let’s try this again…
There must have been a first moment, a first day he’d laid eyes on Alice Martin in all her indifferent, teenaged glory, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember it. Instead, it seemed to him that she had just always been there—hovering on the periphery of his life with her guitar and her rumpled notebooks—until one day, the light changed, and suddenly she was all he could see.
That day, he remembered.
It was tenth grade, October, a Tuesday afternoon, and rehearsal had ended on a high note. That semester, he’d stolen the role of Puck out from under a handful of talented upper-classmen, and on that day, for the first time, he felt like he’d proven himself worthy of it. He’d made it halfway home—high on some brand of Elizabethan euphoria—before he realized he’d left his script in the auditorium. And that’s where he found her, alone, painting a backdrop in her overalls, strawberry blonde hair falling messily from her ponytail.
She’d been there, alongside him, for ages (since middle school at least), and yet her presence had barely even registered in his consciousness. But that afternoon, for some reason, he couldn’t look away, could hardly breathe at the sight of her. Maybe it was the play, all that talk of love and magic, but he suddenly felt all flushed and woozy, standing there watching as a glob of green paint dripped down onto one of her bare feet. He lost his grip on the door handle and it slammed behind him, causing her to jump at the sudden sound.
“Sorry,” he said, letting out a sharp breath of air and shuffling clumsily up the aisle toward the stage. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”
She just shrugged as if she’d been expecting him. “I promised Mr. Cox I would finish these today.”
“Want some help?” he asked, climbing onto the stage and picking up a paintbrush, his abandoned script long-since forgotten. She nodded and shrugged again, and they painted in silence for a while, long enough for him to work up the confidence to ask her, “How do you keep getting into our rehearsals if you aren’t in drama?” She turned and furrowed her eyebrows at him, and he was sure, then, that he had offended her. “I just mean-,” he started, attempting to recover, “shouldn’t you be somewhere else fifth period?”
“Oh.” Her eyebrows relaxed a little, and she set her brush down and walked over to sit at the foot of the stage. “I’ve got gym,” she confessed, “but Coach Salter’s been letting me cut.”
“How’d you manage to swing that?” he asked, perplexed, moving to take a seat beside her. She turned to him and opened her mouth to speak, and he saw of flash of something in her eyes, which he could see then were green. But before he could make sense of it all, she closed her mouth again and shook her head, blushing. “You should just try out for drama,” he offered, hoping to lighten the mood, “Mr. Cox already likes you.”
He caught her grin ever so slightly, and it caused something in his chest to constrict.
“I have a problem with my face,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What?”
“That’s what Mr. Cox told me last year when I auditioned.”
“Are you serious?” he asked, letting out a hesitant laugh.
“Yeah,” she chuckled. “Apparently dramatic monologues are more convincingly acted when the speaker isn’t rolling her eyes the entire time.”
He broke into a full laugh then. “That’s a great tip.”
After that afternoon, the only two things he could think about were the play and Alice Martin. The curve of her shrugged shoulders, that intriguing little grin, but most of all the mysterious blush that had risen to her cheeks when he’d asked her about her gym class. In the midst of all his nervous excitement, that image still troubled him, even more so when, weeks later, Alice stopped showing up to rehearsal.
When he asked Melissa Thomas about it, she’d given him that same look of skepticism Alice had given him before asking, “How do you not know already?”
He widened his eyes and threw his hands up, exasperated.
“A couple of girls started complaining to Coach Salter that they didn’t want to have to dress out in front of a dyke.” They both flinched at the word. “And Al didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, so Coach started letting her cut out of pity, I guess.”
“Well, is she?” he asked, though he hated himself for it. But he needed to know before he got much further ahead of himself.
Melissa shook her head and sighed. “I honestly have no idea.”
