I try to follow everyone out the door, but Ms. Delani catches me.
“Caitlin.”
I shuffle to her desk.
“Yeah?”
She reaches for the photo in my hand.
“Caitlin.” She shakes her head. “What is this? This is not art.”
I give her my iciest stare. “You didn’t help me with my goals,” I say. “I asked you, but you ignored me.”
She sighs. “First a moving car for a still life. Now an empty lot for a landscape. I know that you are capable of much more than this.”
I look away from her, up at the walls. I scan all the photographs until I find the one of me. “Actually, that was Ingrid,” I say. “Ingrid was capable of more than this; I always sucked, remember?” I snatch my landscape from her, crush it in my fist, and shove it in my backpack.
She takes her glasses off and rubs between her eyes like I’m giving her the worst headache. She leans over her desk and puts her head in her hands. I stand there, awkwardly, waiting for her to look up and suggest that I drop the class, or tell me not to waste her time, or send me to the therapist again. I wait, and keep waiting. The freshmen start to come in for the beginning class. The bell for second period rings.
“Um,” I say, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “I kind of have to go.” She still doesn’t respond.
Then she sits up. And my heart stops beating. Ms. Delani’s lips are trembling, her cheeks are flushed. She closes her eyes and tears run down and pool at the sides of her nose. She doesn’t say anything. The freshmen are quiet, staring down at their desks, trying not to look at us. She reaches for a pad of paper and writes something. She hands me the paper and walks back into her office. I look down.
It says, Please excuse Caitlin from second period tardiness.—V. Delani
8
“So, hey,” Taylor says as he’s cramming his stuff into his backpack. “I’m going over to Henry’s to wait for Jayson. We’re gonna go to this kick-ass restaurant in Berkeley to get Ethiopian food. Wanna come?”
We’ve been comparing notes about Jacques DeSoir in the library after school. So far we’ve decided that we’re going to start our presentation talking about how and why we chose him. We also decided to buy a map of Europe so that we can chart all the places he traveled for the class.
I feel kind of nervous about going to Henry’s, but I also don’t feel like saying no and walking home alone when I could be spending time with Taylor, so I say sure. Henry probably doesn’t even know I exist, even though we’re in English together and I know which block of which street he lives on. I know he lives in a three-story house and that his parents are never home. I know this because he has parties almost every Friday night, and because Ingrid and I would sometimes decide to go, get as far as the front yard, and then turn around when we saw the shapes of all the people inside, heard them talking and laughing, saw all the cars parked out front, and recognized whom they belonged to. Even though we wanted to go, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to walk into Henry’s house, see everyone already talking to people, already settled and gathered into little exclusive groups, and watch them look up at us and wonder why we were there.
So this is why I know the outside of Henry’s house so well, but once I follow Taylor through the door, nothing is familiar. Not the huge family portrait that hangs in the entryway, not the marble floor, or the fountain that spurts water in the middle of it. I wonder what a kid does who lives here alone practically all the time. We turn into the family room.
Henry and a couple other guys I recognize but don’t really know are sitting on an expensive-looking sofa, drinking Coronas and staring at the TV.
“Hey,” Taylor says. “You all know Caitlin, right?”
One of them, not Henry, says, “Hey.”
They all turn back to the screen. This is exactly what Ingrid and I feared all the times we turned around and walked away from Henry’s house. I stand caught in this moment, feeling so unwelcome.
I would like to say that a million possibilities are running through my mind and that I’m just having trouble choosing which brilliant exit line to use, or which joke to deliver that will make all the guys laugh, make Taylor look less nervous, make the tension in the room vanish. But really, I’m just trying to think of one possibility. I’ll do the first thing that comes to me. But before I’ve decided on anything, Henry speaks.
Still looking at the screen, he says, “Hey, so you’re friends with that new girl, aren’t you?”
I guess I was wrong; he does know I exist.
“Yeah,” I say, and wonder if this is still true. I guess he really is oblivious if he hasn’t noticed that Dylan and I haven’t sat together for half a month.
He nods. “She’s hot,” he says. “Does she like guys, too?”
I shake my head, but realize that no one is looking at me, not even Taylor, who is studying his shoelaces as intently as he had been our Jacques DeSoir book. So I say it out loud: “I don’t think so.”
“Does she have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Is she hot?”
“Um . . .” I roll up onto the balls of my feet and then back down. “It feels kind of weird to talk about this,” I say.
“It’s not a big deal,” Henry says. “It’s a simple question. So is she?”
“Taylor, I’m gonna wait outside,” I say. I step outside and shut the heavy door behind me.