What did you do to that guy at your table in study hall? He asked me where your last class was.
My heart stops. Where’s your last class? can be code for several things: Where do you want to meet so we can walk to practice together? or Where should I meet you so I can sell you those drugs? or Where can I find you so I can beat you up? Since Jamie and I aren’t on a team together—I’m not on one yet and, in fact, I don’t think he’s allowed on any team anymore—and I have no interest in buying drugs from him—not that I know he actually sells drugs—that leaves one option. But that doesn’t make any sense, either. All I did was sharpen his pencil.
I turn to Tracy. Did you tell him? I mouth. What? she mouths back. I point to the note and mouth my question again, more slowly this time. She nods seriously and then shrugs at my panicked expression.
“What was I supposed to do? He creeped me out,” she whispers.
“Was he mad?”
“Kinda—”
“Tracy Gerren! Enough! Go sit by the window.”
Tracy rolls her eyes, gathers her things and heads toward the back of the room. “Thanks a lot,” she mutters in my direction. Robert places his paper down on Mr. Roma’s desk with a flourish.
“I am officially finished, ladies and gentlemen. You are free to talk.”
“Sit, Robert. And be quiet. In fact, everyone stay quiet until the bell rings. I’ve decided that I like this class best when it’s silent.”
Three minutes until the bell. I have no idea what’s going to be waiting for me out there. I feel sick to my stomach, which gives me a great idea. I slide out of my seat and head toward—Mr. Roma’s desk. Robert tries to grab my hand as I walk by. He smells like cigarettes. I ignore him. I’ve been ignoring him since sixth grade.
“Mr. Roma, I know the bell’s about to ring, but I need a lav pass.”
Mr. Roma hands me the pink pass after writing the time on it without so much as a raised eyebrow.
I guess there are some benefits to freak status after all.
* * *
I’m in the bathroom by the gym—the bathroom farthest from the school’s main front doors—when the final bell rings. Two girls are smoking in a stall at the end. It’s hard to breathe. I wait until they leave, and then I wait a few more minutes. It’s still hard to breathe. I wonder if I’m having one of those panic attacks my mom is convinced I get now. To distract myself I read the graffiti on the wall, which says Suck it, among other things, in hot-pink nail polish.
Such originality here at Union High. Such excellent use of vocabulary.
When I can breathe again, I leave.
The halls are basically empty. I go to my locker. I get my books. I grab my French horn out of the orchestra room so I can practice later, and I leave by the front doors because there’s no other way to leave at the end of the day; they funnel us out through the front to keep an eye on us. I’m waiting at the crosswalk when I see him on the other side of the street. He isn’t holding any books. The crosswalk light goes from the red hand to the silver guy, and I’m afraid to move, but I do anyway. I get closer and closer and closer, but he doesn’t say a word. In fact, I just walk past him as if I don’t see him, and a few seconds pass. My legs are still moving when he says, “Rose.”
I’ve never, ever heard anyone say my name like that in my entire life. I didn’t even know that was my name until he said it like that.
“Yeah?”
He holds out his pencil. “What did you do?”
“I…just…it was…” I falter.
“What’s this stuff on it?”
“Oh, um, sorry—it’s eyeliner.”
He takes a few steps closer and looks carefully at my eyes. “You don’t wear that stuff.”
The flush starts. It’s slow-moving, but it’s going to be a huge burn—it stretches from shoulder to shoulder and it’s going to spread above my collar in about three seconds. I notice that his eyes are hazel with gold specks and then I can’t look anymore.
“Sometimes I do.”
“Like when?”
“If I’m going out with my boyfriend or something.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s that?” I have nothing to say. “You’re a freshman, right?” he asks.
“I’m fourteen,” comes out of my mouth. And then, like we’re playing in the sandbox, I ask, “How old are you?”
That glint of a smile shows up briefly again but disappears before I’m sure it was real.
“Come on, I’ll take you home.”
“You don’t know where I live.”
“Yeah, I do,” he says. I stare at him dumbly. “How’s your brother?” he asks.
The question surprises me. Even though Peter and Jamie played hockey together, I assumed they never talked off the ice. “Okay, I guess. He’s at Tufts. Are you guys friends?”
“I drove him home when Bobby Passeo skated over his fingers,” he says, not answering my question.
“I saw you, you know. Play hockey. When you were still on the team.” I become very interested in my shoes, realizing that I sound like exactly what I am—a babbling fourteen-year-old. He looks at me, waiting. When I don’t say anything else, he says, “So do you want a ride?”
“I can’t get in the car with you,” is my response. I’m no longer a babbling fourteen-year-old. I’m now ten. Or maybe eight.
He can’t help himself this time. He breaks into a huge smile. My heart skitters for a second.
“What do you think is gonna happen?” he asks, taking my French horn from me. I feel like an idiot. “Come on, freshman. I’ll drive you home.”
* * *
His car is old, and rusty and a strange, flat green. But the inside is clean, and black and smells like cold rain. I’m sitting far away from him, embarrassed that I was embarrassed when he opened my door for me in the school parking lot. The radio is playing Kanye, but Jamie changes it to a classic rock station. Pearl Jam. When I was in kindergarten Peter used to play Pearl Jam for me and make me recite the band members and the instruments they played. Eddie Vedder, singer. Mike McCready, guitarist. I can’t remember the bass player’s name. Jeff Something. Peter got me addicted to good music and real musicians at a very young age, which, to be honest, hasn’t done me any favors socially.
I can’t believe I’m in a car with Jamie Forta.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
“You look cold.”
“Not really.” He’s right. I am cold. But not because of the weather—September in Connecticut still feels like summer. I always spend the first three weeks of school sweating through my new fall clothes because I couldn’t stand to wear my summer clothes for another minute. I’m probably the only person in my entire school of 2,500 who wore a sweater today, willing the weather to be cooler.
Well, I sort of got my wish. I’m cold now. Fear does that to me.
I look at him and he’s looking at the road. He stops at a yellow light. I’m surprised. I guess I expected someone like Jamie Forta to just blow through a yellow light without even thinking about it. He’s still looking at the road. Nobody seems to have anything to say. I’m embarrassed again. I’ve been embarrassed a lot today. Mostly because of him.
“Where’s your notebook?” I ask.
“Locker.”
“Don’t you have any homework?”
He looks at me like I’ve said something funny. The light turns green, and he turns left. I realize that he actually does know where
I live.
Silence. Silence, silence, silence.
“I liked the house you were drawing.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a good artist.”
He takes another left. We drive by Tracy’s brown house with the red trim, where I will spend the first part of tonight lying on her bedroom floor, continuing our endless conversation about sex. After she decides she’ll sleep with Matt “soon,” since they’ve been going out since the beginning of eighth grade, she’ll move on to whether I should go out with Robert or not. The answer is usually no, but sometimes she says he’d probably treat me really well. Then I remind her that I hate cigarettes. She suggests I convince him to quit. I reply that people only quit if they want to. She says he’d definitely quit for me.
Robert, according to Tracy, has been in love with me since the sixth grade. I tell her that that’s impossible, because how did we know what love was in elementary school? She tells me that just because we couldn’t identify love when we were eleven, that doesn’t mean we weren’t capable of feeling it. Maybe she’s right. I have no idea. But I do know that I’ve never been in love with Robert. And I have no intention of going out with him just because he’s “in love” with me. Which he’s probably not. Because why would he be? I’m not pretty, and I like to use words with a lot of letters in them—two big turn-offs for guys.
My dad always got mad at me when I said things like that in front of him. “First of all, Rose, you are pretty,” he’d tell me. “And second of all, never look twice at a man who doesn’t appreciate a smart woman. Never.” He was always full of good advice that was impossible to follow.
For a while after he died, I saw him almost every night. I’d dream that I was in an empty movie theater, sitting by myself in a sea of red seats, watching him on a huge screen like he was a star. He was twenty-feet tall, his brown hair sticking out every which way, his blue eyes burning like neon when he looked at me, pinning me to my seat with his stare like he was waiting for me to do something, to fix the situation, to get him out of the action flick or Western he was stuck in and back into the real world. Sometimes I’d see things that really happened, like when I was ten and he took Tracy and me to a Springsteen concert, and I was embarrassed by his weird dancing but also kind of proud that he was so into the concert. Or I’d see us looking at his twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, studying the history and derivation of some crazy word that had come out of his mouth, like erinaceous. One night at dinner he’d said, “Pete, you seem to have inherited the erinaceous hair Zarelli men are often cursed with—consider cutting back on the product.” Later, when Peter found out that Dad had basically said his hair looked like a hedgehog, he didn’t talk to my dad for almost a week.
I bet Peter regrets that now.
Other times when I was having the movie theater dream, I’d see things that I didn’t experience. Like when the convoy Dad was riding in blew up, killing everyone within fifty feet.
Dad never should have been in Iraq. He wasn’t a soldier. He only went because when the economy tanked, he lost his job as an aircraft engineer, and the military recruited him as a contractor, offering him a big salary for a short tour of duty. Mom was freaking out about money, and they had eight years of college tuition to look forward to, thanks to Peter and me, so he went.
Peter and I never said it to them, but we both thought they had gone completely insane. And we were right. Dad got to Iraq in February and was dead by June, when the truck he was in hit a homemade roadside bomb. He died instantly they told us, to make us feel better. But it didn’t make us feel better—well, not me, anyway. It just got my imagination going, wondering exactly what that meant.
Dreaming about exactly what that meant.
The dreams about the convoy didn’t have sound. I never heard the explosion, or the dying, or anything. And there was no blood. I just saw Dad, sailing through the air with his eyes wide open, twisting and turning, and then landing on his back on the ground and cracking into sections like a piece of glass that had been dropped from just a few inches up, shattering but still keeping its shape.
The dreams stopped after a while, and I was relieved—until I started to miss them. Now that I don’t see my dad at all anymore, I worry that I’m forgetting everything about him.
Jamie takes a right and then a quick left, and ten seconds later we’re at my house.
“This is it, right?”
“Yes.” Silence. “So, when did Bobby Passeo skate over Peter’s fingers?”
“I don’t know. Two years ago, I guess.”
I can’t believe he still remembers where we live.
“Wait, you had your license two years ago?”
He shakes his head and leans back against his door, looking at me with those perfectly hazel eyes that make me nervous.
“You okay?” he asks, a cloud passing across his face. His question and dark expression catch me off guard, as I’m still thinking about him driving without a license. A thousand people have pissed me off by asking that question in the past few months. But I don’t seem to mind it when it comes from Jamie. “I’m sorry. About your dad,” he says.
I nod, but that’s all I can do. I’m not going to risk crying in front of Jamie. I can’t really predict when I’m going to cry, but when I do, it involves a lot of snot. “Well, thanks for the ride,” I say, reaching for the door handle.
“Rose,” he says. “You know my name, don’t you?”
His name? He thinks I don’t know his name? The idea that I’m so in my own universe that I haven’t heard Angelo call him “Jamie” and “Jame” every two minutes in study hall—that I wouldn’t know his name, that I wouldn’t know who he was after watching him play hockey all those times—is crazy. But should I admit that I know his name? If I know his name, will he think I…like him?
“Um…” I say.
His expression quickly goes blank. He turns back toward the steering wheel and puts the car from Park into Drive as if he were planning to gun it the second my feet hit the pavement.
“Jamie,” he tells me as he stares straight ahead, waiting for me to leave.
I’m an idiot. But if I now say, Of course I know your name, I’ve always known your name, he won’t believe me. “Thanks again for the ride,” is all I can manage.
I get out as fast as I can, and he takes off, leaving me standing in the street, feeling like a complete loser for pretending not to know the name of someone who just went out of his way to be nice to me, who seemed genuinely sorry about what happened.
Nice going, Rose. Way to make friends. Keep up the good work.
belligerent (adjective): inclined to hostility or war
(once again, see also: me)
3
A FEW HOURS later, I’m in my usual Friday-night spot, sprawled on Tracy’s bright orange shag carpet that we got at Target, waiting for Robert and Matt to show up so we can go to Cavallo’s for pizza. I am very carefully not talking about Jamie, although I feel like I’m going to explode if I don’t. He was being so nice, and I messed everything up. I want to ask Tracy if she thinks he actually likes me or just feels sorry for me, but I can tell she doesn’t like him by the way she looked at him in study hall today. It’s easier just to say nothing.
Tonight, predictably, Tracy and I are covering three topics during our session in her room: her virginity, Robert and her cheerleading tryout. To be honest, I can’t believe Tracy is going out for cheerleading at Union High. First of all, our cheerlea
ding team is not one of those amazing, superathletic competitive teams—there are no backflips off crazy-high human pyramids at halftime. The most acrobatic thing that goes on here is a synchronized hair flip. And being on the cheerleading team at our school isn’t like being a cheerleader at the private school in Union— Here, it doesn’t mean you’re at the top of the food chain. Yes, some of the cheerleaders are beautiful and go out with hot jocks, but some are average-looking girls who just happen to know how to dance. Some are smart, some not. Some have money, some don’t. In other words, not all of them are popular. And to top it all off, Union High cheerleaders have kind of a slutty reputation on the whole. At least, that’s what I heard Peter say once.
So even if Tracy does make the team—and I kind of don’t think she will—she’s not automatically granted access to the top tier of Union High popularity. But I’m not about to tell her that. She’ll just accuse me of being a snob. And in some ways she’s right—after all, I think Union High’s brand of cheerleading is a waste of time and teenage girls.
But I’d still rather talk about cheerleading than virginity.
“I don’t think fifteen is too young to lose it, do you?”
I hate this part of the conversation. “I don’t know,” I mumble.
“You always say that.”
Well, what do I know? I can’t really imagine letting a guy see me naked, never mind letting him do that to me while I’m naked. So I don’t really know what to think. I don’t want to think about it at all, most of the time. Which makes me think that fourteen is probably too young. And is fifteen really that different from fourteen?
“Maybe I should go on the pill,” she says.
I nearly fall through the floor. I suddenly feel like she’s thirty and I’m still in nursery school.
Confessions of an Angry Girl Page 2
