Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum

it’s all f’ing complicated.
    Me: Hey, what’s your favorite word?
    SN: why.
    Me: Just thought it was something I should know about you.
    SN: no, I mean my favorite word is why.
    Me: It’s a good word. Why.
    SN: right? right. a word and a whole question. and yours?
    Me: Waffle.
    SN: huh. a great breakfast food. and of course dictionary.com reminds me that it also means “to speak or write equivocally.”
    Me: exactly.
    SN: i think one day we should eat waffles together.
    Me: equivocally yes.
    —
    Next day at lunch I sit with Dri and her friend Agnes, who is probably her Scarlett. I’m still too new here to see where this table fits into the high school hierarchy. It seems none of my old rules apply. Back in Chicago, the athletes, who gathered Saturday nights in the bowling alley parking lot to sit in open hatchbacks and drink cheap beer by the case and toss their empty cans at the Dumpster were the popular kids, and the theater dorks, who had ill-placed piercings and one silly streak of cotton-candy-colored hair, were, well, the dorks. Theo and Agnes wouldn’t have even rated. Here, it’s the opposite; theater is an actual graded class
and
an after-school activity, and both are considered cool.
    Back home, I was neither athlete nor theater dork. Instead, I was in that middle clique that every school needs to function efficiently: the worker bees. We took the honors classes, ran the newspaper and the yearbook and the student government. Not popular, not even close, but at least indispensible. (Back at my old school, it was important to distinguish the worker bees from the straight-up nerds: the nerds were even less cool than the theater dorks, but they were too busy learning how to write code and nurturing dot-com fantasies to care.)
    The truth is it doesn’t matter to me where Dri and Agnes fit in, because this sure as hell beats sitting on my bench alone outside. Anything is a step up.
    “I just think that if you’re going to post that kind of nasty shit on Instagram, own it,” Agnes says. I have no idea what she and Dri are debating, only that they each seem invested in their side of the argument. Agnes is a tiny girl with a dyed red bob, plastic-framed glasses similar to Dri’s, and a nose that looks like someone pinched it too hard and it stuck. She’s not beautiful, not necessarily even pretty, but cute. What happens when you take something full-sized and remake it in miniature.
    Okay, I’ll just admit something here. Something I’ve never told anyone, not even Scar. Whenever I meet someone new, I silently ask that inevitable catty girl question: is she prettier than me? The truth is, the answer is often yes, which I think makes my even asking the question in the first place a little less offensive. I know I am not ugly—my features all fall within the normal range (nothing grossly oversized, nothing too small), but I definitely look different from the girls here.
    I imagine, or I
hope,
that one day I will be discovered—that I will actually be
seen
—not as a sidekick, or as a study buddy, or as background furniture, but as someone to
like,
maybe even to
love.
Still, I’ve come to accept that high school is not my forum. Bookish is not even on the list of the top ten things high school boys look for in a girl. I’m pretty sure boobs, on the other hand, rank pretty high.
    If you must know: a B cup on a good day.
    Agnes is probably an A but makes up for it by being adorable. That is, until she starts talking.
    “Like, what do you think, Jessie? Am I right?” I wasn’t listening. I was looking at all the other kids in the cafeteria, at all these strangers, thinking how intimate it felt to be sitting there together shoveling our food into our mouths. Wondering whether this place would ever start to feel familiar. And true, I was also watching Ethan, Ethan Marks through the window, sitting alone near the Koffee Kart, another book in hand, though I can’t see the title. “If you’re going to say