I had successfully made it through homeroom when the bell rang, and then I started down the hall looking for my next class. There were only four minutes in between classes. Clearly not enough time to get to my locker, grab my stuff, make my way over to the other side of the school to where I believed my next class was, and do it all without being tardy. It was an almost insurmountable task to have accomplished in just four minutes. Especially with not yet being familiar with the layout of the place. And, forget about stopping off to take a piss. That was out of the question. Yeah, making it to my classes today on time was certainly going to be a hard row to hoe. So, by the time the clock had struck 8:05 a.m. I was already late for my first real class. Physics with Mr. McLaren.
By the time I had found which room it was that I needed to report to, all the hallways were nearly deserted. Completely void of other students and had been so for at least the last couple of minutes. So, I knew already that I would be walking into physics with all eyes on me. An unsettling feeling to say the least.
After finding the place, the door to the room was still open. So I did my best to just nonchalantly walk in as surreptitiously as I could as I quickly gazed out over the room for an open seat. I had spotted one still abandoned in the far recesses of the room tucked away underneath a poster of the periodic table that hung on the wall slightly crooked. I took my seat, careful to keep my head down, not wanting to look up and see everyone’s eyes on me. But after a long moment of silence, I force myself to pick up my head and take a look around.
Mr. McLaren… Well, the thirty somethingish man who I had assumed was Mr. McLaren was standing at the front of the room with his arms crossed while looking directly at me. “And you are?” he asked with a touch of condescension to his voice while giving a little head shake that only a gay man or black woman would do.
“She’s Cera Singer from Saraland.” A voice called out from somewhere else in the room.
I looked around to see who had said it. And, of course, sitting two rows and two seats, up from me was Keri Mahan, the little bitch. “She’s new. Just moved all the way up here from Alabama.” She added while peering back at me with a smug smirk that suggested that she’d just informed everyone in the room that I was a deep-seated hick.
“Well, Miss. Singer.” Mr. McLaren began in a huff as he unfolded his arms only to throw them dramatically up in the air. “This class begins exactly at 8:04. So, I will expect you to be on time from here on out, and certainly not sneaking in late only to disrupt my class.”
“Yes, sir,” I said feeling completely abject and wanting to just disappear.
Mr. McLaren then went on to give an incredibly boring lecture on relative motion while I found myself precariously waiting for the bell to rescue me. At least after it had finally come, the rest of my morning had started to go a little better. Well, at least without another major incident that is.
Fifth period eventually had rolled around, and it was the one that I had dreaded the most. Lunch.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I was truly famished. It was just that lunch is the one period of the day where you knew you were walking into the no-man’s-land known as the cafeteria, and I was an army of one.
After I had eventually found the lunchroom. I found that my impressively bad luck was about to strike again. Because I had been seated for only a few minutes at an unoccupied table tucked away near the corner of the room when Keri, Laurie, Hallie came in. They’d been followed by who I would come to find would round out the male side of their crew, Harlin Tapp, Donnie Reese, and Erik Myers.
Keri and Hallie sneered at me while also exchanging whispers as the group walked on by and I felt the sudden urge to just get it over and start throwing haymakers at them. I had always figured that the best thing to do when you find yourself in such a situation was to whip someone’s ass right away, letting everyone else know that you’re not one who should be messed with. Well, at least that’s what they say you should do in prison. But unfortunately, I didn’t have the nerve to do anything that drastic though. So, I just sat there with my head down pretending to read a book until they passed. I mean, it would have been six-on-one. What chance did I have?
As the clock seemed to slow to a crawl I found myself barely being able to choke down my turkey sandwich. So, I discarded it. Electing to spend the rest of the period just staring out the window while making a sincere effort to avoid any accidental eye contact with the real witches of Mt. Harrison. It was excruciating waiting for time to pass, and I had hoped-to-no-ends that the bell would ring soon. Because every time I glanced away from the window, I thought—although it could have been just paranoia—that I saw about a third of the kids in the cafeteria looking over at me. They would quickly avert their eyes to avoid being caught staring at me, but I knew they were.
At the table next to me sat a small group of girls. At one point during the period I had thought I heard one of them whispering something along the lines of, “She’s a Barrett.” to which another girl concurred and then added, “Yeah, she is. At least that’s what Keri Mahan says.”
Eventually though, the bell had finally gotten off its ass and did its job. It couldn’t have come soon enough either as far as I’d been concerned. I then swiftly slipped out of the cafeteria as fast as my Keds would take me. After that, I eked my way through my last four classes before ducking out of the school a few minutes before the final bell had even rung.
When I had gotten home my mama had seen me come into the house so she of course had asked me straight away how my day was, and I felt myself instantly wanting to go off. Telling her all about what little bitches Keri, Laurie, and Hallie were. But not wanting to disappoint her I lied, telling her my day was fine. I didn’t want her to worry about me. The last few months had been tough enough on my mama already.
As I made myself a PB&J Step Daddy Cade came into the kitchen to grab a can of beer out of the refrigerator and while doing so he ended up also asking me how school was. So, I gave him the same answer I had told my mama that, “It was fine.” But, he knew that wasn’t going to make a horse dump, and he gave me a reserved look as if to say, Yeah, right kid. I can smell bullshit a mile away. But he didn’t say anything else. He just took a long swig from his beer and then went out on the deck.
“I’m glad to hear that at least you had such a good day today, Cera.” My mama then said, speaking up as she fumbled through her purse on the kitchen counter. “Because mine couldn’t have been any worse,”
“What happened?” I asked as I poured myself a glass of sweet tea from a Kool-aid man pitcher I’d found in the refrigerator that was half-chilled with frost.
“Oh, nothing. It was just a little altercation I had with some idiot in the pharmacy.”
Instantly I had thought of Caroline Hemstock and her crazy outburst she had on us at the diner.
“So, what happened?” I asked prying a little further.
“Oh, it was nothing.” Mama replied after having finally found the receipt she’d been searching the depths of her purse for. “Just some guy who tried blaming me for his kid being sick is all.”
“WHAT?” I asked now completely intrigued by the story and not willing to let my mama get away without telling it.
“Well,” She began and then paused as if not knowing where to begin. “I was running my errands like I had told you I would be doing before you left for school this morning. And, I had stopped at the bank to have a letter notarized for Adam Brown, and—”
“Adam Brown. He’s one of the estate lawyers grandma hired right?” I quickly asked my mama cutting her off mid-sentence while I added another couple of tablespoons of sugar to my tea.
“Yeah, Adam Brown, he’s the Brown in Schlitzmeyer and Brown. And, well, anyway… I had stopped at the supermarket and then the post office after a brief stop at the bank. And after all those stops I was at the pharmacy when this man just walks up to me and says kind of curtly, ‘Hey, you’re Janine Barrett, aren’t you?’ At first, he’d startle
d me, but then I said, ‘Yes… Yes, I am. Can I help you?’ And, he says to me, ‘WHAT THE HELL DID YOU HAVE TO COME BACK HERE FOR?’ all gruffly, almost shouting at me, his voice was so loud.”
“No way,” I then interrupted again before taking a sip of my tea that still wasn’t sweet enough. “Who was he? What did you say to him?”
My mama, then sighed and shrugged a little before saying, “Well, I hadn’t any clue as to who he was. And, by now I was a little frightened by him, so I just said, ‘Excuse me?’”
Then, my mama said to me that the man said to her, “YOU HEARD ME!” even louder and more bombastically then before, and then he said, “Why the hell did you have to come back here? Things had finally been getting better around here ever since that old bitch mother of yours dropped dead, and now you show up and shit is starting all over again.”
“So whatchya say to him then?” I asked fully anticipating my mama to tell me that she’d turtled, but hoping-to-God that she had told him to fuck off.
But my mama had said that she had asked him what-on-God’s-green-earth was he talking about and he had replied, “You know damn well what I’m talking about! Everything was getting better around here once you Barretts were gone. And now that you’re here, things are starting to get worse again. All this crap is happening all over.”
My mama, then told me that it was just then that the pharmacist—who she said had seemed, up to that point, rushing to get the man’s prescriptions filled as to get him out the door—thankfully had stepped in saying, “You’re all set Mr. Kolinski.” and then he handed the man a small, white pharmacy bag.
My mama, then said that the man—Kolinski—had snatched the bag out of the pharmacist hand only to shake it in her face and say, “DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS? DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S IN HERE?” to which my mama just shook her head, gasping to say no, her voice having failed her again.
Kolinski then told her it was Carmustine and Becenum. That it was for his little boy. For his brain tumor that had been successfully removed, but was now growing back with a vengeance. He said that his kid’s cancer had been in remission for four years, ever since my grandmother—and I could tell that my mama didn’t really want to say this next part, but she’d come this far in the story already, and I’m pretty sure she knew I’d never let it go until she told me.—that witch, Lyanna Barrett, as he had called her, had stopped coming around the village and just kept her old ass shut away in her house where she belonged. He then went on blaming my mama for what was now happening to his son saying, “And now! Thanks to you. My kid’s tumor is back just when you and that daughter of yours started showing up around here again.”
By this point of her story I had felt myself becoming fairly wrought up by what my mama had told me. I could also see the hurt on my mama’s face too. How even the mere retelling of what had happened to her today at the pharmacy had once again shaken her to her core. It was at this point that all I want to do was nail his nuts—Kolinski’s nuts—to a stump and push him over backwards for what he’d said about my mama and grandma. But at that moment, though, all I really wanted to know was what my mama had said to him in response to him blaming her for his son’s cancer.
My mama had finished her story by telling me she’d been mortified and didn’t know what to do. So, she did what I guess anyone in her situation would have done. She left.
The funny thing is though. At the time of all this happening. She’d been standing in line behind Kolinski at the checkout holding a package of aspirin and some salve ointments for me that were supposedly good for curing poison ivy. (Which she thought I might have had due to the red patches that I’d developed around the scratches on my legs I had received from my time in the forest.) In her confusion. She had simply forgotten to put the items back or at least leave them down on the nearest counter when she’d scurried out the store to get away from Kolinski. She had said that she’d run out of the pharmacy so fast that she hadn’t even realized that she still held the items in her hands until after she had gotten back to her car.
So, that makes the second village store in less than a week’s time that we’d gotten a five-finger discount from. I guess you can add thieves to the long list of things that people liked to call us around here.
“We’re becoming a real family of Bonnie & Clyde’s.” I said teasing her and my mama just cracked a smile and even snickered a little at the thought of us being outlaws. But then we heard a sudden crash that came from somewhere out on the deck. Followed by my Step Daddy Cade yelling, “Goddamn Cats! Get the hell outta here!”
The Weather Girl
That night it had stormed something awful, and I had spent the evening in my room splitting time between looking out my balcony while I awaited the approaching storm (I have always been fascinated with storms.) or on my phone talking with Lettie and telling her all about my three new best buds from school.
It was just after dark when I had eventually given up on my conversation with Lettie after my intermittent phone kept cutting out. (Probably due to the approaching storm and lack of cell towers in the area.) But Lettie had gotten the gist of what I’d been saying and right before we’d hung up, she even teased me for not having kicked the bitches asses. She told me I was losing it, and that I was becoming a real pussy-ass New Yorker already. To which I told her that I could still kick her ass.
After the call had ended, I put my phone back on its charge, and in doing so received a nasty, little shock of static electricity that made me swear out loud. I then sat on my bed looking out my balcony windows at the storm which had come ever closer, and was just now beginning to let it rip after having crested over the hills and forest atop Mt. Harrison.
As I watched the show. I could hear my mama and step daddy down the hall in their bedroom discussing something. But I couldn’t make out just what it was though through the walls and distance, and honestly, I really didn’t care.
Looking out at the mountain the sky above the forest had grown rapidly dark. But I could still see the maelstrom of thunder clouds that were whirling around one another through the last wisps of daylight as if the gods were becoming angry. From my spot on my bed the storm looked like it was building itself up to bring forth a crushing blow that might level all the trees of the forest.
As I waited in anticipation, I thought of Saraland and of how the storms we’d get sometimes rolling in from over the Gulf would build for what seemed like an eternity before bring forth their wrath. For as long as I could remember. I had always loved watching them with their wicked brilliance as they’d let loose their payload of lightning that would pierce the atmosphere igniting the air on fire. And, at that moment as I looked out over the mountain I found myself feeling that way again. Antsy with delectation and almost giddy enough to start cavorting about my bedroom in heightened anticipation of the performance that was about to unfold.
I cracked open the French glass doors that led out to my balcony and was immediately hit by a wave of cool air. It’d been saturated with a powerful stench of ozone and pine. I could also hear the sounds of the trees atop Mt. Harrison groaning as they aggressively swayed back-and-forth as wave-after-wave of upcoming gales rushed down the hillsides sweeping their way through them.
My parents had begun to pick up their voices too, and I could now hear them consistently coming through the walls. But I still wasn’t able to make out just what it was they were talking about. It was like they were drunks and their speech was all slurred.
I opened my balcony doors up even further so I could feel the mist in the hazy air. It was palpable and felt cool on my face.
The heavy clouds, then began fulminating in a cacophony of explosions not far in the distance, and the night sky lit up like the fourth of July. As the lightning illuminated the atmosphere in rapid successions. I could literally see the rain through the darkness coming towards me and down the hills of Mount Harrison in sheets as it headed straight for my house.
At that moment, I wondered where all of Mount Harrison�
��s strays were taking up residency to keep out of the storm, but I had figured their instincts would’ve led them to someplace warm, dry, and safe.
Wave-after-wave of downpour began slamming into the roof and back side of our house eventually beginning to flood my balcony as the forceful winds blew my hair back.
I could hear my parents arguing even louder now as if they were trying to compete with the storm. I had even thought I heard my step daddy shout something like, “So what do you want me to do, go find this guy and kick his ass?” Leaving me to believe that they were discussing what had happened earlier today with Mama and that Kolinski jackass down at the pharmacy.
The winds began picking up even harder as the center of the storm approached overhead. Thunder and lightning continued their banter with one another.
I looked down at my feet and noticed that there was still about a two foot section of my balcony directly in front of me that’d been sheltered from the rain by the eve of the second floor rooftop. I stepped out onto it, hoping to get as close to the storm as possible without getting drenched.
The trees of the forest continued to crackle and moan as they swayed back-and-forth like hippies at a Mama’s and the Papa’s concert. I even thought I heard one snap and come crashing to the ground from somewhere out among the infinite scores of them.
My parents bickering grew as exponentially loud as the storm did and I couldn’t help but think, Will you shut the fuck up already!
The storm was building itself up to a crescendo like how a fireworks show would eventually lead to its grand finale.
I watched as a tree branch that’d been ripped from one of the pines fell from the air and tumbled across the backyard before me. It looked like an umbrella that’d been liberated from somebody’s hand during a hurricane.
In the Forest of Light and Dark Page 12
