Conversion by Katherine Howe Read Free Book Online Page B

his head nearer to my ear and said, “Me neither.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    I was surprised. I’d thought he was older. Most high school guys don’t wear button-down shirts unless they’re forced to. He had this casual-dressy way about him, loafers and everything, but it didn’t look as pretentious as I’m probably making it sound. He carried himself the way I imagined college guys did, though I knew enough actual college guys to know that they were as likely to be in cargo shorts and flip-flops and backward Red Sox caps as any of the guys at St. Innocent’s, our brother school.
    “Where do you go?”
    “Andover,” he said.
    He wasn’t embarrassed about it, either. Usually when I met kids from Andover, they were all apologetic about it, like they didn’t want to make me uncomfortable for being such a plebe. Then I’d tell them I went to St. Joan’s, and they’d be okay again. I could actually see the boarding school kids exhale with relief when I said that.
    “I just hang out in the Square because I’m so punk rock. Obviously.” He smiled an ironic smile over my shoulder.
    I grinned. “Obviously.”
    “Where do you go?”
    “St. Joan’s,” I said.
    “Oh, yeah,” he said, nodding his comprehension. Yep. Typical. Another inch of space formed between us while I waited for him to ask me if I knew Clara Rutherford, because that was what everyone always asked when I said I went to St. Joan’s. But he didn’t.
    “I don’t know how you deal,” I said. “Boarding.”
    “Oh? Why’s that?”
    “I don’t know. It’s just—I’d be homesick. Don’t you get homesick?”
    “I guess I did at first, maybe. But no, not really. My parents live in Belmont. So I come in most weekends anyway.”
    He paused, and I stole a look at him from under my eyelashes, quickly so he wouldn’t notice. He was still smiling, but his dimple was gone. I suspected that maybe he did get homesick after all. With his face soft like that, he looked good. Better. I glanced down at myself, wishing I’d maybe thought to put on a skirt or something instead of running out of the house in jeans and boots like it wasn’t Saturday and I wasn’t going to the Square.
    “Anyway,” he added, “it’s pretty cool, being on your own. Like college.”
    “Yeah,” I said, my eyes roaming over the faces of the throng. I could easily pick out the college kids. A lot of them looked preoccupied and tired.
    “You’re a senior, right? You know where you want to go next year?” he ventured.
    Talking to him felt deceptively easy. So easy it made me examine him more closely, to see what he really wanted. I tended to assume that people who were too nice were being that way because they wanted something. Maybe because at St. Joan’s, that was often the case.
    “Um,” I demurred, “I’m not really sure. I’m applying, like, a million places.”
    The trick, when someone asked me where I was applying, was to see if they were sniffing around to find out if I was their competition. Was my list the same? Was it different? How smart was I? Was I smart enough that they should be worried?
    “Here?” he asked, gesturing with his lifted chin to the gate behind us leading to Harvard Yard.
    “Yeah,” I said. A flush crept up my neck and started to wrap itself around my ears.
    His smile broadened as he said, “Me too.”
    He didn’t look threatened, or worried. He looked . . . happy.
    A gap opened up in the crowd of people pouring out of the mouth of the T station, and in the gap I spotted Anjali, looking older without her school uniform, her fingers threaded through an indifferent hand that was loosely attached to a boy with a skinny beard lining his jaw who was wearing a red tracksuit. Yeah, I said a tracksuit. They were half an hour late, and Jason pimp-rolled his way over to where we were standing with such studied care that it felt like another half an hour before they finally got to the newsstand. I felt the boy in the button-down shirt slide