“No,” I say, and it comes out a little harsher than I meant it to. “It’s just that I don’t see the point in trying to put effort into her class.”
Dylan leans back on the sidewalk and stares up at the sky. I untie my shoes and then tie them again, tighter.
“I don’t want to sound like an ass**le or anything,” she says after a while, “but it seems like there’s more going on. We just walked half a mile so that you could take a picture of dirt. So it seems like you are putting effort into this. You really want to piss her off.”
“Oh,” I say. “So you’re an all-around genius? You don’t have to save it up for English papers?”
She laughs. “I’m thirsty, are you thirsty?”
We walk up one more block to Dylan’s house, which is smaller than the others, painted dark blue.
“You have an old house.”
“Yeah, my parents aren’t into these monstrosities,” she says, gesturing to the three-story beige houses that tower above her little one.
“Look,” she says. “We actually have a white picket fence. I told my parents that if they were going to move me to the suburbs, they’d better go all out. Watch: isn’t this fantastic?”
She stops on the sidewalk and then skips through the fence. And it is funny, Dylan in her dark, tough clothes, her messy hair, and smudged eye makeup, entering a white picket fence.
Dylan’s living room is decorated with all of these old prints that look kind of scientific. They each have one type of flower or fruit printed on them with the plant’s name in small letters across the bottom. When we get to her room, I look at the stuff on her desk as she puts her backpack down and takes off her sweater. She has a laptop and pad of paper and a mug with a bunch of pens in it. Next to it, there’s a photo in a thin, silver frame of a girl with short, light hair and a wide smile.
“Who’s this?” I ask her.
“That’s Maddy,” she says.
“Does she go to your old school?”
“Yeah.” Dylan opens a window by her bed. “We’ve been together for five months.”
“Wow,” I say. I start my crazy nodding. I can’t seem to stop or to think of anything else to say. I want her to know that I’m not weirded out or anything, so I say, “That’s really cool!” It comes out way too enthusiastically and Dylan raises an eyebrow at me.
I look at a bulletin board above her desk and see a picture of an adorable little boy. He’s wearing rain boots and playing in the sand. The photo has this old snapshot quality that I really wish I could pull off. It’s softly focused and the colors are muted in a way that makes me feel nostalgic just looking at it.
“I love this picture.”
Dylan looks at it, then looks away.
“Okay. Something to drink,” she says. “Follow me.”
We walk down the hall and into a kitchen with bright yellow walls and a million pots and pans hanging from a metal rack over the stove.
“Mom’s a cook. Like, as her job. She’s really into her kitchen. When we were looking for houses, my dad would go straight to the backyards, I would head back to check out the bedrooms, and my mom would go directly into the kitchens. This was the first house we all agreed on. So we took it.”
She grabs two glasses from a cabinet.
“Water? Juice? Soda?”
“Water’s good.”
“Plain or fizzy.”
“Fizzy.”
“So,” Dylan says, handing me a glass. “Do you want to go to the city with me tomorrow? I’m meeting Maddy and some of our friends.”
“Sure,” I say, and take a sip so she won’t see me smiling.
When I get home, I drop the camera off in my room and head back downstairs. I unlock the door to my car and climb into the backseat, but for some reason I can’t get comfortable. It feels kind of cramped or dark back there. I haul my backpack up to the front, and squeeze my way into the passenger seat. The view is different from up here—I can see more of the house, the patio. Actually, I can see more of everything.
I take Ingrid’s journal out of my backpack, prop my knees on the dashboard, and read.
I finish reading and shove the journal into the glove compartment. I wish I knew why she never told me any of this. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it, that I was too sheltered or too innocent or something. If she had told me why she cut herself all the time, or that it was the pills that made her act so spaced out, or that she was even on pills, or even saw doctors, or any of it, I would have done my best to help her. I’m not saying I’m a superhero. I’m not saying I would have just swooped down and saved her. I’m just saying the only reason everything was a waste was that she made it a waste. That whole time, back when I was just a normal kid in high school, living out my normal life, I really thought everything mattered.
29
The next day in precalc, Taylor strides past his usual seat and takes the desk in front of me. He doesn’t say hi or anything. He just sits there with his back to me like it’s normal. Mr. James hands our quizzes back to us. I got an 89 percent. I scribble on my paper, trying to figure out the problems I missed.
Taylor turns around and stares down at my quiz.
“Hey, look,” he says. He shows me his. “We got the exact same grade. Crazy.”
“Yeah,” I say, kind of sarcastically, but I’m glad that he’s sitting here, talking to me.