Stranded (5 page)

ON MONDAY MORNING, I GATHERED PENS AND
notebooks and prepared myself for my first day at Carrie Nation High School. An ugly ache swelled in the pit of my stomach. A few days earlier I had been excited for all the boys I was about to scope, new sentences I could diagram, but now my only hope was that Natalie’s secret would go unnoticed in the excitement of learning the history of quadrilaterals. My mother sipped coffee at the table. Nana paced between the refrigerator and the sink, assembling a marketing list. Both of them were irritated I had left the refrigerator door open after waking up at 2:00 a.m. to drink a glass of milk. I wasn’t batting a thousand keeping to the rules at Nana’s house.

I wasn’t sleeping well either. The thought of Baby Grace Sorenson chafed like a pea under my mattress,
causing my eyelids to puff on a day I had to go light on the cover-up because Nana had enforced cosmetic rules. I had a lot of problems stacked in spaces in my brain that had once been empty.

“Time to go.” Natalie, in her coat, urged me to hurry in order to make the bus.

I stuffed the last of my toast into my mouth, kissed my mother (leaving crumbs on her cheek), and rushed through the kitchen door into the garage. Nana flipped her hands as if shooing a cat, telling me to scoot faster. Everyone else’s idea of what my internal speed should be at 7:30 on a Monday morning outstripped my precaffeine reality.

I bustled as fast as I could, doing my best not to panic at the thought of what might happen with so many outside forces propelling my body while my brain remained so dangerously understimulated. One of my new boots resisted yanking. I hopped across the lawn, kicking while balancing my backpack on one shoulder. After a three-minute dance that resembled a Highland fling, I stumbled aboard the bus long after Natalie had reached it.

She waited, talking to the driver.

“You look lovely today, princess,” he complimented her.

“Thank you, Ernie.” My cousin beamed.

Ernie noticed me, glanced at the boots that Nana had not allowed me to wear to church, and tugged at his shirt collar.

“Hello, miss,” he said.

I acknowledged him with the greeting famous people use to flash the paparazzi—a split finger point. Ernie didn’t seem to know what the fingers meant, and he slowly cleared his throat.

“Ernie, this is my cousin from Des Moines.” Natalie introduced us, explaining that I was from the city and that was why I made funny hand signals and wore garish boots.

Except for when I was with Katy and a dare was involved, I mostly avoided bus drivers. I walked to class in Des Moines, stopping at Starbucks to prepare my faculties. Ernie chortled and winked at Natalie and me as if Des Moines was the funniest place he had ever heard a person had come from.

I accidentally winked back.

Boldness is not a good way to handle friendly old men.

When I am photographed I flinch so embarrassingly that I devised the strategy of poking bunny ears behind other people’s heads to get through the agony. I had so many things on my mind—ideas about how to protect
Natalie—I couldn’t quite summon the fake friendliness to charm the old codger. Ernie, in response to my wink, shifted gears and hit the gas, and the bus lurched into motion. He sent me careening up the aisle, bypassing Natalie by one seat.

I flew by her mostly on purpose, not wanting to cramp her style—
if
you call a Fair Isle sweater and a plaid skirt style. We hadn’t fought quite as much since I returned from church, but we hadn’t found our inner Bulgarian chefs again either.

There were only four people on the bus older than twelve: my cousin, a heavyset blonde boy with strangely cut bangs near the back, a clone of him in the front, and a girl who might be Amish. The rest of the seats were filled with elementary school kids.

The Amish girl peered at me.

She had nice skin, very rosy like Natalie’s.

The boys seemed cute.

There were differences between the way they were dressed and the way I was, but not of the extreme kind Katy implied when we joked on my driveway in Des Moines. Thinking of clothing trends made me wonder if Facebook was still a “thing.” So far from my usual world, a fad could come and go and I wouldn’t know. A person like me needed to live in the city just to stay even.

Natalie, meanwhile, shifted toward her window and pulled her diary from her bag. I recognized it as the one that had been sitting on her desk. I guessed that it contained all the details of Bearded Boyfriend and maybe how Natalie had managed to give birth to Baby Grace all on her own—which had to have been quite a story, definitely edgier than the shopping lists and descriptions of Pastor Jim that had sedated me when I read it a year earlier. I had given the journal a Most Boring Book award because Natalie thought that her inner self would be interested in the news that she had ironed three of her shirts. Now I wondered if it was safe for her to have her private materials out in public where anybody could read them or maybe send them to the
National Enquirer
.

Just to be sure she wasn’t exposing herself too obviously, I peered over her shoulder.

I read the greeting “Dearest Journal” before she stowed the book in her pack and zipped the pocket. Her expression, when she turned, was not one of her friendlier ones, and might cause ugly little lines to form when she reached thirty—unless she moisturized responsibly. Before I could explain that I had just been stretching, doing a little bus yoga, and not peeking, a blond girl boarded and took the place next to
Natalie. The girl had to be Sherry Wimple, the friend who had unknowingly made dirty promises to a ravenous vampire two days earlier. Natalie hadn’t talked about befriending anyone else. I shifted one leg over the other while I waited for the introduction that Natalie decided not to make. Instead, she and Little Blondie gossiped about youth group. Little Blondie clapped her hands, behaving very cheerleaderish. She was obviously a member of the perky set.

I leaned my head against the window and listened to how wise Pastor Jim was, how emotional Natalie and Little Blondie both felt after the last group witnessing they attended, what a wonderful sermon Natalie had missed the day before. Sherry definitely connected with Pastor Jim’s words, and I suspected the reason had something to do with growing up in Heaven, where people must have some sort of handbook to understand all the different customs.

While I listened to Sherry bubble with excitement, I counted the signs for Baby Grace sprouting from the lawns of the houses we passed—fourteen in a half-mile stretch. Kids stood alongside their mailboxes, waiting for Ernie to stop, and the spaces inside the bus filled one after another. I read the graffiti someone had written—“Fighting Soybeans Rock” and “Mr. Gruber
is a fag!!!!!”—on the seat in front of me. The multiple exclamation points implied Mr. Gruber—whoever he was—was gay in the extreme.

A lot of people work out their fear and suspicion by writing on public spaces. I looked to see if anything had been written about Natalie.

The bus picked up speed. We traveled along County Road 14, passing farms on either side of the road and combines finishing the harvest. I thought of Katy heading to first period, fortified by a grande mocha latte, her only worry not farting in math class. Meanwhile, the elementary school contingent in the back of the bus began singing “The Ants Go Marching.” City children walking to school don’t burst into musical numbers so spontaneously, and so at first the little wigglers confused me into thinking a tarantula was crawling around in the back seats, but after a minute I made sense of their voices.

The bus crested a hill. The singing stopped and kids shifted sides to look out the window at two metal buildings that I wouldn’t have paid attention to because they were so much like the other farm buildings I had seen on the trip between Des Moines and Heaven. I wiped fog off the bus window. The sheds were near a slue. Their metal sides glinted in the sun. A dirt road led in their direction.

“The police,” I heard the Amish girl say to one of the farm boys.

She pointed to a white pickup with red and blue lights mounted on the top, parked near one of the buildings.

“Maybe they discovered another baby,” one of the boys remarked.

I looked out the window.

All of rural Iowa is more or less the same. Objects just don’t stand out. No one glanced at Natalie after we rolled beyond the drive with the white truck. Ernie punched the gas, and the children started to sing again. I wondered what the etiquette was for getting them to tone it down. Singing children, though potentially uplifting, can be very hard on the ears.

ERNIE MAY HAVE CHOSEN HIS ROUTE TO COLLECT
the largest number of passengers, or he wanted to hear “The Ants Go Marching” for thirty more minutes—either way, the length of the trip burned the song into my consciousness in a way that would surely have lasting consequences. The extra time, though, gave me a chance to overhear that not only were the huts in the field the place Baby Grace had been abandoned, they were also the local Big Bash hangout, home of many a megalocal superparty, always the last one, because the city council kept threatening to knock them down.

When Ernie finally turned in the drive of the high school, I felt on better footing with Heaven’s geography and more at ease with Natalie’s ability to keep her secret. No one had handcuffed her and
dragged her to a police station. No one pointed a finger in her direction and said she was “the one.” A line formed in the aisle as the bus stopped. I hitched the elephant-knee look out of my tights and joined it. My future classmates gathered in groups near the doors of the school. Some of them were hot. It felt good to see hot boys. It reminded me of places in the world where Baby Grace’s ghost didn’t hover and cause me to feel guilty for a crime I didn’t commit.

Before I could learn names, introduce myself, make a boyfriend I could lock lips with, a bell rang. I ran to catch Natalie as she was about to ditch me and leave me with no idea where I was supposed to head next. She seemed to have an awful need to slip off with Little Blondie and exclude me from their twosome.

“There’s the office,” she said, pointing.

“Duh,” my cousin’s friend added.

On the bus, Little Blondie had clucked her tongue at the sight of my boots and rolled her eyes when I had tried to compliment her on her cardigan. She was a judger. I checked my teeth for toast in case I had embarrassing brown stuff between my gums, but my finger came away clean. Natalie pointed to a sign that said “office” right behind me, and I thanked her. After
she and her mean friend plonked away in their Crocs, I opened a glass door and went searching for someone who could help me.

“Hello?” I called.

In a separate section behind a partition inside the office, I found two empty desks that would probably have been filled with secretaries if the economy wasn’t so bad. Nobody else seemed to be in the administrative area, so I was reminded of all those slasher movies filmed in empty high schools or hospitals. Someone hears a noise, has a smidgen of guilt on their conscience, and bloody revenge sneaks up behind them.

Carrie Nation, because it was so small, could maybe have run itself, but that wouldn’t have worked at French High School, where there weren’t shootings, but there were traffic flow problems. I called out “Hello” again and a tall man in a blue suit and a tie with tiny Snoopys opened a door and motioned me into his office.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

He returned to his chair and fiddled with a pencil, flipping it end over end, watching its point touch his desk. I told him who I was and where I had come from.

He appeared interested in the details.

“The Louise part of my name is after Tina Louise, the Movie Star on
Gilligan’s Island,
” I explained.

“That’s unusual,” he remarked.

I wasn’t sure who he was, whether I was revealing private information to a complete stranger, serial killer, or wife-bludgeoning gardener.

“Tina Louise and I are not completely alike.” I told him about my decision to be more of a blonde than a redhead.

“I always found that show quite funny.”

He stowed the pencil in a drawer and introduced himself as Mr. Gruber, the principal.

He was not as gay-seeming as the exclamation points on the back of my bus seat implied—no fuzzy headbands or flapping wrists, nothing to get Natalie excited or all worked up. He reviewed my transcripts, asked questions about the weather, brushed his tie, and showed me, by drawing a line on his desk with his finger, the way to my first class. I had been hoping after our chat that I might get to spend the day in his office, or at least stay until I felt a little less panicked. Fortunately, there were no annexes or subbasements at Carrie Nation like there were at French High School.

Just to be sure I understood all the particulars, I asked Mr. Gruber to repeat his instructions.

“Here,” he said, drawing the route again.

“Are you sure that is a left?” I asked, putting my finger on the desk.

“You’ll find the way,” he said.

I almost reached out and hugged him for having so much confidence in me.

I trekked first the incorrect way before I discovered my mistake and backtracked. I was more disoriented than I thought I would be. A few students lingered in the corridors, and I hurried to catch a boy in a black T-shirt. Mr. Gruber had stated that most of my fellow students wouldn’t mind being helpful, and though we weren’t in Des Moines, there was something about Mr. Gruber I trusted. The boy waited for me, but when I got near, instead of welcoming me to Carrie Nation, he flipped the plastic top of a canister into the air like a Frisbee. It just missed clipping me in the head.

“Where’s room 106?” I asked, retrieving the cap and returning it because I thought he had launched it in my direction by accident.

“Fuck if I know,” the boy answered, flicking the cap again, this time with better aim.

Then he reached for the knob of a door marked 106, which was either the place I was looking for or he was going out of his way to make my search difficult. I asked Mr. Rebel Rebel if he could tell me how to find Mr. Fisher, the person whose room I was looking for. He pretended not to hear while he held the knob. A teacher opened the door from the
inside. The teacher and the boy each pulled like two dogs on either end of the same bone.

“Is this 106?” I asked again about the number I had seen.

“Jesus,” the boy said, and the teacher let go of the knob.

“You are late, Mr. Stockhausen,” Mr. Fisher remarked, and to me he explained, “This is the classroom you are looking for.”

I stepped out of the way while Kenny slunk to the other side of the room and sprawled into his chair (if it can be called sprawling when you are only five feet tall). Kenny was dark but not handsome and far too trigger-happy. Two days earlier, Natalie had predicted his path would intertwine with mine. Hopefully we were all done with that little slice of destiny.

The room smelled of chalk. A screen covered the blackboard, and an overhead projector perched on a dusty rolling table. Natalie sat next to Little Blondie in the front. Little Blondie now only seemed like the third scariest person in Heaven—after Natalie and Kenny Stockhausen.

Just when I thought I might want to hitchhike home, I noticed a boy behind Natalie so good-looking it jolted me nearly out of my skin. He had incredibly
green eyes and looked exactly like my future husband. What a pick-me-up after my last few difficult days. A boy like Mr. Green Eyes could take a person’s mind off anything. He appeared just when the books and movies said he would, right when my day was looking dark.

“Over there, Miss Sorenson.” Mr. Fisher motioned me away from Perfect Boy to a row of empty seats behind Kenny. He warned me not to sit directly behind Kenny because the desk was damaged.

I settled into my seat and listened to Mr. Fisher lecture about the trial scene in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. He called on the green-eyed boy and I learned his name was Steve Allen. Steve said he had read the book but didn’t remember who Atticus Finch was. The class would have to figure out little Scout’s big dilemma—that racism was bad, that her dad was too nice—without either Steve or me. Steve, to express how overcome he was at the first glimpse of me, drew a picture of Bart Simpson on a folded piece of paper.

I had read
To Kill a Mockingbird
in my previous English class and enjoyed most of the book’s plot, but I kept thinking Boo Radley had to be a serial killer and it made me very nervous when, at the end, everybody made such good friends with him.

In front of me, Kenny stabbed at his desk with a pen. Mr. Fisher’s overhead projector gave off a smell of overheated plastic.

I designed a little universe of stars and scribbled several versions of my name with different surnames, including Allen, in my notebook. It felt good to be in the familiar territory of classroom boredom, a place that, if not thrilling, was at least not as unnerving as the bus ride had been as we passed the Quonset huts. Natalie sat with her hands folded on her desk. A boy a row over flipped his watch around and around his wrist. Steve drew another picture of Bart Simpson, this time peeing on a rock. I mentally measured Steve’s eyelashes so I could text the figure to Katy. Mr. Fisher wrote a set of page numbers on the board for us to review the next day.

“Miss Sorenson, Mr. Stockhausen.” He interrupted my mental drifting. “Would you two be so good as to remove this to the hallway?” He knocked on the abused empty seat in front of me.

My cousin heard the words
good
and
Sorenson
and rose, but after a second, she realized that Mr. Fisher meant me. She managed to sit again without making a scene, and I admired her cool recovery. I disentangled my foot from the loop of my backpack. Kenny disposed
of the shards of his broken pen by kicking them and watching them skitter.

“What am I, your fucking slave?” Kenny snarled at Mr. Fisher like a little mad dog who has had his bone stolen.

“Yes.” Mr. Fisher explained that Kenny
was
his slave, or at least his “pedagogical inferior.”

I took my end as I was ordered, disappointed that moving the desk would keep me from mingling in the hall and introducing myself to Hot Green-Eyed Steve Allen. Once Kenny and I were through the door, I noticed the name LiLi inked with pink glitter pen inside a heart. I also noticed the name Steve right next to it. LiLi was the French name I had used for Natalie when we were ten and going through a Parisian phase.

“Did Natalie write that?” I asked Kenny.

I had never before suspected my cousin of having a French alter ego, but then again, I never thought she would drink gin with me, or have a bearded boyfriend, or have secrets worse than clothes she forgot to iron. I wondered if Steve was my Steve and felt an even greater respect for the things I didn’t know about Natalie. She must have some relationship with him if both their names were graffitied on the same surface.
Maybe she could introduce me to him.

“Jesus Christ.” Kenny frowned when I had stopped paying attention to where we were going and bumped into a water fountain. “Just what we need around here, another dizzy, brain-dead blonde.”

“Does Natalie have a boyfriend?” I asked.

He said “Jesus” again in a way that Jesus might take issue with. He nearly knocked me over as he pushed me down the hallway backward with the desk between us.

“Slower,” I suggested.

He increased the pace, what he would likely do if we were ever drunk and driving a car around a hairpin turn together, a scenario I would have been better able to imagine if I thought he were tall enough to reach a gas pedal. We arrived at a space between the lockers and I lowered my side. He continued to push. The legs of the desk shrieked on the tile floor.

“We can’t just leave it here.” He motioned me to lift my side again.

“Is there a janitor’s office?” The school didn’t seem big enough to require a janitor who needed an office.

“Keep it moving, Greeny Locks,” he insisted. He was referring to my hair. The water at Nana’s had tinted the highlights Katy had given me, but I had hoped that the lime aura was only visible under the
fluorescent bathroom lights. Apparently Kenny had noticed it, too.

I hoisted while he steered us down the steps, through an exit to a walk that led to the parking lot. My calves screamed from descending first one and then two sets of stairs backward. Had I known in advance that people in Heaven were still wearing Crocs, I might have opted for a low-heeled clog. I assumed Kenny was aiming for a small white building on the far end of the lot, though it looked more like a shed than an office.

“Can we switch sides?”

“What the hell do you think?” he asked.

He was very crabby.

Over Kenny’s shoulder, I noticed Mr. Gruber, the principal, reopen the door we had come through.

“The principal is behind us,” I said.

“Move.” Kenny shoved.

“I am,” I complained.

“Faster.” He shoved harder.

“Just where do you think you’re going?” Mr. Gruber yelled from the doorway.

When neither Kenny nor I answered, Mr. Gruber half trotted, half ran in our direction, his tie flapping in the wind behind him. It probably wasn’t easy, moving so quickly, flying after wrongdoing when he saw
it in action. I tried to stop and let him catch us, but Kenny propelled us forward with a lot of strength for a near midget. Finally, when Kenny couldn’t budge me another inch because one boot heel had gotten stuck in the half-frozen grass beside the sidewalk, he dropped his side of the desk. A rack of bikes lined the edge of the lot, and Kenny inspected a few before he yanked one free.

“Nice meeting you,” I said as he began to pedal away.

“Not really.” He ran over my foot with the front wheel of the bicycle.

“These are brand-new boots!” I yelled.

But Kenny pedaled so fast, I’m not sure he heard.

I wondered who he thought he was. I was supposed to be mingling with Mr. Green Eyes. Instead, I was sitting in a parking lot with school property, about to get to know my gay principal better. It was one of those moments I asked myself, WWKD—what would Katy do?