“Spaz.” Sandy shook her head while dropping Mandy’s lipstick and brushes into her purse, which Mandy then hung again on the back of her chair. They both turned around to start working on the quiz.
My heart was racing. Divine providence had clearly played a part in these events. This must be a sign. The tide was turning and taking my revenge out to sea.
Eyeing Sandy and Mandy to make sure they were focused on the quiz, I gingerly slid both feet, cell phone gripped between them, to the side of my chair next to my backpack. Then, I reached down and exaggerated the action of scratching my leg, while subtly lifting the phone from the floor and depositing it into the pocket of my hoodie. I flew through all ten pop quiz questions in two minutes.
“Yes, Celia,” Mr. Pearson said when I raised my hand.
“May I go to the bathroom? I’m finished with my quiz.”
He nodded and I made a heroic effort to leave the classroom casually, dragging my boots all the way to the door. It was all I could do to keep myself from running down the hall. I kept one hand on the phone in my pocket and repeated to myself, “Just breathe, just breathe.”
Safely inside a stall and sure I was the only person in the restroom, I flipped the phone open and turned it on. Since students have to power their phones down during class, I could only pray that it wasn’t password protected. The light came on, it vibrated once, then a picture of Sandy and Mandy in swimsuits at the beach wallpapered the screen. No password needed. It was real. I had Amanda Hewton’s phone.
It wasn’t the same carrier as the cell my dad had given me, so I had to tinker with it a little before I could figure out how to create the text message. I couldn’t take too long in the bathroom or I’d risk raising suspicions. I typed hurriedly with my thumbs.
had to share the gossip: sandy f rejected by drake b for hcoming. d says s “isn’t cool” & is taking celia d
Then I selected every name I recognized in Mandy’s phone from freshman girls to boys on the basketball team. Clearly, Mandy was gaining some popularity. I saw some names I didn’t know and selected them anyway. After a few minutes of pressing buttons, I had texted over a hundred people. And the best part was, they all thought that news was coming from Mandy, Sandy Firestone’s soon to be ex-best friend.
I’ve never smoked a cigar, but I had the insatiable urge to light one up. This was a moment to be savored, an experience to be written about in epic poems that future freshman outcasts would recite at high school reunions. I was Beowulf slaying Grendel. I was Casey at the Bat. I opened the bathroom door and walked back through the hall with an opera soundtrack playing in my mind, my boots moving in slow motion. I had just pulled the sword from the stone.
× × ×
Language Arts went on like nothing momentous had just happened in the girls’ bathroom. Mr. Pearson was going over the answers to the quiz, which I was pretty sure I had managed to pass, despite my distraction. Sandy and Mandy looked surprisingly smug for two people so stressed out about a quiz. Enjoy it, I thought. I had a feeling their happiness would last only until the bell rang and students started turning on their phones in the hallway between classes.
I sat with my hand in my pocket, knowing I had to make one more calculated compass reading before I was out of the woods. At the bell, everyone stood to leave. Sandy and Mandy surprised me by rushing to exit, but they didn’t get out fast enough. There was a bottleneck at the door with students trying to get to the hall, giving me just enough time to position myself behind Mandy and slip the phone back into her purse. The perfect crime.
Once outside the room, I followed Sandy and Mandy toward my second-period class, where a bank of freshman lockers lined the wall. They were walking fast and kept looking behind them, almost as if they were expecting the catastrophe that was about to happen. I stopped outside the door to French and propped myself against a column to watch the students bump and rustle through the halls. Then I closed my eyes and listened through all the voices and commotion to the sound of phones coming on, the beeps and chirps and ringtones of incoming texts, the laughter and repetition of, “Oh my God, did you get it?” It sounded like being in a mechanical forest where all the birds sing artificially. It was the sweetest noise I’d ever heard.
Then I heard Sandy Firestone. “What the hell is this?” I opened my eyes to catch Sandy shoving Mandy hard on her shoulder. They were standing at Mandy’s locker down the hall and looking at a third girl’s phone who held it out for them.
“Look at the time signature,” said Mandy. “It wasn’t me. You were sitting next to me in L.A. when this was sent.”
That was my cue to disappear. I backed through the door into French, where I happily chatted away with Liz and Vanessa all throughout conversation, replaying again the words between Sandy and Mandy in my mind. I tried to mentally translate “What the hell is this?” into French. “Est-ce que c’est diable?” People say revenge is sweet, but I would describe it as tangy with a hint of spice, more like pickles or a delicious curry.
I was still full on the intoxicating dish after class when I met Drake to walk to Earth Science. I couldn’t resist asking, but tried to act nonchalant. “Did you talk to that girl Sandy today in Spanish?”
“She wasn’t there,” he said, disinterested. “I still didn’t hear back from my parents yet about this weekend with Japhy. What do you think is taking so long?”
“She wasn’t there?”
“Who?”
“Sandy.”
“No. Why?”
“Oh. That’s strange because she was in homeroom,” I said. Maybe she was so upset by the text, she went home.
“Bad kid. Must have been skipping,” he said, taking a few skips toward science. “If you’re worried about her and homecoming, I could just tell her I’m leaving earlier for New York.”
“I already bought our tickets,” I lied, “so, we should just go.”
“Homecoming Saturday, back to New York on Sunday,” said Drake, giving me a nod and then opening the door to science.
I tried to concentrate on earthquakes and our terrifying look at the Pacific Ring of Fire during third period, but I had my own internal shake-up to think about. Built-up tension was breaking apart inside me. The release the earth must feel during a 9.0 quake must be fabulous. I couldn’t wait to get to lunch and hear all those cell phones beeping again. I looked at Drake two rows ahead and smiled. I had a best friend and revenge. What could be better than that? Finally, the bell rang, and I stood to put my science book back into my backpack. That’s when I noticed something I didn’t see before, something I had been too excited and distracted to take in.
“I can’t find my poetry notebook,” I said as Drake approached my desk. I was pushing aside the other books and folders in the bag.
“You probably left it in your locker,” he said casually, “or one of your other classes.”
I started taking books out of my bag, then abruptly turned the whole thing upside down and poured all the contents onto my lab table. Science book, To Kill a Mockingbird, two subject notebooks, pens, first aid kit, a glue stick. No poetry journal.
“Time to go,” Mr. Diaz said. “I have students taking a makeup test during lunch.”
My hand was shaking as I put the books and notebooks back into my backpack. Don’t panic, I told myself. Not yet.
“Meet you on the grass,” I said to Drake, and flew out of the room and down the hall toward French, saying a little prayer with each step I took. I noticed students grouped in the hall, looking at a flyer posted on the wall, probably a reminder to vote for homecoming court.
I burst into my French classroom and said, “Ms. Arnold, I think I left my poetry notebook in here during—”
“Celia,” she interrupted me. “Je ne comprend pas. En Français.”
I grabbed my head, willing my brain to think quickly in French. “Je . . . lost . . . mon journal de poesie, et je pense que je . . . left it . . . ici,” I finished pathetically.
Mademoiselle Arnold looked
around the room and shrugged. “Je n’ai pas trouvé un journal, mais—”
Rudely, I didn’t wait for her to finish, but turned to race back to Mr. Pearson’s L.A. class, praying he would look at me over his glasses and admonish me for being forgetful as he handed it back to me.
But as I left my French room and started down the hall, I saw what the other kids had been looking at posted on the wall. It wasn’t a homecoming flyer. It wasn’t a flyer at all. Photocopied onto goldenrod-yellow paper and plastered every five feet along the length of the hallway was a sickeningly familiar image. It was six lines long, and it was in my handwriting. I forced my feet to walk over. Yanking the first one I could reach off the wall, I looked closer. Above a page from my poetry journal, someone had written this.
A POEM FROM THE DEEP AND IMPORTANT
WRITING OF CELIA THE WEIRD . . .
Since Drake told me that day in the wooded lot,
while the leaves agreed with gravity and left the trees,
that he liked boys instead of girls, it’s been easier
to love him. Loving him feels like counting or using
the phone or something else that’s effortless. I’m like
a leaf with nothing to do but fall.
I recognized the curly handwriting above my poem instantly. After all, it had tormented me since the eighth grade. I flashed back to standing at Mr. Pearson’s desk, receiving my A minus, while my backpack lay unprotected at my chair. I remembered the strangely smug look on Sandy’s face after the quiz, and the way she wasn’t in Spanish class. While I thought I was so clever stealing Mandy’s cell phone, they had taken my poetry journal.
I heard a boy’s voice down the hall saying in a mocking high falsetto, “I’m like a leaf with nothing to do but fall.” Other boys laughed. The black hole in my chest was growing at an alarming rate. I felt like I might be sucked into it entirely, never to be seen again. The goldenrod paper trembled in my hand, and a few people bumped into me trying to get past.
Something inside of me gave up. Being Dark hadn’t protected me. Revenge hadn’t rescued me, it hadn’t even worked. Now everyone would be talking about the poem instead of the text message, talking about Drake instead of Sandy. I was the same old Celia who could be picked on and humiliated. The only difference between this and the eighth grade was that I had managed to bring Drake down with me. I finally got a best friend, and I had betrayed him to the whole school. After promising I would never tell anyone that he was gay, I told everyone. I started melting like a stick of butter. Soon I would be nothing but a puddle on the floor.
That’s when two firm hands found my shoulders and a deep voice said into my ear, “You head down the hall and I’ll go up.” Those hands pushed me firmly toward the wall where the pages were hanging. I looked behind me and watched Clock tear down a yellow page and add it to the stack he already had in his hand. I stared as he walked on to the next one, pushing away a couple of freshmen who were trying to read it. “Oooh, so shocking,” he said to them mockingly, “we live in the suburbs and we don’t know any gay people.” He tore the paper off the wall right in front of them.
As if someone had held smelling salts up to my nose, I came to life. I turned to go up the hall in the direction of the library, pulling down posters furiously as I went. “Excuse me,” I said rudely, pushing people out of my way. “Just collecting my intellectual property.” I tore my poems down like they were old birthday streamers. “Correcting copyright infringement,” I barked, stomping into the next hall, which was also coated in copies.
I yanked down twenty more photocopies before I thought of Drake. What if he had seen them? Or worse, what if he hadn’t seen them and was innocently sitting on the grass eating lunch, just waiting to be humiliated? I tore down three more of the posters as I raced off through the building toward the outdoor picnic tables.
Comments bounced through the hall as I ran. An upperclassman said, “Is that her?” and pointed. A freshman boy yelled, “I agree with gravity, too.” There was plenty of general laughter. I just wanted to get to Drake and explain what happened, to tell him about the poem before he saw it on the wall. I hit the door to the lunch area and ran past the picnic tables to our usual spot on the grass. To my dismay, Drake was already on the basketball court with the other boys.
I stopped at the edge of the asphalt, praying for the gift of telepathic communication. It wasn’t like I could run onto the court and talk to him in front of everyone. Reacting to the drama any more would only make it worse.
They were still choosing teams. Drake appeared to be deep in thought, but I couldn’t tell if it was his normal reserved demeanor with the boys or if he was thinking about how much he hated me for telling the whole school he was gay. Would he be playing the pickup game if he already knew? Was he trying to be cool, act unaffected, or was he completely unaware of what was posted in the halls?
Clay called Drake’s name as he picked him for his team. Also looking absorbed was Joey Gaskill, who got picked last for the other team.
I stood helplessly on the side of the court as the game began. Drake played better than usual, with more aggression in his stance. When he guarded another player, his eyes bored into their elbows and his hands pushed roughly at the ball. The players’ long bodies spread out over the court like starfish. The offense turned into arrows while the defense transformed into shields. When someone stole the ball, all the players would shape-shift again, shooting themselves one way or the other down the court.
Drake was guarding Greg Baker, a sophomore on the JV team who was in my gym class. Drake blocked all of Greg’s attempted baskets, but every time Drake went for a layup, the ball might have been a magnet. He couldn’t miss. Drake scored ten points before anyone else on either side had a basket.
There were more spectators than I had ever seen for a pickup game. Hershey High’s version of a celebrity scandal was enjoying a public moment on the blacktop. “He doesn’t play like a fag,” I heard a boy say from another spot on the lawn. I tried to look unaffected.
Humans must be natural followers like the famous cliff-jumping lemmings. Actually, it is a misconception that lemmings commit suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs in mass numbers. I learned about it in a book from the public library called Mythical Anthropomorphism: Urban Legends of the Animal Kingdom. What really happens is that as lemmings migrate in large groups and approach a cliff, the first lemmings to the edge try to stop. But the follower lemmings keep crowding in behind the leaders pushing them one by one off the cliff and usually to their deaths.
As the crowd watching the game grew, the game got more intense. A couple of other players made baskets. Drake seemed to grow two feet taller on the court. I was gripping the straps on my backpack so tightly that I had marks on my hands where the nylon was digging into my skin. My hands were sweaty, and my heart was beating hard. Part of me was on that court with Drake. There was no sign yet of Mandy or Sandy, although I kept scanning the lawn for them. I had no idea what I would do if they showed up.
Joey Gaskill’s game was off, no steals or baskets. His shirt was soaked with sweat in huge circles around his armpits. One of Joey’s teammates passed him the ball, and Joey made an impressive run down the court, followed by the boy who was guarding him, with Drake and Greg right at his heels. Their four sets of running shoes seemed to fight each other for a place to land. All of them reached the basket at the same time, ringing around it and gazing up. Joey sprung from his heels with one knee in the air for the jump shot. Joey’s guard, Greg, and Drake all sprung, too. It could have been a ballet if there was less grunting. They all leapt together.
Just as Joey’s hand released the ball into a perfect arc ending at the basket, Drake’s hand made contact, halting the ball’s momentum and sending it off the court. The bodies of all the boys continued their path back toward the earth, propelling Drake and Joey right into each other as they crash-landed back on the court in a tangle of legs and feet.
Despite his slowness on
the court, Joey was the first one off the ground. “Get off of me, you fucking faggot!” he yelled, pulling his legs apart from Drake’s and hurling the words at him. The crowd went silent, and the words hung in the air like fireworks. They were huge.
Drake shook his head for a moment, like he was trying to brush cobwebs off of his face. I watched his eyes take in the size of the crowd around him. The next second he was on his feet, one arm swinging out to his side like a wrecking ball. It was a wide, wild swing, and it landed on Joey’s face like a spaceship splashing down into the ocean.
Joey thudded onto the asphalt. But that didn’t satisfy the demon that possessed Drake. He leapt on top of Joey and landed two more solid punches to Joey’s torso before other boys jumped in to pull him off.
A roar went up from the bloodthirsty crowd. “Fight, fight, fight!” they chanted. I could feel the thrill on every side of me. Their basketball game had morphed into a boxing match. The people on the grass jumped to their feet after the first punch. No one wanted to risk being asked for the details of the fight in their next class and not being able to provide any. After the second punch, kids flooded toward the basketball court, hoping to get a front-row seat for the wreckage.
I had to get to Drake. I grabbed my backpack and started to force my way through the mob. Everyone was pushing. I couldn’t see the court anymore for all the tall boys around me. The crowd was like quicksand. I started shoving harder.
I got to the inside of the circle just in time to watch Principal Foster, Coach Scott, and Mr. Pearson finish tearing Drake and Joey apart and then lead them by the arms back into the school building.
I stood in a throng of bored, desperate, horny, mean, giddy teenagers and watched as the best one of us was dragged away to be persecuted.
CHAPTER
The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door Page 13