Freefall (5 page)

Everyone looked worried, and I could understand why. The candles and beanbags were a little much, and it didn’t feel like school in here at all. It was more like we were around an invisible campfire or getting ready to do satanic rituals, maybe. And it didn’t help that only one minute into class, Mrs. Owl-Lady Dalloway had us trapped in the dark while she laughed in an unhinged kind of way.

With her mouth curved into this freaky smile like she knew secrets about every kid in the room, she looked at us one by one. I glanced away when her hard-blinking eyes zeroed in on me.

“None of you realize it yet, but this is going to be the most important course you’ll ever take. I attended one like it in college, and it changed my life.” She pumped her fist in the air, and Tara—the girl closest to her—jumped. “Communication is the key ingredient for
life
! I’m excited to teach you something this important!”

I had a hard time believing that
talking
was going to make my life better, or that Mrs. Dalloway was the right person to teach me about it. By the weirded-out look on Flip-Flops’s face, I thought she felt the same.

“The majority of your grade will be based on class participation,” Mrs. Dalloway said. “We’ll have group discussions every day in which you will role-play the communication methods. Sometimes I’ll put you in pairs or small groups; sometimes we’ll all work together. Also, several minutes
of class will be spent writing about your experiences in a journal. Don’t worry, I won’t read your journals. But you
are
required to use them.”

Then she let loose with that scary laugh again.

Just great. What could be worse than being forced to write my thoughts in some stupid book?

Mrs. Dalloway went on. “All of you are here for different reasons. Some were directed by the guidance office. Some need to fill elective credits. Others have a particular interest in this subject. But whatever it was that got you here, we’re
all
going to have a great time and learn a lot about who we are and who we want to become. Any questions so far?”

Xander raised his hand. “I’m just wondering, what’s with the candles?”

She nodded like she was excited that someone had noticed. As if there was any way we could have missed it. “We’ll be getting into this a great deal as time goes on. But for now I’ll just say that it has to do with the importance of
where
communication takes place. You’ll be seeing a lot of different things in this room.” She looked around. “Any other questions?”

No one else had any, it seemed. Or maybe, like me, they were so confused about what was going on, they didn’t know where to start.

Mrs. Dalloway clapped her hands together. “Okay, then. One of the things I want to make clear from the beginning is that we won’t be labeling or judging or even
thinking
of
anyone as the person they are outside this classroom. This is everyone’s chance to start over and be whomever they’d like to be. Experiment! Be free! Everyone gets a clean slate. Understood?”

Then she grabbed a pile of journals from behind her and had us pass them around as she rambled on.

The weirdness was wearing off a little, so I started having a hard time paying attention. The beanbag and darkness were making my body feel like it was nap time. I closed my eyes for a few minutes, hoping I looked like I was trying to soak it all in instead of block it all out.

As I was kind of dozing, it struck me as stupid that this wacko teacher kept talking about how we were going to be communicating or whatever, but all we were doing was listening to her. I couldn’t say I actually wanted to talk to these people. Still, the whole thing reminded me of bass lessons where the dudes bored me to death making me work on scales instead of having me play real songs.

Five minutes before class let out, Mrs. Dalloway was winding down. “Now, I want you to get to know one another. This is a good time to try out your in-class identities with the people next to you. Introduce yourselves with your new name if you’ve chosen one. For fun, maybe write your guesses of what everyone’s
legal
names are in your journal. You’ll find out at the end of the quarter if you’re right!”

Xander raised his hand one more time. “But what if you already
know
you’re right?”

Mrs. Dalloway smiled. “I can tell you’re going to be a very eager student.”

That was one way to look at it.

I turned to Flip-Flops first. She seemed to hate me, but if she was buying into this whole clean slate thing, maybe it would go better than our conversation at the intersection.

“Hi, I’m Dick,” I said.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that about you.”

6:37
A.M.

The next morning. Hungover again.

I managed to drag myself out of bed and was getting ready to leave for my ass-crack-of-dawn tutoring session, but I wanted to wake Daniel first. After I’d come home from my shift at the car wash the night before, we’d gotten wasted out by the river. He told me he’d overslept and that when he’d finally gotten up, it had been too late to bother coming in for the first day. I’d never been anyone’s attendance police, but if I had to be there—for
eight
class periods—it seemed only fair that Daniel should have to come too.

I headed to the trailer next door, where he lived with his dad, and let myself in. My place looked like a dump from the outside, but Daniel and Hank’s was thrashed all around. They left their McDonald’s wrappers and frozen dinner
boxes out for weeks and only vacuumed the ratty brown carpet about twice a year. Mom went crazy about them living in that mess and straightened up for them sometimes.

I’d made it about four feet into the living room when I spotted Daniel on the floor, sprawled on his back next to the coffee table. There was an empty bottle of Jack tipped on its side and beer cans scattered all around.

Daniel: Face pale. Eyes shut. Jaw slack. Mouth open.

I took a step forward. “Daniel?”

No response.

“Daniel!”

Still nothing.

I ran to him, fell to my knees, grabbed his wrist. Was that a pulse? Or . . . no pulse? Shit. I pressed my fingers to his neck. My own heart was beating so hard, so fast, I couldn’t tell what I was feeling. Were those quick beats from him or me?

There was some sitcom on the TV. The laugh track was doing its laughing thing. I forced myself to breathe.

“Don’t be dead,” I said. “Don’t be dead don’t be dead don’t be dead.”

He still didn’t move.

“Daniel!” I yelled, shaking his shoulders. “Open your eyes, you motherfucker!”

And then . . . he did.

“What the
hell
?” he asked, bolting upright.

“Jesus Christ.” I put my hands to my chest, fell back
on my heels, and let out a bunch of loud breaths. “You just scared the shit out of me.”

He leaned against the couch and glared. “
I
scared
you
? What is this, Dick? A guy can’t even sleep in peace in his own house without you coming in and freaking out about it?”

If he’d been in his bed or at least on the couch like a normal, nondead person, I wouldn’t have
had
to freak out. “You looked dead. I thought you were dead.”

He rubbed his shoulder and stared at the mess around him on the floor. I could tell that he understood exactly what I’d thought I’d been seeing, why I’d panicked. What I didn’t know was if he cared.

I stood. My eyes were tearing up and I had to get out of there before he noticed and changed his nickname for me to Pussy. “I’m about to leave for school,” I said. “Are you going to be there today?”

He yawned. “Maybe. If you’re lucky.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I said, walking out the door.

6:45
A.M.

Back home, I tried to brush my teeth, but I was losing it.

Since the bathroom shares a wall with Mom’s room and the insulation is about as thin as cardboard, I turned on the sink full blast and flipped up the switch of our rattling exhaust fan to keep her from hearing me. I kept reminding myself that what I’d seen next door had been Daniel asleep.
But calming down was hard because, for those few seconds, he had seemed to me very . . . dead.

It was too much. Way too much.

Cupping my hands under the faucet, I threw cold water at my face until I was gasping and coughing and choking on it.

Fucking hell.

I held on to the edge of the counter and lowered myself onto the purple rug. Then I cried so hard my stomach hurt. So hard I had to crawl to the toilet because I thought I was going to puke. So hard I slapped my own face to try to snap myself out of it.

I’d never cried like this, not even when I found Isaac.

I
hated
crying like this.

In a way I wanted to run back to Daniel’s. To throw him at a wall. To punch his face. Or maybe—
maybe
—to thank him for having enough decency not to die on me today.

2:27
P.M.

When I got to Interpersonal Communications class—IC, I mean—I had a killer headache and my eyes were still kind of red. Not that that was anything unusual; everyone probably just thought I was stoned.

The classroom looked normal today: lights on, blinds open, beanbags thrown in piles against the wall. There were three big tables pushed together to form a U shape so we
could all sit there and stare at each other, I guessed. I took a seat as far from Flip-Flops as possible. No need to repeat
that
mistake. Anyway, I’d been seeing her around in the hall with Vicki Lancaster, which gave me the idea that our friendly talk by Pete’s pool must have been a fluke.

Mrs. Dalloway stood behind the podium up front with a plastic name tag hanging from a string around her neck. She clapped her hands. “Okay, class, I’ve put together name tags just like mine for each of you. Write the name you want to use on your tag and on this sheet of paper I’m about to pass around. From now forward, these names will be how you’ll address one another while you’re in this room. We’ll wear name tags every day until we memorize them.”

I wrote
DICK
on my tag and used my books to prop it up in front of me. I really didn’t want to wear the thing.

“Come on, everyone!” Mrs. Dalloway said, looking right at me. “Name tags
on
so we can see them.”

I slipped the string over my head, feeling like a complete dork. This Mrs. Dalloway was too much.

She gave me a crinkly nosed grin. “Excellent. Before I begin the lecture part of class today, I want to hear a one-word description of how you each felt when you came to this room yesterday.”

Naturally, Xander raised his hand. Mrs. Dalloway squinted at his tag. “Go ahead, Alex.”

“Confused,” Alex/Xander said.

Mrs. Dalloway cackled and wrote it on the white board. She had the messiest handwriting I’d ever seen from a person over the age of seven.

“Who’s next?” she asked.

After sitting quietly the day before, just about everyone wanted to get in on Alex/Xander’s kissing-up action, it seemed. Soon there was a list going: Confused. Nervous. Confused. Curious. Surprised. Interested. Confused.

“What about you, Dick?” Mrs. Dalloway asked.

I didn’t want to be another “confused” loser, so I said, “Tired.”

A few people laughed, but Mrs. Dalloway nodded and wrote it down.

For the next twenty minutes or so, she went over part of the first chapter in our textbook. In that time, I learned that listening to her talk about how and why people communicate with each other was
still
boring as hell. But then things got more interesting.

“Please pull out your journals,” Mrs. Dalloway said. “I want you to examine an interpersonal exchange you’ve had recently that didn’t go well. Write down the words you used and whether they had your desired effect on the other person.”

I’d had so many shitty conversations I didn’t know which to choose. I finally started in with what had happened at Daniel’s that morning. It didn’t take long to write because I hadn’t actually said much of anything to him.
And it was hard to know if it had the right effect because he hadn’t shown up again.

Then Mrs. Dalloway said, “Now I’m going to put you in pairs for the rest of the class period. Please share the interpersonal exchange you just wrote down and brainstorm together about why the exchange might not have had your desired outcome. See if you can come up with ideas that could have made it more effective.”

Wonderful. Just what I
didn’t
want was to talk about my issues with someone in class for the next fifteen minutes.

“Wait a second,” Clover/Lorraine said, waving her hand. “I thought you said the journals are private. What if we don’t want to talk about what we wrote? I mean, this could be really personal stuff and maybe we don’t want the whole world knowing about it?”

Mrs. Dalloway tilted her head, staring in the direction of the wall behind me. “That’s a worthy point. Can we all make an agreement not to share any private things we might learn about one another here? Everything we say needs to be confidential.”

Some chick I didn’t know, whose name tag I couldn’t see, said, “Like, what happens in IC class
stays
in IC class?”

Mrs. Dalloway nodded. “Exactly!”

“The first rule of Interpersonal Communications,” Alex/Xander said in a mock-stern voice, “is that you do not
talk
about Interpersonal Communications.”

That cracked all our asses up.

What a loudmouth that Xander guy was turning out to be. I vaguely remembered him saying something at Pete’s party about being in a band, and I was getting a good idea that he must be the drummer. Drummers can never just shut the hell up. Still, I had to admit, he was kind of funny.

“Or!” Mrs. Dalloway said, clapping her hands together again. “How about this? We all agree to keep things confidential. But at the same time, if ever you
don’t
feel like telling something private, you can fabricate a scenario to share instead. I really want this class to be an experiment for you to challenge yourselves and help you start seeing yourselves differently. If it makes you feel more comfortable to use a persona and role-play, do it. If you find yourself enjoying that persona, consider what it is you like and what you can learn from it to make changes in your life.”