by Nancy N. Rue
“Oh my gosh, Boz,” I said. “We don’t need a recap!”
He laughed again, and so did Ruthie, although I was sure she had no idea why—except that at the moment nobody was telling her she was fat or ugly or dumb or had a Pizza Hut Supreme for a face. I was no closer to a topic for my paper, but I was farther away from the glaring mood I’d been in when I sat down.
*
It actually made me want to brainstorm for an idea, though, which I couldn’t do in sixth period because Rafe and I were working on our art project. Well, I was working, writing down all the stuff he already knew about Norman Mailer being the protector of graffiti and the city of New York getting all over him because he compared “vandals” to Giotto and Rauschenberg (famous artists, Rafe told me when I asked—like I should have known), and they had to cover the subway walls with Teflon paint and make hardware stores keep spray paint under lock and key.
Yeah, through all that, I took notes like a crazy woman while Rafe lounged against the back wall at his desk, one arm around Uma, the other hand pushing a toothpick in and out of his dental work. It didn’t help my concentration that Uma gave me the death stare the entire time. I really was going to have to get her alone and tell her I wasn’t after her man.
On second thought, maybe I could just send her a text.
*
Right after I did my afternoon exercises, I took the smoothie my mom made me to my room, making a silent vow not to come out until I had a topic and an outline for my Scarlet Letter essay.
I stopped inside the doorway. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, but it wasn’t the Frenemy. It was the creepy-weird feeling that somebody had been in there. Again?
I heard Mom coming down the hall and I stuck my head out.
“You don’t have to clean my room, Mom,” I said. “I can do it.”
She laughed. “You’re giving me way too much credit, Cass. I haven’t cleaned anything in this house for about two weeks. Not that it doesn’t need it—”
“No, seriously. You haven’t been in here tidying?”
“Since when have I ever ‘tidied’? That’s your father’s MO.” Her face clouded. “And, no, I’m sure he hasn’t been in there. He’s never here when one of us isn’t.”
That was true. He was usually off “dealing with things.”
“Is something wrong, Cass?” Mom said.
“No, I’m just being weird,” I said. “I’m gonna do some homework.”
It had to be that I was spending way too much time alone in there and I was getting paranoid or something. With resolution I took my bag straight to the beanbag chair and sank into it. Maybe a little RL would calm me down. It usually did.
But when I reached my hand under the beanbag, my fingers only touched carpet. There was no gnarled-up leather book, there or in any of the other six places I looked—frantically— like a cop with a search warrant. By the time I’d pulled everything out from under the bed, I was dripping sweat and my heart was slamming.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
My head jerked up. Aaron stood in my doorway, my RL book in his hand. I didn’t even know where to start.
I chose getting up off the floor first, while Aaron slapped the book onto my desk. Hard.
“You came in here and took that?” I said.
“It didn’t meet me at the front door.”
“You had no right to even come into my room.”
“Yeah, well, you know something, Cassidy? I’m not real concerned about anybody’s ‘rights’—especially not yours.”
His eyes glittered with something way past his usual disdain. Fine. I was sure mine were glittering too.
“I’m going to get to the truth,” he said.
“What truth? You were looking for drugs?”
“Not even you are that stupid.” He picked up RL and dropped it again. “I saw the journal—thought maybe you wrote something in a journal.”
“That’s not a journal.”
“Yeah. I should have known—you never were the contemplative type. Matter of fact, you never were one to think at all.” His face went hatchet narrow. “If you were, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in right now.”
“Look—I’m sorry your girlfriend broke up with you—”
“My fiancée.”
“Whatever—but—”
“No, not ‘whatever.’”
Aaron shoved RL aside and leaned on my desk with both hands, so that his face was barely a foot from mine. We hadn’t been that close to each other since the last family photo. Only then, I’d seen total disdain. Now I was seeing almost hate.
“We were getting married. Now we’re not. Because of you.”
“Why is that my fault? What if she’d offered me the stuff, and I didn’t take it and I told you—wouldn’t she still be wrong?”
“If she really did offer it to you.” He picked up RL and shook it at me. “That’s what I thought I might find out in here.”
I grabbed for the book but he pulled it out of my reach.
“I told you what happened,” I said. “Now give me—”
“I think you’re lying. Gretchen and I had a good thing—and then out of nowhere she risks her whole career and gives you steroids? I don’t think so. No, see, what I think is that she did give you supplements and you got the steroids from someplace else and blamed her.”
I felt my mouth drop open. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you thought she’d cover for you. But I know Gretchen. She has more integrity than this whole family put together.” Aaron breathed hard through his nose. “She had to separate herself from us—from me—so she could clear her name. If she doesn’t, I might never get her back.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that made absolutely no sense. But I closed it. Because my brother had tears in his eyes, and somehow, in some way I’d never meant to, I had put them there.
“You know what?” I said instead. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid you’ll let something slip?”
“No, because I don’t like who I turn into when I’m around you. I just don’t want to be this—this cynical, I-can-say-worse-things-to-you-than-you-say-to-me person. You’re never going to believe me because you don’t want to believe me, so please, will you just leave me alone?”
It looked like Aaron’s eyebrow went up in spite of itself. “Did you just say ‘please’ to me?”
“No,” I said. “I meant that for God.”
“Oh, so now you’ve got religion too. At least you can’t take anybody down with that.”
“Please go,” I said.
“Going,” he said. He opened his hand and let RL drop to the desktop.
When I was sure the front door had closed, I sank myself into the crunch of my beanbag and pressed RL onto my lap the way it had pressed itself there before. I ran my fingers across the battered cover and traced them through every set of carved-in initials and dug-in doodles and into every dent and crack worn there by the others who had found its wisdom. Aaron obviously wasn’t one of them.
After I creased down every page and examined it for traces of my brother, I decided he hadn’t tainted it in some way. It freaked me out that if he hadn’t brought it back himself, I might never have known what happened to it. And it freaked me out that it freaked me out. I actually depended on this thing—I trusted it, I needed its voice. And that was more than I could say for most of the other voices in my life.
Something poked at me, and again, it wasn’t the Frenemy. It was more like a nudge, like somebody telling me there was something way off about the thought I’d just had.
What? What other voice was actually changing anything?
Okay, maybe Mom’s.
And yeah, Ben’s.
And freakin’ Ruthie’s—who was about as bright as the dome light in Mom’s car, and yet she didn’t talk to me like I was somebody who could have been. I guess you could throw Boz in there too, for that m
atter.
I looked down at RL. The thing was, if I hadn’t listened to this book, I would never have heard any of them.
I pressed the covers together and then let it fall open. It chose a new page that yanked me into itself like we only had ten seconds left in the quarter. I dug into the chair and read.
Yeshua told his follower-friends another story. They were getting close to the end of their road trip, and he needed them to hear this. He said, “There was a city judge who couldn’t have cared less about whether there was a God or not. As for people, he didn’t have too much time for their problems either.”
Nice guy. Mr. LaSalle came to mind.
“In the city, there was a widow. She was supposed to get some public assistance, which she totally needed because her husband had left her with zilch, but she wasn’t receiving her checks, her food stamps, her free health care, nothing. She kept going before the judge—we’re talking weekly, and then daily, saying, I need help here. My rights are being violated! This judge kept putting her off, thinking she’d eventually give up and go away. He had important people to deal with—rich, influential types who could get him reelected. This woman could do absolutely nothing for him, and frankly he saw her as a nuisance.”
Jerk.
You got that right. Yeshua went on to say that, yeah, she was a nuisance, even though she had a good case. She about drove the judge nuts, until he finally said to himself, “Y’know, I don’t give a flip what God thinks, and I sure don’t care about anybody else’s opinion, but, man, I better see that this woman gets what she’s supposed to get or I am going to end up on tranquilizers.”
I stifled a snort. I’d sort of felt that way with Ruthie.
That evidently wasn’t the end of the story, because the book got heavy in my lap.
Then Yeshua said, “Did you hear what that judge, jerk that he was, said to the widow?”
Yeah.
“How can you think God won’t come in and help you if you keep asking? Even if nobody else pays any attention to you—even if you’ve lost all credibility—God will be there for you.”
But what about when I tried to tell Mr. LaSalle and Coach—even my own brother and father—that I didn’t know I was taking steroids and they didn’t believe me? Where was God then?
Yeshua said, “How much of that kind of nagging, begging, I-won’t-give-up kind of faith am I seeing here?”
I felt a little sick. He was seeing none.
I hadn’t nagged or begged. I’d pitched a fit and formed a plan. But I hadn’t prayed.
You said thank you.
I didn’t even flinch at the sound of the voice. I only said, “So what do I do now?”
There was a silence as deep as my empty place. And then I heard Say please.
Just say please.
*
For the rest of Thursday evening and the whole next day, I had a strange off-and-on sensation. It happened while I was covering a piece of posterboard with ideas for my paper, and again when I was in the shower, and several times when I was just moving with the mob through the hallways between classes. Suddenly, I was just hit by the realization, again, that voices that didn’t know each other had said the same words, and it somehow changed everything.
It didn’t really change anything. I still wasn’t part of the basketball community. I still couldn’t sit at lunch with the girls I’d sweated and giggled and gone through puberty with. My teachers still looked at me when they didn’t think I knew, like they were checking for the steroid-use symptoms they’d gotten on a memo.
But everything was different in some way I couldn’t identify. The closest I’d ever come to that feeling was the first time I realized I had a crush on a boy. And the first time Coach Deetz confided in me. And the day I suffered a concussion and Kara cried and said, “Cassie, please don’t ever die. I couldn’t live without you.” It was like spring happening inside my body.
I just hoped it wouldn’t go away like all of that had. Maybe if I took better care of it, it wouldn’t.
*
Boz joined Ruthie and me for lunch again Friday, and Ruthie shared her Cheetos with him.
“These have to be the single worst thing you can ingest,” he said as he licked the orange stuff off of his palm.
“They have cheese in them,” Ruthie said. “That’s good for you, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “If there is anything even remotely resembling actual cheese in those things …”
They both looked at me, orange curls poised between their thumbs and fingers.
“What?” Boz said.
I couldn’t finish. Ruthie was there with her pretty sage-green eyes that nobody noticed because all they could see was the acne and the torso that couldn’t be stuffed into a mini T-shirt. And she was smiling, like she was pretty sure I wasn’t one more person who was going to tell her what she already thought about herself.
And I wasn’t.
“Okay, you guys,” I said. “What do you think about this idea for my paper?”
“Give it,” Boz said.
“This might be totally lame, but what if I write, like, a modern-day version of The Scarlet Letter—you know, not as long—”
“Right, I get you,” Boz said.
“Only it’s my story instead of Hester Prynne’s.” I looked at Ruthie. “Sort of like you said.”
“I did?”
“That whole thing about Jeannette,” Boz said.
“Which we heard already,” I said quickly. “So it wouldn’t be exactly an essay, but Mr. Josephson said he wanted to hear my voice. I don’t know—is it lame?”
“No,” Boz said, blinking rapidly in his contacts. “It’s amazing.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’m gonna write a couple of paragraphs right now and see if I can do it.”
“You can totally do it,” Ruthie said.
“And you know this how?”
“I just do.”
The feeling swept through me again, and I decided she might.
*
I got the story started while Boz and Ruthie shared the rest of the Cheetos and their love for The Lord of the Rings, which I personally could never get into. When we got to sixth period, I scooted my desk next to Ruthie’s, holding what I’d done so far.
“Can I read this to you before the bell rings?” I said.
“You want to read it to me?” she said.
“You’ve got your head in a story twenty-four hours a day. You ought to know what makes one good by now.”
She smiled, a soft smile, and in the midst of the bumps that made her life such a misery, I saw two deep dimples. Ruthie was actually cute.
“Okay, but read it slow,” she said. “I read good when I do it myself, but when somebody reads out loud I’m sometimes like, ‘What? What did you just say?’ It’s like bad audio memory or something. My brother has it too, and one of my cousins …”
Annoying. But cute.
I read what I’d written, and apparently Ruthie’s audio memory was having a good day, because when I was done, she repeated “the good parts” back to me, almost word for word.
“So you think it’s okay?” I said.
“I think it’s wonderful! You could describe the coffee shop more, though. But maybe that’s just me. I like a lot of description.”
“Good point.”
I was making a note of that as the bell rang and Rafe sauntered in, which meant it was time to shift gears and be an artist instead of an author. Sheesh. I got up to pull my desk back into place and discovered Ms. Edelstein watching me. The fact that she’d lifted her face from the never-ending stack of papers was surprise enough. But the look in her eyes startled me. It was like she’d never seen me before.
“Um, could we move some desks back?” I said, as long as I had her attention, “so Rafe and I can unroll our paper and start mapping out our—”
“Sure, go ahead,” she said, and went back to the stack. But the look stayed with me for a while.
*
&
nbsp; The map of our project turned out way better than I expected. Rafe drew most of it, and fast. His hand moved across our big paper in swift, broad strokes, and it occurred to me that you probably had to make art fast when you were trying to stay ahead of the police.
“Where do you actually do your tagging?” I said to him as we worked.
He rocked back on his knees and gave me a disgusted look.
“What?” I said.
“For a smart chick you’re, like, dense sometimes.”
“Really.”
“The ‘tag’ is the signature a graffiti artist uses to sign his work. It’s not the art itself.”
“Oh,” I said. “So what’s your tag?”
“I’ll tag this when we’re done,” he said. The eyebrows kicked in. “You’ll see it then.”
“Can’t wait,” I said. It occurred to me that every time he wiggled his brows, I rolled my eyes. We must have looked like the Marx Brothers or something.
I sat back and surveyed our handiwork. “Okay, so we’ve got the cave pictographs here, the stuff from the catacombs here, the prostitution ads from Ephesus here—”
“Say what?”
I looked up at Lizard, who was stretched across three of the desks we’d pushed back.
“They think the really beautiful graffiti art they found on the walls from ancient Ephesus were ads for prostitutes.”
“You mean, like hos?”
“Language,” Ms. Edelstein said in a bored voice.
“Sorry,” Lizard said.
Rafe tilted his chin at me. “Where’s my main man going?”
“Who was he, like a mobster?” Tank said. He propped himself on the edge of Ruthie’s desk.
“No, man, he’s a guerilla artist,” Rafe said. “Cult artistic figure.”
“Or just a criminal,” I said. “Depends on who you talk to. Y’know what—we should put him right in the middle because he kind of represents the fine line between a political statement and a crime. Then we can put all the pop culture -hiphop-underground stuff on the other side of that.”
Rafe pulled his mondo lips into a smile. “Dang, Roid, that’s good. I’m on it.”
“When are you going to build the legal wall?”
All of us, Ms. Edelstein included, looked at Ruthie.