by Beth Goobie
“I’m not having problems,” said Skey.
Another silence began, bringing a second stare fight. Tammy took a long deep breath.
“I feel an incredible need to piss,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ll be back in five minutes. If you’re here, we can get to work. I’d suggest Algebra. If you’re not here, I guess that means I’ve got free lunch hours until they find someone who wants help.” She leaned forward and added, “Whoopee.” Then she walked out.
The room was suddenly full of wings, panic swooping in from every direction. The breathing, it was the breathing that got Skey—the way air faded so she couldn’t get any. Sliding her hand into her pocket, she touched the rock. Immediately there was darkness, the boy sitting next to her, his breathing slow, even.
“You’re here again,” he said.
She paced her breathing down to his.
“I can tell when you’re coming in from the other side,” he said. “The air changes. There’s an electric tingle.”
“Positive vibes?” she asked.
“It’s a buzz,” he said. “Somewhere between blue and green.”
Alarm jerked through her. “You can see me?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s just a feeling—the way blue-green feels. Not a happy camper.”
“First day of a bruise,” she said softly.
“Something like that,” he agreed.
“What do you do,” she asked, “when you’ve pissed someone off? It’s someone you don’t like much and you wouldn’t care, except she has some power over you and you have to make up.”
“How old is she?” he asked.
“Seventeen, I think,” she said.
“Bribery,” he said immediately. “Something illegal works best.”
“Not with her,” she said emphatically.
“Then grovel,” he said. “They like it when you grovel.”
“How do you grovel?” she asked.
“My particular style?” he said. “I wimp out. Beg, whine, whimper. I’m a Class A groveler. As in a groveler without class.”
“I can’t do it,” she said decidedly. “Not with her.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“I grovel all day, every day of my life,” she said. “My whole life is one long grovel.”
He went into a thinking pause, then said, “How much power does she have?”
From a long way off, she heard Tammy re-enter the office. “I take your point,” she muttered and returned to the well-lit room, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the fluorescent light.
“Have a good piss?” asked Skey.
“It was fine,” Tammy said, sitting down.
“Did you wash your hands?” asked Skey.
Tammy smiled a little. “Yes.”
“Algebra would be fine,” Skey said.
THE DESKS IN SKEY’S English class were arranged in two half circles, facing the front. Ms. Fleck, the teacher, had decided upon an alphabetical seating plan, telling the class it was more democratic because it broke up cliques and encouraged new relationships. Skey thought it was stupid. San and Trevor were trapped five desks apart in the back row and Skey’s seat was at one end of the front. Beside her sat Brenda Murdoch, alias Miss Upchuck because of frequent gagging noises she made in washroom cubicles. At the other end of the first row, directly opposite Skey, sat the loser from her homeroom, Elwin Serkowski. Alias Lick.
He hadn’t washed his arm and was keeping his left sleeve pushed up. Every now and then his eyes would flick over her writing and shoot toward her, as if he was continually startled at this tiny connection between them, her touch still on his skin. If their eyes happened to meet, he blushed furiously and ducked his head. Every twenty seconds, he licked his lips. Skey wanted to donate some Lypsyl to the future of his mouth, soften his first kiss for the lucky girl.
For something to do, she watched him. If he wasn’t spinning his pen, he was tapping a finger or bouncing a knee. His lips moved constantly as he talked soundlessly to himself, and she could almost hear the whine in his head driving him insane. He probably heard mysterious voices talking about alien invasions or the next apocalypse. Whatever disaster was approaching the human race, Lick would know about it well ahead of everyone else. Every nerve in his body was radar scanning for danger, just like hers. What separated them, what made Lick the loser and Skey the success, was that he advertised it. She sat absolutely still. No one saw her fidget, gulp and swallow every five seconds.
It was Wednesday afternoon, just after Skey’s first session with Tammy Nanji. Class hadn’t started, San and Trevor hadn’t shown yet and most of the students were milling around, talking. Drifting to her desk, Skey deposited her books. Beside her, Brenda sat reading The Guide to Nutritious Dieting. A member of the Cafeteria Board of Directors, it was Brenda’s personal goal to delete every donut, French fry and greasy hamburger that was stuffed down a student’s throat. Last year she had started a petition for a salad bar. No one had signed.
“Where’d you get that, the Book of the Month Club?” Skey asked vaguely as she scanned the room for someone of interest.
Brenda straightened eagerly. “I’m researching vegetarian menus,” she said. “You know—yogurt, cottage cheese, the kind of food you need to diet properly. How are you supposed to keep thin with the crap they feed you here? You ought to be interested in this. A couple of us are meeting Tuesday and Thursday lunch hours to work out a plan. Want to come?”
“Can I bring my boyfriend?” asked Skey, but she didn’t listen to Brenda’s reply. Her gaze had settled on Lick. Turned around in his desk, he was talking to some guys in the back row, his right knee jitterbugging as if it was trapped in the fifties. Feeling very intent, Skey walked over to his desk, sat down on it, and tapped his shoulder. Startled, Lick spun around so quickly that he lurched forward. Skey had to put out a hand to stop his face from implanting itself into a vital part of her anatomy.
Guffaws broke out around them.
“Hey, Lick, you want to make a meal?” someone in the back row howled.
The shape of Lick’s face seemed to glow against her palm, blue-green, like pain. Without asking, Skey knew Lick could feel it too, this sudden strange connection. For a long suspended moment, the two of them sat surrounded by laughter, his face buried in her hand. Then the weird moment of deep meaning passed. Lick pulled back, his face radioactive, dancing his butt all over his seat. The poor guy didn’t know where to look. Everything he most wanted was eye-level, sitting on his desk, and he was bursting at the seams. This was exactly the situation Skey knew how to handle. Smiling, she touched his forearm. Lick let out a moan.
“May I?” she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she pulled his left arm across her lap. Kids crowded in, snickering.
“Hey, Lick, you want crisis counseling?” called someone.
“The guy needs coaching, man,” said someone else.
“Kiss her, Lick,” a guy hollered. “Pull her down and give her.”
Using a fingertip, Skey traced the words she had written on Lick’s arm and watched his face burn. Every ten seconds, his body gave a convulsive jerk.
“Hey,” she said.
His green eyes flicked up to meet hers—the green of an alpine lake, all the inner life fled deep.
“You bored yet, reading this?” she asked.
Staring fixedly at the teacher’s desk, Lick shook his head.
“Maybe I can make it more interesting,” she said. “Anyone got a pen?”
An array of pens flashed toward her. Skey fingered one after another, rejecting them. “No,” she said, “I want red. Anyone got red?”
“I’ve got a marker,” said San, appearing in the crowd.
Skey flashed her a grin and took it. A silence fell on the kids crowded around Lick’s desk.
“Now,” Skey said in delicate tones. “You promised me you would never wash this off, didn’t you?” She paused for dramatic effect, then added, “Didn’t you, Lick?”
His body j
erked again. “Relax, Lick,” she soothed. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
Uncapping the marker, Skey placed it on his skin, about to draw something no one anywhere would ever live down. But under her touch, his arm began to shake. Glancing at him, she saw he was shaking all over, small quick shakes like a cold dog. Suddenly his bare forearm looked stripped, something hauled out of the safety of the dark into the vicious light of day, and she had trapped it, a prisoner for everyone to mock.
Without speaking, Skey bent toward Lick’s face and touched the marker tip to the end of his nose. His eyes crossed as he looked at his nose, then they uncrossed and he glanced up at her face. She watched his fear retreat as he saw the smile on her face. Wary and silent, he waited.
Slowly, Skey drew a huge pair of kissing lips that extended wrist to elbow over the words on his forearm. Then she capped the marker and handed it back to San. Girls giggled shrilly, guys hooted and began making predictions. Motionless, Lick sat staring at his forearm, which continued to rest on Skey’s lap. Their eyes met.
“Promise?” he asked.
Skey handed back his arm. “Just don’t wash it,” she said.
“Never,” he vowed. A tiny grin convulsed his mouth.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN JIGGER TOUCHED HER, she found out what skin meant. Every time he touched her, it meant something different. Jigger touched her, and she found new places deep within that came swimming to her skin to be touched by him. All last summer, she had sat staring through wired-over windows at a world in full bloom, and there had been no colors, the air without scent, absolutely still. Then San had visited, and placed Jigger’s photo in her hands, and the colors in his picture had been so intense, they had burned her fingers. Nobody knew, nobody knew how Jigger touched her. “Skey,” he whispered, and she came alive in her skin.
When he dropped her off Wednesday after school, he parked half a block from the gate and watched until she passed through it and was out of sight. Then he started up the car, revving the engine heavily as he drove past the grounds. As the sound of the car faded, Skey felt it take some part of her with it, pulling her into the distance to be with him. Colors, sounds, feelings. Meaning. Slowly she approached the lockup’s side entrance, its heavy wood door so old, it looked as if it opened onto another century. Ringing the bell, she waited until a staff peered through the wired-over window. With a groan, the door opened onto the inside, with its set of stairs leading upward, past Administration on the first floor, Unit A on the second, Unit B on the third and Unit C on top of it all.
After the outside light, the stairwell seemed dark. Silently Skey trudged up the stairs after the staff, listening to the sound of girls’ voices and the stereo coming from Unit A. At the next landing, she turned and followed the staff into the entrance hall that led into Unit B. Over her head, circles of light shone from implanted ceiling lamps. The first door in this short hall opened onto the Back Room, a small room into which a girl was placed if staff thought she couldn’t handle things on her own. If she went stark raving mad, a girl was taken over to the school and put into one of several padded rooms that were opposite the gym. Viv had already spent time in these rooms, but Skey had never seen the inside of any of them. Continuing along the hall, she passed the girls’ tub room and the door that opened onto the office. Here, the entrance hall ended and the unit’s open area began. All she had to do now was cross it without anyone noticing her, and disappear into her room.
“Skey,” called a voice, and she turned toward the office to see a tall male silhouette standing in the brightly lit doorway. Skey blinked, trying to make out the face. It got so dark in this place that sometimes it was difficult to see the most basic things. Raising a hand, she traced the air in front of her face. Was there a carving here? If there was, would it tell her where she was, what she was supposed to be doing with her life, why?
“Ready for our meeting?” the voice continued heartily. “Your mother’s waiting.”
Abruptly, the darkness faded and Skey saw her social worker, Larry Currie, standing in front of her, waving his usual cheerfulness like a flag. As always, it brought out a savage anger in her, made her want to punch her name right off his lips.
“Yeah yeah,” she mumbled. So, it was time for the mother-daughter bonding thing, strengthening the family chains. Fortunately only her mother had decided to attend these meetings. Mr. Mitchell had declared himself too busy to attend his daughter’s improvement sessions.
“Just a sec,” said Skey. “I have to dump my books.” Crossing the unit, she stepped into the moment of relief that was her room. Aloneness descended upon her and she stood staring out her window at the gray-wired sky and the slow-moving elm. Then a shuffle sounded behind her, and she turned to see Ann standing in the doorway. Skey nodded and she stepped in.
“Pencil case,” said Skey.
It was on the bed, out of the line of sight from the office. When two girls were in a bedroom, the door had to remain open at all times. Carefully, Ann removed the weed from Skey’s pencil case and slid it into her shirt pocket.
“Don’t forget the matches,” said Skey.
Without a word, Ann headed straight for the washroom. As Skey returned to the office, she saw Larry still standing by the door, watching Ann with a quizzical expression on his face. Skey swallowed the sudden hook in her throat. Had they been that obvious? If staff went after Ann now, she had better be smart enough to flush the weed down a toilet. Tomorrow Viv was just going to have to wait an hour for delivery.
“SO,” SAID LARRY, as they walked along the entrance hall and started down the stairs, “how’s school?” Without seeming to notice, he stepped on and off the stair with the loudest creak between second and third floor. With a slight hiss, Skey skipped the stair. Within a few days of her arrival, she had assessed every stair in this place—which ones creaked, which ones whimpered, and which ones remained silent under the endless feet that came and went, pressing down on them.
“Fine,” she replied, following him into the first floor hall and its rows of social workers’ offices, each with several filing cabinets of files analyzing how stiffly a girl sat, how long she stared at one spot, when she blinked. For extra fun, dysfunctional parents were brought in and arranged in alphabetical seating plans. Then the social workers got down behind their metal desks and observed the ensuing crossfire: who got hit, who went down, who survived.
“Skey,” said a cool clear voice, and she saw her mother standing outside Larry’s office, graceful as a figurine. One light kiss on the cheek, the brief scent of Oscar coming and going—Mrs. Mitchell was delicate air, hardly there at all. Eyes narrowed, Skey looked her mother over. So, she was still working out, keeping herself whiplash thin. As usual, the colors of her face were carefully arranged, her clothing chosen to match the decor in Larry’s office. The first time she visited a place, Mrs. Mitchell always wore off-white and took careful note of the color of the walls and furnishings. On return visits, she dressed to match the furniture. Skey had figured out her scheme several years ago when they were visiting her father’s boss. The wife had ordered new carpet and furniture for the living room and had caught Mrs. Mitchell unaware, dressed in mauve and seated on a chocolate brown couch. Mrs. Mitchell had twitched and jabbered throughout the entire visit, as if sitting on pins and needles.
Larry’s office offered quite a challenge to the fashion obsessed—one red-and-blue plaid couch, one lime green armchair, one sepia armchair, a dark brown carpet and orange-yellow curtains. As she entered, Skey saw her mother take a small determined breath and head straight for the couch. Her aqua blue dress called out to the blue in the plaid. They were an exact match.
Skey was wearing a red shirt and jeans. She plopped down in the lime green armchair and watched her mother’s headache begin. Calmly Larry settled in behind his desk.
“So, how’s school?” asked Mrs. Mitchell.
“It’s been fine since Monday,” said Skey.
Her mother gave her a long-sufferin
g look.
“How’s your golf coming?” asked Skey.
“It’s November, dear,” said her mother.
“Oh, has it been that long since we spoke?” asked Skey.
Larry coughed delicately. Something lived in his throat, something he was perpetually trying to eject. “You’ve started working with a tutor at school?” he prompted.
“Yeah, she’s smarter than me,” said Skey.
“Than I,” her mother corrected.
“She’s probably smarter than you too,” Skey agreed.
Larry let out a heated Gulf Stream of air. “Skey,” he said. “You seem upset.”
Skey crossed her arms and stared at the dark brown carpet. “I don’t need this place,” she said. “What am I here for? I don’t freak out. You don’t see me getting held down or put in locked rooms. I’m not on antidepressants, or crazy drugs or whatever it is you feed the inmates. I’ve got a tutor now, I’ll catch up at school. So why don’t you just unlock your stupid doors and let me go?”
Larry settled back in his chair, observing her carefully. “I’m not sure you’ve resolved your issues,” he said slowly.
“My issues,” Skey mimicked angrily. “Just exactly what are my issues?”
Larry studied her as if she was in a cage and he had all the time in the world.
“You talking about this?” Pulling up one of her sleeves, Skey held up the scars. Larry nodded silently. Mrs. Mitchell turned her head and focused vaguely on the off-white wall.
“I won’t do it again,” said Skey. “I never even think about them.”
It was true. She caught glimpses of the scars when she bathed and changed her clothes, but they simply brushed past the periphery of her consciousness, a slight electric ripple in her brain. Other than that, she never thought about them. The scars were just there, something on her skin. Something she had done once upon a time, in a fairy tale long ago. In another life.
“Something led to it, Skey,” said Larry. “We need to know why you’re so angry.”
“Angry!” Skey’s mouth dropped and she stared at him. “Wouldn’t you be angry if you were locked up for five months?”
