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5

Getting to Know You

Gary says you were a homeless person,” I heard, and turned around in the hallway on my way to our first class. Ryder Garfield was walking right behind me. When I left homeroom, I didn’t look back, so I didn’t know he was that close. I glanced at him, saw nothing warm and friendly in his face, and kept walking. He drew closer until his lips were practically touching my earlobe. “I guess that life-in-the-street stuff was a little bit of an exaggeration, huh?”

I stopped so quickly he almost walked into me.

“Whoa,” he said. “Can’t you signal?”

“Can’t you watch where you’re going?”

“Well?” he said, stepping up beside me now. “What’s the living-in-the-streets story?”

“Why should you care?”

“I can’t help it. I have a built-in fantasy detector and have to attack them whenever I hear or see them.”

I looked at him. He was so positive about me, so smug in his assumptions. “My mother and I were evicted from our home when my father deserted us. We couldn’t keep up the cost of a hotel and eventually ended up living in the streets and on the beach in Santa Monica. You can’t even begin to imagine how much I would rather you were right and it was all exaggerated. This is one time your built-in fantasy detector malfunctioned. Add it to your list of things wrong with yourself,” I added, and continued walking, but a little faster. This time, he didn’t catch up, but when we sat in the classroom, he looked at me instead of looking forward. He was staring at me so long that I finally said, “What?”

“You don’t look like someone who lived on the streets.”

“Oh, you would know? You really look at them?”

“Enough to know you don’t.”

“Well, I don’t live there now, and I haven’t for three years. I don’t have any visible scars from it, if that’s what you mean. The scars I carry are inside.”

He nodded.

“Nothing else nasty to say?”

“I’ll think of something,” he replied, and then he gave me a real smile. I felt the rage dissipate in my body and laughed, but I turned serious quickly when the bell rang. I wasn’t going to be caught not paying attention in any class today, and especially not because of him again.

As the class began, he looked somewhat more involved in the work as well and did take notes this time. When he was called on, he answered the question quickly. After the bell to end class rang, he didn’t jump up to rush out. He took his time, obviously waiting for me to get started, and then he joined me before anyone else could.

“I’d like to hear about all that,” he said.

“Hear about all what?”

“Your life in the streets. What else? Certainly not chemistry.”

“Why is it so important to you?”

“Something tells me it’s head and shoulders over the droll garbage most of the other girls in this place would spew if I lent an ear to it. You know, Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen. Lend me your ears.’ Only here it’s ‘I want to talk about myself and make myself sound so wonderful you’ll be grateful for five minutes of my attention.’ ”

That made me laugh. He was so right on about that. “That’s not quite Shakespeare,” I said.

“You get the drift. Well?”

“I don’t like talking about that time in my my life.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed with

me,” he said.

I stopped walking and turned on him sharply. “I’m not ashamed. Even though we were very poor and these people here are very rich, they were never and are not now any better than me. I’m just not happy about bringing back some of the ugliest memories of my life.”

He nodded. He didn’t say anything else for a moment, so I thought that was it. He was finished with me. He’d spin off and be gone. But he stood there, shrugged indifferently, and said, “Okay, when you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to listen.”