Authors: Susan Vaught
The digital clock on my bedside table made a whispery noise as the numbers changed.
I picked up my memory book.
Hatch, Jersey
.
Time to go. But I would do something about the bra-chicken-head problem, for sure.
“Oh, no, you do
not
have a nasty old sock sticking out of your mouth.” Leza made a noise somewhere between a
laugh and a scream as she hurried down Central High’s front steps.
She was dressed in nice jeans and a Green Rangers cheerleading shirt.
I looked down at my own jeans. At least those were probably okay.
She was right about the sock, too. It tasted pretty fuzzy, but it reminded me to be quiet. Dad had finally agreed just to drop me off. Per the instructions of the principal, I was arriving one hour late at nine a.m., and I was supposed to meet my guidance counselor and go to class. As soon as Dad pulled away, I had fished the sock out of my backpack and shoved it where it would do the most good.
But Leza had yelled about the sock. Her hair was straightened, with little flipped-up curls at the bottom. I thought it was cute. I thought she was beautiful. I didn’t expect her to be waiting, since I was there one hour late at nine a.m.
She reached me and snatched the now-wet sock out of my mouth. Before I could say anything, she hurled it into the bushes and turned back around to point her finger in my face. “No more socks.”
“No more socks,” I repeated. “I’m not going to be selfish anymore, and I don’t wear a bra.”
I clamped my teeth on my tongue. It was coated with fuzz.
Leza only shook her head. “I’m really glad about you not wearing women’s underwear, but be quiet about bras and come on. Ms. Wenchel’s waiting in the office.”
As we climbed the school’s front stairs, she walked on my bad side and steadied my elbow. My memory book felt heavy
in my right hand. I needed a new backpack or something. The book might be as bad as the sock, especially if somebody read it.
Hatch, Jersey
.
I winced with each step, then winced as I realized I used to run up the front steps to Central, even skipped a few sometimes. Sweat beaded on my forehead just from the bad-boy, good-boy march I had to do now.
“There’s a wheelchair entrance around the side by the gym,” Leza said as we finally made it to the top. “It might be easier.”
“Like Velcro,” I answered as I glanced at my shoes.
Leza looked down, too. Her head cocked to one side like she was thinking. “Oh, I get it.” She took my arm and steered me toward the main school doors. “You thought people would laugh at the Velcro shoes.”
“Yeah.”
She shrugged as we walked. “Maybe they would have. I’ve got some Easi-laces at home. I’ll bring them over after school since I don’t have practice today.”
“Easi-laces?” I tried to open the door for her, but it was heavy.
Leza waited while I yanked at it. “Yeah. They’re cool. Laces you don’t have to tie. Kind of a compromise.”
I finally got the door open. She smiled at me as we walked inside, and my heart did a goofy-dance because smiling made her even prettier, and she was going to bring me shoelaces.
Shoelaces.
She made me open my book and write down where
the wheelchair entrance was. Then she made me write
shoelaces
. Like I’d forget that.
When I grinned, Leza said, “Close up that notebook and come on. We’re going to be late.”
The air inside was barely cooler than the air outside, and I caught a whiff of sour locker and bleach. The halls were empty, and I figured everyone was in class. Leza and I walked past the main auditorium toward the office. A short redheaded woman wearing a black dress was standing outside the office door. She looked all bunched up and nervous and dark, like she was going to a funeral. Shoelaces. I hoped that wasn’t Ms. Wenchel.
Jeez, I didn’t need to think about funerals or shoelaces or bras or geeks or chicken heads. Leza threw away my sock. Shoelaces. My backpack hurt my bad shoulder. I was still sweating and my jeans were definitely too tight and some funeral-woman might be waiting for me. If Leza hadn’t been there, I would have wanted to go home even if J.B. laughed at me and made me tell him he was right after all.
When we got to the office, the weird woman in the mourning dress stuck out her hand. “Hello, Jersey. I’m Alice Wenchel, your helper for the day.”
Helper for the day?
Helper?
Funeral shoelaces. What the hell? I opened my mouth to say, “Oh, no way. No way!”
What came out was, “Chicken head bras.”
Alice Wenchel stared at me.
Leza wrinkled up her nose. “You’re a little worse in public, aren’t you?”
I wanted to bang my broken head on the concrete wall. Focus. Focus! Why didn’t I remember to focus? After Big
Larry, I swore I wouldn’t forget. Focus. No forgetting. Not again.
At that moment, the auditorium doors banged open.
A roar of voices washed through the halls. Half the school was suddenly right there beside us, all around us.
Did I have sweat on my lip? I wiped my face on my good arm really fast, just in case.
Ms. Wenchel glanced at the crowd, then gave me a huge smile that reminded me of my dad when he was being all weird.
“Sorry,” she said. “The junior-senior group ran a little over.”
Teachers filed by.
All of them looked at me as they passed, then tried to act like they didn’t.
A lot of the students stared without bothering to hide it. I saw guys I recognized from the football team and the golf team. They were the ones in Green Rangers T-shirts, not looking at me. It was like they didn’t want to see me. They were pretending me away like I pretended J.B. away. They didn’t want me back in school with them.
Did I used to walk like that, all fast and confident?
I knew I did, but that didn’t seem real.
I shut my eyes and turned to the side so I wouldn’t see anything, either. Well, not as much.
When I opened my eyes again, Todd went by with a very pretty dark-haired girl. Her head was down and he had his arm around her shoulders.
Who was she?
I leaned toward them and squinted. Took a step. Todd
shot me a glare of pure fire and hate. I stepped back. Todd directed a wicked frown at Leza, then he and the girl moved on down the hall, kind of in a hurry.
You’re so self-centered I bet you think I’m mad at you
.
The hallucination sentence ran through my head four times, really fast, with the last word the sharpest. My book jerked in my hand like it wanted to pop open to the page where I wrote that down over and over again.
Was Todd walking with the girl who said that to me?
Was that girl Elana Arroyo? She looked like the picture. Did Elana really move away? Leza said Elana moved away.
“Leza?” I called her name before I had time to be scared of what else I might say trying to ask what was happening.
“It was an assembly.” Leza sounded embarrassed and annoyed. “You know, to, um, get people ready for you being here. Remind them not to ask you questions and stuff.”
I turned to face her. “What?”
She pointed to the auditorium. “The principal thought the crisis specialists should talk to everyone one more time today, before you got here.”
“An assembly … crisis … about me?”
All the teachers staring. All the people in the hall gaping. It made a lot more sense now. I might as well have been onstage next to the specialists. They could have pointed and sighed and looked all serious and therapeutic like the doctors at the brain injury center.
The geek is back. Will he bite the heads off live chickens?
Ms. Wenchel was talking, but I couldn’t hear her through the noise in my brain. The skin around all my stupid-marks tightened. My teeth clenched. The hallway image blurred a
little, but if it was the last thing I ever did, I wasn’t going to cry.
Leza’s hand brushed my good arm. “It’ll be okay, Jersey. I’ll see you between classes and at lunch.”
“Are you my helper, too?” The question fell out of my mouth, but it didn’t sound mean. At least I hoped it didn’t.
“Sort of, I guess.” Leza’s smile was a lot more real than anyone else’s. “Just a friend. Gotta go.”
She took off into the crowd and left me with Ms. Wenchel.
I looked at the woman’s bright red hair and dark black funeral dress, and I really, really, really wanted to go outside, dig through the bushes, and find my sock.
As it turned out, the sock didn’t matter. I was so busy trying to take notes and keep up with stuff in class that I didn’t talk to Ms. Wenchel much. In between taking notes, I made lists of stuff I needed.
1. Get a better backpack. Bigger
.
2. Get pencils that don’t break so easy
.
3. Maybe get pens
.
4. Get a tape recorder
.
And I made lists of stuff I didn’t need to say out loud.
1. I need a math tutor
.
2. Do I even have to take math?
3. Did math suck this bad before? Ask Dad
.
4. I think the Earth Science teacher hates me
.
5. Ms. Wenchel has a pimple on her nose
.
6. Ms. Wenchel shouldn’t have nose pimples
.
Ms. Wenchel kept trying to look at what I was writing, so I covered it up with my bad arm. Then I made lists of stuff I kept saying out loud so maybe I’d stop saying them out loud.
1. Wenchel pimple
2. Funeral
3. Funeral pimple
4. Geek
5. Chicken
6. Bra
7. Chicken bra
8. Helper
9. You’re so self-centered I bet you think I’m mad at you
.
Focus. I had to focus. But it was hard. Wenchel pimple.
The next time I saw Leza was at lunch. She was waiting for me at the side of the salad bar, where everybody lined up for hot plates or the grill.
When Ms. Wenchel stopped and stood beside us, Leza gave her a Mama Rush look. Sort of down the nose and out from under the eyebrows. “Do you have to stay for lunch, too?”
“I—well, yes, I’m supposed—but, well.” Ms. Wenchel clasped her hands together. “I suppose I can sit over there with the teachers, as long as I can see Jersey.”
Leza’s
you do that
went unspoken, but it shouted out of her eyes. She pulled my memory book out of my hands, looped the dirty pen-string around it, and tucked the pen into the binder before handing it to Ms. Wenchel. “Keep this so it doesn’t get food on it, okay?”
Ms. Wenchel looked upset, but she took the book, tucked it under her tray, turned back to the salad bar, and started piling up her plate with lettuce and fruit Jell-O squares.
“You’d think you were some escaped convict,” Leza grumbled, tugging my elbow and urging me into the grill line. “Hamburgers okay?”
“Sure. Why is she supposed to watch me?”
Leza shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe they think you’ll fall down some steps and break your head and they’ll get sued.”
“My head’s already broken. Do you think she’ll read my book?”
“What do you want on your hamburger, Jersey? And no, she won’t read your book. Your handwriting’s really bad, anyway. Trust me. She wouldn’t get much if she did read it.”
“Handwriting. Do you think I’ll need my book? Hamburger.”
“No.”
“But what if I—”
“Don’t talk about the book anymore, Jersey.”
“Okay.”
So, we talked about hamburgers and nothing much and lots of stuff except the book until Leza put my plate beside hers on her tray and we left the grill line. As we rounded the
salad bar, we came face to face with Todd, who was carrying a tray with two plates on it—hot lunches, barbecue on top of something that looked like cornbread but probably wasn’t.
Todd scowled at me, then Leza. “What are you doing with him?”
Leza puffed up like she used to when she was little. Her fists clenched. “Helping. Like you should be.”
I wondered if I should grab my hamburger before it ended up in Todd’s face.
“Don’t tell me what I should be doing.” Todd’s voice came out in a low growl. “You know how I feel about this.”
Should I ask him why he hated me? Or about Elana Arroyo? He was standing right here. I could ask. But Todd could throw food just as well as Leza, and that barbecue looked hot and messy.
“Get on with yourself, then.” Leza gestured with her head, and when I looked over her shoulder, I saw tables full of Green Rangers shirts alternating with the pinks and yellows and whites of girl-clothes. Pretty-girl-clothes.
The jock tables.
Some of the jock table jocks looked up. One of them stared at me and cringed.
Did I know him?
Oh, yeah. I used to sit there.
Before.
How could my life have sucked if I didn’t take drugs, my parents weren’t brother and sister, I didn’t hear voices, and I sat at the jock tables with barbecue and pretty girls? I stared at the jocks, and stared. And stared a little more. Neat hair. Neat clothes. No stupid-marks.
I used to look like that. I used to be like that. I used to sit
at those tables. Golf, football, R.O.T.C. I used to sit there like them, talk like them, laugh like them. Didn’t I? Mama Rush and Leza said I did my freshman year, but I got different my sophomore year. Neat. Clothes. Hair. Before. Maybe I didn’t sit there my sophomore year. Maybe I was too busy. Hair. Maybe I made everybody mad. Golf and football. Maybe I wasn’t perfect enough anymore, or too perfect, or something.
Loosen up a little
.
Mama Rush’s djinni-voice ran through my head once, twice, while Todd and Leza snarled at each other a couple more times. Finally, Todd stalked off. The girl he sat beside ran her fingers through her dark hair as he handed her the extra plate on his tray.