Stepping around to the front of the car, I brandished the clicker and pressed as hard as possible. For good measure, I focused on gratitude and positive thinking, with a dash of mindfulness thrown in. To my great relief, the headlights flashed, and the car locked.
As far as I was concerned, that was me mostly redeemed in the eyes of this morning’s only witness. Score one for Ollie. Ethereal Being: three billion. The gap was closing.
The girl raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Thank you.”
I went to pass the clicker back to her, but her hands were kind of busy with the stack of ten or so books balanced in the crook of her arm.
“Um, do you need a hand with all that?” I asked as we hurried on. The redbrick school building loomed in the distance, all menacing and intimidating. It was three stories high, with practically acres of freshly trimmed grass between the parking lot and the entrance, cut through the middle by a steep pathway lined with flagpole after flagpole. Why was Collinswood High so enormous? Collinswood was a teensy little pond, and it had no business boasting a school building that could house an ocean’s worth of fish.
The girl laughed. Ouch. Shut down, much? “You wanna carry my books to class?” she asked. “What is this, the fifties?”
“Not all your books,” I said. “Just maybe one or two of the light ones.” I pointed to the two paperbacks on top. “You could probably manage the rest without me.”
“I think I can manage all of them without you, thanks all the same.”
If it had come from someone else I might’ve been offended by that, but this girl had a way of half-smiling that made me feel like I was in on a joke with her. I decided I liked her. I hooked her key chain through one finger and held it up. “Guess I’ll walk these to your class, then?”
“Actually, that’d be really great.” She offered me a brilliant grin, which I caught and threw back to her. Up this close, she smelled like sugary flowers. “So, guessing you’re new,” she continued. “That, or you’re a seriously tall freshman.”
“Nope. A regular-sized senior. I’m Ollie. I just moved here from California, I guess. Kind of. Possibly temporarily, possibly for a while. Depends on some family stuff.”
Well, gee, are you sure that was awkward enough, Ollie? If you try really hard, you could sound even weirder. Don’t settle for halfway, here.
The girl didn’t seem to notice the word-vomit. “I figured you weren’t from around here. Your accent and all. Anyway, I’m Juliette. Where’s your homeroom? I can take you, if you want.”
Hey, I wasn’t the one with an accent. In fact, Juliette had even more of a Southern drawl than most of the other people I’d met so far. If I had to guess, I’d say Juliette had originated from farther south. So, it seemed someone else wasn’t from uh-ree-ound hay-err. I’d have to ask another time, though: Juliette had reminded me how late I was. I racked my brain to access the memory of my homeroom teacher. It had blurred together with the twenty other names I’d tried to memorize. “Um, I’m with Ms. Hurstenwild, I think.”
“Oh, snap, you’re with us! That makes things easy. Follow me Ollie-oop.”
“Ollie-oop?”
“Ollie-oop. Alley-oop. Roll with it, ’kay? It sounds cute.”
“For a three-year-old, maybe,” I protested, but Juliette didn’t seem to hear me. Convenient. She picked up her pace and powered up the path, through the glass sliding doors, and down several empty hallways. I hurried after her, cheeks flushing. Great. Everyone was already in class.
She stopped short somewhere in the maze of classrooms and nodded toward a door. Right. She had no hands.
As expected, a sea of unfamiliar heads turned as I walked in. Awesome. To my relief, Juliette stepped in front of me. “Hey, Ms. H. Sorry I’m late. Ollie was lost, so I stopped to help him.”
Way to throw me under the bus, Juliette. Ms. Hurstenwild, a middle-aged woman with an underbite and a neck that was too thick for the high collar of her shirt, didn’t seem pissed though. “I’ll give you a pass today, Juliette, but you’ll have to get creative for me to fall for that for the next hundred and eighty mornings.”
Juliette headed straight to an empty desk. How did she know which was hers? How would I know where I was meant to go? “I wouldn’t dream of it, Ms. H,” she said. “I’ll only blame it on Ollie for two weeks, max.”
Ms. Hurstenwild turned to me. Self-conscious, I crossed my arms over my chest. Was I supposed to introduce myself here? Was I supposed to insist that Juliette did not represent me?
“Good morning, Oliver. Glad to see you found your way here.”
Oh. That wasn’t so bad. I managed a smile. I managed to breathe. I even managed to ignore the rest of the students staring at me. For a few seconds, anyway.
Ms. Hurstenwild gestured to the back of the classroom. “You can take that seat. We’re going over some housekeeping things to kick off the term.”
I scanned the faces at first, then, overwhelmed, I settled for staring at the floor. It wasn’t that I was hugely shy or anything. I just … I mean, come on. No one relishes feeling like a zoo animal, right?
Luckily, I made it to my desk without anyone throwing popcorn at me, which was a great success as far as I was concerned. Ms. Hurstenwild started talking about hall passes and library access, and I probably should’ve been paying attention, but my gaze kept wandering around the class. There were thirty or so students. On the surface, they weren’t any different from the kids back home. Only your usual distribution of pretty to plain, self-assured to awkward, skinny jeans to boot cut to miniskirts. But while the class might not be any different from the ones back home, I could be. Different, that is. I was a blank slate now. Anything could happen from here on out. Any of these people might become my best friends or worst enemies by the end of the year. I was totally in charge of my destiny. Whatever move I made today might make or break the year.
But no pressure, right? As long as I didn’t get tangled in any more seat belts, and tamed my use of the English language, I should be okay.
“Should” being the key word.
Suddenly, I realized Ms. Hurstenwild had stopped speaking, and people were moving. I froze—was it first period already? There hadn’t been a bell? But before I could react, Juliette had plopped her butt on the front of my desk. She had two girls with her. One was tall and curvy, with thick eyelashes straight out of a Covergirl advertisement, and cool brown skin. She was decked out head to toe in brand-name workout gear, from her wool sweater to her three-quarter yoga pants. The other girl, in a slight contrast, wore a pale lavender, frilly dress, that shouldn’t have worked with her equally pale skin but somehow did, paired with a leather jacket and Converse. That, plus the heavy eyeliner and slumped posture, made her the spitting image of half of my friends back home. Unfortunately, she was the only one of the girls who looked less than impressed to see me.
“Ollie-oop, this is Niamh and Lara,” Juliette said, pointing to the L’Oreal model and the punk-looking chick respectively. Neev? People had weird names in North Carolina. “Guys, Ollie moved here from California. Apparently he could move back at any time, at the drop of a hat.”
Goddamnit, my face was flushing. All right. My turn to speak. Maybe I should take this opportunity to prove my firm grasp on my first language. “Hi. Yeah, we spent the summer here, and my parents figured hey, why bother going home, let’s hang out here all year.”