Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ✔︎

9 | The Scarecrow and The Lyons

|photo by Valentino Mazzari from Unsplash|

I have the cafeteria to myself for all of twenty minutes—thanks to Professor Bernard's early departure. But even after the tables start to fill, no one acknowledges my existence. Until a fast-talking girl, whose name I didn't quite catch, interrupts my text conversation with Megan.

"Only juniors and senior outcasts hang out in the cafeteria during A-lunch," she says, with raw sincerity.

"Thanks. I'm actually waiting for someone."

"Already? But you just got here and—"

A shrill whistle calls the entire room's attention to the entrance. Conner is there smiling at me, his green Zachary blazer wadded up under one arm. He lifts his chin in a kind of reverse nod. He's not walking toward me, so I guess that means we're going somewhere.

The fast-talking girl doesn't finish her sentence. Her eyes are still a little wide and she's looking back and forth between me and Conner like she's made the connection. I stand and say, "See you around."

But it's not easy to approach Conner. He draws a lot of attention. Everyone seems to know him, but they all call him Crow—which is already starting to annoy me. The boy is plenty smart.

"Are you hungry?" he asks, holding up a brown paper bag big enough to hold a small feast.

I put my hand on my stomach. "I'm feeling a little unsettled at the moment."

"Mari makes me queasy, too," he says and I smile.

"She invited me to her house for lunch."

"Dude!"

"As in dude, that's awesome, or dude, you're in a world of shit?"

Conner has a great laugh. It's like he has this excess of happiness trapped inside him and when it escapes people turn heads and they can't help but smile. "I'm not qualified to make that call," he says. "But I know someone who is."

Paige, of course.

"Lead the way."

* * *

Conner opens the door to a narrow stairwell, then closes it again and turns to face me. With worried eyebrows. "This is a shortcut to the library—that's where we're meeting Paige."

"Oh. I was thinking picnic in Central Park."

"Maybe another day," he says. His smile looks forced. And even though I've only known the boy for like, five hours, I'm pretty sure he's not a fake smile kind of guy.

And he's still standing there, not opening the door—which makes me even more curious.

"I'm good with the library," I say. "And the shortcut."

He bobs his head and re-opens the door. We climb a cheery stairwell with giant windows to the dark and dreary library, which occupies most of the second floor.

It's authentically old—as in, I don't think it's been remodeled in the last hundred years—and it smells like mummies and ink. I think of my mother, who can't walk through a library, or a bookstore, without running her fingers over the book spines.

Conner grabs a clunky wooden chair and drags it to the back wall, to a study room enclosed by glass. A girl, who I assume is Paige, opens the door and the three of us cram into a space built for two.

There's this awkward moment of silence, where Conner's eyes are all over her. It's like that time I got lost in the grocery store, and when Dad finally found me—in the seafood department counting lobsters—he had to search every inch of my body to make sure I was okay.