Someone behind Micki cheered softly.
“I wanted Hester and the minister to get together,” Tiff said.
“Me, too,” said Nancy Challen from the back of the room in the drawling way all The Fives spoke. Even Tiff had begun to speak as if she were too bone-lazy to breathe right. “And what was that thing on his chest about, anyway? Was that sick or what? If he was going to confess, he should have done it way sooner, before he was ready to die.”
Ms. Hoffman looked at Micki. “Why do you think the Reverend Dimmesdale took so long to acknowledge his guilt?”
Micki looked down at the book on her desk, open to one of the hundred-plus pages she had skimmed the night before. No matter. She knew the answer without reading. “People only change when they can.”
Like Eddie couldn’t come find her right away. He had to be ready. He told her on their walk, “I was a boy for longer than most.” Micki had asked him why he and her birth mother—she knew her name now, Barbara—didn’t get married. He hedged a bit and then just said, “We didn’t love each other.” Micki thought she knew the rest: Barbara did not want to marry him; she did not want a baby. Her. Micki.
So the kids at Forrester Elementary had been right, after all. Micki had been given away because she was not wanted. Micki thought about Barbara handing her over to the care of strangers, and a chasm opened up inside her the size of the Grand Canyon with no pretty river at the bottom. No bottom at all.
The bell rang. Micki gathered her books and headed out into the hall. Tiff caught up with her, and they walked together to their next class.
“Did you really read that book?” Tiff asked. “It was so boring.”
“Once I got into it, it wasn’t bad.”
Tiff groaned. “God, you’re smart. Can we study together next weekend?”
Next week she wanted to spend time with Eddie.
She asked, “How ’bout tomorrow, after school?”
As expected, Tiff looked away. After school she would be with The Fives at Bella Luna.
“So what’s he like?” Tiff asked as they slipped into their seats in Señora Dominguez’s Spanish classroom. Micki did not know for sure, but she imagined that Tiff had requested a desk change and been turned down.
“Who?”
“Him. Your father.”
Micki glared at her. “My father is dead.”
“You know what I mean. Did you talk about Mistique and Melany Anderson?”
As a matter of fact, Micki and Eddie French had talked a lot about Melany Anderson, the star of Mistique. At brunch he answered all Micki’s questions about her, the premieres and the parties. He did not seem really interested, though, and when Micki’s questions ran out he changed the subject.
“Is she really pretty up close?”
“We never, like, got around to that stuff,” Micki said with studied condescension. “We had a bunch of other things to talk about.”
Señora Dominguez entered the room, bringing with her heavy perfume and rigid discipline. Although Micki had been speaking border Spanish to the men at Urban Greenery since she was a toddler, she struggled for a passing grade in this class. Señora Dominguez said she spoke Spanish like a hillbilly spoke English. Restlessly, Micki shifted around on the hard desk seat, trying to find a comfortable position. She should have gone to the bathroom instead of talking to Tiff at the break.
She raised her hand.
“May I be excused?”
Señora Dominguez looked at her as if to say a girl getting a C-minus should learn to hold her bladder, but she gave her the nod anyway.
As soon as she was out in the hall, Micki didn’t have to go anymore. She also did not want to return to Spanish. First looking both ways to make sure no one was in the hall, she shoved through the emergency door into the stairwell, where two options presented themselves. She could go down to the ground floor and ditch the rest of the day, or she could ignore the No Entry sign and duck under the chain blocking the stairs to the roof.
Originally this part of Arcadia School had been an office building, and the flat roof was territory strictly forbidden to students. But when Micki was a sixth-grader, she had discovered the roof and used it as her private hideaway. It was hot on the tarpaper-and-gravel-covered roof, and the dry wind made her cheeks shrink and tighten and her eyes feel hot and squinty. She sat behind an air conditioning unit and got a cigarette out of her purse. She used her hands to cup the match as she lighted it. She checked her watch and saw that she had almost thirty minutes until her next class, physical education. She didn’t dare ditch that again.
Beth was the athlete in the family, or had been before she turned into a Kimmie-clone. For the first time Micki could ever remember, she felt like Beth’s older sister, wiser since The Fives dinged her and Tiff got two-faced and Eddie entered her life. Maybe he would talk to Beth. He didn’t mind talking about how low-down and miserable he felt when he hit his bottom. That’s what he called the worst time: his bottom. She could feel the honesty in him when he talked about what it was like to be an addict and an alcoholic, and it made her feel safer than she had in a long time. Maybe her mom would tell him she was worried about Beth.
Micki almost laughed.
No way her mom was going to tell someone she didn’t know, and was halfway scared of, that they weren’t the perfect Porters anymore.
She heard the stairwell door open.
“Micki Porter?”
She recognized the voice of one of the monitors, Ms. Popelli.
“I know you’re up here. I can smell the cigarette.”
Shit, Micki thought. More trouble.
Chapter Thirty-one
As she sat facing Grace Mamoulian, stiff as a bookend on the cruelly right-angled chair to which she had been directed, Lana wanted to kick a hole through the woman’s gleaming walnut desk, right through to her Donna Karan-clad shins. The air conditioner hummed a monotone in the bright, chilly office. An hour earlier the sun had been hot on Lana’s back when she was down on her knees transplanting Early Girl tomato seedlings and heard Carmino’s voice on the PA system summoning her to the telephone.
Grace Mamoulian wore a chocolate brown suede jumper, very simple and expensive. Gold jewelry, hoops at the ears and a thick, punitive-looking bracelet. Lana noticed that her nails had been manicured since their last encounter. Today her polish was a rose-red so dark it was almost black.
Lana glanced down at her own hands. As she suspected, there was still dirt under her fingernails. When the call came she hadn’t stopped to wash her face or comb her hair.
Beside Lana, Micki sat on another straight, hard chair, her hands shoved beneath her thighs—probably cold. When Lana walked into the office, Micki had not looked up at her, but Lana had paused briefly to kiss the top of her daughter’s head just to let Grace know this would not be a slam-dunk for the side of authority.
Grace Mamoulian relaxed into the depths of her own chair of tufted cowhide and smiled with chilling benignity. “Tell your mother why I’ve called her away from work, Micki.” Lana suspected this would be payback time for the scene she had pulled the week before. “Look at your mother and tell her,” Grace said.
“I was smoking. On the roof.” Micki looked at Lana through a curtain of magenta-and-gold hair.
That’s it? Beth’s smoking dope, my sister wants to shoot her husband, and you got me down here to talk tobacco? Since officialdom had demonized them, cigarettes had become the rebellion of choice for most of Micki and Beth’s friends. Lana did not like it that her fifteen-year-old daughter sneaked cigarettes, but neither did she think it was a crisis. Micki would stop smoking when acting-out became less important than staying healthy. Lana had done it, Wendy and Jack and Michael, too. Starting and stopping were middle class rites of passage.
Grace folded her hands on her spotlessly gleaming desktop. “And you knew when you did it that here at Arcadia we regard tobacco in the same way we do other drugs? That tobacco use is absolutely forbidden? Do you know the punish
ment, Micki?”
Micki’s hair shimmered when she nodded.
“Tell your mother what it is.”
“Suspension,” Micki said, and cut her navy blue eyes at Lana.
Lana heard suspension, which could not possibly be right. Lana looked at Grace and pressed the balls of her feet onto the floor. “That’s ridiculous.” Her feet were anchors holding her down when what she truly wanted was to fly across the desk and throttle Grace Mamoulian.
“It’s in the school handbook, Lana. Arcadia has a no-tolerance policy.”
“And you knew this, Micki? Why did you do it? Did you want to be suspended?”
“Everyone goes up there, Ma. To smoke.”
Lana looked at Grace. “Is that true?”
“She exaggerates. The stairs are blocked and the girls know the roof’s out of bounds. Except for a few rule-breakers . . .”
Guess who.
“. . . we have perfect conformity.”
“Perfect conformity always worries me, Grace.”
Lana’s right foot spasmed; she felt a pull up the back of her calf and for a few seconds she concentrated on not letting it cramp. When she spoke again, she sounded calm. Actually she was calm. After Monday night with Kathryn and Dom, being called to the principal’s office was an irritating gnat bite.
“Suspended for how long?” she asked.
“One school week.”
“I think that’s way excessive. What about her work? Tests?”
“Arrangements will be made vis-à-vis tests. She can pick up the week’s homework assignments tomorrow afternoon.”
Lana bent her toes hard against the plush carpet. “Micki, the car’s parked out in front. Will you go wait for me there?” She reached into her bag for her keys.
Micki stood up.
“I think it would be good for Micki to hear what we have to say about her deportment,” Grace said.
“I don’t. It’s okay, honey, go along.”
After a pause that went on a moment too long to be comfortable or natural, Grace said in a voice so sweet and light she might have been wooing forgiveness from an angel, “I know you feel bad, Micki, but let me reassure you that when you get back to Arcadia, no one will hold this incident against you. It will be in your record, of course, but your teachers and the staff will all be supportive. And maybe after a while, you’ll realize this is for your own good.”
Without expression, Micki looked at Grace Mamoulian and then took the keys from her mother and left the room, saying nothing.
Insolent brat, thought Lana, and grinned to herself.
Grace and Lana faced each other across the great walnut divide. Grace tipped her chair back a little, laughing softly as if over a joke only she could fully appreciate.
“These girls,” she said, patting her fingertips together. “They will push the rules.”
“Especially bad rules.”
Up went Grace Mamoulian’s umbrella eyebrows.
“It makes absolutely no sense to treat smoking tobacco as if it were on a par with smoking crack.”
“I didn’t compare tobacco to crack.”
“You did—you said it’s school policy to treat tobacco like any other drug.”
“With suspension for the first offense, yes, that’s true. But of course with crack we’d insist on counseling and mandatory drug testing as well.”
“But not for cigarettes? Which means they aren’t the same.” Lana watched Grace Mamoulian rub the two deep lines between her eyebrows. She wore a small, gold ring on her thumb. Strange.
“Has anyone ever challenged the legality of the policy?”
“Is that your plan?” Grace looked surprised. “To take Arcadia School to court?”
“How many girls smoke off the school grounds?”
“Good Lord, Lana, I have no idea. What concerns me is what goes on at school.”
“So if you knew a girl was a tweaker every day after school you wouldn’t speak to the parents?”
“It isn’t the same.”
“Before this policy, what was the punishment for smoking?”
“Oh, it varied. Detention, usually.”
“But since September, tobacco and crack are the same. Heroin, too, I suppose. Marijuana, Ecstasy, LSD?” When had Lana’s foot and calf stopped cramping?
Grace Mamoulian stood up, spidering her fingers on the desk as she leaned toward Lana. “I don’t think we should continue this conversation right now, Lana. If you want to take this up with the Board, then of course you must suit yourself. Or, I’d be happy to give you the number of Howard Cortez, the school attorney. However, for children like Micki, isn’t it best to hold firm on this? Isn’t her well-being what we have to consider first?”
“What d’you mean, ‘children like Micki’?” Lana stood up, eye to eye with Grace Mamoulian.
“This has upset you, Lana. You’re not yourself.”
Lana laughed because Grace Mamoulian had it all wrong, one hundred and eighty degrees of error.
“You seem to like to label people, Grace. I’m not sure that’s a good trait in a school administrator. Wouldn’t you be better at your job if you treated people as individuals?”
“Are you questioning my qualifications?”
“I’m asking what you meant when you said ‘children like Micki’.”
Grace sighed and patted her smooth hair. “She is a difficult girl, rebellious. She doesn’t take direction well.”
Lana laughed. “You bet she’s difficult. She’s a wonderfully difficult girl and she’s had to put up with some pretty rotten stuff at this school so that, frankly, if she goes up on the roof to smoke once in a while, I don’t blame her.”
Grace’s mouth snapped into a line. She looked down at her pristine desktop, and Lana knew she was fighting to compose herself. “If you would like to meet again next week, I can have Mr. Cortez here to discuss this. I know we all want the same thing, what’s best for Micki.”
“I’m the only one who can speak to what’s best for Micki. And what I think is, she would be better off at another school.”
Cash registers had appeared in Grace Mamoulian’s eyes and once again her voice was creamy. “We value Micki—you know that, Lana. If I sounded harsh . . .” Lana wondered if she had any idea how transparent she was. “She is a difficult girl, no question, but she is also smart and charming and all her teachers admire her energy.”
“Well, that’s too bad because they’re going to lose all that charm and energy.” It meant losing Ms. Hoffman, but maybe she would invite her to dinner, sort of keep her in the family. Lana slipped her leather bag over her shoulder and walked to the office door and opened it. “I’ll tell your secretary. She can do whatever’s necessary to release Micki’s files.”
Ten minutes later, Lana slipped behind the wheel of the 4Runner and expelled a long breath as she leaned her head against the Toyota’s headrest and closed her eyes. She had wobbled down the main hall and out of the school on gelatin legs and now she seemed to be quivering all over.
“What?” Micki asked.
Lana opened her eyes and looked at her daughter.
“Am I suspended?”
“Do you still want to go to Balboa?”
For a fraction of a second, Micki looked confused and then her face opened in a sunflower smile that heated up the car ten degrees. She threw herself across the gearshift and hugged Lana.
“We’ll go down there tomorrow and get you enrolled, but first you have to empty your locker. Make it fast. I want to ditch this place as soon as I can.”
Micki skipped off and Lana watched her go.
On the way up Washington Street in response to Grace Mamoulian’s summons, she had decided to give Balboa some serious thought. She had planned to visit and talk to the teachers, but now . . .
Beth would stay at Arcadia, where she seemed to be thriving despite her recent fall from grace. Lana laughed aloud at the pun. That woman was a piece of work who would have to be mollified before she took her r
esentment out on Beth, who had four more years before graduation. On second thought, Grace would realize it was not politic to be hard on Beth, for if Lana had withdrawn one daughter from the school, she might take another out even more easily. Who knew if other parents would follow her example? Probably at the next meeting of the Arcadia board of directors the no-tolerance policy would be amended not to include suspensions for cigarette smoking. She had done the right thing. Without Jack. Without asking advice of anyone.
Of course, there would have to be consequences for Micki; she could not be rewarded for breaking the rules. Lana tried to think of something that would register as truly onerous. She would also talk to her about right behavior and the dangers of smoking.
If only Lana’s other problems could be as easily settled.
Lana’s day had begun with a warm east wind. A January dawn too warm to sleep. She had been out before sunup with the dogs. From the rim of the canyon she had watched the sky turn from black to deep turquoise shot with streaks of pink and gold, a rococo sky reminiscent of Stella’s favorite decorating colors. She took deep breaths of air and felt her lungs shining like pink toenail polish.
Dom’s calls began a couple of hours later as Lana stood at the counter looking out the greenhouse window as she beat eggs and cheese together for scrambled eggs. Kathryn had burned an English muffin but was eating it anyway and drinking her third cup of coffee. The kitchen smelled brown but outside, in the backyard of the neighbors across the lane, the acacia trees had broken into bloom overnight, their golden-globed pom-poms another proof that spring would come.
Lana answered the phone and at the sound of her brother-in-law’s assertive voice, her good mood shrank. She handed the phone to Kathryn. “You want me to leave?”
Kathryn shook her head.
Lana lifted a frying pan off its hook near the stove and set it down over the heat. After resisting the temptation for a few seconds, she gave up trying to be discreet and listened openly.
Kathryn showed surprising muscle.
The Edge Of The Sky Page 29
