Page 51 of He Hate Me

She pulls her hands from mine and stands up, hugging her middle and pacing a few steps in one direction and then back. The tips of her right fingers tap her left biceps. There’s a soft chime and from far away I can hear the muffled sound of the bell. Lunch is over. She stops, looking at me for a few seconds, but says nothing.

"Are we still meeting tonight for tutoring?" I ask. She nods and goes to the door to leave. I stand up to move my chair back to the desk so I can start studying again.

“Sure,” she says. Her eyes meet mine, and a jolt of heat rushes through me. The image of her bent over the table with her skirt flipped up flashes before my eyes, freezing me in place. I raise my hand towards her—whether to ask her to stay or to grab her so she can’t, I’m not sure—but exactly at that moment she slips through the door and disappears, leaving me uncertain about whether she saw the gesture at all.

Deja

That night we sit at the desk in my room going over logarithms. He's focused, but keeps giving me puppy-dog looks through the corner of his eye. Maybe puppy-dog is an exaggeration, but he definitely looks at me in a way that’s softer than his usual eye fucking. I can’t say if I like it or not, but it’s expectant in a way that makes me squirm. I had classes and practice and then dinner, so I haven’t been stewing over our lunch-time conversation, but every minute I wasn’t focused on something important I was thinking about what he said.

He’s not the only one sneaking looks. I can’t decide if I’m annoyed or pleased that he wants us to date.

“You know what I wanted to be when I grew up?” he asks out of the blue midway through the session. He pushes a hank of hair the color of a crow’s wing off his forehead and he’s so damn hot I’m mesmerized for several seconds.

“Thanos?” I ask, trying to recover. He smiles in response, shaking his head.

“Close. I wanted to be an astronaut.”

“Thanos is close to an astronaut?”

“He did have a spaceship,” Brandon says. “What I mean is, I thought I would go to Mars and help terraform it.”

“That’s an awfully big word. Anyway, I don’t think I’m that good of a math tutor.”

Hurt flares in his eyes, though he dips his head to hide it. “I’m pretty sure you just insulted both of us,” he says lightly, but that quickly hidden reaction reveals the earnestness of his admission. I feel an unexpected knot in my throat. I’m not sure when it happened, but I no longer enjoy making him feel bad.

“I wanted to be a pop star.” I blurt.

“That’s ambitious.”

“You don’t think I can do it?”

“If it was just dancing, you’d hit it out of the park.”

“But?”

“What do you want to be now?”

“Why are you sidestepping my question?”

“I don’t want to be mean, but you can’t sing. I can hear you sometimes when you’re in the shower, and cats fighting in the back alley sound better than you.”

I am a terrible singer, and I can vividly remember the afternoon when I was in my room singing along with and dancing to a Beyonce song in front of a mirror, and I caught my mother’s pained expression as she walked by my door. It was then that something clicked in my brain, and I could actually hear myself for the first time. It was crushing. I think I might even have been too sad to eat dinner that night. At least he isn’t lying to me. That’s a point in his favor.

“I want to either get an MBA and work for a Fortune 500 company, or I want to become a math professor.”

“A professor? That won’t be easy.”

“You know that saying, ‘Shoot for the moon; even if you miss you’ll hit the stars?’ I figure if I don’t get to be a professor, I can still probably teach high school math or go into accounting or something.”

“Very sensible.”

“What about you? What did you land on?”

“I don’t really know. It’s kind of hard to think long term.”

“You’re in your senior year of high school. All anyone is thinking about is the future and what they’re going to do with their lives.”

“Not me,” he says, flippantly. “Just taking it one math test at a time. By the way, do we still have time to do a practice test?”