The Calculus of Change Page 8

  Tate helps himself to a gulp of my mocha. The familiarity of the gesture and the way he leans into me lights me on fire. We make eye contact, and I wish my eyes weren’t so brown.

  “So you’re coming to Aden’s thing, right?” Marissa looks at Tate when she says this, but he’s still looking at me. He leans harder and turns to Marissa as though it’s a chore to break our staring contest.

  “What thing?”

  Marissa raises an eyebrow at me before she says, “Open mic night. Here.”

  “Oh. That thing. I made a promise.” Tate elbows me.

  “Ouch,” I say, rubbing my arm.

  Marissa winks at me. It feels condescending. Like there’s something cute about my feelings for Tate. But this isn’t a Cody thing. With Tate, it’s real.

  When the lights dim and this week’s performer takes the makeshift stage, Tate scoots his chair closer to mine. He drapes his arm around my chair, his body leaning into me so I can smell his shower. Suddenly breathing feels all sticky, and I look at Tate. He smiles and points to the stage like pay attention. If I could, I’d wrap my arms around his neck and lean my head into his. I wonder if he knows what he’s doing to me.

  ***

  Marissa stands outside without a jacket in the fifty-five-degree weather smoking a cigarette. Tate and I are off to the side, Tate complaining loudly about Marissa’s “disgusting habit.” I don’t mention that I indulge in a drag or two myself from time to time. I just can’t seem to get addicted to cigarettes.

  Tate grabs Marissa’s cigarette and stomps it out.

  “What the hell?”

  “It’s time for a drive,” Tate says. “Get in the car, ladies. Aden’s DJ. I’m driver.”

  Marissa flashes me a vicious look, and I lean into her, pushing her toward my car. “Just get in, okay?” I whisper. She looks at me like I’m lucky she loves me so much—nobody gets away with pulling a cigarette out of her mouth.

  Marissa sighs audibly, but gets in the back seat.

  “Key me,” Tate says.

  I toss the keys to Tate over the roof of my car. He catches them and we smile, his eyes sparkling, as he gets into the driver’s seat. The smile stays on my face as I wait for Marissa to get in the back. Then I slide into the seat next to Tate, as though this is where I belong. I flip through my phone and find the Shins. The old-school Shins. Tate rolls down all the windows despite the chilly weather and Marissa’s unseasonable tank top. He takes us out of town onto a dirt road. He can’t figure out how to open the sunroof. I laugh and take over. Our hands meet and we make eye contact. He squeezes my hand. My face turns warm and soft.

  “Kissing the Lipless” comes on, and I blast it as loud as my retro speakers can handle.

  Tate and I are singing at the top of our lungs, hands out the windows. Marissa is in the back seat laughing at us. She’s here, but she can’t be a part of this. No one can.

  The night’s air is cold and alive, and it pushes with force against my skin.

  Me

  I’m in eighth grade. I’ve tried out for the eighth-grade musical. It’s a big deal because it’s performed on the high school stage, and it’s two nights instead of one. Rumor has it I’m a contender for the lead role. The cast list goes up later, and I can hardly stand the excitement.

  “I heard some of the girls talking about you after gym yesterday,” Amy, a girl in my class, says.

  “Why would they be talking about me?” I say.

  “The school play, silly!”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Do you want to know what they were saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, most of them thought you were going to get the lead because you’re such a good singer.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  “But, well, are you sure you want to hear the bad part?”

  “Yes.”

  “The others thought you can’t play the lead since she has to dance and stuff. And she’s, like, super-skinny in the movie.”

  The lump in my throat is a little piece of my soul beaten out of my body.

  I get the supporting female lead. Suddenly I have stage fright. And the girls were right. The one who got the lead is thin, if not downright skinny, and a far better dancer than I. It’s Maggie Tiley. I hate my body.

  ***

  I can’t sleep. The clock on my nightstand reads 2:21 a.m.

  I get out of bed and look at myself in the full-length mirror. My hair is borderline absurd, cowlicks making sections kink in opposing directions.

  I think of Maggie Tiley. I now think of her as a cupcake. I love cupcakes. I love vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting.

  Maggie isn’t totally shapeless. But her curves are barely there. She’s thin, and there’s no question that she’s pretty.

  I force myself to keep looking at my reflection, allowing myself to see the soft lines of my hips, the places where my thighs bulge and dimple. I get on my knees right in front of the mirror, my breasts tilted toward it so I can see down my bra. I back up and practice cat-crawling toward the mirror. It wouldn’t be so bad to be on the receiving end of this. I’m hot. Nothing I see is bad. My hair falls around my face, my eyes big and round, revealing everything.

  I fall asleep by the mirror, and when I wake up next to it, I find the morning light is not so forgiving.

  Jon

  The next night, I’m still battling sleep. I pass Jon’s room on the way to the bathroom—too much pop before bed.

  Jon’s desk lamp is on and he’s staring at his computer, rubbing his eyes. The clock reads 1:45 a.m.

  “What are you doing?” I say. He must have eight windows open, all cluttered with numbers and diagrams. Probably one of his games. He closes the screen and pulls his textbook closer.

  “Taking a break from memorizing formulas. I have a stupid chem test tomorrow.”

  “Well, it’s almost two o’clock in the morning. Don’t you think it’s time to call it?”

  “No. Thanks, though, Mom.”

  It’s always weird when he calls me that. You’d think it’d be forbidden territory, but he pulls it out when he’s feeling like a bad-tempered tool. I guess it’s a big sister thing. Or he just needs to try on the word mom for size. But I wince every time he says it.

  “I just haven’t had time to study with practice, and then Dad has me lifting every other day with this program he found online. I’m barely pulling a B in this class.”

  “I know it’s not the best, but so what if you get a C in one class? Or on one test?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “This test is a quarter of our grade.”

  “That is a lot,” I say.

  “So it matters.”

  “Yeah.” It does matter.

  If I’m being honest, I want Jon to get a scholarship because I know Dad can’t afford two out-of-state tuitions. It’s possible I’ll get some kind of merit scholarship, but we all know that a sports scholarship goes a lot farther than a couple thousand dollars that says great job on all those A’s.

  I look at Jon hunched over his desk, head in hand, eyes squinted as he tries to retain information in the middle of the night.

  It’s also true I wish Jon didn’t feel so much pressure.

  Tate

  “Do you believe in heaven?” I ask as I watch Tate toil through the math problem I finished in class. I stare at Tate’s yarmulke, wondering if my mom believed in heaven, or if it even matters. Sometimes, being with Tate makes yearning for my mom impossible to hold. I want to tell her about him. I want her to help me figure him out. And I wonder, if she were alive, would I actually be Jewish? My mom’s death took pieces of me I’ll never know. But at the same time, when I’m with Tate, pieces of myself I didn’t know existed are illuminated.

  We’re sitting on the floor, me and Tate, backs against the wall in the math hallway after school. Just the two of us in the whole corridor, but Tate’s shoulder is pressed into mine. I’ll never get used to my bursting
insides with Tate.

  “I used to,” he says. “It’s complicated in Judaism.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tate sighs and angles so we can talk face-to-face.

  “Well, there’s no official stance on the afterlife. Most of us believe in some kind of afterlife, but we’re not explicitly told about heaven, or hell for that matter. Most of us don’t believe in hell. But do I believe in heaven?” He pauses, shifting his weight. The half inch he just moved away from me is a mile. “I guess I have to believe in something. This can’t be it, you know? You live eighty-something years, if you’re lucky. Maybe you do some good in your lifetime. Maybe you’re a total schmuck. And then you die? There has to be more to it, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” I say. “But heaven implies God. And I have a hate-hate relationship with God, if she even exists.”

  I think about closing the half inch between us and then some, but instead I grab the zipper of my backpack and start messing with it.

  Tate smiles and repeats, “She.” Like I bemuse him.

  “If there’s a God, then our lives must be some kind of game, right?”

  “Either that or an experiment,” he says.

  “Yeah.” I laugh. “A pretty sick experiment.”

  “Pretty sick indeed.”

  He mimes raising a glass.

  “So you’re not sure about the afterlife. But clearly Judaism is important to you,” I say, pointing to his yarmulke.

  “It is,” he says.

  “So what does it mean to you?”

  “I don’t know—there was this night, in Israel.” He pauses, searching for the right way to say what he’s thinking. “We sang Hebrew songs by the campfire, fell asleep in our tents for a few hours.”

  “I thought you said you don’t sing.”

  “I did that night. There were thirty of us on the trip, from all over the world. But it didn’t matter where we’d all come from, we were connected by something that felt so big.” He sighs and smiles at me.

  “So that night, we got up at two thirty in the morning for a sunrise hike up Masada. We’d spent the week talking and interacting, meeting Jews our own age living in Israel. Trying to dissect what it means to be Jewish. What it means to have this heritage. But on this hike no one spoke for hours. We just shuffled forward, climbing a mountain in dark silence. As though we were one.” Tate crosses his legs, but we’re sitting close enough that his knee rests on mine.

  “When we got to the top, the sun was just dawning. And, it’s so hard to explain this, but I’ve never felt more connected to who I am than I did in that moment, watching the sun rise over the horizon. It’s like I was connected to everyone around me, and my forefathers, and all the Jews who’ve suffered and fought just to be Jewish for generations.”

  He turns to look at me, and I feel like I’m looking right at his soul when he says, “I didn’t choose it. It chose me.”

  “And God?” I say.

  “That”—he pauses—“is God.”

  Me, Tate, Missy

  Marissa and I are in the basement, getting ready to binge on ’90s romantic comedies and chocolate.

  “He must know what he’s doing, right?” Marissa is twirling a piece of hair with one hand and eating chocolate-covered raisins, one solitary raisin at a time, with her other hand. The hair twirling might be cliché except that it’s borderline OCD with Marissa. Once she starts twirling, she can’t stop. I’m already feeling ill because I’ve eaten a bowlful of the candy, and now we’re about to talk about Danson, a subject that is at once cringeworthy and absorbing. I take a swig of my Dr Pepper to offset the raisins.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well.” She searches my face for . . . what? Approval?

  “Keep talking.” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think.

  “He’s asked me to stay after school three days in a row. How much more can we talk about the same freaking essay?”

  She smiles to herself, and it’s in the euphoria of that smile that I realize how serious she is about this. I can’t know how she hopes this will end, and I can only guess at what she’s getting out of it—validation that she’s worthy.

  “I think he knows, Missy.” Because it’s true. Despite not wanting to believe that Danson would flirt with or hit on a student, let alone my best friend, I think he does know. It’s in the way she talks about him. There are some social cues you just can’t miss. And I’ve seen Marissa flirt; it’s not subtle.

  “Marissa.” I want her to know that I’m here, that she can tell me anything and I won’t push her away or reject her like her parents have done, but also I need to caution her, to let her know that this could end badly. “This thing with Danson. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it’s starting to get more serious.”

  “It is.” She agrees with me thoughtlessly.

  “And, I’m worried about it getting out of control.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, have you thought this through? He’s our teacher.” I hear myself say the word teacher out loud and realize Danson is no longer a favorite of mine.

  “Well. He’s not your teacher. Anymore.”

  “That’s not the point, Missy.”

  Suddenly serious, she says, “I know. And I know what I’m doing. I think I might love him, Ade. He’s not even ten years older than us. It’ll be okay.”

  “How can it be okay? He’s married. With a kid.”

  “That part.” She hesitates. “I can’t help it.”

  I wonder what it is that she can’t help. The fact that a teacher, someone with more power than he probably knows, someone with looks and charisma and manly hands, is paying attention to her? Or can’t she help that he’s married with a kid? What can she help? And suddenly I feel the same sentiment. I can’t help it. Whether he has a girlfriend or not, I’m in love with Tate.

  When my phone rings, I picture Tate’s name lighting up the screen and smile when it happens, momentarily forgetting the weight of Marissa and Danson and all the things neither of us can control.

  “Hey.”

  When he talks to me, his voice gets that laughing quality, and I could swear he’s as giddy talking to me as I am talking to him.

  “Hey.” I say it in the same sort of laughing way and turn my back to Marissa, who’s rolling her eyes as she pops her third chocolate-covered raisin into her mouth.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Watching movies with Marissa. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Can I come over? My mom’s on her way to the grocery store. She said she’ll drop me off.”

  I glance at Marissa and mouth the words, Please, Tate? I’m pointing at the phone.

  She rolls her eyes again and says, “Whatever.”

  I don’t worry about whether she thinks Tate is crashing our girl time. We get plenty of one-on-one time, Marissa and me.

  “I hope he likes Colin Firth. Or at the very least Hugh Grant,” she says. We’re deciding between Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

  I toss a raisin at her and then make her pick it up because I don’t want it melting somewhere on the cushions. There’s nothing like Dad’s wrath over melted chocolate on furniture.

  When I hear the doorbell, I fly up the stairs two by two because if I don’t, my dad will be first to greet Tate, and I forgot to mention he was coming, and my dad can’t be trusted.

  I’m at the top of the stairs, and there’s Dad and Tate shaking hands. My dad is acting so normal. So friendly. I was sure he’d do the whole What are your intentions toward my daughter? thing, but instead it’s like he’s inducting Tate into the guy club. And then there’s Tate. So at ease when he just met my father. It’s like they’re old pals. This is weird.

  “Hey, you hungry?” Dad says to Tate. “I just threw a couple of steaks on the grill.”

  “Yeah,” Tate says. “Starving. Just suffered through one of my mom’s meatless pies for dinner. I’d love a steak.”

&n
bsp; “Great. Coke or Dr Pepper?”

  “A Dr Pepper would be awesome, thanks.”

  I’m still standing at the top of the stairs, and I don’t know whether to be annoyed or delighted at the comfort level going on between my dad and Tate.

  “You and Marissa hungry, Peanut?” There it is. Peanut. Tate raises an eyebrow. I mouth shut up. “I could do a couple kabobs.”

  “No, thanks. We’re gonna toss a frozen pizza in the oven.”

  “Suit yourself,” Dad says.

  “I’ll leave you guys to it, then,” I say, pretending to head back downstairs.

  Tate pulls me into a half hug and ruffles my hair, but gently.

  He’s forgiven.

  “But seriously, I have to go back down to finish the movie with Marissa.”

  “What are you guys watching?”

  “Chick flick. Colin Firth.”

  “You coulda warned me.”

  “What’d you think we were doing down there, watching James Bond or something?”

  “A guy can hope.”

  “It’ll be over in half an hour. Forty-five minutes, tops. Then we can hang out.”

  My dad rescues Tate. “Come flip the steaks with me. They’ll be done any minute. You like ’em rare?”

  “A little pink in the middle is great, but I can’t handle red.”

  And they’re off. My dad and Tate heading to the grill on the back porch, discussing the way they like their meat, drinking pop. As the door closes, I hear both of them break into laughter.

  After Tate eats his steak on the back porch with my dad—this is so weird—he makes his way downstairs. He and Marissa end up tossing raisins at each other while I gripe about melting chocolate on the couch or carpets. I’d be annoyed with the flirting, but somehow Tate manages to pull me into it, and I’m sky-high on being in the same room with him at my house, surrounded by a mess of chocolate-covered raisins.