Other Words for Love by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

bathroom, she would find what she needed in the left pocket.
    She was Leigh Ellis. I found this out when she came back and the teacher called her name. Then the teacher said my full first name in a loud voice and I waited for stares, laughter, all the things I was used to, but nothing happened. There was just silence until I spoke up.
    “It’s Ari,” I said.
    “Why do you shorten it?” Leigh whispered in my ear, and I wondered if she had a sore throat. She sounded like she was on the verge of laryngitis.
    I twisted around. She was leaning forward, resting her face on her hand. I noticed a widow’s peak, a pointy chin, and tiny gold flecks in her irises.
    “Why do you shorten your name? It’s very pretty,” she said, smiling with straight teeth, and I decided that I liked her. There was no way I couldn’t. She was the first person besides Mom to say anything positive about my name in all my sixteen years. “It’s the title of a book, you know. By Chekhov.”
    Now I liked her even better. Soon the bell rang and she was off, gliding solo down the hallway past rows of lockers. I walked past girls dressed in tailored pants, crisp blouses, antique earrings made of rubies and sapphires and pearls. Their eyelashes had only a little mascara; their lips, just a touch of gloss. There was nothing reminiscent of my school in Brooklyn—couples kissing against walls, big hair sprayed high and stiff with Aqua Net, Madonna wannabes. No fingerless gloves, no lace ribbon. Not one bustier.
    I glanced down at my clothes as I walked into my next class. It was English literature, and I fit in. My light makeup, my straight hair—I was one of them, and that almost made me cry. I had never belonged at my other school, where I was ignored and dismissed as a dull, quiet girl who sat in the back of class and sketched faces in notebooks.
    But I couldn’t transform into one of those confident types that easily. So on my first day at Hollister Prep, I sat in the rear of each class. I ate my salami sandwich in a bathroom stall while everyone else socialized in the cafeteria. In art class I watched from five seats behind Leigh Ellis as her colored pencils moved across a sketch pad. She was drawing something abstract. It wasn’t what the teacher had ordered us to do, but it was good, and more interesting than the bowl of fruit the rest of the class was copying.
    I watched Leigh’s freckled fingers clutch her pencils, her silver bracelet skim the paper, her thick red hair swish across her collar whenever she shifted her head. She caught me looking at her and I pretended that I wasn’t, but I didn’t have to pretend. She smiled, waved, pointed to herself and mouthed the word homeroom , as if there was any way she could be forgotten.
    Jeff was a one-way chauffeur. He drove Summer to school and then she took the subway home, which I did that first day. It wasn’t very crowded at four in the afternoon, but the station was warm and so was I. My skin was clammy underneath my blazer after I reached Brooklyn and walked up the steps into the sunshine and sticky air. There were people everywhere, going in and coming out of Asian food markets and Indian restaurants, speeding around on bicycles and honking horns at anyone who got in their way.
    “Ariadne,” I heard Mom say.
    She was standing in front of me. Her hair frizzed as badly as Evelyn’s in this weather, and there were dots of perspiration above her lip. She said something about waiting for me, she’d called my name three times, hadn’t I heard her, and was I getting delirious from this hot weather?
    I hadn’t heard her. I’d been thinking that I’d chosen the right outfit that morning and my hair wasn’t wrong, and nobody at Hollister had said a single thing that made me want to lock myself in my bedroom and spend the rest of my life there.
    “So how was it?” Mom asked, holding her breath. She was probably hoping for something good but expecting something bad. She was more familiar