The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door

by Karen Finneyfrock

  From: Celia (celia@celiathedark.com)

  Sent: Thur 9/23 4:05PM

  To: Dorathea Eberhardt (deberhardt@berkeley.edu)

  dorathea,

  For a good and just cause that would take way too long to explain, i need to go somewhere for a day or two. i will be perfectly safe. i’ll be with a friend.

  I’m not going to ask mom and dad for permission, but I don’t want them to worry. will you wait until after 10 a.m. tomorrow and then tell them i’m safe and i will get in touch with them? i can’t say where I’m going, but i can say that i have to go.

  THANKS!

  celia

  I got up from my computer and flopped on my bed. There were seven hours between Drake and me. I made a to-do list that included: make sandwiches, find money, shower, nap, and try not to panic. I managed all but the last two. I was panicking too much to take a nap. I remembered that my mom keeps emergency cash in the freezer, because if your house burns down, the refrigerator might survive. Imagine a ranch house burned to ashes, and the milk is still cold on its shelf. I brushed the ice crystals off three hundred dollars and concealed it in several locations on my person. After that, I spent some agonizing hours staring at the ceiling and checking the clock, and then it was finally quarter to twelve.

  Grabbing my duffel bag, I left through the front door. The neatly manicured sidewalks of our subdivision with their flat slabs of creamy concrete transformed into an eerie stage set at midnight. Directors of horror flicks know there is nothing creepier than exaggerated perfection. The streetlights alternated lighting up sections of the road every few minutes, and televisions flickered in a few dark houses like strobe lights. I had never been in the neighborhood by myself this late at night before. With every step I took away from my house, I felt like my life belonged a little less to my parents and a little more to me.

  I took the same path behind the neighbor’s fence to Drake’s backyard. Instead of tossing a pebble, I stood in the flower bed and knocked on Drake’s windowpane. His grandmother’s house, like mine, is just one story, so all the bedrooms are on ground level. As soon as Drake had opened the window, he leaned right through and hugged me. He had to hang halfway over the ledge to do it.

  “I knew you would come,” he whispered. Even in the darkness, I could see that the bruise on Drake’s cheek had gotten darker.

  I passed him my duffel bag, and he helped me climb over the sill. Luckily, Drake’s grandmother’s house has a brick façade, and it’s pretty easy to find a foothold on brick.

  “My first break-in,” I said as soon as I was safely in his room, dusting off my skirt and hoodie from climbing through the window.

  “Most robbers aren’t given a hand getting over the sill,” Drake replied. He suddenly gripped both of my arms and looked into my eyes. “What is the title of the fifth chapter of Dream It! Do It!?”

  “Um, I dunno,” I said, feeling awkward about the way he was looking at me.

  “Fearlessness,” Drake repeated back. “The first three lines go like this.” Drake closed his eyes like he was channeling a spirit. He recited.

  “Chapter Five: Fearlessness

  “You are Dream Warriors. Your Dream demands that you move boldly through the world. This is the part where you stop Dreaming and start Doing!”

  “The bus leaves for Harrisburg at two a.m., and it gets in around four.” He went to his desk drawer and produced a train schedule. “Then the train for New York leaves at five, so we’ll be stuck at the station for a bit. I’ll bring cards. We can buy our train tickets to New York once we get to the station. The earliest train of the day never sells out, even on a Friday. My parents are planning on getting the train that comes in from New York at ten.”

  Drake walked over to his bed and put the train schedule into the backpack lying there. Dream It! Do It! was on the bed, too, lying open. It was my first time in Drake’s room, which, in truth, didn’t look like a teenage boy’s bedroom so much as a grandmother’s guest room that a teenage boy was trying to inhabit. The rug was robin’s egg blue, and the walls were papered in a deep red fabric. Thick, heavy curtains hung over the windows, and there were two wood dressers and a full-length mirror. There was even a stand with an antique quilt draped over it. The only signs of youth were a pile of sneakers parked next to a skateboard by the door and a bunch of notebooks sitting out on the desk. Drake’s room reminded me again that in Hershey, my new best friend was a guest.

  “I wish I could do something about my eye,” Drake said, looking into his mirror at the dark bruise blossoming there. You could count the individual knuckle prints where Joey’s balled fist impacted Drake’s face.

  “Did it hurt?” I asked him.

  “Not as much as you would think.” He kept looking in the mirror. “All the adrenaline makes your body numb. It hurts more now than when it happened.”

  “So, how long’s your suspension?” I asked, flopping down on the bed near Drake’s backpack.

  “Three days,” he said. “So school won’t notice I’m missing tomorrow, but Gran will figure it out when she calls me for breakfast. As soon as she realizes I’m gone, she’s going to call your mom.”

  “My mom will think I’m at school when she gets home from her shift.”

  “They should both know we’re missing by around nine,” said Drake, “depending how late Gran plans to let me sleep. They won’t know where we’ve gone, so we shouldn’t have to worry about getting caught on the train. We’ll be halfway to New York.”

  “Won’t Japhy be in school when we get there? How will you get to him?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Drake turned away from the mirror to look at me. “I can’t decide if it is better to go to his school and wait for him outside until the bell rings, or to kill time until after school and go to his house. His parents would definitely let me in and he would have to talk to me, but he might feel more awkward about seeing me with his parents there. I don’t know.” A shadow passed over Drake’s face. “Buddy will have advice for me. I need to read some more on the train.” He picked Dream It! Do It! up off the bed and added it to his backpack.

  × × ×

  When Drake finished packing, he stood in the middle of the room and turned around and around as if he was memorizing the look of each of the four walls. Finally, he picked up his knapsack, turned to me and said, “Okay, Celia, we’re going back out through the window.”

  It was harder getting out of the house than it had been getting in. Still, I perched on the ledge and jumped safely into the grass without snagging my tights.

  Drake tossed both of our bags through and then looped two legs over the sill. He got footholds on the brick, gripped the window frame with one hand, and used the other to pull the sash down as far as possible. Then he hopped off into the grass. We made for the street, looking around the way cat burglars do on television shows. Our plan was to walk to the bus depot, since we couldn’t call a cab to come to Drake’s house. We went the long way, weaving through the neighborhoods and staying off of main streets.

  The night air was cold, reminding me that winter would be here soon. We walked quietly for a while past the four different models of houses in our subdivision. The thing about planned communities is that you don’t get a lot of surprises. A homeowner is really thinking outside the box if he decides to add a porch or a two-car garage. In Hershey, even the houses just want to fit in. We left the neighborhood and started walking along Cocoa Avenue, cutting through parking lots when possible to avoid being spotted by passing cars.

  I switched shoulders when my duffel bag got too heavy and refused Drake’s offer to carry it, starting to wish that I had worn sneakers instead of boots. “What will you say to Japhy when you see him?”

  “I keep imagining that moment,” said Drake, walking beside me since he had left his skateboard at his grandmother’s house. “I think when he sees me with a black eye, I won’t have to say a lot. I feel like he will just know. Buddy says that ‘your Dream is looking for you
as much as you are looking for your Dream.’”

  We turned off Cocoa Avenue and then I saw them, blinking through the dark, the fluorescent lights of the bus depot.

  Bus stations are not very friendly environments, especially in the middle of the night. We got there just before two a.m., and the station agent looked at us sideways for a moment but didn’t seem that curious. Of all the people who are hard to surprise, I bet people who run bus stations are high on the list. Even as we purchased our tickets at the adult rate, swearing that we were over sixteen, the man looked jaded, like he knew we were lying and also couldn’t care less.

  We sat in orange bucket seats that were connected on a long, metal rail while we waited to board. They looked like something I imagined would furnish the holding room of a jail. The fluorescent lights kept flickering. I half expected the police to walk through the station door and the station agent to point to us and say, “There they are, officer. I knew that girl wasn’t sixteen.” But it never happened. Instead, the agent announced that the bus to Harrisburg was ready for boarding, and we climbed onto the bus along with ten other people.

  Drake and I chose a row in the middle of the coach. The seats were covered with heavy carpet-like material, and luggage racks were suspended over our heads. The windows were as wide as my outstretched arms, but they showed only streetlights and store signs and darkness. I had never traveled anywhere without my parents. Part of me felt like it was the start of a great adventure, like I was jumping on board a pirate ship in a comic book. But part of me felt like a bully had drawn a line in the dirt and dared me to cross it, and I had just walked over and planted both feet. I wanted the moment to be vibrant in my memory, to recall every detail, but as soon as the engine of the bus fired up, I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the redbrick train station of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

  Drake held my hand as we crossed the bus parking lot and went through the giant glass doors of the station, which is one large hall, like a waiting room built for a giant. The walls are polished wood and there are white columns that appear to be holding up the ceiling on their great, singular arms. Long, wooden benches line the walls.

  The station was surprisingly busy for so early in the morning; it wasn’t even four a.m. yet. “Commuters to New York and DC,” Drake muttered as if he had heard my thought.

  We bought our tickets with Drake’s credit card and walked to one of the smooth, worn benches to wait until our train left. We had almost an hour to kill until boarding, so we sat cross-legged and played Go Fish because it’s a game you could play without having gotten any sleep.

  “Do you have any twos?” I asked, halfway into our second game.

  “Yes.” He handed me two cards. He didn’t seem to care that he was losing.

  “How about threes?”

  “So now everyone at school knows about me,” Drake said instead of “go fish.”

  The statement stung. “I’m so sorry about the poem.”

  “It was probably Joey that posted it, huh? He’s had it out for me.” He shook his head. “How could he have gotten your notebook?”

  Drake looked back down at his hand and said, “Go fish.”

  “It was Sandy.” I looked up from my cards.

  “Sandy?” Drake looked up, too. “But we’ve been partners in Spanish. Is this just because of homecoming? That’s so extreme.”

  “It wasn’t just homecoming,” I said. The black hole in my chest opened to the size of a silver dollar. The cards trembled in my hand. “Sandy targeted you because you’re friends with me, and she has always targeted me. Since school started, I’ve been trying to get revenge on her.” My voice came out high and thin. I had come so far with Drake: from friends, to best friends, to secret allies, and now runaways. I had waited too long to trust him, too long to tell him the story I hadn’t told anyone else. “Revenge for something that happened to me in the eighth grade.”

  We both readjusted ourselves on the bench, and I finally told Drake the story of the Book.

  CHAPTER

  30

  The day I got the note from my English teacher Ms. Green, the one that said I was talented and my writing was a gift, I started standing up straighter. It felt like being in a public place where you don’t know anyone and suddenly, someone calls your name and waves. It was May, a month after Ruth had been dragged from school, and two weeks after my parents had announced their trial separation. My dad was sleeping in the basement, and my mom was working constantly. Ms. Green’s note was pretty much the only thing I had going for me.

  After Ruth was gone, I used to eat lunch by myself as fast as I could and then go to the library for the rest of the period. At first, I didn’t even go to the lunchroom, I just stood by my locker to eat. But I got in trouble with a teacher and started going to the cafeteria. Less than a week after I got the note, I was at a table eating alone when Sandy and Mandy walked over with their sack lunches and sat down beside me. They didn’t ask. They just surrounded me like alley cats around a Dumpster, sniffing me up and down.

  For one crazy minute, I wondered if they wanted to be friends with me, if they had noticed I was solo and were going to invite me into their clique. Sandy spoke first. “Celia, we’ve decided to sit with you today because we want to help you.” She folded her fingers together in front of her like she was giving a speech and then looked at me with practiced sympathy. Mandy seemed like she was suppressing a cackle, but Sandy looked earnest and intent. They started unpacking their lunches. I took another bite of my sandwich and didn’t say anything.

  “The two of us got together last night,” Mandy said, pulling open the lid on her yogurt and licking the excess from the foil. “And we made a list of things you need to change before high school.” She put down her lunch and reached into her oversized purse for a colorful envelope, like one you would get in a set of stationery. She handed it to me. “We’re afraid that if we don’t give this to you now, you might be”—she moved her hand in a circle framing my face in the air—“like this forever.” Mandy popped open the lid on a Diet Coke and looked at me like she was watching a soap opera. Sandy stared at me soberly.

  “We’re here to help, Celia,” Sandy added quietly. “We’ve done a lot for other people.”

  I opened the sealed envelope and took out a piece of pink stationery. At the top of the page, someone had written in excessively swirly letters, Things Celia Needs to Change.

  As I looked at it, Sandy said, “I think you should read it out loud. That would probably be the most helpful thing.” She sounded like a school counselor, like she had my well-being at the front of her thoughts.

  I did exactly what I used to do before I turned Dark, whatever anyone told me to do. I read the paper out loud.

  This is what it said:

  Things Celia Needs to Change

  1.) Hair. Get it cut every three weeks (we suggest long layers) and use a brush every day. You’re going to need a de-frizzing product, too.

  2.) Clothes. Places you should shop: Bruno & Basso, Mode Celeb, Hotheads. Places you should not shop: Goodwill.

  3.) Friends: Try to make friends with some girls before the end of this year. Even if you don’t keep them for high school, you need a starter clique for the first few weeks. We suggest Becky Shapiro, Denise Bailey, and Sarah Ellis. (Please avoid religious freaks.)

  4.) Attitude. You need to stop being a teacher’s pet. Nobody likes a brownnoser in high school. Stop acting like God’s gift to English class.

  Sincerely,

  Sandy & Mandy

  They each signed the note with their own signature like it was the Declaration of Independence. I folded up the note, not looking at them. I couldn’t see them and control the tears that were inching their way closer to my tear ducts at the same time.

  “Do you have anything to say to us? We did spend a lot of our time working on that for you.” Sandy said, like it had been a great sacrifice, as if they had just thrown me a surprise party and I forgot to act surprised.


  I wanted them to go away. I flashed back to Becky Shapiro in the bathroom when Sandy told her to go on a diet. I knew that Sandy wanted me to say “Thank you,” and that saying “Thank you” would make it end. I knew those words would conclude their fun for the day and give them something to laugh about later on the phone. Maybe they really did think they deserved to be thanked. Maybe they truly believed their note was helping me.

  But that’s not what I did. Instead of that, I looked carefully at each of them and then, channeling Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, I said, “Fuck off.”

  Sandy turned bright red. She looked like she was about to take a manicured nail and scratch her initials into my cheek. Instead, a beauty pageant smile lit up her face, and she said, “You’re going to wish you hadn’t said that.”

  Sandy didn’t take her eyes off of me as she methodically gathered up the items of her lunch, forced them back into her paper bag and stood. Mandy looked like she was in a foxhunt, and someone had just released the dogs. She snatched up her yogurt and her Diet Coke. I wasn’t sure what I had unleashed on myself, but fear started forming in my toes and turned into terror as it rose toward my brain. I didn’t know what those girls were going to do to me, but I knew it was going to be brutal.

  Nothing happened that day. Sandy kept her eyes on me in English class so I didn’t raise my hand, even when Ms. Green looked right at me and asked for our thoughts on Of Mice and Men. Ms. Green looked at me quizzically when I didn’t answer, but she didn’t say anything.

  The next day was when everything started. I first caught sight of the notebook in science. Mandy was in that class, so it must have started with her. It was being passed furtively from one table to another the way prisoners in a war camp might hand off a stolen spoon. It skipped my table, but I saw it moving. It was a pink notebook with spiral binding at the top like a steno pad.