by J. S. Puller
And it was all her fault. It was the sick, twisted legacy she’d cursed me with, without my realizing it. The isolation I’d once feared from my mother’s death was going to be Caitlyn Li’s doing instead.
When she left me.
“Janey?”
I’d lost track of time, lost track of my own silence. It was rude, but I didn’t care. I’d been rude plenty today. “Forget it.” I shook my head, feeling like it was underwater. “Just forget all of it.”
“Janey, please.” She leaned forward, holding her hand out to me. “I don’t understand. Why are you so angry?”
I stared down at her hand, overcome by the fact that it wouldn’t be there for me forever. I would have to walk down the halls of Deerwood Park Middle School without her warmth behind my shoulder. Alone. And different. And that—that was forever. “I have to go,” I said, stepping away from her and out of reach.
“Don’t leave.” She tried to stretch forward, to grab me, but I was too far away and she began coughing.
“See you around,” I said, turning from her. I paused before taking a step, adding, “Caitlyn.”
“Captain”—she wheezed and coughed and struggled to get it out—“Superlative.”
I whirled around, balling up my hands into fists at my sides. “Your name is Caitlyn!”
She got the coughing under control. And much to my surprise, she nodded. Just barely. “My name is Caitlyn. But Captain Superlative is who I am.”
There was a difference. Even in my rage, I could see the difference. I just didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want her to be right. How dare she make me stick my neck out into danger like that? How dare she hide the truth? She didn’t deserve to be right, not about anything.
So I stared. A stone-cold, dead stare.
Caitlyn leaned back against her pillows, looking incredibly serene, if not a little pink in the face. “Who are you, Janey?” she asked me.
I couldn’t take another second of it.
I stomped out of the room. I heard her calling after me, but I didn’t answer and I didn’t look back. I took the stairs two at a time, tearing back through the kitchen and the entry hall. I forgot my shoes and threw the door open, letting myself out, cutting across the crisp, silvery lawn and up the sidewalk. Salt crunched under my wet socks, my breath coming out in bright white bursts of fog. The hot tears that had started building up in the Li house fell down the sides of my face, blurring my vision so I couldn’t see where I was going.
But somehow I kept going all the way. On instinct.
The next thing I knew, I was curled up and sobbing on a cold bench, across the street from the hospital. Betty Grossman’s bench. A loving daughter, sister, wife, and mother.
Just like my mother.
I cried with my whole body, shoulders heaving, stomach tightening. And for all the drama and heat and noise, if anyone had stopped to ask me why I was sobbing, I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words. It was so many things, but above all else, I was in mourning for what I saw as the end of my life. Not my life life, but my social existence at Deerwood Park Middle School. I hadn’t even realized it was over until I pictured myself standing at those doors by myself. I had been alone before. Alone and invisible. But things were different now.
I hated different.
Defective.
Deranged.
Doomed.
I walked home after dark—the foggy night obscured the stars—went right to my room, and collapsed face-first on the bed. I breathed in the familiar scent of my comforter (fabric softener and ice cream, I think) and fell asleep. In a hazy, distant sort of way, I was aware of my dad coming in and taking off my wet socks, covering up my feet with a warm pillow. He asked me if I wanted dinner. I said no. And then I drifted back to sleep again.
When I woke up, Selina was curled up in a ball, nestled in the bend of my legs. I raised my head slightly, the bleary red numbers of my digital clock reading 9:14. Too late to get up and do anything. Too early to go back to sleep. I heard the springs of my bed creak and felt the weight of my dad sitting down beside me. He sat still, letting me grow accustomed to his presence. And then, after some time, he put his hand on my head and started stroking my hair.
It felt safe. Like when I was younger. Like when I woke up from the nightmares of monsters and hospitals.
“Rough day?” Dad asked.
“You could say that,” I said, turning my face back into the covers so that my voice was muffled in my sheets.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
He continued to stroke my hair. “Are you lying?”
I frowned a little bit, my dry lips catching against the covers. “Yes,” I finally said.
He didn’t scold me. Or ask why. Or even make a joke. He just sat there. “I’ll wait.”
And he waited.
I finally turned my head, glancing up at him. He looked hazy and white, a spirit from beyond, protecting me. Except that he couldn’t. He could never protect me. As warm and as safe as I felt, eventually I would have to go back to school. “It was all just some kind of stupid game,” I said.
“What was?”
As if he didn’t already know. It had been consuming my life—our lives—for over a month. “Captain Superlative,” I said. “Because she was afraid. Because she didn’t want to live in her reality.”
“Do you always want to live in yours?” he asked, predictably enough. “People always want to escape their realities. That’s why we have books and music and theatre and monster-truck rallies.”
“This was very, very different.”
“Why?”
“Because this is how she’s dealing with dying.”
Dying. What a word. Saying it out loud was violent and rough. Worse than Dagmar saying freak. The D-sound at the beginning was a stab wound in the air. My dad felt it, I could tell. His hand slowed on my head for a moment, hovering there. “Dying.” He said it softer, but the sound was still the same.
“Leukemia.”
There was another unpleasant word.
“Juvenile something-something leukemia. A relapse.”
His palm fell on the crown of my head, cradling it the same way that he cradled Selina when she was a newborn kitten left on the doorstep to his office. “Oh, Janey.” I almost didn’t hear him; he was so, so very quiet. “I’m so sorry to hear that, sweetheart.”
She’s gone.
I felt him try to pull me up against him. He wanted to hug me. But I resisted. Hugs were for sadness. I didn’t want to be sad. It was easier to be angry. I turned over onto my other side, facing away from him and disrupting Selina’s sleep. Directly in front of me was the wooden headboard of my bed, the same one I’d had in our old house. It had been my mother’s when she was my age.
Cancer sucked.
I laughed a little. It was a dry, mirthless laugh. Rusty, like I hadn’t used it in a while. “Guess I know what the big C stands for,” I said.
“Do you?”
“That’s what they call cancer, isn’t it? ‘The Big C.’” It had been staring me in the face the whole time, I just hadn’t seen it.
“Sometimes.”
Lightly, I ran my fingers over the grooves in the headboard. I knew each scratch and scar by heart. My favorite was a little star-shaped one near the top. I traced the shape of it with my index finger. I wondered if my mother had ever done the same thing. What had she been thinking about when she was my age? What hopes and dreams had she had? Hopes and dreams that would never be realized, because the Big C would take her away too early, too soon. It wasn’t fair. But at least she hadn’t started running around in a cape and tights. “It’s not the way it was with Mom,” I said. “I remember.”
“Janey, there’s no one way to do things. I wish you understood that. People are different. People are supposed to be different.”
“Right. Or we’d all be named Bob.”
“Exactly. There are no fewer than ten hundred thousand million diffe
rent ways to be human. Bob is just one of them.”
“I’d take that right now. I’d be Bob in a heartbeat if I could.”
“Why?”
I let out an exasperated, frustrated noise. “I got dragged into the middle of someone else’s story.” And now I was stuck there. It was a strange and mysterious sea and my life raft was dissolving like salt.
“You tried something new. It was scary and exciting and beyond your experiences, but you jumped right into that abyss where the future lives.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
Dad put a hand on my shoulder and, for a moment, I wanted to cling to him. “You were enjoying your adventures.”
“I put my neck on the line. All because of some stupid lie.” I rolled back over to face him, feeling the heaviness of my eyes, still swollen from crying. Selina mewed, hopped down from the bed, and slipped under it. I swear she gave me a dirty look. A very familiar sort of green-eyed look. “Dagmar Hagen hates me.”
“So?” Dad asked. I knew he wouldn’t understand, of course. How could he? “So what?”
“So,” I said, “soon Captain Superlative will be gone, and so will the lie. And then what? What am I supposed to do, Dad? I have a reputation as a freak’s assistant now.”
He slipped his fingers under my chin, tilting it slightly to look me in the eyes. “At least you’re someone, Janey.”
Now he was speaking in riddles too. I pulled out of his reach and slid off the bed. I stalked to the little desk against the wall, near the foot of the bed. Right there in the middle of stacks of drawings and lists of potential good deeds was my social-studies test, with the big red 100 percent circled on the top. Below the grade was the first question. About ostracism, of course.
Oddball.
Outlander.
Outsider.
Outcast.
“Great,” I said. “I’m someone. Someone I’m not supposed to be.” Someone who was dangerous to the state. Someone who would be ostracized.
“How do you know?”
“I just know!”
“Janey, that’s ridiculous. You have absolutely no proof that this isn’t exactly who you’re supposed to be.”
“It’s not who I want to be.”
“I know, Bob. I know.”
I glared down at the test. “What do I do?”
“I wish I could give you a simple answer, Janey.” He laughed softly. “It would make my job a lot easier.”
“I want things to go back to the way they were. Before Captain Superlative. Caitlyn. Whatever.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes. I do.”
He was quiet. Too quiet. It made my skin crawl a little bit. And it wasn’t much better when he finally spoke. “So what do you do?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, “everything goes back to normal. The way it was. The way it’s supposed to be.”
“Well…”
The well trailed off into infinity.
“Well what?”
“If that’s what you want.”
I turned around, the surprise written all across my face. “That’s it? Just like that?”
“Did you want more of a fight?”
“No. But I was expecting one.”
He stood up, the bed groaning. “Sometimes, Janey, being a parent means letting your children make the mistakes that they might need to make.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I know my daughter.” He came over to my side, kissing my head. “Probably better than she knows herself right now. And I know that Jane Esther Silverman is going to make the right choices. Eventually.”
And he left.
The right choice was to go back. I’d been Plain Jane for a very long time. Nothing but air drifting through Deerwood Park Middle School. I could be her again. I wanted to be her again. I needed to be her again.
What was the alternative?
My social-studies test taunted me. At least in ancient Greece, when people were ostracized, they left the city. It wouldn’t be so easy for me. I would be thrown out and still be forced to see the very people who had ostracized me. Day after day after day. Plain Jane was my only hope.
I knocked the test off the desk, sending it fluttering to the ground. Underneath was a stray heart, one of the valentines that Caitlyn and I had cut out. I’d kept it, thinking that I’d make a secret one for her. I picked it up, turning it over in my fingers. And then, overcome with anger, I crumpled it up into a tight and untidy wad in my hand and threw it against the wall.
The next morning, I woke up to the alarm at six. Normally, Captain…Caitlyn…and I met at 6:45 by the front doors, to open them for the teachers who arrived with boxes of supplies and piles of papers.
I hit the snooze button.
At 6:55, I got up and got dressed in jeans and a plain white sweatshirt. Hair loose. My mother’s necklace. Blue Shoes. My reflection in the mirror was appropriately ordinary. I could have been anyone.
“Good morning, Bob,” my dad said to me as he pulled out a carton of orange juice from the fridge.
“Good morning.”
We didn’t talk about anything except the German shepherd he was seeing later today. There was something on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t say it.
I wondered why.
I wondered if it had something to do with those “mistakes I needed to make” or whatever. But I was sure that I was doing the right thing, that I wasn’t making a mistake.
And I was wrong.
I’d forgotten the way Dagmar’s voice sounded when she zeroed in on someone. Sugary-sweet, almost flirtatious. A little too coy. For weeks, she hadn’t dared. Not with Paige, not with anyone. The looming threat of Caitlyn’s presence had been a powerful one. Or maybe just the looming threat of another dramatic exit. But for the past four days, no one had seen any sign of a red cape.
Except for me.
The ticking time bomb was itching to go off.
We were sitting in first-period Language Arts, but Mr. Collins was down in the office, copying a short story for homework. A cluster of girls hovered around Dagmar’s phone (a new one her mother had just gotten her as a “just because” present), watching a movie trailer. Everyone else was talking. Everyone except me. I sat alone in the back of the classroom, counting the motes of dust. Except I kept losing count.
One of the soccer players came into the classroom, carrying a basket full of bright pink flowers. To raise funds for the team, they’d been selling them all week. An idea Dagmar had stolen from Kohn last year. For a dollar, you could have a flower and a chocolate heart delivered to one of your classmates. Dagmar glanced up at her and said, “Oh, hi, Meredith,” in that oozy tone of voice of hers, and I cringed.
“Hey, Dagmar.”
With a wave of her hand, Dagmar shooed away the moths around her, thumbing off the video. “Got a delivery?”
“Yeah,” Meredith said, crossing the room over to Tyler. “This one is for you,” she said, handing him a flower with a heart-shaped card and a piece of candy tied to the stem with a pink ribbon.
Tyler took it, flipping the card over to read the signature. His face split into a grin and then he turned to look at me, of all people. “Hey, thanks so much, Janey!” he said with a wave.
Beside him, Kevin gave him a nudge. “Nice, Romeo.”
Tyler swatted him away.
I felt my face go white-hot. I hadn’t sent a flower to Tyler.
Or anyone else, for that matter.
Caitlyn and I were supposed to start delivering our valentines today. But she was home sick and they were probably sitting in a box on the floor of her room somewhere. Forgotten.
“Oh. Hey. Here’s another one for you,” Meredith said, handing a second flower to Tyler.
“Way to go, Gaston,” one of his other friends teased.
He glanced at the signature. This time his grin looked a little uncomfortable to me. “Thanks again, Janey.”
Two cards in my name?
; But it was only getting worse. Meredith produced a third, and a fourth, and a fifth flower in rapid succession, everyone watching as Tyler read my name each time and the pile of pink petals grew on his desk. Giggles and whispers broke out across the room. “Hey, all celebrities have stalkers,” Kevin said.
Eyes bore down on me. Dagmar, who I realized had lifted her phone to film the whole thing, asked in her most innocent voice, “Five flowers, Jane? Don’t you think that’s just a little bit desperate?”
More giggles. Meredith looked like she was having the time of her life. “No,” I said desperately, feeling a pulse in my cheeks. “I didn’t send them. It wasn’t me.”
“We get the point, Jane,” Dagmar continued, enjoying every syllable. “You have a crush on Tyler.”
She panned the camera over to me.
I knew without a doubt who had sent the flowers.
Mercifully, there weren’t any more flowers that morning. Maybe that was just because I didn’t have any more classes with Tyler until after lunch. But I could feel everyone watching me everywhere I went. Every laugh in the hallway, somehow I knew was related to me. What else could there possibly be to laugh about?
I needed to get away.
At lunch, I decided I would eat in the bathroom. If I could just stay out of sight for a while, everyone would forget the whole thing. I was foolish enough to believe in my plan. Get into the cafeteria. Get lunch. Disappear without ever touching lava. Everything would be fine.
It would have been nice.
Paige was waiting for me outside of the double doors to the cafeteria. “Janey,” she said, trying to flag me down.
I shook my head, trying to push past her. “Can’t talk right now.”
“No, listen.” She grabbed my arm. “There’s something you need to know.”
“I’ll catch you later,” I said, pulling away from her.
“Janey!”