The School on Heart's Content Road (17 page)

Samantha told me to be John Adams.

I said, “GROSS!”

She said, “Just say the John Adams stuff, okay? You can dress whatever way you want.” She said this sad and sweet like she was talking to an animal. I made my eyes squinty.

So the boys did the war part, dying and screaming and poking each other on the head. Mostly girls were Fathers of the Constitution, and one boy, Evan—who is cute if it weren't for the worst pimples—he said Thomas Paine stuff and dressed in pants that didn't fit him and an actual antique coat. Others wore practically nothing in order to be sailors and slaves. They used purple paint to make whip marks and “scars from the sea.” They said their best thing was fire and they said a poem called “Tiger Burning Bright,” which is about slaves, and they yelled “Yo mateys!” and “Ahoy!”

Then it was my turn. I was the stupid John Adams. I had put my lipstick on my lips in a beautiful sex way and patted my lips on paper to make them perfect. Yes, lipstick on the LIPS. That is where lipstick is supposed to go.

I put my hair up in a pretty shell squeegie. The shells are varnished and whitish-pink. So pretty. It makes my neck look long and sexy. I didn't wear my secret heart-shapes dark glasses because I wanted my eyes to show. My eyes, everyone has always said, look like Mariah Carey's, which everyone says are “gorgeous, dark, and sultry.” Sultry is actually a real word.

And then I wore my sundress which lets a lot show. And I wore my gold ankle bracelet and glitter sandals and my long earrings that look just like Mariah Carey's.

So there I was up on the stage with all these horridable monsters with swords and hunched backs and bandaged feet and green masks and
purple scars and white yarn wigs and funny coats and blood and masks made to be faces of the Constitution Fathers,
twelve
Thomas Jeffersons, and one kid had a diaper and shower cap, which everyone thought was cute because he's only age one but was really disgusting, and there was the kid with the busted arm, who was part of the mob, and I was the only pretty person there. You could easily see the difference. My lines went like this:

The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religish sintimints, of their duties and of their oblations. This RADICAL change in principals, opinions, sintimints, and affections of THE PEOPLE was the REAL American Revolution!

I spoke all these words with perfect lips and licked these lips with the end of my tongue in a full sex-type lick, like on TV, just the point of my tongue, which is supposed to put thoughts of sex in all men's minds.

After the play, I put my secret glasses back on and mothers said stuff was going on inside the shops and everybody was picking up the tables. I said No thanks to helping pick up messy tables, No thanks to shops.

So then they say, “Jane, maybe you'd like to help with hair in the beauty shop. There's a bunch going over for haircuts right now. Or maybe you'd like to have your hair done, just have Jillian brush your hair and pamper you.”

“It would be my pleasure,” said Jillian, who has huge teeth. And funny blinky little eyes with hardly any lashes, like an actual monkey's.

“No thanks,” I said.

And they said more stuff about how wonderful the shops are. I cried, in a quiet sad way. They said okay, I could go back to Gordie's house with Lee Lynn for a quiet afternoon.

Lee Lynn is one of the mothers. She sort of looks like Thomas Jefferson but no mask. Her hair is so weird. Flies around like it's maybe plugged into the lamp thing. Her face is pretty, but not pretty enough for TV. Sorry.

I hear the mothers whisper (so I don't hear) that I am beautiful, which is something they are not used to.

Boy, do I have a lot of information in my secret book. All their ugly secrets. All their ugly faces. All their noise. All their hideous food. And electric buggies kids ride around in. And weird soap. Oh, God, there's
BARE FEET in the library. And junk everywheres. Would you call that a school? I call it a dump.

Penny St. Onge talks to us from a future time.

Dear heavens! The separation of mother from child with such ease could only happen to civilized humans. A mother bear would rip your head off. A human mother without the clutter of law-and-order would claw out your eyes.

This with Lisa and Jane takes place in the heart of year 2000, the weight of law very heavy.

And yet Jane, six and a half years old, burned through three foster homes in less than three weeks and was delivered to her Granpa Pete's gas station in a state car wearing nothing but a violet bathrobe, her arms crossed over her chest to show who is boss.

Pete Meserve and Gordon, old friends, talked on the phone about the covert transfer of Jane to our home. The Department of Human Services was to keep on believing she was with Pete full-time. And here she landed. How stalwart she seems! This amazing durable little creature, making life hell for us all. Think! Isn't she the bear? The
baby
bear who bites the hand of civilization! Some here say, “No, no, no, Penny, Pete says Jane has
always
been a brat.” But leave me to my illusions. Whenever I look at that little person, who comes to Settlement meals so rarely, so straight-shouldered, and a face
too
beautiful, saying no to everything we suggest, I
smile
. Forgive me.

More secrets. Secret Agent Jane speaks.

With these powerful secret pink glasses, everything looks so stupid. And people are forced to say the truth before your very eyes. Their thoughts just pour out. And horridable information pours out.

Like right now, this is morning and I am here with these glasses. I'm hiding. It is Claire talking, Gordie's X-wife. She is older than Gordie. She is
eleven
years older than Gordie. This is not the usual way, you know, that people are.

Okay, so she is wearing one of her fat shirts and fat pants. And she wears working boots like Gordie. She does not have pretty legs that show
like my teacher at my real school I had last year, Mrs. Varney. Mrs. Varney had sandals that had nice heels and were pink. All the teachers at my real school are beautiful and fixed up and they walk cute like Mum does and anybody normal.

While I am spying on Claire, she is out near the gardens and the garden sheds. People here LOVE gardens and just come and go in the gardens and weed stuff and pick stuff and shovel piles of stuff.

Gardens are dirty and full of bugs.

I am standing by the big farm truck, which has a million crates and a tire. I have already wiped my secret glasses off for a cleaning.

Claire is loading a different truck with two crates of lettuce.

Bonny Loo almost sees me, but she doesn't. Bonny Loo is sort of beautiful, sort of ugly. Sometimes she wears glasses. Other people almost see me, too, but they are off in the distance bent down in the gardens a long ways off. Claire is getting in the little truck so she can go off with the lettuce to where she sells it. Because of these secret-agent heart-shapes glasses, Claire's lips are now forced to tell the truth about my dog, Cherish. “. . . and they left her Scottie in the car with the windows up! You know how hot it was that first day! All cops care about is getting their damn business done. They left the poor little dog alone to die in the sweltering car.”

“Those shitheads!” snarls Bonny Loo.

A bug bites my ear. I smoosh it quietly.

Claire says, “Jane was at school . . . or you suppose they'd have left
her
in the car too?”

“Probably,” Bonny Loo says in her sexy deep voice.

Claire says, “Meanwhile, they take Lisa off in the cruiser, her yelling and sobbing ‘My dog, my little dog!' and begging, trying to convince the cops to turn back and get the dog. They told her not to worry,
it would be taken care of
. Of course nobody did anything. So Lisa was screaming at the jail. They said if she didn't stop, they'd
have to stop her
. And then Lisa's lawyer called that night—Kane—and said the tow guy found the body under one of the front seats.” Claire mooshes her hand all over her face and up under her glasses like her face itches, and this makes her face all red and rubbed. She says, “Bonny, that had to've been a bad death.”

In my secret agent notebook, I draw my beautiful Cherish black, a better black even than Cannonball, a Scottie who visits here. Cherish so very chubby and stubby, stubby legs, stubby tail. Everything is thick and stubby and strong on a Scottie. I make this picture almost perfect. Even under the circumstances of having to rush, squatted down here behind this big hot smelly truck and hot sweat making my eyes burn wicked. I draw very special details. Little moon places of white around her eyes. That's the way Cherish would always look at you, sideways, like . . . like an old auntie lady would look at you. It was so cute how she did that. My beautiful Cherish.

On the next page I do a special revenge picture of what I wish. Cops. With their heads squashed. I draw arrows in them. And bullets. And needles. And knives. I squash their feet too. Make blood in their eyes. I make their round mouths screaming. Very, very quiet, I tear this page out. I twist my sandal on it till the cops are ripped. Next I will put them in a fire.

The screen purrs.

Oh, yes! Here is the NEWZZZZZ. WOW! Lots of police in special gear . . . thank goodness for FEDERRRRAAAAL funds . . . had to arrest a guy in Nevada today after he ate his mother's ears. Forty-year-old Wesley Fergusson was HEAVILLLLY armed with a twenty-two rifle when police finally captured him this morning after he fled in
blah blah blah blah blah
. . . ads for insurance, investments, banks, loans, a car that seems to fly; a car of squarer shape that shows you are better fancier people; now another car all muddy and funnnn. Insurance. Medicines against aging. Blah blah blah. . . .

Breaking.

After work, Donnie Locke leaves the Chain and stops off at yet another big chain store for groceries, plops toilet paper into the cart, hefts a bag of dry dog chow underneath. He looks along down the seemingly mile-long case of meats, pink and deep red, rising and falling under waves of plastic wrap.