11
Hallway Encounters
A BY NO MEANS COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF OBSERVED BEHAVIOR IN AN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL HALLWAY:
• Bullies shoving smaller, nerdier prey against their lockers as they pass; worse still, actually placing them inside their own lockers.
• Couples that make out on the staircase. On the literal staircase. Like, spread horizontally across the stairs.
• Army cargo shorts–guy seen casually picking his nose and wiping it behind a combination lock.
• Stressed-out kids with rolling backpacks to carry all their books with them at all times who will either end up rich and successful or as supervillains. No in-betweens.
Norris still spent a fair amount of his free time at Anderson High walking around. In a past life, he might have been some vicar walking around his parish all day, nodding to passersby and doling out good will. Or, in the case of this lifetime, complete indifference. It was strange how pleasant of a ritual it had become.
He looked forward to these strolls whenever the day started to drag, and liked hearing the echoes of chatter and lectures happening behind closed doors, or peering into the open-doored classroom and occasionally spotting a familiar face, or row of heads diligently taking notes. It made him feel both apart from and of this gigantic new ecosystem he’d been thrown into.
Today, a few days after skating with Liam, Norris had an ulterior motive for his walk—he was hoping to bump into Aarti. Since the party Norris had yet to make any substantial move with her. Maddie’s instructions were to “play it cool, Canada,” which to Norris meant killing as much time as possible to avoid thinking about the cool, interesting girl he really stupidly wanted to text or call or email or telegram. Walking was the only thing that seemed to work.
But this morning, he didn’t find Aarti. He found his chemistry teacher instead.
Mr. Goade was seated against a locker, inhaling the wettest, cheesiest cheeseburger Norris had ever seen in his life, a brown to-go fast-food bag at his side. Norris was beginning to think that the man had stacks of unhealthy snacks placed around the entire campus.
“Goddammit,” Goade said, wiping his mouth with a fistful of brown napkins when he noticed Norris approaching him with a grin and both hands stuck into his pockets.
“Hi, Mr. Goade,” Norris all but sang.
“Is this a Canadian thing?” Goade sighed, pulling himself up from the floor with his free hand. “Stalking the premises constantly like a nut?”
Norris ignored the question in favor of nodding to Goade’s meal, wet and sticky with orange cheese and meat molasses. “What on earth are you eating?”
“Chicken, bacon, both pig and turkey, and sausage patty in the middle,” Goade said, almost proudly.
“Does it taste like you’re running around a farm and biting a bunch of different animals in a row?”
“I can’t believe I felt bad for you on your first day.” Goade scoffed, locking eyes with Norris and defiantly swallowing the last chunk in an impressive bite. “They should build a wall to keep you northerners out.”
Norris pretended to gag at the sight.
“Don’t you have an office?” he asked. “Four walls that would safely contain . . . this beautiful sight?”
“No, Kaplan. I do not. The teachers of this fine, hyperfunded institution share a bull pen. And my lovely wife has very publicly made my coworkers aware of the very strict, plant-based diet plan she currently has me on. Allegedly for my own good.”
“You guys share a bullpen?” Norris snorted. “Like, journalists with hats and notepads in old movies?”
“You would know that if you ever visited my office hours.”
“Don’t need ’em.” Norris shrugged. Goade’s eyebrows seemed to concede that point to Norris. Two quizzes into the semester and Norris was officially a solid A-minus chemistry student. Two for two.
“Look, I carpool to work with the wife and, bless her, but she has the nose of a hound, so it’s either deserted hallways or bathrooms, and that’s just too sad,” Goade said, crumpling the napkins, wrapper, and brown bag into a ball before discarding it into the nearest garbage can.
“This is plenty sad, dude.”
“Let me have my delusions, Kaplan.” Goade sighed as he walked away. “You need them, the older you get. You’ll see.”
“They have a salad menu too, y’know!” Norris shouted at his back.
Goade stopped in his tracks, glanced to both ends of the hallway, and slipped a quick, crude gesture to Norris before resuming his walk. Norris liked to believe himself unflappable, but something about his chemistry teacher flipping him off in a deserted hallway thoroughly tickled him. He laughed to himself as he continued his stroll. Goade had a bad reputation among the students—detached, moody, a deceptively hard grader and, now, diet cheater—but in a very short time he had cemented himself as Norris’s favorite new teacher.
Norris was about to return to his locker in time to gather his books for American history when Aarti appeared out of nowhere and sidled up to him without missing a beat in the increasing deluge of bodies that filled the hallways once the bell rang.
“How did you know how to find me?” Norris asked, genuinely curious.
She smiled.
“I don’t want to alarm you, but you might be a tad more predictable than you’d like to think.”
“That is the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me,” Norris said over the midday chatter as they walked in tandem in a sea of backpacks and elbows. He grabbed the math book she was carrying, though probably a beat too slow to qualify as naturally chivalrous. Effortfully chivalrous, maybe? Anderson High’s go-to mathematics oeuvre was a freaking backbreaker, containing all the material for Geometry, Algebra I, and Algebra II. The all-in-one tome was one of the school’s cost-cutting measures.
“Thanks,” she said. “I cannot wait to burn this thing when I graduate.”
“I might throw mine up at the sky like a graduation cap,” Norris mused. “Take out a small plane.”
“So there’s a movie I want to see,” Aarti said. “It’s at the Violet Crown. Opens this Friday.”
Norris tried very hard to push down the flicker of joy that danced in his belly. Was Aarti Puri asking him out on a date?
“Sounds cool,” he said as casually as he could manage. Maddie would advise him to play hard to get at this stage. “But I have a shift at the Bone Yard on Friday.”
“Oh, come on,” she wheedled. Norris had a feeling Aarti was used to getting her way. “The movie’s not until eight. I’ll pick you up and leave your virtue unsullied by the end of the night.”
“I mean, feel free to touch it a little bit, if you want,” Norris coughed in the very worst attempt at flirting that had ever come out of his mouth.
Aarti, mercifully, laughed it off. “I’ll consider gently massaging your virtue. How’s that?”
“Right,” a voice said out of nowhere. “Perfectly normal conversation happening here.”
Maddie was staring at the both of them with a raised eyebrow, looking like she really wished she had just kept walking. She was in full orange-and-black cheerleader regalia and had a sports bag under her arm. Her hair was up and particularly shiny, cascading in meticulous curls from the center of her head. Norris had caught a glimpse of the other uniformed cheerleaders around school all morning, which meant they probably had an exhibition performance that afternoon.
“How long have you been standing here?” he asked with a frown.
“Gently massaging your virtue,” Maddie answered flatly. “Quick question: Can you switch your Saturday shift with Julio’s Sunday?”
“Sorry, hanging out with my mom Sunday,” Norris said with a quick glance to the single xeroxed sheet scotch-taped to his locker door.
He did Judith’s PowerPoints for her in the morning, and in the afternoon, they did groceries together, getting anything Norris wanted as compensation for his advanced IT skills of resizing arrows and searching online for the photos her lectures required.
“But,” he teased, “if Julio can spot my Wednesday afternoon shift, we might be able to work something out.”
He’d been putting off an English paper for two weeks now and would definitely need a full day to bang it out.
“No, that won’t work. . . . He’s going out of town.” Maddie sighed. “Okay, wait! How about . . .”
With the reflexes of a ninja, she snatched a dangling sheet from Norris’s binder and scooted past him to grab a stray pencil from the top shelf of his locker before beginning to scribble furiously on the back.
“My education!” Norris gasped.
“Shh.” Maddie tut-tutted. “Okay, if you can take my shift tomorrow, five to nine, I’ll take Tuesday, Julio can switch with Maggie, the new girl, and we’ll push her orientation to Sunday, which covers you. . . .”
Her finger moved around as she spoke, like a gifted detective solving a crime scene. She was a very specific sort of savant when it came to juggling the personalities and schedules of the Bone Yard employees. And to be fair, three employees never showed up for the same shift when Maddie did the scheduling whereas the same definitely could not be said of her father.
“Yes!” Maddie exclaimed, showing him the sheet of neat little blocks in a loosely drawn grid. “Okay, that works!”
“That was impressive,” Aarti commented. Norris had almost forgotten she was there.
“Oh, right. Sorry about that!” Norris cleared his throat and straightened his back with a note of formality. “You guys know each other, right?”
The two girls shared a bemused look at the introduction before Maddie laughed out loud. Aarti contented herself with a smirk.
“What?!”
“We’ve been in the same school since the fourth grade, Canada.”
“Maddie and I have bio together, dude,” Aarti added, with her signature fake smile. “We’re the best of besties.”
“Well, pardon me for being a well-bred gentleman.”
Maddie rolled her eyes and turned away, something she did whenever she had no time for what qualified as “Norris nonsense” during their shifts together.
“How did you do on the bio test?”
“I skipped it.” Aarti cringed in response. “Mrs. Marek rescheduled it for me. Is it going to be brutal?”
“Not that bad, actually. It’s literally all chapter seven stuff. Don’t even touch chapter eight.”
“Okay, good to know. Thanks!” Aarti smiled. Maddie smiled back and after an extended beat gave Norris a nod of acknowledgement.
Before Norris could say anything, she was already on her way, pom-pom strings dangling from her sports bag.
“She’s got spirit, yes, she does,” Aarti sang.
“What does that mean?”
“That I should definitely study chapter eight,” Aarti added wryly, still watching Maddie go.
Norris frowned.
“What? No,” he said. “She wouldn’t do that.”
She looked at him for a moment.
“If you say so.”
“No, really,” Norris insisted, feeling a sudden need to defend his friend. “She wouldn’t. Extracurricular gymnastics aside, she’s actually one of the few people in this entire school that doesn’t make me want to set my hair on fire.”
“High praise.” Aarti smiled. “Should I be jealous?”
Hardly. Although . . .
“Would you be jealous?” Norris continued, closing his locker. She seemed unimpressed at the prospect.
“Nah, I don’t really do jealous.” Aarti shrugged. “It doesn’t look good on me.”
Norris scoured his brain and there simply was no scenario under which bringing up Ian was a good idea in that moment, so he didn’t.
“Right,” he said instead, realizing that the hallway’s foot traffic had drastically decreased and that most students had found their way to class already. “I have to go.”
“All right,” Aarti added. “It’s a date.”
Norris nodded, trying for casual, but in his head, he couldn’t stop repeating those three beautiful words.
It’s a date.