“Yeah. Imagine having a choice.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Alma don’t say anything.
Dear Reader
Noun. Dear rhymes with FEAR.
You are the person that I’m going to hunt down and assassinate when I find out you took my dictionary. I will hit your head so hard against the sink you won’t remember anything I wrote, so put it back, you bitch. Yes, the sink. That way I can wash your blood off my hands so I don’t ruin my sweatshirt.
Detention
Noun. Rhymes with pointless, time-wasting, most uncreativist shit. Cuz if a kid messes up, boring the shit out of them might help.
While we work on the writing prompt of the day, Miss Black walks the room and checks homework. She checks on me every day without rolling her eyes. She even frowns when she puts a X by my name as if I ever get anything else. “That’s three, Macy,” she says this morning. The rule is, whenever I get three Xs in a row, I get detention. Only the detention she gives me is during lunch.
Flash back to the first time this happened, beginning of last year:
“Lunchtime detention? You’re kidding me, right, Miss B?”
“No joke, Macy. Or it’s in-school suspension with the AP.” The AP don’t even let you sleep during ISS. “And if you don’t show up—”
“She will get in her car and track my ass down. She-it. It’s a violation of my civil rights.”
I eat my burnt shriveled-up hot dog on the way from the cafeteria to Miss Black’s classroom. She motions for me to sit down in the front row where she can watch my every move. Damn!
Then she sets a twelve-inch hero cut down the middle on her desk. Imagine slabs of shiny salami, maple ham, provolone cheese, slices of pickle, spicy mustard that clears your sinuses. My jaw drops big enough to fit the whole dang sangwich in all at once. I bury my face in my hands, which I chew on so I don’t leap up on her desk and chew on her sangwich.
“Eyes are bigger than my stomach,” Miss Black mumbles to herself, taking a bag of jalapeño chips out her lunch box. I’m watching her through my hands like a serial killer watches through the blinds. “Always order too much. Even got a cookie.”
I moan. One drop of drool spills out my mouth and onto my jeans so I cover it real fast with my hair. (Yes. This was what Alma calls my pre-bald, pre-sweatshirt period.)
“You know what,” Miss Black says, putting down her sangwich without having tooken one bite. “I can’t be eating all this. A girl has to watch her figure!” (This was when Fiancé was just her “significant other.” Significant—yeah, I’d say. Ain’t no man ever gonna come between me and a sangwich like that.)
I wipe the drool off my face before I lower my hands.
“Maybe you could get caught up on some homework, Macy. Then, if you got the time, split some of this with me?”
I proofread. Imagine if life was like one of these paragraphs where you could insert or delete shit at will. Delete Daddy being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Insert a mom for Yasmin, so she learned how to be a mom and I could have a grandma.
Miss Black ain’t eating. She’s cleaning and organizing closets. She’s recycling perfectly good paper, a binder, spirals, and a pile of books.
I’m done. But I don’t say anything for a minute. I wish I could just stick the sangwich in my pocket. I don’t want to be the monkey rewarded for doing my tricks.
“Well?” Miss B says.
I push the paper to the top of my desk. “Done.”
“Help yourself to lunch. I got to do some copying.” She grabs the cookie and takes a bite. Picks up a stack of papers and leaves me in the room. Alone. Miss Black is cray-cray.
I look to the right. I look to the left. Nobody yet. Only a matter of time though before some teacher sticks her head in, sees me, and accuses me of sneaking in here. I launch myself at the salami like I got shot out a cannon. Devour the sangwich in chunks and layer by layer. Realize while I’m licking my fingers that I didn’t leave Miss Black her half of the chips.
Oops.
I wipe my hands on my pants. Pace. Pull out tonight’s homework. More grammar and a essay. In five minutes I do what I generally can’t do in five hours. I finish Part 1. Stick it on Miss Black’s desk with a IOU: PART 2, TOMORROW. I PROMISE.
I look at the clock. I got five minutes. Miss Black is still not back. I start backing out the room. Detour to the recycling bin. I mean, reduce, reuse, recycle, right?
Can’t explain it. I may not read any of it but I want it all.
I close the door a little. Shove as much “trash” as I can into my backpack until I’ma tip over. I wonder, could I get detention again tomorrow?
Disturbed
Adjective. Synonym: Me.
It’s no secret that I’m disturbed. I hate all people and the promises they make. I hate the shit they say when you know what they’re really gonna do. Everybody got their fingers crossed behind their back including me. I hate kids because one day they just gonna be a people too. I hate everyone. I hate me. I hate you. Fuck you. (And PS, Alma ain’t a people. She’s a person.)
Fuck you for sitting there. Fuck anyone for sitting anywhere. Fuck you for reading this. Don’t you have better things to do?
Deepest
Adjective. AKA: Secret. AKA: Truth. AKA: The hole you didn’t know was there.
George and I dance in our seats. Alma’s AP class files in behind Miss Link to mix and mingle with our degenerate asses.
Alma’s teacher, Miss Link, argues with Miss Black like she do every time we combine. Miss Black ignores her like always and does whatever she planned to do in the first place.
Miss Black passes out little slips of paper. She sets a big bowl on her desk. She holds up a long lighter.
She has our attention.
Gum stops being popped. Heads look up from phones. George stops combing his coat.
Alma’s teacher pays attention too. Her inner monologue is written all over the wrinkles on her forehead.
Miss Black: “Today you'll write down your darkest fear.” She flicks a lighter. “When you’re done, toss it in this bowl.”
Miss Black scribbles on the board. Narrative Writing: Dig Deep!
Alma arranges her pencil on her desk next to two erasers and a teeny tiny stapler. But nobody hates Alma. (See B for Bestie.)
Kid with the crunchy mohawk: “Man, when I was a kid, I made sure every part of me was covered with a blanket at night. Like the blanket was axe-murderer proof.”
Me to Alma: “At night I got on every light in the house including the closets. If your house is dark, people don’t think you’re home. So they get to thinking—maybe they’ll stop by. Help themselves to your TV, your bling . . . Then they help themselves to you.” (See K for Kitty.)
Alma: “Dang, Macy. That’s dark. If I wasn’t afraid before—”
Me: “You should be. I am. Because it don’t matter how many times I lock the door at night—Yasmin is just going to let in the exact kind of asshole I was trying to lock out.”
Alma: “Oh, sweetie.”
Sweetie. Alma is the only person on the planet earth who would ever dare to call me that.
Alma pats my hand and turns to her blank slip of paper. Curtains her desk with her hair so no one can see. Not even me.
I sit up and crane my neck. “What’s yours?”
Alma shrugs but still won’t let me see. WTF???
“What? You once ate without a napkin? You only combed your hairs 99 times?”
Alma turns around so fast, her hair whips my face: “Yes, Macy. That’s it.” She turns around again, but this time I duck her hair.
For real? She really isn’t going to show me? I’m confused. I do what my counselor does to me. I lean in and whisper into her hair: “You are tapping your foot, Alma. I think you are angry. Am I right that you are angry?”
“Shhhh!” Alma. The only person who could shoosh me and not have her neck under my shoe.
Alma leans on her elbow. I tap it. “Uh,
could I borrow a—”
She slams the pencil on my desk. Yup. She’s pissed. She flips her hair so I can’t see her face. Obese Kid: “Rats!”
Like ten kids jumping on their chairs: “AHHHHH!”
Obese Kid: “No!! I mean, like I’m. You know. Afraid of them—don’t even play like you’re not!”
Me to no one because Alma isn’t listening: “Rats? One time, at home, a rat came swimming up through my toilet. Straight from a squat I launched up three feet in the air. I’m thinking of a career as a stuntman.” She don’t laugh.
Pretty Girl: “Cockroach!”
Like ten kids: “AHHHHH!”
Miss Black: “No no no no no. If you can say it out loud, it isn’t your deepest darkest fear. It has to be something you cannot speak, but can write.”
Pretty Girl: “NO, FOR REAL! A cockroach!! It’s crawling out of Mina’s backpack!!”
Me: “Aw. It’s leaving home. Probly for the first time.” I flip off a sneaker and FUÁCATA! Score. There should be a category for my talents in the Olympics. The GettOlympics.
Obese Kid whispers and points to me: “She scares me.”
“Hey!” I tell Big Boy. “Write it! Don’t say it!”
Miss Black flips off the lights. It actually gets quiet. I look around the room. George is carving his deepest fear into his desk. V-A-N. V-A-N.
Poor George. That’s how his little sister died. She thought a white van was a ice cream truck. Whoever was in it pulled her in and drove off with everybody screaming and running behind it. George tried to jump on the back and got hurt real bad. By the time they found the van, his sister had been tortured to death. Every year people throw roses all along the street where the van turned the corner and got away.
Miss Black flips on somebody called Baytoven. I get serious. My deepest fear. Not darkness. Not rats—not even after the toilet incident.
Let me explain first. I’ma do a compare-contrast: Here at school and at home.
Okay, at school the bafrooms ain’t pretty. But, if somebody vomits it’s like the bat signal goes up and Pepe comes running. There’s a rat? Pepe will do everything short of swimming through the toilet to catch its flea-bitten ass. Some kids call him grandpa.
Could be rain, snow, sleet, hail. I still get here at 7:30 every day because as long as you get through those front doors, it’s gonna be dry and warm. Pepe opens them up for me and I can feel the blast of heat—feel it—not imagine it.
At home? Last night, the temp dropped twenty degrees. My mother offered for me to sleep in her bed to keep warm like Zane used to do. Like I used to do waaaay back in the day. But waaaay back in the day my mother’s bed did not have cooties. Me, rathering to die of hypnothermia than Ebola, chose to sleep under the couch cushions.
At school if there’s a arch criminal on the premises we go on lockdown. We do not wear spandex for them and ask if they have a cigarette.
At school, there are different rooms for different things. Ain’t one room for everything. I swear one night after one of Yasmin’s dates I threw out the table. Woman brought it back in, though. Zane and I had to do a anti-cootie ritual. At school, there is a room for eating. I can smell whatever is on the menu around nine. When I eat, all anyone wants from me is to throw out my tray when I’m done. NOTHING else.
At school you celebrate things All The Time.
At home, time stops.
It stops on Fridays at 3:15. The last day I know where the food’s coming from. You’re fucked if it’s a three-day weekend.
So my deepest fear . . . is that someone will find out . . .
I scribble it down real tiny.
I HEART school
Even Alma don’t know. And if she don’t know, no one ever will.
I look at Alma. She making a tent with her arms to cover up her desk. Like always, she folds her paper like origami. This time a swan. (Which will make it easier to find.) She tosses it into the bowl.
I have a lightbulb. My new greatest fear. It makes me more afraid than anyone finding out my secret. What is it that I don’t know about Alma?
She’s still writing.
Don’t have much time to think about it, though. George is done carving V-A-N into his desk and is standing up. Somebody has to stop him from throwing the desk at Miss Black’s bowl and setting it all on fire.
Didn’t
Contraction. A verb and a adverb crunched together till they both break. As in: I didn’t do it. Why didn’t you tell me? You didn’t ansuh the question.
George ends up throwing all the shit on Miss Black’s desk on the floor. After I chill him out, the counselor and the AP escort him and his coat to the office. Kids raise their hands to help her clean it up. I get a lightbulb.
Me: “No. Stop. I’ll clean it up.”
Kids no longer volunteer. I get up and spic-and-span her desk. Oh, look. One piece of paper got kicked under it. I reach under and grab it. I can’t help it if the swan flew up my sleeve.
Alma and I part ways, her to the world of advanced placement and honors and me to the Planet of the Apes—AKA regular and remedial. A lifetime later we come back together at the cafeteria.
Me: “So. English. It was . . . uh . . . interesting.”
Alma stops sipping her water bottle. “Yes. Miss Link thought the fire was very inappropriate—a violation of fire code.”
“But the activity was thought provocating, no?”
“Thought provoking? The—wait. Wait! You didn’t?!”
“No. I didn’t. Prove it.”
Alma slams the table. “Where’s my swan, Macy?”
“Swan? What you mean talking about a swan?”
“Don’t make me search that sweatshirt.”
I’m in no mood to have anybody touch me, even her. “Nah. I can’t fight. I got my period. I’m sorry.” I pull out the swan and flap it. “Actually, no, I’m not sorry.”
Alma snatches it. “I trusted you!”
“You trusted Miss Black. I didn’t make no promises. What’s all this about you being afraid of—you?”
Alma puts her head down. Buries herself in hair. I part some of it.
Me: “If you don’t tell me what you mean by being afraid of yourself, I will tell everyone”—I drop my voice and cover my mouth—“you listen to country music.”
Alma pops her head out of her arm tent. “You wouldn’t. How is that fair? How does that even make sense? If I don’t tell you my secret, you’ll tell one of my secrets?”
“Not fair, but genius, I think.”
Alma looks away. “I’m afraid of me, okay, because . . . last night my mother was working. So it was just me with the kids. Normally this is no big thing. But two of the kids had the stomach flu. And when that happens it spreads like the plague. I cannot afford to get sick right now. So I’m trying to take care of them without contaminating myself.”
“Cooties.”
“Yes. I’m cleaning up throw-up and spraying with Lysol. I’m trying to keep my other brothers from stepping in it. I’m trying to cook dinner, but I can’t leave the flame on the stove when I’m running to take care of my sick babies. Because Wally uses anything—blocks, his truck—to climb up to the cabinets and the fridge. So I have to keep turning off the burner and I get ang—frustrated. I take all of Wally’s trucks away and he screams. I check on the rice and it’s mush. I turn up the heat and run to clean up the sick bucket. William’s eating crayons. Gisselle’s drawing in vomit. I lost it.”
Me: “What did you do?”
Alma: “I locked all the kids out so I could clean up. By then they were all contaminated. I had to run showers for them. The rice burnt to a crisp. My mom was pissed.”
Me: “Lost it, huh? Did you even yell? Break anything? This is your darkest secret?”
“No! Of course not.” She whispers, “This time I didn’t lose it for real—just on the inside. But I felt like I was losing it on the outside.”
“Seriously. You’re scared because of a feeling? And you can’t share that with
nobody? I’d be scared if you didn’t feel that way. Be checking your ass for wires and a battery. And PS, Alma, they’re not your babies.”
Alma: “Really? So Zane’s not your baby?”
Me: “A’ight. Back up. Point taken. What I mean is, feeling angry at something like that is normal. Feeling angry about nothing—or about everything—ain’t.”
Alma flaps her swan. “I feel angry all the time.”
“Really? You’re like the Hulk, aren’t you?” I pretend to bust out of my sweatshirt.
Alma’s on the verge of tears and laughing at the same time. “I don’t show it. I can’t. I’m not like you.”
Me: “Where does it all go?”
Alma: “Nowhere.”
The first bell dings. Alma gets up and tosses her swan onto her tray like trash. I grab it. And her pizza. The only thing she ate was the crust.
We kiss good-bye and go our separate ways till after school.
Dolphin
Noun. When a dolphin has a baby, other dolphins will circle the one giving birf to protect it. And we the ones higher up on the food chain?
A bunch of kids are crowded around the art teacher’s desk. On the wall behind it is a giant wall calendar with a picture of a dolphin on top and a giant X marking next Tuesday underneath. Art Lady says she loves the way a dolphin smiles. She points to the X and tells us that every year, kids get her dolphins for her birfday. She shows off her dolphin earrings from last year’s valedictorian.
I look up from my desk. “Hint, hint,” I say to all the kids. “Personally, I like to think just my presence is a gift.”
The art teacher glares toward me but not at me.
A left-handed kid takes out a planner and writes down dolphins.
“Shit, is that how you get extra credit around here?”
“That’s enough, Macy.”
“You know how much of that dolphin shit I see at the junkyard I pass every day? Maybe for your birfday you should get less dolphin shit and do more for actual dolphins.”
“Office! Now!”
Thank you, Art Lady. I was craving something from the candy bowl anyway.
The Disturbed Girl's Dictionary Page 10