good college. I didn’t stress about AP classes because I didn’t think of them as any different from regular classes. I didn’t stress about the SATs because who gave a shit about the SATs. Not me.
I don’t know, I guess I always thought I’d turn out okay, no matter how badly my many schools tried to mutilate me. And I held on to that feeling every day. Two and a half more years, I thought. Just two and a half more years until I could get the hell away from this existence organized by school bells that, let’s be honest, didn’t even ring.
They beeped.
This was what I was thinking as I peeled another layer of soggy cat flesh away from soggy cat muscle. I was thinking about how much I hated this. How I was already anxious to get into the gym again. I was getting better at holding the crab pose now—I’d almost managed to hold my body weight up on my elbows yesterday—and I wanted to see if I’d make more progress this afternoon. I was headed to my first live breakdancing battle this weekend, and I wanted to feel like I knew something when I got there.
I finished my shift with the cat and peeled off my gloves, tossing them into the trash before washing my hands—for good measure—in our lab station’s sink. So far, our discoveries had been underwhelming, which was how I liked them. One of the groups in our class discovered that the cat they’d been dissecting had died pregnant; they’d found a litter of unborn kittens in her uterus.
This was a seriously messed-up school assignment.
“Your turn,” I said, glancing at Ocean, whose attitude toward me had changed, rather dramatically, in the last week.
He’d stopped talking to me in class.
He no longer asked me generic questions about my evenings or my weekends. In fact, he’d said no more than a couple of words to me in the last few days, not since that afternoon I saw him in the dance studio. I often caught him looking at me, but then, people were always looking at me. Ocean at least had the decency to pretend he wasn’t looking at me, and he never said anything about it, for which I was secretly grateful. I much preferred silent stares to the loud assholes who told me, unprompted, exactly what they thought of me.
But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little confused.
I thought I’d had Ocean pretty figured out, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure. Aside from the unusual name, he seemed to me like an extremely ordinary boy raised by extremely ordinary parents. The kind of parents who bought canned soup, lied to their kids about Santa Claus, believed everything they read in their history books and didn’t really talk about their feelings.
My parents were the exact opposite.
I was fascinated by canned food simply because that miracle of Western invention was never allowed in my house. My parents made everything from scratch, no matter how basic; we never celebrated Christmas, except that sometimes my mom and dad took pity on us—I received a box of envelopes one year—and my parents had taught us about the atrocities of war and colonialism since before I could read. They also had no problem sharing their feelings with me. They relished it. My parents loved telling me what they felt was wrong with me—it was what they called my unfortunate attitude—all the time.
Anyway, I couldn’t really get a bead on Ocean anymore, and it bothered me that it even bothered me. His silence was what I thought I wanted; it was, in fact, exactly what I’d been working toward. But now that he really had ignored me, I couldn’t help but wonder why.
Even so, I thought his silence was for the best.
Today, though, was a little different. Today, after a twenty-minute stretch of perfect quiet, he spoke.
“Hey,” he said, “what happened to your hand?”
I’d been trying to tear open a seam in a leather jacket last night and I’d tugged a little too hard; the seam ripper slipped and sliced open the back of my left hand. I had a pretty intense bandage taped over the space between my finger and thumb. I met Ocean’s eyes. “Sewing accident,” I said.
His eyebrows pulled together. “Sewing accident? What’s a sewing accident?”
“Sewing,” I said. “Like, sewing clothes? I make a lot of my own clothes,” I said, when he didn’t seem to understand. “Or, I mean, often I’ll just buy