I say, distracted. I’m still shocked The Mouse is having sex. What if everyone is having sex?
Crap. I absentmindedly pick up a copy of The Nutmeg. The headline screams: yogurt served in cafeteria. I roll my eyes and shove it aside. With the exception of the handful of kids who actually work on The Nutmeg, no one reads it. But someone left it on the old picnic table inside the ancient dairy barn that sits just outside school property. The table’s been here forever, scratched with the initials of lovers, the years of graduating classes, and general sentiments toward Castlebury High, such as “Castlebury sucks.” The teachers never come out here, so it’s also the unofficial smoking area.
“At least we get yogurt this year,” I say, for no particular reason. What if I never have sex? What if I die in a car accident before I have the chance to do it?
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Maggie asks.
Uh-oh. Up next: the dreaded body discussion. Maggie will say she thinks she’s fat, and I’ll say I think I look like a boy. Maggie will say she wishes she looked like me and I’ll say I wish I looked like her. And it won’t make a bit of difference, because two minutes later, we’ll both be sitting here in our same bodies, except we’ll have managed to make ourselves feel bad over something we can’t change.
Like not getting into the damn New School.
What if some guy wants to have sex with me and I’m too scared to go through with it?
Sure enough, Maggie says, “Do I look fat? I do look fat, don’t I? I feel fat.”
“Maggie. You’re not fat.” Guys have been drooling over Maggie since she was thirteen, a fact that she seems determined to ignore.
I look away. Behind her, in the dark recesses at the far end of the barn, the glowing tip of a cigarette moves up and down. “Someone’s in here,” I hiss.
“Who?” She spins around as Peter Arnold comes out of the shadows.
Peter is the second-smartest boy in our class and kind of a jerk. He used to be a chubby-faced short kid with pasty skin, but it appears something happened to Peter over the summer. He grew.
And apparently took up smoking.
Peter is good friends with The Mouse, but I don’t really know him. When it comes to relationships, we’re all like little planets with our own solar system of friends. Unwritten law states that the solar systems rarely intersect—until now.
“Mind if I join you?” he asks.
“Actually, we do. We’re having girl talk here.” I don’t know why I’m like this with boys, especially boys like Peter. Bad habit, I guess. Worse than smoking. But I don’t want boring old Peter to ruin our conversation.
“No. We don’t mind.” Maggie kicks me under the table.
“By the way, I don’t think you’re fat,” Peter says.
I smirk, trying to catch Maggie’s eye, but she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Peter. So I look at Peter too. His hair is longer and he’s shed most of his zits, but there’s something else about him.
Confidence.
Jeez. First The Mouse and now Peter. Is everyone going to be different this year?
Maggie and Peter keep ignoring me, so I pick up the paper and pretend to read. This gets Peter’s attention.
“What do you think of The Nutmeg?” he asks.
“Drivel,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says. “I’m the editor.”
Nice. Now I’ve done it again.
“If you’re so smart, why don’t you try writing for the paper?” Peter asks. “I mean, don’t you tell everyone you want to be a writer? What have you ever written?”
Maybe he doesn’t mean to sound aggressive, but the question catches me off guard. Does Peter somehow know about the rejection letter from The New School? But that would be impossible. Then I get angry. “What does it matter, what I’ve written or not?”
“If you say you’re a writer, it means you write,” Peter says smugly. “Otherwise you should go and be a cheerleader or something.”
“And you should stick your head in a barrel of boiling oil.”
“Maybe I will.” He laughs good-naturedly. Peter must be one of those obnoxious types who’s so used to being insulted he’s not even offended when he is.
But still, I’m shaken. I grab my swim bag.“I’ve got practice,” I say, as if I can hardly be bothered with this conversation.
“What’s the matter with her?” Peter asks as I storm out.
I head down the hill toward the gym, scuffing the heels of my boots in the grass. Why is it always like this? I tell people I want to be a writer, and they roll their eyes. It drives me crazy. Especially since I’ve been writing since I was six. I have a pretty big imagination, and for a while I wrote stories about a pencil family called “The Number 2’s,” who were always trying to get away from a bad guy called “The Sharpener.” Then I wrote about a little girl who had a mysterious disease that made her look like she was ninety. And this summer, in order to get into that stupid writing program, I wrote a whole book about a boy who turned into a TV, and no one in his family noticed until he used up all the electricity in the house.
If I’d told Peter the truth about what I’d written, he would have laughed. Just like those people at The New School.
“Carrie!” Maggie calls out. She hurries across the playing fields to catch up. “Sorry about Peter. He says he was joking about the writing thing. He has a weird sense of humor.”
“No kidding.”
“Do you want to go to the mall after swim practice?”
I look across the grounds to the high school and the enormous parking lot beyond. It’s all exactly the same as it always was.
“Why not?” I take the letter out of my biology book, crumple it up, and stick it in my pocket.
Who cares about Peter Arnold? Who cares about The New School? Someday I’ll be a writer. Someday, but maybe not today.
“I am so effing sick of this place,” Lali says, dropping her things onto a bench in the locker room.
“You and me both.” I unzip my boots. “First day of swim practice. I hate it.”
I pull one of my old Speedos out of my bag and hang it in the locker. I’ve been swimming since before I could walk. My favorite photo is of me at five months, sitting on a little yellow float in Long Island Sound. I’m wearing a cute white hat and a polka-dot suit, and I’m beaming.
“You’ll be fine,” Lali says. “I’m the one with the problems.”
“Like what?”
“Like
