***
I guess I never really expected my first day at Upton High School to be a particularly good day. Really, my new school was just another corner of an old map where a larger, more organized horde of dragons was waiting to meet me.
I was far more than nervous as I got out of bed the morning I started school. The first challenge of the day was to dress myself as well as I could in last year’s clothes. Fortunately, the days of growth spurts were long past for me. I chose a pair of comfortable jeans and long-sleeved, black t-shirt. I pulled the black fabric over my head even though I knew Mum would probably prefer me to wear something more upbeat, more vibrant, something that screamed, “Please love me!” But I felt most like myself dressed in black – especially on a morning like this one. And all I wanted that day was just to feel normal – to act like my true, best, self instead of some high-strung, desperate, pathetic version of me.
The most interesting part of my plain outfit hung from my neck in the form of an enormous silver locket. It was cast in the shape of an oval covered in intertwining ivy vines. The locket was a gift from the girl I still thought of as my best friend, even though I knew it might be years and years before either of us managed to cross the country for a visit. A little part of me I didn’t like very well quietly acknowledged the possibility that I might never see her again at all. She was another Heather, like me. We used to joke about how unfortunate we were to have parents with so little imagination when it came to naming their baby girls. I loved my fellow Heather. I missed her. And today, thousands of miles away, on the other side of the country, she would be starting a new year of school without me.
I stood in front of my mirror, holding her locket in the palm of my hand, and watched my reflection as I pressed the warm metal to my cheek. I would bring the locket into Upton High School with me that morning as if it was a protective talisman. But every good luck charm is really just a sham. I knew that. Maybe the Heather-locket would be more like a little, shiny piece of a suit of armour, protecting me from my own self-doubt. I hoped it would remind me that I was likeable – even loveable. And maybe it could serve as hard, real proof to everyone else at my new school that I hadn’t always been friendless.
The final thing to reckon with before school started was all my hair. I thought about curling up my bangs and shellacking them with hairspray to make myself look more like the other girls my age. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I took a moment to rehearse my smile in the mirror. Unfortunately, the best I could muster was the same kind of cracking plaster smile I wore to my TacoTown job interview. It would have to do for now.
Jeff and I didn’t really look at the other students in the foyer of our new high school as we walked past them on our way to the principal’s office. Like most kids, we had been taught not to openly gawk at strangers. My peripheral vision registered a vague sense of my new schoolmates’ spiral perms, dark blue eyeliner, NBA logos, and – were those cowboy boots? Seeing people dressed as cowboys on days other than Halloween was going to take some getting used to.
I gulped a breath into my lungs as the doors of the school office parted in front of us. When the principal stepped out to meet us, I let out my breath in a little. I recognized him from the group of men who’d come to help unload the few possessions we’d brought with us from our old lives. Apparently, our new principal also went to church with us. This was strange to me after a lifetime of being part of a tiny, close minority of Mormon people inside a big city. Suddenly, we were in a little town where people with the same religious beliefs as us actually outnumbered everyone else. All the way across the country, Dad kept promising us we’d love that about Upton. I hoped he was right. Maybe I could start appreciating it sooner if everyone here would stop talking about high school football as if it really mattered.
Upton High School itself was really just one long hallway with a gymnasium and a library stuck to one end of it. It was very different from the immense, labyrinthine, three-story campus of our old high school. There was no way to get lost here. I supposed that was both a good thing and a bad thing. At least it would be easy for me to find all my classes. My first one was French.
In our little red-neck school, there weren’t enough French students in my grade to fill an entire class so the room was a combination of both twelfth and eleventh grade kids. I sat down at the back of the room just as the teacher began to speak. It was like no French I’d ever heard spoken before in my life. My teacher spoke with hardly any attempt at a French accent at all – not a France accent, nor Quebecois, nor Acadian, nor even an obscure French-African one. Instead, he sounded like some kind of robotic computer simulation of a French speaker.
The sparkly-eyed girl in front of me turned around in her chair as I sat down. “Bonjour,” she sang.
At least someone in the room can speak French, I thought. “Salut,” I answered aloud. “Parle-t-il toujours comme un ordinateur?” I asked, wanting to know if the teacher always spoke like a computer.
“Whoa,” she said. “That was awesome.”
“Quoi?” I went on, blinking almost innocently. It seemed her French wasn’t really as fluent as her confident “bonjour” had promised.
The girl smiled and shook her long, brown hair – though her high, over-sprayed bangs barely wobbled as she moved. “You can totally speak French,” she said.
“Seulement un peu,” I answered. The meaning of the words themselves may have been modest but I was clearly showing off.
She perked up. “’Un’ means one,” she translated for herself.
“Unfortunately, this is not a language immersion class,” someone drawled from across the aisle, on the twelfth grade side of the classroom. He was a thin boy in glasses, slouching in his seat, and he had spoken to me as if the sparkly girl couldn’t understand English either. “None of them can actually speak French here. Not even by the time they get to the eleventh grade.”
“Mais vous, vous pouvez me comprendre,” I continued, talking to the boy now, trying to see if he really did understand everything I said.
The girl directed her talk to him too. “Ben, are you really getting all that?” she demanded.
“Bien sur,” he replied, generously using his intonation to show her he meant, “Of course, I understand her.”
By now, the teacher had stopped talking at the front of the room and all the eyes and ears of the small French class were turned to me and the boy called Ben Jones.
“Très bien,” the teacher congratulated me. “Class, this is Heather MacLean. She’s just moved here from Halifax.” In the teacher’s defense, there was something about his way of speaking English that also made me think of a computer simulation. He continued in French.
“Bienvenue, Heather. Tout le monde ensemble: Bienvenue.”
“Bienvenue.” The class muttered their welcome in something not very much like unison at his command. It was all far more embarrassing than it was welcoming.
“How long have you been studying French?” the teacher asked me, reverting back to English.
“Depuis grade trois,” I said, holding up three fingers so my classmates would be able to guess that I’d been learning French since the third grade.
I thought I might have seen the teacher grit his teeth as he nodded. “Très bien,” he said again.
“Pauvre monsieur,” the boy named Ben said, whispering across the aisle to me. “He learned enough French to get by while he was a missionary in France and now the school makes him teach it so they can say they offer the full high school curriculum.”
“So that weird accent of his is actually...”
“American,” he grinned into his textbook.
I snorted a laugh into the back of my hand.
The pretty girl in front of us looked uncomfortable and turned around to face the front of the room. “You guys are mean,” she said.
“Sorry,” the boy said to her. “You’re right,
Melanie. I’m sorry.”
“Pauvre monsieur,” I echoed.
Even though the first day of school started off with the smug security of French class, things degenerated quickly when I sat down to the review worksheet handed out by my new math teacher. I knew my old school division hadn’t been known for excellence in its math programs. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I found at Upton High School. Some of the math problems on the review worksheet were so alien to me they may as well have been written in Chinese characters.
At the end of class, I lingered behind the rest of the students and trod meekly up to the math teacher’s desk. He sat in front of a wall of large, wide windows, leaning back in his wheeled chair with his fingers laced behind his head. He looked content but I always wondered how high school math teachers managed to get up in the morning to the same old functions and theorems, year after year. I always figured they must have rich inner lives. Judging by the way this math teacher didn’t seem to see me until I was right at his desk, it’s probably true.
I laid my partially completed review sheet down in front of him. “I don’t think I belong in this class,” I began.
He sat up slowly from his rich inner life and pulled my worksheet toward himself.
“Hmm,” he said, brushing away the stray eraser bits that clung like little pink parasites to my paper. “It’s probably not as bad as you think. Most of the kids in here forget how to do these problems over the summer. It’s the same every year. And somehow we still end up with some of the highest math test scores in the region by the end of the semester, if I don’t say so myself.”
He scratched over my work with a red pen while I stood flinching and cringing beside his desk.
“Look at that,” he said, pushing the paper back at me. “You got a C minus.”
I shuddered. “I’ve never been anything but an honours student. I can’t start getting C minuses now.”
The teacher leaned back again, until the chair sounded a warning squeak beneath him. “Okay, now. Let’s keep our heads. It looks like we need to make a little adjustment. My daughter, Tawny, is in this class too. She can help you catch up. She’s looking for a volunteer tutoring position to put on her resume anyway. Stay behind class on Friday and I’ll get you started with her help. In the meantime, here’s last year’s textbook for you to read. And you may as well take some practice sheets too.”
I gathered up the pile of extra work and answered with a miserable nod. “Thanks. Sorry for all the trouble.”
At home, Jeff looked just as dejected as me. He’d played out almost exactly the same drama after his own math class. “The teacher lined me up with some guy named Ben Jones as a tutor,” he reported.
“Ben Jones,” I repeated, idly closing and unclosing my locket. “My tutor is named Tawny. Jeff, we’ve come to a place where the smart girls are named Tawny.”
Jeff snickered. “Jones says he already met you. You’re in his French class, or something.”
“Oh, you mean that guy,” I said. “Tall and skinny and smart? Yeah, he seems like he’s an okay guy – a little stodgy and formal maybe, but okay.”
Jeff hummed. “He’s actually kind of cool. But I get the impression he thinks he doesn’t really fit in here even though it’s the only place he’s ever been.”
“Wow,” I said. “You learned something that personal about this guy in one math study session?”
Jeff yawned. “Well, we’re in most of the same classes. You know, twelfth grade pre-university core subjects. So we basically spent the entire day together. I think I might have found my new best friend in the form of the town’s resident brainy dork.”
Jeff wasn’t quite being sincere but I sighed anyway. It was disappointing to hear I wasn’t going to get to stay his best friend for long. “Lucky Ben Jones,” I said.
Something was crashing down the stair well. It was our younger sister, Carrie, rushing down at us. “Dad got a job,” she announced.
Jeff and I both bolted to our feet and ran upstairs. Carrie tore on ahead of us as if we were chasing her.
“Dad,” I called. “What’s going on?”
Our dad was still standing beside the massive, green telephone bolted to the kitchen wall. He was failing to look as ecstatic as I thought he would upon getting his first job since our business failed. “Oh, it’s nothing much,” he said, scrubbing his face with his dry hands, “just a little job in a warehouse.”
“Cool,” I said, folding my arm around his. “Forklifts are awesome.”
“Maybe. But I’ll be too junior to be allowed anywhere near the forklift,” he explained. “I’m just there for the heavy lifting.”
“The job’s not ‘nothing,’” Mum said, coming to take Dad’s other arm. “It’s definitely something. When it comes to honourable work, something is always better than nothing.”
“Very true,” Dad agreed.
“Besides, it’s not a life sentence,” Jeff added. “Something better will come along.”
Dad patted my hand where it rested on his arm before he went back to peeling potatoes. I think he was glad to be able to stop talking about the warehouse and start asking Mum about her first day at her new job. Mum had the best luck of any of us in the employment market. When she was a teenager in the 1960s, her dad had given her the choice between careers in teaching, nursing, or the secretarial arts. She’d chosen to become a secretary. I used to think it was kind of sad that her options had been so limited. But now that Mum had already found herself a sweet job working in a clean, peaceful office building in the city, it looked like there might have been more than a shred of practical wisdom in my grandfather’s crusty approach to career counselling.
I would have liked to have stayed in the kitchen, listening to more of Mum’s report on her new job. But there wasn’t any time. Now that she was home for the evening, Jeff and I had just a few minutes to collect our aprons and uniforms before turning the car around and leaving for work of our own.