Ms. Connors punches Coach in the arm. Coach punches Ms. Connors in the arm. They offer me a deal. If I volunteer to teach the Basketball Pole how to swish a foul shot, I will get an automatic A in gym. I shrug my shoulders and they grin. I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t say anything. I just won’t show up.
COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES
Our art room is blooming like a museum full of O’Keeffes, van Goghs, and that French guy who painted flowers with tiny dots. Mr. Freeman is the Vogue Teacher of the Moment. There are rumors that he’ll be the Teacher of the Year in the yearbook.
His room is Cool Central. He keeps the radio on. We are allowed to eat as long as we work. He bounced a couple of slackers who confused freedom with no rules, so the rest of us don’t make waves. It is too much fun to give up. The room is full of painters, sculptors, and sketchers during activity period, and some kids stay there until the late late buses are ready to roll.
Mr. Freeman’s painting is coming along great. Some newspaper guy heard about it and wrote an article. The article claimed Mr. Freeman is a gifted genius who has devoted his life to education. A color picture of the work-in-progress accompanied the article. Someone said a few school board members recognized themselves. I bet they sue him.
I wish Mr. Freeman would put a tree in his masterpiece. I can’t figure out how to make mine look real. I have already ruined six linoleum blocks. I can see it in my head: a strong old oak tree with a wide scarred trunk and thousands of leaves reaching to the sun. There’s a tree in front of my house just like it. I can feel the wind blow and hear the mockingbird whistling on the way back to her nest. But when I try to carve it, it looks like a dead tree, toothpicks, a child’s drawing. I can’t bring it to life. I’d love to give it up. Quit. But I can’t think of anything else to do, so I keep chipping away at it.
Principal Principal stormed in yesterday, smelling pleasure. His mustache moved up and down, a radar sweep for all things unruly. An unseen hand turned off the radio as he crossed the threshold, and bags of potato chips vanished, leaving the faint scent of salt to mix with vermilion oil paint and wet clay.
He scanned the room for merriment. Found only bowed heads, graceful pencils, dipping brushes. Mr. Freeman touched up the dark roots on the head of a lady school board member and asked if Principal Principal needed help. Principal Principal stalked out of the room in the direction of the Human Waste’s smoking haven.
Maybe I’ll be an artist if I grow up.
POSTER CHILD
Heather left a note in my locker, begging me to go to her house after school. She’s in trouble. She is not meeting Martha standards. She sobs out the story in her room. I listen and pick lint balls off my sweater.
The Marthas held a craft meeting to make Valentine’s pillows for little kids who are in the hospital. Meg ‘n’ Emily sewed three sides of the pillows, while the others stuffed, stitched, and glued on hearts and teddy bears. Heather was in charge of hearts. She was all flustered because a few Marthas didn’t like her outfit. They yelled at her for gluing hearts crooked. Then the top of her glue bottle came off and completely ruined a pillow.
At this point in the story, she throws a doll across her room. I move the nail polish out of her reach.
Meg demoted Heather to pillow stuffing. Once the pillow production line was again rolling smoothly, the meeting began. Topic: the Canned Food Drive. The Senior Marthas are in charge of delivering the food to the needy (with a newspaper photographer present) and meeting with the principal to coordinate whatever needs coordinating.
I zone out. She talks about who’s in charge of classroom captains and who’s in charge of publicity and I don’t know what all. I don’t come back to earth until Heather says, “I knew you wouldn’t mind, Mel.”
Me: “What?”
Heather: “I knew you wouldn’t mind helping. I think Emily did it on purpose. She doesn’t like me. I was going to ask you to help, then say I did it by myself, but that would have been lying, and besides they would have stuck me with all the poster work for the rest of the year. So I said I have a friend who is really artistic and community-oriented and could she help with the posters?”
Me: “Who?”
Heather: [laughing now, but I still hold on to the nail polish] “You, silly. You draw better than me and you have plenty of time. Please say you’ll do it! Maybe they’ll ask you to join too, once they see how talented you are! Please, please, whipped cream, chopped nuts and cherry on top please! If I screw this up, I know they’ll blacklist me and then I’ll never be part of any of the good groups.”
How could I say no?
DEAD FROGS
Our biology class has graduated from fruit to frogs. We were scheduled to do the frog unit in April, but the frog company delivered our victims on January 14. Pickled frogs have a way of disappearing from the storage closet, so today Ms. Keen armed us with knives and told us not to gag.
David Petrakis My Lab Partner is thrilled—anatomy at last. There are lists to memorize. The hopping bone’s connected to the jumping bone, the ribbet bone’s connected to the fly-catching bone. He seriously talks about wearing one of those doctor masks over his face while we “operate.” He thinks it would be good practice.
The room does not smell like apple. It smells like frog juice, a cross between a nursing home and potato salad. The Back Row pays attention. Cutting dead frogs is cool.
Our frog lies on her back. Waiting for a prince to come and princessify her with a smooch? I stand over her with my knife. Ms. Keen’s voice fades to a mosquito whine. My throat closes off. It is hard to breathe. I put out my hand to steady myself against the table. David pins her froggy hands to the dissection tray. He spreads her froggy legs and pins her froggy feet. I have to slice open her belly. She doesn’t say a word. She is already dead. A scream starts in my gut—I can feel the cut, smell the dirt, leaves in my hair.
I don’t remember passing out. David says I hit my head on the edge of the table on my way down. The nurse calls my mom because I need stitches. The doctor stares into the back of my eyes with a bright light. Can she read the thoughts hidden there? If she can, what will she do? Call the cops? Send me to the nuthouse? Do I want her to? I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won’t. I’ll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head. Maybe I should wait until David Petrakis is a doctor, let him do it.
MODEL CITIZEN
Heather has landed a modeling job at a department store in the mall. She says she was buying socks with her mother the week after her braces came off and some lady asked if she modeled. I suspect the fact that her dad works for the mall management company had something to do with it.
The modeling gig is paying off in major Martha points. They all want to be Heather’s New Best Friend. But she asks me to go with her for the bathing suit shoot. I think she’s afraid to screw up in front of them. Heather’s mother drives us. She asks if I want to be a model. Heather says I am too shy. I look at her mother’s eyes watching me in the rearview mirror and hide my mouth with my fingers. The scabs on my lips are especially gross in that little rectangle mirror.
Of course I want to be a model. I want to paint my eyelids gold. I saw that on a magazine cover and it looked amazing—turned the model into a sexy alien that everyone would look at but nobody dared touch.
I like cheeseburgers too much to be a model. Heather has stopped eating and complains about fluid retention. She should worry more about brain retention, the way she’s dieting away her gray matter. At last check, she was wearing a size one and a half, and she just has to get down to a size one.
The photo shoot is in a building cold enough to store ice. Heather looks like our Thanksgiving turkey wearing a blue bikini. Her goose bumps are bigger than her boobs. I’m shivering, and I’m wearing my ski jacket and a wool sweater. The photographer turns up the radio and starts bossing the girls around. Heather totally gets into it. She throws her head back, stares at the camera, fl
ashes her teeth. The photographer keeps saying, “Sexy, sexy, very cute. Look this way. Sexy, think beach, think boys.” It creeps me out. Heather sneezes in the middle of a group pose and her mother runs in with tissues. It must be catching. My throat is killing me. I want a nap.
I don’t buy the gold eyeshadow, but I do pick up a bottle of Black Death nail polish. It’s gloomy, with squiggly lines of red in it. My nails are bitten to the bleeding point, so it will look natural. I need to get a shirt that matches. Something in a tubercular gray.
DEATH BY ALGEBRA
Mr. Stetman won’t give up. He is determined to prove once and for all that algebra is something we will use the rest of our lives. If he succeeds, I think they should give him the Teacher of the Century Award and a two-week vacation in Hawaii, all expenses paid.
He comes to class each day with a new Real-Life Application. It is sweet that he cares enough about algebra and his students to want to bring them together. He’s like a grandfather who wants to fix up two young kids that he just knows would make a great couple. Only the kids have nothing in common and they hate each other.
Today’s Application has something to do with buying guppies at the pet store, and calculating how many guppies you could breed if you wanted to go into the guppie business. Once the guppies turn into x’s and y’s, my contacts fog. Class ends in a debate between the animal-rights activists, who say it is immoral to own fish, and the red-blooded capitalists, who know lots of better ways to make money than investing in fish that eat their young. I watch the snow falling outside.
WORD WORK
Hairwoman is torturing us with essays. Do English teachers spend their vacations dreaming up these things?
The first essay this semester was a dud: “Why America Is Great” in five hundred words. She gave us three weeks. Only Tiffany Wilson turned it in on time. But the assignment was not a complete failure—Hairwoman runs the drama club and she recruited several new members based on their performances as to why they needed an extension.
She has a warped sense of humor as well as a demented beautician. The next essay was supposed to be fictional: “The Best Lost Homework Excuse Ever” in five hundred words. We had one night. No one was late.
But now Hairwoman is on a roll. “How I Would Change High School,” “Lower the Driving Age to 14,” “The Perfect Job.” Her topics are fun, but she keeps cranking them out, one after the next. First she broke our spirits by overwhelming us with work we couldn’t really complain about because the topics are the kind of things we talk about all the time. Recently she’s started sneaking grammar (shudder) into the classroom. One day we worked on verb tenses: “I surf the Net, I surfed the Net, I was surfing the Net.” Then, lively adjectives. Does it sound better to say “Nicole’s old lacrosse stick hit me on the head” or “Nicole’s barf-yellow, gnarled, bloodstained lacrosse stick hit me on the head”? She even tried to teach us the difference between active voice—“I snarfed the Oreos”—and passive voice—“The Oreos got snarfed.”
Words are hard work. I hope they send Hairwoman to a conference or something. I’m ready to help pay for a sub.
NAMING THE MONSTER
I work on Heather’s posters for two weeks. I try to draw them in the art room, but too many people watch me. It is quiet in my closet, and the markers smell good. I could stay here forever. BRING A CAN, SAVE A LIFE. Heather told me to be direct. It is the only way to get what we want. I draw posters of basketball players shooting cans through a hoop. They demonstrate very good form.
Heather has another modeling job. Tennis clothes, I think. She asks me to hang the posters for her. I actually don’t mind. It’s nice having kids see me do something good. Might help my reputation. I’m hanging a poster outside the metal-shop room when IT creeps up. Little flecks of metal slice through my veins. IT whispers to me.
“Freshmeat.” That’s what IT whispers.
IT found me again. I thought I could ignore IT. There are four hundred other freshmen in here, two hundred female. Plus all the other grades. But he whispers to me.
I can smell him over the noise of the metal shop and I drop my poster and the masking tape and I want to throw up and I can smell him and I run and he remembers and he knows. He whispers in my ear.
I lie to Heather about the masking tape and say I put it back in the supply box.
RENT ROUND 3
My guidance counselor calls Mom at the store to pave the way for my report card. Must remember to send her a thank-you note. By the time we eat dinner, the Battle is roaring at full pitch. Grades, blah, blah, blah, Attitude, blah, blah, blah, Help around the house, blah, blah, blah, Not a kid anymore, blah, blah, blah.
I watch the Eruptions. Mount Dad, long dormant, now considered armed and dangerous. Mount Saint Mom, oozing lava, spitting flame. Warn the villagers to run into the sea. Behind my eyes I conjugate irregular Spanish verbs.
A minor blizzard blows outside. The weather lady says it’s a lake-effect storm—the wind from Canada sucks up water from Lake Ontario, runs it through the freeze machine, and dumps it on Syracuse. I can feel the wind fighting to break through our storm windows. I want the snow to bury our house.
They keep asking questions like “What is wrong with you?” and “Do you think this is cute?” How can I answer? I don’t have to. They don’t want to hear anything I have to say. They ground me until the Second Coming. I have to come straight home after school unless Mom arranges for me to meet with a teacher. I can’t go to Heather’s. They are going to disconnect the cable. (Don’t think they’ll follow through on that one.)
I do my homework and show it to them like a good little girl. When they send me to bed, I write a runaway note and leave it on my desk. Mom finds me sleeping in my bedroom closet. She hands me a pillow and closes the door again. No more blah-blahs.
I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush.
Mom sees the wrist at breakfast.
Mom: “I don’t have time for this, Melinda.”
Me:
She says suicide is for cowards. This is an uglynasty Momside. She bought a book about it. Tough love. Sour sugar. Barbed velvet. Silent talk. She leaves the book on the back of the toilet to educate me. She has figured out that I don’t say too much. It bugs her.
CAN IT
Lunch with Heather starts cold. Since winter break, she has been sitting at the fringe of the Martha table and I eat on the other side of her. I can tell something is up as soon as I walk in. All the Marthas are wearing matching outfits: navy corduroy miniskirts, striped tops, and clear plastic purses. They must have gone shopping together. Heather doesn’t match. They hadn’t invited her.
She is too cool to be nervous about this. I am nervous for her. I take an enormous bite of my PBJ and try not to choke. They wait until she has a mouthful of cottage cheese. Siobhan puts a can of beets on the table.
Siobhan: “What’s this?”
Heather: [swallowing] “It’s a can of beets.”
Siobhan: “No duh. But we found an entire bag of beets in the collection closet. They must have come from you.”
Heather: “A neighbor gave them to me. They’re beets. People eat them. What’s the problem?”
The rest of the Marthas sigh on cue. Apparently, beets are Not Good Enough. Real Marthas only collect food that they like to eat, like cranberry sauce, dolphin-safe tuna, or baby peas. I can see Heather dig her nails into her palms under the table. The peanut butter molds to the roof of my mouth like a retainer.
Siobhan: “That’s not all. Your numbers are abysmal.”
Heather: “What numbers?”