1 Caplan
Sometime in March, the loudspeaker goes off in the middle of homeroom, calling Mina to the office, which is funny cause it’s Mina.
“You’re getting expelled,” I say.
It gets a good laugh, but not from her. Mina can keep her face straighter than anyone I know, especially if people are looking at her. She’ll tell me sometimes, after the fact, that she was trying not to laugh or cry or roll her eyes, and I’ll think she’s lying, because her face was so pale and still.
I remember just as she’s out of the room about the day they called her to the office because of her dad, and then I feel like a dick.
She still isn’t back when I’m on my way to the office myself to do the morning announcements and everything before first period. When I get there, she’s standing in front of the principal’s desk with her arms crossed, and the principal and the vice are looking up at her all tense. I’m worried for a second that something terrible did happen.
She turns and sees me. “Caplan should do it.”
I step up next to her.
“It is tradition,” the principal says, “for the—”
“But I can’t do it, and Caplan will be happy to.”
“Sure I will,” I say. “Do what?”
He starts again. “It is tradition for the valedictorian to speak at graduation.”
I turn to Mina, but she won’t look at me. She goes into some point then that I don’t really follow, about democracy and the voice of the people.
The principal sighs. “Are you suggesting we hold a vote for the graduation speaker?”
“I’m suggesting we already have. Caplan is class president. He should give the speech.”
I ran for class president on a dare from Quinn. This is sort of common knowledge, I think. My only real duties are the morning announcements and leading pep rallies.
“The speech is supposed to be an honor, and it is ideally”—he looks at both of us, Mina in her sweater vest, arms folded over her books, and me in my TDHS soccer windbreaker, probably with a pretty vacant expression. I realize I’m chewing gum and swallow it quickly—“of a certain tone.”
* * *
Mina waits for me while I do the announcements. Walking back to class, she says, “You did a little fist pump. When you announced the Chess Club’s tournament win.”
“So?”
“So, no one can see you. They can only hear you.” She’s got a small smile in her voice. “I didn’t know you were such fan of chess.”
I give her a shove. “I didn’t realize I was doing it,” I say.
She’s still smiling to herself.
“Stop paying attention to me,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, and she turns the corner to go to AP calc, which I am not in, without saying bye.
“I don’t want to make a speech at graduation, either,” I call to her.
“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” she calls back.
* * *
We bitched back and forth for weeks about the grad speech. I told her I’d deliver it if she wrote it, and she told me she had nothing to say about our high school or anyone in it. I told her that was a pretty mean and lofty thing to say, and she narrowed her eyes and asked me how many people I could say something nice about. I sat down and started to try to write one good thing about each person in our grade. I got tired after about fifty kids. I thought that was pretty impressive, but she just laughed at me. You cannot stand up at graduation, she said, and say that Jamie Garrity once held the side door open for you when you were running late. I told her I could write a really nice speech about her, or Quinn, or Hollis even, and that the whole idea of a graduation speech was dumb, and everyone should just each get to say one good thing about one person they really know and call it a day. She liked that. Like foot-in-the-door feelings, she said. When I didn’t get it, she went on, “Like, the door is closing, it’s your last chance, what do you still need to say?” Anyway, that’s how we came up with the idea. I think the principal was so tired of talking about it that he said yes.
* * *
The day I film my part of the video is the first day of June—shorts-and-sweatshirt weather, really blue sky. After I film it, I head back to the cafeteria and cut through to the outdoor tables. Everyone’s at the usual spot, and then there’s Mina off on a bench with her book.
“CAP-O!” Quinn calls out, and I raise my hand to him as I pass by on my way to Mina’s bench.
“You’re outside,” I say.
“It’s a nice day,” she says, not looking up from her book.
“Come on.” I take the book, which I know will really annoy her. Once when we were little, I threw her book into the sand at the lake, and she didn’t talk to me for days.
“Give it back.”
“You know I will. I don’t know how to read.”
“Ha ha.”
“Come eat with us.”
She crosses her arms, then crosses her legs.
“It won’t kill you. It’s lunchtime. It’s a perfect day. It lured you from the library. Come socialize.” I take a step back, toward my friends, with her book.
“CAP!” Quinn yells again. “Stop flirting.”
This makes Mina almost smile. Really, she just presses her lips together.
“How are you going to make friends next year at Yale if you don’t start now?” I ask.
For a second, she looks like she’s going to start yelling. Then she just says, “It’s a little late for me, with all of them, don’t you think?”
“Mina, is he bothering you? Want me to beat him up?” Quinn yells.
She laughs then and leans around my shoulder, probably checking for Hollis, who I’m pretty certain is sitting up on top of the table, holding court. I don’t know for sure. We were on a break right then, so I was in the habit of trying to never look at her directly, just at the edge of things, off to the side. This is sort of easy to do because of her hair, which is really long and reddish blond and always swinging around.
Mina sees her, or something else ominous, cause she shakes her head.
I hold out her book. When she reaches for it, I grab the strap of her bag and turn toward the others, so she has to walk along backward behind me.
2Mina
Caplan drags me places. When we were little, he’d physically pull me—out into the water at the dunes, into the snow when school was canceled, horror movies before we were seventeen, the middle of the gym at dances—and then eventually, he did it just by existing. Since Caplan went ahead and became the most insufferably physically ideal and athletically competent person on the planet, that meant I went to soccer games. I always sat with his mom and his little brother in the stands above the students’ section, with them all between us, this bright roaring sea—girls with his number on their cheek and boys chanting, O Caplan! my Captain! Drunk and happy and part of it all. I wasn’t part of it, but I was there watching it, and that’s something. He was like a magnet. Or the sun. It would have been more embarrassing if I were the only one, but everyone sort of orbited around him. The sun is bright and warm, and all that.
Sometimes I felt grateful, and others I didn’t. The first true warm day of senior spring, right around the time when we were all filming those godforsaken videos, he got me to eat lunch with his friends by taking my book. I knew he was doing it because Hollis was watching, and they were on one of their breaks. I didn’t like it when he used me like that. First of all, it never works because there is no universe in which I would be a romantic threat. It is a transparent joke, just like me sitting at a lunch table with people like Quinn Amick and Hollis Cunningham.
* * *
I tug my book back for something to do with my hands when we get there. No one’s really eating anymore. Hollis is sucking on the last of a Popsicle, and it’s turned her mouth red. I make a bet with myself that they’ll be back together by the end of the week. She has Quinn’s baseball cap on, the one he always wears with the tiny stitched tree. Ah, love and war. Caplan sits down and pulls one of the other boy’s half-eaten sandwiches toward him.
“Where were you?” someone asks.
“Filming my video,” he says, mouth full.
“I can’t believe Mina nabbed him,” says Quinn. “Who am I gonna get to say something nice about me now?”
I look at Caplan just as he looks at Hollis. She’s meeting his eyes with a blank expression, resting the Popsicle against her mouth. I should probably clarify: Hollis is the scariest person who has ever lived.
“I’ll do it for you,” she says, turning to Quinn.
“Aw, really, Holly?”
She bites off the last of the Popsicle and flicks the naked stick at him as one of her friends looks forlornly at her. Probably Hollis had already agreed to do her video.
“Why not? It doesn’t matter.” She looks at Caplan for a second, and then at me.
It’s always an unpleasant surprise when I spend so much time observing, peaceful and invisible, and then suddenly someone decides to look at me. It’s why actors never look directly into the camera, unless they’re being uncanny on purpose.
“Mina,” Hollis says, like she’s just noticed me standing there, “Friday’s my birthday.”
“Oh,” I say. “Happy birthday.”
“No,” she laughs. “You’re so funny. I mean I’m having a birthday party. My mom’s making me, just a thing at my house. Will you come?”
I stare at her. “Um. Yes, sure.”
“Well, don’t do me any favors,” she says.
“No, yes, I’d love to. Thank you.”
The bell rings, and Caplan stoops to pick the Popsicle stick up off the ground. He marches toward the trash cans with it, and Hollis sighs, stands, and follows him.
“They’re getting boring, aren’t they?” Quinn says to no one in particular as I let myself be carried back inside on their tide. Everyone vaguely agrees, and everyone still sort of watches them, standing by the bins, both looking very bright in the sun, the wind lifting their hair, red and gold, beautiful.
* * *
As we all condense, trying to shove through the cafeteria doors, I brush up next to one of Hollis’s friends—Becca, the one who wanted Hollis to do her grad video. She gives me an unusually overtly bitchy look, so I speed up. In the hallway, I bend down to retie my laces, and she bumps into me from behind. As she passes, she says, “Down, dog,” for her friends. I’ve fallen forward onto my hands and knees, so I take a second to make sure my face is empty, then I stand up and keep walking to physics.
For a while in middle school, they’d say, “Woof woof,” every time they passed me. I assumed it generally meant loser or ugly, but I didn’t know for sure so I tried not to care. I just started wearing headphones. This aligned pretty well with my then-recent commitment to not look at or speak to anyone unless absolutely necessary. They’d tortured me for years for always having my hand in the air, for being a show-off and a know-it-all, and then when I tried to go silent and invisible, they only hated me more. The hypocrisy would have been funny if I’d been in any state to laugh.
The first time I heard the woof, woof punch line was in eighth grade, a few months into my silence, in the girls’ bathroom. “Mina Stern follows Caplan Lewis around like a puppy.”
After the girls left, I came out of my stall at the same time as Lorraine Daniels. We used to have playdates as little kids, because our moms were friendly and she lived nearby. Then my dad died, and my mom got weird, and probably so did I. Plus, Lorraine moved. We still sat next to each other in classes sometimes, though. She wore thick red-framed glasses and got plenty of shit for it, but she never changed them or got contacts. I envied her conviction. She was quiet and smart, and I used to wonder if maybe we could be real friends, but she seemed to genuinely prefer being left alone. I guess I probably come off that way, too.
“They’re jealous,” she said, washing her hands, not looking at me, which I appreciated, because I was crying.
“What? They are. Strawberry Shortcake likes him. She was saying so before you came in.”
This dig didn’t really work because Hollis is like five nine.
“And honestly, he follows you around.”
I know time is supposed to heal all things, but that memory has actually sharpened with age, grown edges, because it’s the first time I can remember realizing the truth. Spending most of my time with Caplan didn’t make me brighter or better. It made me duller, by contrast. And beyond that, I was not the only one who thought it was a miracle that he wanted to be my friend.
The fact that we had sailed together pretty blissfully through all of childhood attached at the hip is entirely to his credit. He never, not even in the pits of middle school, stopped wanting to do elaborate handshakes with me in the hallway or tried to make me his secret friend. There was never that adolescent moment when he realized it would be easier for him, that his world would make more sense, if he left me behind or at least excluded me from some parts of his life. That just never happened. Caplan does whatever he wants and very rarely wonders what people will think. The spring of our sophomore year, he tore something and couldn’t run track. Out of boredom and curiosity and, let’s be honest, a true proclivity for being the center of attention, he auditioned for the play, which was Romeo and Juliet. And of course he was good at it, of course he lit the whole thing on fire and made it indisputably cool.
Copyright © 2024 by Daisy Garrison
