Xia

Xia had been back at school an entire week before somebody that wasn't a teacher spoke to her.

"Hey, Qi. How do you solve for x?" A ruddy-skinned boy she had seen daily for three years yet hadn't spoken to once pushed his notebook under her nose.

Xia pretended to give the problem a long, hard look. She might as well have been trying to read tea leaves in the dark. If that's a thing. Do people do that?

"I don't know."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah." She raised a shoulder in resignation. "I don't really like...math. It's...I don't get it." A dramatic understatement if her last Pre-Cal exam grade was to be believed.

"Oh. I mean, I just thought you would, you know, considering."

She blinked up at him. "Considering what?"

He hesitated to answer and that was answer enough, but she wanted to hear him say it.

"Well?"

"I don't know. I just figured you would."

"Any particular reason? I don't raise my hand in class. I don't share my notes. I don't even talk. Why would you think math was my thing when I never said it was?"

He hunched over and shoved his hands in his pockets, trying to make himself small under her scrutiny. His acne-scarred cheeks were burning hotter by the breath. Petty annoyance kept her from saving him from himself. Xia wanted him to choke on his stereotypes.

"Didn't think so." She folded her homework into the pages of her textbook and began to pack her things. The library was her favorite place because of the solitude it offered; it wasn't much good to her, now.

"That's why nobody likes you. You think you're so much better than everybody else, don't you?"

"Not at math!" she shouted over her shoulder and, ducking under the furious glare of the librarian, made her escape. The bleachers on the sports field would have to do until the presumptuous jerk infestation in the library was resolved.

Let's get one thing straight. Xia might have sucked at math (numbers, how do they work?!), but Xia was brilliant at event planning. She could plan a revolution in the school gym given the chance, but ask her to factor any equation more complex than X^2-1, and you could expect tears.

She could talk to people. They listened when she spoke, because she made her words count; they were never once wasted. She just didn't tend to have anybody to say those words to is all.

Xia chewed a thumb nail and tried once again to understand inverse functions. I can't balance a checkbook, but they want me to get inverse functions. This is a state-sanctioned form of torture. She was looking up the number to Amnesty International as soon as she got home.

"You look down in the dumps. Why the long face?"

Xia perked up at hearing Phaedra's voice. She didn't want the other girl thinking she needed to be saved again. She'll never go out with me if I'm that pathetic. Her brain churned to a stop. Since when do I want Phaedra Barlowe to go out with me? We're barely even friends. Life-saving didn't confer instant friendship, right?

"Uh, it's nothing," Xia stammered, faking a laugh. "I was thinking—about stuff. I was thinking about...stuff." She couldn't think of anything else to say. The truth was out of the question.

Phae threw a leg over the cold bleacher seat and gave it a straddle. She was still dressed in her volleyball uniform topped with a nylon sports jacket, an Adidas sponsorship insignia splashed across the dark blue back panel. Her usually gelled hair was plaited in a French braid that curled over her shoulder like a pet snake. In short, she was sweaty and muddy and didn't much seem to care. Perfect, basically.

"You're an even worse liar than you are a driver. Take a class or something, you're making me nervous."

Xia bristled. It didn't matter that she was completely right. "I told you the accident wasn't my fault. The police have investigated and the insurance company—"

Phae absently sucked on the end of her braid and nudged Xia gently in the ribs. "I'm yankin' your chain, kid. I know that jerk hit you first." She rubbed her shoulder against Xia's in a wordless apology for accidentally being insensitive. "Live a little. Alls I'm saying is you're bad at covering up how you feel. I bet dogs can hear you going around in circles the next county over." She butted her bony knee against Xia's crossed legs. "Come on, what's buzzin' cuzzin'?"

"Nothing." Xia swept her hair up from her neck in a loose knot. It wouldn't hold long since she'd left her hair pins at home, but Xia felt warmer than she had all day now that Phae was near her. Somehow, the girl had the power to raise the temperature of any environment she entered by at least ten degrees. "I'm fine. I told you I was."

"That head of yours giving you the blues?" Phae made an abortive motion towards one of Xia's bruises, a ghastly greenish-yellow smear at the base of her skull. Better, she supposed, than the ugly indigo-grey it had been in the days after her accident.

"School gives me a headache, anyway." She worked her fingers over her orbital arches in search of pressure points that would ease her pain even a little. "If the drill squad practiced outside my skull half as much as they do inside, they might win some of the competitions they compete in."

Phaedra chuckled but she didn't disagree. The drill squad was not great, even with the most competitive Wild Girls filling its ranks.

"Just when I thought you were on the good drugs. That band of squares couldn't win a best squares competition if they were the only ones competing." She scrunched her nose. Xia definitely didn't sigh. "Don't tell Mickey I said that." 

Mickey Benitez was a badass JROTC cadet captain when she wasn't trawling the hallways to drag anybody, teacher or student, giving the Dreamers at their schools crap. She was a second-generation army brat, but not much of a brat. Xia was scared to death of the short girl's reputation, but she respected her.

"She probably already knows."

Phae stared at her a moment, her dark eyes piercing. "Yeah, she probably does." She swiped a cashew from Xia's lunchbox and tossed it up in the air to catch in her mouth. It was gone in the space of a second, lost to the crunch of a razorblade jaw. That was a greaser girl by definition: a human razorblade. Shined like a diamond; cut like one, too. They put the anger in 'danger', the war in 'beware.' These were the kinds of kids Xia's ma had warned her about. That didn't stop Xia from going hot and cold when Phaedra brushed her hand. She was just about perfect.

Greaser girls could do anything a greaser guy could do except get a girl knocked up. 'Point for the greasers with the faces,' varsity soccer star Garvey Shahi would have said. 'Leather jackets and hair gel, jeans and hot rods. That's all you gotta have to be a greaser. You gotta love to ride, love a thrill, and kiss a girl.'

Garvey said a lot for a biker who claimed to be the strong, silent type.

And anyway, Xia wasn't destined to be the girl who got kissed. She tried not to sigh. Failed.

Xia wasn't used to being this lovesick for anybody, boy or girl or any person in-between. She liked being on her own; she missed liking it.

"Why are you talking to me," she finally asked Phaedra when they'd been quiet too long. Which, god, sounded assholic in the extreme and was not what Xia meant to say. Fu.... "Not that I don't like you talking to me. Talk to me more—talk to me all the time, if you want. Just...why? Did you need something? I'm bad at math, really bad, so if that's what you're after..."

"I've got math covered. Top of the class, remember." Her mouth slanted in a smirk. She was a little cocky and a lot pretty. It's not fair. She shouldn't get to be both.

"Sure." Xia remembered nothing of the kind. Since Wild Girls weren't usually her area, she didn't make it her business to know any more about them than she needed to avoid them en masse. Pretty people could be mean and petty. She'd learned that in middle school, and she carried the lesson even now. Better to be ignored than a target.

"That startled lynx look you've got going on is a dead giveaway, you know."

"I don't know what a lynx looks like."

"It's a cold-climate cat. Perky ears. Snub tail. Lots of leg. Sort of stately until you sneak up on it; then, it goes all clumsy."

Xia wavered, almost insulted yet unsure if she should be. "Do you like lynxes?"

"They're all right with me." Her eyes crinkled in a genuine grin. She was joking and it still made Xia all warm inside. Cocky and pretty but so corny. Nobody's perfect. Xia smiled despite herself.

"Because you're a leg woman," Xia guessed. Phae winked, giving Xia's stocking legs a long, considering glance. She doesn't deny it. Xia failed again not to perk up at the thought.

"Because clumsy doesn't mean worthless. Just like being bad at math doesn't mean stupid." Phae plucked Xia's phone off the bench and messed around with the screen that Xia, having no secrets, never locked. "That's my number. Text me if anybody else goes stupid over you." She handed Xia back her phone as she got up to leave and Xia's pulse quickened when their fingers brushed during the handover. The answering twist of Phae's smile was preordained heartbreak, only Xia didn't mind. I'm doomed. Gay and doomed.

"I guess we won't have much to say to each other, in that case."

Popping the collar on her jacket, Phae quipped, "Don't bet on it, cutie," and swaggered down the bleachers and across the green, aware—because she must have been—of how some of the other students paused to let her pass, others stopped altogether to watch her go. Xia was as guilty of the second as any other student of the first.

---

To: Phae B.

From: Xia Q.

Hey, thanks fo

What was she supposed to say? How did people even text each other? What were the rules?

Did you maybe wanna

—marry me?  Xia dropped her head on her desk, a piece of furniture she never used unless times were dire. She had two weeks of homework to make up and a splitting headache besides. An extension was probably in the cards if she asked, but it wasn't like she had much socializing to take up her time; she could do this. It was just, well, greaser girl extraordinaire, Phaedra Barlowe eating her concentration. Now that she had the girl's number, all she could think about was getting in touch—also, talking. Mostly touching. Would somebody please put her out of her misery!?

Come over for dinner. My mom wants to say hi

She deleted that text out of pure shame. Using her mom as a tool to get a hot girl to come over? She'd never live down the humiliation. A first grader could see through that ruse.

I feel like a first grader. This was easier when I could just drop a Scooby-Doo V-Day card in a girl's desk anonymously and she'd never know. I did that so many times. Not even the teacher had me figured out.

Xia lifted her head from her Psychology textbook. Oh. Oooh. That's just corny enough to work.

"Right? Right," she assured herself.

Yanking on her hoodie and her Keds, Xia bolted out of her house at top speed in the direction of the nearest bus stop. She'd stopped long enough to tell her mom where she was going, if not why, and run before she could offer use of the family car again. Xia would probably get behind the wheel panic-attack-free one day, but it wasn't today. Today, she had a plan and she intended to see it through without vomiting from fear.