The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [3]
Much to my relief, Jeremy takes the lead. He settles on the floor, leans against my bed, reaches into his bag, and pulls out his physics book. I’m a little embarrassed, looking around the room at the white wicker furniture that seemed so pretty when I was nine and looks so babyish now. I’m sure that there’s nothing in Jeremy’s room more than a year or two old, that everything is trendy and cool and up-to-date.
“All right, Sternin.” He grins up at me. “An hour of Einstein, and then you gotta tell me what the hell ‘defenestrate’ means.”
Jeremy has a little sister. She’s in seventh grade, but unlike most twelve-year-olds, she seems to have entirely skipped that preteen awkward phase. She’s beautiful, with long, wavy blond hair—just the kind of hair a princess should have, the polar opposite of my stick-straight brown mess. Her name is Kate and everyone loves her, especially Jeremy.
After lunch today, buoyed by the knowledge that I was studying with Jeremy tonight, I invited Kate into the elevator. Only juniors and seniors are allowed to use the elevators, despite the fact that our school is ten stories high, being, as it is, smack in the middle of Manhattan, where buildings tend to go up more than they go out. The younger students get into trouble if they get caught taking the elevator, but the juniors and seniors always try to sneak them on. If we get caught, we pretend it was an accident—we were talking with them, helping them with homework, so they just followed us into the elevator. We didn’t even realize.
I was waiting for the elevator when I saw Kate coming out of the nurse’s office—the perfect excuse to offer her a ride.
“Hey, I’m heading up to the tenth floor—want a ride?”
Kate grinned at me. “Definitely!” She seemed energized by the offer, and practically skipped toward me and the opening elevator doors.
“What’ll we say if Mrs. Turley catches us?” Mrs. Turley is the strictest teacher in the school.
“We’ll say it was all my fault. I lured you in here with promises of a trouble-free flight up, with ice cream sundaes and elevator passes waiting for you at the top.”
I’ve never felt so clever; certainly this is as much as I’ve ever said to Kate Cole.
“That’s not fair,” she said, stopping just before stepping into the elevator. “You shouldn’t get in trouble for doing something nice.”
No wonder everyone loves that girl. She even managed to say that without sounding like a goody two-shoes.
“Don’t worry.” I grabbed her arm and pulled her in. “The teachers love me. This is probably the naughtiest thing I’ve ever done.”
She grinned at me again. “Yeah, but you’re hanging out with Jeremy later; he’ll get you into plenty of trouble before long.”
I could feel myself blushing as the elevator ascended. Kate probably knew better than I why Jeremy had decided to help me with physics. I didn’t know what to say to her; suddenly the ride up to the tenth floor seemed interminably long, and inviting Kate into the elevator seemed like a ridiculously bad idea. But then Kate just started giggling, and so did I, all the way up to the tenth floor.
“Don’t worry, Connelly,” Kate said as she headed to her class and I turned toward mine, “Jeremy may be the most popular boy in school, but he’s really just as dorky as you and me.”
And then she grinned at me, and I smiled back. I don’t believe for a second that Kate Cole is a dork, let alone Jeremy, but it still made me feel better knowing that she thinks they are—and that she thinks we’re the same.
Now, in the two hours we spend studying, Kate calls Jeremy’s cell phone twice, and after both calls Jeremy talks about her for a good ten minutes. He tells me she’s the family mascot. He calls her Mouse when he talks to her on the telephone. When she hears me saying “Hi, Kate” in the background, Jeremy tells me, she says, “Oooh, Connelly Sternin is super pretty,” and I’m happy for the rest of the evening, because maybe that means that I’m one of the juniors that the middle schoolers look up to.
We spend a