Chapter One
Nova
I’m used to the stares, especially at smaller schools like this. And I’m not stupid: I know I’m not getting attention because I’m stunningly pretty or because the resident vampire is about to fall in love with me; I’m just a break in the chain, something different to look at.
Humans are designed to pick up patterns. It’s probably how we’ve survived this long, figuring out that that slain woolly mammoth smelled funny or bad. We couldn’t identify the why, maybe, but it was enough that we didn’t eat it.
I’m a temporary pattern disruption, nothing more. And everyone is trying to figure out if I’m worth eating or if I should be left behind.
But I know their patterns, too. I mean, I’ve been here all of ten minutes, but a school is a school is a school is a school. I’ve been in too many to count since kindergarten, thanks to Mom’s “fixer-upper” accounting job that keeps us moving from place to place, business to business. Mom comes in and annihilates the problem with spreadsheets and projections before putting it all back together again, and then we move on to the next. Since then, the longest we stayed in one place was two years—for some big airline company—and that was when I was so little I hardly remember it.
Hardly.
I’m only a junior, and this is my sixth high school. The paperwork is a nightmare, but it turns out that if you have fairly decent grades and a mom who is a whiz at logistical red tape, it’s entirely possible to be a teenage vagabond who has sampled nearly two dozen different square school pizzas. (Spoiler alert: They taste exactly the same.)
That’s part of the pattern; the first thing other kids usually ask when they find out who I am and how long I’m here is Don’t you hate moving around so much?
I can answer honestly each time: Absolutely not.
It’s a dream, really. I can be whoever I want with zero consequences because the stakes are so low. Miscalculate and make a fool of myself for the six months I join the improv comedy club? No biggie. I’ll be forgotten by summer break. Spend an entire semester dressing in cottagecore attire just to find out that I look awful in ruffles? Literally doesn’t matter. I won’t even be here for school picture day. (The cottagecore was a disaster, by the way. Winter in Cincinnati was not the ideal location for an aesthetic that is mostly eyelet shirts and frilly skirts.)
Sure, it would be nice to be in one place long enough to make friends who don’t disappear a month or two after you move to the next place, the next school, the next group you wrap yourself in like a cocoon before springing forth like a chaotic social butterfly destined to always fly and never land. I’ve gotten used to it, though. I like it sometimes, not worrying so much about how compatible I am with the people around me because they’re going to change in a minute anyway. Fewer friends means fewer goodbyes. It’s a good thing. Really.
But back to patterns.
I know that everybody staring at me as I walk into the lunchroom—the most high-stakes entrance for a new kid—is sizing me up, but for once I’m not formulating who I want them to see, how I want them to react.
I don’t want them to react. I don’t want to be perceived at all.
Because this is going to be my shortest stint yet, just under two months, and I’m not going to try out any new personas. Partly because of he-who-shan’t-be-thought-of from my last school, near Seattle. Because I’ve been too busy pushing the pieces of my broken heart around in my chest to figure out which Nova Evans I want to try on next.
And also—most importantly—because I’m tired. I’ve never tried coasting at school before, just getting through, not making waves, simply … being me, whoever she is.
God, that sounds cheesy.
But college is knocking, and if I can’t figure out who I want to be, where I want to go, I’m going to continue to be a pattern breaker, but not the good kind.
Mom was a first-generation college student. My grandparents didn’t even finish high school, dropping out their senior year. Education has always been super big to my mom.
“I don’t care where you go,” she’s always said. “So long as you go, get in, get out with a degree that means something, something that will earn you a secure income.”
It’s the secure-income thing that is really tripping me up. Because so far, from what I can tell, my only strengths are chameleoning from school to school and knowing how to pack my boxes exactly the same way every time (if I bother unpacking them at all).
How am I supposed to know what will (a) make me happy and (b) make me money when I’m not even sure how to tell the difference between what I actually like to do and what I “tried on” or did just to fit in at all my previous schools?
I went to a career day last year where the principal made this speech over the feedback of the cheap microphone. It was hard to make out with the chatter and the mic acting up, but I heard her last line loud and clear: “You might not be able to turn your hobby into a career, but if you can figure out what part of your hobby calls to you most, what part of it makes you tick, you’ll have a clearer avenue for what you want to do with the rest of your life.”
I’m pulled out of the chaotic jumble of my brain when I feel too many lunchroom eyes burning into the back of my chosen first-day-of-new-school outfit: jeans, a T-shirt from a bookstore I visited once in Michigan, and my super-comfy-but-not-actually-great-for-sports sneakers left over from my athleisure phase three schools ago.
Even though I’ve resolved to simply exist for the next two months, I still have to find somewhere to sit. What I really need is a corner seat with no one around, but this cafeteria is too small. I can see mismatched chairs pulled up alongside the plastic ones attached to the long skinny tables. It’s one of those schools where the infrastructure is stretched to the max to accommodate everyone, which leaves me nowhere to hide and nowhere to sit without making a statement.
I end up on the far side of a table of football players—I hope the only statement I’m making is trying to not intrude. Their letterman jackets and general demeanor of being gods of the school are part of another predictable pattern, and these guys are no different. Loud and boisterous, even their lunch trays sound amplified when they thump them on the table. Nobody seems to be paying attention to the noise, though I catch a number of people looking toward them like they can’t help but watch the minutia of school celebrities. I swear I see a girl walk closer, like a comet drawn into a planet’s orbit, before she corrects her trajectory and walks away.
It’s refreshing, actually, that no matter where I go, jocks are king: hockey, basketball, football—it doesn’t matter. They’re all the same when they sit in groups in cafeterias and have adoring entourages around them at all times.
But at least I can count on them not speaking to me, thank god.
Maybe if I was in my “hot-girl summer” outfit from two schools ago they’d care, but I might as well be invisible for all the attention they pay me.
In a flash, I can see how the next two months will go: I’ll sit and read a book or scroll on my phone during lunch. In between classes, I’ll say hello to the one or two people who have deemed me interesting enough for small talk, but otherwise I’ll float through the day, do my assignments, and go home to … I haven’t figured out that part yet, but whatever it is, I’ll be doing it alone while Mom finishes up her twelve-hour workday.
I can see it so perfectly—and it’s a comfort, the whole coasting-while-figuring-out-a-hobby-and-life-direction thing—that I almost don’t notice when he sits beside me.
At first, I don’t see him at all. He’s handsome, sure, but lots of boys are handsome. He’s not a pattern disruptor. He’s stereotypically cute: curly darkish hair, brown eyes, tall, the kind of broad-shouldered that is probably half genetic, half a result of lifting weights.
I’m about to look away when he smiles at something one of the other boys says, and it makes me pause. There’s something about the way he smiles, a curve of the mouth that makes every cell inside me feel like it has been electrocuted at the same time.
I hardly know this feeling. It’s one I almost never have in a life that has been a rootless, patchwork existence of places and people I won’t ever see again.
It’s recognition.
And just like that, every plan, every persona, every me flies out the window and I am dragged—fingers clawing at dirt and hours and grains of sand in an hourglass—across space and time to an old oak tree, a broken wooden fence between his house and mine, and a pit of snails that we named Snailopolis.
Sam Jordan.
When I say I hardly remember the time when I was little, he is the hardly, the one big thing I recall from the time before Mom and I traveled from place to place, school to school.
Sam. Sammy. I used to call him Samuel to tease him. I’ve thought of him over the years. I even asked Mom about him a few months ago, when Seattle Boy broke my heart.
I asked if she remembered the boy from the fence beneath the oak tree one rare morning when we were eating breakfast together. Normally she eats while she works in whatever office space she has carved out for herself, but that morning we stood on opposite sides of our apartment bar eating our respective yogurts with plastic spoons.
“Who?” Mom asked. Her voice was weird when she said it, a little high, but she got like that sometimes.
“Sam,” I repeated. “My friend who moved when I was little. The one who lived next door. We would ride bikes and play in the dirt between our houses and stuff, remember?”
“Oh, yes.” Mom nodded. She wasn’t really paying attention to me, busy scraping the last bit of yogurt from the sides of the cup. “He moved before we did, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of our promise, promise. “He did.”
But if Mom remembered the cuts and the bruises, she didn’t mention it. I could tell she thought nothing of the conversation at all.
She had no way of knowing that I think of Sam every time I see a tree with an impressive canopy or a snail or someone with a bruised eye. How could she? I’ve forgotten so much, myself.
But to look at him now, sitting feet away from me, is to remember. Looking at him is memory itself, as if I’ve stepped back in time.
Even now, miles and years away, I can feel what it was like. How the moment he stumbled across me poking a stick at the rotted fence wood felt like, Oh, there you are.
I don’t have words for it, but it felt safe. It felt … monumental. Important.
And it’s all coming back to me, the emotions from my five-year-old self, and they feel out of place in this seventeen-year-old body.
Finally, like he’s drawn by my gaze, Sam looks up. Our eyes meet.
We’re inches apart, close enough that I can look straight into his face and superimpose the Sam I remember over the Sam in front of me. He’s not a little boy anymore, but the boy I remember is still there in the nose, a bit in the cheekbones, and definitely in the eyes.
For a second, something flickers across his face, and I wonder if he recognizes me. I wonder if he is on fire with memories, too.
The smile is slow and pulls at both corners of his mouth. I hold my breath, waiting to see what he remembers. Waiting for the promise, promise.
And then Sam Jordan, king of Snailopolis and someone I still, to this day, consider my closest childhood friend, opens his mouth, grins his football-god smile, and says, “Do you mind moving over a seat so my girlfriend can sit next to me?”
Chapter Two
Sam
The new girl has a weird look on her face, but she pushes her tray to the seat directly across from her and mumbles, “Sure.”
I don’t have time to think about it. Abigail plops beside me, occupying the vacated seat in an almost seamless choreography.
“Sammy.” Abigail smiles.
“Abby.” I smile back.
I still haven’t found a way to tell her I hate being called Sammy. It reminds me of childhood, of before. I don’t like to think about it, to be honest. It’s too late to bring up the nickname thing now. I’d look like a weirdo if I mentioned it after months of her writing it in social media captions and on notes she passes me in class.
God. It’s been months.
We’ve been together since the end of our junior year, when her boyfriend dumped her two days before prom. I felt bad about it and asked her last minute to be my date to prom because I didn’t have a date anyway and it seemed like the right thing to do after her jerkwad boyfriend from another school cheated on her.
So I don’t want to upset her by complaining about something as small as a pet name. Abigail is a constant, the person I can reliably look toward nearly every class, every football game and know she’ll be smiling in my direction. It’s easy being with Abigail. And I can’t stand the thought of being like the jerkwad who dumped her. I have this thing about hurting people: I don’t do it. No matter what.
Beside me, she twirls her ponytail around her hand. It’s so long, her hair. When she has it piled high in her cheerleader Friday ponytail, the ribbon almost always comes loose before halftime. I’ve spotted it from the field the last three games.
“So, homecoming,” Abigail says, opening her lunch box. It looks like a purse. Why should lunch boxes look like purses? It makes no sense. “What color do you like me best in?”
I blink. “Don’t you have to wear your uniform?”
Abigail laughs like this is the funniest thing she’s ever heard.
“Sam. This is for the homecoming dance. I know this is Texas, but we can wear something other than uniforms and jeans, at least occasionally. What color dress should I look for? Mom is taking me shopping after school.”
Copyright © 2024 by Ashley Schumacher
