T. Goeglein - Cold Fury

Finally, when Billy loses interest and drifts away, Doug picks up his laptop and finds a quiet place to write.

A few weeks ago, I found him under the old oak tree on the south side of Fep Prep, his chubby fingers a tapping blur.

I sat next to him in silence, and then put a hand on his shoulder, and he squinted into the sun without turning to me.

“Sara Jane,” he said quietly. “Do you want to go to the spring dance with me?”

Other than being forced to climb the knotted rope in gym class, there was probably nothing in the world Doug considered as torturous as attending a high school dance. He knew I wanted to go and was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for me-tight dress pants, tucked-in shirt, and hours of hip-hop in the school gymnasium. I gave his arm a gentle punch and told him that I knew he didn’t really want to go. He blushed and grinned, saying, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

I thought for a second. “ Sunset Boulevard? ”

“ Some Like it Hot ,” he said, pleased with the obscurity of his movie quote as he huffed to his feet and waddled away, whistling.

I watched him go, impressed that even after being persecuted by Bully the Kid, Doug could find it in himself to whistle about, well. . anything.

In my bleak, dateless state, I never whistled anymore.

Also, I never hummed or sang to myself.

My iPod currently moaned with only the saddest, most self-indulgent songs.

The wicked irony is that, in general, I roll my eyes at books, TV, and movies that depict people my age stuck in some moody teenage dilemma. If they’re rich kids, they’re moody rich kids, if they’re vampire kids, they’re moody vampire kids, if they’re postapocalyptic kids. . you get the picture. The thing that bugs me most is that very few people my age even have time to be moody. We’re busting our butts doing tons of homework, or forming classic movie clubs, or working part time, or just, I don’t know-dealing with an existence thick with expectations. According to Doug, there are three or four kids at Fep Prep so worried about their futures that they worked themselves into a state of exhaustion and weirdness and had to be prescription medicated to deal with it.

Our lives are not the ones our parents lived when they were our ages.

Theirs were simpler, slower, and analog.

Ours are complicated, competitive, and digital.

My generation is the smartest, hardest working, most wired and interconnected ever. It’s not easy, but it’s exciting, because we’re in training to take over the world.

And yet-

And yet, for maybe the first time in my life, what I wanted most was to luxuriate in my own moodiness, to listen to sad songs and think about how tragic it was that I didn’t have a date. I considered it pathetic that I could count on one hand the number of times I had been kissed, or kissed someone, since Walter J. Thurber pressed his lips against mine three years ago. I was mortified by the realization that I was three weeks from turning sixteen and had never had a real boyfriend. Despite what was happening in my family, or maybe because of it, I was experiencing a profound sense of aloneness-an overwhelming feeling that I would never find a person who had been made especially for me. It was an isolating sensation, as if I were the only girl in the history of the universe who had ever felt this way. What I wanted was to connect with someone who was not a family member, not a Doug-type friend, but instead a person who was similar to me in good ways and completely different in other ways. And also someone who would just sort of, well-adore me.

I was so me-centric that I sometimes found myself staring into space.

Other times I floated in a warm pool of self-pity, absolutely sure that I was destined to be alone forever.

And then I re-met Max Kissberg.

To shake off my funk over the upcoming dance that I would positively, absolutely not be attending, I decided to focus my energy on recruiting that coveted third member for the Classic Movie Club. My big brainstorm was a pathetic sign-up sheet and pencil-on-a-string that I taped next to the office, labeled with the optimistic headline “JOIN THE CLASSIC MOVIE CLUB AND DISCOVER WORLDS UNKNOWN!”

It hung there for a couple of days.

Every time I checked it, the page was depressingly blank.

Finally, someone stole the pencil.

My literature teacher, Ms. Ishikawa, is also the Fep Prep activities coordinator. She pulled me aside, wrinkled her little hamster nose, and warned that unless I fulfilled the three-member rule for all clubs, funding for movie rentals and use of the theater room would be canceled. All I could think of was how bad it would reflect on my well-roundedness if I couldn’t successfully organize a club where all someone had to do was sit in a dark room, stare at a screen, and eat snacks. Finally, facing the inevitable, I trudged past the office, glanced at the sign-up sheet-and there it was.

max kissberg , printed in red ink.

At first, the name didn’t ring a bell.

After all, it had been three years since Gina’s thirteenth birthday party, when he told me not to pay attention to world-class knuckleheads.

And then, rolling the name around in my mind, I vaguely recalled a tiny kid with monster braces who had moved to the suburbs. If he hadn’t spoken to me at Gina’s birthday party, I wouldn’t have remembered him at all, except for an extra blip of memory that came out of nowhere. We were even younger than at the party, maybe nine or ten, and there had been a school talent show where Max played a part in a scene with some other kids. I remembered his little body swallowed up in a huge pinstripe suit, his hair slicked back, and a little mustache drawn in black pencil under his nose. He was onstage, and I remembered that I knew his lines as he uttered them-they were from a movie I had watched with my parents countless times, with my dad’s running commentary of what, in the film, seemed “legit” and what was “phony.” Max had been playing Vito Corleone from The Godfather ; he displayed a sly sense of danger that hushed the audience. As I stared at Max’s name on the sign-up sheet, I recited his lines from memory-

“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” I murmured.

“What kind of offer?” a voice said.

I turned and looked up at a face smiling down at me that I found a little familiar and very attractive, and then looked closer at the curly hair and imagined thick glasses covering the warm brown eyes. What threw me off was how tall he was-at least half a foot taller than me-but there was no denying it was him.

“Max?” I said.

“Sara Jane, right? I remember you.”

“I remember you, too,” I said, my throat going dry.

I was suddenly hyperaware of how I looked (or didn’t look), wearing distressed (in a real way, not in a fashionable way) jeans, one of my dad’s beat-up Cubs T-shirts, and a pair of ratty Chuck Taylors. I couldn’t for the life of me remember when I’d last brushed my hair, and I licked my glossless lips trying to think of something cool to say. Max, on the other hand, looked like he could star on a TV show as the hot new guy in school-tan, just muscular enough not to be annoying, wearing a vintage motorcycle T-shirt and jeans that were not distressed, faded, or ripped, but normal and blue. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight since I’d seen him before. Maybe it was love at second look, since we were both older now and I was seeing a different Max, a Max who wasn’t a little boy anymore but with the same confident smile. Finally I said the stupidest, most obvious thing that popped into my brain. “Um, well. . you grew.”

Max laughed a little. “You too.”