Free Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything by E. Lockhart Page B

his pants and his boxers with his face practically inside his open locker, and I can see his booty is a solid A—the small, narrow kind. His legs are thin as well. Spindly, you could even say.
    He pulls a pair of white briefs out of the bag and puts them on quickly, followed by baggy gray gym shorts. His pale calves look out of place beneath the wide legs of the shorts.
    He sits down on the bench, as if relieved, and slowly pulls on a pair of sweat socks. Then he goes over to his minilocker and gets his running shoes.
    Adrian and Malachy bang in, along with a couple of sophomore boys from the photography department, guys I recognize from classes, but whom I don't know. Brat trails in after them, lugging his oversize book bag.
    “Hey,” they say to Titus.
    “Hey,” he says back.
    “Crap,” mutters Adrian, running his hand through his spikyhair. “Can you believe what that faggot Meadows gave us for lab homework? We don't even get the weekend to do it.” He's changing his clothes, and his body looks both energetic and relaxed, like he's comfortable in his skin.
    “Whatever,” Titus says, “I don't think he's gay.”
    “Well, he's sure a bastard,” says Adrian. “You give me that?” He pulls on a T-shirt and grabs his shoes from his minilocker.
    “Yeah,” laughs Titus. “I give you that.”
    “I hope we don't have dodgeball again,” pipes up Brat with a nervous laugh. “When did Sanchez say we were gonna do the hockey unit?”
    No one answers him. It's like he didn't even say anything.
    “Come on, Ip,” says Titus. Adrian shoves his feet into his sneakers and the two of them slam through the doors that lead to the gymnasium.
    Brat tries again as Shane comes in. “Hey, Shane, what's up?”
    Shane grunts, he's running late, and starts pulling off his clothes. Brat, already dressed for class, bends down and rummages through his pack as if looking for something.
    Shane looks great without his shirt. I remember from our earlier, um, encounters. He plays pickup basketball every weekend. He's white, tall and blond, with strong-looking legs and visible muscles across his abdomen. A small birthmark on his neck, strawberry-colored. He tugs his sweats down over his sneakers and pulls his shorts on over his gray Calvin Klein briefs; then he puts on a white T-shirt and heads into the gym. Now it's justMalachy and Brat left, Brat still rummaging in that pack as if he's doing something important.
    I've been so busy checking out Shane that I missed seeing Malachy naked. In his gym clothes, he looks incongruous, as he always does. The quadruple-pierced ears, the thick black wristbands, the black socks. He doesn't look like an athlete, though he's actually not bad at sports.
    “Hey, hey,” Brat says, after a minute.
    “Brat.” Malachy looks up. “What's going on?”
    “Not much,” says Brat. He stops the pretense of rummaging and shoves the pack into his locker. “If we're doing the hockey unit, you wanna be partners?”
    In gym, we have to find partners for practicing things, like kicking a soccer ball back and forth, or hitting a hockey puck. I always pick Katya, and she always picks me. Titus is usually with Adrian, Shane is usually with Malachy, and Brat—I can't think who he's usually with. Maybe he switches around.
    “Yeah, okay,” says Malachy, and the two of them head into class.
    The locker room is empty for forty-five minutes, and I can hear the pucks hitting the walls of the gym, and the scrape of the wooden sticks on the floor. Then they troop back in.
    Sanchez enters and blows a whistle. He's done this every hour after class, except for third-period African dance, when he probably takes a coffee break. “Hit the showers! Now! I don't wanna hear your whining!”
    In the girls' locker room, we get the same drill fromKobayashi, the assistant teacher. We have fewer showerheads, though, so she lines us up and stands over us, yelling, “Use the soap, ladies!” and “Speed it up, people are waiting!”