by Sarah Ellis
She slid onto the dusty seat, reached for the handlebars and pushed down on the pedal. There was a crunching squeak but the wheel turned.
Notch by notch, she upped the tension until her heart was thumping in her ears and her thighs were burning. Push, push, push, push. Up some steep mountain road.
And then, just as she flicked the level from eight to nine, she heard it.
Briiiiing.
The sound was faint and it only rang once but it was still echoing in her ears when she reached the kitchen, stumbling on the final step.
“She’s okay.” Dad appeared. He had hedgehog hair and his dressing gown was inside out.
“She was on the bus and she’s in Nelson, safe and sound. The Novaks are leaving to pick her up. Mum’s still talking to Mrs. Novak.”
Charlotte hadn’t thought ahead to what would happen when the police found Dawn.
“Will they put her in jail?”
Dad smiled. “I wouldn’t think so. They’ll just keep her safe.”
Safe. Every twitch and jitter drained out of Charlotte.
“What were you doing down in the basement?”
“Exercising.”
Dad nodded and hugged her and gave her a scratchy kiss on the cheek. “Get thee to bed, Charlotte.”
She only made it as far as the living room.
Fifteen
I’m here today to speak in support of …
Charlotte stuck her spoon into her bowl and read over the presentation that she had written, the presentation that nobody would ever hear. She glanced at the kitchen clock. At two, when the meeting started, Dawn and her parents would probably be somewhere on the road home. Would Dawn be thinking of the meeting and how she wasn’t there and how she had let Charlotte down? To say nothing of O.O.
She stuffed the index cards into her pocket and returned to the stove for a top-up.
James appeared behind her and peered into the pot. “Chili for breakfast?”
Charlotte examined his face. His nose looked normal.
“I was starving when I woke up and it was at the front of the fridge. Want some?”
James shuddered. “Chili before noon is just wrong. Hey, what was going on here last night? I came in around one and you were asleep on the chesterfield.”
Charlotte filled him in on the Dawn drama.
James rolled his eyes. “Dawn’s a dope.”
Those three words made Charlotte feel weirdly cheerful but she automatically came to Dawn’s defense.
“No, she’s not.”
“She’s a dope and she pushes you around too much. Always has.”
Since when had James even noticed how Dawn was?
James poured a cup of coffee. “Charlie, we need to talk about something.”
The chili did a flip.
Charlotte gulped. “Okay.”
“Bring your revolting breakfast out back.”
They sat on the swings of the old swing set. James’s long legs stuck way out.
“Now, make a fist.”
“What?”
“Just make a fist.”
Did James want a fight? “Okay.”
James took her fist in his hand. “Wrong. Your thumb still hurts, right?
Charlotte nodded.
“That’s because you tucked your thumb under your fingers.” He returned the hand.
“Watch. Press your four fingers together and curl into your palm. Lay your thumb across the top out of harm’s way. Try it. Okay. Good. Remember for next time.”
“Where did you learn this?”
“Guy stuff.”
“I’m sorry I hit you.”
“Bad Quaker,” said James, shaking his head. “And I’m sorry I said none of your business the other night.”
He cleared his throat. “So, there’s this place in the Student Union Building called SpeakEasy where they have student counselors and you can go there and talk about stuff. Some days there’s a sign on the door that says, We’re here. We’re queer. Ask questions. So, shoot. I’m here. I’m queer. Ask questions.”
Charlotte gulped. Was she ready for this?
“Is it okay to say queer? That’s not insulting?”
“It’s okay. It’s kind of ironic but it’s not mean. Do you know about irony? Oh, of course you do. All that Jane Austen.”
“How do you know you are?”
“Because I’m sexually attracted to men and not to women.”
“But what about Alisha? Was that just fake?”
“Not fake, exactly. More like being dishonest with myself. That’s the part that’s not so simple. For years I tried to figure this out all on my own. I read everything I could get my hands on. I tried to solve it like a math problem. But there are some things that you can’t figure out just by sitting in your room and thinking about it. You have to go and live it. That means you make mistakes and you get hurt and you can hurt other people without meaning to. You just have to go through it.”
Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it. Have to go through it. The words danced through Charlotte’s brain. It was “Going on a Bear Hunt.”
“Sounds scary.”
“Yeah, but also amazing. You discover things about yourself. Besides, the other choice is pretending for my whole life, never being myself. Now, that’s scary.”
“Do Mom and Dad know?”
“Well, I haven’t made an announcement. But you know how it always turns out that Mom knows everything? I’m pretty sure she suspects.”
The answers just seemed to open more questions. Charlotte ran through the formula. Category one: zero percent. In fact, negative percent. Not only would they not get any status but they would get insulted, maybe even beat up. Ringy-dingy: Also zero percent. It’s not like they were going to get married. What would they call each other? Husband and husband? Ha! Three: kissing: lots of percent obviously. Except if the whole point of kissing was to get busy making babies, how did that work with two boys? Then there was the big one. Souls and all that. That was still a total mystery.
In the meantime. “I thought you didn’t even like Tom Ed.”
“I didn’t. Not at the beginning. I thought he was a slacker and a flake. I still don’t agree with his politics. But, he’s so damn sexy. Slow sexy.”
It was the most grown-up thing James had ever said to Charlotte, the most equal-to-equal. She had to fight off the urge to run away or giggle. But no. Deep breath, bent knees, prepare for a two-footed jump from squares three/four to squares six/seven.
Slow sexy? She looked at the cherry tree and remembered Tom Ed swinging himself up into its branches.
“Yeah.”
A black squirrel bounced along the top of the fence.
James flung the last few drops of coffee into the air. “So. What are you up to today?”
“I was going to that school board thing.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten all about that. That business with nutbar Radger, right?”
“Yeah. And O.O. You know. You had her, right?”
James nodded. “What was the plan?”
Charlotte pulled the creased cards out of her pocket. “This.”
James read for a few seconds and then snorted. “This is good! You had me! This is going to be fabulous.”
“Except Dawn was going to do the talking part.”
“Well, then, you have to do it.”
“Come on. I can’t even speak up in Meeting. There’s no way I can get up in front of a bunch of strangers and public speak.”
“Of course you can. You can read aloud, right? You can talk. You need to do this, Charlie.”
“No.”
It was as if she hadn’t spoken. James was poking his finger at the notes. “It’s actually way better for you to do it anyway, more effective. If Dawn the
Dope said this it would be fake. But with you it’s real. You’ve always got your nose in a book.”
“They don’t know that.”
“But there’s something about real. It shows. Mom and Dad going with you?”
“No. T —” Charlotte stumbled. Was Tom Ed a name she could just say in the normal way? “Tom Ed thought that if parents were there, then people would think they’d put me up to it.”
“He’s right. But I’ll come if you want. As far as I’m concerned that guy in Catcher in the Rye is a complete whiner, but it’s a matter of principle. We can’t have Radger and her friends running the show. Besides, I liked O.O. What time’s the thing?”
“Two, but —”
“Okay, we should get there early because there might be a limit on the number of speakers and we’ll want to get you on the list. I’ll call Dad at the shop and see if we can take the car.”
How did it go from Charlotte saying absolutely no to an estimated departure time? Charlotte’s stomach knotted into a round turn and two half hitches.
* * *
James was right. Twenty minutes early and the sign-up sheet was already filling up. First name on the list: Bernice Radger. Big bold handwriting.
There was still time to chicken out. Charlotte fingered the index cards in her pocket. Just being in the audience was still supporting O.O., right?
James handed her the pen. “Hurry up. We need to make sure we get you an aisle seat.”
Charlotte Quintan. Number seven. There she was. Her own signature.
They found seats and Charlotte looked around. At the front, on a riser, was a table wearing one of those pleated table skirts. There were three chairs, microphones, glasses of water, binders, and two men and one woman, all in suits. In both aisles were microphones on stands. Off to the side was a man with a TV camera.
People were starting to stream in. Charlotte recognized a few kids from school but mostly it was adults. She couldn’t see O.O. anywhere. In the front row one of the backs of the heads looked like Mrs. Radger. There was no sign of Dorcas.
It began when the woman read something from her binder about school-board policy and said how everyone was to be respectful and there was a five-minute time limit for each speaker.
Mrs. Radger hardly needed the microphone. Her voice was so loud that every time she said P or B the microphone made a little explosive pop. She read parts of Catcher in the Rye, some bad-word parts and some sexy parts. She seemed to be enjoying herself in the bad-word parts. Then she said her piece about moral filth. She used up all of her five minutes.
There was a smattering of applause, mostly from around the area where Mrs. Radger was sitting.
Just as the applause died down, Charlotte felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around. Miss Biscuit!
The left Biscuit gave her a pat. The right Biscuit mouthed, “Good luck.”
The second speaker was a weedy man in a gray suit who said all the same things as Mrs. Radger but with less drama and no sexy quotations.
From then on, everyone was on O.O.’s side. There was a woman reporter who had had O.O. as an English teacher in elementary school and said she had changed her life. There was a librarian who was also an ex-student. There was a professor of English from the university who talked about Catcher in the Rye and how it had an “exquisitely rendered character.” James grinned at Charlotte. There was somebody from the teachers’ union.
But Charlotte didn’t really take in what they were saying. Every speaker, every word, brought her closer to her turn. She was on a train in a tunnel hurtling toward disaster, and there was no escape.
“Puintan, Charlotte Puintan?”
James nudged her. A Biscuit squeezed her shoulder.
In the eight-mile walk to the microphone, Charlotte thought about the capital Q. It was always a problem in handwriting, looking like a big 2. Maybe she should just have printed her name.
At the six-mile point her feet had disappeared and the top of her head was abuzz. The silence was booming. The people had disappeared. The room had disappeared.
She had to stretch up to the microphone.
“It’s Quintan.” To her own ears she sounded like a duck.
“Pardon me,” said the school-board lady. “Charlotte Quintan.”
A woman sitting next to the microphone reached over and twiggled it shorter. It gave a little screech.
Just say the first line. That’s all you need. The first line.
Charlotte took a deep breath.
“I’m here today to speak in support of Mrs. Radger.”
Something happened to her voice. It got fatter.
The school-board people looked up from their binders and blinked. But that wasn’t all. Charlotte felt the room behind her click to attention. As the room came back, so did her feet and her head. Every little atom was alive, poking its head up.
She flipped to the second card. “I am here to make my own complaint about a book in our classroom library. I read this book because of the recommendation of Miss O. O. McGough, my teacher. When I read it I was disturbed to find out that it includes an underage girl having sex with a much older man. Furthermore, it encourages disrespect for parents. The mother in this story is portrayed as a fool and the characters are encouraged to make fun of her.”
It was like she had eyes in the back of her head. She could magically see the people listening. She could smell it. Nose in the back of her head? One of the school-board men at the table met her eyes with a crackling look and started to smile. She pretended not to see him.
She flipped to the next card. “Worst of all, the church minister in the book is also portrayed as idiotic and boring. Through the whole book young people are disrespectful of parents and other figures of authority.”
It was like walking the balance beam. She had to sound like a milder version of Mrs. Radger. She had to sound like she meant it.
“I think this book is bad for me and other teenagers because it encourages rudeness, insolence and other bad attitudes. The main character is an inappropriate role model. I therefore request that it be removed from our school.”
It came to her in a flash, what do to next. She had the punchline but she needed to pretend to flub it.
“Thank you.” She half-turned to go but wheeled back to the microphone just before the audience began to react. She pretended to be flustered. She was good at that because she had had lots of practice being flustered for real.
“Oh, sorry. I forgot to say what the book was. The book is called Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.”
They started to applaud before she had even turned away. They applauded for the whole eight miles back to her seat and more. There was even some stamping and a couple of whoops.
She slipped in beside James. She was bigger on the inside than on the outside. She was the amazing expando girl.
* * *
“She was the hit of the whole event!”
They picked up Mom and Dad at the shop on the way home and James started in right away.
“She was so confident. Her voice changed. About two sentences in, her voice got this kind of musical thing. Did you know that was happening, Charlotte? Did you feel it?”
“Kinda.”
“And the way she pretended to forget to say it was Jane Austen. She should get an Oscar. Did you notice the TV guy with the camera?”
Charlotte nodded.
“I’ll bet you’ll be on the news. We need to get home and look.”
What had happened to James? All talky and fun again. The Return of the Alien Brother. Charlotte smiled to herself. Maybe all he needed was a punch in the nose.
When Charlotte saw herself on TV the only thing she could think of was that one piece of hair was sticking out over her left ear, like a little awning. She wanted to reach into the TV and cut it off. But it was also very interesting to see
what she had missed and the camera had seen, like one of the school-board men laughing out loud.
“Hey! Was that O.O.?”
“Where?”
“Slipping out the door.”
“Dang! Missed it.”
“Look at Radger’s face. Now that’s scary.”
It was. It flashed from surprised to pleased to furious.
“That was brilliant,” said Dad. “I thought you were just planning to say what a good teacher O.O. was.”
“And so poised,” said Mom. “Wasn’t she poised, Paul?”
It could actually have been a bit insulting, how surprised they were. But Charlotte didn’t blame them. She was surprised, too. It was like the person on TV with the awning over her left ear was somebody else. Now that she was back to the original non-expando Charlotte though, all the attention was a little embarrassing.
At least it was all over. That was the thing about TV. It was there and then it was gone.
Wrong.
The first call was from Aunt Marlene. Then there were cousins and uncles and neighbors and Quakers and kids from school.
Then the local newspaper called with questions. How old was she? What grade was she in? Did she consider herself a typical thirteen-year-old? (What kind of a question was that?) Where did she get the idea? Charlotte found herself talking about Jerry Rubin and the Santa Claus outfit and then regretting it. Was she going to sound like a complete show-off?
Finally, had she really read Pride and Prejudice? That was the easy question. Yes, three times. What was the appeal of such an old-fashioned book? How was it relevant to the lives of today’s teens?
“Jane Austen tells the truth.”
All through the evening Charlotte kept checking her watch. If the Novaks drove straight up to Nelson and picked up Dawn and drove straight back …
No, they couldn’t be home, not even with speeding.
She wanted Dawn to be home right now. She wanted her to never come home. She wanted to fire her as a friend. She wanted to patch it up, to get back to where they had been, to erase the fight. She wanted another fight except that this time she would be prepared and she’d win. She’d be really cool and precise and sarcastic. She’d make a proper fist with her voice. She’d say, “It’s too bad you missed the school-board presentation. Do you recall that it was on Saturday? It went very well, as a matter of fact. But perhaps you had more pressing things to do.”
