The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door

by Karen Finneyfrock

  karen finneyfrock

  Viking

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking,

  an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

  Copyright © Karen Finneyfrock, 2013

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Finneyfrock, Karen.

  The sweet revenge of Celia Door / by Karen Finneyfrock.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Celia, hurt by her parents’ separation, the loss of her only friend,

  and a classmate's cruelty, has only her poetry for solace until newcomer Drake Berlin befriends her, comes out to her, and seeks her help in connecting with the boy he left behind.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59404-9

  [1. High schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Revenge—Fiction. 4. Gays—Fiction.

  5. Poetry—Fiction. 6. Family life—Pennsylvania—Hershey—Fiction.

  7. Hershey (Pa.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F49835Swe 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2011047221

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed

  or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For Molly Eleanor Rhoades

  × × ×

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER

  1

  At fourteen I turned Dark. Now I’m Celia the Dark.

  The first day of ninth grade, I walked twenty blocks from my house to Hershey High School in boots so thick, it looked like I grew three inches over the summer. I wore a gray shirt under a black hoodie, which was pulled down so far over my forehead, it met my eyeliner. I swept in through the side entrance, located my locker on the second floor, and used masking tape to hang a sign on the door. It was made of black cardboard and letters cut out of magazines like a ransom note.

  Some kids, I’ve been told, come to school to learn. Some come for the social outlet or because they love theatre or football. Most come because it is legally required by the state and, therefore, their parents. I came to Hershey High School for revenge. I didn’t have a specific plan worked out, but I did know this: it would be public, it would humiliate someone, and it would be clear to that someone that I had orchestrated it.

  Call me a planet, orbiting a revenge-colored sun.

  Or a seed growing in the gray soil of settling the score.

  I am a cold drink, retribution for ice cubes,

  a meal spicy with payback.

  Call me a film reel. Watch to see what I do.

  That’s a poem I wrote this summer. I’ve been writing a lot of poetry since I turned Dark.

  As I opened my backpack to put books in my locker, the hall swelled with students and the amplified chatter of the first day. That’s when her voice could be heard, sweet and chipper above the rest, a small bird with a sound too big for its body. She pointed to my locker and sang out, “Weirder every year,” as the girls trailing her snickered into their palms.

  That’s Sandy Firestone. And if my heart were a crossbow, every arrow would be aiming at her.

  × × ×

  The sign on my locker read: CELIA THE DARK.

  CHAPTER

  2

  After securing my locker sign with thick strips of duct tape, I made my way to my first-period class, English. English is more than my favorite subject, it’s my only subject. All other classes are just required credits, but in English, time speeds up, and the bell seems to ring too soon. I’ve always been a reader. I’m usually involved in at least two books, and I love a library the way the swim team loves towels.

  I got to class a minute before the bell and took a seat in the last row. On one side of the room, beneath a bank of windows, were two six-foot tables stacked with novels. Already my heart rate was slowing, and a thin smile was forcing its way onto my face. I took out my notebook and a pen, hoping that class would start with the question, “What books did you read over the summer?”

  The teacher walked in carrying a coffee cup and took a seat behind his desk. He was only slightly taller than I was, balding, and his pants were wrinkled. Not the romantic character I hoped for in an English teacher, but I wasn’t passing judgment yet.

  I was anticipating the bell when a terrible first-day thing happened. Sandy Firestone walked through the door, right behind her best friend and personal tugboat, Mandy Hewton. Yes, their names rhyme. No, this is not a coincidence. In the sixth grade, Mandy went by her full name, Amanda Hewton. In the seventh grade, Amanda climbed the social ladder high enough to score the position of best friend to Sandy and promptly started asking all of our teachers to call her Mandy. Despite her new status, Sandy still treats Mandy more like an assistant than an equal, which is obvious to anyone who knows them.

  I’ve known Sandy Firestone since the sixth grade when we both started Hershey Middle School. And by known, I do not mean liked. To meet Sandy is to understand instantly that she is taking measurement of you in her mind. Her eyes study you before her lips confirm that she considers you either predator or prey. If she considers you prey, meaning you are an ugly girl or a socially awkward boy, then her mouth forms into a pucker like she might be silently saying the word no. If she fears you might be a predator, a pretty girl who just moved into the school district or a boy who’s smart but uninterested in her, her mouth breaks into a smile wide enough to show two perfect rows of teeth. Sandy did pageants all the way through middle sch
ool. That smile got her named Little Miss Derry Township.

  Sandy and Mandy plopped down in two open seats on the opposite side of the room, and I tried to force the tiny beads of sweat forming around my hairline back into my skin.

  “Ms. Door, hood off please,” were my new English teacher’s first words to me. Nice to meet you, too, Mr. Pearson.

  “Okay, students, welcome to ninth-grade Language Arts. Notice I did not say ‘English class,’ I did not say ‘reading’ or ‘writing class.’ I said ‘Language Arts class’ or ‘L.A.’ for short. In this class, you won’t just be reading books, you will be practicing literary criticism, writing papers, and critiquing one another’s work. We will not treat books as things to be passively read and forgotten, but as texts to be analyzed and understood. The first thing we are going to do is get you into your assigned seats.”

  The same groan goes up every time a teacher says “assigned seats.” We groaned the groan.

  “Sorry, people, but this is also homeroom, and I don’t want to waste a lot of time with attendance, so we’re going to do this by alphabet.” Oh no. I had been through this before. The last names Door and Firestone are separated by only one letter, and I spent all of eighth-grade English next to Sandy. I could only pray that someone named Susan Edward or David Emanuel was in the classroom. “Cynthia Adams, here.” Mr. Pearson pointed to a chair at the back, right corner of the room and started working his way forward. “Chad Brooks,” he said, “Alicia Brady, Jahlil Cromwell, Anupa Dewan, Celia Door.” He pointed to a seat halfway up the row by the windows. I held my breath. Come on, Susan Edward. “Sandy Firestone,” he continued, “here.”

  A whole year of Sandy Firestone’s blonde hairs on my desk in English class. Clearly, I had been marked by the gods for torment. I sluggishly dragged my boots over and dropped my backpack loudly on my new desk. “Ms. Door, less attitude please,” Mr. Pearson responded, giving Sandy the perfect opportunity to smirk as she took her seat in front of me. Sandy squealed when Amanda Hewton ended up in the seat next to her, and they high-fived before wiggling their fingers at each other across the aisle.

  I tried to concentrate during the rest of class as we received our syllabus and our first book assignment, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. But all I thought about was how my year seemed ruined before it had even started. I opened my notebook and tried to console myself the only way I could. Maybe this wasn’t all bad, I thought. Maybe this seating arrangement would help provide me with an opportunity to enact my revenge.

  CHAPTER

  3

  When I say I turned Dark, what I really mean is that I gave up. I gave up on trying to fit in and make everyone like me. I accepted the fact that no one liked me, and I didn’t care what they thought. Following the tragic events of my eighth-grade year, I realized that, in a field of sunflowers, I’m a black-eyed Susan.

  My Darkness officially began on July 21, the day I turned fourteen. Maybe it didn’t seem like I changed that much. I didn’t become completely gothic and pierce my tongue or dye my hair black. My hair was already dark, and my skin is pretty pasty, but I do wear colors besides black sometimes. Here is a poem I wrote about my skin:

  celia’s skin

  is white like

  the sun-bleached bones

  of beached whale

  skeletons

  People pushed me around before I turned Dark, and they still push me around. The difference is that now I push back.

  The rest of my first day of high school was bearable. In most classes, our seats were assigned, so I didn’t have to worry about who would sit next to me. In French, we were put into groups of three for conversation, so I got Liz Thompson and Vanessa Beale, who were now required to talk to me for one class per day. There wasn’t much time to kill between periods, and it was easy to look busy at my locker. Lunch, however, was harder to manage. I ventured outside to the grass beyond the basketball court and ate cold pizza with my nose buried in a book. Then I finished the break in the safest, calmest place in every town, school, or jail: the library.

  Libraries are my power centers. If I were a character in a video game and my avatar had to go somewhere to recharge her life force after losing a fight, it would be a library. This summer, I devoured two books each week. This fall, I have committed myself to reading at least one book of nonfiction from each of the ten main classes of the Dewey decimal system. If I continue at a rate of one book per week, I’ll be finished before Thanksgiving. I would eventually like to read one book from each of the ten divisions of the main classes, and then one book from the ten sections of those ten divisions. But that puts me up to a thousand weeks of reading, or nearly twenty years. That’s a lot to undertake at fourteen.

  The first day during lunch, I started with the section closest to the doors, which happened to be the Dewey decimal 400s class on language. The librarian looked a little surprised when I checked out Foreignisms: A Dictionary of Foreign Expressions Commonly (and Not So Commonly) Used in English.

  “Is this part of your language curriculum?” she asked, looking at my school ID card.

  “It’s not for class,” I said back, Darkly. It was the most I said to anyone at school that day in the English language.

  The next two days passed without major incident. Sure, on Wednesday morning when I tried raising my hand in English class to say that reading a novel set during the Great Depression was disconcerting in our economic climate, Sandy sighed and said, “Celia, you’re so . . . negative.”

  So I said, “Well, then why don’t you take me into a darkroom and see what develops?” which I thought was a clever retort regarding film cameras and photographic negatives.

  But then Sandy said, “Ewww, Celia is a lesbian.”

  So Mr. Pearson said, “Girls, less bickering,” and by lunchtime people were calling me Celia the Weird Lesbian.

  Still, I was hopeful that high school would allow me to blend in to a larger pool of oddballs and wallflowers. There had to be enough kids from other feeder middle schools and older grades to let me avoid notice. I dug my trench and prepared to last out the war. It was just after lunch, on Wednesday, that third day of high school that everything changed.

  I was doing a locker stop between the library and history, crouched down on one knee, swapping out a novel for a textbook. His voice broke three days of high school quiet. I was so startled, I dropped European History right on top of The Norton Anthology. “Why does the sign on your locker say ‘Celia the Dark’?”

  His blue-and-yellow sneakers were a foot from me, their fat laces pouting over the shoes’ tongues like bloated earthworms after the rain. One shoe gripped the hallway floor while the other rested its tread casually against a locker. His skinny jeans held his shins as tight as handcuffs and a slim-cut T-shirt embraced his lanky torso under an oversized, orange cotton hoodie. The whole outfit was a dynamic meeting of slender and thick.

  He was eating what looked like a burrito from an aluminum foil wrapper, even though we’re not allowed to have food outside the lunchroom. And he was gorgeous. I had seen him in the halls and also in my Earth Science class. His name was Drake Berlin, and he had the kind of style that you can achieve only if you were raised in New York City or possibly a foreign country. I knew from science class introductions on the first day that Drake had, in fact, moved here from New York.

  A cool, good-looking guy had never approached my locker before. I was half suspicious and half electrified. I tried to sound casual and vaguely menacing. “Because I’m Dark,” I said, picking up my history text again.

  Drake said something that none of my classmates had said to me in a long time. He said, “That’s cool.” Then he added, “Do you like comic books?” and popped the last of the burrito into his mouth.

  That day after school, Drake and I went to the wooded lot for the first time.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, was built in 1903 by Milton S. Hershey to house workers at his chocolate factory.
The tagline for Hershey is “The Sweetest Place on Earth,” but it should be “A Town Dedicated to the Worship of Refined Sugar.” Half of the kids in my school have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and all the kids in my school are being pumped full of Hershey’s chocolate from morning until night.

  Drake’s grandmother lives in the same subdivision as my family. It’s the sort of planned community that has five model homes to pick from, and the only big choice the homebuyer faces is whether to get a one-car garage or two. My house is model number 3: the Cape Cod. My dad used to drive around the neighborhood pointing out the other Cape Cods and naming the families who picked them. “Look, Steve Bishop got a Cape Cod, too,” he would point out to my mother. “Even with one story, I still think it’s the best use of the square footage.”

  My mom would generally respond with something like, “Which night is Celia’s parent/teacher conference?” My parents often sounded like two people who were not involved in the same conversation. It was like they were each talking to someone else on a cell phone with one of those invisible headsets, but they happened to be looking at each other while they did it.

  Drake’s grandmother’s house wasn’t one of the five models. It was the house that sat on the land before the subdivision came, so it lived at the end of one of our cul-de-sacs like an apple tree in an orchard full of peaches. It’s the only house adjacent to undeveloped land.

  As we walked the cleanly edged sidewalks from school to our neighborhood, Drake explained. “My grandparents moved to Hershey from New York City so they could retire someplace quiet. When they built their house, this was all trees,” he said, using his hand gesture like a chain saw to cut down the row of houses we were passing. “Developers bought the plots around the house, and Gran says the trees came down like dominos, and the houses came up like dandelions, and now they live in the middle of a development with only one lot full of trees. Developers still call her every year to ask if she wants to sell it.”