Drenched in Light

by Lisa Wingate

  I pretended not to notice their caught-in-the-act expressions. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” said a leggy, slim brunette with a cute, pert nose and the toned arms of a dancer. She stood at the head of the group, the apparent herd leader. I couldn’t remember her name.

  “I see.” I surveyed the guilty body language. A few days ago, I would have laughed it off as teenage mischief, but lately I was suspicious of everything. Crossing the room, I held out my hand. “How about I have a look?”

  There was an audible intake of breath from somewhere in the group, but the dark-haired girl covered perfectly.

  Leaning close, she held a hand next to her mouth, like we were two grown-ups leveling with each other. “It’s just something one of the boys dropped. A list—you know, like who’s cool and stuff.”

  “Ohhh,” I replied, grateful that this was normal teenaged silliness. “Well, I’ll tell you what—why don’t you let me take it, so I’ll know who’s cool, and then you girls”—pausing, I slid a stern gaze across the group of mortified young faces—“won’t end up being tardy for your next class.”

  “Sure,” the herd leader agreed with an innocent flutter of lashes that probably worked at home with her daddy. Snatching the note from her redheaded companion, she handed it to me. “See? It’s just, like, a list of cool girls in the eighth grade. Who’s hot and who’s not.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Tucking Dell’s essay under my arm, I turned the list over in my hands, glancing at the handwritten column headings—Hots, Nots—with various names written below. “Did you make the cut?” I asked, and the girls giggled in a way that said they were all in the cool column, and I could be too, if only I would give back the list. “This might come in handy,” I joked, and the brunette chuckled with a sneering lip that told me I was being dumped from the list. Poof, you’re outa there. “Go on to class, now.” Folding the paper, I handed it back to the pack leader.

  The group breathed a collective sigh of relief as I headed out the door. Behind me, they descended into a whirlwind of chatter.

  “I can’t believe you let her look at the list.”

  “What was I supposed to do, huh? She, like, asked for it.”

  “Tell her it’s ours.”

  “Yeah, right. So I can end up in detention again? My dad would, like, kill me.”

  “Your dad’s such a Nazi.”

  “Well, at least she gave it back. What was she doing in here, anyway? Who was with her?”

  “Some seventh grader. That weird girl that Verhaden likes so much. She’s in here practicing all the time. Kiss-up.”

  “You know she’s, like, a welfare case from back in the sticks somewhere. My mom heard it at school board… .”

  As I passed through the second set of doors, the buzz of hallway chatter drowned out the conversation. Walking away with Dell’s notebook papers tucked under my arm, I understood more than ever how difficult the Harrington social scene must be for her, and why she preferred the storage room to the cafeteria.

  The vocal music teacher stopped me as I rounded the corner into the main hallway. “I’m missing a group of girls,” she said, standing on her toes, trying to see through the crowd in the corridor. “About five of them. Tall, cute brunette, little redhead, a couple others. Giggle a lot. They were supposed to come directly from lunch to Spring Fling auditions. We can’t start until we get everybody together. The guest director is sitting there waiting, and he is not happy.”

  “I just saw them in Verhaden’s room. They didn’t look like they were in a hurry to be anywhere.”

  Growling in her throat, she checked her clipboard. “Some of these kids can’t remember things from one minute to the next, I swear. They’ve probably gone on to their regular class. If I didn’t need those girls in the performance, I wouldn’t even bother looking.”

  “I can understand that,” I said, but I was really thinking that the girls needed to pay a visit to the school of hard knocks. Late for an audition, no audition. That was how it worked in the real world.

  “Speaking of auditions, I noticed you had Dell Jordan in your office the other day.” The teacher glanced down the hall, then checked her clipboard again. “Think she’s going to have the grades to be available for Spring Fling? She has an amazing voice, three octaves—not the trained kind, either. It’s natural. But if she’s on academic probation, I can’t use her.”

  I waited until a group of kids had passed by before I answered. “I think so.” Hopefully that was true. Hopefully, I could make it true. “She’s trying.”

  “Good.” Nodding, she made a note on her clipboard, then headed off in search of the cool girls, while I continued down the main hall.

  When I reached my office, Barry was sitting in a chair by the administration door, watching with wistful interest as a pair of girls walked past, oblivious to his existence. Sighing, he stood up and came across the hall.

  “Hey, Ms. C.” Clearly, my presence was a poor substitute for the attention of cute teenage girls. It wouldn’t do any good to tell him that life is not dictated by how you look at fourteen. One of these days he’d grow out of his baby fat, develop muscles, and find that girls were interested. But promises like that are cold comfort when you are fourteen, chubby, and unpopular, loaded with potential no one else can see.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. It wasn’t his normal period to serve as office aid.

  “I’m off this hour. They’re working on history projects, and I already did mine. Mr. Cantor said I could stay and help other people, or come down here. You need me to do anything?”

  “I have some attendance sheets that could be alphabetized and filed.” The attendance sheets weren’t urgent, but Barry obviously needed a place to hang out for a while. I wondered if his glum mood had anything to do with the breakfast burrito incident in the hall this morning.

  He shrugged, looking like a pathetic cartoon character in his oversize Orange County Choppers T-shirt. “OK.”

  I opened my door so we could go in. “There are a bunch of DAT forms on the chair in the corner. You know where they go. I need to work on a press release.”

  “Another one?” Picking up the stack of papers, he glanced over his shoulder. “You do one of those about every day, Ms. C.”

  “Seems like it.” Tucking Dell’s latest notebook pages under my Dayminder, I opened an e-mail from Mr. Stafford and tried to work myself into the right frame of mind to write yet another fluffy article about next weekend’s sidewalk jazz concert, during which—as Stafford put it—the Harrington Jazz Players would “go out into the community and delight crowds with refrains of fine jazz and blues music, performed by talented young musicians and vocalists”. What he really meant was that on Saturday, Harrington would bus a select group of eighth graders and their instruments to the right side of town to provide music for shoppers at the mall. Bingo. Community service hours completed while delighted parents and school board members looked on. Meanwhile, of course, no one would dream of holding a concert for the community in which the school was actually located.

  “What’s it about this time?” Sidling along the narrow space between the extra chairs and the desk, Barry peered toward the computer screen.

  “Saturday’s jazz concert at the mall.”

  He brightened instantly. “I’m in that.”

  I reprimanded myself for having negative thoughts. Any event that made Barry look so happy had to be a good thing. “You are? I didn’t know you were in the jazz group.”

  “I finally made it this semester.” Hiking up his pants, he expanded his chest as if he were about to breathe life into his saxophone. “I’ve been trying out since seventh grade, but I never got in until now.” Laughing under his breath, he added, “The sax section’s a bunch of stoners now, so the competition’s not that tough.”

  I sat blinking into space as Barry ambled casually back to the file cabinet, completely unconcerned about what he’d said and whom he’d said it to. “Excuse me?” I choked.
“What?”

  He opened the file drawer and craned over it. “The sax section’s a bunch of stoners. Everybody knows it.” Muttering his ABCs, he started dropping papers into folders.

  “Who knows it?”

  Both shoulders rose and fell in a matter-of-fact shrug. “Everybody,” he repeated with an amazing lack of emotion. “Why?” As in, Why in the world would you ask that, Ms. Costell?

  I was momentarily at a loss for an answer, mentally replaying Stafford’s litany about why we couldn’t possibly have a drug dog come during school hours, and the fact that Harrington had never had a drug problem.

  By contrast, there was Barry casually mentioning that the saxophone section as a bunch of stoners and everyone knew it. By everyone, did he mean that it was common knowledge among the students, or did he mean that faculty members knew and chose to do nothing about it?

  In the lull, Barry changed the topic. “I could write that press release for you, Ms. Costell. I know all about the concert—who’s got solos and all. How about you file the DAT sheets and I write the press release? I can do it in, like, twenty minutes.”

  “I … sure …” I stammered, abandoning my chair, still shell-shocked as we slid past each other and he settled into my desk. “I didn’t know you were a writer.”

  “Heck, yeah.” Punching up a word processor window, he began typing. “I won the KC Young Writers Award last semester. I wrote about rehab.”

  My jaw fell to the floor and I slowly reeled it back up. Fortunately, my back was turned to Barry. “What kind of rehab? I … I mean, what was the article about?”

  He paused momentarily to look over Mr. Stafford’s specs for the press release. “Oh, you know, like for drugs. My friend from last year got sent to rehab in Montana. One of those challenge camps. I interviewed him and wrote an article about it, what it was like for him and all. He doesn’t go to Harrington anymore. His parents thought it’d be better if he didn’t come back here.”

  “I guess you miss him, huh?” I tried to imagine Barry with a friend who ended up in drug rehab. As far as I could tell, Barry was about the cleanest kid on campus. He was into his music, worked hard in his classes, still hugged his mother good-bye every day when she dropped him at the front steps. She always watched until he got to the door. Sometimes, he’d turn and wave as he entered.

  Not a kid likely to be involved with drugs.

  “Yeah, some.” Craning to see the screen through his glasses, he started typing again, the words flying into the blank space with amazing speed.

  “Did you know he was using?” I pretended to be busy dropping forms into folders.

  Stopping to read what he’d written, he drummed his fingers nervously on the keyboard. “Not at first. Then he started hanging around with—” The sentence stopped abruptly, then finished with, “… some other kids. I knew what the deal was. I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t want to listen. We’d been friends for a long time. We went to the same school out in Prairie Village and applied for Harrington together, and all that. Then after we’d been here awhile, last year he started hanging out with some high school kids and stuff, and we just weren’t friends anymore. I wrote about that in the article—how it feels to be on the other side when someone is doing the crash and burn, and there’s no way you can stop it. It’s like part of you is addicted, but you don’t have any control over it, you know? It stinks.”

  A sick feeling rippled through me. I wondered if that was how my parents and Bethany felt when they learned about my eating disorder—as if I’d chosen it over them. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s OK,” Barry answered, but it wasn’t him I was talking to.

  Leaning on the file cabinet, I combed a hand into my hair, holding it away from my face. “Barry, what do you know about the taco stands down on Division Street?”

  He studied me with the keen eye of a junior ace reporter. “Nothing, Ms. C, why?”

  “Barry,” I admonished. He may have been a good reporter, but he was a poor liar. “The way you threw the taco bag away this morning in the hall—I had the impression you knew something else might be in it.”

  Fidgeting nervously, he leaned closer to the screen. Suddenly, he needed to concentrate very hard, too hard to be talking to me. “I don’t know anything about it,” he rushed, checking his watch. “I better finish this. I gotta go back to history class before the period’s over.”

  “All right.” I let my disappointment show in the words. I wanted him to know I expected more from him.

  “It’s not a place you want to go, OK?” He fluttered a meaningful glance my way, then quickly went back to typing, suddenly in a rush to finish up and be out of my office.

  Chapter 12

  By the time Barry completed the press release and left, it was already one o’clock, and my desk remained crowded with more attendance sheets, substitute teacher requests, and a packet of sample testing materials from the textbook rep who’d come by earlier. The modern dance instructor, Mrs. Newberg, showed up at my door with a seventh-grade girl who was having an emotional collapse because she hadn’t made soloist for the upcoming Spring Fling performances.

  “Ashlee doesn’t really want to talk about it,” Mrs. Newberg explained, depositing the girl in my doorway. “She just needs somewhere quiet to sit until she can get her emotions together.” Grimacing apologetically, she mouthed, Sorry, then turned around and hurried back to her class.

  “Come on in and have a seat, Ashlee,” I said, handing her a Kleenex as she slumped into one of my chairs. “Do you need anything?”

  Ashlee shook her head, curling her legs into the chair and burying her head between her arms.

  “Sure you don’t want to talk about how you feel?”

  Another head shake.

  “OK. That’s fine. Let me know if I can do anything. We don’t have to talk.”

  Drawing in a long, shuddering breath, she reached blindly for another Kleenex, and I held out the box so she could grab one. “Oh, God,” she wailed, her voice coming from somewhere behind a wall of thick blond curls. “My mom’s going to kill me. She’s got a whole section booked for all her friends, and I don’t have a solo. She’s chairman of the Spring Fling committee. My grandparents are supposed to fly in, and I don’t have a solo. Oh, God …”

  For a girl who didn’t want to talk, Ashlee ended up having a lot to say about Harrington, Spring Fling, family expectations, performance pressure from her mother, the Spring Fling guest director, the teachers at Harrington and their inability to spot real talent like hers.

  We talked until after two o’clock. Ashlee finally wandered off to her next class, feeling slightly better after having vented her complaints. Watching her disappear down the hall, I saw my seventh-grade self, stressed out over things that seemed all-important at the time but wouldn’t make a bit of difference in six months. I hoped in the long run Ashlee would handle the demands of Harrington better than I did.

  The bell rang, testifying to the fact that, on top of everything else, she was about to rack up a tardy. Poor kid. I should have sent an admit slip so the teacher would excuse her.

  Shaking my head, I turned back to my desk, still piled with things that needed to be done. No choice but to dig in, try to bring some order to the chaos, and hope there were no more Spring Fling audition meltdowns this afternoon. I wouldn’t be zipping out of here at four thirty today, that was for sure. I couldn’t help wondering if Mrs. Kazinski had been given so many tasks that were outside the normal scope of counseling, or if Stafford was just taking advantage of me because I was new and the school secretary was perpetually overwhelmed. Each day, it felt more like I was trying to bail out a sinking ship with a shot glass.

  By the time I’d finished everything and scoured the phone list for substitute teachers, it was nearly five thirty, and the school was empty, except for the janitorial staff. Dad had called twice to check on me and warn that I’d be fighting the worst of the rush-hour traffic on the way home, and I shouldn’t stay in t
he neighborhood after dark. He insisted I remain on the phone until I was safely in my car, even though I’d assured him that one of the maintenance men was in the parking lot, picking up trash.

  The maintenance man waved to me and said, “¿Hla, cómo estás?” as I opened my trunk and set a box of grant-writing materials inside.

  “¿Muy bien, y tú?” I replied, and he laughed at my Spanish.

  Dad was finally satisfied that I wasn’t alone, and said good-bye.

  The scent of flowers swirled around me as I climbed into my car. The roses, forgotten on the passenger seat in my rush that morning, still looked amazingly fresh. They also reminded me that it was probably too late to go by the cleaner’s and pick up the estimate for Bett’s dress. Their sign said they closed at five thirty. A trip down the street confirmed it. The door was locked, the parking lot silent. Nearby, the taco stands were doing a brisk business, the curbside crowded with cars.

  Across the street from the cleaner’s, two men in a black lowrider pickup watched me as I peered through the burglar bars into the dry cleaner’s lobby, just in case there was someone inside. I dreaded the idea of telling Mom I’d forgotten to pick up the restoration estimate, and that work on the dress hadn’t been started yet. It would only confirm the assertion that I couldn’t handle even the simplest task.

  The two men watched me as I stood at the door, alternately knocking and peering through the glass. Finally, their interest and the growing twilight became uncomfortable, and I got back in my car. Pausing with my hand on the keys, I briefly considered joining what was left of the Jumpkids session, but even as I thought about it, my cell phone rang and Mom was on the other end, talking about the pasta carbonara she’d cooked for supper. She wasn’t at all pleased that I was still downtown. By the time we hung up, we were almost in a snit again, and my nerves were on edge all the way home.

  When I arrived, Mom was pacing the kitchen, trying to keep food warm and swatting my poor, starving father out of the way as he tried to sneak bites. The table was decked out in more than it’s usual finery, three places set with the good china, silver, and wineglasses.