“I really don’t need a tutor,” Shy told Liam when they met in the empty art room at the appointed time. “I just need to pay attention in algebra. Mr. Streko posted a Latin quote on his Twitter about absurd things. To me, math is absurd. That’s why we have calculators.”
Liam had a habit of blurting out the thing he most wanted not to blurt out. “ ‘I carry your heart with me…’ ” he began, quoting the e. e. cummings poem he’d just read in AP Lit, looking askance at the paintings that had been left to dry on one of the art tables because he still could not look at her. He attempted to translate the next part into Latin. “ ‘Ego autem in corde meo portare?’ ”
Shy stared at him and then giggled. It was the best response he could have hoped for.
“Sorry. I think I might have Asperger’s,” he mumbled at the art table. “Well, not officially, but after reading all her nursing textbooks, my mom and I decided I’m probably on the low end of the spectrum. I’m weirdly good at school and weirdly bad at everything else, so.”
“Are you saying ‘ass burgers’?” Shy asked, and Liam was grateful. Maybe it was only in the United States that Asperger’s was a household blanket term used for weirdos who did well in school. English people were more forgiving. Probably all the great English talents had Asperger’s. Peter Sellers, the whole Monty Python cast, Harry Potter. Shy herself was probably on the spectrum, which was why they were already getting along.
“Are you really going to tutor me, or can we just pretend to do math and talk about other stuff?”
Liam pointed at her Gucci sneakers, which were white leather with little bees in between the red, green, and black leather stripes. “Those are why no girl here ever talks to you. You know that, right?”
There, he’d done it again. What was wrong with him?
Shy looked down at her shoes. “My mom got them for free. She works for a magazine. Also, it’s ironic. I mean, look at the way I dress. These are boys’ jeans because my legs look weird in girls’ ones and my dad’s undershirt that he shrank by accident that I cut so it’s cropped.”
“Well,” Liam said, keeping his eyes on her shoes. “They’re still alienating. If you were a guy you’d probably get beaten up.”
“But this is a rich-person school, right? I mean, I get that feeling.” Shy only said this because her mother seemed to have chosen the snobbiest school in Brooklyn, probably because she thought it was the best.
“I guess. I go here for free because my dad teaches music to the little kids.”
Shy nodded. That was sweet but also a bit sad.
“And my mom used to be the nurse. She just changed to a public elementary school because they pay better, ironically. But you’re right,” Liam said. “For spring break and Christmas and summer and stuff everyone goes to like, Vail or Martinique. My family goes camping in the Berkshires or to Rockaway Beach.”
Shy had no clue about those places, but she agreed with him anyway.
“See? I bet they have all kinds of Gucci stuff, they just don’t wear it to school. If you like something, why not wear it all the time? If it makes you happy. I used to have this leather jacket from Paris that—” She stopped. She sounded even more spoiled than the Martinique spring break kids.
Liam pulled up a chair and yanked a pad of graph paper and his calculator out of his backpack. “So. Algebra. Can I see your homework?”
Shy flipped open her binder and sighed enormously. “Please be nice to me?”
Liam chuckled into the buttons on his calculator, promising himself he wouldn’t do something awful like spell out I LOVE YOU backward in numbers and then flip the calculator so she could read the words on the tiny screen.
He looked up, blushing. Shy was staring right at him. He forced himself not to look away. “I’ll be nice.”
* * *
“How ’bout we smoke some of that weed tonight?” Stuart suggested after they’d eaten tortellini and garlic bread on the big bed and he’d read Harry Potter to Ted and piggybacked him to his room. He sat at Mandy’s blanketed feet and shook the jam jar.
Mandy pressed pause on her iPad and sat up against the pile of pillows. She’d just started a new anorexia movie on Lifetime. “Now?”
“Let’s get wasted,” Stuart said, tossing the jar into