Chasing Sunrise

Five

Other culture shocks I was dealt on my first day at Taos High:

-All of the lockers were in the homerooms, which is not how things ever were in the movies, which always showed them lining the halls. The thing was, there wasn't a lot to put in a locker these days because...

-The textbooks stayed in the classrooms. If we needed to use textbooks for homework, we had to check them out overnight.

-The school looked pretty generic, but the cafeteria had panoramic windows that showed the mountain skyline. And nobody seemed to find this remarkable.

-The cafeteria served enchiladas with glommy cheese and a spicy scent that tasted amazing, to my palate at least. Everyone else dumped tons of salsa on theirs. Very, very hot salsa. New York "hot" was what New Mexico considered "mild"—bordering on bland, chunky ketchup.

-I was what New Mexicans called an "Anglo". Apparently that term applied to anyone who was neither Latino or Native American.

-The Latinos preferred to be called "Hispanic" and referred to themselves as "Spanish." To me they looked more Mexican than Spanish, but I kept my mouth shut about that.

-There were enough Native American students that I saw at least one in every class. All of them shot me the same look of both amusement and annoyance when I stared at them too long. I shouldn't have been surprised. Taos was built next to Taos Pueblo, a Native American settlement that was over a thousand years old. But I was still surprised. Knowing a thing and seeing it are two different experiences.

-It was hard to spot the cliques.

That last one spun me the most. In boarding school, there was a clear pecking order. In Taos, there were only the vestiges of one. I would have thought that a small town, with people who'd known each other from kindergarten on, would have a rigid caste system. But what appeared to have formed instead was a nebulous one. There were pretty girls who dressed to the nines, but they would stop and talk to frumpy girls who needed to find out what the assignment had been that day in class. There were super buff jocks, but they fraternized with gangly guys with acne. For that matter, the guys and the girls didn't keep a clear line of separation. Watching the cafeteria during lunch gave me the sense that I was looking at geological strata. There were today's alliances, but beneath those were yesterday's, and beneath those were elementary-school seating charts, parents who were best friends, and people who lived near each other. Old bonds didn't dissolve completely when new ones were formed.

By the end of the day, I'd somewhat shaken the feeling I was on a television show. Taos was its own place. Although it was unmistakably an American high school, it educated a very unique local population.

At least all of this provided some distraction while I searched for Corban. I saw him standing at the far end of the hall when I headed to third period, but he ducked out the door and was gone. At lunch, he was across the cafeteria, sitting with a girl who let her hair flop over her face as if to hide. He returned my gaze with one of annoyance and got up and left. After lunch, he was standing by the flagpole when I went outside, but gone in the time it took for me to blink. Whether or not I was a vampire, I was clearly a persona non grata, though I suspected he'd try to corner me again once I was alone. In the morning that terrified me, but by afternoon, I was desperate to talk to him again. We definitely had unfinished business to address.

I saw no sign of him when the last bell rang, though, and that made me wonder how the rest of the afternoon would go. Would Aunt Cassie be home when I got there? Would Corban follow me to my bus or nab me on the walk home from the bus stop?

As I was packing my backpack with the sparse contents of my locker, Gina stepped up beside me.

"Hey," she said. "Amy and I are going to the grocery store. You want to come? I can drop you off at home after."