The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door (2 page)

CHAPTER

3

When I say I turned Dark, what I really mean is that I gave up. I gave up on trying to fit in and make everyone like me. I accepted the fact that no one liked me, and I didn’t care what they thought. Following the tragic events of my eighth-grade year, I realized that, in a field of sunflowers, I’m a black-eyed Susan.

My Darkness officially began on July 21, the day I turned fourteen. Maybe it didn’t
seem
like I changed that much. I didn’t become completely gothic and pierce my tongue or dye my hair black. My hair was already dark, and my skin is pretty pasty, but I do wear colors besides black sometimes. Here is a poem I wrote about my skin:

celia’s skin

is white like

the sun-bleached bones

of beached whale

skeletons

People pushed me around before I turned Dark, and they still push me around. The difference is that now I push back.

The rest of my first day of high school was bearable. In most classes, our seats were assigned, so I didn’t have to worry about who would sit next to me. In French, we were put into groups of three for
conversation
, so I got Liz Thompson and Vanessa Beale, who were now required to talk to me for one class per day. There wasn’t much time to kill between periods, and it was easy to look busy at my locker. Lunch, however, was harder to manage. I ventured outside to the grass beyond the basketball court and ate cold pizza with my nose buried in a book. Then I finished the break in the safest, calmest place in every town, school, or jail: the library.

Libraries are my power centers. If I were a character in a video game and my avatar had to go somewhere to recharge her life force after losing a fight, it would be a library. This summer, I devoured two books each week. This fall, I have committed myself to reading at least one book of nonfiction from each of the ten main classes of the Dewey decimal system. If I continue at a rate of one book per week, I’ll be finished before Thanksgiving. I would eventually like to read one book from each of the ten divisions of the main classes, and then one book from the ten sections of those ten divisions. But that puts me up to a thousand weeks of reading, or nearly twenty years. That’s a lot to undertake at fourteen.

The first day during lunch, I started with the section closest to the doors, which happened to be the Dewey decimal 400s class on language. The librarian looked a little surprised when I checked out
Foreignisms: A Dictionary of Foreign Expressions Commonly (and Not So Commonly) Used in English
.

“Is this part of your language curriculum?” she asked, looking at my school ID card.

“It’s not for class,” I said back, Darkly. It was the most I said to anyone at school that day in the English language.

The next two days passed without major incident. Sure, on Wednesday morning when I tried raising my hand in English class to say that reading a novel set during the Great Depression was disconcerting in our economic climate, Sandy sighed and said, “Celia, you’re so . . . negative.”

So I said, “Well, then why don’t you take me into a darkroom and see what develops?” which I thought was a clever retort regarding film cameras and photographic negatives.

But then Sandy said, “Ewww, Celia is a lesbian.”

So Mr. Pearson said, “Girls, less bickering,” and by lunchtime people were calling me Celia the Weird Lesbian.

Still, I was hopeful that high school would allow me to blend in to a larger pool of oddballs and wallflowers. There had to be enough kids from other feeder middle schools and older grades to let me avoid notice. I dug my trench and prepared to last out the war. It was just after lunch, on Wednesday, that third day of high school that everything changed.

I was doing a locker stop between the library and history, crouched down on one knee, swapping out a novel for a textbook. His voice broke three days of high school quiet. I was so startled, I dropped
European History
right on top of
The Norton Anthology
. “Why does the sign on your locker say ‘Celia the Dark’?”

His blue-and-yellow sneakers were a foot from me, their fat laces pouting over the shoes’ tongues like bloated earthworms after the rain. One shoe gripped the hallway floor while the other rested its tread casually against a locker. His skinny jeans held his shins as tight as handcuffs and a slim-cut T-shirt embraced his lanky torso under an oversized, orange cotton hoodie. The whole outfit was a dynamic meeting of slender and thick.

He was eating what looked like a burrito from an aluminum foil wrapper, even though we’re not allowed to have food outside the lunchroom. And he was gorgeous. I had seen him in the halls and also in my Earth Science class. His name was Drake Berlin, and he had the kind of style that you can achieve only if you were raised in New York City or possibly a foreign country. I knew from science class introductions on the first day that Drake had, in fact, moved here from New York.

A cool, good-looking guy had never approached my locker before. I was half suspicious and half electrified. I tried to sound casual and vaguely menacing. “Because I’m Dark,” I said, picking up my history text again.

Drake said something that none of my classmates had said to me in a long time. He said, “That’s cool.” Then he added, “Do you like comic books?” and popped the last of the burrito into his mouth.

That day after school, Drake and I went to the wooded lot for the first time.

CHAPTER

4

The town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, was built in 1903 by Milton S. Hershey to house workers at his chocolate factory. The tagline for Hershey is “The Sweetest Place on Earth,” but it should be “A Town Dedicated to the Worship of Refined Sugar.” Half of the kids in my school have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and all the kids in my school are being pumped full of Hershey’s chocolate from morning until night.

Drake’s grandmother lives in the same subdivision as my family. It’s the sort of planned community that has five model homes to pick from, and the only big choice the homebuyer faces is whether to get a one-car garage or two. My house is model number 3: the Cape Cod. My dad used to drive around the neighborhood pointing out the other Cape Cods and naming the families who picked them. “Look, Steve Bishop got a Cape Cod, too,” he would point out to my mother. “Even with one story, I still think it’s the best use of the square footage.”

My mom would generally respond with something like, “Which night is Celia’s parent/teacher conference?” My parents often sounded like two people who were not involved in the same conversation. It was like they were each talking to someone else on a cell phone with one of those invisible headsets, but they happened to be looking at each other while they did it.

Drake’s grandmother’s house wasn’t one of the five models. It was the house that sat on the land before the subdivision came, so it lived at the end of one of our cul-de-sacs like an apple tree in an orchard full of peaches. It’s the only house adjacent to undeveloped land.

As we walked the cleanly edged sidewalks from school to our neighborhood, Drake explained. “My grandparents moved to Hershey from New York City so they could retire someplace quiet. When they built their house, this was all trees,” he said, using his hand gesture like a chain saw to cut down the row of houses we were passing. “Developers bought the plots around the house, and Gran says the trees came down like dominos, and the houses came up like dandelions, and now they live in the middle of a development with only one lot full of trees. Developers still call her every year to ask if she wants to sell it.”

Ever since Drake and I left school, I had been fidgeting awkwardly with my clothing. I kept pulling on my hood and taking it off again. I was tugging the string of my hoodie first all the way down with my right hand and then all the way down with my left. It was like I was trying to saw off my head at the neck with a soft cotton blade. I forced myself to release the hoodie string and say something to the beautiful, articulate boy who was walking next to me.

“Do you . . . like Hershey?” I inquired robotically. Bingo. I went right to the top of the most boring questions list. I actually winced after the words left my mouth.

“Krackel and Special Dark miniatures, yes,” said Drake. “The town, not so much.”

When we got to Drake’s house, we circumnavigated the front lawn of his grandmother’s one-story rancher and went straight to the wooded lot beyond her manicured backyard. We walked until the canopy became dense, and after some careful climbing around in underbrush, found a downed tree to sit on like a bench. It was a nurse log, meaning it was dead, but new, smaller trees were using it as fertilizer to grow from. I read about nurse logs in a book called
Nights in the Forest.
The air smelled sweet and wet back there, and the normal neighborhood sounds—televisions, passing cars, barking dogs—were replaced by birds, squirrels, and snapping twigs.

I was wearing black leggings with black boots. I pulled my hood all the way up so it covered part of my face and then I wrapped my arms around my legs and hugged them. I acted like I was feeling chilly, but really I felt vulnerable. Immediately, Drake asked the question I feared.

“Who are your friends at school?” He asked it casually, like it was a “getting to know you question.”

“Um,” I said, and instantly my voice was too high. Not even a full word out of my mouth on the subject of friendship and I was blowing it. I tried to follow with another sound at a lower pitch, but my voice disappeared altogether and then my throat was as empty as an abandoned coalmine.

“Why did you move here from New York City?” I asked, acting like the question had occurred to me suddenly.

Drake got up from the log and walked over to a tree with low-hanging branches. After testing a limb with half his weight, he placed one fat sneaker in the branch’s shoulder and stood all the way up next to the trunk.

“I screwed up,” he said from the tree. “You have to apply to get into high school in New York, and I want to go to an arts school and do illustration. I picked out my top three schools and made my portfolio, but I got my application in late, and now everything is full. My parents feel bad that they weren’t on top of it, so they are trying to get it straightened out,” he said, placing his sneaker on the next branch up, “but I have to stay with Gran and go to Hershey High in the meantime or else go to the school I’m zoned for, which is basically a nightmare.” He pulled himself up again to a higher branch.

I knew about the horrors of school zoning. I had the same group of four friends all the way through elementary school: Jane, Emily, Raisa, and Sarabeth. Every Friday night of fourth and fifth grade, one of us hosted a sleepover, and everyone else was invited. We traveled as such a pack that if my dad saw just two of us together, he would say, “Where’s the rest of the herd?” But in fifth grade, the school board changed the map, and I got zoned to go to Hershey Middle School while everyone else was zoned for Hilltop.

We still played together the summer after fifth grade, and I got invited to their birthday parties in sixth. But when they talked about the teacher who blew spit bubbles when he talked, I couldn’t laugh along. And the name
Chad
did not make me jump onto the nearest bed and giggle. I was out of the loop, and after a while, our unbreakable bonds of friendship broke. Hilltop Middle is zoned for Lower Dauphin High School, Hershey High’s primary rival, so I might see them again if I could stomach going to the homecoming game at the start of October. There were signs for it all over the halls at school.

“So, you might just be in Hershey for ninth grade?” I asked.

“Hopefully, I’ll only be in Hershey a
month
!” He laughed from up in the tree. “I’m on the wait list for two schools, and the admissions offices said that something could open up in the first thirty days. I’m not really living here,” he added, tugging on a higher limb with both hands. “Just visiting.”

I didn’t realize that my hope had gotten itself up and brushed itself off until it got knocked down into the dirt again. He was just visiting. Figures.

“I can see why you don’t have a lot of friends here,” Drake added, testing the same limb with his foot. “The kids in this town are too lame to get you.” He stepped again into the next higher foothold of the tree, and I couldn’t see his face anymore between the branches.

There were two butterflies flirting with each other above a bush several feet away. The hood slipped off my head as I looked up to where Drake was climbing. A limb shook as his feet disappeared fully into the tree.