100 Days

by Nicole McInnes

  Meanwhile, Moira was still screaming at me to stop, to leave Jared alone. Over on the blacktop, other kids had registered the chaos and were running over to surround us with the usual chants and jeers that started up any time a fight broke out. Teachers were hurrying toward us, too.

  Ms. Marilyn wouldn’t even look at me when I returned to Resource after doing time in the principal’s office. I’d been told to gather my things and wait to be summoned back. My mother had been called to pick me up early, and I was being suspended for three days. Moira wouldn’t look at me, either, not at first, anyway. After a few minutes, she got up to sharpen her pencil. She dropped a folded-up piece of paper on my desk as she walked by, and I allowed myself to breathe a small sigh of relief. I’d been afraid she’d never talk to me again. Not that I understood why. She could have at least shown me a little gratitude for decking jerkface Jared. I waited until Ms. Marilyn’s back was turned to open the note.

  I can take care of myself, it read. Go to hell.

  Five minutes before I was called back to the office, Ms. Marilyn finally spoke to me. She knelt down next to my desk and let out a big sigh. “I was really disappointed by your behavior today.” She whispered it so the other kids wouldn’t hear. I could feel Agnes’s eyes on the two of us. Moira was acting like I didn’t exist at all. Ms. Marilyn spent the next few minutes whispering about the whole “words instead of fists” thing. I felt awful, of course, but I forced myself to look at her out of respect anyway. It was a good excuse to watch her mouth as she spoke, like I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying and had to lip-read.

  Still, the message got through. I started to clean things up after that. I started to try harder in school and take pride in my grades. Mom was thrilled. Dad, not so much. It’s not like he encouraged me to go around clobbering people or anything, but it was no secret that he was proud of the fact that I could clobber a guy if I wanted to. I spent less time in the Resource room and more time mainstreamed, even though the teacher that year, Mr. Carter, didn’t try to hide the fact that he wasn’t too pleased to have me back in the classroom for most of the day. The first time I got an A on a math quiz (thanks to Ms. Marilyn’s tutoring), Carter was shocked.

  “This can’t be right,” he said, dropping the quiz onto my desk.

  I focused on my fists and braced myself for the usual remarks from my classmates. It was always going to be the same story. No matter how hard I tried, things were never going to change.

  Then I heard Carter saying, “What is it, Miss Delaney?”

  Agnes typically spent math period in the regular classroom, too. When I glanced over toward her desk, she was lowering her hand from the air. “Um, I’m sorry,” she said, “but why not?”

  Carter sighed. “Why not what?” he asked her.

  “Why can’t it be right that Boone got an A? He worked as hard as anybody else.”

  Our teacher didn’t answer. Instead, he ignored her, walked toward the front of the room, and told us to open our textbooks to page ninety-one.

  8

  MOIRA

  DAY 93: MARCH 24

  After Agnes stood up for Boone during math, she started asking him to hang out with us. He obviously felt awkward about it, which was just as well. I’d already told him I could defend myself, that I didn’t need a bodyguard. Now I made it clear that I wanted nothing to do with him. Agnes and I were just fine on our own. The last thing we needed was a third wheel.

  Then, one week in the spring of sixth grade, I was out sick for a few days. When I got back to school, I found out that Boone and Agnes had been spending recess together, and they were friends now. Agnes was stubborn about it, too. Despite my protests, she wouldn’t stand for Boone being excluded. Still, it always seemed like he was a little uncomfortable being around us. Sometimes, I’d catch him looking over at the other boys in the class as they held tetherball tournaments on the blacktop or flag football games on the field. But the three of us kept hanging out. For a while, anyway.

  Usually, we’d walk out to the chain-link fence bordering the soccer field. It was the farthest point from the school buildings that was still school property. Boone would give Agnes a piggyback ride out there. Sometimes, whatever teacher was on recess duty would leave us be. Other days, we’d hear the shrill whistle calling us back to the crowded blacktop. I always felt myself deflating when I heard it. To me, it was the sound of a prison alarm ordering me back to the exercise yard to be tortured by the other inmates.

  One day, as we were hanging out by that fence that separated us from the outside world, Boone said something that made me laugh. I can’t even remember what it was now, but I do have a vivid memory of Agnes reaching for her camera and snapping a picture at the exact moment I cracked up. Later, Agnes showed me the image on her computer. I was looking a little sideways at Boone. It might have been the first time I really looked at him, now that I think about it. I was surprised by whatever he’d said and by the fact that he’d made me laugh. My smile was natural and relaxed. It was the last time I looked at my own face and thought it was pretty.

  “I think he likes you,” Agnes whispered when the bell rang and the three of us headed back toward the classroom. Boone was walking several yards ahead.

  “Ha,” I said.

  But Agnes claimed to know about these things. “Any day now,” she whispered, “I figure the two of you are going to start holding hands.”

  9

  AGNES

  DAY 92: MARCH 25

  The counter in our high school’s office is taller than I am, so I hold my hand up high to get the secretary’s attention.

  “Can I help you, Agnes?”

  “I need to talk to Principal Weaver.”

  The secretary’s eyes appear over the edge of the counter. “May I ask what this is about?”

  I draw myself up to my full height, which isn’t exactly impressive, but still. “You certainly may.”

  Blank stare.

  “Something happened last week,” I tell her. “In the cafeteria. My friend Moira and I were bullied. Threatened.” I know the words to use to keep the secretary from trying to turn me away. It’s not easy to get a spur-of-the-moment audience with the principal. “Something needs to be done.”

  “Why did you wait so long to let us know?”

  “I … I needed some time to think about it.” This was true. More specifically, I’d needed some time to think about whether or not to throw an old friend under the bus, even if he clearly isn’t my friend now and hasn’t been for a long time.

  * * *

  “And what did he call you?” Principal Weaver is squeaking from side to side in his chair, turning toward and then away from sunlight filtering through the window blinds. His entire office smells like the half-eaten sandwich sitting on his desk. Pastrami and Swiss, I’m guessing.

  “‘Gollum,’” I answer. “Which is fine. I don’t even care. But he called Moira ‘Shamu.’ Like the orca. And nobody should be teased about their weight. Isn’t that what you’re always trying to teach us here?”

  “Indeed. But nobody should be called ‘Gollum,’ either.”

  I’m a bit taken aback by this. I didn’t come here to defend myself. I came here to defend Moira. I’m wearing one of my favorite wigs today, the auburn one with old-fashioned Shirley Temple curls. The principal’s smirk makes me realize that he’s having a hard time taking me seriously. No doubt between the wig and my helium voice, I’m coming off as too adorable. It’s a fairly common problem. I reach up and pull the wig from my head, exposing the nearly bald expanse of skin there. I have a few wispy strands left, but that’s it. Give me a little styling gel and I can create the world’s most hideous comb-over. Long, pronounced veins run like rivers across the map of my skull.

  Predictably, Principal Weaver blanches and stammers. This is nothing new. Just yesterday at the grocery store, a toddler gaped at me until the pacifier fell from his mouth. Kids are usually the easy ones to deal with, though. All I have to do is smile or wa
ve, and they’ll do the same, like I’m a cartoon character come to life. Adults are the worst. They want to be able to check me out while pretending not to. But it’s an impossible thing to hide, even when someone’s wearing sunglasses or watching you from the corner of their eye. I don’t bother to wave or smile at most staring adults because, usually, they just act like they never saw me. Which is preposterous.

  Other people’s fascination and pity are powerful, heavy things. They’re as heavy as those lead-filled X-ray cloaks the techs put over me when I’m getting a scan to check my arteries or bones. Sometimes, when I’m out in public, it’s like people are piling lead cloak after lead cloak on top of me until I can barely walk or breathe or see. People mean well; I understand this. I’ve had more bake sales in my honor than I can count. I’ve been the honorary mascot of my school and my town. If I live long enough, I could probably take the state, maybe even go national. With my nearly hairless head and beaky nose, I might even replace the bald eagle eventually. Who knows? Before I met Moira, it was like I was living in a glass display case with all these people (strangers and acquaintances) on the other side of the glass, telling me how much they loved me, how “there for me” they were as I “battled this disease.” Then Moira and I became friends, and Moira became the freak, taking all eyes off me and onto herself. For years now, Moira has been protecting me almost constantly, in ways big and small. The question is, who protects Moira?

  The pastrami smell is getting to me. My stomach does a nauseated little flip. “You need to do something,” I tell Principal Weaver.

  “We’ll get on it,” he says. “Trust me.”

  “When?”

  “You can rest assured I will be speaking to Boone Craddock as soon as possible.”

  “Okay then.” I put the wig back on and hold out a hand for him to shake, which he does. Then the principal follows me out into the hallway and watches as I turn on my heel and march away from the office. Before pushing through the doors separating the administrative building from the rest of the school, I glance back at him with what I can only hope is a don’t make me come back here look in my eye.

  Sure enough, Weaver gives me a quick but formal military salute.

  10

  BOONE

  DAY 91: MARCH 26

  You wouldn’t think it would be hard work setting up temporary housing for a bunch of chicks and rabbits, but it is. I’m on hour two of pouring poultry starter into feeders, making sure the water containers aren’t full enough to drown the babies, transferring this last batch of chicks from their shipping boxes to their correct holding bins, and double-checking the heat lamps. I head into the storage room, where my boss, TJ, keeps the big steel trough that needs to be set up with shavings, water, and alfalfa for the last of the “Easter bunnies.” People will buy them for their kids on impulse today and then abandon the rabbits at shelters or turn them loose in the forest, where they’ll make easy prey once the kids get sick of taking care of them.

  God, I hate my own species sometimes.

  About an hour before my shift ends, TJ tells me that Cheyenne, one of the cutesy rodeo queens who works the register (and who also happens to have TJ wrapped around her finger), wants to get her older brother a job. Turns out I am—big surprise—the most disposable employee. Not that TJ uses those exact words. He doesn’t have to. My place in the Feed & Seed pecking order is glaringly obvious.

  “Cheyenne’s brother is twenty, and he’s not in school anymore,” TJ says. We’re standing in the hay barn, where I’ve been stacking the truckload of alfalfa bales that came in from Colorado last night. “He can work hours you can’t. We have to prioritize guys who can do that.”

  I hope my boss doesn’t notice the sudden cold sweat breaking out all over my body. Hay dust turns to a thin layer of green paste in the creases of my skin. “What if I can get out of school early? Maybe I can take a work-study elective.”

  “Can you do that as a sophomore?”

  I look down at the ground and give a weak shrug. “You never know.”

  “It’ll all work out,” TJ says, clapping me on the arm. “For now, just start coming in every other weekend, and we’ll go from there.”

  Easy for you to say, I think. More than anything, I wish I could tell TJ where to shove his every other weekend. I wish I could walk out of here with my middle finger high in the air and never look back. I’m not a total fool, though. It’s not like anyone else is going to hire me, and I doubt TJ would give me a good reference if I walked out. The sad truth is that TJ took me on as an act of charity. It’s only my strong back and work ethic that have kept me in part-time hours this long. Still, I have to say something.

  “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think those hours are going to be enough.”

  TJ, who was walking back toward the store entrance, stops and turns around. “Well, it’s what I can offer you.” His voice is sharper than it was a minute ago. “Your father put the roof on this place, and I’ve tried to help you out, but this is a change that’s going to happen. As I said, I can still give you every other weekend. Take it or leave it.”

  I can’t even begin to imagine what I’m going to tell Mom. Probably, I’m going to tell her nothing. Probably, I’m just going to have to step up wood sales, and now that spring is upon us, elk skull and antler sales, too. I’ll have to go out and scout for racks as often as I can after school and on the weekends. Park the truck in one of the abandoned lots in town and set up my painted plywood sign nearby where it faces oncoming traffic: BARGAIN BONES: Antler & Skull Sales. Maybe Mom doesn’t have to know about my hours being slashed. It’s not like she checks up on where I am, anyway.

  My boss is waiting for an answer.

  “I’ll take it,” I tell him.

  * * *

  As usual, I haul a load of water after work. The Chevy’s suspension hasn’t been sounding right lately, and the five hundred gallons of water loading it down don’t help. We’ll be completely screwed if the springs flatten out. That’s a major repair. I try not to think about how carefree Saturdays used to be when I was a kid, but images from that time rise up in my mind anyway. Me lazing around in the hammock, watching Mom teach horseback riding lessons all day. Dad coming home from his job as a roofer, opening up the smoker at dinnertime and pulling out elk or buffalo steaks from animals he’d hunted and processed himself. The three of us sitting around the kitchen table laughing about whatever funny things we’d seen or done or thought about that day. I took it all for granted.

  Back then, whenever my parents argued about something, my dad always had enough sense to simply leave the house and go hang out in the tack room or work on the backhoe’s engine. Once he’d cooled down, he’d come back inside and apologize to her. Maybe I’d find them hugging in the kitchen, smiling at each other. Maybe I’d find them sitting on the couch holding hands, her head resting on his shoulder. Whatever it was, they’d always make up. Things would always go back to normal.

  Then, one overcast day when I was in seventh grade, he slipped on some wet leaves and fell off the roof he’d been finishing as a private side job to supplement his regular income with the construction company. Had it not been for the stack of tarped shingles below that broke his fall, he might have died. “Concussion,” doctors said at first. “Maybe a bit of mild brain swelling.” They saw nothing amiss on his scans and ordered him to take it easy for a couple of weeks. But when he developed a nonstop headache that got worse and worse, they finally said, “Brain injury. It doesn’t always show up right away.” The question then became whether or not my dad would feel better and how long it would take.

  The owner of the construction company he worked for tried to keep him on after the accident, but the economy wasn’t doing well. “People just aren’t building as many houses as they used to,” he told my dad when he finally let him go. My dad was convinced he was really fired because he kept making rookie mistakes, like misplacing the nail gun and forgetting to check on the delivery of shingles and lumber to th
e worksites. His balance was off, too, and his boss had already expressed concern that he might fall off another roof. “He’s just afraid I’d file a workman’s comp claim and raise his premiums, the cheap SOB,” my father said.

  Mom gave as many riding lessons as she could to help pay the bills until he could find other work. She also picked up some part-time work as a cashier at the dollar store and started taking antidepressants. “Just to take the edge off these rough times,” she told me when I asked about the prescription bottle sitting on the kitchen counter. “Just temporarily.”

  The pills actually seemed to help lighten her up. She didn’t seem to get so down about the money stuff when she was taking them. They probably would have helped even more if my dad hadn’t kept turning into somebody we recognized less and less.

  “It’s hard for him to not be able to fully provide for us,” Mom told me when the two of us were alone. “He feels like he’s no longer the man he used to be.” She reminded me that his brain was going to need time to heal. Maybe she was reminding herself, too. I don’t know.

  What I did know was that my dad was noticeably different now. He’d never been an easy person before falling off that roof, but at least he was someone you could reason with. Now it was pretty clear that one of the side effects of his new personality change was that his already lightning-quick temper was even more intense than it used to be. The simplest thing, like misplacing his keys or a minor leak in the water tank, could set him off.

  By that point, my dad was doing what he could to bring in some money. He’d learned to shoe horses as a teenager, so he started doing some of that again, even though his coordination wasn’t what it used to be and bending over to trim the hooves and nail on the shoes killed his back. He’d bring me along to help when I wasn’t in school. Sometimes, on the weekends, he’d take me out on his rounds. Other weekends, when there were no horses to trim or shoe, he’d drag me along with him to the woods to help cut firewood that could later be sold by the cord. On every one of those trips, the misery and frustration of not being the man he used to be seemed to leak out of his pores.