Count Me In

CHAPTER 1
KARINA
Chris Daniels and I are like separate planets orbiting in the same galaxy.
Like the planets, we have our own paths, and I like it that way. Mine is full of photos and stories, and his is full of basketball and hyenas.
Like Venus and Earth, we are next-door neighbors. We’ve been in the same school since I moved to the neighborhood in third grade, but we’ve been in the same class only once-in fifth grade.
Then, of all the crappy karma, there he is, on the first day of seventh grade, in five out of my seven classes at Spring Hill Middle School.
How did this happen-and why?
I must’ve had some good karma too, because Ms. Trotter is my homeroom and social studies teacher. She is the best. She greets me with a fist bump. For real.
Ms. Trotter is flawed, though. She believes in assigned seating. Seeing Chris sitting at the desk on my left in homeroom makes it impossible to focus. Our paths are getting dangerously close.
It makes me remember stuff from a year ago that I’d buried away, like those jeans with patchwork flowers in the depths of my closet.
Being neighbors, Chris and I have waited at the same bus stop every morning for years. He always carries some type of ball: basketball, football, or baseball. The boys play an impromptu game, as if they can’t waste even those few minutes before the bus rumbles in. I typically have my nose in a book, because I have a genetic flaw that does not allow me to catch, throw, or whack a round object. Also, I don’t want to be laughed at. When a girl named Emily played with the boys and flubbed a catch, they laughed all the way to school and back for days.
It feels like survival of the most athletic on our suburban Houston streets.
And Chris was a witness to one of the worst moments in my middle-school life…
It was in sixth grade, early in the school year. It was still ninety-eight degrees, because apparently the weather gods had not flipped the calendar from summer to fall yet.
Every ride home on the bus was a sauna, and it brought out the worst in the boys, who for some reason had turned into a pack of cackling hyenas that year.
While the rest of us fanned ourselves with notebooks or sighed in submission to the heat, they started making lists, and they were not harmless to-do lists.
The prettiest girls.
The bossiest girls.
The girls with the best hair. (My best friend, Ashley, made that list.)
The girls with the worst hair.
Your basic degrading grading system for girl human beings. Then Quinn, or Hyena 1, said, “Let’s make a list of the girls with the hairiest arms.”
Because why not, right?
Instinctively, I pulled at my short sleeves. I didn’t have a sweater or cover-up, because: ninety-eight degrees.
Together, the hyenas said, “K Chops!”
Yuck! Yuck! Yuckity yuck!
Yes, I, Karina Chopra, was at the top of the list. The only one on the list. The boys thought it was so hilarious that they couldn’t stop laughing long enough to name anyone else. I glanced around through lowered lids. Some of the kids nearby pretended they had not heard, but I knew they had, because they weren’t wearing earplugs, and none of them had a hearing problem.
Others were laughing.
For the briefest moment in time, like a nanosecond, I caught Chris Daniels’s eye. He wiped off his grin the moment our eyes met, then looked away, because he had been seen.
Back then, I envied girls who had older brothers or sisters to protect them from bullies. Before the hairy arms incident, I imagined that my neighbor Chris, who had grown taller and bigger, would one day be my friend and stand up for me. His older brother, Matt, was always friendly to me, but he had gone off to college a few years back.
After I saw Chris being a jerk with his friends, I realized he was not Superman. And I didn’t need rescuing, anyway.
The rest of the way home, I was mad at myself for caring. Ashley, who usually sat with me on the bus, was home sick that day. If she had been there, she would have glared at the hyenas and said, “Karina, they’re fools.” But in a way, I was just as glad she missed it all. Who needs a witness to humiliation?
From that day forward, I wore a lot of long-sleeved shirts to cover up my arms, even in the heat of Houston, Texas.