Breathless Page 9

  * * *

  On Monday, we went to school. I usually caught a ride with Toby, but I was still pissed at him, so I rode the bus with the guys. Even though I had my driver’s license, I didn’t have a car. My parents were great, but they didn’t have the money for another car. Not when they had to feed five teenagers. I didn’t really mind. I liked riding with Toby. However, that Monday morning, waiting at the bus stop, I felt kind of stupid. Here I was, a senior in high school, riding the damned bus. My dad worked at the high school too, but we couldn’t all fit in his car. Plus, my dad always got to school about an hour before class started so that he could make copies and get ready. Nobody wanted to get up that early.

  Overall, it was good, because I would have felt bad about making Jason fend for himself on the first day. Sure the guys would have looked out for him, but all of them except Chance were strangers in Bramford. The town looked on them as outsiders. And Chance was only fifteen, so he was a lowly sophomore. He wouldn’t have been much help.

  I took Jason to the office first thing. My dad had set it up with the school so that Jason could get a schedule. They were used to it, since my family was always getting new foster kids. I sat with Jason in Mrs. Clem’s office. Mrs. Clem was the dean of students, and she set up all the schedules. I liked Mrs. Clem, but when we arrived, it was obvious she’d already heard about what Jason had done to Eric over the weekend. Bramford was notoriously protective of its own. Jason didn’t belong in Bramford and had already damaged a member of one its oldest families. That wasn’t good in the minds of most of Bramford’s inhabitants.

  Mrs. Clem seemed a little cold. She pursed her lips.

  “Are we going to get your transcripts, Jason?” she asked.

  “I don’t have any,” he said.

  Mrs. Clem raised her eyebrows in disbelief.

  “I was kind of home schooled before,” he said.

  “But he reads Plato,” I said, feeling like I should defend him in some way.

  Mrs. Clem didn’t react to that. She just poured over her computer screen, lost in thought. Finally, she began punching keys. “Normally, with no transcript, I’d put you in general education classes,” she said to Jason. “But most of them are overcrowded, and it occurs to me that since you seem to be a little volatile, it might be better to keep you away from... over-excitement.”

  She was referring to Jason’s fight. She was so prejudiced! She’d never even met Jason, and she’d already judged him.

  “So, I’m going to try you out in Honors classes,” she said.

  Really? Maybe I was the one who was judging Mrs. Clem. That was pretty decent of her.

  She printed out Jason’s schedule and handed it to him.

  “Cool,” I said, looking over his shoulder at it. “You’ve got three classes with me!”

  Bramford was on a semester block schedule, which meant we only had four classes a day. I was going to be seeing a lot of Jason. Of course, it also meant that Jason was going to be seeing a lot of Toby. Toby and I had the exact same schedule.

  Ugh. And we sat next to each other in every class. I didn’t want to see Toby. I was still angry with him. But I was going to have to. In exactly five minutes, I noted as the opening bell rang.

  I smiled at Jason. “I’ll show you around,” I said. “We’ve got the same first period.”

  Jason, Toby, and I began the day in Ms. Campbell’s Advanced Placement English class. It was downstairs, directly under the main office. Jason followed me as I navigated the crowded halls and staircase. As we approached the door, I wished as hard as I could that Toby wouldn’t be there.

  No such luck. He was sitting in his normal desk. Ms. Campbell was shuffling through some papers at her podium, not monitoring the hall like she was supposed to. She claimed she always forgot to do it, but once or twice the principal had ducked his head in the classroom and asked her to come into the hall. She’d said sweetly, “Sure. One sec!” And then she’d never gone into the hall.

  Ms. Campbell was kind of a rebel, I thought. I liked her. She’d let us read Lysistrata, which was a pretty racy ancient Greek play about a group of women who withheld sex from the men so they would stop fighting a war. It had penis jokes! I couldn’t believe we’d been allowed to read it in class.

  I took Jason up to Ms. Campbell.

  She looked up. “Hi, Azazel,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “You’ve got a new student,” I said. “Jason Wodden.”

  Ms. Campbell looked at him. “The kid who beat up Eric Nelson?”

  God. Had everybody heard about this?

  Ms. Campbell leaned forward conspiratorially. “Nice going,” she whispered. She straightened back up and went back to her papers. “Of course, if you tell anyone I said that, I will deny it.”

  Ms. Campbell was cool.

  “So, I guess I need to get you a textbook and a syllabus,” she said to Jason. “You can sit—”

  “Actually,” I said. “I was hoping I could move my seat for today.”

  “Really?” said Ms. Campbell. “You and Toby—trouble in paradise?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Sure, it’s fine,” she said. “Any open seat then. Both of you.”

  Toby turned around in his seat and saw me. I looked away, ushering Jason and me to some desks in the back of the room. Jason and I sat down. Ms. Campbell’s classroom was long and thin. The desks faced a whiteboard, but there were only three long rows. Toby and I usually sat in the front. There were several sets of seats between Toby and me now. Purposefully, I didn’t look at him.

  Ms. Campbell dropped off a textbook and syllabus at Jason’s desk. Jason began flipping through it. It was Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. I busied myself with beginning our journal prompt, which we had to do each day in class. As I got out my notebook, I pointed it out on the board to Jason. “We have to write a paragraph about whatever the question is every day,” I told him.

  Jason nodded.

  Today’s question was, “What is the purpose of rules?” Ms. Campbell always asked weird things.

  “Azazel,” said Jason.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Toby’s staring at us,” he said.

  “I don’t care.” I didn’t have anything to say to Toby. I was still mad at him.

  “I think maybe you should talk to him,” said Jason.

  “No way.”

  “It’s just you sitting with me like this... He might think ...” Jason trailed off again.

  His trailing off was maddening!

  “He might think what?” I demanded.

  Jason shook his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “No! Tell me.”

  But the tardy bell rang, and Ms. Campbell said, “Okay, guys, get to work on your journals. No talking.”

  English class went by pretty quickly, as it usually did. There were some avid conversations going on from other students in the class, about the short story we’d read, “A Rose for Emily.” I didn’t join in. I usually didn’t. I just liked to listen to what everyone else said. I watched Jason soak it all in. He hadn’t read the story, but I could tell if he had, he’d throw in his two cents.

  Second block was the one class Jason and I didn’t have together. He had biology. Toby and I had French. Mrs. Zimmerman, the French teacher, would not let me change seats, so I had to sit next to Toby.

  I settled into my seat, sulking and vowing not to speak to him.

  “Azazel,” said Toby, “we have to talk.”

  We most certainly did not. In fact, we weren’t going to talk if I had anything to say about it. I buried my face in my French book and tried to ignore him.

  “Listen, I’m sorry,” he said. “I was rude to you for no reason at the party.”

  Damned right he was. But just because he was correctly describing his behavior didn’t mean I was going to forgive him. He’d really hurt my feelings. He’d mocked me. In front of everyone. In that second, I’d had this flash that maybe T
oby really saw me as ridiculous.

  “Please look at me,” he said.

  I didn’t.

  Thankfully, class started right about then, and I had other things to pay attention to besides Toby.

  After French, Jason rejoined us for history. That was my dad’s class. It was weird having my dad for a teacher, but it was either do that or not take honors history, which just wasn’t an option. My dad didn’t have a seating chart in his classroom. My dad didn’t actually have rules in his classroom. He solved problems by classroom quorums, where we all sat in a circle and talked about how we felt the class was going. This worked fine in honors classes, but I knew that some of the general kids took advantage of my dad. He didn’t see it that way though. He thought it was important that the students had the ability to make their own decisions and to discover the consequences.

  I was glad that there wasn’t a seating chart. I usually did sit in the same seat by Toby, but I sat somewhere else today, and I waved Jason over to me when he came into the classroom.

  “How was biology?” I asked him.

  Jason sat down, noting that Toby and I weren’t sitting together. “You haven’t made up with Toby yet, huh?”

  “No,” I said. Maybe I wasn’t going to make up with Toby at all.

  “Biology was okay,” said Jason. “I’ve done most of the stuff in there. Should be a breeze.”

  “So, were you really home schooled?”

  “Kind of,” said Jason and that was all. He never elaborated on anything! I was dying of curiosity. How was I going to get Jason to trust me with his secrets?

  After history, we went to lunch. Usually, I sat with Toby. We ate at a table with a bunch of football players and their girlfriends. After I ate, I usually went into the gym to find Lilith. Lilith never ate lunch.

  Today, however, for some reason, she was in the lunch line. She saw Jason and I and motioned for us to come stand with her.

  “We’ll be cutting the line,” I called to her.

  She rolled her eyes, but she left her spot in the line to come back and stand with us. “There,” she said. “Happy?”

  I made a face at her. “What’s up?” I said. “How come you’re eating lunch?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Baby needs nutrition.”

  “Shut up!” I said, whacking her with my purse. “You are not!”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not.” She smiled at Jason. “And how are you?”

  “Uh... good,” said Jason.

  Every time Jason said something to Lilith, he started out with “uh” or “um.” I wondered if Jason was attracted to Lilith. I considered the prospect of Jason and Lilith dating. For some reason, I didn’t like the idea of it at all.

  “You still pissed at Toby?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said. How could she ask me this? Last night, when I’d talked to her on the phone, I’d explained exactly how I felt about the situation in excruciating detail. We’d dissected everything he’d said, trying to figure out his motives.

  “Maybe you should give the guy a break,” said Lilith.

  My jaw dropped. What was Lilith saying? “You hate Toby,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I do. He’s a total idiot. But, I don’t know, the two of you are like the teen dream couple. You’re good together, you know.”

  “Obviously, we’re not if he makes fun of me in front of everyone at that party,” I said. “Plus, he treats me like I’m twelve or something. He’s so overprotective. And he won’t have sex with me.”

  Jason cleared his throat.

  Lilith and I both looked at him.

  “The line moved forward,” he said.

  We shuffled forward in the lunch line.

  “What do you think, Jason?” I asked.

  “About?” he asked. He looked a little embarrassed. I realized I’d been talking about my sex life (or lack thereof) in front of him. Maybe that made him uncomfortable.

  “Toby,” I said. “You don’t think I should forgive him, do you?”

  Jason didn’t say anything.

  “You’re gonna forgive him,” said Lilith. “You guys never fight for long. You might as well get it over with.”

  “Do you want to break up with him?” Jason asked me.

  I thought about it. Did I? I was in love with Toby. I was mad at him right now, but did I want him out of my life forever? “Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “Like why are you really eating lunch, Lilith?”

  Lilith rolled her eyes. “I’m hiding from Eric Nelson. He was a total jackass to me in the gym because I gave you guys a ride home.”

  I smiled. “I thought you were going to make Eric fall in love with you.”

  “Not in this lifetime,” she said.