Felix Ever After(11)
EVEN THOUGH I HAD ABSOLUTELY NO DESIRE TO GO TO Dean Fletcher and tell her what’d happened with the gallery, word must’ve spread enough that the teachers overheard, because right as acrylics ends, a student pops his head into the classroom and says I have to go to the office. Dean Fletcher, with her Afro and single silver streak, is a no-nonsense, terrifying badass in a business suit and six-inch heels. Her office—all rich, deep mahogany panels except for the single glass wall—is surprisingly bare and minimalist. Not exactly what you’d expect of an arts school. She waves me inside, asks me to sit on the hard chair in front of her heavy wood desk, and wastes no time asking about the gallery.
“Do you know who might’ve been behind it?”
“No.”
“Has there been anyone bullying you, or making remarks about your identity?”
“No.” God, I just want to leave.
Dean Fletcher folds her hands together. “It was unacceptable, and installed without the permission of this administration,” she says, and I get the hollow feeling that this was really why I was called into her office—to cover their asses. She’s afraid I’ll sue St. Catherine’s or something. “I’m sorry that this happened to you, Felix. Do you want to speak with the summer counselor?”
“No,” I say, a little too quickly. The counselor would just ask a whole bunch of questions, and eventually those questions would veer into abandoned-by-mother territory, and that’s definitely something I don’t want to talk about. “No,” I say again, “thank you.”
Dean Fletcher pauses and looks like she might want to pressure me into some counseling sessions, but she finally gives me a single nod. “We’ll begin an investigation.” I stop myself from rolling my eyes. The most they’ll do is ask a few students if they saw anything, and when those students say no, the gallery will be declared a cold case. “If you hear anything, please tell me right away,” Dean Fletcher says. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for this sort of hateful behavior.”
And even if I’m annoyed, and the school won’t do shit to find who it was, it still feels good to hear her say that.
It’s after the fourth I’m so sorry, Felix and the third question about my deadname that I take Ezra up on his offer to peace the fuck out of classes and head to his apartment early. We stop at the Chinese place that’s on the corner one block down for two cartons of what are the best chicken wings and French fries in the entire city, and then hop into the wine shop that’s right next door, using Ezra’s fake ID to grab two bottles of cheap chardonnay because, as he says, it’s time to get fancy. At the counter, the owner looks from the ID to Ezra’s face and back to the ID, like she knows it’s total bullshit. She takes Ezra’s credit card and tells us this story about when she was sixteen and sneaking off into her neighborhood bar in Paris. We take that as permission to escape with our illegal bottles, taking the wine and chicken back up the block to Ezra’s apartment.
There’re men with bulging muscles and white tanks across the street, shouting in Bajan accents and standing around cars that have their rumbling engines on, blasting an old Dixie Chicks song. Ezra unlocks the front glass door and lets us into the asphalt-gray-tiled and scuffed-white-walls hallway. We stomp up the three floors, Ezra muttering a prayer that his neighbors aren’t home—“I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing—no one has sex like that at three in the morning, they were rolling around and slamming shit on the ground, seriously”—before he unlocks his apartment.
The apartment has a single brick wall, dark wood floors, and a pretty nice kitchen area with granite countertops, along with a stainless-steel refrigerator and gas stove—but other than that, the place is basically empty. Ezra’s been here for almost an entire month now, but he hasn’t bothered buying any furniture with the exorbitant amounts of money his parents gave him to spend. So far, all he has is a mattress out in the living room, facing a tiny-ass TV stand with a 12-inch flat screen. He doesn’t even have any lightbulbs. At night, we’ll just turn on Netflix and use the orange of the streetlights outside to see. The bright sunlight shines into the apartment now. There are some plotted plants over by the window—one mint, one basil, one cannabis. Two of those are more for aesthetics.
Ezra drops the wine and food next to the mattress and flops onto it, kicking off his shoes. “Think we’ll get in trouble for ditching half the day?”
I sit down next to him, pulling the chicken to me. “Uh, no, probably not.” Literally the only teacher who’s ever cared about schedules and tardiness has been Jill.
“Okay, look, I hate the guy,” Ezra says, “but do you think Declan had a point?”
“About being late?” I say, mouth full of fries. “Fuck no.”
“What if we get in trouble? Or we end up—I don’t know, getting kicked out or something?”
“Everyone’s always late to everything, Ez. Declan’s just singling us out because he’s a dick.” I try to ignore the tingle of fear in the back of my mind—not that we’d get kicked out, but that Declan was right about one thing, at least: I’m fucking around, procrastinating on my portfolio because I’m too afraid to actually get started—too afraid to try, only to fail. Terrified that I won’t get into Brown. I’ve worked hard these past three years so that all my dad’s sacrifices wouldn’t go to waste . . . but what if none of that matters in the end?