by Pintip Dunn
The seats on either side of me are empty, but five minutes before the bell, someone plops down next to me. The new guy.
My hands clench around the black-and-white composition notebook I’ve been carrying around all summer—the one that’s a prerequisite for our Intro to Psych class. Before I can pretend to be terribly busy with the course syllabus, he turns to me with an easy grin.
“Hi. We didn’t get the chance to be properly introduced before. I’m Sam Davidson.”
“Cecilia Brooks,” I mumble. “Everyone calls me CeCe.”
“I’m new here.” He shifts closer to me. As in, his chair moves an entire six inches in my direction. All of a sudden, I can see the freckles sprinkled across his nose, turned cinnamon by the morning rays of the sun. A thin scar snakes across his forehead, almost hidden by his hair, and his dark eyes puncture me through his glasses. I feel like I’m plunging down a roller coaster, weightless and free.
I look down, but his bare ankles mock me. Reminding me of my role in this morning’s debacle.
“I thought I was going crazy this morning,” he continues. “Everyone stood there and watched that poor girl being bullied like it was some You Tube video gone viral. But then you gave us a hand, and I realized I hadn’t entered some freaky fifth dimension after all. So thanks for that.”
I blink. It was a few papers. Less than nothing. And also more. Because it was a lapse in judgment. A failure to be unremarkable, before the school year even begins.
“I hear we have open lunch periods here,” he says, oblivious to my turmoil. “And I don’t know where to go. Maybe you could show me?”
Despite everything, my stomach flutters. Because the way he looks at me, it’s like a blank slate. He doesn’t see the girl everyone’s been gossiping about for the last six months. He doesn’t see my mother’s ghost lurking behind each of my features. He sees me.
I open my mouth to say “yes,” when I notice the people staring. Girls, primarily, and from the looks on their faces, it has nothing to do with Mackenzie—and everything to do with the new guy talking to Cecilia Brooks.
“I can’t,” I say.
He looks at me expectantly, as if waiting for the rest of the sentence. I can’t because I have a yearbook meeting. Or: I can’t because I have a boyfriend.
But I don’t want to lie. He’s been more genuine with me in five minutes than some of my classmates have been in their entire lives.
“I’m sorry.” I stare at my notebook, my lifeline this past summer. The thing that kept me from reliving, over and over, how my mother looked in her casket.
“Wow.” Sam’s voice, light and gracious, pulls me back to the present. Smoothing things over even as I’m shooting him down. “As far as pickup lines go, I thought that was pretty good.”
I can’t help but smile. “I’ve heard worse.” Much, much worse, on an almost daily basis, but he doesn’t have to know that.
The warning bell rings, and students begin drifting to their desks. The psych teacher strides into the room, wearing a blazer over his Captain America T-shirt. I face the front, ready to put the conversation behind me.
“Okay, class. Settle down.” Mr. Willoughby perches on the edge of his desk, next to a gilded picture frame. “That means you, Mr. Brinson. You and Mr. Taylor can discuss football plays after class. And no need to check your eye makeup, Miss Stevens. This is high school, not a fashion show.”
Raleigh blushes and twirls a lock of hair around her finger, looking up at him through her eyelashes.
My stomach rolls. Ew, ew, ew. Raleigh probably thinks she’s being cute. I’m sure she doesn’t see any harm in flirting with the psych teacher. I mean, he’s nice-enough looking, and he dresses youngish in comic book T-shirts.
But he’s not young. And it’s not cute. In fact, Mr. Willoughby is a widower, and we all know he’s never gotten over his wife’s death. She’s been buried over twenty years, and he still doesn’t date.
After the scandal with my mother, I don’t know why anyone—much less one of my old friends—would think it’s appropriate to trifle with a teacher. I guess that’s why Raleigh isn’t my friend anymore.
“I’m so pleased to welcome you to a year of examining the human psyche,” the teacher says. “Which means, first and foremost, we’ll be studying ourselves. To that end, please pass forward your summer assignments, the self-examination journals.”
I jerk. Wait—what? NO. No, no, no. This wasn’t part of the plan. We’re not supposed to turn in our journals.
All around me, students pull out their black-and-white notebooks. Unfazed. As if this were any other homework. Even Sam has one, so whenever he moved to town, it was recently enough to complete the assignment.
The girl in front of me holds out her hand for my notebook. I stare as if it’s a severed, floating appendage. Then, the hand drops and actually touches my speckled cover.
I snatch the journal off my desk. “Sorry! There’s been a misunderstanding.”
My misunderstanding, at least. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken the assignment to heart. I wouldn’t have bared my soul and drawn my mother in all the ways I remembered her. Heaped on the snow in a tangle of limbs the first—and only—time she went skiing. The sunset-red hair bouncing on her shoulders after her monthly visit to the salon. Rolling her eyes but not saying a word when Gram taught the six-year-old me how to play poker.
My classmate’s brows crease, and the journals pile up behind me.
“Is there a problem, girls?” Mr. Willoughby approaches us.
“You said no one would look at our journals,” I say, my voice low and raspy. I don’t talk in class, as a rule, and it’s like my voice is punishing me for speaking up so early in the year. “You said to fill the pages with whatever we wanted and not to worry because no one would ever see them.”
He frowns. “I’m not going to read the entries, Miss Brooks. But I do need to flip through the pages to make sure the work was done. Why else would I ask you to bring the notebooks to class?”
Why, indeed. The explanation I gave myself—that flashing the speckled covers would be sufficient to earn us credit—seems stupid now.
“I promise I did the work, Mr. Willoughby,” I say. “But I can’t let you flip through the pages.”
“Why not? Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not that. What I put in my journal—they’re not words.”
The room is silent for two heartbeats. And then the whispers begin. I can’t make out the words, but I can guess only too well what they’re saying.
“What’s in it, then? Photos from Tabitha’s private collection?”
“Maybe it’s drawings of her and her mom naked together!”
“Or a collage of all the guys they’ve slept with!”
Snickers fill the air. I fix my gaze on the Captain America shield on my teacher’s chest and pretend not to hear. Pretend not to care. Pretend I never had a mother.
“That’s enough, class,” Mr. Willoughby says sharply. “Turn your psych textbooks to chapter one.” He lowers his voice. “Miss Brooks, please stop by my office after school.”
I nod meekly. The whispers from my classmates circle around my head like a dog chasing its own tail, never tiring, never stopping.
It’s the first day of school. And already, I’m in trouble.
Chapter 3
Mackenzie’s waiting by my locker after school. She sticks out her designer-jeans-clad butt, taking up half the hallway, so that the foot traffic has to diverge around her.
As I approach, her eyes flicker over my gray hoodie and black canvas high-tops, clothes designed to make me disappear. I think about walking past her and out the double-glass doors, but I need to face her sometime. And if I look like the coward I really am? She’ll find some way to use it against me.
“Excuse me,” I say. “You’re in front of my locker.”
Her eyebrows raise. “Oh, is this yours? I didn’t realize.”
She shifts languorously to one si
de. “How was your first day, CeCe? Make lots of new friends?” Her voice arches like a worm on a hook, daring me to say the wrong thing.
“It was all right.” I spin the dial on the lock, but my fingers fumble and I flub the numbers. I try again. And then again.
Sweat pools at my neck, and the hair sticks to my forehead. This is ridiculous! I’ve got more important things to worry about—like my meeting with Mr. Willoughby. I can’t let a simple conversation bother me.
I try the combination one more time, but the FREAKING LOCK WILL NOT OPEN. It spins and spins, and clearly this isn’t the right set of numbers. Clearly, the right combination doesn’t exist anywhere, and they’ve given me the one faulty lock in the ENTIRE school . . .
The dial clicks. Mackenzie smirks.
“Nervous much? You wouldn’t have something to hide, would you?”
Um, yeah. The senior class has been buzzing about nothing else all day. But Mackenzie couldn’t care less about my self-examination journal. She’s got more pressing concerns: herself.
“I saw you getting cozy with the new boy this morning,” she says.
“No, I wasn’t. I hadn’t even met him yet.”
The “yet” slips out, and her eyes narrow. “Listen, CeCe, you and I, we’ve always been okay. I would hate to see some guy get in the way of our friendship, wouldn’t you?”
This is both truth and lie. Sure, we’ve never had a problem with each other, but a guy did come between us. Or more precisely, between her and my mother.
Tommy was Mackenzie’s boyfriend when the scandal broke, and the school princess has never forgiven me for being my mother’s daughter. I don’t blame her. I haven’t forgiven my mom, either.
“Watch yourself. You don’t want to get on my bad side.” Mackenzie looks pointedly at my locker number, as if committing it to memory, and then sashays down the corridor, her ass jabbing the air with every step.
I take a shaky breath. I’m okay. As far as harassment goes, that wasn’t bad. Just a warning. I can handle a warning. That’s nothing compared to a group of boys walking past me while I’m eating a banana, smirking to one another and whispering, “Suck it, baby.”
I open my locker door, and a folded piece of paper tumbles out.
Oh god. I was wrong. It’s not over yet.
With trembling fingers, I unfold the paper. It’s a flyer from the crisis hotline, pleading for volunteers to staff the phones. The same flyer the striped-tights girl was hanging up this morning.
Did Mackenzie stick this in my locker? Or is it from another bully, intent on reminding me my mother may be dead, but her memory is still very much alive?
The last time my locker was stuffed, a hundred copies of my mom’s faculty photo from the yearbook spilled out, scrawled with one epithet after another. Pedophile. Slut. Predator. The crumbled-up papers filled an entire trash can.
Maybe I should be thankful that this time, there’s only one.
I turn the paper over and see handwriting on the back.
Sorry if I made you uncomfortable this morning.—Sam.
I read the message again and then a second and third time. So, not harassment, after all. But what is it, then? A nice gesture?
I’m still staring at the paper a few minutes later when Alisara comes up.
“Are you thinking of volunteering at the hotline?” my old friend asks, her black hair pulled into a long ponytail, a volleyball at her hip.
“What? Oh god, no.” I shove the paper into my pocket, the warmth traveling up my face like mercury in an overheated thermometer. “I’d never do that.”
“Why not?”
“Alisara.” I break her name into four distinct syllables. “My mother died at the hotline. It’s where Tommy said they rendezvoused for sex.”
She passes the volleyball from one hand to the other. “It’s just a place. Besides, didn’t they move the call center, once the police blew the secret location?”
I turn to my locker and begin color-coding my folders, alphabetizing my textbooks. Anything to show Alisara how uninterested I am in this conversation.
“I mean, it’s not like the hotline itself is a bad thing,” she persists. I grab my pens and lay them, alternating ball point and clicker, in my plastic case. “No matter what your mom did, the hotline helps people. It always has.”
“Oh, please,” I scoff, glancing over my shoulder. “Does anyone even call?”
“I did. Last year, when my dad died and we almost moved back to Thailand. We didn’t, of course, but for a while, things were really tough for me and my mom.” A smile ghosts across her lips. “I used to call the hotline when I knew your mom was working. I had her for sophomore English, and she was one of my favorite teachers. Calling her was a way to continue our bond, even if she didn’t know it was me. Up until the day she died, she was so kind to me. I’ll never forget that.”
A twinge of guilt stabs my stomach. Alisara lost a parent, too, and I haven’t been there for her the way she has for me. I’m a terrible friend. An even worse person. But as always, my mom’s death pushes its way to the front, demanding precedence above everything else.
“You talked to my mom that last day?” I ask, hating myself. Hating the self-absorbed person I’ve become. The selfish girl my mother made me. “When?”
She fiddles with the volleyball. “A few hours before she, um . . . you know.”
My throat closes up. I can’t believe this. My mom worked the phone lines that day. Hours before she took her own life, she had enough left in her to counsel other people’s children.
But what about her own daughter? I got nothing. No note. No good-bye. No final wisdom about how to live my life. That’s what gets me the most about my mom’s suicide. She was leaving this world forever. And she didn’t even bother to write me a letter.
I throw the plastic case into my locker. It hits the wall with a metallic twang, and I slam the door closed.
“I’m sorry, CeCe, I shouldn’t have said anything—”
“It’s not your fault.” I look at her, this grown-up version of the girl who used to play at my house. We once baked a coffee cake in a mixing bowl and then wondered why the batter wouldn’t cook. If only that were our biggest problem now. “It’s not your fault my mother didn’t love me.”
I hurry away. That’s all I seem to do these days. Run.
At least this time, I have a destination. Mr. Willoughby’s office.
* * *
When I arrive, Mr. Willoughby’s stretched out on a worn beige sofa, reading a comic book and chuckling to himself.
I hover by the doorway. It’s weird seeing him like this. I know he’s supposed to be some kind of comic book fiend. Supposedly, he even wrote his college thesis on The Dark Knight. But still, he’s a teacher. He belongs in a classroom, pointing things out on the whiteboard. He shouldn’t be kicked back, reading a Spider-Man comic, for god’s sake.
“Cecilia, come in.” He sits up and waves at a folding chair next to the coffee table, which holds, predictably, yet another photograph of his late wife. There’s no desk in sight, and that adds to the weirdness. But it’s not like Mr. Willoughby is a traditional guidance counselor. Due to budget cuts, we had to let go of “nonessential” staff. If Mr. Willoughby hadn’t volunteered, the student body would be without any career advice whatsoever.
Not that I need much. At least, not anymore.
“We haven’t talked much since last spring,” he says as I perch on the chair. “How’s your portfolio going for your application to Parsons?”
I won’t meet his eyes. “I decided not to apply.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows leap up his forehead, even as his voice remains perfectly calm. Too calm. “When did this happen? It’s all you’ve talked about for the past three years.”
“That was . . . before.” Before my mom died. Before my dad stopped looking at me. Before he would forget to change his clothes unless I place a freshly laundered outfit on his dresser every morning.
Attending Parson
s School of Design was always my dream, and even back then, New York seemed like a whole other world. Now, it might as well be in a different galaxy.
“It’s across the country,” I mumble. “And I can’t leave my dad right now. He . . . he would completely fall apart if he had to fend for himself.”
“I see.” The lines around his eyes soften. “And have you discussed this with him?”
I give a short laugh. “My dad is a man of few words. The only thing we talk about is what I ate for dinner. If it doesn’t fall into one of the four food groups, then forget it.”
“May I suggest you submit an application, then? You can always turn them down. No harm done.”
I close my eyes. He’s wrong. Deciding not to apply severed the connective tissue around my heart. As it is, that organ’s holding on by a few strands. If I have to clutch an acceptance letter in my hand and then say “no”? I think my heart would float away altogether.
“I know you haven’t stopped drawing,” he says. “In fact, I’m guessing that’s why you won’t turn in your self-examination journal. Because it’s filled with your sketches?”
“Yeah,” I whisper.
“I understand, Cecilia. I really do. And I wish we could leave it like that. But if you slide by without consequences, then nobody would bother doing the assignment.” He places his hands on his knees. “So let me put it this way: If you don’t turn in your journal, I’ll have to give you a zero. Do you stand by your decision?”
This is bigger than you think, a little voice whispers. The decision you make now could impact your GPA—and, in turn, the rest of your life.
But I can’t give him my journal. Once upon a time, I displayed my artwork for everyone to see. The bigger the audience, the better, since that meant my drawings had a life outside the visions in my head. But ever since my mom died, it seems like they all want a piece of me. The reporters who camped out on my lawn. The boys who raked me over with their eyes. Even my girlfriends who pumped me for every bit of gossip. They gobbled me up and spit me back out, and I can’t give them any more of myself. I just can’t.