If He Had Been with Me
: Chapter 48

On the first day of school, Jamie and I drive past my old bus stop, and the freshmen look like children. A girl with black hair and combat boots shuffles her feet and glares at the ground. I wish her well.

“We’re seniors!” the girls squeal to each other. The boys mimic our squeals and roll their eyes. It’s deathly hot on The Steps to Nowhere, but we will have to sit there before class and during lunch so that all the freshmen know it’s off limits to them. We sit together before the first bell rings and talk about realizing that, in a way, this was our last summer. Next summer, we won’t be children in any sense of the word. We’re almost there, that finish line that has stood before us all our lives. We are almost adults, our lives are about to begin.

I’m in Mr. Laughegan’s creative writing class.

“I told you I’d see you in here again,” he says when I walk into his janitor’s closet classroom. He tells us to write a page on what kind of fruit or vegetable we would be. I would be a kiwi, obviously.

I also have a college credit literature class, two English classes, and no math class. It’s almost more than I can bear.

I do have gym though, a themed class called lifetime sports. It’s supposed to be sports that you’ll be able to play your whole life, like bowling or walking or something. I signed up for it because it sounded easy.

I’m not sure why Finny signed up for it. He’s good at all sports; I can’t imagine why he would want a class with so little activity. I’m already sitting on the bleachers when he comes in the gym. The teacher takes his name and he sits down in front of me. I’m not sure if he saw me.

While Ms. Scope goes over the expectations of the class, what we’ll be doing, and when we’ll do it, I look at the back of Finny’s head. His mother probably thinks he needs a haircut, but I like it when it gets a little long. At the end of her speech, Ms. Scope says we must choose a partner for the semester, someone to play shuffleboard with and keep score in pool. Everyone looks around and whispers, pairing off as quickly as possible so as not to be left behind. Finny turns around and looks me in the eye.

“You want to?” he says.

“Sure,” I say. I think about standing at the bus stop with him that first day of freshman year, too awkward to even say hello back to him. We couldn’t have been partners that year, or maybe even last year. He’s still the most popular boy in our school, and I’m still the girlfriend of the misfits’ leader, but since we’re the only seniors in the class, we can be gym partners; it won’t look like it means anything.

Ms. Scope writes down every pair and tells us we are free for the rest of the period to shoot baskets or sit on the bleachers. Everyone else gets up or climbs higher to gossip in the corners. Finny and I stay sitting. He turns to me again. I’m not allowed to wear a tiara in gym, and I feel strangely exposed to him.

“So we’re seniors,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.