The Journal

The Journal

  By Ronnica Z. Rothe

  Copyright 2011 Ronnica Z. Rothe

  Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.

  Used by permission.

  www.Lockman.org

  Note to Parents and Educators:

  This book contains non-graphic discussions of sexual situations. It may not be suitable for children under 14.

  For my mother, for introducing me to the new worlds

  found within books,

  And for my father, for showing me the stars

  Kissing

  February 2102

  The day I found Beth’s journal, Sebastian broke up with me for the last time. Or I broke up with him, depending on how I chose to tell the story.

  That Monday morning began with a case of the common fight shared between mother (my lovely mom) and daughter (me). I told my mom I hated her. I certainly didn’t mean it. I wasn’t one of the teenagers who regularly used the “h” word to describe the person who gave birth to me, but Mom had made me so angry. To hear those words come out of my mouth surprised her just as much as it did me. We were fighting about Sebastian—my boyfriend, when I can call him that—and how much time I spent with him. Mom told me weekly that I needed to slow down my relationship, but I fought harder against her this time. I had just received a chip from Ryan telling me that Sebastian had gone back to Kinsley Stewart, and that made me angry.

  Don’t even get me started on Kinsley Stewart.

  I knew there was no need to continue fighting with Mom about Sebastian if he went back to ignoring me like he did last time he got back together with Kinsley, but if I told her that, she’d be proven right. Seeing the look she gave me as I walked out the apartment door was satisfying, if only until the guilt hit my stomach. I didn’t want to hurt Mom as much as I wanted to win the argument.

  On most days, my brother Chester and I would take the same pod to school. He went to Palin Middle School, while I was a proud fighting bear at Bramble High School. Though his school was two miles farther from home, Mom preferred us to go together so that I can make sure he gets there on time. Of course, she received a chip as soon as the school registered his brain chip, but Mom was old-fashioned like that and preferred me to see that he got into school with my own eyes. She didn’t know that I put on the next chapter of The Turn of the Millennium as soon as the pod door closes behind Chester and never actually saw him walk inside.

  The Turn of the Millennium was my latest favorite show. My best friend, Ryan, didn’t get the show and could care less about history. True, the show was a bit like school at times, but at least it wasn’t Ms. Sydney droning on and on about the Great Depression. The music on the show was cheesy—clearly meant for an audience much older than high schoolers—but I loved to watch anything about the 2000s. The Turn of the Millennium was narrated by Noveb White, a 70s crooner whose slicked back hair is the color of his name. On the show, he was always dressed in a corny gold blazer, though he at least changed his outlandish bowties between episodes.

  As the pod arrived at Bramble, I turned off Noveb White and unthinkingly replaced it with my music. I don’t really like silence: it tempted me to think about Sebastian. I don’t want to think about him right now.

  But apparently I had to think about Sebastian, as he was the first person I saw when I started walking towards the school building. I wish I had taken the time to dutifully watch Chester walk into his building this morning as that would have delayed me enough to have avoided seeing Sebastian altogether. I thought about turning around when I saw Sebastian, but just when I made up my mind to do so he spotted me…and waved. I turned pink, or at least I assumed I did because my cheeks were hot. I raised my right hand wiggling my fingers just enough to qualify it as a wave. It would never have won me any points with the judges at a beauty pageant. My hand felt like lead, but I didn’t want to ignore his gesture because people were watching.

  As I waved, I heard the clicking of heels coming up from behind me. These heels were attached to long, tan legs: the long, tan legs of one Kinsley Stewart. Unlike Kinsley, I had short legs paired with a long torso. My skin was a toasted light brown color—my favorite attribute about myself—but my eyes were too wide and dark for my tastes.

  If I had been pink when I saw Sebastian, I must have at this point turned red. Kinsley was the one Sebastian was waving to, not me. While I was glad that he hadn’t seen my wave, I didn’t like the fact that I was so easily overlooked by the boy who until last night I assumed was my boyfriend. I wondered whether he would even notice me if I walked right past him.

  As I was thinking this, I was thrown once again. As Kinsley passed me to reach Sebastian, he leaned toward her and gave her a quick kiss on the lips, a move strictly prohibited by the Bramble High code of conduct. The forbidden intimacy was quickly followed by Sebastian’s lingering hand on her nearly bare shoulder.

  The two gestures were certainly sufficient confirmation for the chip I received from Ryan last night. Couldn’t Sebastian have had the courtesy to officially end things with me before kissing her ten feet from the front door of our school? Was it not enough for him to choose her over me? Did he have to rub it in my face?

  I was already thinking about what I would tell the school gossips. I’d tell them that Sebastian and I had come to a “mutual understanding.” That sounded very mature and amicable. I just hoped I wasn’t pressed for the details, as I might get tripped up in my lies. For the moment, I turned up my music as loud as it would go and tried to think of something, anything, to distract me.

  Thankfully, I was soon at the door of Ms. Oscar’s classroom. As I passed through the doorway my favorite song by Eminem turned off with a quiet click. It might sound strange that I listened to music old enough to have been my great grandma’s favorite in her teenage years, but my love of the 2000s extended to my music preference.

  I would have continued to listen to my music in class if I could, but this was one place it wasn’t allowed. The minders were smart enough to know that we wouldn’t do our school work if we were allowed to access our chips. Instead of watching videos internally via chip, we have to view all our lectures on our desk screens, so the minders could do what they did best: monitor that we’re on task. We even had to use old-fashioned ear buds for audio, so they wouldn’t have to worry about us overriding the lectures on our chip audio input. Mom told me in her day when chips had first come out they didn’t have the technology yet to block them. Many of the students then would sit in class and listen to their chips instead of the teachers. That was before minders, too. I guess teenagers have always been one step ahead of their elders when it comes to technology.

  As I walked past the rows of desks in Ms. Oscar’s classroom, I headed to the back row where Ryan was already seated. She nodded to me as I slid into my seat, and I could tell from the curious yet sympathetic look she was giving me that she wanted to bring up the one subject I had tried and repeatedly failed to avoid. At the moment I would have actually rather discussed geometry or even the latest choose-your-own-adventure episode.

  “Amala, how are you doing?” Ryan leaned over and whispered with a pitying look. I just shrugged at her. We had stayed up late last night chipping, so she already knew every feeling I could express about Sebastian. Well, everything before the kiss I had just witnessed. Now knowing that I had no way of denying the truth of Sebastian’s betrayal, I felt even worse. I guess I still carried some hope last night that his betrayal was just a rumor.

  Thankfully, I was saved from having to answer Ryan by Ms. Oscar. Usually I disliked how punctual she was with starting class, but today it was a desired respite.

  “Now, class, it’s time t
o turn to your screens and begin your work. I expect you to get through your math and English lectures before lunch.” Why Ms. Oscar had to remind us of this protocol every day, I didn’t know. Perhaps she was reading from an invisible script, or even monitored herself, and not allowed to collect her measly paycheck if she didn’t repeat these lines each day.

  “Kaysah, Ming, and Ryan, you all have math tests today, so come up to the front, please.”

  I was grateful that I didn’t have to begin Monday morning with a math test, but I was feeling a little bit guilty that I kept Ryan up so late last night chipping about Sebastian when she had a test the next day. Ryan said she didn’t need to study more but we both knew better. I turned to my own math lecture, putting in my ear buds. I was thankful they didn’t have cords like the ones I saw in The Turn of the Millennium. I think that they would really get in the way.

  On my screen beside the video of my math lecture, I had my math eNotebook open. Around the geometry proof Professor Larry had me writing, I was doodling a continuous border of flowers. Apparently calling our math lecturer by his first name, Larry, allows us to relate more to him. His outfit, a red and gray striped sweater over high-waisted pants, circa 2089, makes the task more difficult, though. I’m thankful that Ms. Oscar hadn’t walked by to see my embellishments—it’d be hard to claim that the proof that two triangles are congruent required the floral decoration. There were too many sharp angles in math.

  As Professor Larry wrote the next step of the proof on his screen, he called out my name. Of course, my name is not in the original video, but it has been added for my benefit to make sure that I’m paying attention. Got to love technology, right? I was a bit behind the 16-year-old class’s average in math, but I was okay with that. If I had tried harder, perhaps I could move through the lessons at a quicker pace, but I didn’t really see the benefit of getting to Algebra II any faster, because that was the last math class required before graduation. If we finished early, we just got the “reward” of continuing our math studies.

  After Professor Larry’s lecture and English with Ms. Julie Anne, Ryan and I headed to the cafeteria for lunch. We quickly clicked our music in sync, listening to the latest release from Restra, Ryan’s favorite band. Ryan and I had been friends for a few years, and though things sometimes got tense between us, we’ve been able to remain best friends for over two years. As we sat down to lunch, Ryan looked at me expectantly. I knew the conversation would focus on Sebastian and me.

  “So, Amala, are you going to confront Sebastian about what we heard?” Ryan blurted out quickly, sounding almost excited about the plight of her best friend’s latest relationship. She must have been holding it in all during her math test and English lecture.

  At that moment, we both turned our heads towards the serving line, as our attention was drawn by a big clatter followed by laughter and shouts of “Peg-leg Ming is at it again!” Ming, a fellow year 16, had tripped and thrown her plate of mashed potatoes and pinto beans under a nearby table where several popular kids were seated. She was busy scrambling under the table, rescuing the few beans that had sloshed off of her plate. Ming had a bad leg that made her walk with a pronounced limp, though she was often “helped” in her clumsiness by her classmates who liked to trip her.

  Ryan was only momentarily distracted. “I told you Sebastian was a jerk from the beginning,” she said, taking a sip of her watery apple juice. I remembered nothing of the sort, but hindsight was 20/20, right? In fact, it was Ryan and her boyfriend, Tate, who had convinced Sebastian and I to get together in the first place. But Ryan and Tate broke up last week, and ever since then, Ryan has claimed to have known both Tate and his best friend Sebastian were jerks all along.

  “Who cares, I never was that into him,” I say to shut Ryan up. Actually, it’d be truer that he wasn’t ever that into me.

 

 

  Finding

  Sebastian and I met year 15. We had come from different middle schools, and were not in the same class our first year at Bramble high. When he entered my classroom last year, I instantly had a crush on him. Perhaps it was the confidence he had, or the way he seemed to know most of the cooler kids in the class that made him attractive. His adorable grin helped, the one he’d use that would make me instantly forget why I was mad at him. I don’t want to fall for that smile again.

  Mere seconds after his smile left me awestruck for the first time, he sat down next to Kinsley Stewart. I was sitting next to the door and there was an obviously available seat right next to me, but he passed it over. I was a little disappointed. Then he leaned over and gave Kinsey a shoulder hug. My disappointment grew.

  I don’t know why I assumed a guy must be available if I liked him. It was not like I had dibs or anything. I certainly wasn’t the kind of girl to whom all the boys flocked. Kinsley was that kind of girl, and maybe Ryan, but not me. I probably could have handled my disappointment with grace if Sebastian had been with any girl but Kinsley Stewart, my former best friend.

  At 11, Kinsley and I were as close as could be, but by year 12, some distance had grown between us. She started hanging out with other girls, the ones whose parents always let them stay out later and had more eCreds to spend on makeup and new earrings. I was fine with being just one of her best friends (though I didn’t have any others), until I found out that she had been spreading rumors about me behind my back: rumors that I had a crush on our minder, Mr. Rosas.

  Yes, the rumors were true. I had confided to Kinsley earlier that year that I had a crush on Mr. Rosas. But she did too, though she wouldn’t own up to it to her new friends. When we would play M*A*S*H, we would both include his name, hoping to land on him as our future husband. I tried to respond to the rumors, but when I would say anything, it was always mocked, adding to my humiliation.

  Kinsley and I hadn’t talked ever since. Though Ryan soon became my good friend, every time I saw Kinsley basking in her new found popularity, I remembered the hurt she had caused me. Though there was no way she could have known that I would have a crush on Sebastian after spying him for the first time, it felt like her being with him before I had the chance was to spite me.

  I spent the rest of year 15 putting that behind me, pretending like I didn’t even care about any of the boys in my class. I would discuss Ryan’s crushes with her ad nauseam, but when the attention turned to me, I emphasized, probably too vehemently, the lack of crush material in our class.

  But then, two days before the end of year 15 as I was walking out into the warm June sun I heard two 14-year-olds walking in front of me discussing how Kinsley had given Sebastian the boot. I never did hear the details—surely it couldn’t be true that she found him holding hands with a girl from Kaffor High—but that wouldn’t matter anyway. What mattered was the crush that I pretended not to have all year was now 100% available (not counting that girl from Kaffor High, of course) and surely he was just waiting for me to make my move.

  So make my move I did. Every summer afternoon since middle school, Ryan and I would visit the Palin Pool. But this past summer, I convinced her that the boy-watching was better over at the Leigh Pool, which was only a 15-minute pod ride away. What I really meant was that we were sure to run into Sebastian if we went to Leigh Pool, as it was just two blocks from his house.

  Dressed in my old blue one-piece—Mom wouldn’t let me buy a new one since I hadn’t worn out the old—I joined Ryan at her apartment and we set off in a pod. Our moms only gave us so many eCreds for the summer, so we had to carpool to save eCreds so we could spend our allowances on the pool admission and snacks, not transportation. One-person pods were more common, but two-person pods cost just a little bit more, making them a much better deal if you could carpool.

  It turned out, the boy-watching was better at Leigh Pool. Instead of running into the same guys we’ve known since grade school—the ones who weren’t cute or fun—we ran into Sebastian and Tate. Tate hit it off with Ryan right away. They were holding hands with their feet
dangling in the pool by the end of our first week of summer break.

  With Ryan and Tate being all lovey-dovey, I was left hanging out with an acquaintance, Clara, which was fine. I actually really enjoyed spending time with Clara, though we had never gotten particularly close. One day when Clara was grounded, Ryan convinced me to still come to the pool, even though I knew she was going to hang out with Tate the whole time. Ryan wasn’t allowed to go to the pool alone, but she didn’t want to miss an afternoon with Tate so she had to bring me. Her mom definitely didn’t know about Tate, and Ryan planned to keep it that way.

  Ryan knew I had a crush on Sebastian, and she had told Tate. It wasn’t a coincidence that Sebastian also showed up alone, instead of with his usual cohorts. His gang of three or four popular guys from our school enjoyed having burping contests when they were not trying to impress the female, college-aged lifeguards with their tricks off the high dive. It was just the four of us—Ryan and Tate, Sebastian and me—throwing each other around in the deep end and laughing. Before I knew it, Sebastian and I were alone in a corner of the pool, and he was slower and slower about removing his hands from my waist each time he threw me.

  At first I thought I was dreaming, making much of nothing. After all, I had daydreamed situation after situation much like what was happening. And then suddenly he wasn’t tossing me away at all, but instead pulled me close to him against his firm chest. With that, we were unofficially a couple. We had two weeks left of our four-week vacation, but we took advantage of every afternoon by spending them together at the pool from that point on.

  When the first day of year 16 at Bramble High came around, Sebastian still hadn’t made it official between us. I had expected him to bring it up the “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” words at any moment, but he didn’t. I didn’t want to do it myself, as I was afraid it would change what was going on between us. So I settled for being his unofficial girlfriend, happily holding hands as we returned to school together.