I walked through the town of Grissom with Amanda following along at my heels. This was not a date—I knew that much—but I was still trying to get my head around how we’d arrived here together and what it was we were supposed to do.
It had started a couple of days earlier when I told my math class about my interview with Monica Grey, and how surprised I’d been to find out how much she struggled despite looking like she had everything together.
Mr. Griffin, who was taking Jarod’s request for more homework way too seriously in my opinion, immediately jumped on my case. “You must learn to see less through your eyes and feel more through your heart,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the face that people put out to the world does not always reflect what they’re feeling inside. Kelvin, you led us in the work on the Identity Cards because your primary challenge this year was to truly see yourself. Now that you’ve made some strides in that arena, it’s time that you came to see others as well. Here’s your assignment.”
I was to go to a town where I knew no one and to take pictures of strangers. For each picture, I needed to provide a caption saying what emotion that person was feeling. I had to come back with at least five people who were happy, five angry, etc.
Christy had her first swim meet since the accident that Saturday in Grissom, so I decided to go to the meet and do the assignment afterward. The team’s spirits were sky high with Christy’s return, and we won the meet easily. Christy swam with her cast on and was barely competitive, but Amanda was a terror. She won every race she entered. Christy cheered her on the entire time, and when Amanda, as anchor, came from behind to win the 4 x 100 relay, Christy was the first to envelop her in a giant hug.
I congratulated them both, and Amanda asked me why I’d come all the way out here just to watch a swim meet. When I explained about the assignment, she thought it sounded fun and asked to come along.
So here we were, but it was definitely not a date. It was a sunny day, so we walked into the main park in town and sat outside a coffee shop where there was plenty of foot traffic. I kept my phone at the ready.
“Happy people should be the easiest,” I said. “We might as well get that out of the way first.”
“You think so? That’s not my experience,” Amanda said.
That didn’t surprise me coming from Amanda, the awkward homeschooler. Fortunately, we weren’t in a town full of Amandas. There were plenty of people around, having a good time.
I picked up my phone, ready to snap a photo of a girl who looked around fifteen or sixteen, chatting with a bunch of guys.
Amanda looked over my shoulder. “You’re not seriously taking a picture of her, are you?”
“Why not? Look at that smile on her face.”
Amanda shook her head. “Forget the smiles. Look at that thick, black eyeliner. And see the way her hand is twisting the straps of her purse?”
“OK, so you find someone.”
“What about that guy over there?”
“The one sitting by himself, reading a book?”
“He looks content.”
I pulled out my phone and snapped his photo. “I’ll put him down under lonely.”
“Why, because he’s alone? That doesn’t make someone lonely.”
I sighed. “I guess it’s hard to tell what people are feeling.”
“It’s not so hard. Get your camera ready.” Amanda walked toward a guy taking a picture of his kids. I thought she was going to ask him something, but she didn’t stop and walked right into him.
“Watch where you’re going, will you?” the man said.
“I’m so sorry.” She ran back to me, a big smile drawn across her face. “See, it’s not so hard to tell what people are feeling. That guy was angry.”
I burst out laughing. “Of course he was angry—you walked right into him. But I don’t think that was the assignment.”
“The assignment was to take pictures of angry people. You did take the picture, right?”
“Yes, I did, but I can’t count it. Our job was to identify emotions, not create them.”
“Oh? And who do you think made him angry?”
“You did, obviously.”
“Oh, it’s obvious, is it? You want to bet? Loser takes the winner out to dinner tonight. Deal?”
Out to dinner? This was definitely starting to feel more like a date. Still, I was having fun. “Deal. But how are you…”
I never got to the end of my question. Amanda ran off again until Bam, she smashed into a light-skinned black girl laughing with her friends, and both of them went down. Amanda scrambled to her feet and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you.”
Remarkably, the girl kept laughing. “That’s alright,” she said. “Give me a hand up.”
Amanda pulled her to her feet. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” the girl said, though she winced and rubbed her shoulder. “You?”
“I’m okay. So sorry again.”
The girl waved to her as Amanda ran back toward me. “I’m in the mood for Italian,” she said. “There’s a great new place off route 89.”
“What are you talking about? We were betting on whether you’d made the guy angry, not on whether you could beat up on some helpless girl. I figured we’d go ask him.”
“Well, of course, he’d say I made him angry. It’s that kind of thinking that made him angry in the first place.”
“What kind of thinking?”
“The thinking that says that other people are in control of your feelings. But I just proved to you that you can’t make anyone feel anything. If you could, then all of the cliquey brats on the swim team would make me feel like crap every day.”
I’d wondered if Amanda knew the other girls were talking about her. “So you know what they say about you?”
“Of course. The more riled up they get, the more fun I have irking them. Yesterday, I intentionally put my shirt on backward after practice just to send them into little hissy fits.”
“But I thought you said you can’t make anyone feel anything?”
“I can’t. The girls on the team are already feeling jealous and spiteful, I simply amplify it. Look at what just happened. If running into someone automatically made them feel angry, then that girl I just bowled over should have felt livid. The fact is, that guy was already angry, he was just bottling it in. All I had to do was let the cork out of the bottle. But I ran into that girl much harder and still couldn’t make her angry.”
“I’m not so sure I’m buying this.”
“No? Want to go double or nothing on a movie after dinner?”
A movie? She definitely wanted to make this a date. “Sure,” I said, still in shock, “but how are…”
“Selfie!” Amanda pulled out her phone and pointing it at us. She leaned in close and, just before taking the picture, planted a kiss on my cheek, which instantly grew hot. “Ooh, that’s a good one. I think you can definitely submit this one under embarrassed.” She held the phone out to me. “What do you think?”
Indeed, there was no mistaking my pained expression and the red hue to my cheeks. But Amanda had made me feel that way. Hadn’t she?
Not in her mind. She took my hand, and said, “Ooh, I’m so excited. There’s this new Japanese movie playing at the arts cinema not far from the Italian place. You keep looking for people to photograph, I’ll check out show times.”
“So how do you think you’ve changed from all of this work with Mr. Griffin?” Amanda asked.
I held Amanda’s hand as we walked through the rapidly-filling parking lot. The two of us had spent more and more time together over the last few weeks until hardly a day went by when we were apart. I thought over her question.
“At the start of the year, I felt very much alone. Like it was me versus the world.”
“Did you ever think back then that you’d be strolling with a serious babe on your arm?” She squeezed my hand.
I laughed. Amanda, a babe?
“You think reading your cards helped you open up to other people?”
“Yes, but only little by little. At first, instead of me versus the world, it became us versus them.”
“Who was the ‘us,’ and who was the ‘them?’”
“The ‘us’ were all the losers: me, Darnell, Megan. The ‘them’ were all of the beautiful, popular people.”
“I certainly know where I would have fallen.” She threw back her hair like a movie star.
“You would have been Queen of the Losers.”
“Oh good, I’ve always wanted to be royalty. You think they would have given me a crown with a jewel-encrusted L.”
“Of course, but the L would be written in ASCII.”
“No, I’m the Queen of the Losers, not Queen of the Geeks. It should be written in Elvish.”
“Perfect.”
“So what happened then?” she asked.
“Christy’s accident. That was the first thing. Interviewing Monica Grey sealed it.”
“Sealed what?”
“The realization that everyone struggles. All this time I kept thinking, ‘poor me,’ meanwhile, even the people I thought had it together were also flailing—they just hid it better.”
“So what?”
“What do you mean, so what?”
“I mean, how does that revelation change your life? Why should it matter to you that other people struggle too?”
Why should it matter? “It’s like everything suddenly flipped around. I used to think that no one cared about my problems. Now I see they’re suffering from the exact same issues. They might mask them differently, but they don’t know how to handle them any more than I do. Rather than seeing myself as an oddball, I realized I actually have something to give.”
Amanda weaved her fingers into mine. “There’s one thing you’ve never told me.”
“What’s that?”
“You told me about the moments that define a lifetime, about Darnell going through his after Thanksgiving, Christy hers after the accident, and Jarod his when deciding not to go to college. Don’t tell me you went through all this without one of your own. When was it?”
When was my moment? So many flashed through my mind. Sitting on the floor of the faculty bathroom with Mr. Griffin, baking brownies with Megan on New Year’s Eve, visiting Christy after her accident, sitting in the cafe across from Monica, sitting on the roof with Dad; yet, none of those seemed right. Was it possible I didn’t have a moment?
Then inspiration struck. Why couldn’t I create my own moment? Why couldn’t I take any moment and imbue it with all of the lessons learned over the past few months?
“This,” I finally said, “this is my moment.”
Amanda squeezed my hand. “What’s so special about this moment?”
“Here I am walking with the Queen of the Losers, and I couldn’t be happier. For the first time, I’m allowing myself to love and to be loved. It all stems from finally loving myself.”
Amanda wrapped her arms around my neck and stared into my eyes. “If this moment is going to define your entire lifetime, is there anything else your Queen can do to make it more memorable?”
“Yes.” We now stood at the entrance to the swim stadium at State College, where the high school championship was about to begin. Christy’s lap times were still not as fast as they had been before the accident but were good enough for her to swim third on the 4 x 100 relay team. The team’s hopes largely rested now on Amanda, their new anchor. “Go in there and kick some ass.”
