I was shocked to see Joey playing a team sport. I was even more shocked to see that he was wearing a Hershey High basketball jersey, indicating that he had made the JV team.
From the start, Drake was impressive. I know nothing about basketball, but when one player keeps getting the ball and running with it, it’s pretty obvious he’s a talent. Drake made two baskets while I watched. The scene inspired me to write. I was experimenting with visual poetry.
BASKETBALL
boys grunt and shuffle
check right then left and sweat,
grit their pounding teeth as the earth
keeps grabbing the ball back. they are
practicing to be jackhammers. they are
practicing to be men, looking for
something they can win.
basketball
I was so involved in writing my poem, I didn’t notice Sandy and Mandy approaching until they spread out a blanket in the grass near me with a crew of four girls I didn’t know from middle school. Social-climbing transfer students maybe, or mean girls from other feeder schools. A chilly wind blew from their direction. I pulled my hood up and stuck my nose farther into my journal to pretend I was still working on my poem.
“I think she got that dress from her grandmother.” I heard Mandy’s voice carry over, followed by a smattering of laughter. “And it was already out of style when her grandmother wore it.”
“She thinks she’s alternative,” responded Sandy, “when really she’s just gross. She smells like a junk shop.”
“She smells like a Dumpster,” echoed Mandy.
“Did you see the sign she put on her locker?” said a third girl’s voice.
I had to force myself not to glance over at them. The space between us on the grass folded together like an accordion. They were inches away instead of feet. I could feel them breathing on me.
“Look at her writing in her journal. She thinks she’s so much deeper than the rest of us. I’m sure people are lining up to read books by fringy, high school creepers,” said Sandy.
I could feel my face starting to flush and glanced up to make sure Drake wasn’t noticing anything. He was still involved with the game. I was writing so hard in my notebook, I poked my pen tip through a few pages. I thought they couldn’t affect me anymore. When I turned Dark, I thought I stopped letting Sandy get to me. It was starting to feel like eighth grade all over again, like there was a black hole opening up in my chest with enough gravity to suck me into it.
“Maybe she’s in love with the new guy,” said Mandy.
“As if someone that hot would date someone that ugly,” Sandy came back.
“He probably ate lunch with her so she would do his homework,” said another girl I didn’t know.
One of the by-products of mean high school girls is other mean high school girls. Even though two of the girls who were talking about me didn’t even know me, ganging up on another girl is the quickest way to get into the gang.
I wanted to get up and leave. But leaving would be like sending them a note that said, “Dear Mandy and Sandy, I submit to your dominant power.” Ice formed between my butt and the grass, holding me frozen in place. I just kept writing in my poetry book and pretending I didn’t hear them. In actuality, my hearing had become five times better. I could hear them click their fake nails together like claws.
When the bell rang, Mandy and Sandy’s group stood to leave. Sandy threw one last comment at me over her shoulder, as if she were littering. “Drake told me he was going to hang with her because he feels sorry for her.”
I looked down at my poetry notebook. My “poem” read:
things celia needs to change
things celia needs to change
things celia needs to change
things celia needs to change
things celia needs to change
things celia needs to change
things celia needs to change
CHAPTER
8
After the basketball game, Drake asked me to go to the wooded lot again after school. I spent the next three periods failing to sit still in class. I must have asked to go to the bathroom or water fountain twenty times before the final bell. I was so drunk on the thrill of discovering him, I managed to forget about what Sandy and Mandy did at lunch. Drake was from a fantasy world called New York City, a place where it was possible that people might actually “get me.” If I was an alien here, then Drake had come from my home world, and we were both currently stranded on a bizarre planet called Pennsylvania.
“Meet anyone cool in the basketball game?” I asked on the walk home, trying to sound nonchalant.
Drake cleared his throat. “Yeah, one of the guys told me about the new exhibit at the art gallery, and another one invited me to a silent film festival.” He looked at me and crossed his eyes. He was carrying his skateboard under one arm so we could walk together.
“Oh yeah, those guys never shut up about the symphony season,” I managed to say before hiding my hot cheeks inside my hood. I was still holding out hope that I might have fooled this hapless newcomer into believing I was one of the cool people in Hershey, not some jealous girl desperate for friends.
“All the jocks love Debussy,” Drake said back.
When we got to his house, we cut across his lawn to the wooded lot. I followed Drake through the leafy ground cover and snarling undergrowth to the same horizontal log we had populated the day before. It felt familiar to me already as we each settled in across from each other on a smooth and barkless section of the tree trunk.
The more time I was spending with Drake, the more I found myself noticing how truly handsome he was. When he smiled, his jaw formed a set of ninety-degree angles, and his mouth sat in the middle like it was framed. He had brown eyes and exceptionally long eyelashes for a boy. His hair was styled to point up in the middle, a short faux-hawk. Drake’s lips, particularly the bottom one, were plump. If you sat close enough, you could count the creases in the pulpy flesh. I counted fourteen, sitting on the log.
“Celia,” he said, snapping me out of my crease-counting daze. I turned away from him to fumble awkwardly in my backpack, so I had an excuse to hide my face. “Yeah?” I responded distantly. I pulled lip balm out of my bag and made a show of putting it on.
“So, do you date guys or girls?” asked Drake. “Or both?” He asked me casually like we were talking about bowling. “Still using duckpins?” he might have been saying. “Or have you graduated to ten-pin bowling?”
“Um, I guess . . . guys,” I answered, trying to match his casual tone. I hesitated because in order to date guys, you actually have to go on dates. I had never been on an actual date.
I do have an interest in guys. In fact, I have so many love interests, I’ve organized them by genre. My classic crush is Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. For fantasy, I’ve chosen Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. Sci-fi is a tie between Peeta and Gale from The Hunger Games, and my favorite contemporary fiction bad boy is Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. Maybe they aren’t exactly real boys, but I feel like I know them all, their deepest thoughts and desires. It’s not like I’m going to go get a crush on some boy in Hershey High when I’ve got Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle at home.
I wasn’t about to tell any of that to Drake, though, and I didn’t know why was he asking me. Was he checking my sexual preference before telling me he liked me? Was this a New York thing? I held my breath to listen for what Drake would say next, hoping he would ask me out or ask me to be his girlfriend or whatever boys ask when they like you.
“Well, I . . . like guys,” Drake said in a voice that sounded abrupt and professional. Then he softened and added, “A guy, actually.”
I was suddenly aware of all the little noises around me. There was the textured, white noise of the leaves rustling and falling, at least three types of birds calling to one another from high branches, the distant hum of the highway. It had never crossed my mind that Drake might like boys. Th
ere were two older men at my church who were a couple, but I had never met anyone my age who was gay.
Drake stood up off the log, put his hands on his head, and said, “Wow. That felt so good.” He wiped his palms off on his jeans like they had been sweating. “I have never said those words out loud to anyone before.”
The best response I could come up with was, “Um . . . congratulations.”
“Thanks, Celia,” he said sincerely, putting a hand onto his chest. “I needed a test run. I needed to tell someone who just met me, who I knew wouldn’t judge me. I’ve been nervous about it all day.”
I sat on the nurse log trying not to wish he had said something else. I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs, looking for a position that didn’t seem awkward.
“I just feel like it’s time now.” Drake started to walk carefully over the roots around the log. “Ninth grade, high school, new opportunity to define yourself.” Drake used his hands to talk. “I wanted to tell someone before I go back to New York this weekend and come out for real.”
“For real?”
“You know, like tell the people who really know me. My parents and Japhy.” Drake sat back down on the log next to me.
I reminded myself for the second time that day that Drake’s real life was still back in New York. “Japhy?” I asked. “Like the character in Dharma Bums?”
“Hippie parents.” Drake laughed. “His mom’s an actress at the theatre my dad runs. You’re well read.”
“Is Japhy the guy?”
“Yeah. He’s the guy. He’s my best friend since we were ten. We’ve always been close, and I guess I always knew I had feelings, but in the last month . . . I don’t know, something’s been changing. You know, Celia, when you can just tell someone likes you?”
“Yeah. It’s so . . . cool when that happens,” I lied.
“The last time he was over . . .” Drake stopped. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Do you guys hang out a lot?” I didn’t want to feel jealous of Drake’s other friend, his best friend, whom he did like. But I did.
“Our parents have always had dinner together every Tuesday night and then gone to a show. When we were little, they would bring Japhy over and get us a sitter. When we turned twelve, we convinced them we could be left alone. Well, really, Japhy convinced them. Japhy likes trouble.”
Since I met Drake the day before, he had looked so confident and unflappable. Now he was blushing and braiding his fingers together. He stood up again and picked a stick out of the dirt.
“When we do something risky, or a little dangerous, Japhy calls it the ‘envelope,’ like ‘Come on man, we gotta push the envelope.’” Drake kicked leaves away from a patch of dirt and started drawing pictures with his stick. I dangled a leg on either side of our tree-bench.
“Sometimes we sneak out and go to Times Square, talk to homeless guys, skateboard on subway platforms, count rats.” Drake drew a circle surrounded by arrows. “Our parents don’t know about any of it.”
Jealousy threatened to burn a hole right through my sweatshirt. Why didn’t I get a best friend to sneak out of the house and count rats with? Why didn’t I get a best friend who was possibly in love with me and liked trouble? I felt cheated. Sandy Firestone’s face flashed through my mind.
“But the last time, we decided to stay home. We were playing video games in the living room, and I kept beating him. So, finally, he grabbed the controller out of my hand and tackled me. Japhy’s athletic, great at basketball and skating. I was fighting back, but he pinned me on the floor.” Drake threw down his stick and stood in the leaves, holding out both arms to pantomime the act of holding someone down. “We’ve always wrestled, but this time when he was lying on top of me, he just looked at me and smiled. Then he said, ‘Don’t beat me again,’ and got up.” Drake’s cheeks were in full bloom, red as a sunburn.
“After that, we just sat on the fire escape and watched pedestrians. But I have the feeling that he was telling me something. That smile. Wow, I’m so nervous,” Drake said, shaking his hands like he had just washed them and couldn’t find a towel.
“There’s a new play opening at my dad’s theatre this weekend. I’ll see it Friday night, and then Japhy will come over Saturday night while our parents are at the show again. I’m going to tell him, Celia. Or, at least, see how things go and maybe tell him or maybe just . . . No. I have to tell him. I can’t chicken out.” Drake ran both hands through his hair and then styled it again. “Then I’ll tell my parents on Sunday.
“Celia,” said Drake, turning toward me and folding both arms over his chest. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone what I told you? I don’t want anyone in Hershey to know before I tell my parents.”
Drake looked so vulnerable then, I felt terrible for being jealous of him. Plus, it had been a painfully long time since anyone shared a secret with me. “Drake,” I said, pulling my hands out of my hoodie sleeves and clutching them together. “I would never do that. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Thanks,” said Drake, moving to sit down next to me on the log again. “Okay, your turn. Now you have to tell me something.”
I swear I almost told Drake right then, all about eighth grade and Sandy and the Book. It was the perfect moment with a secret hanging out on my tongue just waiting to sprout wings and fly out of my mouth. But a familiar black hole started to open in my chest sucking my words away into it. What if I told him the truth and he didn’t like me anymore? He was staying for only a month, but a friend for a month was better than no friend at all. I needed him too much to be honest with him.
“I write poetry,” I blurted out.
“Oh, cool,” said Drake, sounding only mildly disappointed with my tame secret. “Will you read it to me sometime?”
A little light started to flicker in my chest where the black hole had been. I nodded.
CHAPTER
9
Before I left his house to walk home, Drake asked me if I wanted to walk to school together the next day. So, Friday morning, the end of our first week of ninth grade, I showed up at the park in our neighborhood at eight a.m. I was there a few minutes early, hoping to get to school in time to exchange my library book before first period. I hadn’t read all of Foreignisms because it was a bit like reading the phone book, but I did pick up some good words and felt I could ethically move on to the 500s class of the Dewey decimal system. I sat on a swing to wait for Drake.
I don’t have a cell phone. I had one, briefly, when my dad left for Atlanta and bought me one, saying we could “keep in touch better.” But I left it in my hoodie pocket and accidentally washed it and that was the end of my connectivity. Mom said, “No more cell phone until you make enough money to replace that one. You’re old enough to babysit.” This particular attempt to teach me responsibility reeked of hypocrisy because she loses things more than anyone. Since the only people who called me were my mom and dad, I decided to teach a lesson of my own and not bother to earn money for a replacement. Now my dad mostly emails, and my mom has to deal with not being able to contact me whenever she wants.
Waiting for Drake in the park, I checked the time on the digital watch I got at the thrift store. It told me Drake was running late. I started pushing my feet back and letting myself swing casually forward, then twirling side to side, looking down the street in the direction of Drake’s house and then up the street toward school. At ten minutes after eight, I started to get a bad feeling. Maybe I didn’t react well enough to Drake being gay. Maybe he was hoping that I was gay, too, and now that he knew I wasn’t, he wasn’t all that interested in me. Maybe he just wanted someone to practice coming out to and I had served my purpose. It’s not like it really mattered, since he was going back to New York soon anyway, and I would go back to being a lone wolf again, no friend in sight.
I used to have a best friend in middle school, from sixth to eighth grade. Ruth and I found each other at the public library the weekend after school started, both reading The Egypt Game on a su
nny Saturday afternoon. We fell into a conversation about the book and didn’t climb out of it for two hours.
Ruth’s family was religious, and she wasn’t allowed to watch television or wear pants. She wore long white dresses and a blonde braid that hung to her waist. She also wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers or go to the mall, so our friendship, although intensely close, was limited.
One of the ways we connected was by reading the same book and trying to stay on the same page so that neither one of us gave away plot points. Sometimes she would call to say, “I couldn’t stop myself and I read a hundred more pages after dinner.” I would have to stay up late to catch up. One time I was so sick with the flu that I couldn’t hold up a book, and Ruth read to me over the phone from James and the Giant Peach for over an hour until I fell asleep with the receiver on my pillow.
We were inseparable at school and good students. But middle school is a toxic environment for kids who deviate from the mainstream. Maybe it was my friendship with Ruth that first brought me to the attention of Sandy Firestone. Early in the seventh grade, Ruth was targeted. Changing in the locker room before gym, she pulled off her button-down dress, revealing large, white cotton panties that looked two sizes too big, and a heavy, stitched polyester bra. They seemed out of place on her body, like a three-piece suit on the beach.
Ruth was already starting to “develop,” so she needed the polyester bra. What little I have in the boob department hadn’t started to emerge yet, so I was still wearing an undershirt.
“Jesus, Ruth,” said Sandy Firestone from her station at the lockers. “Do you even have hand-me-down underwear?”
The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door Page 3
