Homesick

"Lorrie's party Saturday night was insane, Tatum," Natalie York is saying, leaning over the Holland Private lunch table with her dark brown eyes glowing mischievously. She pushes her homemade fruit salad aside to give her hands more room to gesticulate as Tatum crosses her legs and pushes her uniform skirt further down to her knees, looking around the large, sparkling cafeteria absently. "It sucks you were too busy in Jacksontown to be there. He was even looking for you."

"Cool," Tatum says as she returns her attention to the leftover pasta in her plastic container and picks up her fork to take a bite. She chews dutifully, snatching a napkin from her lunchbox and wiping her mouth with it, laughter and inaudible conversation filling the air around the two friends. Holland Private's cafeteria is large; there are four bars – two dedicated for healthier meal choices and the other two for those looking for a quicker, tastier bite; the floors are white and pearl tiles, sparkling under the bright lights on the tall roof overhead, and the girl bathrooms are to the east of them, double front doors to the north. The worst part about the cafeteria, Tatum thinks, is that there are wide, arched windows that give way to too much sunlight and too little privacy; she feels all of the city can see her stuffing food into her mouth.

"Lorrie's brother was making out with Tyler," Natalie continues, nevermind if Tatum cares or not. "It's 'cause they got crazy drunk and Erica – you know how she is – dared them to do it." She shakes her head while tugging her dark brown bangs out from in front of her small forehead and thick, arched eyebrows. "Never knew they'd go gay for pay, right?" She laughs distantly at that, as if it were some long-forgotten memory just now coming back to her.

Tatum swallows dramatically before picking up her bottled water and tipping it towards her lips. "Tyler's always been a little homo, though; remember those rumors last year?" Just then the table full of the butch lacrosse players burst into laughter and half of the cafeteria turns to look, annoyed, at them before returning to their expensive dishes and high-priority conversations.

Natalie's eyes twitch in disgust at the interruption, but there's still a mischievous smirk on her thin, practically-gone lips. She tilts her pointy nose up into the air and frowns some. "Well, yeah, but no one ever believed those. I mean – until now." She picks up her lemonade and takes a loud gulp before smacking her mouth and finishing, arrogantly, "Tyler just seemed too straight for those kind of dares."

Tatum only shrugs. "Overall, the party sounded fun." Which, in her mind, meant something she's happy to have missed. She can't stand the types of parties where teenagers from Holland and Bradford Private – all familiar, boring faces – went to make out and get drunk and smoke and throw up. She only went once to steal a few cigarettes and bring them back to her house to pretend to smoke, but other than that there's no point. She needs new faces; she needs an exciting gathering where she knows no one and it doesn't matter, because by tomorrow she'll never see them again.

"It was," Natalie sighs heavily. "I'm almost glad you didn't come, because then you'd bring your boyfriend of yours and act all cute." She pouts at that, crossing her arms across her large breasts."I wish I had a boyfriend to act all cute with. You're so lucky, Tee. He's hot and sweet."

Tatum shrugs again. "It depends on the day with Nicholas. Some days he's nice and others he's a wild animal, acting like he's never seen a girl before." She wonders if that's too much to admit to Natalie, but when her friend still has those love-clouded eyes of hers, she realizes she can say Nick raped and killed a girl while getting a swastika tattooed to his forehead and Natalie will still be enamored with him.

"I want a boyfriend, Tatum," Natalie groans, dropping her head onto the table, next to her untouched fruit salad. "But no one wants a girl like me."

"A girl like you?" Tatum asks as she closes her water bottle again and watches a crowd of girls leave the cafeteria, deciding that she's bored enough to entertain one of Natalie's low-self-esteem rants.

"A fat, ugly girl, Tee," Natalie grumbles. "A fat, ugly girl. But you've never had to deal with that because you have Nick." She suddenly raises her head and looks, desperate, at Tatum. "Can you find me a Bradford boy? Like Wyatt, or something?"

Tatum chokes on a mouthful of pasta; she has to quickly swallow and take another sip of her water to calm her irritated throat down. "Wyatt?" she asks, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "No, no, no – Wyatt is . . . Wyatt's not your type."

"What?" Natalie frowns. "He doesn't like fat, ugly girls like me? I knew you th-"

"No, Nate." Tatum shakes her head. She waits as a spontaneous burst of giggling from a table adjacent to them dies down before she continues with, "Wyatt is on a different spectrum. He . . . He likes older women. A lot older. And blonde." She nods furiously, trying to really imagine Wyatt with his arm around an older, blonde woman's waist as they walk down a street, laughing to themselves. "He told me he can't stand being with girls his age or younger anymore; too much trouble, he says."

Tatum is glad at how fucking stupid her friend can be sometimes, because Natalie furrows her brows like she believes it and cocks her head. "Really? Wyatt? He doesn't seem like the type."

"I didn't believe it either. But yeah – he does." Tatum shrugs curtly like it's the natural way of life and closes up her pasta container. "I'm gonna head off to catch up on some homework, alright?" She's desperate to leave before Natalie catches on to her extended little fib, so she barely hears Natalie say, "Okay – see you!" before she's rushing across the sparkling floors of the cafeteria in her red kitten heels, lunch box tucked tightly under her arm. She pushes the white double doors open with her forearm and steps out and into the wide, fresh-smelling hallways. The floors are still a shiny pearl, the walls and roof is bright and white and tall, and the lockers are a faded velvet red.

Tatum walks down the main, east hall, towards the artsy part of the school. The hard flooring turns into a gray carpet, blue waves and curls threaded into it. The walls are now covered in freehand paintings, all abstract and imaginative ( Tatum's favorite is one of a girl with large red lips and curly red hair that carries on to the end of that hall ), and the doors are made out of a dark oak. Looking at her surroundings, she continues to walk until she arrives at room 4386: her Art 3 classroom.

From inside the small window on the door, she can see her art teacher, Mr. Wright, sitting on a stool in one of his usual itchy cat sweaters, posture terrible as he scribbles intently on his sketchpad. His prescription glasses are thick and large on his long, tan face, held up only by the large bump on the slope of his nose; his dark brown hair is matted in some sections, knotted in others, like he just got up from a 5-hour nap and wandered aimlessly into Holland Private. There are several empty mugs of coffee on the office desk behind him, paintings of kittens on each one, sitting on top of loose sheets of papers, graded and covered in red pen. Tatum opens the heavy door with her free hand, stepping into an atmosphere riddled with the stench of sharpies, paint, and what smells like nail polish remover and erasers. There are stools sitting every which way; canvases are half-done and sitting in front of the stools, waiting to be completed; the window sills have pots of different kinds of plants growing out of them, soaking up the sunlight.

Mr. Wright jerks his head up, blinking his inhumanely large blue eyes in the direction of the disruption, but then lets out a sigh of relief when he realizes its Tatum, her bright red hair hanging down to sharp, covered collarbones. "Oh," his gentle, calming voice breathes. "It's just you. For a minute I thought it was Ms. Taylor coming back in to –" he pauses, contemplating his next words. "Well – forget it." He sits up properly on his stool and looks curiously at the teenage girl. "Do you need something, Tatum? It's not often you come in here on your own."

"I wanted to come alone today," Tatum says shyly, letting the door close loudly behind her. She steps over a few stacked cans of assorted paints and finds a nearby stool, settling on top of it with her legs crossed. "Natalie is trying to date my brother and it got a little weird at lunch today." Mr. Wright gives her sympathetic eyes and she shrugs as if she doesn't deserve his pity. "Nothing unusual."

"Well," Mr. Wright begins wearily, scratching at a matted spot on his head. "Teenagers and their hormone-driven emotions, right?" He laughs to himself, like he's never actually had the privilege to experience what his students are, and then looks down at his sketchbook. He has always reminded Tatum of an adult that has never gone past the socially awkward stage in his younger years; he looks like a mess and is always absorbed in art, spending his entire time at Holland Private in his classroom, sketching and painting and grading. Which is why he's been the perfect teacher to hang around with, if Tatum needed someone to be bashful and weary all the time; he may be a little odd, but he is good at providing advice and silence, when needed.

"Yeah," Tatum says, shifting in her seat to drag her uniform skirt down a little further. "I just don't like when the girls here mention my brother like that; I know he's not ugly, but who likes it when somebody is lusting after their sibling? It's weird." She looks down at her fingernails, the pink polish already chipping. "Sometimes I wish Wyatt was ugly and uncharismatic so I wouldn't have to hear about him all the time." She gives a nervous laugh at this.

Mr. Wright turns in his stool to quickly grab some thicker-headed pens and then twists to face Tatum again, nodding slightly. "I understand," he says, voice almost inaudible in that usual way of his. "My sister – her name's Olivia – often had boys just swarming the house to talk to her." His huge eyes study the handiwork on his sketchpad while he massages his right shoulder, squinting. "My mom thought she was . . . well . . . promiscuous."

Tatum laughs. "Was she pretty?"

Mr. Wright nods. "My entire family talked all the time about how she was growing up into a nice-looking woman." He glances at Tatum before looking away again, off out of the window. "Olivia doesn't look so nice now, though. Maybe your brother will turn out like her."

Tatum laughs again, tucking some frazzled strands of hair from her white face. "Maybe. But I feel like it'll be my fault if he's an ugly man, y'know? I don't want to wish him hideous just to feel better about him not being hit on. It's going to happen – I just have to accept it."

"You're protective about your brother, then?" Mr. Wright asks. "That's understandable, too. He's probably overprotective about you, too."

"Yeah," Tatum nods slowly. "He is, actually." And then she pauses, lost in thought, before she suddenly leans towards Mr. Wright and lowering her voice to somewhat of a whisper, all hushed and secretive. "You see . . . my boyfriend isn't too good to me all the time . . . and . . ." she has a flash of worry, wondering if she really should be telling her art teacher about all of this, but then she decides what the hell – Mr. Wright has no one to tell, really. "And he can be pretty forceful sometimes. Like, wanting sex and stuff."

Mr. Wright looks at her wearily. "Tatum? Has he –?"

"No," Tatum hurriedly replies. "He hasn't. But sometimes it gets almost there before I shove him away. And Wyatt hates it –"

"– Understandably."

Tatum leans back again, staring absentmindedly at Mr. Wright's sketchpad. From where she's angled, she can see the top of a woman's head before his large hand blocks her view. "A lot, I guess. He hates it a lot. So . . . so sometimes he gets really protective of me. More so than I am of him." Tatum pauses. "He . . . He says that Nick – my boyfriend – doesn't deserve a girl like me. He says . . . He says that I'm too good. Much too good."

Mr. Wright is just listening now, looking between her and the window, and sometimes the classroom door when somebody passes. "So, he . . ." Tatum continues, broken, not quite sure where she's going with this, but she just wants somebody to talk to about this. "So I think that maybe – sometimes – Wyatt just wants to . . . He wants to, probably, um, wants to just –"

"To what?"

"To replace Nick, I mean." There. Tatum said it. She got it off her chest and even though she feels good about admitting this, her chest suddenly fills with this overwhelming sickness, like it was never meant to be said in the first place. Like, by admitting it out loud, to another person, it became that much more real, unattainable, improbable. And the worst part about the entire thing is that Tatum doesn't feel too disgusted about it; she's felt this way about most of Wyatt's girlfriends her entire life that it somehow forged into her mind, labeled as 'normal'. And Wyatt probably has his labeled as the same in his head; and Wyatt probably has had it labeled as normal for years longer than her.

And Wyatt probably has many things labeled towards her as normal for years longer than her.

Mr. Wright's features are come over with this hard, contemplating look, and that's what makes Tatum feel even more disgusted and wronged about the entire thing. She suddenly gets up, snatching her lunch box up and tucking it back under her arms while saying, weak and close to tears, "I have to go," before opening the door and rushing out, down the abstract hallway, Mr. Wright watching her receding back the entire time.