“Well?” Ms. Goldberg waited, and the entire class hardened into stubborn silence.
Deep down, she must have been a very perverse person, because she grinned. “Isn’t that appropriate,” she drawled, “since J. Alfred spends the entire poem debating whether to profess his love, and chooses silence. Here is one question you will answer, or fail my class.” She turned to the board and wrote:
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
“This is J. Alfred’s question,” she said, “and it is yours. Your assignment is to decide what it means. I will give you a month to prepare a presentation of your findings to the class. You may work alone or with a partner.”
Well, that was fair. At least she wasn’t going to force me to find someone to pair up with. I listened to the squeal of desks dragged across the floor. To loud voices bouncing off white concrete walls as people sought and found partners. I opened my sketch pad and kept my head down, doodling a cityscape, though it was no city I had ever seen. The skyscrapers were slender and curved. They looked like a wind could knock them down.
“Darcy?”
That voice. Quiet. Deep. I knew before I lifted my eyes who owned it, but I couldn’t believe he was speaking to me.
“Will you be my partner?” asked Conn McCrea.
There was only one possible answer. “Yes.” I shut my sketchbook, but not before his gaze fell on my drawing. I could have sworn I saw a flash of recognition in his eyes. Then it was gone, and I doubted what I had seen, for how could he know a city I had invented only moments before?
Conn pulled up an abandoned chair and sat down next to me. He was tall, yes, but broader than I’d thought, not as lean as he’d seemed from afar. He looked like he trained for something.
It troubled me more than it should have. I instinctively touched the scar on my neck. His gaze flickered to it, and lingered.
Then his eyes met mine. They were a fitful color, the kind that changes according to mood or the light. Gray, blue, green. Like pieces of glass washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan, polished by waves almost as big as the sea’s. My pulse sped along the scar beneath my fingertips.
“Did you know the answer to Ms. Goldberg’s question?” he asked. “About Prince Hamlet?”
I went for nonchalance. “I suppose there could be several theories. What’s yours?”
He gave me an inviting smile. “I’d like to hear what you have to say.”
I played with my pencil. “J. Alfred’s decided to be unimportant. No one’s going to notice him.”
“Yes,” said Conn. “He is very different from you.”
The pencil spun out of my fingers and clattered to the floor. Conn picked it up and set it neatly on my desk. His words had sounded like a compliment. But his voice hadn’t.
The bell rang, and turned off any hint of friendliness in him. Now he looked at me clinically, as if he were wearing night-vision glasses and I had stopped being a person and had become just an interesting pattern of heat.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said shortly, and even though that was a promise of some kind, I felt dismissed.
He stood. I stayed in my seat, watching him go, and pulled the cardigan’s cuffs over my fingers. A little bit of color, and Conn had asked me to be his partner.
Could things really be so simple?
7
The next day, we learned that Raphael got the part of Hamlet. Taylor Allen was cast as his mother, Queen Gertrude, which led to a lot of “your mama” jokes from Jims.
At lunch, Raphael seesawed between excitement about the play’s fencing scenes and misery about the cafeteria food. Finally, he dropped his taco pizza to his plate. “Why am I even eating this? It tastes nasty.”
“Just like your mama,” said Jims.
We cracked up.
“Why is it funny that James insulted Raphael’s mother?”
We blinked, startled that A) someone was using Jims’s real name, and B) that someone was Conn. He stood expectantly, a lunch tray balanced on one hand.
“I doubt you’d understand,” Raphael told him.
A smug smile tugged at the corner of Conn’s mouth. “I know more than you think.”
I became acutely aware that this—this small lunch table, my three friends—was my territory. Conn had already invaded my mind. I felt nervous about having him so close to the rest of my life, too. And yet—
“May I sit with you?” he asked.
And yet, I wanted him close. Close enough to touch.
The thing about wanting, though, is that it had never gotten me very far.
“Why are you interested in slumming it, Conn?” I tore shreds off my lunch bag, examining them as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls and I was a very brainy scholar who had no time for gorgeous boys. “Haven’t you figured out that people like us will depreciate your social value?”
Lily gave me an odd look, the kind you might give to someone who was about to eat her winning lottery ticket after slathering it in chili sauce. “Sit down, Conn,” she said. “We won’t bite. Not even Darcy.”
Jims warned, “But we might pelt you with questions.”
Conn sat and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. Amusement colored his expression, but also a quiet arrogance he didn’t quite bother to hide. No question, he seemed to believe, could rattle him. “Pelt away.”
Jims pretended to straighten an invisible tie. “You see, we know so little about you, and we’d like to make certain you’re a decent sort of fellow. What brings you to our humble table?”
“Darcy’s my partner for a class project,” Conn said. Three pairs of curious eyes turned toward me. “I hoped that she’d be free to meet me after school today to work on it.”
“So ask her,” said Raphael, knowing full well the answer.
Conn looked at me, and for a moment I was in danger of drowning in his lake-colored eyes. But I knew my priorities. “I can’t.”
“Really?”
Conn’s tone was mild, yet I sensed that beneath it lay something frustrated. And pushy, which set some steel into my spine. “Yes, really,” I told him.
He narrowed his eyes. “Why not?”
Somehow, Conn’s questions were evolving into an interrogation. I didn’t like it. Judging by the looks on my friends’ faces, they didn’t like it either. “Because I’m busy.”