normally as possible, so let’s just try to pretend our friend here is invisible and learn a little calculus, shall we?” She turns to the board to write out the equations we were working 29
on yesterday and then pivots to address us, knocking into the camera. “Sir! A little breathing room, please!” But she doesn’t get any. Nor is anyone able to pretend he isn’t there. Everyone, sporting four-step eyes or unusually clean clothes, depending on gender, speaks theatrically, which is impressive when they’re saying things like, “X equals . . .
seven .” Every equation comes out sounding like a declaration of war or a deep betrayal.
The rest of the morning goes much the same. The bright lights atop the cameras crisscross one another in the winter-dark stairwells and hallways like searchlights on the ocean surface looking for survivors. I’m counting the seconds until AP Euro, the only class Caitlyn and I share. She drops her good bag at my feet, the Century 21
Botkier we found on last year’s So-Dan’s-Not-The-One post-breakup road trip to the city.
“Not you, too.” My gaze pans up the bare-legged goose bumps, past her favorite tank top, to rest at the false eyelashes.
“What? I want my grandchildren to see me as a loser with out-of-date jeans and underconditioned hair?” She sits down and opens her notebook.
“Our grandchildren will not be able to get past the fact that we are breathing unfiltered air. Our follicles will be of no interest.”
Caitlyn leans in, unsticking the ends of her curls from her lip gloss. “They filmed Melanie Dubviek, like, an inch from her face—”
30
“Yes, I’m familiar with their techniques.”
“—for all of English. Why? ”
I push up the sleeves of my henley. “Uh, Melanie is very compelling when she thinks?”
Clearing his throat, Mr. Cantone stands from his desk with our papers on the Corn Laws. “I want to start out by saying I’m not impressed.”
Lunch is my first opportunity to witness the stars of our class adjusting to their expanded stage. Caitlyn and I wait for a clean tray as the cameras follow the swarm of merging students. Nico walks in first in her skinny cords and wrap sweater, looking exactly like she does every day. So that makes two of us. For opposite reasons. I know there’s no way I’ll get cast, and she knows there’s no way she won’t.
As she does every day at this time, Nico twists her amazing golden mane up in a topknot and secures it with one of her many decorative chopsticks. She collects them.
It’s on her MySpace page. What’s not on her page is that the reason she twists her hair up at lunch is that she’s a surprisingly messy eater. Taco Day is a good time. Of course, she still looks gorgeous with ground meat all over her face—she has that Cameron Diaz unembarrassable thing going. Which at this moment seems to have spread over to her friends. Which is unfortunate. Because they should be feeling embarrassed. A lot.
Melanie walks in first, looking like a Real Housewife.
She is in some middle-aged leopard-print puffed-sleeve something. And it is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But 31
better than what walks in behind her.
“Are we doing Rock of Love, the Musical this year?”
Caitlyn asks, tilting her head to the side and squinting to take in the almost-naked platform-shoed glory that is Trisha cutting in at the front of the lunch line. “Oh, baby.
Where was Momma this morning?”
“She probably dressed her in it.”
“You mean licked it and stuck it to her like a stamp.”
We open our tuna-salad-filled pita pockets and start the painstaking process of potato chip integration, to get the tuna and chips to live as one inside our pita world. I am engrossed in fitting as many little chip pieces as possible in the sandwich when I hear the crash, then the sudden silence, and feel Caitlyn grab my arm. “Oh. My. God.”
I whip my head up as all eyes (and cameras) converge on two spindly U.V.-tanned legs