Category Archives: #4

Dweezil, Drawing, and Why the Hell Am I Not Capable of Eye Contact?

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May is coming to a close and in the grand scheme of the high school narrative, things are actually going really well. Jane is out of the hospital, I have three English classes, and the soccer team keeps winning playoff games. The semester is almost over. Summer is almost here.

We’re two weeks from finals, and teenage Brenna is surprised to realize that despite her general lack of enthusiasm for public school (also, that right there is a gross understatement intended for comedic effect), she’s not really all that impatient for the semester to end.

This time last year, I was restless, annoyed, unsatisfied with pretty much everything. (I was probably a little insufferable.)

But now, I feel strangely light. I want to dance around and put lilacs in my hair, and toy animals and feathers and tiny paper cocktail umbrellas. I want to roll in the grass like a puppy. I’m just not the same girl I was at 16.

The change is mostly apparent in little ways, like how the underclassmen on the soccer team will sometimes look to me when it’s time to organize ourselves for relay drills, and the way my teachers have started treating me like they expect me to take charge of projects or volunteer answers, and the fact that my hair has grown more than five inches and comes down almost to my hips when I wear it loose.

Also, now I sometimes wear my hair loose.

I have a whole closet of eclectic DIY clothes, some of which are disastrous, but some of which are excellent. I have a sister who looks like a best friend. I have pastel-pink fingernails and cinnamon lipgloss and I get picked for things, group presentations and committees and teams in PE. People say hi to me in the halls—sometimes people I’ve never even talked to. They nod and smile when they see me, and even though I’m still marginally terrified of strangers, I keep my chin up and work hard to smile back.

I am (sort of/kind of) someone-in-the-real-world, and I don’t even know exactly how it happened. keep reading…

The Fence

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This is the story of how I did not behave honestly or say anything useful or kiss #4 over the fence, even though I kind of wanted to.

This is the story of how I eventually decided that whatever was happening between me and Dill had to end, and how it still took two more weeks for me to actually do anything about it.

This is the story of how I knew once and for all that I was a bad girlfriend.

Right now, I’m just going to go straight into the excerpt, because personal realizations aside, the excerpt is pretty much the whole story. It’s the part that matters.

Dill got a PA system for his truck. Now, he yells at people when he doesn’t like their driving. It’s kind of embarrassing, but kind of funny, too.
     On Saturday, we were coming down from my house, and we were at that T-intersection by the Jif Store when we saw a big white Blazer come bouncing through the field and careen onto the road. Dweezil was by himself, blank-faced in the driver’s seat, vacant as always.
     Dill grabbed the PA speaker. “Dweezil, you punk-ass!”
     Dweezil didn’t turn though, or act like he’d heard. He never hears. In Fishwoman’s class, I drew his portrait during the figure drawing unit, skinny and smooth like a weasel. I spent two whole days just concentrating on his hands, his narrow, squinting eyes. Fishwoman put the picture in the art show at the mall.
     She said, “You’ve made him look so . . . pensive.” Like Dweezil in real life is incapable of thought.
     He drew his self-portrait using the reflection in the back of a spoon, blurry around the edges. It was kind of amazing. She always just treated him like he was stupid.
     Dill yelled again, holding the speaker close to his mouth. “Dweezil! Look at me, m*****f*****!”
     We were stopped behind him at the light, but Dweezil didn’t glance around.
     And yeah, Dill and I had Drawing with him last quarter, but it’s not like we actually know him. So, he used to sit with me sometimes on the bus, so what? He wasn’t even really sitting with me. Just next to me. What is that? Stoned before class and drunk on the weekends. Not an actual friend of ours.
     We were just beginning to gain on him when he turned off the main road and onto a side street down by the Lutheran church. Dill followed, screaming to a stop by the side-yard of a low, dingy house. Dweezil’s Blazer was parked out front. Dweezil was standing in the yard, smoking a cigarette with Holden and #4.
     Dill pulled right up to the fence, so close that I wouldn’t have been able to open my door if I’d wanted to get out, and reached for the PA again.
     “Dweezil, you crack-fiend! I been chasing your ass down since the light at JJ’s Lounge, buddy!”
     His voice boomed out over the neighborhood, amplified, alarming, and the boys in the yard all flinched.
     #4 came to the fence and leaned on his elbows, smiling wide and nervous.
     Behind him, Dweezil was giggling in that slow, stoned way he always does. “Holy shit, m*****f*****! Just, holy shit.”
     #4 cleared his throat. “So, what are you doing here?”
     He was looking at me steadily over the chest-high chainlink. I’d never really seen him in the sunlight before. Back in M’s Foundations [of English] class, there were windows and so there was always light shining in. But one stray beam is not the same as the whole outside dropping down all at once. This was not tenth-grade #4 smoking in the rain, not last August, blood-smeared in the bus circle. Now he was clean, clean, clean, leaning on the fence. He was still looking at me, a cautious, complicated look, and it occurred to me that he really did expect an answer.
     I grinned a little, awkward. “We’re not really doing that much, just saw Dweezil driving. We were trying to get his attention for like two miles. Since the Jiffy Store.”
     #4 took a deep breath, cigarette burning down in his hand. “Oh. Hey, look, we’re going camping* later on and . . .”
     He ducked his head down, not finishing.
     Dill threw the truck into gear. “Well, you guys have a good time. See you around.”
     #4 lifted his head, looking at me, only at me, nowhere but me. “Yeah. Bye.”
     He waved gently over the fence, then turned and walked away, back to where Dweezil and Holden stood. Smoking.
     We peeled out on the gravel, light and vicious like nothing else. And then we got in a fight. It was so stupid.

keep reading…

Boy Friends

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My sister and I grew up surrounded by boys.

Okay, so we don’t have any brothers, and hardly even any boy cousins, but still, our childhood was distinctly boy-heavy. When we first moved to Colorado, the kids in our neighborhood were mostly guys, and back in Arkansas, I didn’t have even a single friend who was a girl. (Holly lived close by and was my age, but she wasn’t my friend because she only liked relentlessly pastel things like My Little Pony and I was always accidentally making her cry.*)

What I’m saying is that in the course of my life, I’ve built a lot of forts and bridges, shot a lot of air rifles and BB guns and homemade bow-and-arrows. Gone off bike ramps balanced on the handlebars, poked dead things with sticks, chased the cows in the pasture, walked out on the ice.

I’ve done all the fast, reckless, dangerous things** that girls left to their own devices almost never do. Because yes, you might think of it, but thinking of something is still a universe away from thinking it might be a good idea to try it.

And now, at seventeen, I feel a little bit like something’s missing. I look around at the boys I know and think how weird it is that I only ever talk to them when we’re sitting in class. I have this mute, sneaking suspicion sometimes that it shouldn’t be like this. That I should still be running around in the scrub brush, making up ridiculous games and pulling crazy shenanigans.

It’s not that I don’t love my girlfriends—I DO—but even when we’re all hanging out together, laughing and teasing each other, sometimes I get this mysterious sense of restlessness, like I’m missing some deep, integral part of me. Because even though I babysit and go grocery shopping and spend my spare time baking cookies and customizing my clothes and making lacy headbands and fancy barrettes, on the inside, I’m still a little bit (okay, a lot) of a tomboy.

I design elaborate princess hairstyles that have the structural integrity to stand up to the rigors of sledding or cross-country capture the flag. I keep cigarette loads in my wallet and a buck knife in my backpack. I jump off roofs onto trampolines and shoot bottle rockets and climb anything that looks like it needs climbing. I paint my toenails to hide all the places they’re bruised purple from soccer.

Dill is my friend. He is a boy.

Wit is also a boy. And even though I’ve only known him for a few months, I’m already starting to understand that our friendship is something rare and valuable. But Wit is also less aggressively boyish than Dill. He likes to get coffee and talk on the phone and dissect his feelings, all of which I’m delighted by, but none of which is familiar from the friendships of my childhood.

So when April rolls around and I find myself spending more and more time with Dill, it’s sort of not even that surprising. After all, the good things about Dill are obvious. keep reading…

The Ice Girl, Redux

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It’s February. Which is another way of saying that it is brutally, unreasonably cold. In fact, it’s so cold that I’m perpetually obsessed with how cold it is.

In Drawing, Dill lets me wear his fingerless gloves. They’re too big and make me feel like an imaginary creature with very small hands. Which I like, because every imaginary thing is more fun than actual reality. Especially in winter.

He leans his elbows on our table and says, so casually it sounds fake, “Hey, me and Greg and Vee are going to a movie tonight. You want to come?”

And when I look back at him too long, it’s because I’m considering all the things I like best—the blue of his eyes, the width of his shoulders, how he never talks down to me, never treats me like I’m stupid. He drew my picture like I was a doll-version of myself, but so what? He’s interesting and fun. Handsome. Dependable. (Actual, when everyone else is just hypothetical.)

“Sure,” I say, wiggling the gloves so they flop like puppets.

“Cool. I’ll pick you up.”

We’re in the middle of the Self-Portrait unit and everyone has mirrors, but mine is broken into jagged shards. Every day, I arrange the pieces in order on the tabletop, matching them up to a map of pencil marks. It’s easier to think of my face as a series of individual features. Mouth, cheek, forehead. One dark, furtive eye. I don’t know why I decided to do it this way except that otherwise, everything starts to seem too complicated.

I don’t even ask what movie we’re seeing.

“Are you crazy?” said Catherine after lunch. “The last thing you need is to start dating him again. And anyway—” She cut her eyes significantly at Jane.
     “What do I care?” Jane said.
     “I’m not dating him,” I said. “It’s just a movie.”
     “Yeah, and then another one and then—oh, great.” Catherine rolled her eyes grandly. “Now here’s your other helpless victim.”
     Brody had broken off from his friends and was heading straight for us. He looked like several adjectives, but helpless wasn’t one of them.
     “You want this?” he asked, coming in very close and grabbing his crotch.
     I stood looking up at him. Sometimes, at the strangest moments, I can tell that my expression is inscrutable.
     He lifted his shirt and pulled a Coke out of the gap behind his belt buckle. “It’s still cold. So, you want it?”
     “Maybe,” I said, tilting my head. “It hasn’t got cooties on it or anything, does it?”
     He cracked the can open, took a drink and handed it to me. “Now it does.”
     I smiled at him, sly, coy, demure, pick-a-word. It was easy. He kissed me lightly on the forehead and walked away.
     Jane gave me a dubious look, but didn’t comment.
     Catherine said it was disgusting. She said it was repulsive. She said he wants to have sex with me. But I don’t even know what combination of those things is true.
     “You’re not going to drink that, are you?” she said as we watched him go. “It’s contaminated.”
     I just shrugged. It seemed a shame to waste it. He was right, it was still cold.

Passing over the wisdom of drinking from the same can as someone who makes out with a lot of girls, we need to address a more serious concern. (Even more serious, I mean.) keep reading…

The Secret Crush

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I am excellent at keeping secrets.

I keep every secret anyone ever tells me. I keep them like they are going out of style. I keep them so long that I forget them. I keep secrets even when they are not, strictly speaking, secrets at all.

But this post is not about that.

This post is about the one semi-excruciating time when I didn’t. Keep one.

First, about Greg. Greg is huge. He’s not the tallest boy in school—there’s a senior on the basketball team who’s close to seven feet. And he’s not the heaviest—there are still a few who outdo him when it comes to sheer poundage. However, taking height and weight into account simultaneously, he’s easily the biggest person I’ve ever encountered. He is patently tremendous and has no problem scooping me up with one arm and carrying me around on his shoulder like a doll.

We start hanging out together just before Thanksgiving break, because we have the same off-hour. Mostly, we go over to his house and eat Poptarts and he teaches me to play the bass. He makes up songs about me and I help him with his homework, and sometimes we hang out together at parties or go to movies on the weekends. With anyone else, I might be worried that spending so much time together would mean there was an expectation of it turning into Something Significant, but Greg also happens to be Dill’s best friend, so no matter what, it never, ever feels like a date.

Greg is a classic extrovert and a big self-starter. He likes autonomy and discipline and taking the initiative. He’s a Seven Habits of Highly Effective People type of guy. Until I met Greg, I had never actually heard anyone use the word proactive in conversation.

I like hanging out with him because I can always just say whatever, do whatever, and he never acts like I’m strange. The fact is, he’s way more focused on manifesting a purpose-driven life than on whether or not I happen to be wearing matching socks.

The Afternoon of the Secret is hard to describe. It’s one of those cold, gray days when the sky is flat and low and the whole world seems not-quite-real. Everything is a little too pale and a little too glassy and a little too imaginary, which is probably why I accidentally say what I think in the first place—I just mistake the entire situation for a very vivid dream.

The conversation starts innocently enough.

It comes about because of a Student Council fundraising scheme in which we all fill out a survey in homeroom and get matched up with a handful of other students whose views and personalities complement our own. Then, if you pay a dollar, they’ll give you a printout of your algorithm-approved matches.

Seventeen-year-old Brenna is way too above this whole endeavor to even bother filling out the survey,* but Greg is enthusiastic. Since I generally make it my business to know as much as possible about Everyone Ever, I’m his go-to girl when it comes to evaluating his matches. He’s proactively on the hunt for a relationship and so I go down his list with him, describing the relative merits of each girl and offering my opinion on whether or not they’re appropriate girlfriend material.

We spend close to an hour sitting in his truck, talking about romance and dating and whether you can really measure a person’s character simply by looking at their smile.

I don’t remember a single name on his sheet. But I do remember this conversation, and not just because I wrote it down. At the time, it was actually kind of seared into my soul. keep reading…

The Conversation

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For the first semester of junior year, US History kind of dominates my journal-keeping.

This is mostly because it’s the one class where something at least semi-interesting happens almost every day, and also, I can scribble manically in my binder for the whole period and never get in trouble, since it looks like I’m just taking really good notes.

Obligingly, Mr. Tully has aced his audition for the role of Brenna’s Favorite Teacher. This has a lot to do with the fact that he’s one of the first ones I’ve ever had who actually likes his job. But also, he’s just pretty cool. He loves history, he loves teaching, and against all reasonable expectations, he really loves his students—yes, even the ones whose grades are below the Purple Failing Line. (Especially the kids below the purple line.)

He’s also the first teacher I’ve ever had who doesn’t seem particularly interested in me. At this point, I’m kind of used to being an impressive student, but Mr. Tully is barely even aware that I exist. At first, I think it must be because everyone else is really loud and I’m really quiet, but after a month or so, I begin to understand that’s not the reason. The truth is, the whole class is such a mess that it would be ridiculous to expect him to have time for the six people who are actually doing okay.

Anyway, it can’t be an issue of being quiet, because #4 is way quieter than I am and Mr. Tully totally loves him, although #4 would probably not see it that way.

In history, we never have written quizzes. Instead, Tully calls people’s names from a list, which he maintains is randomly-generated. I don’t actually believe this. Over the course of the semester, I will be called on exactly twice. Two times. Two.

If #4 only gets called on three days in a row, he’s having a pretty good week.

Almost every afternoon, Tully stands at the front of the room, waiting, while #4 looks down at his desk, going a bright, violent red.

“I don’t know,” he says, low and apologetic.

And Tully nods, looking sad-but-resigned. It’s a look he saves just for #4. Other people get a reproachful smile, an admonition to do better next time. When Mr. Tully looks at #4, it’s weary and imploring. He never bothers to hide his disappointment.

The way the game is played, if someone doesn’t know the answer, other people can raise their hands and take the points. I know the answers, but I don’t raise my hand.

I did once. #4 was staring down at his desk like always—flaming red and tragically mute. I put my hand up, and the look he gave me was so uncomprehending, so betrayed that I felt guilty. I answered the question, told myself I was just taking back my zero from the colonist assignment. Then felt worse. keep reading…

Daisies

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In the morning, Little Sister Yovanoff dawdles on the porch. Which isn’t surprising. Any time we’re supposed to be in a hurry (to catch the bus, for instance), she’s always a few steps behind.

When I turn to check her progress, she’s still poking around by the front door.

“Come back,” she says. “There’s a thing for you.”

The thing is a plastic freezer bag of Hershey’s Kisses with a note inside asking me to the Homecoming dance. The note is anonymous, and also written in Dill’s handwriting, with his red rollerball pen.

“Did you leave a ziplock bag of candy on my porch?” I say, catching him at his locker.

His eyes widen in surprise, but the truth is, he’s easy to read. “Someone left a bag of candy? Maybe there’s something inside.”

When we get home, Little Sister Yovanoff (ever the pragmatist) gets out a mixing bowl and plunks herself down on the living room floor. We sit across from each other and unwrap the candy piece by piece. We find Dill’s name in the second-to-last one. There are 87.

At his locker the next morning, I say, “Okay, I’ll go to Homecoming with you.”

I don’t say it this way because I’m mean or ungracious. At least, I am never ungracious on purpose. It’s just that I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided that this is what I’m going to do.

Dill says, “That’s not how it’s supposed to go. You’re supposed to tell me yes.”

“I did tell you yes. Just now.”

“No,” he says, looking mildly aggrieved. “Like with—like I did, with a note. Or . . . balloons or something.”

I think about this. Then, I take a deep breath and say, without any irony or ill will, “That seems kind of complicated.”

Ever since I told him I would go to the homecoming dance, Dill has been bringing me flowers in the morning. A single cheerful daisy—simple, sweet. We are sort of (sort of) dating again.
     The first time he brought me a daisy, I thanked him for it. I put it on my locker shelf and forgot. At lunch, Little Sister Yovanoff accidentally set her Spanish book on it.
     “Oops,” she said. “Were you saving that for something?”
     Later, when I showed up to History without my flower, Dill wanted to know where it had gone. I tried to explain that I couldn’t just carry it around with me all day.
     He said, “It was for you to appreciate. You can’t appreciate it if you leave it in your locker.”
     So I carried the second daisy with me, even though it got gross-looking and started to wilt. It made my fingers sticky, and left a weird metallic smell, like you get if you hold a handful of pennies. When I showed up to Tully’s class with it, Dill grinned.
     “You have my flower!” he said. “That’s so cool.”
     “Classy,” muttered Rooster, who still has stitch-marks on his forehead. “Giving your girlfriend dead flowers.”
     Across from me, #4 sort of laughed and sort of didn’t. He was looking past me and then he put his head down on his arms. I set the flower on the edge of my desk and tried to forget that my hands smelled filthy and like metal.
     I wrapped the third daisy in a paper towel and ran it under the faucet in the bathroom. I came into History with a wilted daisy and a handful of soggy paper. No one said anything.
     It’s not that I want things. I don’t care about romance or dating or being given things. Daisies are Dill’s favorite flower. I like primroses and violets. When he brings me something that he likes and I don’t, it’s confusing.
     We don’t have to like the same flowers or the same music or movies or gum or anything else. But it would be nice if he recognized that the things I like are different from what he likes. I just want someone who pays attention, who takes into account what other people are thinking and doing.

This whole business of daisies is unsettling. It’s like a really clunky metaphor for the business of relationships, and last year I was naive enough to think that maybe I could demystify romance if I just studied the equation long enough. Now, I’m forced to admit that I absolutely do not understand. Anything. keep reading…

The Accident

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This is not going to be a funny story.

I mean, yes—if I tried hard enough, I could probably think of a way to make it seem clever or ironic. But that would be a cheap thing to do, and while I’m shockingly up-in-my-head sometimes, and too glib (inappropriately sardonic), I am not in the business of cheapness.

I don’t have a written account of what happened, and in a way, I’m glad. When you write something down, it’s like that version becomes the official one. It starts to eat away your memory and whatever you left out will slowly disappear, until all you have left is what’s on the page.

So, I remember the little things because I didn’t write them down. And other things I’m almost sure of. I think it was a Friday. I think they were both wearing white T-shirts, but I couldn’t swear to it.

Here are the things I remember:

We were standing in the bus circle, waiting for route 38 to come and take us home. In two weeks, Irish would get expelled and I would not be devastated, or even very surprised. I remember that Irish was smoking, which he wasn’t supposed to be doing, so we were standing strategically, Little Sister Yovanoff and I positioned in front of him, arms linked, while Irish cupped the cigarette in the palm of his hand so the security guard wouldn’t see.

It seems important to point out that in this moment, I was really, really happy.

So happy that I was actually thinking about how happy I was, arm-in-arm with my sister, discussing John Steinbeck and watermelon gummi-O’s and whether or not I should grow out my bangs. (We decided yes. Which is good. Because they were really terrible).

Her hair was dyed a purple so purple it looked black. Mine was summer-bright, strawberry-and-caramel. We were like this perfectly mismatched set—her, and then me. Rose White and Rose Red. We were like this idealized version of us that only ever really existed in pictures.

me high schoolmaddy high school

In my head, I was making up a fairytale, how we went on an adventure. I was thinking how glad I was that we were related but didn’t look like it, how easy that made everything. How strange it was to be standing outside with your sister and a boy who used to tell you all the time that he was your made-up brother and now he only talked to you when none of his cool friends were around.

Little Sister Yovanoff and I leaned against each other, laughing at Irish’s jokes, at the plume of smoke drifting up from his hand. The sun was so bright and the grass was so green that for weeks afterward, I kept dreaming about it.

Here is what happened next:

They came across the parking lot together. The other boy, Rooster, was much bigger, and the way they were hanging onto each other, it was hard to tell who was holding up whom. Except Rooster had a hand against his face. He was putting most of his weight on #4′s shoulder, and every time he stumbled, I thought they would both fall.

And still, no one really noticed. No one looked at them, not really, not even me. (Before this happened, I’d always been so unshakably sure that I saw everything.)

We kept talking, quoting lines from Tommy Boy and debating the usefulness of the word “circumambulate.” Little Sister Yovanoff was teasing Irish about the cigarette, pretending she would slap it out of his hand.

Then #4 dropped Rooster on the grass in front of us and straightened up. His T-shirt was splattered red.* keep reading…

The Zero

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I consider my junior year to be an opportunity for change. It’s a fresh start. A chance to actually be authentic or real, or possibly even enjoy myself.

I don’t realize exactly how much I’m changing though, until I’m forced into an uncomfortable situation, and once there, I make the kind of decision that Sophomore Brenna would just never make.

It’s the last period of the day. I’m in history class, and Mr. Tully is assigning us random partners because even though he is, in many ways, a fundamentally decent man, he still believes in torturing us with strangers.

I’m hoping I’ll get Pony, or else Dill, but in a cruel stroke of luck, they’re assigned to work together. When Mr. Tully finally calls my name, it’s to pair me with #4.

“Wait, who do you have?” Dill asks.

I tell him.

“Ooh—that sucks,” he says. “Welcome to doing the whole thing yourself.”

And I don’t say anything, because Dill may or may not be right, but that’s completely immaterial. I don’t have the slightest problem doing the whole thing myself. I love doing things myself. What I hate, as in hate with a fiery toxic HATE, is group-work.

Our assignment is to draw a picture of a colonist and make up a story about them—a biography explaining why they left England for America.

We’ve been in school for about a week at this point, and I’ve spent that week feeling pretty good about things. Like I finally know what I’m doing and have even achieved some new kind of mastery. I have leveled up.

Then, I glance at #4, who is sitting back by the supply cupboards—waiting for me, but not really looking like he’s waiting for anything—and all that goes straight out the window.

I meander across to him, clutching crayons and butcher paper. I stand over him, trying to act like everything is normal and okay, like I’m cool, or at least acceptable. The kind of girl he wouldn’t mind spending the next twenty minutes with. He doesn’t say anything.

Brenna: Hi, I’m Brenna.

#4: I know.

Brenna: . . . Okay.

Sometimes moments are excruciating because someone is being purposefully awful or doing something cruel to you, and sometimes they’re excruciating because they just are. This is the second kind.

I take a breath and compose myself, accepting that the next half-hour is not going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to be miserable. keep reading…

The Brand-New Girl

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If Sophomore year was the year of Learn by Watching, then Junior year is the year of Boys. And I mean that in a whole spectrum of ways. It is the year of noticing boys, and of studying them and admiring them and being noticed and of having friends who are boys.

This boy-onslaught is made possible, in part, because the girl I just spent a whole year being seems to have vanished over the summer.

The easiest thing would be to say that in the last three months, I’ve completely transformed. But that’s not really true. Instead, it’s more like I’ve reverted. I’ve simply gone back to being the at-home girl—the one who makes physics jokes and likes Warren Zevon and glitter lipgloss and sewing beads and sequins on her shoes.

Already, I’ve become less pokerfaced and more Mona-Lisa-ish, and I’m actually kind of looking forward to going back to school and trying again. Like Beckett says, fail again, fail better.

I’m particularly excited because Little Sister Yovanoff is starting tenth grade, which means that I finally have daily access to a girl who understands me. We ride the bus together. We are locker partners. We are on the same soccer team. We share shoes and clothes and ice cream cones and coffee and look absolutely nothing alike, which means that I can basically be best friends with my little sister and there are no social consequences.

shoes and starsOn the first day, I am wearing leaf-green Chuck Taylors with gold foil stars sewn all over them and jeans paired with an old-fashioned thrift-store blouse. I’ve cut the sleeves off, tailored the bodice. The blouse has tiny fake-pearl buttons and a high lace collar and a crumbling cluster of dried rosebuds safety-pinned to the shoulder. It makes me look vaguely Victorian and also strangely frail.

Little Sister Yovanoff is similarly bedecked, resplendent in ragged cut-offs and tiny plastic barrettes. With her burgundy velvet blazer and her purple hair, she looks bold and statuesque. She looks much sturdier than I do.

Me and Dad I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to find pictures of our outfits, but sadly, it seems the best I can do is the close-up of my shoes (yes, those are soccer socks I’m wearing. What? I had a lot of them), and a shot of my second-favorite outfit from that era—also quite lacy. You’ll notice that my dad has the decency to ignore the state of my jeans. Which are actually his jeans. My dad is nice.

School is anticlimactic. I go to my classes, introduce Little Sister Yovanoff to Catherine and Elizabeth, use up my shiny new free hour by driving around with one of my sophomore-PE friends.

Things do not get interesting until US History, which is the last class of the day. I show up after the warning bell, only to find the room half-empty. Honestly, this should already tell me pretty much all I need to know, but because there’s some stuff I still haven’t figured out yet, it doesn’t.

Ponyboy is there, so I take the seat next to her and congratulate myself on having a class where I already know someone. We play Outsiders for a little, which mostly just means her asking me how prison was and me asking her if she had a good time at reform school. keep reading…