“Okay,” I say. I read it over quickly, but I’m so worried about taking forever to answer that I don’t really absorb anything. “If you look at it,” I say, “you’ll see that there is a . . . pattern? Things repeat a lot?”
“Great. Repetition. Benjamin, what else?”
“Uh, like a theme?”
“Of what?”
“Love, I guess.”
“Okay. What’s another theme of this song? Dylan?”
I glance at her and wonder if she really got kicked out of her old school for making out with a girl. She’s wearing the same black jeans, but today with a light blue shirt with some words on it that I can’t read. She has bulky leather bracelets on each wrist and she’s sitting with one elbow on the desk, holding her handout in front of her face.
“Human potential. Or identity,” she mutters.
“Great,” Mr. Robinson says. He nods. “Wonderful.” He looks at one corner of the ceiling and hums a little bit of the song. He seems to forget where he is for a minute.
Then he returns to us.
He says, “For homework, please choose a song that matters to you. I want you to write a paper that first explains why the song is important to your life, and then analyzes the song’s lyrics as you would a poem. I’ll give you until Friday.”
I’m getting my math book from my locker when Dylan comes up next to me and asks, “Is there anywhere good to eat around here?”
By now, the secret is out—almost all the lockers in the science hall have been claimed. Before school and after school, the hall echoes with locker doors groaning open and slamming shut, with forty people’s voices and ringing cell phones and stomping feet. When I glance at Dylan, she’s staring like she did the first day. Her eyes are this clear blue green, surrounded by black smudged makeup. She’s standing close to me, and it feels strange. Apart from being accosted by Alicia, I haven’t been letting people get near me.
“If you go down Webster,” I say, “toward downtown, there are a few places.”
She looks at Ingrid’s hill stuck to the door of my locker, cocks her head, and squints at it. Then she nods her approval.
“So,” she says, “hungry?”
Without thinking, without even considering going, I say, “I have homework.”
“Okay,” she says. “Whatever.”
I head home, ready to pull Ingrid’s journal out of my backpack as soon as I get there and read for hours, until I’ve finished every entry. But as I pass the hills and the condos and all the places we used to walk past together, I decide that isn’t something I should do.
Here’s how I feel: People take one another for granted. Like, I’d hang out with Ingrid in all of these random places—in her room or at school or just on some sidewalk somewhere. And the whole time we’d tell each other things, just say all of our thoughts out loud. Maybe that would’ve been boring to some people, but it was never boring to us. I never realized what a big deal that was. How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head. You just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment of your life, and think, Soon this will be over. But I understand more now. About the way life works. I know that when I finish reading Ingrid’s journal, there won’t be anything new between us ever again.
So when I get back to my house, I lock my room door even though I’m the only one home, take Ingrid’s journal out, and just hold it for a little while. I look at the drawing on the first page again. And then I put the journal back. I’m going to try to make her last.
15
After dinner, I climb into the backseat of my car with my laptop. I push in Davey’s mix tape, but I keep the volume low so I can concentrate. I’m thinking of ways to start my English paper.
I type, Music is a powerful way for people to express themselves. Then I delete it. I try again: Songs can be important ways of remembering certain moments in people’s lives. That’s closer to what I’m trying to say, but it isn’t exactly right yet. I shut my computer. A girl plays her guitar, sings earnestly, and I crank open the moon roof, sink lower on the seat, look up at the sky, and listen.
When the song is over, I turn the tape off, and try again. There is an indescribable feeling that comes from being desperately in love with a song.
I read the sentence over. I keep writing, trying to feel the best night of my life over again.
Ingrid and I had stood in front of her bathroom mirror, concentrating. The counter was cluttered with little makeup containers and bobby pins and hair goop.
We are so hot, Ingrid said.
I nodded, slowly, watching my face as it moved up and down. My hair was shiny and straight and long, parted down the middle. Ingrid had put this deep green, glittery eye shadow on me and it made my eyes look amber instead of just brown. She had pinned her blond curls back messily, and was wearing red lipstick that made her look older and kind of sophisticated.
Yeah, I said. We look really good.
We look amazing.
What it was, was that we complemented each other. We just fit in this way that made strangers ask us if we were sisters, even though her hair was blond and curly and mine was straight and dark. Even though her eyes were blue and mine were brown. Maybe it was the way we acted, or spoke, or just moved. The way we would look at something and both have the same thought at the same moment, and turn to each other at the same time and start to say the same thing.