"Uh, yes," she stammered, backing a step away from the counter. "Whatever you think."
"Okay."
By the time I was wrapping the flowers in paper and stapling the preservative pack into the fold, I decided that I was afraid of Haley, after all, because I was afraid of what he represented. If he was leading me on and setting me up for the world's biggest humiliation, well...there was just no way I could deal with that. It would be devastating, in a way that I instinctively knew would damage me deeply and permanently.
I'd seen it happen before, with other classmates, and it wasn't a pretty sight. Morris Chow had tried to ask Kara to the homecoming dance our sophomore year. She had said no. Brutally. To this day, the Gaggle snicker and stare at him whenever he walks by them. I had learned my lesson just by watching him try to get through the days and weeks that followed his rejection, trying to pretend it didn't matter, that like his mom and other adults said "There would be other girls." Sure, there'd be other girls, but there would always be Kara who had laughed when she said no.
At this point, I could hear my mother's voice, gently trying to explain that those popular kids were just jealous that I was so sensible and mature. She would have pointed out that the popular kids were all wrapped up in their little world and that they'd end up working at K-mart for the rest of their lives and never know what it was like to think for themselves. They'd been raised with bad values and listened to all that rock music and seen those racy, violent movies. I was much better than that. I'd been raised with good values and was a good person. The proof of that was that we had such a wonderful mother-daughter relationship, didn't we? I didn't even feel the need to rebel because I was so sensible and mature.
Having let her have her say in my head, I felt no need to invite her into the conversation in real life. It would only irritate me to have to listen to the same thing over again. Besides, it wasn't true. I might have been raised with good values and be a mature, sensible girl in my mother's world, but I was a geek to the rest of my world, which was within the walls of Darbyfield High. My two worlds were constantly colliding, pressing in on me and crushing me with their expectations, opinions, and judgments. I could barely breathe sometimes from the suffocation. I had no space for my own thoughts, feelings and desires. My wings had been chained and locked, and I served two sentences under two different jailers.
And yet...
Haley had challenged me, dangling a key to my cage before me that I could take to free myself. Just those simple words we had exchanged had opened up a little breathing space for me, yet I didn't know what to do with the air that now filled my chest.
"On how much of a mommy's girl you are."
"I'm my own person."
"Are you?"
I could be. The oxygen burned my lungs.
"Hey, Starr!"
I snapped out of my girl-power reverie and slapped on a stupid grin for Benjamin, the Health and Floral Departments Manager.
"Need a break?" he asked, joining me behind the counter. "Why don't you take your fifteen minutes now? If you take the Floral and Health trash out to the dumpster, I'll throw in an off-the-record five minutes."
"You're the best, Ben," I replied, grabbing the trash bin from under the desk and smoothly knotting the bag and yanking it up fast so the vacuum action wouldn't make it stick in the bin.
The light outside had faded from the intensity of twilight blue to the flat grey shadows that swept over the sky before it turned fully to night. What should have been a pleasantly cool evening in early fall was bitter, and I saw the white puffs of my breath on the breeze. The icy air made the shadows around me sharper, and for some weird reason, I was reminded of Haley.
Shrugging off my distraction, I slung the bags into the dumpster and went over to my graveyard to check on it, rubbing my hands along my arms to try and warm them up.
I blinked hard to make sure it wasn't the light playing tricks on me. My body shook so hard that I fell into a cramped crouching position, hugging myself tightly. I couldn't believe it because it couldn't be real.
Just two days ago, everything had been lush and thriving.
Now, every flower, every leaf, every blade of grass was dead, rotted away on the hard, cold ground.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE DAY BEGAN the same way as yesterday. I woke up from a weird dream about a cold, dark place, and then it was a cold, dark day outside.
I looked out the window and down into my garden. The flowers were wilting and dying from the cold, entombed by a hard, grey frost. I frowned, wondering for the millionth time since last night why the graveyard flowers had died so suddenly. Yet, they weren’t just dead, they had practically decomposed.
Maybe someone had spilled cleaning supplies or something had leaked from the dumpster. Maybe the town had come and sprayed weed killer, suddenly trying to clean up the graveyard after ignoring it for the past several decades. Maybe...
Yeah, no. There was no rational explanation I could think of that would fit. I couldn't even come up with a plausible irrational explanation.
Shivering from the chill in the air, I turned away from thoughts that danced closer and closer to the young man I had seen in the graveyard, caressing the headstones with reverence.
"Good morning, sweetie!" Mom called from the other side of my door. "Time to get up!"
"I'm up," I replied. "Be down in a minute."
"It’s extremely cold out. Dress extra warm today. Maybe you should wear your corduroy skirt and that nice Peruvian alpaca sweater I got you last year. The one with the matchstick dolls on it?"
"Okay, Mom."
I sighed.
***
From what I knew, most television shows and books about teenagers had them doing all kinds of exciting things after school: playing sports, hanging out with friends, shopping, grabbing hamburgers together, having slumber parties, going to the beach or the lake, even having study dates.
I thought the Gaggle and the Jocks, and even some of the Goons, led that kind of life. For the rest of us, though, life was get up, go to school, come home. The only variation was going to work a couple times a week.
School was the stage where the drama happened every day, and the rest of my time was spent at home, analyzing that day and preparing for the next one. My entire social life revolved around the eight hours a day I was ignored at school.
Except, I wasn't being ignored now.
When I got to school, I noticed Kara glaring at me as I crossed the gym lobby, and then she followed me up the short flight of stairs to the senior hallway. I tried to walk just a little faster, but she not only kept up, but managed to catch up to me.
Suddenly, she shoulder-checked me into my locker. It didn't hurt, but it startled the crap out of me. I whirled around to face her. The last time someone had tried to beat me up was in the third grade, and it looked like my ten-year dry spell was about to come to an end.
She lunged at me, pulling back just at the last moment. I cringed, throwing my arms over my head to protect myself. The blow didn't come. Nor did the hair-pulling or the slapping.
I heard her aluminum-can-crumpling laughter and realized she had faked me out. I lowered my arms and looked at her, trying not to recoil from the nasty sneer on her face. My ears burned from humiliation, but I refused to be the first one to break eye contact.
Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw three of the Goons come up alongside Kara.
"Hey, Rock Starr," Joe Bandino taunted, using the nickname I hated because it was given to me knowing it was everything I was not. "Nice sweater."
"Are all those your imaginary friends?" Matty Forbes, aka Goon #2, asked.
"They're dressed-up boogers!" Chad Samuels, aka the gross one or Goon #3, snickered.
"Ew, that's gross, Chad," Kara sniffed, curling her lip. That wasn't in defense of me, though. It was an upholding of her dainty feminine reputation.
I still wouldn't look away from Kara. Angry tears were close, and I prayed for something, anything to
happen.
"What's up?"
My heart jerked sideways in relief as I heard Zack's voice to my right, except, this was not the lighthearted jock from English. His words were casual but rock-hard, as if he was giving the others one chance to be nice and walk away.
Kara, Joe, Matty, and Chad looked at Zack and seemed to shrink in size—at least half an inch.
"Nothing," Matty mumbled, trying to look defiant at the massive build of Darbyfield's newest quarterback.
"We were just talking," Kara said, smiling nervously.
Zack glanced at me, and then his gaze swung to the others. His lips tightened a fraction before grinning, edging the expression toward a grimace. Part of me recoiled seeing this, worried he was going to join in and torment me as well.
"That's nice," he said evenly. "Now, if you don't mind, I need to get to my locker."
The others might not have an honors-level class among them, but they weren't dumb. They heard the meaning in his voice and skedaddled. Befuddled, I watched them go, barely aware that I was now gasping for air.
Massive arms came around me and crushed me in a giant hug. It was like being hugged by a block of cement with battering rams for arms. Zack rubbed my back for a moment and kissed the top of my head. He then held me at arm's length and looked into my eyes.
"You okay?" he asked.
I nodded, my vocal cords apparently still locked in a death spiral with the urge to cry.
He frowned slightly and leaned in. His hands on my shoulders flexed, in what I think he meant to be a comforting squeeze, but was more like a bone-crushing grip.
"I'm glad I got here first," he said with a sigh.
"Why?" I croaked.
"Haley wouldn't have..." Zack's voice trailed off. "He might have..." He made a choking sound and looked annoyed, then tried again. "Haley is a lot calmer than me, usually. He's the one who has common sense, but he also has a really strict sense of right and wrong. He would... not have liked seeing you attacked like that."
"They didn't attack me," I replied. “They weren’t being violent.”
"Violence comes in a lot of flavors," Zack said drily. "But, trust me, no one wants to see Haley's particular flavor."
I froze, and I think my heart did, too.
"Is he dangerous?" I whispered.
"To you? Never. Never in a million years. Literally mmph." Zack choked on his words again and grimaced.
The bell rang. Zack poked me on the tip of my nose and grinned.
"Better get to class," he said. "I'll catch you later."
I was left standing at my locker with one thought. What the hell?
***
Haley was glaring at me like he was pissed at me. I hunkered down in my seat and tried to imagine a huge concrete wall between us. Why did he take the desk next to me again if he was just going to glower at me?
The bell rang for first period, and Ms. Collins came in. She explained that we were going to be doing a group exercise today. She began pairing us off for the exercise, and you didn’t need telepathy to hear the various prayers that sprung up:
Please God, let me be paired with Haley. (Jordan and every other girl in the class except for me.)
Please God, don’t let me be paired with the nasty losers in the back row. (From pretty much all of us.)
Please God, don’t pair me up with Jordan. (That was mine.)
I didn’t dare speculate about Haley’s prayer. As expected, God failed us all. Most of the girls ended up with the nasty losers in the back, except for Darla Feinberg who got matched with Haley. I had the joy of partnering up with Jordan.
It was painfully obvious that Ms. Collins was pleased with herself, as if this ridiculous exercise was her way to taking a small step toward integrating the different cliques and eliminating the social hierarchies among students. I hated when teachers did that. They thought that just because they were teachers, they could get all after-school-special on us and make us realize the error of our separatist ways and come together in love, friendship, and equality.
Um, no. Wasn’t going to happen. Ever. Had they forgotten about their own high school experiences as bottom-of-the-barrel? Or had they been the popular kids and had the luxury of blissfully mis-remembering that everyone had been friends with them?
Whichever it was, I wished they would just leave well enough alone and let us muddle through as best we could until graduation set us free.
Jordan made it clear she wasn’t going to move from her desk, so naturally, I had to be the submissive one and go over to her, gritting my teeth the whole way. The entire scenario was playing out in my head already.
Cue: fake smile.
“Hey, Stephanie,” Jordan said, smiling sweetly enough to give me cavities.
“Hey,” I replied softly.
Cue: pretending to misunderstand the assignment from the beginning so as not to come off as having been uncool enough to pay attention.
“So, um, like, I’m not really sure what we’re supposed to do,” Jordan said in a confidential whisper.
Cue: reassurance that the geek was prepared.
“That’s okay,” I said flatly. “I got it.”
“Awesome!”
“So, we are basically supposed to come up with five things that Charlemagne did that changed the course of European history.”
“Oh, uh…”
“Based on the reading in the textbook.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay. We can use our books.”
“Okay, so, like, why don’t you look up the reasons, and I’ll write them down?”
Cue: double standard of expecting the geek to do the work, then secretly and righteously despising the geek for being smart enough for having done the work, and for wanting to do the work to get a good grade.
“Sure,” I said. “That works.”
Jordan smiled sweetly.
Not only did she smile, but she expected me to smile back—the equivalent of curtsying and saying thank you for allowing me the privilege of doing all the work for her while receiving her disdain. Whether she was intelligent enough to consciously know it or not, she knew this game cold and played it with ease and finesse.
I smiled as genuinely as I could. The last thing I needed was for her to get the idea that I was angry with her. The wrong kind of smile, the slightest hint of rebellion, and I’d be plucked from obscurity—temporarily—and labeled a bitch who was mean to the nicest girl who was friends with everyone in the school. I suspected she was already looking for a way to crush me because of Haley.
Keeping my smile carefully in place, I bent my head over my book, but a quick glance revealed that Haley was watching us…or rather, me. I saw his eyes narrow at me, and my heart skipped a beat.
I bit my lip and kept my eyes on my work after that.
Depressed and exhausted, I made my way to Poetry. I slumped down at my desk, arms folded across my chest and chin tucked down as I stared unseeingly at the doodles of penises that had been scratched into the laminate surface of the desk. A shadow fell over me, and I jerked, making an awful, humiliating noise as my breath mingled with my saliva and went down the wrong way.
Once I could breathe again, I risked opening my eyes, only to see Haley standing before me, arms crossed.
“So,” he drawled. “When were you going to tell me?”
I stared at him, totally lost. “Tell you what?”
“About the little attack this morning?”
“Wait, what? Why would I tell you about that?” It was an honest question. I could not think of a single reason why Haley would care or want to know what happened at the lockers with Kara, Chad, and the others.
He seemed genuinely taken aback by my response.
“Why wouldn’t you tell me?” he asked, utter disbelief coloring his voice.
“Um, because I barely know you. And there’s nothing you could do about it?”
“I can stop them from doing that to you ever again.”
“No, don’t!” Th
e words tumbled out of me in a rush, my heart squeezing in sudden fear at the consequences of Haley intervening on my behalf.
“Why not?” he demanded, placing his hands on my desk and the back of the seat, and leaning over me.
Great. Here we were again. Another situation where I couldn’t be honest with him because the truth was both stupid and awful. How could I tell him that if he tried to defend me to the Gaggle and the Jocks, it would give them just the ammunition they needed to torment me some more. I also couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t engaging in his own special brand of mockery of me.
“It’s nothing, really,” I said through gritted teeth. “It’s not a big deal.”
He bent over me further until his nose almost brushed mine. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you, Stephanie.”
The words were sweet, but there was sharp, black edge to his words, and I remembered Zack’s warning about Haley’s “particular flavor of violence.” A hot wash of fear stung the surface of my skin. I shuddered involuntarily.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” he whispered. “It’s not you that should be afraid. Never you.”
“How did you know about what happened?”
“My brother informed me.”
“Oh.”
“What I want to know is why you didn’t?”
“I don’t know why you would care,” I murmured, risking a glance up at him, only to see a flash of anger darken his face.
But, before he could say anything, Jordan bounced in and sat down, and the second bell rang.
Mr. Brown came in and wrote on the board, "Death and Romance."
"We are going to start examining one of the major themes of 19th century poetry," he said. "There were several prevalent themes that seemed to dominate 19th century poetry, one of which is nature and naturalism, which we will examine later. But the ideas of romance and death became entwined in a way that they had never really been before."
"From Greek mythology, to the horrors of Edgar Allan Poe, poets addressed death from all angles. They not only brought the ideas of love and death together, but they romanticized death itself."
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