Don't Ever Change (3 page)

“Kids,” I say. “Like, little kids?”

“Doesn’t Dad say he learned everything in life from raising two girls?”

“That’s Dad,” I say. “What does Dad know?”

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AT GRADUATION I’M
seated between boy Alex and girl Alex. They converse across me through the whole ceremony about some big party at boy Leslie’s house tonight, which they assume I’m going to. Tiffany Lee’s valedictorian speech is literally called “The University Is the Universe,” and near the end she breaks into intense, choking sobs. I try to spot Courtney and my parents in the bleachers but, since I’m not wearing my glasses (thanks to AP English last semester I’ve become haunted by the Dorothy Parker quote, “Men seldom make passes at women who wear glasses”), it’s impossible to distinguish faces that far off. It’s even hard to tell boy Alex apart from girl Alex, but mainly because we’re all wearing the same thing.

During our principal’s speech I wonder what the party will be like tonight and if I should go. I’ve been to less than ten
party
parties in all of high school, but this seems like the one not to miss—mostly because it’s the last one. I assume at least a few of my friends will be going, so I decide I’ll go too. Plus, it sounds kind of nice to get sentimental. Not in a Tiffany Lee meltdown kind of way but just appreciating right now, what we all went through. It feels like all this obsessing over
just getting to college already
is somehow missing a point. But when I ask boy Alex who’s coming to the party, he says, “The usual,” and I realize I’ve probably been missing the point for years.

Then someone in the row in front of me turns around and waves. I lean forward to see who it is, and it’s Foster Hoyt, which makes me wish I hadn’t leaned forward.

“Hey, Eva,” he says.

“Oh hi, Foster.”

“Tiffany Lee really went for it, huh?”

“She’d been waiting for that moment her whole life,” I say. “Considering that, she did all right.”

Foster nods. I notice he’s holding some black blurry thing, which at first I think is a camera, but when I squint I see it’s a mini tape recorder and the red recording light is on. I laugh because it seems ridiculous to record our graduation ceremony, but then stop laughing when I realize Foster’s taping
our
conversation.

“I’m working on my dialogue,” he says.

I can’t help but have a Harsh Eva reaction: Foster
should
be working on his dialogue. He should also be working on his plot ideas and his characters and everything else. The problem is that Foster’s a terrible writer precisely because he’s
actually
a pretty decent writer who refuses to get better by just evolving a little. He always writes about varsity baseball team fights that somehow end in an innocent freshman getting stabbed in the eye, and not only is it like,
who cares
, but he wastes whatever interesting imagery he might’ve been able to tap into on an unbelievable narrator who ends up blind anyway. Even though Foster’s pretty smart—maybe smarter than me—he just doesn’t
get it
, and wasn’t it someone important who said, “You’re either born with taste or you’re not”? I like Foster fine, but there’s no teaching him good taste.

What’s most frustrating of all is that the answer’s right in front of him. Like me, like how I’m right in front of him (or in this case, right behind him).

For instance, if everyone in his stories just talked like I talk and acted like I how I act, he’d write the best story of his life. If, just once, his protagonist did something natural, like walked out to the parking lot, got in her car, turned on the radio, rolled down the windows, and didn’t even drive anywhere, just put on some lipstick and stared at herself in the rearview mirror, hinting at some kind of emotional epiphany, and then ended it with an ambiguous final line—well, that would be an absolutely legendarily good Foster Hoyt short story.

“Your dialogue is fine,” I tell him.

“Come on, dude,” Foster says.

“What?”

“I read what you wrote in workshop.”

“No,” I say, “it’s not like that.”

“I don’t mind,” he says. “I want the feedback.”

“Foster.”

“Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

I expect Foster to turn back around when there’s a lull in the conversation, or start scanning around me for other less harsh people whose dialogue he can record, but he doesn’t. He just sits there, looking at me, while our class president rambles on about the game Simon Says and how we should all stop listening to Simon and just be ourselves. I want to tell Foster how I’m not this awful person who insults his stories, I’m just a serious girl who’s sort of his rival but only in a healthy, challenging way. Like how if I’m better it makes Foster better, and isn’t that a positive influence? Something about the moment, the finality of high school maybe, makes me feel connected to Foster, and I can’t let this end with him thinking I’m some jerk.

“You know,” I say, “Roush hated my final story. He ripped it apart.”

“That’s not true,” Foster says.

“No, really.”

“Well, I liked it,” Foster says. “If that matters.”

“It does,” I say, not lying.

Foster nods in a sweet way and then his eyes catch someone behind me, and he waves. I make a gesture with my hands like I’m dismissing him, like, “Go ahead, I’m fine,” and he does, and I am.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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COURTNEY GOES TO
real college parties sometimes. “Classic” college parties, as she calls them.

An acquaintance or friend of a friend at USC or UCLA will invite her to their dorm room, where the beds have been cleared off and the mini-fridge stocked with wine coolers and soda (which my sister calls “mixers”). The rooms are small, they only hold like twenty people, so eventually everyone spills out into the hall and common area. Apparently there’s always a DVD playing, like
The Sopranos: Season One
, but the volume’s muted and no one really watches it. And there’s also always a stereo on, turned up loud—usually some Velvet Underground album, she says, rolling her eyes—so the video and audio overlap in this particular mashed-up cliché that Courtney swears has been reenacted in similar dorms in similar colleges across the country since basically the beginning of time. It’s part of this “sucking black hole” she calls the Generic College Experience, which also includes stuff like
Taxi Driver
posters, shower shoes, standard-issue single beds, Nag Champa incense, one Great Book (like
The Iliad
or
Ulysses
or
Moby-Dick
), clove smoke, and lots of spilled beer.

Still, Courtney loves going and never says no when invited. I assume that’s how I’ll be one day, especially once I institute my new motto: Walk Through Every Open Door. It’s actually something Jesus did, and although I’m not that interested in him, I’m pretty impressed by his dedication to Making It.

The last high school party I remember going to was Derek Hoff’s Anti-Prom Prom my junior year, so I’m definitely not the most qualified person to identify the Generic High School Experience, but it seems like it’s way less Classic somehow. Courtney says the difference is that in high school everyone still mainly likes what they like. They haven’t started worrying about what they
should
like, which happens later. This is why high school parties are sort of a little more genuine: people still get really excited and enthusiastic because it’s not cool yet to act numb and blasé about everything.

Tonight is my first door, and it’s open, and it’s fake to pretend you don’t want to walk through it.

Later, at the graduation party, the Usual do come and they’re mixed in with the Unusual, yet overall everyone seems pretty happy to be together.

“Remember when you tutored me?” our class treasurer, Hayley Rubin, asks. We’re by the iPod dock. She’s scrolling through songs impatiently.

“I tutored you for two summers,” I say.

“Yeah, remember?”

I laugh. It’s mindless chitchat, but I don’t mind.

“Remember all your flash cards?” she asks.

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“You always held them too low. I could see all the answers.”

“Yeah, that was on purpose.”

“No.”

“I thought if you could read the answers they’d be easier to memorize than if you just guessed and got them wrong and then waited for me to give them to you.”

Hayley looks up from the iPod with thankful eyes. “Aww,” she says, hand over heart, “you were trying to trick me into thinking I was smarter than you.”

“Something like that.”

“Awwwww,” she says again, and grabs me for a hug. “I love you, Eva,” she tells me, and then—spying a few members of our student council approaching, quickly dropping her arms—“But only as a friend.”

I expect to see Shelby here, basically running things, since she’s single now and avoiding Zack, but she’s a no-show, which is also very Shelby, always having cooler plans. Michelle texts that she’ll be there soon and so does Steph, but while I’m waiting for them I chat with some random classmates I haven’t interacted with since freshman year. I’m the only one who brought their yearbook, which makes me feel like an insane dork, but everyone’s cool about it, and I get it signed, like, a hundred times and hear a hundred stories about which college everybody’s going to and what they’re doing this summer to save money. Most of them are applying for jobs at the mall (with a heavy emphasis on ice cream/frozen yogurt places, for some reason) or interning with their dad or a family member—except for Foster, who blows my mind when he tells me this’ll be his fourth summer in a row as a
camp counselor
at Sunny Skies Day Camp.

The fact that Foster’s plans are
identical
to mine makes me think originality is basically dead, because whatever you decide to do someone else has already done it, and is still doing it. So all you can really hope for is to add your own twist somehow.

Around midnight Michelle and Steph finally show but by then the house is packed, mostly with kids who clearly never even went to our school. The social vibe is getting fairly out of control. During my second trip to the bathroom, I see a keg for the first time, ugly and metallic and buried in a bathtub of ice. Some boy hands me a plastic cup of beer, but it smells like moldy white bread so I pour it down the sink.

Everyone seems pretty buzzed, talking too loud, and this guy behind me in line for the bathroom keeps rambling to his friend about how many bitches there are here tonight, and it’s seriously making me pissed.

“Look at them all, man,” the guy says again to his friend, who’s so drunk he’s swaying, until he stumbles into me, knocking my bag off my shoulder. Everything spills everywhere. I crouch to gather up my key chain and notebook and change pouch and whatever else and the guy—not his friend—stoops down to help too. That’s when I get a closer look at this jerk for the first time, and what I see is a boy with an oddly round head on top of a very skinny, very tall body. He looks like an orange on top of a celery stick, but in an okay way.

I don’t want his help, though, so I scoop up all the rest of the stuff myself and throw it in my bag. Doesn’t matter if he’s trying to be nice and doesn’t matter if he’s kind of okay-looking; I’m positive he’s a jerk because I heard him saying, “Bitch, bitch, bitch,” under his breath, pointing to every girl in the room.

“I heard you,” I tell him.

“What?”

“I heard you calling those girls bitches,” I say.

“And?”

“And nothing, it’s just
offensive
.”

“Why, are they your friends?”

“Some of them, yeah.”

“They don’t look like it,” he says.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s a compliment.”

“Do you even go to our school?”