Robin Wasserman: Lust

“What?” hissed Miranda, flashing her a look of caution as the teacher circled toward them again. They bent intently over their flasks and beakers, feigning enthusiasm in the scientific process. The two girls at the next table squealed with joy as they measured their solvent-just as they’d predicted, to the millimeter. Woo-hoo.

“Great job, Einstein,” Harper grumbled to the nearest squealer, a loser in a loose polo shirt and dark-rimmed glasses whom she recognized vaguely from homeroom. Probably on the math team. Or the chess “squad.” “Can you invent a chemical solution that will make us care?”

The girl and her equally geeky lab partner studiously ignored her-but at least they shut up. Harper knew she probably shouldn’t alienate anyone who might later be persuaded to do her work for her (since she knew from experience that doing these labs herself was basically a no-go), but it was all just too tempting. Especially given the mood she was in: shitty.

“So, is she going to be here all year?” Miranda whispered, once Bonner was a safe distance away.

“Who? Marie Curie over there? I hope not. I’ve already got a headache.”

“No, the new girl-Kaia? How long’s she staying?”

Harper shrugged. She was already sorry she’d ever started this conversation-she didn’t want to talk about the new girl anymore, especially since this was shaping up to be the start of a yearlong conversation.

“It’s a little hot and stuffy in here, don’t you think?” she asked, dodging Miranda’s question.

“What? I guess. So?”

“So maybe it’s time we get a little fresh air.” Before Miranda could stop her, Harper crumpled up a piece of paper, dipped it into the Bunsen burner’s flame for a moment, and then surreptitiously tossed the fiery ball into their trash can.

“What the hell are you doing?” Miranda hissed.

Harper ignored her, and instead watched with triumph and delight as flames began to lick at the edges of the squat trash can, slowly consuming the small collection of crumpled paper. It was mesmerizing.

“Fire!” Harper finally shouted.

On cue, the girls next to her began squealing in horror, and one slammed her fist into the emergency sprinkler button that hung next to each lab table.

And that was all it took.

The room began to rain.

The smoke alarm blared.

And chaos broke out as the roomful of students scrambled to get their stuff together and escape the downpour, pushing and shoving each other out of the way, only a couple of them craning their necks to search for the fire, which had very quickly gone out. Mrs. Bonner raced back and forth across the room, herding students out of danger but clearly more concerned about making sure that her precious chemicals and lab equipment stayed safe, sound, and dry.

Laughing, water pouring down her face, Harper pulled Miranda out of the classroom and down the hall. They ran for an exit together and ducked into the parking lot, finally sinking down behind a row of parked cars, convulsing with laughter on the warm concrete.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” Miranda gasped, half annoyed and half amazed. “I’m totally soaked.”

Harper grinned lazily and, catlike, stretched her body out and preened in the sun.

“You’ll dry. And now instead of titrating and distilling and blah, blah, blah, we can spend the rest of the hour talking about the important things in life.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know. Guys? What we’re going to do this weekend? Whether any of your cigarettes are still dry enough to smoke?”

Sighing, Miranda pulled out her pack-only slightly wet on one corner-and tossed it to Harper.

“I don’t want to rain on your parade, but did you even stop to consider what would happen if you’d gotten caught? Or if, I don’t know, you’d set the school on fire ?”

“Rand, it was a double period .” Harper spoke slowly and loudly, as if deciding that Miranda needed a little help trying to wrap her brain around the basics. “We would have been stuck in there forever ”

“Oh, please,” Miranda snorted. She began digging through her soggy backpack, assessing the damage: Spanish notebook: dry. Sort of. Paperback Hamlet for AP English: soaked. Stila mascara and MAC lipstick: mercifully intact. “If you’d just waited, we would have been out in an hour.”

Harper took a long drag on the cigarette and took a moment to consider that. She shook her head.

“We’re seniors now,” she said finally “We’ve waited long enough.”

Boring.

It had taken the girl-Harper-an endless fifty minutes to guide Kaia through the school, fifty minutes of her life that she would never get back. And the rest of the morning had just been more of the same. People she didn’t want to meet, telling her things she didn’t want to know. As if she cared what to do or where to go in this shoebox of a school, or had any interest in who was who-or who was sleeping with whom-as if the mundane details of anything in this tedious town could be anything less than tedious.

Anything but boring.

Boring.

Boring.

The word had been beating a steady tattoo in her head ever since she’d arrived in this one-horse (or in this case, she supposed, one-Wal-Mart) town. Not by plane, of course. There was no airport in Grace, CA. Apparently, there was no airport anywhere near Grace, CA, if the endless drive from Las Vegas was any indication. Though to be honest, she was surprised there were even cars in the ridiculous town-the whole place had the feel of a different century, except for the tacky tourist strip of Route 66 running through the town center- there time seemed frozen in a particularly bad year of the 1970s.

She’d plodded through three hours of the school day and knew pretty much all that she needed to know about her new life in Grace-as in, there wasn’t going to be much of one. Now here she was, standing in line in a cafeteria-a cafeteria , a smelly, cramped room painted hospital green, with long metal tables bolted to the floor, cranky old women in hairnets doling out lumps of food, hordes of dull-eyed students who at least deserved credit for not all outweighing an elephant, if they’d been eating this greasy crap their entire lives. Who knew places like this actually existed? Kaia’s schooltime meals had varied. There was the gourmet health food in the regal boarding school dining hall, with its vaulted ceilings and centuries-old oak tables. And of course the Upper West Side takeout cuisine grabbed to go during lunch periods-well, any and all periods-at her city prep school. (Prep school had been before and after boarding school-getting kicked out was easy when you had plenty of money and connections to kick you into somewhere else. How was Kaia supposed to know that she would only have so many opportunities to vacillate between the frying pan and fire before getting thrown off the stove altogether?) Even the lunches the maid had occasionally put together for her-or, years ago, the lunches her mother had packed before she’d decided that mothering was too last season-even those had been better than this slop. But that was then, this was now. This was life in Grace: dry heat, neon, decrepit gas stations, incompetent teachers, grease, dust, cafeterias . This was her life.

She was stuck. Stranded. A world away from everyone and everything she’d ever known.

At least it was also a world away from her mother. Thank God for small favors, right?

“Kaia, over here!”

Kaia whirled around to see the mind-numbing tour guide, Harper, waving in her direction. She stuck on a smile-though she didn’t trust Harper any farther than she could throw her (which, judging from the poorly hidden roll of flesh squeezed into the waistband of the girl’s faux designer jeans, wouldn’t be very far at all). But no reason to burn any bridges-not yet, at least. Besides, no way was she eating alone.