by Ann Braden
Two periods later is social studies, and Ms. Rochambeau is coming around to collect an essay that’s due—that I’ve yet again done a wonderful job of not doing.
“Zoey,” she whispers when she gets to my desk and I don’t have anything to turn in. “I’d like you to stay after class, so we can talk.”
I don’t say a word or even nod, but she walks away like I’ve agreed to it. Sure enough, when there’s just a few minutes left of class and my tentacles start working to gather up my papers, Ms. Rochambeau, who has been reading us excerpts from Daniel Webster’s, Henry Clay’s, and John Calhoun’s speeches in Congress about the Compromise of 1850, wanders over to my desk without missing a beat and rests her hand on my notebook.
It doesn’t matter how many tentacles I have. She’s not going to let me pack up my notebook.
When the class has been dismissed and I’m still in my seat, Ms. Rochambeau finally removes her hand from my desk.
“Thank you for staying after, Zoey,” she says.
I didn’t exactly have a choice.
Ms. Rochambeau pulls the neighboring student desk over and sits down in it. “Now,” she says, her big earrings bouncing off the collar of a different turtleneck sweater, “we could talk about how much your grade will suffer if you don’t turn in this reflection essay, but instead I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about your participation in debate club.”
I watch her through the slits of my octopus eyes. Nice and steady.
“I want to know why you’re not trying.”
I glance at the clock.
“And I want to know what kind of person you want to be.”
I want to be the kind of person that doesn’t have to sit here and have this conversation.
“What’s your next class?” she asks.
“Computer tech,” I say. “So it’s all the way down in the other wing.” So I’d better leave right now.
“Great,” she says without standing up. “That means we have the next forty-three minutes to dig into this. I have a prep period right now, and Mr. Roberts will definitely understand why you weren’t able to be in class today—I’ll be happy to talk to him about it over lunch.”
It’s like my octopus body has gotten trapped in a net. But there has to be an opening somewhere. If I can just stay calm and avoid getting tangled up …
“Marcy?” Another teacher pops her head into the room. “Do you have a minute?”
It’s my opening. My tentacles spring back to life, and I stand up from my chair.
“Sit back down,” Ms. Rochambeau says to me. To the other teacher she says, “Sorry, another time maybe? This is important.”
I slide back into my chair. In a net—and now I’m getting poked with a stick.
She even thinks it’s important to poke me with a stick.
Important.
Me.
Once the other teacher is gone, Ms. Rochambeau turns back to me. She says things, but I’m not listening. No one has ever connected me with being important. The things that they want me to do are important—do my homework, bring a pencil, wear sneakers for PE.
But this somehow feels different.
Ms. Rochambeau has stopped talking and is looking like she’s waiting for me to say something.
When I don’t, she says again, “Zoey, what kind of person do you want to be?”
I stare down at my notebook. What am I supposed to say to that?
“I don’t know,” I finally mumble.
I wait for Ms. Rochambeau to say that’s okay—because “I don’t know” almost always gets a teacher to move on—but she doesn’t. Instead she stares at me harder and finally says, “Then, I’m glad you have some time right now to think about it.”
I shift in my seat.
“Here,” she says, “stand up. I want you to come over here.” She goes over to her desk in the front corner of the room and starts clearing off the top of it. She moves a pile of paper to the top of a filing cabinet, and then pulls out the cushy rolling chair. “Come sit,” she says.
“At your desk?”
She nods. “I want you to imagine you’re an adult. And I want you to picture the life you want to have. Oh, and hold on … ” She bends down and rummages in one of the cupboards behind her desk until she pulls out a bag of pretzels. “Good hard thinking is always a lot easier with food.”
I slowly make my way toward her desk. When I finally reach the cushy, rolling chair, I look at her. “Really?”
“Really,” she says.
I sink down into it. I rest my arms on its armrests. I lean my head back. I survey the classroom like a kingdom. Like all those hard plastic desks are my kingdom.
I lean forward and take a pretzel.
I’m ready to start telling myself a story about the pretzel-eating queen when Ms. Rochambeau takes a seat in the front row of student desks.
“Does it feel different there?” she asks.
I nod. I take another pretzel.
“Good,” she says. “That should help. Sometimes the walls of the hole we’re in are too close for us to see anything else.”
I stop eating the pretzel. “Are you saying I’m in a hole?”
Ms. Rochambeau doesn’t move. “Do you think you’re in a hole?”
I feel my brow furrowing against my will. I need to be an expressionless wall that things just bounce off of, like Silas. Or even better—so slimy that things slide right off, like any good octopus.
Because if people see that they’re getting to you, they’ll never let up.
“Of course not,” I say quickly. I try to pretend that things are so easy right now that I could never even consider my life as a hole. Because it’s like beautiful, flat, easy-walking ground, all the time now, right? Maybe some bumps along the way, but that’s just like the beautiful rolling hills they show on the ads to remind people that they should come to Vermont for vacation.
“You know that the Ace Period debate club is ending, and a new rotation starts next week, right?”
Do I know that? Of course I don’t. But since I don’t usually listen to the teacher, that makes sense.
Ms. Rochambeau leans forward. “The real debate club is going to be starting after school next week, and I want you to be part of it.”
“Because I’ve done such a great job during Ace Period?” The crack slips out before I can stop it, but Ms. Rochambeau doesn’t flinch.
She just keeps staring me down.
She can’t be serious. “But after school I need to—”
“Pick up your brother and sister, right?” she says. “What time does the Head Start bus drop them off?”
“Umm … about 3:55?”
“Great. Debate club goes until 3:30, and then I can give you a ride right to their bus stop. I’ve checked to make sure that I could legally drive a student, and as long as your mom gives consent, it’s fine.”
She’d be willing to be my personal driver? It’s mind-blowing enough that I can almost forget that we’re talking about staying after school for debate club.
Almost, but not quite.
“We’ll meet every day after school except for Tuesday when there’s a faculty meeting. The tournament is at the beginning of March.” She gives me a hard look.
I look away.
“Zoey, only you can choose what kind of person you become.”
My eyes drift to the tops of the trees I can see out the window. Bare branches. Gray sky. Nothing else.
“That assumes I have a choice,” I say.
Ms. Rochambeau practically leaps out of her seat. “But you do have a choice. You make choices every day, and maybe you can’t see how they could affect your future, but they do.”
She is quiet for a moment as she stands there. “I want you to know,” she finally continues, “that I was the first person in my family to graduate high school and go to college. Since life isn’t fair, it’s often up to us to balance it out.”
I look at her. She’s looking back at me like she
’s trying to explode me with her eyes. “What made the difference for me,” she says, “was the advice someone gave to me back when I was in middle school.”
I still don’t believe she was like me.
“It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t easy,” she continues. “But it was the only way forward if I wanted a future for myself.”
I want to look away, but I also want to know what they said. “What was it?”
She chews on her lip without taking her eyes off me. “I’ll tell it to you, and then I’m going to leave you alone for the rest of the period.”
“Okay.”
“Are you ready?” she asks.
I nod.
“You sure?”
I nod again.
“Well here it is … ” She stands up. “Suck it up.”
Then she picks up a folder of papers and walks out of the room.
CHAPTER 12
I’m so angry that I don’t hear a single thing anyone says for the rest of the day. How could a teacher have the nerve to say something like that? How? What does she think I’ve been doing my whole life? All I want to do is write mean notes to leave around Ms. Rochambeau’s classroom. And the “Ms.” is probably an unmarried “Ms.” because no one would marry a miserable person like that. I glare out the bus window as we pull out of the school parking lot. Stupid school. Stupid teachers. They think they’re so smart.
They don’t know anything.
But whatever. Even when the oxygen level in water drops, an octopus can still manage to maintain a constant intake of oxygen. Can still find a way to keep breathing.
When the bus stops to let off the kids who live in the neighborhood near the hospital, I glance over at Silas. He’s tucked into the corner of his seat, his knees up to his chest and his camo trucker hat pulled down so low that I can’t tell if he can see. Silas, who has had plenty of kids trying to make his life miserable.
Suddenly, I feel bad about wishing all those nasty notes on Ms. Rochambeau. Still, if I told Silas about all the stuff that I have to deal with, would he tell me to suck it up?
“Silas?” I say.
Nothing. No response. No words. No twitches.
Maybe he didn’t hear me. “Silas,” I call louder.
He’s like a vault of silence. He has perfected the expressionless wall.
I’d bet anything he’s never answered a single question in class.
When we get off the bus and the other kids from the bus stop have spread in other directions, I look over at Silas again, and this time he looks back.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says. All normal, like his on/off switch has been flipped and, of course, he can talk now.
“Why do people say stupid stuff?” I blurt out. “Like stupid, I-know-better-than-you-and-you’re-just-a-waste kind of stuff.”
Silas doesn’t answer. He’s still walking alongside me, but his face has changed. Like it’s gone back to an emotionless wall that isn’t going to let anything in or out.
“Silas?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he whispers. Then, he peels off, heads up the couple steps to his trailer, and disappears inside.
At least that was better than “Suck it up.”
As soon as I walk into the trailer, I remember. Today is the first of the month, which means a refilled EBT card, which means:
A stocked fridge.
Cabinets with cereal.
A new full bag of chicken nuggets in the freezer.
I go straight over to the fridge to examine its contents. Milk. Juice. Eggs. Yogurt. One package of uncooked chicken and a package of ground beef. I grab a coffee yogurt, shut the fridge, and dig in the drawer for a spoon.
I take my first bite of yogurt and it melts in my mouth like ice cream. It’s like my old competent mom is back, and that mom knows I love coffee yogurt.
Because when someone is doing the best they can, you don’t tell them to suck it up. The right thing to do is buy them coffee yogurt.
The walk to the Pizza Pit today isn’t too bad because it’s not windy, but the side of the road has enough puddles of semi-frozen slush that my feet are cold and wet by the time I get there.
My mom is sitting at a booth with Hector in her lap, folding cardboard pizza boxes.
“Thanks for the coffee yogurt,” I say as I reach for Hector. I slip my feet out of my sneakers and tuck them up underneath me as I slide into the seat across from her.
My mom looks up from her folding and almost smiles. “It’s a good day.”
Hector grabs onto my cheek, and it hurts, but he’s so pleased about it that I let him. “Did you go to the grocery store today?” I ask him. “Did you get to ride in a cart?”
“Walmart, not the grocery store,” my mom says. There’s a spark in her eyes, the old-mom kind of spark. “Like that bag of chicken nuggets was two dollars cheaper than anything they have at the grocery store. And then with all the savings I was able to make another payment on the phone bill, and that gets us closer to getting out from under that ridiculous interest rate.”
“How’d you get all the way to Walmart?”
She leans forward. “Well, I found out that the bus that goes by the Cumberland Farms in the morning now has a stop at the train station, so then all Hector and I had to do after that was walk over the bridge into New Hampshire and up that hill to get there.” She puts another folded box on the pile. “And then Lenny picked us up to bring us back home in the break between his jobs.”
“Did you get more diapers?”
She nods. “Just a small package this time so I could make that phone bill payment. But I feel it, Zoey. I feel like things are going to get better. I know you’ve been working so hard, and I’m hoping that at least I’ll be able to clean your clothes for you more often. We’re so close to being able to start saving for a functioning washing machine.”
It’s like she’s my old mom again. The old mom who would zero in on a project like a laser. The old mom who told jokes. The old mom who would climb into her car and step on the accelerator like she meant it.
The bell jingles and an elderly man walks through the door. My mom hops up and grabs a menu. “A table for one, sir?” she says. “Right this way please.”
At one of the restaurants my mom used to work at (before her teeth got bad), it was fancy enough to have a hostess separate from the waitstaff, but I kind of like it smaller like this. It feels more like a home.
Connor pushes through the kitchen doors, wiping his hands on his apron as he goes. He slows down and his face breaks into a smile as soon as he sees me with Hector and realizes my mom’s already been able to greet the customer.
“My fabulous Zoey!” he says, sitting down where my mom had been. “How was your day?”
“It was okay.” The coffee yogurt and getting a glimpse of old mom made up for a lot.
“Hold on,” he says.
A moment later, he comes back with an ice water that has a nice fat lemon slice perched on the rim. “Now. Do you want to talk about it?” Connor leans back and pushes up his sleeves. I can see his tattoos better now. That two-way cross with all these designs around it.
“What’s the story behind that tattoo?” I say, pointing. “That one that’s like a cross? You got that in Peru, right?”
“This one?” Connor says, pushing his sleeve up higher to reveal all of it. “I was in Cusco, and I’d been backpacking for weeks.” He traces his finger around its edges. “I was still so raw from the fallout after coming out to my parents, and I was starting to worry that I was only there because I was running away.”
Hector squirms and I shift him up higher on my lap, trying to keep him quiet so Connor will keep talking.
“But it was still good to be there. I don’t think it’s healthy to always stay in a place like this where almost everybody is white like us. This was a place filled with all kinds of people; it’s a place where brown people were once kings.” He taps his tattoo. “And I kept seeing this symbol all over. My Spanish
wasn’t great and I didn’t know any of the native Quechua, but I finally got up my courage and did my best to ask a woman selling souvenirs what it meant.”
Hector keeps squirming and I spread out the Sweet’N Low packets on the table for him to play with.
“She said it’s called the chakana and that there are different interpretations of its meaning,” Connor says, leaning forward. “What she believed, though, was that it represents the state in which all beings are their complete selves. And that the empty space in the middle of the cross was a portal for people to enter and fully understand how we’re all children of the stars. That was the moment.” He looks out the window and smiles. “I wasn’t running away anymore. I had run to what I needed to find.”
Hector knocks a bunch of Sweet’N Low packets onto the floor, but I ignore it.
“I hadn’t ever considered getting a tattoo before, but I had this on my arm by the time I fell asleep that night.” Connor brings his arm up and gives the tattoo a kiss. “Sometimes life gives you a moment like that where everything is suddenly clear. And for me, it’s good to have a daily reminder of it.”
A moment when everything is suddenly clear.
Like when you start to wonder if maybe you do have a choice about the kind of person you want to become.
Maybe.
CHAPTER 13
It’s after 11 p.m. when my mom gets home from work. I’m lying in bed—mostly because the TV show that Frank had been watching is the one with the news guy that’s angrier than all other news guys and who makes me feel like the whole country is just minutes away from exploding. Lenny is in his bedroom and is probably organizing my mom’s clothes for her. Still I don’t feel like going to sleep, and when I hear my mom get home I tiptoe past Bryce and Aurora and push open the door into the main room.
I don’t see my mom, though. Frank is still watching that show—this time it’s a secret government drone conspiracy that’s going to make everything go up in flames—and he doesn’t even notice me. I cross the room to see if she’s around the corner in the entryway. Her coat is there, tossed on the washing machine, but no Mom.