Noggin by John Corey Whaley

Author:John Corey Whaley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

IT’S THAT EASY

Over the next week Cate and I talked on the phone about four times. And she was actually the first one to call. It was the day after the concert, and she wanted to thank me for “being so cool” and not “acting weird or anything” with her around Kyle. I told her I wanted to be friends just as much as she did and that I’d do whatever it takes to make sure she wasn’t uncomfortable or scared to be around me.

I called her the next afternoon, and we caught up a bit more. She mentioned Turner a couple times, and I somehow managed not to throw up into the phone. I guess she was testing the waters a bit, making sure I still didn’t have the wrong idea or anything. But both times she said his name, it felt like she’d walked into the room and samurai-style ripped my gut open. It was brutal, but not so brutal that I couldn’t get over it just to hear her voice.

The third phone call was a bit weird at first. She was upset about something, I could tell. I asked her what was wrong, but all she would tell me is that she’d just had a bad day. That made me happy, which is sort of sick, I know, but still. It made me happy to think that after a bad day she’d want to talk to me and not anyone else, especially Turner. Maybe old feelings were coming back to her again. Maybe I was growing on her more quickly than she’d predicted. I was just me, after all. I was just Travis 2.0—all the same files in a brand-new, fully functioning operating system.

It was our fourth phone call, though, that confirmed for sure that I shouldn’t give up on us so easy. At first she just griped about something that happened at work. Someone had been rude to her—one of the lawyers—and she was thinking about trying to find a job someplace else. Then she started talking about her art. It surprised me, for sure, since she’d seemed so determined to avoid that topic after the concert. But now she was asking me if I remembered these different paintings she’d done in high school and that mural she’d designed for the English hall.

“Of course I remember the mural,” I said. “The Canterbury Tales.”

“Yeah. You helped.”

“I painted about five square inches of the blue background before Mrs. Campbell refused to ever let me touch a work of art again.”

“You weren’t that bad,” she said.

“Cate. For real. She told me she’d give me an A if I’d run errands for her, keep everyone supplied with clean brushes, and never make her grade a piece of my art again.”

“Hilarious.”

“I thought it was pretty fair. I was only there to watch you anyway.”

“Travis, come on.”

“It’s true. You were so good at everything. You remember that stained-glass window you made for the library? It’s still there.”

“Really? Wow. I haven’t thought about that in so long.

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