Sparks Read online

  It’s not like I hadn’t known it was a crush. I’d been through the whole internal struggle of realizing I liked girls years before. I’d even told my dad without any real drama. I hadn’t told Mom yet, but only because I was afraid she’d sign me up for workshops where they’d tell me I was a bad lesbian if I didn’t change my name to Willow and stop shaving my armpits.

  But I didn’t want to risk freaking Lisa out and

  making her not want me hanging around her anymore, so I’d never told her. I could live with her not loving me back, but not with her pushing me away. I needed her, at least as a friend.

  The teacher, Mrs. Malatesta, came into the room, carrying an armload of worksheets, a cup of coffee, and a stack of books.

  “Good morning,” she mumbled. “We have a lot to get done before spring break, so everybody sit down and shut up.”

  The sheer notion of getting anything done was insane. Everyone was already in spring break mode, mentally. I was lost in my own world, trying to get my mind off Lisa and onto something nasty, like popping zits, so that anyone who was reading my mind would get grossed out and stop.

  Mrs. Malatesta put down her armload of papers and picked up an attendance sheet. She mostly just looked for people and then made a mark next to their name, until she got to mine.

  “Debbie Woodlawn?” she said. “Debbie, are you here?”

  “Here,” I said.

  She looked up. “Oh, there you are, Debbie,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Yeah. Her or anyone else.

  I always tended to blend in with my surroundings, but that was just the way I wanted it right then. The fewer people there were paying attention to me, the fewer there were who might be reading my mind.

  Fifty minutes later I was back in the hallway, wondering where I should be standing, where I should be looking, and what I should be saying.

  Everyone had divided into their groups already. Cheerleaders were on one side of the hall. Punk rock kids were on another. There were a couple of emo kids near the bathroom, and the stoners were in a cluster by the drinking fountain.

  Which of the groups in the hall would I have been in if I hadn’t started being friends with Lisa back when I was eleven? What was I even like back when I was ten? I remembered being into horses and gossiping and Disney movies, but that seemed like it was a hundred years ago. Was that same person still even inside of me?

  And what did it matter? I couldn’t go back to acting like a ten-year-old.

  But I knew that I was going to have to stop being The Girl Who Hangs Out with Lisa and start being myself. Whoever the hell that was.

  The goth kids always looked about as depressed as I felt, so that was a possibility, but I didn’t think they’d let me hang out with them. It’s hard to get in with the goth crowd if you weren’t, like, born a goth. If I tried to hang out with them after years of being The Girl Who Hangs Out with Lisa Ashby, they’d probably call me a poseur or something.

  The cheerleaders on the other side of the hall probably wouldn’t let me near them, either. One thing I’ve got to give them credit for is that at least they have a formalized processed for joining their group—they have try-outs. The only other groups I could think of that have a process like that are the theater kids, who have auditions, and gangsters, who I always heard make you kill someone for their shoes or something. The wannabes (the kind of gangsters we have around suburban Des Moines, at least on the West Side) probably really just make you steal a pack of gum from the Quick Trip or something, which I could probably pull off, but there’s no way they’d be the group for me anyway.

  I was about to duck into my next class early, just to get the hell out of the hall, when Emma, the overweight girl from the bathroom in the Tangled Up in Blue shirt, came up to me.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said back.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you about Jesus,” she said. “I have something else that might help you out.”

  “I can’t afford drugs,” I said.

  She chuckled. “Not that, either. Another religion.”

  I started walking away, but she followed me.

  “She’s not just your friend, is she?” she asked.

  I stopped dead in my tracks and turned toward her.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, praying to any deity who might be listening that this wasn’t proof that people could read my mind after all.

  “Come on,” she said. “No one gets this broken up or stops going to ACTs because their best friend is dating an asshole.”

  I felt myself going a bit short of breath.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Hey, don’t worry,” she said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. My religion doesn’t have a problem with it.”

  I sighed. “Fine, I’ll bite,” I said. “What’s your religion?”

  “The Church of Blue,” she said. “Bluedaism. It’s the best religion ever.”

  “I’m not really in the market for a new religion,” I said as I started to walk away again. “My mom’s already tried them all.”

  “Not this one,” she said. “Trust me. For five bucks, I’ll tell you all about it and take you on a holy quest.”

  “You think I’m gonna give you five bucks to hear about a religion?”

  “All the best religions cost money,” she said. “People don’t take things they get for free seriously. But it’s totally tax deductible. Probably.”

  “I’ll pass,” I said.

  “Just keep it in mind. Active Bluish Teens do way cooler stuff than bowling. We got George Washington’s autograph last week.”

  I stared at her for a second. “You guys raise the dead?”

  She chuckled. “Not that George Washington. The old black guy named George Washington who lives out in Ankeny. It was part of a holy quest. I’ll bet they don’t do that in the FCA.”

  “I’ll think it over and let you know,” I said.

  And I walked along to my next class.

  I really wanted someone to hang out with that night, so I didn’t want to burn any bridges, but Emma struck me as a real freak. And it disturbed me, in a way, to hear her talking about me liking Lisa right out loud, like it wasn’t that big of a deal. Because it was. It was, like, the biggest deal ever.

  In my next class, I sat next to a hairy guy named Nate Spoelstra. The fact that he wasn’t attractive didn’t stop him from coming on to anything with breasts—including me.

  “Hey,” said Nate when I sat down.

  “Hey,” I mumbled.

  Nate scratched the back of his head for a second—he did a lot of scratching in any given day. A couple of stray hairs would fly off the back of his head each time, and sometimes they ended up on my desk. He shed enough hair in a day it’s a wonder any was left, but somehow it just kept coming back. I wouldn’t have thought this out loud at an ACTs event, but it seemed like Nate was proof we’re related to apes. He looked like he hadn’t quite evolved all the way.

  Mr. Lombardo, the teacher, wandered in looking like he’d just climbed out of a coffin—he always had the pale, clammy look of a guy who’s been dead for a day or two. He picked up the attendance sheet to take the roll, and one of the Outdoor Kids (the ones who always hang around by the window and run to the front door just to be outside between classes) raised her hand.

  “Can we have class outside today?” she asked, without waiting to be called on.

  “No,” said Mr. Lombardo.

  “Come on!” the girl pleaded. “We’re all suffocating in here! Right, guys?”

  “Eighty percent chance of thundershowers today,” said Mr. Lombardo. “And a chance of tornados. Last thing I need to do is bring the school’s insurance rates up.”

  It wasn’t going to start raining for several h
ours, but the girl should have known it was hopeless. You could just look at Mr. Lombardo’s skin and tell he didn’t like going outside much.

  The Outdoor Kids were a group I hadn’t thought about joining. But I didn’t feel like the sun gave me energy, like they always said it did for them. I think that only works for plants.

  I took better notes in Chemistry that day than ever before in my freaking life. I wrote down every damn thing Mr. Lombardo said, even the stuff about his dogs that was totally off topic. It gave me something to think about besides Lisa.

  Still, she kept creeping back into my brain—her smile, her hair, the way she never seemed unhappy for even a second. Every joke she’d ever told me.

  Every time I noticed Mr. Lombardo looking like a corpse, which was about every thirty seconds, I remembered all the stuff Lisa had said about him when she’d had him last semester.

  “He looks like he’s not even human,” she’d said. “Maybe some other teacher built him as a science project and forgot to add pigment to his skin!”

  Ever since she said that, I had a hard time looking at Mr. Lombardo without laughing. That might have been why I was failing his class.

  Halfway through class, Hairy Nate passed me a note.

  Doing anything for spring break? it said.

  I wrote maybe below it and passed it to him.

  Gonna party, then? he wrote back.

  I just shrugged, and he sent me another note.

  I get off work at the Burger Box at 7.

  Call me. 266-1727.

  I put the note in my pocket and gave him a “we’ll see” shrug.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d ever had a guy try to hook up with me (I’m not gorgeous or anything, but I’m pretty cute, if I do say so myself—cute face, golden-blond hair that shines no matter what I put in it, decent body), but this would have been the first time I ever even thought about saying “yes.” I was getting desperate. Anything sounded better than sitting at home, alone, while Lisa was out with Norman.

  I spent a minute trying to talk myself into liking Nate. I wasn’t totally sure if I was gay or bi or what yet, officially, so I supposed I could try dating a guy. Sure, he was hairy, but wasn’t it kind of mean of me to think he wasn’t worth hanging out with just because he seemed kind of gross? You can’t control how fast your hair grows, right?

  But then I decided that it wasn’t the hair so much as the grease that made him gross. And the fact that, right after Mr. Lombardo stopped talking and let us just work on our chemical-reaction worksheets, Nate started picking his nose and talking about wrestling with the guy who sat on the other side of him. And then they started talking about getting “fucked up.”

  I could picture a night with Hairy Nate—I would sit around trying to keep him from doing anything stupid while he drank, smoked, shouted at a wrestling match on TV, and shed all over the couch until it was time for us to do it.

  And for just a moment, I went back to thinking

  of Lisa as an angel who had kept me on the straight and narrow path and saved me from guys who reminded me of skinny gorillas. But I knew I couldn’t let myself think of Lisa like that. Not anymore. I was going to have to start saving myself.

  Even if, by some miracle, she dumped Norman and went back to hanging out with me, I couldn’t go on like this. Living in her perfect version of the world was probably giving me so many ulcers that my stomach would look like a slimy hunk of Swiss cheese by the time I was thirty.

  I had spent five years pretending to be her girlfriend, never stopping to think that it was all going to have to come to an end eventually. But now it had. Things would never be the way they were again. All I could do was try to take control of the way things had changed.

  The whole idea of, like, declaring myself to Lisa, or whatever you call it, scared the heck out of me, but the only other option if I wanted to be with her was to murder Norman Hastings, then be there to comfort her while the cops looked for his head.

  It may not have been practical, but at least it was an idea that never would have occurred to anyone on Full House. And it gave me something relatively safe to think of through the next couple of periods, until it was time for lunch.

  Which would be at my usual table. With Lisa.

  Three

  After obsessing over her all morning, it was weird

  seeing Lisa sitting there at the table, smiling that super-cute smile of hers, oblivious to the fact that she’d been haunting me all day.

  But lunch was clearly not the best time to tell her how I felt. There were too many other people around. Even if she secretly did love me back, she’d probably have to act like she didn’t in case anyone who might tell her parents overheard. My best chance would be getting her alone later.

  I was just going to have to get through lunch, and maybe drop some hints to lay the groundwork for later.

  “Hi, Debbie,” Lisa said cheerfully as I sat down. I’d felt like I was sloshing through a dirty gutter all morning, and she seemed like she’d been floating on a cloud.

  “Hey,” I said, as I tried to smile and look cute.

  “Get through Chemistry okay?” she asked. She always remembered when I had trouble in a class. She was thoughtful like that.

  “Not really,” I said. “I think I’m failing.”

  “Oh no,” said Lisa. “Don’t worry. Look at the window. See those clouds?”

  Out the window, I could see the clouds getting darker and closer, like they were peering through the window at us. It almost looked like nighttime. Maybe I’d get lucky and a tornado would blow me to Oz.

  “So it’s gonna rain tonight,” I said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Maybe whoever built Mr. Lombardo made him water soluble,” she said. “As soon as he gets wet, he’ll just, like, wash away.”

  She laughed, and I laughed, too. Even when her jokes weren’t that funny, her laugh was so infectious that I always cracked up whenever she did.

  This was part of why I loved her. If you had a problem, she’d make you feel better. She’d bend over backward to do it, if she had to. She could make a joke out of anything.

  And then she reached out and squeezed my hand. Just, like, to reassure me, not out of affection, but I smiled. It was one of those stupid, teasing moments that gave me hope that maybe she had a secret crush on me, too. I lived for those moments. But they really just made it all worse in the long run.

  The more she hung out with Norman, the less she’d be holding my hand or touching me. Thinking of that made it suddenly seem difficult to breathe, and trying to smile and look cute got harder and harder.

  Angela came in and sat down beside Lisa and across from me.

  “Hey guys,” she said. “How’s Norman?”

  Lisa let go of my hand to hold it to her chest. “It’s like a dream,” she said.

  Angela grinned. “I’ve had those kind of dreams.”

  “Me too,” said Lisa. “Only now it’s coming true!”

  Angela grinned at me sneakily, like she was expecting me to share in the joke that Lisa hadn’t even realized she was talking about sex dreams, but I just felt worse. I pulled my lunch out of my backpack and fished out my sandwich.

  “What are you red hot lovers doing tonight?” Angela asked.

  “We were going to go miniature golfing and then hit a late movie,” said Lisa. “But since it’s going to rain, we’ll probably just go to an earlier movie and a late one.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Who cares?”

  Angela snickered. “Not planning to watch them, huh?”

  And Lisa clapped her hands like a five-year-old at a birthday party.

  “So,” asked Angela, “has he … you know?”

  “Kissed me?” Lisa grinned.

  Angela nodded.

>   Lisa smiled so big she’d probably be sore in the morning. “Like, a million times!”

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …

  “Gone any further?” asked Angela.

  Lisa just smiled. “We’ve sort of taken a lead off first, but I haven’t let him go to second yet.”

  Yet.

  My innards did another quarter turn inside of me.

  “Well, over the course of two movies, I imagine you’ll get around to something,” said Angela.

  “I’m not sure two movies will be enough,” Lisa

  giggled.

  I guess I’d wanted to believe that Lisa was actually blinded into thinking that normal people didn’t really have premarital sex by all those Full House episodes where Becky comes over to see Uncle Jesse in the morning—she’s never still there from the night before until after the wedding episode. Actually, if you read between the lines, I think the writers made it pretty clear that they were doing it way earlier than that, but they had to keep it on the down-low to fool the kids. I had thought—hoped—they’d fooled Lisa, too.

  What was she thinking, acting like this?

  The teenagers on the shows she watched never went to second. Sometimes they had friends who did, but they always ended up regretting it. Sometimes they even got pregnant. Or AIDS, if it was one of those “very special episodes.”

  My chest started tightening and my vision got blurry. I felt like every cloud outside had rolled in through the window and just, like, enveloped me. Pinned me down. It was the kind of feeling I always get right before a panic attack.

  I started thinking “I love you” right out loud, loud enough that Lisa should have been able to read my thoughts even if she wasn’t trying to. Loud enough that the whole school should have turned their heads and looked over to see what the ruckus was all about.

  But they didn’t notice, and neither did she.

  Then, of course, things got worse.

  “Anyway,” Lisa said to me, “now that I’ve found true love, we need to find someone for you! We can double date!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I totally need a boyfriend.”

  “I can see if Norman has any single friends,” she said, like Norman would have any friends that I would even like.