by J. Q. Coyle
My father grabs my arm. “Go, Alicia!”
My right hand hurts. I know that the hallucinations are coming to an end.… There’s a blast of wind so cold it takes my breath. I throw my head back. Can you drown in air? I’m gasping …
* * *
… I’m on the cafeteria floor, near the legs of one of the tables. Hafeez is shaking me like he’s trying to wake me. “Alicia!”
I’m not wet, not shot, but I’m shivering. The chill is deep in my bones.
I look for Sprowitz but don’t see him. Did Coach haul him off? “I’m okay. Let’s get out of here,” I say.
“Coach told us not to move. She’s coming back for us. She’s really pissed.” Hafeez looks pretty shaken up, the blood already crusting on his lip.
“I was with my dad again and I saw this boy,” I say, more to myself than to him.
And, true to her word, Coach is marching toward us.
“You’ve got to look up that cruise ship,” I mutter to Hafeez, my voice hoarse. “Was it on the Dnieper River?”
“Who gives a shit about that now?” he says, dabbing at his lip.
“My phone is crap, Hafeez. Can you please look it up?”
He pulls out his phone.
There are Coach’s duck-footed Champion sneakers.
I look up.
Coach’s whistle is resting on her pregnant belly. “I heard from a little bird that you might have something to do with starting this fight. I think Principal Waybourne would like to see you first, Hafeez.”
“It was Sprowitz!” Hafeez says.
“He says it was you two. You say it was him. All three of you have to take a stroll. Hafeez, principal’s office. Alicia, you come with me.”
I try to stand, my shoulder still aching from the memory of pain. One of my knees buckles, but I keep my balance.
“We really didn’t start this!” Hafeez says, and Coach rolls her eyes.
“Don’t,” I say to Hafeez. “Just let it go.” There’s no fighting Coach.
I straighten up and let Coach lead me out.
But just as we get to the heavy doors, Hafeez shouts out, “That cruise ship didn’t sink in the Dnieper! It was the Volga! The Volga!”
Coach whips around. “Don’t get smart with me, Hafeez! Watch your mouth or you’re next!”
“Volga,” Hafeez says. “I said Volga.”
Is the Dnieper even a real river? Or did my brain make that up, too?
CHAPTER THREE
COACH TAKES me to her office in the girls’ locker room. The air is heavy with the smell of sweat and aerosol hair spray. Every time I smell it what comes to me is shame—the red ring from the waistband of my elastic underwear on my stomach as I hunched over to change into shorts and a T-shirt freshman year, and how the little metal door didn’t provide much to hide behind.
“What are we doing here?”
Coach unlocks the door, pushes it open, and there’s her small office with filing cabinets, an old wooden desk stacked with clipboards, and a leather chair on wheels. Nets filled with basketballs and volleyballs hang from wall hooks. It smells like Band-Aids.
“Want to tell me what happened?” Coach plops down in her seat.
“Sprowitz punched Hafeez. That’s it.”
Coach looks at me for a long moment then starts stacking the clipboards. “Look, Alicia. I know you’re struggling. We all got the memo. But if you want good things to happen to you, you’ve got to think positive.” She taps her head.
“Was there an actual memo?”
Coach rolls her eyes. “You’ve got to change your mind-set.”
“So, what’s happening to me—it’s just a phase or something?” Coach cradles her belly, and I wonder if she’s hoping her kid doesn’t turn out like me. “And if I just think happy thoughts, I’ll be fine?”
Coach stacks a few more clipboards, leans back in her chair, and tilts her head. “Maybe it is a phase. You should look for good opportunities instead of bad ones. Be ready, you know, to move on to other things. Just be positive. If you look for the good, it has a way of finding you.” She makes it sound so simple. She pulls out a pink pass form and scribbles something on it. I think she’s going to send me back to class, but then she tells me my mother’s been called. “About how long does it usually take her to get here, thirty minutes or so?”
My heart squeezes. My mother has enough to deal with, being a single parent and working all the time, without me causing her more grief.
“Why’d she get called?” I ask Coach. “I didn’t do anything; I’m serious. Wait. There was an actual memo, wasn’t there?”
Coach looks up at me. “She’s worried about you. We all are.”
I want to cry, not just because I know she’s right, but also because she’s trying to help in her own gruff way. I feel guilty that she’s even making the effort.
She hands me the pass. It has my name and her signature, but it doesn’t have a destination on it. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Coach gives me a level look. “You decide, Alicia. You have thirty minutes. Then you need to go to the principal’s office to meet your mom.”
I stand up, still shaky from the cafeteria ordeal. I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from losing it. I take the pass and turn to leave.
“Remember, Alicia,” Coach says. “Look for the good. Be positive.”
“I’ll try.” I pull her door shut behind me.
* * *
I decide to head to the library—the only quiet place in the whole building. Even after my father telling me that I had to get lost and stay lost, and the gunshot wound, and all of that, it’s the boy’s face in that scarred world that stays in my head, his bright blue eyes. And that world—the gash in the earth, the weird deep hum at its core, its harsh light. I can’t shake any of it, even though it’s just a product of my malfunctioning brain.
Get lost and stay lost? Isn’t that what my father’s good at—staying lost? Wasn’t he just asking me to be more like him?
I open the library’s heavy doors.
It’s quiet and empty, no one even manning the reference desk. The air is dusty and stale but comforting, like being inside a book.
I angle down the poetry aisle—the only one I’ve ever spent much time in—and grab the copy of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. I don’t even like to tell people I love her poems, because it will absolutely make me seem like an emo girl who likes the poet who killed herself. It’s not the way she died. It’s the way she seems to be so alive. It’s the way she seems to be talking to me.
I take the book and slide into a carrel. “Daddy” is the poem I always turn to, and the book knows this: it always opens to that page, talking about his “brute heart.”
Is my father a brute?
A couple years ago, when the pinholes of light broke through the darkness in my hallucinations, I realized the pinholes weren’t light stabbing through a fabric, but stars, part of the night sky. I should say part of a night sky because it wasn’t this night sky or the one I would call our night sky. That’s when I started scratching out poems or parts of poems. What did I know about poetry except what seemed to be cracking open in my own head? Jane told me writing would help. “Keep writing. Keep filling those notebooks,” she said.
Eventually, one of the hallucinations of the night sky turned into day, and there was sunlight. I remember watching that blade of grass push its way up from dirt in fast motion. It wasn’t there and then it was.
I remember the exact blade of grass, how the dirt clung to it.
After that, one world after another built itself—stitched itself together. Bark rippled around trees, leaves flipped open, buildings piled up brick by brick, suspension bridges spanned rivers with their steel cables spun like spiderwebs, and finally, details—church bells rang on the hour, plastic bags swirled in gutters, dogs pulled on their leashes, and the leashes were held on to by people.
Those were the final details, the people.
And in each worl
d, there was some other version of myself. Another me, like this me but not quite. This is what it feels like to be known, to see a glimpse of yourself in someone else—like a winter hive, iced over, is thawing, like hibernating bees are moving their thin wings again, like being told you’re still alive.
I started reading poems like crazy because they made sense when nothing else did. I tripped across Plath’s poems, and it was like she was speaking a secret language. I memorized the ones that felt like confessions most of all, like when she writes about being scared of the “dark thing that sleeps” inside of her. The poem unwinds like a spool of thread as she describes the thing as “soft” and “feathery,” turning within her.
My mother thinks it’s not a good idea to read the work of someone who committed suicide. As if the poems would infect me.
They already have.
When the bell rings, I can hear the halls flooding with noise from the cool calm of the library. I slip the book back onto the shelf and head for the office. I have my own copy at home, under my pillow. It’s dog-eared and scribbled in, with notes to myself and many of my doodles of trees with spiraling roots and branches.
I wonder what’s happened to Hafeez. I could text him, but he’s careful to keep his phone turned off in school. He follows rules, not just because he’s a good guy, but because he thinks they might protect him in some way. Hell of a lot of good they did him today.
Time’s up.
* * *
The principal’s secretary, Shirl Boswell, smiles when I come in. She likes me, but it makes me sad that she’s so used to seeing me show up here. I get sent by teachers for just fading out and not responding when they ask me questions. I get sent in because sometimes I fade out and other kids take that moment to want to talk to me. Then, of course, there are the couple of times I’m kind of ignoring them, more or less—not all there—and they’ve gotten pissed and suddenly I’m back in the real world in a fight. In other words, Shirl Boswell and I know each other pretty well.
“Have you ever heard of a river called the Volga, Shirl?”
She gives me a warning look for using her first name, then shakes her head. “I vacation on the Cape.” Then she softens. “You okay? Tough day?”
I’m now paranoid that this memo makes me seem pathetic. Then I think, Maybe the memo is right. “Thanks, yeah. Tough day.”
I look out at the parking lot—large gray blocks of plowed snow piled in the corners, the line of buses sending up dark exhaust. My father went to this high school, and some of the teachers even remember him. He wasn’t okay in the head, either. He was the demented black sheep of the family, and I’m probably doomed to become like him, despite my mother’s high hopes.
I sit down in a waiting-room chair and then I see my mother walk up to the front desk and sign in—she’s got this down pat. She’s wearing her scrubs decorated with cartoons of happy stick figures as if drawn by children. She works as an LPN in a pediatric ward, and she’ll get docked for missing part of her shift. Her eyes, wet with worry, sweep the room and land on me. It’s just the two of us, and sometimes I imagine us as two small glass figurines—the kind you’d find in a nativity scene near someone’s Christmas tree—but we don’t belong to anything.
She’s the reason I didn’t lean into the knife of the kid robbing me in the bathroom at group counseling. I couldn’t do that to her. I can’t abandon her, no matter how much I am a burden to her. We’re just two glass figures and we could easily shatter.
Now that she’s here, I want to kill Sprowitz for what he said about her in the cafeteria. I feel angry and guilty and ashamed all at the same time. I try to smile.
“There’s nothing funny about any of this,” she says, and then she walks over and sits next to me. “Tell me what happened.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “What is with people? It’s like”—she brushes my hair back from my face—“the world just wants us to hand our children over to it. You pour all this love in and then they just want to take it.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head. I know that I’m breaking her heart. She used to be lighter, happier. But since all of this mental stuff started happening to me, she seems almost haunted. She wanders the house late at night like she wants to ward something off. I wish I were the kind of girl who stood up straight and thrived in team sports and helped decorate proms.
“You can tell the principal you’re sorry,” my mother says. “Just nod and take responsibility. People respect that.”
“But what if that’s not the truth? Don’t people respect honesty?”
“Not really. The truth isn’t always simple. People like things simple.”
The principal’s door opens and Sprowitz walks out. He smiles at my mother, his lips all wet, his eyes narrowed. I want to grab his head and knee him in the face.
“Hey, Mrs. Maxwell,” he says, low voiced.
“Move on, Brian,” Principal Waybourne says, arms crossed. His jaw is tight.
Sprowitz waves. “Later, Mr. Waybourne.”
When Principal Waybourne sees my mother, he uncrosses his arms, puts his hands in his pockets, and looks at the floor. “Ms. Maxwell,” he says. “I’m glad you could make it.”
Sometimes I forget the effect my mother has on men. My mother doesn’t date. At all. She says she’s not interested. But even in scrubs she’s beautiful. She had me when she was only nineteen and my dad was twenty-one. Sometimes when she’s not being so hard on herself, she says, “Your dad and I were kids. How could we have known what we were getting ourselves into?”
There’s a lot I’ll never know about my parents, but I like to imagine them like that—just kids who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Honestly though, my father doesn’t deserve forgiveness.
And here’s Waybourne, now glancing at her in a way that makes me a little sick—as if Sprowitz weren’t enough for today. “Hey, Principal Waybourne!” I say to get his eyes off her.
Waybourne’s expression goes serious. “Hello, Alicia.” He ushers us both into his office.
As we sit down in fake leather chairs, Principal Waybourne says to my mother, “Third time I’ve seen her this trimester.”
“I know,” my mother says. “We’re trying to sort out the meds. Once we do, everything will settle. I promise. She’s sorry. Aren’t you? Tell him how sorry you are.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry Brian Sprowitz punched my friend in the face.”
Waybourne smiles, hangs his head low, and shakes it slowly. “See?” he says to my mother. “This isn’t good.”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“We’re worried about you,” Waybourne says. “That’s all. We want to set a course. We want to get you going in the right direction.”
“Let me show you our documentation,” my mother says. She pulls out a piece of paper she’s had for a year now and has already shown to Principal Waybourne plenty of times. It’s so heavily creased that it’s almost worn through. She spreads it on the desk. “Dr. Alex Maxwell. He’s got Alicia going to Dr. Jane Larkin, and he’s overseeing her treatment and prescriptions.”
“The uncle, right?”
She nods. “He’s Briggs-Wharton Chair in Neurobiology,” she says. I’ve never understood what this means and I’m sure my mother doesn’t either. “He’s assured me that he can sort out Alicia’s meds and that she has a really bright future.” She pushes the letter toward the principal another few inches. “It’s all in there.”
“I know what it says,” Principal Waybourne tells her. I know how Waybourne would describe me. “Troubled. Disturbed.” In the old days, I’d probably be chained to the wall of an asylum already.
But Principal Waybourne sees the look on my mother’s face after his last comment and retools. “Let’s make the best of this. Let’s do the right thing. I think I’ve found a workable solution.”
“Oh, okay,” my mother says. She picks up the letter and refolds it.
&
nbsp; “You know that this—disturbance—at lunch isn’t the only issue. Alicia isn’t prompt. She glazes over in class. She’s failing Spanish, math, and economics.”
I don’t like it when they talk about me like I’m not there. I tap my sneakers.
My mother says, “Her math teacher hasn’t ever really accepted any of Alicia’s issues. She thinks it’s all behavioral—”
“It’s not just Mrs. Bartle. All of the teachers have serious concerns. Across the board.”
“Sit up,” my mother says to me, and I do, quickly, but I can’t look at the two of them, so I look out the wide window—kids pouring out of the main door, herded through the metal detectors. I search for Hafeez, but don’t see him. If he were brought in here, both his parents would show up. It makes a difference. Hafeez’s parents are doing doctoral work in something physics related. My mother, a single mom, has a wrinkled doctor’s note.
“And she has these, uh, medical conditions that make her unreachable from time to time. This has an effect on the other kids. And this isn’t the first altercation she’s found herself in.”
“I’m aware of that,” my mother says, “but—”
Waybourne lifts a hand. “Let’s talk to Alicia about this.” He looks at me. “The thing you’ve got to figure out, Alicia,” Waybourne says, “is that you’ve only got one life to live. Only one! It’s precious. Do you want to throw it away? Your one life? Or do you want to do something with it?”
My mother looks at me as if she’s desperate to hear my answer, as if she can’t breathe until she knows if I’m going to do something with my life. Only one! I think, and I feel it in my chest, pressure so tight I could burst. I see the moment that kid pulled the knife, how surprised he was when I put my iPod down on the edge of the sink, raised my hands in the air, and whispered, “Just do it! Go ahead! Split me open.” And I took a step toward her. What did she expect, robbing screwups at a counseling session?