The Art of Escaping

by Erin Callahan

  At least my outfit wouldn’t make me a target. I had on jeans, clean white socks, a red t-shirt with no graphics or slogans, and a generic black hoodie. It’s not that I wanted to dress like a nondescript extra from a teenage-problem-of-the-week movie, I just couldn’t quite bring myself to wear anything from my collection of vintage dresses to school. The crown jewel of my collection was a blue and white party dress from the ’50s with cap sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. I generally preferred the fashions of the Jazz Age to midcentury-modern, but I didn’t have the cash to buy a dress from that era and refused to settle for a contemporary knockoff. I pictured myself wearing the party dress while trying to dig a fat chemistry textbook out of my locker and almost laughed out loud.

  I took one last serene breath and forced myself back into the hall. I found Liam hunched over his desk, scowling and scribbling on a notepad. He had his closed fist pressed against his forehead, as if he planned to punch himself in the face once his frustration reached its peak.

  “Your chicken scratch looks fascinating. But can I suggest a laptop?”

  “Huh?” He looked up at me but kept his fist against his forehead. “Judas Priest, Mattie, I didn’t even hear you come in,” he said with just a hint of his New Zealand accent. “Well . . . One more grueling year almost over.”

  “Thank fucking god.” I tried to come up with something more insightful, but the word well-rounded was ringing in my ears again.

  He squinted at me. “What happened?”

  “Ms. Simmons sat me down for a chat.”

  Liam leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on his desk. “That woman is exhausting. She smells lovely and is strikingly pretty, but she’s utterly exhausting.”

  I realize most students don’t swear casually in front of their history teachers and most teachers don’t disclose co-worker crushes to their students. But Liam and I have had this dynamic since the day I accosted him about a note he wrote on one of my exams. He claimed my sentimental hero worship of Sacajawea was clouding my critical thinking, and I informed him that he was a joyless misogynist. He laughed and upped my B to an A for “having the ovaries to call a forty-five-year-old man a misogynist to his face.”

  “What did she want?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. She rambled on for, like, ten minutes about liberal arts colleges, extracurriculars, and well-roundedness.”

  “She wants you to pad your resume?”

  “I think that was the general idea.”

  “Hmmm. Can’t you say you’re the sole research assistant for a soon-to-be-famous historian?”

  I snorted. “That’s a well-rounded lie.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I think most colleges are just as impressed with independent interests. You’ve got history . . . what else?”

  I shrugged.

  “Mattie, what do you do when you’re not at school?”

  “Hang out with Stella?”

  “Okay, we can work with that . . . call yourself a devoted sidekick to a vapid overachiever.”

  “Wow. So helpful. And Stella’s not vapid.”

  “Kidding, kidding. What else?”

  “I also collect quirky antiques and vintage clothing, watch Star Trek, listen to old jazz records . . .”

  Liam looked at me with his lips all scrunched into the corner of his mouth.

  “What?”

  “This is off topic, but has it ever occurred to you that all of your interests involve consumption, rather than creation?”

  “Et tu, Liam?” I whined. “You mean I don’t make anything, right? You sound just like my mom.”

  Whenever I told her I was going to spend an evening dusting my jazz records or watching Star Trek with my dad, my mom would say, “When I was in high school, I started a band and we lugged all our equipment fifteen miles through the snow so we could play at some shitty rec center and then lugged it back home again. Uphill both ways.”

  “I really do need to meet your mum one of these days,” Liam said with a dreamy look in his eyes. “She sounds like a positively fascinating woman.”

  “God, Liam. Ew. And I didn’t come in here to talk about my mom.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Well . . .” He steepled his fingers under his scruffy chin and then shrugged. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  I blinked at him. “‘You’ll figure it out?’ That’s all the teacherly advice you have for me?”

  “Mattie, it’s the last day of school. I dispensed the last of my teacherly advice back in December. You need to time your crises better.”

  My phone vibrated in my back pocket, letting me know that I needed to be back in homeroom in two minutes. “That’s my cue. So help me god, Liam, you better come up with something better than ‘have a nice summer.’”

  He narrowed his eyes and tapped a pen against his desk. “Enjoy the solstice?”

  “Ugh.”

  I stalked off to my last homeroom session of the year and found Stella sitting in her unofficially reserved seat. Her already sunny face, framed by two blonde pigtails, brightened a few more lumens when she spotted me. The effect was blinding.

  I met Stella in sixth grade, the year she convinced her on-the-verge-of-divorce parents to stop homeschooling and send her to public school. Dressed in a sweater vest and knee socks, she was practically a swan among the slouchy, publicly educated riffraff. But she was also desperate for someone to guide her through the promised land of semi-normal kid-dom. I somehow talked her into hanging out with me that afternoon, and because she didn’t own a TV, subjected her to a pedantic PowerPoint presentation on all the various Star Trek series. Whereas most eleven-year-old girls would have run home screaming, Stella had just smiled while she sat cross-legged on my bed and said, “Neat. This is fun.” My head had pretty much exploded.

  “We’re almost there,” she said. “I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, Ginger.”

  “Ugh,” I moaned. “I can’t handle nicknames right now. Especially nicknames derived from embarrassing hair-dye-related incidents.”

  Her million-dollar smile dropped to a cartoonish frown, like the blue sad face they use to teach preschoolers about emotions. “What happened?”

  “Am I that much of an open book?” I whined. “I sicken myself. Anyway, Ms. Simmons pulled me out of seventh period.”

  “Oh my god. Ginge—I mean Mattie—please tell me you’re still on track for graduation next year.”

  “Christ, Stella, I’m not even close to risking not graduating. As always, I’m solidly in the middle, where I belong.”

  “So what did she want?”

  “I don’t even know. It was all extracurriculars . . . blah blah blah . . . well-roundedness . . . blah blah blah.”

  Stella opened her mouth to say something but held back.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  Meadow Winters breezed in and took her unofficially reserved seat in front of me. Today, she was sporting what Stella referred to as her “off-duty model hair,” with her glossy locks piled on top of her head, like a delicate nest for a few cartoon songbirds.

  “Hey, Mattie,” she said as she pulled out her phone.

  “Hey, Meadow.”

  “What are you guys up to this summer?”

  “I’m working at Café Italiano and—”

  She took a two-second break from scrolling, scrolling, scrolling to say, “Oh my god, they have ah-mazing gelato.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay.” The tiny state of Rhode Island didn’t have much to offer the world besides hot wieners and rich people with yachts, but at least we had decent gelato. “Stella’s abandoning me for St. Joe’s,” I added.

  Yes, my best friend, the traitorous overachiever, had been accepted to the prestigious summer session at St. Joseph’s Academy, a private high school that opened its hallowed
halls each summer to motivated public high school seniors so they could experience a small taste of college-prep life. Only two other students from our class had been accepted—a guy from Stella’s AP classes who I’d dubbed Marlon Blando because he shouted Stellll-ahhhh literally every goddamn time he saw her, and this fourteen-year-old genius named Frankie who’d skipped two grades and had zero friends.

  “Oh, wow. Congrats, Stella,” Meadow said as she finally looked up from her phone and turned to face us, and by us I mean Stella. “I could never waste a summer going to school, but good for you.”

  Though I agreed St. Joe’s sounded about as much fun as a root canal, Meadow’s backhanded compliment made me cringe. Stella must have seen me grimace because she flashed me a smile that said play nice.

  “I was just telling Mattie that it’s not like regular school,” Stella cheerfully explained to Meadow. “We get to read books the teachers wouldn’t dare cover in public school, and we work on independent projects . . .”

  Stella trailed off as Meadow nodded and waved to Will Kane when he trotted into the classroom with his tousled brown hair and sinewy basketball player limbs. He took the seat next to Meadow and tossed his messenger bag on the desk.

  “What’s shakin’, kids?”

  Even though Will had said “kids,” as in plural, Stella and I both knew he was really talking to Meadow. Will had been dating Meadow’s best friend, Betsy Appleton, since middle school, which, for most people my age, was before the dawn of time. As Will typed out something on his phone with lightning speed, he and Meadow struck up a conversation about an end of the year party at some rich kid’s beach house and ignored Stella and me.

  Okay, here’s where TV always gets it wrong. Meadow didn’t need to flip her hair and sneer at me or sprinkle me with epithets or shove me into a locker to let me know that me and my BFF didn’t matter to her, and that we didn’t matter to anyone who matters. The dismissive little nod she gave Stella the second Will plopped down at his desk said it all, loud and clear. You might even say this was worse, because this was nothing. Insults and epithets would at least be something. But this was all Meadow thought Stella and I deserved from her.

  I’d become generally impervious to that kind of shit. Sometimes, though, I could see it wearing on Stella, grinding her down ever so slightly. I didn’t think it would ever break her, but six years of it had dulled her shine. And that made me want to stick a big, wet wad of gum in Meadow’s off-duty model hair. Maybe I expected more from Meadow because we shared pre-high school history. Will had grown up in Grayton, the town over from Tivergreene, and I doubted he even knew my name.

  I took a deep breath and shoved my notebook into my backpack. Deep down I knew semi-invisibles like Stella and me had a better chance of escaping Cianci Regional unscathed and becoming reasonably well-adjusted adults. High school traumatized some people, and spoiled others, like Meadow and Will. They got fat and lazy off an endless supply of sycophants and self-esteem boosters, and never learned the subtle art of not giving a shit.

  Stella heaved a dreary little sigh, bringing another grimace to my face. I’d expected the last hours of my junior year to be a breeze at best and a tolerable bore at worst. But Ms. Simmons’s command to sand down all my sharp edges plus Liam’s completely unhelpful burnout multiplied by Meadow and Will had ruined it and left my palms sweaty, my chest full of sharp little icicles, and my stupid ears all ringy.

  And the worst was still to come. The Stella-less summer heading my way would drive me from the comforts of my jazz records and knickknacks and vintage dresses and into the dining room of a resentful stranger who insisted on calling me “Girl Scout.”

  The magician stared at me from across the counter of his magic shop in Shinjuku. “Assistant?” He scratched his balding head with his stubby sausage fingers. I wondered how he pulled off sleight-of-hand tricks with those monstrosities. “You’re too young. Just a school girl.”

  I tugged at the sailor collar of my uniform and cursed the fact that I’d taken the metro straight from school. “I’m old enough,” I croaked as I wiped a bead of sweat from my brow. “And I live with my family so you don’t even have to pay me.” I resisted scratching an itch below my nose and watched him squint at me. “I just want to get my feet wet. Soaking, in fact. I want to be knee deep in escapology.”

  – Akiko Miyake, Tokyo, January 24, 1974

  Mattie and the All-Purpose Key

  I’m not ashamed to admit that I’d never mowed a lawn before. Despite my mother’s feminist leanings, our house followed a fairly traditional chore division. Besides, my dad loved mowing the lawn and then sitting on the back porch with a beer or a glass of expensive scotch to admire his work.

  But now, my budding career as an escapologist hinged on my promise to mow Miyu’s neglected lawn and her promise to at least consider training me. That was the best I could get out of her after she’d bristled at my offer to repaint the front door or power-wash the stone walkway.

  “All these things,” she’d explained, “send a clear message of keep away. But the lawn has been a point of contention between me and the neighbors. If shorter grass means I don’t have to hear them bitch for a few weeks every time I go out to the mailbox, I might be open to it.”

  After my early shift at Café Italiano, I flew over to Miyu’s in Stella’s Bug and pulled the dusty push mower out of the garage. The home’s expansive lawn seemed endless, but within a couple hours I’d managed to take most of it down, right up to the edges of a swampy swimming pool. It didn’t look nearly as perfect as my dad’s lawn, and my mowing lines curved and wobbled. I hoped Miyu wouldn’t mind as long as the lawn looked like a lawn instead of a prairie.

  Exhausted and drenched in sweat, I shuffled across the porch. Miyu opened the door before I even had a chance to ring the bell.

  “Dining room,” she barked.

  I nodded and followed her. An epic spread of padlocks and boxes of all sizes covered the dining room table.

  “We’ll start small with one of the essentials.”

  “Lock picking,” I said.

  “Pick up the Westin four pin,” she commanded.

  I scanned the table for brand names, but saw only a few. None of them were Westin.

  Miyu sighed and picked up an imposing hunk of stainless steel that looked like it weighed at least two pounds. She pulled a bobby pin from her pocket and handed it to me. “This is your all-purpose key. Keep it on you at all times. Now have a seat.”

  I sat in the same stiff chair I’d sat in during our awkward tea party. She passed me the lock, and I immediately shoved the bobby pin inside and began poking around.

  “I don’t care what you’ve seen on TV, Girl Scout. That is never going to work.”

  “I just have to press the right pins, right?” I shoved the bobby pin further into the lock but succeeded only in producing some clicking and scraping noises.

  Miyu snatched the Westin four-pin out of my hand and pulled a bobby pin from her own dark hair. She pried the pin apart, straightening the bend, and then snapped it in half. “When picking a lock, you will almost always need two tools—a pick and a torsion wrench. And if you hear anyone refer to it as a tension wrench, you should slap them straight across the face.”

  “Noted.”

  With her newly-made pick and torsion wrench, Miyu defeated the Westin four-pin in under six seconds.

  “Awesome,” I whispered. “You must’ve done that with your mom a million times, right? How fast could she do it? Did she pick locks just for fun? Or did she never carry keys so she could always get practice in?”

  “No questions,” she snapped.

  I gulped. “Sorry.”

  Miyu explained the basics of lock picking and, after handing back the re-locked Westin four-pin, stared at me with crossed arms. Without a hint of humor, she said, “You will not leave until you’ve picked every single lock on this table.
”

  I tried to hide my laughter but failed. “Wow. I get that you’re trying to pull off the whole hard-as-nails mentor with a well-hidden heart of gold thing, but I have a family. And a summer job. If I don’t show up at home or at work, someone will call the police. And I know you’re not a fan of cops.”

  “Fine, I’ll rephrase.” Her lips curled into an unnerving smile. “If this truly is important to you, you will figure out a way to stay here until you’ve picked every lock.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, when you put it that way.”

  With occasional impatient instruction from Miyu, it took me almost an hour to pick the Westin four-pin. The sun was already beginning to set, so I texted my mom to let her know I was watching a movie marathon at Meadow Winters’s house and wouldn’t be home until late.

  This, of course, was the first of many lies.

  By 10:30 p.m., I’d cracked less than a quarter of the locks on the table. Blisters were rearing their ugly heads on my fingertips, and I had to pee.

  “I need a bathroom break,” I said to Miyu. “And I’m starving.” With the exception of the two minutes it took her to retrieve a paperback from the living room, she hadn’t left the table and had continued to give me exasperated pointers throughout the night.

  “I will be very displeased if you relieve your bladder or bowels on that chair,” she said. “Bathroom is down the hall to the left. And I’ll throw a frozen pizza in the oven.”

  Feeling minimally refreshed after peeing and scarfing two slices of cardboard parading as pizza, I returned to the table. The night became a blur of locks and pins, picks and torsion wrenches. Sometime around midnight, I tackled the last piece on the table—a locked jewelry box with gold inlay. My fingers ached, and my brain was running on autopilot, but after some frustrated and sleepy picking, the box popped open with a satisfying click.