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99
AFTER THAT I STARTED SPENDING LUNCH in the sound booth. The auditorium was always empty these days; even Steven didn’t think to look for me there. I read How to Survive and played with the lights, blending greens and blues and purples on the empty stage.
Other times I just sat in the dark and didn’t move until it was time to go home.
100
IN ART, MR. LIM GAVE ME back my jar of stones with a yellow sticky note with a big letter R for Redo. I wished he would just give me a zero, since the assignment was now almost five months late.
The jar of stones sat on my desk all through class. People looked at it, and looked at me, and my neck prickled with self-consciousness. Midway through class, Steven slipped a note across the table.
Dear A, the note said.
Morgue Master Lim is clearly a dilettante. The substitution of stones for fruit speaks volumes. Instead of something sweet and ripe, something cold and hard. The stones/secrets are sealed inside her; the smooth glass surface of the jar belies the disordered rubble within, barely keeping it at bay.
The juxtaposition of the two pieces, furthermore, is striking. The first, dry twigs, are fruitless and bare. The second piece is full to the brim, but still manages to speak of hunger. She is trying to nourish herself with food only fit for a ghost. I would be worried about her, too.
Regards,
Steven McNeil
I slipped out of class as soon as the bell rang, in what had become my daily escape routine. Steven didn’t come after me, but the note burned in my pocket for the rest of the day.
On the radio, blizzard warnings.
At home, bags of driveway salt.
The local paper showed a picture of Noe in the sports section, leaping over a vault to nowhere. LOCAL GYMNAST SOARS TO NEW HEIGHTS.
I wondered if Kaylee Ito had always hated me.
101
THAT NIGHT I WENT FOR A walk past the half-built houses near Lorian Woods, their harsh geometry softened by snow. I felt sorry for them. They looked hungry, hungry and dumb, like tourists who hadn’t come dressed for the weather. I walked into the woods and looked at the way the branches fractured the sky. I put my hand on a tree’s bark and felt a quiet current of friendship there.
Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to freeze in a snowbank. It sounded almost dreamy, almost pleasant.
“A
I walked to the edge of the woods and lay in a snowbank. I looked at the stars and remembered being younger.
Sometimes, Dad was the moon. Sometimes he was the man on the radio singing “Brown Eyed Girl.” Sometimes he was the truehearted woodsman in Little Red Riding Hood, about to stride in with his ax to claim me. On one too-fast hike with Mom, the snacks all gone and the winter sunlight waning, I let her get farther ahead of me than ever before. I’d left the trail and sat down under a tree, pulling my hood up and cinching my jacket more tightly around my waist and neck. Before long, I knew, he would come striding through the woods in tall leather boots and a green feathered cap (he was Robin Hood, sometimes) and carry me on his shoulders all the way to a sturdy log cabin with cookies on the table and a tiny orange kitten like the one in my fantasies that Mom would never let me have. Say hello to Stallion, Dad would say, pouring the purring animal into my arms (How did he know her name would be Stallion?). She’s yours.
Instead the sky had darkened and the temperature dropped. After several hours—five minutes, maybe—I heard Mom calling my name, and glimpsed her coming down the trail. In spite of myself I’d leaped up and shouted, “I’m here,” my five-year-old’s resolve wavering at the sight of her familiar sweater and hat. She scooped me up and hoisted me onto her back, and within a few minutes I was lulled to sleep by the steady up-down jostle of her stride. That night was pizza-and-ice-cream at Uncle Dylan’s house, and a turn on my cousin Max’s new computer game. They were always especially nice to me, Uncle Dylan and Aunt Monique and Nan and the cousins. By the time Mom put me to bed, I’d forgotten about the orange kitten for a while.
Overhead, the ice-encrusted branches rattled in the breeze, sending down a flurry of snow. For a long time now, there had been no benevolent moon-spirit watching over me, no radio-father singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” and the man in the forest was a smirking boy I must be prepared to fight hand-to-hand and, if necessary, kill.
How were you supposed to move on from something like that?
I lay in the snowbank and waited to sleep. Eventually I got up and walked back home.
What’s that Tom Waits song? “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today.”
The snowbank didn’t want me. There was no use fighting. I don’t believe everything I hear in songs, but when you lie in a snowbank for an hour without falling asleep, the message is pretty clear.
102
IN DRAMA, WE HAD A NEW teacher, Ms. Hoffstadter, who was on loan from some school in England. I guess teachers can go on exchange too. She wore bloodred pants and a white blouse, and earrings made of slender purple feathers. For the first couple of weeks she had us doing drama exercises, which were pretty okay because they were largely silent—pretend you are carrying a staggering weight on your back, pretend you are dragging your weight across the floor, pretend you are being crushed beneath it. I didn’t have to talk to anyone, just walk around in circles with these invisible torments. She had us memorize parts in a Lillian Hellman scene, then put on the scene without speaking.
“Words are the last layer,” she said. “The tip of the iceberg. Ninety-nine percent of theater takes place in the body.”
We pulled our invisible weights around, and moved them from shoulder to shoulder, and put them down and walked away and came back and picked them up exactly where we had left them. At the end of each class, Ms. Hoffstadter made us stack our weights neatly against one wall.
One day, I got so tired from dragging my weight around the gritty floor that I fainted. I don’t know how it happened. It was a gray day. I was cold all the way through. I had been cold for days. The cold was inside my skull. I couldn’t knock it out or melt it. That morning I’d taken a hot shower, but the cold was still there when I got out. My arms got all goose-bumpy under my sweater. You know when you put something in the oven but forget to turn it on, then you go to check it and it’s still frozen? My goose-bumpy arms were like that. Still frozen, even though I’d been inside the school building all day.
We were doing our usual warm-up with our invisible weights, and I felt like I was going to sneeze, and then I woke up with my cheek on the floor and seven or eight people standing over me. Ms. Hoffstadter dispatched a girl named Win to walk me to the nurse’s office. I hadn’t realized I had a fever. Win felt my forehead while we were walking down the hall.
I drank the burning juice the nurse gave me and sat in a chair with a fleece blanket that smelled like cupboard and waited for my mom to come.
She stroked my forehead on the car ride home. She had the radio on, some talk show with a scientist. I fell asleep but didn’t realize it, and the talk show kept going in my dream.
“Butterflies burrow underground in the winter,” the scientist was saying. “Their dens are often six feet deep.”