Lock and Key

by Sarah Dessen

  By then, Cora was gone. A great student, she’d spent high school working shifts at Exclamation Taco! for college money and studying nonstop, to better her chances of receiving any one of the several scholarships she’d applied for. My sister was nothing if not driven and had always balanced the chaos that was our lives with a strict personal focus on order and organization. While the rest of the house was constantly dusty and in disarray, Cora’s side of our shared room was neat as a pin, everything folded and in its place. Her books were alphabetized, her shoes lined up in a row, her bed always made, the pillow at a perfect right angle to the wall. Sometimes, sitting on my own bed, I’d look across and be amazed at the contrast: it was like a before-and-after shot, or a reverse mirror image, the best becoming the worst, and back again.

  In the end, she received a partial scholarship to the U, the state university one town over, and applied for student loans to cover the rest. During the spring and summer of senior year, after she’d gotten her acceptance, there was a weird shift in the house. I could feel it. My sister, who’d spent most of the last year avoiding my mother entirely— going from school to work to bed and back again—suddenly seemed to loosen up, grow lighter. People came to pick her up on weekend nights, their voices rising up to our open windows as she got into their cars and sped away. Girls with easy, friendly voices called asking for Cora, who’d then take the phone into the bathroom where, even through the door, I could hear her voice sounded different speaking back to them.

  Meanwhile my mother grew quieter, not saying anything as Cora brought home boxes to pack for school or cleaned out her side of the room. Instead, she just sat on the side porch during those long summer twilights, smoking cigarettes and staring off into the side yard. We never talked about Cora leaving, but as the day grew closer, that shift in the air was more and more palpable, until it was as if I could see my sister extracting herself from us, twisting loose and breaking free, minute by minute. Sometimes at night, I’d wake up with a start, looking over at her sleeping form across the room and feel reassured only fleetingly, knowing that the day would come soon when there would be nothing there at all.

  The day she moved out, I woke up with a sore throat. It was a Saturday morning, and I helped her carry her boxes and a couple of suitcases downstairs. My mother stayed in the kitchen, chain-smoking and silent, not watching as we carted out my sister’s few possessions, loading them into the trunk of a Jetta that belonged to a girl named Leslie whom I’d never met before that day and never saw again.

  “Well,” Cora had said, when she pushed the hatchback shut, “I guess that’s everything.”

  I looked up at the house, where I could see my mom through the front window, moving through the kitchen to the den, then back again. And even with everything that had happened, I remember thinking that of course she wouldn’t let Cora just go with no good-bye. But as the time passed, she got no closer to the door or to us, and after a while, even when I looked hard, I couldn’t see her at all.

  Cora, for her part, was just standing there, staring up at the house, her hands in her pockets, and I wondered if she was waiting, too. But then she dropped her hands, letting out a breath. “I’ll be back in a sec,” she said, and Leslie nodded. Then we both watched her slowly go up the walk and into the house.

  She didn’t stay long—maybe a minute, or even two. And when she came out, her face looked no different. “I’ll call you tonight,” she said to me. Then she stepped forward, pulling me into a tight hug. I remembered thinking, as she drove away, that my throat was so sore I’d surely be totally sick within hours. But I wasn’t. By the next morning it was gone.

  Cora called that first night, as promised, and the following weekend, checking in and asking how I was doing. Both times I could hear chatter in the background, voices and music, as she reported that she liked her roommate and her classes, that everything was going well. When she asked how I was, I wanted to tell her how much I missed her, and that my mom had been drinking a lot since she’d left. Since we’d hardly discussed this aloud face-to-face, though, bringing it up over the phone seemed impossible.

  She never asked to speak to my mother, and my mom never once picked up when she called. It was as if their relationship had been a business arrangement, bound by contract, and now that contract had expired. At least that was the way I looked at it, until we moved a few weeks later and my sister stopped calling altogether. Then I realized that deep down in the fine print, my name had been on it as well.

  For a long time, I blamed myself for Cora cutting ties with us. Maybe because I hadn’t told her I wanted to keep in touch, she didn’t know or something. Then I thought that maybe she couldn’t find our new number. But whenever I asked my mom about this, she just sighed, shaking her head. “She’s got her own life now, she doesn’t need us anymore,” she explained, reaching out to ruffle my hair. “It’s just you and me now, baby. Just you and me.”

  Looking back, it seemed like it should have been harder to lose someone, or have them lose you, especially when they were in the same state, only a few towns over. It would have been so easy to drive to the U and find her dorm, walk up to her door, and announce ourselves. Instead, as the time passed and it became clear Cora wanted nothing to do with me and my mother, it made sense to wipe our hands of her, as well. This, like the alliance between me and my sister all those years ago, was never officially decided. It just happened.

  It wasn’t like it was so shocking, anyway. My sister had made a break for it, gotten over the wall and escaped. It was what we both wanted. Which was why I understood, even appreciated, why she didn’t want to return for a day or even an hour. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  There were so many times during those years, though, as we moved from one house to another, that I would find myself thinking about my sister. Usually it was late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, and I’d try to picture her in her dorm room forty-odd miles and a world away. I wondered if she was happy, what it was like out there. And if maybe, just maybe, she ever thought of me.

  Chapter Three

  “Ruby, welcome. Come join us, there’s a free seat right over here.”

  I could feel everyone in the room watching me as I followed the outstretched finger of the teacher, a slight, blonde woman who looked barely out of college, to the end of a long table where there was an empty chair.

  According to my new schedule, this was Literature in Practice with an M. Conyers. Back at Jackson, the classes all had basic names: English, Geometry, World History. If you weren’t one of the few golden children, anointed early for the AP-Ivy League fast track, you made your choices with the minimal and usually disinterested help of one of the three guidance counselors allotted for the entire class. Here, though, Mr. Thackray had spent a full hour consulting my transcript, reading descriptions aloud from the thick course catalog, and conferring with me about my interests and goals. Maybe it was for Jamie’s benefit—he was super donor, after all—but somehow, I doubted it. Clearly, they did things differently here.

  Once I sat down, I read over my list of classes, separated into neat blocks—Intro to Calculus, Global Cultures and Practices, Drawing: Life and Form—twice, figuring that would give people adequate time to stare at me before moving on to something else. Sure enough, by the time I lifted my head a couple of minutes later to turn my attention to the teacher, a cursory check revealed everyone else was pretty much doing the same.

  “As you know,” she was saying, walking over to a table in front of a large dry-erase board and hopping up onto it, “we’ll be doing several assignments over the course of the rest of the year. You’ll have your research project on the novel of your choosing, and we’ll also be reading a series of memoirs and oral histories.”

  I took a minute, now that I felt a bit more comfortable, to look around the room. It was large, with three big windows on one side that looked out onto the common green, some new-looking computers in the back of the room, and instead of desks, a series of tables, arranged in
three rows. The class itself was small—twelve or fourteen people, tops. To my left, there was a girl with long, strawberry-blonde hair, twisted into one of those effortlessly perfect knots, a pencil sticking through it. She was pretty, in that cheer-leader /student-council president/future nuclear physicist kind of way, and sitting with her posture ramrod straight, a Jump Java cup centered on the table in front of her. To my right, there was a huge backpack—about fourteen key chains hanging off of it—that was blocking my view of whoever was on the other side.

  Ms. Conyers hopped off her desk and walked around it, pulling out a drawer. With her jeans, simple oxford shirt, and red clogs, she looked about twelve, which I figured had to make it difficult to keep control in her classroom. Then again, this didn’t seem like an especially challenging group. Even the row of guys at the back table—pumped-up jock types, slumped over or leaning back in their chairs—looked more sleepy than rowdy.

  “So today,” she said, shutting the desk drawer, “you’re going to begin your own oral history project. Although it isn’t exactly a history, as much as a compilation.”

  She started walking down the aisle between the tables, and I saw now she had a small plastic bowl in her hand, which she offered to a heavyset girl with a ponytail. The girl reached in, pulling out a slip of paper, and Ms. Conyers told her to read what was on it out loud. The girl squinted at it. “Advice,” she said.

  “Advice,” Ms. Conyers repeated, moving on to the next person, a guy in glasses, holding out the bowl to him. “What is advice?”

  No one said anything for a moment, during which time she kept distributing slips of paper, one person at a time. Finally the blonde to my left said, “Wisdom. Given by others.”

  “Good, Heather,” Ms. Conyers said to her, holding the bowl out to a skinny girl in a turtleneck. “What’s another definition? ”

  Silence. More people had their slips now, and a slight murmur became audible as they began to discuss them. Finally a guy in the back said in a flat voice, “The last thing you want to get from some people.”

  “Nice,” Ms. Conyers said. By now, she’d gotten to me, and smiled as I reached into the bowl, grabbing the first slip I touched. I pulled it back, not opening it as she moved past the huge backpack to whoever was on the other side. “What else? ”

  “Sometimes,” the girl who’d picked the word said, “you go looking for it when you can’t make a decision on your own.”

  “Exactly,” Ms. Conyers said, moving down the row of boys in the back. As she passed one—a guy with shaggy hair who was slumped over his books, his eyes closed—she nudged him, and he jerked to attention, looking around until she pointed at the bowl and he reached in for a slip. “So for instance, if I was going to give Jake here some advice, it would be what?”

  “Get a haircut,” someone said, and everyone laughed.

  “Or,” Ms. Conyers said, “get a good night’s sleep, because napping in class is not cool.”

  “Sorry,” Jake mumbled, and his buddy, sitting beside him in a Butter Biscuit baseball hat, punched him in the arm.

  “The point,” Ms. Conyers continued, “is that no word has one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life. So the purpose of this exercise will be to take your word and figure out what it means. Not just to you but to the people around you: your friends, your family, coworkers, teammates. In the end, by compiling their responses, you’ll have your own understanding of the term, in all its myriad meanings.”

  Everyone was talking now, so I looked down at my slip, slowly unfolding it. FAMILY, it said, in simple block print. Great, I thought. The last thing I have, or care about. This must be—

  “Some kind of joke,” I heard someone say. I glanced over, just as the backpack suddenly slid to one side. “What’d you get? ”

  I blinked, surprised to see the girl with the braids from the parking lot who’d been running and talking on her cell phone. Up close, I could see she had deep green eyes, and her nose was pierced, a single diamond stud. She pushed the backpack onto the floor, where it landed with a loud thunk, then turned her attention back to me. "Hello? ” she said. “Do you speak?”

  “Family,” I told her, then pushed the slip toward her, as if she might need visual confirmation. She glanced at it and sighed. “What about you?”

  “Money,” she said, her voice flat. She rolled her eyes. “Of course the one person in this whole place who doesn’t have it has to write about it. It would just be too easy for everyone else.”

  She said this loudly enough that Ms. Conyers, who was making her way back to her desk, looked over. “What’s the matter, Olivia? Don’t like your term?”

  “Oh, I like the term,” the girl said. “Just not the assignment. ”

  Ms. Conyers smiled, hardly bothered, and moved on, while Olivia crumpled up her slip, stuffing it in her pocket. “You want to trade?” I asked her.

  She looked over at my FAMILY again. “Nah,” she said, sounding tired. “That I know too much about.”

  Lucky you, I thought as Ms. Conyers reassumed her position on her desk, a slim book in her hands. “Moving on,” she said, “to our reading selection for today. Who wants to start us off on last night’s reading of David Copperfield?”

  Thirty minutes later, after what felt like some major literary déjà-vu, the bell finally rang, everyone suddenly pushing back chairs, gathering up their stuff, and talking at once. As I reached down, grabbing my own backpack off the floor, I couldn’t help but notice that, like me, it looked out of place here—all ratty and old, still stuffed with notebooks full of what was now, in this setting, mostly useless information. I’d known that morning I should probably toss everything out, but instead I’d just brought it all with me, even though it meant flipping past endless pages of notes on David Copperfield to take even more of the same. Now, I slid the FAMILY slip inside my notebook, then let the cover fall shut.

  “You went to Jackson?”

  I looked up at Olivia, who was now standing beside the table, cell phone in hand, having just hoisted her own huge backpack over one shoulder. At first, I was confused, wondering if my cheap bag made my past that obvious, but then I remembered the JACKSON SPIRIT! sticker on my notebook, which had been slapped there by some overexcited member of the pep club during study hall. “Uh, yeah,” I told her. “I do. I mean . . . I did.”

  “Until when?”

  “A couple of days ago.”

  She cocked her head to the side, studying my face while processing this information. In the meantime, distantly through the receiver end of her phone, I heard another phone ringing, a call she’d clearly made but had not yet completed. “Me, too,” she said, pointing at the coat she had on, which now that I looked more closely, was a Jackson letter jacket.

  “Really,” I said.

  She nodded. “Up until last year. You don’t look familiar, though.” Distantly, I heard a click. “Hello?” someone said, and she put her phone to her ear.

  “It’s a big place.”

  “No kidding.” She looked at me for a minute longer, even as whoever was on the other end of the line kept saying hello. “It’s a lot different from here.”

  “Seems like it.” I shoved my notebook into my bag.

  “Oh, you have no idea. You want some advice?”

  As it turned out, this was a rhetorical question.

  “Don’t trust the natives,” Olivia said. Then she smiled, like this was a joke, or maybe not, before putting her phone to her ear, our conversation clearly over as she began another one and turned toward the door. “Laney. Hey. What’s up? Just between classes. . . . Yeah, no kidding. Well, obviously can’t sit around waiting for you to call me. . . .”

  I pulled my bag over my shoulder, following her out to the hallway, which was now bustling and busy, although at the same time hardly crowded, at least in terms of what I was used to. No one was bumping me, either by accident or on purpose, and if anyone did grab my ass, it would be pretty easy to figure out who it was. Acco
rding to my schedule, I had Spanish in Conversation next, which was in building C. I figured that since this was my one day I could claim ignorance on all counts, there was no point in rushing, so I took my time as I walked along, following the crowd outside.

  Just past the door, on the edge of the quad, there was a huge U-shaped sculpture made of some kind of chrome that caught the sunlight winking off it in little sparks and making everything seem really bright. Because of this effect, it was kind of hard at first to make out the people grouped around it, some sitting, some standing, which was why, when I first heard my name, I had no idea where it was coming from.

  “Ruby!”

  I stopped, turning around. As my eyes adjusted, I could see the people at the sculpture and immediately identified them as the same kind of crowd that, at Jackson, hung out on the low wall just outside the main office: the see-and-be-seens, the top of the food chain, the group that you didn’t join without an express invitation. Not my kind of people. And while it was kind of unfortunate that the one person I knew outside of Perkins Day was one of them, it wasn’t all that surprising, either.

  Nate was standing on the edge of the green; when he saw me spot him, he lifted a hand, smiling. “So,” he said as a short guy wearing a baseball hat skittered between us. “Attempted any great escapes lately?”

  I glanced at him, then at his friends—which included the blonde Jump Java girl from my English class, I now noticed—who were talking amongst themselves a few feet behind him. Ha-ha, I thought. Moments ago, I’d been invisible, or as invisible as you can be when you’re the lone new person at a school where everyone has probably known each other since birth. Now, though, I was suddenly aware that people were staring at me—and not just Nate’s assembled friends, either. Even the people passing us were glancing over, and I wondered how many people had already heard this story, or would before day’s end. “Funny,” I said, and turned away from him.