Ridiculous/Hilarious/Terrible/Cool (13 page)

It's the day before break. At the west end of the atrium, the special ed students have wrapped blindfolds over their eyes and are whacking a snowman piñata with a stick. All except the blind. The blind students just grab the stick and start swinging. That they don't need blindfolds dawns on the other students standing nearby and they nudge each other. They also cheer with each swing, and when one blind student crushes the piñata, scattering candy everywhere, the crowd roars.

With the last bell, students pour into the hallways, where they eat cupcakes and unwrap presents and leave wrapping paper on the floor. The cool kids wear Santa hats. Then everyone surges through the front door and into the cold. Snowballs fly overhead. A teacher shouts, “You have permission to be gone for two weeks.
Don't come back!
”

Payton is deserted over the holidays, almost. At the front desk a security guard reads a novel. In the hallways two teachers talk in normal non-whispering voices. In the library, chairs remain tucked under the carrels. In the classrooms, chairs are stacked while floors are cleaned. Mops lean against lockers.

Outside, through the atrium windows, steam can be seen billowing out of the tops of buildings downtown, making Chicago look like a forest dotted with campfires. Everything is soft, cold, distant. The high school is hushed, as if the building itself were taking a deep breath.

JANUARY

Diana comes back from break looking different. It's hard to tell how initially. She's wearing the same plain jeans, a plain T-shirt. But, there it is. In her right nostril. A stud.

Diana's best friend Sandra had wanted a nose stud forever. Diana had also been tempted. Some friends said a nose stud wouldn't look good on Diana because she didn't have the right nose. Too fat. Diana didn't listen, much. Last year, Sandra and Suki got matching angel-wing tattoos on their hips but Diana backed out at the last minute. Not this time.

First they had to find the right person to do it, especially since Sandra was underage.

“A neighbor who is single and thirty, but acts eighteen, she knows a guy. And he knows a guy who works in a shop. This guy couldn't do it, but a friend of his could.”

The friend of the guy who knows the neighbor made them fill out lots of paperwork, which took a long time. The piercing didn't. When the needle slid into Diana's nose it felt like a pinch.

Diana avoided her parents for a couple of days and didn't go out of her way to tell them. Her seven-year-old brother did. The family was watching television after Christmas when he turned on the lights and pointed at Diana's nose and said, “See? I told you so!” Diana's
mother didn't say anything. Her father was working that night and didn't see the stud until the weekend, and when he did he didn't say anything either. Diana says, “They didn't like it, but they figure it's not as bad as it can be.”

There are more pressing concerns for the Martinez family. Diana's brother is still in jail. The police informant didn't show up for the first few court dates, so her brother had to spend Christmas and New Year's locked up in Cook County. The family went to visit over the weekend. Everyone was on edge. They found when they arrived that the brother had been in “the hole.” Diana didn't know what “the hole” meant. When the correctional officers told her, they were rude about
it, “treating someone bad just because they're related to someone they think is bad.” This made Diana furious. “What does that
mean?!
” she yelled at the officers. One of her sisters told her to shut up, raising her hand in a feint as if she were about to slap her, and Diana, in a preemptive strike, punched her sister in the face.

Diana walked out of jail, her sisters clamoring behind her.

“Get in the car!” they yelled, but Diana kept walking down the avenue, heading toward home. As she turned on 26th Street, the barbed-wire-topped wall of the jail gave way to smoke-churning factories, sheet-metal auto-repair shops, and browned-out lots covered in frozen weeds. Diana walked past it all, her sisters trailing her in the car, driving the same speed she was walking.

At first, Diana stayed angry.
They think I'm not going to walk. I
am
going to walk
. As she kept going, she thought about next year, where she was going to be. She thought about her applications, the colleges where she was applying, the financial aid that would get her there. She thought about this walk and how it was giving her some exercise.

Then Diana didn't think. Her sisters were driving ten feet to her left, honking and yelling through the car windows, but Diana tuned them out and just kept plowing ahead. In some curious way, it was nice to be by herself, at least until her parents drove up in their car and made her get in.

As Diana talks about her walk home, a phys ed class jogs past in the hallway. Diana watches them turn the corner.

She is not supposed to swim for six weeks because of the stud in her nose, something about the threat of infection. She's thinking of ignoring that and getting back in the water.

“For the most part,” she says, finger on the side of her nose, “I think it's healed.”

Students come back from break with a little something more, a little something less. One student has new vertiginous five-inch heels. As she wobbles down the stairs, unsteady as a baby taking its first steps, it is debatable whether she can pull this off. Next period she's wearing flats.

Ms. Murphy comes back from the holidays different too. Instead of the gray sweaters she usually wears, she's wearing a loose green sweater over a small belly. She's pregnant.

There's also something missing at Payton. Something in the atrium. There, on the bench under the stairs. A space. Someone who is not here. A few days pass, a few days more. Zef Calaveras did not come back to Payton this semester.

A tray clatters to the floor in the cafeteria, sending a spray of mashed potatoes everywhere. The heavy girl from whose hands the tray fell stares at it—
the nerve!
—then keeps walking. A security guard sees her and barks, “No you don't!” As he points at a broom leaning against the wall, the girl stares at him, at the broom, at him. His arm does not lower an inch. She takes the broom—the students at the tables nearby have stopped chewing—and swipes at the linoleum. After she leaves, the security guard throws a towel over the remaining mess. He shakes his head. “
Oooeee!
You can really hurt yourself on mashed potatoes!”

Not noticing any of this is Anthony Johnson Jr., back against the cafeteria's rear wall, surrounded by girls. Anthony is wearing baby-blue sweatpants, a baby-blue sweatshirt, and blindingly white sneakers with baby-blue trim. On top of everything, the green turtle shell.

He's trying to explain some situation to his cousin, who is sitting across from Anthony and leveling a stare at him so blistering it could warm the french fry dangling from his fingertips, which he seems to be holding up between the two of them in an attempt to ward her off.

Something happened with his cousin's wallet. She left it on the floor of the cafeteria yesterday. Anthony picked it up. He meant to bring it to her but then he ran into The Girl. The Girl wanted to go to her home on the South Side. Anthony went with her, and his cousin's wallet went with him. He called his cousin from the train and told her he'd come back to school and bring her wallet after he was done with The Girl, but when the cousin called back to find out how long that would be Anthony didn't answer the phone.

He didn't answer because he was listening to The Girl on
her
cell phone—she'd gotten one since the missed meeting at the McDonald's in the fall—talking with The Dude. The Dude, from what Anthony could overhear, was pressuring The Girl to have sex with him. She was saying no. Anthony tried to be supportive, telling The Girl in between the times she hung up on The Dude that she should “straighten out her situation.” He was being a good friend, he says.

Anthony's cousin rolls her eyes.

“Press Pause!” she shouts, her forefinger jabbing an imaginary button an inch from Anthony's nose (the protective french fry has since disappeared into his mouth). Then she tells the other girls at the table what
really
happened: Anthony took her money. That is
all
.

The cousin gets up and stalks off with a backhand wave. Anthony keeps explaining his side of the story to anyone who will listen. There were extenuating circumstances. He and The Girl were in the middle of an important conversation. They were working things out. And, she was slapping him.

It all started because of what happened back in the fall, that time they ditched school and went to his house. Around that time Anthony had been talking with some guys in the neighborhood who knew some other guys who set him up with some dope to sell. But he couldn't move anything, so he enlisted his younger brother. Business picked up.