It was then that she started working seriously on her manifestos. Pretty soon after that, she accidentally kissed Emily Miller for the first time.
It would have been impossible to keep Emily a secret if Wyatt had been there in school with her. But it didn’t take long for him to lose interest in Vander after he stopped going there every day. In the beginning, he still asked about whether Mr. DiNapoli had worn the red loose baggy sweater or the blue loose baggy sweater that day, or if they’d had the excellent Tater Tots in the à la carte line at the cafeteria, or what kind of polo shirt Justin Hasaki-Bernstein had had on in Spanish. But after only a few weeks, Wyatt started to act like the people Jesse was talking about were characters in some foreign-language soap opera, remote and unreal, instead of the actual flesh-and-blood humans who populated her real life, all day, every day.
This year, Wyatt doesn’t even know half of Jesse’s teachers. He’s not reading Bleak House or Their Eyes Were Watching God. He doesn’t care about the new schedule change that turns either fourth or fifth period into a long lunch every third day, confusing the hell out of the entire school. When Jesse complains about the new schedule, Wyatt sighs and says things like, “It’s a shame when little things have to take up so much of your time and attention.” He doesn’t get that this schedule change is not a little thing—not if you have hideously un-fun trigonometry and hideously dull Foundations of Western Culture during fourth and fifth periods (Jesse does).
One thing that hasn’t changed is their favorite afternoon activity. One of Wyatt’s main hobbies—second only to following the stock market online—is the construction of what he calls “sartorial personae,” costumey outfits built around interesting pieces of clothing he finds at Rose’s Turn, a dark little hole-in-the-wall thrift shop tucked under the train bridge down on Route 9. Wyatt will find a curious garment (a plaid blazer, say) and gradually build an iconic outfit around it, adding other items and accessories (lime green slacks, argyle socks, a salmon-colored polyester button-down shirt, gold Scorpio-sign medallion), and refining the effect until he’s worked out a complete persona (Golf Course Lady-Killer). Then this will become his uniform for a while—he’ll wear it every day for a few weeks or months, until he gets bored with it and starts building another persona. Last year he spent time as 1960s Corporate Executive, Ex-Marine, Punk-Rock Street Thug, Mozart in Amadeus, and Friendly Grandpa, feeling them out until they were just right, then abandoning them. Lately he’s been working on a sort of gay Hugh Hefner look—velveteen smoking jacket with a cigarette burn in the sleeve, ascot, fake-silk pajama bottoms, Isotoner slippers.
As long as they’ve been friends, Jesse has been going with him to Rose’s Turn at least once a week, usually on Wednesday afternoons, since Marla, the college girl who works the register on Wednesdays, is super chill and lets them take an unlimited number of items into the dressing room at one time. Jesse has even found a few choice items for herself on certain Wednesdays, though Wyatt rarely approves of her selections. The best thing she ever found was an insanely awesome light blue tuxedo from the ’70s—ruffled satin shirt, lapels as wide as surfboards, satin racing stripe down the side of each leg, and flappingly huge bell-bottom pants—so wide that her fisherman’s boots fit easily inside. “I cannot permit you to pair those boots with that pantsuit,” Wyatt had said at the time. “The boots or the pants alone are bad enough, but together they are an abomination in the sight of God.”
“These pants were made for these boots,” Jesse had argued. “That’s why they call them boot cut!”
“I just wish you could spend your unique, brilliant energy in a more productive way,” Wyatt continues now. “There are a few very extraordinary people in the world—of whom you and I are, of course, two—who strive for greatness in all things, and the way we do this is not by telling other people what to do, it’s by setting an exceptional example and living brilliantly and getting everything we can get and ignoring everybody else. Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Yes, I know you are.”
“I’m going to get my GED by the end of this year and go to MIT and graduate a year early and start my own nanotech company and make microscopic cell phones that you implant in people’s brain stems and be the youngest person ever to make the Forbes top ten wealthiest Americans list.”
“Yes, I know.”
“When I’m married to my gorgeous, brain-surgeon husband who loves to cook, you can come stay with us and our two chocolate labs at our beachfront house in Malibu.”