Outside In (13 page)

When she didn’t stop, didn’t notice us, I gave Dave a little nudge on the arm. Shouldn’t you go to her?

He shook me off. Aunt Bonnie kept on crying.

I poked him with my finger. She’s your mother. Go to her!

He shook his head at me, his face red.

I pinched him.
Go!

He turned and flailed at me, punching my arm over and over with his fist. Through all this we were silent, listening to Aunt Bonnie. There isn’t anything like hearing a mother cry, even if it’s your aunt who isn’t really your aunt.

I grabbed Dave’s fist and held it to stop him from hitting me. He threw off my hand but stopped punching me.

I crawled away. I kept the bushes between Aunt Bonnie and me and crawled past them to the corner of the Rankins’ house. It was like the toughest game of hide-and-seek ever. It wasn’t even dark, but I got away without being spotted.

I had other homework besides science, but somehow all my worries and fears got caught up in my oral report on the eye. When I got to the end of my homework each night and turned to the book on the eye, I would nearly fall asleep over it. Instead, I’d turn to sketching the diagram of the eyeball, and it was coming out perfect and beautiful, in my opinion.

If only I didn’t have to stand up and talk about it in front of Mr. Stone and the whole class, especially Dave. I had seen him only once since the day in the bushes. He hadn’t said “You!” He hadn’t said anything. “Why be mad at me?” I’d said to him when I saw he wasn’t going to speak. “It’s not my fault your family’s gone nuts!” He’d turned and pointed his finger in my face like Pete, then turned and walked away.

I was up late the night before my report was to be given, coloring in my diagram. I used my brightest colors: lime green, bright red, sky blue. Now I was crying because as I copied the diagram, I realized more and more that I had little idea what any of the parts of the eye did. Frantically I’d begun cramming after dinner, memorizing the parts of the eye and what they did, wondering if I had the facts I needed to fill my three minutes in front of the class. I didn’t dare stop and do a dry run in front of the mirror, couldn’t face asking Mom or Dad to hear me practice. I went to bed that night hoping for the best.

The next day I stood beside my beautifully drawn eye and said to the class, “My report is on the eye.” I turned to the diagram to point. “This is the pupil,” I said. “It’s the colored part of the eye.” I admired the sky blue and Prussian blue and wished I were home in my room, drawing. “This is the optic nerve—”

“Excuse me,” said the polite voice of Dave Asconti. “Is that the right eye or the left eye?”

Mr. Stone said mildly, “Can we hold questions to the end of Chérie’s presentation, David?”

Presentation. The word said that Mr. Stone was expecting a lot. I didn’t have much more to say, and I’d barely wasted thirty seconds, Dave’s interruption and all.

“The iris is the colored part of the eye,” I said, then
realized I’d already given that definition to the pupil. Confused, I backed up. “The pupil is colored, too, but the iris is the colored part of the pupil,” I said.

Dave looked over at his friends Nathan and Ziggy and crossed his eyes. Couldn’t he see I was having trouble, floundering up here? Or was that his point?

I went on to the retina and the lens and thought I’d remembered them right. I glanced at the clock. It looked as if I’d only taken about a minute, nothing close to three. I felt as if I’d been standing there an hour. “This is the optic vein,” I said, trying to remember. “It brings blood to the eye.”

“From,” said Ziggy, who had done his report on veins.

I stopped. “What?”

Ziggy waved his hand, wishing he hadn’t interrupted. But Dave was happy to step in. “A vein brings blood from organs to the heart.” Dave was showing off.

“David—” Mr. Stone warned.

I was sure my face was cherry red. I paused, took a breath, and remembered something. “This is the optic nerve,” I said again. “It brings nerve messages”—I hoped nobody asked what they were—“to the brain and back to the eye.”

I stopped. Mr. Stone waited. The class waited. I stood there holding my diagram, unable to remember any more eye parts.

Dave said, “Chérie? What’s the difference between the iris and the”—he pointed at the diagram and pretended to sound out the word—“poo-pil?”

“Shut up, Asconti!” I yelled in his face. I reached for my sketch pad but missed and knocked it to the floor. I left it there and ran out of the room.

In the hallway I fell apart. Mr. Stone found me there,
crying with my face against the yellow ocher, glazed brick wall, which felt cool and slightly sticky under my hands and forehead.

“Dave Asconti was bugging me!” I said.

“Is that what’s bugging you? Or is what’s bugging you the fact that you don’t know enough about the human eye?”

I gulped and shrugged my shoulders. “I’m sorry. I—”

“No excuses,” said Mr. Stone. “And no blaming Dave. Did you procrastinate about this report, Chérie?” Now there was another fifty-cent word. I shrugged. “Did you give yourself enough time to prepare?” Mr. Stone asked. His voice was kinder than before. I shook my head. “Procrastination,” he said, “shows fear.”

“Okay,” I said. Procrastination shows fear? But procrastination is doing nothing.

“I’m giving you a D for this report, Chérie. The next oral report is due November fifteenth.”

“Okay,” I said, gulping. I’d never gotten a D in my life.

“Go to lunch,” he said.

In the cafeteria I heard, “Hey, Chérie! That was a great report on eye
balls!”
Loud snorting came from the lunch line behind Dave.

The baseball field was green and bare, a bald spot in the midst of full-grown blue chicory flowers and goldenrod spikes. The sky was a perfect blue. Aimée was whining about how she just knew she’d fall off and hurt herself and then Mommy would be mad.

“Quit weentzing,” I said brightly. “We’ve only got Pammy’s bike for a limited time, and a limited time only.”

Aimée stood there with her arms crossed.
Procrastination is fear.

“Aimée,” I said, “how much do you want to ride a bike?”

“None.” She hid her face in her hands, shook her head.

“No crying, or I’ll let you fall,” I said in an evil voice.

“You’d better not.” She kicked at me, eyes still hidden.

“Save it,” I said. “Get on the bike.”

“Come on, Aimée,” called Joanie from the pitcher’s mound.

Pammy was in a cheerleading mood. She stood at home plate and did a little dance around the bat. “You’ve got to F-I-G-H-T!”

“Save it.” Aimée groaned. I smiled my evil smile.

“Get the bike, Aimée,” I said. She went and held the handlebars and stood next to it.

“Put up the kickstand,” I said. She could do that much. “Now wheel it over to home plate.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. It’s my great idea. Bicycle baseball.”

“You’re going to love it,” said Joanie.

Aimée sniffed enormously. I looked away. Don’t notice, I told myself. Don’t notice the sniffing, the weentzing. And don’t notice how far this field is from the road and how near the tall wildflowers are, how possible it would be for a man to hide among them, jump out, and grab—

“Okay, here’s how it goes,” I announced. “Joanie pitches the ball to Pammy. Pammy swings the bat. When she hits the ball—”

“If she hits the ball,” said Aimée. Pammy’s tongue went out.

“You ride to first base. If you make it, that’s a hit. Now I,” I said, “am going to hold on to you halfway to first base. If you can ride past that, you can try to get to home.”

Aimée bit her cheek. Her face around her mouth was white.

I gave Joanie a glance. It’s worth a try, her face said.

Pammy swung the bat and gave another strange cheer. “A-I-M-E-E! Congratulations, you can read!”

“Stand in, you little weirdo,” Joanie said.

Joanie pitched the ball. Pammy hit it, and it rolled into the space between second and third base. “Go, Aimée!” Pammy yelled. I pushed Aimée toward first base.

“Don’t let go, Chérie,” Aimée said.

“Not till first base,” I said.

“Not there, either,” she said.

Joanie was running in slow motion toward the ball.

“Don’t let go,” Aimée said louder.

“Here it comes,” I said.

“Don’t!”
she screamed in my ear. She wasn’t pedaling. She was hardly holding the handlebars. If I’d let go, she’d have crashed.

I stopped running. “All right,” I said, breathing hard. “Let’s try again.”

Joanie picked up the ball, but Aimée was screaming hysterically. “Don’t! Don’t!” It was as if I were still running, pushing her toward a cliff edge.

I stood perfectly still and held the bike firmly. “Aimée!” I shouted at her. “I’m not, you little twerp!”

She wasn’t crying. She was raving, flailing her arms and trying to hit me. And I’d been so creative, planning just how to make learning to ride a bike fun. She was going to stop putting it off, stop being afraid. Fun!

Joanie and Pammy stood stiffly at home plate, shrugging their shoulders at each other, until I looked up and waved to them to go on home without us. Sorry about that.

Aimée sat in a wet frazzled ball, her head buried in her arms. She looked up, saw the others leaving, cried harder, and finally calmed herself. I waited for her to say something, to apologize, to make some excuse. When she didn’t,
I said, “Let’s go home.” I picked up the bike and wheeled it away, heard her get up and follow. I said, “You’re going to have to learn sometime.”

Aimée said, “I know.”

“So when’s it going to be?”

“Not now.”

“When?”

“When I tell you.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“Chérie,” she said, running up on the other side of the bike, “this was your idea, not mine.” She put her hand on the bike seat and walked home that way, balancing her hand, letting me push.

I was in my room working on elf furniture, far harder than I’d ever worked on my oral report. Aimée came, knocked, entered, and dumped the papers on my floor.
SEARCH ENDS
.

“Thanks a
lot,”
I said.

“Don’t like it?” she said. “Too bad. Mom wants your junk off the front porch.” The paper was my job, not my junk.

Aimée hadn’t forgiven me for bicycle baseball. And she was right. Maybe procrastination was fear, but fear was not procrastination. Fear was something else. It was a lot of other things. It was the ground coming up to meet you when you lost your balance. It was people making fun of you when you failed. Fear was helplessness, on a bike or in the dark. It was the feeling that something was going to get you and hurt you and keep you from getting home. I should have understood Aimée’s fear before.

Now the papers were here to give me more fear, here in my room, with a headline that said
SEARCH ENDS
?

Aimée popped her head back in before I could touch
the horrible papers. “Mom says fold up here. A realtor’s coming.”

“Someone to sell the house?”

Aimée banged my door shut.

The police were giving up on Wendy Boland. They had no leads, no clues, nowhere to look but the places they had already looked.

SEARCH ENDS
! Of all the news I’d read or heard all year, this was the worst. How could a thirteen-year-old girl just disappear—“lost or kidnapped,” the
Bell
said—and how could they give up looking for her?

I refused, after that day, to look at the paper at all. For the rest of the week I refused. I folded it facedown, banded it without reading a word, and dropped it off without a peek.

When the typewriter sounds at the beginning of the news came on the radio, I went into the bathroom and turned the water on so I wouldn’t hear.

Life
magazine was lying on the bathroom floor, but I shoved it under the bath mat without reading it, not even tempted by the story about the Apollo 7 rocket that was going to orbit Earth in October, just a few days away.

I wanted none of it: not the rocket circling the world, not Vietnam or the presidential election or the baseball playoffs or the high school football scores. Not a girl my age in a town near mine with braids like mine who couldn’t or wouldn’t be found.

But the news got in anyway.

Looking Out

October 1968

I
T WAS
A
UNT
B
ONNIE’S IDEA
for the grown-ups to go into New York City that lovely October night. Dad laughed when he saw her come striding across the road, Uncle Joe and Faux Pas padding along behind. “What crazy idea is she cooking up now?” he asked Aimée and me.

“If I have to hear one more word about Richard Milhous Nixon,” Aunt Bonnie said before she was even on the steps, “I’m going to split my pants.”

“Who are you voting for, Aunt Bonnie?” I asked.

“Me? I’m no Republican!”

“But—”

“You know, Bon,” said Mom. “Nixon had the cutest dog …”

Aunt Bonnie wanted to go to Broadway to see
Man of La Mancha,
the new musical that was supposed to be strange, funny, full of adventures, even sexy. “Great music, too,” Uncle Joe added. I hadn’t heard him act jolly in the longest time.