Everybody Knows Your Name Read Free

upperclassman guy came around the corner and almost kicked my head with his Vans. He was hiding from a campus security guy, who’d spotted him trying to take off early. The way he put it was, “I was gonna pack it up for the day.”
    You know how in movies they have those things called meet-cutes? Like when two people knock heads while going for the same frozen yogurt topping. This was more like a meet-sad. The guy asked if I minded if he stayed for a minute, until the narc was gone, and just as I’d suspected, anyone saying anything to me made tears come. They started rolling down my face just because of a nothing question.
    People who have seen me cry are confused sometimes because I don’t hiccup or sob. I just get a very wet face, very fast. I’m like one of those fountain walls at a restaurant.
    â€œWhoa,” the guy said, and there was the first moment between Scott and me.
    I know that girls throwing over their girlfriends for a guy is a thing, but in my defense, I had already thrown over my friends for myself. We have a sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Corinthos, who’s more worried about female students getting too into their boyfriends than she is about teaching how to write a coherent essay. She’s known to call conferences with girls she’s seen draped over their boyfriends, even ones who aren’t in her class, to tell them that their romance might seem incredibly important right now, but they can’t let it take over their lives or they’ll be sorry later. Which now that I’m thinking about it, is just another way of trying to convince them that they’re going to change.
    I had Mrs. Corinthos’s class. After she saw Scott jokingly press his lips and then his bare chest to her window to cheer me up on the fourth anniversary of my dad’s death, she called me in for an after-school conference.
    â€œSo was that your boyfriend who came to show you his nipple?” she asked.
    â€œYes,” I said.
    She sighed like she had to break really bad news to me. “Listen, I know he seems like your world right now, but I just want you to remember that you’ve got to keep up other parts of your life. And I’m not just talking about school. Keep up with your friends. Keep up with your hobbies. What do you like to do?”
    Being my English teacher, she of all people should have noticed that I liked writing. That instead of using the week’s vocab words in unrelated sentences, I’d been keeping a running plot of an imaginary TV show going for both of our entertainment. I called it Ships in the Night (because it was set in a small seaside town and was about people who constantly misunderstood each other’s needs). I had two families who hated each other. I had “covert” (vocab) make-out sessions and an unsolved murder. And I turned every vocab assignment into another episode.
    I’d gotten less interested in solving the murder than just updating Mrs. Corinthos on whatever issues the characters were working through. Like Warren Gettysburg, teenage son of the richest couple in town, who had become incredibly “capricious” (vocab) after he realized all the bad things his parents were up to. He couldn’t help but start to see his whole existence as this hollow thing.
    Anyway, what I said to Mrs. Corinthos was, “I like to make out.”
    I didn’t mean it as disrespectfully as it sounds. I wasn’t trying to throw her concern about me back in her face. I was just sticking up for myself.
    Because even though I was one of those girls always with her boyfriend, I didn’t believe that everything had to come down to me being young and dumb. I was a person who’d gotten seriously stressed out by being a part of a group. And when I met Scott, I was able to combine a friend and a guy I wanted to make out with into one person.
    One person!
    It was the perfect situation for someone like me.
    So what if making