I’ve made a huge mistake. I need to turn this into a joke, make it seem like I planned it and I’m just setting up another punch line. But there’s not a single funny thought in my mind right now. Every cell in my body has switched over to “dead serious” mode.
The setting right before “And now we cry.”
I have to say something before that happens.
“I’m not going to let you ruin my senior year,” I fling at Stuart. Not bad, I congratulate myself. Except my voice sounds like somebody else’s, like it belongs to some robot I may or may not be able to control. And I’m still talking. “You want to know what happens to cheaters? Cheaters get caught. They go to prison. They lose in the end.”
I barely stop myself from saying, “Like that guy did. Like Daddy.”
Bring it back to Stuart, I tell myself frantically. Stop talking about Daddy.
“So . . . if you’re going to be a cheater . . .” My voice wobbles, but I have to go on. “Or if you’re just going to be all negative and nasty all the time . . . then . . . then . . . I’ll eat somewhere else.”
Okay, that was acceptable, I tell myself. Nothing that Oscar and Rosa and Clarice wouldn’t have wanted to say too.
I turn around and walk away, feeling oddly triumphant. I’ve abandoned my unopened lunch sack and I left my gov book behind, but someone else will get them for me. I just need to make it to the girls’ bathroom and calm down.
I’m halfway there when I hear Stuart calling after me.
“I’m only telling the truth, Becca,” he says. “You can’t run away from the truth.”
I just finished a summer reading list of the classics. I bet I’m the only person in AP lit who actually read the whole of Moby Dick, instead of just skimming the SparkNotes online. But even with all that supposedly great literature sloshing around in my brain, somehow the only words I can think of are from a children’s story:
Run, run, as fast as you can
You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.
The words in my head are in Daddy’s voice. The way he always told that story, nobody ever caught the Gingerbread Man. He didn’t fall for anyone’s tricks; the fox didn’t gobble him down. He never met his deserved end. He just kept running and running and running, the happiest Gingerbread Man around. He could run away from anything.
How am I supposed to handle any truth? My head was filled with lies from the very start.
Now
(Still not “then.” But maybe some “if . . . then . . .”)
I pretend I don’t hear Stuart. I keep walking. I shove my way into the girls’ bathroom, and it is blessedly empty. God still loves me, after all.
Debatable, I think.
I can’t bear to consider that issue right now. And I can’t count on the bathroom staying empty. I enter the stall at the far end and bolt the door, guaranteeing myself eight square feet of privacy. I lean against the concrete block wall, which is probably exactly like the concrete block walls imprisoning my father.
Vanderbilt, I think. Vanderbilt University.
If my father really had stolen all that money for me, it wouldn’t have been Harvard he’d try to buy or bribe my way into. It would have been Vanderbilt.
If.
He wasn’t actually stealing all that money for you, I tell myself.
But it’s too late. I’m plunged into some alternate-world fantasy based on another “if”: If Daddy hadn’t been caught . . .
If Daddy hadn’t been caught, I would still live in Georgia. He and Mom and I would have spent the summer visiting various college campuses, maybe with groups of my giggling friends, all of us imagining glorious futures for ourselves of frat parties and sorority formals and midnight pizza runs. . . .
We would have saved the trip to Vanderbilt for a special day. Maybe it would have been just the three of us; maybe I would have picked some truly beloved friend to marvel with me at Daddy’s tales of his days as a student at Vanderbilt.
“I lived in that dorm freshman year,” he’d say, pointing at Tolman Hall. “My roommate and I were always playing pranks on each other. . . . One time I answered the phone and he’d put shaving cream all over the earpiece.”
And:
“Those are the gates we all walked through, starting out as freshmen,” he’d narrate as we’d stroll around. We wouldn’t even need the official campus tour, because we’d have Daddy. “Founders Walk, it was called. And then my whole class marched through them again, all together, after graduation. . . .”
I know my father’s Vanderbilt stories by heart.
The thing is, after he was arrested, it came out that he’d never actually gone to Vanderbilt. Not as a student, anyway. He’d worked in the dining hall washing the real students’ dishes. He’d put in again and again for a job in the computer lab instead, but it had never come through.
People swore to this version of my father’s past in court. That Vanderbilt dish-washing job must have been the last one he’d gotten without a lie. After that, in job interviews, he’d talked about his Vanderbilt degree, his years of computer experience. He made it all up. And then he got big, important jobs; he got those years of experience; he started his own company.
All because of the Vanderbilt lie.
I know my daddy lied. I know he lied to me and Mom and pretty much everyone else he ever met—including all those people whose money he stole. I know the truth about my daddy.
But there’s still some dumb, hopeful voice whispering in the back of my mind, I want to go to Vanderbilt like my daddy. No—I want to go for real.
• • •
I don’t cry. I can do this sometimes: hold back the tears until it’s safe to let them out. I tell myself I’ll wait until tonight, after Mom’s left for work and I have the apartment to myself. But maybe I won’t cry even then. Maybe I’ll fill out college applications instead.
The sixth-period bell rings and I step out of the bathroom like I’m perfectly fine.
Rosa drops my lunch sack and my gov book on my desk when I get to AP lit.
“Aren’t you starving?” she asks. “I bet Ms. Darien would let you eat in here if you explain what happened.”
I frown and shake my head.
“I can wait until after school,” I tell her. “Besides, what’s there to explain?”
Rosa smirks at me.
“Stuart’s in Ms. Darien’s third-period class,” she says. “I bet if you said, ‘Stuart Collins was acting like a jerk and made me miss lunch,’ she would totally get it.”
I shrug to let Rosa know I don’t need to do that. And I don’t need to talk about this anymore. But Rosa continues leaning toward me.
“Just a warning,” she says, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “The trending topic in DHS gossip is that you and Stuart secretly dated over the summer, but your relationship couldn’t take the strain of being back at school. So that’s why you were screaming at each other at lunch.”
I must have a completely blank look on my face, because she adds, “People think you were breaking up.”
I jerk back, away from Rosa.
“Who would think that?” I ask. I make a face. “Me and Stuart? Why would anyone date him?”
I decide not to let Rosa answer that one. I have a tiny suspicion that, for all her complaints about Stuart, Rosa might actually have a crush on him herself.
“Besides,” I say, “nobody ever gossips about me. Who cares?”
I am a nonentity as far as the DHS gossip machine is concerned. I’ve worked very hard to try to stay that way.
“It’s a slow news day,” Rosa says. “And after three years of the Shannon Daily crowd holding center stage, that whole scene’s getting a little boring. You’re fresh meat.”
Lovely, I think.
I buy myself some time by pulling a blank sheet of paper out of my lit folder, carefully centering it on my desk, getting ready for Ms. Darien to start class. I look back at Rosa.
“You can fix this, can’t you?” I as
k. “Can’t you send out some texts, tell people nothing happened, it’s all a bunch of lies?”
Rosa looks around, so I do too. We’re surrounded. Someone is sitting in every seat nearby, and Josie Wu, Tamela Evans, and Dustin Dubowski are standing at the very edge of my desk. Rosa leans in so close she can whisper in my ear.
“Which is better?” she asks. “To let people believe the lies or have them know the truth?”
I freeze.
She knows she knows she knows she knows she . . .
I close my eyes. I clench my teeth.
“Please,” I whisper. “Please don’t. . . .”
But Rosa is still talking.
“Don’t you know I’m poor too?” she whispers. “Don’t you think I understand?”
Poor? I think.
I pull back from Rosa so I can stare her right in the face. Probably my eyes are burning with all those unshed tears from the bathroom, and my face is flushed with the shame of what I thought Rosa was going to reveal.
But her eyes are burning too.
She tugs on my arm, pulling me close again to whisper some more.
“People like Stuart don’t know what it’s like,” she says. “He complains all the time about not having enough money, but really . . . Remember how his family took that vacation to Aruba last spring break? Remember—”
“Rosa,” I say, twisting away, trying to break her grip on my arm. “I don’t care how much money Stuart Collins has.”
She doesn’t let go. She is unrelenting. She is acting like this is a problem that God himself has ordained that Rosa Alvarez must solve. Like it’s AP calc or something.
“For college, it doesn’t matter,” Rosa hisses into my ear. “My sister said, when it comes to financial aid, it’s actually better to be flat broke. They see you can’t pay a dime, they don’t expect you to. So don’t worry about it.”
Rosa thinks this is all about money. She thinks I’m ashamed. She thinks I would rather have people think I secretly dated Stuart Collins than know I can’t afford college.
She thinks that is all I have to be ashamed of.
I look her full in the face again.
“Rosa,” I say, “you’re a good friend.”
What else can I tell her?
Now
The school day ends, and I walk across the street to home. I am, as usual, the only person walking. Even the other kids who live in my apartment complex drive, or get friends with cars to drive them. Or, if they have neither cars nor car-owning friends, probably they are loitering at school so no one will see them leave.
I did that freshman year. I actually joined the cross-country team just so I didn’t have to walk past all the other kids roaring out of the school parking lot in their Mustangs or Jeeps or even the practical Civics and Corollas and hand-me-down minivans from their moms. No heavy-duty symbolism there: I ran away every day that fall. At the end of the season the coach, who still hadn’t learned my name, said, “Kid, you’ve got stamina. You and that Muslim girl—the two of you came in last or second to last every single race. But you’ve got staying power; I’ll give you that much.”
Jala ran with me. I would have quit without her. But it was always the two of us bringing up the rear of the pack; it felt like I owed it to her to keep showing up. It would have been too lonely for either of us to be the only one losing. And then it was natural, in November when the cross-country season ended, to follow her into math club and Spanish club and service club and other activities that, it turned out, I was actually good at.
It is mostly thanks to Jala that I have any extracurriculars to put on my college apps.
Does Jala think of me as poor, like Rosa does? Do Oscar and Clarice and Lakshmi and Stuart and . . .
I stop myself before I end up listing everybody in my class, every single person I’ve met in Deskins.
I know, because my sociology teacher made a big deal about it last year, that Deskins High School is very “economically diverse.” Some people (like Stuart Collins) live in mansions; some people (like me) live in the apartments. People in Deskins call our complex just “the apartments,” not “Whispering Pines Apartments” because, as it turns out, these are the only apartments in town. But, thanks to the bad economy, lots of people who live in actual houses are poor too. Mr. Stoddard, the sociology teacher, said the factor everyone looks at is how many kids get free or reduced lunches courtesy of the government. At DHS, it’s 20 percent of the student body.
I am not in that 20 percent, even though I am pretty sure that I qualify. This is one of Mom’s quirks, that every single year she refuses to fill out the paperwork. I think this is her way of doing penance: It’s like she thinks that if Daddy is eating free government food in prison, we don’t deserve to sign up for me to get free government food at school.
Not that she’s actually said that.
I am clinical and detached as I think about this all the way across the street. I make my strides long and carefree. I am just pondering government statistics and sociology class and paperwork—nothing that actually matters. Then I reach the front door of our apartment. Open it, shut it behind me, lean against it like I leaned against the concrete block wall in the bathroom during lunch. I drop my backpack and let myself remember the expression on Rosa’s face in lit class, the tone in her voice. I let myself identify the emotion behind that expression, that tone:
Pity.
No, no, I tell myself. You can’t call it pity when she says she’s poor too. That makes it empathy, compassion. She thinks she knows how you feel. She thinks you’re both alike.
She thinks.
It’s not the same. We’re not poor for the same reasons.
And if she did know the truth about me? Would the pity/empathy/compassion turn into disgust? Revulsion? Hatred?
It doesn’t matter, because Rosa is never going to know. No one is.
I kick my backpack to the side just because—well, it was on the floor. It was just asking to be kicked. My stomach growls, and I remember I never ate lunch. Sheepishly, I pull my backpack back to me and take out the lunch sack. It’s flattened, much less appealing for having been carried around for an entire day instead of just the first half. And for being kicked and rolling under my gov book.
I open the sack and find that my potato chips are crumbs, my carrot sticks are dried out and streaked with white splotches, my turkey sandwich is pancake thin and starting to reek. Four years ago I would have thought nothing of throwing away such an unappetizing meal. I might have even whined to Mom, “I’m starving! Can’t you take me to Panera or the Corner Bakery to get some real food?”
Now I just start eating.
Is this proof that I am poor? Or that, like Mom, I am still trying to do penance for Daddy’s sins?
I accidentally rip the lunch sack, and there’s a corresponding sound from the back of the apartment: a creak of mattress springs.
Oh, crap. I woke up Mom.
The groaning mattress springs turn into other sounds: the floor creaks, the toilet flushes, water flows in the bathroom sink. I walk down the hall and knock at the bathroom door.
“Go back to sleep,” I say. “You’re working tonight, right? I promise I’ll be quiet.”
The door opens anyway, and Mom blinks at me, her eyes adjusting to the light.
“That’s okay,” she says. “I’m not that tired. I want to hear about your day.”
This is awful and shallow and petty of me, but I don’t like looking at my mom anymore. I do better talking to her through doors. Every time I see Mom I think of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which we read sophomore year in honors English: It’s like Mom is the cursed picture. Daddy did the crimes, but Mom is the one who aged and sagged and developed gaunt hollows in her cheeks.
I try to tell myself she just looks different because once she stopped coloring her hair, it grew in gray. But that’s not all that changed.
Looking older isn’t the same as being cursed, I tell myself. And, anyhow, how do you know Dad
dy’s looks haven’t changed just as much? You haven’t seen him in three years. It’s not like he sends pictures with his letters.
I have this argument with myself practically every time I look my mother in the eye. It’s exhausting.
“How was school?” Mom asks.
“Oh, you know. School,” I say.
I am not going to tell her about Ms. Stela handing out the packet of papers with Daddy’s picture. I am not going to tell her about Stuart saying you have to cheat to come out on top. I am not going to tell her about Rosa accusing me of being poor.
Or about that moment when I thought Rosa knew everything about me.
“I remember senior year,” Mom says wistfully. “We had so much fun.”
Mom went to some dinky school in Middle-of-Nowhere, Kentucky. Everybody was poor there, but they didn’t know it. They just thought it was normal to make their own clothes, to cut the flowers for school dances out of their own gardens.
It is funny how Mom’s stories about her childhood have changed over the past three years. Before Daddy went to prison, they were all, “We had nothing! We were miserable!” Now it’s, “We had so much fun!”
I do not want to get her started on the thrill of hanging out on a Friday night at the town’s one and only root-beer stand.
“Yeah?” I say. “Now senior year is all about the stress of getting into college. And figuring out how to pay for it.”
It is not so funny that, even now, there is some little part of me that wants to punish Mom. (For what? Marrying Daddy? Not being able to stop him from becoming a criminal? Not being able to hide his crimes from the entire world? Not being able to give me all the luxuries on her legal salary that Daddy gave us with his illegal funds? Not completely giving up, which would have given me permission to completely give up too?) Mom flinches at the way I say, “And figuring out how to pay for it.”
That was exactly what I wanted.
Still, she pastes on a tired smile and pats my arm.
“You have excellent grades and test scores,” she says. “I’m so proud of you. I’m sure you’ll get in anywhere you want. And you’ll have dozens of scholarship offers.”