by Tish Cohen
“All I’ve done since you left is listen to the saddest elevator music and weep.” She has music thumping in the background and I’m quite certain it’s never been played in an elevator.
“Liar.”
“You go first. How geeky are the kids there?”
“They try to get out of phys ed so they can work on trig assignments, they hold Sudoku tournaments on the floor in front of their lockers, and I can pretty much guarantee there’s no wood shop.”
“In other words, you fit in right away,” she says with a giggle.
“No. I managed to stand out just as much as I did at Finmory. Ate my egg-salad sandwich on a bus-shelter bench down the street from the school.”
“Aw, dude. That makes me weep all over again.”
“Why? I ate lunch at the bus shelter near Finmory tons of times until I met you. Teenagers don’t like me. I’m used to it.”
“They’re just like the idiots at Finmory. Jealous as all hell because they know you’re going to cream them in life. You’ll be the serious brains of the school.”
I grunt. “I wish. These kids are way beyond me, Mand. I’m completely lost in pre-law and it’s only the end of the second day. You should see the stack of homework on my desk. I couldn’t even finish it all. And none of the other kids seems to be freaking out. They’re all totally used to it.”
“Yeah, well. Wait’ll they see you in math. Will it help if I tell you I have the sweetest news ever?”
“Let me guess. Eddie proposed to you and wants you to blow off high school so you can follow him around the country and keep the groupies from getting fingerprints on his guitar.” Eddie Wilcox is Mandy’s long-term boyfriend. A full two years older than her, he manages Video Invasion back in Lundon by day and wastes away his weekends trying to reinvent 1990s boy-band songs with his fellow idiots in his mother’s garage. Mandy is completely smitten with him, which baffles me because he has cheated on her twice—that we know of. Besides, I think he looks like a cartoon baby, only stretched out, rubberized, and without the zingy one-liners.
Mandy bites into something crisp—sounds like an apple or a carrot. “Hey, that’s the father of my future dropouts you’re knocking.”
“Sorry. I’ll make it up to them in candy and violent video games. What’s up?”
“Remember Jessie Clarke’s cousin used to have a horse she kept outside of town?”
“Sure. She never let you ride it, no matter how much you hinted. So what?”
“The cousin has scoliosis.”
“Wow. That’s brutal.”
“She needs someone to ride him every day and muck out his stall. And it’s going to be me.”
“What’s the pay?”
“I don’t want pay. I want to ride Bojangles.”
I consider this. “Not to burst your thought bubble, Mand, but what about homework? You can’t just goof around in a barn all year.”
“I’ve come up with a new life ambition. Stable manager. There’s a course I can take in Cohasset and, believe me, my grades are not going to matter. Hanging in a barn will be like doing homework.”
Mandy has always loved horses but her parents could never afford regular lessons. I know this is a dream come true for her. So why do I feel like throwing up? “That’s cool,” I say.
“It gets better. Remember my great-grandma died?” she asks. “I guess she’s been stashing money under her lumpy mattress or something, because we just found out she left us money. My brother and I are each going to inherit thirty thousand dollars when we graduate high school. I’m going to use it to start my stable.”
Mandy is getting to ride a horse for free, inheriting a wad of cash, and she gets to stay at Finmory High? I force a smile. “That’s amazing! You’re so lucky.”
“What about you?” she asks with her mouth full. “Is your new house totally gorgeous?”
I glance at my window frame, which still has bits of tinfoil stuck to it. “It’s not exactly a house. It’s an apartment. Above a hardware store.”
“Huh.” Mandy is quiet for a moment. “Anyway, I can’t wait to come visit next month. Will your dad pick me up?”
“Of course. God, I can’t wait.”
“I wish he’d let you go on Facebook. A few guys friended this Cosmo model and she answered them. Bobby asked her out, the moron.”
“I’d have loved to have seen her reject him.” I laugh. “But you know my father—no Web presence for little Sara.”
“Once more, I weep for you.”
“Please do.”
I hear shuffling from the hall and my dad’s sleepy head pokes into my room. “Sara? Are you on the phone?”
I whisper, “Gotta go,” snap my phone shut, and pretend to roll over in my sleep.
chapter 6
lockers, unlike mothers, are for life
Late Thursday night I sit at my desk, the surface of which is littered with notebooks, open textbooks, an empty package of Oreos, dirty dishes, and a yellow highlighter whose lid has been swallowed up by confusion, exhaustion, and what should be an illegal amount of homework.
I was finally assigned a locker this morning. Apparently lockers are for life since Anton students are assigned a locker number their first day of freshman year and keep it until they graduate or, considering the pressure, go AWOL. Whichever comes first.
All of which means Tommie, the senior who dropped out so famously on the first day of school, left behind something much more exciting than a juicy exit story. He left behind an empty locker. So guess whose new locker is on the third floor with all the twelfth graders? Mine. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you think about it, high-school students don’t have recess, so where do they make social plans and get to know each other? Hanging around their lockers, of course. It’s a pathetic formula.
1 lonely kid + 0 people her age = a whole lot of Saturday nights alone playing Scrabble with Charlie.
It’s 12:37 a.m. My eyes itch and ache, and the strain of keeping them open is making me think of using toothpicks as props, like in the old Flintstones cartoons. But I still haven’t finished my calculus, and after that, I have to read over two case studies for pre-law. Now I’m reading the first three chapters of Crime and Punishment for Nineteenth-Century Lit.
I thought I’d hate it. Truthfully, I’m more of a Jane Austen fan. Give me Miss Elizabeth Bennett and her pert opinions over a bedraggled Russian loner in a garret any day. But the main character in Dostoyevsky’s book, this Raskolnikov, he had me at rascal. I can actually relate to him. His crappy room, his isolation, the way he’s afraid to bump into his landlady in the stairwell. I bumped into our landlord, Mr. Ness, in the lobby this morning, and I have to say, was mighty creeped out by the way he looked at me in my skirt. It’s not that Rascal thinks his landlady is hot for his bones, he’s just a little lean on rubles and it’s been awhile since he’s paid any rent. But here’s what really got me: Rascal hates his ragged clothing almost as much as I hate my new uniform. He’s embarrassed to meet with anyone from his past and to this I can totally relate.
Dad knocks on my door. I spin around to find him yawning and scratching his stomach in the hallway. “Fell asleep watching a sitcom.”
“Don’t torture me with tales of life as I used to know it. Because that would be cruel.”
He wanders in and perches himself on the edge of my bed. “It’s a bit late for Crime and Punishment, Sara. Why don’t you pack it in for tonight?”
“No can pack. I’m nowhere near finished.”
“You’ve been at it for hours and you need your rest.”
“Tell it to the Antmasters.”
“The workload here does seem to be pretty intense, doesn’t it?”
“A heavy workload I can handle. This workload is pulverizing. By the time I’m done I should be milled into a finely ground powder.”
Dad doesn’t say anything right away. He’s been unusually quiet since he started his new job. I can see he’s worried he’s done the wrong thing, moving m
e to such a school. He stares at my desktop. “This kind of pressure isn’t acceptable. We’re going to have a rule around here. Books packed up, lights out by midnight.”
“Midnight? I worked longer than that the first day of school!”
He leans close to kiss my cheek, then stands up. “Whatever work you haven’t finished by midnight will just have to wait.”
“But that’s not fair! Or realistic …”
“Maybe not, but it’s the way it’s going to be. Anton students may maintain nothing is more important than getting into an Ivy League school, but I don’t. It doesn’t matter to me where you attend college as long as you—unlike your feckless father—actually attend.” He walks toward the hallway, keys jangling in his pocket.
“Where are you going?” I ask, doing nothing to hide the sarcastic edge in my voice. “It’s after midnight.”
“Just out back to check the doors on the van.”
“They’re locked. You asked me to check earlier, remember?”
His footsteps echo from the front hall. “I’ll sleep better if I’ve checked myself.” And the door slams shut.
There’s only one reason my father is a janitor. She’s five foot six, with dirty blonde hair and a highlighter that is dying a slow aerospheric death atop her unfinished schoolwork. I wouldn’t know it for another sixteen years, but that speck, that poppy seed that was me, that inseminated crumb would force her parents to marry too young and abandon any larger ambition that may have involved postsecondary education.
And if just one event hadn’t happened, they might be married still.
It happened back at Finmory, back in tenth-grade science class. All because of an empty water bottle and a kid with lousy aim.
“Students brave enough to hurl their trash at the receptacle from as far away as you sit, Miss Black, generally have better aim. You’ll stay after class.” Mr. Nathan glared at me from the science-room blackboard where he’d just drawn a lima bean with four teensy sea-turtle flippers and written five-week-old human fetus underneath.
Great, I thought. My mom was supposed to pick me up in front of the school after class to take me to the dentist. Isaac Walters threw the empty bottle, we all saw him. But you didn’t rat on a kid whose parents had lost their assembly-line jobs at the car-parts factory that just shut down, and who now had to share his grandparents’ house with his entire family tree.
The bell rang and as everyone filed out, Mandy gave my shoulder a sympathetic nudge and whispered, “Nathan’s such a dick.”
Mr. Nathan dropped a battered science book on my desk, flipped it open, and pointed at the left page, toward a faded and fully labeled illustration of a little girl fetus. A long pink umbilical cord wriggled its way out of the baby girl’s belly, dipped down into the gutter of the book, and snaked up onto the right-hand page, ultimately latching on to the uterus of a naked lady who, judging from the way she let her unborn child float all the way over to page 232, was probably not going to be much of a mother.
“Copy this illustration on a blank piece of paper, color and label it. I’m going to head out for the day, so you can leave it on my desk when you’re finished,” he said.
I lowered my head and began to draw.
Once I had filled in the baby’s face with closed eyes, pudgy nose and heart-shaped mouth, I paused, staring at the illustration. When a baby is born, she comes out in a whoosh of amniotic fluid and blood, with umbilical cord and placenta still attached. Doctors take hold of the slippery baby and placenta, then sever the thick, flopping cord, immediately compressing the end of the stump with a plastic clamp that remains until the cord dries up and falls off, usually one to three weeks later.
My mother hated the sight of an ugly yellowing stump and blue plastic vise on my body after I was born and dabbed it with rubbing alcohol at every diaper change to dry it up. But as badly as she wanted it gone, I refused to let go of my connection to her womb. The grisly remains of my umbilical cord didn’t fall off for a full twelve weeks, prompting the pediatrician to joke that I’d probably be the kind of kid who lives in her parents’ basement at thirty.
I’ve always hated that story. It makes me look needy.
Mom breezed into the classroom and pointed at her watch. Her hair was caught up in a high ponytail and she was wearing black yoga pants, white T-shirt, and white hoodie, making her look younger and more energetic than me. I didn’t like her coming right into the classroom. She’s flirty—and way too pretty for me to feel comfortable with it. It always made men in our neighborhood stop too long and smile too wide as they walked their dogs or taught their kids to ride two-wheelers in front of our house. “We don’t want to keep the dentist waiting, Sara. Let’s get moving.”
“You must be Mrs. Black,” said Mr. Nathan. “Nice to finally meet you.” He set down his jacket and briefcase as she told him to call her Tina. Suddenly the man was magnetically incapable of leaving the room.
“I’ll just be a few more minutes,” I mumbled.
Mom glanced down at my drawing. As she stared, I noticed the way the umbilical cord bulged in spots, like it might burst with pressure, then grew as narrow and limp as overcooked spaghetti. She ran her finger over the amniotic sac. “That looks great. Especially the baby’s face. She has a nice smile.”
“That’s not the baby, Mom. That’s the placenta.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Huh.” She studied it. “Oh, right. I see it now.”
I grinned, shaking my head. “Liar.”
She giggled and leaned over me, pressing a kiss to my cheek. “Never mind, sweetie. You’re a whiz at math and science. As long as you don’t become an obstetrician and throw out the baby and hand the mother the smiling placenta instead, you’ll be fine.”
“I’ll watch out for that,” I said.
“Sara is definitely one of my better students,” Mr. Nathan said. “Tell me, Tina, does she get her talent from her mother’s side or her father’s?”
Tell me, Tina. That crawled under my skin a bit. And anyway, Mr. Nathan knew my dad was the school janitor—what kind of question was this?
Mom raised her brows. “Well, one can accuse Charlie Black of many things. But being a science whiz wouldn’t be one of them. You’d be more likely to find him under the hood of an old car than behind a microscope. He’s always been that way. Mechanically inclined.”
It wasn’t her words but her tone that knocked Dad. I slapped my finished assignment on Mr. Nathan’s desk, but neither of them noticed, just kept chatting about science.
Mom sneezed a girly sort of sneeze. Delicate, with a baby chick sort of peep at the end. Her ponytail swished from side to side. If I’d known I would have only 125 more days of her, that after June 27, all I’d have left of her was a green cardigan with beaded roses sprinkled on the shoulders and a fistful of phone messages, I’d have scanned her face for details, committed them to memory.
Did her nose crinkle when she sneezed?
Had springtime freckles begun dusting her cheeks yet?
Were her eyes more hazel or emerald?
“Mom?” I tapped my watch. “I’m ready to go.”
She looked at me. “Right! You have some teeth to get cleaned.” She glanced at Mr. Nathan and rolled her eyes. “Well … off to the dentist.”
For a terrible moment I thought he might scoop up his briefcase and follow us to Dr. Pape’s. Instead, he waved good-bye, picked up my drawing, and frowned.
Mom was right. I wasn’t good with umbilical cords.
Now, sitting at my cluttered desk, waiting for Dad to come back up from the parking lot, I think about his new rule. It will squash me. Which means I need to come up with a quick way around it. Fighting my father is not going to work—his stubbornness is immovable. What I’ll have to do is crawl into bed and turn off the lights at twelve o’clock, wait until I hear Dad snoring, then get out of bed and get back to my new friend, Rascal, and toil until I finish my homework. Starting tonight.
Flipping my books shut, straightening my papers, stacking my dirty dishes, I arrange my desk to make it look as if I’ve actually finished for the night. In the bathroom, I scoop my hair into a ponytail, reach for a bar of Ivory soap, and scrub my face. It isn’t until I’m uncapping the toothpaste that I hear the front door thump shut. He’s back.
Dad pokes his head into the bathroom and nods his approval. “That’s my girl. Night.”
“Night,” I say with a mouthful of Crest. I spit into the sink, rinse, and reach for a towel to wipe my lips. As I’m rehanging the hand towel, I hear Dad’s keys jingle. I wander into the hall to find him heading for the front door once again. “What are you doing?”
He looks sheepish as he steps through the door. “Just realized I forgot something. Off to bed.”
I do what I’m told. I climb under my covers, turn out my light, and stare at the shadows until I can get up and start breaking his impossible-to-follow new rule.
I open my eyes to see it’s 3:07 a.m. Throwing back my blankets, I jump out of bed, relieved I woke before morning. No sounds come from Dad’s room, no snoring, no loud breathing. I’m certain he’s submerged in the most cavernous stage of sleep, but I pad to his room to check, with the plan to grab a Coke from the fridge and get back to my homework. His bed is empty. I wander the apartment to find no sign of my father.
Not in the bathroom.
Not in the living room.
Not in the kitchen.
I run out of rooms to search at the exact same moment I run out of calmness. It makes no sense. My breathing grows spiky and thin as I try to think of where he could be.
In nothing but a baggy T-shirt and underwear, I stuff bare feet into my school shoes and race out the front door onto the landing. I peer over the railing—see nothing but dirty steps—then rush down the stairs, praying I don’t find his lifeless body. I don’t know, exactly, what I’d like to find. But not that. Please not that.
No sign of him in the stairwell. After what seems like days, I reach the door to the back alley and, finally, I see him. Relief thunders headfirst into me, nearly knocking me backward onto the floor. My father is safe.
