by Sarah Bannan
Mrs Matthew: You know what I mean. I just want to give you a hand. Okay?
Carolyn: Okay.
Mrs Matthew: Yes.
(Pause. 42 seconds)
Carolyn: Is it for, like, insurance purposes?
Mrs Matthew: What?
Carolyn: Do you have to do this? You have to interview me? To get, like, covered by your insurance, in case I do something crazy at school?
Mrs Matthew: What? No.
Carolyn: Like, after the thing that happened before Christmas? You might be, like, legally REQUIRED to ask me questions.
Mrs Matthew: Carolyn, we’re getting off subject.
(Water is poured.)
Now, can you tell me how things are at home?
Carolyn: Fine.
Mrs Matthew: You and your mother getting along?
Carolyn: Yeah, fine.
Mrs Matthew: Could you be more specific?
Carolyn: Um. I don’t know. Like, I like the new house. It’s bigger than our last one.
Mrs Matthew: And that’s good?
Carolyn: Yeah, of course it is.
Mrs Matthew: And do you feel you can talk to your mother.
Carolyn (laughs): No.
Mrs Matthew: You seem very sure about that.
Carolyn (still laughing): It’s just – well, she’s very busy.
Mrs Matthew: With work?
Carolyn: Yeah, with work. And with extracurricular activities.
Mrs Matthew: What do you mean by that?
Carolyn: Oh, you know, like her exercise stuff. And she’s got some friends now.
Mrs Matthew: So she goes out a lot?
Carolyn: Everything’s relative, I guess.
Mrs Matthew: So you’re on your own a lot?
Carolyn: Not, like, a lot.
Mrs Matthew: But a few nights a week?
Carolyn: Yeah. Maybe three or four?
Mrs Matthew: Mmmmm.
Carolyn: But that’s fine, you know?
Mrs Matthew: So you prefer that?
Carolyn: I guess.
Mrs Matthew: What can you do in the house that you can’t do when your mother is there?
(Pause. 15 seconds)
Carolyn: When I have the house to myself, I can, like, open up all the windows, you know? And change the air in the house. My mother never does that, you know? And you’re meant to do it, like, at least once a day. Even in winter . . . It’s, like, with that stupid air-conditioner she forgets that it’s just recycling the same air in the house, and it gets, like, all stale and it starts to smell or something and it’s just like – like, I feel sick to my stomach. And if she’s ordered Indian food or something earlier in the week – then the whole place stinks like we live in an apartment over some Indian takeout place or something.
Mrs Matthew: What else do you do on your own?
Carolyn: I don’t know.
(Pause. 10 seconds)
I listen to music, I guess. And I can turn it up real loud. In New Jersey? That’s what my best friend and I used to do after school. We’d download whatever we wanted – like even old stuff sometimes – and then we’d put it on the iPod and into the deck and then we’d like sing and scream along and stuff. Nobody likes good music here.
(Water is poured.)
And my dad used to buy me loadsa music, you know? Like, even classical music, which I don’t really like, but I liked it when he played it.
Mrs Matthew: And why is that?
(Pause. 12 seconds)
Carolyn: He’d close his eyes, as soon as it came on. And he would describe the movements to me – like, what was happening in the song and what it meant, or what he thought it meant – and his face would go all soft, and he’d have his eyes closed and he’d look like he was almost asleep and he’d ask me to sit with him, in his armchair, and sometimes I hated that, ’cause I’m not five anymore, you know? But when I sat with him, I could feel his heartbeat – at first really fast – or faster than mine – but when I sat really still and close, then his would slow a little, and maybe mine sped up? Or something. But I would put my head against his chest and my fingers on my throat and after a movement of Bach or two, they’d be the same. Our heartbeats, I mean. And I couldn’t believe that could happen.
(Coughing. Water is poured.)
Mrs Matthew: Do you miss doing that?
Carolyn: I’m too old for it. It’s kind of weird now.
Mrs Matthew: How so?
Carolyn: Sixteen. I mean – almost sixteen, that’s all. I’m too old for that – people would think there was something wrong with me if I still did that.
Mrs Matthew: But you miss it?
Carolyn: I don’t know. I guess. Not really.
Mrs Matthew: Would your dad still like it if you’d do that?
Carolyn: When I see him, yeah, like, I guess. But I told him I’m too old for that.
Mrs Matthew: And how does he respond to this?
Carolyn: I’m sorry I brought this up, you know? It’s not a big deal.
MARCH
Chapter 22
In March, a couple of weeks before we went on Spring Break the pipes in the Science building burst and we had to evacuate. We thought it would mean we would get to go home – there had to be a rule against holding students in a building that didn’t have functioning toilets – but they just made us go to the library for the afternoon, to “work quietly” and to study for our mid-terms. We groaned but we were happy all the same – it meant we could sit where we wanted, and even if we couldn’t talk, we could text and look around and not have to listen to Miss Simpson or Coach Cox for the rest of the day.
In the library, twenty-five Macs lined the walls, and during study hall or free periods we could surf the net. The blocks and filters that the librarians had put up were super easy to take down and we put them back up again afterward – it was funny the lengths the librarians would go to keep us away from porn and sex offenders and skeevy chat rooms. We weren’t interested in that stuff anyway – we just wanted to go onto Facebook and Google questions – a weird rash, irregular periods, how to lose ten pounds, average age girls lost their virginity – stuff like that.
When we got there, Brooke and Gemma were at the Macs in the far right corner, near the poetry section, where nobody ever hung around. The rest of the computers were taken too – the band geeks came in like a swarm, with their instruments packed up behind them. We took our seats at the round tables in the center. We watched the Goths to our right paint their fingernails with Wite-Out; we watched the freshmen boys to our left unpack paperback copies of Lord of the Rings. We situated ourselves so we could watch the computers, so we could see what Brooke and Gemma were doing. We kept two seats open for them at our table – not like they’d sit with us, but still. Just in case.
The librarians shushed us and told us that Mr Overton would be in later to make sure we were behaving, and we rolled our eyes. Brooke and Gemma laughed and they were told to be quiet. They laughed again two minutes later and they were told they had their first warning. They were quiet after that, except for the sound of Brooke chewing her gum and popping her bubbles. She could make a bubble so big it would cover her face. (Guys said this meant she was good with her tongue.)
We were doing our Trig homework, or those were the books that we had out, but really we were texting and trying to figure out what people were going to do on the weekend. We looked up at Brooke and Gemma every few minutes – we looked at them as much as we could get away with, as often as we could without them thinking we were lesbian stalkers.
Andrew and Carolyn walked in after the fifth-period bell rang – they’d been in the Science building before that, they had Biology together. When the two of them walked in, we thought we heard Brooke say “whore” or something like that, but we weren’t really sure. One of the Goths laughed, which we thought was weird, since they hated all the cheerleaders’ guts, and one of the freshmen losers sitting behind us told his table that Carolyn had had sex with six different guys since she’d mov
ed here, and that she was probably carrying an STD. Andrew and Carolyn walked to a table in front of us – near the periodicals – and as they sat down, one of the Goths told them the table was reserved and Carolyn started to get up to move before Andrew said “Fuck you” and they sat down. Somebody threw a piece of paper – like a giant spitball – and just missed Carolyn’s head. Whether they’d done it on purpose wasn’t clear – and we couldn’t tell who it even came from, but the whole line of computer users were laughing now, backs shaking as they clicked away. Mrs Kelly, the Head Librarian, was in her office. The librarians never paid attention to anything, we said later, they just wanted to get through the day and go home to their cats or their DVR-ed Grey’s Anatomy or whatever sad hobby they pursued when they weren’t in our school.
Andrew took out his books before Carolyn did – she just sat there – and after seven or eight minutes had passed she put her head on the table and went to sleep. Or else just lay there with her eyes closed – we didn’t know. Andrew sat and read, and he took notes and he didn’t look around. He was focused. We heard later that Andrew nearly flunked all of his classes that semester – that when he was dating Carolyn he was on the verge of failing everything except PE and Driver’s Ed, where he was the teacher’s aide. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine what he was doing, what he was working on so hard, but he didn’t look up, didn’t look around, didn’t lift his head.
A ring tone – the iPhone default one – came from Carolyn’s bag. It rang for twenty or thirty seconds and we watched Andrew put his hand through Carolyn’s hair, trying to wake her up. She lifted her head, just barely, and picked up her bag and took out her phone and stopped the ringing and we watched her face as she looked at the screen, her mouth moving, her eyes starting to fill up, her cheeks burning red. She threw the phone on the table and Andrew picked it up. He lifted his head and half stood up and looked around until steadying his stare on Gemma and Brooke, who were looking right at him. They weren’t laughing now, but they looked happy, pleased, proud. Like they always did.
Carolyn stood up and put her messenger bag across her body. She turned to go and Andrew pulled her back. He whispered something in her ear. We tried to look down at our books, but we couldn’t – not really. He pulled her in close and her whole body started to slacken, soften. She put her hand through his hair – he was still seated and he pulled her like he was going to kiss her or tie her to the seat, but he didn’t. He let her go. Carolyn walked out and only then did Mrs Kelly emerge from her office – to try to stop her probably. But Carolyn was too fast and as she left we watched Brooke and Gemma wave, mouthing “Bah-bye.”
That same night, somebody posted a search history on the Hot List blog and said it belonged to Brooke Moore. She’d left all her cookies open after we’d left the library, and somebody did a screen shot and saved it. The usual things: “Lose ten pounds in a week” and “cheap Coach purses” and, the most embarrassing, her own name. Way down the list, there were other things, the things that we remembered most clearly, that became the major points of discussion: “cum in your ass pregnant?” and “teeth in way blow job” and “make boyfriend jealous.” It was up for an hour when she put out a mass message, on text and Facebook and in person to anybody she saw: “Some Yankee bitch was on that computer before me. You can guess who that slut was.”
We didn’t think that it could be true – Carolyn had gotten there late and left early, it wasn’t her kind of thing. But nobody confirmed that Carolyn did any of that, and we never found out who or what was on Carolyn’s phone that day. At the time, we didn’t think much of it, not really. Everybody got spam or shitty messages from people they didn’t like. There were things you just had to live with. Things you just had to get over. Now, we think it might have been better if we’d told her that it wasn’t that weird, that she shouldn’t freak out or think she was some kind of social leper just ’cause of a couple of texts from some jealous bitches. Or we could have told her to stop hanging out with people’s ex-boyfriends, to try to keep a low profile. But we didn’t do any of those things. We were busy with our own stuff and, plus, there were things she just should have known.
The following week, after the plumbing had been fixed, we sat in Trig, trying hard to stay awake, trying hard not to look out the window, fighting the urge to take out our phones and text each other, check Facebook. We looked ahead at Mr Ferris as he told us about sine, cosine and tangent. He made us write the Pythagorean theorem hundreds of times, as if this would make sense of it: “The sum of the areas of the two squares on the legs equals the area of the square on the hypotenuse: can you tell me what’s important about this theorem?”
Carolyn knew the answer, everybody knew this, but she never raised her hand, or called out in class. Mr Ferris searched our eyes for the answer, but nobody would make eye contact with him. We bit our cuticles and looked at our desks or out the window or just stared at his ears.
He looked around and then smiled: “Bueller, Bueller?”
It was hard, even though he was nice. It was hard to maybe be wrong. “Anybody?”
“No?”
Coughing. A phone vibrated. Another went off – Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” as the ring tone. Mr Ferris laughed – he was the only teacher in school who let us leave our phones on in class, let us keep them, and so we never touched them while we were in Trig. Reverse psychology probably, but we didn’t care.
“Right. Well – it’s a statement about both area and about length. It’s both geometry and algebra.”
He looked pleased. We didn’t understand why. He asked us to draw unit circles using our compasses, on graph paper.
He spoke while we drew:
“Let a line through the origin, making an angle of θ with the positive half of the x axis, intersect the unit circle.”
He waited. He started to write on the board.
“Okay, ready? The x and y coordinates of this point of intersection are equal to cos θ and sin θ, respectively. Can you write this in?”
He took out his big chalk compass thing, and drew his circle on the board. The wooden handle scraped against it, just for a moment, just long enough to make a screech, and the classroom erupted in squeals.
“Sorry, sorry.” He laughed a little. “Okay. We’ve got it here. The triangle in the drawing enforces the formula. The radius is equal to the hypotenuse and has length 1, so we have sin θ = y/1 and cos θ = x/1.” He paused for a moment, looked at us. Worried, like he’d lost us at the side of the road.
He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Getting excited. Can somebody explain to me, as simply as possible, what a unit circle is, and why it’s so important for us? Jessica?”
She reddened, hesitated, and then spat out her words. “A unit circle has a radius of one. It’s a circle with a radius of one.”
He smiled. “That’s right, uh-huh. And why is that good for us?”
“Because it’s so easy?” Jessica kind of laughed when she said it, looked around, and other people were laughing too. She continued, her voice firmer, less nervous and shaky. “It’s simple, I mean. The circle is. It means we can look at lots of different kinds of angles and triangles and lengths and understand things. Or try to understand things. It’s good to play around with when you’re trying to learn. There’s an app for it, you know? The unit circle, I mean.”
“Is that right?” Mr Ferris smiled. “Good, good. That’s great.”
We continued to fill in the angles, mark in the functions, measure the radians. Using a compass and a ruler, the circle could almost come out looking like the picture in the book and this was something we liked. It was Math and drawing, but with less of a chance to get it wrong.
“Keep working, okay? You can just keep working on these until the end of class.”
He walked around the room, curving in and out of our desks, and we concentrated hard and long, rotating around our circles, trying to make our writing look like the type in the pictures. Mechanical pencils, graph paper, erasers shaped lik
e fruit or hearts or soda bottles. We liked our supplies. Graphic paper was like a Magic Eye poster – if you looked at it too long, you would see shapes coming toward you, from beneath your notebook, from beneath your desk. It took such concentration, what we were doing, and Jason Nelson always stuck his tongue out of one side of his mouth, Jessica Grady wrapped her legs around the legs of her chair, Lauren Brink sometimes hummed show tunes to herself, until somebody would throw a spitball at her and tell her to shut up.
We were so absorbed, so involved, that when Mr Ferris inhaled and called out “Jesus. What the fuck?” Jessica Grady actually screamed.
We looked up. He was standing over Carolyn’s desk, in the far corner. She was looking up at him, eyes empty and wide, but we could only see the back of his head. Her graph paper was dotted with red and pink splotches, and there was more red on the ground around her desk. She held her compass in her right hand and its point was pressing deep into the flesh of her left arm.
Mr Ferris pulled it out of her hand and, as he did, she let out a gasp – but she held her arm still, the rest of her body shaking. There was a deep, straight line, with blood running out of it at uneven intervals. Blood was still flowing, and it looked watery and thin, not like the blood in movies and TV. We wondered what was wrong with her. Anemia, somebody said later.