You can’t believe what he said.
One word. Six letters like daggers, shouted for all the school to hear.
So why does it feel like they’re aimed at you?
“How’d you do?” Nour asks.
Her locker is right above yours, which is annoying, because she’s like a foot shorter than you, so she has to go on her tippy-toes while you have to crouch, and it didn’t occur to either of you to switchearly on, and at this point hers is all decorated with magnets and stickers and you’re both too used to things to change now.
Nour’s wearing a keffiyeh over her vintageStar TrekT-shirt, her black hair pulled into a ponytail. You thought she might be Iranian, like you, when you heard her name, but it turns out Nour means “light” in Arabic, too, and she’s Palestinian and Jordanian, not Iranian. Plus she was born here—her parents, too.
“We still caucus together, though,” she had told you blithely as you talked about your backgrounds. “All from the ‘terrorist-y’ part of the world.”
“Fair,” you had answered, trying to pull off blithe yourself, but you weren’t sure if you had or not.
You’ve gotten better since, so now you blithely answer, “At least a B-plus. You?”
“I think I messed up a couple, but I know I got the extra credit at the end right.”
You nod. Thank God they still do extra credit in high school. You grab your orchestra folder out of your locker and stuff it into your backpack. You don’t have orchestra until sixth hour, but it’s on the other side of the building from the computer lab, where you have fifth hour computer science, so you don’t have time to visit your locker. At least you don’t have to lug your cello around—you keep yours at home and use one of the school’s for class, even though it doesn’t sound as good.
Nour stands on her toes to look in the mirror hung inside her locker door and apply some sort of tinted thing to her lips with the pad of her middle finger. You smell a hint of cherries before she screws the lid back on the stuff and drops it into her backpack. “Ready?”
You shrug your backpack to settle it and nod.
Nour’s got bio next hour, but her class is close to yours, so you walk together through the press of bodies on all sides, freshmen weaving in and around tall seniors who have time to stand in place talking to one another because their lockers are actually close to their classes.
You hear it again—those six letters—but it’s someone talking about Dayton this time. Nour must see those hackles of yours.
“That was awful, huh?” she asks. “The assembly.”
“Yeah.” You don’t know what else to say.
Dayton never did show up to US history. Maybe he got sent home. Maybe he got suspended. Maybe he got expelled.
Whatever happens, he deserved it. Unless it was, like, a firing squad, but you don’t think they do that in high school, not even in Missouri.
“I mean, I knew we had bigots here, but to just shout it like that, with all the teachers there…” She shakes her head. “What a butthead.”
“Yeah,” you say again, because there’s something churning in your chest, and you can’t quite decide what it is. But your heart feels a lot louder in your rib cage, as though its syncopated beats should be making your shirt ripple like the skin of a timpani when it’s been struck.Bumb. Bumb. Bumb.
And then something hits you from behind, and you stumble, and for a second you wonder if getting beaten up is a thing that really happens to people in high school. You thought it was a myth. But then you realize it’s another freshman, their backpack way too full and probably giving them scoliosis or something, barreling down the hall like an awkward Ninja Turtle trying to make it to the far end of the A Hall before the bell.
Nour catches you before you actually fall.
“Thanks.”
She pats your back and looks after the retreating turtle. “Sure. See you?”
“Yeah. See you.”
Nour keeps going, and you turn left at the cross hall for your computer lab, TECH 4, and though you’ve seen TECHs 1, 2, 5, and 6, you’ve never actually seen TECH 3. You’re not entirely convinced it exists.
TECH 4 smells a little like burnt dust, like that first day when the heat comes on in the fall, and you wonder if maybe the computers need to be cleaned or something. The lab is in four rows, monitors and keyboards and mice (mouses?) on the blond desks, the towers themselves on the floor below at just the right height to bang that soft spot in your knee if you wheel your chair in at the wrong angle.
You take your seat at the far end of the second row, get signed in, log in to the portal to see if the grade from your history quiz is posted yet, but of course it’s not, Ms. Suchecki probably hasn’t even graded it yet.
There’s one notification, though, from your student email.
