Lost for Words

by Alice Kuipers

  We had Art today. Mrs. Haynes wanted me to hand in my prep work. How stupid is that? To do prep work for a painting? Surely I should just do the painting, not sketch it first and waste time? I tried to explain to her that I didn’t understand what a sketch was for and she yelled, “Sophie, we can’t keep forgiving you for your failure to do the work you’re given!”

  I think she realized she’d gone too far, because her cheeks reddened. I’ve always thought she looked like a little witch with her sharp cheekbones and spiky hair, but in that moment she looked like a kid, all sorry and guilty. Then she looked like a witch again as she spat, “If you don’t know what a sketch is, I can’t see you ever passing your exam.” She walked away, her spine stiff.

  Abigail and Megan were sitting at the same table as me. Abigail must have been able to tell I was about to cry because when I caught her eye she smiled over helplessly, as there was nothing she could do.

  Rage fired through my body and heat roared like flames to my cheeks. I shoved my stuff into my bag, knocking my pencils onto the floor. Leaving them there, I started walking.

  Mrs. Haynes screamed, “Where are you going?”

  I kept walking, my cheeks hot as sunburn, and I let the door slam as I stormed out of the room.

  Walking around school when everyone else is in lessons feels like walking around a cemetery. So quiet. My feet echoed down the white steps. I wondered what it might be like to climb white steps to heaven, if there even is a heaven. But I was going down. Getting farther from heaven with every step. Hot tears spilled down my cheeks. I pushed the double doors to go outside. It had started to drizzle.

  The feeble rain dampened my shirt because I hadn’t remembered my things. I hoped Abi would bring my jumper and blazer from the back of my chair where I’d left them. I rolled down my skirt so it covered most of my thighs. Shivering, I hurried toward the corrugated iron lean-to at the back of the field where Abi and I used to hang out, where she used to smoke and I used to chat. Abi and I spent so many hours back there planning for the future, talking about our families—her mum who drinks too much, my mum who worked too hard, talking about our sisters and her brother—talking about boys and school and everything. I need to make more of an effort with Abi. I’m the one who keeps screwing it all up. I’m surprised she still even likes me.

  The field was squelchy with mud. I worried a teacher would be able to see me from the Addley Building. I imagined the music teacher over there running from her room and making me go back inside. No one came out. No one cared.

  When I got to the lean-to, I expected it to be empty, but Rosa-Leigh was there, her arms wrapped around herself as she stamped from foot to foot. She was gazing out at the trees and didn’t seem to have noticed me. I said, “What are you doing here?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. I could ask you the same.”

  “I hate Mrs. Haynes,” I said, as if that explained anything.

  She said, “I hate all of England. I wish I could go back.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Go back where?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, realizing how stupid I must sound.

  She stepped to the edge of the lean-to and craned her neck to look at the sky. “It rains all the time here.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you live with it?”

  “I guess I’m used to it,” I said. Then, “I walked out of Art. I’m going to get detention.”

  She said, “Don’t you think it’s dumb that we have to wear uniforms?”

  “You don’t in Canada?”

  She shook her head, her hair sleek, even with the damp.

  I said, “I should go back.”

  “You can’t if you walked out.”

  “I’m going to be in so much trouble.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She picked up her bag. “You know, I didn’t mean to be quite so…you know…unfriendly…when I first met you,” she said.

  “That’s okay.” I thought what else I could say. I ended up with, “It’s hard starting a new school.”

  She smiled at me like she was grateful or something. I think she’s really pretty; I wish I looked more like her. She said over her shoulder as she walked off, “I think if I stay away much longer Miss Sparrow’s not going to believe I’ve been in the washroom.”

  I called after her, “You were really good at dance with that teacher,” and then I worried that I sounded pathetic, but she was gone.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 26TH

  Our house has a window from the upstairs bathroom that leads out to a flat roof. By scrambling through and sitting outside I can watch the comings and goings of the neighbors far below. I can see the tops of the nearby houses and the orange, starless skies of a North London night lit by trillions of street lamps. Passing cars send beams that lick the broccoli-shaped trees; a train thunders by, leaving darkness in its wake. I’m sitting here now, writing, even though it’s cold enough to make my fingers feel brittle like bones with no skin or blood.

  It was summer a year and a half ago. (I guess, although it feels like a different lifetime.) Emily and I clambered onto the roof long after Mum had gone to sleep. There were still hours to go before daylight, but that’s what we’d planned to do: stay awake until the sun came up. Fluffy—I named her, evidence that originality wasn’t my strong point (according to Emily)—came onto the roof with us and prowled along the edges, a shadow in the moonlight. We’d brought hot chocolate in a thermos and two sleeping bags, a small stereo. We put on an old Suzanne Vega CD, one of Mum’s, something Emily liked to listen to. Vega does a song about sitting in a café, pouring milk, looking out of windows. Emily put it on Repeat.

  Emily talked about interior designing, about art. She was going to Leeds College of Art & Design at the end of the summer. We talked about Mum. I reached out to forward the CD to a different track. One started about Christopher Columbus. I said, “He was Spanish, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Columbus.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Emily said. “He was Italian.” She looked at me as if daring me to argue. Three years, two months older, she always knew everything.

  I didn’t know what to say. After a long moment she said in her random way, “Do you know that the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel was a woman? Her name was Annie. The very first thing she said afterward was ‘No one ought ever do that again.’”

  I giggled. I put my hand over my mouth and tried to quiet down. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Imagine closing the lid, bobbing along a stupidly fast river, and then hurtling into space. It’s either funny or terrifying.”

  “Or insane.”

  She said, “I read that she went over with a cat, which is the most insane thing of all.”

  I giggled again and this time couldn’t stop. We both got the giggles. I remember looking at her brown eyes in the silvery light, her long blond hair held back with two pencils, her heart-shaped face, and wishing we could hang out more often.

  We listened to the end of the album and set it to the beginning again. We played cards. Fluffy rubbed her furry head against Em’s hand. We sat in silence for a while. I told Emily about a boy I liked.

  “Steve at the end of our road? That Steve?” she said.

  “He’s cute.”

  “He seems really young. How old is he?”

  “Sixteen. A year older than me!” I said.

  “He doesn’t look it.”

  “Well, I like him.”

  “Ask him out, then.”

  I thought about it, told her I might, knowing I was too scared ever to do that or ever follow through. I tried to imagine being a person like Emily, who could just ask out a boy if she wanted.

  Then, far away, the sky began to lift. I said, “It feels like someone huge is peeling away the night, like God.” Then I felt stupid. But she said she felt like that, too, that somewhere gods were endlessly painting and repainting the sky, sculpting clouds
and moving them around, forever trying to make a perfect aesthetic. I didn’t know then what aesthetic meant, but I didn’t want to ask her. It was the sort of word she and Mum used together when they talked about art, when I sat there not understanding. I didn’t know if Emily believed in God or not, but finding out right then felt like too big of a question. Of course now I wish that I’d asked.

  Instead of watching the sunrise I watched her. She tucked her knees to her chest. Passing a pale tendril of hair between her fingers and her lips, she had a faraway look in her eyes. I turned to look at the sky, and a sliver of violently orange sun had been spat out of the roofs of the houses to the east. After all that waiting I didn’t even see the coming of the day.

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 27TH

  Today in detention Mrs. Haynes sat at the desk at the front, head down, scribbling away, holding the pen with such force I thought she would rip holes in the pages. Her face was all angry sharp angles. I tried really hard to imagine her as a teenager, what she’d be like if she was at school with me. I thought she’d probably be like Zara, all perfect clothes and perfect hair and nice teeth and bitchy sideways glances at everyone. The most annoying thing about Zara is that everyone (except me) deep down wants to be her friend, even though she thinks we’re all immature. Right now she has a boyfriend who is eight years older. Thinking of that made me wish the guy from the party, Dan, had called.

  Detention went on and on, and then, instead of thinking about Mrs. Haynes and Zara, I was all of a sudden thinking about sitting on the roof that time with Emily, and before I knew it detention was over. I had to go out in the rain and wait for the bus. Even though the bus took ages to come and it was freezing cold, time seemed to have gone all weird. I felt like I was back on the roof with Emily waiting for the sun to come up and I felt fine.

  3

  The silver of winter

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2ND

  In the cafeteria today I bought myself chicken nuggets and chips. I sat with Abigail and Megan. The room was full, and I imagined what would happen if a fire started. The fire alarm would scream and water from the system would spray over all the panic below: girls running in every direction, trampling one another to get out. The heat and the smoke would layer over the fear like gravy over a roast dinner, suffocating.

  Zara came over and plunked herself down. “God, the day just goes on forever,” she sighed. Everything she says comes out like she’s sighing. I imagined her short black hair on fire, flames like devils dancing around her face.

  She said, “Thank God I’ve got Alec. Isn’t he adorable?” She says things like “adorable” all the time. She started telling us all the details of making out with Alec at the party. Not like we didn’t see enough when we were there! I wish I didn’t want to know, but I couldn’t help listening. The others were rapt, too: Abi and Megan were paying so much attention to Zara, neither of them ate anything. When I asked Abi if she wanted one of my nuggets, she gave Megan this look like she knew something I didn’t.

  Megan said, “Not all of us can eat like you do.”

  My lunch tasted bad after that.

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6TH

  I had to go and see Lynda today after school. She called because I missed my last appointment and walked out of the one before.

  No one knows—except Mum, who made me go in the first place—that I go and see her. That’s one thing I have to be grateful for.

  I forced myself to apologize. Lynda sat with her finger resting on her lips, her dopey face horribly sympathetic, and then said, “Take a seat and we’ll forget all about it.”

  I wanted to leave again right there and then, but I made myself sit down. I said nothing else for the whole hour. She can’t make me speak. Or remember.

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9TH

  Tonight Rosa-Leigh and I waited for the bus FOREVER. We didn’t say much to each other because it was raining and getting dark. We both had our shoulders hunched up. Cars streaked past, spraying rain over the slick pavements, and I imagined them suddenly veering out of control. Again and again in my mind’s eye I witnessed cars crashing: the terror of the drivers, the agony of those last seconds as the vehicles slid out of control.

  The bus came. As we got on, Rosa-Leigh and I bumped gently into each other. She smiled, in a nice way, and followed me to the backseat; normally, she heads upstairs.

  She said, “Did you get detention for walking out that time?”

  I nodded. “Surprise, surprise. But Mrs. Haynes is so stupid and mean that I don’t even care. I’m glad. And I’ve done the detention already.” I paused. “How was Miss Sparrow?”

  “I like her, even though she seems a bit…you know…. She didn’t even notice how long I’d been gone from class.”

  “I think she’s weird,” I said. “But I like English. I wish she were still my teacher. I had her last year. This year I’ve got Ms. Bloxam for English.”

  “Our form teacher?”

  I pulled a face as I nodded. “She doesn’t even like books,” I said.

  Rosa-Leigh said, “Have you read this?” She pulled a novel out of her bag. It was a Canadian book about a guy who loses his arm. It sounded really good, really different. She told me she reads a lot. Then she went quiet.

  I said, “What?”

  She pulled her mouth into a tight smile like she’d eaten something surprisingly bitter. She said, “My mom didn’t really die like I said, you know.”

  I noticed grease on the window. Maybe from someone’s hair wax. I thought about the person who’d leaned there. I didn’t say anything.

  Rosa-Leigh said, her eyes downcast, “Well, it wasn’t like I said.”

  “So you lied?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Okay.” I wanted to know what she meant, but it wasn’t the easiest thing to ask.

  She said, “Well, she did die, but it wasn’t the reason I moved here, which is how it sounded when I told you. She died when I was really young.”

  “So why did you move here?”

  “My dad got a new job.”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t really know what to say.”

  “I just wanted you to know. Mom died when I was two. I have a stepmom who’s more like my real mom and she’s not dead.”

  I couldn’t help it. I had to put my hand over my mouth, and I was trying really hard not to, but I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. It doesn’t seem funny when I write it down, but there was something about the way she’d put all the words together that set me off. I said, “I’m sorry. I’m not laughing because your mum is dead,” which sounded awful. But THANK GOD Rosa-Leigh’s tight smile broke and she burst into giggles. That made me laugh more, so I was doubled over, laughing so hard it hurt, and she was laughing, and I kept trying to say it wasn’t funny and we shouldn’t be laughing, but every time I tried to say it, we both laughed harder.

  Then I missed my stop, and we thought that was even more hilarious. Rosa-Leigh’s stop was the next one. She said I should come over, and I figured why not.

  As we got off the bus, it was pouring rain, so she ran, gesturing at me to follow. Rivulets made feather patterns on the slippery tarmac, all black and wet. We arrived at a big Victorian, three-floor house, redbrick with a red door. Because we were soaked, we slowed to catch our breaths, not caring that it was raining so hard. In the drive were a Mercedes Estate and a Citroen 2CV. Rosa-Leigh told me what the cars were—I don’t know stuff like that. The only car I know is the old Honda Mum has.

  The 2CV was purple and yellow and really weird: all bubbly shaped. Rosa-Leigh said it’ll be hers when she turns seventeen, which is in the summer like me.

  She said, “And I’ll be learning to drive on the left.”

  I wondered what it would be like to move to the other side of the world. England in winter has got to be awful to arrive into. I asked her what winter is like in Canada. She said that in Canmore, where she’s from,
it’s cold for months and months of the year. Really cold. And really snowy.

  We were so wet by then that water was trickling inside my shirt and tickling down my spine. I felt for a moment light and free, and I tipped my face up to the weeping sky.

  Rosa-Leigh said, “This country’s so rainy all the time. Come on!”

  We hustled through the front door. I thought there would be just her and her dad and her stepmum and everything would be silent and dark around the edges with sadness because Rosa-Leigh’s mum was dead. NOT AT ALL! Her stepmum came running down the stairs. She’s tall and curvy, and she was wearing a low-cut red top that made her cleavage show, something my mum would never wear. Her walnut brown hair was incredibly shiny. She looked like she’d jumped out of the pages of a clothing catalog. She waved at Rosa-Leigh, smiled at me, said, “Hi, you’re drenched!” and kept running toward the back of the house.

  There were two doors off the corridor leading into brightly colored rooms. One looked like a playroom, full of carelessly thrown toys and books. The other was an elegant space that had three golden couches artfully placed under two huge paintings of mountains. A train set had been built on the coffee table, and the toy train lay on its side, clearly having careened to the floor. A faint smell of smoke hung over us. Rosa-Leigh’s stepmum burst into the hallway holding a little boy she petted and told off all in the same breath. She said to us, “Hi. Sorry. Chaos. Sorry about the smoke everywhere. I burned tonight’s lasagne. Disaster. Does it still smell terrible?”

  From upstairs there came a shriek.

  Rosa-Leigh’s stepmum yelled, “That’s enough, you two. You’ll wake up Baby Adam. Oh, for goodness’ sake.” She ran up the stairs, holding the little boy against her waist. “Could you please leave it five minutes?” she cried.

  Two guys came in behind us.

  I looked at Rosa-Leigh. She must have seen the question in my eyes. She said, “I have a lot of brothers,” and sighed affectionately.