by Nancy N. Rue
“What?” I said to it.
And then I felt ridiculous, which was only slightly better than feeling like I wanted to beat everybody, including myself, with both crutches.
I got myself to the floor, dumped the weapons, and reached for the leather thing. I had really intended to ask Gretchen to return it to the coffee shop. Back when I thought she and I were going to be sisters. Back when I thought she could save my life.
The pages were still pressed open, but not to what I’d read before, something about getting me on my feet. If it had, I might have dumped it again. But this time it said:
If you’ve found me, you need me. I was left for you for a reason. Read and discover what that is. Before you do, prepare to enter a strange new world.
Why? I liked my old world—the one that existed when I jumped up to make a winning shot and disappeared when I hit the ground.
That one’s lost.
It was absolutely what the words said. I blinked. Shook my head. Wondered if Mom had slipped me an extra pain pill. But that was still what it said.
You’re not the first person to feel like you’ve lost it all, it went on. Interested in some stories on the subject?
That was it. Mom had put a second—or third—Lortab in my smoothie.
Despite the fact that my father eyed every tablet my mother took out of the container so there was no way she was drugging me up, I went with that theory. It let me pretend the thing was talking to me. After all, basically nobody else was.
I hauled myself and the book to my beanbag chair under the window and managed to prop my ankle on some throw pillows. The blinds and curtains were closed against the accusing sunlight, but some of it seeped down over the windowsill and onto the open page.
Yeshua,
I read.
You know who he is?
The name sounded vaguely familiar.
He was catching some serious flak from the church staff for hanging around with lowlifes.
I knew the type. My art class was filled with them.
They basically hung onto every word he said, these people with their rap sheets and their tats and their reputations. Yeshua was getting through to them, so he ate with them, took them to coffee, frequented their hangouts. But the usual teachers and counselors didn’t get that. They said he ought to establish some boundaries because there was no changing a loser.
I kind of had to agree with them. What were the chances that guys like Rafe Diego weren’t going to end up doing time? I couldn’t see Mrs. Petrocelli-Ward having them over to her place on the weekends.
All their yapping finally triggered a story from Yeshua, the book said.
He told them, “Suppose you were in the wool business and you had a hundred head of prime sheep. Let’s say you lost one. Wouldn’t you leave the other ninety-nine and go hunt for the one that got away until you found it?”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. This was some kind of Bible. I knew this story. And the one about the lost coin, and the lost son who got the ring and the fatted calf and the welcome-home bash—
Then you know how it ends. The sheep owner finds the sheep, puts it over his shoulders, and comes back to celebrate with his friends.
Right. Except that even if my knee healed, nobody was going to throw a party and invite me on the basketball team again.
“It is so over!” I said. Out loud. Without caring whether my parents heard me. They already knew. Everybody knew.
I put my hands under the book’s covers and tried to close it, but it resisted. The harder I pushed, the harder it pushed back.
“What?” I said. I could hear the tears in my voice as I looked down at the page.
They all missed the point too. So Yeshua spelled it out for them. He said, “You can count on it: there’s more of a celebration at my house over one loser being rescued than there is over the ninety-nine who already get it. I like a celebration.”
“Then celebrate this,” I said.
With a perfect shot I landed the book in the wastebasket across the room.
*
I didn’t know what my mother said to my father to keep him off me the rest of the weekend. It must have been her, because he didn’t speak to either one of us for two days.
I was fine with that, at least enough to let Mom talk me into doing the exercises.
“Even if it’s not about basketball, Cass,” she said on Saturday afternoon, when Dad had stormed out to his office, “you want to be able to walk, don’t you?”
Because of that, and the fact that she didn’t say anything else about my game, I endured the straight leg raises and the quad sets and the heel slides and the hip abductions and adductions and whatever other kind of ductions, all with the hated tears dribbling down my face.
“I’m so sorry, Cass,” Mom kept saying.
That was what made me insist on going back to school on Monday. The bandage was off, and I had an ACE to cover the wound that looked like a grotesque tattoo under my brace. I’d taken a shower. While everything still ached and felt wrong, I had to get away from my mom’s sympathy and my dad’s chiling silence and my own inner voice that said, “Loser, loser, loser.”
Mom finally gave in and drove me to school Monday morning. She wanted to go in with me, but I insisted that she just drop me off at the curb.
“You’re stronger than I would be,” she said.
No, I didn’t say. I’m just afraid you’ll say you’re sorry for me again and I’ll fall apart.
I almost did anyway when I swung down the hall on my crutches and felt the stares pummeling me like fists. I never thought I’d be glad to escape into Mr. Josephson’s room or be told to read The Scarlet Letter silently. I found myself relating to Hester Prynne. I might as well have a big letter on my chest too. A giant A for Addict.
“Miss Brewster.”
I jumped a little and looked up at Mr. Josephson. “For you,” he said.
I stared at the paper he put on my desk. The last time he’d delivered something to me, my life had ended.
“Looks like a schedule change,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
I waited until he moved on down the aisle before I unfolded it. A blink later, I wished I had balled it up and done a free throw with it into the trash can.
Change from: Period 6—Basketball Conditioning, Practice Gym—Deetz
Change to: Period 6—Study Hall, 109—Edelstein
“A schedule change now? Dude—it’s March.”
I looked at the kid next to me, the same one who had informed me I was busted last week when I got the pass to the office. I didn’t even know him—people just called him Boz, except Mr. Josephson, who called him Mr. Thacker. He was the first kid who had spoken to me since I entered the building that day, which was the only reason I pushed the schedule change to the edge of my desk so he could see it.
“Dude, that bites,” he said.
I attempted a shrug. “I’ll get a lot of homework done.”
“Yeah. Right. Nobody does homework in Loser Hall. You’re too busy watchin’ your back.” Boz bent back his copy of The Scarlet Letter and directed his sizeable nose toward it. “Good luck with that.”
I didn’t even try to answer. I was sure I didn’t have a voice now. After all, everything that I used to be just wasn’t anymore.
*
It would be a total understatement to say that for the rest of the day I regretted coming back to school.
My team that wasn’t my team now was everywhere and I couldn’t even look at them. Especially Kara.
My phone buzzed with texts from her:
I’m sorry, Cass.
Can’t we talk about this?
I swear I never meant to hurt you.
I sent her only one text: But you did.
Then I turned my phone off and left it in my locker. There was no other way I could start over.
At lunch I hid in the nurse’s office, although Nurse Bad Perm couldn’t resist having a look at my wound and asking me questions u
ntil I felt like a science project.
During fifth period art I hid behind a blank easel until P-W found me and told me that most great art arose from pain.
I ought to be able to create a masterpiece, then. I was in absolute agony when I left the arts wing at the end of the period and made my way to Room 109. Most of the pain wasn’t coming from my knee.
Room 109 was a math room, bare and tidy and all straight lines. Nobody was there except the woman at the teacher’s desk, who I assumed was Ms. Edelstein. Although she was youngish, she definitely wasn’t a student. Not with rimless glasses and a too-neat off-blonde haircut and a tweedy blazer over a turtleneck. Most of the other teachers didn’t even dress like that.
“I guess I’m in here now,” I said.
She held out her hand, never taking her eyes from the paper she was grading. It took me a minute to realize what she wanted.
When I handed her the schedule change, she glanced at it, nodded, and said, “I guess you are.”
She still didn’t look at me.
“Where do you want me to sit?” I said.
“I don’t care. No, wait—all the seats in the back are taken. Any place else is fine.”
“Is it true that I won’t be able to get any homework done in here?”
She finally tore herself away from the red pencil and let her eyes travel up to my face. They registered surprise behind the glasses, and then flickered to the schedule change.
“Huh,” she said. “Oh—I see.” She was now studying my crutches. “I guess you can’t do much ‘conditioning’ with those.”
“Right,” I said.
So she didn’t know about me. I’d assumed every member of the faculty had gotten a memo announcing that I was a drug offender. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Hope rose that I could crawl anonymously to a corner where nothing could remind me that I’d fallen from the heights.
Until I saw Rafe Diego in the doorway. I tried to whip around to avoid eye contact, but he saw me first. His big pouty lips formed a smile that made my stomach turn over. It dropped all the way to my aching knee when he came toward me, bush-brows hooding his eyes. I managed to look away, but that didn’t stop him from brushing my arm with his jacket sleeve and whispering into my ear.
“You were wrong,” he said. “We are both here for the same reason.”
“I don’t have a rap sheet,” I said between my teeth.
“I know. But you’re a loser.”
He moved away, but I didn’t miss his last words:
“Just like me.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I didn’t see the banner in the hallway until Tuesday. By then I’d stopped trying to be invisible so people wouldn’t point and whisper and had graduated to pretending not to care if they did, which was why I swung right down the main hall after fourth period instead of slithering through the back way to find a place to hide while everybody else ate lunch. I didn’t think Nurse Bad Perm was going to let me escape to her office every day anyway.
So I was tooling along, head up, face saying, “You want a piece of me? Bring it”—and suddenly there it was. A banner taller than any member of the basketball team and practically as long as a court, hanging from the wall across from the main office. Two-foot-high letters read:
CONGRATULATIONS, WOMEN WARRIORS #2 IN THE STATE!!!!!!!!
I knew it already, of course. I wasn’t sure if my father had left the Sunday morning paper open to the sports section on purpose—right on the coffee table in the family room, no less— but it had been a whole lot easier to see it there than here.
In smaller letters dancing across the cloth were the names.
Hilary McElhinney M.J. Martinez Selena Chen Kara Van Dyke Emily Watson
I stopped reading. There were more—the whole team— but all I could see was the blank. The space where Cassidy Brewster should have been.
I maneuvered the crutches around and thumped my way on down the hall, but the names called after me.
If you hadn’t screwed up, you could have been there for us. We could have been number one. You could have made us the winners.
So what were they now? Losers because they only came in second in the entire huge state of Colorado?
My crutches slowed, and I leaned against the wall outside the cafeteria. People almost unconsciously made a wide path around me so they wouldn’t knock me down, but my own thoughts tried to do it for me. If you always won, what were you when you lost? Maybe it wasn’t a big A I should have on my sweatshirt. Maybe it was a big L.
Head down, I stumped into the cafeteria and found a table in a back corner.
*
I tried to avoid thinking the L-word for the rest of the day and Wednesday. It wasn’t that hard for the first four periods, unless the L-word was actually “lonely.” I’d never realized you could feel so alone when you were surrounded by people. I figured out that in high school, Lonely and Loser were pretty much the same thing.
I was probably the loneliest when I saw Kara or M.J. or Hilary in the halls. M.J. waved the first time, but it looked like she was performing a duty. Hilary tried a smile, which was as plastic as Mr. Potato Head’s lips. It hurt to feel like they were “trying,” like they could tell themselves later that I didn’t respond when they reached out to me. Maybe I would have if they hadn’t given up after the second day.
Still, I could pretty much deal with it, even during lunch when I parked myself and my crutches at my corner table and pretended to be catching up on The Scarlet Letter while I acted like I was eating the lunch Mom had started packing for me. At least Kara, M.J., and Hilary usually went off campus to eat. At least there was that.
But from fifth period on, my Loser status was in my face, mostly in the form of Rafe Diego. I’d barely noticed him in my art class all year long. Now I was suddenly his new career.
When I hobbled up to sharpen my pencil, he was at my elbow, treating me to cigarette breath.
If I held up a sketch to the light to look at it, he leaned his chair back from across the room so he could check it out too. Or so he could try to weird me out.
Even when I wasn’t doing anything besides staring at a blank sheet of paper and wondering what ever possessed me to take an art class, I’d get a feeling creepier than the Frenemy and I’d glance around to find him staring at me. It wasn’t like the way I used to wish the bagger at Safeway would look at me—back when I had room in my brain to care about stuff like that. This was more like … well, the way a tagger might size up a wall before he breaks out the spray can and starts defacing it.
P-W kept a pretty tight rein on her class—“Artists don’t need to be running amok” was one of her pet sayings—so I could sort of ignore him some of the time. Not so in Loser Hall. If Ms. Edelstein even knew we existed after she took the roll, she never showed it. Study hall was evidently like a second prep period for her, and she was always grading a stack of papers that never seemed to get any smaller. I was glad I didn’t have her for AP Geometry; it looked like she was working her students to death.
So while she went after it with a red pencil from bell to bell, the four other Loser Hall students sat in a row against the back wall and worked toward their goal, which after the first day I realized was to make the life of the fifth person as miserable as possible for fifty-five minutes. Even though that fifth person wasn’t me, since I didn’t count myself as an actual member of the class, Boz was right. It was impossible to get any homework done with that going on.
I tried. Maybe Rafe’s two evil minions and his girlfriend thought I was actually reading American history and writing up chemistry labs. But mostly, all I did was stare at the same paragraphs about World War II and charts of the elements and wish they would leave that girl alone.
It took about five minutes of the first day to learn that her name was Ruthie. Which wasn’t hard, since somebody was saying it every seven seconds.
“So, Ruthie,” Rafe would say, out of those lips that to me grew more enormous daily. “Yo
u got plans for the weekend? You hookin’ up with somebody?”
His girlfriend, the heinous Uma, would punch his arm like she didn’t like him teasing Ruthie, although she was obviously eating it up. She definitely showed no signs of coming to the girl’s defense. Mostly she just gave the chubby Ruthie looks that clearly said, “You need a makeover, girl—but don’t expect me to do it.”
Not that she could have pulled off her own look on Ruthie. Uma had the streetwalker thing pretty much down. Seriously, it had to be expensive to look that cheap, not to mention the time involved. She was a tiny, scrawny thing, except for the miracle being performed by her bra, but she had more hair on her head than the entire basketball team put together, every tress curled and cascading down her back in a color not found anywhere but in a package. She was constantly swinging it out of her face like it was this huge inconvenience, which made me want to ask, “So why don’t you cut it off if it bugs you so much?”
But I’d already made a vow not to get into a conversation with her. I just watched over the top of my chemistry notebook as Uma strutted past Ruthie in her pencil-heeled boots, standing-room-only leather pants, and tight T-shirts that said things like My PRETENDING to listen should be good enough for you.
If she was even pretending, she wasn’t very good at it. Her mouth was always drawn into a little rosebud-looking thing, and her eyes stayed about half-closed most of the time. Of course, that could have been from all the makeup she loaded on.
But Uma wasn’t really Ruthie’s biggest problem. It was Rafe and his nasty little cronies. There was truly no other way to describe his sidekicks Dumb and Dumber. Their names were actually Tank and Lizard. At least that was what Rafe called them, and their tattoos seemed to confirm it.
Lizard, the skinny one, who wasn’t that much bigger than Uma, had one of a salamander going down his arm, with teeth like a shark and a tongue you’d expect to see on Godzilla.
Tank’s was on his large left shoulder. I couldn’t see the whole thing—nor did I want to—but the top half of it showed when he took off his jacket and revealed his T-shirt with the cutout sleeves and neck. The oversized gun barrel etched into his skin made me want to say, “For Pete’s sake, would you put that jacket back on?” But I didn’t. I didn’t want a discussion with him any more than I wanted one with Uma, or Lizard. Or Rafe. Besides, they were concentrating all their efforts on Ruthie.
