Maybe that was the right response, because Tanner’s whole face lit up into a grin to match my own. “I’m… You’re welcome. So you do drink it, then?”
“I hardly ever get to, because I don’t have the funds, but I love it. Thank you.”
His face fell. “Really? I…I would have gotten you better coffee. This was very basic. I could’ve done better than this.”
I touched his arm as I took a sip of the bliss he’d brought me. “No, this is perfect. Seriously. Thank you. It’s perfect.” We started walking together toward the front of the building, and something he’d said dawned on me. Maybe it was the coffee finally waking up my brain, because I remembered I’d given the ten dollars to a homeless man on the street. That was where it had gone, back at the beginning of the month. I’d thought Mom was getting paid from her job at the gas station, so I’d be okay with bills. He’d been so hungry. I was too, but he’d been worse off. It had then and still did seem like the right thing to do.
“You noticed I never have coffee?” I hoped he got the underlying question, which was me checking on the fact he’d noticed me at all.
Tanner was long, lean, and gorgeous. He looked like he could truly be on the cover of a magazine. He could sell… Well, I didn’t know what he could sell, but his cheekbones alone would make people haul out their money for products they didn’t need.
“Of course. You’re a pretty girl. I’d have to be dead not to notice you.”
My cheeks heated up. I must have been absolutely red. He grinned at me. “Well, I just made you blush. That’s sort of awesome.” He swung around to look at me as we finally entered the building. “I don’t talk to people. Not much. I can’t. Long story, but it doesn’t mean I don’t notice you. I do. I really do.” He spun around, then faced me again. Tanner seemed to have lots of energy in a really good way. It was amazing he needed coffee at all. “Which way is your class?”
I groaned. I had English first period. It was an AP class and I loved English most years, but this year, the teacher hated me. I had no idea why, but she seemed to relish torturing and embarrassing me every morning, first thing. “That way.”
My class was on this floor. I’d have to run up two stories for math, but for the moment, I was close to where I needed to go.
“Then why are you talking to me, if you don’t talk to anyone?” His words had struck me right in my gut and lodged there where I imagined they’d stay for a while. No one talked to me, but he didn’t talk to others. There was something sort of synchronous about it.
“You talked to me first. Well, the whole table, but it counts. So that made it way easier to talk back.”
I stopped walking. “Hold on—so what you’re telling me is you don’t talk to people unless they talk to you, so therefore, you don’t talk to people, generally.”
He nodded, a piece of his light brown hair falling in his face. Tanner pushed it away. “That’s it exactly.”
“Then youhaveto talk to a lot of people. People must talk to you all day. You must be inundated with conversation.”
Several groups of people passed us, and an ache struck my heel. That was happening more and more to me lately. I needed a new pair of shoes. The heels on my sneakers were just completely worn out. I felt like I might as well have not been wearing shoes at all sometimes.
“You might be surprised. You know what this place is like, right? You only talk to your friends and sort of stare at other people. Everyone has these groups, and they pretty much don’t venture out of them. They stare at us. Maybe they have a sense they should stay away? An instinct. I don’t know. But no, most people leave us be.” He nodded toward me. “Except you. You spoke to me. Well, us. It counted.”
We started walking again. “Is this like an unwritten rule you guys just follow?”
“It’s what our fathers want from us, not to talk to others, but of course, we have to answer if spoken to.” He rolled his eyes. “This you? Junior English?”
We had gotten to my room. He was right. “What does your mother say? I only have a mother and she’s never around, so I don’t know what it’s like to have a dad. But maybe she could intervene or something? That seems kind of rough.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a mother anymore. None of my friends do. Bunch of motherless boys running around, setting things on fire, pissing off girls in libraries. See you later, Maci with an I because your mother couldn’t spell it.”
The good mood that talking to him caused followed me all the way to my seat. Two minutes into class, it fled. My good mood took a big giant leap right out the window.
“Well, well, well, Maci Green,” Mrs. Reemus said to me from the front of the class. “Is that a new hole in your sleeve? We should have readOliver Twist. You would fit right in with those poor orphans. Except they didn’t have parents and you do, so what does that say about you? That they don’t even want to dress you properly?”
I stared down at the long sleeve T-shirt I’d shoved on that morning. She was right. There was a hole in the top of the sleeve. I hadn’t even noticed it. A small hole, but there it was. There were some things a teacher could do to insult a student that would make others laugh, and then there were some things that were so awful, even high schoolers didn’t laugh, as though even we understood that it had gone too far.
As I was never very important in the cliques—Tanner was right, people did tend to stick to themselves—it didn’t surprise me that no one laughed. I was already too low to be of much interest to anyone. Picking on me didn’t fix anything for anyone else. My group was just me, myself, and I. The teacher had made fun of me, and it made the others so uncomfortable, they didn’t even laugh.
I sank down in my seat and prayed that my stomach didn’t grumble. The coffee was going to be my breakfast and lunch today. I couldn’t give this woman any more ammunition against me. So far, she hadn’t been able to mess with my grades, but the big essay for the end of the year was coming. She’d be able to grade it without there having been a right or wrong answer she had to abide by.
Mrs. Reemus would be able to do as she liked with my grade. Clearly, she was a miserable person and my existence pissed her off. Despite my good grades, I wasn’t collegebound. I had no money, not even for the applications, and my only motivation was to get out of town. I’d worry about things like further education later.
I just needed her not to fail me. I couldn’t go to summer school, because I had to really work this summer to earn money for my escape. Besides, I heard she sometimes taught this class in summer school. If so, she could fail me again and outright prevent me from graduating at all.
Looking down at my hands, I said nothing. Just like I always did.
And I died a little bit inside. Just like I always did.