This Must Be the Place: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

never had friends over, she never asked for a ride to the movies orthe mall. Better lonely and right than stupid with friends, she’d think, and tell Mona that the other kids weren’t interesting. They didn’t understand her and it was pointless to pretend she cared about useless things like who was taking who to homecoming and who said what on Face-book and blah blah boring.
    “They can’t all be bad,” Mona would say. “There were plenty of boring people in my class, too, but there were a few worthy souls. You just have to figure out how to recognize each other.” Oneida, aside from finding this almost impossible to believe, chafed at her mother’s suggestion that the reason she didn’t have any friends was because she wasn’t trying hard enough. What the hell did her mother know? Mona didn’t have to spend the day bouncing from class to class, struggling to stay awake and interested, when all she really wanted to do was curl up with a book and teach herself what she really wanted to know—which, incidentally, was
everything
, something she was fairly certain was absent from the curriculum at Ruby Falls High.
    And then her sophomore year Andrew Lu transferred into the district, and Oneida understood what her mother meant about recognizing worthy souls.
    Andrew Lu was beautiful. He was an athlete with skin the color of milky tea and warm dark eyes. He was also the only Asian in the entire school system, and rumor held that he had been born and raised in China until he was eight. He spoke three languages—English, Chinese, and French. He signed up for cross-country, the fall sport for smart jocks, and when he walked through the hall, cool rolled off him in waves. Oneida didn’t understand how anyone under the age of eighteen could possibly be as comfortable in his own skin as Andrew Lu was. She envied him. He fascinated her. She wanted to ask him how he did it: how could he be so confident and yet so
different
from everyone else?
    They had the same American History class, and Oneida, who sat three rows behind him to the left, would spend the whole period waiting for him to answer one of Mrs. Dreyer’s questions. He’d raise his hand, and she’d notice how smooth and muscular his upper arm was, and then he’d answer the teacher’s question correctly and confidently, without stuttering or rambling or adding extraneous detail, as Oneida was wont to do whenever she was called upon because Dreyer didn’tthink she was participating enough. One day, after Oneida had given a miniature treatise on the Whiskey Rebellion under such duress, Andrew Lu had actually turned around, made eye contact, and smiled. Oneida felt she’d been plugged to an electric generator; her entire body was shocked. It made her violently aware of a hunger she didn’t even know she had, and she’d spent the rest of the day hiding in the drama club’s prop closet, in the loft above the auditorium stage, sulking and crying and generally feeling sorry for her freakish, friendless self.

    The fates aligned: Mrs. Dreyer assigned Andrew Lu and Oneida Jones to the same group history project. The worthy souls were being given a chance to recognize each other at last. That the other members of their group were two of Oneida’s least favorite people at Ruby Falls High, not to mention in the world, hardly seemed relevant. That is, until they were sitting in her kitchen and wouldn’t shut up.
    “I don’t know why anybody still cares about the Beatles,” Dani Drake said. She jiggled her leg against the kitchen chair and rubbed her temple with her pen. “They’re just . . . they’re so
done
, you know? Everybody knows they’re, like, the gods of pop music, but who cares
now
? You know? God is dead, so if the Beatles are God, wouldn’t it follow they’re
also
dead?”
    “Who would you rather we write our reports on?” Oneida asked. She reshuffled her stack of loose-leaf history notes until all the pages were straight and neat. Oneida was