Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

25

SO, YEAH. I’VE BEEN CARELESS. I guess I left a trail of clues, and I shouldn’t be surprised that Blue put them together. Maybe I kind of wanted him to.

Jacques a dit is “Simon Says” in French, by the way. And it’s obviously not as clever as I thought it was.

But I really fucked it all up with the Cal thing. I mean, honest to God, I’m a freaking moron. I seriously don’t know what I was thinking. Blue-green eyes and a gut feeling that Blue was Cal? It’s classic Simon logic. No surprise that I was horribly, epically wrong.

I spend about twenty minutes staring at Blue’s email on my laptop that morning before writing back. And then I sit there refreshing the browser over and over again until Nora bangs on my door. We get to school five minutes early anyway. So I spend five more minutes sitting in my parked car staring at my email again on my phone.

I mean, he didn’t see the Tumblr post. So that’s something. That’s a huge something, actually.

I walk in just as the bell is ringing, and I’m in a serious daze. It’s lucky that my hands seem to know my locker combination, because my brain has checked out. People talk to me, and I nod along, but absolutely nothing penetrates. I think a couple of pickup truck guys change my name to Semen Queer. I don’t know. I don’t even think I care.

All I can think about is Blue. I guess a part of me is hoping for something today. Some kind of reveal. I can’t believe Blue wouldn’t tell me, now that he knows who I am. Which means I’m looking for it everywhere. Leah passes me a note in French class, and my heart starts pounding, thinking it could be a message from him. Meet me by your locker. I’m ready. Something like that. But it turns out to be an impressively realistic, manga-style drawing of our French teacher performing fellatio on a baguette. Speaking of things that remind me of Blue.

And when someone taps me on the shoulder in history class, my heart is a pinball. But it’s just Abby. “Shh, listen to this.”

I listen, and it’s Taylor explaining to Martin that she wasn’t necessarily trying to get a gap between her thighs, but it’s just her metabolism, and she didn’t even realize that some girls try to get the gap on purpose. Martin nods and scratches his head and looks bored.

“She can’t help her metabolism, Simon,” Abby says.

“Apparently not.” Taylor may be an undercover, bully-fighting ninja, but she’s still kind of awful.

And then Abby nudges me again later to pick up a pen she dropped, and it’s pinballs all over again. I can’t even help it. There’s just this thread of anticipation that I can’t seem to quell.

So when the school day ends and nothing extraordinary has happened, it’s a tiny heartbreak. It’s like eleven o’clock on the night of your birthday, when you realize no one’s throwing you a surprise party after all.

On Thursday after rehearsal, Cal very casually mentions that he’s bisexual. And that maybe we should hang out sometime. It catches me off guard. All I can do is sort of gape at him. Sweet, slow-moving Cal, with his hipster bangs and his ocean eyes.

But the thing is, he’s not Blue.

Blue, who’s barely been returning my emails.

Amazingly, I forget all about Cal until the next day in English class. Mr. Wise is out of the room when I walk in, and the nerds are restless. A couple of people are arguing about Shakespeare, and then someone stands on a chair and basically bellows Hamlet’s soliloquy into this other dude’s ear. The couch is especially crowded for some reason. Nick is perched on Abby’s lap.

She leans her head out from behind Nick’s torso and calls me over. She’s beaming. “Simon, I was just telling Nick about what happened in rehearsal yesterday.”

“Yes,” says Nick. “Who, pray tell, is this Calvin fellow?”

I shake my head, blushing. “No one. He’s from drama club.”

“He’s no one?” Nick tilts his head. “Are you sure? Because this one tells me—”

“Shut up!” says Abby, clamping a hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry, Simon. I’m just so excited for you. It wasn’t a secret, right?”

“No, but it’s not—it wasn’t anything.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Abby says, with this smug little smile.

I don’t know how to explain to her that, for all intents and purposes, I’m already taken. By someone who evidently shares a first name with a president and an obscure cartoon character, and doesn’t like to draw, and doesn’t have blue eyes, and has not yet pushed me in a rolling chair.

Someone who seemed to like me better before he knew who I was.