The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door (3 page)

CHAPTER

5

Before Drake went inside for dinner, he turned to me and yelled, “See you tomorrow at school.” I kept replaying those words in my head as I walked home.
At school
, reverberated at the end of each line, the way a bell keeps singing for a few seconds after you ring it.

As usual, my mom wasn’t home. At least three nights a week she works the swing shift from two p.m. until ten p.m., which is the only reliable thing in her schedule. As one of the newest nurses at the hospital, she has to fill in as shifts come up, so sometimes she works the night shift until six a.m. and then sleeps for a few hours before going in for a swing. She works in the pediatric unit. The most consistent thing about seeing my mom is that you can count on her to look tired.

She left a note:

You can eat pasta or grilled cheese.

Your sheets are still in the dryer.

Please be in bed by ten p.m.

My mother’s communications are becoming so spare, they are turning into poems. I edited the note to make it a haiku.

pasta or grilled cheese.

your sheets are in the dryer.

bed by ten p.m.

I was never home alone like this before Dad left. My parents are currently involved in a “trial separation” that officially began in July when my dad separated all the way to Atlanta. I wanted to go with him but was forced to stay here in Hershey with a mom who works all the time. They didn’t even say, “Get ready to be kicked out of the nest, baby bird.” The nest just flipped over one day, and I’m left trying to fly on my own. Naturally, I have a refrigerator door full of emergency numbers, instructions on dealing with everything from a fire to a snake bite, and three neighbors ready to come to my rescue if a creepy, unmarked van should so much as drive down the street.

Grabbing some cold pasta from the fridge, I went down the hall to my room to check for email from Dorathea. I set the pasta down on my desk and forgot to eat any. There was a drummer keeping time in my head and the bass drum sounded like
Drake, Drake, Drake.
My inbox offered no new emails from Dorathea to distract me.

Dorathea is my only cousin. She’s in her sophomore year at University of California, Berkeley, and she is like my own personal Magic 8 Ball. I go to her when I need mystical answers with questionable reliability. I decided to send another email, even though I wrote last. I hoped that didn’t make me look needy.

Re: question

From: Celia ([email protected])

Sent: Wed 9/08 6:42 PM

To: Dorathea Eberhardt ([email protected])

hey, dorathea,

when a guy comes up to you at your locker and asks if you want to hang out in a wooded lot after school, and then tells you that you are too cool for the kids in your town, does it mean he likes you or that he wants to be your friend?

how’s college?

celia

I want Dorathea to think I’m cool. Maybe that’s lame to admit, but she’s the one person reasonably close to my age who doesn’t consider me a loser. Of course, I never told her about what happened in the eighth grade. I never told anyone.

Turning away from the computer, I flopped onto my bed and reached one hand into the cool, dark recesses below my mattress. I like to think of my bed as a house and the space beneath it as the basement. Down there in the cellar, nestling at the base of the nightstand where I left it, was my notebook.

In the case of fire and a mad scramble to run from the flames, there is no contest among my possessions for the honor of “item to be saved first.” Poetry notebook wins. My only problem would be deciding which one. I have three notebooks full and am scribbling my way through number four. Most are standard composition books, their black-and-white-marbled covers eroded by stickers, traced Manga drawings, and quotes from famous people written in marker. My current notebook says, “‘Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.’—Charles Kuralt.”

I write poetry every day. Sometimes people think poetry has to be obscure or complicated or spring forth directly from your soul with the magical force of nature. I think poetry is like music—you either like to make it or you don’t.

I pulled out my notebook and wrote this poem:

I expected you to vanish

up and up into the tree,

a shake of the branches

and gone like you

had never happened.

But you came down

and handed me a leaf

“from seven limbs up,

already yellow,” you said,

and then you walked away

and you were still real.

I took the yellow leaf out of my hoodie pocket and pressed it between the pages of my notebook. Then I lay on my bed trying to read. It was two more hours until my heart slowed down enough to let me fall asleep.

CHAPTER

6

Thursday, the day after I met Drake, I showed up for school with a beehive buzzing in my brain. Would he talk to me again? Had he somehow discovered that I was an outcast? Was he a hallucination brought on by my extreme loneliness, an imaginary friend created by my subconscious to protect me? I went to my locker to get my book before English and as soon as I unlocked the door, a note fell out. Someone must have stuffed it in through the air vents.
A note from Drake?
I hopefully snatched the folded paper from the floor and opened it. It said:

You’re not fooling anyone, Weird. You’re still a loser.

I did not let my shoulders fall or inhale too sharply. I didn’t display any identifiable sign of suffering. In high school, it’s not just the walls that have eyes. The lockers, lunch tables, and desks have ears and gossiping mouths.

Naturally, my first guess about who wrote the note was that pit bull Sandy Firestone or one of her pack of mongrels. Sandy had had a group of freshman girls trailing her since school started, and so far, I had made it through three days with no visible bite marks from their canines, so they had to be thirsting for my blood by now. But the longer I looked at the note, the more it didn’t seem like Sandy’s work. The handwriting was sloppy, and I can say from brutal experience that Sandy and her hounds are more cunning and vicious than an anonymous locker note.

Like my neighbor’s cat, Peaches, who drops dead mice on our front porch after tormenting them to death all night, Sandy toys with her prey. In seventh grade, I overheard her talking to Becky Shapiro in the girls’ bathroom. I was in one of the stalls.

“Becky,” said Sandy, who had been standing at the mirror applying makeup since I walked into the bathroom.

“Yeah?” said Becky, turning off her faucet and sounding surprised that Sandy was addressing her.

Becky Shapiro was overweight. In the sixth grade, she had to have a special table at school instead of a chair with a desk attached like the rest of us. She couldn’t fit into a fixed desk.

“Me and some of the girls were talking, and we think you should try the Atkins diet,” said Sandy offhandedly as if she were offering advice to a friend who asked for it.

I heard Becky let out a long sigh as she tore off a paper towel.

“Well, I’m sorry, Becky,” Sandy went on, clearly offended by Becky’s response, “but you need to do something. It’s kind of . . .
depressing
,” Sandy finished, like she had been searching around for the saddest sort of word she could find.

That happened a year before Sandy started using me as a sharpening stone for her claws. I hadn’t turned Dark yet. I stayed in the stall longer than necessary and tried not to make any noise.

Next, Becky said something that made my heart sound like a broken wind chime. She said, “You’re right, Sandy . . . thanks.”

And as if things had been restored to their proper order, Sandy said, “You’re welcome,” and snapped shut the lid on her lipstick tube.

The piece of folded paper that I was currently holding featured too much anonymity to be created by Sandy Firestone. Sandy liked to take credit for her brutality.

“Did you get a love note?” said a voice in my ear.

I was startled and balled up the paper, crushing it beneath the black nails of my right fist.

“Sorry,” said Drake, his brown eyes brimming with honesty. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I stared back at him without a word to say.

“Hey, um,” said Drake, kicking his sneaker gently against the wall below the lockers, “do you want to eat lunch together today?”

I tossed the note back into my locker like it was a trash can. “Sure,” I said back, slamming the door.

CHAPTER

7

That afternoon, a momentous event occurred. For the first time since high school started four days ago, I didn’t eat lunch by myself. The day was so warm, it felt more like August outside than September. After we picked a spot on the grass near the basketball court, Drake pulled off his sweater, but I kept wearing my black hoodie. I like having a hood at my fingertips.

I was also wearing black tights and combat boots with a polyester dress my mom handed down to me. It looked like something a 1970s housewife would wear to host a holiday party, offering her guests drinks in ceramic tiki cups. I had cut it off so it would hang just above my knees.

For lunch, I brought the pasta I didn’t finish from the night before, and Drake had a turkey sub. I could feel the eyes of the high school wandering over us, the new kid and the outcast eating their lunches in the grass. Frankly, I was as mystified by Drake’s interest in me as my classmates probably were. New kids at school always have to work to make friends, but Drake was cool and good looking. He could have tried to get into one of the big, jovial groups populating the picnic tables. Why pick a loner? Did Drake want to go out with me? Was this turkey-and-pasta brown bag our first lunch date?

I slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses and tried not to betray my confusion. We had barely swallowed our first bites before the boys started gathering on the basketball court. I don’t know how boys can eat so fast.

“Do they always play a pickup game now?” asked Drake, leaning back on one elbow on the grass to get a better view of the court.

“I’ve seen them out here the past three days,” I said.

“Can anyone join?” he asked, as if I was an insider on the Hershey sports scene.

“I dunno,” I said, but Drake’s question was answered when the tallest boy on the court filled with seven guys yelled, “Anybody else?” in the general direction of the picnic tables.

Drake’s eyes scanned the court like he was speed-reading a book. He appeared to be calculating something.

“Are you into basketball?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Drake said without taking his eyes off the players. “In New York I played all the time.”

Oh yeah, New York
. My joy turned sour. I was sharing my lunch with someone for the first time in high school, and he was staying only a month. Whatever was happening between Drake and me, it was temporary.

“I’m going to get in on this game,” Drake said suddenly, practically jumping up to a full stand from where he was reclining on the grass. “Watch my stuff?” He bounded over to the courts as I picked his sweater up out of the grass and put the rest of his sub back in his lunch bag.

Drake entered the game just as team selection was starting. A couple of the other boys gave him lazy half waves and I could almost read their lips mumbling, “What’s up, man?” Drake’s shoulders slouched when he was with the other boys, and he kept his hands in his pockets. It was like they were all competing to see who could look the most disinterested. Some mysterious ritual involving gestures toward players and baskets was followed by a jump shot, and then the game was on.

The only other boy I recognized on the court was Joey Gaskill, another ninth grader who went to my middle school. Since I first met him in the sixth grade, I’ve watched the spill of menace that leaks from Joey grow larger with each year. In sixth grade, he got suspended for fighting. In seventh, he was suspended again after he snuck into a math room during lunch and set a stack of tests on fire, tripping the sprinkler system and ruining books and electronics in an entire wing of the building. In eighth grade, someone broke into the ceramics room one night and smashed all the green pots waiting to be fired in the kiln. No one could prove that Joey did it, but everyone seemed to share the unshakable assurance that it was him.

I was shocked to see Joey playing a team sport. I was even more shocked to see that he was wearing a Hershey High basketball jersey, indicating that he had made the JV team.

From the start, Drake was impressive. I know nothing about basketball, but when one player keeps getting the ball and running with it, it’s pretty obvious he’s a talent. Drake made two baskets while I watched. The scene inspired me to write. I was experimenting with visual poetry.

BASKETBALL

boys grunt and shuffle

check right then left and sweat,

grit their pounding teeth as the earth

keeps grabbing the ball back. they are

practicing to be jackhammers. they are

practicing to be men, looking for

something they can win.

basketball

I was so involved in writing my poem, I didn’t notice Sandy and Mandy approaching until they spread out a blanket in the grass near me with a crew of four girls I didn’t know from middle school. Social-climbing transfer students maybe, or mean girls from other feeder schools. A chilly wind blew from their direction. I pulled my hood up and stuck my nose farther into my journal to pretend I was still working on my poem.

“I think she got that dress from her grandmother.” I heard Mandy’s voice carry over, followed by a smattering of laughter. “And it was already out of style when her grandmother wore it.”

“She thinks she’s alternative,” responded Sandy, “when really she’s just gross. She smells like a junk shop.”

“She smells like a Dumpster,” echoed Mandy.

“Did you see the sign she put on her locker?” said a third girl’s voice.

I had to force myself not to glance over at them. The space between us on the grass folded together like an accordion. They were inches away instead of feet. I could feel them breathing on me.

“Look at her writing in her journal. She thinks she’s so much deeper than the rest of us. I’m sure people are lining up to read books by fringy, high school creepers,” said Sandy.

I could feel my face starting to flush and glanced up to make sure Drake wasn’t noticing anything. He was still involved with the game. I was writing so hard in my notebook, I poked my pen tip through a few pages. I thought they couldn’t affect me anymore. When I turned Dark, I thought I stopped letting Sandy get to me. It was starting to feel like eighth grade all over again, like there was a black hole opening up in my chest with enough gravity to suck me into it.

“Maybe she’s in love with the new guy,” said Mandy.

“As if someone that hot would date someone that ugly,” Sandy came back.

“He probably ate lunch with her so she would do his homework,” said another girl I didn’t know.

One of the by-products of mean high school girls is other mean high school girls. Even though two of the girls who were talking about me didn’t even know me, ganging up on another girl is the quickest way to get into the gang.

I wanted to get up and leave. But leaving would be like sending them a note that said, “Dear Mandy and Sandy, I submit to your dominant power.” Ice formed between my butt and the grass, holding me frozen in place. I just kept writing in my poetry book and pretending I didn’t hear them. In actuality, my hearing had become five times better. I could hear them click their fake nails together like claws.

When the bell rang, Mandy and Sandy’s group stood to leave. Sandy threw one last comment at me over her shoulder, as if she were littering. “Drake told me he was going to hang with her because he feels sorry for her.”

I looked down at my poetry notebook. My “poem” read:

things celia needs to change

things celia needs to change

things celia needs to change

things celia needs to change

things celia needs to change

things celia needs to change

things celia needs to change