hot breath on your neck, and you think how strange it is that the body runs at 98.6 degrees, day and night, summer and winter, hotter than the city of San Francisco ever gets, the kind of heat that makes people want to take off their clothes and jump in the ocean.
“Take me to a party,” she whispers.
You don’t want to move to get your journal, so you can only stare at her, waiting for elaboration. For the first time, you notice that she smells a little like almonds.
“It’s Friday. Halloween, even. My phone hasn’t rung yet. I want a big party. Can you find me one?”
You nod, because how could you say no to her now? She nestles back into your shoulder.
“Marvelous.”
And that’s what you do at a movie theater.
KILLING TIME, PART 1 (SCHOOL)
I’VE ALWAYS HATED SCHOOL. I know that’s a cliché, and probably a really stupid thing to tell you, of all people, but it’s the truth. I mean, what’s not to hate? I have to get on a bus at an hour of the day that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, and I’m just waking up by the time it’s all over. Between these bookends, a bunch of adults try to get me excited about the things they can only vaguely remember being excited about themselves, and that was years before they were hired to teach those things to roomfuls of kids who were unlikely ever to get excited about them. The only thing I really enjoy is this after-school elective I take called Chess & War, in which we read about chess, read about war, then play chess. Probably the best thing about it is how nobody there cares that I don’t speak. See, usually, people who don’t speak are considered rude. But if someone tries to talk to you while you’re reading, or while you’re thinking over a chess move, they’re the one being rude. I am the least rude person in Chess & War.
After Zelda and I got out of the movie, I told her I’d have to go back to school if I was going to find her a party. She called a car, and we made it to campus just a few minutes into the last class period of the day.
“Here’s my number,” she said, keying it into my phone. “Text me the details when you have them.”
What if your dreaded call comes in before then? I wrote.
She shut the cover of my journal before I could write anything else. “Then you’ll just have to go without me.”
I got my collection of shopping bags out of the trunk, then stood in the drop-off as the car drove away. Though I’d implied to Zelda that it would be a piece of cake to secure a last-minute Halloween party, I wasn’t very confident about my chances. Truth is, I’m not exactly the partying type, and it’s not just because I don’t speak. Even before the accident, I preferred spending time on my own. I think I got that from my dad. He was a crazy-hard worker; when he wasn’t teaching classes or grading papers, he was in his office, trying to write. My mom called him an absentee father, which was sort of a joke, because technically he was home all the time. But in another way, it wasn’t a joke at all, because even when he was around, he wasn’t really there, if you know what I mean. I think maybe he liked the worlds in his head better than the real one. As far as I ever knew, he didn’t have any close friends, and his whole family (other than us) was back in Colombia. Once, when I was about nine or ten, I told him I wasn’t very popular at school. He told me that friends were overrated, because the only person you could ever really count on was yourself. Weirdly, that answer actually made me feel better.
My point is that I learned how to be antisocial at a young age, and that tendency only got worse after I stopped talking. Oh, and then I think I freaked out a lot of people when I got in this big fight in eighth grade and a kid almost ended up dead. (It’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds, but I’m gonna hold off on giving you the details just yet. You’re still getting to know me, and I’d rather