Tell Me Three Things Read Free Page A

elegant grunt, one with remarkable subtext:
You and your gold-digger dad should get the hell out of my house.
    He’s not wrong. I mean, my dad’s not interested in his mom’s money. But we
should
leave. We should get on a plane this afternoon and move back to Chicago, even though that’s an impossibility. Our house is sold. The bedroom I slept in for the entirety of my life now cradles a seven-year-old and her extensive American Girl doll collection. It’s lost, along with everything else I recognize.
    —
    As for today’s lunch, I considered taking my sad PB&J to the library, a plan that was foiled by a very stern NO EATING sign. Too bad, because the library here is amazing, so far the only thing I would admit is an improvement over FDR. (At FDR, we didn’t really have a library. We had a book closet, which was mostly used as a place to make out. Then again, FDR was, you know, public school. This place costs a bajillion dollars a year, a bill footed for me by Dad’s new wife.) The school brochure said the library was donated by some studio bigwig with a recognizable last name—and the chairs are all fancy, the sort of thing you’d see in one of those high-end design magazines Dad’s new wife keeps strategically placed around the house. “Design porn,” she calls them, with that nervous laugh that makes it clear that she only talks to me because she has to.
    I refuse to eat in the restroom, because that’s what pathetic kids do in books and movies, and also because it’s gross. The burnouts have colonized the back lawn, and anyway, I don’t want to sacrifice my lungs at the altar of fake friendship. There’s that weird Koffee Kart thing, which would normally be right up my alley, despite its stupid name: Why “Ks”? Why? But no matter how fast I get there after calculus, the two big comfy chairs are always taken. In one is the weird guy who wears the same vintage Batman T-shirt and black skinny jeans every day and reads books even fatter than the ones I tend to like. (Is he actually reading? Or are the books props? Come on, who reads Sartre for fun?) The other is taken by a revolving group of too-loud giggling girls who flirt with the Batman, whose real name is Ethan, which I know only because we have homeroom and English together. (On that first day, I learned he spent the summer volunteering at a music camp for autistic kids. He did not, in any way, operate a blender. Plus side: he did not give me one of those pitying looks I got from the rest of the class when I told them about my super-cool smoothie gig, but then again, that’s because he couldn’t be bothered to look at me at all.)
    Despite the girls’ best efforts, the Batman doesn’t seem interested in them. He does the bare minimum—a half-hug, no-eye-contact brush-off—and he seems to shrink after each one, the effort costing him in some invisible way. (Apparently, there’s a lot of hugging and double kisses at this school, one on each cheek, as if we are Parisian and twenty-two and not American and sixteen and still awkward in every way that matters.) Can’t figure out why they keep coming back to him, each time in that bubble of hilarity, as if being in high school
is so much fun!
Seriously, does it need to be repeated? For the vast majority of us,
high school is not fun; high school is the opposite of fun.
    I wonder what it’s like to talk in superlatives like these girls do:
Ethan, you are just the funniest! For reals. Like, the funniest!
    “You need some fresh air. Come walk with us, Eth,” a blond girl says, and ruffles his hair, like he is a small, disobedient child. Sixteen-year-old flirting looks the same in Los Angeles and Chicago, though I would argue that the girls here are even louder, as if they think there’s a direct correlation between volume and male attention.
    “Nah, not today,” the Batman says, polite but cold. He has dark hair and blue eyes. Cute if you’re into that
I don’t give a crap
look. I get why that