Page 14 of August Lane
After four days of staring, the perfect opportunity to speak to her again finally presented itself. They were the last two in the classroom, finishing a quiz that would have taken him half the time if he’d actually studied. August always finished her work last, which was probably intentional. She wanted to avoid her classmates. The bell rang, and they stood in unison, on a collision course for the pile of completed tests.
August eyed him like an unexpected traffic jam while Luke tried to think of something clever to say. He looked at his paper, staring blindly at the wall of multiple-choice questions. “What did you put for number six?”
Her annoyed expression didn’t change. “C.”
Luke nodded like he remembered which question that was. “C’s always good. Reliable. Good odds of being right. ‘None of the above’ fucks things up though.”
She looked at the stack of quizzes. Then at his test. “Are you trying to cheat off me? I have a D in this class.”
“No!” He threw his paper down like it had caught fire. “I don’t cheat.”
Her expression shifted to pity. “Was that flirting?” Her tone made it clear she hoped it wasn’t.
“No,” he repeated, and then immediately broke out in a bold-faced-liar sweat. “I was just making conversation. Being nice.”
August glanced at the hallway, which was filled with slow walkers who stared at them as they passed. “Don’t let anyone else hear that.”
“Hear what?”
“You being nice to me.” She put her test down and neatened the stack.
“Why not?” Luke asked, even though he already knew. People talked about her like they were posting comments on some message board: Passionate hate because she stole someone’s boyfriend. Vicious ridicule because her mother sang country, which meant the whole family was ashamed of being Black. Sleazy fawning that sounded vaguely threatening, like the way Richard crowed about how much he’d love to get his hands on her again.
Luke had never joined the supportive leers and fist bumps, but he never pushed back, either. He’d stood still and silent, blending with the walls while his teammates reduced her to horny shower fantasies.
Looking back on those moments made him hate himself. He might not have been able to stop it, but he could have done something.
“They’ll think I’m fucking you,” she said, with little emotion.
Luke was embarrassed and irritated because she was right. “They’re saying stuff about me too,” he pointed out. “That it’s all I’m after.”
“It’s not the same.”
He couldn’t argue with her. Stories about him sleeping around only made people like him more. They avoided August like a new strain of the flu.
“None of it’s true,” he said, because he needed her to set him apart.Those guys are assholes, but then there’s Luke.
August shrugged. “Even if it was, you’d still be fine. They all think you’re a good person.”
“That’s ’cause I am,” Luke said, and gave her a half smile that had always worked for him in the past. “Or at least, I’d like to be if you let me.”
Something flashed across her face before she smothered it, a look he only caught because it was so familiar. Sometimes when Luke was alone and forgot to dodge the mirror, he’d see his hunger, the parasitic need that only grew bigger the more he fed it friends, trophies, and Facebook likes. Maybe she was starving, too. Maybe they were both just ants addicted to sugar.
August studied him and he did the same to her, since it was the first conversation they’d had with the lights on. Her eyes were large and heavy-lidded, like she’d just stumbled out of bed. She had a wide nose and lips that were almost too perfect, a hard cupid’s bow painted with cartoonish precision. It was jarring how pretty she was. With her standoffish attitude, her beauty was easy to overlook, but once it gripped you, it held you by the neck.
“You’re cute,” she whispered, almost like she was talking to herself. Then she dismissed him with a tiny head shake. “Save it for your girlfriend.”
August picked up her books and left. He watched her, so lost in his own thoughts that he nearly overlooked the small black Moleskine she’d dropped on the floor.
Luke only noticed that August carried a notebook everywhere because he did the same thing. His was a black-and-white composition book he’d picked up at Walmart last year, now creased and curled from his constant handling. Inside was an incoherent cloud of lyrics and music notes he was starting to think would never be more than that. He guarded that book like it held the keys to the universe, or his universe at least.
August was protective of her notes, too. She would dump her books so carelessly on a desk that half the stack would slide to the floor, but the black Moleskine was always gripped in her hand or pressed to her chest. Seeing it on the floor triggered something tight and impatient inside him, like she was offering another secret and daring him to take it. Because he already knew what it was. Keys toheruniverse. But that seemed like a dangerous thing to want from August Lane.
High school was made of boxes. And so far, Luke had done a good job of figuring out which ones he fit inside and which ones he should avoid. Football was a gilded box. It was a social lubricant and a wide-open path to being every teacher’s pet. It was guaranteed girlfriends and a place on the homecoming court. It was knowing that every day he walked these halls, anyone who made eye contact with him would do it with a smile. And he needed that in his life. People who were genuinely happy to see him.
But it came with other boxes that he didn’t like as much. He was lumped in with the rich kids, even though his family didn’t have much. His position in that group was tenuous. If he admitted that he’d never left Arkansas or had only recently learned that Pabst Blue Ribbon was a cheap beer, they’d toss him aside. Which might not be a bad thing, but he wasn’t sure what would happen next. Maybe all the other boxes would collapse like dominoes, and he’d be left on some island on the outskirts of a high school maze.
He couldn’t survive that. Luke was soft in all the wrong places. He knew perfectly well the world could eat him alive, so it was better to bow to the natural order it imposed. And most days, he was fine with that. On others, he’d end up suffocating slowly in the dark.
