Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,8

a bright hello. I edged past.

Dee Dee stretched her lips. “How ya doin’?”

Jodie flapped the tops of her fingers but said nothing since she had just inhaled. It must not have gone down right because she lurched forward and began to cough. It was the rolling, mucousy kind of cough that sounds totally contagious.

Through the double doors behind the girls the school corridor was packed with bodies. I took a breath and went in because nothing is worse than being on the verge of doing something, teetering like a jackass. It’d been a long time since I’d been around so many eyes. In schools eyes are everywhere, there are twice as many eyes as bodies, and in our school there were about a thousand bodies. High schools offer nothing compelling for all those eyes to regard, nothing other than the vista of teenaged bodies, which is sort of the entire fucking problem.

Madame Murat filled the doorway to her classroom, blocking the light from the windows at her back, forming a shadow lagoon in the hallway. She was not fat, just inexplicably large. In profile she seemed to be carrying a basket of laundry.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Auerbach, Mademoiselle Cassirer.”

“Bonjour, Madame Murat,” we recited in unison. Jack called her Madman Murat, which Mom said sounded like the name of a Turkish assassin.

“Je comprends que je ne vous verrai pas en classe cette année, Ca-trine. C’est vrai?” Madame said to Kate.

“Oui, c’est vrai,” Kate responded, and Madame nodded from top to bottom and over to the left, ushering us along. “Great,” Kate whispered. “Now she hates me.”

“Maybe,” I said. It was hard to know for sure. It could have been that Madame felt sorry for Kate’s loss, and understood that that was what had motivated Kate to drop the class. Though it was also possible that Madame felt offended. French people are funny that way.

Kate went onto her toes. “Denny’s there with Alicia Ross and Sara Eden. Want to run up?”

“No, thanks,” I said. Having to talk to people was one thing, but soliciting conversation was something else. If I acted squirmy or didn’t make eye contact, they would want to know what was wrong, and I would have to say, Nothing, since nothing really was wrong. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express.

By the time the bell was about to ring, we had made it three times around the loop of classrooms. You could tell when the bell was about to ring because suddenly everything accelerated. Personal time drew to a close, and people responded to the pressure by acting bigger. I prepared myself for the change. My shoulders drew inward. My face dipped down as though to dodge a blow. From the top of the science hall, we heard a group of girls shrieking at the other end.

“Oh, my God!”

“That is the cutest T-shirt!”

“You look, like, soooo unbelievably skinny!”

Coco Hale spotted us, and she started waving like crazy, calling Kate over as though it was a complete surprise to see her. “Kate! Kate Cassirer!” Something flashed between Kate and me, nothing you could name, not really.

“Do you mind if I go say hi?” Kate asked politely.

“Not at all,” I replied, politely also.

She leaned forward and peered at me. “You’re not just saying that, are you?”

I filled my cheeks and expelled the air slowly, who knows why. It’s just a thing people do. “No, I’m not just saying that.”

One time Jack made me explain why I disliked Coco.

I said, “She’s, like, witchy, or something.”

He was picking at his guitar. “Be specific.” We were sitting on the farm table in the barn out back, and his head was cast down over the strings.

“Okay,” I said. “Her teeth.” She had two rows of miniature teeth, undifferentiated, same-size squares that appeared glossy even in the dark. They were like those miniature corn cobs. “They’re witchy.”

Jack considered that. “Good one,” he agreed. “Next.”

“Her eyes.” Her eyes shuddered in their sockets when she was being insincere, as if resisting affiliation with her body. “Do you know those earthquake monitors, the rolling graphs with attached pens that measure tremors?”

He looked up with part of his face. “Seismographs.”

“She has eyes like that, only they measure her lies.”

“Seismographic eyes,” he said contemplatively. “That’s great.” He pulled a felt-tip from his pocket and wrote the phrase on the sole of his blue suede Puma. Suddenly the mirror near the door fell off the wall and into the center of the room, shattering. “Holy shit!” Jack lifted