This Is How I Find Her

by Sara Polsky

But she doesn’t. I look past her, out the driver’s side window, and see that we’re already stopped in the school parking lot. Leila always parks in the small overflow lot at the back, the one that’s an entire school building away from the windows of the principal’s office. The radio’s still on, but Leila’s hand is on the key in the ignition, ready to turn the car off.

  A clump of people is walking toward us, each person trying to fit on the narrow mulch median bordered with stones that separates the rows of the lot. I recognize a few of them as friends of Leila’s from the jazz band she sings in, but I know only one: James, a tall boy with dark hair who seems to flop as he moves, as if all his limbs are noodles.

  Or I did know him. A shorter, younger version of him who used to play foursquare on the blacktop outside our elementary school with Leila and me, who would walk home with us almost every afternoon so we could run around in Leila’s backyard or ride bikes through her neighborhood. Aunt Cynthia worked with James’s mom, and he would stay with us until one of his parents came to pick him up for dinner.

  He used to be my friend too. Maybe even more my friend than Leila’s.

  In my head, I hear the rubber playground ball thwack against the pavement as James bounces it to our side of the chalk square. I hear Leila shout his name, annoyed, as the bounce goes high and she misses.

  She turns to me, her expression telling me she expects me to get the ball, but I shake my head. “No way,” I tell her. “It was in your corner.”

  James grins at me as Leila goes running after the ball, a grin that says hey, isn’t it nice to make her do the chasing sometimes? He produces a melting candy bar from his pocket and offers me half. I smile back from my quadrant, chocolate dripping from my fingers, and we’re allies.

  But I don’t know if he remembers any of that. As he and the girl next to him look toward where we’re parked, I turn away from the window, not wanting to make eye contact.

  Here, in the car, Leila is still looking at me, her expression asking, are you going to move, or what?

  I guess she decides the answer is or what, because she huffs, turns the car off, and shakes her head a little as she opens her door. She swings one leg out, then the other, then reaches around her seat for her bag. She gives me one more glance over her shoulder.

  Something about that look finally triggers me and I move, working my backpack out from under the glove compartment. My eyes skim over the initials on the front for the thousandth time, and I wonder who JKP is and whether I could slip into her life as easily as I slide her bag onto my back. I wish.

  Leila and I step out of our opposite sides of the car at the same time, shutting the doors with thuds that are almost synchronized. But that’s where the symmetry ends. She hits the door lock button and jumps right into a conversation with her friends. I hunch over, hook my thumbs under my backpack straps, and start to walk away.

  I glance back once to see James passing Leila one of his headphones so she can hear the song he’s listening to. She leans in and starts to tap her foot. They’ve always had that in common, music, the way my mother and I have art.

  I’m facing the school again, walking, when I hear one of Leila’s friends, a girl whose voice I don’t recognize. “Hey,” she says, “who was that?”

  “What?” Leila asks, and it’s what are you talking about, not what did you say.

  “The girl in the car with you,” her friend says. “Who was that?”

  “Oh,” Leila says. In the next second of silence, I imagine her waving one arm carelessly to say Her? She’s nobody.

  Then she says, “That’s my cousin, Sophie.”

  James says nothing, and I don’t wait to hear if the girl I don’t know will say anything else. Instead I walk faster, listening only to the slap-slap of my sneakers on the pavement and the jingle of the zippers on my backpack. The more quickly I get inside, the sooner I can lose myself, just one in the stream of eight hundred other students heading for class, hurrying to beat the bell.

  Seven

  But hiding is harder than I thought.

  In math class, we’re working quietly through a set of equations Mr. Borakov has scrawled across the dry erase board, our daily warm-up, when the phone in the corner buzzes. It’s a loud staccato sound that makes at least half the class jump and look toward the yellowed cradle on the wall. I put my head down, focusing on the next trig problem. Please don’t be for me.

  I punch some more numbers into my calculator, trying to get the equation to graph correctly. In front of me, there are at least two people using their calculators to play games while Mr. Borakov is on the other side of the room. I could play too; all the school graphing calculators have the same games saved by bored students from some other year. But I don’t look for them. Math is one of the few classes I actually like. The numbers and symbols are a language I don’t completely understand, but I believe I can if I keep trying. Eventually, the equations will form complete sentences. X plus Y will equal something: an answer, concrete and unambiguous.

  Mr. Borakov says a few words into the phone and sets it down with a click, and everyone looks up again. “Sophie Canon?” he calls. It’s only the fifth day of school, so his glance skims over the entire class, not completely sure which student I am.

  In the second seat in the third row from the right, I nod and put my hand up, just slightly, to the level of my shoulder. Mr. Borakov’s gaze finds me and stops.

  “Your guidance counselor needs to see you,” he says. “Just give me what you’ve done so far so you can get credit for today.”

  I’m only half aware of tearing the page from my notebook and putting my backpack on, of passing the sheet of paper to Mr. Borakov and hearing his thanks as I leave the room. I don’t know if anyone in the class is watching or wondering why I’m leaving. There’s only one thought in my head. What’s wrong now?

  —

  My guidance counselor is still in a meeting when I get to her office, so the secretary tells me to have a seat in one of the chairs lined up between her desk and the door. “Her meeting’s running a bit late. Or maybe you just walked here a lot faster than everyone else does,” the secretary says. Her voice is dry when she adds, “I have no idea why people aren’t more excited to get a call from the guidance office.”

  I try to laugh, but I can hear how fake it sounds. So I just shrug at her. I have no idea how fast I got here. I was too busy wondering what my guidance counselor needed to tell me. Is my mother worse than the nurse said she’d be? Was Aunt Cynthia or the hospital trying to reach me at school?

  I sit. The guidance office chairs are all fabric and cushion, nothing like the plastic-y hospital chair I spent hours in yesterday afternoon. But the feeling I have sitting in it is the same, the braids of anxiety twisting themselves together again in my stomach. I jiggle my legs. That makes me think of how jittery Leila was in the car this morning, then of seeing James and Leila sharing headphones in the parking lot, then of the way Leila shrugged me off. I stop moving and wait.

  “Sophie, hi!” My guidance counselor comes around the corner in her usual neat dark suit and pumps, hands out in greeting. She’s smiling and says my name with an exclamation point, and I must look confused, because when she stops in front of me, her eyebrows V downward. “Sophie?”

  “Hi, Ms. Wilkins,” I say. Why is she acting so cheerful about this? I follow her into her office, where she waves me into another cushy chair.

  She sits too and riffles through a mess of papers on her desk until she pulls out a single white sheet. Through the back of it, I see heavy black lines, what looks like a chart.

  “Here’s your new schedule,” Ms. Wilkins says, handing it over.

  New schedule?

  Ms. Wilkins is still talking. “You’ve lost your study hall and we had to switch you to a different period of English because there wasn’t an art class at your level in your free period, but it’s a
pretty minor change.” She points to the afternoon time slots on my printout.

  My eyes follow her finger down the page, but I’m not really looking or listening. Now I remember that I came to see Ms. Wilkins on the first day of school, just last week, because I’d been put in study hall instead of art by accident.

  The only thing I wanted that day was to be back at my black-topped table in the art room, sitting quietly in the same alphabetical order as always, closing my eyes and trying to make the shapes I saw behind my eyelids.

  If my mother ever asked me if I had a good painting day, I wanted to be able to say hmm too, in that same satisfied humming voice. To share a secret smile with her that said I know what that’s like.

  Ms. Wilkins must have called me in here just to tell me that she straightened out the schedule glitch. Not to talk about anything else.

  Not to tell me that something else happened to my mother.

  “Sophie?”

  I look up. Ms. Wilkins looks like she’s expecting me to answer a question, but I didn’t hear it. I wait, the way I did with Leila in the car this morning, for Ms. Wilkins to repeat herself.

  “Does that work for you? The new schedule?”

  I nod. I shift forward in my chair, ready to get up.

  “Good,” Ms. Wilkins says. “We’ll have to make another appointment soon to start planning for college applications, okay? Your math and science grades are strong, and your work in art, of course. You may want to start talking to Ms. Triste about what kinds of things to work on this year so you have art samples ready to go.”

  “College,” I say dully. “Sure.”

  Ms. Wilkins reshuffles another pile of papers, then runs her thumb down the side of the stack. The papers make a zzzwip noise. “How’s everything else going so far? Year off to a good start?”

  I freeze.

  In the next few seconds of silence, while I’m superglued to the edge of my chair, I try out a few phrases in my head.

  Not really. My mother’s in the hospital. Actually, I thought that’s why you called me in here. She overdosed on pills. I didn’t even know she had them.

  I need to change the address you have on file because I’m living with my aunt and uncle right now. It should only be for a little while.

  Ms. Wilkins waits, her eyes moving from the papers up to my face. She doesn’t know anything about my mother.

  I could tell her now.

  But all those sentences are locked away in my brain, separated by a thick wall from the regular words I let myself use every day. There’s a door in the wall, but it has a heavy padlock and rusted-over hinges. I don’t have the key.

  And when I open my mouth, somehow my feet move instead, propelling me up from the chair. Standing by the door of Ms. Wilkins’s office, the only words that come out are a lie.

  “Yeah,” I tell her, trying and failing to smile. “So far the year’s going fine.”

  —

  I eat lunch where I always do: sitting in the hallway by myself, back against my locker, textbook balanced across my knees. I chew a bite of my turkey sandwich for as long as it takes to read a word problem in my math book. Then I swallow, click more lead out of my pencil, and start writing an equation. The words become simpler numbers and symbols and I do problem after problem until my homework is finished. It’s the first time all day that I feel focused. Grounded.

  The bell hasn’t rung yet, so I reach into my bag for my history book. When I pull it out, there’s an envelope stuck between the book and its brown paper bag cover, the name of the electric company printed in the upper left corner. But there’s no bill inside. Just words scrawled across the back in my mother’s handwriting.

  Dear JKP,

  Today you’re a famous ballet dancer in school for a few weeks between tours with your company. You’ve got a big part in The Nutcracker for the holidays, so you’re gliding through the hallways, and none of your teachers dare ask whether you finished the homework. (Of course, being you, you did.)

  Have a great day!

  Love,

  Mom

  This is another one of my mother’s games: imagining who JKP could be and leaving notes for each of her many identities—debutante, guitarist, dancer, art thief—scrawled on scrap paper in my backpack. Sets of instructions for me on how to be a different person.

  I stare at the note, the letters getting blurrier below me, until there are feet thundering past me through the hall and the lockers above me start to open and slam shut again. Lunch is over.

  The voice in the back of my head starts whispering then, as I toss out the last bit of my sandwich and put away my history book. It whispers all the way through chemistry and gym, as I balance equations and count push-ups and do two laps around the track with the rest of the class. It keeps asking if this was the moment yesterday that my mother poured herself the glass of water and opened the bottle of pills. Did it happen now? The voice has a question for me between each jumping jack. How about now? I count crunches under my breath. Yesterday, while I was doing just this sit-up, was that when she swallowed the first one?

  The bell for seventh period interrupts the endless whispered questions, and I take out the schedule Ms. Wilkins gave me and walk toward English, Mr. Jackson, Room 210. Around me in the hallway, people are saying hello and shouting plans for after school. I keep my head down and watch my feet step on the lines between the floor tiles. Line, square, line, square, line.

  When I open the door to 210, the first person whose eyes I meet is Leila. The second is James.

  I stop three steps into the classroom, stuck in place just like I was in the guidance office.

  Someone bumps into my backpack from behind and I trip forward. “Excuse me,” a loud girl’s voice says.

  The teacher looks up at that, and I finally move away from the door and hold my new schedule out in his direction. I’m gripping the paper so hard I feel it crumpling in my hand, leaving a dent at the top. I refuse to look toward the desk where Leila sits.

  “My guidance counselor reassigned me to this class,” I say. And I wish she could switch me right back out of it.

  “Right,” Mr. Jackson says. “I think I got an email about that.” He squints at his computer monitor, clicking the mouse a few times, and I wait. The ceiling’s buzzing fluorescent lights reflect off the frames of his glasses and the shiny top of his head. The second bell rings. Students shuffle in and take their seats in the U-shaped row of desks until I’m the only one still standing.

  “I can’t find it,” Mr. Jackson says, straightening up and turning to face me. He peers at my schedule. “Sorry about that. What’s your name again?”

  I feel the rest of the class sitting there, waiting for this to be over. Out of the corner of my eye, I see James watching me. And I think I see the edge of Leila’s mouth turn up in a smirk. I remember again how I imagined her this morning, waving one arm after me in a gesture that said, Her? She’s nobody.

  “Sophie Canon,” I say. But somehow my voice runs out halfway through, so I swallow the “on.” My face starts to feel hot.

  “Well, welcome,” Mr. Jackson says. He sweeps one hand toward an empty desk at the back of the U. “Have a seat.”

  He launches into an explanation of this week’s reading assignment, interrupting himself to remind everyone that words from the first few chapters will be on Friday’s vocab quiz, but I catch only about one word in every six he says. When I glance at the other side of the room, I think I see James looking toward me, but his eyes flick away quickly, and I’m not actually sure he was looking at all.

  I doodle absently in the corner of the vocabulary worksheet someone passes me, sketching towers of connected triangles and cubes. Mr. Jackson’s words fade into the background and the other voice, the whispery one, comes back. Was it now? I look over at the clock and imagine the ticking I’m too far away to hear. I try to draw
another cube, but my hand is shaking and it comes out crooked. Or now?

  Then the voice starts asking another question. What if? What if my mother hadn’t been breathing when I leaned over her yesterday? What if I hadn’t come home right after school and run upstairs to look for her? What if she had taken the pills somewhere other than our apartment?

  Panic rises up through my body as my imagination keeps asking questions, wilder and more far-fetched, taking me far away from class and my desk and the vocabulary book sitting on it.

  And I wonder: if I’m listening to a voice in my head, a voice that makes me scared, does that mean I’m crazy too?

  Eight

  I don’t go to art.

  By the time English ends, the questions have grown to a crescendo in my head, too loud for me to hear anything Mr. Jackson says. The bell pulls me out of my thoughts just as I’m starting to imagine my mother’s funeral, everyone in black dresses and suits except for my mother’s artist friends in long sweaters and scarves. Finding myself in my seat again feels like waking up from a nightmare. I’m shaking and terrified.

  I need to see my mother.

  I need to reassure myself that what I remember is what happened; that what I’m imagining isn’t real. That I found her and called the ambulance; that she’s at the hospital and on her way to being okay.

  When the bell rings, I’m one of the first out of the classroom, backpack on, feet almost skidding across the hard hallway tiles. I turn right and hurry down the stairs, thinking only of yesterday afternoon, when I climbed up to our apartment so quickly I felt it in the backs of my legs. I try to breathe evenly, to keep my heart from racing. My mother is the one who is anxious, who can sometimes talk and move impossibly quickly. I am calm.

  I’m calm.

  The nearest exit is past the art room, where I’m supposed to be spending the next period. As I walk that way, people weave around me and peel off into classrooms; as I get closer to the art room, I recognize a few of my old classmates ahead of me.