So there it is. The day it happened: a romantic tale filled with beers consumed in a public urinal, getting creamed at volleyball by varsity water polo, kissing a girl in the tide pools, and not knowing what I was getting myself into.
Back in ninth-grade science, we had a unit on ecology, and I’d read Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez for extra credit after failing to impress Mr. Ghesh with my tenuous understanding of the water cycle. Steinbeck wrote about tide pools and how profoundly they illustrate the interconnectedness of all things, folded together in an ever-expanding universe that’s bound by the elastic string of time. He said that one should look from the tide pool to the stars, and then back again in wonder. And maybe things would have been different if I’d heeded his advice that day on the beach with Charlotte, but I didn’t. Instead, I linked my hand in hers and failed to appreciate the bigger picture, and the only stars I saw were wearing varsity jackets.
10
YOU CAN ALWAYS tell when it’s Friday. There’s an excitement specific to Fridays, coupled with relief that another week has passed. Even Toby’s friends, who I didn’t think ever did much over the weekend, were in a good mood that first Friday.
Luke, Austin, and Phoebe were already there when I got to the table during break. Luke had his arm around Phoebe, who was eating a Pop-Tart, and Austin was engrossed in some mobile gaming device.
“No, no, bad portal,” he scolded, totally oblivious to the world. “Stop—evil—eurgh! Suck my flagellated balls, douchenozzle!”
Phoebe sighed. “Help, help, Austin! Your flagellated balls are on fire!”
Austin didn’t even look up.
“Told you he was in the gaming zone,” Phoebe said.
“What’d I miss?” I asked, sliding onto a bench.
“Well, I heard Jimmy’s having a sick kegger tonight,” Luke said, in this sarcastic way that let me know he still wasn’t all that thrilled to have me around. “It’s a Tier One party, of course.”
“Yeah, I heard that too,” I said, not liking the way Luke had casually thrown around the term my old friends used to express the exclusivity of their little events. “It’s like Animal Farm.”
“You mean Animal House,” Luke corrected. “The movie about college frat parties.”
I shook my head. “No, I mean Animal Farm. You know: ‘Some animals are more equal than other animals.’”
Phoebe laughed and squirmed out from under Luke’s arm to throw away her Pop-Tart wrapper.
“Ezra, you’re taking me to Jimmy’s party, right?” she asked, fake-pouting.
“Definitely,” I said, playing along. “Should we bring a bottle of wine or an assortment of cheeses as a host gift?”
Luke broke off a piece of Phoebe’s Pop-Tart and she squealed in protest, ignoring my question.
“What up, minions?” Toby slid a preposterously large coffee thermos onto the table. “Ooh, is that Mortal Portal Three?”
Austin still didn’t look up.
“He’s in the zone,” Phoebe said. “Honestly, what is it with boys and video games? No wonder print is dead.”
“I read,” Toby protested as Sam and Cassidy joined us, eating fresh cookies from the bakery line. “For instance, last night I read that you can levitate a frog with magnets.”
Phoebe rolled her eyes, unimpressed.
“Hypothetically, or scientifically proven?” Cassidy wanted to know.
“Scientifically proven,” Toby said triumphantly. “These Nobel Prize–winning scientists did it.”
“How many beers do y’all think it takes before one internationally respected scientist turns to another and says, ‘Dude, bet you twenty bucks I can levitate a frog with a magnet?’” Sam drawled.
“Well, which magnetic charge?” Cassidy asked. “I mean, it has to be either positive or negative, doesn’t it?”
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” Toby teased.
“Just a tadpole,” Cassidy replied.
Everyone groaned.
And then the bell rang.
Cassidy and I had English together—with Luke, actually, but he usually walked Phoebe to class.
“So,” I said as Cassidy and I headed toward Mr. Moreno’s room, “I didn’t see any secret messages last night.”
“I didn’t want to be predictable,” Cassidy retorted. “But at least now I know you’re paying attention.”
GOOD OLD MORENO and his pop quizzes. I’d nearly forgotten about those. He slammed a tough one on us—themes and metaphors from the first one hundred pages of Gatsby.
I was slogging my way through the questions on the Smart Board when it hit me how the billboard that Wilson thought was watching him—the one with the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg—wasn’t so different from the idea behind the panopticon. I scribbled my revelation down as my final long-answer question and finished just before Mr. Moreno called time.
He made us trade papers with the person sitting behind us, which, lucky me, was Luke. Luke grinned as I tore my page out of my notebook and handed it over.
“Hope you studied, Faulkner,” he said, uncapping his pen.
I got Anamica Patel’s paper. At the top of it, she’d written her name, the date, our teacher’s name, our class period, and “Gatsby Quiz #1” in the neatest handwriting I’d ever seen.
Mr. Moreno went over the short-answer questions and the true-false. Anamica missed one of the true-false.
“All right, hand them back and then pass them forward. I’ll grade the long-answer questions myself,” Mr. Moreno said.