hear.” Anna pretends to pound a gavel and then snorts into her palm.
I love the feeling of thickness around me. I’m swimming in murk. The green walls are water. “I kissed Mr. Daimler.” As soon as I say it I die laughing again. Those must be the four most ridiculous words in the English language.
Anna heaves herself up on one elbow. “You did what?”
“Shhhh.” I bob my head up and down. “We kissed. He put his hand up my shirt. He put his hand…” I gesture between my legs.
She shakes her head from side to side. Her hair whips around her face, reminding me of a tornado. “No way. No way. No way.”
“I swear to God.”
She leans forward, so close I can smell her breath on my face. She’s been sucking on an Altoid. “That is sick. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“Sick, sick, sick. He went to high school here, like, ten years ago.”
“Eight. We checked.”
She lets out a loud howl of laughter, and for a second she lays her head down on my shoulder. “They’re all perverts,” she says, the words quiet and directed straight into my ear. Then she pulls away and says, “Shit! I’m so dead.”
She stands up, steadying herself with one hand on the wall. She teeters for a moment as she stands in front of the mirror, smoothing down her hair. She takes a small bottle from her back pocket and squeezes a couple of drops into each eye. I’m still on the floor, staring up at her from below. She seems to be miles and miles away.
I blurt out, “You’re too good for Alex.”
She’s already stepped over me on her way to the door. I see her back stiffen and I think she’s going to be angry. She pauses, one hand resting on the chair.
But when she turns around she’s smiling. “You’re too good for Mr. Daimler,” she says, and we both crack up again. Then she shoves the chair out of the way and tugs the door open, slipping into the hall.
After she’s gone I sit with my head back, enjoying the way the room feels like it’s doing loops. This is what it’s like to be the sun, I think, and then I think how stoned I am, and then I think how funny it is to know that you’re stoned but not be able to stop thinking stoned thoughts.
I see something white peeking out from underneath the sink: a cigarette. I lean down and find another one. Anna forgot to pick them up. Just then there’s a sharp knock on the door, and I snatch both cigarettes up and get to my feet. As soon as I stand the circling and the feeling of being underwater gets worse. It seems to take me forever to push the chair out of the way. Everything is so heavy.
“You forgot these,” I say, holding the cigarettes up between two fingers as I open the door.
It’s not Anna, though. It’s Ms. Winters, standing in the hallway with her arms crossed and her face pinched up so tightly it looks like her nose is a black hole and the rest of her face is getting slowly sucked into it.
“Smoking on school property is forbidden,” she says, pronouncing each word carefully. Then she smiles, showing all of her teeth.
THE PUGS
In the Thomas Jefferson High School R & R (Rules and Regulations Handbook), it says that any student caught smoking on school property is subject to three days’ suspension. (I know this by heart because all the smokers like to tear this page out of the handbook and burn it at the Lounge, sometimes crouching and sticking their cigarettes in the flames to catch a light, as the words on the page curl and blacken and smoke into nothing.)
But I get off with only a warning. I guess the administration makes exceptions for students who have dirt on a certain vice principal and a certain gym teacher/soccer coach/mustache fan. Ms. Winters looked like she was going to have a massive coronary when I’d started going off about role models and my poor impressionable mind—I love that expression, as though everyone under the age of twenty-one has all the brain power of dental plaster—and the administration’s responsibility to set an example, especially when I’d reminded her about page sixty-nine in the R & R: it is forbidden to engage in lewd or sexually inappropriate acts in or around school property. (That one I know because the page has been