The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door (18 page)

“It was probably Joey that posted it, huh? He’s had it out for me.” He shook his head. “How could he have gotten your notebook?”

Drake looked back down at his hand and said, “Go fish.”

“It was Sandy.” I looked up from my cards.

“Sandy?” Drake looked up, too. “But we’ve been partners in Spanish. Is this just because of homecoming? That’s so extreme.”

“It wasn’t just homecoming,” I said. The black hole in my chest opened to the size of a silver dollar. The cards trembled in my hand. “Sandy targeted you because you’re friends with me, and she has always targeted me. Since school started, I’ve been trying to get revenge on her.” My voice came out high and thin. I had come so far with Drake: from friends, to best friends, to secret allies, and now runaways. I had waited too long to trust him, too long to tell him the story I hadn’t told anyone else. “Revenge for something that happened to me in the eighth grade.”

We both readjusted ourselves on the bench, and I finally told Drake the story of the Book
.

CHAPTER

30

The day I got the note from my English teacher Ms. Green, the one that said I was talented and my writing was a gift, I started standing up straighter. It felt like being in a public place where you don’t know anyone and suddenly, someone calls your name and waves. It was May, a month after Ruth had been dragged from school, and two weeks after my parents had announced their trial separation. My dad was sleeping in the basement, and my mom was working constantly. Ms. Green’s note was pretty much the only thing I had going for me.

After Ruth was gone, I used to eat lunch by myself as fast as I could and then go to the library for the rest of the period. At first, I didn’t even go to the lunchroom, I just stood by my locker to eat. But I got in trouble with a teacher and started going to the cafeteria. Less than a week after I got the note, I was at a table eating alone when Sandy and Mandy walked over with their sack lunches and sat down beside me. They didn’t ask. They just surrounded me like alley cats around a Dumpster, sniffing me up and down.

For one crazy minute, I wondered if they wanted to be friends with me, if they had noticed I was solo and were going to invite me into their clique. Sandy spoke first. “Celia, we’ve decided to sit with you today because we want to help you.” She folded her fingers together in front of her like she was giving a speech and then looked at me with practiced sympathy. Mandy seemed like she was suppressing a cackle, but Sandy looked earnest and intent. They started unpacking their lunches. I took another bite of my sandwich and didn’t say anything.

“The two of us got together last night,” Mandy said, pulling open the lid on her yogurt and licking the excess from the foil. “And we made a list of things you need to change before high school.” She put down her lunch and reached into her oversized purse for a colorful envelope, like one you would get in a set of stationery. She handed it to me. “We’re afraid that if we don’t give this to you now, you might be”—she moved her hand in a circle framing my face in the air—“like this forever.” Mandy popped open the lid on a Diet Coke and looked at me like she was watching a soap opera. Sandy stared at me soberly.

“We’re here to help, Celia,” Sandy added quietly. “We’ve done a lot for other people.”

I opened the sealed envelope and took out a piece of pink stationery. At the top of the page, someone had written in excessively swirly letters,
Things Celia Needs to Change.

As I looked at it, Sandy said, “I think you should read it out loud. That would probably be the most helpful thing.” She sounded like a school counselor, like she had my well-being at the front of her thoughts.

I did exactly what I used to do before I turned Dark, whatever anyone told me to do. I read the paper out loud.

This is what it said:

Things Celia Needs to Change

1.) Hair. Get it cut every three weeks (we suggest long layers) and use a brush every day. You’re going to need a de-frizzing product, too.

2.) Clothes. Places you should shop: Bruno & Basso, Mode Celeb, Hotheads. Places you should not shop: Goodwill.

3.) Friends: Try to make friends with some girls before the end of this year. Even if you don’t keep them for high school, you need a starter clique for the first few weeks. We suggest Becky Shapiro, Denise Bailey, and Sarah Ellis. (Please avoid religious freaks.)

4.) Attitude. You need to stop being a teacher’s pet. Nobody likes a brownnoser in high school. Stop acting like God’s gift to English class.

Sincerely,

Sandy & Mandy

They each signed the note with their own signature like it was the Declaration of Independence. I folded up the note, not looking at them. I couldn’t see them and control the tears that were inching their way closer to my tear ducts at the same time.

“Do you have anything to say to us? We did spend a lot of our time working on that for you.” Sandy said, like it had been a great sacrifice, as if they had just thrown me a surprise party and I forgot to act surprised.

I wanted them to go away. I flashed back to Becky Shapiro in the bathroom when Sandy told her to go on a diet. I knew that Sandy wanted me to say “Thank you,” and that saying “Thank you” would make it end. I knew those words would conclude their fun for the day and give them something to laugh about later on the phone. Maybe they really did think they deserved to be thanked. Maybe they truly believed their note was helping me.

But that’s not what I did. Instead of that, I looked carefully at each of them and then, channeling Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye
, I said, “Fuck off.”

Sandy turned bright red. She looked like she was about to take a manicured nail and scratch her initials into my cheek. Instead, a beauty pageant smile lit up her face, and she said, “You’re going to wish you hadn’t said that.”

Sandy didn’t take her eyes off of me as she methodically gathered up the items of her lunch, forced them back into her paper bag and stood. Mandy looked like she was in a foxhunt, and someone had just released the dogs. She snatched up her yogurt and her Diet Coke. I wasn’t sure what I had unleashed on myself, but fear started forming in my toes and turned into terror as it rose toward my brain. I didn’t know what those girls were going to do to me, but I knew it was going to be brutal.

Nothing happened that day. Sandy kept her eyes on me in English class so I didn’t raise my hand, even when Ms. Green looked right at me and asked for our thoughts on
Of Mice and Men
. Ms. Green looked at me quizzically when I didn’t answer, but she didn’t say anything.

The next day was when everything started. I first caught sight of the notebook in science. Mandy was in that class, so it must have started with her. It was being passed furtively from one table to another the way prisoners in a war camp might hand off a stolen spoon. It skipped my table, but I saw it moving. It was a pink notebook with spiral binding at the top like a steno pad.

In every class I had that morning, the book traveled around the room like a cold virus. Every time the teacher’s back was turned, it infected a new table, and by the end of class, everyone was sick with it. I ate lunch as fast as possible that day, barely sitting down for five minutes before rushing off to the library.

It went on like that after lunch, too. First, the notebook would get handed to a new person and he or she would curiously open it and read the first page. Next, the reader would look up at me. Then that person would continue flipping through the pages and reading until finally writing something and passing it on. I saw a few people who only read the book and never wrote in it, like Becky Shapiro. There were others.

I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, that kids weren’t obviously staring at me over their lockers between class or laughing when I walked by them in the hall. I wished so much I had someone to talk to about the notebook, but I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t want to go to the principal. The punishment for being a tattletale would probably be worse than what was already happening.

I was walking home from school by myself when I saw them. Mandy and Sandy were standing on the sidewalk a block away from the parking lot. They looked relaxed like they were waiting for some smoothies they ordered to go drink on the beach instead of waiting to ruin a girl’s life. I could see it when I was still twenty feet away. Mandy dangled the book from one hand, like a dog bone that she expected would make me run to her faster. I thought about turning around or crossing the street, but why delay the inevitable? I kept walking.

“Hi, Celia,” chirped Sandy when I was within taunting distance. “We’ve got a present for you.”

“Everyone at school helped make it,” added Mandy.

They both looked so pretty standing there, their long, thin legs stretching out from under their skirts and reaching down to their flip-flops. They wore their hair in ponytails that hung down their backs like velvet ropes. It was a warm day, almost the end of the school year. I wondered why it wasn’t enough for them to be pretty and popular. Why did they have to do this to me?

I walked up and stood in front of them, a criminal before a judge. I knew the verdict already.

“Since you wouldn’t take our word for it,” said Sandy, “we decided to ask everyone at school what they thought you needed to change about yourself.”

“This way you can know what everyone is really thinking about you,” said Mandy conspiratorially as if she were offering me the answers to a math test.

I had come too far to bother breaking now. “Screw you,” I said with a blank look on my face. I didn’t offer them any emotion.

“You wish, lesbo,” said Mandy as she tipped the book out of her hands letting it thud on the pavement in front of me. She and Sandy pushed me out of the way and walked past me down the sidewalk.

“Some people refuse to be helped,” Sandy sighed as they stalked off, their flip-flops beating against the bottoms of their feet like the drums of war.

I had no choice but to pick up the book. I couldn’t leave it there for someone else to find. At least if I took the book, I could go burn it or toss it in a Dumpster or use my parents’ paper shredder on it. I picked it up delicately between my thumb and forefinger, stuffed it into my backpack, and glanced behind me. Sandy and Mandy had turned to watch me, and they were laughing.

When I got home, I sat in my room alone. My mom had already left for the swing shift, and my dad wasn’t home from work yet. They seemed to be avoiding each other as much as possible, with one showing up only after the other one left. I took the notebook out of my backpack and placed it on my desk. It just sat there looking back at me.

I told myself it was a terrible idea to open it, that whatever was written on the pages would only hurt me. But I knew what Mandy and Sandy knew when they gave it to me: I couldn’t resist. I had to find out what was inside.

The first page of the book was the same note Mandy and Sandy handed to me, with
Things Celia Needs to Change
and the list of five things. It was glued onto the lined paper.

The new entries started on the next page. They were all written in different handwriting and pen colors like signatures in a yearbook. They were all anonymous.

Try to make friends who aren’t fundamentalists.

Celia needs to shave her legs before wearing shorts. Gross!

She should wear clothes that fit her. Her jeans are two inches too short, and she’s wearing the same T-shirts she wore in sixth grade.

One word . . . posture.

Learn to cross your legs when you sit down.

Try growing some boobs.

[The next person drew an arrow to the comment above and wrote “jerk.”]

Celia just needs to try and fit in.

She should learn to play sports like other ugly girls.

It’s hopeless. If I was Celia, I would probably just kill myself.

I closed the book and thought about the story we had read in English earlier that year,
The Fall of the House of Usher
by Edgar Allen Poe, where a family’s house gets a crack in it, and the crack keeps getting wider until the house falls down. That’s what I had inside of me, a crack. I could feel myself coming apart.

My dad got home around six o’clock that night and immediately started packing boxes in his office. He asked me to help him, but I refused to come out of my room. That weekend, I barely spent any time with my parents. I was reading
The Giver
by Lois Lowry and trying hard to pretend I had another life. They each made attempts to come and talk to me, but I had sewn my mouth up tight, and the seam wouldn’t rip that easily.

On Monday morning, I played stomachache. On Tuesday, it was a migraine. By Wednesday, Mom said, “Fine. If you aren’t going to school, you’re going to the doctor,” and I relented and went back to Hershey Middle.