Yesterday

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “Ten,” I tell him.

  The boy runs one of his hands through his blond hair. “Too bad.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m in eleven. But hey, at least I know where to find you.” He taps my locker with two of his knuckles. “See you around.” He flashes me one last grin before disappearing into the crowd.

  By the time I’ve stuffed my coat into my locker, shaken my binder and boots off (having forgotten to bring a pair of shoes to change into) and retraced my steps back to room 114 I’m late for homeroom. Mrs. Snyder seems like the cranky type but because I’m new she cuts me a break. She’s written today’s date—Monday, February 4, 1985—on the blackboard and I stifle a yawn as I weave my way over to an empty seat in the second row. We have to stand for the national anthem and then listen to a series of announcements that most of the other students seem to sleep through. I would probably sleep through them too but I don’t feel at ease enough for that.

  The discomfort clings to me like a second skin as I move from homeroom to math to English. Being the new kid is never good but I don’t think I’ve ever had people stare at me this much and it makes me paranoid. Like I’m never going to fit in here because no one except the teachers and the blond guy from earlier will ever say anything to me; they’ll just keep sneaking peeks at me from across the room like I’m seven feet tall or my skin is purple.

  At lunch I don’t know where to sit without making it look obvious that I’m alone and I pause just a few feet inside the cafeteria door, scanning the tables as though I’ll magically spy someone I know. Just as I’m resolving to stride boldly forward a girl I recognize from math class appears at my side. She has wavy black hair that you can tell was dyed and is wearing equally dark clothing but her makeup (except for her paint-thick black eyeliner) is as pale as death. “Freya, right?” she says.

  She doesn’t allow time for me to answer or maybe I’m just too slow, neck-deep in that fog I can’t escape. “You can sit with me if you want,” she says, pointing to a table on our left. “Derrick and I usually sit over there.”

  “Thanks.” I step forward to trail the girl from my math class to her table. Her friend Derrick is already seated. He’s black and skinny and his clothes are as decisively dark as hers. His hair, however, is the exact same color as a bumblebee—wide, alternating strips of black and yellow. I can’t work out why everyone’s staring at me when his head doesn’t seem to be scoring the slightest bit of attention.

  “This is Derrick,” the girl tells me as we sit down across from him.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Freya’s in my math class,” she explains. “Is it your first day here?” she asks, turning towards me. “I don’t remember you from last semester.”

  “First day,” I confirm.

  Derrick rests his sandwich on his lunch bag. “So what other classes do you have?”

  He brightens when I run through the names of my teachers. “You have bio with me last period,” he notes. “Believe me, Payne is the nicer tenth-grade biology teacher, despite his name. We lucked out.”

  “Cool,” I murmur. I need all the luck I can get. I’ve already forgotten virtually everything my math and English teachers said this morning and I doubt my afternoon concentration levels will be much of an improvement.

  My stomach roars like a wildcat as I head over to buy my lunch (chili with a bread roll), but I’m relieved that I don’t have to sit alone and now know people in half of my classes. Once I return to the table, Derrick and the girl, who I learn is named Christine, are bad-mouthing a French teacher and discussing bands I’ve never heard of. It’s like eavesdropping on two people speaking a secret language and after I’ve polished off my lunch and have essentially been staring into space for a few minutes, Derrick notices that I’ve tuned out. He wags a finger at me as he remarks, “We’re losing her.”

  Christine scrapes at one of her cuticles and switches her attention to me. “So, who do you listen to?”

  I shrug. “Whatever’s on the radio. I’m not big into music.”

  Christine’s chin dips like I’ve given the wrong answer and, not wanting to be a disappointment, I rack my brain for band/musical artist names to give her. Coming up with any is surprisingly difficult. “Wham’s okay,” I offer at last. “And, like, Prince and Van Halen. The Police. Cyndi Lauper.”

  Christine’s and Derrick’s twin expressions reveal that these, too, are the wrong answers. Then Derrick shrugs with his elbows and says, in what I think is meant to be a charitable tone, “Music’s a really personal thing. Everyone’s taste is different.”

  Christine scrunches up her face. “Van Halen, though, seriously? David Lee Roth is such a joke.”

  I mean … I don’t know. Why does it even matter?

  “Whatever,” I say, her disapproval beginning to grate on me. “I told you I wasn’t really into music.” I can’t remember a single person asking me about bands at my old school, not one, and I struggle to recall who my best friend Alison’s favorite band or musical artist was but the information’s not there. I see us riding horses together and laughing about boys. She’d land herself in trouble with teachers more than I would but never about anything serious, just stuff like talking and passing notes in class.

  Last July she convinced me to walk to the supermarket three blocks from my house and finally speak to the cute stock boy I liked to stealthily stare at. His name was Shane and he kissed me by the bike rack behind the grocery store three days later. In another week and a half he was my boyfriend and two months after that we were breaking up.

  Suddenly I can’t stop thinking. About him. Alison. Everyone. Everything. My mind’s racing with thoughts of life in New Zealand and all the other places I’ve lived in the past sixteen years. Teachers I liked. The gerbils my mother let me keep as pets in Hong Kong. My father building a network of elaborate sand castles with me on a Spanish beach. My parents coming home from the hospital with my sister days after she was born. Dates, names, geographic locations and cultural events flood my brain, making my head throb like I’ve just gulped down a frostbitten scoop of ice cream.

  December 8, 1980: John Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman in New York City.

  January 20, 1981: After fourteen months, fifty-two American hostages were released, ending the Iran hostage crisis.

  July 29, 1981: Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England.

  November 30, 1982: Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was released.

  March 23, 1983: U.S. president Ronald Reagan announced a defense plan popularly known as Star Wars.

  April 23, 1984: The discovery of the virus that causes AIDS was announced.

  I’m a human encyclopedia, pictures, concepts and people flashing behind my eyes: Macintosh personal computers. Pac-Man. Cabbage Patch Kids. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Compact discs. MTV. Mount Saint Helens. E.T. Rubik’s Cube. Duran Duran. Madonna. Space Shuttle Discovery. Atari. Margaret Thatcher. Pope John Paul II. James Bond. Blondie. Trivial Pursuit. Darth Vader. VCRs. Oreos. Playboy magazine. Tylenol. Touch-tone telephones. Big Macs. Easy-Bake Ovens. Kool-Aid.

  Remembering, remembering. Lost in an avalanche of information …

  “Hey!” Christine snaps, waving her hand in front of my face. “Earth to Freya.”

  I hurtle back into the present, my fingers massaging my forehead and the pain beginning to subside. I shouldn’t have come today; I should’ve tried Olivia’s line about still being sick. I’m not ready to be around people. Not right.

  I could beg off sick after lunch. Postpone my first full day at school until tomorrow or the next day. But will being here feel any more natural then? I doubt it.

  When the bell rings I stick with Derrick and head for bio, feeling quiet and tired (and already hungry again, always hungry). Because this is the first day of second semester Derrick and I are able to grab seats together and as I slip into mine I notice what I’ve been noticing all day—fu
rtive eyes on me. I try to let it slide, act like I don’t notice, but thirty minutes into the period my resolve cracks and I lean close to Derrick and whisper, “Why does everyone keep looking at me?”

  Derrick’s expression shifts from slightly sheepish to incredulous. “Have you looked in a mirror lately, Freya?”

  My eyes dart to my cable-knit sweater and then my jeans and casual winter boots. Is there something wrong with what I’m wearing?

  “You look like a model,” he adds. “You must get guys staring wherever you go.”

  Derrick’s not kidding but his explanation comes as a shock. I know Shane considered me pretty but it’s not like I had guys lining up at my door to ask me out in New Zealand. I’ve always been the kind of girl who blended into the crowd.

  I take a sweeping look around the room, eyeing up the other girls in my class. Maybe I’m better looking than a few of them—I don’t have braces, acne, or frizzy hair—but I’m nothing special. As I’m scanning the room, thinking this over, my gaze collides with a dark-haired guy’s in the row ahead of me. Caught, he fixates on Mr. Payne talking about worksheets and quizzes at the front of the room.

  A similar scene plays out during history class last period. Guys staring. Some girls too. Most of them avoid my eyes when I zero in on theirs but a couple of the boys are bold enough to smile at me. It’s bizarre to have this attention out of nowhere; I’d feel out of place enough without it but now, more than anything, I don’t want to stand out.

  I look exactly the same as I did when we left New Zealand two and a half weeks ago—it doesn’t make sense for people to see me differently—and as soon as I’m home again I track snow into the hallway, tugging off my coat, gloves and scarf as I approach the mirrored sliding closet door. Olivia, already back from school, has the TV on in the other room and I hear a siren wailing and pretend cops shouting as I focus on the image in the mirror.

  Of course I know what I look like. Slim. Just shy of five foot nine. Dirty-blond hair. Fair skin. Straight teeth. No scars. The mirror doesn’t reflect anything other than my usual self.

  “What’re you doing?” my sister asks, coming up behind me.

  “Nothing. I thought I had something in my eye.” I lean closer to the closet, pulling one of my eyelids down and scrutinizing my eyeball like I’m searching for a stray lash or speck of dust. “It must be gone.”

  I twirl around to study Olivia. I never noticed how flawless she is compared to other people, like she won the genetic lottery. Symmetrical, blemish-free, each part of her body in perfect proportion to the rest. Her hair’s dark and curly where mine is light and straight and her skin tone’s closer to olive than ivory. Even her eyes are darker than mine—navy blue to my pale aqua. You probably wouldn’t guess we were sisters if you didn’t know us. We really don’t resemble each other much.

  I don’t know why it should come as a surprise to me that Olivia and I don’t have the same hair or eyes. Why does my entire life suddenly feel so alien to me? Can my father’s death really account for all of that?

  “Laverne and Shirley’s going to start in a second,” Olivia says, like she’s offering the best news either of us will hear today.

  A smile jumps to my lips, despite my confusion. My sister and I have both transformed into absolute TV addicts since being back in North America. But that’s one thing I’m actually not worried about. The television stops me from thinking, blocks out my sadness and the feelings of strangeness that cling to this new life in Canada. Could it be that I need to stop fighting the strangeness and simply surrender? What would my father advise if he were here?

  I know the answer to that one as well my own name.

  He’d say, “Trust me, Freya. This is for the best.”

  And maybe being home is what’s right, even if I don’t feel that yet. Give it time, I tell myself. You just lost your father and moved across the globe. Disorientation is normal. Stop thinking so much and just let things be. I’m not as convinced by my own words as I want to be but I follow my little sister into the family room, curl up in an armchair and give in to the higher power of television.

  TWO

  By Tuesday my teachers are already assigning hours of homework and by Wednesday I half expect to find myself sitting alone at lunch because while Christine and Derrick are two of a kind I’m more like an unnecessary third (and broken) wheel. But they’re too nice to try to get rid of me, despite our pronounced differences. Maybe they sense that although I don’t fit in with them I don’t really fit in with anyone else at school either. Not the preppy kids, not the jocks, not the metalheads (Derrick’s word), not the honor-roll kids and not even the nerds.

  As I approach the cafeteria I wonder if I should plop myself down at some other random table and release Christine and Derrick from what they likely see as an obligation, but that would feel like giving up. As if I’m prepared to spend every lunch hour of the semester alone, no one to gossip with or bitch about my classes to. Just sitting hunched over my food solo, the object of silent stares.

  In some ways that would be easier. I wouldn’t have to pretend to anyone at school that I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong place. But what’s the point of being here if I don’t speak to anyone? In the end I think it would just make me feel even more lost.

  Listening to Christine try to educate me on the merits of new wave music is better than sitting across from an empty chair and I gladly take the handful of tapes (by The Cure, The Smiths and Depeche Mode) she lends me in the hopes that they’ll improve my musical taste. As I’m shoving her tapes into my purse with one hand and holding my chicken burger with the other, Derrick asks where I lived before. I guess he’s trying to get to know me, find some common frame of reference, but it’s not a good subject for me and I give him a severely condensed account of my family history. “We were in Auckland, New Zealand, where my dad was working. He was killed in a gas explosion on the way home from work.”

  The story’s more involved than that but the more I say the greater the likelihood that my throat will close up around the words. A somewhat longer version of events goes like this: A woman my father worked with was having car trouble that afternoon and my father helped her out by dropping her off at home. It was my dad’s tragic luck to be pulling into her driveway when a gas leak inside her house caused an explosion. The newspaper said the sky lit up and the whole house collapsed in the blink of an eye. The car was destroyed in the blast too, my father and the woman from his office along with it.

  The bottom line is that my dad went to work one morning as usual but never came back and for several seconds Christine and Derrick are too stunned to say anything. I can’t stop blinking into the silence, my mind hanging on those golden days at the beach in Valencia with my father years ago: swimming on my dad’s back, building worlds in the sand with him and stopping for gelato breaks to help fight the heat. I’d never seen ice cream melt so fast. It poured down between my fingers like a glass of milk. My father’s too. Watching the ice cream landslide made us laugh as we lapped at our gelatos, struggling to beat the sun.

  The sense of loss drills deeper inside me. I can’t believe I’ll never see him again.

  “I’m so sorry,” Christine says finally, her lips twitching as she frowns. “I had no idea.”

  “No one does.” I put down my chicken burger and fiddle with the zipper on my purse. “And I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Of course,” Derrick murmurs with such sympathy that I’m afraid he might tear up. “Changing topics—uh … what’s with the tenth-grade field trip to the museum next week? The museum’s something you do in fifth grade.”

  “Better than spending the day here, though, isn’t it?” Christine says. “I’d rather stare at dinosaur bones and mummies than sit in math class.”

  I nod in agreement. My diminished attention span won’t matter on a field trip.

  After wolfing down the rest of my chicken burger and fries I have to go back to the lunch counter to buy chocolate chip coo
kies to carry me through the next couple of hours. Christine, who is on the pudgy side, shakes her head at me when I return to the table with the cookies. “How can you stuff your face like that all the time and stay as skinny as you are?”

  Even with Derrick having mentioned my appearance two days ago, I’m taken aback by her comment. “Bulimia,” I quip after a brief pause.

  Christine’s eyes pop like I’ve dropped a second dark surprise in her lap. She tosses her head back, relieved laughter spilling from her lips as she realizes I’m not serious. It’s just then that the blond guy who showed me to my homeroom and locker on Monday grazes my shoulder. “Hey, can I talk to you a second?” he asks.

  My eyes seek out Christine’s—she looks as quizzical as I feel—before I face the guy again and tell him yes. I can’t imagine what we have to talk about but I squeeze out from my space at the table and follow him to the noisiest corner of the cafeteria where Derrick and Christine have told me that the jocks sit. I already recognize some key members of the different cliques thanks to Derrick and Christine. They’re not the only tenth-grade new wavers at school but for some reason they don’t seem to speak to most of the others.

  The blond guy stops and stands with one arm against the wall, smiling at me. I guess Derrick and Christine would characterize him as a jock but I don’t even know whether he plays sports.

  “I stopped by your locker this morning but you weren’t around,” he says, right hand slipping casually into the front pocket of his jeans. “So, how’s it going?” He stares at the spot we left behind, Derrick and Christine’s location across the room. “What are they like?”

  I shrug, thinking about my cookies, wishing I’d brought them with me. “What are you like?” I ask, meaning who is he to question me about Derrick and Christine when I hardly know him but he takes it in a different way, like I’m flirting.

  “We should hang out sometime so you can find out.” His blond bangs flop forward as he tilts his head. “There’s this party thing my friend Corey’s having on Saturday night.” He pushes off the wall and taps a finger to his lips. “Want to go with me?” He squints at me with his mouth closed and in that second he does look sort of interesting—kind of intense.