Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  Two seats over, Joyce Peyton stared at me like she was doing algebra in her head. Since getting her teeth fixed, she’d become what some considered pretty. She was what I considered a jerk. She managed a small cabal of girls that some days included Melanie. Melanie didn’t like Joyce any more than I did, but she said it was important to get in with the right crowd. We used to have friends. Now we had crowds. The word was enough to make me feel claustrophobic.

  My stomach growled. I ignored Joyce and took out my lunch. Rona, as Miss Blumberg insisted on being called, said we were adults and didn’t need permission to eat or use the bathroom. Most of the adults in second period chose to sleep. Peeling back the wax paper, I remembered Mom’s warning. American cheese and cocktail olives. I lifted the sandwich to my mouth. I’d seen worse.

  “Don’t eat that.”

  A small girl stood in the doorway, dressed, it seemed, in someone else’s clothes. Even with a bucket hat perched on a nest of strawberry-blond curls, she wasn’t five feet tall. The sleeves of her blouse grazed her knuckles. The cuffs of her patchwork jeans had been rolled at least twice. You could’ve made another outfit with all that extra fabric. What skin you could see was a milky pink not found in Golden, where even the newborns had tans. She walked over to my desk, reached out a freckled hand, and plucked a cigarette butt from underneath my Wonder Bread. “Don’t you know that cigarettes are bad for you?” Her laugh was like a bell.

  Miss Blumberg bent down to address the child. “Are you lost, dear?”

  The girl took in the teacher’s getup and held out a green slip of paper. “No,” she said. “Are you?”

  “Well, class, it seems we have a new student. This is Carol Closter from Montana. Who can tell us the capital of Montana?” Our teacher’s hopeful smile met twenty-two blank stares. We’d never seen anything like Carol Closter. She might as well have been from Mars.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Carol. I’m Miss Blumberg, but you can call me Rona.”

  “Do I have to?” Carol Closter said, hugging a purple binder to her chest.

  “Well, that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. Does anyone know what ‘prerogative’ means?” More blank stares. “A right or privilege belonging to an individual or group. Okay, then…Carol? Why don’t you take a seat.” She scanned the cramped classroom. “There, by the window.”

  “I’m supposed to sit near an exit,” Carol Closter said. “I have an abnormally small bladder.” She thrust another piece of paper forward. “I have a note.”

  Mouths fell open, but not the faintest chuckle left our lips. It was like watching someone leap off a bridge.

  “Well, I’m not sure what to do here, Carol. Maybe someone wouldn’t mind switching?” Miss Blumberg appealed to Joyce, who stuck her tongue against her capped teeth and sucked.

  “You can have my seat,” I said. Carol Closter beamed at me as if it was the nicest thing anybody had ever done for her. Joyce frowned at me like I was a quadratic equation. I shrugged and gathered my books. Poor math skills were another thing I’d inherited from my mom.

  In my new seat I could see all the way from the parking lot to the football field. The late-winter sun glinted off windshields. Lemon trees rustled sweetly in the breeze. Another nice day—yippee. Vice-Principal Galpin was on a ladder, peeling paper hearts from over the school doors. The ones he didn’t catch fluttered to the ground like red and pink butterflies. He looked down at those fallen hearts for a long time. Melanie’s older sister had told us Mr. Galpin used to be everyone’s favourite teacher. She said he’d show up at dances in a tuxedo T-shirt and bow tie and get everyone doing the Chicken. He’d cracked jokes all the time. Then he lost his wife and daughter in a car accident. One day he came to school with only the left side of his face shaved. That was the last day he’d taught anyone anything. Now he went around peeling little pieces of tape off paper hearts so they could be used again next year. He reminded me of my dad, of all the dads, with his dirty-blond hair and beige blazers and the look of someone who’s realized life’s given him the old bait and switch. Moody Miller, perched up above on the corner of the roof, nodded as if in agreement. That and his hand lifting a joint to his lips were the only moves he made. It was Moody’s seat I was in, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him in it. He preferred the school roof to classrooms and the company of Mary Jane to other kids. He could sit up there all day if he wanted to. He often did.

  Below Moody, the door to the gym opened and Jamie Finley stepped outside. He put his hands on his hips and scanned the parking lot like he was having a wonderful day. I held up my middle finger and waited for him to turn my way.

  I didn’t have anything against Jamie Finley personally. I didn’t even really know him. We had gone to the same junior high, but we were two years apart, which might as well be twenty at that age. Jamie was on the swim team with Troy Gainer, but he wasn’t like the other jocks, who stalked the halls punching lockers and hooting like apes. I’d never once seen him stuff anyone in a locker, though I’d have bet he’d seen the inside of one himself at some point. He was tall but skinny—ten pounds soaking wet, my dad would’ve said. When he slung his gym bag over his shoulder, its weight spun him like a top. Jamie Thinly, kids called him. Not that I was one to talk. My own arms were violin bows without the elegance. There was no escaping my Johnson dowry. We had the long, tapered fingers of pianists, Mom said. Or serial killers.

  As Jamie untangled himself from his gym bag, Mr. Galpin smiled at him. He almost laughed. Jamie Finley should get a medal for that, I thought. He should get his own page in the yearbook. When Jamie smiled, a dimple appeared on his right cheek, as if somebody had poked it with the tip of a protractor. You couldn’t see that dimple and not smile yourself, not even if you were hungry and in a lousy mood. Then I remembered that Troy Gainer had a cleft in his chin. It looked like someone had nicked him with an axe. He was probably on the other side of that gym door right then, snapping at people with a wet towel.

  I scrutinized my sheet of doodles. Someone had written JAMIE in bubble letters on it. I crumpled up the page. My hand was as useless as my brain.

  “I heard that. Say it again, freak.”

  Everyone turned to look at Joyce, who was twisted around in her seat, glaring at the new kid. Carol Closter sat with her head bent over her clasped hands.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.

  Miss Blumberg put her hand on Joyce’s shoulder. “Who were you talking to, dear?”

  Carol Closter lifted her head slowly. “I was talking to God.”

  Gasps. Whispers. What was the protocol for prayer? This was worse than the bladder thing.

  “She’s doing it again,” someone said. “She’s praying.”

  Joyce jumped up so fast her chair fell over. “I am not sitting next to some Jesus freak.”

  “People, please.” Miss Blumberg held her hands in the air. Her voice was getting squeaky, the way my mom sounded when one of the country club women popped by and found her in a pair of jeans. “We’re all adults here. Let’s talk this out.” Everyone groaned.

  The bell rang. Kids shot out the door, shouting with relief, saved from another Rona Blumberg share circle. Our teacher followed, waddling awkwardly in her cheongsam, just as anxious to get away. When she was gone, Joyce turned sharply in the doorway and pointed her push-up bra at Carol Closter. “Don’t ever look at me again. Okay, freak?” She didn’t wait for an answer.

  Carol Closter folded herself tightly around her purple binder, cotton handkerchief balled in one fist. Her breath was loud and shallow, like she was trying not to cry.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I said. “That’s just Joyce.”

  “It’s allergies,” she said. “I’m allergic to this town.” She blew her nose as if to prove it.

  I peered into the hall and saw what I always saw—the field of blond hair, the plains of bronzed skin, the oceans of blue eyes, the mountain range of ski-slope noses. Golden was the only home I’d ever
known, but that didn’t stop me from feeling as foreign as my mom. I was brunette and bony. I’d never learned to feather my hair. Left to its own devices, my mouth preferred a flat line. In class photos, beside my sunny classmates who beamed at the camera in a flawless row, I stuck out like a rotten tooth. Melanie said I didn’t give myself enough credit. “You’re not unpopular because you aren’t pretty,” she’d recently assured me. “You’re unpopular because of your personality. But some lemon juice in your hair now and then wouldn’t hurt.”

  This from my best friend since sixth grade. A girl who prayed and carried a handkerchief didn’t stand a chance.

  Joyce and two other girls leaned against a bank of lockers, sneering at us. When Melanie joined them, they closed ranks around her, whispering loudly.

  Carol Closter blew her nose. “I hate it here already.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said.

  Behind her, the huddle broke. Joyce and the other two girls slouched against the lockers, their arms crossed as Melanie waved me over frantically. She mouthed Troy’s name. When that didn’t move me, she held a finger to her throat and sliced.

  I turned my back to her. “Maybe just don’t…”

  “Be myself?” Carol Closter smiled with one corner of her mouth, a sly grin reminding me that, small or not, she wasn’t actually a little kid.

  “Well, anyway,” I said. “Turn the other cheek, right?”

  “Right. And if that doesn’t work, kick them where the sun don’t shine.”

  I smiled now. Maybe she’d be okay after all.

  Melanie was suddenly beside me, grabbing my arm. “We’re late for gym.”

  “We already had gym.”

  She pulled me down the hall anyway.

  “You really are hopeless, you know. If it wasn’t for me, you’d end up like one of those old ladies who get eaten by their cats. You’d end up like that loser Moody Miller.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Carol Closter was still at Miss Blumberg’s door. Mr. Galpin was talking to her now, a stack of fallen hearts wedged under an arm. One was taped to the back of his beige blazer. Someone had written on it in felt marker, If lost please return to Reagan High. When Carol saw me looking, she lifted her handkerchief into the air as if one of us was going off to war. Either that or she was ready to surrender.

  “Moody’s not a loser,” I said. In fact, I was beginning to think Moody Miller might just be the smartest person I knew. “He’s a loner.”

  “What’s the difference?” Melanie said.

  I didn’t know the answer. Losers, loners, Jesus freaks, jocks—in the end most of us would end up members of the Golden Country Club. Some day Troy Gainer would probably sneak out of my recently redecorated bedroom, carrying his shoes.

  2

  Why the Closters left Big Sky Country for the Golden State was at one time a subject of some national debate. In one supermarket tabloid, a woman from Montana claimed she had spilled coffee on an atlas at Mrs. Closter’s house and both women had watched, wide-eyed, as the profile of Jesus Christ took shape over Southern California, with my town smack dab where his eye would go. The article included a grainy photo of a thin woman in a cheap wig holding up what looked like a gas station map. The stain on it did resemble the saviour rather impressively, but also a young Jerry Garcia. I heard it was sold to a collector in New York who was neither religious nor a Grateful Dead fan. An article in Newsweek later discredited the woman’s story, among others, and set the record straight. But back when I first met Carol Closter, it was still a bona fide mystery, like how they made Spam.

  We were not what you would call a God-fearing people. In a town where just about everything had a store-bought glow, what churches we had were low-lying, bleached, and forgotten six days of the week. My family went to church four times that I can remember, all on Christmas Eve so my mom could hear the children’s choir and Dad could shake hands with the minister, who signed the cheques for his staff’s life insurance. When Mrs. D’Angelo dragged Melanie to confession, they had to drive an hour to the city, where people knew something about shame.

  Founded at the turn of the century by a man with a gold rush fortune and redeveloped fifty years later by men with business degrees, Golden had risen preternaturally from rock and clay. Our kidney-shaped swimming pools, nitrogen-spiked golf courses, and air-conditioned mini-malls were nothing short of a miracle. Every day blue skies, every year a new tax loophole. The Kent State shootings and Manson murders were tragedies watched from the temperate safety of Freoned living rooms, the Vietnam War was “that unfortunate business over there,” and the civil rights movement had no effect whatsoever on the healthy supply of immigrant labour. We still had the PTA, the NRA, and thank our lucky stripes for the CIA. So nothing against religion, we just didn’t have much need for it. If all else failed, there would always be barbecues and office picnics, cocktail soirees, canapés, and two kinds of fondue. It was Sodom and Gomorrah, only with nicer cars.

  How could we explain Carol Closter, who said grace over her tater tots and dropped scripture in class like she was quoting Shakespeare? Every Friday, she invited her classmates to her super-fun Bible study group. “We’ve got beanbag chairs!” she’d say. It was as if she’d never been around human beings before.

  Jesus Freak. Carol Cloister. Sister Carol. In a place like Golden, she was an abomination, as repulsive and fascinating as the fetal pig locked in the biology cupboard. As much as you didn’t want to look at the pulpy pink glob, you couldn’t help yourself. Wherever Carol went, sniggering trailed her. Banana peels and sandwich crusts collected in front of her locker like tumbleweed. Kids rode her about her hair, her clothes, her hats. Those hats! She wore one everywhere, even inside.

  “Do you think she ever takes them off?” Joyce said. “I bet she doesn’t. Not even to go to bed.”

  “She probably sleeps in one,” Melanie agreed.

  “She probably wears one in the shower,” Joyce said, though no one knew for sure since Carol was always the last one to shower after gym class.

  “She probably showers with all her clothes on,” Melanie said.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Joyce said.

  Carol, walking a few feet ahead, pulled her shoulders back and lifted her hatted head a little higher.

  “You guys sure are fascinated by what other girls do in the shower,” I said.

  They sucked their lips shut and kept them that way.

  The truth was, I sort of liked Carol. There was something commendable about her obstinacy, her constancy, her unwavering Carolness. Guys were always knocking those hats off her head and throwing them in the trash or out windows, but the next day she’d show up with another one, like that Dr. Seuss character. Until I met her, I hadn’t known it was possible to pity and admire someone at the same time.

  When Carol found me in the library the next day, her hat was the same bright yellow as her overalls. She looked like a baby chick bounding toward me. I hid my smile behind my notebook. Maybe I liked Carol, but she didn’t have to know that.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said, grinning at me with her hands on her hips. “What are you doing? Do you want to study together?”

  “You don’t have any books.”

  She held out her hand and showed me a white book not much bigger than a deck of cards. The pages were gold-edged. A thin red ribbon marked her page. I’d never seen a Bible that small before.

  “I get a free block to study scripture,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t. I’m actually pretty busy. I have to hand in this biology report today. So if you don’t mind.”

  I picked up my pen. At the top of the blank page I’d written Plant reproduction is very important to plants. I was supposed to write two hundred words and draw the anatomy of a flower with all its parts, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The dozen red roses Dad had given Mom on Valentine’s Day had sat in a vase on the dining room table ever since, their heads drooping so quickly that if you stood there long enough you’d se
e one nod. But Mom refused to throw them out. Every day she took the bouquet into the kitchen and carefully rearranged it, brittle leaves rustling as she worked. “There now,” she’d say, palming the fallen petals. “That’s not too bad. I think we can get another day or two.”

  Then that morning while Mom was busy scraping the toast, Dad had scooped up the vase, opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and chucked the whole thing into the garbage. “That smell is enough to put a man off his coffee,” he said. When she turned around he was already shin deep in the bin. She’d burst into tears and fled to her bedroom. “Well, it stunk, didn’t it?” he’d asked me and I’d had to agree. But I still didn’t like the sound of their stems cracking under his shoe like the fine bones of a small animal. Now, thanks to my biology textbook, I knew that roses had ovaries. I didn’t even want to know what a pistil was.

  “I’m really good at reports,” Carol said. “I could help you. It’d be fun.”

  But I didn’t want help with my report. What I wanted was to keep an eye on Joyce, who was talking to Allen Wendell a few tables away. Allen was one of the kids who languished in the portables at the back of the school. Guys like Troy Gainer thought it was hilarious to high-five Allen in the halls, but girls gave him a wide berth. If you laughed at one of his dirty jokes to be nice, you’d never hear the end of them. He knew hundreds. I think he memorized them from books. Joyce was always saying what a pervert he was, so what was she doing sitting next to him, whispering in his ear?

  “Earth to Robin! Are you there? Come in, Robin!”

  The librarian rang her bell in our direction. Joyce glared our way.

  “Jeez, Carol. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” I made a big show of flipping through my textbook, hoping she’d get the hint.