by Laura Goode
“I gotta get, pretty.” I trace a map on her back, over the perfect fins of her shoulder blades.
She nods, snuggling down in the covers. Dawn is just breaking, bleak and freezing, drizzling weak light over the frosted grass.
I will myself to leave, yanking on my jeans and sneakers and jacket. “I’ll see you at school. Don’t forget to go back inside soon.”
“Mmm,” she grunts in response, already half-asleep. Some nights I come home and she’s still trapped in my nose, gardenia and almond and that third fragrance that is, I know now, cardamom.
“Ro?”
“Mmm.”
“I think I could fall in love with you.”
There is a pause in which I wonder if she’s already slipped into a REM cycle.
“Rowie,” I whisper. “Don’t fall back asleep. You have to get back inside.”
As I gingerly lift the door and toe the ladder, I hear her small voice.
“Not a bit tamed,” she murmurs.
The morning frost hits me like a cold mackerel in the face; I let out a soft string of expletives as I dig through the damp, dirty leaves, grasping for my bike. My legs are limp as I try to shake enough sleep out of my head to ride. The faint light breaks into morning, accelerating my pace as I race to beat Pops’s alarm clock. I swing around Iroquois Circle and offer a silent salute to Tess’s waking house, the lights in the upstairs bathrooms just flickering on. As I ride past the high school, a few teachers are starting to arrive in cars far less expensive than their students’. I can’t believe I have to show up there in a few hours and stuff my lunch in my locker and hobble through class and pretend the electricity in my gut isn’t there and Rowie and me aren’t really Rowie and me, the manic sample of us in my head looping no one knows, no one knows, no one knows. I walk around with it inside me every day, all the days after the nights we spend in her treehouse, and I wonder if people are starting to wonder why we look so underslept.
Our garage door is old and wicked janky — it’s one of those relics that you have to hoist open manually. I sleepily pull it up halfway and duck under it, ditching Priscilla, my bike, in the corner. The door into the kitchen is unlocked. Shit.
Pops is sitting at the kitchen table, whittling a wing as I slink in. Not seeing the point of trying to avoid him, I drop my backpack on the floor and flop into a chair.
“Have you been up all night?” I ask.
He nods slowly, not looking up. “Mmm-hmm. You?”
“Pretty much.”
He sets the knife and fairy down. “Where you been, parakeet?”
I shrug and look down, pigeon-toeing. “Out.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna need more information than that.” He looks up. “You been drinking? Getting high?”
I shake my head and stare at my feet, trying to undo the laces to my Pumas without using my hands.
“Look, Ez, you know I don’t want to put a curfew on you. There’s nothing you can do after eleven p.m. that you can’t do before. But six a.m. on a school night? Three, four times a week? I gotta know what’s going on here. I’m worried.”
My head snaps up. He knows I’ve been sneaking out and hasn’t said anything?
“You don’t have to be worried.”
“Yeah, parakeet, but the thing is, I love you and I don’t know if you’re out turning tricks on the streets while I’m trying not to invade your privacy. I’m worried. I just need to know where you’ve been and if you’re okay.”
“I was over at a friend’s,” I concede. “And I’m not turning tricks, for Christ’s sake. Do you really think I’m, like, standing outside the Holyhill Community Center hitching my skirt at passing midlife-crisis-mobiles?”
“I don’t know, Esme,” Pops says, throwing up his hands. “You never tell me anything anymore. Whose house were you at? Is it someone I know?”
Pause. “Yeah.”
“Well, that’s fine if you were sleeping over at Marcy’s, but why didn’t you tell me?”
“I, um, wasn’t at Marcy’s.”
All of a sudden, new understanding breaks across his face. “Esme, are you — seeing somebody?”
I squirm uncontrollably, literally writhing in my chair.
“You could say that.”
Dad looks like he’s just been given a free pass out of hell. His face dissolves through relief into a big smile.
“You know, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before, but it’s so nice not to be afraid you’ll get pregnant.”
“Dad. Ew.”
“I mean, it is, a — you know, right?”
“Is girl the word you’re looking for? Yes. It is a girl. Have you ever thought about how ironic it is that I’m the gay one? I mean, you build fairy houses, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t turn your little poison darts of wit on me, missy. I’m impervious.”
“Christ on a bike. I was just saying it’s funny.”
“To avoid talking about your love life.”
“I have to go to bed. For like, an hour.”
“I’m grounding you only if you won’t tell me who it is.”
“You are the weirdest parent ever.”
“Spill it, kidlet.”
I take an extremely deep breath. “It’s — it’s, um. It’s Rowie.”
Pops makes a little sound, and his face gets all warm and soft and gooey. I begin to pray fiercely that he won’t cry.
“Dad. Compose yourself. This really doesn’t have to be a moment.”
He gets it together, cupping a hand to my cheek. “Rowie is wonderful. Smart and beautiful. Just like you.”
“Whatever.”
“Uff-da, I just didn’t know I had to be ready for this yet. I do miss your mother in these moments,” he says. “I wish you had a woman around to help you with stuff like this.”
“Because she always dealt with things so well?” I say acidly.
“She did the best she could, kidlet.”
“You let her off the hook too easy.”
“It’s not that,” he sighs. “I’ve just — made my peace with it, and I’d like to see you do the same. She’s gone, and we miss her, and we can’t change that.”
“Sometimes I don’t know — like, how to miss her,” I say. “I don’t feel like I ever knew her very well, or well enough to miss her. And I don’t know how to forgive her for leaving.”
“Yeah, that’s a tough one.” Pops rests his chin on folded hands. “Tell you what, though. In Jewish law, it’s customary for the children of departed parents to atone for those parents, but not vice versa. So maybe in finding your forgiveness of her, it might be helpful to understand that forgiveness as a Jewish one: it’s your sacred responsibility, in a sense, to find forgiveness for her.”
“That’s a bum deal,” I say.
“How?”
“That I have this Jewish responsibility to atone for her when I wouldn’t have been Jewish without her in the first place. It’s basically all her fault.”
“Well, your first responsibility is to figure out the kind of woman you want to be without her help, and I’m sorry for that lack.” Pops looks pained. “And you’re entitled to your anger at her, but it would be a far better thing, in the long run, to find forgiveness. And love.” He gives me a crinkly smile. “So. You and Rowie. Are you happy?”
“I think so.”
“Why do you sound so unsure?”
I put my head down on the table. “Shit’s complicated.” He raises his eyebrows. “She doesn’t want anyone to know.”
He folds his arms across his chest in thought. “Hmm. That’s tricky.”
“Yeah. I guess I’m just hoping she’ll get past it.”
“Well, promise me you’ll quit with the sneaking out from here. I want both of us to get a lot more sleep than this. Bring Rowie over sometime, anytime. I’ll stay out of your hair.”
“We’ll see.” I haul myself to my feet with great strain, stretching. “Pops?”
“Hmm.” He’s inspecting the wing
again; I guess he’s decided it’s too late to sleep.
“If you know it won’t last, is it still worth it? I mean, losing Mom — was it worth it?”
He looks up.
“That’s a complicated question — you know that.” He pauses. “Of course Johanna was worth it for me because she gave me you. But you need to find your own love, to give yourself away. Now — you’ll only be able to be this uninhibited once. Don’t let it pass you by.”
Halloween at school is even weirder than regular school. Halloween is too confusing to do it at school. Not to be, like, a total buzzkill, but I feel like it’s so easy to get way too into dressing up for the whole day, and then you’re just the douchebag trying to sit down in a SpongeBob costume in math class. So I always skirt the issue in regular clothes, erring on the side of disdain. Today I’m just wearing a big T-shirt over a black unitard and Timbs. While Rowie and Marcy share my resistance to dressing up for school, Tess, of course, does it with unabashed eagerness. She also never tells anyone what her costume’s going to be beforehand; she’s into surprises or something. We’re shambling into Mrs. DiCostanza’s AP English class second period, waiting for Tess to make her grand entrance. Just before the bell, she strolls in wearing a long kind of Laura Ingalls Wilder dress with fake blood all over it, holding a bloody ax under her arm.
“Who the eff are you supposed to be?” I lean over and whisper as she slips into her seat.
“Lizzie Borden. Duh,” she says.
“Who the balls is that?” I hiss back.
“You know. ‘Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.’”
“Sick,” I say approvingly. I was actually born late the night of Halloween, during a huge blizzard. It’s like one of those back-in-my-day-I-walked-to-school-uphill-both-ways legends: I was born right smack in the icy middle of the Halloween blizzard nearly seventeen years ago. Pops couldn’t drive very fast in the midnight hell-snow, so I was mostly born right smack in our 1984 Colt Vista supercruiser, and my birthday’s technically November first, which is tomorrow. Marcy always pretends to forget, but she’s definitely up to something.
“Ladies, let’s rein it in,” Mrs. DiCostanza says tersely. Marilyn DiCostanza is no fucking joke. There is absolutely no messing with this woman; she’s a Holyhill institution. She’s head of the English department and has been teaching AP English here for twenty years. Everyone says that if you can get in with her good enough to ask her to write you a college recommendation, you’ll get in anywhere you want, because all the committees know her (yes, these are the titillating urban legends Holyhill has to offer). Some of the other kids talk shit about her because she’s so strict, but I secretly worship her. She’s supersmart and sometimes she even throws things. In HolyHell, where parents will drop a lawsuit quicker than you can say jumpin’ Jehosaphat, throwing things at your students takes some serious ovaries.
“Hey, Mrs. D.” The four of us sidle up to her. “Can we talk to you for a second?”
“Make it quick,” she says, ordering some papers.
“Would you be the faculty adviser for our new student group?” Tess asks.
She looks up and smiles. “Ah, yes, I remember my ill-timed entrance into your attempt to convince Ross Nordling about this. Remind me of the particulars?”
“It’s, um,” I say. “It’s a gay-straight hip-hop alliance. Called Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos.”
“Excuse me?” Marilyn DiCostanza says.
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds, I swear,” Marcy says. “Nordling tried to make us sign that racist hip-hop policy, so we decided to form a combination hip-hop/gay-straight discussion group to prove that people can learn from hip-hop. We want to talk about gender and race and culture and stuff.”
“It sounds a little crazy,” Mrs. D. says, “but I must admit I thought making students sign that policy was ludicrous. Let me know when your next meeting is and I’ll come learn more?”
“Mos def,” Rowie says.
“What?” Mrs. D. asks.
I giggle. “We’ll definitely let you know.”
“Ah,” she says. “Well. Super. Now take your seats, please.
“In honor of Halloween,” Mrs. D. begins as we sit, “I have made the ambitious decision to spend today’s class discussing Christina Rossetti. Who would like to begin by reading the poem ‘Goblin Market’?” A pointy witch hat sits on her desk.
“We’re not going to read ‘The Raven’?” Tess asks eagerly, her hand popping up. “I love ‘The Raven.’”42
42. Ultra-stealth text from Marcy: I’d know she quotes Radiohead on her Facebook profile even if we weren’t friends.
Mrs. D. cracks a smile. “I left Poe off the list because I thought it was a predictable choice, but if ‘The Raven’ sets your heart on fire, Tess, we’ll try to squeeze it in at the end. Oh, and also, the little ghost in the back is my daughter Johanna. Her school is closed today, so she’ll be joining our discussion.”
The name makes me start; Johanna is my mother’s name, after the Bob Dylan song, or that’s what Pops told me, anyway. I turn around to see a small besheeted figure wave shyly at us. Seeing Johanna makes me wonder what would happen if I ever met my mother on the street, randomly, a meeting I’ve both fantasized about and feared. How would I know she corresponded with me, her body with mine? How would I recognize her? Sometimes I don’t remember what she looks like. Looked like. Would she recognize me?
Tess leans over and whisper-sings the White Stripes’ “Little Ghost” in my ear. Though the sheet makes it hard to tell, I’d place this Johanna at about eleven or twelve, and think that she’s younger than a child I’d imagined someone of Mrs. D.’s stature having.
“Will someone volunteer to read the poem?” Mrs. D. asks. I raise my hand. She nods at me. “Thanks, Esme. Whenever you’re ready.”
I begin to read; the poem is long, lyrical, more than a little sensuous, rhythmic, and riddled with graphic fruit. It seems to be about two sisters walking through this surreal bazaar where sketchy goblins try to sell them evil fruit. One sister, Lizzie, is the good, virtuous, cautious one, and the other one, Laura, is too curious for her own good:
“‘No,’ said Lizzie, ‘no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.’
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man. . . .
Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.”
I look up. Mrs. DiCostanza smiles expectantly.
“So — first impressions? Where do we start with this poem?”
I love the dead silence that always follows open-ended questions like this, especially when they’re about poetry. We’re all word nerds, the Sister Mischief cohort, so I’m just waiting to see who jumps on it first.
It’s Marcy, hot on the buzzer. “The metric structure is pretty complex,” she answers. That’s my girl, finding the beats in everything. “It mostly alternates between iambic tetrameter and trimeter, but a lot of the lines stop short at dimeter.”
“Can someone translate that into English?” Anders Ostergaard quips from the back. What a genius.
Johanna DiCostanza lifts up her ghost face and smiles helpfully at him. “It means that the emphasis is on every second syllable, and that there are alternately three and four poetic feet per line. And that some of the lines stop at two feet.”
“Oh, snap!” I hoot, raising a snicker from the class.
“Yo, Mrs. D., your kid is like crazy smart,” Elijah Carlson, another of the white hats, contributes. I see Johanna kind of shrinking in her chair and remember viscerally how much it sometimes
sucked to be the smart kid.
“Yes, my kid is smart,” Mrs. D. says. “Nicely observed, all of you. So what’s the thematic content of ‘Goblin Market’? What kind of narrative does it enact? And why did I choose it for Halloween?”
“Because it’s about goblins and it’s creepy as fu —?” Elijah offers another insight.
“Watch yourself, Mr. Carlson,” Mrs. D. responds swiftly.
Tess raises her ax. “This poem feels really sexual to me. Like, kind of violently sexual. This is a really intense sister relationship.”
“Can you push that a little bit harder?” Mrs. DiCostanza asks.
Tess continues. “It kind of feels like a fight with seduction. Like, Laura’s the greedy sister, the curious sister, and she gets all up in the market, but Lizzie’s a little more prudish, a little more wary. And the goblins are all after them in this sort of rapey way.”
“Do you think we’re meant to interpret this poem as an allegory?” Mrs. D. asks. “Is this a cautionary tale about girls and sex?”
“No,” Rowie pipes up unexpectedly. “It starts off wanting to make you think that. But it ends up being more like the sisters vanquishing the goblins, outwitting them at their own game.” She pauses. “As a whole, this feels to me like a poem about love between women.”
Rowie’s pupils dart around as if she’s being followed. Mrs. D. nods.
“I like that interpretation very much, especially considering it’s ultimately Lizzie’s love that saves Laura from ruination and death. Can we unpack the significance of fruit in the poem a little bit more —”
Mrs. D. still has her mouth open to continue her sentence when she is abruptly cut off by a whoop in the hall, followed by the fire bell. She hangs her head, having taught too many Halloweens to feign surprise. Resignedly plunking her witch hat onto her head, she ushers the class and Johanna toward the door.
We squeeze out the door with no preparation for what we’re entering. The hall is a scene of unbridled sensory chaos. Everyone’s pressing their ears and squinting against the jangling bell and flashing alarm lights, but, even more jarring, the central cafeteria floor is covered in a tempest of wretched shit — there are suds everywhere, suggesting that soap is one of the ingredients to this liquid disaster, and there’s gobs of something thick and shiny that looks a lot like Crisco mingling with the bubbles. I hear Wu-Tang’s “Shame on a Nigga” pumping, but I don’t know where it’s coming from. As we gape from the doorway, various stained people run by: two guys chortle as they slick the slime off their vintage North Star hockey jerseys, and a short girl weeps as she realizes her suede skirt is ruined. I clap a hand over my mouth, awestruck.
