Chapter 3:
The Boy with Sad Eyes
Bridgeton was never my dream. It was Sasha's. She was obsessed with using her brain to escape the ghetto. Starting in fifth grade, she applied every four months like clockwork. She got accepted in seventh grade but only with a partial scholarship. She kept applying until she was finally awarded a full scholarship for her sophomore year. The next year, my sophomore year and her junior year, I applied and got in as well on an arts scholarship. And while Bridgeton was a big improvement over Grover Cleveland High School with its metal detectors, drive by shootings, and constantly overflowing toilets, I still never felt safe or comfortable. I always felt like something was bubbling just under the surface of Bridgeton's pristine façade waiting to attack me. So I invoked the power of anonymity as a protection. As far as the Bridgeton populace was concerned, I was invisible. To anyone who was anyone at Bridgeton, I was no one.
Invisibility had its side effects at times, though. For example, one December day, right after the dismissal bell, I was too afraid to ask Lauren DeHaven to move out of the way so I could get into my locker. I just stood there silently hoping she'd move eventually, but she never even noticed me. She just stood there twirling her cream knit scarf with green fringes around while chatting with Greg Smythe.
"So the money is going to the starving children of Honduras," she was saying in reference to her latest philanthropic fundraiser. Among Bridgeton students, Lauren DeHaven was considered the patron saint of altruism. She was constantly raising money or collecting food or organizing benefit walks of one type or another. Most people completely loved her, but to me, she just never seemed genuine. Sasha thought that all the fundraising was just a way for Lauren to draw attention away from her lackluster grades on her college applications and had nothing to do with actually making the world a better place.
"Wait a minute. At the school-wide assembly you said it was for the children of Haiti," George replied.
"Did I? Silly me." She touched his shoulder playfully and tossed her golden brown hair. "I get all those little hell-holes confused. Anyway, do you think you can get your parents to donate a few thousand?"
"Well, that depends, LD. What's in it for me?"
It wasn't like I was afraid of either of them, I just always avoided talking to Bridgeton students. I had no idea how to even hold a conversation with a Bridgeton student. We had nothing in common, had none of the same experiences in life. I was afraid I'd say something that would reveal where I really came from.
Finally, I just left without accessing my locker. It wasn't until I was on the bus on the way to dance rehearsal that I realized I'd left my pointe shoes in my locker. I slammed my head on the seat in front of me. I needed those shoes. We were doing final rehearsals for the Nutcracker and I was playing Clara. Ms. Alexander would kill me if I showed up unprepared.
It was after five by the time I made it back to campus. Thankfully, all the students were gone. Or so I thought.
As I walked along the hall with sugar plume faeries dancing in my mind, the door to the janitor's closet swung open and smacked me in the face. I sailed to the ground with an ungraceful thud. While on the ground clutching my forehead, a pretty redheaded girl and a cute blond boy stepped out. I recognized the boy although I didn't know his name. Two weeks ago I'd seen him crawling out from under the bleachers with his pants in his hand followed by a different girl.
"Sorry about that," he said, extending one hand to help me up and using the other to tuck in his uniform shirt.
I accepted the offer and let him help me to my feet. Then he gently removed my hand from my forehead and took a look at it.
"No damage done," he said. "You're all good."
Before he turned away, I noticed something…compelling.
"You have sad eyes," I said.
"Sad eyes?" the redhead muttered with a laugh. "God you're such a freak. I can't believe you're Sasha's sister." Then she stormed off. I felt like I probably should've told her that her Bridgeton polo was on inside out, but I couldn't take my eyes off the cute, if not, lewd blond boy.
I could only imagine what he was doing with the redhead in the closet, so he should've been quite happy, but his eyes told a different story.
While staring at me, his lips parted as if to say something, but only a troubled sigh escaped. Then he blinked and shook his head as if coming to his senses. "Maybe you should watch where you're going." He gave me the distasteful glare so common among Bridgeton students. It was a look that said 'I'm better than you.'
I gasped. How could he possibly blame me for this run in?
"And maybe you should…should…" he stormed away before I could think of anything clever to say. Let's face it, it would have taken me all day to think of something anyway.
After retrieving my precious pointe shoes, I decided to take the far stairwell. I didn't want to risk running into Closet Boy again. As soon as I entered the stairwell, I heard crying. I wondered if it was the girl from the closet. Maybe she'd regretted her behavior and felt ashamed for having meaningless sex in a closet. Hmph. Served her right. I instantly felt bad for thinking this. I had no right to judge her. I didn't know the circumstances. Maybe she thought this boy really loved her and that's why she did it. No matter what the case, I hated seeing people in pain. I just had to see what I could do to help.
I went up to the next flight and found the source of the crying. A dark haired girl was crouched in the corner of the stairwell completely naked and sobbing.
"Oh my God what happened?" I dropped all my belongings then whipped off my coat and covered her with it. I knelt beside her and rubbed her back.
"Nothing. Go away. Just leave me alone," she snapped through the tears. That was obviously a lie. Something had to be wrong. Under normal circumstances no one cowers in the corner of a public stairwell naked and crying. I wasn't about to leave the poor girl alone.
I glanced around and searched for her clothes. They were nowhere in sight.
"Where are your clothes?"
"They took them."
"Who's they? Was it a boy? Were you raped?" Instead of answering she shook her head frantically and started crying harder. I felt my eyes well up. Who would do such a thing? It was below zero outside. How was she supposed to get home naked and in the freezing cold? Where was she supposed to find clothing? I guessed that was part of the cruel, sick joke. How could anyone do this to another human being? I tried to blink away the hot tears welling in my eyes. I needed to focus and help this girl. "Come on, let's get you out of here." I helped her to her feet and let her put my coat on. She was quite a bit shorter than me so the coat covered what it needed to, but she would still freeze outside.
"Wait a minute," I said, reaching for my dance bag. Considering I only cleaned it out about once a year, I was bound to have some sort of clothing in there somewhere. I pulled out a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt from a dance camp I went to in Spain. They smelled kind of rank, but they were better than nothing.
The girl accepted the clothes silently, her well of tears slowly receding. She slipped on the pants, then turned around to take off the coat and put on the shirt.
"Thank you," she said in a hoarse whisper when she'd finished. Under different circumstances, I could tell she was a really pretty girl. With her pale skin and short jet black hair she resembled Snow White.
"No problem. Do you want me to go call the police?"
Her eyes expanded. "No, God no! I don't know what they'll do to me. No one can know about this. Ever." This mysterious 'they' wielded enough power over this girl to literally make her start shaking.
"You can't let them get away with this."
She fell to her knees and started crying again. "Please, you can't tell anyone about this. Please. I beg you."
I bent down beside her and hugged her. "It's okay. It's okay."
"Promise me you won't tell anyone. Promise!" She was hysterical. I didn't want to make such a promise, but I had to do something to calm her down.
"Okay, I won't tell anyone. I promise."
Her tears subsided again. And after about ten minutes I was able to coax her into leaving the building.
"Do you live far? Can I help you get home?"
"I have my car. They took my purse, but I have an extra key under the license plate."
When we reached the only car in the parking lot, I thought surely she would succumb to another onslaught of tears. Instead, however, she just stared numbly at the vandalism that violated her red SUV. Someone had spray painted male genitalia all over her car, along with the word SLUT on the hood. I could only assume it was the same 'they' that left her naked and shivering in the stairwell. How could she not want to make them pay for all they'd done to her?
In a daze, she found her spare key and entered her car. Seconds later she sped away. I didn't even find out her name.
Chapter 4:
The Right Thing
The sight of that poor girl weighed heavily on my mind. What if this 'they' wasn't finished with her? What if they came back to finish her off? Though I didn't even know the girl's name, I knew in my heart that nothing she could have done warranted such treatment. For two weeks, I searched the halls for her. She was nowhere to be found. It was like she'd dropped off the face of the planet. How could she just disappear without anyone taking notice? Was she another invisible person like me? Could I miss school for two weeks without causing alarm?
I couldn't hold out any longer. I had to tell someone. I had to find this girl and make sure she was alright. So in an effort to do the right thing, I found myself in one of the most dreaded places on campus. Headmaster Collins' office.
"I'm glad you made an appointment to see me, Sonya. I've been meaning to commend you on how much you've brought up your grades."
"Thank you. Sasha has been helping me."
"You know, Sasha might not always be there for you. You should try to do things on your own sometimes. I bet you don't even know what you're capable of accomplishing."
Why wouldn't she be there for me? We'd always be there for each other. I couldn't imagine my life without my sister. Headmaster Collins cracked his knuckles, yanking me out of my thoughts. "So what brings you to my office today?" Considering I hadn't been in his office since the day of my application tour two years ago, that was a very valid question.
"Um. I saw something that I thought needed your attention."
"Does it involve cheating?"
"No sir, but I think it's even more serious." Headmaster Collins leaned back in his chair and tapped a pen on the desk waiting for me to explain. "Um, two, almost three weeks ago there was a girl in the stairwell. She was naked and crying. Someone had stolen her clothes and then vandalized her car." He leaned forward and stared at me intensely, but didn't say anything. "I don't know her name. And I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone. But I haven't seen her since and I was, I mean, I am worried and…and…I thought you should know." I took a deep breath and let it out. It felt so good to finally get the secret off my chest.
Without saying a word, Headmaster Collins stood and walked to his bookcase. He pulled a yearbook off the shelf and handed it to me. Yearbook. Why the heck didn't I think of that?
"If you don't mind, would you take a few moments to flip through the pictures to see if you can find her?"
Considering the girl was pretty distraught when I saw her and the fact that a lot of these white girls looked exactly the same to me, I found three girls that it could have been.
Headmaster Collins studied the three names I picked out and settled on one. "Emmaline Graham transferred two weeks ago. I wonder if this coincides with the incident you describe." He closed the yearbook and pulled out the school directory. "I'm going to arrange an appointment with her parents." He reached for his phone and started dialing. "You may go," he said to me. I bolted out of my seat and headed for the door. But before I left he said, "Ms. Garrison, you did the right thing."
***
Though my sister Sasha and I came from the same parents, lived in the same house, and went to the same school we couldn't have been more different.
"Sonya, sweetie, did you start your English paper?" she asked me one night while I stretched on our bedroom floor. I needed to work on my audition choreography for the DiRisio Academy of Dance in Rome. I was hoping to spend my senior year dancing in Europe and then hopefully get picked up by a dance company.
"The paper is under control," I assured her while rolling from a split to a straddle. Sasha pursed her lips and folded her arms as she leaned on the door jamb. She didn't believe me. She knew 'under control' was my code for 'at least I know what class the paper is for'.
"It's due Thursday."
"Yeah, I know. I found your Post It note reminder on my pointe shoes before ballet class today. Very stalkeresque, way to go."
"You need a good grade on this paper," she said, ignoring my sarcasm.
"I know I need a good grade on this paper," I replied mockingly. "I also need a fantastic audition piece. Do you know how world famous DiRisio is? This is my future. I plan on being a professional dancer, ya know, not a professional…englisher…or whatever." Sasha rolled her eyes.
"You see, that's your problem. Everything is dance, dance, dance, with you. You have to have an education too. You have to have something to fall back on in case dancing doesn't work out. What if you break your knee or something, huh? Then where will you be? I'm not gonna be around to take care of you forever." Sasha wagged her index finger at me like I'd just pooped on the floor. I'm surprised she didn't roll up a newspaper and smack me on the head with it.
"I don't need you to take care of me," I snapped. I turned my back to her and did a heel stretch.
"Like hell, you don't. Who do you think got you into Bridgeton?"
"I got in on an arts scholarship, thank you very much."
"They wouldn't have even looked at your application if I hadn't already built up the reputation I have as a quality student. And here you come just ruining it." Sasha sat on her bed and pulled out that God awful daily planner of hers or, as I like to call it, 'her left hand'. It was probably more important to her than her left hand. "You know you got an 82% on your last English test? That's practically failing in my book. According to my calculations, you need at least a 95% on this paper to bring your grade into the respectable range."
I put my head in my hands. She gave me such a headache when she went on her grade rampages. I just wished I could think of something to say to get her off my back. But there was nothing. She was right. If it wasn't for her meticulous organization habits, I probably would've flunked out of Bridgeton after only a week.
Sasha reached for my backpack and I winced. She'd flip once she saw how disorganized I'd let it get. She'd probably spend half an hour just organizing everything before we even started on the paper. It's not like I was messy or anything, okay, my papers were a bit cluttered. I didn't even have separate folders for classes. In my world, everything fell into two categories; dance and not dance.
"What is this, a banana?" She shrieked in disgust as she pulled out a black slimy banana peel from the front pocket of my backpack and held it between two fingers.
"Sasha, please, I have this really cool idea for my third audition piece. Just let me spend 30 minutes working it out then I promise I'll work on the stupid paper."
"A, it's not stupid. B, your 30 minutes will morph into three hours and you won't even crack open a book. I know you." She grabbed my backpack and dumped out the contents on to the floor a.k.a my dance space. "This is insane," she murmured staring at the mess of papers, magazines, tights, etc. escaping my backpack.
I inhaled sharply and bit my tongue. I couldn't win this argument. I wanted to be angry with her, but looking into her eyes, all I saw was the heartbroken little girl being rejected from Bridgeton time after time. It was nothing but her love for me and her overwhelming desire to get out of the ghetto motivating her to be so…so aggravating sometimes.
Sasha's hatred
for Venton Heights was ten times stronger than mine. She hated everything about it. She hated the suffocating stench of urine permeating the halls of all the apartment buildings. She hated looking at a brick wall when she opened her bedroom window. She said that brick wall symbolized how her life would go nowhere as long as she lived in this place. She hated going to sleep to the sound of gunshots. She hated the alley she had to walk through to get home where she had to step over the not quite dead bodies of homeless people and crack addicts. But I think most of all, Sasha hated the roaches.
She could shut everything else out if she just closed our bedroom door and turned up her music, but those pesky roaches would still come through the fortress she put around herself. They crawled under our bedroom door and out of power outlets and through air vents. No matter how much Sasha cleaned, they kept coming back. She spent hours on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, the refrigerator, the bathroom, the stove, everywhere she thought the critters would congregate and it didn't matter. They kept coming back promising to embarrass us one day. Sasha had already had a close call at Bridgeton once. A roach crawled out of her backpack while she was sitting in class. She told me she froze and almost stopped breathing. Someone screamed; the entire class went into hysterics. Fortunately, no one else saw where it came from.
The Queen Bee of Bridgeton Page 2