Skipping School

by Jessie Haas

  Greg was still limping, so Phillip kept the little limp in his own walk. This was a civilized country school. Even being this provocative, he knew he wouldn’t get knifed in the showers.

  Later, with a carton of milk in his coat pocket, he walked openly past Mr. Pilewski, joining the flow of legitimate early leavers.

  Good game, Johnson.… He felt great. A spring in his step and a chicken sandwich in his pocket; a destination; an enemy. You are defined when you have an enemy. Making one is taking a step in the world and can feel as good as making a friend.

  He remembered Chuck (“No Relation”) Johnson, more clearly than he remembered Rob or Billy Kennett, his best friends. Chuck missed him. In one of Rob’s letters—to which he had not replied—he’d learned that Chuck still asked about him. “So how’s that little jerk Phillip these days? Anybody stepped on his face yet?”

  He hadn’t written Rob simply because he had nothing to say. His old self had melted away like a snowflake on a hot truck hood. Now he thought of telling Rob about the soccer game. So many words, one after another … so different than if Rob had seen it. But maybe he’d do it anyway. “Tell Chuck that somebody has tried it. He says he’ll try again when he gets the cast off!”

  The kittens were in the bike basket, totally abandoned to sleep. When he spoke, they stretched and purred, slitted their eyes, and blinked at him warmly.

  “Hey, guys! What if I was a fox?” He picked them up, still limp with sleep, cuddled them a minute, then gave them milk and food. The food dish was empty again, and he wondered if they were getting it all or having help from the local wildlife. They seemed fat, though.

  He went outside and sat on the front step. The sky was brilliant blue today. Far up in the heavens the black locust branches traced scraggly lines, like trees in a Chinese drawing. Phillip saw a crow flap across the sky, and he saw it turn its head in flight to look at something to the east, without changing direction. He had never seen that before.

  He took the sandwich out of his pocket and slowly began to eat it.

  “Mew!” Suddenly one kitten was climbing his back, and the other was halfway up his chest, both going for the chicken sandwich. Hastily Phillip raised it above his head. The kitten on his back climbed onto his head, reaching up his arm. The other one looked around frantically, spotted the second half of sandwich on his lap, and rappelled down the front of his jacket toward it.

  “Hey!” He snatched the second half aloft. “How’m I s’posed to eat?”

  “Mew! Mew!” Desperate round kitten eyes coming toward his face, as the front kitten climbed his jacket again. He snatched a bite of sandwich. While he chewed, the kitten’s whiskers tickled his lips, bobbing along as it searched for an opening.

  Phillip took most of the chicken out of one half of the sandwich and gave it to them.

  “Call you two Bonnie and Clyde!” he said. “Or Frank and Jessie!”

  He got back to school a little early and sat on the curb, hidden by a car hood, and watched the buses come in. When the school doors opened and people began to pour out, he got up and joined them.

  Kris was looking out over the heads. She seemed to know just where to watch for him today, stared hard for a moment, and then looked away. It was like the beam of a searchlight, turned on and suddenly off.

  He edged into line beside her. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” Her voice was light and perfectly neutral. Now what? Phillip wondered. All of a sudden it was no problem? That didn’t make sense. Kris didn’t let go of things like that.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I ate my apple today.”

  What is she up to? Phillip wondered. She was almost smiling, and she hadn’t smiled at him in days, now.

  He slumped in the seat, feeling the hunger in his middle that half a chicken sandwich had only teased. The hunger was as good as a meal, reminding him of barbecues he had eaten, huge platters of spaghetti and meatballs. He laced his hands across the hollow spot beneath his ribs, feeling good as a very hungry wolf might feel.

  “Greg was still limping this afternoon,” Kris said. “I heard you ran into him.”

  “And stubbed my toe,” said Phillip.

  “Hurt yourself?”

  “Not much. It was worth it.”

  He heard a very faint snort of laughter. Her face was turned so he couldn’t quite see her expression.

  He unlaced his fingers, with difficulty because the knuckles were swollen with cold and wanted to stick against one another, reached over, and took one of her hands out of her lap. It was astonishingly warm. He curled his fingers into the palm.

  They’d never held hands before. At their most intimate they knocked shoulders, walking, or she leaned over him as they read something together. This had better not become a habit, Phillip thought. The hunger blazing through him made everything more keen, and just holding her passive hand had his heart pounding.

  “Phillip … are you okay?”

  He burst out laughing, loud enough to make the bus driver glance up into his mirror. “Yeah,” he said. “Do you have a stick of gum, even?”

  “No. No, I mean, in general?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m okay.” On the soccer field, at the house beside the stream, sometimes even on the bus, he was okay.

  At the clinic he was okay, too. Mrs. Farley’s cat was gone, and all the kittens, except maybe his own two, had good homes. A note from Dr. Franklin said, “Leukemia tests negative.” There were no greyhounds to kill and hardly any cages to clean. Dr. Rossi was in a sparkling mood, joking and laughing with everyone. It was one of those times when being a vet seemed like the most fun in the world. Phillip thought uneasily, at moments like this, about his grade point average.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tuesday Kris wasn’t in school, and Phillip was glad. He’d awakened with that sinking, hollow feeling of having made a big mistake quite recently, and it wasn’t skipping school, it wasn’t kicking Greg, and he couldn’t remember any serious omission at the clinic. That left Kris, and his stomach lurched distinctly at the thought of her. Whoa! Go slow, Johnson!

  But the debate team had a statewide meet today. They had left very early in the morning, and since there was no one to watch him at all, Mr. Pilewski’s supervision beginning in the front hall, Phillip walked around the bus straight across the parking lot and vanished for the day.

  It was so easy. Having no friends simplified life enormously.

  He spent a pleasant, leisurely, even slightly boring day alone: cut some wood, played with the kittens, took a nap in the sunshine. Then he walked out to the road and hitchhiked to work. It felt dangerous to do it that way, not going back to school at all. It felt like one step too far. Phillip was in a mood to like that feeling.

  A lady in a new Volvo picked him up. She had short, elaborately cut hair that looked stiff to the touch, expensive clothes, and bloodred fingernails. But she was nice, asked about his job, and then wondered, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “I don’t have classes in the afternoon,” said Phillip. He felt high and loose, like a kite with a broken string. “I’m a teen entrepreneur,” he said. “I’m saving money to invest in my own carpet-cleaning business.”

  “You’re a teen bullshitter,” said the woman, taking a pack of cigarettes from her trench coat pocket. She shook one out and lit up without ever looking from the road. “Want one?”

  “No.” He watched her puff. “My father’s dying from that.”

  “Emphysema?”

  “Kind of.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  They were silent for a few moments. Then she said, “You’re a good kid, you know? Most kids would have started the why-don’t-you-quit bit.”

  “I figured I made the point,” Phillip said.

  She gave a bark of laughter, coughed, and threw the cigarette out the window. Phillip felt an inner glow, a smugness that he was afraid spread all over his face. “Wise-ass!” the woman said.

  He arrived at the clinic exactly on time, to
find things in an uproar. There had been greyhounds. Sharon had had to help with them, and just before office hours she walked into Dr. Rossi’s office with red eyes and blotched makeup and gave notice. “I just can’t take it anymore.”

  “Well, what about me?” cried Dr. Rossi.

  “It’s your job!”

  “It’s your job, too!”

  “Not if I quit,” said Sharon, and marched back out to the desk.

  There was no time for more talk. The first patient had arrived, a huge cat, brought in to have his claws clipped. Phillip was holding him when the cat suddenly jerked out of his grip and slashed a bleeding line across Dr. Rossi’s arm.

  “Please hold him, Phillip,” was all she said.

  “Oh, don’t hurt him!” cried the owner as Phillip almost lay on the enormous, cursing cat.

  “You could do this yourself, you know,” Dr. Rossi suggested, pausing to wipe a trickle of blood from her arm with a bit of gauze.

  “Oh, no! He’d never forgive me. He’s very sensitive, aren’t you, Boss?”

  Boss, though mostly squashed, managed to project a hind foot from somewhere and rake it across Phillip’s stomach. A ripping sound accompanied, not all cloth. Phillip flinched, Boss writhed, all claws at full extension, and Phillip fell on him again. Dr. R., I hope you see what I’m suffering for your sake! When he straightened up afterward, there was a six-inch rip in his shirt and a long scratch across his stomach. Dr. Rossi was sympathetic, but not to the point of dressing the wound with her own hands. She gave him a bottle of disinfectant and headed him toward the bathroom.

  Soon after that Dr. Franklin blew in, in a high state of irritation with every single one of his fellow beings. The news that Sharon was quitting sent him promptly to her desk, where he tried to conduct a whispered argument in front of everyone in the waiting room. Sharon burst into tears. Dr. Franklin retired to the storeroom to curse. Later he darted across the road to the supermarket, and at five o’clock, when the last customer had been shunted out the door, he popped out of the office to present Sharon with a bouquet of flowers, still wrapped in the original cellophane. She burst into tears again, and she and Dr. Rossi berated him on his attitude toward women. This ended with Dr. Franklin’s loudly stated intention to go the bar in the motel next door and drink himself senseless. Sharon instantly said she would join him, unless he thought that women shouldn’t be seen in bars. They swept out the door, and Dr. Rossi donned her stylish coat with the wide, wide shoulders and looked severely at Phillip.

  “You stayed late eavesdropping,” she said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  As Phillip put on his jacket, he smelled again the Volvo lady’s cigarette smoke. But in Dr. Rossi’s little red car there was only the spicy scent of her perfume. Daringly, Phillip directed her to his house by the longest possible route. It was the most he could do. He could have ridden beside her, not speaking, for miles.

  He walked into the kitchen and closed the door, and it was like a lid coming down. It shocked him how hot the house was, the smells of cooking all closed in—good smells, but too much—and how his mother prepared a plate and trotted it around the corner to his father, the tray clacked, murmur of TV. She scolded him, he ate a little.… From the moment he walked in, Phillip’s free, expanded feeling began to narrow, and pressure built in him. How could it all be so unchanged?

  “What did you do today?” he asked his mother.

  “Oh, dubbed around as usual.”

  A few minutes later she asked, “How was school?”

  “Huh? Oh. Fine. Where’s Thea?”

  It was then that he began to think of Kris again. She wouldn’t be back till late. She was probably on the bus now, probably sitting with Handsome Dan Morgan.…

  The TV was turned up so all could participate in the family activity. Phillip sat on the couch next to the duck pillows and hated Dan Morgan. He hated Kris, too, and Alice Knapp, and all the debate team—bused so far away, just to talk all day. Talk about anything—be assigned an opinion and defend it.

  He’d be lousy at that. He defended himself with silence.

  So he’d lose. At least he wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t have his day of freedom, the wildness at the clinic, Dr. Rossi’s perfume, all smothered to death inside him.

  “Going for a walk,” he said, and went to Kris’s house, which looked like every other house on the street, gazed at her dark, blank window, and tried to breathe freely. But something pinched in the middle of his chest and stopped the breath. Clouds muffled the moon, and a raw breeze sprang up. Phillip went home again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When he got on the bus the next morning, someone else was sitting with Kris.

  Phillip hesitated in the aisle. There was not a single empty seat.

  “Oh, here,” said Kris offhandedly, patting the seat in front of her. The person sitting there was Dan Morgan; he was turned around, talking with Kris and Alice Knapp.

  Phillip sat down beside him and tried to understand the conversation. The rules of debating were unfamiliar. At last he had to ask, “Did you win?”

  Dan Morgan turned his head, faintly incredulous. “Of course, we won!”

  In homeroom Heidi Holler took Dan Morgan’s place, and the debate postmortem continued. Phillip took refuge in a book. Out the corner of his eye he watched Kris, and to his great shock he found himself thinking how beautiful she was.

  No way! he thought. He’d first been attracted to her by moonlight, and in the light of day she had become a friend. He didn’t think about what she looked like anymore, except to register alarm. She was too tall, too straight, like a young Viking. Not beautiful.

  Yet he couldn’t stop looking. She was lit up today, keen and excited. Even in the company of debaters, hers was the voice that cut through nonsense, that capped a sequence and got a laugh. She was brilliant, and proud, and yes, damn it, beautiful.

  It would be nice if she spoke to him once in awhile.

  He tried to work himself up to a state of indignation—tossed aside like a dirty sock!—but unfortunately it seemed only too natural. The debate team was a unit now, with things to talk about and victory to share. Phillip was what he’d always been, an outsider.

  After gym he walked toward the front door as usual, passing Mr. Pilewski. A moment later he heard his name spoken: “Phillip. Do you have a reason for leaving school early?”

  Phillip had actually forgotten that anyone had the right to stop him. He paused, eyes on the girl walking out ahead of him. A senior with no afternoon classes, she was assistant manager of a pizza joint. Her picture had been in the paper, in an article about high schoolers in the workplace. How can you fault these nice, straight kids for going out and making money? the paper had wondered. But when do they find time to study?

  “Work,” he said, slowly turning to face Mr. Pilewski. The man was a former football star, able to lift a fighting kid in each hand if necessary.

  “Where do you work?”

  “The veterinary clinic. Opposite the mall—”

  “Oh, Madeline Rossi! She’s great, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, get a note from her, will you, that you’re working there afternoons? Just to put everything in shape?”

  “Sure,” said Phillip, putting an innocent puzzlement into his voice. He saw how that made Mr. Pilewski momentarily doubt himself, waved, and walked out the door and openly up the road.

  Going by the road meant going the long way—long enough for triumph to evaporate. Phillip began to feel cheap. He never used to lie much. He remembered once wanting to, when a youthful experiment with a tractor had disastrous consequences. He remembered his father’s direct look and heavy cuff and a lecture that made him realize exactly what a jerk he’d been. And then it was over.

  Fixing the tractor had been fun actually. They’d worked late into the night, his mother bringing out coffee and sandwiches at ten, barn cats twining around, forgiveness and talk starting to come from his father as they grew mo
re certain of making the repair. He remembered walking back to the house with his father, the stink of pig manure on the warm night air, and cutting it, a sharp curl of cigarette smoke, his father’s hand on his shoulder.

  Since he wasn’t biking, he left the road early and skirted the edge of the cornfield. The mountain rose on his right, a dark bulk in the corner of his eye. To his left, the farm buildings receded into small bright paint spots across the expanse of brown earth and blond stubble. It took a long time to go around the field, and Phillip felt worse with every step.

  Who would have dreamed, when his father stepped into the dark outside the barn that night and lit a cigarette, half his face reddened by the match flame, that the little curl of smoke above his head would change everything so soon?

  Not just the cigarette. The hog smell, too, had done it. The gases from the manure pit below the hogs … It was against nature for animals to live that way, and it worked against nature, as if taking revenge.

  Phillip toiled up the road to the gray house, clumped heavily down to the door, and pushed it open. No kittens. Dishes empty. He put down food, got water from the brook, and sat on the front step.

  After a moment he heard cat food being crunched.

  Wind picked up the locust leaves and whirled them around. Phillip’s stomach whirled, too. He bent over, trying to squeeze it into stillness. He heard the wind and the cold, rushing sound of the brook, and they pained him like the memory of something lost.

  Prrt! A kitten climbed the hunched back of his jacket. It stopped around his shoulder blades, and he felt by the small rocking motions that it washed its face and paws.

  Rock, rock. The little thing weighed at most two pounds, yet Phillip felt how it moved his whole body. There was a secondary motion, smaller, quicker, and more regular, that after awhile he came to realize was his own heartbeat. Rock-rock-rock, his butt cold as ice on the cold stone step …