In Zanesville (10 page)

I sit down at the kitchen table.

She fumes, smoke trailing from her nostrils, while my dad is summoned from the bathroom. He comes to the table in his undershirt;
it’s Monday night and he’s as sober as he gets. My mother hands him the form to read, and lights another cigarette off the
burner.

She can’t believe it! They are heartsick over this, they don’t know what is happening to me. They could understand if I were
deprived, or if I were some kind of mental case. But I’ve had every opportunity, every benefit of every doubt whenever it
was called for, every type of discipline and support parents could reasonably be expected to give their kid. I ask for a dress,
somebody sits her ass down and makes me one. I ask for a nightstand to keep my books on, somebody hauls one down out of the
attic and puts a coat of paint on it. I want to spend every goddamned minute over at some house six blocks away, hanging around
with a girl who won’t open her mouth when you talk to her, but then suddenly this same girl who can’t say boo is willing to
behave like an idiot “launching projectiles.” Whatever the hell that means, and it better not mean what she thinks it does.
Talk.

“I…”

“Shut up for a minute. What do you think?” she asks my father, who has placed the form facedown on the table and is shaking
his head at the floor.

“I don’t know until she tells us what happened,” he says sadly. “I do know they misspelled
undue,
not that it makes a difference, but they did.”

“Let me see that,” my mother says. She reads the form and then puts it, faceup, in front of me. “I don’t care what they spelled
how, you better talk.”

I clear my throat.

“Well,” I say, “first of all, this whole day started out bad. I had a history test that I studied and studied for, and I was
terrified I wasn’t going to pass it—and it was really hard!—but then it turned out that I not only passed, I did perfect!
And then I was at lunch right after, in such a good mood, and then Debbie Duncan got up and was carrying her tray to the belt,
and I said, ‘Hey, Dunk, throw my stuff away,’ and so did Felicia, and I was in such a good mood—over the history test—and
Flea was too, because she had a test
she
did well on (we studied together over the weekend!) and so we threw our hamburger papers, trying to land them on Dunk’s tray,
and we went overboard, is all. And mine didn’t hit the lunch lady, it went in the hot dogs.”

“That’s what they mean? You threw trash at a cafeteria worker?” She stares at me in disbelief, and then at my dad, who is
starting to look like he could use a drink.

“Mom! If I threw a feather, it would count as launching a projectile—you can’t go by the categories!”

My mother looks pointedly at my father.

“Honey,” he says, staring at his hands. “Those people really work hard in there, cooking and cleaning up and I don’t know
what all, for you kids.” He sighs and shakes his head. “Boy, oh boy. Something like that is really, really…” He trails off.

The stove clock ticks. Tammy sidles into the room, checks
her dish, takes one piece of kibble, and tiptoes out with it. I wait for a second, then get up to follow her.

“By the way,” my mother says, “you can forget seeing any more of Flea.”

“I’m grounded from you,” I tell her when she picks up the phone.

“Yeah, I’m grounded from you too,” she says. “Mick Jaggermeyer told my mother you were a bad influence. We have to meet on
the corner because I’m not even allowed to walk by your house.”

“I have to bring the la carte lady a plate of fudge tomorrow.”

“Who’s making it?”

“She is.” Even with my door closed, I can hear the sound of angry candy making going on downstairs.

“What’re you wearing?” she asks.

“I thought maybe culottes and my blue vest.”

“With what?”

“White shirt?”

“Too plain.”

“I know. What about you?”

“That spongy dress with nylons.”

“I never know which one is spongy.”

“Green with gray stripes that have triangles inside them; you think the neck is funny.”

“Oh, right. Listen. No matter what, we have got to talk to those boys
tomorrow.
Otherwise, we were mean for nothing.”

Instead of yelling at us, the cafeteria lady had stood there stunned, paper hat askew, cheeks aflame.

“It made her feel terrible,” Felicia says in a hushed voice.

I can’t bear to think about it. She somehow thought we were making fun of her. All the fudge in the world isn’t going to fix
that.

Next day, three o’clock, we linger in the detention doorway, sizing things up. I went against the culottes at the last minute
and am wearing a short wool wraparound skirt instead. While the monitor checks the paperwork of some new recruits, a hoodlum
plays with the science skeleton, which has been left out by accident. He puts his hand through the pelvis from behind and
turns it back and forth, like a periscope. The boys we’re in love with sit up front on opposite sides of the room, while our
table is at the back, in the center. Right before the buzzer, Felicia heads down one aisle and I head down the other.

Just when you depend on time to do its job and keep things moving, it slows down completely.

Mr. Prentiss, hunched over a drawing he’s working on. Glances up. Looks right at me. His eyes are brown and narrow, friendly.
There is a small indentation next to his eyebrow, like someone has pressed a star into his temple. He’s wearing some kind
of leather string around his neck, inside his shirt, which is not flannel today but corduroy. Green. The drawing is of a lion’s
face. It’s good but the nose is like a beagle nose. Lion noses are wider than that. His hand holding the pen is grubby.

“Hi,” I say.

Silence. The wind blows across the barren landscape of my chest. Time reverts to normal and I make my way to our table in
the back, hands trembling, and sit.

Well, that’s it, then; all is lost. Why would someone in such a beautiful, soft shirt, with those narrow, clear eyes, ever
want to speak to me, with my doughy face and fishing-pole legs? My wraparound skirt is held together with a big, decorative
safety pin. I unfasten it and refasten it, taking a moment to stab myself in the thumb.

Hers said hi back; I can tell and I’m not even looking at her. She’s looking at me, though. I dig around in my purse until
I locate a nail file, and then in small, jagged letters I carve a thought into the table. When I take my hand away she leans
over to read it.

SHITE.

She slumps back in her chair.

A canyon yawns between us now. She has leaped across it, hollering hi and having her hi come back to her. I’m thrilled for
her, she deserves it, but I’m alone over here and it’s making me feel wavery and unsound, like I should be home in bed waiting
to die.

Instead I do algebra, which I’ve recently started working up to capability in. Poor old Mr. Lepkis, with his speckled head
and spidery equations, put a couple of things on the board one day that were first of all readable and that second of all
made sense to me. It was like getting the key word in a crossword puzzle, the word that releases all the other words from
where they’re hiding in your brain. I would just stare at the board until suddenly I got the key thing, and then the rest
of it was easy and satisfying, like tidying up a house—put this over here, put that over there, go like this and you get this,
then go like this to get this. I could do the staring part from my seat but had to go to the board in front of everyone for
the tidying up. We always thought he was using faulty, squeaking
chalk, but I’ve had no trouble with it. And
x
always ends up equaling something simple, like
n
to the second, or even one.

It’s a burden, actually, because poor old Lepkis now keeps saying, “Let’s ask hherr,” whenever there’s an uncomfortable pause;
so it means not only that I have to pay attention in class but that class pays attention to me. I’ve had to stop repeating
certain clothes; everything has gone into regular rotation.

My favorite clothes are a white shirt with extralong, hand-hiding sleeves, a charcoal gray dickey that I can thrust my whole
face into, and two things given to me by a slightly older cousin: a tartan plaid skirt with fringe along the bottom and a
long black crocheted vest. That cousin may live in the country and have to take a bus to school, but nobody can fault her
taste in clothes. Her dolls even had better clothes than mine, although mine were professionally made by my mother on a sewing
machine, while hers were constructed by her, using household materials and a stapler. While my Barbie was wearing a shirtwaist
housedress with piping and roomy pockets, hers would be tightly bound into a Japanese kimono made from an old satin negligee
and belted with a strip of flocked wallpaper. She once made both of our Barbies reversible rain capes from a plastic tablecloth.
The rain side had a latticework theme, with sprigs of cherries; the other side was the white flannel backing, which we thought
looked like a fur stole.

Anyway, I have favorite clothes that I like to repeat.

“If I am forced to respond, Mr. Prentiss, you will receive the first of
next
year’s detentions,” the monitor says without looking up. She now has something angora blooming in her lap, a rainbow-colored
scarf with frilled edges. Very pretty, although people don’t actually wear things like that.

He’s waving his arm around.

If
x
equals zero, then
n
and
p
equal zero too. It’s a trick question. You hardly ever see a trick question in a textbook, although it does happen. I check
my work, but it appears to be correct.

“Mr. Prentiss, what can I do for you?” she says wearily.

“Thank you! This has to do with homework, which Mr. Bingham—gym—kept us too late last period for me to get to my locker, which
I had planned on doing to get homework for in here. We were climbing the ropes and nobody could do it, we were all just hanging
there, so Bingham took off his whistle and started showing us!” He pauses to look around. “The Buffalo climbed the rope.”

This causes a stir among the male detainees. When the monitor starts to set her needles aside, Mr. Prentiss hurries on.

“Anyway, can I borrow an algebra book from this person so I can copy down today’s problems? Otherwise I’ll just be sitting
here for an hour, wasting time and probably who knows what.”

She squints at him, considering all the angles. “And who has the book?”

“That girl at the last table, with brown hair. I don’t even know her name.”

She looks back at me. “Do you have what he’s talking about?”

I nod.

He starts to get up.

“Oh no, you don’t.” She points at me. “You. I don’t want him walking around.”

I collect my math book and walk up the aisle. He doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at him. I return to my seat and a minute
later his hand waves and she nods at me. I go up the aisle, take the book, and return again.

Inside the front cover is a sheet of notebook paper, folded twice. I open it under the table, where Felicia can see. It’s
his drawing of the beagle-nosed lion. Below it, floating, is one word in tiny cursive:
Hi.

The next couple of days are a whirlwind of speculation and advice, impromptu conventions around my locker, home of the dwindling
plate of fudge. The la carte lady had been gone the day I brought it, and by the time she returned, I wasn’t too sure about
taking food to someone who spends all day up to her neck in it. Instead, we ironed our sewing projects and gave them to her,
a ruffled pillow sham and a smocked apron, both orange and white gingham.

“Well,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”

We didn’t either.

Mr. Prentiss says hi to me twice more on my way to the back of the room, each time widening his narrow eyes as though he is
about to say something else. I can’t stay for it, whatever it is, because I’ve begun to feel weightless and slightly faint.
Now that I’m over here on this side of the canyon, everything seems so intensified—his long, expressive feet in their ripped
sneakers, hooked abstractly around the rungs of his chair, the way he bounces a pencil, so lightly, against his temple while
he reads, the way he raises his head when someone walks past but doesn’t raise his jaw, so his mouth drops open a little bit.
Not in a way that makes him seem impaired, but in a way that makes the looking up seem uncalculated. He’s just looking up,
is all, because he wants to see who is walking past. He isn’t thinking about his mouth! That’s what’s so overwhelming.

“She has to calm down,” Dunk advises Felicia.

“I know, but she can’t,” Felicia replies.

This delirious, buzzing feeling is neither unpleasant nor unfamiliar—I used to get it lying in the mildewed hammock in my
grandmother’s backyard, utterly relaxed in body if not in mind, the tops of the trees moving back and forth across the sky,
the rope creaking, the peeling paint on the garage coming into view and then leaving again, slower, slower, slower, until
I had to reach out with my stick and give another push. I do miss childhood: one long trance state, broken only by bouts of
sickening family discord.

What if this guy actually wants to talk to me?

“Don’t worry,” Felicia says soothingly. “He won’t.”

“This is clinically depressing me,” Gina Maroni, Duncan’s best friend, says. She’s a tall, graceful girl with a large nose
and silky black hair who used to be a figure skater until her butt grew—as she puts it—and threw everything off. She’s outgoing,
which means she doesn’t really belong with us, but we like having her. “Not talking to someone is snotty. Why would you want
to be snotty to him?”

This kind of psychology never works on me.

“You ought to give him a piece of this fudge,” Dunk suggests. “Just go, ‘Want some fudge?’ and then hold out a little piece
of this.”

“What if he says no and I’m just standing there with fudge in my hand? Or what if he asks where I got it?”