100 Days

by Nicole McInnes

  But I kind of had to pull myself together. Had to just stand there for a minute and get the kinks worked out of my brain. Had to refocus and breathe. I was just waiting in the lunch line. That was all. It was fine. It was a normal day. Nobody had punched me. Nobody needed to be punched. One of the things ACE teachers kept trying to teach us before the program shut down was to listen to the voices of our higher selves when we felt overwhelmed. That was supposed to help neutralize whatever negative energy was about to get us in trouble. Bring it down, dude, the voice of my higher self urged as I stood in that line. Everything’s okay. Just bring it down.

  Then Moira said, “Sometime this year would be nice.”

  When I turned around again, it looked like she was trying to melt my face with her laser-beam eyes because I wasn’t moving fast enough. Which made sense. I was, after all, standing between her and a counter full of food. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the most charitable thought, but with the adrenaline and the barely held back rage pumping through my bloodstream, it was the first thing that came to mind. At the same moment, images of a sixth-grade dodgeball game popped up before I could stop them. It was a pointless memory, one of those things you’re embarrassed to think about. I’ve put it out of my mind in the four years since. Who wouldn’t?

  I took a deep breath. Thank God I hadn’t knocked Moira out before realizing who she was or even that she was a girl. She definitely didn’t make that second part easy with the black hair and lips, the white face, the crap around her eyes. Don’t goths realize how ridiculous they look? Total freaks. If you want to be dead, then be dead already! Stop inflicting your hideousness on the rest of us.

  My father’s voice in my own head stops me cold.

  We had words, me and Moira. Then she crossed the line by getting right up in my face. If I’d done that to her, I’d be kicked out of school so fast, it would make your head spin. True, some part of me instinctively felt cornered when she came that close. Still, if I’d had time to think, I know I wouldn’t have called her what I did. Agnes, either.

  The second I said it, the second I called her “Shamu,” Moira’s expression changed the way a just-punched guy’s expression changes right before he hits the ground. Her face looked like something from the pain chart I saw in the school nurse’s office after my first fight this year. Ten faces on the chart ranged from smiling (Feeling good!) to scowling and tearful (The worst I’ve ever felt). Moira’s face was roughly a seven, but at least she backed the hell off when I insulted her.

  God, my head is a muddle this morning. I look down and realize I’ve poured and eaten two bowls of cereal without knowing I was doing it. I don’t even recall getting the milk out of the fridge.

  * * *

  That afternoon, when I get back home from hauling a load of water from the standpipe in town to our cistern out back, Mom’s in the hallway. She’s wearing her threadbare bathrobe and she looks like a nervous wreck, as usual. Trembly and drained of her life force. Standing in the doorway of her bedroom like she’s just woken up (which she probably has). Who are you? I sometimes want to ask her. And what have you done with the woman who used to get up before dawn? That woman used to fry up a big skillet of bacon and eggs just about every morning. She’d squeeze oranges and make French press coffee before waking me and Dad up so the three of us could start the day together.

  “How was your day?” she asks me in the small, defeated voice she uses all the time now.

  “Fine,” I tell her. “You okay?”

  Mom nods before disappearing into the bedroom. As soon as she closes the door, I grab my dad’s hunting jacket to wear while I feed Diablo and chop some wood for tomorrow’s fire. It still feels subzero outside, but at least the worst of the sleet has let up a little.

  Sometimes I think the hunting jacket still smells like my dad. He was wearing it the first and last time he ever took me elk hunting. At one point, I had a clean shot at a mature bull, but I couldn’t kill it. Instead, I raised the barrel of the rifle just a hair and missed on purpose, fired off the round just over the animal’s shoulder. The bull bolted, and my father cussed as if he hadn’t realized all along how misguided it was to bring me out there. I could punch guys out all day long for teasing me about being dumb, but I loved elk too much to kill one. I’ve always been much happier hunting for their antlers, which tend to break free in winter from the impact of the bulls landing hard on their forelegs after jumping over forest service fences. If I look carefully enough, I always find discarded racks along those fence lines come spring.

  To keep my hands warm now, I bury them in the pockets of the hunting jacket as I walk toward Diablo’s paddock. My right hand encounters something solid, and I pull it out. It’s an empty snuff can I found in the forest last week. I hate litter, so I picked it up, meaning to throw it away later. I didn’t give it any more thought at the time, but now a memory from out of nowhere catapults me backward to the day I first found a full can just like it. I couldn’t have been older than eight or nine. The can was resting on the edge of the truck bed, beckoning me. I twisted off the wide, flat cap quick, before my father returned from whatever he was doing. Then I pinched out a gob of the mysterious brown substance that reminded me of wet mulch and stuffed it inside my bottom lip, the way I’d seen him do.

  I didn’t know you’re not supposed to swallow. Within moments, I could have easily passed for the lead singer of a metal band called the Heaving Vomits.

  My father returned shortly thereafter. It didn’t take him long to put two and two together. Those cool gray eyes of his moved from the open snuff can to my pea-green face. He didn’t cuss or remove his belt like I thought he would, though. Instead, he came toward me, looming large and blocking out the sun. I remember how huge his frame seemed to me at the time, even though he probably wasn’t as big as I am now. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you’ve been punished enough.”

  Back then, he could still be merciful like that.

  4

  AGNES

  DAY 97: MARCH 20

  Moira is my shade tree.

  I first met her when I changed schools halfway through fifth grade. I needed better help with my work as I missed more and more school due to doctor appointments, visits to out-of-town specialists, and time spent at home feeling generally not well. By then, I already had the blood vessels of a seventy-year-old and the beginnings of cardiovascular issues to match. No other Resource room in the district compared with Ms. Marilyn’s Resource room at my new school.

  I was wearing my Hannah Montana wig that first day, the one that best covered up my sticky-out ears. The fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bhamra, had obviously told the students about me already; not one of them dared to so much as look my way when she introduced me. Except Moira. She was sitting in the front row desk to my right. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, staring for so long that I finally turned with a frown and mouthed, Can I help you? Between dealing with my parents’ divorce and changing schools, it had already been an especially stressful year. I wasn’t in the mood to be gawked at today.

  “Miss Watkins will be showing you around,” the teacher said.

  At that, the staring girl smiled and held out her hand for a shake. “I’m Moira.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m Agnes.” Her hand was huge when it closed around mine. Everything about her was huge. She could have squashed me like a bug, but the handshake wasn’t rough at all. Just firm and certain, like something between us was being decided once and for all.

  5

  MOIRA

  DAY 96: MARCH 21

  Monday morning I pick Agnes up at her house as usual and force myself not to protest as she slides her favorite mix tape into El-C’s old cassette player. I know every song on the tape by heart, and not because I want to. The song she loves most, “Dream” by Priscilla Ahn, sounds a little warbly now, probably because Agnes has rewound and replayed it over and over more times than I can count. I guess it’s a pretty enough song, if you like schmaltzy, tear-jerker stuff, which
I definitely do not. Sometimes I find myself humming it for no reason other than because it has been drilled into my brain over the past couple of years. I’m actually grateful for the song this morning. It seems to be distracting her, because she doesn’t mention the name of my old nemesis even once.

  Sixth grade flashed through my mind for only a split second as I stood in that cafeteria line with Boone Craddock looking like he was about to go all postal. But that split second was enough to make me shudder.

  Looking back, I think some major hormonal event must have happened to everyone the summer after fifth grade, especially to the girls. All I knew was that when I returned in the fall, there was a new glint of meanness in the eyes of my classmates. It was as if the queen bees had gotten together over the summer and decided what part each kid would play in the Stephen King movie we’d all be forced to reenact. Some kids, the smart, quiet ones, got to be innocent bystanders. Others, the bees included, got to be perpetrators.

  I, as it turned out, got to be the star, if not the heroine. My parents are hippies, which meant I usually wore clothes my mom made from tie-dyed cotton fabrics. For lunch, I brought reusable containers full of kefir and tabouleh, sandwiches made with tempeh instead of store-bought lunch meat, everything vegetarian. To top it off, I was already five foot eight and weighed as much as my weight-lifting brother, Grant, who was a senior in high school at the time. It didn’t make sense that I could weigh so much eating the way I did, but my mom has always been the same way. One thing she started telling me that year was: We just have slower metabolisms. Another was: You’re beautiful, Moira. Embrace who you are. Someday, you’ll be the kind of woman Peter Paul Rubens would have painted.

  As if that solved everything. Who’d want to model for a seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, anyway?

  It didn’t help that much of the weight was in my breasts, which were the most recent gifts bestowed by the Puberty Fairy during my own summertime hormone surge. It took the boys a while to figure out what to call me. The nickname “Dolly Farton” was in heavy rotation, as was “Booby McGee.” But I was big everywhere else, too. Hence the moniker that topped all others during that year for sheer usage: “Shamu.” Killer whale. Between the name-calling and the fact that Agnes, my only real friend at school, spent most of her time in the Resource room, it wasn’t long before every day of sixth grade felt like a slow lead-up to Carrie’s prom night.

  Thing is, this wasn’t a new story. People who are different get bullied all the time. Interesting adults who contribute to society in amazing ways got bullied when they were kids, too. Even back then, even in the middle of it, I knew this. I’d watched Sesame Street when I was little. I’d seen the PSAs. Plus, my parents reminded me of this stuff all the time. But knowing I might one day help save the world wasn’t much of a comfort when I was twelve and just trying to survive the school year. I was, after all, the one who’d been cast in the starring role by the queen bees at school. I was clearly the girl destined to end up drenched in pigs’ blood under the disco ball.

  6

  AGNES

  DAY 95: MARCH 22

  I was twelve when I got my first digital camera. It was cheap and had only a handful of megapixels, but it seemed like no small miracle to be able to take pictures at school and then go home and look at them on the computer. In no time, I figured out how to crop images, adjust the brightness and saturation, even add some basic effects.

  From that point forward, I never went anywhere without the camera. I used it mainly for taking pictures of my friends and family, but there was another reason I loved it. I couldn’t remember not being stared at constantly every time I entered a public space. I couldn’t remember strangers’ eyes not taking me in, judging me, and then revealing the verdict of what those strangers thought of me. I was funny looking, scary looking, a complete oddity. All of it was out of my control. But holding a camera up to my face gave some of that control back. It gave me a real sense of power for the first time in my life. It was a way of saying, I’m looking at you, too. And I have thoughts about what I see.

  7

  BOONE

  DAY 94: MARCH 23

  There was one teacher in grade school who I especially liked. Okay, maybe the truth was I loved her a little. Ms. Marilyn ran the Resource room. Her job was to help kids who needed a little more time to figure out the stuff we were learning. Unlike my sixth-grade classroom, Resource was always quiet. It was a great place to concentrate, or would have been, anyway, if being around Ms. Marilyn wasn’t such a distraction. She had dark hair and a warm smile, and she was curvier and softer looking than any girl I’d ever seen. She made me think of angel food cake and roller coasters, though I didn’t exactly know why. Maybe it was because my insides felt like I was on a roller coaster any time she leaned over my desk to help me with a math problem or to correct my spelling. She smelled like the woods near my house in midspring, when the pine trees started releasing their vanilla scent.

  She was also the first teacher who encouraged me to “explore my options” when I felt the need to give some other kid a beatdown. My dad always said I’d been born with his short fuse. When I was little, my parents both laughed about it, but they stopped laughing when my anger started flaring up at school. I tried explaining to them that it only happened when I didn’t understand some of the concepts we were supposed to be learning or when I got teased about taking more time than anyone else to finish my work. That’s when Mom insisted I get extra help. At first, I stormed around the house like my dad did whenever he’d had a hard day at work. I’d never thought of myself as stupid before. I’d always thought some stuff just took me longer to figure out. Now I wasn’t so sure. I was convinced that being pulled out of the regular classroom to spend time in Resource was going to be the end of the world. As it turned out, it was anything but.

  Ms. Marilyn taught me to count to ten when I got angry, to use my words instead of my fists when other kids teased me. “You’re a good kid,” she said. “You just need to learn to deal with frustration in healthier ways.” The thought of not seeing her anymore the following year when seventh grade would start nearly did me in.

  The two hours I spent in Resource were the best two hours of every day. Sometimes, though, when I got back to my regular classroom, I felt more like a visitor than a regular student, an awkward antelope that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the herd. It didn’t help that I started kindergarten a year later than everyone else and so was older than my classmates. By all rights, I should have been smarter and surer of myself than all of them.

  Like me, Agnes spent a good chunk of time in Resource. I thought of her as the “little old lady girl.” There was nothing wrong with her brain, that much was clear right off the bat. She was there mainly to get help catching up on work she’d missed when she was out of school for medical stuff. A couple of times, she was even in the hospital. I never asked her for details when she got back, but I figured it couldn’t be good. Sometimes, when Ms. Marilyn was busy with other students, Agnes helped me with reading. There’s no way I would have read out loud in front of anyone else at school, but being embarrassed in front of Agnes just felt wrong somehow. Like, Hey, I know teachers have explained to us how you have this terminal disease that also makes you look like someone’s grandma when you’re twelve, but I can’t read out loud to you because I’m afraid I’ll get some of the words wrong. That would have been too self-conscious even for me, and I was about the most self-conscious person I knew, other than Moira Watkins.

  Moira was Agnes’s best friend and unofficial bodyguard. The only time I wouldn’t read aloud was when she came to Resource to hang out and study with Agnes. Moira was smart and fierce, and she could be sharp-tongued when she wanted to be. I thought she was extremely pretty, too, though I could tell she didn’t think so herself. She was almost as big as I was; she towered over the other girls, even when she walked around with her shoulders slumped and her head down, which was most of the time.

  Ms
. Marilyn clearly loved Agnes and Moira. In fact, I was pretty sure she loved every student who came through the door of the Resource room, which caused me no small amount of torment. She was like Miss Honey in Matilda, which Agnes read aloud to a group of lower-grade Resource kids over the course of a few weeks. I was right there in the room, as usual, and I couldn’t help but listen as she read. It was a great story. I wouldn’t admit that out loud even if someone was holding a Kalashnikov rifle to my head, but it was true. Matilda was a badass. Moira was probably a badass, too, underneath her shyness and the way she’d retreat when other kids teased her about her size. They were harder on her than they were on me, even, which was saying something. Maybe it was because Moira hadn’t beaten anyone to a pulp yet. I thought about mentioning this as a potential strategy to her, but then erased it from my mind immediately.

  Boy, was that ever a mistake.

  One day at lunch, I came out of the boys’ bathroom and found Jared Vandercamp cornering Moira in the covered corridor between our classroom and the playground. “Fat ass, fat ass, fat ass,” Jared was saying over and over again, his face only about an inch away from hers.

  I didn’t doubt he was spitting on her a little as he said it. Without thinking, I stepped between the two of them and shoved Jared backward. “Hey! Leave her alone.”

  “Boone,” Moira told me. “Don’t.”

  Jared looked surprised at first, but he quickly regained his balance and squared himself. “What are you going to do about it, Tardboy?” He made his mouth all droopy and stuck his tongue out the side of it as if to demonstrate what I was, what I would always be.

  And that was it. A few seconds later, I was standing over Jared, every muscle in my body tensed and coiled as Moira screamed, “Stop it!” The whole thing happened so fast that I didn’t even recall the flats of my hands on Jared’s shoulders, propelling him backward yet again, this time onto the concrete walkway. He looked up at me, wide-eyed and helpless. A brief wave of utter peace flowed through my veins at the sight. If he attempted to get up, I’d strike like a rattlesnake. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. At a certain point, these kinds of things became instinct.