The Fog

by Caroline B. Cooney

  She raced upstairs, taking the steep steps two at a time. This was how stairs should be climbed! Her purse, so carefully bought with summer earnings, was not something she could leave behind. She had waited all these years to be old enough to have a purse at all.

  But back downstairs, her precious purse felt clunky and dumb next to Anya’s tiny bag. She was not used to holding it and it banged against her and took up space.

  Outside Benj checked to be sure the door had locked behind him. He attached his house key to his Swiss army knife and jammed that into his pocket. Michael fastened his to his belt. Anya had a tiny zip pocket on her tiny purse into which she slipped her key. Christina’s mother had made her a key ring, her name embroidered onto canvas in a leather oblong like a luggage tag. Christina and her mother had been so proud of the key ring. Now Christina thought, It’s too big. And dumb. Nobody else bothers with anything like that.

  She was suddenly horribly afraid.

  Afraid of all those other children, all those rooms and corridors, all those times when she would have to walk alone, sit alone, eat alone. And be different, with her dumb fat key tag, and her dumb fat purse, and her strange tri-colored hair the other kids would say she dyed.

  Wind lifted out of Candle Cove, billowing Anya’s skirt and making a black storm cloud of her hair. Christina and the boys in their jeans and sweaters were as untouched by the wind as if it had steered around them. The first day comes only once, she told herself. No other day can be as bad as the first one. So tomorrow will be fine. Stop being jittery. Don’t yarn. Don’t make it worse by exaggerating. Mrs. Shevvington is right; aim for a satisfactory day.

  Christina bumped her fingertips along the wire fence that kept people from falling into Candle Cove.

  Down in the mud flats, in almost exactly the same place as the day before, stood somebody in a brown wet suit. There was no water there to swim in. There was no boat to get into or out of. There was no bucket for clams. It was just a wet suit, gleaming.

  It walked in the children’s direction fluidly, as if being poured. Mud sucked on its feet. Christina could hear the sucking. She could see the mud, reaching up above the toes, grabbing the ankles. The wet suit came to a stop. It lifted its right hand, very slowly, very high, and beckoned.

  “Listen to his fingers,” whispered Anya. “It’s not a wave. Not a hello. Come here, say the fingers. Come down here and drown with me.”

  Out in the Atlantic, the waiting ocean chuckled and hissed.

  The wet suit raised the other arm, as if to embrace them.

  Christina was already suffocating in the embrace of her own fear and loneliness. She wanted to be hugged. The wet suit would hug her. She listened to the fingers, like Anya.

  Come here, said the fingers. Come here and drown with me.

  But her sneaker tip hit the fence and a button on her jacket caught on the wires.

  I almost walked over the edge, thought Christina Romney, disengaging her button. Some guy down there waves, and I start believing Anya’s yarns. She said the sea knew we were here. She said the sea kept count. She said the sea wants one of us.

  Down in the mud the arms leaned toward them, longingly.

  Christina wrenched her eyes off the wet suit.

  Very slowly a car drove up Breakneck Hill. It was tiny and bright red, gleaming new, as if the driver were on a test drive from the showroom. It was shaped like a long, thin triangle, with the pointed end ready for take-off. The headlights were hidden under slanting hoods. Inside, the upholstery was even redder.

  The driver stuck a casual sleeve out the window, followed by a casual turn of the head.

  It was Blake.

  How handsome he was! A catalog Maine model featured among the hunting equipment and camping accessories.

  “Hi, Anya,” said Blake. He did not smile. His heavy eyebrows lay neatly on his tanned face, and his deep set eyes matched them perfectly, as if they too had been ordered from the catalog. “Would you like to ride to school with me, Anya?” he said. He was nervous, as if she might say no.

  He planned this, Christina thought, filled with romantic appreciation. He timed it. He probably test-drove the route so he’d arrive at just the right moment. Or maybe he’s been sitting at the bottom of the hill, waiting to see the front door open, and Anya, whom he loves, emerge!

  Anya smiled at Blake. Her whole face smiled — even her body seemed to smile. Shyly she touched her stormy hair, and the wind responded by covering her fingers as well as her face. From beneath the black mist of her own hair, Anya whispered, “I’d love to, Blake.”

  Blake’s smile broke through his face like the sun through the fog, dazzling them. He bit his lip, a childlike expression that Anya returned with a wild, loving laugh. In this world of smart cars and fine clothes, only Anya could make Blake happy. Christina could tell by their lips, which were desperate with the need to laugh, kiss, and beg at the same time. Anya danced around the car to slip in beside Blake. He leaned toward her, as if to kiss her, and she held her face up, but in the end he did not, and Christina was disappointed. Instead Blake pushed the pedal to the floor and took off in a squeal of tires. From the back the car had no shape at all; its triangle was pointed away from them and it was nothing but a red cube.

  Michael and Benj walked on. Michael’s posture said, This is where I stop knowing you, Christina. Remember not to bother me.

  They’ve abandoned me, she thought. I’ll have to walk into the school alone. When I go up those steps, I won’t have a single friend on the American continent.

  Alone.

  It was a word so horrible she seemed to hear it in the waves, repeating over and over, saying, You’re alone, Christina, alone, alone, alone.

  The school itself was plain; brick rooms squatting around a courtyard. But the front steps were pink granite from Burning Fog Isle — fifty feet wide, impressive as a state capitol. In fair weather, half the school sat on the steps to eat lunch. What if hundreds of teenagers, all with their best friends, leaned against each other, talked to each other, shared with each other — but left Christina alone? What if she, and only she, had to stand in the sun, shunned and unwanted?

  Clutching her notebook and purse like a sword and lance, Christina looked back at the Cove.

  It was empty. There was nobody in a wet suit.

  There was nobody there at all but a little cormorant, drying its wings.

  Chapter 5

  CHRISTINA HAD MATH FIRST. The teacher, Miss Schuyler, was a plain young woman with odd, old-fashioned braids. I like her, Christina thought. Oh, please, let her like me!

  Miss Schuyler said how lovely it was to have new faces this year. “Let’s welcome Brandi, who’s moved here from Boston,” Miss Schuyler said, pointing to a little dark girl cringing in the back. The class smiled. Everybody said, “Hi, Brandi. Glad to have you, Brandi.” The little girl stopped cringing.

  “And Kevin, who was here up through third grade, moved away, and is now back,” Miss Schuyler went on, pointing to a tall, very thin boy in a sweatshirt so large it nearly touched his knees. The class welcomed Kevin.

  Christina braced herself. Her purse, sitting on the desk, looked fat and stupid. Nobody else had spiral notebooks. Their paper was in three ring binders with impressive fold-out pockets and zips. Nobody else wore brand new jeans. All their jeans were old.

  “And our third new face is Christina, who lives on Burning Fog Isle, and is boarding on the mainland for the school year!”

  There was no teasing.

  Everybody looked as if this were the most interesting, romantic thing they had ever heard.

  Miss Schuyler said it had always been her personal fantasy to live on an island, but she was not brave enough: It took courage to live on an island, she said, and she knew through the year they would find Christina a person of courage.

  Nobody laughed at this. They looked awed.

  Two girls asked Christina to be sure and sit with them at lunch.

  Next Christina had science
. Both the girls who had asked her for lunch — Vicki and Gretchen — were in science with her, and she sat between them. The science teacher said how well prepared island children always were; it put the rest of the class to shame.

  Nobody teased Christina about that either; they looked respectful of Christina’s superior knowledge.

  Gym was what Christina feared most. Her knowledge of team games was almost zero. She discovered that nobody else knew how to hold a hockey stick, either.

  She was as athletic as any of them.

  It’s going to be all right, Christina thought. I’m going to make it.

  Changing classes was not as scary as she expected. Most seventh-graders stayed together, and the classrooms weren’t spread very far apart. Choosing a desk wasn’t awful; nobody saved seats for best friends; they just walked in and slid down. All desks were modern and slick, seats attached like one-room schoolhouse desks. Christina found it difficult to get in and out of them. Everybody else was graceful. Except the boys, who kicked things, stuck their feet out, wrapped their ankles around themselves, and honked like geese.

  Christina was fascinated by the boys.

  So many of them!

  They were all like Michael, with immense feet and hands and noses. They were noisier than Michael, though, and had specialties Michael did not. The boys showed off their skills at hiccuping, burping, and jumping on each other’s feet. This was what you were supposed to fall in love with? Where were the boys like Blake? She examined her classmates for potential Blakes and decided there were none. Seventh grade had a full complement of creeps, weirdos, future criminals, and nerds.

  At lunch it turned out that Vicki and Gretch were fashionable. They were “in” — a phenomenon Christina had read about but never experienced, as the island had so few children. Other giggling seventh-graders angled for the chance to sit at the same table. Vicki and Gretch were given extra desserts. Vicki and Gretch’s opinions were sought and their jokes laughed at.

  The girls were much more attractive than the boys. They were neater, cleaner, and prettier. Christina nevertheless could not take her eyes off the boys. How annoying that the boys sat at their own tables and the girls sat at others. Christina wanted to be next to the boys.

  She was full of second-day-of-school resolutions. No purse, better notebook, memorize everybody’s names, scruffy jeans.

  “If you’re not going to eat your Jell-O, can I have it?” Gretch asked. “I love it with whipped cream.”

  Christina handed Gretch her Jell-O. She wouldn’t have eaten it anyway because she liked only dark-colored Jell-O (raspberry, strawberry) and never touched light-colored Jell-O (lime, lemon). It was a small price to pay for Gretch smiling at her, for being “in” like Vicki and Gretch, for sitting at what was obviously the best table.

  The only thing wrong with lunch was that she did not pay for it.

  Mrs. Shevvington had handed her a blue ticket to exchange for a hot lunch. Christina noticed that about a quarter of the students had these; the rest brought bag lunches, or paid money to buy a hot lunch.

  “How come I have this blue ticket?” Christina asked Gretch.

  “Because you’re poor,” Gretch said. “Island kids are always poor. The state is paying for your lunch.”

  For the first time Christina saw that Gretch, too, was dressed in catalog Maine. That while Christina’s jeans were from a sale rack in a discount store, bought on a mainland shopping trip in July, Gretch’s jeans had a brand name Christina recognized from full-page ads in Seventeen magazine. I might be able to afford the three-ring binder, thought Christina, but not the jeans.

  She wanted jeans like Gretch’s.

  It was the first time in Christina’s life that she had lusted after a brand name. She hated her own boring, unstylish jeans. They embarrassed her, they hung wrong, and they were too blue. She resented her parents for being poor and living where they didn’t know anything about seventh-grade fashion.

  Anya walked over to Christina’s table.

  An honor roll, drama club, soprano solo, tennis team, senior girl — pausing at lunch to chat with a seventh-grader? Even Christina, who knew nothing of the social life of schools, knew this was remarkable. Senior high kids ate on one side of the cafeteria and lowly junior high kids on the other. Nobody crossed the invisible lines, not with their feet, their speech, or their eyes.

  Gretch and Vicki were awestruck. Their giggles were silenced. Their Jell-O spoons hung motionless. Anya had never looked so beautiful. The eyes of all the seniors and juniors followed her, and so, in person, did Blake. Now the younger girls almost swooned. Blake was perfect. Anya was perfect. Anya and Blake together were twice as perfect.

  At first Christina thought. Anya had come over to make Christina look good and stop any teasing that might have begun. But Anya’s eyes caught Christina’s with a strange, dark desperation. Anya was not crossing the cafeteria lines to be sure Christina was surviving her first day, nor to borrow a dime for a phone call, nor to give her a message — but because Anya was not okay.

  Christina did not know what to offer. She could not imagine what had gone wrong for Anya.

  Anya held her arms out for comfort.

  Blake caught up to Anya. Certainly Blake wasn’t upset. Laughing, he took both of Anya’s outstretched hands and twirled her away, like a dance partner. The seventh-grade girls sighed in delicious envy. “Do you see a lot of Blake?” breathed Gretch. “He’s so wonderful! He’s so handsome!”

  “What’s it like on that island of yours?” Vicki asked. Vicki was very tan, and wore a white cotton knit sweater, which made her look even tanner. Her light brown hair was absolutely straight, and it swung when she moved. She had a tourist look to her; she was the day tripper they scorned on the island.

  “Oh, you know,” Christine said, “just a rock and some sea gulls.”

  She flushed with shame. She loved Burning Fog. Why had she made it sound like a garbage dump?

  “I adore sea gulls,” said Gretch. “They’re so beautiful and pure. I love how they tilt in the wind.” Gretch had blonde hair, cut exactly like Vicki’s, and they had a habit of tilting themselves toward each other, so their brown and yellow hair swung together and then swung apart.

  “I don’t think pure is the word,” said Christina. “You should see them with baby ducks and baby terns. Why, one sea gull could goffle up a whole brood.”

  Gretch’s blonde eyebrows lifted like punctuation marks. “Goffle?” she said, starting to laugh. She turned to Vicki, who giggled with her. They tilted hair. “Goffle. That’s so cute. What other cute little words do you know, Christina?”

  Christina said lamely, “I mean eat. Sea gulls eat anything.” She would not tell them how her mother took the kitchen garbage, eggshells, crusts, and scrapings off plates to the top of the cliff, where sea gulls would swoop down like Roman gladiators.

  Once they stood up from the table, junior high etiquette allowed the boys to join them. This turned the girls arch and silly. Christina did not know how to be arch and silly. One boy claimed to be able to spit tobacco farther than anybody, but as the cafeteria proctor was approaching, he could not substantiate this claim. One girl said out on Burning Fog Isle even the girls chewed tobacco. “I bet Christina can spit as far as you can,” she said. “That’s probably what she does when she’s not canning fish.”

  Everybody laughed.

  Another boy said he had been to Burning Fog Isle himself several times. Each summer his parents liked a day trip and a picnic on Burning Fog. Christina did not tell him what she thought of day trippers, but he was not so polite to her. He said he did not think much of islanders. He said they charged too much for soft drinks and yelled when you touched their silly dock.

  It was probably Christina’s mother who had sold him the soft drink. It was probably Frankie’s dock.

  Michael had told her to laugh it off. Christina could not find any laughs. But it was the other seventh-graders who laughed, closing in on Christina, talking loud
er and louder.

  She had been afraid of being alone. Now she was afraid of being in the center.

  “What’s your house like?” said the boy. He had a funny, knowing smile. She felt wary, the way she would around lobster claws. “Is it one of those little shacks that always needs a coat of paint?” he said.

  Vicki and Gretch giggled. “Jonah,” they said, warningly — but coaxingly, so they could get credit for telling him to stop, but yet not stop him.

  “It’s a cottage,” Christina said.

  Jonah smiled triumphantly. “I know which cottage, too,” he said to the rest of the seventh grade. “Christina’s cottage has thirty-two rooms.”

  Gretch and Vicki looked impressed. They blended their hair together like a fence against strangers.

  Jonah said, “And notice that, nevertheless, Christina is getting free lunch. Another welfare cheat. Welcome to our midst.”

  In English, Christina did indeed have Mrs. Shevvington.

  The manners in her room were markedly different. There was no jostling or kidding. Even the boys behaved like human beings, without spitting, tripping their friends, or imitating tomcats in heat.

  Mrs. Shevvington stood in front of the class, and the class sat in front of Mrs. Shevvington, and nothing else happened. Mrs. Shevvington gave a lecture while twenty-four children took notes.

  When Christina picked up her pencil to take notes, her fingers smudged the page, and she left a sweaty palm print where the pencil couldn’t write. Class seemed to last forever, and yet when the bell rang nobody jumped up. They waited until Mrs. Shevvington excused them. Then they walked quietly out of the classroom, just as Christina had to walk quietly down the stairs at the Schooner Inne.

  In the hall Vicki and Gretch walked on either side of Christina as if the cafeteria scenes had never happened—and they were a trio of best girlfriends.

  “What’s it like living with the Shevvingtons?” said Vicki. “Mr. Shevvington is so handsome, don’t you adore him? If he weren’t a hundred years old, I would have a crush on him. But Mrs. Shevvington is so dull, isn’t she? It’s like being in first grade every year, absolutely nothing happens. Oh, well, at least she’s sweet. Her first name is Candy. I think it fits perfectly, don’t you?”