“Hey,” he says, with a pretty bright smile for a kid who just had his head sewn shut.
“We don’t even get to see it?”
“They said to keep it covered. Plus it’s pretty gross.”
“You should tell everybody it’s a new tattoo.”
“On my forehead?”
“It’s your tattoo.”
“Greer!” Maggie calls. We look over and she’s patting one of the two empty seats at her table.
“Maggie saved us seats.”
“Cool,” he says, unfazed, and leads the way to the circle of girls. Turns out he’s got chem with Tahlia and English and math with Natalie, so everyone knows everyone else.
Jackson doesn’t have a lunch. He says he’s on “like twelve thousand milligrams of Tylenol” and he’s pretty sure he’ll throw up if he eats anything.
“Tylenol? There’s not something more hard-core if you crack your head open?” I watched a video of a girl talking about her breast surgery where she said they gave her pain medication that made her feel like she was eating her way through a cloud of flavorless cotton candy, but at least her chest didn’t hurt as bad while she was on it. I am hoping someone will invent a drug that takes away all the pain and tastes like regular cotton candy before I ever need it.
Jackson reaches over and takes a piece of Pirate’s Booty from my bag. “As long as you haven’t had your eye gouged out with a grapefruit spoon or something, they try not to give out anything you might try to sell.”
“That was weirdly specific,” I say. I pick up a piece of Pirate’s Booty; Jackson plucks it right out of my fingers and grins at me.
Natalie says, “That happened to my cousin!”
We all turn to her in shock. Maggie says, “Your cousin’s eye was gouged out with a grapefruit spoon?”
“No, he had his wisdom teeth out, and he sold all the pills they gave him.”
Maggie rolls her eyes.
“Did he get caught?” Tahlia asks.
“No, but it hurt really, really bad and then he couldn’t take anything except, oh, well, Tylenol.”
Everybody looks at Jackson again. “It’s not that bad. And they did give me the really serious Neosporin.” He pulls a white tube with a pharmacy sticker out of his bag and holds it up. “This stuff is hospital-grade. Not that punk-ass CVS Neosporin. Mine kills Ebola!” Natalie laughs loosely, her suffering cousin forgotten, and Tahlia giggles to catch up to her. I feel a little pinch in my stomach, because I can see how much they are drawn to him and how good he is at making that happen. I knew it wouldn’t just be me, but I didn’t want it to be them.
Jackson lowers his voice. “But seriously, do you think I can sell this? It’s pure, man. A hundred percent . . .” He turns the tube over in his hands. “Actually, I have no idea what it’s made of. Uranium? Vibranium?” He looks completely confused, and now even Maggie is laughing, but I can tell hers is genuine because she’s dribbling yogurt smoothie down her chin. “Greer, could you take this to your private lab and analyze the chemical components for me?”
I throw a puff at him, which he tries to catch in his mouth and misses. He makes a shame face at me like it’s my fault he can’t catch, and the pinching feeling turns into a warm spot, like a tiny butterfly has just peed on my liver.
“But what happened to your head, though?” Natalie spills out. If the tube of prescription antibiotic ointment leaked enriched plutonium that turned Maggie and me into radioactive pudding right now, Natalie and Tahlia wouldn’t notice. Tahlia is literally holding her breath until Jackson speaks again.
“He got a tattoo. It says ‘New Kid.’”
Jackson makes a show of rolling his eyes at me, but he knocks his knee into mine under the table.
“My sister hit me.” By now he is seriously inhaling my Pirate’s Booty. “Maybe I am hungry.”
I twist the bag toward him. “Did you deserve it?”
Jackson smiles at me. “She thinks so. I was trying to finish my Heart of Darkness essay before school—”
“I haven’t even started mine!” squeals Natalie. Jackson pauses to give her a sympathetic cringe, and she is sucked right in.
“And Quin brings over Operation—you know that game? It’s not even worth it to say no to her, because she’ll keep at you until she wears you out. Greer’s met her. She knows.” The other girls shoot me a slightly curious, slightly jealous look, and the pinchy/piddling butterfly stands up and sticks her tongue out at them. “She goes first and the thing buzzes immediately. I get my piece out, and it’s her turn again.”
“I can only get the little basket out!” shares Tahlia.
“I can’t even get that!” says Natalie.
If Jackson was a cute girl telling this story, and Natalie and Tahlia were boys, they’d be bragging about how good they were at Operation (or soccer or Call of Duty or parkour or whatever) instead of how bad they were. Maggie rolls her eyes. She’s thinking the same thing.
“It’s actually not a basket. It’s a bucket,” says Maggie, annoyed.
“She buzzes, but I let her try again. And again. And again. She’s terrible at it. I think she gets some kind of rush from making the guy’s nose light up. I’m trying to do my homework, so I let her keep going. But then she gets mad at me because she says I’m not really playing with her. ‘Watch, Jackson! You have to watch my turn!’”
Tahlia is leaning so far forward I can see down the front of her shirt. It’s a plain white fitted Henley with little black buttons, nothing fancy, but I can see the top of the lavender lace cups of her bra and the breasts that are snuggled in like twins at a Perk Up! sleepover. Cute. Perky. If anyone ever managed to sneak a peek down my sweatshirt, they’d see a bright white granny bra, completely plain except for a satin bow the size a mouse would tie onto a birthday present stuck right between the humps. Like if you planted one dandelion in front of a nuclear power plant to make it less industrial and more pretty. I cross my arms in front of my chest and lean back in my seat.
“Finally, she gets out the last piece—somehow with only one buzz—”
“Was it the basket?” asks Tahlia.
“Bucket,” corrects Maggie.
“Heart.” I can’t tell if he is a performer and this table of girls is the audience, or if he is a performer and we are all the instruments, but he is definitely a performer. Of course it would be the heart. “And then she says, ‘I win! Now I get to pick a prize from you.’ And then I see that she’s already got”—there is just the tiniest pause that no one else notices—“something from my room. I take it back, and five minutes later she comes in and nails me in the face with a can opener.”