“Leni.”
“You’re what, eleven?” Ms. Rhodes said, studying Leni.
“Thirteen,” Leni said, feeling her cheeks heat up. If only she would start developing boobs.
Ms. Rhodes nodded. “Perfect. Matthew is thirteen, too. Go take a seat over there.” She pointed to the boy with the blond hair. “Go on.”
Leni’s grip on her stupid Winnie the Pooh lunch box was so tight her fingers hurt. “H-hi,” she said to Axle as she passed his desk. He gave her a who cares? glance and went back to drawing something that looked like an alien with massive boobs on his Pee-Chee folder.
She slid bumpily into the seat beside the thirteen-year-old boy. “Hey,” she mumbled, glancing sideways.
He grinned, showing off a mouth full of crooked teeth. “Thank Christ,” he said, shoving the hair out of his face. “I thought I was going to have to sit with Axle for the rest of the year. I think the kid is going to end up in prison.”
Leni laughed in spite of herself.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
Leni never knew how to answer that question. It implied a permanence, a Before that had never existed for her. She’d never thought of any place as home. “My last school was near Seattle.”
“You must feel like you’ve fallen into Mordor.”
“You read Lord of the Rings?”
“I know. Hopelessly uncool. It’s Alaska, though. The winters are dark as shit and we don’t have TV. Unlike my dad, I can’t spend hours listening to old people yammering on the ham radio.”
Leni felt the start of an emotion so new she couldn’t categorize it. “I love Tolkien,” she said quietly. It felt oddly freeing to be honest with someone. Most of the kids at her last school had cared more about movies and music than books. “And Herbert.”
“Dune was amazing. ‘Fear is the mind-killer.’ It’s so true, man.”
“And Stranger in a Strange Land. That’s kinda how I feel here.”
“You should. Nothing is normal in the last frontier. There’s a town up north that has a dog for a mayor.”
“No way.”
“True. A malamute. They voted him in.” Matthew laid a hand to his chest. “You can’t make this crap up.”
“I saw a man sitting with a goose in his lap on the way here. He was talking to the bird, I think.”
“That’s Crazy Pete and Matilda. They’re married.”
Leni laughed out loud.
“You have a weird laugh.”
Leni felt her cheeks heat up in embarrassment. No one had ever told her that before. Was it true? What did she sound like? Oh, God.
“I—I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. My social skills blow. You’re the first girl my age I’ve talked to in a while. I mean. You’re pretty. That’s all. I’m blabbing, aren’t I? You’re probably going to run away, screaming, and ask to sit next to Axle the soon-to-be murderer and it will be an improvement. Okay. I’m shutting up now.”
Leni hadn’t heard anything after “pretty.”
She tried to tell herself it meant nothing. But when Matthew looked at her, she felt a flutter of possibility. She thought: We could be friends. And not ride-the-bus or eat-at-the-same-table friends.
Friends.
The kind who had real things in common. Like Sam and Frodo, Anne and Diana, Ponyboy and Johnny. She closed her eyes for a split second, imagining it. They could laugh and talk and—
“Leni?” he said. “Leni?”
Oh, my God. He’d said her name twice.
“Yeah. I get it. I space out all the time. My mom says it’s what happens when you live in your own head with a bunch of made-up people. Then again, she’s been reading Another Roadside Attraction since Christmas.”
“I do that,” Leni confessed. “Sometimes I just … spaz out.”
He shrugged, as if to imply that there was nothing wrong with her. “Hey, have you heard about the barbecue tonight?”
*
SO WHAT ABOUT THE PARTY? Can you come?
Leni kept replaying it over and over again as she waited for her dad to pick her up from school. She’d wanted to say yes and mean it. She wanted it more than she’d wanted anything in a while.
But her parents weren’t community barbecue people. Community anything, really. It wasn’t who the Allbrights were. The families in their old neighborhood used to have all kinds of gatherings: backyard barbecues where the dads wore V-necks and drank Scotch and flipped burgers, and the women smoked cigarettes and sipped martinis and carried trays of bacon-wrapped chicken livers while kids screamed and ran around. She knew this because once she’d peered over the neighbors’ fence and seen all of it—hula hoops and Slip ’N Slides and sprinklers.