a freshman girl with shiny Barbie hair and enormous Barbie breasts. Since then, it’s all she thinks about. How free guys are. How they go after what they want, how they get it, how happy they are doing it. How hooking up is so much better than having a boyfriend, how it can keep you from getting hurt.
But I know that’s not true, and I know better than to bring up Jimmy. After Jimmy, Ashley became Ash and Jimmy became a ghost. He might as well be dead, even though his locker is right down the hall from ours. “This particular prodigy doesn’t have time for Luke DeSalvio or any other guy,” I say. “This prodigy has to keep her grades up so that the colleges come knocking with the big bucks.”
Ash smiles. “My list is up to six now. I’ve got Rutgers, Oberlin, NYU, SUNY, Sarah Lawrence. I’m hoping that they’ll ignore my math grades. And my chemistry grades. And that D I got in cooking freshman year.”
“I still don’t know how you managed a D in cooking.”
“Mrs Hooper had us make mayonnaise. How is that cooking?”
“You said six colleges.”
“I’m also applying to Cornell.” She gives me a knowing look. “Bet that’s your safe school.”
I pull Ash’s cup out of the holder and take a swig of cold, gritty coffee. “Nothing’s safe.”
First-period study, and Chilly’s on an Audrey hunt. He lopes into the library and gives me a wicked grin. He sits in the seat across from me, his brows waggling, suggestive of God knows what. I ignore him, grab one of my books and flip it open without really seeing it. Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing. Blah blah blah, says Beatrice. Blah blah blah, says Benedick. Your lips are like worms.
“Nice party?” Chilly says.
“Fine.” I try to make my voice flatter than a robot’s in the hope that he’ll leave me alone. No such luck.
“Did you hook up?”
“You have sex on the brain,” I say.
“I have sex other places, too.”
“I don’t think you have sex anywhere, and that’s why you have to live vicariously through the rest of us,” I say.
“Vicariously,” he says. “V-I-C-A-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y. Is that one of the words in your SAT practice book? I bet you use flash cards.”
“Is there a reason you always have to sit near me? Isn’t there anyone else you can irritate around here?”
“You’re my favourite.”
He props his chin in his hands and bats his nuclear-accident eyes. Chilly would probably be nice to look at if he wasn’t such a jerk, but the jerkiness overwhelms every other thing, the jerkiness is like a great cloud of nerve gas that causes the eyes to roll and the knees to buckle and disgust to claw at the back of the throat. When he first came to our school from Los Angeles in the middle of sophomore year, the girls took notice. Tall, lanky, skin like coffee ice-cream, those freaky blue-green eyes, a movie-star strut—what’s not to like? I liked it, I’m embarrassed to admit. Oh, he started out great. Notes and gifts and all this attention that I’d never had from anyone. My mom called him “charming”. But then Chilly started feeling more comfortable. He started opening his big stupid mouth. He took all the same honours classes that I did, but while I did hours of homework and studied every night, he seemed content to do the least amount possible. He almost never had a book with him. At least not one that he was supposed to. He made fun of me for my study habits, my friends and my work on the sets of the school plays. He said that the only thing worth my time was him. I finally told him that if he wanted a pet, he should go out and get a poodle.
He’s never forgiven me for it.
Today he’s got some Japanese comic book that you read backwards. Not that he’s opened it yet, because he’s too intent on pissing me off. Sometimes he sat near Kimberly Wong and made her so nervous that she would forget which math problem she was on. And sometimes it was Renee Ostrom, sure to be voted most likely to become a starving artist, who would whip out a piece of paper and draw a quick sketch of Chilly with arrows sticking through his head, or a knife in his heart, or his face shattered in Picasso-like pieces.
Chilly spends about five minutes trying to provoke me when the bell rings. I’m glad that we’re not allowed to talk in Mrs Sayers’s study period, and the room is silent except for the scratchy whisper of pages turning. We all hear Cindy Terlizzi’s phone when it starts to vibrate. In unison, everyone says, “Phone!”
“Miss Terlizzi,” says Mrs Sayers, who is shelving books in her persnickety way. The edge of every book touches the front of the shelf. “You know that phone is supposed to be turned off when you arrive at school.”
“Whatever,” says Cindy Terlizzi. When Mrs Sayers gives her a look, she says, “I know.”
“Well then, turn it off,” Mrs Sayers snaps. She picks up the end of her long scarf and flings it around her neck, waiting for satisfaction.
Cindy digs around in her bag for the phone and flips it open with a flick of her wrist. She presses a few buttons and the phone chirps like a sick bird. We all know she’s probably getting a text message and is counting on the fact that Mrs Sayers’s own phones are of the rotary or perhaps even the tin-can variety.
“Off!” says Mrs Sayers.
“That’s what I’m doing,” Cindy says, tsk-tsking, like Mrs Sayers is just old and grumpy and wrinkled and can’t understand modern communication devices. She glances back at the phone in her palm as if she can’t quite believe the message she’s reading and slaps her hand over her mouth. Then she looks up. Finds me. Smiles.
She’s too busy smiling to pay attention to Mrs Sayers, who, I have to say, is ferret-fast when she wants to be. She swoops down on Cindy, scarf flying like an aviator’s, and snatches the phone. “What a clever little gadget,” she says.
“Hey!” says Cindy. “Give that back!”
Mrs Sayers peers down, one eyebrow rucked up. She starts punching random buttons and the phone whirrs. “Very nice,” she says, passing it back to Cindy.
Cindy scowls. “You erased it!”
Mrs Sayers says, “Oh, my! Did I? I’m so very sorry. I hope it wasn’t important.”
Behind Mrs Sayers’s back, Cindy sticks out her tongue but says nothing. Mrs Sayers glances my way and I know that whatever was on Cindy’s phone was about me—probably about the party, about Pam, about Luke. Well, they could have him. They could all get in line.
Of course, Chilly doesn’t miss any of it. He’s turning from Cindy to Mrs Sayers to me, me to Mrs Sayers to Cindy. He opens his mouth to say something icky and nuclear and obnoxious, but I cut him off: “Speak and you die.”
Chilly gives me his signature “Who, me?” look and opens his mouth again when Mrs Sayers says, “Yes, Mr Chillman, please do spare us all. I can’t promise you death, but I can promise detention, which I’ve been told is a bit like dying very, very slowly.”
Everybody goes back to not reading, not studying and not thinking, except for me and a couple of other geeks who think grades are important. At first I can’t concentrate, but as the minutes tick by I settle into it, settle into me again: the me who thinks about grade point averages and college applications and various possible futures. I consult my assignment notebook and measure how many days till the final draft of my Much Ado About Nothing paper is due, worry about my history test, calculate how many hours I’ll have to study for the next calculus exam. It’s soothing, the measurements and the calculations and even the worry. Luke is still there, of course, in the back of my head, doing some sort of jock dance of the veils, but I know that he’ll fade eventually, taking all his hot boy voodoo into the past.
Finally the bell rings and I’m free of Chilly the Soul Chiller and Cindy Terlizzi, Demon Queen of Text Messaging. As I’m running to my next class, Pete Flanagan, one of football players,