The Sharp Time
Authors: Mary O'Connell
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Mary O’Connell
Jacket art copyright © 2011 by Metin Demiralay
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint “The Monk’s Insomnia” from
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New
by Denis Johnson, copyright © 1969, 1976, 1982, 1987, 1995 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Connell, Mary.
The sharp time / Mary O’Connell. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In the week following her mother’s death in a freak accident, eighteen-year-old Sandanista Jones finds small measures of happiness even as she fantasizes about an act of revenge against an abusive teacher at her high school.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89929-4
[1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Revenge—Fiction. 3. Teacher-student relationships—
Fiction. 4. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 5. Vintage clothing—Fiction.
6. High schools—Fiction. 7. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.O2166Sh 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010044170
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
For Steve Hill, forever
and
Dedicated to the memory and spirit
of Nick Givotovsky
Contents
Monday: The Feast of the Epiphanies
Tuesday: The Furnace of a Star
Wednesday: Frog and Toad are Friends
Friday: Playing with the Cheetahs
Saturday: God’s Guide to Gettin’ it On
Sunday: This is the Day the Lord has Made
MONDAY
THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANIES
Anybody can tell that the pretentious ass who runs the Pale Circus fancies himself an artiste of sorts: a purveyor of poplin and mohair, an architect of nostalgia. A man of his station can’t be bothered with the workaday minutiae of references and social security numbers, and so instead of a regular xeroxed job application, he gives me a Big Chief tablet and a handful of pastel-colored pencils.
“I want to know who you
are
… your essence.… your, your
thing
…,” he says, his voice cryptic, trailing off. Mr. Mystical! His eyes are pale, green as celery; his breath is fruited with Altoids. He has the pomposity of a great beauty, which, to be fair, he most certainly is. “Tell me why you want to work here.” He strikes his hand to his heart when he says
here
, as if I’m a freelance cardiologist.
I give him a smile of supplication and hug the tablet to my chest.
He leans back in his chair and looks at me as if seeing me from some great distance, a squinting, owlish lover wondering:
Who, who, who are you?
He is seated behind the blond oak desk that holds an old-fashioned cash register, a foot tall and scrolled in bronze. I already know it will make the actual coin-clash
kaching!
sound when the Sale key is struck. Candy is on either side of the cash register: a mahogany box filled with delicate chocolates and a cut-glass bowl of circus peanuts, coral-colored and chewy and filling the shop with the candied dreamscape fragrance of Easter lilies and marshmallows. The Pale Circus is entirely without the usual ground-pepper-and-hair-oil scent of vintage clothing shops. Breaking up the sugary aesthetic is a postcard-sized print of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
taped to the back of the cash register; above the howling figure’s open mouth there is a Magic-Markered word bubble that proclaims
CREDIT CARDS NOT ACCEPTED. CASH AND CHECKS ONLY, PLEASE
. The walls are painted the soft coral of the circus peanuts, so that the Pale Circus glows with the otherworldly sweetness of man-in-the-moon honeycomb.
Mr. Pale Circus startles me by leaning forward in his chair. In an urgent tone more appropriate for alerting someone that her pants are on fire, he demands: “I want to know why! Tell me
precisely
why clothes are important to you!”
This of course seems like a test, which it probably is. Probably everyone who likes to shop at the Pale Circus dreams of working here. I wish I’d gone home first to change out of my school clothes.
School clothes
. It makes me sound like I’m wearing a smock top and corduroys, when in fact I am wearing a vintage red swing coat over some basic black. Still, had I known what the morning held, I would have dressed more carefully.
“Oh! Okay!” I take a deep breath that hurts my ribs. Not the entire skeletal cave, just that one spot. “Um, clothes are important to me for so many reasons. God, about a million reasons—”
He wags his finger, cutting me off. Tragic, as I was about to go all Marcel Proust on his ass, with varied tales of the poignancy of peacoats, of the chlorinated smell of swimsuits flung over the shower rail, which is pure August, pure aquamarine. I might have told him about my mother’s winter white angora sweater, worn to fluff and gossamer, the remaining grid of yarn at the elbows so full of memories that if it could, the sweater would certainly open its mother-of-pearl button mouth and rasp:
Recherché, recherché
.
He puts his fingers to his lips and reaches out for my hand. He pulls my fingers back taut and with his thick forefinger writes on my palm. I try to smile casually—all righty then!—as if this is the most standard gesture between near strangers, but after a few seconds I fall into it and live in the creep-show ecstasy of this moment. He writes along each finger, a baroque cursive with deep curlicues; he wreathes my palm with—what?—ivy leaves, I think: soft, geometric, replicating. Oh, I am paying attention, yes I am. I am Helen Keller to his Annie Sullivan. The pad of his fingertip is full and beautiful and slowing the bang bang bang bang bang of my heart.
I close my eyes. Valentine pinks and purples and wild navy blues swirl behind my lids: constellations of paisleys and polka dots.
The tablet that I hold across my chest with my other hand is weightless, a mere paper shield over my heart. He moves his finger down my hand. He presses his thumb to the heart of my palm. Just sixty seconds ago I was terrified to walk into the Pale Circus, terrified of forming the question “Are you hiring at the moment?” The rehearsed, quasi-British
at the moment
sounding completely jackassy when said aloud to another human being. And yet I had gone and done it, hadn’t I?
The shock of my morning at school gave me the courage that allowed me to pull open the door of the Pale Circus:
O brave new world
.
“Write down why you want to work here,” he says. Then he drops my hand and says “Now, shoo, you” in a schoolmarmish voice that I guess is supposed to be funny or ironic or what have you, and I think
Hey, shoo you too, pal
, though of course my hand feels like the softest firecracker and my heart is all agog with sudden cuckoo bird love, but I shoo, people, yes I do.
I walk through the maze of circular racks of clothes, a fabric kaleidoscope that I have perused many times as a mere customer, not a potential employee. At the door I pause to give a little wave, but he doesn’t wave back. He is holding up a salmon-pink coat and frowning at the frayed triangular collar until he catches his reflection in the mirror and gives himself a lovelorn gaze.
And then I’m in the cold again.
Because I had wanted to gather my courage before I walked in and applied for a job, I parked a half block down from the Pale Circus on the opposite side of the street, in front of a pawnshop called Second Chance? The jaunty question mark at the end of Second Chance? seems to be a thematic joke that emphasizes both the inherent corniness and questionable promise of second chances:
Second Chance? You think?
And of course there’s the standard pawnshop vibe, the seedy sadness of the candy-apple-red drum set in the front window, a single drumstick sitting forlornly on a high hat—some sweet little rock and roller down on his/her luck. Next door to the pawnshop is Erika’s Erotic Confections. In the display window a white chocolate bust, a milk chocolate bust and a dark chocolate bust are demurely covered in bikini tops. I have shopped at Erika’s once, intending to buy a gag gift. However, when I walked in and found Erika—six feet, whacked-off hair bleached white, tattoos and a black tank top beneath her chef’s apron—glowering at me, offering up a tart and perfunctory “May I
help
you?”, I looked away from the marzipan handcuffs and organic edible underwear and bought one of her artisan chocolates displayed on a silver platter in the cooler. The only other row building that is not boarded up and plastered with handbills is the liquor store on the corner—a liquor store that pains me, pains me, pains me—and then, at the end of the street of deserted blocks, is St. Joseph’s Monastery, a towering redbrick beauty that sits on a hill like the gateway to some uneasy Oz:
Uh, so, welcome to the Emerald City? I guess? We hope?
I unlock my car and grab my cigarettes from the dashboard and see that a pamphlet has been tucked beneath my windshield wiper: a holly-green brochure with three stenciled kings proclaiming
Happy Feast of the Epiphany!
in bloated thought bubbles floating above their staffs and camels. I think about the events of this morning and let out a bitter little snort.
No fucking kidding, wise men; epiphanies galore
.