“Last Period” by Erick Wu
By the time the fire alarm went off, we had already
spent forty minutes pretending to understand derivatives,
and everyone seemed relieved to have something
we could agree on. Outside, the football field
was still wet from the morning rain, and the girls
in front of me were discussing a breakup
that had apparently happened over lunch,
though nobody could agree on who had ended it.
I stood beside a boy I'd known since seventh grade
who was showing me a picture of the car
he planned to buy when he got his license,
a silver BMW with two hundred thousand miles
and a dent in the passenger door. He said
he could probably fix it himself, and I believed him
because he'd once taken apart his entire computer
during a sleepover and somehow put it back together.
Across the parking lot, somebody was crying
into her friend's shoulder, and the rest of us
were trying very hard not to look. A teacher
kept counting heads, losing track, and starting over,
while the boy beside me enlarged the photograph
to show me the leather seats, which were cracked
in several places but otherwise, he insisted, perfect.
I wanted to tell him I had been accepted nowhere yet,
that I'd spent the previous night reading the same
three sentences of an application until they stopped
meaning anything, but he was already explaining
how much insurance would cost, and anyway
the alarm had stopped. We began filing back inside,
stepping carefully around the puddles, and he asked
whether I wanted a ride once he got the car.
I said sure, though by then we would probably
be living in different states, and neither of us
mentioned this. He put his phone away
as we reached the stairs, still talking
about how fast the thing could go.
