Bridgeport Academy 2

48

Alex glanced down at her calculus homework, unable to concentrate on the lines of letters and numbers. She'd come over to Yara's for some study time, but so far hadn't been able to focus. She bit the end of her pen.

"What did you get for number twelve? It's n2 + 2n, right?" Yara asked from her perch in her red butterfly chair, her calculus textbook balanced on her thighs. She pressed the eraser end of her pencil to her forehead, right between her eyes. "Because if it's not, I'm going to take this book over to Dr. Goldstein's house right now and set it on fire on her front lawn, right next to her freaky little gnomes." Dr. Goldstein lived in one of the small white clapboard faculty houses at the edge of campus, and her lawn was filled with brightly colored ceramic gnomes that would probably have been stolen by frustrated calculus students if not for Spike, Dr. Goldstein's Rottweiler, which patrolled her yard, drooling and growling.

"Good thing you're right, because they say Spike can smell pissed-off student blood a hundred yards away." Alex giggled. "A man-eating dog and garden gnomes—what is Dr. Goldstein's deal, anyway?" 

Yara leaned forward conspiratorially, slamming her heavy textbook closed. "Didn't you hear that, like, two years ago, she started hooking up with some genius graduate student from Harvard who was interviewing her for his senior thesis?" Yara's eyes widened and she drummed her bitten-down fingernails against her notebook. "Apparently, he lives in the city now and comes up every weekend to, you know, interview her." 

Alex gasped. Dr. Goldstein's shirts were always buttoned wrong and she wore mismatched socks. Alex had taken it as a sign of her absentminded brilliance—but maybe it was because she was up late the night before, getting some from her hunky young grad student? "Isn't she, like, a thousand? I definitely would not have guessed that she was...you know...having wild, passionate sex every weekend." 

Yara let her pencil fly across the room so that it landed right in Alex's lap. "I say more power to her." 

"Whatever. I've been with younger guys and older guys, and I think they're all the same breed of idiot." Alex picked up Yara's yellow number 2 pencil and examined it. No teeth marks. Alex's pencils were all chewed up at the ends, no matter how gross she knew the habit was. Someone had told her once—probably Dave—that chewing on pencils was a sign that you were sexually repressed.

"That sounds so pessimistic," Yara said wistfully, dropping her calc book onto the floor and standing up to stretch, her gray American Apparel t-shirt rising to reveal a thin sliver of stomach above her black drawstring pants. "I'm sure there are some good guys out there. Like, one or two." 

"Right." Alex ran her hand across Yara's Batgirl bedspread, smoothing out the wrinkles she'd made by sprawling out across it for the past hour. God, how much easier would life be if she had a single? No more nutjob Jasmine to have to tiptoe around, worrying about when her next eruption was due. And Yara's room was just so...nice. It was so neat and clean, and smelled like new books and incense. She even had a leafy green plant dangling from her curtain rod. 

"They just happen to live in, like, South America or something." Yara spun the dial on her stereo, turning up the volume on the new Bruno Mars CD. She did a few dance steps on the hardwood floor, looking kind of silly but totally unselfconscious. Alex envied that about her. "And they probably don't have Internet there, do they?" 

Alex smiled as she watched Yara prance around her room. Until last weekend, Yara had hung out by herself—but after the lockdown party, she had sort of unquestioningly been taken in by the Bridgeport elite. Alex had noticed both Zendaya and Keke wearing clothes from Yara's closet this week, and Dave and some other guys had been seen hanging out with her at various times. And yet she still sat with Debbie Mitchell and some of the other loners at dinner. To Alex, that was just so unimaginably cool. 

"Are you saying you wouldn't date someone who lived in South America and didn't have Internet access?" Alex teased. "That's discrimination." 

Yara nodded with a wicked grin. "Sure am—no cybersex, no deal!" 

Alex laughed loudly. It felt good to laugh, to forget about Quincy and how he had lied to her, and Mr. Jordan and how he had lied to her too. Forgetting guys was totally blissful.

"Ladies?" There was a stern knock on Yara's open door and Angelica Davis, with her faded flowered bathrobe bunched tightly around her waist, glared into the room disapprovingly. "It's late. Time to turn in." 

"Sorry, Mrs. Davis," Yara answered sweetly, quickly turning her music back down. "We just have a few more calc problems to finish off, and then we're done." 

Angelica cinched her belt tighter around her waist and sniffed the air disapprovingly, but not seeing any banned candles in sight, she seemed satisfied. "Not much longer." 

Alex got up and closed the door behind her. The hallway had already quieted down after Angelica's patrol, and Alex was suddenly very aware of the fact that she and Yara were completely alone. "So, what about that last problem?" She returned to Yara's bed and perched gingerly on the edge, her pulse racing. It was totally Dave's fault for putting the thought into her head this afternoon, but she couldn't help it now—she just kept thinking about the tiny kiss that she and Yara had shared.

Yara scooped up her calc notebook and sat down on the bed. The stereo was still playing, but quietly, and there were no noises from the hallway. It kind of felt like she and Yara were the only people (or at least the only sane people) awake right now. Yara leaned over and placed her finger on Alex's notebook. "I think you've got it." She flipped a page of the math book, then glanced up at Alex. "It's the summation, right?" 

Alex nodded, feeling kind of dazed.

"Are you okay?" Yara asked, swiping at a curl that had fallen in her face. "Are you still thinking about Dr. Goldstein and her boy toy?" 

"No!" Alex laughed and grabbed for her bottle of Evian on Yara's bedside table. "Don't give me nightmares."

"Then what are you thinking about?" Yara asked, gently, her wide brown eyes curious.

Could she honestly tell her? What if Yara thought she was a freak and demanded Alex get the hell out of her room? But she knew Yara wouldn't do that. Everything with her seemed so natural—even this didn't seem like a big deal. "Umm...about the meeting last night." 

Yara finally blushed, but only a little, like she knew immediately what Alex was referring to. "Oh." She played with the edge of her notebook paper, waving it back and forth. "That was..." She shrugged her slim shoulders, and a small grin crept onto her face. "Kinda fun." 

Alex pressed her lips together. "Yeah." A moment passed, as they looked at each other. Alex noticed a tiny freckle just below Yara's lips. And then Alex leaned in, over the sprawled-open pages of mathematical problems and pencil scrawls, and pressed her mouth slowly to Yara's.

Their lips touched softly, and Alex closed her eyes, letting her mouth move almost faintly against Yara's. It wasn't the sort of sloppy devouring she was used to from Quincy. Yara's mouth was neat and small, and in a totally weird way, it was sort of like...kissing herself.

It was nice.