OOM: Reassessment
There are times - a lot of them, actually - when Hannah wonders if she made the right decision, asking to come back to Neptune High.
For one thing, spending one third of one year at an all girls’ Catholic boarding school on the other side of the country is going to look seriously fishy on college applications. She suspects college admissions types will have no trouble figuring that out.
On the other hand, she also suspects that a personal recommendation from Dr. Temperance Brennan of the Jeffersonian Institution will go one hell of a long way towards offsetting that. And she’d be lying to herself if she said her concerns here were purely academic.
If she’s being honest (and at the moment, she is), it really comes down to wondering if she wouldn’t be happier in Vermont, at Our Lady of the Maples, sharing a room with Hilary, 3000 miles from Neptune.
Her relationship with her father would probably be better if they didn’t have to spend every other weekend and two evenings a week trying to figure out how to deal with each other. At the very least, it wouldn’t be any worse. She counted, this weekend. From the time he picked her up at her mother’s on Friday to the time dropped her off this evening, she said 106 words to him, and he said 123 to her. That works out to an average of just over 4 ¾ words exchanged per hour. Not good.
As for school . . . well, it’s better than it was in the fall, and not just because she’s ignoring it. There really is less to ignore. But the problem, she tells Hilary, is that high school reputations really don’t go away. So while the relentless harassment of September and October is long gone (at least on the high school time measurement scale), it doesn’t take much to set off an encore. Someone running into Logan Echolls in town on a slow gossip week will do it. (Really, why doesn’t he just leave? Why stay here if he doesn’t have to?)
It’s been especially bad this past week, because Connor Harris asked her out, and she turned him down (first politely, then firmly, then more firmly, and finally rather forcefully). And at that point he and his friends trotted the whole mess out again for a day or two. But Mackenzie Miller, his ex-girlfriend, and her friends have kept it up for over a week now - the worst kept secret at Neptune High is how badly Mackenzie wants Connor back.
“And this is what happened when I said ‘no,’” she tells Hilary on the phone. “God help me if I’d said ‘yes.’ Though not just because of Mackenzie, because if I ever tell you I’m dating Connor Harris, you’ll know I’ve gone insane. I mean, I don’t know why anyone would want him in the first place, never mind wanting him back. He’s stuck-up and mean and kind of stupid.”
“Is he cute?” Hilary asks.
“Well, yeah, there’s really no denying he’s cute. But he knows he’s cute, so-”
“Oh, one of those,” says Hilary.
Hannah calls her former roommate every Sunday evening. Hilary, Hannah has found, is an excellent person to talk to, because she’s very sympathetic, pretty objective, and there’s virtually no chance she’s will have repeated everything you tell her to the rest of the junior class before breakfast.
“Oh, damn it," says Hilary, and then, more loudly like she's calling down a hallway (which she is), “Sorry, Sr. Mary Renee!” There’s a sigh as she turns her attention back to Hannah. “I have to go, because Sr. Mary Renee is doing the lights out warning. E-mail me?”
“Absolutely. Tell everybody I said hey, okay?”
“I will. We miss you, Hannah.”
“I miss you guys, too.”
She gets to school early on Monday, because there’s time built into her mornings for things to go wrong - missing shoes, uncooperative hair, orange juice spilled on her shirt, chipped nail polish and so on. Nothing goes wrong this morning, and so she’s early.
The “thing to do” would be to hang out in the courtyard, but she can see Mackenzie holding court, and walking into that gets the week off to a bad start. So she heads for her locker.
The halls are pretty empty, with 23 minutes till the homeroom bell, but there’s a guy she doesn’t recognize - tall and broad-shouldered and fair-haired.
And he’s trying to open her locker.
“Can I help you?” Hannah asks, sharp and annoyed and not sounding terribly helpful.
“I’m just trying to open my locker,” he says, uncertainly.
“That’s my locker.”
He looks at the paper in his hand. “It’s not 222?”
“222 is the one on the bottom. You’re trying to open 221, which is probably why your combination doesn’t work,” she says, relaxing a little. Honest mistake, she decides, and not anyone planning anything unpleasant.
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No big,” says Hannah. “You’re new here, aren’t you?” she adds, sympathetically. A year ago she turned up at a new school in the middle of the year. Karma would seem to dictate that it’s time to be friendly.
He nods. “Just moved here. I’m Sam. Keith.”
Hannah gives him an amused look. “You don’t know your locker number or your name?”
He looks, if possible, even more uncertain. “What?”
“Sam or Keith? Which is it?”
“Oh, no. Keith is my last name. Sam Keith.”
“Oh. I see. I’m Hannah Griffith,” she says. “Nice to meet you, Sam. So, where did you move here from?”
“A town you’ve never heard of in Kansas.”
“Kansas. That’s one of the flat ones in the middle, right?” It takes him a moment to figure out that she’s kidding, and then he grins. “Welcome to Neptune,” she adds.
“Thanks. I feel kind of like I’ve been blown to Oz here.”
“That happens in Kansas occasionally, I hear,” she says. “Totally unsolicited advice here, Sam. There are not a lot of secrets at Neptune High - generally, you tell one person, you’ve told a thousand. Don’t believe everything you hear, especially about yourself. Don’t keep anything in your locker you wouldn’t want found in a surprise police raid. Don’t ever insult a Latino with a motorcycle, unless you want to wind up naked and taped to a flagpole. And watch out for Amber.”
“Who’s Amber?”
“Oh, you’ll meet Amber. She’ll make sure of it. You’re new and cute and male, and she’s not subtle.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, flushing slightly. “So, what you’re telling me is that not everyone here is as nice as you are, Hannah.”
She laughs. “Now, what makes you so sure I’m nice?”
“Call it a hunch,” he says. “Am I right?”
“Let’s just say that I’m generally not considered one candidates vying for the title Wicked Witch of the West. Seriously, though, it’s not that bad here. Certainly not as bad as I just managed to make it sound, even if I do occasionally have to remind myself of that fact. You’ll do fine. And if I can help, just ask. I’ll certainly try.”
“I’m probably going to take you up on that.”
“Good. I hope you will. It’ll do me some good to have to remember that more often than I do.”