Leap Day

by Wendy Mass

  I’m about to head out of the room when I remember to get a hall pass. That kid isn’t going to get me twice! I debate a bathroom stop since now I have the time, but decide I’d better just hand in the note. I stand in front of Mrs. Lombardo’s desk waiting for her to look up from her paperwork. She has been at our school since it opened forty years ago. As the main office secretary, nothing gets by her. But since she refuses to use a computer, the stacks of paper on her desk are literally several feet high. She may not even be able to see me. I clear my throat and she looks up, surprised.

  “Oh, hello Josie,” she says in her too-many-cigarettes-over-too-many-years rasp. “What brings you to my part of town?”

  I reach in my pocket and hand the piece of paper across the desk, careful not to knock anything over. She tosses it on the top of the closest pile and says, “Let me guess, it’s your birthday and you need to go take your driver’s test.”

  I smile. “You’re good.”

  She shrugs. “It’s a gift. Also the mixture of fear and excitement on your face gave me a clue.”

  I laugh. People always tell me they can tell by my face what I’m thinking. I guess that’s what makes me a good actress.

  “Good luck on your driver’s test,” Mrs. Lombardo says, turning her attention back to her work. “You’ll do fine.”

  “Thanks, I hope you’re right.” I turn to go and remember the detention slip. Grudgingly I dig it out of my back pocket and hand it across the desk. “I forgot to give you this too.”

  She takes the slip from my hand, looks at it, crumples it up and winks.

  I love Mrs. Lombardo. Hurrying from the room before she can change her mind, I realize I still have time to get to the bathroom. As I push open the metal door to the stall I wonder if everyone has a favorite stall or just me. Each bathroom is different. In this one, it’s the last stall. But down at the other end of the hall, it’s the middle stall. And upstairs it’s the last stall again. Sometimes I’ll actually leave the bathroom if someone is in my stall. I’m about to flush the toilet when two girls come into the bathroom and immediately start screaming at each other. I sit there and listen, moving my feet back as far toward the toilet as I can.

  “You are such a liar,” one of them says. “You totally knew we were seeing each other.”

  “Hooking up one night after a party at the lake is not seeing each other.”

  They are silent for a moment but I can feel the tension through the door. I don’t recognize the voices.

  “It was more than that one time,” the first girl says, her voice bordering on hysterical now.

  “Listen, Marissa, I’m sorry, okay? What else do you want me to say? I can’t take back what happened, believe me, I wish I could.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean I wish I hadn’t slept with him, it was so not worth this.”

  “You SLEPT with him?” Now the girl is really wailing. “I just thought you fooled around!”

  “Why aren’t you mad at Steve? He was there too, you know!” “Because you’re supposed to be my friend. He’s just a guy.” I can hear her pulling the paper towels off the rack. Now she is blowing her nose.

  Even though I’m completely riveted, I also wish the bell would ring soon. The walls are starting to close in on me. In a minute I’m going to start sweating. Luckily I don’t have much longer to wait. The bell rings, and the front door to the bathroom clicks shut. It’s finally quiet. I flush the toilet and walk out of the stall right smack into the crying girl. She seems just as surprised to see me as I am to see her. I recognize her now. Marissa Badish, a senior. She and Rob did a science project together last year.

  “Are you gonna be okay?” I ask, running cold water over my hands.

  She shakes her head. More people file into the bathroom, but she doesn’t budge. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?”

  “No.” I wish there was something I could do for her. “Do you want me to go find you one?”

  A tiny smile flits across her face. “No, that’s okay. I’m trying to quit anyway.”

  “That guy sounds like a jerk,” I say, simply because I can’t think of anything else. “You’re better off without him.”

  “Probably,” she says. “But I really love him.” She splashes some water on her face, smoothes her hair, shrugs, then leaves. I stand there for a minute dwelling on her words. Feeling suddenly very immature in comparison to someone who is in love, I consider soaking my crumpled paper towel and throwing it onto the ceiling like we used to in middle school. Luckily, my better judgment prevails, and I toss it into the overflowing garbage and hurry to the gym. I’m not even going to bother getting changed because I’ll only be here for twenty minutes before my dad comes. I drop my bookbag on a locker room bench and wonder if Rob loves Anne. If he does, he sure hasn’t told me. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to love someone and have them cheat on you.

  The other girls start changing into their gym clothes. As usual, Alyssa Levy strolls the full length of the locker room in only her gym shorts. Everyone else changes as quickly as possible, facing the lockers. But not her. She’ll even have a conversation with you while she just stands there with her perfectly proportioned breasts held proudly in front of her like they are on display at the science fair. I glance down at my own chest. My birthday wish apparently has not kicked in yet. I decide to wait in the gym. I’m about to push open the swinging door when Katy comes barreling in and grabs me, for the second time in an hour.

  “Josie! Did you go down to the office yet?”

  “What? Yes, to hand in my absence note. Why?”

  “Did you read it first?”

  “No, why would I? I gave it to Mrs. Lombardo. It was actually pretty funny.”

  Katy looks stricken. “Why was it funny?”

  “Just that Mrs. Lombardo guessed I was going for my test today, that’s all. She didn’t even open the note.”

  “So she didn’t read it?” Katy asks.

  I shake my head. “Why are you asking me this? What’s going on?” “It’s nothing,” Katy assures me. “I’ll be right back.” With that, she turns and runs out of the gym at full speed. She is being very strange today. And people think I’m the dramatic one!

  9:40 A.M. – 10:30 A.M.

  Chapter 3B: Everyone

  Arnold Slotnik whistles as he walks down the hall away from Josie Taylor. It felt as good as he imagined it would to give her that detention slip. If it had been almost anyone else he probably would have let them go. He wishes he could share the experience with his next-door neighbor Mitch Hurley, but Mitch is the last person he can tell. Arnold and Mitch used to play after school for as long as Arnold can remember. They would put on Mitch’s dad’s old Meatloaf albums and jump around his basement like they were in the band. They played video games for hours until Arnold’s mother warned them their eyes would start to bleed if they didn’t give it a rest. Then came that fateful day last summer when Arnold opened Mitch’s closet by mistake. Sure, it did have NO ADMITTANCE, PRIVATE, and

  KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS YOU written all over it, but he didn’t think Mitch would mind. After all, they were best friends. He was trying to find Mitch’s old pair of Rollerblades. Instead he saw all these pictures of the same girl tacked up on the inside of the door. They were mostly cutouts from school playbills; some were class pictures, one or two were from newspapers. He looked closer. One of the photo captions identified the girl as Josie Taylor. He was so stunned at this display that he couldn’t tear his eyes away. He was still staring at it when Mitch came in, found him, and told him to leave his house and never come back. Arnold is still furious that Mitch would let a girl come between them. When Arnold is a junior he will develop a huge crush on a girl in his after-school karate class and will steal the top of her uniform so that he can smell her perfume at night. He will finally understand what Mitch was going through.

  Arnold stops whistling as he nears the tired-looking man in the cru
mpled brown suit who is making one of his monthly visits. Arnold no longer bothers to ask the man if he has permission to be here. As they pass in the hall they nod at each other. The man stops next to the closed door of the photography classroom. With a shaky finger he traces the engraved words on the gold plaque to the left of the doorway. As usual, he wonders what his son would think of this gift of his. He has no idea if he would feel pleased, honored, or embarrassed. He comes by here every few weeks just to see Hunter Jr.’s name. It makes him feel good to know that so many children see the plaque each day. Even if they don’t give it a second thought. It helps to know that his son is remembered.

  “All right, Mom!” Zoey yells from the shower. “I’m almost done!” She adds more of the special ammonia mixture to the loofah and continues to scrub her left arm frantically. Then she holds both arms out next to each other to compare. The left one still looks faintly orange. She continues scrubbing. Her mother knocks again.

  “I’m on my last arm,” she calls out, scrubbing even harder. She wonders if the ammonia is doing more damage than the fake tan did.

  “Can’t you just wear a long-sleeved shirt?” her mother asks through the door.

  “It’s eighty degrees out!”

  “You should have thought of that before you got yourself into this mess.”

  Zoey tries to keep her voice under control. “If you let me sit in the sun every once in a while, I wouldn’t have to do this!”

  “Do you need me to show you those skin cancer pictures again? Two more minutes and then we absolutely have to get going.”

  Zoey turns off the water and reaches for the towel. She catches her reflection in the mirror over the sink. Her face still has a slight orange tinge to it, contrasting horribly with her red hair. That guy from Orlando South High promised to come to Josie’s party tonight. She really wanted to look good for him. Too late for that. She calls out, “What if I just don’t go to school today at all?” She holds her breath and waits for her mother’s reply.

  “That’s fine,” her mother says, and Zoey feels a surge of happiness. “But then you’re not going out with your friends for Josie’s birthday tonight.”

  Zoey mumbles under her breath, scrubs her face until it hurts, and hurries to get dressed. During Zoey’s sophomore year of college she will go to Cancun for spring break and her friends will convince her that SPF 25 is enough to protect her pale body from the sun all day. Since she will have sworn off alcohol after a fraternity party gone wrong, she’ll choose to stay out in the sun while most of her friends go back and forth to the bars. That night Zoey will be so sunburned and blistered that she’ll have a panic attack. All she’ll be able to hear is her mother’s voice in her head yelling at her. She will imagine the splotches of skin cancer growing right before her eyes. The hotel doctor will give her a Valium, and she will wear long pants and a long-sleeved top for the rest of the trip.

  In her history class, Katy stares at the clock over the doorway. She swears it is moving backward. Mr. Maron sits at his desk reading the Orlando Sentinel. Every few minutes, without looking up, he says, “Eyes on your own paper,” “Don’t make me move you,” and his personal favorite, “Cheaters never prosper.” Katy cannot understand why everyone is taking so long to finish the test. She handed hers in ten minutes ago, even though she couldn’t think of the last freedom in the “four freedoms that America was founded upon.” She can picture the page of her notebook where she had written them, but she can’t make out the last one. She got the first three — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from fear. Now as the clock ticks ever so slowly she realizes with a groan that the last freedom is freedom from want. She certainly doesn’t have freedom from want right now, because what she wants more than anything is to trade the note from Josie’s mother for her own note. Tomorrow, when Mr. Maron hands back the exams, Katy will discover she missed a whole page of questions, which accounts for why she had finished so fast.

  Becky Dickson watches Josie hang her photograph on the clothesline without having rinsed it long enough. A few drops of fixative fall on the floor, leaving a small puddle that anyone could pick up with their shoe and track into their kitchen at home, where maybe their baby brother would crawl over it and then put his hand in his mouth. Josie doesn’t even notice and walks right out of the darkroom. Becky wonders if Josie ever wonders why she isn’t friends with her anymore. The two of them used to ride their bikes together after school until that day in seventh grade when Becky was at Josie’s house and saw Josie’s brother pick his nose and stick it under the kitchen table. Since then Becky has refused to step foot inside Josie’s house. She would have given Josie an explanation if she had asked, but she never did.

  No one ever notices the things that Becky does. They don’t know so many important things. Like that scientists have found flesh-eating bacteria on pay phones. Flesh-eating! They don’t know never to use the middle stall in a public restroom because it is the most germ-filled. Becky knows these things and more, but nobody listens to her. When she is thirty-three, with twin boys and an ex-husband, she will wash her hands so many times during the day that they bleach, and the doctor will diagnose her with obsessive-compulsive disorder. She will argue that she is not obsessive; she is just taking necessary precautions. Her therapist will be able to trace the onset of her condition to a documentary she saw when she was eleven, which used a special infrared camera to show the millions of microscopic bugs crawling over people’s bodies as they go about their day.

  Katy glares at the three students still holding onto their history tests. They don’t seem to care that they are keeping her prisoner in this room. The clock is definitely moving backward. There is no other explanation for the eternal slowness of this class period.

  Greg Adler is relieved that he has a little time to practice his Haf Torah during photography class. He can’t believe his bar mitzvah is in two weeks. If it were up to him he wouldn’t do it at all, but his grandfather would be really disappointed. At least now he’ll finally become a man like he should have at thirteen. He didn’t notice any of his friends from Hebrew school becoming any manlier, though, so he’s not expecting much. But at least that pain in the ass Becky Dickson will stop making fun of him. He feels like he regresses to second grade when she talks to him.

  Greg overhears Josie telling Tyson Davis that she needs to leave the room and wonders if he should explain why he was laughing at her picture. It was just so funny seeing Zoey holding this phallic-looking hot dog. After he’d kissed her that summer, she wouldn’t even talk to him. It wasn’t like he really minded. After all, she is so pale she looks like a vampire. A kind of cute vampire, though.

  Mrs. Lombardo thinks she will never be able to sort through the stacks of paper piled on her desk like miniature skyscrapers. She unfolds the note from Josie Taylor and gives it a quick glance on its way into the filing drawer. Then she brings it closer to her face and reads it carefully. She pushes herself out of her seat and steps out of the office. She looks down the hall in both directions, but Josie is gone. She tucks the note into her pocket for safekeeping and then takes it out and reads it one more time.

  Wiping away any traces of tears, Marissa Badish holds her head up high as she leaves the bathroom. She is embarrassed to have made such a scene in front of that sophomore. The girl was nice, though. Nicer than she would have been in her place. As she walks in a daze to her next class, she passes ultra-pregnant Sherri Haugen making her way slowly to her class. Her friend Val has to carry her books since she can’t balance very well anymore. Marissa counts backward from the first day of her last period and hopes that her math is wrong. If she finds out she got knocked up like Sherri did, she’d lose her mind. Then she’d kill Steve. At lunchtime that afternoon, a relieved Marissa will find herself in the nurse’s office looking for a tampon because the dispenser in the girl’s bathroom is empty. Nurse Sanders isn’t around, so Marissa will take one from the box on the shelf and vow never to have unprotected sex again. And sh
e won’t, until one afternoon twelve years later, when she will conceive a baby with Steve’s cousin Kerry, whom she will have married because his face reminded her of Steve’s, even though she swore to Kerry that it didn’t.

  In the gym locker room, Alyssa Levy pulls her t-shirt up over her head and unsnaps her bra. She watches as her breasts fall gently out of the cups. She wonders how long she will have them, since every woman in her family has had breast cancer. Only her mother and one aunt have beaten it by having their breasts removed before the cancer could get them. She is determined to enjoy hers for as long as she can and begins her daily stroll through the locker room, aware of the envious stares and storing them up for later, when the stares will be of pity instead.

  Thirty seconds after the bell rings, Katy Parker runs into the school office. Before she can get any words out, Mrs. Lombardo reaches into her pocket, holds up the note, and says, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  10:35 A.M.– 12:15 P.M.

  Chapter 4A: Josie

  I sit down on the hard metal bleachers and wait for the rest of the class to get changed into their gym clothes. Jason Count enters from the boy’s side. He looks even better than he did on the bus this morning. Maybe it’s the tight gym shorts. I flip my hair over my shoulders and give him my best smile. He looks caught off guard but gives me a quick smile back. Then he looks away. I’m sure he’s thinking, Just what I need, one more girl with a crush on me. And I don’t even like him that much. I mean, I don’t even know his class schedule!

  Jason starts jogging around the track, his sneakers squeaking with each step. Admittedly, exercise is not my thing, but gym class has never made much sense to me. When am I ever going to have to climb a rope at top speed? To escape the clutches of a crazed lion? Or I’m sure some day I’ll find myself in the middle of a circle trying to dodge a rubber ball being thrown at me from all sides. It’s the same every day, no matter what sport we’re playing: all the boys try to show off how athletic they are and the girls just try to avoid getting hit by the ball so we don’t break a nail. Or maybe that’s just me.