Chapter 1
A Day In The Life Of A High School Girl
The bell rings. Students file out of the room and a few moments later, a girl, head down with blonde, crimped hair shielding her face, walks to her desk and sits down without looking around or noticing the stranger talking to her teacher.
Richard, a short, round boy with hair carefully combed and sculpted around his head with mousse enters the room and sits at the desk next to hers.
“Hi, Tegan,” he says, turning to her with a proud smile. “That’s my brother, Charles. You know, the one who let you borrow his Enigma CD.”
Tegan looks up for the first time and takes notice of the stranger. The boy talking to her German teacher is tall and lean, with a babyface, shallow chin, short but messy brown hair, crooked teeth, and glasses. The classic geek.
The rest of the class enters the room and the bell rings as the stragglers hurry to their desks. The teacher turns to her students.
“Today,” she begins, “We have a special guest who has come here to talk to you about college life…. auf Deutsch.”
The class groans. Tegan sits upright in her chair ready to listen but when Richard’s brother talks in German, he speaks too fast for Tegan to catch much of anything he says except for the phrase und so weiter that he repeats while waving his hand in a rolling motion.
When he finishes, the teacher asks the class, “Did you understand everything?”
Everyone around Tegan nods their heads. Tegan is in disbelief. How is she the only one who didn’t understand a damn thing? That or the entire class is lying. Either way, Tegan keeps quiet. Which isn’t hard for her because she keeps quiet all the time.
Starting in middle school, Tegan became uncomfortable around her peers. Surrounded by the loud, and raucous, Tegan began to feel like an alien dropped on a foreign planet. Throughout middle school and high school, she kept her distance from most of her peers and did her best to remain invisible at school. The good to come of her inverted nature is it kept her out of the line of fire of any drama common in high school. With no enemies and few friends, everyone thought of her as nothing more than that “sweet, quiet girl.”
Richard turns to her. “You understood everything, right?” he asks.
“Um, yeah,” Tegan lies.
“Hey, what are you doing Saturday? Would you want to see a movie with me? I hear The Fugitive is really good.”
“I saw it.”
“Well, there’s Ace Ventura. That’s supposed to be funny.”
“I have to babysit,” Tegan lies again.
“Oh, okay.”
Richard is the smart kid in Tegan’s graduating class, the one who’ll definitely do something with his life, assuring everyone he’ll be rich by the time he is thirty. He already runs his own business out of his parents’ house selling herbs and alternative medicines. No, not weed! Quite the opposite, Richard is uptight and proper. With the slicked-back hair of a used car salesman and the clean-cut look of a business professional, Tegan has no interest in him.
She tells herself it is his stick-in-the-mud personality she finds offputting but, if she’d be honest with herself, his weight is probably the bigger turn-off. This bothers Tegan since she does not want to think of herself as a shallow person, not like her sister. She often berates her preteen sister for caring too much about looks. And yet, hypocritically, Tegan has begun gravitating towards the sloppy tall, thin boys with dark, messy hair.
“What about next weekend? Are you going to the dance?” Richard tries again.
Tegan gulps. The idea of a dance horrifies her. Trapped in a loud room with a bunch of popular extroverts did not sound like a good time to Tegan. She’d never been to a dance and had no intention of going to prom either.
“No, I, um, have to watch my brother and sister,” she once again lies.
“Babysitting again, huh? Okay, maybe next time.”
“Yeah.” Tegan is at a loss for anything else to say. Thankfully the bell rings and she can get away.
With a bookbag clutched close to her chest, Tegan rushes out of the room, her head down as always, and navigates the crowded halls. She is one of the first to reach her next classroom. She sets her bag on the floor underneath her desk and takes out her math book and notebook. She waits. Waits for the sound of someone not picking their feet up all the way as they walk. Tegan dares not turn around to watch for him. That would be too obvious.
This is all new to Tegan, this feeling of euphoria at the mere sight of another person. Her peers had all begun crushing in middle school but it wasn’t until a year ago that Tegan finally discovered boys. Her first crush was a tall, dark, skinny boy from drama club a year ahead of her. She wasn’t the only one crushing on him but once he was out of school he came out of the closet as well.
Jen, a friend of a friend of Tegan’s, comes in first and sits across from her. They greet each other and then Tegan hears it. The lazy swooshing of Mike’s walk. She stares straight ahead doing her best not to look at him. A towering, dark, scrawny figure plops into the desk in front of Jen.
Tegan peers out of the corner of her eye. He is still wearing his black overcoat. She just might die. Ever since seeing Tommy Lee Jones running around in a long trench coat, Tegan has found herself especially attracted to men wearing long trench coats.
Mike turns around to face Jen with a wicked smile on his face. He points a sharp pencil at his eye and Jen cringes, begging him to stop. This isn’t the first time he’d teased Jen with a pencil to his eye.
“But Jen,” he says. “There’s glass.” He taps the pencil on his glasses. Jen still cringes so Mike looks over at Tegan with a look that says isn’t she being ridiculous? Tegan melts at the glance but keeps her composure enough to study his eyes, something she hadn’t had the chance to do before. They are a deep dark brown. The richest, purest, deepest brown she’s ever seen, one nature couldn’t possibly reproduce elsewhere. He also has a crooked bluish-purplish scar above his right eye Tegan had not seen before. This was exciting because she also has a scar above her left eye from when she fell onto a bed frame as a toddler. Tegan takes this to mean they are soul mates.
“Hey, what did you get for question ninety-four?” Mike asks Tegan.
“Um…” Tegan opens her notebook to look. “Forty-two,” she says, happy to help.
“Thanks!” Mike turns back around to write the answer down.
As class begins, Tegan draws in her notebook, being careful to look up as little as possible to study her subject matter–the back of Mike’s head. His hair is as black as her sister’s but in some light, you can see the dark brown. Hmm, Tegan thinks, remembering her first crush. This must be my type: tall, dark, and… cute!
“Tegan?”
Tegan is startled out of her reverie. She looks up from Mike’s head to see her teacher looking at her.
“Yes?” she asks nervously.
“Can you come up and work out the problem on the board?”
Tegan feels faint. Oh, God, no. Not on the board! Not in front of the whole class! What if she messes up? What if she looks stupid?!
Trembling, she stands up and approaches the board as if walking against a strong wind. Trying to keep her hand from shaking, Tegan picks up a piece of chalk and writes out the steps to a FOIL problem.
“Good,” says her teacher.
Relieved, Tegan heads back to her seat.
“Good job,” whispers Mike with a wink. Tegan blushes and can’t help smiling to herself as she sits down. Maybe it was worth it after all.
After school, Tegan heads for the auditorium after a brief stop at her locker. The spring musical is approaching and there is still a lot of work to get done. Behind the heavy, black, backstage door awaits a different world. Stage crew suits Tegan. Hiding in the shadows, watching her classmates live out their lives on the bright stage, is where Tegan feels the most comfortable. Not only that but with a penchant for the artsy, she enjoys building and painting the sets.
Tegan sets her stuff down in the backroom and walks out on stage to await instructions. She hears Andrea’s angry voice shouting.
“You all need to be quieter! I can’t hear myself think let alone practice my lines!”
The sound of hammers and drills is deafening but what does she expect? Tegan thinks. Building a set is noisy! Maybe she’d like to do it herself and show them how to keep a saw quiet!
Tegan hates Andrea. One, because she is popular and mean. Tegan’s friends think she’s a witch. Two, and this may be more the reason, she is Mike’s girlfriend. They make such an ugly couple! Everyone thinks so and Gayle, Tegan’s closest friend since third grade, has agreed to help her kill Andrea. Just kidding. Maybe.
Mike walks out on stage to soothe his diva.
“Hey, hey, that’s no way to talk to stage crew. After all without talent like Tegan here,” he approaches Tegan from behind and puts an arm around her shoulders, “There’d be no amazing sets for the play.”
Tegan stands stiff as a board as Mike hugs her to his side. His smell is intoxicating, a musky scent she’d never noticed before. She wants nothing more than to melt into that amazing hug, to squeeze him around his waist, but is terrified of the angry look etched across Andrea’s face.
“I don’t care,” she says. “If I can’t get my lines down, there is no play.”
“Of course,” Mike breaks away from Tegan and approaches his girlfriend, the lead in the musical. “You have the most important part of this play and…of my heart,” he says, bringing his hands together over his chest.
“I’m serious,” Andrea says annoyed with Mike’s mocking.
“I am too,” Mike says, uncrossing Andrea’s arms. He says something too quiet for Tegan to hear and Andrea’s face softens. She looks up at Tegan and laughs.
Tegan breaks free of her moment of paralysis and turns, blinking away forming tears. Sometimes Tegan wonders if Mike even cares about Andrea but at times like this she is made painfully aware they are a couple.
Hours later, once everything is done that can be done that night, Tegan goes to the backroom to phone her parents to pick her up. But when she picks up the receiver there is no dial tone and nothing happens when she presses a number. Her heart starts to race. She has no way to contact her parents. There is another phone in the performers’ make-up room and also a payphone out in the hallway but she doesn’t have a quarter. She’d have to either ask to use the performers’ phone or ask for a quarter. Both feel like impossible tasks.
Nobody else from stage crew is around. They have either left or are somewhere else in the school. Shaking, Tegan picks up her things and walks outside. It is already dark but not too cold for a February night. Other people are leaving, heading for their cars or for their waiting rides. Tegan keeps walking, praying no one will call out to her, wondering where she’s going. Terrified of any confrontation, Tegan needs to find a place to hide and wait until her parents come because they have to come sooner or later, don’t they?
She chooses to hide behind a bush near the school’s entrance. It isn’t cold but the wait would have still been excruciating if it were not for a stray cat begging for attention. This makes the wait more bearable. An hour later, after everyone else had long gone, she sees her parents’ Station Wagon pull into the parking lot. Grabbing her stuff, she leaves her hiding spot and says bye to the cat.
She had been right. Her parents did come after all and, besides, the universe had even sent a cat to keep her company. Yep, this was much better than asking for a quarter!
