Free Someone I Wanted to Be by Aurelia Wills

window. A lanky football player named Dwayne Lewis yanked her door open. Kristy screamed and fell laughing into his arms.

Tuesday. “OK, let’s do this thing,” said Carl Lancaster in his deep, manlike voice. Mrs. McCleary said no one could change lab partners again for the rest of the year. I was stuck with Carl Lancaster. “Where’s your lab book?” he asked.
    “What? This?” I waved my lab book around. I’d lent my first one to Kristy so she could copy my notes, but she never gave it back. I had to buy another from Mrs. McCleary. Cindy was incredibly pissy about it. A kid tripped over an extension cord and knocked over a five-foot-tall stack of old textbooks. I ignored Carl and observed the chaos.
    “Leah. Leah! Look at me. Yes. That is your lab book. OK, let’s open it up to a fresh page. Today is Tuesday, May second. We’re measuring pH in acidic and basic solutions.”
    Kristy was watching Carl. She leaned over and jerked her body as if she were throwing up into her sink.
    “Carl, back off.”
    “Come on, Leah.” He leaned very, very close; I could see his excellent bones and all his distinct freckles. “We’re lab partners. We have to do this together. Your work is going to affect my grade.”
    He was so close I could smell his tangerine breath and his neck. His neck smelled faintly like fresh bread. I could feel warmth rising off of him. I wondered if I stank like cigarettes.
    He studied me with his calm green eyes. Half the people I knew had green eyes. Carl’s were ocean-colored — at least what I imagined the ocean looked like in real life. I never got to see it when we lived in Florida. In my mind, the ocean was green, sparked with little flecks of blue. Carl didn’t look mad, even though I’d blown him off in study hall the day before. He looked at me like he knew something. He looked like he was about to kiss me. Carl Lancaster! I was going to throw up.
    But he didn’t kiss me. He pulled back and looked down at his lab sheet. We put on our goggles. He said in his radio voice, “OK, first we have to label these test tubes. How about you write the labels? First tube: distilled water . . . Second tube: dilute sulfuric acid.”
    Something about his deep, steady voice and the long, slow way he said
sulfuric
made me relax. I leaned on the chipped lab counter. He put twenty drops of Solution A into the watch glass with a pipette. I moved a little closer to him.

I lay on my back, staring up at the picture of Damien Rogers and thinking that the muscle in his arm looked like an apple. He would be my boyfriend someday. I skipped lunch sometimes and did sit-ups in the tiny space at the end of my bed, because even if he thought I was beautiful just the way I was, like LaTeisha Morgan was beautiful, and our personalities were an excellent match, I wanted to be thin and look good for Damien. I wanted to look good next to him. It was the only way I could imagine myself with Damien — me being thin. I wanted to be ready.
    I’d corralled Anita into a walled-off section of my mind. She was fine, I told myself. She had Iris and Maria to eat lunch with. I liked her, she was a great kid, but we were destined for different ways of life. I could not spend my high-school years with the members of the Anime Club. I still wanted to be a doctor but did not want to discuss that fact in public. I ignored her stares in the hallway, though sometimes the look on her face haunted me when I was trying to go to sleep. I constantly talked to myself, rationalizing and explaining so that it all made sense, because if I stopped and thought about it, it didn’t make sense at all and it felt terrible, like I was letting something die.
    I found a twenty in one of Cindy’s old purses and bought some minutes. Ten minutes later, my phone vibrated. When I saw who was calling, the phone vibrated all the way through me. I flipped it open and held it to my cheek.
    “Ashley. What happened with your phone? You got to keep in touch,