Chapter One
Ben West
spent summer vacation growing a handlebar mustache.
Seriously.
Hovering
over his upper lip—possibly glued there—was a bushy monstrosity that shouted, “Look out, senior class, I’m gonna tie some
chicks to the train tracks and then go on safari with my good friend Teddy
Roosevelt. Bully!”
I blindly swatted at Harper with my comic book, trying to alert her to
the fact that there was a mustachioed moron trying to blend in with the other
people entering campus.
“I know I
should have made flash cards for the poems that Cline assigned,” she said,
elbowing me back hard, both acknowledging that she wasn’t blind and that she
hated when I interrupted her monologues about the summer reading list. “But I
found Mrs. Bergman’s sociolinguistics syllabus on the U of O website and I’m
sure she’ll use the same one here.”
The mustache
twitched an attempt at freedom, edging away from West's ferrety nose as he
tried to shove past a group of nervous looking freshmen. It might have been
looking at me and Harper, but its owner was doing everything possible to ignore
us, the planter box we were sitting on, and anything else that might have been
east of the wrought iron gate.
“So,” Harper
continued, louder than necessary considering we were sitting two inches apart.
“I thought I’d get a head start. But now I’m afraid that we were supposed to
memorize the poems for Cline. He never responded to my emails.”
Pushing my
comic aside, I braced my hands against the brick ledge. The mustache was daring
me to say something. Harper could hear it too, as evidenced by her staring up
at the sun and muttering, “Or you could, you know, not do this.”
“Hey, West,” I called, ignoring the clucks of
protest coming from my left. “I’m pretty sure your milk mustache curdled. Do
you need a napkin?”
Ben West lurched to a stop, one foot
inside of the gate. Even on the first day of school, he hadn’t managed to find
a clean uniform. His polo was a series of baggy wrinkles, half tucked into a
pair of dingy khakis. He turned his head. If the mustache had been able to give
me the finger, it would have. Instead, it stared back at me with its curlicue
fists raised on either side of West’s thin mouth.
“Hey, Harper,” he said. He cut his
eyes at me and grumbled, “Trixie.”
I leaned
back, offering the slowest of slow claps. “Great job, West. You have correctly
named us. I, however, may need to change your mantle. Do you prefer Yosemite
Sam or Doc Holliday? I definitely think it should be cowboy related.”
“Isn’t it
cruel to make the freshmen walk past you?” he asked me, pushing the ratty brown
hair out of his eyes. “Or is it some kind of ritual hazing?”
“Gotta scare
them straight.” I gestured to my blonde associate. “Besides, I’ve got Harper to
soften the blow. It’s like good cop, bad cop.”
“It is
nothing like good cop, bad cop. We’re waiting for Meg,” Harper said, flushing
under the smattering of freckles across her cheeks as she turned back to the
parking lot, undoubtedly trying to escape to the special place in her head
where pop quizzes—and student council vice presidents—lived. She removed her
headband, pushing it back in place until
she once again looked like Sleeping Beauty in pink glasses and khakis. Whereas
I continued to look like I’d slept on my ponytail.
Which I had because it is cruel to
start school on a Wednesday.
“Is it
heavy?” I asked Ben, waving at his mustache. “Like weight training for your face?
Or are you just trying to compensate for your narrow shoulders?”
He gave a
half-hearted leer at my polo. “I could ask the same thing of your bra.”
My arms flew
automatically to cover my chest, but I seemed to be able to only conjure the
consonants of the curses I wanted to hurl at him. In his usual show of bad
form, West took this as some sort of victory.
“As you
were,” he said, jumping back into the line of uniforms on their way to the main
building. He passed too close to Kenneth Pollack, who shoved him hard into the
main gate, growling, “Watch it, nerd.”
“School for
geniuses, Kenneth,” Harper called. “We’re all nerds.”
Kenneth
flipped her off absentmindedly as West brushed himself off and darted past Mike
Shepherd into the main building.
“Brute,”
Harper said under her breath.
I scuffed
the planter box with the heels of my mandatory Mary Janes. “I’m off my game. My
brain is still on summer vacation. I totally left myself open to that cheap
trick.”
“I was
referring to Kenneth, not Ben,” she frowned. “But, yes, you should have known
better. Ben’s been using that bra line since fourth grade.”
As a rule, I refused to admit when
Harper was right before eight in the morning. It would just lead to a full day
of her gloating. I hopped off of the planter and scooped up my messenger bag,
shoving my comic inside.
“Come on. I’m over waiting for Meg.
She’s undoubtedly choosing hair care over punctuality. Again.”
Harper slid bonelessly to her feet,
sighing with enough force to slump her shoulders as she followed me through the
front gate and up the stairs. The sunlight refracted against her pale hair
every time her neck swiveled to look behind us. Without my massive aviator
sunglasses, I was sure I would have been blinded by the glare.
“What’s with you?” I asked, kicking a
stray pebble out of the way.
“What? Nothing.” Her head snapped
back to attention, knocking her glasses askew. She quickly straightened them
with two trembling hands. “Nothing. I was just thinking that maybe senior year
might be a good time for you to end your war with Ben. You’d have more time to
study and read comics and…”
Unlike the
tardy Meg, Harper was tall enough that I could look at her without craning my
neck downward. It made it easier to level her with a droll stare. Sometimes,
it’s better to save one’s wit and just let the stupidity of a thought do the
talking.
She rolled her eyes and clucked
again, breezing past me to open the door.
“Or not,”
she said, swinging the door open and letting me slip past her. “Year ten of
Watson v. West starts now. But if one of you brings up the day he pushed you
off the monkey bars, I am taking custody of Meg and we are going to sit with
the yearbook staff during lunch.”
“I accept
those terms,” I grinned. “Now help me think of historical figures with
mustaches. Hitler and Stalin are entirely too obvious. I need to brainstorm
before we get homework.”
•ABOUT THE AUTHOR•
 |
| credit: Sarah Lambert |
Lily Anderson is an elementary school librarian and Melvil Dewey fangirl with an ever-growing collection of musical theater tattoos and Harry Potter ephemera. She lives in Northern California. THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN ME IS YOU
is her debut novel.
