My hand goes to my cheekbone. “Grace and Britta said it looks fine.”
“It does look fine,” Britta says.
“It’s all the rage,” adds Grace.
I slump down in my seat. “Is it terrible?” I ask Christian.
“It’s pretty red. What happened?” he asks.
“Head-on collision with a soccer jock.”
“Which one?”
“All of them,” Grace says.
“Adam Millstein,” I say. “His head hit my head.”
“Was he trying to kiss you?” Christian asks.
“Was who trying to kiss you?” Christian’s friend Josh sits down next to him. “Is someone trying to edge in on your lady, Chris? ’Cause I’ve got your back. Like, name the time and place and I will be there. I’ll even bring my brass knuckles.”
I shift in my seat. “I’m not his chattel.”
Grace punches Josh in the arm. “Enough,” she says.
“As you wish,” he replies, and he pulls out his iPod and shoves the earbuds into his ears.
Mr. Morgan, our principal, makes the same speech every year, involving an extended ship metaphor. “A school is like a ship at sea.”
“As opposed to a ship on land,” Grace whispers.
“Every person has a role to play. And let me tell you, before I go on, that I am proud of this ship. It’s a good ship. Strong.” Our first year he made the mistake of saying he was proud of every seaman. “You all work hard. You should be proud to be from Essex.”
A few of the soccer players hoot at that, and Mr. Morgan smiles as if they are cheering for him. “Now, sometimes in school you encounter rough seas. Maybe you’re having trouble at home. Or maybe the workload is just a tad too much. Well, let me tell you that all of your teachers, your guidance counselors, even your administration, we’re all here to help.”
Christian takes my hand in his and squeezes. “It really doesn’t look that bad. I’m sure it will fade.”
“Thanks.” I squeeze his hand back. My stomach is doing the mix of churning and I guess butterflies that I feel when I’m around him.
The side door opens and a girl walks in. She has black hair that’s chopped unevenly at the chin and she’s wearing a flowing black skirt and blue tank top. She looks familiar but also not, and for a moment I think it’s another transformation of Ramona. But then I say, “Is that Kayla Winters?”
Britta looks up. “It’s Dru now,” she says.
“Dru?”
“Yeah. She said Kayla was too much of the ‘white-bread patriarchy that pervades our town.’ So she decided she would be Dru instead.”
“You can’t just do that,” I say. “You can’t just change your name and who you are.”
“Well, she did.” Britta doesn’t sound especially interested. Then again, she was the one who came back to school last year saying she was a lesbian. So maybe she doesn’t think metamorphosis is a big deal.
“How do you know all this?” I whisper. Someone in the row in front of us turns around and shushes us, and Grace scowls at him.
“She played tennis at the club. One day she was Kayla. The next day she was Dru. And the day after that she was gone. Tennis is just too chichi, I guess.”
I don’t mean to stare at Dru, who’s taken a seat by the aisle a row ahead of us, but I can’t help it. She was one of those girls who wore jeans that were never quite the right shade of blue with polos from the uniform department at Sears, but that look has been jettisoned. Instead she wears a choker with a bright blue stone on it right in the center of her neck, which she flicks at with her ragged fingernails.
Mr. Morgan says something that has the audience laughing, bordering on losing control. Josh laughs so hard he isn’t even making a sound. Grace mutters, “Oh my God.”
“What?” I ask.
“Remind me to thank you for not letting me miss this year.”
I turn to Christian, and he just squeezes my hand again a few times as if he’s trying to send me a Morse code message. Whatever it is, I’m not receiving it.
Up on stage, Mr. Morgan is getting into his speech. “You all need to toe the line!”
“How are you doing?” Christian asks. I’m wondering if he means my face, but he adds, “About your grandmother, I mean.”
My body tenses. Everyone else seems to have forgotten. This isn’t the place I want to talk about it. “Okay.”
Josh leans toward us, pulling an earbud out of his ear. “Excuse me, but I am trying to listen to our brave sea captain, and you two are disturbing me.”
“Put your earbud back in and turn up the music,” Christian tells him.
“Yes, master.”
Josh turns his music up so high that we are all able to hear the bass and heavy beats of the hip-hop he likes. Britta sighs heavily, but he, of course, cannot hear her.
Christian brushes my hair off my shoulder. “So you’re holding up okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. And then repeat myself as if that will make it true. “Yeah.”
“That’s my strong girl,” he says, then immediately corrects himself. “Woman. That’s my strong woman.”
It’s like he has a checklist in his head, all the right things to do and say, and the right words to use so as not to offend anyone. He’s that kind of good guy. Maybe that’s why Nonnie doesn’t like him. My gaze flicks down to our interlaced fingers and I notice that he is wearing a bracelet of corded leather, and I wonder where he got it, and why, and if he thought I would like it. I nuzzle closer to him, knowing that he will put his arm around me, and that will be enough. He won’t have to keep talking to try to make me feel better.
Mr. Morgan is wrapping up his speech. “So go forth, young sailors. The world is your oyster! Explore.”
“Go forth and multiply, young seamen!” someone calls out.
Mr. Morgan frowns but then tries to pretend he didn’t hear it, which is probably a pretty good way to deal with the situation. Public high school principal is high on my list of jobs I never, ever want to have. “Good luck and have a great year. Thank you.”
From the assembly, we all go to our homerooms. When we reach a bend in the hall, I need to break off with Grace to go to our homeroom on the second floor. Christian pulls me to him for another hug. “See you at lunch,” he says. And then he whispers into my hair, “I love you.”
“Yep,” I say. “See you at lunch!”
iii.
Grace takes her schedule and places it on my desk on top of my own.
“Notice anything?” she demands.
We’ve been in homeroom advisory together all through high school, since for some reason my last name is alphabetized under the W instead of the S, and her last name is Yang. Our adviser is Mr. Tompkins, who was also my math teacher last year and convinced me to take his AP Chemistry class this year by promising it would be absolute candy to college admissions officers. That’s when I was still thinking about Stanford—before Nonnie got sick.
Mr. Tompkins is busy handing out schedules and checking in with kids, and doesn’t seem to care that Grace is perched on her desk, her feet on her chair.
“Chinese,” she says. “My mother is making me take Chinese. She heard they were offering it and even though I’m a senior, now I need to learn a whole new language. With a bunch of freshmen, I bet.”
“She’s making you?” Grace’s mom subscribes to a theory of parenting we like to call “The Power of Suggestion.” She never tells Grace and her brother to do anything. She makes suggestions based on her own experience, but ultimately “supports” her children in their choices. Like, “Grace, getting a perm is going to make you look like a French poodle, but if you really must do it, let’s go to the salon.”
“She’s going through another renaissance. And this one is all about getting in touch with her Chinese side.”
“But your mother isn’t Chinese.” Grace’s parents’ families have both been in America for generations. Her mom can trace her family back to Spain, and her dad to
China. Grace likes to say that unless people still have splinters from the Mayflower in their asses, her family was probably here first, so stop asking her where she’s from. Her father is a professor in the sociology department, and her mother, well, dabbles, I guess.
“You know how you can marry someone Jewish and then convert? I think she’s trying to convert to being Chinese. And she’s not just going regular Chinese like my dad. She’s going ultraorthodox Chinese. It’s her latest thing. She’s learning how to do Chinese calligraphy. And she’s started ordering all these clothes from Chinese companies. I mean, like clothes that they wear in China, not like clothes we wear that are made there. Like she’s walking around in these tunics and flat canvas Mary Janes. Anyway, I thought it would all blow over by the time school started, but here we are and I’m signed up for Chinese. And I’ll bet you that the teacher is going to see my face and he’s going to break out into this big grin and probably even start talking to me in Chinese right away, and I’ll have to be like, ‘No hablo Chinese, dude.’”
“It could be fun.”
She sticks her finger in her mouth.
“A lot of people try to reclaim their culture. My dad talks about it all the time. Like, people come to America, and it’s all melting pot, and then a generation or two goes by and they want to get back their culture. Music is often the first place they start.”
“Well, maybe your dad could convince my mom to let me take some sort of Chinese music class, but Chinese the language? I don’t even know which Chinese language it is.”
“Probably Mandarin,” I tell her.
“I’m supposed to be in French four,” she says. “You know what they do in French four? Crepes. Crepes, crepes, crepes. Every day is just a big crepe party in French four, but will I be having tasty Nutella and whipped cream? No, I will not.”
“Maybe you’ll make dumplings or something.”
“It’s bad enough being half Chinese and friends with you and Britta. The expectations are like—” She waves her hand above her head.
“Wait, what’s bad about being friends with me and Britta?”
“Not bad, exactly.” Her voice is calm, but I swear I see a slight eye roll. “It’s just, like, I walk into a new classroom and the teacher does a little math. Model minority plus friends with two geniuses. Must be übergenius. And then when I’m my mediocre self, it’s like I fall down into the negatives.”
Her math doesn’t make sense, but I think I understand what she’s trying to say. “You’re not mediocre,” I tell her.
“But I’m not a genius. The only way I could make the setup worse is if I dated Brooks Weston.”
“Britta would flip.”
“She would filet me. And flay me. And flambé me.”
The bell rings, and we grab our stuff. In the hall, she chirps, “Make good choices, honey!” before disappearing into the throng of people.
iv.
Our petite, elfish English teacher, Ms. Staples, is already seated in a chair-desk at the front of the room with an array of books stacked up in front of her. Britta and I take seats in the circle with our backs facing the windows. Once I’m settled with my notebook open and my pen ready, I look across the circle and see Dominic Meyers. He’s the last person I would have expected to see in this class. Officially there’s no tracking at Essex High School, but everyone knows which English electives are puffballs and which are the tough ones. Ms. Staples’s American Literature class is definitely one of the toughest, harder even than AP English. Dominic is definitely not in the college-bound set: he’s the type of kid to whom the phrase “up to no good” is often applied. Surprising, also, is the way he is staring at me. His dark green eyes watch me intently from beneath a shag of brown hair. He gives a sly smile, and I remember his hot breath on my neck in the cold gallery and I realize that now I am the one who is staring. I avert my gaze.
“You don’t have to be so nervous,” Britta says.
“What?” I blush harder.
“I know it’s an advanced-level class, and we’ll be doing scansion and all that. But you know, scanning a line of poetry is just like doing a math problem. There are symbols. Balance.”
“If you say so.” Even if I work my hardest, I’ll be lucky to end up with another A minus from Ms. Staples—which was better than the B I got from Mr. Speck. But Mr. Linz, my guidance counselor, assured me that colleges would like that a math genius—his words, of course, not mine—would challenge herself with difficult humanities classes.
My gaze flicks to Dominic, then over the rest of the class. Hunter, the photographer, and his hockey-loving model Serena are sitting next to each other. She is sketching in her notebook with her red hair falling onto the paper while he talks to the guy next to him.
As soon as the bell rings, Ms. Staples jumps to her feet in a stunning display of agility for someone her age and says, “Welcome!” She quickly circles the room, passing out a syllabus printed on pale purple paper. “I’m so glad to have you here, and to see some of you again.”
Britta and I had Ms. Staples for freshman English, and probably that comment is directed at Britta, who is a crazy-good English student.
“And,” she goes on, “of course I’m happy to meet some of you for the first time. I don’t believe much in the getting-to-know-you activities that so many teachers do. Waste of time as far as I’m concerned. You all know each other, and I’ll know you soon enough, as well as any teacher knows any student.”
I like Ms. Staples because she’s a fan of Nonnie’s but never makes a big deal of it to me. I’ve had other English teachers who expect me to be like the second coming or something, and are inevitably disappointed in my work, which isn’t bad, just not ready for the anthology of Best American anything. I guess that’s the same feeling Grace was talking about.
“The English department has done some rearranging, and we’ve decided to approach material thematically rather than chronologically.” She has made her way back to her desk and now picks up another stack of papers, these ones printed on green. “We’re going to start with some poetry. Specifically, women’s poetry.” She pauses and glances at me. I wonder if she knows how sick Nonnie is.
As soon as the packet lands on my desk, I begin to flip through it to see what poems are included. Past Emily Dickinson, past Elizabeth Bishop, past Plath. There she is.
I exhale: none of the sex poems she’s so famous for. Nonnie’s exploits are okay by me, but I really don’t want to discuss her sex life in English class.
Ms. Staples folds herself back into her chair. “To say good-bye to summer, I’d like to start off with one of Imogene Woodruff’s poems. Page seventeen of your packet. Now then,” she says cheerily. “Why don’t we read it aloud?” She surveys the room, looking for a reader, and I feel people’s eyes on me. I make a show of looking away so that Ms. Staples knows that I really, really don’t want to read.
Dominic saves me by raising his hand. Ms. Staples claps joyfully. “A volunteer!”
He clears his throat and holds up his paper. “Fireflies.” He reads the title, nods at Ms. Staples, and begins reading:
I shed my cardigan sweater
Slip out of my sensible shoes
Leave them on the sun-charred grass
And march
Past the summer garden
Gone to waste,
Past the pine tree garlanded
By student words
—Always words, words, words—
Past the puddles of feint praise.
I go to join the pixies
In their
Polyester nightgowns.
(You scoff.
The wry smile tells me you
think I’m telling you tales.
Yet this time it’s
Truth.)
They hold glass jars
And capture tiny lights
Detain dancing fireflies
Until their light fades.
(And what I want to say to you is:
You cannot
catch my lightning in glass.)
Dominic lowers his paper, and, once again, looks right at me. He has figured out, I am sure, that I am one of the pixies. I shift in my seat, and stare at the poem, trying to reread it, but the words just swim in front of me.
I know the cardigan she mentions. It’s army green and she wore it rolled up because the sleeves were too long. A moth ate a small hole through the front pocket. The polyester nightgowns, too: mine had a rainbow, Ramona’s a winged unicorn.
These are details that people would like to know. They would like me to share my insider view of the poem, but I won’t.
The class discusses the poem’s meter (could one be discerned, and the places where it broke it, and why), the allusions and metaphors, and the emotion underlying it.
In town, you can buy her books everywhere, even at the grocery store. The college store sells postcards proclaiming Essex to be “Woodruff Country.” Every year, we have to attend the Woodruff Festival, where Nonnie gives an award to some aspiring poet who proceeds to read one of his or her (usually dreadful and quite long) poems. Everyone thinks they know her. I just want my memories of the woman who braided my hair and brought me down to the large outdoor swimming pool—which was really more of a swimming hole—and sipped gin from a water bottle while she watched me and Ramona splash around. She always traveled with gumdrops, and would pick out the white ones for me because she knew they were my favorite. She told me that men weren’t worth the bother, unless they were particularly handsome, and then they’d be worth it for only a week or two, which made me giggle and say, “What about Daddy?” To which she replied, “I suppose we can keep Dallas around. He makes a good Manhattan.” Analyzing her poems in class made her less my grandmother, and more of the world.
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