Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda Page 15

  I guess I’m getting a little fucking tired of this. I’m trying not to let it touch me. I shouldn’t care if stupid people call me a stupid word, and I shouldn’t care what people think of me. But I always care. Abby puts her arm around my shoulders, and we watch through the wings as Ms. Albright steps onto the stage.

  “Hi,” she says into the microphone. She’s holding a notebook, and she’s not smiling. Not even a little bit. “Some of you know me. I’m Ms. Albright, the theater teacher.”

  Someone from the audience whistles suggestively, and a few people giggle.

  “So I know you’re all here to see an exclusive sneak preview of a pretty awesome play. We’ve got a great cast and crew, and we’re eager to get started. But before we get to that, I want to spend a couple of minutes reviewing Creekwood’s bullying policy together.”

  Something about the words “review” and “policy” just shuts people down. There’s this drone of quiet conversation and denim rustling against seats. Someone shrieks with laughter, and someone else yells, “QUIET!” So then a bunch of people start giggling.

  “I’ll wait,” Ms. Albright says. And when the laughter dies down, she holds up the notebook. “Does anyone recognize this?”

  “Your diary?” Some asshole sophomore.

  Ms. Albright ignores him. “This is the Creekwood handbook, which you should have read and signed at the beginning of the year.”

  Everyone immediately stops listening. God. It’s got to freaking suck to be a teacher. I sit cross-legged on the floor backstage, surrounded by girls. Ms. Albright keeps talking and reading from the handbook and talking some more. When she says something about zero tolerance, Abby squeezes my hand. The minutes just drag.

  I feel so totally blank right now.

  Eventually, Ms. Albright steps back into the wings, slamming the handbook down on a chair. “Let’s do this,” she says. There’s this scary-intense look in her eyes.

  The houselights start to dim, and the first notes of the overture rise up from the pit. I step out of the wings and onto the stage. My limbs feel really heavy. I kind of want to go home and crawl into bed with my iPod.

  But the curtains start to open.

  And I keep moving forward.

  28

  BUT LATER, IN THE DRESSING room, it hits me.

  Martin Van Buren. Our eighth fucking president.

  But there’s no way. It’s not possible.

  My washcloth falls to the floor. All around me, girls tug hats off and let their hair down and scrub foamy soap onto their faces and zip up garment bags. A door bursts open somewhere, and there’s a sudden shriek of laughter.

  My mind is racing. What do I know about Martin? What do I know about Blue?

  Martin is smart, obviously. Is he smart enough to be Blue? I have no idea if Martin is half-Jewish. I mean, he could be. He’s not an only child, but I guess he could be lying about that. I don’t know. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense at all. Because Martin’s not gay.

  But then again, someone thinks he is. Though I probably shouldn’t take anything on the authority of some anonymous asshole who called me a fag.

  “Simon, no!” says Abby, appearing in the doorway.

  “What?”

  “You washed it off!” She stares at my face for a minute. “I guess you can still kind of see it.”

  “You mean the ridiculous hotness?” I say, and she laughs.

  “Listen. I just got a text from Nick, and he’s waiting for us in the parking lot. We’re taking you out tonight.”

  “What?” I say. “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. But my mom’s up in DC this weekend, meaning the house and car are mine. So you’re spending the night in Suso territory.”

  “We’re sleeping at your house?”

  “Yup,” she says, and I notice that she’s out of makeup and back in her skinny jeans. “So go drop off your sister. Whatever you have to do.”

  I look in the mirror and attempt to push down my hair. “Nora already took the bus,” I say slowly. It’s strange. The Simon in the mirror is still wearing contacts. Still almost unrecognizable. “Why are we doing this again?”

  “Because we don’t have rehearsal for once,” she says, poking my cheek, “and because you’ve had a weird-ass day.”

  I almost laugh. She has no fucking idea.

  All the way out to the parking lot, she talks and schemes, and I let her words kind of wash over me. I’m a little stuck on this Martin situation. It’s almost unfathomable.

  It would mean that Martin wrote that post on the Tumblr back in August—the one about being gay. And that Martin’s the one I’ve been emailing every day for five months. I can almost believe it, but I can’t explain the blackmail. If Martin’s actually gay, why bring Abby into it at all?

  “I think we should spend the afternoon in Little Five Points,” Abby says, “and then we’re definitely going into Midtown.”

  “Sounds good,” I say.

  It just doesn’t make sense.

  But then I think about the afternoons at Waffle House and the late evening rehearsals, and the way I was actually starting to like him before things fell apart. Blackmail with a side of friendship. Maybe that was the whole point.

  Except I never got the vibe that he liked me. Not even once. So it can’t be that. Martin can’t be Blue.

  Unless. But no.

  Because it can’t be a joke. Blue can’t be a joke. That’s not even a possibility. No one could be that mean. Not even Martin.

  I’m having trouble catching my breath.

  It can’t be a joke, because I don’t know what I would do if it were a joke.

  I can’t think about it. God. I’m sorry, but I can’t.

  I won’t.

  Nick’s waiting in front of the school, and he and Abby bump fists when they see each other. “Got him,” she says.

  “So now what?” asks Nick. “We drive home and get our stuff, and then you pick us up?”

  “That’s the plan,” says Abby. She swings her backpack around and unzips the smallest pouch, pulling out her car keys. Then she tilts her head to the side. “Did you guys talk to Leah?”

  Nick and I look at each other.

  “Not yet,” Nick says. He kind of deflates. It’s tricky, because as much as I love Leah, her presence changes everything. She’ll be moody and snarly about Nick and Abby. She’ll be weird about Midtown. And I don’t know how to describe it, really, but her self-consciousness is contagious sometimes.

  But Leah hates being excluded.

  “Maybe just us three,” Nick says, carefully, eyes shifting downward. I can tell he feels kind of shitty about this.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Okay,” Abby says. “Let’s go.”

  Twenty minutes later, I’m in the backseat of Abby’s mom’s car with a stack of paperbacks under my feet.

  “Put them anywhere,” Abby says, eyes flicking to meet mine in the rearview mirror. “She reads them when she’s waiting to pick me up. Or if I’m driving.”

  “Wow, I get nauseous just from reading my phone in the car,” says Nick.

  “Nauseated,” I say, and my heart twists.

  “Well, listen to you, Mr. Linguist.” Nick turns around in his seat to grin at me.

  Abby eases onto 285 and merges with no difficulty whatsoever. She doesn’t even appear tense. It occurs to me that she’s easily the best driver out of all of us.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I ask.

  “I do,” says Abby. And twenty minutes later, we pull into the lot for Zesto. I never go to Zesto. I mean, I almost never come into Atlanta proper. It’s warm and noisy inside, full of people eating chili dogs and burgers and things like that. But I quite honestly don’t give a shit that it’s January. I get chocolate ice cream swirled with Oreos, and for the ten minutes it takes to eat it, I almost feel normal again. By the time we step back out to the car, the sun is beginning to set.

  So then we go to Junkman’s Daughter. Which is r
ight next to Aurora Coffee.

  But I’m not thinking about Blue.

  We spend a few minutes poking around inside. I sort of love Junkman’s Daughter. Nick gets caught up in a display of books about Eastern philosophy, and Abby buys a pair of tights. I end up wandering through the aisles, trying not to make eye contact with scary-looking pink mohawk girls.

  I’m not thinking about Aurora Coffee, and I’m not thinking about Blue.

  I can’t think about Blue.

  I really can’t think about Blue being Martin.

  It’s dark but not late, and Abby and Nick want to take me to this feminist bookstore that evidently has a lot of gay stuff. So we look through the shelves, and Abby pulls out LGBT picture books to show me, and Nick shuffles around looking awkward. Abby buys me a book about gay penguins, and then we walk down the street for a little while longer. But it’s getting chilly and we’re getting hungry again, so we pile back into the car and drive to Midtown.

  Abby seems to know exactly where we’re going. She pulls into a side street and parallel parks like it’s nothing. Then we walk briskly up to the corner and onto the main road. Nick shivers in only a light jacket, and Abby rolls her eyes and says, “Georgia boy.” And then she puts her arm around him, rubbing her hand up and down his arm as they walk.

  “Here we are,” she says finally when we arrive at a place on Juniper called Webster’s. There’s a big patio strung with Christmas lights and rainbow banners, and even though the patio’s empty, the parking lot is overflowing.

  “Is this like a gay bar?” I ask.

  Abby and Nick both grin.

  “Okay,” I say, “but how are we getting in?” I’m five seven, Nick can’t grow facial hair, and Abby’s wearing a wristful of friendship bracelets. There’s no freaking way we pass for twenty-one.

  “It’s a restaurant,” says Abby. “We’re getting dinner.”

  Inside, Webster’s is packed with guys wearing scarves and jackets and skinny jeans. And they’re all cute and they’re all overwhelming. Most of them have piercings. There’s a bar in the back, and some kind of hip-hop music playing, and waiters turning sideways to squeeze through the crowd with pints of beer and baskets of chicken wings.

  “Just the three of y’all?” asks the host, resting his hand on my shoulder for barely a second, but it’s enough to make my stomach flutter. “Should be just a minute, hon.”

  We step off to the side, and Nick gets a menu to look through, and everything they serve here is an innuendo. Sausages. Buns. Abby can’t stop giggling. I have to keep reminding myself this is just a restaurant. I accidentally make eye contact with a hot guy wearing a tight V-neck shirt, and I look away quickly, but my heart pounds.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” I say, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to combust if I keep standing here. The bathrooms are down a little hallway past the bar, and I have to push through this crowd of people to get there. When I step out again, the crowd is even thicker. There are two girls holding beers and sort of dancing, and a group of guys laughing, and lots of people holding drinks or holding hands.

  Someone taps my shoulder. “Alex?”

  I turn around. “I’m not—”

  “You’re not Alex,” says the guy, “but you have Alex hair.” And then he reaches up to ruffle his fingers through it.

  He’s sitting on a barstool, and he looks like he’s not much older than I am. He’s got blond hair, much lighter than mine. Draco-blond. He’s wearing a polo shirt and normal jeans, and he’s very cute, and I think he might be drunk.

  “What’s your name, Alex?” he says to me, sliding off the barstool. When he stands, he’s almost a head taller than me, and he smells like deodorant. He has extremely white teeth.

  “Simon,” I say.

  “Simple Simon met a pie-man.” He giggles.

  He’s definitely drunk.

  “I’m Peter,” he says, and I think: Peter Peter pumpkin eater.

  “Don’t move,” he says. “I’m buying you a drink.” He puts a hand on my elbow, and then turns to the bar, and all of a sudden I’m holding an honest-to-God martini glass full of something green. “Like apples,” says Peter.

  I take a sip, and it’s not awful. “Thanks,” I say, and the fluttery feeling takes over completely. I don’t even know. This is so totally different from my normal.

  “You have amazing eyes,” Peter says, smiling down at me. Then the song changes to something with a heavy thumping bass. He opens his mouth to say something else, but the words get swallowed.

  “What?”

  He takes a step closer. “Are you a student?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Yes.” My heart pounds. He stands close enough that our drinks are touching.

  “Me too. I’m at Emory. I’m a junior. Hold on.” He empties the rest of his glass in one big swallow, and then turns back to the bar. I crane my neck over the crowd and look for Nick and Abby. They’ve been seated at a table across the room, and they’re watching me, looking uneasy. Abby sees me looking and waves frantically. I grin and wave back.

  But then Peter’s hand is on my arm again, and he hands me a shot glass filled with something bright orange, like that cold medicine. Like liquid Triaminic. But I’m only half done with my apple drink, so I sort of chug it, and hand the empty glass back to him. And then he clinks his shot of Triaminic against mine and makes it disappear.

  I sip mine, and it tastes like orange soda, and Peter laughs and tugs at my fingertips. “Simon,” he says. “Have you ever taken a shot before?”

  I shake my head.

  “Aww, okay. Tilt your head back, and just . . .” He demonstrates on his empty shot glass. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, and that warm, happy feeling starts to creep in. I take the shot in two gulps, and I manage not to spit anything. And I grin at Peter, and he takes my glass away, and then he takes my other hand and laces his fingers through mine.

  “Cute Simon,” he says. “Where are you from?”

  “Shady Creek,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says, and I can tell he hasn’t heard of it, but he smiles and sits back down on his barstool and pulls me closer. And his eyes are sort of hazel, and I sort of like this. And talking is just easier now, and it’s easier than not talking, and everything I say is the right thing, and he nods and laughs and presses my palms. I tell him about Abby and Nick, who I’m trying not to look at, because every time I look at them, their eyes start yelling at me. And then Peter tells me about his friends, and he says, “Oh my gosh, you have to meet my friends. You have to meet Alex.”

  So he buys us each another Triaminic shot, and then he takes me by the hand and leads me to a big round table in the corner of the room. Peter’s friends are a big group of mostly guys, and they’re all cute, and everything is spinning. “This is Simon,” Peter says, flinging his arm around me and hugging me sideways. He introduces everyone, and I forget their names instantly, except for Alex. Whom Peter presents by saying, “Meet your doppelgänger.” But it’s really a little baffling, because Alex doesn’t look like me at all. I mean, we’re both white. But even our famously similar hair is totally different. His is purposely messy. Mine is just messy. But Peter keeps looking back and forth between us and giggling, and someone sits on someone else’s lap to clear a chair for me, and someone passes me a beer. I mean, drinks are just everywhere.

  Peter’s friends are loud and funny, and I laugh so hard I’m hiccupping, but I can’t even remember what I’m laughing about. And Peter’s arm is tight around my shoulders, and at one point out of nowhere, he leans over to kiss me on the cheek. It’s this strange other universe. It’s like having a boyfriend. And somehow I start telling them about Martin and the emails and how he actually freaking blackmailed me, and it’s actually kind of a hilarious story, now that I think about it. And everyone is full-on belly laughing, and the one girl at the table says, “Oh my God, Peter, oh my God. He’s adorable.” And it feels amazing.

  But then Peter leans toward me and his
lips are close to my ear and he says, “Are you in high school?”

  “I’m a junior,” I say.

  “In high school,” he repeats. His arm is still around me. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” I whisper, feeling sheepish.

  He looks at me and shakes his head. “Oh, honey,” he says, smiling sadly. “No. No.”

  “No?” I ask.

  “Who did you come here with? Where are your friends, cute Simon?”

  I point out Nick and Abby.

  “Ah,” he says.

  He helps me up and holds my hand, and the room keeps lurching, but I end up in a chair somehow. Next to Abby and across from Nick, in front of an untouched cheeseburger. Cold, but totally plain and perfect with nothing green and lots of fries. “Good-bye, cute Simon,” says Peter, hugging me, and then kissing me on the forehead. “Go be seventeen.”

  And then he stumbles away, and Abby and Nick look like they don’t know whether to laugh or panic. Oh my God. I love them. I mean, I seriously love them. But I feel sort of wavy inside.

  “How much did you have?” asks Nick.

  I try to count it on my fingers.

  “Forget it. I don’t want to know. Just eat something.”

  “I love it here,” I say.

  “I can see that,” says Abby, shoving a French fry into my mouth.

  “But did you see his teeth?” I ask. “He had like the whitest freaking teeth I’ve ever seen. I bet he uses those things. The Crest things.”

  “Whitestrips,” says Abby. She’s got her arm around my waist and Nick’s got his arm around my other waist. I mean my same waist. And my arms are around their shoulders, because I love them SO FREAKING MUCH.

  “Definitely Whitestrips.” I sigh. “He’s in college.”

  “So we’ve heard,” Abby says.

  It’s a perfect night. Everything is perfect. It’s not even cold out anymore. It’s a Friday night, and we’re not at the Waffle House, and we’re not playing Assassin’s Creed in Nick’s basement, and we’re not pining for Blue. We are out and we are alive, and everyone in the universe is out here right now.

  “Hi,” I say, to somebody. I smile at everyone we pass.