by Dan Josefson
“Well,” she said, “I just came up to take a look at the eye. You can take a little break if you like.” But Aaron said he was fine and watched as Tidbit turned in her chair and Nurse Kavita took a little white flashlight out of her jacket pocket. She looked at the swollen eye carefully, pressing and pulling gently and pausing whenever Tidbit sucked air through her teeth in pain. When she was done, Kavita told Aaron, “I’d like to have her go to the clinic. I’m afraid the swelling is putting pressure on the eyeball.”
“You have to talk to Aubrey about that, right? Marcy said that none of the kids can have a doctor’s appointment unless you tell him they need one.”
“Yes,” Kavita said, putting away her flashlight. “And sometimes not even then.”
Aaron leaned forward over his steering wheel and looked both ways. The Webituck Medical Clinic was located in an expanse of fields interrupted only by large wooden signs offering plots for sale. But after what had just happened, he didn’t want any more trouble. He pulled slowly out of the gravel parking lot and turned right. He accelerated evenly down the road, glad to be gone from the clinic.
Tidbit was next to him with her feet up on the dashboard. She stared out the window and watched the telephone poles sail by. Her eye followed the rise and fall of the wires between them.
“We missed lunch,” Tidbit said.
“They’ll have saved you something.”
“Did you ask them to when you called?”
“No.”
“Then they won’t save either of us anything. We should stop somewhere.”
“Yeah?” Aaron said, smiling. “Where do you think we should stop?” She wasn’t crying anymore, but he hoped he could get her to smile.
“There’s a Sugar Burger on the way back,” she said. “You can’t make me miss lunch. No matter what I did.”
“I didn’t say no. We can get Sugar Burger.”
It had been drizzling on and off all morning, but that had stopped. Fog still clung to the hills that rose behind the fields. The road ran past some houses, and then they were following the shore of the lake to their left.
“Are you going a different way?” Tidbit asked.
“No,” Aaron said. “What?”
“This isn’t the way we came. I think you turned the wrong way out of the clinic.”
Aaron didn’t say anything for a time. He just drove. The lake’s surface was like lead. “I think this’ll turn out somewhere along where we want to go.”
Tidbit had refused to be given a shot at the clinic. They had looked at her eye and said that she would be all right, but she was also supposed to get a tetanus shot because she had bitten someone again. There was nothing Aaron could do to make her. He had been uncomfortable enough walking in there escorting a sixteen-year-old girl with an enormous black eye. He called the school from the clinic phone, but Tidbit refused even to talk to anyone. She’d been bawling and yelling. Now, though, she seemed fine.
“Can we listen to some music?” she asked.
“Not now that you asked we can’t.”
“Why?”
“You know why. Alternative Girls don’t have music privileges.”
“But you’re allowed to play music if you want when you’re driving, even if a kid’s in the car.”
Aaron drew to a stop where the road ended in an intersection. He thought about it for a moment, then turned left. The road led up into thickening woods. Tidbit sloped down in her seat to get a better look at the branches spotted with buds. The wet branches were black against the pale, quilted sky.
“Aaron? So you don’t want to listen to music?”
“Actually, I do. But we can’t now that you asked me to because you’ll never know whether we were listening to it because I wanted to or because you’d manipulated me into it. Which is what the rule is there to keep from happening. Shit, I think I better turn around.” The car shuddered as he turned too quickly onto the gravel and made a wide U-turn.
“Maybe what I really wanted was no music,” Tidbit said, “and I just manipulated you into not playing any.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ll never know.”
“I’ll never know.”
Aaron sped into the turns as the road exited the woods and rejoined the contours of the lake. The sky had cleared some, and Tidbit rolled her window down. She hummed to herself in the seat next to him and seemed very little. The school philosophy, as Aaron understood it, was that strictly enforcing the rules made students feel safe. He wondered whether she felt safe. Tidbit was playing with the door lock, pulling it up and pushing it down. She started singing, “The owl of Minerva’s on the windowsill, At midnight she gets restless, steals a Coupe de Ville, Romeo was pumping gas, got in without a fuss, And said, Darling it’s late, who’s gonna entertain us? What?” she asked. “I’m allowed to sing, aren’t I?”
“You’re allowed to sing.”
“It’s from Worries Are Wishes. The Kinky Lincolns?”
“Yeah?”
“God, you’re old.”
Aaron laughed and turned back to the road. They passed the clinic again, and Aaron suddenly remembered that in all the confusion he had forgotten Tidbit’s lunchtime meds when they had left. He could picture right where they were, sitting on an old copy of Backwoods Boating in the lobby. But he didn’t stop. If he went to get them now, Tidbit would know he’d left them behind, and he would have to fill out another med error report. He watched the clinic drift away in the rearview mirror. He could only hope that Tidbit would forget about her lunchtime meds. He could come back here to get them later. Aaron was sure she’d be fine without them.
In Webituck they rolled past shopping centers sunk back from the road behind empty parking lots. Then Tidbit sat up and said, “There it is.”
Sugar Burger was a plain cement box, painted white, except for the front, which was made up of large plate-glass windows. Above the windows hung a banner announcing a special: SWEET DEAL WITH MAPLE FRIES ONLY $3.99.
Aaron and Tidbit got out of the car and crossed the parking lot. Long puddles lay across the asphalt, but the sun was out, and the smell of rainwater evaporating from the pavement was thick in the air. Inside, beneath fluorescent lights and surrounded by plastic furniture, things felt even more delightfully ordinary. They got in a short line behind the only open register. In front of them was a man with two young girls who looked like sisters. As Tidbit looked around, she noticed that the restaurant was full of young girls sitting with their parents. It was eerie. She pointed it out to Aaron.
“Probably a ballet class just got out. A recital or something,” he said.
“Why d’you say that?”
“Tight buns.”
“Aaron! They’re just kids.”
“Their hair, Tidbit,” he said. “Look at their hair.”
He was right; the girls in line ahead of them also had their hair up tightly. They were whispering, the taller one occasionally looking up at Tidbit. At first Tidbit thought the girl was checking to see if she was listening in on their conversation, but then she remembered her eye. She’s probably scared of me, Tidbit thought. The girl tugged on the man’s pants.
“What is it, Ashley?” he said.
“Daddy, how much is thirty-five?”
“Thirty-five what?”
“Thirty-five. Is it a lot?”
“Thirty-five?” The man scratched at the stubble on his cheek. “It depends.”
“Oh. What about … seventeen?”
“That’s not a lot.”
The girl looked at her sister. “A thousand?”
“Yeah, that’s a lot.”
Tidbit ordered a Sugar Burger with no meat, which took some explaining, an extra-large Sunkist soda, and an ApplePocket. Aaron got the Sweet Deal with maple fries. When they sat down, she waited a moment to see if he was going to give her her meds.
“You know it’s funny,” Aaron said. “I was pretty worried walking into the clinic with you. I mean, if you saw the two of us walk
ing in someplace, with that eye, wouldn’t you think I’d beat up my girlfriend?”
“Or your daughter,” Tidbit said. She began eating.
“No. You think? I’m not that much older than you.” He took a bite of his burger.
Tidbit laughed. “How can you eat that thing? Don’t you know how they breed them?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know how they’re breeding cows bigger and bigger so they have more meat? Well, at one point, they made them so big that their hearts started to explode from trying to get blood to their whole huge bodies. So then they tried breeding cows with no bones that were just these sacks of meat, but their lungs kept collapsing under all the weight.”
“Tidbit.”
“What? You’re the one eating it.”
“Yeah. Did that occur to you at all? About your eye and walking into the clinic with me?”
Tidbit leaned forward to take a sip off the top of her orange soda. “Well, yeah. That’s why I kept asking you if I could do things like sit across the room from you or use the pay phone. So you’d have to say no, and you’d look like some psycho control freak. I thought it was funny.”
“I didn’t realize that,” Aaron said. “I was just worried that you were going to make up some story so you wouldn’t have to go back to the school.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like saying that it wasn’t an accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident. Roger pulled me off the bed.”
Aaron was finishing his fries. “You could have made up something worse. How come you didn’t?”
“We’re not always trying to get away, you know. We could pretty much run whenever if we wanted. You guys aren’t that smart.” She slid the orange soda closer. Beads of condensation rolled down the waxed-paper cup when she touched it. “Why don’t you leave?”
“I guess because there’s always something interesting going on.”
“Yeah, everyone says that. Everyone the interesting stuff isn’t happening to.”
“But you’re happy staying there?”
“No,” Tidbit said. She was half standing so she could suck on her soda straw without tipping the enormous cup. “But if I wanted to leave, I wouldn’t have to wait for some dumb nurse to save me. For a while I thought I’d stay and try to be good and graduate, but now I’m okay just being there. I’ll probably be in a ton of trouble when I get back, huh?”
“For refusing to get the shot?”
“Yeah.”
“Probably.”
“You think people will be mad?”
“The people you bit? Wouldn’t you be?” Aaron started cleaning the table, piling the empty wrappers onto their tray.
“The people I bit? I only bit one person.” Tidbit felt a sudden surge of resentment. They were sitting here like two normal people, but when they got back to the school she was going to get grief thrown at her while he had nothing to worry about.
Aaron was nice as far as faculty went, but didn’t seem to get that he was dealing with real people. Over the course of the three weeks Tidbit had sat in the corner, her sixteenth birthday had passed. Aaron had asked her what she wanted, and she said vanilla pudding. So he got her a box of Jell-O pudding mix. He let her eat it in the corner. Tidbit had licked her finger and dipped it into the mix, over and over. That was really nice of him, she knew. Still, he didn’t seem to understand. No one in Tidbit’s dorm had even talked to her since she bit Claire, but she could hear what they said when they passed by her room.
As they cleared the table, Tidbit had trouble maneuvering the orange soda. It was too full, and the waxed-paper cup was weak and sweating condensation. However she grabbed it, the soda overflowed. Tidbit considered reminding Aaron about her lunch meds but didn’t.
Both Tidbit and Aaron were increasingly anxious as they drove back to the school. Aaron wanted to drop Tidbit off and get back to the clinic to grab the meds as soon as possible. Tidbit wondered if her panic was worse because she had missed her meds. She knew she couldn’t possibly feel a difference but it was something to focus on. Aaron rattled through the front gates of Roaring Orchards a touch too fast. Tidbit felt sick. He drove up past the weeping beech trees, tiny leaves budding along the length of their wands, and parked in the Mansion’s carport.
They ran into Alternative Girls coming out of the Classroom Building. They were with June. Aaron began to tell her about what had happened at the clinic, but she had already heard. The girls in the dorm had as well, he thought, by the way they were looking at Tidbit.
“Is there any way,” Aaron asked, “that I could leave her with you? There’s one more thing I need to take care of off campus.”
“Well, sure, she’s out of the corner,” June said. “They called from the clinic and said they’d found some meds you left behind.”
“Oh. I’ll stop by there, too, when I’m out.”
“Roger already went and got them. Did Tidbit get her lunch meds?”
“You know, she didn’t. Those, those must be the meds left at the clinic.”
June nodded and checked her watch. “Don’t forget to fill out a med error report,” she told Aaron as he left. She pulled a small yellow med envelope out of her pocket. “Come on,” she said to Tidbit, “it’s not too late for you to take these. Do you need water?”
Tidbit shook her head.
June poured the contents of the package onto Tidbit’s tongue. Tidbit swallowed and let June check her mouth. Alternative Girls were on their way to drop Claire off at therapy. As they continued toward the back entrance to the Mansion, the girls were being so cold to Tidbit that June had to remind them to stay within arms’ distance. When Claire rolled her eyes, June told her that she and Tidbit would be holding hands for the rest of the afternoon if she didn’t adjust her attitude.
Before the girls got to the Mansion, the back door opened, and I walked out with New Boys. June had her girls step to the side of the road and face away so that they wouldn’t make eye contact with a restricted dorm. I saw Tidbit, but she couldn’t see me. I watched her run her hands through her hair a couple of times. At this point no one outside her dorm had seen her black eye. “Oh my God,” I heard her say to Claire, “do I look busted?”
“Do you look busted? You fucking bitch, you haven’t even apologized for biting me, you won’t get your shots, and you’re worried about how you look?” Claire was shaking as she shouted, and it seemed it was only fear that kept her from hitting Tidbit. “Do I look busted with the bruises you gave me all over my face? Or the bite scars on my leg? I’d rather have been bit by a dog than you, you selfish, trashy whore.”
Tidbit turned and ran. She slammed into some of the New Boys, and for a moment was face-to-face with me. She pushed past and ran into the Mansion. Claire called after her, “At least real bitches get their shots.”
“Claire,” June said. “Shit.”
“Aren’t we going to chase her?” Bridget asked.
“She’s not going anywhere. We’ll find her. But first we’ve got to pay for Claire’s f-word and get you to therapy.”
My dorm just stood still. Both Jodi and Spencer were watching us, and June waved Spencer over to ask him for help. “We can check the therapy rooms and the girls’ wing. Could you look in the boys’ wing and see if she’s in Aubrey’s apartment?”
“I’ll check the boys’ wing, but that’s it. Last time I was up in Aubrey’s rooms, he was in a nightshirt and Regular Kids were chasing him around the apartment trying to pinch his nipples.”
Tidbit did go up to Aubrey’s apartment, but not before hiding in a closet on the second floor to catch her breath. She kept expecting to cry, but she couldn’t cry. Tidbit listened to hear if anyone was coming, then left the closet and climbed to Aubrey’s rooms. She knocked gently and let herself in.
“Aubrey?” She took her shoes off and placed them on the pink carpet, by the door.
“Miss Lasker?” Aubrey’s voice came from his bedroom in the back
. Walking across the pink deep-pile carpet in her white socks felt fantastic. She dragged her feet some, to feel the carpet better.
“How’d you know it was me?” Tidbit asked when she entered Aubrey’s room.
“I’m magic.”
Aubrey was in bed, covered in sheets and a comforter so thick that his shape beneath them was completely obscured. He seemed to be only a head and arms propped up on pillows. He wore blue pajamas. Tidbit sat down in a chair by the bed.
“You don’t seem to be so upset,” he said.
“Should I be?”
Aubrey had shut his eyes. “When they called from the clinic about the shot, I could hear you wailing in the background. Like a wounded wombat, my mother would have said. Broke my heart.”
Tidbit didn’t know what to say. She looked around Aubrey’s bedroom. The best part was the wallpaper. It was white with tan vertical stripes. The stripes were interrupted by pink medallions, which had designs painted on them in red. But the designs had faded with time. Tidbit had heard the wallpaper was a hundred years old.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I didn’t want the shot, and it felt like it was punitive. I mean, I only need it if I’m going to bite someone again, and I swear I won’t. I swear.”
Aubrey didn’t respond. Tidbit waited. She couldn’t tell whether, beneath all his covers, he was breathing. After waiting a little longer, she called, “Aubrey,” and he stirred, his eyebrows moving first and then his large eyes opening.
“Dear, would you make me a cup of tea? The infuser’s in the sink.”
“Sure.”
Tidbit had never made tea from loose leaves before, so she called out questions from the kitchen, and he told her what to do.
Once Tidbit managed to get the infuser open, he called, “You only want to fill it halfway with tea. That’s so the leaves can expand. That makes more of the surface of each leaf exposed to water. It brews better that way. If you fill it all the way, the leaves press out of the perforations when they expand and get in your tea. Make yourself a cup, too.”
“No thanks.”
“You don’t like tea?”
“I’m not, like, ninety.”
Aubrey told her which cup and saucer he wanted, which she thought was funny. “Are you always that specific,” she asked as she brought him his tea, “or are you just showing off?”