Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  • • •

  Seeing Mr. Powell is not a good idea after all. The books on his shelf are always in the same order, so I know he doesn’t read them. I can’t blame him. They have titles like Depression in Adolescents and Our Youth, Our Future.

  I have a hard time paying attention to the right things in Mr. Powell’s room. I notice that his clock battery has died and we’re stuck at ten after five. I notice that he’s worked his way down through the yellow layer on his Post-it cube and now he’s working on the pink layer.

  I don’t remember what he says.

  I walk into my first class late, clutching a bright pink Post-it that says not to count me tardy. I don’t want to get in trouble, so I don’t say anything or look at anybody. After a while, it’s like I’m not here.

  In between classes, I sneak into the girls’ bathroom. I carry my brown paper lunch sack, which Phyllis filled with egg salad sandwiches. I hide in one of the stalls, on the toilet. I feel scared for no reason. It’s strange, being back. Everything here is so normal, like no time has passed. Everything’s been different in the two weeks since Michael died, and now I’m back at school, with rows of eraser-pink lockers with bad words scratched in them, and speckled blue carpet that makes my eyes cross, and everything looks the same as it did when I left.

  I came to school the day after Michael died, but I didn’t stay. I tried. I really did. I wanted everything to be normal, and on a normal day, I’d be at school. But people already knew about my brother, and they kept giving me this look, like they were wondering when I might snap. When I caught the teacher looking, too, I got up and walked out in the middle of class, kept walking past the double doors and through the courtyard and into the street. It wasn’t one of those things that happened. I was calm. I remember it perfectly. I walked all the way across the four-lane and lost myself in the woods for a while. It was the social worker, Grace, who found me, driving up and down the highway in her rickety old Jeep Cherokee. When she picked me up, she ran her fingers through my hair to clean out the pine needles I’d gotten from lying on the ground. She wrapped her sweater around my shoulders. She made me drink some hot coffee from a thermos. That was the day she drove me to Phyllis.

  • • •

  Two class periods and lunch have gone by when I come out of hiding, somewhat more collected now, and aim toward class. I’m still clutching my egg salad sandwiches in their paper sack. In the hall, Anthony Tucker approaches me. It always makes me nervous seeing him approach. There are two versions of Anthony Tucker in my head, the before Chris McKenzie version and the after. Before Chris McKenzie, Anthony could be counted on to snap my bra strap or to jostle me so I dropped my books or to say something rude about my outfit. Ever since he followed me out to the Dumpster that day, he doesn’t seem to know what he’s supposed to do with me. His solution for a while was to be nice to me, but then his friends noticed, and they started making kissy noises at us, and Anthony went back to proving his dislike for me. Now it’s like he’s only pretending to be a bully, which is somehow more upsetting than when he was really being mean. Every time he misses the chance to poke me with a pencil or scrape his muddy shoe against my jeans, I think of his face by the Dumpster and I feel like I’m back there for a minute. Anthony tugs at my braid, which is more mess than braid at this point. It’s been up for three days. I don’t like taking it down. Someone might make me wash my hair.

  I can’t handle Anthony today. I can’t think about how he treats me differently now. I don’t speak. I keep walking. Behind me, I hear his buddies making rude noises in time with my steps. I’m afraid they might be following me. I feel like my insides are trembling. I cut half-moons into my palms with my nails. Boys like Anthony Tucker don’t understand. They don’t know about egg salad on porches, about fists full of dirt that taste like blood. They don’t know.

  Anthony keeps on and keeps on following, and when he taps me on the shoulder, I’m ready for him. I spin around and punch him in the shoulder as hard as I can.

  Except it isn’t him; it’s the small girl from the bus ride this morning. And instead of her shoulder, I hit her face. She screams. I see blood coming from her nose. I stand perfectly still and will myself backward in time five minutes, but it doesn’t work.

  • • •

  The principal calls Phyllis to come get me, even though it’s almost time for the buses. I breathe for a minute. Then I ask for the bathroom and find the door instead.

  I get on the wrong bus on purpose by writing myself a note from Michael to the bus driver. Please allow Sasha to take the Cary Fork bus to visit her grandparents. She is to get off at the park. It shouldn’t be this easy to sneak away, but in the chaos of bus boarding, it is. The kids on this bus smell a little better than the ones the Caboose way. Like lotion and chewing gum. Their sneakers look newer. The driver is bored. He barely glances at my note. If there were Greyhound buses here, buses that went to other cities, I’d sneak on one and end up in a faraway city with my clothes stuffed in my backpack and my eyes wide, ready to see new things. I think of how proud that would make Michael.

  At the park in the center of Cary Fork, I climb off the school bus and walk as though I know where I’m going. Only once the bus is out of sight do I sag to a stop. Taco Bell is still open, but I didn’t bring any money. I eat my sandwiches, which are warm and taste like vinegar and paper bag. I drink the can of soda Phyllis sent with me, which is also warm. I sit on a bench, one of six. There’s no caboose here. A bird lands in the grass. I have the girl’s blood on my knuckles.

  • • •

  I think about how it would be if I looked up and my mother was there. I am never in Cary Fork. I don’t know that this isn’t where she ran to. I could look up right now and my mother’s truck could be there, blue and clean. I’d prefer that she jump out of the truck and run to me, fling her arms around me, grab me, and take me with her. But I would settle for me chasing after her, getting my hand over the tailgate, which after all these years has a little more rust, and hefting myself into the truck bed. I would lie on my back with the brown pine needles and the flat spare tire until my mother pulled into the driveway of her new home, which would be brick and white and on a hill. When Mom got out of the truck in the circular driveway, I would sit up. I would surprise her.

  She would cry. She would apologize for leaving. “I had to get out,” she would say. “I was losing my mind, and I had to get out. I’ve thought about you every day.”

  I would understand. I mean, I do, sort of. Understand. A little more each day, I feel like I’m losing my mind living in Caboose, where so many bad things have happened, and you only ever see the same things over again: coal-filthy buildings and flood-damaged roads and headlines filled with bad news. I wouldn’t have to work hard to understand why she felt like Caboose was a cage she was trapped in.

  But I would make her wait before I forgave her.

  The inside of the house would be clean. On a shiny oak table inside the door, there would be an iris. Not the part of your eye, but the flower. The walls would all be cream and beige without any Sticky Tack or nail holes. There wouldn’t be any streaks on the windows. The carpet would be new and smooth. My gaze would trace the vacuum lines.

  It would take me a few nights to forgive her. Once I did, I would crawl into her bed and rest my head on her extra pillow. She would pat her shoulder and open her arms to me, and even though I’m too big to want to cuddle, I would scoot over and do it anyway. She wouldn’t smell like Phyllis, like hair spray and dryer sheets. She wouldn’t smell like she used to, either, back before she left, when she worked at the Burger Bargain—like grease and weariness. She would smell new. Like soap and flowers and faraway places.

  • • •

  Phyllis arrives shortly after the police car. I don’t remember throwing rocks at the streetlights. There is glass on the sidewalk. My mother isn’t here.

  6

  “I wou
ld like to get a job,” I tell Phyllis.

  I’m more comfortable with her now. Comfortable enough to eat at the table at regular hours of the day. Since I’ve been staying with her, I’ve more or less figured out her body language, and so far it hasn’t told me anything about her being angry with me, like I was afraid of after the guitar. For the most part, she just looks at me like she does her morning crossword, like there are answers she hasn’t figured out yet.

  We’re on the front porch. It’s early—not as early as four, but not completely light out, either. It’s pouring rain, like it has been for days, and I have to speak up to be heard.

  Phyllis waves me quiet with a glance toward the Harless house. Yesterday morning, I forgot not to holler. I woke the babies. The Harless household was not pleased.

  “What do you need a job for?” Phyllis asks, soft. Her voice is like the rain, steady and shushing. Her glasses have slipped down her nose. Her hair isn’t in its braid yet and falls loose on her bony shoulders. I’ve never met anybody as bony as Phyllis, at least not anybody who eats as much egg salad as she does. She tries to wrap up all her bones in broomstick skirts and home-knit shawls, but I can still see her angles.

  “I think you’re very pretty for an older person,” I tell her. I don’t know how old she is, but she’s old. The middle of her fifties, at least.

  “Pffsh, Sasha. What do you need a job for?”

  I need money to do what Michael wanted and escape—money for the trip, and money for food and a place to sleep once I get there. But I have to make up the guitar first. I can’t leave Phyllis without a guitar and have it be my fault.

  “That’s private,” I tell her.

  Phyllis lets out this shaky little breath, and her fingers grip each other and slip off. She worries her thumbs against her forefingers like she’s trying to rub off dried glue.

  “We have to talk to Grace,” she says. “I don’t know if jobs are allowed at your age.”

  “You can call her,” I suggest.

  “Be nice if you asked,” Phyllis points out. Nothing about her is not gentle, but I’m starting to pick up on when I’m testing her patience.

  “Would you please call her?” I ask.

  “I will.”

  I wait.

  “Not now,” Phyllis clarifies. “When it’s daylight out, at least.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” I tell Phyllis. “Maybe I should grow up to be a fireman.” Her head whips around sharp, like I’ve said something shocking. But her voice is steady when she answers.

  “That so?”

  I finger the too-long sleeves of Michael’s Navy sweatshirt I’m wrapped in. I think of Michael’s team, his fellow firefighters. How they marched careful patterns at his funeral. How they had his back, even after he died. I don’t have family now, but Michael did. I don’t necessarily want to fight fires—in fact, I’d like to stay as far away from them as possible. But I’d like to share something with my brother. I’m not making a lot of sense and I know it, so I don’t say anything more, but Phyllis keeps going.

  “You’re too young for that kind of job yet, girl.”

  “I don’t want to work at Burger Bargain.”

  “You got to be sixteen to work there anyway,” she says.

  “I don’t like the hats. I—” There is too much history to go into, and I stop again, speech grinding into quiet. I focus on the rain to blur out the image of Judy smiling out from under her hat. A quick peck on the cheek and out the door she went, singing her favorite song, “A Bird in a Gilded Cage.” I should have listened. I should have realized she was trying to say that she felt like a caged bird. Maybe then her flying away wouldn’t have shocked me so bad. I don’t know if that memory was the day she left, or just any old other day before, but it’s the picture in my head.

  We sit awhile. Hubert Harless creaks out his front door, kicks one of Mikey’s shoes back inside. He locks the door behind him. I raise a hand and he raises one back. I haven’t been over again for lunch, but Mikey and I have been staring at each other through the window early every morning. There is something weird about that kid.

  This morning, he put his hand flat on the window. I mirrored it with mine. Mine was so big against his small one. I wonder if I was that little at nine. There are days I still feel little. But then I think about how Mikey must feel, and touching hands with him through the window makes me feel bigger and older and stronger.

  • • •

  The next three mornings, Mikey Harless doesn’t meet me at the window. I look into his bedroom and see the little girls sleeping in their beds. Sara is two years old, and she is mostly only tangled hair sticking out from under a pillow. Marla is barely a year, and she is chubby feet through the bars of a crib.

  Phyllis has told me about the whole family over egg salad sandwiches in our mornings together. I’m fascinated by my coal miner cousin and his apple-scented wife and their trio of kids. Mikey is the most interesting one. Because he’s only Hubert’s, and because he, as Mr. Powell would describe it, “exhibits unusual behavior,” he seems more related to me than his two baby sisters.

  According to Phyllis, the Harless clan are decent neighbors, if a little bit odd. Hubert can be counted on to fix the plumbing or the furnace when things go wrong for Phyllis, and he won’t accept payment unless it’s baked or knitted. Shirley, Phyllis describes as quiet, and she doesn’t say much about Mikey—only that he’s had a hard time of things. She looks at me too long when she says stuff like that.

  • • •

  I’ve settled into a routine at school—one that, to Mr. Powell’s delight, does not include the regular skipping of classes. I can’t keep skipping classes without Grace getting a phone call, and I’m afraid she’ll take me from Phyllis. I don’t want to leave Phyllis until it’s time to leave Caboose.

  It’s easy to fade into the back of the classroom and not say anything. Only my English teacher seems to want to draw me out, asking me questions in class every chance she gets. I answer as quietly as possible, sometimes only with a shrug or a shake of my head. Her gaze lingers before she moves on to other students. On my persuasive essay assignment against school uniforms, she makes a note in green ink next to one of my better sentences: This is the sort of thing you ought to say in class! Beautifully put!

  I spend Saturday on Hubert’s porch, playing with Marla and Sara. Marla likes to be picked up and spun in circles. She likes to touch faces, pull ears and poke eyes and squeeze noses. I’m constantly untangling her fingers from my hair and trying to keep her from sticking them in my mouth.

  Sara does everything Hubert does. Hubert is fixing the porch railing. He lifts a board, and Sara reaches to put her small hand on it, too. Hubert considers the angle of a nail, and Sara tilts her head the same as he does. When Hubert tugs at his beard, Sara tugs at her sharp little chin. When Hubert knocks in a nail with his hammer, Sara chooses a nail that is already driven and smacks it with her bare hand, keeping time.

  “I wish the rain would stop,” I say to no one. Hubert is fixing the porch rail for the little girls to hold on to, but at this point there’s no reason for them to walk down the steps anyway. They’d sink away in the soupy yard.

  “Rain ain’t bad,” he says. Hubert is a guy of few words. I’ve pestered him all day with questions about himself. About the mine: he drives over to Dogwood every day. About his family: yes, his mother is living—she’s over in Elm Fork—but she’s ailing and they don’t get on good. No, his father isn’t living. This is where I stop, not wanting to ask why.

  The babies are still dressed for sleep. Sara wears a long T-shirt with the sleeves rolled and rolled and rolled up until she can barely put her arms down over the cuffs. Marla wears a diaper and a pink T-shirt with a glittery LOVE on the front. The weather has suddenly turned spring, warm but wet. Five days of rain have the creek up so high you can see it from the porch, even sitting. Normall
y you’d have to climb onto the railing to catch a glimpse.

  I scoop Sara up and flip her upside down. She shrieks a giggle. Marla’s fat hands open and close in the “gimme” signal babies have, so I hook her into the other arm and spin in circles. I go faster with the weight of the babies in my arms. The speed and the weight feel good. The babies squeal.

  • • •

  Hubert puts out his big hands and catches me by the shoulders. I stop spinning, startled. I feel like time has passed. Hubert takes the babies, one under each arm. He looks them both over, but his eyes keep coming back to my face. Eyes crinkled at the corners, mouth disappearing under mustache. He looks so sad, I think I must have missed something.

  The babies cling to Hubert. Their cheeks are wet. Marla is wailing. Sara wipes snot off her nose with her too-long sleeve, which has come unrolled and now hangs past her fingertips. “All done!” she sniffles.

  I pat the two curly little heads, and then I walk down the steps into the rain. With every step, I test the porch rail, rocking it away from me and back. It doesn’t budge like it did before. It holds steady.

  “You done a good job,” I tell Hubert. I use improper grammar on purpose, to make him feel comfortable.

  • • •

  I’m not at any risk of being hired as a babysitter. But Hubert puts me to work the following week after school, doing odd jobs. You don’t need permission to do odd jobs, Phyllis says, and you don’t have to be a certain age. It saves her a phone call. I hold boards while Hubert hammers in nails. I lift the screen door into place so he can put in the screws.

  “Steady,” he says. “Watch your fingers.”

  “Sorry. I ain’t trying to move it, but it’s heavy.”

  The girls are forgiving. They come for kisses. They come for ring-around-the-rosy. Sara wants to be in charge of everything that happens on the porch. She arranges her baby sister like an unwilling rag doll. Marla shakes her off and squalls. Sara gets my hand and tugs me where she wants me. I don’t squall. I go where she tugs.