by N. Griffin
“Do you know why we’re stopped?” Bett asked Paul, who was in her class and also a basketball beast.
“The Catholics?” he guessed.
“Oh, right.” Bett remembered. There were so few kids in the Catholic school now that they couldn’t afford their own buses, so the public school buses were taking the kids who needed to go to the Catholic school there, too. They started the year later than the public school kids, so today was their first day.
Bett held her soda gingerly, because, even though she had already taken her first swig, the soda was all stirred up from the bumping bus ride and she could feel it bubbling against the two fingers she held over the opening of the can. She released them the barest bit and fizz spilled over the lid, but not horribly, not to the point of mess-making. Bett licked it and took her second-third swig as a girl with a headful of long straight dark brown hair that could be considered done in The Way came down the aisle in a plaid skirt and blue sweater.
“Can I sit here?” asked the girl as she got to Bett’s row.
Bett shrugged and moved over, one hand holding her soda and the other hoisting her backpack on her lap to give this girl enough room.
“I’m just Catholic,” said the girl beside her. “I’m not new or anything. So you don’t have to worry about being stuck introducing me to your school.”
“I kind of guessed that,” said Bett. She glanced at the girl’s sweater and skirt.
The girl caught the glance. “This foxy look is a dead Catholic giveaway, right?”
Bett snorted with surprise. The girl laughed, and then they caught sight of the contents of Bett’s snort on the back of the seat ahead of them, and both of them laughed so hard and so long that no sound came out and the last part of the bus ride was over before they knew it because the laugh was as wide as a week.
The bus pulled up at the Catholic school and the two of them were still laughing.
The girl wiped tears from her eyes. “Save me a seat this afternoon,” she said to Bett.
“You have to save one for me,” said Bett. “With your weird Catholic shorter day.”
“Fine,” said the girl. “You just sit there wearing human clothes and be mad about the one good thing about going to my school.”
They laughed again, but they were already weak from the last laugh, and the girl had to get off the bus with all her stuff, but it didn’t matter because they were already friends. Bett didn’t know a word for this instant familiarity you felt when you met someone who got it, whatever “it” was. But that’s what happened between her and this girl.
Bett wondered what the girl’s name was. Whoops.
5
Thursday Morning, the Start of Eleventh Grade at Last After That Wack Bus Ride
EDDIE PULLED THE BUS UP in front of Salt River K–12, and Ranger piled out, followed by Mutt and Dan and then Bett, who was full of anxiety again at the thought of seeing and being seen by everyone else out there. She was ready as could be expected for the rigors of eleventh grade, but the schoolful of kids boiling up the lawn was already too much. Especially after that crazy bus ride.
The school itself was old stone walls with large rectangular windows staring out at the lawn and stairs in the center leading to its main doors. Ahead of her, Ranger walked toward the entrance, tossing his head back every once in a while to keep his baseball cap out of his eyes, even as he kept hoisting his backpack over his shoulders. The double movement made him stagger sideways like a drunkard.
“You know where our homeroom is?” Dan asked Bett.
Bett opened her mouth wordlessly. Speak. “I can find it,” she managed at last. She tugged her sweater down and briefly wished she could tug her shorts legs down as well, long enough to cover her whole bottom half. But no. This was the whole point of wearing them. Mortification was everything, everything Plus- and positive-preemptive.
Dan shrugged and let his steps take him a little ahead of her, behind his head-tossing little brother.
Oh. It was a question, not an offer. Bett was such an ass. Dan’s own backpack was slung over one shoulder as he walked, hands in the pockets of his hoodie, head down and kind of bobbing as he headed into the school.
Mutt was ahead of her, too, already surrounded by his minions. “My dad’s name is on that,” he bragged to them now, nodding at the statue at the base of the school’s stone steps. “IED in Iraq. Shrapnel still in the old man’s skull. Too small to get out. And still he walks.”
Bett glanced at the statue now, one that honored everybody in Salt River who had served in a war. It was a man holding two other men in his arms, the arms of those men dangling, their faces slack. It was beautiful, in a sad kind of way. Bett had grown so used to it, though, that the man supporting the other two seemed to her to be more a resting place for the crows that bobbed around the school entrance than a man. Bett stayed her course up into the entrance of the school, but she knew if she turned around that the back of the statue man’s jacket was bulky, as if he had something under there. Supplies, maybe. He was a soldier, though, so more likely some kind of weapon.
Kids from all the buses piled into the school and swarmed forth to find their homerooms. Bett let them bump her and pass her on the way into the main foyer. The foyer itself was lined with charcoal drawings from the school’s free summer art classes, portraits of people’s grandparents, mostly, or other old people. They were surprisingly lovely. Who knew the proportion of kids who could draw was so high in Salt River? All Bett knew was that she certainly wasn’t one of them. There had been the tree incident in grade four, when her homeroom teacher suggested she be the cleanup monitor of the class if she didn’t feel successful as an artist. Fine by Bett. Why draw a thing when you could just be outside and look at it?
“You have the first lunch,” Mrs. Schlovsky, the apricot-haired woman who ran the main office, told Bett as she handed her her schedule for the year.
“First lunch?” Bett groaned inwardly. First lunch was at the inhumane hour of 10:48 and full of kids from the junior high part of the school. Bett would stand out like a camp counselor surrounded by tens of Rangers. “Can I switch out?”
“Don’t give me any grief,” said Mrs. Schlovsky. “You kids have no idea how hard it is to put together these schedules. Besides, there are other juniors in that lunch, don’t worry.”
Ugh.
Bett exhaled. There was no more putting it off. She had to make her way up to the third floor and her own homeroom. She climbed the stairs and stood at the door, steeling herself to go in, glancing into the classroom to see who was already there. There was Dan, talking to Hester, one of the few brown girls in the school and the only one in the high school. Hester had been adopted by a white family when she was born, and she hated it when someone, usually a clumsy teacher, brought up race.
“Shut up,” she would say to the class. “You people know nothing.” And she was kind of right. Salt River was almost entirely, rurally, Northeastily white, and race was not exactly a common topic of conversation amongst the white people.
Anna was with Hester and Dan as well, she and Hester slim as those little stone tube houses the caddisflies built—you could find them in the river if you knew where to look. The girls’ elbows were so thin they made points. A bunch of guys were tossing a Superball back and forth on the other side of the room, bouncing it against the ceiling and walls, getting it all in before the homeroom teacher showed up.
Bett slipped into the room and took a seat in the back as quietly as she could.
Crash!
Bett jerked. The Superball had slammed into the can of pens on the teacher’s desk and tipped them to the ground. The noise was enough to make Bett’s bad ear, the left one, fill with fluid and go out momentarily so the room quieted immediately by half. Anna leaped over to pick the pens up while the guys laughed like hyenas and high-fived each other and started up with the ball again, whipping it at one another with an aim to harm.
Slowly, Bett’s ear settled and she took a pen out of
her backpack and parked an ankle on her opposite knee. STOP, she wrote on the bottom of her sneaker. She traced the word until it was thick and black and depressed into the sole.
6
At Bett’s Locker After Homeroom, First Day of School, About to Do an Illegal-on-School-Premises Thing
OKAY, BETT TOLD HERSELF, HIDING her phone with her hand in her locker while she put in her one earbud with the other. Now. You have to.
And she pushed play on the Rayfenetta channel again.
“Blythe dolls are special,” Rayfenetta was saying. “You can change out their hair and clothes and even their eye color.”
Bett flinched.
But Rayfenetta was something else. You wouldn’t believe what she could make out of those dolls, and not just by switching out their eyes.
What did Rayfennetta’s eyes look like?
No. Don’t think about that.
Yes. You have to.
Bett watched as hands in the video cut out tiny pieces of foil and made them into a flower. Then the hands set the flower to one side and started cutting out more pieces of something like the foil, only heavier and even more metallic; she was using some kind of clippers rather than just regular scissors. What was Rayfenetta going for? Whatever it was, the doll was already gorgeous, partially dressed in a bodice made of the metallic stuff, braided and cross-woven in a complex pattern of three interlocking triangles.
Rayfenetta put the clippers down and took up the scissors again, but what was she cutting? Bett leaned in close. There was the barest hint at the edge of the frame. It was hair. Rayfenetta’s actual hair. There was a snip, and then a thin, five-inch hank of hair was in Rayfenetta’s hands and she took up the doll and started braiding her hair into its.
7
Autumn, Thursday, First Day of Eleventh Grade, Lunchtime
“HI, BETT!” IT WAS RANGER, standing in front of her in the barbarically houred lunch line. “They got tater tots!”
How was this kid so cute? Seventh graders were generally not adorable. Though Bett imagined Ranger had it tough in his own way, in a class full of well-developed girls and boys who were taller than he was.
“Hi, Ranger,” she managed to say back. At least she could talk to a seventh grader. “Congrats on the tots.”
He beamed at her. “Totscakes,” he said. “Want to cut me?”
Bett looked at him, startled, and then realized he meant in the lunch line. “Sure,” she said. Why not?
It was as bizarre as she had imagined to sit with a seventh grader at lunch. But Ranger seemed cheerful enough about it, even as the lunchroom filled.
“Bett. Dumbass.” It was Dan, passing them with a loaded tray on his way with a couple of senior guys to another table. Neither of the other guys said a word to her as they passed, but that was fine with Bett as she remembered her weird sweater and shorts. The inner thighs of the shorts were already fraying from her legs rubbing together, so she was almost afraid of standing up to empty her tray when the time came. Maybe she could wait everyone out and be last to leave. Ranger, though. That kid was parked with her for the long haul.
Across the lunchroom, Anna, a born Twinkler if there ever was one, was tearing off tiny pieces of a roll with bony, slim fingers and slowly putting them in her mouth. She wore drapey, artily torn clothes over her stick arms and leggings on her stick legs. The group of girls she was with laughed continuously, one after the other, sometimes two, the sound trickling like water in a stream.
Behind Bett, a bunch of Mutt’s minions were already seated. “He’s so proud of his dad on that statue,” said one now.
“So what?” said another. “My grandfather’s on it and I’m proud of that.”
“Yeah, but your grandfather isn’t a dick. Mutt’s dad is.”
“What else is new?”
“He called Mutt a fag last night.”
“So he’s a homophobic dick. We knew that. Gimme your tater tots.”
“And shut up. Here comes Mutt.”
“It was in one of those goddamn basement holes.” Mutt was plonking down his own tray and clearly continuing a conversation he had started with them earlier, pissed off still and reliving the events of the morning bus ride. “You know what? I am so sick of people coming up here and wrecking the place with these new houses. They cut down all the trees so snowmobiling is no fun over there anymore. ‘Coyote Acres.’ ” Mutt snorted. “There aren’t even any coyotes left in those woods, anyway.”
Bett’s head came up, surprised. She had thought that kind of thing was her own personal Stay sort of observation. But she would never turn around and say so, not after Mutt’s morning assholery.
She looked back down at her lunch tray, but on the way she caught Dan’s glance. There was agreement in his brown eyes, agreement about Mutt’s assholiness and the development both. Bett’s face grew hot. She did not have moments with people at school.
“And then that anus of a bus driver—”
But Ranger was calling to his brother’s table, a beat too late, really, to pick up on Dan’s earlier insult: “I’m not a dumbasscakes!” and the moment ended, thank God, because Dan was calling back over to Ranger:
“DUMBASS. YOU ARE A DUMBASS. THAT’S WHAT I CALLED YOU BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE,” and all the noise of the caf blended with their argument, Ranger cakesing along and holding his own against the stream of Dan’s disdain. Bett couldn’t help but admire the kid’s persistence.
Then: “I got to go to the bathroom,” Ranger announced abruptly. God, he was young.
“Go, then,” said Bett. “I’ll let them know where you are if anyone asks.” Now was the time for her soda, warmish and dented but still sweet. It was going to be an adventure, opening this can, given how it had been knocked around the bus this morning. Still, she was glad she’d picked it up off the floor on her way off her bus. Soda was her life’s blood.
Through the windows, a group of seniors were kicking a soccer ball around, but gently, talking at the same time, none of the whip energy of the junior homeroom Superball pegging tournament. More like the ripple of a warm-up dribble with a field hockey ball or the bumping of a nineties-feeling hacky sack, which her father had been into but Bett had been spared from for the last two years.
But at least those kids were outside. At least they let themselves move.
Bett sniffed the air. Was that a whiff of smoke? There was a line of kids who sat with their backs to the school outside every lunch period, smoking cigarettes. Maybe the smell was drifting in from the open window of the caf. Or no, more likely the smoke was coming from the bathroom outside of the caf, where people also gathered to do their smoky thing. The stink was gross.
But before she could think about it more, Ranger was tearing back into the room, still doing up his belt buckle, the metal parts of it clinking together like a pair of stones.
Dan slapped his forehead with his palm.
“It’s like the kid goes out of his way to be an idiot,” he said to his friends.
But Ranger was clearly too worked up to care about his undone-up pants. “Come see!” he cried, and it wasn’t just Bett who looked up. There was genuine alarm in his voice. “Come see!”
Bett left her lunch at her table and hurried behind a smallish crowd out into the main hallway behind Ranger. Once out in the hallway, she gasped along with the other kids who had followed Ranger out, too. Every drawing in the long front hallway had been slashed from top to bottom, the remains of the drawings swaying and swinging against the wall, pieces of faces dragging against the tiles, and those pieces were smoking, burning, fire licking and curling at the paper edges as if someone had walked by with a knife and a fingertip of flame.
“What the hell?” yelped Dan.
“Get out!” screamed a teacher. “Now!”
But kids weren’t listening, instead shooting their water bottles at the flaming, smoking paper even as other teachers were now yelling at them. There was Mutt coming out of the caf, too, with his loud, meaty friends, sto
pping short in the cloud of smoke.
Mutt swallowed hard, staring at his own name on one of the drawings from the summer, hanging now in smoking shreds.
If the hallway hadn’t been on fire and Mutt hadn’t been such a douche this morning, Bett might have had brain space to feel bad for him. But she was too shocked at the weird rage of the fiery destruction going on here to think about anything else at all.
Then one of the pictures flared up in flames and the rest went up, too, in a roar, and the school fire alarm finally went off, sudden and loud. Bett ran outside the building with everybody else, past the statue of the man holding the other two, heart pounding, near to throwing up and her left ear completely out again and numb.
8
Thursday, End of the First Unexpectedly Flamey, Loud, and Unsettling Day of Eleventh Grade
“DO WE HAVE, LIKE, A psycho in our midst?” said Dan in p.m. homeroom. He was only saying what other people, Bett included, were clearly feeling. Wasn’t the slashing and burning one of those signs they were always being warned about of someone who was about to go off on the whole school? Who even was it? A student who hated Salt River as much as Bett had grown to? An ex-student or a random nut who had not signed in with the apricot-haired office lady, as per procedure? Bett hoped it would be figured out quickly, today, because the last thing she needed was her own mother the cop up here investigating, for God’s sake. But she knew that was probably inevitable.
And sure enough, just before the final bell, the principal had to get on the loudspeaker to address all the nerved-up chatter about the sliced, burned drawings. “The police have been called and an investigation has been launched,” he said sternly.
Oh, God, help me.
Bett’s mother’s uniform alone was enough to make Bett need to go lie down, never mind watching it walk around her own school with her mother inside it.
“We’ll be questioning students in my office throughout the week,” Mr. McLean, the principal, continued. “The person responsible will be caught.”
