a short story ‣ Maroon Beanie

length ‣ 3998 words, 8 pages

notes ‣ until I am done writing my current novel, I am going to aim for two Every Universe updates a month, and the first one this month happens to be a short story featuring some characters I hold very dear in my heart (and will hopefully write a novel about someday). enjoy!

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KATHRYN MYERS HAD never gotten below a seventy-five in her entire life. She hardly even struggled with classes. For the most part, Kathryn enjoyed studying, so doing well in school was a fringe benefit, and although she didn't particularly enjoy a few history classes, two math classes, and one science class, she still passed with high B's, mostly low A's.

Never had she even received a grade below seventy-five. Never had she failed.

So receiving a failing grade for an AP Calculus BC test — for a test she had studied long and hard for, and felt confident about when she took it — was devastating.

With a sickening feeling in her stomach, she walked toward the cafeteria, her feet dragging behind her. She didn't want to go to lunch and pretend everything was okay, especially since she just failed her first test ever, but she also didn't want to make a big deal about it. She knew she was going to survive this hurdle, but it just didn't feel like it at the moment.

They weren't allowed to take the tests out of the classroom, but the 56, scribbled and circled in red ink from a cheap Bic ballpoint pen her teacher had bought on sale, seemed imprinted on her eyelids. The idea that she had gotten an F, an actual, failing F on something, for the first time made her feel scared, ashamed, to have failed on a test she did in her favorite pencil during a two mod calculus class. She hadn't even failed precalculus, passing that class with flat nineties both semesters, and she had to do Khan Academy lessons daily to actually understand what was going on in that class.

Pulling on the frayed ends of her sweater's sleeves, she took a deep breath and made a mental list of things to do to raise her grade. After all, to take AP Physics C, to prove to the world she was not a failure, she had to pass calculus. She had to study more. Make mind maps. Revise. Rewrite notes. Do more Khan Academy lessons online.

There was no such thing as failure. This test was a threshold, but she would cross it and enter the new world. She could resurrect and return with the elixir. That was what she did.

About to make a study plan, her thoughts were interrupted by a voice nearby suggesting, "Let's go to My Other Kitchen." Kathryn blinked and only then noticed, down the hall, a group of male teenagers leaning against the wall, looking like they should be smoking a joint. The boy in plaid and khakis, who had suggested the trip of My Other Kitchen, looked over at Via, who was wearing a t-shirt from the Belmont High School spirit shop and using the wall to finish up a homework assignment — it looked like algebra II, but it could've as easily been chemistry — and Via just made a sound of acknowledgement, muttering a quiet "sure, sure," not meaning his words, but also not not meaning his words. Another boy, in a maroon beanie, was reading The Things They Carried with intense focus, not even looking up at the suggestion, and not even looking up when everyone else piped in an agreement about going to My Other Kitchen after school.

Kathryn would've paid them no mind, but the problem is, a year ago, they would've agreed wholeheartedly, gone to My Other Kitchen, and have a blast. A year ago, they would've noticed Kathryn's presence and invite her to go with them. A year ago, the popular clique still had meaning, because he had still been alive, and he had trusted them with all his heart. Then, everything changed when he trusted her, and not them.

Instead of going the long way around to avoid them, Kathryn decided to walk right by them, sneak by unnoticed. Although her stomachs were doing flips, she managed to get past them without any of them noticing her, or maybe choosing not to notice her, but she didn't care. Smiling to herself, she heard the group talk about pancakes and glanced back, wanting one peek at the group of friends who used to be Kathryn's friends, only to see Maroon Beanie staring at her, a finger holding his place in his book, not flinching when they made direct eye contact. He didn't look away, nor did she, and they just stared until something inside her shifted uneasily and made her compelled to look away. She abruptly turned and left to the cafeteria, leaving him behind.

Again.

No matter what, she always seemed to be leaving them behind.

In the cafeteria, Bill Smith Jr. and Cassidy sat near the entrance of the cafeteria, the latter of the two scribbling the answers to a history assignment she hadn't completed. Kathryn greeted them, took out her food container and fork, and began to eat her rice and steamed eggplant. Normally Cassidy would make a face at the eggplant, but she was too busy doing the history assignment to notice.

"Ms. Neuburger's still gone," Bill Smith Jr. said after a few moments, "and the coursework is really easy. I finished it in less than one mod, so you should be fine."

"Cool," Kathryn said. She hadn't really liked Ms. Neuburger, who had pregnant up until yesterday when she started having contractions in between writing on the writeboard and waiting for the students to plug the numbers into their calculators. It had been up to the students to get Ms. Neuburger to the hospital and have the front office informed, and Kathryn was thankful she had been in the bathroom when this entire incident happened. Childbirth was not a miracle Kathryn understood. It was messy, it was ugly, and it was disgusting.

"I wonder if she'll leave," Bill Smith Jr. commented, and the bright fluorescent lights caught on his bright blue braces as he talked. She remembered a time when she still had braces. "She's not married, so she'll probably quit to take care of her baby."

Kathryn didn't like gossip like Bill Smith Jr. did, so she said instead, "This means I have free time today. Maybe I'll do the calc problem set. It's like ten pages long." Kathryn chewed on some rice. "How far have you gotten?"

"I finished half of it," Bill Smith Jr. admitted. "Oh, by the way, what did you get on the test?"

"I did okay, I guess. I made some stupid mistakes." Stupid didn't even begin to cover it, but neither Cassidy nor Bill Smith Jr. asked any more questions. "What about you?"

"Ninety-three."

"Good job!" Kathryn bit into a steamed eggplant. She felt guilty for not telling the truth, but her friends already moved past this topic. After all, Kathryn said she did okay, which meant she did well. "How much more do you have of history?"

"I'm on the last page," Cassidy answered, the Pilot pen in her hand reliably putting ink on paper. "Have you finished the English project yet?"

"Yeah," both Bill Smith Jr. and Kathryn answered at the same time. Out of the corner of her eye, Kathryn saw the boys from earlier walking into the cafeteria, chatting amongst themselves without caring if anyone was looking at them. Before, they would get stares whenever they walked into any room. Now, they were just another group of friends.

She was about to look away when she saw Maroon Beanie surveying the cafeteria slowly, as though looking for something, someone, and pausing when he saw her. Looking around to make sure no one was looking, he waved a small, timid wave at her, and Kathryn felt the corners of her lips pull up. She decided to wave back, which was a small gesture, but it brought a small smile to his face. He looked down at the ground, smiling, and walked off with his friends.

"Who are you waving to?" Bill Smith Jr. asked, noticing her odd action. He looked around to see anyone looking in their direction, but Maroon Beanie had already joined his friends at another table.

"It was no one," Kathryn explained, "just someone in calculus with me." Bill Smith Jr. was convinced, but Cassidy raised an eyebrow. Kathryn did not have the habit of waving to people she wasn't friends with, and Kathryn did not have a lot of friends.

"Did they save your life or something like that?"

"No," Kathryn answered, grinning a little at the absurdity of the question. "We just had calculus today, Cass." She bit into an eggplant, smiled down at her food, and then struck up a conversation about archaic laws in Roman Empire with the two of them. Cassidy and Bill Smith Jr. took this as normal, and they spent ten minutes talking, until Kathryn couldn't take it anymore. "Hey, I think I'm going to spend some time alone. I'm sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry about," Bill Smith Jr. said, while Cassidy asked, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just need some time alone. You get it, right?" Kathryn smiled a little, gathered her stuff, and left to the library. On the way, she grabbed the coursework for AP Chemistry, hoping that it only took one mod.

It did.

By then, lunch was over, and she was left in the library with some of her classmates and a few students with this mod off. She didn't know anyone that well, and she didn't feel like making conversation with anyone, as the only conversation in the library right now was about a television show Kathryn did not watch. Sighing, she settled for listening to Spotify's "Targeted" playlist with her earbuds and started on the calculus problem set, pencil marking paper as she worked on each problem slowly. Unsure if she did any of it right, she just trudged on, until she reached one problem she couldn't do.

She checked the notes. She searched for solutions online. She plugged the work in her calculator again. Nothing gave her a real, let alone reasonable, answer.

Leaning her forehead on her hands, she stared at the problem, hair falling on either side of her, and willed for the problem to start making sense. She redid all the work, and nothing changed. Before she knew it, she felt a tear roll down her cheek. None of the numbers made sense. The problem was a puzzle where all the pieces were scrambled from three separate games.

The pencil faded as her tears landed on her work, and not wanting to make a scene in the middle of the library, she wiped her cheeks and eyes with the back of her hand, put her pencil down, and paused her playlist. The lack of music willed her back into reality, where nothing seemed to be happening, until she heard him.

Looking up to the library entrance, cheeks sticky and wet, she saw the principal, talking to a student who was listening to the entire lecture with disinterest. They didn't even seem fazed by any of it, and by the time Mr. Richards was done, Maroon Beanie said, "I didn't do anything wrong—"

"You've skipped enough school over the years to get you expelled." Mr. Richards crossed his arms, and Kathryn just watched, scratching the area underneath her left eye. "We don't take truancy lightly here, but I made an exception for you because you're extremely bright. Yet, for some reason, you're skipping class. Because of what? Lawrence?" Kathryn flinched at the name, and so did Maroon Beanie. The wounds were still fresh, but of course, Mr. Richards wouldn't know. He never liked Lawrence. "Why can't you be like Kathryn?"

Neither of them seemed aware that she was sitting at a seat earshot away, and neither of them seemed to care that people could hear them, period, because Maroon Beanie's voice grew aggressive. "Don't act like you know us."

"I never understood why Kathryn and he dated, because she is ambitious and smart and has the whole world going for her, but he skipped school, didn't care about anything, and I'm glad Kathryn's free of him."

She could see Maroon Beanie's face twisting into anger with every word Mr. Richards said, and she had to close her eyes for a second to process it. She inhaled. Too soon, Kathryn thought. They were still left in the ghost of Lawrence's presence even after a year. She still ducked in the halls every time she saw Lawrence's friends, because it was easier that way.

It was easier to ignore the wounds.

"Kathryn wants to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he never understood that."

Maroon Beanie looked furious, but he didn't argue with Mr. Richards, didn't say why Mr. Richards was wrong. Instead, he said, "I know," in the same, slightly too quiet voice she remembered.

"Of course, his death was a tragedy, but I think Kathryn's better off without." Mr. Richards cleared his throat, seemingly aware that Maroon Beanie's anger was still stewing. "Anyway, follow Kathryn's example and go to class. It's weird, you know, that you're failing all your classes because you're missing class, but all your test scores are above average." Maroon Beanie broke eye contact with Mr. Richards, noticed Kathryn sitting in the library, watching with her wet and sticky cheeks and bloodshot eyes, and almost seemed to zoom in on her, as though nothing else mattered but the two of them, not even Mr. Richards. Kathryn sent him a little wave against her better judgement.

His expression changed for half a second. He almost looked like the real him, the him who still didn't know what to do with Lawrence gone, the him who used to talk to Kathryn, the him who was lost and wandering but had found himself in Lawrence.

"—planning to go to class?" Mr. Richards was still talking, his tone impatient. "Your class is about to start, but you might just go to the CVS nearby to buy gum just for the laughs and talk about how stupid, old Mr. Richards can't do anything about you, but guess what—"

"I have a quiz in English 12 I need to take," Maroon Beanie interrupted, suddenly tearing his gaze away from Kathryn, and nothing about him, not his voice, not his actions, seemed to match up with the real him. The real Maroon Beanie was too polite to interrupt the principal. "The Things They Carried, antithetical parallelism, story truth and happening truth, et. al."

Kathryn smiled. Maroon Beanie had never been a slacker, and Mr. Richards looked surprised Maroon Beanie mentioned antithetical parallelism. "If you know all that, why do you skip school so much?" The silence answered the question for Kathryn, but Mr. Richards couldn't pick up on it and sighed, dismissing Maroon Beanie. The teen glanced at Kathryn for a second, sending her a small smile, and then left to class, and Mr. Richards stood where he was, sighing and scratching the back of his neck, muttering loudly, "What will I do with him?"

She wanted to know the answer to that question, but she had other problems to worry about. Looking down at her calculus problem set again, she sighed. She couldn't think about Maroon Beanie, and how before he had left, she saw the person Maroon Beanie used to be, the person before Lawrence's death. She couldn't think about how he was healing, which meant Kathryn could too, and she couldn't think about the fact healing was difficult, and that getting over Lawrence was even more difficult.

Instead, she put in her earbuds, unpaused the playlist, and worked on her problem set, her focus not slipping for a second. The bell, signaling the end of the school day, startled her, and as she looked around, she realized everyone else had already left. She quickly packed her stuff, pulled her backpack over her shoulders, and headed to the corner where she always joined Bill Smith Jr. and Cassidy on the walk home.

That was supposed to be the end of the day, but as she walked down the science hall to the exit, Kathryn heard the single word spoken a second before she felt it in the form of his warm hand grabbing her sweaty forearm to stop her in the middle of the hall as a few student walked around them, talking about their upcoming Spanish test. "Wait." Kathryn looked to the hand holding her left arm and saw the hand belonged to Maroon Beanie. "Are you okay?"

"Okay?" she repeated like it was a question, her voice catching on the second syllables.

"You were crying earlier, during mod M." He said it like it was just the reasonable thing to say, and she wondered if she could ever be that sensible. She wanted to be that sensible, but she could never do it. Not in a million years.

"It was nothing."

"You wouldn't be crying if it was nothing."

He was holding the arm with her watch, so she couldn't check the time, but she knew she was late in meeting Bill Smith Jr. and Cassidy and that she had to to lie to them, saying something about talking to the calculus teacher about a problem on the problem set. "I won't say it was nothing if it was something." Kathryn resisted the urge to smirk when Maroon Beanie's face fell just a fraction. "I need to go."

"Kathryn—" He couldn't finish the sentence, as Mr. Richards walked out of a classroom all of a sudden, and Maroon Beanie dropped her arm immediately. It went limp by her side.

"Are you bothering the poor girl?" Mr. Richards asked Maroon Beanie, and Kathryn frowned.

"I am not a poor girl. I come from a middle class family, and I am one of the most intelligent students at this school. You wouldn't ask a girl if she was bothering the poor boy."

Mr. Richards paused, realized the offense in his question, and apologized. "Is he bothering you, though?"

"No," Kathryn concluded, in a that's that manner. "I have to go. It was nice seeing you, Mr. Richards." She started walking off and heard Maroon Beanie apologize to Mr. Richards before following her outside, his footsteps louder than he was probably intending. "Please stop following me," she said, pushing open the door leading outside and wincing at the blinding sun. "Don't you have to go to My Other Kitchen or something?"

He didn't dignify that with a response. "You were crying earlier."

"Why do you care?"

"Are you okay?"

"Why do you care?" Kathryn asked again, whipping around to look at him, her neck craning up since he was a full twenty centimeters taller than her. As she looked at him, she suddenly wondered if Maroon Beanie still missed Lawrence. After all, after Lawrence, the posse dwindled to a small group of boys who were barely friends.

"You're not denying it." Maroon Beanie was different. He was unlike any other teenage boy she had met in her life. "You were crying."

"I was." She wondered if her frustration was bleeding into her voice.

Maroon Beanie seemed to droop, sad that she had confirmed what he had been thinking. "Why?"

"Calculus BC." She didn't know whether or not to include the fact that she had always been bad at calculus, that she was not the smart Asian girl everyone believed her to be, that she could never seem to figure out what was going on in calculus or biology, but Maroon Beanie just stared at her, his eyes lingering on her watch on her left arm for a moment too long.

"I can tutor you."

"You're Lawrence's friend," she said, unmistakably implying that being Lawrence's friend meant being unintelligent. "You can't—"

"Matthias!" a voice shouted from across a distance, and Kathryn tensed. If they saw him talking to her, he would no longer get to choose whether or not he was friends with them, and she would be shunned even more, if it was possible. Luckily, they didn't recognize her from the back as she stared at her feet, the white and blue of her Skechers sneakers muddy and dirty from P.E. "Come on, we've been waiting for you." He had somewhere to go but had put her as a priority. Uncomfortable with this information, she wondered if Maroon Beanie — Matthias — recognized her as Lawrence's girlfriend. "She can come, if you want," his friend added, almost as an afterthought, as though Matthias wasn't one to talk to girls. Kathryn wasn't sure if this was true or not, because most of Lawrence's friends talked to girls, if talking meant flirting.

Matthias opened his mouth to say something to Kathryn, but she didn't wait around to see it, walking toward the corner where Bill Smith Jr. and Cassidy were waiting for her. When she finally joined them, she quickly lied about the calculus problem she had asked the teacher about, and the two of them had nodded before they started making their way home. It somehow felt wrong to mention Matthias to the two of them, as though it would take away what little Kathryn and he have.

It didn't matter, though. The next day at school, everything proceed as normal, and so did the next day, and so did the next week, and so did the rest of the quarter. Kathryn and Matthias never spoke again, she continued to avoid Lawrence's friends in the halls, and Matthias did whatever he did before that fated day.

Everything was normal, except Kathryn was still doing poorly in AP Calculus BC, and except she could never seem to get Matthias out of her head, the same Matthias who had once been Maroon Beanie, the same Matthias who had been Lawrence's right hand man for all these years, the same Matthias who had blamed Kathryn for Lawrence's death.

They saw each other around occasionally, because that was the disadvantage of going to the same school, but they never were alone, they never had the opportunity to talk privately, and things could proceed as normal. They still avoided her, and she avoided them, and they fell into a nice rhythm.

At least, until that day at the start of December in the counselor's office, where they were waiting to talk to their respective counselors. Alone in the reception area, Kathryn revised for her history test tomorrow, painfully aware that the two of them sitting on the same green cloth couch, only a few inches separating the two of them.

"Are you okay?" he suddenly asked, breaking through the ambient noise of the air condition in the background, and his gaze shifted from his worn white Nike shoes to her. She stared down at her notes and pursed her lips, unsure whether to give him a response for the longest time.

She gave in. "Not really."

"Calculus?"

"Yeah. I still don't get what's going on in that class." She looked over at him, her eyes searching his. For what, she didn't know, and she turned away, rubbing the back of her neck, embarrassed. "Um, can you tutor me?"

Matthias was quiet as he thought this over, and she was sure he was going to say no. But when she looked back in his eyes, there was something that had previously not been there, and he gave in, just like her. "Sure."

"Really?" He nodded. "Thanks." She smiled at him, relieved at his answer, and he shyly smiled back, looking more and more like himself by the second. Because, she decided, they didn't need to get over Lawrence and his death. They didn't have to. They could just — carry on. Be not the person they used to be before Lawrence, but be the person they are because of Lawrence.

She didn't know what who that person was yet, but he didn't know who he was either, so maybe they could just carry on and slowly figure it out together.