could see over her shoulder that her binder was covered with snowboarding stickers. “What’s your jam?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Strawberry? I like apricot, too.”
She laughed. “I mean, what’s your thing. Do you board?”
“I’ve never been on a ski slope in my life.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Jesus, you really are new here. So, what then? Mountain biking? Lacrosse?”
I shrugged. “Books?”
“Ah.” She nodded soberly, as if this answer required deep contemplation. “Well. You really should meet the new guy.”
* * *
—
I didn’t meet the new guy for months, though I sometimes saw him in the halls—the only other person besides me who always seemed to be surrounded by a bubble of solitude. It wasn’t that the other students weren’t nice to me—they were always, like Hilary, pleasant in a wholesome, responsible-citizen sort of way. They invited me to study sessions and let me sit at their tables at lunch and asked me for help with their English papers. It was just that, beyond academics, we didn’t have much in common. My mother had enrolled me in a school that believed in the concept of the “outdoor classroom,” a school that planned kayaking adventures and overnight camping trips and mandated “stretch breaks” that consisted of wandering through the pines in the yard. We didn’t take tests; we went on ropes courses.
Most of the other kids had ended up here because they were that kind of kid—locals whose parents had migrated to the mountains because they wanted their kids to be outdoorsy individualists. My mother had selected this school, I suspected, purely because of the financial aid packages, the proximity to the South Lake casinos, and the Academy’s willingness to embrace a student who was more “promising” than distinguished. The Academy, in turn, probably looked at me—at my half-Colombian ancestry and my low-income single mother—and saw “diversity.”
Benjamin—Benny—Liebling was the only other kid at the school who didn’t clearly fit into the Academy’s outdoorsy vision of the world. He’d recently moved into town from San Francisco, I heard; his family was rich; they owned some fancy mansion on the West Shore. Kids whispered that he’d been kicked out of a much more exclusive prep school, and that’s why he’d ended up here. He stood out, with his flaming orange hair and his long, articulated limbs; a pale giraffe ducking awkwardly through the doors. Like me, he arrived on campus with a foreign aura clinging to him, although in his case it was wealth, not the urban stench of Las Vegas. His T-shirts were always pressed and spotless; his sunglasses had an unmistakable Gucci logo on the earpiece that he’d failed to disguise with duct tape. Every morning he unfolded himself from the passenger seat of his mother’s gold Land Rover and dashed to the front door of the school as if he thought his speed might make him invisible. Everyone noticed anyway, because how could you not notice a six-foot-two kid with hair the color of a jack-o’-lantern?
Curious, I looked up his family name on the computer in the school library, and the first thing that came up was a photo of his parents: a woman draped in white furs, neck heavy with diamonds, leaning on the arm of a bald, older man in a tuxedo, his fleshy face rubbery and sour. Patrons Judith and William Liebling IV attend the opening night of the San Francisco Opera.
I saw Benny during lunch sometimes, in the library, where I usually retreated to read after wolfing down my PB&J on white bread. He’d be hunched over a notebook, inking comic-book-style drawings in dense black ballpoint pen. A few times we’d catch each other’s eyes across the room, in our tentative smiles a recognition of our shared “new kids” status. Once, he sat in front of me at assembly and I spent the hour gazing into the magnificent nest of his hair, wondering if he would ever turn around and say hi; and even though he didn’t, his neck slowly flushed pink, as if he somehow intuited that I was staring. But he was a year ahead of me; we didn’t have classes together. And neither of us belonged to any teams that might force us to interact.