The C was a relief, but also a lie, a fake-ass cover-up because she felt sorry for me.
Ms. Novak said I had until after break to write the Macbeth paper that had been turned in by the others while I was absent. She reached her hand across the table and grasped mine, squeezing it, telling me if I needed anything, anyone to talk to, she’d be there for me. Her eyes watered and I thought she might cry, or I might cry, and I felt like if either of those things happened I wouldn’t be able to stop, so I mumbled thank you and pulled my hand away and headed out of the classroom and on to lunch, where Nicole was waiting to take me away.
BUT THAT WASN’T EVEN THE WORST PART
Coach received a note telling him to excuse me from fifth period P.E. I thought, at first, that I was in trouble, that maybe the time I’d missed in the hospital meant I was getting kicked out. But when I checked in with the secretary, she told me to take a seat, and then the guidance counselor came and brought me to her office.
There was another girl sitting in there already. She was wearing a pink polo shirt and glasses. She had shiny black hair and when she smiled at me I could see her neat white teeth. I could tell just by looking at her that she woke up every morning with enough time to shower and blow dry her hair and sit down and eat breakfast. I hadn’t even showered since they’d made me in the mental hospital, and my clothes were wrinkled and stained.
The guidance counselor told me she was my Peer Assistant Listener, my PAL, a new friend—someone who would help me figure out my studies and the things I’d been missing. My PAL looked friendly, like she wanted to help.
We walked back over the hill together, to a bench in the quad under a tree where a group of surfers sat during lunch, the surfers with more money and better grades. As we walked, she said mindless things about Christmas break and Christmas trees, to which I smiled and nodded like I knew what she was talking about.
We sat down and she asked me about the problems I’d been having. I thought I should just say I’d been really sick, but then I remembered what they’d told us in the hospital, to be honest, that if we weren’t completely and totally honest then no one could help us. I wanted things to be different, I really did—so I told her everything.
She was facing into the sun, and the light reflected off her glasses in a way that made her look like a golden space creature. The blankness made it easy to talk and talk. When I was finished, I thought she’d know what to do, or at least have something to say.
But it was obvious she had nothing to say to me. Nothing to offer me. She looked at me, looked away, disgusted. She fingered the silver cross that hung on a chain around her neck, me, a vampire, something to ward away. Her mouth opened but she said nothing, white teeth now looking more rodent-like than pretty. I felt my face flush hot with embarrassment. I was so stupid.
I didn’t know what to do so I just told her the old standby: I had to pee. I went to the bathroom and peed and washed my hands. The bathroom was empty. The absences, the inability to sleep, the inability to eat, the inability to read, the visions, the suicide attempt, the hospital, the other hospital. I stood at the mirror and reapplied my lip gloss. I didn’t look like someone who’d just been let out of the mental hospital. I didn’t feel like it either. I didn’t feel like much of anything. The new psych meds had turned me cold. A machine.
Someone had scratched the words LIVE FAST DIE YOUNG into the mirror. It was a funny joke.
THAT NIGHT
Neither of my parents would leave me alone. My mom came home early, walked by my door every thirty minutes, like she was checking to make sure I was still alive. My dad came home with pizza and a bunch of videos from Blockbuster. Stupid movies, movies I didn’t want to watch—Air Bud, Liar, Liar, The Nutty Professor—but I felt so guilty that I pretended I was excited. We watched two movies and then it was time for bed. My dad went upstairs but my mom said she wanted to talk. It turned out she had nothing to say. We sat there at the kitchen in silence for a while, her opening her mouth and then closing it like a fish. “How are you feeling?” was finally what she settled on.
She was looking better, better than before. Her skin was no longer that gray color it had been while I was in the hospital. The bags were almost gone from her eyes. But they were red rimmed, and it made me wonder if she’d been crying. I felt guilty, that I’d made her cry. I told her I was feeling better. It was even sort of true. The hallucinations had stopped and I no longer felt like anyone was watching me. Every night since the hospital, I’d slept like a log. I did feel drugged and sluggish, but it was better than the Other Thing. But underneath the blanket of medicine, I still felt so sad and hollow. Like an alien, this strange interloper that didn’t fit in anywhere, didn’t have a core or a true self. I didn’t want to go back to Carmel Heights, but at the same time, I wished this wasn’t true.
At first I didn’t say anything about the sadness to my mother. I smiled and said I was feeling good. But then I told her the truth. “I’ll be fine as long as I don’t have to go back to that school,” I said. “I can’t go back.”
I thought she might be angry, or disappointed. But she slid her hand across the table and put it over mine. It felt good there, warm and solid. “Your father and I will figure it out.”
We sat there for while, quiet. Then she said, “You know what I think would be fun? We could have a slumber party. Right here in the living room. We could get out the camping mats and sleeping bags.”
I knew what she was doing. I knew she was still afraid of what would happen if she left me alone, if I would try it again. I wouldn’t. The whole experience had been so humiliating and exhausting that there was no chance. But I figured I owed her something, more than I could give her, that this “slumber party” on the floor was the least I could do.
We got the mats and sleeping bags from the garage, pushed the coffee table aside and rolled everything out, our pillows so close they were touching. I could feel her watching me as we both lay there. I could feel her eyes on me as I fell asleep, trying to uncover something, trying to figure out if I was really her daughter, or just some maniac who had been left in her place.
CARMEL HEIGHTS HIGH SCHOOL: A CALIFORNIA EXEMPLARY SCHOOL
Carmel Heights didn’t want me to switch to New Hope, the district’s continuation school. The vice principal called me into a meeting with my parents and pulled out my scores from the standardized test they made us take every year. He pointed to the numbers, all in the ninetieth percentile, except for listening.
“It’s unusual to have a girl score so high in both math and English,” he said, transparent. Everybody knew that Carmel Heights was the top-scored high school in the county, although sometimes they lost that title to Reagan High or Sierra Vista, the two high schools just north and south of Carmel Heights, in neighborhoods equally wealthy and white as Santa Bonita. And everyone knew the factors determining this scoring had nothing to do with how much the students learned, or how well they did in college, or how well they did in life, and were instead decided by things that should have been arbitrary yet somehow weren’t treated that way, like championship titles, and test scores, and cumulative GPAs, and the percentage of students entering elite colleges upon graduation. I hadn’t known the numbers were broken down into gender and subjects.
If he looked at the papers in my file that weren’t my test scores, he’d see my shitty grades, and all of my truancies and tardies and detentions. He had even been the one who gave me dirty looks while I had detention, which mostly involved filing things in his office, and he was the one who made the phone calls about the truancies that led to detention and my subsequent endless grounding, and he was the one who had just last month signed a document stating that I had exceeded the acceptable number of truancies and therefore was required to go before a review board, which would probably result in Harry, the narc, following me around from class to class, and would therefore make my attendance a drain of school resources, and not, as he was saying, an asset, a valuable component to the envir
onment that was Carmel Heights High School.
Not to mention the new document that had made its way into my file while I was in the hospital, my IEP, which stated in big bold capital letters that I was the opposite of an asset. I was a liability. Maybe the IEP plus my test scores showed diversity or something. Maybe they got more funding for that kind of thing. Double bonus for smart, emotionally disturbed teenagers.
Individualized Education Plan for “Julie” [sic], December 1998.
I didn’t laugh though, mostly because I just wanted to get out of there. Mom and Dad seemed as annoyed as I did, nodding and saying nothing, understanding that this was just a stupid formality. We listened as the vice principal went on, explaining how there were no AP or Honors classes at New Hope, no science past biology, no team sports, that someone with my talents would not be “granted the room to thrive” at a school with limited resources like New Hope. Once he’d finally finished, my dad told him I would indeed be switching schools.
It was three days before the semester was supposed to end. We walked out and my mom told me she didn’t care if I finished the week, that I could stay home if I wanted. My dad, who always seemed so interested in following the rules, shivered and said the whole school gave him the creeps. He understood why I didn’t want to go; he wouldn’t want to either. They both agreed: we were making the right decision.
SO I STARTED AT NEW HOPE
In the mornings I took the bus, which I didn’t mind because it reminded me of being in grade school. A sign that this would be a new start, and things would return to how they were. But the bus stop was at Carmel Heights.
New Hope started at nine, an hour and a half after Carmel Heights, where classes were just beginning. I would have been in Math, at the back of the school, and Nicole in Social Studies. I could see her classroom, but the bus pickup was at the far end of the parking lot, too far for me to see in the windows. The building might as well have been empty. From this distance, my old high school looked cold and lifeless, like some sort of office complex housing a company that specialized in the manufacture of deadened workers and blandly malevolent machines.
The first morning was cloudy and cold. I was the only one waiting because my mom had dropped me off so early. She made me take a piece of toast on a paper towel since I was too nervous to eat before I left. I had nothing in my backpack except for an empty binder, my Discman, and a few pencils. I put on my headphones and sat on the curb. I took a bite of toast, then crumpled the paper towel into a ball and threw it all in the gutter.
SCHOOL RULES
At New Hope, we didn’t have classes. Instead, there was a math room with a math teacher, an English room with an English teacher, and so on. You chose which room to go to and when. Right away I could tell that people didn’t actually do this, instead holing up in a single classroom for most of the day. I couldn’t figure out how you decided which classroom was your home base. I thought it might have to do with your advisor—we were all assigned one, mine was the English teacher, Mrs. Hunter—but nobody spent much time in her room so I figured that wasn’t it. Most of the Spanish-speaking students spent the day in the history room because that teacher was fluent in the language. This was the only thing I could piece together.
The Spanish-speaking students were one of the major populations that made up New Hope. There were also the pregnant girls, and people with jobs who needed fewer school hours and a more flexible schedule. Then there were the nerds, kids who’d been made fun of so much they had to be sent somewhere else. Everyone else was some sort of art kid—gay, weird, and/or depressed. I’d never seen so many different colors of hair in my life.
I didn’t know who any of the other students were, and none of them knew me.
I was any old kid.
Not crazy. Just weird.
THE SMOKERS
I’d heard rumors that you were allowed to smoke at New Hope. This was admittedly one of the main reasons why I wanted to go there. But I sort of assumed it was mere hearsay, the kind of thing Carmel Heights students told each other while sneaking cigarettes behind the tennis courts, hoping to not get a ticket from one of the cops that patrolled the streets around the school.
The rumors were true. Before and after school, all the smokers gathered at the upper parking lot, in this tiny dirt area next to the main road, cordoned off with a rusty chain-link fence ratted with holes. One of the teachers always went up there too, to make sure we didn’t get abducted or leave the property or smoke something that wasn’t tobacco. Sometimes a policeman even came by, rolled down his window, talked to the teacher, said hello to us, signaling we were in a safe zone.
But I didn’t go up there the first couple days. I wasn’t sure of the etiquette, and standing in the small area with a bunch of strangers seemed like too much pressure. When I got to school, I just sat behind a tree in the little courtyard at the center of the school, hoping no one would notice me. It was peaceful under that tree. Its leaves were small and the palest green, and as I sat there the breeze pushed them off the branches, fluttering into my hair.
BUT ON THE FOURTH DAY
This girl I hadn’t seen before showed up at the bus stop. She was wearing big platform shoes and pink heart-shaped sunglasses. I didn’t recognize her until she came up to me and said hi. It was Holly. Her mother was the secretary at my mom’s school, and we used to play together after school when we were little. Now her hair was dyed black. She acted happy and surprised to see me, said she’d been sick the past few days. We sat down on the curb and she offered me a cigarette. Her nails were long and painted bright blue. I hadn’t thought to smoke here before, figuring we’d get caught by the narc or something. But I didn’t say anything, remembering a conversation I’d had with her when I was in third grade and she was in fourth. She’d asked me if I knew what a condom was. I said yes, thinking she was stupid, because, as I told her, I lived in one. My answer made her laugh and laugh. It took two years before I figured out why.
I took a cigarette from her and figured nothing bad would happen. I smoked it fast, the tip turning narrow and thin like a pencil. I put my butt out on the remainder of my toast from the first day, which was now a nasty beige lump crawling with ants.
At the end of the day, Holly and I got in the back of a truck with three students I’d seen but hadn’t talked to. The owner of the truck was this guy Derek, a senior with a blue mohawk. The girl was his little sister Cara. She had a pierced nose and was wearing a belly T with JNCOs. Her hair was neon red. I’d never seen a girl who looked like her until I came to New Hope, and now there was a dozen of them—as good-looking and cool as a popular girl at Carmel Heights, but wearing clothes that made my Calvin Klein T-shirts and Guess? jeans seem prissy and square.
The third person was this guy named Robbie, who was a big ugly with acne scars all over his face, but I gathered everyone liked him anyway because he was funny.
We all went to Derek and Cara’s house, which wasn’t a house at all, but an apartment they lived in with just their father, furniture old and faded and everything a different color, walls blank except for a photo of the three of them at the zoo in a #1 DAD frame over the doorway to the kitchen. We smoked weed. I didn’t say much, worried about how I was coming across, afraid of acting like a stuck-up Santa Bonita girl. But no one seemed to care. It seemed they liked having me around. They passed me the pipe and Robbie told jokes until we couldn’t stop laughing, until Holly was snorting and Cara had tears streaming down her face.
FLOCK
Most days after school, Holly and I went to the Palms, this shopping center a few blocks over from Carmel Heights. There was a bookstore, a Walgreens, a grocery store, a brand new Bath & Body Works. The first time Holly brought me there, we’d gone to her house first for hot dogs and Pepsi, pretty much the only thing she ever ate, before walking over. There were a bunch of metal tables in front of the movie theaters, chipped white paint. A small group of boys sat at one of them, playing chess. They were younger than us, maybe junior h
igh, scrawny and covered in acne. I couldn’t figure out why Holly wanted to hang out with them. I pulled out a cigarette, said nothing, smoked it, pulled out another, bored. The boys and Holly made dumb jokes that I only half-listened to.
As it grew later, other people started showing up in big trucks and tricked-out cars, shouting from the open windows before parking and walking over to us. The boys wore hoodies and wide JNCOs. The girls wore a lot of makeup, and had long straight hair. I vaguely recognized some of them from Carmel Heights and New Hope.
“Who’s this?” one of the boys said to Holly, nodding at me. His black hair was bleached blond and he was old enough to have a goatee. I couldn’t tell if he was cute. Holly introduced me. His name was Ramon. He smiled, then told Holly we should go smoke a bowl.
I followed them around the corner, to this corridor behind the theater full of big bags of trash. Ramon pulled out a shitty metal pipe and a tiny baggie of sticky weed, giving me the first hit. I felt funny smoking it right in public like that, hidden only by a tiny stucco wall that separated us from the parking lot, right where someone could see us. But Holly and Ramon acted like it was no big deal.
And later I learned that it wasn’t. This was a space I’d smoke in often. Nobody was ever back there besides us. There were other places too—behind the green power box on the far side of the circle, which is what we called the drop-off area for the theater in front of the tables, crouching in the tall grass that grew in the vacant field across the street. During the day, we sat at the tables, the lacy iron pressing curlicues into my thighs, smoking cigarettes until my lungs hurt, drinking cheap beer or liquor hidden in plastic cups and somebody’s backpack. The grown-ups and children going to the movies looked at us warily, but nobody ever bothered us. The tables were ours.
Juliet the Maniac Page 6