by Nina LaCour
I look at the clock. There aren’t even two minutes left.
I get up and walk to her desk. She has a folder of my photographs from last year and she’s looking at them through her little glasses. She sighs, tucks some of her straight black hair behind her ear.
“You definitely need to work on your use of color this semester. Look at this one,” she says, but I don’t.
I look straight at her face. She doesn’t even notice.
“Do you see how there is no contrast here? If we were to convert this image to black-and-white, you would see that all these colors would be the same value of gray. It has a dulling effect.”
I keep looking at her and she keeps looking at my photo. Last year she wasn’t like this. She may have paid more attention to Ingrid, but she talked to me, too.
She sifts through the stack. “Your compositions are sometimes good, but . . .” She shakes her head. “Even they need quite a bit of work.”
I want to say, Fuck you, Veena. They were obviously okay with you last year, because you gave me an A. But I don’t say anything. I’m just waiting for her to look up at me so she can see me glaring. The bell rings. She looks up at the clock, back at the stack, and says, “Okay?”
“Okay, what?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I shake my head.
“But what are my goals?” I ask. I just want her to look at me.
“Color,” she says, staring at my pictures. “Composition.”
I’m about to ask her what she means, how I can just get better, where I should start. But she’s already turned and walking to her back office. The door shuts.
12
I’m headed up to the science building, holding a cold slice of greasy pizza. On my way through the quad I see Jayson Michaels. There are only a few black kids at our school, so he stands out. Plus he’s really popular—track star, runs the mile in 4:20 flat. We went to the same junior high and had homeroom together in sixth grade, and the only thing that I really remember about it was that when we were discussing segregation the teacher randomly asked Jayson how he felt about it. She asked him right there in the middle of everyone. As if a sixth grader who had lived his whole life in this practically all-white town would feel like being a spokesperson for Black America. And anyway, what a dumb question. What’s he gonna say? Well, actually, I feel pretty good about it. It’s pretty uplifting that people like me couldn’t get served in restaurants or use public bathrooms.
Now he takes a step toward me. I haven’t seen him this close for years. His eyes are lighter brown than I remember. His face is smooth and he has a nick on his right cheek, at the jaw.
I can’t remember a single thing that Jayson and I ever said to each other. Still, I know these personal things about him because he told Ingrid and she told me. Like he has a sister who’s in college, who he talks to on the phone a lot. And he lives with his dad alone. He loves to run because it makes him forget about everything else. When he trains, he listens to old groups like the Jackson Five.
Now he looks at me like he knows me.
And I get this feeling. It’s like my head suddenly gets lighter, fills up with air. I want to talk. Jayson opens his mouth. Then he closes it. Then he opens it again.
“Hi,” he says.
It’s the saddest hi I’ve ever heard.
We hesitate, but it only lasts a moment.
Then we keep walking, away from each other.
13
It’s the weekend again, and even though I know I should be building something with the wood that’s been waiting in the backyard all week, all I want to do is lie on my bed and listen to music. I keep getting these songs in my head that I want to put on, but I have to get up to change tracks because I can’t find the remote to my stereo. After I’ve done this about twenty times, I finally decide to just look for it. It isn’t buried under the covers. It isn’t under all the clothes piled on top of my chest of drawers, or sitting on top of my CDs or my desk. I get down on the carpet to look under my bed. I stick my arm under and feel around, find a couple mismatched socks, a progress report from school that I hid from my parents last year, and something I don’t recognize—hard and flat and dusty. I pull it out, thinking maybe it’s a yearbook from elementary school, and then I see it and my heart stops. Worn pages, bird painted on the blue cover in Wite-Out.
Ingrid’s journal.
For some reason, I feel afraid. It’s like I’m split down the middle and one half of me wants to open it more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything. The other half is so scared. I can’t stop shaking.
Did it get kicked under the bed one night by accident?
Did she hide it?
She carried it with her everywhere. I know this sounds stupid, but I felt kind of jealous of it. Whenever I had to figure something out or vent, I would just call her up, so I couldn’t understand why she needed to have this book that was so private. But here it is, in my hands, and I’m holding it like it’s some alive thing.
I stare at it in my hands forever, just feeling its weight, looking at the place where one Wite-Out wing is starting to flake off. Then, once my hands are steadied, I open to the first page. It’s a drawing of her face—yellow hair; blue eyes; small, crooked smile. She’s looking straight ahead. Birds fly across the background. She drew them blurry, to show movement, and across the top she wrote, Me on a Sunday Morning.
I turn the page.
As I read, I can hear Ingrid’s voice, hushed and fast, like she’s telling me secrets.
I shut the book.
My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.
I know I should want to keep reading but I can’t. It’s too much. I put her journal in my chest of drawers, not in the top drawer where everyone puts things they want to hide, but buried in clothes all the way at the back of a drawer near the bottom. But after a few minutes I move it. That place doesn’t seem right. So I put it on a shelf in the walk-in closet I painted purple a couple summers ago. I slide a shoe box full of photo negatives in front of it.
I stand in the doorway of my closet and look in at the shelf. I almost expect to see the shoe box rising and falling with the journal’s breath. But it’s just a journal. It isn’t alive. Something is wrong with me.
An hour later I reach up and touch it to make sure it’s still there.
After lunch I move it again. This time, I put it back under my bed, because that’s where it’s been for the past three months. I try to do homework. I try to watch TV. But all I can think about is Ingrid’s journal, in my room, and if it’s still there, and what if someone finds it, and why I don’t want to read it, and how I know I need to.
The next morning, already dressed, shoes tied, hair pulled back in my perpetual ponytail, I stand in front of the closet again. I want to walk out the door but I can’t. I don’t mean I can’t like I don’t want to. I mean, I can’t, like something is physically making it impossible for me to leave my room without it. So I crouch over my backpack and find an inside zipper pocket. The pocket’s pretty small, so I don’t know if it will work, but I take Ingrid’s journal from the shelf and try to fit it in, and it turns out to be perfect. It rests there, hidden.
I close my backpack and heave it over one shoulder, then the other. The journal makes it so much heavier, but the weight feels good.
14
On Mr. Robertson’s stereo, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are singing the word love over and over. He lowers the volume to let the song fade out, pushes the sleeves of his worn-in beige sweater up to his elbows.
“When I was a kid, my parents used to play ‘All You Need Is Love’ on our record player almost every night,” he says, perched on his desk, looking out at us. “At the time I thought it was just something to dance around to. I memorized the lyrics before I even considered what they meant. It was just fun to sing along.” He reaches for a stack of papers next to him, and walks in between the rows of desks, handing the papers out to us. “But if you look here at the lyrics, you�
��ll see that it has many elements of a poem.”
He sets my copy on my table and I look at his wedding band and the little hairs below his knuckles. I wonder what his wife is like, and if they dance around their house at night listening to the Beat les or other old bands. I try to imagine their house, how they have it decorated, and I think they probably have lots of plants, and real paintings on the wall painted by people they’re friends with.
“Caitlin.” Mr. Robertson smiles at me, interrupts my thoughts. “Show us one poetic element in this song.”
“Okay,” I say. I read it over quickly, but I’m so worried about taking forever to answer that I don’t really absorb anything. “If you look at it,” I say, “you’ll see that there is a . . . pattern? Things repeat a lot?”
“Great. Repetition. Benjamin, what else?”
“Uh, like a theme?”
“Of what?”
“Love, I guess.”
“Okay. What’s another theme of this song? Dylan?”
I glance at her and wonder if she really got kicked out of her old school for making out with a girl. She’s wearing the same black jeans, but today with a light blue shirt with some words on it that I can’t read. She has bulky leather bracelets on each wrist and she’s sitting with one elbow on the desk, holding her handout in front of her face.
“Human potential. Or identity,” she mutters.
“Great,” Mr. Robinson says. He nods. “Wonderful.” He looks at one corner of the ceiling and hums a little bit of the song. He seems to forget where he is for a minute.
Then he returns to us.
He says, “For homework, please choose a song that matters to you. I want you to write a paper that first explains why the song is important to your life, and then analyzes the song’s lyrics as you would a poem. I’ll give you until Friday.”
I’m getting my math book from my locker when Dylan comes up next to me and asks, “Is there anywhere good to eat around here?”
By now, the secret is out—almost all the lockers in the science hall have been claimed. Before school and after school, the hall echoes with locker doors groaning open and slamming shut, with forty people’s voices and ringing cell phones and stomping feet. When I glance at Dylan, she’s staring like she did the first day. Her eyes are this clear blue green, surrounded by black smudged makeup. She’s standing close to me, and it feels strange. Apart from being accosted by Alicia, I haven’t been letting people get near me.
“If you go down Webster,” I say, “toward downtown, there are a few places.”
She looks at Ingrid’s hill stuck to the door of my locker, cocks her head, and squints at it. Then she nods her approval.
“So,” she says, “hungry?”
Without thinking, without even considering going, I say, “I have homework.”
“Okay,” she says. “Whatever.”
I head home, ready to pull Ingrid’s journal out of my backpack as soon as I get there and read for hours, until I’ve finished every entry. But as I pass the hills and the condos and all the places we used to walk past together, I decide that isn’t something I should do.
Here’s how I feel: People take one another for granted. Like, I’d hang out with Ingrid in all of these random places—in her room or at school or just on some sidewalk somewhere. And the whole time we’d tell each other things, just say all of our thoughts out loud. Maybe that would’ve been boring to some people, but it was never boring to us. I never realized what a big deal that was. How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head. You just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment of your life, and think, Soon this will be over. But I understand more now. About the way life works. I know that when I finish reading Ingrid’s journal, there won’t be anything new between us ever again.
So when I get back to my house, I lock my room door even though I’m the only one home, take Ingrid’s journal out, and just hold it for a little while. I look at the drawing on the first page again. And then I put the journal back. I’m going to try to make her last.
15
After dinner, I climb into the backseat of my car with my laptop. I push in Davey’s mix tape, but I keep the volume low so I can concentrate. I’m thinking of ways to start my English paper.
I type, Music is a powerful way for people to express themselves. Then I delete it. I try again: Songs can be important ways of remembering certain moments in people’s lives. That’s closer to what I’m trying to say, but it isn’t exactly right yet. I shut my computer. A girl plays her guitar, sings earnestly, and I crank open the moon roof, sink lower on the seat, look up at the sky, and listen.
When the song is over, I turn the tape off, and try again. There is an indescribable feeling that comes from being desperately in love with a song.
I read the sentence over. I keep writing, trying to feel the best night of my life over again.
Ingrid and I had stood in front of her bathroom mirror, concentrating. The counter was cluttered with little makeup containers and bobby pins and hair goop.
We are so hot, Ingrid said.
I nodded, slowly, watching my face as it moved up and down. My hair was shiny and straight and long, parted down the middle. Ingrid had put this deep green, glittery eye shadow on me and it made my eyes look amber instead of just brown. She had pinned her blond curls back messily, and was wearing red lipstick that made her look older and kind of sophisticated.
Yeah, I said. We look really good.
We look amazing.
What it was, was that we complemented each other. We just fit in this way that made strangers ask us if we were sisters, even though her hair was blond and curly and mine was straight and dark. Even though her eyes were blue and mine were brown. Maybe it was the way we acted, or spoke, or just moved. The way we would look at something and both have the same thought at the same moment, and turn to each other at the same time and start to say the same thing.
Okay, Ingrid said. Hold still. She put pink lip gloss on my mouth with this little wand thing, and I licked my finger and wiped off a speck of mascara that had gotten on her cheek.
We climbed into the back of Ingrid’s parents’ SUV, and Ingrid’s mom, Susan, looked at our reflection in the rearview mirror.
You two look great, she said. In the mirror, I could see that she was smiling. Mitch, Ingrid’s dad, turned in his seat to see us.
Look at you two. What a sight. Which I think was his way of saying he thought we looked good, too.
Ingrid’s brother, Davey, and his girlfriend, Amanda, had just gotten engaged, and they were throwing a huge party at a restaurant near their apartment to celebrate. Ingrid’s parents had Davey ten years before they had her. She always liked to say that she was a mistake, but Susan and Mitch never admitted it. All the people at the party would be older, but that didn’t matter. We still got to dress up and look forward to something. We still got to get out of Los Cerros for a night.
Mitch and Susan dropped us off in front so that we wouldn’t have to drive around with them, searching for parking for an hour. We found Davey and Amanda inside the restaurant, smiling and looking so happy like they always did.
After we had talked with them for a while, we found a table and ate all these small dishes of fancy food. The lights dimmed and the music got louder, and everyone got up and started to dance. All of Amanda and Davey’s friends were beautiful, but for once I felt beautiful, too. I got up and walked out into the middle of them, wearing my black V-neck sweater and the tight maroon pants I got from the mall. Ingrid followed me in her yellow dress and brown boots. It felt good to be in the middle of strangers. I didn’t feel like a kid in high school. I was anyone I wanted to be.
We started dancing, real jumpy and twirly, to these British rock bands we hadn’t heard before. At one point we danced our way back over to the edge of all the people, and a waiter came by with a tray of champagne. Ingrid grabbed two
glasses before he could take a good look at her, and we drank them down fast. It didn’t make me drunk, exactly, I mean it was only one glass, but it did make me feel a little bit dizzy, and that made the dancing even more fun. And then, after we had danced through about five songs straight, a new song started, and as soon as the man started singing, with this voice that was urgent and calm and passionate all at once, I froze. I stood in the middle of all the dancing strangers and I just listened.
It was the moment I realized what music can do to people, how it can make you hurt and feel so good all at once. I just stood there with my eyes closed, feeling the movement of all the people around me, the vibration of the bass rise through the floor to my throat, while something inside me broke and came back together.
When the song was over I grabbed Ingrid’s hand and pulled her out of the crowd, over to Amanda, who was standing with the DJ, handing him CDs and telling him which tracks to play. These huge speakers were next to them and I could feel the bass pounding through me.
What band was that? I shouted.
The Cure, Amanda shouted back. Like them?
I nodded. I wanted to say, I love them, but the word felt too simple.
Amanda put the CD back in its case and handed it to me. Take it, she said. It’s yours.
A couple hours later my paper is finished. Through my car window, I can see the lights are all off in the house. My parents must be sleeping already. I guess they’re used to me being out here now. I cross the path toward the house, stop at the pile of wood. I run my hands along a plank at the top.
16
I wake up before my alarm this morning, roll over, and shut it off. It took forever to fall asleep. I kept thinking about that night. After that were months that Ingrid was alive but not really awake. She would still draw in her journal and hang out with me and laugh sometimes and everything, but now, looking back, I know that she did it all automatically. The way you brush your teeth and eat breakfast. You don’t really think about it; your mind is other places. It’s just something you do to get ready for something else.
