40 for McHenry?
I laugh along but inside I know that it’s true: Being in love is totally punk rock. (quiet kisses are so hardcore)
The girl who sat in front of him at ten on Tuesdays and Thursdays had black hair like his but long and partially pulled back. She wore her nails short with clear polish, he could see them when she opened her bag and took out her cloth pencil case, then again when she got bored towards the end of the period and fiddled with her pen at her side. She was one of those girls who took notes in different colors and McHenry wondered which her favorite was.
He’d never lean forward into her space, but he could smell her shampoo and perfume sometimes and thought he could identity the brand name of the latter and at least knew for sure that she liked fresh notes and white flowers, nothing too powdery.
She got a new bag (bucket, patent, with a hidden zip on the inside) shortly after the start of the semester and she had thanked the girl next to her for the compliment and explained that it was a birthday present from her parents and he felt an old, almost foreign stab of jealousy. Uncalled for, really. He had put his face down and concentrated on the page before him and answered every question the professor posed and left that day feeling confident that he’d get an A even though the class was nowhere near his major.
He showed up the next time with his hair freshly cut and contacts in and when he greeted her as he passed she commented on it and he felt like he had won.
Not against her, he wasn’t competing against her, he’d never compete against her. He answered as many questions as he could again, and made a point to amplify her voice.
“Building off of what she said…”
She wore an orange tie in her hair that day, but he knew that they came in rainbow packs and how easily they could snap, especially those thin cheap ones and especially if she was in the habit of putting her hair up frequently.
She had turned back and smiled at him in thanks the second time he had done it and sounded earnest about it and he had tried to keep his expression politely distant and professional.
The next class she still had the orange tie and he made a little mental note under “possibly, not sure.”
“You’re not a humanities major, are you?”
That was pretty much the first real thing she had said to him and it embarrassed him.
“No,” he admitted and wondered if she had seen his grade on their first paper and known how much work he had put in for that B+. “Pre-med.” He expected the same shallow enthusiasm most people gave him in response.
“Really?” She asked, genuine. “What do you want to specialize in? Is it true that the new MCATs are harder than the old ones?”
He found out later that she had looked into pediatrics briefly before deciding her heart was elsewhere. (“Social work or education,” she had told him while explaining that she was currently an education major but was trying to keep her options open for after graduation. That was a couple weeks later, when the air outside was getting crisp and she had started showing up with gloves and a coat.)
It was a strange feeling, to almost recognize yourself in someone. When he sat behind her it wasn’t like looking into a mirror, not at all, but something like seeing a drawing of who he could have been. He could have laughed like that, he could have leaned across to the girl one row over and showed family pictures like that. He could almost—almost—have been in her place and effortlessly turned heads by how fluidly she reached up and pulled her gloves off, exposing her wrists like soft cream. He imagined what he would look like if he were to mimic her and he almost snorted with laughter and had to busy himself pretending to find the right page in his book.
“So why social work?” McHenry asked her one day before class, leaning forward, just a little, at his desk.
“I want to help children,” she said, as he expected, but he didn’t expect the brief admission afterwards that she had never wanted for anything as a child herself. It felt like a much more honest answer than anything else she could have told him.
He didn’t usually talk to people he didn’t already know, but he felt like he could talk to her for days.
They would talk, just a couple sentences back and forth, before the professor began the lesson, and class started being the highlight of his Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that he’d be at the gym in the morning and thinking about what clever remark he could make. Not about Shakespeare but about that spending bruise across his side and look at me, look at me, don’t you want me because I’m sure it’s not ever confusing for you, you can feel admiration without second-guessing it as jealousy and I want you to crave me like I crave you. I bet you are just working your way down the cardboard backing and already snapped the reds and I wish I was bold enough to ask you out without worrying that it would go somewhere or that, more precisely, it wouldn’t.
That it almost would, like how a B+ is almost an A.
McHenry would trail off into these thoughts and be lost in them by the time practice was over and he was stalling for time, grateful but annoyed that there were a couple other people who preferred the private shower.
In their last class someone had mentioned derisively how Romeo and Juliet were thirteen and sixteen and gotten a round of laughter.
He had laughed but noticed the thin band of yellow around her ponytail.
He made a mental note two days later as he stood, staring blankly at the wall outside the shower stall, that he was right about that one and that the inside of her bag was sky blue.
