The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [5]
Jeremy looks right at me then. “Yeah, she’s home sick. I gotta go to class,” he says, and starts getting up, so I do too, even though I have a free period after lunch.
“Okay,” I say, feeling awkward. I mean, it’s weird—he sits down next to me, and then we spend forty minutes watching an anorexic girl eat her lettuce-lunch, and then, as soon as we actually begin talking to each other, he’s scrambling away. Clearly he’s only interested in me for my vocabulary. Clearly he doesn’t actually want to be my friend. Even if his sister thinks I’m super pretty.
“Studying on Monday?” he asks, resting his hand on the back of my chair.
“Huh?” I turn to face him, distracted by his long fingers so close to my shoulder.
He grins at me and I melt, like always. “Monday, Sternin? After school? There’s that physics quiz on Tuesday. Gotta get you ready.”
“Yeah, definitely.” I say it too fast; I’m so excited that we’re still studying together. I try to slow down. “Sounds good.”
“Have a good weekend.”
“You too. Hey—tell your sister I hope she’s feeling better.”
He shrugs. “Sick or not, Mouse is pretty happy to have an excuse to get out of her French test.” He grins, and as he walks away, it seems to me that people part to make room for him to pass. Just like in Tudor England, where when the king’s presence was announced, everyone had to give him the right-of-way.
I spend the weekend alternating between studying for physics and the SATs. The physics is so hard that I’ve begun to consider the SATs a break. Emily Winters calls to quiz SAT words with me, but her phone calls irritate me, because they’re interrupting my studying and I have my own rhythm. She invites me over to study with her, but I turn her down. I much prefer to be in my room. Even though it’s not hot out, I have the air-conditioning turned up as high as it can go and I’m curled up on the bed, layers of blankets over me. I like to think that it’s so cold, I can almost see my breath. I like to bury myself under blankets.
Maybe Emily only invites me because she knows I’m good at the vocab and thinks I can help. I say no because I think studying alone is better. But then I remember how well studying with Jeremy went, that I did exactly what Emily is asking me to do with him and it wasn’t at all counterproductive. I even learned a new word or two. Plus, it was fun.
I think about calling Emily back, about going over to her house and quizzing words back and forth over a box of pizza like they do on TV or in the movies. But I’m in my pajamas and my bed is so soft, and going all the way to her apartment seems like such a chore.
My mother pops her head in a few times, wishing me luck, asking if I’m hungry. Sometimes I think she wonders how I can stand to stay in all day, in bed, studying. My mom likes movement; she’s almost never home during the day on weekends. She goes out shopping, meets friends for lunches, takes long walks around the city. When I’m not studying, sometimes I go with her. When I was little, I almost always went along—we rarely used a babysitter, and I was too young to be left alone. I felt very grown-up at lunch with her friends, at restaurants where I was the only kid. I still remember the feel of my legs swinging down from the chair. My mother used to complain that I was kicking her, which always confused me, since I thought I was hitting the table legs.
Mostly, I’d sit quietly at these lunches and watch; I knew I wasn’t supposed to participate. You can learn a lot if you watch. Most of my mother’s friends were married. They were women with whom my mother had gone to college; women who had been at—or maybe, come to think of it, in—her wedding; women who had known her as a wife. I’d watch the rings that flashed on their fingers and wonder why my mother, for all her stylishness, never wore jewelry. They discussed problems they thought I was too young to understand—fights with their husbands, impatience with their children. Maybe they thought I wasn’t listening; I was given crayons and drew on paper placed over the