by Kari Maaren
“Got to pee,” said Mel, and ducked out of the room before either of the others could stop her. Freddy was left blinking up at Roland.
They had almost been fighting earlier. Then the accident had happened, and … she didn’t know. It was as if the time at the house on Grosvenor Street had propelled them into some sort of neutral zone. She wondered if maybe they could stay there for a bit, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She could feel the constant anger trying to creep back. But it had been better this afternoon. Tentatively, Freddy opened her mouth to speak.
“We’ll be playing in the living room,” said Roland, “whether you like it or not. Go read somewhere else.”
Or maybe she was right to feel the anger.
“Yes, your majesty.” Freddy bowed deeply. It was the closest she could get to screaming at him properly. She didn’t look into his face again; she knew what she would see there. Moving lightly, as he had never been able to do, she nipped out the door, leaving him standing alone.
3
By lunchtime the next day, Freddy was thinking longingly of noisy RPGs and exploding boxes of breakfast cereal. She should have remembered that nothing could be worse than school.
She always forgot. She never truly wanted to go back to school in September, but the summer tended to mute the horror. The first day of school even seemed kind of exciting, a change of pace from the parade of Mel’s and Roland’s larger-than-life friends and the anger that was forever making her want to lock herself in her room and pull the covers over her head. But school was … well, it was school. There were black holes that caused, on a daily basis, less terror. This was only the first day, and already, Freddy could tell she was going to be groping for her key so often this year that the metal was going to start wearing away.
It hadn’t been the useless welcome assembly, during which she had sat alone in the midst of a squirming, jostling mass of fourteen-year-olds who were all the best friends ever. It hadn’t been the equally useless second welcome assembly, during which the kids from the School for the Deaf had been herded into the gymnasium and had sat there looking awkward and vaguely offended with the whole world as the two principals had droned on about Feelings. It hadn’t been the short homeroom period, during which Mme. Gauthier had twittered at them and tried what was apparently her best to make the entire concept of homeroom seem anything other than pointless. Freddy had handled all that simply by turning off her brain. The real horror of school happened in the in-between bits, of which lunchtime was the worst.
She had managed to stay unobtrusive and harmless so far, but now she was sitting with Rochelle and Cathy, and danger was everywhere. She wasn’t sure why she was eating with them; she thought it was just out of habit. Freddy had known it the second she had spotted the two of them whispering together in the hall: they weren’t friends with her any more. She looked at them and saw two girls with perfect hair and skin, breasts threatening to escape the confines of their shirts, tight jeans hugging their hips. Rochelle had been wearing makeup for more than a year, but now Cathy was, too. Beside them, Freddy felt small and grubby. She had grown a bit last year, finally, but so had everyone else in her class. She was still the shortest kid in grade nine. More worryingly, despite the fact that she’d had her first period a couple of months before, she had hardly developed at all in what Mel called “girl ways.” She wore a bra more out of hope than need.
Rochelle was being very … nice. At least, she was smiling a lot, and she had loudly mentioned how pretty Freddy’s shirt was. Since Freddy was wearing an oversized green T-shirt with a breast pocket, she was suspecting sarcasm. Rochelle’s sarcasm wasn’t like Mel’s. It was less friendly, and it was harder to tell whether or not it was there.
Now Rochelle said, “Who’s your boyfriend?”
Freddy stared at her. She wanted not to be sitting at this table, and she had no idea why anyone would think she had a boyfriend. “What?”
Rochelle nodded at a point behind Freddy. “He keeps looking at you.”
“He’s not cute,” said Cathy with a harsh giggle that set Freddy’s teeth on edge.
For a moment, she considered not looking. Her lack of interest in boys sometimes worried her, but not all that often. Rochelle would punish her if she didn’t look. Freddy turned around.
It took a few seconds before she found the boy and a few seconds more before she recognised him. When she did, she thought several bad words in a row. She should have known Josiah would be coming to school here. She should have known this might be a problem. At the house on Grosvenor Street, Josiah had seemed … well, not normal, exactly, but … sort of in context. He had fit the situation. Here, it was obvious that he wasn’t anything like a single other kid in this building. She could see the others starting to realise. He was the only person at his table, though the cafeteria was crowded. She wondered how long it had taken him to drive everybody else away.
Josiah was glowering at her through his bangs, which fell into his eyes and hid the cut that had bled all over him the day before. When he saw her looking, he pointed at her dramatically, punched himself in the forehead a couple of times, swung his legs out from under the table, and slipped off behind three tall boys who were trying to out-obnoxious one another.
“Weird,” said Rochelle. Freddy cringed. Rochelle thought weird people attracted other weird people. She was probably only a few seconds away from calling Freddy weird, too.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Freddy. “He’s just my neighbour.”
“Well,” said Rochelle, “you’re not mature enough to have a boyfriend.” She gave a quick little smile that didn’t mean anything.
Freddy poked at her sandwich, but her throat was so tight that swallowing was going to be pretty well impossible. She had known for most of the summer that Rochelle and Cathy were ignoring her. They hadn’t told her why, but she thought she knew. They looked like teenagers. She looked like a kid.
She had known them both since kindergarten. They had spent hours playing together. She had thought they would be friends forever.
“You will be,” said Cathy, not as earnestly as she seemed to think. “You’re just a late bloomer.”
“Yeah,” said Freddy. The thought of “blooming” as these two had “bloomed” made her face feel hot. She looked at her watch, purely for something to do. There was far too much time left in the lunch period.
“A watch?” said Rochelle. “Are you seriously wearing a watch? Who does that any more? Where’s your phone?”
Rochelle knew Freddy didn’t have a phone. She asked her mother for one at regular intervals because the kids laughed at her for not having one, and her mother always said, “Of course, dear,” and forgot all about it. It was more or less the way her mother dealt with everything she asked for. She knew she could have brought it up yet again, but the truth was that she didn’t really want to carry a phone around all the time. It would have felt like always being, well, reachable. Besides, she liked her watch, which was waterproof and wound itself when she moved and told her the date as well as the time and had six distinct settings, not all of them entirely comprehensible to her.
Freddy shrugged, her eyes down. She knew how Rochelle would be looking at her right now.
“I’ve got social studies after lunch,” said Cathy. “Oh my God, it’s going to be so boring. Mr. James is cute, though.”
“No,” said Rochelle.
“That’s what I meant,” said Cathy.
They had stopped paying attention to her. She let the conversation wander on without her as it turned into Rochelle rating the cuteness of the male teachers and Cathy agreeing with everything she said. What’s wrong with me? This is the kind of stuff people talk about. I want to be normal. I want to fly under the radar … what’s “cute” mean, anyway? For years now, Freddy had survived school by walking what Mel called “the fine line between fame and notoriety.” She’d had to look up “notoriety,” but once she had, she’d admitted that Mel had got it right. She’d never
been popular, but she’d never been unpopular, either. She’d just sort of been there. She could fade into the background. Now the background itself was changing, and she could feel herself becoming more visible. A boy Freddy didn’t know walked past and leered at Rochelle, and Rochelle made such a meal of pretending he wasn’t there that it was obvious to everyone at the table that she wanted him to leer at her some more.
The problem was that school was really just a series of invisible lines. When you stayed on your own side, no one knew the lines existed. When you crossed one, everybody noticed. Freddy had once been good at telling where the lines were.
She escaped as soon as she could. She knew, realistically, that nothing had really happened over lunch, but she still felt the conversation with Rochelle and Cathy had more or less summed up why school was worse than anything anywhere.
This semester, she was in English, science, math, PE, band, and drama. English and PE were on alternate days, as were band and drama; those classes would run all year. Science and math were daily and would be replaced by social studies and French in the second semester. Ordinarily, she would have had four classes a day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Today, thanks to the morning assembly, all four classes had been crammed into the afternoon, with each only forty minutes long. The first bell rang, and the lights flicked off and on again so the kids from the School for the Deaf would know the period was changing. There were five minutes until English. Freddy was actually glad she would get English first thing every other morning. It wasn’t her favourite class, but growing up with an English professor for a mother had forced her to read beyond her grade level in self-defence. She could enter the classroom and just stop paying attention. Of course, the fact that she had English first period every other day also meant that she had PE first period every other other day. She would try not to think about that now.
She knew neither Rochelle nor Cathy was in her class; both of them were in the afternoon English class with Ms. Chang. She shared only one class with each of them this semester. A week ago, she wouldn’t have thought that would be a relief. It turned out now that it was. There would be no whispering and giggling and pitying glances to distract her from the soothing boredom of the class. She took her seat and tried to disappear into it. Despite the shifting background, Freddy still considered that making people not notice her was one of her few really useful gifts.
Of course, it only worked if the weird new kid didn’t thump into the seat next to her and say loudly, “Fancy meeting you again. Why are you all scrunched up like that?”
Freddy’s stomach rolled over. Damn Josiah. It was the bits between classes that were supposed to be dangerous.
“You should scrunch up, too,” she whispered. “Stop drawing attention to yourself.”
“What? I’m not. How am I?” said Josiah in a clear, carrying voice.
“Be … quiet,” she said.
“Oh,” said Josiah, “you’re wanting me to conform. I’d rather not, but thanks all the same. Shall we have a bet on how long it takes me to get beat up for the first time?”
Heads were turning all over the classroom. Freddy suspected they would have done so even if Josiah had spoken softly and kept his head down. He was that sort of person. And she was talking to him. In public. Why was she?
And I was all worried about being in a class with Roland again, thought Freddy.
Mr. Dillon entered the room exactly as the second bell rang. He had been Freddy’s English teacher the year before as well, and she knew he always made a point of being precisely on time. As a teacher, he was just barely okay. He was likely in his mid-twenties, but he struck Freddy as wanting to be older. Mr. Dillon had a brown vest and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He had the students sit in strict rows, and unlike the other English teachers at the school, he taught grammar and logical argument. He spoke in a droning monotone that everybody knew he was putting on. They had all heard him talking normally to other teachers in the hallways.
She sank into her usual Dillon-enabled daydream before he was halfway through the attendance sheet. She already knew everything he taught them; Mum could be truly terrifying when someone misused an apostrophe in her presence. Freddy found that all she had to do to achieve a reasonable grade in Mr. Dillon’s class was show up and occasionally answer a question about Shakespeare. She half listened as Mr. Dillon told them they would be starting with poetry and eventually moving on to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and some novel involving a young boy dealing with the death of his dog. Most of the novels she’d been forced to read in school were along those lines. It seemed as if this year was going to be pretty much like last—
“Brilliant,” said Josiah.
Mr. Dillon paused in his droning monologue. Twenty-nine students swivelled their eyes towards Josiah. Freddy was pretty sure most of them had never before heard anyone outside a Harry Potter film say “Brilliant.”
“Mr.… Lachance?” said Mr. Dillon, the only teacher in the school who used surnames.
“I’ll kill her for registering me as Josiah Lachance.” Josiah sounded quite pleasant about it. “I said ‘Brilliant.’ I was approving of your curriculum.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Dillon, raising his eyebrows, “good.”
“It’s designed to teach us nothing of value,” said Josiah, ignoring the muttering and giggling that were beginning to fill out the space behind his words. “I’ve covered more interesting material while trapped in a cave for a year.”
Mr. Dillon was evidently startled enough that he forgot to drone. “Have you been trapped in a cave for a year?”
“Metaphorically speaking,” said Josiah. “Everything I say should be taken as metaphor ninety percent of the time. Have you thought of assigning a real novel? One with characters and a plot, not just profound messages about death?”
“Mr. Lachance,” said Mr. Dillon, “when we begin And the Dog in the Midnight Sun next semester, you’re free to express your opinion—”
“I’m expressing my opinion now,” explained Josiah. “I’ve read it. It’s earnest and uplifting, and it ends with a heart-wrenching scene designed to provoke tears in even the most jaded of readers. Are there any novels read in high school that aren’t written by people who have never learned the meaning of the word ‘subtle’?”
The background giggling was threatening to leach into the foreground. “Shutupshutupshutup,” Freddy hissed out of the corner of her mouth. She wouldn’t have bothered if she hadn’t been seen talking to him just before.
“Miss Duchamp,” said Mr. Dillon, “do you have something to say? Do you, too, have some objection to And the Dog in the Midnight Sun?”
Freddy opened her mouth to tell Mr. Dillon she had no objection to anything at all. “Are you going to ‘teach’ it by spending two weeks describing the plot?” she said.
The giggling stopped as if it had been switched off. Freddy put her head down on her desk. She had not said that. There was no possible way she had said that. Maybe Mel had been right about them being enchanted after all.
“Mr. Lachance and Miss Duchamp,” said Mr. Dillon after a lengthy pause, “a word outside.”
Freddy didn’t dare look at the other students as she shuffled out into the hallway. The giggling was starting again, though it may have counted as tittering now. It didn’t sound very friendly.
Mr. Dillon closed the door firmly on the sneering class and looked down his nose at Freddy and Josiah. “Miss Duchamp,” he said, “I’m surprised at you. You were a model student last year.”
Josiah gave a quiet but audible snort, drawing Mr. Dillon’s gaze. “Are you going to be a disruptive influence?”
“No,” said Josiah.
“Then your behaviour today won’t be repeated?” said Mr. Dillon.
“No,” said Josiah.
“I’m willing to put it down to start-of-semester high spirits,” Mr. Dillon told them with a condescending generosity that made Freddy cringe. “As long as it doesn’t happen again. And it won
’t, will it? Miss Duchamp?”
Freddy shook her head. She knew her face was burning. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the other two had felt the heat radiating from her.
“Mr. Lachance?” said Mr. Dillon.
“It won’t happen again,” said Josiah.
“Then let’s return to the class,” their teacher said. He opened the door.
As they moved back to their seats, Freddy sneaked a glance at Josiah. He was, to her dismay, making the same face Mel made when she had just told an outrageous lie and got away with it. He was going to keep on doing it. I’ll just keep my mouth shut, thought Freddy. This was an accident. Everybody knows I don’t say things like that. She covered her face with her hands and pretended not to notice that as Mr. Dillon continued his lecture, Josiah was sniggering at almost every sentence. There were twenty-five minutes left in the class. Freddy was reasonably certain they wouldn’t pass for years.
* * *
When the bell rang several agonising decades later, Freddy gathered up her books and rushed out of the room before most of the students had a chance to rise to their feet. Science was next. After English, she expected to find it soothing. She took a seat at the end of one of the lab benches and tried to look inconspicuous. No one sat next to her, not even Rochelle, who had managed to get a seat at a bench already occupied by three boys. That was fine with Freddy.
The teacher, Ms. Treadwell, was in the middle of handing out textbooks when the classroom door opened. “Sorry,” said Josiah. “Got turned around in the hallway.”
Knowing what was coming, Freddy slowly lifted her notebook until it hid her face. There were only five open seats in the classroom, and four were at a completely unoccupied bench front and centre.
“Is this teacher as hopeless as the last one?” asked Josiah as he slid onto the stool next to hers. “She looks as if she may be. It’s the general lack of chin.”
Heads were turning again. Freddy said as quietly as she could, “Don’t you ever whisper?”