Oh, right, I thought, like I’d ever take you with me.
California. The idea took shape as I drove home to Animal Cracker Park, the edge of my personal precipice. I finally understood what my teachers hinted at: I would drop like a stone into an abyss of failure if I didn’t teach myself to fly. California put some light at the end of my high school tunnel. Reinvention began my last first day of class.
I entered Brucknerfield High School and followed the senior herd to homeroom at the cafeteria lunch tables. Covert buzz about my being the new girl triggered a blush. Since I didn’t even have junior Missy to focus on, I labelled my Trapper Keeper folders and raised the latest Vogue to my face.
Despite my history of truancy and recalcitrance, I had already passed enough required high school subjects to allow a relaxed senior schedule: four academic classes among a sea of study halls. I started off strong. I finished assignments and turned in immaculate required work. For the first week I ate lunch alone buried in a textbook or fashion magazine. The second week I chose random tables. By this time BHS girls considered me more exotic than dork so I was never rebuffed. Not that anyone called my name and slid over.
Soon enough even I knew I had too much free time. the guidance department assigned me to help a few teachers grade papers. As I’d done all my life, I adjusted to my new environment. By now I knew enough to make the best of my circumstances and fit in.
The next crisp, sunny day, during my late morning study hall, I took my assignment files out to the stadium bleachers, climbed up nearly to the press box and worked through the lunch bell. Clanking on the risers and a sudden shadow across my algebra quizzes made me look up.
A combination James Dean, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez studied me. “You’re in my seat.” Half smile, half smug grin. “Sorry to disturb you but since you’re new, I guess you don’t know I have my lunch in these bleachers. I sit there. Twenty-four.”
Lunch appeared to be four Little Debbie snack cakes and vanilla ice cream overflowing a Styrofoam cup. I smirked at his lame pickup line and glanced at the empty metal rows on either side of me. “Doesn’t look reserved to me.”
“Common knowledge. I guess no one told you.”
“Right. I guess all my new best friends forgot.” Cripes. “Always seat, twenty-four?”
“Always.”
“Some kind of ritual?”
He sort of cocked his hip and looked me over. “I guess so. It’s the number on my football jersey.”
“Wait. It’s your player number? You’re a jock?”
“An athlete,” he replied.
I stood up, papers against my chest. The pencil clattered on the metal frame and dropped to the ground. “Well, we can’t have you lose the big game because your ritual was interrupted.” My intended flirtation came out sarcastic and half-assed. This James Dean-Rob Lowe-Emilio Estevez person looked confused and embarrassed. My spunk drained and wit left me. Instead of sliding into seat twenty-three, I hustled past him to the railing.
“Hey! I didn’t mean—”
“Eat your lunch, Mr Athlete.” I hustled down to the track and headed for the cafeteria.
“They said your name’s Emma,” he called. “Ethan. Ethan Paige.”
I gave him a thumb’s up but kept walking.
After I left Stadium Seat Twenty-Four, I plunked myself into a cafeteria gossip gaggle of familiar faces. They all said hi and got back to badmouthing someone named Jennifer. I pulled out my assigned reading paperback of Macbeth. I needed to look uninterruptable while I ate and obsessed over my bleacher meltdown. A year ago it had been football fanatic Liam and now I convinced myself that Ethan James Dean-Rob Lowe-Emilio Estevez Paige was just another conceited jock jerk.
By the time I slid my lunch tray into the kitchen pickup window, truth weighed me down. He was either a really bad pickup artist or he just wanted me to get the hell off his lucky seat. I had been the total asshole. The bell rang again and I hustled down the hall to grab my earth science text. Mr Athlete stood slouched against my locker. A high school miracle.
“Why’d you shoot me the bird when you left the bleachers?”
“Oh my God.” I raised another thumb’s up gesture. “Does this look like my middle finger?”
For the next week we met daily, sometimes in seats twenty-three and twenty-four. Small talk was not his forte. Halting speech caused him to pause, or catch his breath in odd places. I’d reply thinking he was finished. Then we’d tumble over
“Sorry, you go.”
“No, you finish.”
I asked if playing football beside a cemetery bothered him.
“Hell no.” He said the Paige family plot was laid out along the shrubbery and red bud trees separating the properties. “Living Paiges are total buzzkill. I’ve got ghosts right there to cheer me on.”
Like mine, his family was screwed up. He lived nine miles from school now; used to live in town but his mother couldn’t cope and dumped (his word) her three kids with his father, stepmother and new family. His brother and sister were now on their own. “It’s like the clock’s ticking till I have to get out, too.” He halted with a flush rising from his collar.
I told him about trying to live with Alexandra when my parents dropped the Animal Cracker Park bomb. I made him pinky swear he’d never tell, and then described Genevieve and Darby’s cockroach game. Once he got a drift of my situation he loosened up. He lived beyond us, out on what had been the Paige family farm for three generations. “Just our house and trailers now. My old man rents out lots.” I knew enough to keep still. “Plus they own the Methodist church on the parcel across the road.”
“You own a church?”
“Yup. Crazy, huh? And the preacher’s a woman, Maxine MacElroy…Sees I’m in Sunday School every week. Closest thing I got to a mother looking out for me. I get some odd jobs from Charlie the maintenance guy.” It was the most sentences I’d heard him put together.
Football practice was in full swing so I took to sprinting around the cinder track every afternoon. When the coach finally approached me, I explained I’d done well on my St. Louis team and was keeping in shape for spring try-outs. For the lunch room girls who asked, I mentioned training for the Olympics trials.
The next lunch period Ethan mentioned FFA.
“F A?”
“Come on. Future Farmers of America.”
I smothered my guffaw into a snort. “Sorry, I’m a city girl. Cows and stuff?”
“Damn straight, ‘cows and stuff’. I could tell you about my meat judging team but you’d fall under the bleachers from laughing your ass off.”
“No I wouldn’t.” Yes, I would.
