In every class I had that morning, the book traveled around the room like a cold virus. Every time the teacher’s back was turned, it infected a new table, and by the end of class, everyone was sick with it. I ate lunch as fast as possible that day, barely sitting down for five minutes before rushing off to the library.
It went on like that after lunch, too. First, the notebook would get handed to a new person and he or she would curiously open it and read the first page. Next, the reader would look up at me. Then that person would continue flipping through the pages and reading until finally writing something and passing it on. I saw a few people who only read the book and never wrote in it, like Becky Shapiro. There were others.
I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, that kids weren’t obviously staring at me over their lockers between class or laughing when I walked by them in the hall. I wished so much I had someone to talk to about the notebook, but I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t want to go to the principal. The punishment for being a tattletale would probably be worse than what was already happening.
I was walking home from school by myself when I saw them. Mandy and Sandy were standing on the sidewalk a block away from the parking lot. They looked relaxed like they were waiting for some smoothies they ordered to go drink on the beach instead of waiting to ruin a girl’s life. I could see it when I was still twenty feet away. Mandy dangled the book from one hand, like a dog bone that she expected would make me run to her faster. I thought about turning around or crossing the street, but why delay the inevitable? I kept walking.
“Hi, Celia,” chirped Sandy when I was within taunting distance. “We’ve got a present for you.”
“Everyone at school helped make it,” added Mandy.
They both looked so pretty standing there, their long, thin legs stretching out from under their skirts and reaching down to their flip-flops. They wore their hair in ponytails that hung down their backs like velvet ropes. It was a warm day, almost the end of the school year. I wondered why it wasn’t enough for them to be pretty and popular. Why did they have to do this to me?
I walked up and stood in front of them, a criminal before a judge. I knew the verdict already.
“Since you wouldn’t take our word for it,” said Sandy, “we decided to ask everyone at school what they thought you needed to change about yourself.”
“This way you can know what everyone is really thinking about you,” said Mandy conspiratorially as if she were offering me the answers to a math test.
I had come too far to bother breaking now. “Screw you,” I said with a blank look on my face. I didn’t offer them any emotion.
“You wish, lesbo,” said Mandy as she tipped the book out of her hands letting it thud on the pavement in front of me. She and Sandy pushed me out of the way and walked past me down the sidewalk.
“Some people refuse to be helped,” Sandy sighed as they stalked off, their flip-flops beating against the bottoms of their feet like the drums of war.
I had no choice but to pick up the book. I couldn’t leave it there for someone else to find. At least if I took the book, I could go burn it or toss it in a Dumpster or use my parents’ paper shredder on it. I picked it up delicately between my thumb and forefinger, stuffed it into my backpack, and glanced behind me. Sandy and Mandy had turned to watch me, and they were laughing.
When I got home, I sat in my room alone. My mom had already left for the swing shift, and my dad wasn’t home from work yet. They seemed to be avoiding each other as much as possible, with one showing up only after the other one left. I took the notebook out of my backpack and placed it on my desk. It just sat there looking back at me.
I told myself it was a terrible idea to open it, that whatever was written on the pages would only hurt me. But I knew what Mandy and Sandy knew when they gave it to me: I couldn’t resist. I had to find out what was inside.
The first page of the book was the same note Mandy and Sandy handed to me, with Things Celia Needs to Change and the list of five things. It was glued onto the lined paper.
The new entries started on the next page. They were all written in different handwriting and pen colors like signatures in a yearbook. They were all anonymous.
Try to make friends who aren’t fundamentalists.
Celia needs to shave her legs before wearing shorts. Gross!
She should wear clothes that fit her. Her jeans are two inches too short, and she’s wearing the same T-shirts she wore in sixth grade.
One word . . . posture.
Learn to cross your legs when you sit down.
Try growing some boobs.
[The next person drew an arrow to the comment above and wrote “jerk.”]
Celia just needs to try and fit in.
She should learn to play sports like other ugly girls.
It’s hopeless. If I was Celia, I would probably just kill myself.
I closed the book and thought about the story we had read in English earlier that year, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe, where a family’s house gets a crack in it, and the crack keeps getting wider until the house falls down. That’s what I had inside of me, a crack. I could feel myself coming apart.
My dad got home around six o’clock that night and immediately started packing boxes in his office. He asked me to help him, but I refused to come out of my room. That weekend, I barely spent any time with my parents. I was reading The Giver by Lois Lowry and trying hard to pretend I had another life. They each made attempts to come and talk to me, but I had sewn my mouth up tight, and the seam wouldn’t rip that easily.
On Monday morning, I played stomachache. On Tuesday, it was a migraine. By Wednesday, Mom said, “Fine. If you aren’t going to school, you’re going to the doctor,” and I relented and went back to Hershey Middle.
That’s when I started learning how to be Dark. I glowered at teachers and classmates and wouldn’t raise my hand in class. When people laughed at me or whispered about the Book, I pretended I didn’t hear them. I pulled my hood up whenever possible and wore my hair down around my face.
The only teacher who seemed to notice was Ms. Green. “Could you stay after class please, Celia?” she asked a week after I got the notebook. She waited until everyone had cleared out and then sat down at a student desk next to mine. “You haven’t been participating in class like you used to. You’ve seemed a little sad or something, so I gave a call home yesterday. Your mom told me about the separation. Atlanta’s a long way away, huh?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I said, not actually knowing how far away it was.
“I wanted to give you this.” She stood up and got a package from her desk wrapped in brown paper and handed it to me. “I was trying to think of something that might help.” I opened it and found a blue journal with blank, creamy pages and the word Poetry written in bold letters on the spine. “Creative writing can be a great way to work through your sadness,” she said, resting her hand gently on my arm. “You can get out what’s inside of you.”
I tried several times over the next two weeks to write a poem. I took the journal with me to lunch and the library. Sometimes I sat in front of it, thinking how clean and lovely the pages were. None of my ideas seemed important enough to vandalize them. Other times, I would think of a phrase or line, but then it would seem stupid, or cliché, something I’d heard a hundred times before. What if I tried to put my feelings on the page and they were pathetic? That would feel worse than being sad. Ms. Green must have been wrong about me.
Finally, in mid June, eighth grade ended, and I hoped I would be able to breathe again. Then, in mid July, my dad left for Atlanta. During the month in between, I tried ignoring my parents, yelling at them, asking politely, and finally begging. I begged that we would all move to Atlanta together. When that didn’t work, I begged that I be allowed to go with my dad. They were unrelenting. My mom insisted on staying in Hershey, and she insisted that I stay with her. Through it all, I never cried, even when the car came to take him
to the airport and he hugged me and said, “Turtle, I’m leaving Hershey, but I’m not leaving you. I’ve got a great job down there, and I’m going to make things better for us. I love you.”
Even one tear might crumble the new cement that was hardening between me and the world. I just said, “Bye.”
Summer never came that year. I’m sure it got hot like it always does in Pennsylvania, but in my memory, June and July were cold. I spent a lot of time staring at the Book that my classmates made. I didn’t open it again, but the words written in it bounced around my head like an echo through a canyon. Especially the phrase, “I would just kill myself.” Everywhere I went, that phrase followed me. It started to sound like a viable alternative to everything. Like, “I could take a shower, or I could just kill myself,” or “I could go make breakfast, or I could just kill myself.” The crack that had formed inside of me widened. The color drained out of everything. I stopped going outside, I stopped going to the library. I stopped emailing Dorathea. Then I stopped reading.
My mom noticed, but she would just say things like, “I know, June Bug, it’s hard for me having your dad gone, too, but it is necessary. Things will get better.” She started seeing a therapist and reading self-help books.
Then, on July 20, the day before my fourteenth birthday, I finally gave up. My childhood was over. My dad had moved, middle school was done with, and everyone hated me. High school would just be more of the same. I decided the book was right. I decided I should probably kill myself.
It was a Tuesday, and my mom was working a double shift, morning and swing. I spent the day thinking about how I would do it. People used sleeping pills I had heard, so that seemed like an option. But we didn’t have any in the house. We had no garage, so I couldn’t go for carbon monoxide poisoning, and my mom’s car wasn’t there anyway. We didn’t own a gun, and the thought of hanging terrified me. I decided I would do it with a razor blade in the tub.
I started by collecting everything I would need into the bathroom. The only candles I could find were the little ones you put on a birthday cake, so I stuffed them down into the soil of an aloe plant. I found a new razor blade in my mom’s shaving kit and some bubble bath under the sink. I got the clock radio from my room and put it in the bathroom so I could play music. I thought something classical would be nice.
I put on a bathrobe and left my clothes in my bedroom. I didn’t exactly feel sad or excited, I felt relieved. I was relieved that I wasn’t going to have to face anything anymore, relieved that I would never have to go back to school, relieved that I wouldn’t have to watch my family break apart. I started the water in the tub and put in the bubble bath. I wanted everything to be clean.
Sitting on the edge of the tub and staring into it, something struck me. It had to do with the way the light was hitting the razor blade. It wasn’t a conscious thought; it was more of a feeling coming to me in words. I couldn’t shake a phrase out of my head, “The razor reflected the sky like a mirror.”
I figured I might as well go write it down. After all, I wouldn’t have another chance. In my room, I looked for paper and then remembered the poetry journal from Ms. Green. I had to search through my bookshelf and desk, but I finally found it stashed in the bottom drawer, still blank. I opened the cover and wrote the first stanza of my first poem.
When I felt good about the lines, I went back to check on my bathwater. I had spent so much time finding the journal and writing in it, the water was lukewarm. Something struck me again. I went back to my room and kept writing. When I finished the poem, I added a title.
THE DAY I ALMOST KILLED MYSELF
It was afternoon and the razor
reflected the sky like a mirror. The bath towels
were white like the bathtub and my wrists
were white like the towels.
The bathwater got lukewarm.
The afternoon turned into late
afternoon and I was still pulling ropes of air
into my lungs like a sailor. The razor reflected
the sunset. The bathwater got cold.
The bath towels were white like the bathtub
and my wrists were white like the towels.
I pulled the plug on the tub and ended up taking a shower. That night, I thought about the title of the book Mandy and Sandy had given me, Things Celia Needs to Change. I decided that there were some things I needed to change before high school. I also decided that I would be the one to decide what those things were going to be.
The next day I woke up, turned fourteen, and became Dark.
Celia the Dark.
CHAPTER
31
Drake sat there with his hands folded together in a prayer position, and his pointer fingers pressed against his lips. He didn’t say anything for a minute.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked gently without moving his fingers from his lips.
“I was worried that you wouldn’t like me if you knew how much of an outcast I was.”
“But I already knew about the Book,” said Drake.
“What?”
“Sandy told me about it in Spanish class during conversación the second week of school, but didn’t admit that she was behind it. Actually, she acted like she felt sorry for you because you didn’t have any friends. She had seen us hanging out and wanted to warn me that befriending you would be social death for me at Hershey,” said Drake, rolling his eyes dramatically.
“But you never asked me about it.”
“I figured that you would tell me when you were ready, and I kept waiting. I was surprised that it took you this long to trust me.”
I had kept a terrible secret from my best friend, and it turned out he had known it all along. “I wouldn’t have guessed about the other part,” said Drake. “The . . . bathtub.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at the polished wood of the bench. It was so hard letting him know I had considered doing something terrible to myself. The black hole was open in my chest, but it wasn’t getting any wider. I felt like Drake could see it now, too.
We met each other’s eyes. His were brown and tender, like a picnic on a warm day. I was looking at him when something over his left shoulder caught my eye. A woman was walking toward us.
And she wasn’t just walking, she was also waving. She became more visible with each step, the way a Polaroid picture develops while you are looking at it. I had never seen the woman before, but she was definitely moving in our direction. She was elegantly dressed in brown pants, a black coat, and high heels. She had a mass of long, dark hair framing her face and falling over her shoulders. She was pulling a suitcase behind her like it was a reluctant dog.
I twisted around to look over my shoulder, thinking that she must have been waving at someone else sitting nearby. Drake turned to see what had my interest, and in an astonished voice, he said, “Mom?”
Drake stood up off the bench and swung around toward the lady. Busted! We were caught and we hadn’t even made it out of Pennsylvania. How did she find out? I had never met Drake’s mom, but knowing parents, I braced for yelling.
She took a few more quick steps and released her bag. “Hi, honey,” she said, grabbing Drake and putting her arms around him while he hung limp as a cotton doll. “Are you okay? Does it hurt? Let me see your eye.” She put her hand around his chin to get a look at Drake’s bruise. “Probably a week to heal; I was afraid it would be worse.” She turned away from us. “David.” She motioned toward a man in a pair of jeans and button-down shirt who was holding a large, leather bag in one hand. “Over here.”
“I told your grandmother we would get a rental car.” She turned back to us and then reached out her arms to hug me. “This must be Celia. I’m happy to meet you. Shouldn’t you be in school today? Where is your grandmother, Drake?” Drake’s mom looked right and left at the other commuters as the man in the button-down shirt walked over to us.
“Hey, kid,” he said to Drake warmly, wrapping him in a hug. “Sorry to get you out o
f bed so early. We told Mom not to come pick us up, so you guys could sleep in.” Again, Drake was stiff, not hugging the man back. “Celia, I’m guessing. Hello,” he said cordially, extending a hand to shake mine, “I’m Drake’s dad.”
Neither Drake nor I said a word. We were like two rabbits in the grass with a snake moving nearby. Frozen.
“Honey, is Gran waiting in the car?” Drake’s mother asked him, starting to sound concerned. Then, she looked at him more closely and said, “What’s wrong?”
I saw the realization pass over Drake’s face at the same time it occurred to me. They didn’t know they were catching us. “You were supposed to come in at ten.” Drake sounded like a person waking up from a faint.
His dad said, “All the other trains were sold out until this evening, and we needed to get here early enough to meet with your principal. Gran must have told you that.”
“Where is your grandmother?” Drake’s mom asked again, more forcefully.
“I have to be in New York this weekend,” said Drake quietly, as if he was talking to himself.
“What are you talking about?” his dad asked calmly. “We told you we were coming here instead.”
“I’m still going, with or without you.” Drake started to seem mildly hysterical. He took a few steps away from them.
The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door Page 16