Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (6 page)

“Would you like someone to smash your head against a locker? To see if it feels serious?”

This feels like a threat, and suddenly my assumptions about VP VanO seem very, very wrong. He’s pushing back. I’m not even pushing.

“Most people think it was a pretty tame fight,” I say.

He starts reading from the file and I compare the facts I have with the facts he has. The resulting story is chaos, with my sister swinging in on a rope like a pirate with a knife in her teeth, shouting some kind of crazy alien-language “YAWP!”

“And do you know what happened the day
before
the fight?” he asks, no longer reading from the file. In fact, he closes the file very deliberately.

“I don’t think so.” I gulp.

Turns out Jorie had a “confrontation” with a teacher in the library that ended when Jorie “threw a laptop” at her History teacher, which shocks me since she loved History class and was indifferent toward technology.

“Your sister threw a laptop at a teacher,” he repeats for emphasis.

“Whose laptop?” I look toward the file, believing the answer to be in the manila container.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Did it hit her?”

“This was assault, James. Your sister wanted to hit Mrs. Yao.”

No one in school talked about this laptop assault. If it happened, why wouldn’t they talk about it? The only thing people talked about was Gina Best’s ambulance ride. Then the people who hate the pretty girls laughed about how Gina didn’t really look all that messed up the next day. They listed all of Jorie’s many transgressions, and assaulting Mrs. Yao didn’t make the list.

I try to picture this scene. Mrs. Yao is a regular-looking teacher—not foreboding. Not the kind of face that is asking to get punched. (Unlike the gym teachers, who are all looking for trouble, if you ask me.) She doesn’t have a reputation of any kind. Not one of the school favorites, but not known for hard grading or boring classes. Kids like her enough to not complain about her, which is usually the best thing teachers can ask for in a school with more than a thousand kids ready to tear the place apart at the first sign of a pop quiz.

“Is there any chance that what you’re saying is not true?” I ask.

“There is
no chance
that it’s
not true.
”

“Well, that double negative is not clearing things up.”

I apologize once I see VanO’s dour face.

“I’m sorry. It’s not that I can’t picture my sister losing it. It’s just hard to believe she’d yell at someone who didn’t deserve it. And I can’t believe she’d throw a laptop at a teacher.”

The vice principal considers me for a moment. I’m a nervous kid with inconsistent facial hair and no reputation except that Jorie’s my sister. But he doesn’t know about how I listened to all the one-sided fights Jorie lost at home. All the yelling and assaults she absorbed. Of course, she took out her anger on lamps, trinkets, doors, and walls, so my momentary image of her as a silent, suffering girl is inaccurate. But if VP VanO knew her life outside of the halls of this school, wouldn’t he have to understand how she got to the breaking point? How all the little things became big things and all the big things became like a wildfire menacing everything flammable?

No, he wouldn’t care. It wouldn’t make a difference, because he’d say she deserved all the trouble.

“Mr. Whitman, I think you have too much faith in your sister. Because you don’t deny that she beat up Gina. And you don’t seem surprised.”

“I was surprised. When it happened. Gina and Jorie used to be best friends,” I say.

“
Used
to be.”

Now VP VanO knows that I came in here to fight for my sister despite not knowing all the details of things she’d done. Who beats up her former best friend? Who throws a laptop? Especially one that works perfectly well?

The anxious vomiting butterflies wake with a burst. VanO keeps speaking, but the sounds aren’t making their way down my ear canal. I see his mouth moving, and there are little darts of noise—words, I suspect—getting through. But I’m in a wet-lunged, lightheaded, heart-pounding anxiety attack.

Do you know what it’s like to be very embarrassed? Even when whatever you’ve done is unknown to others? I’m talking about the feeling you get when you
will
be found out. Not the same as when you
are,
in fact, found out. This is what I feel like right now. Mostly, it manifests itself as a burning right beneath my skin.

Then there’s the fear, right on the heels of the original anxiety, that I’m going to cry in here and VanO will go out to ask Mrs. Berry for some tissues and Mrs. Berry will tell Mrs. Hatch and she’ll tell her daughter, who is popular enough to have about a dozen friends (mostly guys) to tell. And then I’ll be the crybaby again, but this time I’ll be the short bus crybaby, mocked by even the short bus kids.

All of this is in my head and I can’t get around it. My eyes are drowning. I just want to defend my sister.

THE REST OF THE DAY
sludges along; all my energy gets sucked up by my dirty sponge of a brain. I sweat and pace in my room after dinner. I have trouble falling asleep, and when I finally do, I wake up sometime later just as I nearly crack my molars by dragging them against one another. My heart pounds hard enough to pump wet concrete.

Weird worries press down on me: Did I eat dinner? Did I leave my homework at school? Did everyone smell the rank T-shirt I wore in gym? Did I forget to say thank you to the lunch lady? Does my mother know I contemplate messy suicides? Does my father hate me because I yawp in the morning?

I fear that I have not noticed crucial details about my life—my parents’ anniversary, my best friend’s birthday, my sister’s moments of kindness.

I try to read but can’t focus. I hate all my music. I rearrange the various gargoyles on my bookshelf. I pile up books I hate or will never read. I sneeze because of the dust, and then my skin gets dry and I have a headache. The air is humid but I’m cold. I go sit on the toilet but nothing happens. The sound of the exhaust fan is inappropriate at this late hour. I consider jerking off but can’t stop thinking about unattractive things.

I think about the shark that ate bad dreams, which I haven’t seen in years, and become obsessed with finding it. I can’t find it, but I
have
to find it. I become hyperfocused on the absence of that particular thing, a thing I need right now. I pull everything out of my closet and from under my bed.

Once my closet’s innards have been retched onto the floor and the bed—all the strange objects kill me with little dust swords in my lungs—I give up.

I pick up a book about the circus that I read a million times as a little kid. I don’t even have to open it—my brain already knows the pictures. I remember one image of the circus elephant, holding its foot up and smiling. Elephants don’t smile, certainly not in the circus. I saw a video of an elephant trampling people at a circus. It just
had enough
and went mad and the reporter in the video couldn’t explain it.

Well, anyone would go crazy and trample people out of desperation if prodded, whipped, and shipped around the country to parade under lights and hold up a massive foot to amuse people. How hard is that to understand? Anyone would go crazy suppressing their preference for rivers, for savannah life, for squirting themselves with water.

I wish I were an elephant, so I had something serious to be depressed about.

When my alarm goes off in the morning, I have no energy to celebrate myself or hug trees or even look any birds in the eye.

DR. BIRD WANTS TO KNOW
if I’ve had any panic attacks this week.

I say no.

Then I say yes because lying to Dr. Bird is impossible. When I’m lying, she tilts her head dramatically and stares me down.

“Sort of. Started in the vice principal’s office.”

Dr. Bird asks whether I made any progress.

I’m not sure of the question.

Dr. Bird asks me if bringing Jorie back is for my sister’s benefit or mine. I tell her that it’s for Jorie’s benefit.

Dr. Bird raises and slowly tilts her head.

“Honest?”

“I think.”

MY DAD AND I
eat dinner without Mom tonight. One of those together-alone feelings hits me. The worst thing to watch the Brute do: eat. Especially foods with gravies or sauces. He’s not a slurper, but he chews with his mouth open and often ends up with food around his mouth. Why he’s not more conscious of his eating manners befuddles me. Each night, when he’s done eating, he pushes his plate away from his body. It’s usually piled high with about seven used paper napkins, yet he still ends up with some dot of food on his cheek.

I offer to just make some mac and cheese, but he wants to order a pizza. This means we have to sit around and wait for it—not even the rather pleasant distraction of prepping food can save me from a conversation.

We manage to get through the topic of school; then randomly my father asks how Derek is doing.

“Fine. I guess. Why?” We’re sitting at the kitchen table. Empty plates sit ready next to glasses with rapidly shrinking ice cubes.

“I knew a guy when I was your age who’d lost his dad. He’d lost his dad a little later than Derek. I wonder if you know how hard it might be for him.”

“He’s always been fine.” I wiggle a fork, focusing on it with the same blank stare my father’s directing at the junk mail.

“It’s a lot of pressure to live without a dad, I think.” He folds a couple of flyers up, tosses them into the recycling box from where he sits, and then crosses his arms. “It’s pressure to live in a broken family of any kind.”

“I don’t think he thinks his family is broken. He’s got his sisters and his mother.” The truth is, I’ve never thought about this. My father makes a good point. “I think people adjust, you know? I think, with my broken arm, I don’t have to adjust because my arm will get better, but if my arm had been removed, I would adjust.”

“You’d miss your arm. Just like Derek misses his dad.”

I wonder about this whole conversation. What’s my father trying to do, make me feel superior for having a dad? Or make me feel crappy about not thinking about Derek? Is this about Jorie? Either way, my father’s certainty about Derek’s emotional state irritates me. He’s my friend. If anyone gets to say how Derek feels about things, it’s me.

Thank goodness for doorbells and pizza delivery and my father’s inability to carry on a significant conversation when food enters the room, because I might’ve said I am a little jealous of Derek’s father-free life.

WHITMAN PASSED OFF LISTS
of things as poetry. It makes for a tedious read sometimes, but I think I know why he did it: it totally shuts down the mind. Thus, I spend all morning cataloging things in classrooms and hallways. My anxieties take a back seat to unfettered words—no sentences, no strings of repetitive phrases. No worries about what I said and how I said it. Just
things.

Many of the things he wrote about don’t exist anymore. Well, wagon wheels and blacksmith hammers, sure—somewhere those things are still in use. But he talks about stuff that is just foreign. I mean, what’s a “jour printer”? What are “the frisket and tympan”? And what the hell are “the etui of oculist’s or aurist’s instruments”?

So I look at stuff and consider whether it will become extinct in a hundred years. I even take some covert photos. Maybe I could write a poem about objects that will be extincted by technology:

Chalk
.

Chalk dust.

The black blackboard.

The curly wire ofthe notebooks,

the scraggily edge ofnotebook pages,

the little bits of paper that used to hold the paper in

the notebook.

Notebooks.

The ink pen,

the gel pen.

Mr. Hobbelstein’s aviator sunglasses.

Mr. Hobbelstein.

I’m not sure if Beth will publish this, but it’s a start. Pictures and poems. It would take up all sorts of space in the literary journal. Mr. Hobbelstein might be annoyed. But I can call the poem “Gone in 2112.” If he thinks he’ll still be here, then it’s his problem.

My cell phone vibrates. I check it covertly, fearing the wrath of Mr. Hobbelstein, who believes cell phones are the worst invention since television. I have a text message
with a picture of where a tree limb meets the trunk.

I text back:

I swear I see now that every thing

has an eternal soul!

The trees have, rooted in the

ground . . . . The weeds of the sea

have . . . . the animals.

I like this shot. Send me more!

She replies:

Last days with my phone.

Can't afford it. Enjoy!

As I look away from the photo and out the classroom door, I see the person who might be able to confirm why Jorie freaked out and got expelled: Mrs. Yao.

I ask for the bathroom pass and follow her, trying to glean her mood by the way she walks the halls. I’m not sure if she is displaying normal behavior, but she doesn’t look anyone in the eye. Some of my teachers go out of their way to be friendly. Mrs. Yao is trying to stay invisible. I always notice weird things about teachers. I catch some of my male teachers looking at the girls. I catch teachers yawning. I overhear complaints. I notice when their deodorant fails. I can remember keeping track of my seventh grade teacher’s eye blinks.

Mrs. Yao doesn’t display any strange traits, but she does dress like an old lady. She is not an old lady, but her skirt looks like something my grandmother would have worn back in the eighties. Or something she would have wallpapered her bathroom with in the sixties. It’s hard to believe that Mrs. Yao has a husband. I can’t think of most of my teachers as being married. They seem so dull.

Mrs. Yao darts into her classroom and nearly smashes my face with the door. I suspect this is accidental, but who knows how far her desire to be invisible extends? Perhaps she’s willing to knock a few students upside the head to keep people at a distance.