Getting Over Jack Wagner by Elise Juska

the girls giggling and whispering, the boys cracking jokes and slapping low fives. To our right, the drama kids frequently burst into song—“Memories” or “Too Darn Hot!”—like some wannabe Fame. Once, they had attempted a choreographed number that culminated in lunch aides pulling Henrietta Meara off their table shouting, “I want to live forever!” Fortunately, with that kind of commotion, my friends and I usually attracted little notice.
    â€œYou look…different,” Hannah said, as I dropped my orange tray. She had her usual healthy brown bag of homemade lunch and I my Philly-fried cheesesteak bought with the three dollars Mom had handed me that morning.
    I shrugged, scraping back a chair.
    â€œI don’t mean bad,” she amended. “Just, different.” She picked up a celery stick and gnawed it like a toothpick.
    Eric Sommes, who had been sitting beside her scrawling in a notebook full of sigmas and pis, raised his head and surveyed my new look. “Wow,” he said, but it was an innocuous “wow.” Not like “wow, she’s hot” or like “wow, you’re nuts!” I could tell nothing from Eric’s bland, nasal “wow” and unfortunately, he was the only male opinion at my disposal.
    â€œThanks, Eric,” I said, unfoiling my sandwich.
    Then Katie Brennan arrived on the scene, decked out in striped leg warmers and a shirt with a rainbow spilling across the chest and arms. She plunked down her daily soft pretzel and Diet Coke (did Katie turn out to be a travel agent?) then looked at me and squealed: “Oh. My. God!”
    Unlike Eric, Katie was not too cryptic. She was plainly horrified by the new me, but this was to be expected. One could argue this was actually a point in my favor. Katie was a slave to ’80s fashions, a girl born ready for ’80s fashions, bold and loud and leg warmed to the core.
    â€œWhat happened to you?” she said, and started laughing so determinedly that soda spurted out her nose. Katie could make even the gross come off as cute and pink. “Eliza, what did you do?”
    I shrugged again, the picture of nonchalance. “It was time for a change,” was all I said, and took a cool bite of my heat-lamped cheesesteak.
    â€œI guess!” Katie said, glancing at the soccer players/cheerleaders beside us. It had long been obvious to Hannah and me that Katie was just sitting with us until our proximity to the soccer players enabled her to merge, unnoticed, into their table. In the meantime, she certainly didn’t want any of us hurting her chances at getting there. “You look like Pat Benatar!” she laughed, loud enough for every soph in the caf to hear.
    I felt my cheeks burn. Coming from Katie, being compared to Pat was the gravest of insults and everyone in earshot knew it. Thankfully, before she could say anything else, the choir/drama gang, probably resentful the spotlight wasn’t on them, launched into a full-table rendition of Phantom.
    Katie tossed her blond ponytail in the general direction of the soccer players. Then, satisfied she’d saved her reputation from near disaster, she launched into an overly loud recap of her latest conquest: a senior on the swim team. “I know he’s like three years older than me, but it’s perfect because he’s really immature…”
    Left alone, I fumed with my sandwich. To be honest, I wasn’t too concerned about my friends’ opinions. Now that the heat was off, I didn’t mind being compared to Pat Benatar; in fact, I was secretly pleased. I’d already begun to realize that I wasn’t like my friends, or my sister, or my mother, or most of my classmates for that matter. I “danced to the beat of my own drummer,” as Nanny would say. There was only one person whose opinion I cared about, and I knew where to find him.
    The Quad: a square, stark fish tank of a place comprised