Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  “That’s okay,” I said, tearing up again. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.

  Mr. Galpin’s door swung open. He looked about as miserable as I felt. He wore a crisp white shirt, but he hadn’t shaved at all that morning. His stubble was white around his mouth like the muzzle of an old dog.

  “How are you, Miss Fisher?” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”

  Mr. Galpin smiled sadly. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking. Come on in.”

  I’d never been in a vice-principal’s office before. There were stacks of paperwork, file folders filled with failure. One wall was covered in photographs of the teams he coached and clubs he sponsored. Mr. Galpin had been marked long ago as a soft touch who’d say yes to pretty much any extracurricular request. I couldn’t see the one photo on his desk, but I knew it was probably of his dead wife and daughter. Even supervising the chess club had to be better than going home to an empty house.

  There were two wooden chairs for visitors. I didn’t sit down. A visit to the vice-principal’s office meant your parents were divorcing, somebody was dying, or they’d found a bag of pot in your locker the size of a bread loaf. Basically, your life was over. I thought I should be standing when that happened. Mr. Galpin sat on the edge of his desk. It was supposed to make me feel better, but had the opposite effect.

  “Miss Fisher, maybe you know why you’re here. Then again, maybe you don’t.” I said nothing. He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s come to the administration’s attention that students have been using an abandoned house for drinking. Now this is nothing unusual, I’m afraid. If I had a nickel for every one of these places—” He stuck his hand in his pants pocket, palmed the change, then put it back in his pocket. “Well, there was a fire at this abandoned house a few weeks ago. I’ve spoken to the police and from what I understand, what with the nature of these sorts of places, the candles and whatnot, and then the earthquake—well, things are inconclusive at best and nobody’s all too sure it’s even worth the bother. Things like this happen. As far as the developer is concerned he’d rather it go away, insurance premiums and whatnot. Between you and me, he has a son at another high school who doesn’t have an exemplary record and, well, really, it isn’t any of our business what happens or doesn’t happen off school property.”

  The intercom on his desk buzzed. He reached over and pressed one of the buttons on top.

  “Not now, Bev,” he said and let the button go.

  “Am I in trouble?” I said.

  “Well, that isn’t always a question someone else can answer, Miss Fisher. Do you think you’re in trouble?”

  “Am I getting suspended?” I tried, maybe too hopefully.

  Mr. Galpin shook his head. “It’s not quite like that, Miss Fisher. It’s not that sort of situation. But…” He looked at the photo on his desk, then turned it to face the wall, as if he didn’t want them to hear. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Miss Fisher?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Does anyone answer yes to that question?”

  Mr. Galpin chuckled softly. “No, I suppose they don’t. Look, I don’t know what did or didn’t happen. I don’t give credence to rumours, and rumours are pretty much the currency of secondary education as I’m sure you are well aware, so I just have to be content with not knowing. That’s part of my job. Do we ever really know anything anyway? Now there’s a question.” He looked at me like he expected an answer.

  “No?” I said.

  “No, indeed. What I will say is that it seems to me that you’ve hit a rough patch, Miss Fisher. A very rough patch. I’m guessing that right now you’re probably wondering how many ways out of this school there are. Twenty-six, in fact. But in my experience, these things tend to have a short shelf life. This will blow over. Whatever has or hasn’t happened is now in the past. The school year is almost over. Keep your head down and your eye on the prize.”

  As he walked to the door, I saw that the back of his shirt was badly wrinkled, as if he’d pulled it straight out of the hamper. Or slept in it.

  “And if you ever do feel like talking about anything—anything at all—well, now you know where to find me. In the meantime, we’ll get you a new locker. How does that sound?”

  He held out his hand and I shook it.

  “Okay,” I lied. Much as I liked Mr. Galpin, I didn’t believe him for a second. The man wasn’t optimistic enough to iron both sides of his shirt.

  —

  The crowd around my locker had cleared. Only Carol Closter stood there now, clutching her purple binder and shaking her hat at the mess. I left my books and made for the side door. Twenty-six exits. I only needed one.

  I heard the door slam twice behind me, then quick, light steps. Carol chased me halfway down the sidewalk.

  “I’m not supposed to run outside,” she said, wheezing.

  “So don’t,” I said, but stopped anyway so she could catch her breath. She pulled an inhaler out of her pocket.

  “I told you those girls weren’t really your friends,” she said. “But I’m your friend, Robin, and I know those disgusting things they’re saying are lies. You just have to suffer their persecution with immaculate devotion, that’s all. That’s what I’d do.”

  “Great. Thanks.” As usual, I had no idea what she was talking about. “Can I go now?”

  She squinted at me from under the brim of her hat. “Do you know the story of Saint Lucy?” she said. “They were going to take her to a brothel and defile her, but a team of oxen couldn’t even move her. Then they tried to burn her at the stake, but that didn’t work either. She couldn’t be burned.”

  “So, what? She lived?”

  “Nah. They stabbed her to death instead.” Carol jabbed at the air between us with her purple pen to demonstrate. I started walking.

  “I know it doesn’t seem like it right now,” she shouted after me, “but it’s sort of a happy ending, if you really think about.”

  —

  Mom was in bed when I got home. It was two o’clock in the afternoon but she was bundled under the covers. Her eyes were red and puffy. I saw the Valium on her nightstand beside a bottle of unknown pills the size of Brazil nuts.

  “Are you sick again?”

  “Just tired,” she said, closing her eyes.

  “You need to eat more,” I said.

  “You’re right. I will. How was school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  The air was stale with old coffee and cigarettes. Dirty clothes and towels were strewn across the floor. She’d probably slept all day again. I opened a window and walked around angrily, picking things up. “I’ll do it,” Mom said, hugging her pillow, drifting off into her Valium cocoon. I ignored her and stomped around the room, mad at the carpeting, wanting to make more noise. She couldn’t even do laundry. How was she going to have a baby and keep a job and pay the bills? She should marry Mr. Galpin, I thought. Then the four of us could all be sad together.

  As I stuffed a towel into the hamper, my hand touched something wet. I dumped out the hamper and there it was. One of Mom’s shapeless skirts bundled haphazardly with her underthings, everything heavy and wet, almost black with all that blood. My hands were red with it.

  I knew plenty about periods, some about miscarriages. I also knew there was a doctor in Golden who took cash and didn’t ask questions. Melanie had once lit a candle in church for all the unborn souls.

  “Mom?” I whispered. There were a hundred questions I couldn’t say out loud.

  “I need to sleep,” she mumbled. “Okay, sweetie? Okay?”

  I bundled the skirt in a towel, put everything back in the hamper, and backed away. I needed to wash my hands, and maybe throw up.

  “Okay,” I said, unsure of what I was agreeing to. What a slippery thing that word had turned out to be.

  —

  Mom stayed in her room for the rest of the week, or so I assumed. I still had to go to school a
nd wait for everything to blow over, as Mr. Galpin had promised. I was assigned a new locker near the ESL students, which suited me fine. I ate lunch on the gym bleachers, watching the square dancing team allemande all over the place.

  At home, I camped out on the sofa in front of the TV’s comforting glow, watching with the sound down. I was starting to like it better that way. I brought Mom dry toast, bottomless cups of tea, bowls of mashed potatoes I made from a box, cellophane bags of black licorice pipes from the corner store. She could not be tempted. She didn’t even want her cigarettes, which sat with her silver lighter on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. I didn’t eat much either. Food was too fleshy, too viscous, too red. I preferred the hole that hunger was gnawing inside me. I felt hollowed out, which seemed about right.

  When Mom finally got out of bed, it was the middle of the night. She was slamming cupboards and drawers again, this time in the den. She pulled things out and dropped them on the floor. I yawned and rubbed my eyes, tried to make sense of the mess at her feet. Black umbrella, crime novels, two boxes of Puerto Rican cigars, imitation silver plaque from the Golden Business Association, real silver business card case.

  “It all has to go,” she said, climbing a chair to reach the top shelf.

  “Even stationery?” I said, holding up a black Swingline stapler.

  A dozen old Time magazines went crashing to the floor.

  “Everything.”

  You’d think she’d been planning it for years, she moved so deftly. There were no decisions to be made. If it was his, it went into waiting cardboard boxes. When one filled, she labelled it with his initials and sealed it with packing tape. When she ran out of boxes, she used garbage bags. His armchair was dragged across the yard to the pool house, Mom heaving and panting as it dug its feet stubbornly into the grass. She piled the bags on top of it. The boxes she stacked on the little cot and on the floor. When she was done, she stood over the pile, glowing with sweat. It was the healthiest she’d looked in weeks. “Okay, then,” she said and went back to bed.

  While Mom slept, I cleaned, or tried to. I didn’t dust so much as move the dust from one surface to another. I broke two plates and left exuberant scour marks on the aluminum pots. My beds were lumpy, my windows streaked. I swore at the fitted sheets and cursed whoever had invented grout. I didn’t want to wake Mom with the vacuum, so I swept small squalls of grit into the dark. When there was nothing left to wax, bleach, or break, I went out to the pool house and took the first thing I saw that could be pocketed. Mom’s silver lighter. Dad had given it to her as an anniversary present.

  I got my bike from the garage and rode around for a while. I ended up at a vacant lot where weeks before a dozen houses had stood. You could still see the tracks the bulldozers had made, wide scars in the hard brown earth. Some kid’s teddy bear was lying half buried under a bunch of concrete blocks. They formed a sort of pit. I took out the lighter, flicked back the lid, and thumbed the wheel. The flame sprang to life, hungry, ready. I gave it a furry ear, stepped back, and let it do its work. It took longer than I expected, but I didn’t have anywhere else to be. When it was over, I kicked a concrete block over what remained. I didn’t feel better exactly. But then again, I didn’t feel worse.

  —

  The next morning, Mom was up before I was. I found her sitting at the edge of the pool with her feet in the water, a cigarette on a plate beside a pack of matches. She wore her oversized work shirt and a pair of fraying jean shorts. She was thirty-five then, plenty old by the day’s standards, ancient by mine, but she looked like a kid sitting there, kicking her toes in the water and watching the waves ripple across the surface. The pool was fuzzy with dead leaves and bugs. They bobbed and flittered in her wake. It was my job to clean it, but I didn’t want to swim anymore. Some nights as I drifted to sleep, I would catch the hot scent of chlorine in the air and have to rise and shower, with the moon through the bathroom window blue on my skin.

  Mom reached for my hand. We used to hold hands all the time when I was younger, walking down the street, in the grocery store, watching TV—and then one day we didn’t. I let go of her hand now. I didn’t know how to be that girl anymore. Mom nodded and took a drag from her cigarette. Maybe she didn’t know how to be that mother anymore either.

  “I was a lifeguard,” she said. “That was the job I had. Two summers at the lake. They didn’t like to hire girls, but I passed the test and beat out three boys. The second summer I beat out five.”

  “But you never swim,” I said.

  “Don’t I?”

  “It wrecks your hair.”

  She leaned over the water and peered at her reflection. Unwashed for days, her hair fell limp and stringy around her face. Mom reached a hand toward her watery image and swatted it away. “That ship has sailed, I think.”

  She stood up and shed the work shirt. She had her swimsuit on underneath. “Here we go,” she said, like someone about to jump off a cliff. Instead, she eased down the ladder until the water lapped her chin, and pushed off on her back. Her arms windmilled through the air, water sluicing from her fingers as she glided along. I wasn’t a fan of the backstroke. Swimming backwards meant trusting what you couldn’t see. But Mom didn’t seem to mind that. “What a beautiful day,” she said, face turned up to the sky.

  It was the slowest backstroke in the history of the world. It was like watching somebody dream of swimming. When she finally reached the other end of the pool, she stayed there for a minute, clutching the edge. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the lighter. Dad had had it engraved with her initials. The letters were barely visible now, the silver rubbed clean from so much use, but they were still there. You just had to feel for them. At last Mom took a breath, large and extravagant, the new air preparing her, readying her muscles for what came next. I took it with her and watched her push off, held it until she came back.

  Here we go.

  6

  A high school rumour has its own bell curve. It starts slowly, then picks up steam, climbs to an impossible fervour, and crests in a heady flurry before tipping over the edge and crashing to a dead stop. Which is to say that the looks and whispers at school dwindled until finally nobody looked at or spoke to me at all. Some days Carol Closter was the only person I talked to who didn’t have crow’s feet. That was fine by me, or so I told myself. Of course, I couldn’t listen to “Rainy Days and Mondays” without bawling into my pillow, but wasn’t that the point of sad songs?

  You’d think with all that time on my hands, I’d have caught up on the weeks of schoolwork I’d missed. It’s not that I didn’t try, but it was hard to focus on anything through the fog that followed me around. Keeping my head down, as Mr. Galpin had suggested, didn’t help. I couldn’t find the track, never mind get back on it. The rest of freshman year was the real-life version of one of those nightmares you have in middle age, when you’re sitting down for a big test and realize you haven’t studied. Carol Closter left encouraging notes in my locker addressed to “Lucy,” inspirational drawings done with her signature purple pen. There was one of Jesus playing volleyball that was actually pretty good. You’re God’s MVP, she’d written underneath in bubble letters. Unfortunately, God wasn’t the one doing the grading. While other kids set out for lakeside camps and beach vacations, I’d be spending six glorious weeks in summer school.

  “It won’t be so bad,” Mom said, dropping me off on her way to her new job. “Maybe you’ll even have fun, make some new friends.” She was enjoying getting coffee for lawyers more than she’d expected and sometimes it made her impossible to be around. She’d started watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. While I admired Mary’s swishy pantsuits, Mom admired her plucky spirit. She didn’t get it at all.

  “It’s only a junior secretarial position,” Mom said. “But Mr. Grant says there’s a lot of potential for someone who applies herself.”

  “You have your own Mr. Grant,” I said.

  She clasped her hands together, smiling dreamily. “My own M
r. Grant.”

  My own prospects were less encouraging. Summer school was held at a junior high that looked a lot like my old junior high, which looked a lot like a prison for short people. I already knew the classrooms would wrap around a square gravel courtyard where I would eat Kraft slices or peanut butter on white bread for the next six weeks. When Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, the plumes of ash were so thick they blocked out the sun. The atmosphere choked with sulphur for months, and the average global temperature fell several degrees the following year. Parts of Europe and North America saw frost from June through August. It was known as the Year Without a Summer. Looking at the painted concrete structure curing in the morning sun, I could already feel my throat constricting.

  Mom had dropped me off a half-hour early. I sat on the field picking mini daisies and waited for nine o’clock. I didn’t feel like making a bracelet—I wouldn’t have had anyone to give it to anyway—so I just ripped off their tiny heads by the handfuls and scattered them over the browning grass while I hummed Mary’s theme song. You’re gonna make it after all.

  Slowly, other kids arrived, dragging their feet across the baseball field, kicking up dust devils with every begrudging step. Hooligans, petty criminals, and general malingerers from across the Golden school system. I searched for familiar faces and relaxed when I found none.

  Eventually, Moody Miller arrived in his brother’s car, smoke billowing. The passenger door opened and Moody spilled onto the ground, laughing. I laughed too until I noticed someone standing against the sun, light bursting all around them. I shielded my eyes. Carol Closter in a kaleidoscope of acid-coloured paisley topped with a bright green hat. It looked like a strawberry stem pulled down tight over her orange curls.

  I squinted at her. “You’re in summer school?”