Addie on the Inside (8 page)

There are others who are silent.
I've never noticed them before.
They don't wear tape over their mouths
or look defiant. They look down, or
if their eyes happen to catch yours,
they look away. How many are there
who walk these halls unnoticed each day

while I talk and talk and the loud ones
shout and shove? What do they think of
when they study the floor or glance sideways,
taking a chance that they will not be seen?
What is it they, unseen, are seeing?

What is that look Ms. Wyman is giving me as we pass
in the hall, the one she wears with such showy
satisfaction? I've seen it before. It's the
I've-just-
come-from-talking-to-the-principal-and-you're-
in-trouble
look. Why so cheery about it, Ms. Wyman?
Why devote so much facial real estate to a gloat?
You hold the power

but maybe that wasn't always so.

Maybe when you were my age you felt powerless too.
Were you made fun of then as you are now? Maybe
that explains why you try so hard to look so wise.
Maybe that explains the sadness in the corners
of your eyes.

Mr. Kiley sits on the other side of his desk
playing the part of the principal.
Blah blah
,
he is saying, his mouth turned down in self-
importance, or maybe to keep from laughing
at how ridiculous this is. I mean, he's looking
into a face with duct tape where a mouth
ought to be. I hear him ask if I am listening
and I nod and try to look grateful that he's
letting me keep the tape on until lunchtime,
even if after that IT MUST COME OFF!

I notice a photo on the wall behind him.
I don't recognize him at first in that floppy hat
and the T-shirt with a guitar on it and his arms
around two boys on either side of him,
all three of them beaming like they just won
some big prize. The younger boy is missing
two front teeth and the older one holds a fish
on the end of a line.

I'll bet Mr. Kiley is a good granddad.
I'll bet he swivels his chair a lot so he can look
at that photo and see those smiles. I'll bet
he hates having to wear a tie all day and act
like it matters that some girl in his school
is wearing duct tape over her mouth.
I nod when he asks, “Agreed?” and shake
his hand when he extends it and leave
his office thinking I'll never look at Mr. Kiley
in the same way again, now that I've seen
that photo behind his desk and have imagined
him swiveling his chair all day long
just to take another look.

The way I can see in ways I have never seen before.
The way I can hear when I'm not busy planning what I have to say.
The way I'm relieved not to be the smart, outspoken one everyone

expects me to be.

The way it feels good to take a break from the me I expect of myself.
The way none of my friends (except Skeezie) tease me but instead make

me feel that what I'm doing is real and that it matters.

The way Becca leaves me alone.

The way Ms. Wyman doesn't call on me in math class and allows me not to

speak.

The way Ms. Watkins admires what I'm doing and likes my outfit and

doesn't point out that we're wearing the exact same shoes.

The way when the tape comes off, though I remain silent, the scoffing

and quacking and calling of names begin to fade away.

The way not talking begins to make me feel that I, too, am fading away.
The way a few kids give me a thumbs-up, including some of those who

are silent most days, who have become visible to me only

Today.

DuShawn sits at his old table at lunch,
laughing with his old friends,
looks sideways when we pass in the hall,
never reaches for my hand,
keeps his crooked smile and his dimples
to himself.

Skeezie says, “Ha! I knew you couldn't last the whole day!”
“I was only trying to go to the end of school,” I say, the words
feeling strange in my mouth, like food whose taste I'd forgotten.
Shutting my locker, I ask the gang to wait for me before
we head to the Candy Kitchen.

I go to wash my hands. They aren't especially dirty.
Perhaps it's the loneliness I want to wash away.

The last stall is taken.
I recognize the shoes.

I turn to walk away
but don't get very far

when the stall door opens
and there's Becca Wrightsman,

looking like a rabbit
surprised in the headlights

of an oncoming car.
She doesn't try to hide

eyes that have been crying.
She says to me simply,

“You don't know everything.”
And goes to wash her face.

“Has the cat got your tongue?” Bobby asks.
We are walking and I, uncharacteristically,
am not talking. “You
can
speak now,”
he prods, but all I can give him are uh-huhs
and nods. My mind is on Becca and why
she was crying. It's on DuShawn and why
he was lying when he told me he couldn't
see me later.

         “Wait up!” Joe cries, and he

and Zachary surprise me with hugs from
behind. “Our hero!” Joe says. “We love
your courage, we love your mind!” “We
want to marry it!” says Zachary, though
how they'll marry my mind I really
don't know.

         My mind is full of not knowing,

and if it's true that not knowing is a kind
of strength, then at the rate I am going,
I will soon be the strongest girl
in the world.

He told me he'd be busy
when I asked him to come over,
there was something about something
that had suddenly come up

and he can't see me all weekend
and I think it's all baloney
or a worse word than baloney
but I don't know about what

and I'm tired of not knowing
but I'll wait it out till Monday
for what
ever
to blow over, then
I might just

kick

his

butt.

Running in the backyard,
trying to catch a ball and missing it,
I trip on what turns out to be

a two-by-four, the end post
of a swing set long gone.
“Remember, Joe?” I say,

“remember when we were little
and would swing out here
in the summer evenings,

counting fireflies, pumping
higher and higher,
racing to the moon?”

“We never did,” says Joe,
as hopeless at throwing balls
as I am at catching them.

What we are doing tossing
a ball around in my backyard
is anybody's guess.

“Of course we did,” I insist.
“My mother made us lemonade
and those little butterscotch cookies.”

“Nope,” says Joe. “I never had
butterscotch cookies, and we never
raced to the moon.”

Joe can be so stubborn.
Then I remember:
That old swing set was taken down

the summer I was four,
the summer Joe moved in to
the house next door.

It was someone else I raced
to the moon, a girl who lived
down the street. It was Becca

who loved my mother's
butterscotch cookies,
who counted fireflies,

who pointed her toes to the sky.
It is Becca who would remember
what was here.

She lived down the street.
Each spring the first tulips on the block
nodded hello from her mother's garden.

When my mother told me she'd moved
to another town, using the word
divorce,
I nodded in my most grown-up way,

not asking what it meant. I bent
down in their garden later that day,
picked a tulip to take home, peeked

through the window to make sure
they weren't playing a trick, hiding inside
and waiting for me to seek.

The house was empty. The tulips,
all but the one drooping in my hand,
nodded goodbye as I turned away.

Grandma appears at the back door.
“Stay for supper, Joe?”
“Can't,” says Joe, “but thanks.”
And off he goes to his house, running
and trying to kick his heels together in the air
and not quite making it and laughing
at himself for not quite making it,
as Grandma lets the screen door
shut softly behind her and comes to me,
pulling her braid over her shoulder
and stroking it like a cat. “I like Joe,”
she says. “I like how comfortable he is
in his own skin.”

We stroll around the yard, looking for
tulips. Grandma carries a pair of shears.
I love the word: shears. So old-fashioned
and yet it's what she calls scissors
because it's what her mother called them,
and it's a way for her, she says,
to keep her mother near.

“What were girls like when you were my age?”
I ask as she bends and touches a yellow tulip
the way moments ago she'd touched my arm.
“Did they mess with your head?” I ask. “Did they
act like you were their friend and then talk about you
behind your back? Were there mean girls
when you were my age?”

Grandma's shears go
snip
, and she straightens
herself to look me in the eye. “There have always
been mean girls, Addie. I just don't know
that they were ever so well organized. But then
back in the day we didn't have as many means
of organizing.” She leans over and snips. “Cell
phones and the Internet and what have you.
Cruelty has gone multimedia so production
has gone up.” She hands me the tulips
and we turn back to the house.

“Rise above it,” she says, her hand
on my shoulder. The air is turning colder
as I tell her, “I'll try.”

It isn't because I was silent today
and took from the silence lessons to keep.
I have always loved this quiet time of the week,
or have for as long as I've been allowed
to stay up this late. Ten o'clock on Friday night.
Dinner has been eaten, the dishes have been washed
and dried, the cats are curled around somebody's feet.
Kennedy mine, Johnson my mother's. The PBS
documentary on sea turtles ended five minutes ago,
and the TV put to bed. I finger the edge
of my Garfield and Odie bookmark, flip the tassel aside,
find my place in
The Secret Life of Bees
. My father
in his chair is reading too but I can't quite see the title,
and he is already so lost in the words I don't want
to interrupt him to ask. My mother, nestled
in the other corner of the sofa, is knitting another hat
for another child who needs a hat somewhere in the world.

Johnson must be worn out from the day's activities,
whatever they were for him, because he doesn't lift
a paw to bat at the needles flashing and clicking
above his head or the yarn dangling inches from his
whiskers. Kennedy stretches and yawns, looks up at me
with one eye open, one eye closed. I'd tell him he's got
sticky-eye (that's what I call it), but he'd just look at me
as if to say,
Get a life
.

Grandma shakes her head at something she's just read,
takes off her drugstore glasses, and gazes into space.
She'll be going home soon, sitting alone in the living room
she once shared with my grandfather, his chair empty
across from hers, his papers still stacked at its side.
I remember that chair, Grandpa sitting there, me
climbing up his leg and onto his knees when I was little
and he was still strong. How he would bounce me to Boston
to get a loaf of bread. Trot trot home again . . .

Grandma sighs, then winks when she sees me looking.
My mother curses a missed stitch, my father grunts
and turns a page. I roll my head slowly to relieve the crick
that has announced itself in my neck and return to my book
reluctantly, not quite ready to leave Paintbrush Falls, New York,
for Tiburon, South Carolina, to join Lily in her search for a home
when I have found what she is looking for right here.

“I'll make us a nice lunch,” Grandma says
the next morning when I find her packing
and go into a pout. “Just you and me.
Your parents will be out. Now, put your
lip back where it belongs.” She hands me
a shawl, the one she calls her Carmen
shawl. “Here,” she says, “this goes perfectly
with your eyes.”

“For keeps?” I ask as if I'm five years old.
“For keeps,” she says with a wink. “And I'm just
getting myself organized. I don't leave until next week,
so who knows what other treasures I may yet
bestow upon you. In the meanwhile, how about
I make us a nice lunch?”

How did this happen?
When did my grandmother
become my best friend?

It is not clear what some students at South Hadley High
School expected to achieve by subjecting a freshman
to the relentless taunting described by a prosecutor and
classmates. Certainly not her suicide.

—The New York Times

The air is sweet and full of spring
as I read these words, sitting
with my grandmother at either end
of the porch swing, lunch on paper plates
between us, napkins tucked under our thighs
so the wind won't surprise them
and carry them off. They flutter delicately
like scarves.

The girl hanged herself on a bitter winter day,
tired, at fifteen, of the taunts and bullying,
frightened and feeling alone, even though
she had friends and a mother and father
and a little sister who had given her a scarf
for Christmas.

Hours earlier she had cried in the nurse's office.
Walking home, she was hit by a can of Red Bull
thrown from a car by some of the girls who were driven
to hate her, all because she was new to the school,
from another country, had dared to date
one of the popular boys. “Irish slut,” they called her.
“Druggie,” they called her. Texted her: “You deserve
to die.”