by Jessica Raya
“Isn’t it great?”
“Weren’t you on the honour roll?”
“Oh, I don’t have to be here. My parents think the structure is good for me. I prayed to God that you’d be here too, and now here you are!”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
Carol put her hands on her hips and smiled. “Do you believe in signs, Robin? Because I sure do. God sends us signs all the time. Most people are just too dumb to notice.” She squatted down and threw her arms around me, knocking us both over onto the grass. Her arms vise-gripped my neck. “This is going to be the best summer ever!”
“You really need to get out more,” I said.
As I peeled her arms off, I saw Jamie Finley standing beside an old ten-speed, staring at me. Before I could stop myself, I smiled. I almost waved. Jamie dropped his eyes and pushed his bike toward the school.
“What’s he doing here?” Carol said, squinting after him suspiciously.
I didn’t know, but I took it as a sign that if there was indeed a God, he had a strange sense of humour.
—
Summer school was, in practice as in appearance, prison-like. We were permitted in the hall to use the bathroom, with a pass, for exactly three minutes. Otherwise, we were to remain in our seats, with our hands visible at all times. During class, we took turns reading out loud from our remedial textbook while our teacher dug under his nails with an uncoiled paper clip. Between chapters, we filled out multiple-choice exercise sheets. If someone tapped you on the shoulder, you shifted in your seat so he or she could see your answers. We didn’t know each other, except in the vague way kids in a town with four highs schools do, but we would be shackled to one another for the next two months, so we made the best of it. If the kids from other schools knew about the fire, they kept it to themselves. Among us were girls who puked up their lunches every day, guys who stole cars, kids who’d been to foster homes and juvie and worse. What was it to them?
Moody Miller came in late every day reeking of pot. He sat at the back of my row and slept until lunch. Carol sat beside me, of course, reading her Bible or doodling in her notebook. Being in summer school voluntarily, she wasn’t made to read out loud or do much of anything. She’d pass me notes, drawings of Jesus at the beach, Jesus getting ice cream, Jesus snoozing at the back of a classroom, wearing a crown of z’s. Now and then, we’d read something that made her lift her head and glare at our teacher. “A question, Miss Closter?” he’d asked her once. “No, no, Mr. Ford. Please continue. I’m enraptured.”
At lunchtime, we were locked in the gravel courtyard with our brown paper bags. Moody and the other career stoners usually huddled in a shadowy corner with a joint. Jamie always sat by himself, doing homework or reading a dog-eared copy of On the Road. But most of us just sat wherever there was a free space. There were no cliques in that particular lunch yard. We were all equally lame. For a half an hour Carol had a captive audience and she did not intend to waste it. “What a load of malarkey,” she’d say loudly the moment the door clicked shut. “If you believe what that guy’s selling, I’ve got a bridge you can buy.”
Carol, as we learned, thought most things were malarkey—rock music, science, canned pie filling, Dick Cavett. The moon landing had been faked, she insisted, and Kennedy was still alive on a tropical island somewhere. “Think about it,” she said, tapping her head through her hat.
“I like Dick Cavett,” someone said.
“You think you like him,” Carol said. “You’ve been brainwashed like everybody else.”
“What shows do you watch?”
“I don’t watch TV. It’s an instrument of Beelzebub. I prefer to read. Not that junk they think they’re teaching us. The Good Book is the only book I need.” She placed her hand on the little white Bible sitting beside her sandwich. She carried it everywhere. You never knew when you might need one, she told us. A kid nodded and said he felt the same way about his bong.
It would be a good while before many of those kids realized that Carol’s friends Paul and Luke weren’t kids who went to Reagan. But they seemed to genuinely like Carol, or at least get a kick out of her. Nobody in that dusty lunch yard ever called her a Jesus Freak or a Bible-thumper. They left her hats alone. Later, when the reporters came knocking, when everyone and their cousin tried to make a few bucks hawking their cafeteria memories to tabloid rags, not one of those burnouts spilled the beans on the girl with the wild stories they’d known one summer or her quiet, skinny friend. In that way, too, summer school was like prison. On the inside we were all innocent, and nobody likes a rat.
“Hey, Carol,” they’d say. “Tell that one again about the guy who had to kill his kid.”
“Abraham.”
“Yeah, Abraham.” And they’d lift their heavy heads from the warm stone table to hear the story again.
While Carol had everyone’s attention, I’d keep an eye on Jamie on the other side of the yard. Usually his face would be deep in a book, his summer-long hair dusting the page. But sometimes when I glanced over he’d be staring at me. I’d cover my embarrassment with a whopping laugh, slapping the table like I’d just heard something hilarious. Oh, that Abraham! What a card!
—
The weeks found their rhythm. Days were hot and endless, evenings lonely but quick. After dinner, I did my homework on the dining room table while Mom practised her typing on an old IBM Selectric that her Mr. Grant had let her take home.
She showed real promise, Mr. Grant had told her. He admired her initiative.
“Admired,” she said. “That’s the word he used.”
Some nights he admired her on the phone. The first time he called I’d thought he was one of Dad’s old clients. A few of them still called now and then, widowed women in empty houses or young mothers left alone all day. Mom could have had the number changed, but she didn’t. They needed someone to talk to, she said. I guess Mr. Grant did too.
Weekends, I lay in the overgrown grass, head on top of the books I was supposed to be rereading, and plotted our move to Minneapolis, where I’d help Mom pursue a career in broadcast journalism. I pictured us on a city street, twirling around in our pantsuits, tossing our berets in the air. After a while, the grass held the shape of me, as if it was waiting for my return. I preferred it this way. I could almost lose my legs in it. I could almost disappear. If Mrs. Houston was gardening, she’d wave hello from her side of the fence, but she never commented on the lawn or asked where my dad was. Being a widow, she was probably used to men being there one day and gone the next.
On Sundays, Mom made a lasagna that we’d reheat night after night until the layers were as dry and crispy as winter skin. She was a career woman. She didn’t have time to burn something every night. She didn’t have time for TV either, but she always managed a half-hour to watch Mary Tyler Moore. She looked more like Mary every day. Her hair was back to its usual ambiguous blond, but she teased it on top now and flipped the ends. She’d traded her cotton blouses and slacks for smart shifts and black pumps and did her eyeliner the way the other secretaries had shown her in the bathroom at work. They were loads of fun, she said, a real hoot. The Girls, she called them, as in, “The Girls swear by this new cabbage diet” and “Well, the Girls thought it was funny.” Mom switched to Virginia Slims, because that’s what the Girls smoked.
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” I said, but she only grinned vaguely, missing the joke.
They appeared at our front door one Saturday in July, big-haired, short-skirted, holding a deck of cards and a bottle of gin. The Girls—Lorna and Suzanne. They didn’t huddle around the kitchen table like the neighbourhood women used to. No, the Girls lounged by the pool or reclined in the living room, their sweet cocktails leaving sweaty rings everywhere. They drank Dad’s good hooch and fanned themselves with Mom’s magazines. They wore nail polish on their toes called Deep Kiss and Marilyn Mauve. Suzanne read romance novels. Lorna preferred true crime. She said, “Don’t you think?” after everything. Robert Redford is
scrumptious. Don’t you think? Suzanne thought everything was a riot. Oh yeah, Redford’s a riot. When they wanted a refill, they’d jingle their ice cubes at me and say, “Would you, pet?”
The Girls gossiped about their bosses, the men who drank so much at lunch they slept at their desks all afternoon, the yellers whose tantrums sent secretaries to the bathroom to cry. They all had nicknames. Mr. Fingers. Pants McPatterson. All except Mr. Grant. He was heads above the rest of them, Mom said, and he deserved their respect. When she talked about him, Lorna and Suzanne would grin at each other, like they’d swallowed something tasty.
Mostly they talked about sex, more than kids at my school did, even more than Carol, whose little white Bible was filled with it and all the ways it could get you a one-way ticket to hell. The Girls compared notes on chest hair and back hair, who was a good kisser, who knew what to do with his hands. They swapped notes on emergency contraception like cake recipes, the things you could do with Coca-Cola, orange juice, and baking soda. They assumed they would shock me and were disappointed when they didn’t, though it’s true I’d never look at the contents of a pantry the same way again.
If anyone was shocked it was Mom. Lorna would be telling a story about getting felt up outside a ladies’ room and Mom would start running around putting coasters under everything. “Who needs a refill! Who needs a snack!”
“Why so shy?” Suzanne said.
“I guess I was brought up to think that kind of talk was beneath a girl,” Mom said.
“That’s one way to do it,” Lorna laughed. “Don’t you think?”
“You are a riot!” Suzanne screamed.
But nothing the Girls said or did could convince Mom that they were anything but a breath of fresh air. “You girls are a breath of fresh air!” she’d tell them, inhaling deeply and letting it out in one big whoosh to prove the point. I would’ve plucked all my eyebrows out before I’d admit it, but she was right. The Girls were single and broke. They lived on the other side of the canal in a shared one-bedroom apartment. They had hotplates instead of ovens and roommates instead of families. They were no Phyllis and Rhoda, that’s for sure. But they got a kick out of everything. The world for them was a big juicy peach. They did things and went places. There were beaches in Florida, they told us, where the women went topless, and whole neighbourhoods where nobody spoke a word of English.
“Imagine that,” Mom kept saying. “Just imagine that.”
I’d never been out of California. Imagine was pretty much all I could do.
7
Some days Carol showed up at summer school in a bright yellow T-shirt with UP WITH JESUS silkscreened on the front. Those afternoons, Mrs. Closter would collect her in a brown station wagon at lunch and ferry her away. Carol was not, after all, really one of us. She could come and go as she pleased, and twice a week it pleased her to volunteer with her church group.
With Carol gone, the yard was quiet as dust. You could hear girls’ sticky thighs pulling apart and mouths being sucked dry as the stoners and rejects and misfits paired off, making out lazily against the walls, where the overhang provided shade if not privacy. Inspired by Jamie, who’d finished Kerouac and taken up Faulkner, I used the time to get a jumpstart on my homework. American history was even more boring the second time around. I didn’t want to try for a third. There was a daycare across the street, and sometimes the kids would get walked over in a line like little soldiers to use the playground. We could see them running around through the fence. Let’s pretend, they’d shout to each other. Let’s pretend this is our castle. Let’s pretend we’re on a desert island. It was nice to sit there listening to them, remembering when the whole world could be whatever you wanted so long as you believed it so. Those days, when I glanced over at Jamie, I’d often catch him grinning to himself and I knew he was listening to them too. I can’t name more than twenty presidents, but I still remember the way his dimple looked when he lifted his face to watch them.
—
Now and then older guys cruised by the junior high, circling the block in their waxed trucks and deep July tans. They were older versions of us, dropouts waiting out the weeks until they shipped off. “Hey, losers!” they’d yell. “What’s two plus two? What state’s California in? Anyone know how to spell PBR?” A couple times, they threw empty beer bottles at our windows, but they were too lazy to hit anything. We’d even laugh at their jokes sometimes. The same guys would come back later, half-cut, and offer the girls rides home.
One Friday they were waiting for us after school with cartons of eggs. We were easy marks, half-blinded by the bright sun, and they took us out one by one as we came out the front doors. A few kids made a run for it. The rest of us crouched inside. There were no teachers in sight, and this was some relief. Their presence would have only embarrassed us.
Carol stood on her toes to peer out the small window in the door. “There are four of them and forty of us.”
“They’ll still kick our ass,” Moody said.
We would just have to wait for them to get bored and leave. The boys mumbled fake bravery under their breath. The girls reapplied their lip gloss. Nobody seemed too surprised by any of it. Outside, the truck was idling. “Come on out and play,” they called.
Some older kids filtered out of a classroom at the end of the hall, Jamie Finley among them. Seeing us huddled at the doors, he came over, curious, and stood beside me. It was the closest we’d been since he’d held my foot in his hand. He was taller now, but just as skinny. I waited for him to turn and give me his usual stony glare, but he only stared out the door’s window as though he didn’t know I was inches away, or didn’t care. “What the fuck?” he said.
He opened the door a few inches and began to ease his long body through the gap. A bottle exploded at his feet, glass shooting across the linoleum, beer gushing everywhere. He pulled back, breathing hard. One leg of his jeans was soaked. “There’s two more in the back,” he said.
“Isn’t anybody going to do something?” Carol said. “What is everyone so afraid of? When the Romans threw the Christians to the lions, they went to their death singing.”
Jamie swallowed hard and curled his hands into fists. In a month, he’d be a senior, a year after that, gone. I reached out and touched the tip of one finger to his arm. I didn’t mean to. My finger had a mind of its own. When Jamie turned his face to me, his green eyes were dark and worried. He didn’t want to go out there any more than I wanted him to.
Moody made himself comfortable against a wall and drew a joint from behind his ear. “Make love, not war,” he said. Jamie uncurled his fists and we both smiled, embarrassed, at the floor.
“Oh, forget it,” Carol said. She clutched her little white Bible to her chest with one hand and threw open the door.
We watched through the window as she charged across the gravel in her pink hat, Good Book thrust in the air. The guys in the truck didn’t throw anything. They just sat there, dumbfounded, as she flung herself toward them, belting out the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Halfway between us and them, she skidded to a stop and chucked her Bible. It got about twenty-five feet before dropping in the dirt nowhere near their truck. Then one of them yelled, “Incoming!” and they all fired at once. When they ran out of eggs, they hurled a few more insults and sped away, howling with laughter.
Carol stood for a minute, back heaving, clothes dripping. But when she turned around she was laughing. She held up her arms like a gymnast who’d stuck her landing. “They didn’t even knock off my hat!”
I smiled at Jamie, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. He turned and started back down the hall, stopped at the first classroom door, made a fist, and punched it. We stared, slack-jawed, at the dent he’d made. Nobody seemed more surprised by it than Jamie.
“Far out,” Moody said. “I am really starting to dig this summer school thing.”
—
That weekend, the Girls talked Mom into going to the public pool across town. “But we have a perfectly good pool he
re,” she said. “And they have perfectly good men there,” they said.
They called it the “town pool,” as if this made it something other than the tepid outdoor facility crawling with diapered toddlers that it was. It was as I remembered it. There were diving boards, lap lanes, and a small concession stand that served soft ice cream and limp fries. I was relieved to see I didn’t know any of the boys who hurled themselves into the water, ignoring the lifeguard and the laws of physics, or the girls in crocheted bikinis and silver toe rings who lay on their backs, bellies exposed like contented cats. The rest were heat-dogged families making the most of another scorching Golden day.
Lorna and Suzanne laid their towels on the pokey grass where the young mothers watched their babies loll around on blankets. Babies left, babies right. Everywhere we looked—babies.
Two wiggled around on a blanket beside us.
“Let’s swim,” Mom said, looking at the Girls and not sitting down.
“You’re a riot,” Lorna said, taking a bottle of baby oil and a square of cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil out of her bag. They’d washed their hair that morning. Their bikinis weren’t designed to go anywhere near actual water. Mom and I both wore Speedos, piling across the bums and sagging every which way. I wore a long T-shirt over mine.
“What about you?” Mom said, trying to sound cheerful. “Want to do a bit of diving with your old mom?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“I haven’t seen you swim in a while.”
“Define a while.”
She gave up, spread her towel, and sat. The babies gurgled and cooed at her. They squirmed and giggled. They wiggled their fingers and toes. Mom tried to ignore them, but the babies wouldn’t have it. One climbed over her ankle and clutched her knee. She watched, horrified, as he got closer. He grabbed on to her thigh with one hand, the other reaching up, fingers squeezing. He moved his mouth at her, a little fish sucking the air. I found other things to look at. The state of my toenails was revolting. Something must be done.