What's Not to Love - Austin Siegemund-Broka Page 0,1

the newspaper. I’ve walked up the stairs leading to the locker hall hundreds of times, and I could recite the names of the teachers in every classroom just like I could Shakespeare’s seventeen comedies.

It’s 6:52 in the morning, and the heavy fog coming in off the ocean hovers over everything, coating the campus in dew. Droplets cling to the needles of the pine trees outside the front gate. San Mateo is thirty minutes from San Francisco and ten from the water, and even in the first week of March we’re fending off the Northern California winter of forty-eight-degree mornings and seawater-scented clouds.

It’s zero period, and right now the only people here are those like me who needed an early extra hour to fit every class they wanted into their schedule. The half-empty locker hall echoes with the squeak of sneakers on linoleum, the clang of closing locker doors, and the mumbled conversations of Monday mornings.

I head directly for my locker, where I unload my physics and government books and pull the plastic bottle of Tums from my backpack. I chew and swallow down four.

There’s no way I’m letting the events of last night interfere with this English exam. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have gone out on a Sunday night. When Dylan invited me to sushi with her and Nick Caufman, I wanted to say no. I only went because she begged me, and because Dylan is the only person in the known universe for whom I’d forsake a few hours of important test prep. Nick had invited Dylan to dinner, and she didn’t know if she wanted the night to be a date. I was brought to third-wheel.

Of course, fifteen minutes in I could feel the dinner veering decidedly into date territory. While Dylan flirted and probably played footsie under the table, I prodded my hamachi with chopsticks. Dylan and Nick shared California rolls. Three hours later, I ended up hunched over the toilet, puking my guts out.

On the upside, I did plenty of studying between trips to the bathroom. I’m not the type to pull all-nighters before exams—I’m usually prepared by then, and I prefer to be well rested. While conditions weren’t ideal, I made it work.

I close my locker, my stomach cramping ominously. Ignoring the pain, I head for class, rehearsing the history plays to distract myself. Henry VI. Richard III. Richard II. Whatever happens, there’s nothing I’m letting keep me from this exam. Not even explosive vomiting.

Two

THE REASON I’M NOT home recuperating is waiting outside the door when I reach English.

“Hello, Sanger,” Ethan says casually. He doesn’t look up.

“Molloy,” I reply.

I wish there was a word worse than nemesis I could use just for Ethan. He’s an un-popped blister. The splinter in your shoe from walking on woodchips. Your printer running out of toner when you’re finishing your twenty-page final paper on the Hundred Years’ War. He’s your Kindle dying in the first hour of your flight to Boston, even though you’re pretty certain you charged it, leaving you to sit through a random in-flight movie you never wanted to see. If this was the last time I ever had to look at Ethan’s overly coiffed blond hair and obnoxiously piercing green eyes, I’d feel like the luckiest person on earth.

Unfortunately, it’s not the last time. I have every class with Ethan, the regrettable effect of us both taking every AP Fairview offers and the same electives. It’s been this way for two years. Every class, every study group, every extracurricular event. Ethan, Ethan, Ethan. I just have to endure the rest of our final semester of senior year. Then Ethan’s out of my life.

Unless, of course, we both get into Harvard. It’s not a possibility I permit myself to consider. Two students from the same California public school getting into Harvard would be exceedingly rare. I’ve studied Fairview’s Harvard admissions history, and it’s rare we have even one accepted student per year. Yet another reason for me to outdo him in every way I can.

I ignore the way he’s leaning casually on the wall next to the door, not glancing up, reading his phone’s screen. We stand in icy silence. Ethan is Kennedyesque via California. High cheekbones, sharp nose. He’s rolled up the sleeves of the white button-down he’s wearing under his forest green sweater, which, combined with the leather shoulder bag he uses instead of a backpack, gives him the look of a prep-school boy who’s wandered off his high-hedged campus