by Sean Boling
Chapter Twenty: Mia
Cleaning out her desk was the most difficult part of her last day. She felt as though she was being fired from a job. With Mr. Benton’s permission, she stayed behind when everyone lined up for the walk over to the main building, but didn’t want to start sweeping her pencils and notebooks and stray papers into the shopping bag she had wadded up in her backpack until her now-former classmates had filed through the door.
While they stood along the wall waiting for their procession to start, Mia sat alone at her desk. Most of the exchanges were light-hearted, as some of the goofier boys reached in her direction and pretended to blubber on about missing her, while the girls made pouty faces and gave her little waves. She worked hard not to laugh when Beatrice imitated the girls’ attempts at sincerity, and discovered that the best way to keep from laughing was to notice that neither Kimmy nor Artie would look at her.
When the whistle blew and Mr. Benton opened the door, Mia kept her focus on the two of them. They were only a few students apart from each other, toward the end of the line. Kimmy was ahead of Artie, and she finally glanced at Mia as she reached the sunlight that poured through the opening. Mia had a feeling that the timing was by design, but it worked. Kimmy looked lovely as she turned and smiled at her. She seemed to apologize and wish her well all at once. Mia would have been more emotional if she hadn’t been so surprised, but the emotions came seconds later when Artie took his turn in the sunlight. He couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Mia, but a trail of tears on his cheek caught the light and shined it her way. She looked down as though the sun itself was in her eyes, and was glad there were but a few students left so that she only had to wait a few more seconds to cry on her own.
She did so for a good thirty seconds before unraveling the shopping bag and gathering items into it from inside her desk, while trying to compose herself before Mr. Benton came back. But when he returned, she was still breathing heavily, with her eyes and nose running at full sprint.
She apologized as he walked over and sat in the desk next to hers.
“Sorry for what?” he asked. “Being sad about leaving my class? I’d be offended if you weren’t.”
Mia laughed a little and tried to see through her tears if she had forgotten anything.
“I need to see if Zoey needs help,” she explained as she stood up.
“You’re a great kid,” he said as he stood up with her.
“Thank you.”
“And your Mom’s cool, too. She’s just going through a rough time.”
“Why do I have to go through it with her?”
She started sobbing again and Mr. Benton hugged her.
“I’ve seen much worse,” he said. “So much worse.”
“I hate it when people tell me how good I have it when I’m feeling this way.”
“I know. But it’s true in the long run.”
“And then they tell you it’s a long run,” she separated from him but kept hugging herself. “As if you don’t feel bad enough. Wow, you mean I get to feel like this a bunch more times? Great.”
Mr. Benton chuckled.
“And then they laugh at you,” he chastised himself. “You do see my point, though, yes?”
She nodded.
“Sorry for hugging you,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to get anyone else in trouble.”
Mr. Benton sighed until he ran out of breath.
“Grab your shopping bag,” he finally said. “Let’s take the walk one last time before I start crying, too.”
Mia could see her Mom’s Cherokee looming just above and beyond the campus on the frontage road.
Zoey was in the showroom pressing her face against the window as they approached, trying to earn some laughter.
“People are going to miss her more than me,” Mia said.
“That’s because they know deep down, she won’t miss them,” Mr. Benton answered.
Mia wasn’t expecting anything so frank about a student from a teacher. And though she agreed with him, she felt a primal urge to defend her sister.
“She might,” was the best she could come up with. “Some of them, maybe.”
“You think that’s a bad quality to have?” he asked her.
She turned toward him, once again surprised by something he said.
“You don’t think it is?” she asked back.
“It can come in handy,” he answered, then stopped short of the building.
She halted alongside him, but he put a hand on her back as a signal for her to proceed.
“You’re going to be great,” he told her.
Mia smiled as best she could, and as she made her way closer to her sister’s funny face exhibit, she looked back before entering the showroom. Mr. Benton was staring out in the direction where her Mom was parked. He appeared to be deciding whether or not to wave, or maybe even walk over and say something, but he was deliberating in such a serene fashion, as though watching the ocean at sunset.
As she and Zoey walked up to their Mom’s parking place, she didn’t look back, but was hoping to hear Mr. Benton’s voice asking them to wait up. When they crawled into the car, she peeked at the campus, but didn’t see him anywhere.
He was done surprising her.
At the middle school the following week, she noticed that a lot of the reactions concerning her mother weren’t what she had come to expect. Her teachers, in particular, regarded her mother as something of a folk hero.
When she met with each of them after class, their initial explanations regarding how they were going to handle her late arrival made enough sense.
“Since there isn’t much work left,” went the party line, “we’ll just base your grade mainly on how you do on the state tests.”
But then when Mia asked if she should bring in work from LOCA, or if they were going to contact Mr. Benton or Mr. Copeland, none of them found it necessary, and they would wrap up the meeting by asking Mia to “say hi to your mother for me.”
She never delivered the greetings on their behalf. At first she withheld them out of spite. But her continued refusal was based on how much her mother was enjoying the fight. Mia hadn’t seen her so happy in some time. Conflict seemed to suit her, give her a sense of purpose, and Mia didn’t want to encourage that quality. Enjoying the agitation was enough. She didn’t need to take pride in it.
The students, meanwhile, didn’t take much notice of Mia. She drifted from class to class, as disinterested in making new friends as the established cliques were in expanding their ranks. She still hung out with Beatrice whenever she could after school. The middle school was in between the Live Oak campus and the shipping warehouse where Beatrice’s mother worked, the “realization station”. So on days when Candice allowed it, she would bring Mia’s bike in the trunk on her way to pick up Zoey, and Beatrice would stop by the middle school on her bike and the two girls would ride to the warehouse together. Candice allowed it rather frequently, for as much as she relished her role as an agitator, when it came to the parts her daughters had to play, she harbored plenty of guilt for Candice to untie.
The bike ride was the best part of any day they were allowed to be together. The road leading to the realization station was sparsely traveled when there wasn’t a shift change in process, and the land split by the road was flat, making for an easy ride. The ease inspired some maneuvers designed to ruffle the flatness and add curves to the straight line. Their signature move was to weave back and forth past one another in rhythm. If they were able to leave a trail of smoke that could be seen from above, their ritual would have left the shape of a rope that had unraveled.
After they finished doing their homework in the break room, they would look in on the warehouse with one of the managers, a combat veteran named Hector in the process of moving from muscular to rotund, who appreciated the change of pace that the girls threw into his shift. But they could only follow him so far. There was a line they couldn’t cross, an ac
tual yellow line painted on the shiny epoxied floor that ran around the entire perimeter. Hector told them the line was a mile and a half long.
For all the activity in the one million square feet, the space operated at a low volume. It was all hum and hiss. Viewing it from Hector’s office provided a drone’s eye view, but little difference in terms of sound. Even when on the floor, everything seemed to be happening through a window. Hector took a lot of pride in his work, but explained that much of the pride was grounded in surviving his previous work, and managing to adjust to a civilian job with less difficulty than a lot of his old co-workers.
“I never think of soldiers as co-workers,” Beatrice said as they stood in Hector’s office with him and surveyed the floor and its hundreds of gliding parts sneaking around beneath them.
“There’s actually a lot of them here,” he added. “Well, mostly their spouses, from the base. But a lot of vets who were stationed there and came back to the valley when they retired.”
“I never think of anyone wanting to live here,” Mia said.
“You should see where a lot of the other bases are,” Hector chuckled. “This is the Garden of Eden compared to them.”
The girls were not comforted by the thought that their hometown wasn’t as bad as much of the rest of the world. They revisited the idea the day after Hector broke the news, as they worked on their pre-Algebra homework in the empty break room.
“We’ll just have to aim for the nicer parts,” Beatrice concluded as they considered their future in such a world.
“Maybe it’s comfort,” Mia offered. “People get used to a place.”
“Like you,” Beatrice said.
“Me?” Mia dropped her pencil into the gulch between the pages of her textbook. “Do I seem satisfied to you?”
“I mean when it comes to school. You adjusted quickly.”
“I was just relived to get out of Live Oak.”
“Aw…”
“You know what I mean. I was starting to feel like Artie.”
“Son of Satan?” Beatrice likewise surrendered her pencil.
“Daughter of Shiva, destroyer of charter schools.”
“Shiva’s male.”
“That’s right. Sounds so feminine, though.”
“We need more kick-ass goddesses.”
“Speak for yourself. Try being raised by one.”
“Come on. You said the teachers love her, and the students don’t care.”
“Most of them. Do you remember a girl named Eve? Seventh grader at LOCA?”
“I think. She’s at the middle school now?”
“Yeah, and pissed about it. She’s cornered me a couple times and bitched about my Mom convincing her parents to transfer her.”
“So,” Beatrice looked on the bright side. “It’s just one.”
“But if the charter closes, I’m screwed. I’ll have dozens of Eves coming at me, all the time.”
“The teachers will have your back.”
“Sure,” Mia scoffed. “That’ll help. A teacher’s pet on top of whatever you call the thing I’ve become thanks to my mother.”
The door to the break room opened and a woman whose mascara blended into the darkness around her eyes flashed them a split-second smile before fetching a flattened bag of microwave popcorn from the pile in a shallow basket next to the oven.
The girls weren’t ready to return to their homework, but didn’t want to talk while the woman stripped away the plastic and put the paper shingle behind the smeared door of the microwave.
“If that happens,” Mia picked up the conversation as the oven started to breathe, “if the charter closes, maybe Artie and I can finally bond.”
“Not unless you go to boarding school with him.”
“What?”
“That’s where he’s headed next year,” Beatrice explained. “No matter what happens to LOCA. Some school in San Francisco, I think. That’s the rumor.”
“So he may not be going?”
“No, he’s definitely going. The rumors are about where the school is. I don’t think his father wants anyone to know.”
Mia stared at the pencil nestled in the shallow chasm of her math book. She heard the popcorn start to thump into the sides of the bag as it spun around.
“How convenient,” Mia deflated. “I wish we had the money to run away and hide.”
The sound from the oven was accompanied by laughter from the woman who pushed the button.
“Ain’t the first time you’re gonna wish that, honey,” she cackled.
Mia and Beatrice looked at each other as the popping grew louder and closer together, bunches of kernels bursting at once while the bag absorbed the blows. Mia looked down at her pre-Algebra, then Beatrice looked at hers.
The oven stopped and its bell rang.
They took the bell as their cue to start working again, exchanging weary grins as they did.
