Free The Story of Us by Deb Caletti Page A

sloped like lonely desert hills. His ponytail, usually buoyant and cheerful, was riding as low as a dragging tailpipe. If a ponytail could be defeated, it was. All that kite flying had tired him out. He had one hand on the boardwalk railing to aid the climb up. I had always thought of Dan Jax as being a man of total commitment. Solid. He would stand by my mother’s side and never waiver, and if she herself did, he would hold her elbow firmly and guide the way. I guess I thought she had room to falter, because he never would. Same as me and Janssen, yeah. Same thing.
    But Dan Jax’s bent shoulders reminded me of something. Something that made me feel suddenly unsettled. He was only a man, wasn’t he? He could fall too, if enough weight were loaded upon him. I realized it then: anyone, anyone , could buy a ticket and get on the next plane out. We don’t like to think it. No, better not to. But it came to me. I could be left standing there by myself. I could be the one holding a suitcase full of hope and ten days of clean underwear.
    I used the trick I’d accidentally discovered when I got stuck being partners with Zoe Hammell for a junior year project onthe Middle East. Zoe was a golden wall of inapproachability; she’d never talk to me unless she had to, and her friends wouldn’t either. She smelled like nail polish and self-tanner, and her hair glowed. No matter what situation you’re in, just like dogs, there’s a hierarchy. You don’t understand the reasons for it, but it’s there, and I was somewhere in the middle, too average for Zoe Hammell and her friends, too boring. I’d had the same steady boyfriend for forever, and my friends liked their parents and we thought getting high was stupid. But we weren’t Shawna Jarredy and her group either. We didn’t wear creepy black felt fedoras and black vests and discuss fantasy books in odd but arrogant detail. We took AP classes and got grades that were good enough to get us into college but not so perfect that we’d become like that other group (which, let’s see, fell below us but above the Shawna Jarredys)—the isolated slaves of parental expectations.
    If Zoe Hammell was disappointed at getting paired up with me, I was just as disappointed ending up with her. There’s some teen movie cliché that says that I (lower level, see above) would be thrilled and fawning at her possible attention, which was stupid. It’s a strange but cherished myth that everyone wants to be in the “popular group.” I’d always been someone who could see pretty clearly (then, anyway), someone who knew my own mind. My mind knew this: Zoe Hammell wore those sweatpants with words written on the ass, and I hated those. I ended up looking at her ass, when I didn’t want to look at her ass. In her tight shirts and short skirts, she was awalking advertisement for her own body. It was shallow, but also kind of sad. Kind of desperate. Behind any ad—even the cool, hip ones—they’re still trying hard to sell you something.
    So I had to get through my time with Zoe Hammell as much as she had to get through her time with me. But I accidentally figured out something: Zoe opened up with a few compliments. (Something, no doubt, that Trevor Woods figured out too, ha, if you believed what you heard.) I once told her I liked her shirt, and she beamed and told me where she bought it and for how much and what her friends thought of it. Man, compliments worked like magic on some people—I wish I’d known that trick before. I’d tell Zoe I liked her handwriting, and she’d tell me about her second-grade teacher and about her best friend that year who moved away and left her heartbroken. The project was over and she didn’t know a thing about me, not a single thing, except what pen I used. But once, she’d even cried after I’d complimented her haircut. She broke down about the fight she’d gotten into with Trevor Woods, who preferred it long, that jackass.
    I tried the trick again on the