Читать книгу Slant - Laura E. Williams - Страница 8

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It’s TTGLIFF. That stands for Thank The Good Lord It’s Finally Friday. TGIF just seems too easy. And not only is it TTGLIFF, it’s halfway through the day already.

I’m standing in the lunch line, following along behind Julie. She takes a salad. I take a double cheeseburger. She takes water. I take chocolate milk. She skips dessert. I never skip dessert.

It’s not that I’m fat. I’m not. Some would even say that I’m petite. It’s just that Julie looks at food and she gains weight. She pretty much hates me for my metabolism, and I hate her for her height, her wavy blonde hair, and her girl parts, so I figure I hate her more than she hates me. Funny how we’re best friends.

We met when my family moved into the tiny house behind her mansion. We were both Maia’s age now—five. The first time Julie saw me, she thought I was the gardener’s granddaughter, and I thought she was a giant fairy. She really looked like one. You know, all fluffy pretty and wispy and wide-eyed, except she didn’t have any wings. That didn’t bother me, though. I figured she just kept them hidden under her shirt. So we got to be friends, her thinking I was one of the servants, and me thinking she was magic.

Someone behind me in the lunch line bumps into me. I turn around.

“Hey, chinko,” says Greg. He pats me on the shoulder.

“Hi,” I say.

His friend, Matt, says, “Yo, gook face, got any toothpicks to hold your eyes open?” They both crack up.

I kind of smile. What else can I do?

Julie whirls around and glares at the boys.

“Don’t talk to her like that,” she says through perfectly even, white teeth. She’s so tall she looks down on most guys.

“Oh, come on, bones,” Matt says, still laughing, “we’re only joking around.” He looks at me. “Right?”

I nod. I want to escape. My burger’s getting cold.

“Well it’s not funny,” Julie says. “And don’t call me bones, you little twerp.” She pays the cashier, smacking her money down on the counter, and stomps away.

“Man, what rhymes with itch?” Greg says.

Matt opens his mouth. “Bi—”

The lunch lady gives him the evil eye, which only makes those two laugh even more.

I pay quickly and follow Julie to a table near the windows. She’s still glaring as I sit down.

“Why do you let them talk to you like that?” she demands, picking up her plastic fork and wiping it on a napkin. She always does that.

I shrug. “It’s no big deal,” I say, wondering if Daddy would call this a lie of submission? I pour ketchup on my burger and squirt more out for my fries.

“It’s racist and demeaning.”

“They’re just jerks,” I say.

“That doesn’t excuse them.”

“They don’t know any better.”

“You don’t know any better,” Julie says.

“What do you mean, me?” I demand, sitting up straight. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly!”

We don’t speak again through the rest of lunch. It’s lunch for me, it’s picking through her salad for Julie. She doesn’t eat anything that’s a certain shade of green, so I don’t know why she always gets a salad. Nothing green on a cheeseburger. She eyes mine hungrily, and I purposely make a show of enjoying a great big bite.

I’m on my chocolate pudding when Julie says, “So, do you still want me to come to the mall with you after school?”

I look up in surprise. “Of course.”

She nods and stands up, tray in hand. “Fine. I’ll see you in photography class.”

“Okay, fine,” I say.

“Well then, fine.”

“Fine.”

We smile at each other, still best friends. She waves and disappears into the throng of students who are clearing their tables, but she’s so tall I can still see her blonde hair bobbing along in the sea of heads as she aims right for the door. I finish my pudding and join the crowds, letting the surge push me this way and that. It’s easier to go with the flow than to shove against it. Luckily I’m pushed next to a garbage can where I dump my trash and deposit my tray. Unlike Julie, I’m so short I can’t see a thing except shoulders and backs until I’m released into the hall and the press of bodies spreads out. Finally I can breathe again.

Until I see Sean O’Malley, that is. He takes my breath away, plain and simple. He’s got reddish hair, too many freckles to count (though I wouldn’t mind trying), hands big enough to practically palm a basketball (I admit they look a little goofy on him, but I figure he’ll grow into them one day), and a smile that could melt an iceberg.

The only bad thing is the two guys on either side of him. Matt and Greg.

“Where’s your bodyguard?” Greg says, looking around for Julie.

I smile. Please, I wish silently, not now, not with him here.

“So, slant, did you do your math homework?” Matt says.

So much for my wishes. Does that mean none of them will come true?

Sean frowns. I think he’s going to say something to his friend about calling me names, but he only says, “Jeez, I forgot about that. I’m screwed.” Knight in shining armor goes up in a puff of dust.

Matt’s still waiting for an answer. I shake my head. I know he just wants to copy my homework. I should let him, and it’d serve him right. Does he think I get math just because I’m Asian? Maybe he thinks slanty eyes can see the numbers better or something.

“I’m getting a D in math,” I say.

Matt hoots. “Yeah, right, and I’m the King of—of England.” He turns to Greg. “They have kings there still, right?”

I marvel at the fact that when I actually tell the truth, I’m not believed anyway. What would Daddy call this? A lie of disbelieving morons?

I don’t want to be late for my least favorite subject, so I step around the boys and head down the hall. I hear them following me. Well, not following me exactly, just walking in the same direction since we’re all in the same class. I do wish Sean would follow me, like to the ends of the earth, or even just to my locker sometime, but no way am I going to waste wishes on that impossibility. Better to save them for something that might actually come true.

In the room, I sit at my assigned front-and-center seat. Maybe Mr. Driggs thought I’d be a good example to the other students. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t be able to see over the top of anyone’s head if I sat anywhere else. Maybe he went alphabetically—backwards, since my last name is Wallace. I don’t dare try to figure out the last names of the two sitting on either side of me, just in case this theory doesn’t pan out.

The bell rings, Mr. Driggs shuffles through the door, boredom sets in. Another typical math class.

Fifty-two minutes later, when the bell rings again (waking everyone up), I don’t rush to the door with my classmates. I’ll get crushed. Plus, I don’t mind avoiding Greg and Matt when I can, even if it means missing a last glimpse of Sean. But to my amazement, Sean looks back at the last second before he disappears through the door, and he smiles. At me? I look all around. No one else here except Mr. Driggs. So for the rest of the day I have to wonder if that special, secret smile was for me or for the math teacher with the droopy pants, too much cologne, and a bald patch that I’m not sure he even knows about.

I make it to seventh period in a daze. Was the smile for me or Mr. Driggs? For me? Or Mr. Driggs? Mr. Driggs? Me?

“Hey, space-case.”

My eyes focus. I’m about one inch from walking into Julie. We have photography together down in the art wing. Not that either one of us is artsy, but we had to sign up for some elective above and beyond our core curriculum, so we thought it’d be fun to take pictures together. I can’t even draw a stick figure with a ruler, so I figured this’d be easy. You know, let the camera do the work. Ha!

After the first week of class, when Miss Shepard tried her best to teach us all the parts of a camera and explain about f-stop and shutter speed and other stuff I’ve already forgotten, she gave us our assignment.

“You are to get with a partner,” she said.

Julie and I grinned at each other. Perfect!

“And take photos of each other.”

This, I thought, was not so perfect. I hate having my photo taken. I’m so not photogenic. My nose looks flatter than ever, my eyes are slits, my hair is a black helmet.

“You are to capture the essence of the person you are shooting. Take a look at these photos by Dorothea Lange.” She flashed a series of black-and-white images on the screen. “See how Dorothea captured the souls of these people during the Depression.” She talks in italics a lot. She went on to explain how Dorothea Lange traveled across the United States during the Depression, shooting pictures of families looking for work and food.

One image appeared on the screen called “Migrant Mother.” It was a picture of a woman with two children beside her. The children were hiding their faces. The mother had one hand to her face, and she was staring off into the distance. I was surprised to feel tears prickle the back of my eyes as I looked at this image. Another shot came up. It was another mother with two children. It looked like they were in a car or the back of a bus. She looked so confused, like she was wondering how she got there. And even though it looked like it might have been hot out, because the little boy wasn’t wearing pants or shoes, they were all wearing heavy winter coats. I thought it was to remind them of when they had money, and I couldn’t help wondering what their lives were like before the Depression, and where they went, and how they ended up . . .

Miss Shepard finished up with, “Use Dorothea Lange as your role model. Your photos must have quality and be evocative, literary, if you will. In other words, I don’t want my-trip-to-the-Cape type photos. And you must not show your model the photos until the end of the quarter.”

It’s six weeks into the quarter now, and so far I have no evocative pictures of anything. They’re not Julie’s-trip-to-the-Cape photos. More like Julie’s-trip-to-the-tree, Julie’s-trip-to-the-couch, oh—here’s a creative one, Julie’s-trip-to-the-mirror. That was Julie looking in the mirror so that I got the back of her head and the reflection of her face. I thought it’d be so artsy and “literary.” Mostly it was just out of focus because I didn’t know whether to focus on her head or her reflection. The frame of the mirror is looking pretty good, but that’s about it.

The biggest bummer about the class, other than having to have pictures taken of me, of course, is that we can’t use digital cameras. Miss Shepard says we have to learn to really feel the camera and to see the image and to experience the chemicals and the magic of developing. I think it’s just a way for the school to save money by not buying digital cameras. We use the school’s ancient Canons.

We take turns in the classroom lab. Julie’s signed up to develop film on Tuesdays and I’m in there on Thursdays. That’s so we don’t see each other’s shots.

It’s kind of an odd class because, unlike math where I get daily reminders of how poorly I’m doing, in photography we don’t get a grade until the final week of the quarter when we all display our photos and get critiqued. I’m thinking that’d be a good week to have instant chicken pox or mono or the flu or something else contagious.

“Where should we shoot today?” Julie asks as I deposit my book bag on a table. She already has our cameras loaded with 200-speed black-and-white film.

“Does it really matter?” I say, taking a camera.

Julie gives me the stink-eye. “Of course it matters, but only if you want to pass this class,” she says, like she is reading my mind.

“Okay, how about the caf?”

“Food pictures?” Julie wrinkles her nose.

“Then the gym,” I suggest. This has a double benefit. I know Julie’s into the gym scene, and I’m pretty sure Sean is there now.

“Great.”

Oh, I’m so devious.

Julie grins at me as we walk down the hall. “You don’t think Sean has gym this period, do you?”

Devious, not. Julie knows way too much about me.

I shrug like I don’t have any idea and I don’t care, but Julie just laughs and nudges me with her elbow. She does that a lot, and I have the bruises to prove it. Of course they’re all up around my shoulder, seeing as she’s a giant compared to my barely five feet of height.

We have to show our “art pass” to only one hall monitor. Miss Shepard lets us wander the school for location shots as long as we don’t disrupt other classes, run in the hall, smoke in the bathroom, or get caught by the principal.

The gym is cavernous, which makes it loud and breezy. Only the breeze doesn’t blow away the stink of rubber soles, “newly pubescent boys” (lingo care of Mrs. Flint, the health teacher) who haven’t yet been turned on to deodorant, and the high-octane stench of Ms. Daniel’s perfume. She’s the gym teacher and kids call her Bertha Butt on account of her rather large rear end. I think she wears a bottle of perfume every day to cover the other odors, only it doesn’t work that well. It’s like eating a breath mint after a clove of garlic. All you get is minty garlic. Here the stink is perfumy B.O.

I’m still trying to decide what’s the worst smell in this place, when I catch sight of Sean. Not that I was looking.

He doesn’t see me, or if he does, he doesn’t wave or smile. Now I’m sure his smile at the end of math must have been for Mr. Driggs and not me. Depression settles in.

“Sit over there,” Julie says, waving me toward the bleachers.

I sit and ignore her as she walks and crouches all around me, clicking away. Mostly I just look away. I despise having my picture taken. I should have dropped out of this class. I hate it. Almost as much as I love Sean O’Malley, who likes Mr. Driggs, the drippiest teacher in the school, more than he likes me.