Theo and Agnes wouldn’t have even rated. Here, it’s the opposite; theater is an actual graded class and an after-school activity, and both are considered cool.
Back home, I was neither athlete nor theater dork. Instead, I was in that middle clique that every school needs to function efficiently: the worker bees. We took the honors classes, ran the newspaper and the yearbook and the student government. Not popular, not even close, but at least indispensible. (Back at my old school, it was important to distinguish the worker bees from the straight-up nerds: the nerds were even less cool than the theater dorks, but they were too busy learning how to write code and nurturing dot-com fantasies to care.)
The truth is it doesn’t matter to me where Dri and Agnes fit in, because this sure as hell beats sitting on my bench alone outside. Anything is a step up.
“I just think that if you’re going to post that kind of nasty shit on Instagram, own it,” Agnes says. I have no idea what she and Dri are debating, only that they each seem invested in their side of the argument. Agnes is a tiny girl with a dyed red bob, plastic-framed glasses similar to Dri’s, and a nose that looks like someone pinched it too hard and it stuck. She’s not beautiful, not necessarily even pretty, but cute. What happens when you take something full-sized and remake it in miniature.
Okay, I’ll just admit something here. Something I’ve never told anyone, not even Scar. Whenever I meet someone new, I silently ask that inevitable catty girl question: is she prettier than me? The truth is, the answer is often yes, which I think makes my even asking the question in the first place a little less offensive. I know I am not ugly—my features all fall within the normal range (nothing grossly oversized, nothing too small), but I definitely look different from the girls here.
I imagine, or I hope, that one day I will be discovered—that I will actually be seen—not as a sidekick, or as a study buddy, or as background furniture, but as someone to like, maybe even to love. Still, I’ve come to accept that high school is not my forum. Bookish is not even on the list of the top ten things high school boys look for in a girl. I’m pretty sure boobs, on the other hand, rank pretty high.
If you must know: a B cup on a good day.
Agnes is probably an A but makes up for it by being adorable. That is, until she starts talking.
“Like, what do you think, Jessie? Am I right?” I wasn’t listening. I was looking at all the other kids in the cafeteria, at all these strangers, thinking how intimate it felt to be sitting there together shoveling our food into our mouths. Wondering whether this place would ever start to feel familiar. And true, I was also watching Ethan, Ethan Marks through the window, sitting alone near the Koffee Kart, another book in hand, though I can’t see the title. “If you’re going to say something online, be prepared to say it to my face.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say, a good waffle. They’ve saved me on more than one of these lost-in-thought occasions. I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with Agnes, if only because she seems to be the type of girl to make all sorts of silly pronouncements. (“Mr. Greene is such a bitch. He said I plagiarized, just because I borrowed a couple of sentences from someone else’s blog post. It’s called pastiche, dude.” Or “Only wannabes wear Doc Martens.” Or “Jessie, you’d look so pretty with a little makeup.”)
“Agnes, sometimes people are shy. She didn’t say anything bad. She just said you hurt her feelings, which you did. Some people find it easier to write than to say it to your face,” Dri says. She looks to me to back her up, and I wonder if my existence is a problem for her friendship with Agnes. Scar and I always sat alone at lunch. We weren’t really interested in talking to anyone else. To be honest, I’m not sure how I’d feel if she had invited some new girl to sit with us. Dri not only invited me, but did so excitedly.
“Obviously, I don’t know the full story, but I’m definitely like that. I’m so much more comfortable writing than saying things out loud. I wish I could live my whole life on paper.” I consider