The Nature of Jade

by Deb Caletti

  Anyway, I don't mind driving with Jenna too much because she's a careful driver, and she's also got this cross hanging from her rearview mirror. I'm not a hugely religious person--the members of my family are Christmas Eve Catholics--but the cross does make you think that maybe this gives you a few safety points. Probably like if you saw a sweet old lady reading a Bible on an airplane you're on, you'd feel a tiny bit better about flying--that kind of thing. God couldn't kill her off, right? They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.

  "Do you realize how many calories are in those butter

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  scotch bars?" Hannah asks me. I've got a small brown bag in one hand, a cup of chai tea in the other. We settle into a table surrounded by coffee mugs and espresso machines for sale. Today it's me, Michael, Jenna, Hannah, and Akello, this friend of Michael's from Uganda who hangs out with us sometimes.

  "Frappuccinos have more calories than a Big Mac," I say as Hannah sips hers. I don't particularly care how many calories it has, anyway. I love those butterscotch things, and besides, I'm too skinny. My mom says it's nervous energy, and I'm thinking she's right. I've probably burnt the calories I've set down on the table just by worrying about the grade I'm going to get on the Faulkner paper I've just turned in.

  We pull a couple of chairs over so everyone can sit. Michael's been reading my mind. "That Faulkner paper killed me. I was up till two in the morning doing the citations."

  "Like you won't get an A," Hannah says.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Michael says.

  "Michael, have you ever not gotten an A?"

  "Yes," he says, a guilty yes that really means no. He probably hasn't, but so what. "Some of us want to get into a good college. Some of us want to go to med school and become doctors and not just meet some guy and have sex." He's noticed about Hannah too.

  "Some of us actually want to have a social life. You've been more intimate with your laptop than an actual female."

  "I don't own a laptop," Michael says.

  "For God's sake, you'll still be a successful adult one day if you get an A minus," Hannah says.

  "Please," Jenna says. "Don't."

  "What?" Hannah says. "He's getting obsessed. He started the nature of jade 38

  his American Government project practically before the teacher finished handing out the worksheets. We had two weeks to do it. He's like the teacher's pet in the Kiss-Ass School of Life."

  Michael looks murderous.

  "Not that," Jenna says.

  "What?"

  "For blank's sake. I wish you wouldn't say that." "What?" Hannah says. She squinches up her face. "Who's blank?" Akello says, twisting open the cap from his juice bottle.

  "You know. What you just said. 'For blank's sake.' Taking the Lord's name in vain."

  "Oh, fuck," Hannah laughs. "You're kidding me." "It's offensive."

  "You're kidding me," Hannah says again. "Maybe we should change the subject," I offer. "Yeah.

  Back off, Hannah," Michael says. "Me? God," she says. "Hannah!" Jenna says.

  "What? Jeez. I'm sorry! I can't help it! I say 'God' all the time. You never had a problem with me saying 'God' before. I don't think it makes me a bad person."

  "It's sacrilegious. You just shouldn't do it," Jenna says.

  "Like, 'Thou shalt not fight in Starbucks,'" Akello says. I'm beginning to like him.

  "Oh, for Christ's sake."

  "That's enough," Jenna says. "That's it." She shoves back her chair. Gets up, slams her balled-up napkin into the garbage can, and walks out.

  39

  "Great," Michael says. "That's our ride. If I'm late to Physics, Mr. Geurnley's gonna kill me."

  "She's gotten psycho lately with the whole Christian thing," Hannah says. "Shit, it's annoying."

  She's right, really. Jenna had gone from this really cool, fun person to someone who wouldn't listen to rock music. We went together to my first concert, an alternative band that played at the Sit 'n Spin, the Laundromat-concert place downtown. Two years ago, she'd had the side of her nose pierced, and that's gone too, ever since she started going to this Bible study group at the end of last year.

  Then again, my group of best friends, these people sitting around this tiny round table who are now realizing we'll have to walk back to school, these people I'd done every memorable thing with over the last three years, have all gotten a bit extreme. It is true, Michael is grade obsessed--

  he even has one of those shower curtains at home decorated with the vocab words and definitions that most often appear on the SATs. And Hannah is so guy magnetized that I even saw her flirt with Jake Gillette the other day, who's this seventh-grader who comes over from the middle school to be part of my calculus class. He's about four-foot-seven and sixty-eight pounds, and rides over on his skateboard that has a parachute attached to the back. The other day, Jake raised his hand to answer a problem, and then gave an answer to which Ms. Arnold responded, "Uh, these guys don't know about that yet. Let's hear from someone who doesn't know as much."

  Akello starts reading a newspaper. He is bored with us. I can't blame him. I'm bored with us too.

  "I don't think it was very Christian to leave us stranded here," Hannah says.

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  "It's your fault. If I get marked down, I'm blaming you," Michael says.

  "I thought she was Buddhist," Hannah says.

  "Just because she's Asian, doesn't mean she's Buddhist," Michael says.

  "Yeah, just because I'm Italian, doesn't mean I'm in the mob," I say.

  "I'm not in a tribe, but at the moment, it sounds kinda nice," Akello says.

  Michael tilts his head back, drinks the last of his coffee. "We'd better get walking. Next time you piss off my ride, you can pay for a cab," he says to Hannah. He crushes the paper cup in a manly fashion, causing the plastic lid to pop off and go flying onto the floor. After he retrieves it under the table of two businesswomen, we walk outside.

  "Did you get their shoe size?" Akello says.

  "Shut up," Michael says.

  I realize it's cool, suddenly, almost seriously chilly, and I'm in a T-shirt. Fall is like that. It's the only season that sneaks up on you. Every other season gives you advance notice, builds up, but fall--even if you're determined to see it coming, it's not there and then it is. The leaves are orange, bam, the air is cool, the furnace goes on, and there's that sad, something-finished feeling. I rub my arms for warmth. Great, and I'm feeling like I'm getting a sore throat. I'll probably get strep and miss a ton of school right at the start.

  We walk about a block, and there's Jenna, waiting for us with the car idling.

  "Get in," she says. "But no more garbage."

  Everyone keeps quiet on the ride. Jenna turns on the

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  Christian rock station and we listen to some frenzied, pounding song about loving Him being easy, and no one even says a word.

  "So, how're you feeling," Abe says.

  "Like shit," I say. I put my hand to my throat. "Ach." "Lovely," he says.

  "I was out in the cold. I'm probably going to catch pneumonia," I say.

  Abe works with teens mostly. Or, as he says, "The Jung and the Restless." He's pretty young himself, for a psychologist, at least compared to the others I've seen there. He doesn't wear doctorish clothes, just his jeans and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up, with some T-shirt on underneath. It looks like he gets dressed in five minutes. He barely shaves, either, so he's always got a face half-full of bristles. "Do you think you're going to catch pneumonia?" he asks. He peers at me with his eyes, set a little too close together on his face. But they're twinkling. He's testing to see if I'm bullshitting him.

  "My great-grandmother's sister died from pneumonia," I say. This is true. Whenever we look at the old pictures, that's what they say about her. She was only twenty-two. I look in her face, wonder what she was like when she was twenty-one and only had a year to live but didn't know it.

  "Ye
ah, that was a billion years ago, before they invented good drugs," Abe says. "And speaking of, how are yours? Any more insomnia?"

  "No. A little zingy at night, but it's okay. Things have been good." Here, he writes a few things down in my chart. He shares some of this information with my psychiatrist, Dr.

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  Kaninski, who works down the hall and who I can skip visiting if my medication is okay.

  "School?"

  "Yeah, I go to school."

  "Great, terrible, mildly crappy?"

  "Somewhere in between." I tell him about school. How my friends have all been going their own directions lately.

  Abe listens. He leans back in his chair, folds his hands and rests them on his chest. Behind him are pictures he took from a trip to Tibet. Prayer flags flapping, the brown, eager faces of a group of children, tents at a mountain base. "Why do you think you're feeling this separation now?"

  Abe asks.

  "Distancing?" I guess. "Kind of distancing beforehand?"

  "I think you got that exactly right."

  "When I was in the fourth grade, I had this best friend-- April Barker," I tell him. "We did everything together. Made forts, baked our own recipes." Blue cupcakes, I especially remember.

  "Then, in the fifth grade, she moved. We got in a big fight the day she left. I guess it's like that.

  Same as you've said before about Mom and me--trying to get to our own territory."

  "Senior year," Abe says. "Everyone gets thinking about going their own way. . . . Everyone starts bugging you, huh? Best friends, parents. Everyone is themselves in the extreme, which is annoying as hell, right?"

  I laugh. "Really right."

  "What's the latest on your college applications?" "I've been working on them." "Which 'them'?"

  "Same as I told you last time. University of Washington, Seattle University, SPU. You know.

  The ones around here."

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  "The applications your mom sent away for." Abe rips open a tea-bag package on his desk, plunks the bag into his cup of hot water, and dips it up and down, up and down. His cup says WORLD'S

  GREATEST GOLFER on it, which is a crack-up. Abe's just not the golfing kind. Golf sweaters?

  Abe? Ha-ha. I can't see him in any sport that involves matched clothing. I'm guessing he's snitched it from Dr. Kaninski, who I know for a fact is big on golf. I once saw him get out of his Lexus in the parking lot. His license plate read BO-GEE, and the plate holder, "I'd rather be driving my club," which probably has Freudian undertones.

  "Yeah," I say. "But I'm filling them out."

  Abe takes a sip of his tea. "Last time, we talked about the upsides and the downsides of going to school so close to home. You were going to consider applying to other schools. How did that go?"

  "I thought about it. . ."

  "Mmhmm."

  "It just seems like such a hassle."

  "You have a common application, right? What's the hassle of applying to other schools? Maybe you'll have to write an extra essay question?"

  "It's not just that. Mom'll freak if I go out of state. And it's expensive."

  "With your grades? Read my lips. Scholarship. All those AP courses? You just breaking your butt for your good health?"

  "No . . ."

  "You'll be applying for scholarships anyway?" "Yeah."

  "Is Mom getting a degree, or are you?" the nature of jade 44

  "Shut up, Abe." I appreciate the fact that I can tell my psychologist to shut up and he won't scribble notes in my chart.

  "Whose job is it to make this decision?" Abe thinks I try too hard to please people. He's trying to get me to do it less, but he doesn't understand that sometimes fighting is just not worth the hassle.

  It's too much pain and effort. Maybe Abe doesn't mind climbing a mountain to see the view on top, but I'm happy with a postcard.

  "Mine." I bite an annoying bit of skin at the edge of my fingernail. "I was thinking I'd just live at home and go to school."

  "And if that's your decision, I applaud you one hundred percent. Just, your decision, right?

  There's no magic here. If you don't change direction, you'll go where you're heading."

  "Okay." I know he's right, but I still feel the battle inside-- Oliver's White Witch and Asian going at it.

  "I'm going to give you a little homework. For us to discuss next time."

  "You want me to get a scholarship and you're giving me more homework? I already have no life."

  "Do a little research. Bop on the Web and look around. Find three schools that look cool. Away from home. And then let's try applying to one."

  "Oh, God, Abe." I groan.

  "What's the worst that can happen?"

  "Mom refuses to write the check and starts crying hysterically. No, wait. I actually get in."

  "Dad can write the check?" Abe suggests. I nod. "If you get in, do you have to go?" he asks.

  "No," I say.

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  "We've tried things in the past and it's worked out all right, yes? You've trusted me."

  "Of course I trust you. Even if you have no fashion sense."

  "Hey . . ." He mock-scowls. "This is about you. You pretending you can go anywhere you want.

  Palm trees? Homework on a beach? No problem. Bring me pictures. Tell me what you like about them."

  "Fine," I say.

  "All right," he says. Abe always finishes up by looking at his watch, which he does now. Then he says, "Anything else I should know?"

  "No," I answer. I'm not going to tell him about the guy with the baby. I'm not telling him that I've seen the boy appear at the elephant exhibit for eight days in a row now, enough to know there's a pattern. He comes with the baby at three thirty most weekdays, and if not, he comes at night, alone. Then, he just stares, lost in thought, like he's trying to work something out. It doesn't even matter if it's raining or not, he still comes. I don't tell Abe how much I look forward to seeing the boy appear, how much I think about why he's there and who that baby is, because that's all mine.

  It's like a little present I can count on--a happy something to look forward to.

  "You know how to handle anything," Abe says. "You can take any step you want and be okay.

  I'm proud of you."

  He always gives me that rah-rah right before I leave, no matter what kind of bad shape I'm in, but that's all right. I kind of like it, even if I can see through it.

  "And you," I say. "Work on your klepto tendencies." I point to the cup. Abe looks down. Smiles.

  "Fore!" he says.

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  When I get home, I start my Abe homework. I'm not going to see him for another week, but he'd made college hunting sound like a quest for a vacation spot, and it sounds better to dream a while with an excuse than to do my AP English. Also, it requires me to be at my computer. Flicking back and forth between websites and the elephants. On the screen, I can see Chai rubbing her side against a tree, and baby Hansa nearby. They're never far from each other. A nine-year-old elephant still spends half of its time only five yards from its mother. If they were in the wild, Chai and Hansa as mother and daughter would have a bond that would last fifty years or more, just like a lot of humans. They are the most fun to watch, because Chai just loves that Hansa so much. She puts her trunk under Hansa's butt to help boost her up the hillside, and she tucks Hansa underneath her on a hot day to keep her cool. She'll steer Hansa around by holding her tail, or Hansa will follow behind, holding Chai's.

  The Abe homework is harder than it seems. I narrow it down to the west coast (no way I want to go farther), choose only sunny climates (I like Abe's palm tree idea, and besides, I'm one of those people who are cold all the time). I narrow it further to colleges with animal studies programs.

  It's all getting complicated and overwhelming. University of California Dauis, I write down, though it looks huge and busy and crowded. Uniuersity of Arizona, smaller, thank God, and because I love the desert. Uniuersity of New Mexico. Same reasons
, smaller yet. Animal studies and cool adobe architecture. And I write down Uniuersity of Hawaii, just because it sounds warm and daring, though it's a bit like those posters in hair salons--hip, unusual styles that look possible in the hair spray scented, pop music

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  fortified moment of why-not, but that you know have nothing to do with your real life.

  By the time I'm done, my head hurts and my nose has gotten so clogged my sinuses feel like the human body equivalent of a sofa cushion. I think I might have a fever. I go downstairs to find Mom, who has ingredients for tacos spread across the counter. She's grating cheese onto a paper towel, the shredded orange growing into a pyramid.

  "Am I hot?" I ask.

  "Not you, too. Just when Oliver's feeling okay . . . Boy, I thought he'd never get better."

  Oliver had used the alibi as long as he could, but now he was back at practice. Maybe that's what you get for faking someone's illness--a real one. Mom sets down the grater, wipes her hand on a kitchen towel. She sets her hand to my head. "Nope. You feel fine."

  I have the small, backstage thought, If I'm sick, it might be the flu, and if it's the flu, am I nauseous? Just this small thought, which begins as a spiral somewhere inside, a wide circle, which will grow ever smaller. Smaller and tighter. Tighter and faster.

  "Are you sure I'm not hot?" See, my chest. Got tight. Like I was running. Out of air. Like I'd just.

  Run up. This huge hill. In the cold.

  "You're fine, Jade. You've got a cold," Mom says. "An annoying but harmless cold." "I've got to . . ." "Are you all right?" "Lie down."

  I head back up to my room, knock three times, sit on my bed. See, you come to understand this thing, come to notice it when

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  the circle of thought is still wide. You catch it, before it starts spiraling so fast, so fast upward to where it clutches your heart and grabs your throat so you can't breathe and you're sweating and about to pass out. I find the quiet place in my mind that Abe taught me about. For me it is the desert, empty and calm. No sea, no tidal waves that sometimes visit my dreams. Just the desert, and cacti, and other plants and animals that have adapted to a harsh environment, hardy and long living, from the time of the dinosaurs. I breathe in, and out. Picture red and rolling forever desert.