Willow

by Julia Hoban

  Unfortunately, the halls are only so long, and Willow only has so much stamina. She’s furious, furious when she reaches a dead end and she finds herself staring at a brick wall. If it weren’t such a cliché she’d start pounding the brick with her fists.

  If it weren’t such a cliché, and bruised hands weren’t so hard to hide.

  Instead she collapses against the wall, her lungs screaming, even if she herself is silent, and tries to focus on how badly her ribs hurt, on whether or not running that way opened up some of the cuts on her legs.

  She moves one sneakered foot gingerly up and down her calf, rubbing, feeling if there are any open sores.

  A hit! Willow looks down. A small bloodstain is creeping through the denim of her jeans. Not much, not something that anyone else would notice, but . . .

  There’s a hand on her shoulder. An inquiring voice. Willow looks up to see the face of her physics teacher, Mr. Moston.

  He looks alarmed.

  Willow doesn’t want to talk to him. She wants to focus on the way that the wound on her leg feels. She wants to make it feel even worse by worrying it with her shoe. But unfortunately she can’t. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows that if she doesn’t pull it together right now there’ll be repercussions: a conference with a guidance counselor, a lecture. Maybe her brother will be called in. Most probablyher brother will be called in. Just the thought of that is enough to shock her back into reality.

  “Willow? Are you all right?” His manner is sympathetic, gentle, solicitous. Is it sincere? She can’t tell anymore. There have been so many people over the past seven months asking her if she was all right in just that tone.

  Willow has come to hate that tone. “Are you all right?” He repeats the question, and Willow has to fight not to laugh at how absurd he sounds. Why is it that people only ask if somebody is all right when it’s obvious that they aren’t?

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he continues.

  Willow is worried that his next move will be to offer to take her to the infirmary, or maybe worse, to get in touch with David. She’d better start talking, and fast.

  “No. Thank you,” she says finally. “I’m okay, really. I’m fine now. I was just a little . . .” She trails off uncertainly, hoping that Moston will be so relieved that she’s actually responding that he won’t demand more convincing answers.

  “Do you want to come and help me set up in the physics lab?” Mr. Moston asks. He says this as if she were five years old and he was offering her an ice cream cone. It’s clear he means well, but this is beyond him. He’s young, probably younger than David. Willow’s heard that this is his first teaching job. She’s sure that he’s never dealt with a student in her condition before.

  Willow doesn’t care that he’s completely unable to offer anything in the way of real help, she’s just glad that he doesn’t really know what’s going on with her. He probably just thinks she’s fragile. Maybe he’s already gotten the heads-up about her in the teachers’ lounge: Give her time, don’t press her, she’ll need a little breathing room. . . .

  “Okay,” Willow manages to say after a few seconds. “I’ll help you set up.” After all, physics is the next class on her schedule, and there’s nothing else for her to do. There’s no place else for her to go.

  Willow straightens up. She can feel a thin line of blood trickling its way down her right leg and she concentrates on that as she follows him to the physics lab.

  Moston pushes the door open and Willow enters the musty room behind him. Class hasn’t started yet, but there’s already another girl puttering around in there.

  “Hey, Vicki, how’s the experiment going?” Moston asks.

  The girl looks up with a start. “Um, well, not perfect yet,” she stammers, clearly nervous, “but I think I can get it to work out this time.”

  “All right then.” Mr. Moston nods. “I’ll leave you to it in that case.” He riffles through the papers he’s carrying, a frown on his face. “Willow.” He looks up. “I thought I had last week’s corrected homeworks with me, but apparently I left them in my office. Do you want to come with me, or are you okay waiting here?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Willow assures him, but she’s embarrassed. He’s made her sound like some kind of special case, which she guesses she is, but he doesn’t have to advertise. She glances over at Vicki, but thankfully she’s too busy with her own stuff to be paying them much attention. She probably didn’t even hear.

  Willow dumps her bag on the table. Mr. Moston leaves, and she sits down on one of the stools with a sigh. Now she can get back to exploring the cut on her leg.

  She props her chin in her hands and watches idly as Vicki bustles around. It’s important to keep her face clear, not to give anything away with her expression. She has to look like there’s absolutely nothing going on underneath the table. She has to look like she’s not trying to open the cut further, she has to look like she’s not smearing the toe of her sneaker with blood.

  She feels like a woman playing footsie with her lover at a fancy dinner party.

  Her leg hurts. It’s extraordinary that a two-inch cut could be so painful. It’s easy to do, really, just open it up before it’s healed, take something blunt like the toe of a sneaker and try to enlarge the cut up to three or four inches . . .

  Now that she has her fix, now that the pain is flowing through her blood like a narcotic, Willow is free to think about other things. She tries to follow what Vicki is doing, but the experiment she’s working on seems totally unfamiliar. She wonders if she should recognize what’s going on. Maybe she’s behind in this class too.

  “What are you working on?” Willow asks. “That’s not supposed to be part of this week’s homework, is it?”

  “Oh, no.” Vicki scribbles something in her lab book without looking up. “I’m just doing this for extra credit. I . . . I barely passed last year, and I’ve really got to bring up my grades this semester.” She flushes a little as she says this. “Moston said that doing some independent experiments was the way to go.” Vicki snaps her notebook closed and narrowly misses knocking over some equipment.

  “What’s the experiment?” Willow asks. Her leg hurts enough that she can leave it alone now.

  “Oh, I’m trying to figure out this thing about acceleration under gravity. I mean, who cares? I just want to—Hi, Guy,” Vicki interrupts herself to say as the door swings open.

  Willow knows before she turns around that it has to be the same Guy that she met in the library. Of course there could be others. He’s not in her physics class, so there’s no reason why it has to be him, but she knows it is. So what? She has nothing to be ashamed of with him. She didn’t ask him about any kittens.

  “Hey, Vicki, Willow.” He smiles at them. “Is Moston around? I wanted to drop off this lab report.”

  “He should be back in a minute,” Vicki says. She attaches a weight to a length of metal tubing and sets it to swinging back and forth.

  Willow can’t help thinking that it’s no wonder Vicki has to do extra credit projects. The girl’s completely clueless—anyone can see that the way she’s set things up is extremely precarious. The little metal weight is swaying dangerously close to a group of glass beakers, some filled with fluid, clearly part of another experiment.

  She’s about to suggest that Vicki move the apparatus away from the glasses, when the weight smacks into one of them. Willow watches as several of them tumble to the floor with a loud crash, all shattering beyond repair. A nasty blue liquid starts to seep across the tiles.

  “Oh, Christ!” Vicki exclaims.

  “It’s not that bad,” Guy hastens to reassure her as he hurries over to inspect the damage.

  “Not that bad?!” Vicki looks at him in disbelief. “Are you crazy? It’s disastrous! I’m only doing this stupid experiment because I’m so far behind! The last thing I need is to wreck someone else’s! He’s going to kill me!”

  “We should probably clean it up before he gets bac
k,” Willow says as she joins them, hobbling slightly. “Here.” She grabs some sponges sitting near the sink and tosses one to Guy. “We need something to take care of the glass.” She gets down on her hands and knees and starts wiping up the blue fluid.

  “Oh, what’s the use?” Vicki wails. She’s practically wringing her hands.

  Willow is shocked to see that she’s on the verge of tears. Doesn’t this girl know that a couple of broken beakers and a failed physics experiment are nothing to cry over? Willow sits back on her heels, the sponge dangling uselessly from her hand, and stares at Vicki. Doesn’t this girl realize how lucky she is that the worst thing in her life is some broken glass?

  Tears, actual tears, start to form in Vicki’s eyes and roll down her cheeks.

  Over some broken glass?

  Willow is stunned. She can’t help it, maybe she should be more charitable, but she simply can’t bring herself to feel anything but contempt for someone so weak.

  “What’s going on?” Mr. Moston has come in. He stands behind Willow and looks at the mess on the floor.

  None of them say anything for a few minutes. Vicki has managed to avert her face so that Moston can’t see that she’s crying.

  Willow can see that Vicki is screwing up her courage to tell Mr. Moston what happened.

  “My fault. Totally.” Willow is surprised to hear her own voice.

  She tosses the sponge on the floor and stands up to face Mr. Moston.

  “I asked Vicki to show me the experiment,” Willow continues, deliberately avoiding looking at Guy and Vicki. “I was trying to adjust the weight, and while I was doing it, well”—Willow waves her hand toward the mess on the floor—“everything just kind of smashed. . . ”

  Willow isn’t quite sure why she came to Vicki’s aid. Maybe it’s because she knows that as the new girl she won’t get in trouble. Maybe it’s because she knows that Moston is already so worried about her that he wouldn’t dare give her a hard time. Or maybe it’s because if she’s honest with herself, she knows that she doesn’treally feel contempt for Vicki.

  She feels jealous.

  Because now that she thinks about it, reallythinks about it, is it so awful that the worst thing in Vicki’s world is some broken glass? Isn’t that actually just the way things should be?

  It wasn’t that long ago when some smashed beakers would have been the worst thing that could have happened to her . . .

  “All right.” Moston nods slowly. “Don’t bother cleaning this up, I don’t want you getting hurt by the glass. It looks like you already have a cut on your leg, Willow.”

  Willow is startled. She must have opened it up even further than she thought. She hopes that he isn’t going to suggest that she see the nurse. “Uh, it’s nothing, honest, I got that before—shaving,” she stammers, and immediately starts blushing.

  Shaving???

  “If you say so.” Moston looks dubious. “Still, I don’t want anyone else getting hurt. I’ll find a maintenance man to take care of this. Guy, can you come with me?” He takes the lab report from him. “I don’t want to keep you from your next class, but I need help carrying some equipment.”

  “No problem,” Guy answers Moston, but Willow can feel that his eyes are on her. “I have a free period anyway.”

  The two of them leave, and Vicki and Willow are alone again.

  “I can’t believe that you did that,” Vicki says. Her eyes light up with something like hero worship.

  Willow didn’t take the blame in order to win this girl’s admiration. But the expression on Vicki’s face, well, it’s hard not to feel at least a little bit good about that. . . . It’s been a long time since someone looked at her without pity.

  “Forget it.” Willow shrugs. “I knew that I wouldn’t get in trouble.” She smiles at Vicki as she walks back to her seat.

  “Oh, sure, I know,” Vicki says, following her. “I mean, forget the fact that you haven’t been screwing up in here like I have, Moston would never give you a hard time. He’s got to be feeling bad for you, I mean, you having no parents and all.”

  “Excuse me?” Willow is rifling through her bag for a Band-Aid since she doesn’t want anyone else to notice her leg, but she stops and turns back to face Vicki.

  “Well, I mean you’re an orphan, aren’t you? Your parents just died like last year or something? Right? You can probably play on that until you graduate.”

  Willow feels like she’s been slapped. Vicki’s casually delivered sentence crushes the little good feeling that was starting to bloom. She’s as disenfranchised from this girl as she was from the other ones.

  But she shouldn’t be angry, not really. Vicki isn’t speaking maliciously. She’s simply too insensitive to know any better, as clumsy with words as she is with equipment.

  Mr. Moston and Guy come back carrying a load of equipment. A group of students enter with them. It’s time for class to start.

  Willow watches Guy as he helps Moston set up. She thinks about the way he reacted to what she’d told him.

  He’d turned pale. He didn’t come out with some platitudes. He didn’t say anything callous. There was nothing to say and he had the sense to know it.

  Willow is so grateful as she remembers this that she almost wants to go up and thank him, to follow him as he leaves the classroom, and tell him how much his consideration meant to her.

  For a moment their eyes meet. Willow can feel herself blushing again, but she’s not sure why. He can’t possibly know what she’s thinking, and anyway the moment’s passed. She has no intention of thanking him, or even talking to him. She’s learned her lesson. It’s probably best to not talk to anyoneat this point.

  She can’t talk to people anymore, and clearly, they have just as hard a time talking to her.

  If she does speak to Guy again, maybe he won’t be so nice. Maybe he’ll have heard things about her that will make him change his mind, or maybe that’s just the way he felt like acting on that particular day.

  Whatever. She’ll never know. Still, as she watches him leave, she can’t help feeling a small pang. She thinks that he must be the only person she’s met in the past seven months who didn’t say something stupid or insensitive about the fact that her parents are dead.

  And the only one she talked about Tristes Tropiqueswith too.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Couldn’t she talk just a little more quietly?Willow thinks as she rolls over onto her stomach and buries her head deeper in her book. She’s still struggling with the Bulfinch; at least she has a couple of weeks before the paper is due. Ordinarily more than enough time, but things are far from ordinary these days, and the other girl’s chattering is hardly making her job any easier.

  “He saidhe’d call. . . .”

  Willow tries to tune her out, but it’s a losing battle. She’d cut out of school early and come up to the campus hoping to get some work done, but instead of concentrating on the Bulfinch,she keeps being distracted by everything that’s going on around her. She’d had to move twice already to avoid being hit by a Frisbee, and then finally, just when she’d gotten herself settled, this girl had plopped down right next to her and started talking, very loudly,on her cell phone.

  “It’s been two days already! But you know what? He had this really big test to study for, you knowhow stressful that is. I bet that’s why . . .”

  Willow closes the book with a sigh. It’s futile to even try to read. At least eavesdropping promises to be entertaining.

  All of a sudden Willow is overcome by a wave of loneliness. She wishes that she could to talk to Markie, that she was capableof talking to Markie. Rewind seven months and it could have been the two of them gossiping this way. They wouldn’t have sounded any different really. After examining the phone call problem from every possible angle, they’d move on to skin care, and then . . .

  “You should see how fried my hair is getting . . .”

  Oh, okay, split ends, not skin care, close enough. Willow smiles a little. Maybe she can sti
ll follow these things after all. Maybe every time she opens her mouth it doesn’t have to be an unmitigated disaster.

  “I tried doing my own highlights and it was a complete catastrophe.”

  Catastrophe?Willow sits up and stares at the other girl in disbelief. That’s her idea of a catastrophe?

  She’d like to show her some pictures of the accident.

  Maybe she should have stayed at school, but really, was listening to this any worse than listening to Claudia and Laurie talk about SAT scores? At least up here no one expects her to join in; besides, she likes hanging out on the campus lawn. Back when her parents were alive she used to come into the city all the time and read on the grass while she waited for their classes to end. Then they’d pick up David and Cathy and go out to dinner.

  Willow shakes her head. Ridiculous that she thought it would be the same now. After all, nothing else is.

  She doesn’t want to hear any more. She doesn’t want to lie around on the lawn anymore. There’s only one thing she wants to do. Odd really, because until this moment she hadn’t even thought of doing any razor work.

  Willow isn’t stupid. She knows what’s going on. Listening to this type of conversation is like a window onto her past. The actual crash, the angle of her mother’s collarbone, the way her own hair was soaked in her father’s blood, those things are too difficult to process. But trivial things, they get her every time.

  She’d been foiled in her attempts at cutting the day before. Maybe she’ll have more luck today. The campus is big, much bigger than school, and if she can’t find a place on the grounds, there’s always the park. . . .

  But it’s still daylight. She doesn’t want to take the risk of someone seeing her in the park. Willow rummages through her bag in search of her library ID. Even though she hates going up to the stacks alone, they would be a good place, except it looks like she left her ID at home.

  Of course she has everything else that she needs. She’d never think of leaving home without her supplies. But she has to be careful, exercise a little discipline. Do it too often and things could get tricky. Each time she indulges, the chance of someone finding out, the chance of infection, even the possibility of her losing too much blood increases. She’s going to have to start rationing her sessions. Think about the razor the way other girls might think about ice cream.