Ever since Drake and I left school, I had been fidgeting awkwardly with my clothing. I kept pulling on my hood and taking it off again. I was tugging the string of my hoodie first all the way down with my right hand and then all the way down with my left. It was like I was trying to saw off my head at the neck with a soft cotton blade. I forced myself to release the hoodie string and say something to the beautiful, articulate boy who was walking next to me.
“Do you . . . like Hershey?” I inquired robotically. Bingo. I went right to the top of the most boring questions list. I actually winced after the words left my mouth.
“Krackel and Special Dark miniatures, yes,” said Drake. “The town, not so much.”
When we got to Drake’s house, we circumnavigated the front lawn of his grandmother’s one-story rancher and went straight to the wooded lot beyond her manicured backyard. We walked until the canopy became dense, and after some careful climbing around in underbrush, found a downed tree to sit on like a bench. It was a nurse log, meaning it was dead, but new, smaller trees were using it as fertilizer to grow from. I read about nurse logs in a book called Nights in the Forest. The air smelled sweet and wet back there, and the normal neighborhood sounds—televisions, passing cars, barking dogs—were replaced by birds, squirrels, and snapping twigs.
I was wearing black leggings with black boots. I pulled my hood all the way up so it covered part of my face and then I wrapped my arms around my legs and hugged them. I acted like I was feeling chilly, but really I felt vulnerable. Immediately, Drake asked the question I feared.
“Who are your friends at school?” He asked it casually, like it was a “getting to know you question.”
“Um,” I said, and instantly my voice was too high. Not even a full word out of my mouth on the subject of friendship and I was blowing it. I tried to follow with another sound at a lower pitch, but my voice disappeared altogether and then my throat was as empty as an abandoned coalmine.
“Why did you move here from New York City?” I asked, acting like the question had occurred to me suddenly.
Drake got up from the log and walked over to a tree with low-hanging branches. After testing a limb with half his weight, he placed one fat sneaker in the branch’s shoulder and stood all the way up next to the trunk.
“I screwed up,” he said from the tree. “You have to apply to get into high school in New York, and I want to go to an arts school and do illustration. I picked out my top three schools and made my portfolio, but I got my application in late, and now everything is full. My parents feel bad that they weren’t on top of it, so they are trying to get it straightened out,” he said, placing his sneaker on the next branch up, “but I have to stay with Gran and go to Hershey High in the meantime or else go to the school I’m zoned for, which is basically a nightmare.” He pulled himself up again to a higher branch.
I knew about the horrors of school zoning. I had the same group of four friends all the way through elementary school: Jane, Emily, Raisa, and Sarabeth. Every Friday night of fourth and fifth grade, one of us hosted a sleepover, and everyone else was invited. We traveled as such a pack that if my dad saw just two of us together, he would say, “Where’s the rest of the herd?” But in fifth grade, the school board changed the map, and I got zoned to go to Hershey Middle School while everyone else was zoned for Hilltop.
We still played together the summer after fifth grade, and I got invited to their birthday parties in sixth. But when they talked about the teacher who blew spit bubbles when he talked, I couldn’t laugh along. And the name Chad did not make me jump onto the nearest bed and giggle. I was out of the loop, and after a while, our unbreakable bonds of friendship broke. Hilltop Middle is zoned for Lower Dauphin High School, Hershey High’s primary rival, so I might see them again if I could stomach going to the homecoming game at the start of October. There were signs for it all over the halls at school.
“So, you might just be in Hershey for ninth grade?” I asked.
“Hopefully, I’ll only be in Hershey a month!” He laughed from up in the tree. “I’m on the wait list for two schools, and the admissions offices said that something could open up in the first thirty days. I’m not really living here,” he added, tugging on a higher limb with both hands. “Just visiting.”
I didn’t realize that my hope had gotten itself up and brushed itself off until it got knocked down into the dirt again. He was just visiting. Figures.
“I can see why you don’t have a lot of friends here,” Drake added, testing the same limb with his foot. “The kids in this town are too lame to get you.” He stepped again into the next higher foothold of the tree, and I couldn’t see his face anymore between the branches.
There were two butterflies flirting with each other above a bush several feet away. The hood slipped off my head as I looked up to where Drake was climbing. A limb shook as his feet disappeared fully into the tree.
CHAPTER
5
Before Drake went inside for dinner, he turned to me and yelled, “See you tomorrow at school.” I kept replaying those words in my head as I walked home. At school, reverberated at the end of each line, the way a bell keeps singing for a few seconds after you ring it.
As usual, my mom wasn’t home. At least three nights a week she works the swing shift from two p.m. until ten p.m., which is the only reliable thing in her schedule. As one of the newest nurses at the hospital, she has to fill in as shifts come up, so sometimes she works the night shift until six a.m. and then sleeps for a few hours before going in for a swing. She works in the pediatric unit. The most consistent thing about seeing my mom is that you can count on her to look tired.
She left a note:
You can eat pasta or grilled cheese.
Your sheets are still in the dryer.
Please be in bed by ten p.m.
My mother’s communications are becoming so spare, they are turning into poems. I edited the note to make it a haiku.
pasta or grilled cheese.
your sheets are in the dryer.
bed by ten p.m.
I was never home alone like this before Dad left. My parents are currently involved in a “trial separation” that officially began in July when my dad separated all the way to Atlanta. I wanted to go with him but was forced to stay here in Hershey with a mom who works all the time. They didn’t even say, “Get ready to be kicked out of the nest, baby bird.” The nest just flipped over one day, and I’m left trying to fly on my own. Naturally, I have a refrigerator door full of emergency numbers, instructions on dealing with everything from a fire to a snake bite, and three neighbors ready to come to my rescue if a creepy, unmarked van should so much as drive down the street.
Grabbing some cold pasta from the fridge, I went down the hall to my room to check for email from Dorathea. I set the pasta down on my desk and forgot to eat any. There was a drummer keeping time in my head and the bass drum sounded like Drake, Drake, Drake. My inbox offered no new emails from Dorathea to distract me.
Dorathea is my only cousin. She’s in her sophomore year at University of California, Berkeley, and she is like my own personal Magic 8 Ball. I go to her when I need mystical answers with questionable reliability. I decided to send another email, even though I wrote last. I hoped that didn’t make me look needy.
Re: question
From: Celia ([email protected])
Sent: Wed 9/08 6:42 PM
To: Dorathea Eberhardt ([email protected])
hey, dorathea,
when a guy comes up to you at your locker and asks if you want to hang out in a wooded lot after school, and then tells you that you are too cool for the kids in your town, does it mean he likes you or that he wants to be your friend?
how’s college?
celia
I want Dorathea to think I’m cool. Maybe that’s lame to admit, but she’s the one person reasonably close to my age who doesn’t consider me a loser. Of course, I never told her about what happened in the eighth grade.
I never told anyone.
Turning away from the computer, I flopped onto my bed and reached one hand into the cool, dark recesses below my mattress. I like to think of my bed as a house and the space beneath it as the basement. Down there in the cellar, nestling at the base of the nightstand where I left it, was my notebook.
In the case of fire and a mad scramble to run from the flames, there is no contest among my possessions for the honor of “item to be saved first.” Poetry notebook wins. My only problem would be deciding which one. I have three notebooks full and am scribbling my way through number four. Most are standard composition books, their black-and-white-marbled covers eroded by stickers, traced Manga drawings, and quotes from famous people written in marker. My current notebook says, “‘Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.’—Charles Kuralt.”
I write poetry every day. Sometimes people think poetry has to be obscure or complicated or spring forth directly from your soul with the magical force of nature. I think poetry is like music—you either like to make it or you don’t.
I pulled out my notebook and wrote this poem:
I expected you to vanish
up and up into the tree,
a shake of the branches
and gone like you
had never happened.
But you came down
and handed me a leaf
“from seven limbs up,
already yellow,” you said,
and then you walked away
and you were still real.
I took the yellow leaf out of my hoodie pocket and pressed it between the pages of my notebook. Then I lay on my bed trying to read. It was two more hours until my heart slowed down enough to let me fall asleep.
CHAPTER
6
Thursday, the day after I met Drake, I showed up for school with a beehive buzzing in my brain. Would he talk to me again? Had he somehow discovered that I was an outcast? Was he a hallucination brought on by my extreme loneliness, an imaginary friend created by my subconscious to protect me? I went to my locker to get my book before English and as soon as I unlocked the door, a note fell out. Someone must have stuffed it in through the air vents. A note from Drake? I hopefully snatched the folded paper from the floor and opened it. It said:
You’re not fooling anyone, Weird. You’re still a loser.
I did not let my shoulders fall or inhale too sharply. I didn’t display any identifiable sign of suffering. In high school, it’s not just the walls that have eyes. The lockers, lunch tables, and desks have ears and gossiping mouths.
Naturally, my first guess about who wrote the note was that pit bull Sandy Firestone or one of her pack of mongrels. Sandy had had a group of freshman girls trailing her since school started, and so far, I had made it through three days with no visible bite marks from their canines, so they had to be thirsting for my blood by now. But the longer I looked at the note, the more it didn’t seem like Sandy’s work. The handwriting was sloppy, and I can say from brutal experience that Sandy and her hounds are more cunning and vicious than an anonymous locker note.
Like my neighbor’s cat, Peaches, who drops dead mice on our front porch after tormenting them to death all night, Sandy toys with her prey. In seventh grade, I overheard her talking to Becky Shapiro in the girls’ bathroom. I was in one of the stalls.
“Becky,” said Sandy, who had been standing at the mirror applying makeup since I walked into the bathroom.
“Yeah?” said Becky, turning off her faucet and sounding surprised that Sandy was addressing her.
Becky Shapiro was overweight. In the sixth grade, she had to have a special table at school instead of a chair with a desk attached like the rest of us. She couldn’t fit into a fixed desk.
“Me and some of the girls were talking, and we think you should try the Atkins diet,” said Sandy offhandedly as if she were offering advice to a friend who asked for it.
I heard Becky let out a long sigh as she tore off a paper towel.
“Well, I’m sorry, Becky,” Sandy went on, clearly offended by Becky’s response, “but you need to do something. It’s kind of . . . depressing,” Sandy finished, like she had been searching around for the saddest sort of word she could find.
That happened a year before Sandy started using me as a sharpening stone for her claws. I hadn’t turned Dark yet. I stayed in the stall longer than necessary and tried not to make any noise.
Next, Becky said something that made my heart sound like a broken wind chime. She said, “You’re right, Sandy . . . thanks.”
And as if things had been restored to their proper order, Sandy said, “You’re welcome,” and snapped shut the lid on her lipstick tube.
The piece of folded paper that I was currently holding featured too much anonymity to be created by Sandy Firestone. Sandy liked to take credit for her brutality.
“Did you get a love note?” said a voice in my ear.
I was startled and balled up the paper, crushing it beneath the black nails of my right fist.
“Sorry,” said Drake, his brown eyes brimming with honesty. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I stared back at him without a word to say.
“Hey, um,” said Drake, kicking his sneaker gently against the wall below the lockers, “do you want to eat lunch together today?”
I tossed the note back into my locker like it was a trash can. “Sure,” I said back, slamming the door.
CHAPTER
7
That afternoon, a momentous event occurred. For the first time since high school started four days ago, I didn’t eat lunch by myself. The day was so warm, it felt more like August outside than September. After we picked a spot on the grass near the basketball court, Drake pulled off his sweater, but I kept wearing my black hoodie. I like having a hood at my fingertips.
I was also wearing black tights and combat boots with a polyester dress my mom handed down to me. It looked like something a 1970s housewife would wear to host a holiday party, offering her guests drinks in ceramic tiki cups. I had cut it off so it would hang just above my knees.
For lunch, I brought the pasta I didn’t finish from the night before, and Drake had a turkey sub. I could feel the eyes of the high school wandering over us, the new kid and the outcast eating their lunches in the grass. Frankly, I was as mystified by Drake’s interest in me as my classmates probably were. New kids at school always have to work to make friends, but Drake was cool and good looking. He could have tried to get into one of the big, jovial groups populating the picnic tables. Why pick a loner? Did Drake want to go out with me? Was this turkey-and-pasta brown bag our first lunch date?
I slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses and tried not to betray my confusion. We had barely swallowed our first bites before the boys started gathering on the basketball court. I don’t know how boys can eat so fast.
“Do they always play a pickup game now?” asked Drake, leaning back on one elbow on the grass to get a better view of the court.
“I’ve seen them out here the past three days,” I said.
“Can anyone join?” he asked, as if I was an insider on the Hershey sports scene.
“I dunno,” I said, but Drake’s question was answered when the tallest boy on the court filled with seven guys yelled, “Anybody else?” in the general direction of the picnic tables.
Drake’s eyes scanned the court like he was speed-reading a book. He appeared to be calculating something.
“Are you into basketball?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Drake said without taking his eyes off the players. “In New York I played all the time.”
Oh yeah, New York. My joy turned sour. I was sharing my lunch with someone for the first time in high school, and he was staying only a month. Whatever was happening between Drake and me, it was temporary.
“I’m going to get in on this game,” Drake said suddenly, practically jumping up to a full stand from where he was reclining on the grass. �
��Watch my stuff?” He bounded over to the courts as I picked his sweater up out of the grass and put the rest of his sub back in his lunch bag.
Drake entered the game just as team selection was starting. A couple of the other boys gave him lazy half waves and I could almost read their lips mumbling, “What’s up, man?” Drake’s shoulders slouched when he was with the other boys, and he kept his hands in his pockets. It was like they were all competing to see who could look the most disinterested. Some mysterious ritual involving gestures toward players and baskets was followed by a jump shot, and then the game was on.
The only other boy I recognized on the court was Joey Gaskill, another ninth grader who went to my middle school. Since I first met him in the sixth grade, I’ve watched the spill of menace that leaks from Joey grow larger with each year. In sixth grade, he got suspended for fighting. In seventh, he was suspended again after he snuck into a math room during lunch and set a stack of tests on fire, tripping the sprinkler system and ruining books and electronics in an entire wing of the building. In eighth grade, someone broke into the ceramics room one night and smashed all the green pots waiting to be fired in the kiln. No one could prove that Joey did it, but everyone seemed to share the unshakable assurance that it was him.
The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door Page 2