Taking Flight (9 page)

The boy raised his eyebrows. “
You
wanna sit with
us
?” He let out a sarcastic laugh, and the girl rolled her eyes, and then they both proceeded to ignore me.

My cheeks hot and embarrassment coursing through me, I glanced around the cafeteria in search of a table I could just eat at alone. And, abruptly, as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes, I noticed that there were a
lot
of white kids here. Like, a lot. I’d never noticed it before, but literally everyone I could see was white, with the exception of the boy and the girl sitting in front of me, waiting for me to leave them alone. Their reactions suddenly made a lot of sense.

I cleared my throat and tried again. “Look, um… I really am new. I guess maybe I just don’t get how things work around here yet but—”

The girl laughed at me there. “Yeah, you got that right.”

“Well, I’m all about breaking down barriers. Yay diversity,” I tried, raising a fist weakly, and they both eyed me like they thought I was crazy. Then the girl looked to the boy.

“Okay, can we just put this poor girl out of her misery?”

“Go ahead,” the boy sighed in response, and the girl chuckled at me again as I hastily moved to take a seat beside her.

“Thank you!”

“I always wondered when some clueless white girl’d be dumb enough to try and talk to us, and now it’s finally happened,” the girl told me. “What’s your name?”

“Lauren. I’m new here. I think I said that, um…”

They exchanged looks, and then the boy told me, “I’m Nate. This is Fiona.”

“Are you guys the only…?” I asked, and then trailed off awkwardly. I didn’t know what the protocol for this sort of thing typically was. L.A. wasn’t by any means some racial equality haven, but it certainly wasn’t like this.

“No. But we’re the only ones in this lunch period, I’m assuming,” Fiona told me. “Which is why we were the only ones sitting here.”

“But isn’t that creepy? It’s like segregation,” I pointed out, and felt like I’d put my foot in mouth again when they exchanged another look.

“It’s not like it’s our choice,” Nate replied. “That’s just the way things are around here. You wouldn’t understand.”

We sat in silence, then, and for a moment, I wondered if one of those groups I’d seen earlier had actually been the group for the gay people here. Then I wondered if the gay people even got a group. Maybe they were all closeted, or all ate alone.

“I do,” I finally said, nodding my head. “A little bit, at least. I know that might be hard to believe.”

Fiona changed the subject abruptly. “What are you doing in Collinsville? Who comes here voluntarily?”

“Not me,” I declared. “I’m the new Marshall kid.”

Both Fiona and Nate looked at me, wide-eyed. Then Nate started laughing. “Oh, wow. So you thought you’d stir shit up by coming and sitting with the black kids?”

“What? No,” I retorted, not sure how I was supposed to take his comment. “Definitely not. You guys just didn’t seem intimidating.”

“Well, she’s got that right,” Fiona said, arching an eyebrow at Nate as a smile pulled at the corners of her lips.

“Do you know how to fight?” Nate asked me abruptly. “The last one beat up a kid on the first day.”

“Um…” The answer was no. Undoubtedly. I had the fighting capabilities of Paris Hilton. “Maybe?”

“Even if she doesn’t, it’s gonna spread that she’s the Marshall kid,” Fiona pointed out to Nate, and then turned to me. “It might be a good idea to keep you around. You’ll definitely intimidate people.”

“I will?” I cleared my throat and corrected, “I will. Exactly.”

“I didn’t even think of that,” Nate declared, looking to Fiona proudly. “That’s a great idea, babe.”

I glanced back and forth between them, raising my eyebrows. “Wait, you guys are dating?”

“For two years,” Fiona confirmed. “Sorry you’ll be third-wheeling every day if you’re crazy enough to keep sitting with us.”

“It’s okay. I can do that,” I insisted.

“Cool.” Nate grinned at me, and then the three of us spent the rest of our lunch period making small talk. I liked both Nate and Fiona; they seemed guarded initially, but got friendlier as they begun to realize I wasn’t sitting with them just as a means to mess with them. Plus, they were cute together.

My second day ended just under two hours later, after another Health class, and for the first time since I’d arrived in Collinsville, I felt like I might actually have a shot at making friends.

*   *   *

Cammie and I did our homework in her room together that night, although “together” was hardly the right word to describe us sitting separately on our beds whilst silently scribbling equations onto sheets of notebook paper. I got through numbers five, six, and seven in that I was able to get an answer that made relative sense, but after another half-hour of working on number eight, I was back to being convinced I’d made my life one-thousand times more miserable by taking AP Physics.

“I should’ve just let everyone think I was stupid,” I mumbled eventually. “This is impossible.”

Beside me, Cammie let out a sigh she seemed to have been holding in for a while. “Right? I’ve been working on seven for, like, an
hour
.”

I paused, the eraser on the end of my pencil halfway to my third sheet of notebook paper, where I’d already erased four other attempts at number eight. I looked at Cammie. “You’re stuck on seven? Really?”

“Yeah, the wording on this question sucks. Does he want us to find an answer for the entire wheel or for the hub?”

“You find both and take the difference, I thought.” I flipped back through my work to number seven, then reread the question. “Yeah.”

“Wait, you’ve done that one already?” she asked, abruptly standing up and walking to me. She looked over my shoulder at my paper. “How?”

“Maddie walked me through a few of them today. I guess it helped,” I said calmly, trying to hide how smug I felt now that I knew I was further along than Cammie. My confidence was majorly boosted. “Maybe you should ask her for help sometime.”

I looked at her in time to see her pull a face that told me she had no intention of doing that. She went back to her own bed. “Huh. I guess she always has been pretty smart.”

“You’ve known her for a while, I’m guessing?”

She looked away from me, focusing on her work again. Her response was distracted. “Yeah, sort of. Been in school together and stuff since we were kids.”

“Oh.” I sighed, looking to my problem set again. “So how much of our grade is this worth?”

Cammie let out a short laugh. “Oh, he doesn’t take it for a grade. It’s just practice for the test.”

I stared at her, hard. I stared until my eyes burned holes into her cheek, and until she finally looked up at me with an innocent, “What?”

At last, I blinked. “Are you kidding me right now?”

Almost immediately, she shot me a knowing look. “Oh. You were doing it because you thought it was due tomorrow, weren’t you?”

“Duh. Why else would I do it?”

“To learn it,” she said, as though the answer should’ve been obvious. “How else will you ace the test?”

“I just need to pass,” I retorted, pushing every study material on my bed aside and immediately collapsing onto my back with my head on my pillow. “Wow, was that a colossal waste of my afternoon or what? Can we watch a movie or something?”

“You’re welcome to it. But you’ll have to do it in the living room,” Cammie told me. She was back to focusing on her problems again. “You might not like anything from my DVD collection, though.”

“I’ve seen it,” I remembered with distaste. And I had. Cammie owned an unnecessarily large amount of romantic movies. Her posters didn’t lie; Ryan Hansen did, in fact, seemed to be her favorite author, and she had too many of his movie adaptations to count. I mean, I liked a good romance myself every now and then, but she took it way too far.

“So when did the Hansen obsession start, by the way?” I asked, mostly because I got a kick out of distracting her from her work. I was quickly realizing that Cammie was the overly studious type; she didn’t appear to have a massively large IQ or anything, but she
did
seem to work really hard.

She sighed at my question. “It is not an obsession. It’s like I said before: Every teenage girl enjoys a good love story.”

“Even you?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. That, for some reason, got her attention, and she abandoned her work to give me a slightly affronted look.

“’Even me’? What does that mean?”

I shrugged my shoulders, suppressing my amusement at her indignation. “I mean… you just don’t seem like the romantic type. You wouldn’t have the time to, like, indulge in mushy, pointless stuff.”

“I do too have the time,” she retorted, turning her entire body to face me from her spot on her bed. I had her full attention now.

“Oh, come on.” I rolled my eyes. “You seriously want me to believe that you’re the kind of girl who sits around and wastes her time watching movies about bad boys who show up to save the good girl from the monotony of her good girl life while she in turn encourages him to give up his bad boy ways? Give me a break.”

“You seem familiar with the formula yourself,” she noticed.

I scoffed. “Yeah. Unfortunately my best friend is completely
that
kind of girl.”

“What kind of girl?”

I paused, trying to put my thoughts into words. “You know… the kind that acts like she doesn’t believe real romance exists or whatever, but deep down she totally wants to be the protagonist of a cheesy romance movie. As if it’s actually going to happen. The real world doesn’t work that way.”

She watched me for a moment, and for a few seconds I thought she actually might laugh. Finally, still trying to suppress a smile, she told me, “You’re very cynical.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, nodding. “I guess I am. And I think you should be
more
cynical. I’d like you more, you know.”

At that, for some reason, she finally did laugh.

“You’re the strangest girl I’ve ever met,” I murmured, shaking my head at her.

She grinned back at me. “You’ve only known me for four days.”

I occurred to me, then, that it felt like we’d been friends for much, much longer.

*   *   *

I got a reality check regarding how little I really did know about Cammie just an hour later, when Scott came up to let us know that dinner was ready.

While he was still peering into her room, he suddenly added, “Oh, by the way, Cammie, Jill and I are going to the drive-in this Friday night to see this old black-and-white horror film they’re playing. I know you don’t like scary movies, but I thought you and Peter might wanna come along anyway.” He offered me a smile. “You’re welcome too, Lauren, if you don’t mind fifth-wheeling.”

He ducked back out of her room and I heard his footsteps descend down the stairs as Cammie shifted on her bed. I looked at her. “You have a boyfriend? Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was a natural assumption based on Scott’s wording, and so I wasn’t surprised by Cammie’s response. “Yeah, I guess I just forgot to mention him. He’s nice. I’d be surprised if you wanted to hang out with him, though.”

She got off of her bed to leave the room, and I trailed after her, confused that she seemed eager to end our conversation so soon. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, he plays football,” she told me dismissively as we headed downstairs. “Not your kind of person.”

Wendy watched us from the dinner table, and perked up when she realized we seemed to be talking about Peter. “Cammie, did you introduce Lauren to Peter yet?”

We joined the Marshalls at the table, and Cammie shook her head shortly. “Not yet.”

“Well, if you two are going with Scott and Jill to see a movie Friday night, maybe he could come have dinner with us beforehand,” Wendy suggested, and then looked to me. “Peter’s a very nice boy. He even helps us out on the weekends every now and then when he’s not busy working.”

“He came over once, like, a month ago,” Cammie corrected hastily, and then cleared her throat and reached for Scott’s hand in preparation for prayer. “Can we eat, Mom? I’m starving.”

They bowed their heads as Wendy spoke, David and Cammie’s hands clasped together over my lap, and I looked around silently, waiting for them to finish. Cammie’s eyes were shut a little too tightly, and I watched with furrowed eyebrows as the muscles of her jaw tensed. I wondered if her failing to bring up Peter with me was more than just a coincidence. Maybe they were on the verge of a breakup.

I had to admit that it was weird to me that Cammie had a boyfriend. It was like I’d said in her room earlier: she just didn’t seem like the type to be into romance. Although I admittedly hadn’t known her long, the Cammie I knew was a workhorse when it came right down to it. She worked hard at home, she worked hard at school, she read the Bible every night and listened to every little command her parents gave her… It was only during our short time in the clearing and when we’d gone out together on Sunday that I’d really seen another side of her, but that side didn’t seem the type to have the perfect football-playing boyfriend her mom would approve of, either.