The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door (14 page)

CHAPTER

25

“Did you know that the organized gay rights movement started in New York City?” Drake was riding his skateboard next to me on our way to school Monday morning. He was wearing skinny jeans and a bright green hoodie with white zipper and strings. I was wearing a plaid wool skirt and a blue sweater, along with my black hoodie and fingerless gloves. It was the third week in September, and the air was full of fall. “Police were harassing queer people in Greenwich Village until riots broke out at a bar called Stonewall. After that, gay people started organizing and demanding equal rights. Maybe I could take Japhy there.”

Drake’s skateboard made thumping noises every time he rolled over a crack in the sidewalk. “Also, the books I borrowed from the library say that the average age of people coming out now is sixteen,” Drake went on, “and that lots of people don’t come out immediately but wait until they feel like the time is right.”

“Did you read anything that will help you talk to Japhy?” I asked.

“Not yet.” Drake skated quietly for a minute, looking toward our school building a block away. “But I will.” We continued on to school.

I removed my hood and floated into first period, feeling like I had grown an exoskeleton over the last few days. I had a best friend and a paved, tree-lined avenue toward revenge. It was easier to table my anxiety over seeing my mom at the mall while I was at school. After all, my real Dream required my attention.

Sweeping gracefully into my seat behind Sandy, I saw her whispering to Mandy across the aisle. Mr. Pearson started class with a brief lecture on responsible use of prepositions and then asked us to write a paragraph about our homework reading assignment. I rushed through the paragraph and got out my poetry notebook to finish a poem I’ve been working on about Drake. I was so engrossed, I didn’t notice Sandy get up and walk to Mr. Pearson’s desk. I did notice Mr. Pearson standing over me.

“Hand it over,” he said, holding his palm below my chin.

I slapped my poetry book shut and reached for my backpack.

“I didn’t say
put it away
, I said,
hand it over
.” He snapped his finger and held out his palm again.

My mouth went dry and my hand shook. Not my poetry notebook. Anything but that.

“I’m sorry, I won’t get it out again,” I stammered.

“I didn’t say
apologize
, I said
hand it to me
.” He sounded like a monarch, irritated with one of his subjects.

I sat there like an ice sculpture, not blinking.

“Now, Celia.”

Barely able to will my arm to do it, I handed him my notebook.

“I will keep this journal until you complete your assignment on ‘We Real Cool.’ Since it is now one full week late, instead of a three-page essay, you owe me a
five
-page essay, double-spaced, twelve-point font.” He stalked back to his desk, opened a large drawer, and dropped my notebook into it before slamming it shut. Then he sat down again, as if he hadn’t just stuffed my heart into a glass jar and sealed the lid.

I couldn’t breathe or think. I’m sure my mouth was hanging open when Sandy and Mandy both turned their heads to look at me. All they did was smile.

× × ×

“That guy’s a monster,” Drake said at lunch when I told him about Mr. Pearson. “Full Napoleon complex.”

I was sitting with a turkey sub in my lap, unable to eat it. I could feel the midday sun on my neck, but I didn’t bother pulling up my hood. Everything felt numb.

“You don’t think he’ll read it, do you?” Drake said.

Maybe I wasn’t entirely numb, since that sent another stabbing pain into my chest.

“Are you going to be okay if I go play in this game?” he asked gently.

I nodded heavily and drew the rest of my belongings around me like a little fortress as Drake walked over to the basketball court. I started to wrap up my lunch since it seemed unlikely that I would be eating any of it. Sandy must have been waiting for Drake to leave, because she and Mandy walked through the grass in their high heels just minutes after the game started. I saw them coming, but had no poetry notebook to use as a hiding place.

“So pathetic the way she follows him around.” Mandy didn’t try to conceal who she was talking about.

“He told me he’s going back to New York,” said Sandy. “What’s she going to do then?”

“My mom says that her dad left,” said Mandy. “Not surprised.”

I couldn’t hold it together. Mentioning my dad was like using a baseball bat in a boxing match. I grabbed my backpack and jumped up, abandoning Drake’s stuff in the grass, and took off toward the closest set of doors to the main hallway. I navigated around groups and through couples, making my way as fast as possible to the girls’ bathroom and into the first open stall. Dropping my backpack on the floor, I pulled the end of my sweatshirt sleeve down over my hand and stuffed it into my mouth to conceal the sound of sobbing.

I thought I had tough enough skin to keep Sandy from getting to me now, that turning Dark had protected me from her. I leaned my head against the cold metal of the stall wall and cried so hard that there were barely any tears. I beat one side of the wall with my fist and the other side with my foot. A vicious anger spread over all the skin on my body like a rash, growing hot and itchy from my scalp to my toes.

I took a few deep breaths and pulled a Sharpie out of my backpack. Then I wrote this in the bathroom stall while wiping the tears off my cheeks.

Sandy F. asked Drake B. to homecoming & he said NO!

It was time to pull the trigger on my revenge.

CHAPTER

26

After school, I had to go home and start my paper for Mr. Pearson. Mom was working the swing shift, so I didn’t have to worry about seeing her after the incident at the mall. Still, concentrating long enough to write a five-page essay felt impossible, but I had no choice. I couldn’t survive without my poetry notebook. I sat down at my computer to spout English class jargon about “We Real Cool,” but my mind kept running back over the school day. By the end of lunch, I had visited every girls’ bathroom and written the same line in at least one stall in each. I could only hope that somewhere, a rumor was beginning to take. I churned out two pages about how the poet uses rhyme and meter to display themes of disenfranchisement in youth, blah, blah, blah, but there was no way I was getting all the way to five.

I got an email back from Dorathea while I was working.

Re: Parents

From: Dorathea Eberhardt ([email protected])

Sent: Mon 9/20 5:57 PM

To: Celia ([email protected])

celia,

parents do a lot of things when they are trying to “find themselves.” after her divorce, remember how my mom changed her name from alice to alyce? she told me she traded in her “housewife name” for her “artist name.” now she spends all her time in the attic with her oil paints.

my dad is wearing his midlife crisis like a badge of honor: blonde girlfriend, sports car, condo in los angeles, the whole nine. we’re not talking right now. until he is able to acknowledge his white male privilege, I can’t deal with him.

maybe your mom is just spending time with different people, trying to figure out who she is. my advice is concentrate on yourself and try not to worry about what they’re doing. that’s how i got through it.

d

I flopped down on my bed and tried to think of my parents as individual people, and my life as something not connected with their decisions. I imagined my dad in Atlanta with a blonde girlfriend and a sports car, my mom with a boyfriend named
Simon
. I managed to visualize it, both of them in their new lives. The problem was, I couldn’t imagine where I fit in. My head was spinning, and my stomach hurt.

Drake and Dorathea were giving me the same advice. Forget about my parents, concentrate on my Dream. I decided not to ask my mom about the guy at the mall. The truth is, I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what she might have to say about it.

× × ×

By the end of Monday night, I still only had two and a half pages of my essay finished. Still, I brought what I had to Language Arts on Tuesday morning. After dropping my backpack next to my chair, I took the paper out of my folder and went to Mr. Pearson’s desk, trying not to sound Dark. “I’m almost halfway finished. If I can have my notebook back, I promise to do the rest of it tonight.”

“I’m glad that you finally started your paper”—he pushed back his chair and propped his right ankle on his left knee—“although it’s a week late and you broke a promise to have it finished on Monday. I need the completed version before I can give back your notebook. I have not been unaware of the distraction it causes you in class.”

My left hand clenched into a fist inside my sweatshirt pocket while my right hand held the essay.

“But the original assignment was only three pages—”

“The answer is no. Frankly, if I had known it would be such an incentive, I would have confiscated your notebook sooner. Back to your desk.”

I turned and dragged my feet back down the aisle, while Sandy and Mandy smiled like pageant winners. A hammer in my chest kept pounding the same nail:
Revenge. Revenge. Revenge.

Before third period, I met Drake by the lockers and walked with him to the science wing.

“Let’s go find out the
truth
about the biosphere,” said Drake, mimicking our enthusiastic teacher Mr. Diaz.

We walked by one of the orange posters advertising the homecoming dance.

“Hey, Drake,” I cleared my throat loudly, as we traveled through a throng of freshmen. “Did you get your suit yet for homecoming?”

He stopped short. A girl bumped into him.

Looking around and then taking a step closer to me, he said, “You actually want to
go
? Red punch, taffeta mall dresses, people you hate in a gym dancing to a bad DJ?”

“It sounds awful,” I whispered, “but you told Sandy we were going, so she would know you were lying if we didn’t.” My plan was backfiring. Now, I didn’t want anyone to overhear us talking about homecoming.

“True, but I’ll be gone the next week, and I’ll never see her again. It was just an excuse.” Drake shrugged. “Who cares if Sandy knows I lied?”

I needed to change tactics, so I tried several. “It’ll be lame, but homecoming is still a seminal event in our high school experience,” I whispered. “We’ll go ironically. We’ll be like anthropologists studying American teenagers.”

“Does seminal mean what I think it means?” Drake asked. Then he caught the look on my face.

“Okay,” he added. “We can go, I guess. It will be my last weekend in Hershey, so it will be cool to hang out with you. Ironically . . . or whatever.”

“I’ll get my dress this weekend,” I said in a robust voice, before subtly glancing around.

Drake gave me a questioning look as he opened the door to science.

× × ×

At lunchtime, while Drake did his usual turn in the pickup game, I sat on the grass constructing a note. In order to make it look like two different people were writing it, I used my left hand to write the responses.

have such good gossip.

w?

sandy f. asked hot new skater guy to homecoming and got rejected!

say more

he’s taking dark girl who wears the hoodie

I folded up the note into squares and triangles and crumpled it a little to make it look like it had been read a few times. Then, I got up to walk over the recycling bin to toss in the tinfoil from my sandwich. On the way there, I “dropped,” the note in the grass. Then I returned to my spot and put on my sunglasses. Drake was involved in his pickup game, scoring points as usual. I watched the note like it was a dollar bill with a string attached to it, waiting to catch a curious passerby. Through the rest of lunch, sneaker after sneaker walked past that note, a few even stepped on top of it. Not one shoe paused mid-step while the owner bent over to investigate. When the bell rang, I picked up the note myself. I tried dropping it again later in the hall but still wasn’t getting any bites. The note idea went nowhere.

× × ×

“In chapter four, Buddy describes our Dreams as tigers. He says that you have to lay the right bait in the forest and then get very still and wait,” Drake said, kicking his skateboard along next to me on the walk home from school. “He says it’s more effective than trying to hunt a tiger.”

“Sure,” I said in no mood to internalize any lessons about patience. It was a week and a half until homecoming, and I had a rumor that no one seemed willing to spread and a date who was barely willing to go. I couldn’t just sit around and wait for my revenge to take itself.

Truthfully, I didn’t want to go to the dance either. An opportunity to hobnob with my classmates over punch bowls and pretzels sounded like torture. I just needed everyone to
know
that we were going. That’s the only way my plan would work.

“I called my parents last night and asked them to invite Japhy’s family over for Saturday.” Drake was focused in the distance, talking toward the trees as I plodded along, trying to keep up. “My dad suggested that we use the weekend to talk about our ‘plan B’ if I didn’t get into an arts school. How can I make him understand that expressing doubts out loud doesn’t lead to a positive outcome? If I could just get him to read Buddy’s book, he would understand. Maybe I’ll bring it with me to New York.”

“Is it possible you might stay in Hershey?” I asked, my hands tightened on the straps to my backpack.

“I can’t even think about that right now,” he said, swerving his skateboard in the graceful shape of an
S
. “I have four days to figure out what I’m going to say to Japhy. In one of the books I got, it says that queer kids are two times more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Do you think that’s why Japhy wanted to drink that night? Do you think it’s because he can’t accept who he is?”

I felt increasingly called on to support Drake’s theories about Japhy. “Maybe,” I said cautiously. “Sounds believable.”

I’m not sure Drake even heard me. “So you really want to go to this homecoming dance?”

“Yes,” I lied awkwardly. “I really do.”

“Okay. But I’m not wearing a suit. Chuck Taylors and a skinny tie is as far as I’ll go. I’m sure Japhy will understand that we’re just going as friends.”

× × ×

I declined Drake’s invitation to go to the wooded lot even though my mother was working the swing shift again. Instead, I forced myself to go home again and eke out three more pages about the metaphorical significance of going to a pool hall instead of high school. By early evening, the shock of having my poetry journal confiscated was starting to wear off, but the time sensitivity for my revenge was growing by the minute. It was time to turn the heat up. The days were wasting.

Wednesday morning, I marched into L.A., dropped off my bag, and then walked bravely to Mr. Pearson’s desk to slap down the paper, titled “Jazzing June,” five pages, stapled in the upper left hand corner. He looked up from his computer and over his glasses at me.

“Good title.” He flipped through the paper first, stopping to read a few sentences in the middle, then opened the drawer where my poetry notebook appeared to be sleeping. He started to hand it back to me, but stopped, then took off his glasses and looked at me intently. “It’s clear to me that you are bright and interested in writing,” he said. “Your comments in class, when you make them, are incisive and finely articulated. But you don’t apply yourself. Why aren’t you trying?”

My notebook was within inches of being back, and my hands were in danger of grabbing it without my head’s permission.

“I dunno,” I said lamely.

“Can you assure me that you will start giving me your full effort?”

“Yes.”
Sure. Fine. Whatever. Notebook. Back. Now.

“Here then,” he said, releasing it to my greedy clutches.

I held the binding gripped tightly in my hand as I walked past Sandy and Mandy and then replaced it securely in my bag. I spent the rest of L.A. with one leg resting on top of my backpack.

After class, I went to my locker to exchange books before French, thrilled to see that Becky Shapiro was at her locker, too. Not only was Becky one of the few people I could reasonably appear to confide in at Hershey High, she was also a previous victim of Sandy’s malice.

“Hey, Becky,” I said sweetly, dialing in my combination.

“Hi, Celia,” she replied, adding a nervous laugh.

“The greatest thing happened this week.” I didn’t look at her as I retrieved my French book from underneath math.

“What?” She closed her locker and leaned on the door.

“Drake Berlin asked me to homecoming,” I whispered, standing up and leaning toward her as I said it.

“Ooooh!” She beamed. “I’ve seen you two together. He’s so cute!” She clapped her hands together while balancing her books between her arms.

“I do feel awkward about one thing,” I went on, still whispering.

Becky looked around the hall and leaned in closer. “Sandy Firestone asked Drake first, and he turned her down. He told me he would never go with someone so . . .” I paused. “. . . un-cool.”

Becky’s eyes sparkled like diamonds. “She isn’t cool,” she said firmly. “Not at all.”