I stared back at her in disbelief. Tracy just shrugged and went back to her gum smacking.

I tried to catch Analiese's eye as we boarded the bus to go home for a long weekend. I wanted to give her what I imagined to be a soul-searching glance. But she was happily chatting with Billy O'Brien as she got on her bus. I guess if I learned anything
from the whole incident, besides that girls were completely baffling, it was not to imagine a future for myself that was dependent on anyone's feelings, even my own. Especially when it could be so easily shattered by uttering a simple, “Oh.” And I couldn't help but wonder if I had lost my one shot at love to a kid who always chewed with his mouth open.

Margaret is not a hot girl's name. But there she is, sitting two rows in front of me in English class. And she is undeniably hot. They always know it too, the hot girls. They always know they're hot. I wonder how they know? Does it come on their birth certificate as a designation? Caucasian, six pounds eleven ounces, nineteen inches long, hot girl. Margaret was named after the anthropologist Margaret Mead. She told us this on the first day of school. I don't think there's anything sexy about anthropologists, not even in a bare-breasted
National Geographic
kind of way. But I'm willing to make an exception.

She is chewing on her pencil eraser. And even that's hot. If anyone else did it, it would be disgusting, but Margaret looks all nervous, and while she's chewing on her pencil eraser, her silky red hair starts falling out of her ponytail blocking my view of her incredibly hot neck. I start thinking about running my hands through her hair, or how it would feel to have her head in my lap. That goes nowhere good. I shift uncomfortably in my seat, glad that there's another half hour left before I have to stand. I try and focus on the test: an essay on
Romeo and Juliet
. Embarrassingly, all I can think of is that scene where Romeo
says he wishes he could be the glove on Juliet's hand so he could touch her cheek. I don't think this particular line of thinking is going to help me complete my essay on the individual versus society. I'm also pretty sure that sharing this thought with Margaret would not turn out much better for me than it did for Romeo.

Something pings me in the back of the head. I picked up tiny piece of paper off the floor and unroll it.

“Look up, moron,” it says in Alex's tiny penciled scrawl.

Ms. Tuttle is staring at me. She is sitting at the front of the room, correcting papers while we take the test. She waggles her green pen at me (Ms. Tuttle thinks that red pen is too punitive) and points down at the test. I smile and do my best to look appropriately sheepish. When I turn around to give Alex a head nod he rolls his eyes in my direction and then in Margaret's. He shakes his head sadly.
Out of your league,
he mouths. I shrug my shoulders and we both go back to the test. It's not long before I'm spacing out again, staring out the window at the bare gray branches and the white November sky. Did I grab my jacket today on the way out the door? I'm wondering how cold it is when Ms. Tuttle coughs loudly. I look up and see that she is beckoning me with one hooked finger. Reluctantly I get up from my seat.

I follow her into the hall. She sighs before she says anything and touches her neck the way a religious person might finger a cross. But there's nothing there. “Andrew, I assume you're aware that this test counts for fifty percent of your grade this quarter.” Teachers always think things are more important than they really are. But I nod anyway to satisfy her. And it's true, I am aware of that fact. She's only said it about fifteen
times a day for the last three days, as though bludgeoning us with this fact might get us to actually study. “Did you even prepare a note card?” she asks.

I pull a crumpled 3x5 index card from my pants pocket and hold it up briefly for her inspection. Ms. Tuttle may be a teacher, but she's no dope. “Does it have anything on it?” Her voice is patiently sarcastic. I can't believe it's only November. Usually it takes teachers at least six months to figure out that I'm a terrible student. I smooth the card open and show her. It's titled
Romeo and Juliet Theme Essay.
Underneath that are the words
Individual versus Society,
followed by
Romeo versus society
and
Juliet versus society.

“It seemed like kind of an obvious theme so I didn't think I needed a lot of notes,” I say without meeting her eyes.

“Well, you've got about twenty minutes left of class time, and I can't wait to see what you come up with once you conquer that first sentence.” Again with the sarcasm. I just nod and make like I'm going back into the room. Ms. Tuttle must have a moment of weakness, because she puts her hand on my shoulder and asks in a softer tone. “Is this about your meeting this afternoon?”

Honestly, I had forgotten, but I know an opening when I see one. “I guess I am a little distracted.”

“Well, I suppose if you need more time on your essay,” Ms. Tuttle relents.

No! I want to shout. Don't do it! I thought for a minute you were different, but you're a sucker just like the rest of them. “Yeah,” I say. “That might be good.”

“I'm not going to hang you out to dry, Andrew,” Ms. Tuttle assures me.
In front of your mother the Dragon Lady,
I think. I
wonder if Ms. Tuttle is afraid of my mother the way so many teachers are. It's pretty much the reason I passed first quarter. Nobody wanted to piss off the new headmistress early on. I don't hate my mother, but I hate when she plays the headmistress. I'm smart enough to know when she's throwing her Ivy League vocabulary in someone's face, and it makes me want to vomit and run in the opposite direction from whatever future she has in mind for me.

“We just want to find a way to help you be successful,” she adds. It's hard not to cringe. I remember this is Ms. Tuttle, not Mom, but it seems like I've heard these words a hundred times over the course of the last three or four years. This is not my first parent-teacher meeting, nor will it probably be my last. On my way back into class I catch another smirk from Alex. I manage to at least write a passable introduction to my essay before the bell rings at the end of the period.

My first teacher meeting was a result of my first-ever trip to the principal's office. We were living in Geneseo, New York, so Mom could finish her Ph.D., and I attended the local elementary school. I remember this first teacher meeting quite clearly. Every other one since then kind of blurs together.

The unit was called Understanding Handicaps. Each week several well-meaning volunteers came to our school and provided a lesson designed to better help us understand what life was like for people with different disabilities. We liked it because it interrupted a rather tedious social studies unit that involved the mass memorization of all the land forms in Europe and Asia. Our teacher, Mrs. Wilcox, liked it because she got to sit at her desk and let the volunteers run the class. After a few initial head nods, probably meant to underscore the importance of whatever we were learning, she would grade papers and drink her Lemon Lift tea.

The first week we got to push each other around the hallways in borrowed wheelchairs. The second week we were paired off and had to lead one another around the school blindfolded. We were given several tasks, such as opening a locker or
washing hands in the bathroom. Roz Parker chipped her front tooth when her Seeing-Eye friend let her lean too close to the fountain while getting a drink. Pushier parents, the kind who send their daughters to St. Mary's, might have investigated the use of curriculum time that led to the unfortunate dental incident. But Geneseo was a different kind of town, and Roz's parents probably had problems, dental and otherwise, far worse than a chipped tooth.

After each of these experiential activities, we had to answer some questions in a workbook about what it felt like to try out the disability for the day. Week three was called Developmental Disabilities, which someone had figured out was grownup code for retarded. By the time the volunteers arrived the classroom was buzzing with anticipation. How were they going to simulate this? Everyone was trying out their best retard voice—surely not what the program initiators had in mind when they wrote the curriculum. Andrea Peterson's cousin told her that they had a machine that could turn your brain retarded for short periods of time.

Much to our disappointment, our task was a lot more mundane than what we had all imagined. Pennies were spread out on the desk—this was a good start. And we were given oven mitts to wear and told to pick up as many pennies as we could. This, we were told, was what it felt like to be mentally retarded. In my own defense, I think we were
all
a little disappointed. I raised my hand and asked what I felt was on everyone's mind: “Why does picking up pennies make you seem retarded?”

“People who are
developmentally disabled
have to struggle to complete tasks that are simple for people without disabilities,” the volunteer explained patiently.