Page 9

At the end of lunch, I had decided to invite Jessica over, and she had called her mother to tell her she was going home with me. She was waiting at the exit to the parking lot.

“Did you speak to him yet?” she asked. “If anyone can get him into a conversation, I bet it’s you.”

“Speak to whom?”

“Ryder. What other boy could I have meant?” she cried, bouncing on her feet.

“There are about thirty other boys in the senior class, Jessica.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. She smiled. “I saw him say something to you in the hallway, but I couldn’t see if you said anything back.”

“What were you doing, following his every move?”

“Are you kidding? Like a moth to a candle,” she said unashamedly. I laughed, and we stepped out to the parking lot.

Both of us stopped instantly. Just ahead of us, Ryder was talking excitedly and obviously angrily at his sister. His arms were flailing about, his hands clenched into fists. His sister stood there with her head down and then looked up at him undaunted.

I thought she was a very pretty girl with diminutive facial features. She had hair the same shade as his, neatly styled with bangs. I remembered she was in the eighth grade and thought she was quite tall for her age. She was developing a very nice figure, too. She turned away from him, and then he pushed her toward his car, a classic-style Ford Mustang. We could see she said something nasty to him and then got in quickly.

“What was that all about?” Jessica muttered.

He got in and backed out of his space, almost hitting Yesenia Romero. Her father was the weatherman for one of the more popular Latino television stations. She screamed after him and waved her fist as he drove out, but he was still y

elling at his sister and jerking his right hand in the air between them and surely didn’t notice or hear Yesenia.

“What was that shouting all about?” Jessica asked Yesenia before I could. She had been closer to them than us before they got into his car.

She looked at us and calmed down. “That’s that new boy.”

“We know who he is,” Jessica said. “What was going on between him and his sister?”

“He was bawling her out for taking off her bra.”

“What?” I said, smiling.

“That’s what he was angry about. He said he was going to tell their mother. He called her some names, too. She must have gone into the bathroom between classes to do it, I guess. He said with the blouse she had on and no bra, she might as well have started the new school topless.”

Jessica and I looked at each other and laughed.

“Did you see him back out? He didn’t even notice he almost hit me,” Yesenia said, growing angry again. “I might just report him. You saw it!”

“Oh, give him a break,” Jessica told her. “It’s his first day. He’s just nervous.”

Yesenia raised her eyebrows. “As nervous as a rattlesnake and probably just as dangerous,” she said, and headed for her car.

“So what do you think? He’s some kind of prude, someone who has a sex hang-up or something?” Jessica asked me as we got into my car.

“Maybe he was just being her big brother,” I suggested.

“My brother wouldn’t waste his breath telling me what to do and not to do, especially when it came to what I wore, and he certainly wouldn’t bawl me out in a parking lot loud enough for others to hear.”

Her brother was a sophomore at Michigan State and on the football team.

“Of course he wouldn’t. You’re a lost cause,” I told her, and started out of the parking lot.

“Okay. Out with it. Everything has gotten more interesting now. So let’s hear what he said to you in the hallway.”

“He commented in two words on an answer I gave in English class.”