Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (7 page)

Still, she doesn’t seem to recognize me when she sets her folders on her desk and notices me pushing the door open.

“Yes?”

“I’m not one of your students.”

“Okay?”

“But I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

The look of panic on Mrs. Yao’s face cannot be described with words. Just know that she seems to fear all the possible things I might want to reveal to her, and the fear creates wrinkles and darkness around her eyes.

“It’s about my sister. Jorie. She was in your class until a few weeks ago.”

“Jorie?” The fear lines disappear, but her face doesn’t change otherwise.

“Yes. She got expelled. She was in a fight and that was probably the real reason. The last straw, or something, but I found out recently that she had a fight or something with you.” I fidget a bit and step farther into the classroom. “I’m saying too much.”

“You are speaking, but you are not saying anything.” She gestures for me to sit.

I don’t want to sit at a desk for this conversation. I need to feel like something other than a student, and there’s nothing like a school desk to make one feel helpless and physically uncomfortable.

As a compromise, I put the bathroom pass on the desk chair and I lean against the desk.

“I guess I want to know what happened. I’m trying to make a case to have her reinstated here at school.”

I notice that Mrs. Yao’s eyes are quite expressive for a woman who didn’t look where she’s walking in the hallway.

“Jorie was failing my class but not for any good reason. She handed in homework half the time. She failed quizzes. She failed sections of tests. But she also aced tests. She always asked good questions and answered my more open-ended questions.”

I smile. These are good details mixed with bad.

“But I think I got her on a bad day. I came into the library and she was arguing with some students.” Mrs. Yao begins writing things on the board but doesn’t continue talking.

“What was she arguing about?”

“The argument started before I arrived. I heard cursing and insults that aren’t worth repeating.”

Mrs. Yao has precise, neat chalkboard writing.

“I moved her away from the conflict,” she continues. “I just had this sense that something bad would happen if she stayed there. I pulled her aside and asked her if she was okay. But then I made a mistake and brought up the performance issues. I asked her why she didn’t seem to care as much as she used to. I asked her what was getting in the way of her success.” She stops here, but there seems to be something else she wants to say.

“That’s what set her off?” I ask.

“Maybe you know. It wasn’t this class. It wasn’t school. It wasn’t even the fight in the library.”

“I’m not sure I can fill in the details here.” Maybe I’m just not willing to fill in the details. I want outside sources. I want someone to construct the truth. I want to know what Mrs. Yao suspects.

Mrs. Yao busies herself in an unconvincing fashion.

“I heard she threw a laptop at you,” I say.

“No! That’s not what happened, really. Who would say such a thing?”

“It’s what I heard. That she threw a laptop at you.”

She asks me my first name. I tell her, and then there’s a pause. I feel my phone sitting in my pocket and think about trees. I picture Jorie in a room somewhere, texting pictures. Even she’s being obscure. (Or opaque? I’m not sure what word I mean.)

“James. Your sister abuses herself. That is why she got mad at me.” Another pause. A horrible, terrible pause. “The cuts on her arm? You didn’t know about them?” Mrs. Yao looks at me. I want her to look at papers or out the window.

“Who cut her arm?”

“She cuts her own arm.” Mrs. Yao’s finger cuts repeatedly across her forearm, a safe illustration of the truth.

“Oh.” I swallow. Little prickly pains march down the back of my throat. This happens when I am nervous or, sometimes, when I eat an apple.

“She tried to kill herself?” I ask.

“I asked her that. She did not like being asked.”

I am lightheaded. Right before my eyes! All the things I’ve noticed about strangers! All the things I’ve missed about Jorie!

Kids start coming into Mrs. Yao’s classroom. She gestures for me to move with her near the chalkboard and whispers, “I didn’t report this to the principal, James. She got angry and yelled and she
knocked
my laptop onto the floor accidentally. She did not try to hurt me. Maybe I did wrong by prying then and there. Maybe my tactic was wrong.”

I want to believe Mrs. Yao, because she seems too normal to lie. Maybe she can’t care about her students because it will mean she gets too involved. She tried to care about Jorie and ended up with a broken laptop. And maybe she used to look kids in the eye in the hallway. And maybe now she only sees angry kids who don’t want to be bothered.

I look her in the eye and say thanks. She might think I mean thanks for the information. But she might also know what I really mean.

I SPEND MY ENTIRE WEEKEND
in the park, photographing trees and trying to think all poetical. It’s surprisingly easy for my brain, it seems. Or, at least, the things I think
seem
poetical. Maybe I just think in rants and rambles like Walt.

It's pretty hard to hold the camera with my broken arm, but I still manage to use six rolls of this expensive super color film Jorie bought me. Digital cameras seem like the best thing ever, but film cameras offer a pleasing and necessary mystery that depends on the delay between the shutter-click and getting my prints from the drugstore. Anticipation seems healthy.

At first I try to avoid man-made things in my pictures, but then I think about Whitman, and he had no problem with man-made things. He loved everything. So I photograph clouds and airplanes dragging themselves across the blue. I photograph a leaf flat on crackling-gray concrete. I photograph an earwig in the nooks of a maple tree. I photograph the power lines disappearing into the crinkling twig-fingers of a tree.

The drugstore gets my photos done in twenty minutes, and I tell the lady who rings me up that the turnaround time is amazing.

“Not much volume these days.”

“That’s too bad.”

“We spent all sorts of money getting this machine in, and now it’s collecting dust.”

I don’t have anything to say. The decay of drugstore photo developing machines is not really on my radar of concerns. Sadly, this woman seems to have taken it to heart.

Back home I spend the rest of my Sunday afternoon looking closely at my photos. I have lots of great tree pictures. Pretty abstract stuff. Trees in parts—limbs, leaf stems, bark textures. I start a pile of good pictures and a pile of rejects. There are more good ones than I expected.

Lying on my bed, I hold pictures up against my dull ceiling. I have a great shot of two branches coming together in a V. It looks all artsy.

What I begin to see is hard to describe, but the one limb in the picture in my hand sort of matches a limb in a shot from another roll. Different tree, different limbs, but they blend well. I hold the seams together and look for other photos that fit. Soon I have a long, winding tree arm, some that branch off into a burst of tinier, leafed branches. Others that are as bare as my own arms.

A fizz of energy shoots through my body. I turn on my iPod and shuffle through my
Los Campesinos!
albums because they keep me moving, jumping, active. Movement tricks me into feeling happy. I get a roll of tape and I stand on my bed and try to keep the photos aligned as I tape them to my ceiling, though it’s tough with my cast. I match tree trunks with other trunks and tape some of the shots of individual leaves next to branches. I start cutting out a leaf from one photo, but that feels like cheating, so I toss the scissors and the cut photo aside and get back to making my Frankenstein photo tree.

My ceiling comes alive! My ceiling tree has roots with knuckle-y bumps and a huge trunk with half a dozen types of bark and leaves in color, leaves that don’t match but are now together on the same tree. I use some of the blurry shots and even put the huge earwig picture up; the alien bug looks ready to leap off the ceiling.

After three hours of intense, strange craftwork I lie back, my head dotted with sweat, my heart suddenly tired. I have completed some kind of manic moment and the result is a strange, twisted tree that I will cherish every waking morning. Dr. Bird is so proud of me that she fluffs her feathers and taps her left foot four times, as if she’s trying to balance on one clawed foot but can’t.

My mother comes in my room as I stare up at the product of my mania and asks what I’m doing while also telling me to turn the music down.

“How are you going to get this to school?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you do this for school?”

“I just did it.” I hold out a stack of the photos I didn’t use for the ceiling tree. “I had all these pictures and I wanted to look at them. I saw how some of the tree pieces fit together—the pictures fit together, I mean.”

Then my father decides to poke his nose into something that I did not invite him to take part in. As such, I move toward my door, hoping to signal to both of them that entry requires that they show some respect for my artistic endeavor.

“How much money did you spend printing all these?” the Brute asks.

“It wasn’t a waste.”

He exhales. They leave, condescending me in their mean brains.

I put on a song and let it repeat seven times. But the song is grim and pushes me
down down down.

I take a picture of the photo tree with my phone and e-mail it to Jorie’s address, though who knows if she’ll get it. Then there’s more anticipation, the bad kind. I’ve sent out a little ping into the tube-ether of the Internet and imagine all the reasons that no response appears.

I wish I could call a girl like Beth to ask her about her Sunday and forget mine.

Instead, I go into Jorie’s room looking for poems but also, maybe, perhaps looking for some evidence to refute or confirm what Mrs. Yao said about Jorie cutting herself.

I use some of the Banshee’s invasive snooping tech- niques—I jab my arm between the mattress and boxspring. I look and feel under the bed. (Bad idea! Crumbs! Hair! Something that feels like peanut butter
that isn’t peanut butter!
)

Her closet is a densely packed mishmash of clothes and boxes. Shoes, art supplies in plastic containers, old encyclopedias that she used to cut pictures out of.

In the back, behind a stack of comic books, I find a wooden box that’s loosely tied shut with a black ribbon. I undo the bow and lift the lid. For some reason, this doesn’t feel like an intrusion. Still, I look over my shoulder.

The box holds a bunch of white notebook pages with handwriting scratched in fine blue ink. I get scraps of words, but there are also dark lines that are not ink. It looks like maroon. I’m not sure, but I think it’s blood. What else would it be? Centered on each page is a large fishhook of blood. Or a
J.
Probably a
J,
but the curls at the base of the
J
are smeared on some, thin on others, thick on others. The written words do not intersect with the
J
s.

I read the pages. It’s poetry but not. It’s a story but not. It’s memories and dreams but not. Is this what she was going to publish in the
Amalgam?
Did she plan to reveal the abuse? Bruises? Welts? The cutting? My father, the Brute? My mother, the Banshee? Me, the invisible boy?

Maybe. Jorie is writing about some version of herself in the book. Different name, different looks, but familiar arguments, familiar angers. The sentences are compact, fast, brutal. Reading this
is
an intrusion, but it reveals things that I need to know if I’m going to end her banishment.

The girl in the story-poems is cutting herself. She’s not doing it to die. She’s doing it for something else. This is the explanation that I understand:

The lines are thin enough to not exist. The lines are nothing and then appear in red. The lines are lines; the lines are dots. The sharp lines on my arm are made with a sharper line of a blade. Like meets like, even if it hurts for them to meet. The lines fade and I can recreate them anywhere. But I need to breathe easy while I do it. I need a steady hand. A straight thin line, not too long, makes me feel better. A curve hurts. A curve ruins the whole moment.

I have mastered lining myself with evidence.

The evidence has mastered invisibility.

I pick up the box lid to replace it but see that inside the lid are taped a dozen razorblades in a square around a quote:

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

I put the lid on quickly and hold it on the box for fear it might lift itself off and make me face the shining pain again.

For some sick reason I think that I could publish this. I could make her private pain public and then people would know that she wasn’t just the girl who got expelled for sending someone to the hospital. She was a person in pain with no outlets.

But who would want to read it? Who would read it seriously? Who would feel better knowing that someone else was in so much pain that they hurt themselves to feel something different? I can’t imagine Beth’s face if she read this. It seems foreign—Beth wouldn’t cut herself and probably would think Jorie is a freak.

Maybe Jorie
is
a freak. She’s in exile, and that’s what a freak is: someone who doesn’t belong and who can’t belong.

Here’s the night she got kicked out. As I remember it.

Dinner, for me, was non-nutritious and eaten quickly. My parents used anger and fear as appetite suppressants.

At seven o’clock, my father got off the phone with the principal.

I was in my room. Godspeed You! Black Emperor murmured from my stereo. Their music half fades into the background when you’re not listening, and I was not listening, and you never really know when the album is done and starting anew. It feeds into itself quite nicely.