“Good.” Ms. Doman smiled, but she seemed less impressed than she had been with Elizabeth’s response. Maybe because the whole “doomed to repeat it” thing is a cliché. Or maybe because Sarah hadn’t raised her hand.
“Can you explain a little?” Ms. Doman added.
“I mean, we have to read books or we’ll make mistakes. If we read stories of how other people lived, we can figure out better ways to live. I mean we can look at other people’s lives and not make the same mistakes they made. Or we can, like, use their examples as models for ourselves.” I knew she meant the V-word play, hoped she would stop short of saying it out loud.
“Brilliant,” said Ms. Doman, and I could tell she was thinking: “Wow, this is going better than I even imagined it would.” I was kind of thinking that too, like Sarah had turned out to be smarter than I thought she would. And so had Elizabeth Wood. I had this experience a lot at Darcy, because the truth is, the kids there were pretty smart for the most part. I mean, once we were trapped in classrooms.
“If those are two reasons for reading, then what about writing? Why write?” asked Ms. Doman.
“Immortality,” said some ass-kisser.
“Yes! What else?”
“So you won’t forget something you want to remember,” Molly added.
“Those are related, right?” said Katherine Hassel. “I mean, not forgetting and not being forgotten?”
I noticed none of the guys had spoken.
“They certainly are,” Ms. Doman said. “So, what does it mean to call this class ‘American Lit’?” This was the first I’d heard of that. I thought it was just AP English.
But Ms. Doman was such a good teacher that she taught hers as an American lit class. She thought it was too “institutional” to teach straight AP English. She promised that her class would also prepare us for the AP test; she just wasn’t going to plan the whole syllabus around a stupid standardized test. She taught us contempt for tests, especially standardized ones, and never gave us quizzes. We just wrote papers for her. Ms. Doman wanted to be a college teacher, I think, so she pretended that we were college students and that this was a university class. Everyone adored her; I wasn’t the only one.
“That you teach American writers?” Molly said.
“Okay, but it’s more than that, too. What makes a body of literature American?”
“I think the relationship between culture and literature is two-way,” I said, breaking my Tracy Flick rule, but feeling inspired and like everyone else in the class was a huge nerd, too, so why couldn’t I live it up a little? Plus, right away I had a teacher crush on Ms. Doman and I couldn’t resist showing her as soon as possible that I was smarter than anyone else in the class.
It worked. She looked at me glowingly and then looked down at her grade book, trying to remember my name. “Say what you mean, Judy,” she said, and then, “Do you go by Judy or Judith?”
“Judy is fine,” I said. Everyone in the class was staring at me except Kyle, who was looking at his notebook, and it occurred to me that they were grateful that I had raised my hand to speak, because now they got to stare with impunity, at least for a few minutes. I resisted the urge to smooth my hair down, felt the weight of my legs, tried to hold them still so they wouldn’t swing. I cleared my throat a little, not in a gross way, but just enough to speak without coughing.
“I mean, we define American literature as American because it comes from America. But the idea of what America is comes from our literature. So it’s two-way.”
She smiled openly at me, the way you do at someone you know you’ll fall in love with—a person you agree with more than you agree with anyone else. Maybe like the way I smiled at Kyle when we met at Chessie’s party. I think Ms. Doman knew I’d be her best student, and she wanted me to know she knew. Maybe she wanted me to feel like that was enough, like my life would be okay if I could come up with smart things to say and write in American lit. Or maybe it went further than that; maybe she knew that it wouldn’t be okay, that I’d be eaten alive at Darcy, and that she would love me by then and be heartbroken when it happened.
After class, I had my first D’Arts lunch with Goth Sarah, which was a relief, because even though she spent the whole hour chewing with her mouth open and telling the story of her on-again-off-again thing with a tall, black-haired guy named Eliot Jacobs, it meant I wasn’t alone. I couldn’t tell from the story whether they had done it or not, and thought maybe she wanted me to ask, but I didn’t want to ask and I didn’t want her to ask me if I was still one, so I said as little as possible. I didn’t see Molly; maybe she went off campus to Zingerman’s or something, at D’Arts you were allowed.
When Ginger came into the lunchroom with Amanda Fulton and Chessie Andrewjeski, she didn’t sit with me, but she did wave from across the room and smile. Kyle was on the other side of the cafeteria, taping some stupid thing Alan and Chris were doing, something that involved grabbing each other in headlocks and rubbing each other’s hair. I was happy just to have a clear view of him, and I felt pretty sure that I could feel him turning the camera across the cafeteria every now and then, maybe even including me in a pan of the room.
“He’s coming back right before Thanksgiving,” Goth Sarah was telling me, about Eliot. “His dad was on sabbatical, but now he’s finished and—well, wow—I can’t believe he’s coming back. He’s great. He’s, like, super evolved.”
“So less of an armpit-scratching caveman than other guys?”
She laughed. “Exactly. I hope you guys will like each other. He’s a really open-minded person.”
I arched an eyebrow, wondering about the connection between that and our liking each other.
“Meaning?”
“He’s okay with my, you know, whatever you want to call it—bitchiness,” she said, and looked down, embarrassed.
I was interested. “What do you mean, your bitchiness?”
“Well, you know,” she said, looking flushed. “A lot of people find me, I don’t know, too abrasive or radical or something.” She shrugged, but I could tell she was hurt by whatever it was she perceived that people thought of her. And that it was a question.
“I don’t,” I said. “I find you weakwilled and not enough of a loudmouth.”
She laughed and then, to my astonishment, climbed onto the bench so that she was towering over the room. Everyone looked up. She wadded the Saran wrap from her sandwich into a ball and threw it overhand, hard, across the room. It missed the trashcan by six feet and landed in the middle of the floor, but she yelled, “Three points, woo-hoo!” without any holding back, and threw her arms up in a mock cheer.
Then she climbed back down onto the bench next to me and opened a bag of barbeque soy crisps. Everyone, including me, was still staring.
“Wow. Well, I take back the part about the loud mouth,” I said.
“I knew you’d rethink it,” Goth Sarah said, grinning, and held the salty orange bag open to me. “Want one?” she asked.
I did. I love those things.
4 I’ve made a friend at the Motel Manor, a middle-aged guy named Bill, who has apparently been living here for more than a year. This is the kind of place that rents rooms by the week or month. Sometimes, late at night when there’s no wall of sunshine between me and my terror, I think I’ll be like Bill, just settle down and stay here for the rest of my life. It’s only $106 a week; I could last a long time with the money I took.
I wonder who’s paying for Bill’s room. Maybe he has some money saved up from when he used to go to Alaska every winter to catch fish. That’s what he told me when we first met in the hallway. He seemed harmless in some hard-to-define but certain way, so I stopped to talk to him when he said hi, and he told me he used to go every winter and work on an Alaskan fishing boat and then he would come home and “just live” the rest of the year on the money he’d made, once it wasn’t fishing season anymore. I guess you can make a lot of money if you’re willing to go to Alaska and work on a fishing boat. Although I don’t really unde
rstand what it means to “just live,” especially if you do it at the Motel Manor.
Bill is a good friend for me here because he’s too daft to realize that I’m a teenager and shouldn’t be here on my own, or that my story about being between jobs and “down on my luck” can’t possibly be true, that there’s probably a manhunt across the Midwest for a missing dwarf, or that I’m three feet tall. That’s why I like him; in his worldview, I’m as normal as the next person. The truth is, there are so many freaks on this wretched strip of highway that I barely stand out. I like that aspect. And I bought enough cans of SpaghettiOs to live for at least another week before I have to emerge and walk down the street to Kroger.
The funny thing is, even though I started out by lying to Bill about the whole “between jobs” thing, I decided almost right after that to tell him my whole story, the way the reporters, and maybe even my parents and brothers and friends, would have liked to hear it. Bill doesn’t know how lucky he is to be the recipient of the epic dwarf download. Which is why he’s perfect. At first, I wasn’t sure how to tell him, even. I thought maybe I’d start with the hardest part, but then I rethought it, and decided I’d do it chronologically. I mean, I hinted that things turned out badly for me, and of course he knows—in whatever way it’s possible for a guy like him to know anything—that I ended up here and that that’s not good news. But I started with the beginning of my life at D’Arts.
I’ve already told him up to the part about Chessie’s party. Bill’s a good audience for drama, probably not comedy. I don’t think he’d get jokes. But he’s kind, and he listens. And he nods a lot. Maybe he’s on drugs and can’t manage much information. That’s basically why I decided I’d tell him—it’s like practice in case I ever have to talk about it with my family, a rehearsal. During the whole nightmare, I managed to say impressively close to nothing for someone with such a big mouth. But I might have to explain it at some point, my perspective, I mean. Maybe to Sam. The thought of Sam makes me feel like my heart might bite its way out of my chest, fangs all over the place. He must be so grossed out and hurt and—I wonder if everyone at Tappan is making fun of him. I wonder if he’s seen—I can’t think about it.
If I survive this, and leave the Motel Manor, even if I can’t ever bring myself to talk about it with Sam or Chad, I might need to tell my kids. I mean, if I ever have kids and they’re daughters or teenagers or something. I could make it like one of the “morality tales” Ms. Doman liked to talk about.
Ms. Doman had this whole thing about how we have to tell stories about whatever happens to us, and then we can use those stories to decide whether our lives are happy or not, whether events have redeeming aspects or are totally hopeless, that it’s really all about how we choose to shape and name things. If we can just make a bearable story out of what happens to us, then whatever happened becomes bearable. Ms. Doman once said that that’s how people rebound after losing their entire families in car crashes and stuff.
But I can’t do it, and my whole family isn’t even dead; I’m just disgraced, so what’s my problem? I mean, some nights I lie awake thinking about all the worse things that have happened to people in the world, and how can I feel this sorry for myself, etc. But none of it, no matter how gruesome, changes the fact that my life is ruined. So maybe suffering isn’t relative. And I can’t take Ms. Doman’s advice, because every time I start to try to make a story out of it, let alone make one I “can live with” or that makes me seem like a person who might be happy again in the end, I start chattering like a wind-up toy, clacking around the room. Literally. The first time I talked to Bill about what happened, I got so scared while telling him that I had to excuse myself and throw up.
Sometimes, at night, when my mind wanders back to the video and what it looked like and how many people are probably watching it right now—this minute—my teeth actually start banging against each other like shutters in a storm. Every night, even if I sleep for a few sweaty hours, it’s like I’m rewinding myself to start the anxiety again every time I wake up. So my new coping strategy is to watch Friends reruns all night, every night. It’s not working. I’m not coping.
My mom says I have a bad habit of tying all my anxieties together, which makes them seem “systemic,” rather than sorting them out and dealing with each at a time. My mom went to nursing school before she and my dad opened the Grill. She thought she wanted to be a nurse, but then decided she hated it before she had graduated. But she likes to use words like systemic, maybe to make herself feel like the whole enterprise wasn’t a waste. And it wasn’t. I mean, when we got hurt as kids, she always knew exactly what to do, even the time Chad cut his leg open on some terrifying submerged rock when we were swimming on vacation and my mother made a tourniquet out of her shirt and stopped the bleeding while we waited for an ambulance to come. Chad still has a scar so giant it looks like he used to have another mouth on his leg and they sewed that one shut, but at least he didn’t bleed to death. The paramedics said that my mom had saved his life. It took them forever to get there, but I can’t remember why. My dad almost fainted, apparently, did nothing to help. Poor guy. I guess he watched Sam and me, which is something, considering that we could have drowned while my mom was putting pressure on Chad’s leg. I was only five at the time. Sam was a toddler.
In this case, who cares if my panics are systemic? There’s only one giant one, and I don’t see how its only being one thing makes it any better.
To make matters more horrifying, someone knocked on my Motel Manor door this morning. I didn’t answer it, and they didn’t come in, so I know it wasn’t housekeeping. It wasn’t Bill, either, because he’s the only person I know here and he never comes to my door. It’s like an unspoken agreement we have that if I want to talk I stop by his room, 214, and knock twice quietly and once loud and he comes out. Or we peek into the hallway if we want to see each other. He’s almost always outside 214, smoking. I was scared it might be people looking for me—I don’t even know who, reporters, I guess. There’s no one I can stand to face, so I hid. In the closet. Maybe I’m losing my mind. I mean, when I think that out loud, even say it, I hid in the closet, it reminds me of The Shining, of how if you stay in a hotel too long, you go crazy. Of course I’ve been here only a few days. What if I stayed a month? A year? Forever? I wonder if the police are looking for me, but it wasn’t them, because I know from movies that when the police come to your door at the Motel Manor, they shout “Police” really loud and bash the door open, and that didn’t happen. Plus, I don’t think this whole thing, my life that is, is a big enough deal for the police. Although maybe it is. Hard to say. But maybe it was just some jackass looking for someone else. Part of me thinks it might have been my mom, but wouldn’t she have called my name? Or Sarah. It was gentle knocking, so I don’t think it was, like, the media, coming to ferret me out. I don’t know. The only certainty was it wasn’t anyone I could tolerate seeing.
My second week at Darcy, I moved through the days on a cloud. It was “placement week,” meaning we auditioned for voice and dance. Acting class was organized by grade: freshmen took freshman acting, sophomores took sophomore acting, and so on. Since I was a junior, I was automatically registered for junior acting. But for voice and dance, we had to try out. And even though in the school brochure, Darcy claimed that its “artistic productions are collaborative and inclusive rather than competitive,” someone gets to play Juliet, if you know what I mean. So they auditioned us that second week of school for our classes and then a few weeks later for whatever the winter production would be in February. We all knew it would be some huge thing that cast everyone, what with the fall production starring only Kyle and Elizabeth and two other senior guys, who played the “old man” by putting baby powder in their hair or the other guy part by wearing a fat suit. The official reason for doing such an unfair star vehicle of a show in the fall was that it went up four weeks into school, so they had to begin rehearsing before the year even started. There was no need for a party line a
bout why Kyle and Elizabeth got the leads; they were both perfect in every way, a simple fact accepted by the rest of us, like gravity or the sun rising. But D’Arts would make it up to us with a huge winter show. We’d all get fabulous parts, they promised, and have to rehearse for a million hours, probably including over Christmas break. But we had signed up to make such sacrifices. The “professional world” was so demanding, and everyone acted like even though we were in high school, if our families took a vacation that meant we weren’t dedicated “artists.” We used the word artist all the time there.
My fall placement auditions happened the second Tuesday of school, the second day of my second week. I had told the dance teachers I’d just take the absolute beginning-level class and therefore there was no need to audition me, but they made me go in anyway. Before it even started, I was already blushing to the roots of my hair, wearing kid-sized yoga pants and a tank top instead of the leotard they required, and I made my way through the moves in the most half-assed way anyone has ever seen. The sad secret truth is that I love to dance, but only at home in my bedroom, on the bed with a fake microphone, or in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom with Sam break dancing. I do not like to dance in tights in front of Ms. McCourt, whose anorexic daughter Katie goes to the school, or in front of Ms. Smith, the seven-foot Amazon dance teacher who used to be a professional dancer and still wears her hair in a bun so tight her eyes bulge like they’re going to explode out of her head. Her entire being is singed with disappointment that she ended up teaching. I barely made it through the audition, and when it was over Ms. Smith just said, “We’ll post the list later today,” so I knew I’d be in the beginning dance curriculum, which meant I had to learn basic ballet, tap, and jazz. I wondered if they regretted letting me into D’Arts at all. Maybe I’d be an embarrassment to the school.
I promised myself that I would do better in the singing audition, but as soon as I had the thought, I felt sick because before I blew the dance audition I hadn’t even had to think about the voice one because I’d been sure I would do great. Now my one song had so much riding on it. Why hadn’t I just practiced the dance moves more? What if some weird thing happened and I did a bad job at the voice audition, too, and everyone thought they had let me in as a total pity move? Worse, what if they had?
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