Chapter Four: Mia
She was fascinated by Kimmy Althouse in the way some people chase tornadoes. Mia was determined to find an answer as to why Kimmy held so much sway over so many people, especially given that most of those people didn’t even like the girl. She pledged neither fealty nor disdain for her. Kimmy was a field of study.
It was easy to assume that a large part of her subject’s appeal lay in the novelty of her body, which had developed earlier than the rest, and once the other girls’ figures caught up, there would be a shift in power. But there had to be more to it, Mia believed. The physical draw had such obvious limits, yet she seemed to have so little else to offer. Everything about her fell into blatant patterns. She wore the same high skirt no matter the weather, always showed up toward the end of morning announcements with a ten-inch tall travel mug she claimed was full of coffee, and forever posed for pictures by looking upwards at the camera with the same slight pout of artificial innocence. When she spoke, it was of conflict, constantly telling stories of spats with everyone from people at her old school to people who worked at Walmart. Every tale involved a moment in which she would bark “Fine!” at someone.
“So I just said ‘Fine!’ and walked away.”
“And then I go, ‘Fine, be a school secretary the rest of your life.’”
“I’m like, ‘Fine, work at Walmart till the day you die.’”
“So I’m all ‘Fine, Grandma! I’ll be in my room.’”
“Fine…!”
“….Fine!”
“Fine!”
Her words and actions were so repetitious, so embodied by the bottomless collection of selfies she took, that she reminded Mia of how a word starts to sound weird if you say it over and over, how it seems to lose its meaning.
So she couldn’t understand the strong emotions Kimmy inspired, particularly in those who clung to her. Perhaps they hated themselves for caring.
As appeared to be the case with the girl in front of Mia during morning announcements on around the twenty-fifth morning. They stood in their line of fellow sixth graders, minus Kimmy, who was due to sashay in around the middle of the Pledge of Allegiance. They listened to Mr. Copeland speak from above. It was Tuesday, which meant it was Great Trait Tuesday, and the Great Trait for that Tuesday was “Compassion.” He asked if anyone could define it. In the line next to them, a fifth grader who looked like a miniature middle-aged man formulated a close enough answer, stating it was “Like when you see a lost dog and you feel bad for it. Or a person.” Mr. Copeland called him up to give him a prize, a coupon for free tacos at Jack in the Box, and as a mixture of polite applause and embellished yelping echoed through the showroom and accompanied the modest boy’s journey up the stairs, the girl in front of Mia started to stare over her shoulder into the space behind them where Kimmy would fall in at any moment.
The girl’s name was Corinne, and her wide open features would have been very expressive had she anything to express. She looked back constantly, with no particular face, until Mia could tell Kimmy had entered. Corinne then scowled and turned around. She wore her hair a little shorter than Kimmy’s and her skirt a little longer, and as she faced forward, replaced her frequent glances backwards with frequent checks that her hair and skirt were in place.
Mr. Copeland finished his further explanation of compassion as Mia heard Kimmy slurp on her travel mug.
“What’s he talking about?” Kimmy asked Mia, barely bothering to keep her voice down.
“Great Trait Tuesday,” Mia turned her head just enough for Kimmy to hear her quiet reply.
“That’s a thing?”
“Every Tuesday.”
“Never heard of it,” she sipped.
“Why would you? You’re never here on time.”
Mr. Copeland asked the prize winner to lead the class in the Pledge of Allegiance. Kimmy snorted.
“I made it for the Pledge this time.”
Mia kept looking ahead and saw Corinne shoot a rueful glance backwards. Kimmy picked up on it.
“Keep your eyes on the flag, Corinne.”
“Fine!” Corinne scowled as they all turned to look out the showroom window at the flag flying from the top of the pole planted in front of the school.
Mia stifled a giggle throughout the Pledge of Allegiance. Disguising her laughter was easy while she could submerge it into the words and pass off her smile as love of country, but when the Pledge was over, and each grade waited their turn to walk in a line to their classroom, she was exposed.
“Something funny?” Kimmy asked with more insecurity than Mia was accustomed to hearing from her.
Mia leaned closer to Kimmy to keep Corinne from hearing her. “Corinne does a good imitation of you.”
“It takes more than a skirt and a hairstyle,” Kimmy scoffed.
Mia started to laugh again. She was about to explain what she meant, but their line was about to move, so she didn’t bother. Kimmy shrugged and invoked her second most commonly-used word: “Whatever.”
Which further goosed Mia’s giggling, but she was once again able to conceal it, this time thanks to the movement of the line. They walked single file, behind the fifth graders and in front of the seventh graders, out of the main building to the ‘upper cluster’, as they had taken to calling the ninety-degree angle of modular rooms. By the time her class climbed the ramp up to their door, Mia was sufficiently settled down.
So far the only thing that seemed to differentiate the charter from her old school was that Mr. Benton, their teacher, was awesome. The subjects were the same, and he didn’t seem to use any revolutionary methods, other than a sense of humor and energy. Mia had heard the other teachers and the parents call him by his first name, Isaiah, which struck her as fitting, as it sounded like the name of a wise person.
They were only on the cusp of their second month, and their room was already filled with original works of art and sample projects from the students. Not a single item hanging on the walls or from the ceiling was printed by a textbook company. The historical timeline spanning the great ancient civilizations was captioned and illustrated by the class, as was the checklist on when to use a period or a comma, the multiplication table, the periodic table, and quotes from Shakespeare. They had yet to fully study all of these subjects, but Mr. Benton organized the room décor project to establish what they would be covering during the first half of the year.
He was also very good when dealing with disruptive students: patient, but not with the contrived calm that Mia noticed in so many adults. He let them know they were being obnoxious by asking them sincere questions about what they were doing or talking about. Asking questions was the main way he communicated. Someone would ask what they were supposed to be doing on an assignment, and he would ask what they thought they were supposed to be doing, and let them know if they were on the right track.
“But I really have no idea,” said Artie when Mr. Benton employed this tactic as everyone was finalizing their proposals for their Major Projects, a long-term assignment that was supposed to take them at least a few months to work on.
“You have some idea, Arturo.”
“Artie.”
“Until you give it a shot, I’m calling you Arturo.”
The class laughed and Artie talked over them.
“I guess what I mean is I don’t know what to put for the part that says ‘date of completion’. Mine never ends.”
“Yeah,” cracked Josh, the closest thing the boys had to a male version of Kimmy, “because your parents never stop buying you Legos.”
“Oh, like you’re so poor,” Artie snapped back.
“All right,” Mr. Benton drifted into the middle of the room to obstruct their view of each other, “you’ve each taken a shot. Let’s move on. Artie, what’s another way of saying ‘never ending’?”
“Ongoing,” chimed in Delilah, whose disheveled appearance went well with her nebulous sense of boundaries.
“Artie…” Mr. Benton reminded her witho
ut looking her way.
“Ongoing,” repeated Artie, earning some giggles.
“Have you considered ‘ongoing’?” Mr. Benton played along and heightened the laughter, then told everyone to change the question to ‘date of presentation’ rather than ‘date of completion’, as it dawned on him that Artie’s may not be an isolated case, which turned out to be true upon polling the class.
Mr. Benton’s willingness to acknowledge his mistakes was another point in his favor. He actually seemed to enjoy being corrected by students. Mia suspected some of his errors were by design, to assess their awareness and reward them if they were indeed being attentive.
Artie’s project not only lacked a definitive end, but had started years before. He starred in his own web series, in which he would take a Lego set designed for a specific outcome, like a Star Wars Imperial Destroyer or a Hobbit dwelling, and demonstrate alternative creations with the defined parts. Each episode had hundreds of thousands of hits, and his channel had almost three thousand subscribers. Some thought it was unfair that he could use his online videos for his Major Project, that he should have to propose something new, but he claimed each episode was in fact new, and that he also planned on adding some special effects to liven up the parts where he was connecting the pieces. There was also the fact that his father built the school. That slant went unspoken, but it hovered over anything that involved Artie.
His mother had helped him start production on his videos when he was eight years old, and when Mia watched some episodes after hearing about them the first week of school, she was struck by how little difference there was between second grade Artie and the sixth grade version. His voice had hardly changed, he was only slightly bigger, and his spastic energy was exactly the same. He acted young for his age when he was eight, and the meter had not risen much from its arrested position since.
During recess, Artie acted as though he didn’t mind being the butt of jokes. He appreciated the attention, and played up whatever awkward mannerism he was being teased over. When Josh, or one of the boys who attached themselves to Josh like lampreys, would laugh at the way Artie was running, Artie would tuck his elbows into his sides and swing his forearms like a flailing Tyrannosaurus Rex while kicking his legs out behind him as though on a treadmill that was set way too fast for him. Artie was always the first one willing to subject himself to the riskiest ventures on the adventure playground. He would crawl into the center of a tractor tire or empty oil drum and let others roll it along until either he fell out, it fell over, or it ran into the scrub brush upon reaching the meadow. Some eight graders liked to put him in the shopping cart and push him over the dirt grades they had developed in the meadow, and the wooden jumps they had made in the garage. And when he seemed to be injured, all it took to cover up the incident was for a student to mock his grimacing and Artie would pretend to cry like a cartoon baby and throw a fit.
Initially there were plenty of kids ready to jump in and oblige Artie’s willingness to make fun of himself. But by the end of the first month, their interest paled. They seemed to conclude that if they couldn’t break him, then it wasn’t worth teasing him. He wasn’t the kind of victim that could sustain their practice.
So their spotlight searched for someone else, and Artie tried a broad variety of acts to convince them to train it back on him. He had to try to engage them rather than respond, since they no longer initiated. He came across like a desperate street performer at recess, turning the playground equipment into props for his slapstick routines, darting from one area to another in a frantic hunt for a sympathetic audience. His attempts started to work their way into the classroom and assemblies, which led to him spending more time in the office, and being put on work duty at recess and lunch.
He was supposed to pick up garbage and sweep, but there was little supervision to make sure he followed through. The dust bin became his shield, while the broom became his lance, or his guitar, or his horse, or a Godzilla-like phallus. The call for yard duties had gone mostly unanswered. The rare parents who did volunteer for yard duty hovered near their child and their child’s friends, and not simply because they were overprotective, from what Mia could tell. What really drove them to stalk their own was the number of problem children who wound up at the charter academy, for whom LOCA was their latest and possibly last landing spot, having bounced around the rest of the district creating piles of paperwork based on stories that grew more alarming with each whispered revision.
The yard duties were from the go-getter group, while most of the kids who disturbed the duties were products of those mysterious households from which family members would only surface when they had no choice, when their child was getting suspended or expelled. The volunteers seemed content to let all situations reach that extreme, to let everything become an administrative matter, so great was their discomfort at intervening on the ground level.
“Live Oak Reform School,” Mia’s Mom would mutter after helping out with recess. She was actually pretty good about not lingering near Mia or Zoey, and not being afraid to mix it up with the wild bunches. But she was a bit overzealous in pursuing them, at least when it came to the younger grades. Just like all the other volunteers, she was intimidated by the hard cases who were older, from about fifth grade upward.
“If they would just train us,” she would further mutter after lunch service as she checked in with Mia before going back to work. “Give us some direction, some tips on how to deal with these gypsies.”
There didn’t seem to be any average students at the charter. They were either children whose parents felt as though they weren’t being challenged at their previous school, or children who were a challenge. And unlike the parents, the children themselves mixed together pretty well.
The first friend Mia made, Beatrice, by her own admission should have flunked just about every previous grade due to all the time she missed, but was bright and funny enough to charm her way into passing as each year drew to a close.
Now that Beatrice was older, her Mom was able to hold a steady enough job to separate from the father, an itinerant worker who had dragged them all over the state. Beatrice’s Mom worked at the shipping warehouse for an online retailer which had opened four years earlier on some foreclosed farmland. It was a massive building that the company wanted people to call a “realization station”. Mia was always curious about it and was glad to finally meet someone who had seen the inside. Beatrice would ride her bike out to it after school and do her homework in the break room while waiting for her Mom’s shift to end, since they rented a room in a house occupied by a family who expected Beatrice to help babysit their children when she was around. She doused Mia’s vision of the “realization station” as being like a giant Toys R Us or Willy Wonka’s factory. Beatrice described it as the world’s largest messy closet, filled with stacks of hodgepodge, a fluorescent catacomb of whatever, being picked at by robotic arms and placed on conveyer belts that passed by the humans who were there to put it all in boxes.
“For now,” Beatrice joked. “I’m sure they’ll find a way to get rid of the rest of the people. I told Mom she should learn robot repair if she wants to keep working there.”
She and Mia often didn’t look at one another when they spoke at school. They would sit on the table of a picnic bench on the perimeter of the upper cluster and watch the play unfold in front of them while they conversed. Mia set her sights on Kimmy holding court with the hoi polloi. Beatrice apparently did, too.
“Speaking of robots,” she said. “How does Kimmy do it?”
“Speaking of random piles of stuff,” Mia said. “I’ll give her one thing: she doesn’t discriminate. If you adore her, you’re in.”
Beatrice exhaled a quick laugh.
“Sometimes I think my little sister Zoey might end up being like Kimmy,” Mia continued. “Hopefully a nicer one.”
“There’s no doubt she’ll be nicer,” Beatrice assured her. “How could anyone be less nice?”
“T
hat would be a good test,” Mia said, still looking over at Kimmy’s circle as she assumed Beatrice still was. “Like a personality test.”
“Yeah,” Beatrice agreed. “Like one of those signs at an amusement park that says you have to be this tall to ride. If you are less nice than Kimmy, you can’t be a member of society.”
“Please report to the nearest mental hospital.”
They laughed at their own material, loud enough for someone in Kimmy’s world to notice. It was Corinne, whose eyes flared.
“Uh oh,” Beatrice saw it too.
“Funny,” Mia said. “I though they didn’t like each other.”
“I’m not sure any of them really like each other.”
“True.”
Corinne directed Kimmy’s attention their way, but the great leader appeared unperturbed.
“I’ll bet I know what Kimmy said,” Beatrice narrated.
“Whatever,” Mia said.
“Fine!” Beatrice added.
They laughed again. This time Kimmy looked pissed at them.
Any trepidation on their part was interrupted by Artie banging together two metal garbage can lids like cymbals behind them.
“Dammit, Artie!” Beatrice glared back at him from around her slumped shoulders.
Even Mia felt like cursing at him, and she usually felt sorry for Artie.
“Shouldn’t you be picking up garbage instead of playing with the cans?” Mia said instead.
Artie shrugged. “Like anyone checks.”
“Maybe we’ll tell on you,” Beatrice said.
“Seriously?” he asked.
“Of course not,” she sighed. “They’re all inside the garage and I don’t feel like walking over there.”
“Poor women,” Mia said. “They’re scared to death of us. My Mom’s probably in there trying to rally them to come outside and do a sweep, like a yard duty SWAT team.”
Artie didn’t seem to hear them, which was surprising since he liked to be included in anything, even a conversation. He looked past them with more fear than neediness, and it was usually the other way around.
Mia and Beatrice turned to see Kimmy leading a leisurely charge toward their picnic table.
“Hey Artie,” she called out as she entered their space. “Is your dick as small as the rest of you?”
She came to a stop and her team reared up behind her, giggling like whinnying horses.
Mia had seen Artie gape at Kimmy in class, and was outraged that she should be so cruel to someone who appeared to truly like her.
“At least he does things,” Mia heard herself say before she could form the words the way she would have preferred. She tried again as everyone reprogrammed their expectations for the encounter.
“He has talent,” Mia annunciated. “What is it that you do, Kimmy?”
“Well I don’t act like a retard.”
“I’m not so sure,” Mia said. “I’ve read your posts that go along with your selfies.”
She got a laugh and was inspired to expand on her point: “I’m bored”, “I want frozen yogurt”, “I’m tired”, “I want Starbucks”.
The laughter bloomed larger. Kimmy stared at Mia, who was planning to grab one of Artie’s garbage can lids should Kimmy strike.
“Something’s gonna happen,” Kimmy finally said. “It’s just not gonna happen now.”
Mia found that comforting. She relaxed and almost smiled, but decided not to push her luck. Kimmy read Mia’s instincts. Rather than seethe even hotter, however, Kimmy studied Mia as though through a pair of binoculars. When one of the yard duties ventured from the garage and blew her whistle to signal it was time to line up, it actually rescued Kimmy more than Mia.
When Kimmy’s pawns went to line up in front of the classroom, she hung back a ways and lined up just ahead of Mia.
“I’ve got your back,” Beatrice murmured, who was indeed right behind Mia.
Kimmy, meanwhile, leaned against the wall and rolled her head in Mia’s direction.
“You really don’t give a shit, do you?” Kimmy asked.
Mia pretended to think about it for a moment before shaking her head.
Kimmy contemplated the situation while Mr. Benton opened the door and let them in.
As they walked up the ramp, Mia and Beatrice exchanged looks that were as marked by confusion as Kimmy’s had been.
Between looking away from Beatrice and entering the room, Mia noticed her Mom had been the one who blew the whistle. Mia nodded at her. Her Mom nodded back, but very absent-mindedly, apparently more interested in who surrounded her daughter in line.