by S. L. Naeole
“So Janice is now out of a job?” I asked, trying to buy some time to process this bit of information. If the school was closed, that means that Graham would be attending Heath High School…with Erica…and…me. The forkful of eggs and toast in my mouth suddenly felt like lead; it weighed down my tongue, and the metallic taste of something I didn’t recognize filled my senses as they clobbered each other to occupy space in my already confused mind.
I was so consumed by this new piece of information that I barely heard Dad as he answered me. “Technically, she’s been out of a job for a while now. She’s having difficulties finding other work, both in Heath and Newark, and she’s getting desperate. Her unemployment is set to run out soon.”
He put his hand on my shoulder, pressing down in what should have been a reassuring gesture, but instead felt more like he was holding me down for what he had left to say. He looked into my eyes once more, hesitant, as though he knew that what would come next would cause a negative reaction. “Grace, I asked Janice if she’d like to stay here with us until she can get back on her feet. I wanted to tell you a week ago, but you were still in such a state, I couldn’t bring it up.”
Stupid Graham. Stupid North Cumberland. Stupid me. Look at me—reduced to juvenile insults. Why did I have to open my mouth? All it ever did was disappoint me in some way.
“You invited her to live with us? Without talking to me?” I was incredulous. I was angry. I was…hurt.
He looked down at the table and stared at his plate, now full of cold, greasy eggs surrounded by stale toast. “Janice needs a place to stay, Grace. She’s been out of work for too long, and she can’t afford her mortgage on top of all of her other bills. You’re almost an adult, getting ready to head off to college, to a whole new life without your old man. I didn’t think that it would be a big deal if she stayed here.”
Janice. Janice “Du Jour” Dupre. Janice “The-woman-who wants-to-take-my-mom’s-spot” Dupre was going to be moving in to my mom’s home. Sleep in my mom’s bed. Cook in my mom’s kitchen. The thought disgusted me. The betrayal to my mom turned the already congealed blood within me to ice. Could things get any worse?
Dad took a deep breath, exhaling it slowly while his hands gripped the table, preparing for what came next.
Of course. Things could always get worse.
“Grace. Listen. I care about Janice a great deal. She’s funny and she makes me laugh, and that’s not something I have done a lot of since your mom died—you know that better than anyone. Your mom will always be your mom, nothing can or will ever change that, and I will always love her, but Janice is giving me a new start…at a lot of things.”
Your mom? Suddenly she’s no longer just “mom”. She’s your mom. And new start? At a lot of things? What things? What could he possibly need a new start at? The warning bells starting going off in my head. The knocking at the door of my consciousness turned into banging: insistent, desperate. A question quickly formed in my mind, a frightening question that I had to voice. I had to hear the words, even though I knew the answer before they ever left my lips.
“Dad—is Janice pregnant?”
His wide-eyed stare, coupled with his silence was, ironically, pregnant with the answer that I dreaded. He slowly nodded his head.
My face burned from embarrassment and anger. “Why, Dad? Oh my God, aren’t you guys old enough to know how to use a condom or birth control pills?!”
Okay. I admit that I went too far, but what was I to do? My forty-seven-year-old father had just knocked up his girlfriend!
I sensed it before I saw it; Dad’s face turned several shades of red before settling on a near ketchup-like color, and it couldn’t have been more of a warning than if he’d actually had it tattooed on his forehead: I was about to get an earful.
“Grace Anne Shelley, don’t you ever speak that way to me again! I won’t be disrespected in my own home; you will do well to remember that, young lady. Yes, Janice is pregnant, and how that happened is none of your damned business! Yes, she is moving in with us in three days, and I expect you to be respectful to her, if not friendly, because this is my house, and when you disrespect someone in my house, you’re disrespecting me.”
I stared at his face, his nostrils flaring so wide that I considered shoving some bacon up there just to get him to stop talking about respect and houses, especially when he was planning on disrespecting Mom’s memory by bringing that woman into her home. I really didn’t like to pay much attention to him when he was angry. It saved me from having to relive the words he’d said later. The words he was about to say now.
“I love you, Grace Anne. I have loved you from the first moment you entered into this world, probably before you were even born. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done, the best part of me and your mom. You make it easy to love you; you’re a lot like your mom in that regard. But while it’s easy to love you, Grace, it’s very difficult to like you. It’s hard. You make it so difficult with your expectations, your guilt!”
He shook his head, his disappointment clear, and then said quietly—almost too quietly—but not quietly enough, “Perhaps it was best that Graham ended your friendship. You always expected more from him than he could give you, especially after Mom died.”
I felt my fingers dig into my thighs under the table and winced; my once numb body had started feeling again. It was feeling the burn of anger, betrayal, and…pain. But this time I wasn’t going to let it turn me into a ball of gelatinous Grace. Instead, I got up, ignoring the outraged expression that crossed over Dad’s face.
Déjà vu had me walking upstairs to my room. But rather than throwing myself on my bed to cry myself senseless again for another two weeks, I grabbed my book bag, tossed in my wallet and my binder, grabbed my MP3 player, and left.
The clock read twenty past seven.
I was going to be early to the worst day of my life.
ERICA
I stood in a line, invisible while in plain sight like any other day. Over half of the senior class was either in front or in back of me, all of us clamoring for our class schedules like junkies looking for a fix. Everyone else who had already endured the wait stood off to the side, comparing classes together. The typical questions were being passed around: who was in whose class, who would sit next to whom, who was going to be closest to the doors for a ditch day success, and who had free periods.
All I wanted to know was if Dad had been right. Would Graham be here? And if he was, would we be in any classes together? It was a strong possibility and I didn’t know how I’d be able to handle that. Seeing him would be difficult enough. My heart, still nothing more than a cold pile of ashes, did nothing at the thought.
And then there he was, standing next to a beautiful girl with a halo of blonde hair that hung down her back like a gold curtain. They had their heads bent towards each other, comparing schedules and laughing, completely oblivious to the icy turmoil that raged within me just a few yards away. When she looked up at him, he smiled down at her, his hand reaching up to stroke her hair. His fingers trailed to her waist, and she leaned into him, her arm wrapping around his in return. I, in turn, felt nothing but the cold September air around me, still warmer than I was on the inside. But death wasn’t supposed to be warm unless you were heading straight to Hell, right?
Well, I was in Hell. A cold, dead, Graham-holding-onto-a-beautiful-blonde-Erica filled Hell.
A little cough from behind me alerted me to the fact that I was next; great, caught daydreaming again. I hurried forward and quickly whispered my name to the registrar whose name I could never remember, despite seeing her every single year for the past four. The slightly plump woman with the friendly smile was standing outside her office with her folder of senior schedules. Now, Heath isn’t exactly a large school; our student body is quite small in comparison to some of the surrounding high schools, so comparatively, her task was undoubtedly quite easy. But she hadn’t heard me—I had to repeat my name, she told me, and so I did, my voice just a
decibel higher, and yet still barely louder than a whisper.
“Oh honey, I know who you are. You’re Miss Grace Shelley. My, you’ve matured a great deal over the summer, haven’t you, sweetheart?” she cooed robustly. She cooed at everyone. She knew everyone. It was nothing special to be recognized by the school’s registrar—it was her job. But why did she have to be so loud? I could feel dozens of pairs of eyes on me, burning through my bag, my shirt, my hair.
My hair! I forgot to brush it!
Quickly, my hand reached up to what I hoped was a few neatly disorganized strands, knowing full well that the wrath my hair could put down on me probably meant something much worse. What I felt was my own embarrassment doubling, all in the palm of my hand. My hair—or what should have been my hair—felt like I had a blind ostrich’s nest attached to the back of my head, the unruly weave of tangles and knots forming an unrecognizable mass that sat at the base of my neck in a heap.
I would need to get to a bathroom quickly to try and fix this, though I was certain that enough eyes had seen the horror that was my hair and the news would spread throughout the school before I’d even gotten a chance to see the damage for myself. I stared at the registrar, trying to will her to hurry up. She rifled through several sheets of paper and finally pulled out what I hoped was my schedule.
“Here you go, sugar. Have a great first day!” she said in a sing-song voice, a broad and cheerful smile stretching across her pretty round face.
I snatched it out of her hand and stepped backwards, trying to get as far away from the cooing, the syrupy sweet endearments, and the pair of jade-green eyes that I could see staring at me from the corner of my eye as quickly as possible. I backed up…right into a wall that had not been there a minute ago.
I turned around to see what it was that had obstructed my escape, and ended up giving one of my best glares to a button. An expensive button, judging by the logo stamped on it. There were many of them, too; I counted them, my gaze going higher, the look in my eyes becoming less mean and more…confused. Five buttons later, I was staring into a pair of gray eyes nestled in a face that I didn’t recognize—not that I could have recognized half of the faces at Heath anyway—but I thought I had made mental images of every senior here, if only to know who to avoid. He was new. He had dark hair. He was tall.
He was…beautiful.
“Um’scusemesorrygottago,” I quickly mumbled with no breath, no pause, and no thought as to what I sounded like. I had spent a lifetime staring into the perfection that was Graham’s face, and not once had I ever been at a loss for coherency. Yet here I was, mush-mouthed, a gigantic bird’s nest in my hair, and an eager and willing audience that included Graham just 6 feet away. And so I did what any reasonable person would do in such a situation.
I bolted.
I felt like such a coward, but self-preservation screamed at me, urging me to go, pulling me away as quickly as my feet could carry me. I found an empty girls restroom as far away from the office as possible, threw myself into a stall, and felt my breathing stumble and falter as I sat down on the seat, locking the door as my backpack tumbled to the ground by my feet.
My chest rose and fell like a teeter-totter; I couldn’t seem to find a pace that mimicked normal breathing. It seemed that the more I focused on doing it as naturally as possible, the more odd it felt, out of place.
How many breaths per minute were enough to keep you alive? How many would be enough to get you to start hyperventilating? Where among those numbers was I? Not wanting to lose this inner battle, I concentrated on trying to keep the burning in my eyes from unleashing its fire in the form of tears instead. That seemed to be easier.
I hadn’t cried in school since the seventh grade, when Patricia Daniels had lifted my shirt in front of the entire junior high student body…and I wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
Oh God, why did I remind myself of that? The heat that rimmed my eyes was growing ever stronger. I needed to think about something else before I turned into a bawling, babbling mess in the girls’ bathroom.
I looked down at my hand and saw my class schedule, still clutched in my grip, now wrinkled and crushed by hands that had balled up into frustrated little fists. I hadn’t had enough time to put it away before I bumped into him. Its sterile and benign print beckoned. I might as well look it over while I sat here in self-inflicted purgatory.
I had homeroom with Mr. Frey, French with Madame Hidani and Calculus with Mrs. Hoppbaker. I was pleased so far. Mr. Frey was always asleep during homeroom, so I could be late if I wanted, and walking to school would most likely make me late. Madam Hidani was a transplant from Hawai’i who somehow mastered in French Literature and ended up teaching in our small Ohio town. Her fluent and flowing French, coming out of that exotic face always made me smile. Just to throw us off a little more, she had even done the hula while singing in French! Then there was Mrs. Hoppbaker, who was probably the largest woman in all of Heath, and never failed to point out that fact to us every year. I felt a bubble of laughter form in my chest when I thought of how she had introduced herself to us at the beginning of last year.
“Good afternoon students. My name is Mrs. Hoppbaker, and I’m so big, I’ve got two parking spaces reserved for me; one for my car, and one so I can get in and out of it.”
She always did her best to make math fun and had it not been for her, I probably would have never been accepted into the Calculus program she taught in the morning. It was going to be tough, but she would make it a much more pleasant experience than—I scanned down the list…
Ugh. Fourth period science: Biology II. Not that I hated dissection or bodily examinations. I’m the furthest thing from squeamish. Rather, it was the teacher Mr. Branke that made me ill. He liked to touch all of the female students. And I mean all of them, including me. It wasn’t the kind of touching that’d get you arrested, just the kind that made you feel uncomfortable. His unwanted attentions had earned him the nickname “The Octopus” because of how it seemed as though he had eight arms, and each one of them somehow managed to touch you all at the same time.
I had hoped for the only other Biology teacher at Heath, Mr. Yost, but he required you to take a placement exam before allowing you in, and I’m not one of those naturally gifted braniacs. I’m not an idiot, but I’m not MENSA material either; seeing Mr. Branke’s name on the schedule confirmed what I already knew: I wasn’t cut out for advanced biological sciences.
Fifth period was English Literature, which was a sleeper class with Mrs. Muniz. I had read all of the books on last year’s fourth year syllabus, so I knew there would be nothing new learned there. Sixth period was a surprise, however. Theater? I didn’t even know we had a Drama program! But there it was in black and white, with a Mr. Calvin Danielson listed as the teacher.
I knew I hadn’t chosen an elective at the end of last year, hoping that on the off chance that there was nothing else, I could have a free period, but Theater? Seriously? What did I know about the arts other than the plays I had read? I could understand their emotions, sure, but to physically act them out? If I couldn’t lie with a straight face to my dad, how would I manage lying to an entire audience? Maybe I could be a stagehand, a techie—I’d be the person pulling the curtain or handing out props. As long as we didn’t have to get up on stage, I’d be fine.
The sound of the bathroom door opening and the clunking of heavy soles on ceramic tile yanked me from my thoughts. Giggling and talking accompanied the interruption. I recognized one of the voices immediately, even though I had never spoken to her in my life.
Erica Hamilton’s voice filled the bathroom with its presence, and did nothing to detract from the air she gave of money, power, and popularity. We were a lot alike in some ways, I suppose. Most people avoided her like the plague, too. Well, most sane people anyway. The difference between the two of us was that while people avoided me because I was odd, they avoided her because of how mean she could be if you dared to cross her. It was the main reason she was
as popular as she was. No one felt brave enough to stand up to her; beauty and money were intimidating things.
And she was certainly beautiful. The ice blue eyes that glared past heavy lids were so full of malice, one often felt like they had no choice but to continue to look at her for fear of havoc she’d unleash if you did not. Her smile was full, but upon closer inspection it was plain that she did so through gritted teeth, as though expressing genuine pleasure was somehow painful or annoying.
I stared at her, trying to find a reason to like her, if only to make it easier to see why Graham had chosen her. Did she have a redeeming quality of some sort that I didn’t see that Graham did? Everyone knew she was rich, and obviously she was beautiful and popular, but was that it? Graham had never been that superficial… On second thought, she did remind me of one of Graham’s favorite actresses who was always casted as the cold, calculating high school villain. Maybe that was it. He liked the beautiful girls with the flawed personalities. I was just flawed.
“Did you see him? Oh my GAWD, he was beautiful! HAWT!” Erica gushed. “I think Graham was getting jealous that he was staring at me for so long. Oh-Em-Gee, those EYES! I swear, they were so amazing! It felt like he could see right into me!”
Another voice replied, “I know! He stared at you for, like, ever! Like you were something he wanted to eat! And Graham should be jealous. Hell, I’m jealous! He’s not the cutest guy in school anymore!”
More giggling filled the room.
I wanted to gag.
“Speaking of Graham, did you see that freak friend of his? She ran right into that new guy and it was like she bounced off! He repelled her like he had some super power against freakiness or something! Hawtman!” the other voice laughed.
I could see Erica through the crack between the door and the frame of the stall. She was staring in the mirror at her reflection, a twisted smirk on her face.
