She thought a Volkswagen would be good. Not a bug but one of the old minivans, with a pop-up roof. We could learn to fix it ourselves. “You know, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” she said. She was lying across my bed staring up at the ceiling, her hair fanned out around her.
“That could be cool,” I said, drawing my feet up a little so I wouldn’t touch her by mistake.
We would skip the South—who cared about all that plantation crap?—and drive as fast as we could across the boring Midwest. The part of the country we wanted to see started with Colorado because Sylvie’s ex-boyfriend had told her the Rockies were an amazing place to trip. Utah was on the list for the rock formations, and New Mexico because it was so spiritual with all the Native Americans and everything. San Francisco—the best place—was where we would settle down.
We never looked at a map or read a travel book; our ideas about what to see came from movies and rock songs and stories we’d heard. I wasn’t even sure where all those places were, what was close to what. It didn’t matter. When I sat with Sylvie in my room at night, a crazy happiness brimmed up in me.
I didn’t even mind my mother so much when Sylvie was around. The first night she was over, my mother wandered up in her bathrobe, drink in hand, and stood rambling irrelevantly in the door of my bedroom. I kept glancing at Sylvie as my mother stumbled through her monologue, veering from what she imagined were standard nice mother comments (“Well, we’ve certainly enjoyed having your family for neighbors”), to bitter jabs at my father, whom Sylvie had never met.
“Sure, Mrs. Wainwright,” Sylvie said, flicking her ash into her water glass, “I can see that.”
I looked away, unable to withstand the sight of my mother’s penciled eyebrows or the wedge of pale, freckled skin in the V of her robe.
“Gin and tonic, huh?” Sylvie said when she had left. Then, without waiting for an answer: “That’s cool, man.”
* * *
I didn’t see much of Sylvie at school. She’d been put in a lower track because of her bad grades, so the only class we had together was homeroom. It was a strange one, down in the Voc Ed part of the school, where neither of us had any other classes. The room didn’t look like a classroom—there were no desks, just large, low tables where eight or ten students could sit—and the teacher, Mrs. Handy, didn’t look like a teacher. She was black, for one thing—most of our teachers were white—and she was old. The dresses she wore were calf-length and old-fashioned, and if you got up close you could see the milky blue rings around her irises. What she looked like, actually, was one of those old ladies you’d see coming out of the churches in the black neighborhood on Sunday, with a matching hat and dress and swollen feet shoved into a pair of pumps.
I don’t know what she taught—Home Ec, probably, judging by the ragged pattern books that lay around the room—it was hard to imagine her teaching anything, really. She almost never spoke, even when one of the kids started cutting up; she just sat there, outraged and silent, until the twenty-minute period was over. It was pretty clear she had given up, and that marked her as an easy target, someone we could trick and slip things past. Still, I had a funny feeling about Mrs. Handy, like I’d somehow done her wrong.
One morning, Sylvie and I stayed too long at the swings and missed the first bell. We ran all the way from the main entrance but we were still late—the final bell cut off just before we walked through the homeroom door. Another kid, one of the black guys who sat at the back of the room, came in right on our heels. I glanced at Mrs. Handy to see if she was going to bust us, but her head was bent over the newspaper. I was already seated and taking out my school-issue copy of Dubliners when I realized she was speaking. She had stood up behind her desk and was pointing in our direction with one bent, arthritic finger.
“You are late,” she called out in her shaky, old voice. “You need to get a late pass.”
I felt myself go red. “Me?” I said.
But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past me, at the black kid who had come in with us.
His eyes widened in disbelief. “You talkin’ to me, Ms. Handy?”
“Yes, young man, I am speaking to you. You have got to go and get yourself a late pass.”
He was one of the popular boys, a basketball player, not the type to look for trouble. Game days, he came to school in a button-down shirt and tie. I turned back around and kept my eyes on the table, but Sylvie was still twisted in her chair, staring.
He started in with the charm defense: “Ms. Handy, why you gotta do me like that? You know I don’t mean no disrespect. Ms. Handy, I’m askin’ you. Ms. Handy!”
But Mrs. Handy had snapped; she wasn’t listening to any of it. “Don’t you sass me, young man!” she erupted. “Don’t you sass me!”
When she threatened to call the basketball coach, I heard the boy’s chair scrape the floor. He stopped at the door and looked back, his face grave. “What about them?” he said quietly, jerking his chin in our direction. “You gonna send them, too?”
“Get out!” Mrs. Handy yelled. “And take off that hat!”
The door slammed behind him. In the electric silence, I watched Mrs. Handy lean her hands on the desk and lower herself slowly back into her chair.
“Shiiiit,” muttered one of the black girls at our table, drawing the word out like a growl.
“You know what I’m saying?” I recognized Sherri Thomas’s raspy voice. She was one of the four black kids in our Advanced Placement track. If she was mad enough to speak up, I knew the situation was bad. I bent my head over my book, the next best thing to disappearing.
But Sylvie hadn’t noticed. “Whoa!” she said, too loudly. “That was a trip!”
I didn’t have to look to know how the black girls were glaring at her.
That wasn’t how I wanted to think about Sylvie. I didn’t want to imagine how the black girls saw her, with her Grateful Dead jeans jacket and bouncy walk, or wonder if she got hassled in the halls like the rest of us did. I wanted to think about her the way she was when we were alone, and together, and no one else was there—at Brewster Park, for instance, sitting on the old stone bridge in the slanted October sun:
Sylvie, sleepily: “We’re alive, man. You know? We’re alive right now.”
Me: “I guess.”
But I did know; I knew exactly. I could feel every separate inch of my skin thrilling to the heat, a million breathing cells, and Sylvie beside me, her body a mirror of my own. We were alive. We were alive and I wasn’t afraid.
* * *
That fall was a strange one, warm and green. The days had shortened but everything else stayed the same: The afternoons were hot; the leaves didn’t turn. It was as though the normal consequences of things had been suspended.
I knew it couldn’t last. Winter would come; I would have to make a choice: apply to college or commit to driving cross-country with Sylvie. But whenever I tried to think about any of that, a weird arbitrariness would come over me, a dizzy, free-falling sense that it didn’t really matter what I did.
Walking in front of the bus, for instance: It was nothing I wanted to do and yet when I saw the bus coming a voice in my head would say, Go ahead, step off the curb, and I’d think, Why not? I wasn’t suicidal, it was just that “Do it” and “Don’t do it” suddenly had the same weight, which was no weight at all, and for a few seconds, watching the bus speed toward me, my heart would fly up like a gull, just spring up out of the way and wait. Then the bus would pull over, the door would hiss open, and I would step on. And everything on the bus would be normal—the same people, the same plastic seats, the same view of the park passing by the metal-edged windows—and I would sit down, a little breathless, like someone who had nearly fallen.
* * *
There was one last warm day in November. Sylvie and I spent it at Brewster Park, smoking pot and watching the clouds shape-change across the sky. Afterward, she walked me downtown to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet my father for our
monthly dinner. Darkness had fallen and a crazy wind was snatching little clumps of twigs off the trees and flinging them down around us; I remember feeling happy.
The dinner was what it always was, awkward and long, but I was used to that. When my father dropped me off at home afterward, I found my mother waiting for me at the kitchen table. I was used to that, too; only this time, instead of grilling me about my dad, she began to talk about college. Somehow she’d overheard enough of my conversations with Sylvie to understand that college might not be in my plans.
I leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, while I waited for her to finish. It was the usual stuff: money and jobs and social status; opportunities not to be missed. I didn’t really care what she thought, so what harm could it do to stand there? But she was drunk and struggling to keep her words from slurring, and I couldn’t help noticing that she looked precisely like the foolish, incompetent person my father believed her to be.
“You simply have to go to a good school,” she said, waving her hand in the air, open-fingered, like an old-fashioned movie star. “It’s just a basic requirement.” With her pinkie still extended, she took a little sip of her drink, and I saw that she was entertaining some flattering idea about herself. “A basic requirement, that is,” she said again, setting her drink carefully on the table, “if you want to be anyone.”
The banked misery in my chest took fire. “Anyone like you?” I said.
Her startled eyes locked on mine. “What?”
“‘What?’ Jesus! You can’t even hold a normal conversation.”
“Casey!” she cried. “I’m trying to help! I’m trying to keep you from making a terrible, terrible mistake!”
“Yeah, well, thanks, but I don’t really think you’re qualified to be giving advice.”
She blinked rapidly. “What?”
I should have stopped then—the whole thing was pointless anyway—but I was itching to hurt her. “Look at yourself, Mom,” I said. “You’re a drunk, okay? A goddamn drunk who never leaves the house.”
I stomped up the stairs and left her there. Crying, probably. So let her. I hated her for being hated, and my father for hating her, and myself, too, for being a part of it.
* * *
That night, the weather turned bitter and the leaves all fell at once, like stunned birds. I walked to school with Sylvie through the frozen piles the next morning, dark with foreboding. It should have been a good day. Our class was going to a college fair at a high school in one of the surrounding suburbs and Sylvie and I were planning to slip away once we got there—smoke a jay, see if we could find a coffee shop to hang out in. Only now, for some reason, I wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Fuckin’ college,” Sylvie said, dragging her feet in the leaves. She stopped and looked at me, her face pale and exposed. “You know?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, averting my eyes. I couldn’t understand why she got so petulant and weird whenever the subject of college came up. Why did she care? She wasn’t even planning to go. Besides, we were late and I had to sell a couple of joints to a girl from Social Studies before we got on the bus. “Look,” I said, “I gotta hook up with that girl. Want to come?”
She sighed. “It’s fuckin’ cold, you know?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, turning away. I wasn’t going to beg her.
Of course the girl wasn’t there. I walked back and forth in front of the swings, fingering the pink plastic Tampax case I kept my joints in. I was seriously cold—the boys at the side door had pulled off my down vest a few weeks before, so all I had on was my hoodie. Also, I was worried that the bus would leave without me. By the time I saw the Social Studies girl coming up the sandy bank by the sidewalk, I was so anxious to get going, I barely even glanced around. We were still making the exchange when I noticed the group of black girls coming across the park.
There were four or five of them, walking toward us in a ragged line. Not the clean, well-dressed girls who went to class with us but the kind who hung out in the bathrooms all day, harassing anyone stupid enough to venture in.
“Hey!” called the tall one in front, her chin up like a hunting dog’s. “Hey! What you got?”
The Social Studies girl whirled around, her eyes wide. “Oh shit!” she yelped.
“Shhh,” I said, shoving the Tampax case in my pocket. “And for chrissake, don’t run,” I added, like she was the problem. She gave me a resentful look but she fell into step beside me and we speed-walked down the little slope that led to the street.
“You better stop,” the tall girl was saying. “You better stop ’fore I bust you skinny ass!”
It was the same old nightmare: the rabbit kick of my heart, the slipstream of faces turning to look, to watch us humiliate ourselves by running away. But I couldn’t bring myself to stop, to face whatever it was they might do to us.
Maybe they didn’t really want to catch up, I don’t know, but somehow we reached the bus ahead of them. The Social Studies girl split off and headed for the main entrance and I leapt through the bus’s folding doors and up the two short stairs. The tall girl, the one who’d started the whole thing, put her head inside the door and raised her foot like she was going to come in after me, but then she just laughed and turned away. She’d had her fun.
I stood there for a moment, holding on to one of the poles by the driver’s seat. No one looked up; no one seemed to have noticed anything. The trouble I’d just been in, if you could call it that, was purely my own.
Sylvie was sitting with Robert near the back. She was smiling now, warmed up and awake. James, I remembered, was home with a cold.
“Yo,” she said, as I ducked into the seat behind them, “you got the Tampax?”
I never gave her my pot—I never gave anyone my pot—but I took out the Tampax case and tossed it to her. She caught it and turned back to Robert—no “thanks,” no nothing. I sat down and put my frozen hands under my armpits. I didn’t care; I didn’t want to talk to her anyway. A familiar darkness was falling over my mind; all I wanted was to give in to it.
“Someone sitting here?” It was Sherri Thomas.
I looked up into her curved, mahogany face and shook my head. I didn’t have the nerve to say no to her. Plus I knew she wasn’t likely to talk to me; she would have sat somewhere else if she could have. I moved over and leaned my head against the cold window. We were already on the highway when I heard her say my name. I lifted my head.
“Where you applying? To college, I mean.”
“Oh. Um, I don’t know.”
“Oh.” She turned away and stared off at the front of the bus.
I hadn’t thought about Sherri in connection with college. I hadn’t thought about her at all, really. She was just Sherri: quick, short, good at math. I stole a glance at her. She still looked exactly as she had in ninth grade—slim and almost completely flat—and she still wore her hair the way she always had, pulled back in swirly pigtails with those colorful plastic-ball elastics. It wasn’t the style; most of the black girls did their hair in sophisticated-looking curls and updos, but Sherri’s reputation didn’t seem to have suffered for it. She was the manager of the girls’ basketball team, and popular outside the AP track, where it mattered. She didn’t have to worry about getting jumped; she could walk anywhere, talk to anyone she wanted.
It seemed like I ought to say something, so I said, “What about you?”
She shrugged without meeting my eyes, and I remembered suddenly that she’d been there for that incident in homeroom. She probably couldn’t stand me. I turned and gazed out at the gray posts of the guardrail whipping past.
“I bet you could be whatever you want, huh?” she said softly.
There was something in her voice—a cracking or breaking, the raw sound of emotion. Instinctively, I turned on her a face of bright dismissal. “Me?” I said. “No way.”
Her eyes clung to mine for a second, searching; then she looked away.
I had been thinking of myself—whether
she disliked me; when I could get away with leaning my head back against the window—but the look in her eyes stung me. Staring at her shut face, I wondered: What if she didn’t get in anywhere? Or couldn’t afford to go? Because she was poor, of course, I knew that; when she walked to school in the morning, she came over the hill with all the other black kids. I just hadn’t really thought about that before, about what it might mean.
“No,” I said. “Listen, I’m in the same boat as you.”
She looked at me. “For real?”
“Of course,” I said. “Totally. I have no clue what schools I’ll get into. Or, you know, if I’ll even get in.”
“Huh,” she said.
I took in a strained breath, like I was struggling to make headway against a stiff wind. “There’s lots of schools,” I went on. “I mean, we’re bound to get in somewhere, you know?”
“I guess,” she said doubtfully, though her expression softened.
“I mean even if we’re rejected everywhere else, there’s always Quinnipiac. There’s no way we wouldn’t get into Quinnipiac.”
She smiled a little. “I know, right?”
I leaned back, relieved. It made me feel better to have her agree. “Whitney’s older brother got in there and he’s a total waste case,” I said. “Remember him? Whitney Peabody?”
She snorted. “Yeah. ‘Last Name Last Name.’ ”
That had been my joke; it had never occurred to me that she might have overheard it. A bubble of elation swelled in my throat. I’d always thought of Sherri as someone who couldn’t stand us, who only put up with us because she was in our class and had no choice. But she’d heard that joke; she’d thought it was funny.
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