“I don’t want to go to Kentucky or Toledo or some school nobody’s ever heard of,” I say. “I want to go to Vanderbilt.”
I sound like a spoiled toddler about to cry because she doesn’t want the small, plain-vanilla ice cream cone; she wants three scoops of rainbow sherbet in the chocolate-dipped waffle cone with the fudge sauce and sprinkles on top. And I must have waved my arms almost like a tantrum-throwing toddler, because suddenly coffee is sloshing from the cup I’d forgotten I was still holding for Ms. Stela.
She takes the coffee cup from me and puts it on one of the few uncluttered spaces on her desk, right at the edge.
“I’m not saying give up your dreams,” she says, and her voice is as cautious as someone trying to reason with a small, irrational child. “I’m not saying, don’t even try. But you need to have a backup plan. Just in case. The rules have changed recently so more people can get financial aid, but if you really don’t think you can, you’ll need to apply widely to lots of colleges and—oh!”
She jumps as if she’s just thought of something amazing. But at the same time she jolts her knee against the desk, which sends her coffee cup tumbling off the edge. The cup hits the floor and the lid bursts off, sending liquid gushing across the carpet. I grab Kleenexes from a box on her desk and dive down to try to soak it up. Ms. Stela scrambles after me.
“This is why the custodians hate me,” she says.
I realize there are already several rings of coffee stains on the off-white carpet.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think it’s kind of an improvement on the original design.”
Ms. Stela laughs and says, “Remind me to give you the comedy-writing scholarship application come January.”
She stands up and walks to a filing cabinet.
“This is what I just remembered,” she says, pulling out the drawer. “This is what I know you’ll want to see . . . now, where is it?”
She’s rifling through folders. She sounds so excited, I stand up and walk over close enough to see the labels on some of the folders: “The Scott Prescott Memorial Scholarship,” “The Amanda DeVries Memorial Swim Scholarship,” “The Ronald Higgins Memorial Technology Scholarship . . .”
“Are all scholarships named for dead people?” I ask.
“On the local level, yeah, most of them are,” Ms. Stela says. “It’s a way for parents who lose children to make sure that their kid’s memory lives on and that something positive comes out of what might otherwise seem like a senseless death.”
She sounds so clinical that I’m surprised when she sniffs and swipes a hand at her eyes.
“Sorry,” she says. “One of my best friends was killed in a car crash my junior year. Her parents set up a scholarship fund, and we had all sorts of fundraisers for it . . . and then I ended up getting one of those scholarships. Still not the same as having my friend around, you know?”
“That’s too bad,” I say. But Ms. Stela has already moved on. She’s at the back of the drawer now, pulling out a folder labeled “Whitney Court Scholarship.” It figures she wouldn’t have the files in alphabetical order. And that she’d leave out a vital word like “Memorial.”
“Okay, this is what I was looking for,” Ms. Stela says, opening the folder and holding it out for me to see. “This is a fairly new scholarship, and its deadlines are earlier than the other local ones. I have it marked on my Google calendar to send out this information to all the seniors next week, but that’s so close, I’ll give this to you now and bump it up for everyone else, too.”
I bend down and read the first lines of the paper on the top of the folder:
Whitney Court spent her entire childhood in Deskins and graduated from Deskins High School fourteen years ago. . . .
“This is last year’s handout,” Ms. Stela says, reaching around me with a pen to cross out the “fourteen” and make it “fifteen.” “I’ll have to update it before I hand it out to all the seniors. Let’s see, are there any other changes?”
She reads over my shoulder as I go on:
Whitney was very involved in DHS activities and thoroughly enjoyed her time here. It would not be an exaggeration to say that she loved each and every one of her classmates, and they loved her. In her honor, her family has begun awarding a scholarship each year to one graduating DHS senior. Scholarship amounts vary but can be for up to a full-ride scholarship at a private university, renewable for up to four years . . .
I have to back up, make myself reread the magical words a second time.
“Full ride?” I say. My voice squeaks with amazement. “This is for a full ride?”
“It’s up to a full ride,” Ms. Stela corrects.
I barely notice.
“So, if I get this, it could pay for everything at Vanderbilt, or some other school like that . . . any school, really.” I laugh, almost giddy with the news.
“Well, maybe. If you get it, and if they give the full amount,” Ms. Stela reminds me. “But the deadlines are good for you too, since the application is due in mid-October and they announce the winner by the end of December. It’s totally weird but, hey, if someone wants to donate money to DHS students, they can set it up practically any way they want.”
“This is exactly what I need,” I say. “I’ll do anything to get this.”
I remember Stuart’s questions from yesterday: “What would you do, if you had to, to go to your dream college? What laws would you break? What moral dictates would you toss aside?” Then I push that out of my mind. Some scholarship administered through the school is not going to require breaking the law.
Ms. Stela shakes her head and rolls her eyes at the reverence in my voice. But she’s grinning, too.
“The requirements for this are unusual,” she says. “Not as strange as some of the scholarships you’ll find online, where kids can win money for playing marbles or making prom clothes out of duct tape or taking tests about fire sprinklers. But, still. Most scholarships require a personal essay—about volunteer work or your plans for the future or what DHS has meant to you . . . stuff like that. The Court scholarship requires an essay about some student who graduated in Whitney’s class.”
I do a double take.
“You mean, any student who graduated then?” I say. “I could just pick somebody at random? And then write about what they’ve done since high school?”
I’m just as glad not to have to write about myself. But this seems cruel, like Whitney’s parents are gluttons for punishment. The little summary of her life doesn’t say anything about her death, but she must have died late enough in senior year that she still got a diploma. Or maybe right after graduation. She couldn’t have lived long after that, if they’re still so fixated on her high school years. So why would her family want to hear again and again about all the glorious accomplishments her classmates went on to achieve without her?
“You can pick anyone from that class at random, yes,” Ms. Stela says. “But you don’t write about their lives since high school. You write about their high school years.”
This I understand. If I’d lost Daddy simply because he’d died, I’d probably want to dwell constantly on our happy memories. I would have welcomed people reminiscing with me. That’s pretty much what the Court family is doing, right?
“I get it,” I say. “This is great.”
I beam. Ms. Stela’s office is still coffee stained and cluttered. But it suddenly feels like a holy site for me. I feel as though a ray of sunlight has broken through three years’ worth of clouds around me. I feel as though there might as well be an angelic choir in the filing cabinet belting out the Hallelujah Chorus. I feel . . . hope.
“Becca?” Ms. Stela says, an edge of worry to her voice. “Remember, this isn’t guaranteed—”
“I know,” I say.
But I want so much to believe that it is.
Now—
finally, a happy now. Sort of
I sit through my morning classes in a daze. At lunchtime I don’t go to the cafeteria.
I go to the yearbook office. It’s too early in the year for anyone to be hard at work on it yet, so the office is deserted except for Mrs. Iverson, the advisor, straightening her desk after her last class.
“Can I look through some old yearbooks?” I ask. “I won’t take them out of the room.”
She glances up, jolted.
“Oh, is that starting already?” she asks. “For the Whitney Court Scholarship?”
I nod, and she sighs. She points toward a row of books lined up against the wall.
“Over in the corner. Her senior year is the purple one,” she tells me. “And if anyone else comes in, you have to share, all right? I am not spending my lunch period policing this.”
I guess my idea of looking through old yearbooks to find out about Whitney’s class isn’t as original as I thought. I guess seniors do it every year. But thanks to Ms. Stela, at least I have a head start. If I’m lucky, she’ll forget to give the information to the other seniors until the last minute, and I’ll have a huge advantage.
But would that be fair? I wonder. Or is that like Stuart-style cheating?
I push the questions aside. I’m just glad that, once Mrs. Iverson leaves for lunch, I have the room to myself.
I pull out the yearbooks from fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years ago and sit down with them at a long table. I’m actually a little surprised that there was a Deskins High School so long ago, since everything in Deskins seems new. But I open the book from Whitney’s senior year and find that I’m staring at a picture of a completely different building: a small, plain, brick structure. It’s labeled, “Deskins Junior-Senior High School, Grades 7–12.”
They had six grades in one building back then? I marvel. And it’s still such a small building—and such a small yearbook?
I feel a little like I’ve just discovered that Deskins, like me, has a secret history.
Then I turn the page and forget about Deskins. Now I’m staring at a picture of Whitney Court.
She’s a pretty blond girl in a DHS cheerleader’s uniform. The camera has caught her midjump, so the pleats of her white skirt are flared out; her ponytail bounces behind her. Her smile is a mile wide, and she’s clearly so full of joy and vigor and, well, life, that even though I don’t know the girl, tears actually spring to my eyes at the thought that, probably not too long after this picture was taken, she died.
Sitting at her feet in the picture is a cluster of younger girls, also in cheerleading uniforms. They’re maybe sixth or seventh graders. Some of them are sitting awkwardly, their clothes too baggy or too tight—you can see that they’re not quite comfortable in their own skins. But it’s clear from their upturned, reverent faces that they adore Whitney. They want to be exactly like her. She’s apparently just showed them how to do a handspring or a cartwheel or a cheer—or maybe just how to be happy.
I almost feel like whispering, “Oh, please. Show me too!”
And I know that this is Whitney because some long-ago yearbook writer evidently thought it was clever to label the picture, “Whitney Court, holding court.”
The yearbook must have been finished before she died, I think. Because otherwise there’d be some mention of her death here. This would be a tribute page.
I feel a pang, not just for poor, dead Whitney, but also for those worshipful girls at her feet. They’d be, what, nearly thirty now? Can they stand to look at this picture knowing Whitney died? Maybe it would be like me looking at pictures of my life before Daddy was arrested. I know Mom has old photo albums stashed at the back of our hall closet, but I haven’t looked at them once in the past three years. It would hurt too much.
Stop it, I tell myself. It’s not the same. You didn’t even know Whitney Court. She’s nothing to you but a chance for money.
It’s harsh, but I have to think that way to get myself to turn the page.
Whitney’s there too. In this picture, she’s wearing chemistry-lab goggles and making a comical face as a short, pudgy guy beside her prepares to combine two liquids in a beaker. He’s laughing, too, and holding his nose. Behind them four or five other kids are cowering, their hands over their ears, their mouths open as they scream or shriek or call out warnings. I can almost hear them crying, “It’s going to blow!” or “Duck!” or “Watch out!”
Evidently Whitney even had fun in chemistry class.
I keep going. Whitney is everywhere in this yearbook: in the musical, on the tennis team, on the science fair committee and the homecoming parade float committee and the teacher appreciation committee . . . She’s in a lot of the candid shots, too. Here she is hugging her fellow cheerleaders at their last football game together; here she is in a pile of kids crammed into a Volkswagen Beetle like so many circus clowns; here she is, her arm looped casually around the waist of one of the basketball players. She and that same basketball player, Corey Wisner, reappear together on the prom page wearing, respectively, a ball gown and a tux, and matching crowns: They’re prom king and queen.
I turn a couple more pages and there Whitney is again, wearing a white cap and gown, speaking at a podium: She’s one of the three valedictorians.
On top of everything else, she was smart? I think. A cheerleader, an athlete, prom queen, a girlfriend, and valedictorian, too?
Now I have to remind myself that Whitney died, that something tragic and awful and unbearable was waiting for her soon after the last page of this yearbook. Because otherwise I would be so jealous of Whitney Court.
She had everything, I think. She was so happy in high school.
I glance toward the newest yearbooks in the lineup against the wall. I’ve been at Deskins High School for the past three years, of course, but you could search the books from my freshman, sophomore, or junior years and not find a single shred of evidence that I ever stepped foot in the place. I’m not in any of the club pictures or the candids. I’m not in the cross-country team shot from freshman year. I’m not even in the class-by-class rows of pictures that should show every kid in every grade. Right before picture day my freshman year, Mom read a newspaper article that freaked her out, about how some yearbook company’s records were hacked, and the hackers got access to the names and personal information of every single kid pictured in more than eight hundred high school yearbooks.
“If even one TV station tracked you down through the yearbook . . . ,” Mom said.
She didn’t have to finish the sentence. She and I filled out all sorts of privacy paperwork with the school. Just as she’d made Dad’s name “not applicable,” on my school forms, she turned me invisible in the yearbook. The few times anybody noticed me missing—Jala did, looking at the freshman yearbook; Oscar did last year—I just shrugged and said, “I guess there was a mistake.”
But looking at what was essentially the Whitney Court memorial yearbook makes me regret all that. What if I actually do want some of my classmates to remember me?
Reality check here, I chide myself. There would not be fifty kazillion pictures of you like there are of Whitney. It’d be two or three fuzzy, forgettable shots, and that’s not worth getting upset about. Focus. Which of Whitney’s classmates are you going to write about? Who’s going to win your scholarship for you?
I know the answer instantly. Only one student who graduated from DHS fifteen years ago drew my eye again and again as I turned the pages of the yearbook. Only one student seems worth researching and studying and writing about.
My essay is going to be about Whitney herself.
• • •
When the bell rings for sixth period, I put the yearbooks away and stumble out into the hallway. My head is still full of the DHS of Whitney’s era—a place with cornfields behind the school building and a Future Farmers of America chapter and a quaint tradition where the entire senior class worked together to serve their parents breakfast on the last day of school. It looks like Deskins itself was just a small rural town then, not an extension of greater metropolitan Columbus, not the glitzy new suburb that looks like it sprang
out of the cornfields five minutes before Mom and I arrived. Deskins evidently used to be the kind of place where everybody knew everybody, where people minded one another’s business, for better or for worse. It was more like where Mom grew up.
Old Deskins wouldn’t have been a good place for Mom and me to hide.
I’m so intent thinking about all that, and Whitney’s life, and however it was that she died, that when I get to AP lit, it takes me a few seconds to realize that Rosa is giving me the sad-puppy-dog look.
“Chica,” she says mournfully as soon as I sit down. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Huh? Do what?” I ask.
“You know how I hate getting people to make up,” she says, drumming her fingers on her desk. She turns to face me. “You want to teach Stuart a lesson? Fine, teach him a lesson. But don’t take it out on the rest of us.”
“Teach Stuart a . . . ,” I repeat blankly before I realize what she’s talking about. “Oh, you think I skipped lunch because I’m still mad at Stuart? That’s not the reason. I just had something I had to do.”
“Don’t we all have things we have to do?” she asks, frowning. “We only get one senior year of high school. It’ll be over before we know it. Do you really want to spend the whole year just working and studying? Never having any fun with your friends?”
I blink. Has Rosa taken up mind reading? I could have shrugged off that argument without a second thought yesterday. But not today. Not after spending my entire lunch period looking at pictures of a girl whose life ended right after her senior year.
I put up my hands like I’m surrendering.
“Okay, okay, I promise. I’ll be at lunch tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll be fun. I’ll even sit beside Stuart, if that makes you happy. But I’m bringing duct tape, so I can cover his mouth if he starts getting annoying again.”
“Now, that would be fun,” she says, nodding approvingly. “Even Stuart might like it, since it would give him some ‘suffering’ to write about in his college essays. He’ll turn it into, ‘How I overcame having friends who tortured and abused me . . .’ ”