by Mary Hogan
My emotional Richter scale had already registered a megaquake and several aftershocks that day. By dinner-time, I was wiped out. I didn’t feel much of anything. Except hunger.
Gastronomically, my grandmother was awesome. Her food danced down my tongue, exciting each bud on its way to my throat. The first bite was a burst of intense flavour, then subtle layers of smoke, spice, sweet, and salt erupted like tiny fireworks. It terrified me. I was dying to pile my plate high with curried aubergine, grilled lamb shanks, and fresh spinach bread with herb butter. Not to mention mulligatawny soup. The rich colours on her table were as luscious as the rich smells. Every meal here? I was never going to make it. It was one thing to eat a Grilled Chicken Salad at McDonald’s when my family was devouring Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese. I could handle refusing to eat seven hundred and sixty calories and forty-eight fat grammes of fast food. But gourmet food? Controlling my portion sises was going to be next to impossible.
“More mulligatawny, Libby?’ Nana asked.
I swallowed hard. “No, thanks.”
“It’s one of Emeril’s recipes,” she said. I stared blankly, as did my whole family. “‘Bam? Crank it up a notch’?”
Nothing. Nana glanced up at the heavens, made a praying gesture with her hands. “Thank you, God, for bringing my family to me so I can teach them about life! ” Looking at the rest of my family, she asked, “Who’s ready for more soup?”
Mom and Rif held their bowls up; Dad gulped another cola. Dirk said, “I’ve never eaten yellow soup before. It’s so good I don’t want to know what’s in it!”
Nana glanced at God once more.
“Can I please have more yellow rice, too?” Dirk asked.
While Nana served us, she asked, “Who knows why saffron is the most expensive spice in the world?”
Yip!
“Anyone?”
Juan, sitting beneath the table at my feet, was impatient for me to drop another chunk of lamb.
“Because,” she said, “the orange stigmas of the saffron plant have to be picked by hand.”
No one responded. Juan Dog licked the Italian tile floor.
“Can you imagine? By hand! ”
Mom smiled a crack and nodded her head. Dad took another gulp. I noticed his hands were shaking and his forehead was damp.
“Who knows what poha means?”
Dirk erupted in giggles.
“Dirk? You’ve studied Indian cooking?”
Still laughing Dirk said, “No, but Juan pohaed in your backyard earlier!”
Peeved, I scowled at him. He wasn’t supposed to tell! I didn’t have a plastic bag with me and it was still sitting there. Oblivious, Nana barrelled on through.
“Poha is rice!” she said. “Aloo is a potato, kishmish are raisins, podina is mint. These are all common ingredients in the Indian kitchen.”
Mom mumbled something about the food being delicious no matter what was in it. Dad kept his head down and chewed.
“It takes a while to familiarise yourself with all the terms.” Nana seemed so unaware of the tension around her table it occurred to me she might be senile. Either that or the woman was as thick as a sack of poha.
“So tell me,” she said, “all moved in? Are your rooms big enough? Is the air-conditioner working well? Barstow is hot by day, cool by night. Be sure to shut it off.”
We bobbed our heads up and down, raised our eyebrows. Rif even gave her the thumbs-up sign. We didn’t tell our grandmother that her son had installed the refrigerator in the living room, right next to the couch, and announced, “Anyone moves this, I’ll cut off his or her arm.” We didn’t tell her where he told the Trailer Life photographer to shove his camera, either.
As the spectacle of our first family dinner played out in front of me, I found myself stealing glances at the old lady with the bright red hair. She had the same nose as my dad’s, same cowlick in the left front of her hairline. I imagined her holding my father in her arms when he was a baby, singing lullabies to him. Had she made his favourite meals for his birthday? Did she kiss his boo-boos when he fell off his bike? Did he bury his head in her chest and weep when his father died? Did my father grow up in a trailer park?
I also found myself searching Nana’s face for similarities to my own face. Would I look like her when I was old?
Suddenly, I felt mad all over again. Having a weird grandmother was better than having no grandmother at all! I’ve been robbed! Isn’t it some form of child abuse to tell your kids their nana is dead, then spring her on them fourteen years later?
Dad interrupted my thoughts with another loud burp.
“My goodness, Lance, where are your table manners?” his mother asked.
“My name is Lot,” Dad said. “Don’t call me Lance again.”
Nana looked hurt. Mom looked annoyed. And everyone pretty much resumed chewing and not talking to one another after that.
The only bright side to my family’s insanity was the fact that it was a great distraction. With my parents feuding, I didn’t have time to dwell on my own dismal life. I didn’t have time to miss Nadine or Fernando High or Mr Puente’s lame jokes about geometric theorems. I didn’t have the energy to worry about turning into white trash or being hated by everybody at the new school I was starting in the morning whether I liked it or not.
“Save room for dessert,” Nana said, finally. “I made tiramisu.”
I stifled a groan. Why me? That’s what I thought over and over. Why, of all the kids in the world, did everything awful happen to me ?
SEVENTEEN
The tap, tap, tap of Mom’s Press-On nails against my bedroom door woke me early the next morning. It was just light out, already hot. Mom held a wrapped box in her hands. She sat on the edge of my bed.
“I know this is hard on you, honey,” she said quietly. “It’s hard on all of us.”
At first I thought I was dreaming. I didn’t say anything, just kept my head on the pillow waiting to see where this dream would go. When Mom reached up and brushed the hair out of my eyes, I marvelled at how real it felt.
“I have a present for you,” she said. And I smiled, expecting the package to unwrap itself and reveal its contents to me.
“Don’t you want it?” Mom asked.
Oh, yes, I thought. What is it, Mommy?
“Libby?” Mom shook my shoulder. “Are you awake?”
Startled, I looked at my mother. “Mom?” I asked. “Is that really you?”
She laughed. “Yes, silly. Who did you think it was? Santa?” She handed me the box. “For the first day of the rest of your life,” she said.
Sitting up in bed, I was now fully awake. Reality came crashing down on my head – I was living in Barstow, in a trailer, about to start my first day at the worst school ever. Even the thought of seeing the gorgeous guy with the incredible hazel eyes didn’t lift my spirits. Carefully, I unwrapped the gift (we always saved wrapping paper in our house) and opened the box. My mother beamed.
“Breakfast is at Nana’s in fifteen minutes,” she said, getting up from my bed. “I can’t wait to see you in your new outfit.” Then she kissed me on the forehead and left me alone in my new metal room.
Rest of my life, here I come.
Nana insisted on waiting for the school bus with us, even though the stop was directly in front of the entrance to the trailer park.
“We’re old enough to stand alone,” Rif attempted. We both knew there was no budging her. Nana had proudly pulled major strings to get the bus to pick us up right at the front gate of the trailer park. Dirk’s school was across the street, lucky for him. She didn’t know how embarrassing it was.
“No grandchild of mine is going to walk a million blocks to the school bus. I pay taxes.”
“Really, Nana. You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do.”
So she did. We were the only kids picked up at that spot. Apparently the other kids who lived in Sunset Park drove to school or walked. But Nana would have none of that. She
stood between my brother and me, one arm around each shoulder. I wore the tacky new pastel-green frilly outfit Mom bought me from Wal-Mart. And brand-new matching pastelgreen canvas shoes. Yeah, I know. My heart sank when I lifted the ensemble out of the box. Hadn’t she ever even looked at her daughter? What gave her the idea I’d ever wear such a hokey outfit? No way was I going to make my first impression in a new school in pastels !
Still, I couldn’t erase her face from my mind. That eager, hopeful, apologetic, loving, desperate look she’d given me as she sat on my bed, gift in hand. Her face reminded me that her life was ruined, too. We were all stuck in Barstow. I couldn’t stomach hurting my mom’s feelings by showing up at the breakfast table in jeans and a rumpled black T-shirt pulled out of the bottom of my suitcase.
So I wore it.
I looked like the nerd of the century.
And I brought my real clothes with me in my backpack so I could change the moment I got to school.
“Finally!” Nana took her hands off our shoulders and clapped them together.
Just over the crest of the hill, the familiar orange-yellow colour rose like a hideous sunrise. We watched the bus driver put on his blinkers and flashers, practically taking out a billboard announcing he was pulling over to pick up the losers who lived in Sunset Park. Nana stood like a peacock, a huge turquoise medallion hanging around her neck. My heart raced. I felt dizzy. Nana sealed our fate by loudly asking the bus driver, “When was your last drug test?”
The whole school bus erupted in laughter. My face burned so red it felt like sunburn. Rif didn’t care. He high-fived everyone as he pimp-walked down the aisle to the back of the bus. Me, I simply tried not to barf as I kept my head down and searched for the first empty seat out of the corner of my eye.
“Who’s that?” I heard some guy ask.
“Nobody,” another guy answered.
Recognising the voice, I glanced up. It was him. The soulful blond boy who’d given Juan Dog back to me the day before. The boy I thought I might one day seriously kiss. When he caught me looking at him he said, “Keep moving. You’re not sitting with me.”
I wanted to cry. I wanted to explain how this had happened, how my life had veered wildly off course and careered into Barstow. I wanted to pull my clothes out of my pack and show everyone who I really was. I longed to turn the clock back to last year, when I was happy and didn’t even know it. Instead, I watched my grandmother waving at me out of the back window as she shrunk to a tiny turquoise dot in the bus’s exhaust. Then I grabbed an empty seat in the back and stared at my fingernails.
“Nobody wants to sit with me, either.” A girl’s voice in front of me jolted me back to reality. I looked up. She said, “I’m Barbara Carver. It’s okay. I’ll be your friend.”
Ah, geez.
Every high school has a Barbara Carver. She’s a five-time loser: overweight, acne, braces, glasses, and bad hair. No, make that awful hair. Barbara gathered a tuft of hair on top of her head into an old rubber band; it shot straight into the air like Old Faithful. Her fingernails were chewed so ferociously they were ten bloody half-moons.
I gulped. “Thanks. I’m Libby Madrigal.” Then I settled into the bus seat and imagined how nice it would feel if the vinyl seat opened up and swallowed me whole.
Barbara stood, swung around, plopped down beside me and chatted all the way to school.
“. so if you want to join a club, you pretty much have to organise it yourself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And sports, there’s like football and stuff. But if you want a really cool sport, like chess, you have to organise that yourself, too.”
“Uh-huh.”
As Barbara Carver filled me in on the limitations of Desert Valley High, I felt more and more woozy. My head was doing loop de loops. Each time I took in a breath, I felt dizzy when I exhaled. Hang on, girl, I repeated over and over in my head. Hang on. Everything’s going to be okay.
We rode past Wal-Mart, through downtown, hung a right after the police station. My ears were hissing. By the time we passed the same tired old taco stand I’d passed several times the day before, I could barely hear Barbara at all. My ears were filled with the sound of the ocean. My upper lip was damp with sweat.
“. so you want to stay away from them. I mean, like they are totally bad news.”
Barbara continued her monologue, but all I heard was whoosh! All I felt was dizziness and a growing sense of panic.
The bus lurched to a stop, the door swung open. “Careful getting off, kids,” the driver said. “No pushing.”
Standing shakily, I let the crowd sweep me along in its current. My vision was blurred, I saw twinkling white lights. In the next horrible instant I felt like throwing up. Saliva flooded my mouth. The more I swallowed, the more liquid came rushing in. My stomach churned.
“Are you okay?” Barbara asked behind me. But her voice sounded so small and far-away I didn’t think she was talking to me. My heart raced as my stomach lurched closer to upchucking the egg-white omelette Nana’d made for breakfast. I grabbed for my backpack. Lunch, and my non-nerdy clothes, were the only things inside it. I figured I could barf on Nana’s smoked turkey wrap and suffer the additional humiliation of wearing my pastel ensemble all day. If I stuck my head far enough inside my pack, I could hurl and no one would even know. Dizzy, nauseous, and nearly off the deep end in terror, I fumbled with the clasp.
“Move your butt,” someone yelled to me. It sounded like Rif.
“Shut up,” Barbara snapped back.
“I wasn’t talking to you, crater face.”
“Good one, Shakespeare. Got any more original lines?”
Somehow I made it to the door. The bus steps were blurry. The crashing waves in my ears were now deafening. My hand clutched my stomach. Inch by inch, I managed to crawl down the bus steps. My knees didn’t give way until I stepped on to the sidewalk. There, I folded like an accordion right into the gutter.
“Step over her!”
That’s the last thing I heard before my head smacked the pavement.
“It looks worse than it is, Mrs Madrigal,” I heard the nurse tell my mom over the phone. That’s when I reached up to feel my head. An enormous bandage covered the right half of my forehead, almost into my eye. It felt like a bath sponge.
“A nasty scrape,” the nurse said to me, hanging up the phone. “You fainted. You’ll be fine.”
“Did I throw up?” I asked, wondering if I not only had to drop out of school in disgrace but move out of California, too.
“No. You just passed out.”
I nearly fainted again when the nurse helped me into a sitting position, and I saw my reflection in the mirror across the room. “Can I have a Band-Aid instead of this . this . maxi pad on my forehead?”
“It’s a bandage, and you’ll need it if you start bleeding again,” she said efficiently. “Do you have a headache?”
“No.”
“Good. Any dizziness?”
“No.”
“Nausea? Blurred vision?”
“No. I’m okay now.” Even my heart had returned to its normal beat. “I think it was just a slight panic attack.”
“Fine,” the nurse said. “Then you can go to class.”
That’s not what I expected to hear. Suddenly I remembered, yeah, I did have a headache. “Can’t I go home?” I asked. “Now that you mention it, my head does feel a little achy.”
“Your mom said you should go to class if you could,” said the nurse. “And I think you can.”
My mom?! What did she know about my body? My mortification? The fact that my life was truly over if I started the first day of my new high school dressed like a lime-green mathlete with a pillow taped to my forehead!
“Here,” said the nurse. “Let me help you to your feet.”
Gripping my arm, the nurse supported me while I stood up. “If you bleed beyond the bandage, or feel sick at all today, come back in,” she said.
Before I could protest, th
e nurse patted my shoulder and released me into the wilds of Desert Valley High.
Mr Tilden asked the class, “Who knows the difference between a metaphor and a simile?”
I knew his name because it was written on the class schedule I held in my trembling hand. I heard his question because I was standing, frozen, outside the closed door of my second period English class. The doorknob was inches away from my hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to reach out and turn it. My heart pounded wildly. Trickles of sweat dribbled down into the cotton bandage on my forehead. As I took one tiny step forward, my too-new green canvas shoes squeaked on the exterior cement sidewalk. My backpack sagged against my rear end. Considering waiting it out, I looked at my watch. Then I looked at my schedule. There were still twenty minutes left before the end of class. No way could I wait it out just standing there. Or could I? Maybe now would be a good time to go to the bathroom and change my clothes?
“Door locked?”
My head jerked up. A handyman with a million keys hanging from his belt walked purposefully for the door.
“Well, I . ”
Before I could say more, he tested the knob and the door opened easily. Annoyed, he said, “You’ve got to actually turn the knob, missy.”
“I’m new,” I stammered. Then I reached up to touch my bandage as some sort of explanation.
He softened, led me into the classroom. “Knobs turn to the right,” he said slowly. The eruption of class laughter made me wish I could hide my whole body beneath that bandage. The handyman patted my shoulder just as the nurse had done and left.
“Can I help you, young lady?” Mr Tilden asked.
“I’m in your class,” I said. But my voice was so dinky I barely heard it.
“Pardon?”
Gulping, I took two steps further into the class. The moment I was in full view, no one said a word. It was the silence of curiosity, of alarm, of contempt. The walk to Mr Tilden’s desk felt longer than the trip to Bartow, and twice as hideous. If my legs were working properly, I would have turned around and run . all the way back to Chatsworth.