The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [17]
“Oh,” she said.
“Then there’s Billy Mack, who started his own religion out of his garage, the People’s Church of Universal People. Even my grandmother, who is almost normal, poses for a formal photograph each year in a slightly revealing dress and mails said photo to all her friends and family, including my dad, who shreds it without opening the envelope. This is what my town is like.”
Jazza was quiet for a moment.
“I very much want to go to your town,” she finally said. “I’m always the boring one.”
From the way she said it, I got the impression that this was something Jazza felt deeply.
“You don’t seem boring to me,” I said.
“You don’t really know me yet. And I don’t have all of this.”
She waved at my computer to indicate my life in general.
“But you have all of this,” I said. I waved my arms too in an attempt to indicate Wexford and England in general, but it looked more like I was shaking invisible pom-poms.
I sipped my tea. My throat was feeling more normal now. Every once in a while, I would remember what it was like not being able to breathe and that strange whiteness . . .
“You don’t like Charlotte,” I said, blinking hard. I had to say something to get all that stuff out of my head. It was probably a little abrupt and rude.
Jazza’s mouth twitched. “She’s . . . competitive.”
“That seems like a polite word for what she is. Is that how she got to be head girl?”
“Well . . .” Jazza picked at my duvet for a moment, pinching up little bits of fabric and letting them go. “The house master or mistress chooses the prefects. Claudia made her head girl, which she deserves, I suppose . . .”
“Did you apply?” I asked.
“You don’t apply. You just get chosen. You don’t have to be unpleasa—I mean, I like Jane a lot. And Jerome and Andrew are good friends of mine. It’s just Charlotte, well . . . everything was a bit of a competition. Who studied more. Who was better at sport. Who dated whom.”
Aside from being the kind of person who used “whom” correctly while gossiping, Jazza was also the kind of person who seemed pained about speaking badly about another person. She squeezed up her fists a few times, as if gossip required physical pressure to leave her body.
“When we first arrived, I was seeing Andrew for a while,” Jazza said. “Charlotte had no interest in him until I did. But she could never let something like that go. She dated him after we broke up, then she broke up with him instantly, but . . . she has to . . . well, I don’t have to live with her anymore. I live with you.”
Jazza let out a light sigh, like a demon had been released.
“Do you date someone now?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I . . . no. Maybe at uni. This year, all I’m concentrating on is exams. What about you?”
I mentally paged over the short and terrible history of my love life in Bénouville. My life had been about school too. It had taken a lot of work to get into Wexford. And I wasn’t sure if a few make-outs with friends in the Walmart parking lot constituted dating. Now that I thought about it, maybe I had been waiting too—waiting to come here. In my imagination, I’d always envisioned some figure by my side at Wexford. That prospect seemed unlikely after my display tonight, unless English people were really into people who could eject food from their throats at high velocity.
“Me too,” I said. “Studying. That’s what this year is about.”
Sure, we both meant that to an extent. I had come to study. I did have to apply to college while I was here. I really was going to read those books on my shelf, and I really was excited about the prospect of my classes, even if it appeared that said classes would probably kill me. But neither of us was telling the entire truth on that count, and we both knew it. There was a look, an almost audible click as we bonded over this mutual lie. Jazza and I got each other. Perhaps she was the figure by my side that I’d always imagined.
7
THE NEXT DAY, IT RAINED.
I began the day with double French. At home, French was one of