by Julie Buntin
* * *
Mom didn’t speak during the drive home. She jumped out the second she parked, leaving me alone in the passenger seat, engine ticking as it cooled. The air around me sharpened until it matched the temperature outside. Marlena’s house had a few lights on but no cars in the driveway. Sal was home, but he was probably alone, even though he was young enough to need a babysitter. I stared myself down in the rearview until it grew dark and my hands lost feeling.
Inside, Mom was on the phone with Dad. Her words were awake, wheedling, as if she was trying to make a deal and play it cool at the same time. I pressed the front door until it clicked almost silently into the frame, and slipped off my shoes and coat, hovering in the hall’s shadows so I wouldn’t attract Mom’s attention. She strode circles around the kitchen island, yelling into the receiver. I grabbed the extra cordless from its dock against the wall near the bathroom and took it into my room, where I slid open the closet, nudged aside a pile of sandals and summer Keds, and curled myself up in the far back corner before pushing Talk.
“You can pretend all you want like this is just a phase, but I’m telling you right now, Rick, there’s something wrong. Have you ever known Catherine to do something like this? Doesn’t it bother you one tiny bit that your daughter’s been floating around, ditching school, hanging out God knows where, and that she doesn’t even seem remotely concerned about the consequences?”
“I’m not sure how this is my fault. I’m not the one who’s there every day, who’s supposed to be in charge of her coming and going,” Dad said. “She’s a smart kid. She’s allowed a few mistakes. Don’t make this into some big hoopla because you’re trying to get my attention.”
“This isn’t about us, for God’s sake,” Mom hissed. “This is about your daughter. Your real daughter, not that midlife crisis getting your dick wet.”
Getting your dick wet getting your dick wet, my brain shrieked over and over.
“Well,” Dad said. “There goes your credibility.”
On his end, a girl’s voice. “Jesus Christ,” Mom said.
I hung up.
* * *
I texted Marlena what felt like a dozen times that night, stupid, desperate things. I need to talk to you, My mom is crazy, Help, Where are you, four- or five-word fragments composed while I was possessed by such feverish emotion that I was almost blind with it. Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is a kind of self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you’re still responsible for your mistakes. It’s a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I’d just feel numb.
I stuck two cigarettes into my bra, sliding them between my breasts and tucking the filters into the place where my bra met in the middle. I wanted a drink. I wanted something. At the barn’s back door, I peered through the window before knocking. Marlena and her dad were on the couch, Sal between them. They were watching something on their shitty little TV. I left without knocking and smoked both cigarettes by myself in the jungle gym. There would’ve been nowhere for me to sit. Back inside my house, while Mom was taking a shower, I filled a tall glass to the brim with wine and shut myself up with it in my room, plugging my headphones into my CD player to listen to one of Marlena’s burned mixes—Pink Floyd, Weezer, a lot of Janis Joplin and Neko Case—turned up so loud my thoughts, my body, dissolved into sound.
* * *
In my earliest memory, Dad and I are sitting on the floor in the pantry, our knees poking each other. He’s helping me organize the cans. I don’t know how to read, so we organize by color, by the length of the names, by size. Blue cans on the bottom, big red cans on the top. We stack tuna cans in a tall cylinder. When we’ve taken them all out and put them all back in the best order, he scoops me into his lap and rocks me crazy-fast, not at all like a baby. He stands up and takes me with him, squeezing so hard my ribs flex inward and all the noise is pressed out of me. When he puts me down, there’s a dull band of pain around my chest. I love you, he says. I love you the best.
* * *
Instead of dropping me off in front of school, Jimmy parked in the lot and turned off the car. “I’m walking you in,” he said. A smear of salt formed a snowflake pattern on the dashboard. When I was little, I believed that nobody could see me unless I wanted them to. After Mom and Dad kissed me good night, I’d sneak downstairs and stand in the corner of the living room while they watched TV, Mom’s head on Dad’s lap, his arm draped across her body. I moved through the shadows and tucked myself between the wall and the back of an armchair. The screen cast dancing light on the pages of my book. It was only after Mom and Dad shut off the TV and went silent behind the door to their bedroom that I crept back upstairs, the house so dark I felt like I’d changed into darkness with it, the same nothing color as everything around me.
I pulled down the visor mirror, ignoring Jimmy’s groan of irritation. What would it feel like to be a student preceded by a bad reputation instead of a good one? I looked different. A yellowy color stained the corners below my eyes, fading into purple above my cheekbones. My hair brushed my shoulders, middle-parted so it hung straight on either side of my eyes. No bobby pins, no makeup, a spray of tiny pimples across my chin. After my alarm rang, I’d stared into the closet for half an hour, trying on outfit after outfit, before pulling a pair of jeans and a State sweatshirt out of the hamper. I’d thought that the freedom to dress how I wanted would be one of the few good things about KHS.
“Now.”
“I’m going,” I snapped.
I slid from the front seat and jumped over a mitten drowning in a puddle of slush. Jimmy walked a few steps ahead with his head down and his hands deep in his coat pockets. Once we hit the lobby he practically dragged me to the office. “Catherine, please take a seat,” Mrs. Tenley said, glancing up from her computer. I sat in the cleanest of the stained chairs that lined the wall. Jimmy gave me a two-fingered salute, Dad-style. As he was leaving, the office door swung open, jangling a cluster of bells around the doorknob. Marlena. Jimmy’s face.
“The Bobbsey Twins,” Marlena said.
She leaned over the barrier above Mrs. Tenley’s desk until her feet skimmed the floor. “Hello,” Marlena told her. “I’m here!” As usual, no coat. The back of her black dress scooped below her shoulder blades. Between them, a network of blue veins cat’s-cradled across her spine.
“I see that, Ms. Joyner,” said Mrs. Tenley. “Cher will be with you in a moment.”
“Do you believe in life after love?” Marlena sang, obnoxiously loud. She hurled herself into the chair beside me. She smelled, slightly, like kitty litter. Jimmy was gone.
“Well, I really don’t think I’m strong enough,” I said. “But?”
Marlena laughed, an easier, open-mouthed version of her normal laugh. Her Cat-laugh. She twined a strand of hair around her finger and tucked it into the loose knot on top of her head. Four pointillist bruises climbed up her neck, each one precisely quarter-sized.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said to Marlena, quietly.
“I wasn’t going to make you do this by yourself.” Marlena pulled a legal pad from her tote bag and wrote: this place will be my death. The pad looked as if it’d been dipped in water and then laid out on a heater to dry. With all the shit I was in, I didn’t dare write back, so I tried to give Marlena a me-too nod only she would notice. I was positive Mrs. Tenley could see the note, though it wasn’t possible, really. Marlena flipped to a clean page and drew a girl getting attacked by arrows from all directions. At the bottom she added, at least Hen House will look STUNNING at my funerel … THAT OUTFIT. I took her pen and scribbled lichen + dental floss = that sweater.
Marlena took off the pin on her chest, the one she always wore, and opened it in her lap, shielding it from Mr
s. Tenley’s view by crossing her legs. She tipped out a pill and quickly popped it in her mouth.??? I wrote on the pad. Head hurts, she wrote back, and then drew her pen through the words so many times she tore the paper.
Now? I was writing, when Principal Lacey stuck his head out of his office and nodded at me.
“Don’t forget the balls,” said Marlena.
“Fuck you,” I mouthed, hooking my backpack over one shoulder.
I sat on a couch adjacent to Principal Lacey’s desk. A window overlooking the football field framed his head. Person by person, the marching band formed an N-shape in the snow. Principal Lacey pressed his palms onto his desk and burrowed into my eyes with his watery blue ones. He was talking about fish—how they started small, showing up in his office after missing a few days of school, coming in late, but how they got bigger and bigger, skipping assignments, getting caught with weed, hanging out with the wrong crowd. I couldn’t keep myself from imagining the chubby redheaded woman in the picture by his lamp kneeling before him in the center of the room. I was going to kill Marlena. Sweat tingled on my upper lip. As he talked, I picked one of the pimples on my chin until blood smeared my fingertip. The N dissolved into a square that expanded and contracted. From so far away, the marching band sounded like an asthmatic elephant. “Then bam,” he said, and smacked his palms against the wood so that I jumped. The picture of the woman fell facedown. He righted it. Now I was directly in her gaze. The kneeling scene cropped up again and I shifted, uncrossing and recrossing my legs. “Next thing you know, I’ve got a killer whale on my hands.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said, kind of meaning it. “I don’t think that’s me.”
“What was your GPA at your previous school?”
“Three point eight seven.”
He whistled. “Three point eight seven. Three point eight seven. Do you want to go to college, Catherine?”
“Yes,” I said automatically.
He said something about how this was a big boo-boo, and that word in his mouth made me want to die. He clapped his hands, rubbing them together so they made a whispering sound. He’d talked to my Concord counselor. Because of her testimony and my strong freshman year record, all I had to do to make up for my absence was attend one month of detention, to be fulfilled before or after school; commit to biweekly meetings with Cher to discuss my progress settling in and anything else that popped into my head; and coordinate makeup projects with each teacher. There was also a general proviso about making choices that reflected my potential. I’d made a big mistake, but no matter how it felt, the school didn’t want to punish me. They wanted to help.
“Thank you,” I said, standing. I tugged my sweatshirt as low as possible and resisted an urge to lift my hood and disappear.
“Catherine?” Principal Lacey asked. He smiled like he meant it. Crooked yellow teeth. Creases spidered from the outer corners of his eyes. A smoker. “Be one of my little fish, okay?”
* * *
The halls were empty. An electronic clock above a set of water fountains informed me that I was nine minutes late. My phone vibrated in my sweatshirt pocket. A text from Jimmy. You can do this. I knocked on the door to Botany/Soil Ecology, peering through the window. Tons of kids, all slouched at tables that looked like they were made out of chalkboard. Tidbit and Greg were in the row closest to the back wall. I was surprised to see Greg—every day I’d skipped and hung out with Marlena and Ryder, Greg had been there too, at least part of the time.
“Come in!” the teacher shouted. I looked at my schedule. It took me a minute to fully register his name. The letters seemed to exist individually, as if each one belonged to a different word. “Come in, I said.” Mr. Ratner was holding open the door. I walked in.
He was middle-aged, middle-tall, his features completely regular. I expected him to look like a rapist, but what did that mean? Even his hair was a kind of nonparticular brown, a composite of every shade that had ever manifested on a human head. Hawaiian shirt tucked into khakis. “Your phone.” It took me a second to understand what he meant. A snicker: girl, second row, snub blond ponytail, smushed-together breasts framed by the V of her T-shirt’s neckline. Mr. Ratner winked at her, waggling his fingers. “Please,” he said. I placed my phone on his palm, wanting to call him what I knew he was. “Why don’t you tell us a little something about yourself?”
“I’m new here?”
“I meant something that’s not obvious, but that will have to do, as we’ve already been extremely derailed by your arrival,” said Mr. Ratner.
Tidbit lifted her wrist off the table, a tiny, genuine hello, and I relaxed. On my way to the only empty spot, in the middle of the third row, I tripped on an unzipped backpack, catching my balance on the shoulder of a boy with his collar popped. “Careful,” he whispered, unnecessarily loud. Heads swiveled. I sank into the seat next to him.
I spent class muffled in a cocoon of self-awareness, emerging only when people began to shift in their seats, slide textbooks into backpacks. The guy next to me zipped his pen into a foam hotdog, packed the rest of his bag, and then hugged the whole thing on his lap like it was an animal that needed to be restrained. At Concord, you were awarded a demerit for anticipating the bell. When it finally did go off, Mr. Ratner pointed at me and then pointed at the floor near his desk.
He slid a weary copy of Fundamentals of Ecology: GRADES 9–10 in my direction. Inside the yawning mouth of a neon frog some now middle-aged student had written: NEVER AGAIN!!!! “If you are late tomorrow, please do not bother coming to my class.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. Before I’d known he was Mr. Ratner, I’d planned on apologizing. But Marlena’s best friend was not sorry and she was not wrong and she did not give two shits what Mr. Ratner thought about her.
He made a red mark in his notebook and said, musingly, “It never is, is it?” He picked up my cell phone and ran his thumb over the words on the back—What a thrill—before turning it over in his hands.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Certain things are. Abusing a position of power, I would say, for example.” I grabbed the textbook off his desk. “Can I have my phone back, please?”
“Do you deserve it?”
“It’s mine.”
He clicked the call button, and the screen glowed. I snatched the phone from him and left, hating myself for not saying something about what I knew.
Tidbit was slumped against the lockers outside, Greg standing very close to her, hands cupping her hips. “I’m so glad you’re in our class,” Tidbit said, twisting away from him.
“That guy is the worst,” I said, though Tidbit had automatically made me feel better.
“Mr. Ratner sucks a fat one,” said Greg. “He grades based on, like, the weather. Or what he had for lunch.” Tidbit hooked her arm in mine. Marlena hadn’t told them about Mr. Ratner, I realized, with a surge of pride.
“Or like, how he’s just feeling,” said Tidbit.
“That’s what I meant,” Greg said, snappishly, to her. Then, to me, “I’m sure you’ll be fine, Little Miss Library.” He squeezed me against his side, a one-armed hug that went on too long. I tried to relax. Cat, a girl with male friends galore, a girl for whom touching was no big deal. Tidbit’s scrawny biceps tightened against my own, territorial. She asked to see my schedule, and I pulled it from my back pocket. Greg let me go.
“Yay, lunch you’ll have with all of us,” she said. “Choir and French III you’ll have with Mar, and history, no clue, I didn’t even know that was an option.” French III?
They’d walked me down to the school’s main artery. The girls here wore faded jeans with intentional tears and pastel eye shadow—they moved through the halls in clusters. “Want to smoke a cig with us?” Tidbit asked. I told her no, still rattled from my brush with Mr. Ratner. “Your funeral,” Tidbit said, and dragged Greg toward the auditorium. Before they disappeared into the crowd, he looked back at me once, and that’s when I knew that he liked me more than he should. I didn’t yet
have words for that knowledge—the awareness of a boy’s awareness.
In Algebra II, I recognized the snub-faced blond giggler and Hotdog Pencil Case guy. I took an empty desk in the back. Pencil Case moved from the front corner to a seat next to me. Near the end of class, Pencil Case, whose name turned out to be Micah, leaned across the aisle and placed a piece of paper onto my open book. On it was a drawing of hand, a plus sign, and a penis, followed by an equals sign and a bunch of jagged lines that I could only presume represented sperm. LESSON NUMBER ONE, he’d written, surrounded by a bunch of tiny hearts.
I was out the door and halfway to choir before the bell stopped ringing. I still hadn’t found my locker. Ms. Low, the choir director, had me sing a quick major scale before handing me a stack of sheet music and relegating me to the front row with the rest of the harmony-bearing altos. Tidbit was a Soprano II. Snubby Blonde, my schedule-twin, sat two seats to my left. “No one’s seen Marlena today, I take it,” said Ms. Low. She pointed at Snub Blonde, who scooted to the edge of her chair and sang the Ezekiel solo, her voice high and pitchy, squeezed through a tube.
The carnival in the cafeteria—a couple of guys playing catch with a carton of chocolate milk, a chain of girls straddling the table bench and French-braiding each other’s hair, four geeks cheering on one enraptured by a retro Game Boy, a wraparound line for the pizza station—about summed up the KHS universe. You could tell the popular kids by how rich they looked. I felt a stab of belated gratefulness for Concord, where your clothes couldn’t betray your financial status, and where everyone assumed everyone was rich, and if not rich then smart enough to be a scholarship student and therefore worthy of a kind of benevolent indifference. Marlena was sitting alone at a round table in the far corner. We sat with her, and a few minutes later Greg joined us, choosing the seat next to me.