I shivered in my tank top as I approached the lunchroom. “That’s easier said than done,” she’d finally replied.
“Couldn’t you just move your art studio to North Carolina for four months?” “Mom, you’re self-employed,” I’d reminded her. “And you can’t stay here Mom’s work is too unpredictable right now,” he had chimed in. “Your dad can’t pass up this visiting professorship,” Mom had said plainly when they’d sat me down on our living room couch. More than anything else, I’d been dreading my first lunch period as the “new girl” ever since April, when Mom and Dad had broken the news. Two blocks from not-home, I envisioned the dim, after-school hallways at South Campus Lab School and laid my half-eaten pizza slice onto a napkin. North Carolina was a different kind of August-hot than Saint Louis, and humidity draped invisibly from the overhang, southern-style. Outside, we sat on the peeling front porch steps, the pizza box between us. The doorbell rang, saving me from the need to say more. And I wasn’t sure which made me feel worse. That I’d settle in and the semester would be fine. And I knew I should tell him that it was okay. I could tell by Dad’s wrinkled brow that he felt sorry. “They weren’t in any of my morning classes,” I replied. I’d nodded while internally rolling my eyes at the idea that having a random connection to one out of hundreds of people at a new school could make anything about this move less terrible. I’d heard of that an eighth-grader back home used they/them pronouns. Marianne told me Ollie’s pronouns are they and them, Dad had said that morning before I’d left the house.
Apparently someone Dad worked with had a kid in my grade. Mostly because it had ended at eleven thirty. The first day of school (the classic half day) had been fine. All of this while life went on without me, back home. And it was going to be the two of us, alone together, for exactly one hundred and ten days in a new city, in a new state, at a new school, for my first semester of seventh grade. “Are you trying to tell me this quaint month-to-month rental is the proverbial prison?” Dad was a walking stereotype of a college professor: myopic, balding, lactose intolerant. He sighed his professorial sigh, adjusting his glasses. Then we’ll paint it over, go back home, and pretend this semester never happened.” “And then three … And it’ll go all the way up to one hundred ten. “It’s just a line,” I replied, standing on my bed, Sharpie in hand, as late afternoon sun slanted through the window. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind when I said you could decorate your bedroom however you wanted,” Dad said from the doorway.
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