Page 33 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
“Thank you?” I said, accepting it in confusion. “Or am I supposed to hold it for you?”
He grinned. “No, I brought it for you.”
I stared at the orange juice. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had orange juice. What an odd yet perfect thing to do. And how annoying for him to suddenly talk to me again after the silent treatment and no explanation. I thrust it back at him. “Can you hold it for a minute?” I shoved a few books inside my locker and plucked out my copy of Jhumpa Lahiri’sNamesake,my mind racing to figure out why he had suddenly turned up.
His eyebrow rose. “Fun or class?” he asked, nodding at the book.
“Both,” I said. “I have Strangers in Fiction. Which lit did you take?” The academic electives were one of the cooler things here. A whole semester of stories about protagonists who are slightly removed observers appealed to me.
“Straight AP English,” he said. “Unfortunately.”
“I’m sure more electives will open up during winter term. You can choose something better then, if you want.”
He shrugged. “My dad...I don’t think so.”
I waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. He wasn’t an explaining kind of guy, obviously. He handed back my orange juice.
I wanted to ask him where he’d been. I wanted to not care about the answer. I wanted to smile at my orange juice. Instead of doing any of that, I stared down at the floor.
He shifted, and then stuck his hands in his pockets. “I was wondering—”
“What’s up, Rhett?” Bran asked, strolling up.
“Not much, man.”
I wondered what Rhett was wondering.
“Let’s go, Cam,” Bran said. “Mrs. Hebert has it out for me. I don’t want to give her any reasons to write me a tardy.”
“She wouldn’t have it out for you if you’d quit talking in class so much,” I said.
“True. But I got a lot of pearls of wisdom to drop. And I’m going to go not be tardy. You want to not be tardy with me?”
I glanced back to Rhett. “Um, yeah.”
Rhett smiled. “I’ll let you walk me part of the way to my class.”
Bran laughed, and I rolled my eyes. When Rhett peeled off for calculus a minute later, I was glad when all the eyes tracking us shifted to follow him and leave me alone. I hadn’t missed that when he’d been avoiding me.
I sipped my orange juice. Maybe having a cute boy bring me juice in the morning was worth the stares. I groaned at my indecisiveness and Bran shot me a startled look. I ignored him and decided not to think about Rhett too much.
But of course, I did. Instead of listening to Mrs. Hebert talk about exclusion as a social control tool (a lecture I could have delivered by giving a rundown of Angelique’s tactics), I played what-if. What if Rhett had been about to ask me out? What if we started hanging out a lot? What if he wanted me to hang out with him at Angelique’s house?What if he wanted to hang out at my place?
The dating thing...no. Just no.
I resolved to go back to exchanging awkward head nods with Rhett if he showed up at my locker again. He wasn’t there. Bran and Livvie were, and she jiggled her keys. “Let’s go. I’m hungry and only a po-boy will save me.”
I deposited my books without comment and headed out to the car. Bran complained the whole way about how our lit novel was boring, and he couldn’t wait to be done with it. “I thought it would speak my language,” he said. “So far, it’s only speaking the language of some dude named Google.”
“Gogol,” I corrected him. “And you’re exactly why he’s so tortured. No one tries to understand him.”
“Wait,” Livvie said. “Why would a class on Strangers in Fiction speakyourlanguage? You belong to the whole LaSalle scene. If anyone’s a stranger, it’s me. And Cam. And the other scholarship kids.”
Livvie embraced the role of the outsider. She liked to be in the middle of things while proclaiming her separateness. Like me, she found LaSalle pretty tolerable, but she drew a clear line between herself and the glut of old money socialites. Like Angelique. Except Angelique actually had the brains to make it at LaSalle even if her daddy hadn’t been from old money.
“You’re kidding me, right?” Bran demanded. “I’m the biggest minority at this school. A quarter of the kids are on scholarship. You’re not unique.”
“Twenty percent,” Livvie grumbled.
