After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Their names are Christa. Melanie. Brooke. Rosalyn. Susan, maybe Suzanne. Their last names flew past me. Why are they being so nice to me, making an effort I can see, like everybody in Yarrow Lake knows about me, an effort like trying to be nice to a crippled kid, somebody with leukemia? My aunt has spoken to her friends (of course—this is what women do) to ask them to ask their daughters to be “nice” to the new girl: See, she’s practically an orphan, her mother was killed in a terrible accident on a bridge it was on TV and in the papers, she was almost killed too.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t care to discuss my family. I don’t like personal questions. Excuse me.”

  The looks on their faces, as I shove back my chair, grab my backpack, leave my tray and food, and exit the cafeteria stiff backed and my heart pounding and determined not to limp.

  The codeine has worn off, I’m feeling jittery and shaky.

  Hiding in a restroom. Nowhere to go. What’s my next class?…

  Those girls: Christa, Melanie, Brooke…The looks on their faces like the cripple-orphan girl suddenly screamed at them.

  Why’d Christa jump up to approach me, smiling, inviting me to sit with her and her friends? Christa has the look of a class officer, and her friends are obviously popular girls, A-list girls, their power as popular girls to anoint any girl they wish if they decide she’s worthy. So rude! Like we were prying into her private life when we only meant to be nice.

  I hope my aunt doesn’t find out. In a small town like Yarrow Lake, probably she will.

  “Ab-bott, Jen-nifer.”

  Show-offy Mr. Farrell reads my name from the class list in a mock computer voice. He’s been reading off names in exaggerated accents like somebody once told him he was funny, which probably he’d believe since everybody in the room is laughing at him, except me. I answer, “Here,” I guess so softly Mr. Farrell doesn’t hear it, or pretends he doesn’t, so he repeats, “Ab-bott, Jen-nifer,” in the same flat way but louder now, peering out into the classroom, searching for this Ab-bott person like you’d look for a deaf or retarded person, and naturally this draws laughs. My face is hot with dislike. I want to tell this guy he should try out for Comedy Central. A strange fiery feeling comes over me:

  don’t have to answer to that name

  don’t have to play this game

  So I don’t answer. I don’t play the game. Hunched in my desk with the rim of my hat pulled low over my eyes, and all Mr. Farrell can see of my face is it’s (maybe) a girl’s face shut up tight as a fist.

  After a very awkward minute or two, Farrell catches on that this is the “new” girl, this must be “Ab-bott, Jen-nifer.” And everybody else in the class catches on too.

  Now it’s like I am retarded. Or “mental.” Something special and scary about me. The rest of the period Mr. Farrell avoids looking at me.

  I wonder what kind of mark he’s made next to my name on the class list.

  “Jenna? How was…”

  Aunt Caroline is eager to be told how my first day was. Hoping I will confide in her. Expecting to hear how “nice” people were to me. How already I’ve begun to “make friends.” How “terrific” my teachers were. Which activities and clubs and sports I’ve signed up for. My uncle will want to know too. My little cousins Becky and Mikey are brimming with excitement about their first-day adventures.

  Politely I say it was “fine.”

  My classes were “fine,” people were “nice.”

  “…guess I don’t feel hungry tonight, Aunt Caroline. I have lots of homework. Especially math. I hate math. Maybe I could just have some fruit and yogurt upstairs, okay? Thanks.”

  Trying not to see my aunt’s look of hurt. Upstairs, quietly shutting the door to my room, and when my aunt hesitantly knocks later in the evening, I will pretend I’m asleep.

  …tight and stiff, like somebody scared of falling through ice, scared of feeling pain. Like me.

  10

  “Hey.”

  I look up startled, and it’s him.

  This time he’s smiling like he knows me. Like there’s something between us. For a panicky moment I can’t catch my breath, my heart is beating so rapidly.

  “Guess you got back home safe the other day?”

  Yes. I did.

  “Ankle’s okay?”

  I’m blushing, yes. That a stranger should care in the slightest about my ankle is embarrassing.

  “You didn’t seem like you were from around here the other day. You go to school here?”

  I tell him yes, I just started.

  “Just moved here?”

  “I…guess so.”

  My voice is low and hoarse, and I know this is a weird thing to say. His eyes wander over me. I’m sitting by myself on a crumbling concrete wall at the far end of the parking lot behind Yarrow High. It’s the second day of classes, lunch break. I’m avoiding the cafeteria altogether. Going over my math homework is like dragging a comb through snarled hair. Equations dance in my vision like deranged sunbeams. This morning I was aware of people watching me covertly. A few guys stared openly. Out here I’m wearing the grimy white sailor cap pulled low to shield my eyes.

  Just when I’ve stopped expecting to see him, here he is. Maybe in fact I’d forgotten him. For there is nothing at Yarrow Lake Consolidated High School that holds out any promise to me, after the misery of the first day.

  Where he’s strolled over from, I guess, it’s that group of loud-laughing older students hanging out at the other end of the parking lot where somebody’s pickup is parked, and some motorcycles. These look to be seniors of a certain type, not exactly what you’d call preppies or jocks—in a city high school they’d be “druggies,” but I don’t know what they’re considered here, at Yarrow Lake—smoking cigarettes and drinking out of cans. (Beer? Would they dare to drink openly behind the high school in broad daylight?) Today in this safer setting, clean-shaven, this guy doesn’t seem so menacing, except he scares me anyway, his sharp-boned face, fierce, spiky black hair, the tattoo on his left forearm that looks like a coiled snake (!). There’s something gold-glittering in his left earlobe, must be a stud. He’s wearing work trousers of some rough fabric like sailcloth, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt with frayed cuffs. I’m having difficulty looking at his face, those long-lashed beautiful eyes.

  He’s saying, in his sort of teasing way, “Would it be rude to ask your name?” and I say, trying to be relaxed, my voice like sandpaper rubbing sandpaper, “It would not be rude,” and he says, “Then I’m asking,” and I tell him, swallowing hard, like this is the most crucial utterance I will make since coming to Yarrow Lake, New Hampshire, “Jenna.”

  “Jen-na.” He pronounces the name in two syllables as if it’s a foreign sound. “‘Jenna No-Last-Name’?”

  “You haven’t told me your name.”

  “What I am named, or what I am called?”

  Uncertain how to answer this, I tell him whichever.

  “Saint-Croix is my name, but je m’appelle Crow.”

  To Saint-Croix he gives a nasal French pronunciation, San-Krwah. I’ve had enough French to pick up Je m’appelle Crow—“I am called Crow.”

  “‘Crow.’ That’s an ugly, big bird.”

  “To other crows, a crow is not ugly or especially big.”

  “A crow is a…predator bird?”

  “Is it?”

  I’m not sure. Really, I don’t know anything about crows except they are large, ungainly, raucous, said to be highly intelligent. Possibly crows aren’t predators like hawks and eagles. For sure their feathers are pure sleek black, like this guy’s spiky hair.

  “Crow. People call you that?”

  “Some people. Some others, like in my family, call me ‘Gabe’—‘Gabriel.’” He crinkles his nose as if this is too pretty a name for him. “At school here, even teachers call me Crow because nobody can pronounce Saint-Croix. Nobody in Yarrow Lake mostly.”

  “Are you French?”

  “Me? Hell, no. Do I look French?”

 
; Crow has a way of speaking somewhere between teasing and sincere. His voice is low and gravelly, not like the voice of a typical high school boy. He does look French, sort of. Years ago, before my dad left us, we went to Paris, rented a car, and drove south to Nice. Crow reminds me of people there. He says, “There’s relatives of mine in Quebec, but my father crossed the border into Maine, became a U.S. citizen just in time to be drafted to Vietnam. My mother was born here, and so was I.”

  Crow pronounces “Quebec” with a hard emphasis on the “Q,” like “Kay.” He’s running a big-knuckled hand through his hair, pondering me. His eyes are like warm molasses with a look of bemusement, as if there’s something comical about the way I’m sitting here by myself, math text open on my knees, homework papers fluttering in the wind.

  The new girl, alone. Hoping to be seen.

  “What’s that, algebra? Feldman’s class?”

  “Yes. I hate it.”

  “You’re a sophomore?”

  No avoiding it—I tell him yes. I ask if he’s a…

  “Senior. Should’ve graduated last year, but I lost a year. Like I said, Jenna, I’m accident-prone.”

  Jenna! The sound of my name in Crow’s mouth, the special inflection he gives to the name like it’s some kind of music, makes me feel weak.

  “So, where’d you say you’re from, Jenna?”

  “I…didn’t say.”

  “So, where?”

  “I…”

  My throat shuts up. I can’t speak. I’m feeling panic that in another moment I will blurt out to this guy I don’t even know what happened on the bridge. The wreck, and after the wreck.

  “Go away! Leave me alone.”

  It’s a joke, I realize. Crow’s friends are watching. The sexy-cool older guy pretending to be interested in the misfit new girl, hilarious.

  I fumble for my backpack, shove my math text inside, and stammer I have to leave. Something flutters from my hand, I don’t have time to retrieve it. Crow seems surprised. Maybe he says something, but I don’t hear him, blood is pounding in my ears.

  “I hate you. Hate you all. Hate this place I’m trapped in.”

  Stupid buzzer bell ringing for one-o’clock classes. I am so embarrassed and so angry. Thinking that I will walk out of this school and never come back. No one can force me to be a student here where I don’t belong just like no one can force me onto an airplane with my father, to go live with him and his “new family” in La Jolla, California.

  I can’t face my classes. My teachers. Everyone will know. Everyone will be laughing at me.

  I’m at my locker, trying to work the lock. So upset I can’t remember my combination.

  One thing I’ve learned since the wreck: Nobody can force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Even for your own good.

  Except: If I walk out of school, my aunt and my uncle will be upset. They won’t understand. They will try to reason with me. And Mom, if she knew. I hate this: I can’t let down anyone who loves me.

  So I don’t walk out. I don’t even hide in one of the girls’ restrooms. Instead I trudge upstairs to fifth-period math. Mr. Feldman’s class, which I hate. (Are people watching me? Laughing at me? How quickly can word spread through school that Crow made a fool of me out in the parking lot?) I’m just about to step inside Mr. Feldman’s classroom when I feel a jab on my shoulder. It’s a smirky red-haired guy with a silver wire glittering in his eyebrow. He hands me two crumpled sheets of paper: “Crow says you left this in the parking lot.”

  My algebra homework.

  11

  Oh oh oh, help us

  No codeine now, but I’ve been advised to take Tylenol for “pain relief” except I don’t dare take as many tablets as my “pain relief” would require, and I’ve been waking from sweaty dreams at dawn. By the luminous green digital clock at my bedside I see that it is 4:28 A.M. when the dream jolts me awake like a kick in the belly. I’m tangled in bedsheets, my heart is pounding worse than when Crow was laughing at me. It’s two nights later, maybe three. This dream is like a hawk’s talons sinking into me. My fingers clutching raw at a railing, a bridge railing that has been broken and twisted, I’m desperate to keep from being sucked through the broken place and into empty space. Oh oh oh, help us, I’m sobbing, I’m a little girl sobbing, below us the river is rushing black and brackish-smelling, it has sucked away the person I was with, the person behind the wheel of the car, the person I was trying to save whose face I could not see, my throat is raw with screaming, Mom! Mom!

  Soon afterward, someone knocks on the door of my room. My aunt asking if I have called her, and I say no.

  12

  In Yarrow Lake much of my life becomes secret.

  Like an iceberg, which they say is nine tenths hidden below the surface of the water. What you see is such a small part of it, you don’t have a clue what it actually is.

  How was school today, Jenna? is code for Are you adjusting? Are you going to be “normal”? and it pisses me off how my aunt and my uncle are always asking. Even my little cousins Becky and Mikey. Their parents have instructed them, Be nice to Jenna! so they try, and I love them for trying so transparently only just I’m not in a mood to play big sister to them. Sorry.

  A secret life is the sweetest life. Also the safest.

  Weekends are family time. (Even if sometimes on a rainy Sunday afternoon Uncle Dwight, the workaholic, slips back to his office at McCarty, Weissman & Associates, Architects, for a few hours before supper.) The McCartys are children-oriented, like almost everyone in Yarrow Lake, as in Tarrytown, so this means the family being together, in good weather on Yarrow Lake, where friends have a sailboat, or bicycling on the Sable Creek trail, or watching Becky play soccer at her school, or going to see Shrek 2 at the Lakeland Mall and having an early meal afterward at Leaning Tower of Pizza. Family time is a kind of sacred time, so it baffles and hurts the McCartys when Jenna explains politely that she would rather stay home, she has schoolwork, or wants to walk/hike/run by herself, or…whatever it is Jenna does in her room with the door shut for hours.

  Doesn’t Jenna like us, Mommy?

  Of course Jenna likes us! What a thing to say!

  If she likes us, she’d be happy, wouldn’t she? She always seems kind of sad.

  But that doesn’t mean Jenna doesn’t like us, Becky. It just means that Jenna is sad.

  Here is a secret.

  How when the McCartys leave to go sailing on Yarrow Lake, I immediately go into my aunt and uncle’s bathroom to see what drugs they have in their medicine cabinet. So disappointing! Mostly just boring over-the-counter drugs like Bufferin, Advil, Tylenol anybody can buy, plus medication for “hypertension” (Uncle Dwight) and “dyspeptic stomach” (Aunt Caroline). I was hoping, with my aunt sometimes kind of nervous and edgy, that she was into tranquilizers like Valium (which Mom took for a while after Dad left us), but I guess not.

  Except I don’t give up the search. Their bathroom is kind of old-fashioned, with a long cabinet counter and drawers filled with stuff, including old prescription drugs, vials with just a few pills remaining, and one of these turns out to be OxyContin, prescribed for Dwight McCarty, one tablet every three to four hours for pain relief, and there are four big pills remaining! I’m so excited, I almost drop them.

  Figure my uncle will never miss these pills, the prescription was for zero refills in March 1999.

  13

  “Hey, babe, you bald?”

  Trudging upstairs to math class, which is my worst class of the day, I’m jostled by some obnoxious guys grabbing at my grimy sailor cap, yanking it from my head in a burst of hyena laughter and tossing it into the air, and I’m red-faced, furious, and embarrassed, fumbling to retrieve it, except now that it has fallen onto the stairs, people are kicking it and stepping on it, I’m desperate, pleading, “Give it back, give it back, please,” and finally the cap is returned to me, a girl has picked it up, slaps dust off it, hands it to me with a pained little smile: ”Here, Jennifer.”

&nb
sp; To my embarrassment, the girl is Christa Shaw. Who seems to feel sorry for me, not hate me.

  I can only murmur thanks, pull the hat down on my head, and escape.

  Wrapped in a wad of aluminum foil, kept in a secret compartment in my backpack, are the last three OxyContin tablets I’ve been saving for such an emergency. Risking Mr. Feldman’s seeing, I take one of the tablets, trying to hide my mouth with my hand, swallowing the big tablet dry, and praying I won’t choke or start to cough and be discovered.

  14.

  Never! Never tell my secrets.

  Never tell my aunt how miserable I am at school. How my face shuts up tight as a fist even when a part of me wants to be friendly. How it’s so much easier to stare straight ahead than make eye contact in the corridors, at my locker, in classes. How I dread seeing Crow, or his friends who laughed at me. How I dread being called on by Mr. Feldman and Mr. Farrell, who hate me for sitting silent, sullen, down-looking in their classes. How it’s getting harder and harder for me to concentrate on schoolwork, even subjects I used to like, history, English, science. How in gym class I can’t keep up with the other girls—I’m afraid of feeling pain. And anyway, everything is so trivial. And anyway, I know that I will fail, what’s the point of trying? I’ve gotten dependent upon wearing the grimy sailor cap even indoors, against the “dress code.” Anxious that if I don’t wear something on my head, people will see the ugly scars in my scalp from the wreck, my hair isn’t thick enough to disguise them, this baby-fine hair that I hate, that I’m ashamed anyone might see and think it’s mine. And tiny nicks in my skin, in my forehead and on the underside of my jaw that I can’t stop running my fingertips over and over. And how hard it is to walk without wincing if my ankle hurts, or my knee…. You know what you look like? Like somebody who’s been in a car crash.