The Icarus Girl

by Helen Oyeyemi

  She had reddish brown hair in a long bob, and often, when strands of her hair came loose from where she had tucked them behind her ears (she never wore her hair in a ponytail or braid), instead of pushing them back, she would chew the ends, leaving the strands darker, wet and coated with pale globules of saliva.

  Jess thought it was disgusting.

  Colleen thought Jess was disgusting, although it was never clear why. It was a different thing every day. Mostly, when Jess didn’t want to talk about her ideas in class, Colleen thought that Jess was showing off, making sure that she would be coaxed and pleaded with, but how could Jess have explained in a coherent way that she was scared? Once you let people know anything about what you think, that’s it, you’re dead. Then they’ll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.

  There was no way that anyone was ever going to get into her mind. Not ever. Fine, she’d do the work, yes, fine. Fine, she’d sit with a straight back and crossed legs, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt: Who can sit up the straightest? Me, me, me! Yes, she could do all that, but after that, something in her said: They should leave me alone and let me read my books, let me think my thoughts. If they pushed her too far with their requests for her to open up, interact more, make friends, she would scream. They knew it. She’d done it before.

  Despite the

  (disgusting)

  chewed hair, Colleen was friends with everyone in the class, even though some would quarrel with her when she got too bossy, which was often. She wouldn’t get bossy in an outright way, but she would force people to see things from her perspective through a simple tool: scorn.

  “Oh my Lord,” she’d say, looking to heaven as if God was nodding in silent agreement with her, “you’re not really going to do that, are you?”

  And Andrea Carney would titter disdainfully somewhere behind Colleen’s left shoulder, or maybe, for variety, her right.

  If some hapless child organised the class at playtime for a game of Bulldog on the rare occasion the biggest playing space in the Juniors’ playground could be wrested from the Year Six basketball boys, they would look at her in alarm. If Colleen didn’t play, then Andrea wouldn’t play, and if Andrea didn’t play, then Sonia, who was Andrea’s cousin, wouldn’t play, and if Sonia wouldn’t play, then Alison Carr, the prettiest girl in the class, wouldn’t play . . . and so on. Tunde Coker and Samantha Robinson, two people who always tried to get the class together and make peace between warring factions, were the ones who most often fell victim to Colleen McLain’s sarcasm.

  Sometimes they would rebel—Samantha had pulled Colleen’s hair after school one day and scratched Andrea when she had tried to come to her best friend’s defence—but mostly they would sigh and give in, because “Colleen’s all right really.”

  Jess, who saw everything but participated in nothing, observed Colleen’s little attacks to secure her permanent leadership, and felt most sorry for Tunde Coker. He actually made an effort to talk to Jess whenever he saw her, bravely struggling to revive a conversation that died almost before it started. Jess would feel like turning away in despair, unable to explain that she just couldn’t say anything worthwhile when other people were talking to her, but also unable to say anything friendly to dispel the feeling Tunde jokingly expressed that she “didn’t like him much.”

  Jess liked Tunde Coker quite a lot—the habit he had of digging his hands so deep into the pockets of his tracksuit trousers that it looked as if he had two hand-sized bumps growing out of the sides of his legs; the long, slow, lopsided smile that he smiled when someone said or did something funny. He rarely laughed, but he also never seemed to take conversation seriously, was constantly smiling as if words washed over him like an impure tide of meaning, searching instead the face of the person he was talking to with his eyes. Yes, she really did like him quite a lot, although she knew that he, much like any other boy in their class, would do anything the blond, dimpled Alison Carr asked.

  Not that she disliked Alison Carr, either . . . Everyone in their class, except for Colleen McLain, was OK. Even Andrea Carney was OK—she had taken Jess to the school nurse once when Nam Hong had tripped her up in the playground and she had cut her knee badly. That was the problem—everyone was just OK.

  Jess sat down, keeping her back straight, as if someone had attached a hook and string to her skull and was yanking the string taut so that her head went up, as she strove to ignore Colleen and Andrea’s glances prickling on her back.

  I have a friend an amazing friend who’s coming to see me soon and she’s better than the two of you put together and she listens to me I talked about a poem with her and I don’t care if you don’t like me and and and . . .

  “OK, Year Five, settle down, SETTLE DOWN! Get to the tables—we’re going to make some information booklets about Sir Francis Drake now—”

  But Miss Patel didn’t get a chance to finish, because just at that moment, Jess bent double and, putting her hands over her eyes, began to scream and scream and scream.

  TWO

  “Jessamy?”

  Jess raised her head from her knees and looked around blearily, her eyes still smarting from her tears. She stared at Mr. Heinz, the headmaster. She recognised him from assembly. His dark brown hair was sprinkled with grey, and his tie stood out from his sleek navy-blue suit because it was red with yellow smiley faces on it.

  Mr. Heinz drew a chair out from beneath the clean white nurse’s desk, and sat down. He clasped his hands in his lap, then lifted them, linked them together, pushed the lattice made by his joined fingers outwards. Jess silently watched his hands, her own hands creeping to her face to rub at her eyes. It was quiet.

  Say something.

  He didn’t.

  She lost patience.

  “Yes, Mr. Heinz?” she asked, wanting him to say whatever it was that he was here to say, show his concern, his dismay, and then go away so that she could be by herself.

  “Jessamy,” he began again. “I wanted to ask you—are you happy in your new class? I mean, obviously, I know that sometimes it all gets a little bit stressful and you, you know, erm, vent your feelings and so on, but in general, is it all right there?”

  Jess had calculated one weekend that on average she had at least one serious tantrum in school per week. She had laughed with a kind of embarrassment, thinking No wonder my class thinks I’m weird. Was it getting boring?

  She remembered how, one day, Colleen McLain had said something pretty horrible. Colleen had been with Andrea and Andrea’s cousin Sonia, and she had said loudly, with several glances to make sure Jessamy was listening, “Maybe Jessamy has all these ‘attacks’ because she can’t make up her mind whether she’s black or white!”

  Jess hadn’t known what to think about what Colleen had just said, (I mean, is it true?) but she knew that her mum would have gone mentalist.

  So she hadn’t told her.

  “Sir,” Jess said finally, in a small, polite voice, “I hate being in that class, but I have to go to school, so I might as well not complain.”

  He did not seem surprised by what she said; if he had, she would have thought him an idiot—after all, he must have at least discussed her with Miss Patel, if not noticed all the times that she’d had to go home after a particularly bad tantrum when they couldn’t get her to settle.

  Jess realised another thing.

  She hated the word “settle.”

  Mr. Heinz cleared his throat.

  “You could always go back to Year Four,” he said.

  Jess almost laughed at him outright, hysteria bubbling in her throat as she remembered his visit to her house to speak to her parents about moving her up to Year Five. Her mother had looked long at her, an assessing sort of look, as if she wasn’t sure whether to object or to be proud that her daughter was going to be advanced “a whole class,” as she put it—as if
someone could be moved up by half a class. Offering the plate of biscuits to Mr. Heinz, she had said in a matter-of-fact, somewhat Nigerian manner, that she had no objection to Jessamy’s being moved up a year. After all, it wasn’t irrevocable, was it, and there would be a trial period first. Mr. Heinz had taken a biscuit. Yes, Jessamy would think later, laughing, that her mother had been very Nigerian about it, had hidden her pride. Give her any scenario, and that calm acceptance that Nigerian children might be singled out for anything would emerge: What is that I hear you say? You have randomly and spontaneously decided to elect my daughter as Prime Minister? Well, all I can say is: good choice .

  But her father—Jess had watched him turn the lenses of his glasses towards him and stare at them as if they were another pair of eyes looking back. He looked around the living room before speaking, and Jess followed his gaze: he seemed to be taking in the dark-red sofa and chairs, the plum-coloured light filtering out from the lampshade. He fiddled with his glasses again and seemed to be hesitating.

  “It’s, erm, not Jess keeping up that I worry about,” he had said, his usually buoyant voice sounding almost muffled. Jess, her mother and Mr. Heinz waited to see what exactly he had been worrying about.

  “Erm, well, I just thought maybe she might not actually, you know, like it.”

  Sarah Harrison laughed, and so did Mr. Heinz. Jessamy had heard and was glad to hear that her father worried about these things; she was starting to think that no one did. She took a small bite of her bourbon biscuit.

  “Well, we did say that nothing’s definite until Jessamy’s tried it out,” Mr. Heinz said. Jess looked at him guardedly—he laughed with his mouth open too wide.

  The confidence in Mr. Heinz’s voice seemed to make Daniel Harrison shrink somehow, but Jess, watching from beneath her eyelashes, could not see exactly how or what the change was. Daniel looked at Sarah, who gave him a slight shrug (They want to make our daughter special; what can we do?), then he looked at Jessamy. Jessamy took another self-conscious nibble at the biscuit. She did not like to, could not, eat very much in front of strangers.

  Then her father looked at Mr. Heinz.

  “Let’s try it,” he said, his tone suddenly cheerful. “Where’s the harm? If you don’t like it, you’ll tell us, won’t you, Jess?” he added.

  Another one of those choiceless, spiral questions. She had to think carefully, clutching the biscuit in her palm as a talisman against the three faces looking at her. They had suddenly become a group.

  What could she do?

  Thinking of this, now, Jess put her head down and cried quietly, miserably.

  After a few minutes, when Jess had composed herself, the nurse returned her to her class, where she spent the rest of the day going through the motions of being a Year Five pupil, hunched over a stack of coloured paper with scissors, glue, a copy of the book that Miss Patel had been reading from, and some coloured pencils. She vaguely noted that there were three other people at the table with her, but said hardly anything to them, not even when Jonathan Carroll and Nam Hong’s wet-tissue fight ended up hitting her in the face. She gave a nod in acceptance of their apologies and continued snipping and colouring, placing things against the page, making sure that the only thing that she had any control over would look just right. She talked to Tunde Coker, who was also at her table, even less than usual, and steadfastly refused to look at Colleen McLain, who as always finished making her Sir Francis Drake booklet before anyone else.

  “Bit slow, aren’t you, Jessamy?” Colleen called out loudly, and Jess pretended not to hear, in fact, did not hear, made it her business only to hear the small clicking sound of Tunde’s pencil breaking as he pressed too hard, and the scratchy, grating sound as he sharpened it up again.

  THREE

  At home after school, Jess settled herself cross-legged on the tall kitchen chair, drinking her chocolate milk and eating a makeshift cheese, peanut butter and chocolate-spread sandwich. The food wasn’t exactly making her memory of the afternoon go away, but it was helping. As Jess chewed, she ran her eyes over the green-and-white tiles running around the kitchen walls, particularly the area where the tiles ran behind the fridge and out the other side again, like a length of ribbon. Sometimes she left incriminating chocolatey hand marks on the white tiles.

  A rap at the back door.

  She glanced at the kitchen clock; it was only four o’clock and her dad didn’t usually finish work until five.

  Jess jumped up and pulled the back door open.

  “Hi,” TillyTilly said.

  Tilly seemed different, just a little different. She stood just outside the door, one hand on the doorpost, almost exactly the same height as Jess, just as before, but— She was wearing shiny black buckled shoes, and kneesocks like the white, crocheted ones that Jess herself was wearing, and a checked green dress. Her face seemed fuller, her arms firmer, as if she had put on some healthy weight, and her hair! Her hair was completely different.

  When Jess had thought about TillyTilly, she’d pictured her two enormous puffs of hair bound with thin, trailing string. But now the two puffs had been braided into thick, stubby plaits, the end of each plait brushing a shoulder.

  “I like your hair,” Jess said, a hand flying up to her own single plait. She felt shy and embarrassed all of a sudden, as if things were too different.

  Then TillyTilly smiled, and everything was all right again. Jess felt warmed. She smiled back, stepped aside for TillyTilly to come in.

  “Me and my parents have just moved into the area,” Tilly said.

  “Oh,” Jess said, trying to suppress her excitement.

  TillyTilly had done it again! She’d done the impossible! Tilly might even go to her school! Why not? Jess had no doubt that Tilly would soon get herself moved to Year Five as well, but until then they could eat lunch together and maybe even play clapping games in the playground like the other girls did, and with Tilly there, she would be able to ignore Colleen McLain completely, as if she didn’t even exist, and—

  “So, d’you want to do something?” TillyTilly asked, laughing a little.

  FOUR

  “Let’s go upstairs,” said TillyTilly.

  Jess hesitated in front of her mum’s closed study door, not knowing whether she was supposed to make some kind of introduction. She hadn’t had anyone whose parents her mum didn’t know to play before.

  TillyTilly pulled at her hand.

  “Come on!”

  Jess’s room was gloomy because the curtains were drawn. The smell of lavender, her mother’s latest scent craze, hung in the air, and Jess was suddenly extremely aware of the way that her room looked.

  It looked too full. There were too many big, chunky things robbing space, air. The shelves . . . did they really need to be there, so wide and wooden, only half full with slim, gaudy paperbacks, the shelf sections opening into gaping squares of the blue-painted wall behind them? And her bed in the corner beneath the window, the patchwork quilt sprawled over it seeming to swell with a greedy fatness of colour! She was almost alarmed. She looked sidelong at TillyTilly, a quick, embarrassed glance, then went in through the doorway, feeling her toes squishing into the clumpy tufts of spotty rug. They gravitated towards Jess’s desk, looking at the pictures and postcards on the wall above it.

  “Hmmm,” TillyTilly said, staring around. “There doesn’t seem to be very much we can do here.” She turned her gaze on to Jess. “D’you have any games?”

  Jess shook her head. TillyTilly stood silent, her head tipped to one side, her eyes darting around the room. Her nose wrinkled up as she thought. Jess began nervously clicking her desk lamp on and off. She saw TillyTilly’s eyes flick across towards the lamp, then away again, as if the sound, the constant shift between circle-light and square-darkness bothered her. Soon, Tilly’s eyes did not shift from the lamp anymore but remained on Jess’s hand, Jess’s hand clicking the lamp on and off.

  Jess frowned and stopped fiddling with the desk lamp.

  “Games
. . . D’you mean like Connect 4 and snakes and ladders?” she asked. When TillyTilly, head still cocked, didn’t reply, Jess continued: “I don’t really have games like that . . . My mum doesn’t like playing them all that much, and my dad’s usually doing something else . . .”

  TillyTilly stood on one leg and rubbed the sole of her foot against the kneesocked length of her other leg. It was distracting, and Jess’s words slowed down, and then died.

  “Haven’t you got any brothers or sisters?” TillyTilly asked, switching feet. She had her arms out as if she was going to launch into the air any minute and just fly away. Jess perched herself on the edge of her desk.

  “No,” she said. “You would’ve seen my brother or sister in Ibadan if I had one.”

  TillyTilly dropped her arms to her sides. She looked at Jess, her gaze ruler-straight, intent.

  “But . . .” she said softly, “I thought . . .”

  Jess waited, feeling a little sick. There was a key in her chest that was being tightly wound until it hurt.

  TillyTilly twiddled the end of one of her pigtails and smiled.

  “D’you know a girl called Colleen McLain?” she asked.

  Jess jumped, just a little surprised at this new line of conversation.

  “Yeah,” she said. “She’s horrible. She thinks she’s amazing, and she chews her hair, and she hates me.”

  TillyTilly looked suitably impressed by the gravity of all this, her eyebrows raised in what Jess fancied to be a mix of disapproval at Colleen’s behaviour and amazement that she could dislike Jess.

  “And I hate her too,” Jess added, after a split-second reflection.