by Jonah Black
I said yes, but I was thinking that this was like one of those car wrecks where everything goes in slow motion.
“Well, I’m afraid that the situation that made it necessary for you to leave Masthead Academy had to be taken into consideration. You did not complete the year in good standing. As a result of the . . . situation.”
“The situation?” All I could do was sit there repeating the last thing she’d said.
“Yes. I’m sorry. If you had finished the year with distinction at Masthead, we might have considered matriculating you into the senior class. But our policies are quite clear on this. We can’t set a precedent, Jonah. It wouldn’t be fair to our other students who have been working with focus.”
“Working with focus?” She used all these weird phrases that only high school assistant principals know.
“On their studies. And on their languages in particular. According to your Masthead transcript, you received a D in German last term. That alone was enough to jeopardize your status. But after the—”
“The situation,” I said, like a robot.
“Yes. I’m afraid it’s out of the question. “
“But I can’t be a junior again,” I said. “It’s not fair!”
Mrs. Perella stood up. “I’m sorry you didn’t find out earlier. But I’m sure you will like Miss von Esse’s class. She’s very popular.”
I just sat there staring up at her. I really didn’t believe it was true. It couldn’t be.
Mrs. Perella sat back down and took a sip of her coffee. “I understand it’s been arranged for you to start therapy, Jonah,” she said.
I nodded mutely. The jerks at Masthead had suggested to my mom that I see a shrink, and of course Mom thought it was a wonderful idea. My first appointment is tomorrow.
“I hope it helps,” Mrs. Perella said. She sipped her coffee again. “Make a nice day, Jonah.”
I wanted to hit her. “Make a nice day,” I said.
I waited one more second and then this funny look creeps over her face and there’s just enough time for her to realize what I’ve done before the poison I’ve slipped into the coffee begins to work.
“Jonah,” she says, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I know you are,” I say, and she starts to turn blue. “That’s extract of Eucalypto. Undetectable. But its effects are powerful.”
“Excuse me,” she yawns, resting her head on her desk.
“As I’m sure you’re aware,” I say, “being an educated woman, extract of Eucalypto makes you feel very sleepy. So sleepy you lose control of your faculties.”
“Night, night,” grunts Mrs. Perella. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Wow,” I say. “You’re drooling. Gross.”
I left her office and Mrs. Otto watched me leave and I heard her thinking, Dead man walking, and the guards take me by the arms and we walk down a long corridor toward the gas chamber and Thorne and Posie and Luna Hayes and Rosemary Mahoney are all standing there crying. Sophie is on the phone with the governor but she hangs up and shakes her head sadly. I’m brave, I don’t cry, I just sit down in the chair they’ve prepared for me and I say to all my friends, “It’s all right. Don’t be sad.”
I walked up the stairs to the fifth floor and stood in front of the door marked MISS VON ESSE. I could hear the teacher talking to the eleventh graders, and her voice sounded nice. I tried to imagine myself going in and sitting down and everyone staring at me and smirking, but I couldn’t do it. So I came down here to the cafeteria and sat down at an empty table and now I’m writing this and I don’t know what to
(Still in the cafeteria, but I better make this fast.)
Just as I was writing that, this amazing girl with waist-length golden blond hair walked into the cafeteria. Her hair was wet and she was wearing rubber flip-flops and a short purple sarong skirt that was tied around her waist like a towel. Her legs were tan and wiry and so strong, like a racehorse or something. Beads of water clung to her collarbone, and I could see a red bikini top through her damp white T-shirt.
The minute she saw me the girl stopped and said, “Whoa. Wait. It’s not. It’s not!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“It is,” she said. “Whoo-hoo! It’s Jo-nah!” She dropped all of her stuff on the floor and ran over to me with her arms open and it was then that I realized, it was Posie! I couldn’t believe it. I mean, she’d always been cute, but now she is this beautiful, athletic, graceful, sunny goddess.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” she squealed. “Wow!” Her hair smelled like saltwater.
“God, Posie,” I said. “You look great!”
“Look who’s talking, Jonah! Boy, you haven’t changed a bit!”
If one more person says that to me I’m going to go out of my mind.
Posie kind of paused for a second and blinked.
“Wait. What’s wrong, Jonah?” she asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. It was so like Posie to be able to tell something was wrong with me in less than thirty seconds without me saying anything.
“Bullshit. What’s going on? How come you’re sitting by yourself in the cafeteria? Isn’t first period just about to end?”
I took this huge breath and told her. “You’re not going to believe this. They made me a junior. I’m in Miss von Esse’s class.” I felt sick saying it, like I was making it true.
“No way! They can’t do that.”
“They say it’s because of what happened at Masthead,” I said. Of course Posie doesn’t know what happened, but I knew that wouldn’t matter to her. “I didn’t take all of my final exams.”
“Oh, that’s crap. You know it’s crap. Hey, listen. I gotta get to class. But you’re going to get out of this mess. I promise. You won’t have to be a junior, okay?” She grabbed me and gave me another big hug, making a wet mark on my T-shirt with her hair. “I am so glad you’re back. I’ve got so much to tell you.”
“Yeah? You look happy, Posie,” I said. She really did. I wish I could feel like she looks—like nothing could go wrong, the world is just this big, wonderful Shangri-la.
“Oh, Jonah, I am happy,” Posie said. “I can’t wait for you to meet Wailer.”
“Wailer? Who’s Wailer?”
“My boyfriend. My . . .” She blushed, and I remembered what it’s like to see Posie blush. She turns dark purple, like a plum. It’s pretty funny, since there isn’t too much that makes her blush. I mean, this is a girl who does stuff like chew tobacco, and she was the first person I ever knew to buy a copy of Penthouse.
“I want to meet him,” I said, but as I said it I realized, I already hate this guy. I mean, what kind of a name is Wailer, anyway?
“You know what he wants to do?” Posie said, so breathlessly she was almost whispering. “He wants us to drop out, get married, go pro. He wants to live on the beach and make babies with me!”
“Whoa,” I said. “Hard core.” It sounded like the worst idea I had ever heard.
“I know, it sounds insane,” Posie said. “But I’m actually thinking about it. I mean, that’s how serious it is.”
“Wow,” I said, wondering what other stuff I’d missed out on while I was gone. “Hey, you want to hang out down at the dune after school?”
“Today’s no good,” Posie said, and she blushed an even darker shade of purple.
It was pretty clear that she had plans with Wailer after school and those plans were of a sexual nature. I mean, you don’t talk about dropping out of high school and marrying someone and living on the beach with them and making babies if you had never had sex with them, right?
So is everyone having sex now? I guess that’s something else I missed out on while I was away. Suddenly I am like the lamest person in the entire town.
“How about tomorrow? Is that okay?” Posie offered.
“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
The bell rang. Posie picked up her backpack and ran toward t
he door. “Welcome back, Jonah!” she yelled as she ran. “We’re going to party, okay?”
“Okay, Posie,” I said.
So here I am. Probably the only seventeen-year-old virgin in the school and I’m going to stay that way for the rest of my life because why would anyone have sex with someone who had to repeat eleventh grade?
I really have to go check in with Miss von Esse.
But I hear footsteps approaching, and it’s Sophie holding this silver platter with two dishes under huge silver domes and a bottle of white wine and two crystal glasses. She sits down next to me and pulls the domes off. There’s a lobster on one plate and the book The Joy of Sex on the other.
“It’s Maine lobster,” Sophie says. She opens the bottle of wine and pours it and we ting glasses. Then Sophie pulls one of the lobster’s little legs off and sucks on it. I love watching her. She gets butter all over her chin and her eyes shine. “Jonah,” she says, pointing at the book. “Will you read to me?”
Outside, the lighthouse beacon flashes, and for a moment we are bathed in bright moving light.
(Later that afternoon. Miss von Esse’s classroom.)
Okay, so here I am, in my eleventh grade remedial German class, which turns out to be taught by Miss von Esse in the same classroom as my eleventh grade homeroom, which I missed. When I first came up here to meet Miss von Esse I was thinking, No way, I can’t do this. When I got to the door, I took a deep breath, kind of pretending I was doing a difficult dive, like a double somersault with a half twist, starting from the handstand position. I execute the dive perfectly and the crowd roars and I plunge into the pool.
“You must be Jonah Black,” Miss von Esse said when I opened the door.
I nodded, and she stood up and walked around her desk and handed me my schedule. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.
Miss von Esse is preppy, but not in a plain, L.L. Bean sort of way. She’s more like the Ralph Lauren model kind of preppy, with straight brown hair that falls just below her chin. A bob, I guess it’s called. She looks really young, too. Like, no older than twenty-five. I can picture her in a ski lodge in Vermont at the end of a long day, wearing an Irish fisherman’s sweater and her cheeks all red from being on the slopes all day and we’re drinking hot mulled wine out of goblets made of red glass. Over by the bar someone is playing Irish folk tunes on the piano and there’s a huge fire roaring in the fireplace and above the fire is the head of a stuffed moose with a brass plaque under it that says BAOIGHEOLLEAN.
“I am so glad you are in my class,” she says. She leans over my desk and I smell saddle soap. Then Sophie sits down on my lap and takes my face in her hands and kisses me.
“This isn’t right,” I say. I don’t want to do it in a classroom.
But Sophie says, “Let’s not worry about right or wrong anymore. Let’s worry about what we feel.” Then she unbuttons her blouse and hangs it up on the pencil sharpener on the wall. She unhooks her bra and swings it around on the end of her finger, and sways her hips in a dance that reminds me of the Hokey Pokey, only slower.
“I was supposed to be a senior,” I whisper to her. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“I know, Jonah,” she says, lying back on the satin sheets. “I know.”
Ich liebe, du liebst, blah, blah, blah.
Christ. We are actually reviewing the present tense in German right now. I don’t believe it. This is my fourth year of German—I’m pretty sure I have the present tense down by now. Seriously, I think I’m going to die.
At lunch, I looked around for Posie and Thorne but of course they have a different lunch period than me because I’m a junior and they are seniors. The only person I saw that I knew was my little sister, Honey, because the senior genius section has the same lunch period as the juniors. Honey is so smart, she got to skip tenth grade, so she’s a senior now, which is so unfair I can’t even think about it.
She was sitting with all these geeks with oily noses wearing thick glasses and golfing shirts. Honey looks like this rocker chick, not a genius. But that’s what’s so great about her. She’s an enigma.
I walked over to her table. “Hey, Porkchop,” she said. “There’s a rumor going around you’re a junior. Tell me that’s bull,” she said.
“Oh, it’s a big mistake,” I lied. “They can’t make me repeat eleventh grade, I mean, come on!”
Honey looked me up and down and shook her head. “You are a junior, aren’t you? Boy, is Mom going to be pissed.”
“Hey, I want to be the one to tell her,” I said. “All right?”
“Whatever,” she said, and turned back to this guy sitting next to her, working on some ten-page equation in his notebook. He handed Honey his pencil, and she started filling in numbers really fast with this crazed smile on her face. Honey really gets off on math. It’s like a drug for her. Actually, she gets off on everything. Honey is never bored.
“Hey, I’m serious,” I said, trying to get her attention back. “You’d think after I’d been gone for like, two years you could at least—”
“Eight hundred and twenty-one days,” Honey said, still scribbling in the notebook.
It is so completely insane that she can do that—figure out exactly how many days I’ve been gone without even trying.
“Yeah. Well, you’d think after all that time that you’d cut me some slack,” I said.
Honey looked up as if she was actually noticing me for the first time.
“Listen, Squidly,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, okay? Mom’s so into her stupid book right now, she won’t even notice.”
“Well, just don’t say anything, okay?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Yeah, whatever,” she said, and then she went back to scribbling numbers.
I still can’t believe my little sister is a senior and I’m a junior. It’s like the whole world is upside down. Nothing makes sense anymore.
I sat down at another table and studied my stupid junior class schedule while I ate. Then a girl put her tray down across from me. She had thick curly black hair and she was wearing a lab coat. She was eating ravioli in sauce and she very carefully cut each ravioli in half with her knife and fork. Then she reached into her purse—which was weird because most high school girls don’t carry purses, they carry backpacks or courier bags—and she pulled out this container of Kraft Parmesan cheese and shook it on her ravioli. I was thinking, Oh, my God, she carries her own cheese! Then she looked up at me and asked if I wanted some cheese and I said yes. So she shook the cheese over my plate.
“I just totally love cheese, don’t you?” she asked me. Then she speared her ravioli and chewed it slowly, dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “Did you know that ravioli means ‘pillow’ in Italian?” she asked me.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
And she said, “Yes. It’s so perfect. I mean, I would love to have a ravioli as a pillow.”
And I say, “Yes, so would I.”
The two of us are lying on a huge, soft bed. The sheets are made of lasagna noodles and the pillows are giant raviolis and all around us is warm tomato sauce and mushrooms. Outside, the chapel bell gongs so I know it’s Sunday and Sophie and I can lie there as long as we want to. She’s sleeping. I try to reach for her hand, but it’s lost in the sauce.
When I looked up, the girl wasn’t there anymore, and I looked around but I didn’t see her. I looked down at my plate and it was licked clean, but I couldn’t remember eating all of my lunch. I wonder if Cheese Girl stole it from me. She was definitely sneaky.
Anyway, I got up and took my tray back and then I went to the bathroom. God, it was like being in a time machine—I mean the bathroom is exactly like it was two years ago. The same stuff scrawled on the walls, the same light blue tile, the same moldy smell. For a second I got so totally overwhelmed I thought I was going to pass out, so I leaned against the wall with my forehead pressing into the cold tiles. Then I heard this voice go, “Hey, man. You okay?”
It
was Smacky Platte, in a stall, smoking a cigarette. All I could think was, Smacky the degenerate gets to be a senior, but me, I have to go back to eleventh grade and read The Color Purple all over again.
Smacky looked at me and nodded. “You okay, man?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I turned on the faucet and started splashing my face with water.
“If you need something to make you feel better, you let me know. No reason to feel down in the dumps,” Smacky said, patting me on the shoulder.
“I said I was fine. Jesus Christ!” I growled, shrugging his hand off.
“Yo, man, take it easy. Jesus, man. Mellow out!” Smacky said.
I pull out my badge. “Sorry, Smacky. I’m going to have to take you in.”
“Whoa, man, chill!” Smacky says. “This isn’t what you think!”
I snap the cuffs on him. “Smacky,” I say. “You don’t know what I think. Now, are we going to do this the hard way, or should we do it the easy way?”
Then Smacky starts to cry. “Dude,” he whimpers. “You gotta believe me.”
But I am a rock. I am totally unmoved. “Tell it to the judge, Smacky,” I say. I pull out my cell phone and tell the sergeant I’m bringing in another junkie, and the sarge says, “Good work, Jonah, my man. Good work.”
(Still Sept. 5, after school.)
When I got home, Honey’s Jeep was already in the driveway and Mom was standing in the kitchen, talking on her cell phone. She waved at me and I grabbed a banana and now I’m sitting out on the dock waiting for Mom to get off the phone so I can talk to her about my horrible day. I guess I’m kind of nervous because I just jumped up and down on the dock like it was a diving board and now I’ve got a splinter in my toe. It hurts like hell.
Okay, I finished the banana. Why can’t Mom just get off the phone, already?
Oh, she just waved for me to come into the kitchen. Okay, Sarge. I’m going in.
When I got into the kitchen I realized that Mom was actually on the phone with Mrs. Perella, discussing the whole situation.