“Whatever,” I said, and immediately hated myself. Whatever? “Or whatnever.” I tried to amend it to sound clever. It did, sort of.
“Cool,” he said.
“What’s cool?”
“Eeverything, duuude.”
I had to laugh. “Yeah, well it doesn’t feel too cool to be the school anti-Christ.”
“Yeah, well it iis cool. Youu should come sit with uss.”
I looked over at the corner table where he sits with longhaired DJ, blue-haired Kelly, and died-black-haired Liz. Liz lives down and across the alley from me, but we’ve never been friends. She’s also in my reading class. It must have been Liz who told them about my dragon rant.
I was tempted, but while Quill got in the food line, I took my lunch over to my usual spot with Sophia and Gwen. You might think from what I have written that I have no friends at all, but I do, sort of. I have my lunch group, three of the quietest, least gossipy girls in the school. When I was freaking out last week after the anti-Christ incident, two out of three didn’t even know about it, so I actually told them.
The strange thing is that those same two are very religious. Sophia and Gwen are Mormons, which the bad side of me has a hard time with, but it’s impossible to have a hard time with Sophia and Gwen because they are so good. They should not belong to a religion that is in any way comparable to the Christian hypocrites’. The hypocrites wear WWJD bracelets, but it’s just for show. They only want to act righteous and be part of the herd, while Sophia and Gwen actually act from goodness and love. Or so it seems—maybe it’s just brainwashing.
Anyway, I told them at lunch how my whole reading class was mad at me because I actually answered the teacher’s question and everybody else wanted to talk about evolution.
“Good job talking in class, though,” Sophia said. “You hardly ever contributed last year.” We had been in a lot of classes together, and they knew how quiet I was.
“Yeah, but I got a little worked up,” I said. “First of all, the article did mention Darwin, but only because it was about definitions of species.” I was on shaky ground here—we had never discussed this. “Then, I got into it with Matthew and Jenny because they were not being scientific—totally ignoring the fossil record.”
“Which is full of gaps.”
“Unconformities—unlike middle school,” I said. “But it was insane. Jenny actually brought dragons into it—dragons—as if they were real, as if there were evidence that dinosaurs had lived until medieval knights killed them.”
“It is possible,” Sophia said. Then she saw my face. “Though, granted, unlikely.” She talks that way, sophisticated. She loves Greek mythology and all kinds of old tales and lore, which is strange because I thought that all Christian people were terrified of pagan stuff. Not that I knew anything about “LDS,” as the Mormon kids call themselves, except that they don’t drink alcohol or caffeine and had been run out of just about everywhere except Utah.
“Don’t you wonder what inspired the stories of the dragons?” she said. “And what about Nessie?”
“Watch out.” Hannah sat down. “You’re going to piss off Miss Darwin Junior here.”
“You heard.”
“Something about you being the devil and screaming about dragons. You don’t believe in them, but you do believe in dinosaurs.”
“I think we should talk about something else.”
Later—
It was just about a year ago that I came up with what I called the Invisibility Code. Although it’s not easy becoming invisible when you’re a seventh-grade girl who’s pushing six feet, I decided to try. After all, if a giant like Chief Broom could do it, I figured I could too.
The rules go something like this:
1. Flat shoes—easy since I had no desire for super-cool platforms.
2. Loose clothes—something I learned about in fifth grade when my chest started to mushroom.
3. Show up and do your work—difficult in those instances when you’d rather crawl into a pit and never come out, otherwise, no problem.
4. Speak only when spoken to or when not speaking would make you more visible.
I relax the last rule when it conflicts with number three. And last week, of course, I broke it completely. Like an idiot. Just because morons are dominating the discussion, and just because they’re pissing me off, doesn’t equal me being able to accomplish anything by opening my big, fat trap. All I do is make myself a target, but even so, I think I’m ditching the Code. Not only does it sound sort of dumb, but I’m afraid I’ll keep doing stupid things like ranting about dragons. Maybe hanging around Ally has changed me more than I realized. Maybe I want to rant about dragons when I feel like it. What sucks is that nobody understands me like she does, and since she is a thousand miles away, I might as well be talking to myself. Hence the compulsive journal writing.
The Code seemed to make sense last year, but I was having a number of strange thoughts. I couldn’t keep certain images out of my mind, for example, like my own body, in free-fall, as if I’d slipped into one of the photos that froze people forever in their tumbles from the World Trade Center. I kept this very strictly to myself, and I lied beautifully in the “depression assessment” Mom set up after the doctor couldn’t find anything physically wrong with me.
The fibbing became number five of the Code. Since I figured that I would be okay if people would just let me alone, I tried to tell them what they wanted to hear. If old Randall McMurphy (Chief Broom’s buddy in Cuckoo’s Nest—the hero of the book, who gets lobotomized) had done that sooner, he wouldn’t have had a hunk of his brain scooped out. I should remember him the next time I want to mouth off.
Anyway, the depression questions were either about recent changes, or were matters of degree. I had been bummed out for more than a year, and how sad is too sad? How are people supposed to feel?
The conclusion was that, aside from some perfectly natural fears and sadness over 9/11, I was within the normal range for moods. Some counseling might be a good thing, but I was able to talk them out of it.
The tricky part in all of this was having enough energy to do what it took to keep people from bothering me. Third quarter, I almost got a B in math, the fear of which put me in a panic that gave me energy to do extra credit until I got my percentage up. “Math Mates” worksheets—gotta love ’em.
Then the Gifted and Talented lady kept trying to get me involved, which was the last thing I wanted. One day she pulled me out of class for a chat.
“I work with students who need a little more challenge,” she said. “Do you think you might fall into that category?”
“I don’t know.” Keep it short, noncommittal—they’ll get tired of you.
“Is school boring for you, Cassie?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Come on. You have some of the highest test scores in the school. You get straight As, yet your teachers say you put in almost no effort.”
“I do my homework.”
“No class participation, nothing beyond exactly what you’re asked to do.”
“I don’t like to talk in class.”
“Why not?”
We were sitting at a table in the library. A class of sixth graders came in and charged the books. One of them waved to the GT lady.
“Hi, Ms. P.!” he said in a little piping voice.
“Hi, Devin,” she said.
“Can I get back to class now?” I asked.
She looked a little startled—even the good kids in Gifted and Talented probably don’t want to rush right back to class.
“Of course you can,” she said. “It was nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too, Ms. P.” I turned on a little sweetness and bailed out of there.
Soon an invitation came, asking Mom and Dad and me to atte
nd a GT breakfast before school, where we learned about exciting opportunities such as the Knowledgemaster Open, Battle of the Books, and the National Geography Bee. I didn’t want to be bothered with any of this stuff, and when I told Mom and Dad it wasn’t my style, they didn’t push me to participate.
Ms. Price made one last-ditch effort get me “involved.”
“What’s your favorite class, Cassie?”
“They’re all good.” Really they were, every one of them, awful. This is why number five is essential. If I told her that every single class was tedious torture for no apparent purpose, what could she do? Could she stop the teachers from reviewing the same things I’ve heard since fifth grade? Could she stop them from saying the same things over and over again, every day, several times a day? Could she stop the endless test preparation, sample questions, practice tests, and the innumerable standardized tests themselves? Could she stop half the kids from being morons and the other half from being mean? Could she get me a chair that wasn’t an instrument of torture for a girl my size? I didn’t think so.
“Well, what do you like to do outside of school?”
“Go to the mountains, hike, read.”
“Sports?”
“I’m not talented in sports. Or gifted.” That gave her a smile.
“You like hiking,” she pointed out.
“Yes. I can walk. But that’s not a real talent now, is it?” Careful. But I loved playing with that snooty English inflection: that’s not a real talent now, is it?
“Do you ever feel, I don’t know—depressed?”
I thought I had avoided counseling—what the hell? Steady . . .
“Depressed?” Who, me? “No.” What could possibly make you think so?
“Come on, we all get down sometimes. But you seem … ”
“I’m just a normal girl.” I was going for a light effect, a non-depressive affect. “Just ordinary me.”
“I think you’re more like extra-ordinary. I looked in your portfolio—at some of your writing. You may be normal, but you’re not ordinary.”
I didn’t like this woman pawing through my stuff, and yet who can object to being told she’s wonderful? And yet again, short of little chats in the library, what could she do?
“Thank you,” I said, the mannerly child. “But I’d prefer that you didn’t go through my work. Can I go back to class now?”
“Yes, Cassie, but let me tell you,” she leaned forward, and her smoothly dyed, reddish-dark hair swung forward as she tapped the table for emphasis. “I said your reading scores were high—the truth is that they’re higher than anyone else in this school. Your writing is probably too good to score that high.”
She reached over and put her hands on my arms, which were folded in front of me. Her hands were warm, with a big diamond on a wide gold band dwarfing her short finger. Her perfume was something expensive, like the symphony ladies who blanket the lobby of the theater with their reek. I felt sick.
“If I were you, school would be killing me,” she said.
It was not appropriate, but I started laughing. Her perfume was killing me. And yet, school was too. She patted my arm and drew her hands back with a puzzled smile.
“What?” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “I just want to be left alone. I mean—” I had to play this just right. “I’m fine. Thanks. Really. And today’s math is kind of tricky,” I fibbed. “I ought to get back to class.”
“Okay, Cassie. I’m here if you need me.”
“Thanks, Ms. P.”
“Bye, now.”
It was partly with Ms. P. in mind that I pulled my stealth rebellion when the big state tests came around. I figured she wouldn’t be bothering me if my scores weren’t so high, so I decided to throw the tests.
I was in a foul mood—we had been suffering day after day of practice and drill for months, peaking at a pre-test frenzy that included teachers showing peppy “Rock the Test” videos produced by the elective classes. I wanted to retch every single day.
Quill and his friend DJ were dumped in the in-house suspension hole for changing it to “Fuck the Test!” during our pep assembly, which summed up the way I felt, though I wouldn’t have shouted it at the top of my lungs in a gym full of people.
These tests are important, we’re told, and I’d always tried my best because that’s what I do. Also I guess I liked to show off my smarts. But they don’t affect your grade. They don’t keep you from passing. You don’t even get the results until the following fall. So who cares? I was breaking Invisibility Code, but no one at school really cared what my scores were. They wanted the school’s average to go up—which was why we were drilled and psyched to the breaking point—because the teeth of the government testing monster were chomping on the schools. If a few kids had to get thrown to the beast to save the institution, well, sometimes you have to think of the whole rather than the individual.
So bombing the test was an act of revolution—not just a bad score. Or so I told myself when it occurred to me that Mom and Dad would be devastated.
On the first day, the school was giving everybody sausage biscuits and Egg McDuffins. I asked for a vegan snack and got a pesticide-ridden, wax-coated apple. See what I mean? The whole thing is, as Dad would say, a charade (which he would pronounce sher-aád).
The first test was math. We had been told over and over again that showing the work and explaining your answers was just as important as the answers themselves. So the easiest way to throw it would have been to darken random circles and leave all the workspaces and written parts blank.
Trouble is, the teacher was walking around making sure everybody was filling in every blank. So what I did was to carefully work every problem in the wrong space, then choose the wrong answer. Some of them were really very hard, but my brain seemed to be working better than it had all year. Stuff that I’d have had to look up in the book when I was doing my homework just came to me out of the blue. I was enjoying myself for the first time in a long time, especially on the explanations. On those I made sure to write a lot of stuff that didn’t make any sense at all:
To find the area of a sphere, various formulae are needed. Not the kind of formula you give to a baby, you dumbbell! Math formulas! (But for baby, breast is best.) Anyhoo, you must circumnavigate your particular globe, which will necessitate more math, in the form of triangulations with or without a sextant. Not sex—SEXTANT—like in Captain Cook? But since the globe is a sphere, and not a triangle (even though pie is cut in triangles) you need to use the formulae for them. (Spheres, not babies!)
I’d never write something like this on a paper that would be graded by a teacher I knew and possibly be seen by Mom and Dad. But these tests were sent off to be graded by strangers and never seen again. It was great.
Every ten minutes on the dot, Mr. Stephens would get up from his newspaper to pace the aisles. Since I was so hard at work and was filling in all the blanks, everything looked great to him. I knew he would never bother to actually read what I had written.
On the literature test I did the same thing. There were a couple of decent stories and poems among the usual garbage, but I pretended to have no clue whatsoever of how to make sense of any of it. The written answers were again a particular source of enjoyment and pride.
When it came to the writing test, we’d been trained to stay on topic, and if they asked for an expository essay, we must be sure not to write a story; if they asked for a story, we mustn’t do an essay. Guess what I did? The topic was a persuasive essay, so I wrote a story that had nothing to do with it. I scrambled all my punctuation, garbled my grammar, and didn’t paragraph anything. I capitalized all the wrong words. I also took a lot of trouble with my spelling: I nailed somnambulist, but misspelled sliep wocker. It was a blast.
There were two two-hour testing blocks per day, three days per
week, for two weeks. By the end of the first week, my energy was flagging, but I kept with the program.
I debated telling Mom and Dad, especially when they asked how the tests were going. I had been complaining about all the prep during the previous weeks, and they were surprised at how chipper I seemed once the actual testing began. Dad said standardized tests are a crock of Cheez Whiz, anyway. But Mom was sympathetic to the school and pointed out how tickled Dad got when his little girl brought home the astronomical scores.
“And she’ll have a lot more tests to take before she’s through,” Mom said. “She’d better get used to them.”
After the tests were over, the remainder of seventh grade dragged on. I perked up a little when spring came around, and we took more weekends at the cabin. Sean was due back for the summer right after school was out. And he was bringing Ally—the love of his life, as Dad quipped—for a week’s stay, and we were all curious about meeting her.
30 August
Mom has rehearsals this weekend—big concert on Monday—but Dad and I are heading up to my favorite place on earth: our cabin in the mountains.
Years ago, before Sean and I were born, Mom came into some money from her grandmother, and she and Dad put it into land.
Land. It’s a funny word when you look at it. Earth, ground, dirt, soil, acreage. Property. “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth,” said a bumper sticker stuck on a car that was spewing carbon into the earth’s atmosphere. People.
Dad still talks about how his grandfather lost all the family land in the depression, how land is the only thing that comes close to lasting, how the cabin will belong to Sean and me someday and we will never sell it. “Land is part of your own body,” he says, “and your children’s bodies, and their children’s. So, selling is amputation. Do you think I’d sell my arm? Or even worse, yours? The land is part of you—you don’t sell it.”
But somebody must, because he and Mom were able to buy our little valley, nestled under the western shoulder of the Peak. Until they got the cabin built, they camped out, taking vacations and weekends to work on it.
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