Chapter 41 A question I Wasn't Ready For

Chapter 41 A question I Wasn't Ready For

Wren

By Wednesday I had stopped going to the cafeteria.

It wasn't a decision I made out loud. I just walked past the doors on Tuesday and kept moving and found a table at the back of the library behind the geography shelves and nobody said anything about it, so that was where I went every day for the rest of the week.

The group project situation started on Tuesday morning. Mrs. Allard sorted us into threes for a media literacy presentation and the two girls assigned to my group looked at each other when they heard my name. One of them said she was pretty sure she had already been paired with someone else. Mrs. Allard checked her sheet and said no, Priya was in a different group. The girl spent the rest of class looking at her phone under the desk.

After class I went up to them and asked what we should split.

The taller one shrugged. "I can do the research," she said.

"I can do the written part," the other one said.

"So the slides are mine," I said.

"Sure," the first one said, and walked out.

I looked at the other one. "Should we set a time to review everything before we present?"

She looked at her phone. "Just send it to me when it's done."

"What's your email," I said.

She gave it to me without making eye contact and then left.

I stood in the empty classroom for a moment and then picked up my bag and went to my next class.

I did the slides and the written part and formatted their research into a structure that actually made sense and I sent it over without saying anything about the fact that I had done most of it.

In the hallway after third period a boy I had never spoken to said loudly enough for the people around him that he heard the Hensley house was getting a bad review online. His friends laughed. I kept walking.

The photo of the house with the address had gone everywhere. By Tuesday afternoon my name came with a new thing attached to it at Westbrook and the way people said it made it sound like something it wasn't and correcting it would only make it louder so I didn't try.

In the library at lunch on Wednesday a girl from my English class came and sat two tables away from me and looked over once and then opened her own book and didn't say anything. After about ten minutes she looked up again.

"The cafeteria's pretty bad this week," she said.

I looked at her. "Yeah."

"I come here sometimes too," she said. "When it's loud."

I nodded.

She looked back at her book and didn't say anything else and I looked back at mine and it wasn't a conversation exactly but it wasn't nothing either and I thought about it on the bus ride home.

At home that evening I wrote for two hours straight.

My notebook had come back. It appeared on my desk sometime during the school day, slipped through my door, no note with it. Someone had returned it and I did not let myself think about whether anyone had read it because if I thought about that I would have to deal with all of it at once and I wasn't ready for that. I opened to a blank page and wrote until my hand ached.

I went downstairs to get water.

There was a small bag of salt and vinegar chips sitting in the middle of the counter. Not near the fruit bowl where the snacks always went. Right in the center, where I would see it the moment I came in. No name on it. Nothing.

I stood there looking at it.

Salt and vinegar was my flavor. I had said so exactly once, three weeks ago, when Mia asked me during a conversation about chips that I hadn't even started. It was a small, throwaway thing and I had forgotten I said it the moment I said it.

Someone had remembered.

I opened the bag and stood at the counter eating chips in the quiet kitchen and I did not let myself think too carefully about who left them there or why because if I thought about it I would have to deal with what it meant and I wasn't ready for that either.

Cole came downstairs about ten minutes later. He looked at the bag in my hand and looked away again and went to the fridge.

"There were chips on the counter," I said.

"I see that," he said.

"Were they yours?"

He poured himself a glass of water. "Mia doesn't like salt and vinegar."

I looked at the bag. "Jake?"

"Jake likes plain," he said.

He drank his water with his back to me and I ate a chip and the kitchen was very quiet.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he said.

He put his glass in the sink and went back upstairs and I stood there for another minute before going back up myself.

Thursday started fine. I got Mia and Jake their breakfast, made sure their bags were packed and walked to the bus stop without anything happening. I counted it as a win.

On the bus Priya sat two rows ahead of me and talked to the girl beside her loudly enough for the surrounding rows to hear about how some people used babysitting as a way to get close to boys they could never actually have any other way. She didn't use my name. She didn't need to.

I looked out the window.

That evening I was helping Jake with his spelling words at the kitchen table. Eight words left and he kept getting distracted by a sticker on his pencil.

"Necessary," I said.

He spelled it wrong the first time and right the second and I put a small star next to it on his practice sheet.

Mia came in from the living room and sat across from me with her chin in both hands and looked at me with the particular focus she got when she had decided to ask something important.

Jake sounded out the next word without being prompted.

"Wren," Mia said.

"Good job," I told Jake. "Next one."

"Wren," Mia said again, sharper.

I looked at her. "What."

She tilted her head slightly and her expression was completely serious in the way only a six-year-old can be serious, like she had worked something out and needed credit for working it out.

"Are you Cole's new girlfriend?" she asked.

Jake looked up from his word list. He looked at me. Then he looked at Mia. Then he looked back at me.

"Wait," Jake said. "Are you?"

I kept my face completely still.