Full Ride (5 page)

It was starting to look really weird that I hadn't said anything after “I.” I could tell by Shannon's expression that she was on the verge of switching her opinion of me from “friend potential” to “definite social liability.” And she'd been so loud—was every kid in the room waiting for my answer? Just to buy myself time, I started fake-coughing. I made the coughs sound deep and resonant and
troubling, and I gestured at my throat and then out toward the hall.

“Got—to—drink—” I sputtered between coughs. And then I bolted from the room.

I hoped I was judging Shannon correctly, and she wasn't the kind of girl who'd leave her seat beside a hot, muscular football player just because some other girl she didn't even know was practically choking to death.

Out in the hall I found I couldn't stop coughing, so I really did walk back to the water fountain I'd stopped at before. I gulped in the lukewarm water, which tasted like it'd been sitting in a rusty pipe all summer. The water made me cough more. I stood there, hunched over the fountain, coughing and gulping and thinking,
You can't even pretend you're the same Becca Jones you used to be. You can't be popular here. You have to make it so nobody notices you, nobody wants to ask you questions, nobody cares who you are . . .

I felt a hand on my back and heard a voice say, “Are you all right?”

I whirled around. It wasn't Shannon behind me. It was the girl in the head scarf.

We stared at each other for a moment, and then she said, “I think I scared the coughing away.”

She had a faint accent, but I couldn't place it, and I wasn't about to ask where she was from. But it would be weird if I didn't say anything, so I agreed. “You cured me! Thanks, um—”

“Jala,” she said, vaguely pointing at herself, as if she thought I might need that to understand.

“Becca,” I said, making the same gesture.

She didn't seem to know what to say after that. I was stricken by a fear that she would settle on the same question Shannon had chosen—“Where are you from?”—and I didn't have a safe answer yet.

Head off a question with another question,
I told myself, and so I blurted out the first one that came to my mind: “Does it help? The head scarf, I mean?”

Something in her expression closed down, and I remembered she was a new kid too. She probably didn't know anybody at Deskins High School, either.

“It's called a hijab,” she said flatly. For a minute I thought that was all she was going to say, but then she went on, “Do you mean, does it make people stare more than they would otherwise? Does it make them say mean things, and act like they think I can't hear them through the cloth?”

I was suddenly frantic at how completely she'd misunderstood.

“No, I mean, does it help you remember who you are—who you're supposed to be, what you believe—even though you're in a strange place, among strangers?” I asked.

She tilted her head, considering this seriously.

“It
should
,” she conceded. “The fact that it doesn't—that's probably my fault. I shouldn't worry so much about everyone staring. But at my old school back in Michigan, there were a lot more Muslims. I'm not used to being the only one in a classroom.”

Jala was just from Michigan? Her accent was just Michigan-ish—Michiganian? Michigander? I guess it sounded exotic to me because I was used to the way people talked in the South.

Jala didn't seem angry at me anymore, but I wasn't going to let talking about her old school lead to questions about my old school. I saw that she had a piece of paper in her hand labeled “Class Schedule Requests.”

“What are you signing up for?” I asked.

Jala handed me her paper. I could tell she was a freshman like me because she'd listed Phys Ed I. Other than that, all her classes started with the words “honors” or “advanced.”

If Daddy hadn't been arrested and convicted and sent to prison, and Mom and I hadn't run away, I would have moved naturally from McCormick Middle School to Belpre High School without so much as a hiccup in my life. I would have hung out with people like Shannon, not like Jala, and not just because there probably wasn't a single Muslim at Belpre High. I would have chosen my friends based on who was popular and good-looking, and whether they could make me seem popular and look good too. I would have picked my classes based on what I could glide through with the least effort, so I had time for hours of texting and exchanging gossip on Facebook and planning parties and hanging out.

But I couldn't be around people who lived for gossip anymore, because, if I wasn't careful, the gossip at Deskins High School would be about me. I needed to be around people who were quiet and trustworthy and kind—and maybe studying too hard to care about gossip or nosy questions. And if the Jalas of Deskins High School were all in the advanced and honors classes, then those were the classes I would take too.

I handed Jala's class schedule request sheet back to her.

“That's almost exactly what I'm signing up for,” I said. “Except for that one.”

I pointed to the last course title she'd filled in: Honors Computer Programming I.

“You don't like computers?” Jala asked.

“No, not at all,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis. “I hate everything about them. I'm horrible with computers.”

And that was the first lie I told at Deskins High School.

I became a normal kid again, with a normal life.

Well, sort of. As much as possible. As long as nobody looked too close.

And believe me, I didn't let anybody look too close.

I slip into an aisle seat in the school auditorium. Three rows behind me, Jason Sprunger and Martin Lee are pounding their fists on the seat backs and chanting, “Sen-iors! Sen-iors! Sen-iors!” Three rows ahead of me Shannon Daily—the redheaded girl I met at new student orientation and have barely spoken to since—is holding court with her usual crowd, the self-proclaimed “popular girls.” Pretty much everyone else refers to them as the mean girls, but they're mostly just cannibalistic, constantly fighting among themselves about who's queen bee and who's second tier and who's kicked out of the group. They consider the rest of us beneath their notice, which is fine with me.

“You know, my mother was homecoming queen at her high school, and my grandmother was homecoming queen at her school, so it's almost like a family tradition,” Shannon is saying, a little too loudly. “I wouldn't want to let them down.”

I bend my head down so I can roll my eyes without anyone seeing. Poor Shannon is so good at clawing her way to the top of the mean-girl clique, but she's totally inept at staying there. The power always goes to her head. She'll probably be out as queen
bee by the end of this assembly. Maybe temporarily out of the group entirely. Sometimes I've considered sidling up to her and giving advice—as a secret power behind the throne, perhaps—but I don't want to make myself a target of the other mean girls. A few would be devious enough to find out the secrets in my past—and evil enough to use them against me. Helping Shannon isn't worth the risk.

“Borderline personality disorder,” my friend Rosa Alvarez mutters beside me.

“Are you diagnosing Shannon or just doing your AP psych homework?” I ask.

Rosa grins at me from beneath her unfashionably heavy bangs.

“Both,” she says. “This is going to be a tough year. I'm all about the multitasking.”

Rosa is the only one of my friends who will join me in keeping track of the machinations of the in crowd. She says it reminds her of the telenovelas she watched back home in Mexico. Since Mom sold our TV the first winter we spent in Deskins, I'm similarly starved for entertainment.

But I wouldn't want to be in the middle of all that drama,
I tell myself.
Who needs it? Even if it weren't for Daddy, I'd be happier flying under the radar.

I've taken to automatically labeling many of my thoughts “truth” or “lie,” and I'm not sure about that one.

“People, people, quiet down,” our principal, Mr. Gordon, says from the stage. “You don't want to disturb the underclassmen, do you?”

The “Sen-iors! Sen-iors!” chant behind me dissolves into sarcastic comebacks: “Why not?” and “Who cares?” and “We're seniors! We can disturb anyone we want!”

“Jala had the right idea graduating early, if this is how everyone's going to act all year long,” Rosa mutters beside me.

I nod distractedly. I've learned it isn't wise to dwell on who or what you've lost, and Jala is the closest thing I had to a best friend for the past three years. That's weird to say when neither one of us has even been to the other person's home—Jala has six younger brothers and sisters who make her house, as she put it, “chaos to the nth degree,” and I've always used the excuse that my mother worked nights and I didn't want to bother her when she was sleeping during the day. But Jala was a good school friend, and school doesn't seem right without her.

Really, all I have now are school friends: the kind of people you partner with in chemistry lab or sit with at lunch or shoot the breeze with walking to class. I don't have the kind of friends you'd tell deep, dark secrets to.

In the past three years I haven't told a single soul about my father.

And nobody has figured it out.

And it isn't like Daddy's in the news anymore. So what do I have to worry about?

Mr. Gordon pounds his hand against the podium, a signal that he's getting mad.

“Let me remind you gentlemen in the back that you are still subject to my authority until graduation day, and I personally can determine whether you graduate or not,” he threatens.

To my surprise, the rowdies behind us actually quiet down.

“Thank you,” Mr. Gordon says with exaggerated patience. “Now, seniors, this assembly is for your benefit. If statistics hold, some ninety-five percent of you are planning to further your education after high school, which is a really good idea if you intend to make more than minimum wage. So hopefully you all picked up the handouts in the back—”

“Wait!” someone cries out. It's Ms. Stela, my guidance counselor, who's running down the far aisle waving a stack of papers.
“The copier broke this morning, and I just printed the last one and . . . here! Pass them down!”

She starts thrusting papers at the kids at the end of each row.

“Couldn't she have printed those handouts before today?” Rosa mutters disgustedly beside me.

“That's Ms. Stela for you,” I mutter back.

Ms. Stela's maybe twenty-eight, and always frantic. She said to me once, “I'm so glad there are kids like you who don't have problems, so I have time to deal with the ones who do.”

I think that comment alone should disqualify her from her job—shouldn't guidance counselors be more observant? But it's not like I'm going to turn her in.

The handouts flow down the row toward me. When Rosa hands me the stack, I take one and stand up and walk across the aisle to pass the rest on. I've grown four inches since moving to Deskins, and it's a little amazing to me how quickly I can move now that I have long legs. Still, by the time I get back to my seat, Rosa has already flipped through the whole packet and is ready to rattle off all the ways it's objectionable.

“Like we don't already know that grades and course selection and extracurriculars really matter for getting into the college of our dreams?” she asks scornfully. “Didn't they tell us that a million times freshman year alone?”

“Oh, who remembers freshman year?” I murmur back, shrugging.

If I hadn't put that as a question, it would count as an immense lie. Because I remember everything from freshman year. I remember how cold our apartment felt when I sat in it alone after Mom left for work each night. I remember how I cried when Mom told me Daddy was being transferred to a federal prison in California, of all places, and there was no way we could afford to visit him any time soon. I remember how, most of the time, I couldn't decide
if I was more angry than I was sad, or more sad than I was angry—when I did see Daddy again, would I want to hug him or slug him? If I ever wrote him a letter, would I curse him out or try to comfort him?

I didn't write any letters. I sat staring at blank sheets of paper for hours on end and then put the paper away, still blank. I let Mom tell him whatever she wanted about us and our new lives in Deskins. To keep anyone from knowing our connection to Daddy, all her letters—and Daddy's, back to us—had to be sent in care of his attorney. I told myself that was what made it impossible to write. And, because phone calls are so easy to trace, the attorney said we shouldn't talk to Daddy by phone, either.

What did I feel the strongest: relief at not having to communicate? Or just more of that battle between sorrow and fury?

Not much has changed in three years. I'm still angry and sad, but I've buried all those emotions deep down inside me. When our junior-year AP language teacher made us write character studies of each other, Jala described me as “the most even-keeled person I know.”

So I've fooled even my best friend. I deserve an acting Oscar.

Rosa is still ranting about Ms. Stela's handouts.

“And this sheet,” she says, turning to the last page. “Are they trying to convince us that we can afford college or that we should just give up because we can't?”

She shakes the packet at me, so I have to dart my eyes back and forth to see what she's talking about. That last page is a reprint from some magazine, and the headline says, “What If the Middle Class Really Can't Afford to Send Their Kids to College Anymore?”