Her Name in the Sky (10 page)

The laughter dies when Ms. Carpenter stands up from her stool. Her sharp eyebrows draw together in anger. “This discussion is over,” she says, her voice tense. “Hannah, I will speak to you after class.” She purses her lips and clears her throat. “For now, we’re going to spend the rest of the hour on
Their Eyes
. Take out your books, and someone tell me: What is Hurston trying to do with the scenes of Janie beneath the pear tree?”

There’s a flurry of activity as everyone digs their books out of their booksacks. Ellie Thomas raises her hand to answer the question, and Marty Carothers speaks after that, and within minutes, the classroom has returned to its normal, relaxed state. But Hannah sits with her shoulders hunched and her throat full of bile, and to her left, Baker spreads her fingers over her book as if she can draw strength from its leaves.

Ms. Carpenter meets Hannah’s eyes when the bell rings for lunch. “My desk,” she says, pointing to the back of the room.

Baker casts Hannah a quick look before she leaves with the rest of the class, but Hannah cannot discern what her look means.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah says before Ms. Carpenter can sit down.

“I’m not interested in hearing an apology,” Ms. Carpenter says. She settles herself in her desk chair and burns Hannah with her eyes. “I’d rather hear what prompted you to say those things.”

They sit in silence while Hannah tries to articulate in her head. “I just…don’t like Father Simon.”

“Liking and respecting are two different things.”

“Well, I don’t respect him, either. Him or his religion or his faith. Any of it. It’s all just a huge fabrication that’s been used to oppress people for ages.”

“Cynicism doesn’t look good on you, Hannah.”

“I’m not being cynical, I’m being truthful.”

Ms. Carpenter gives her a knowing look. “Whatever you are being, it’s not truthful.”

Hannah inhales from her stomach.

“I don’t know what’s bothering you,” Ms. Carpenter says, “and I don’t need you to tell me. But I do need you to understand that words mean something, and the words you used just now were very damaging.”

Hannah’s heart hammers in her chest. “I wasn’t being
damaging
, I was just speculating. Besides, so what if I’m right about him? How is that damaging? Because he’s not supposed to be that way?”

Ms. Carpenter’s eyes rest steadily on Hannah’s. Her sharp, dark eyebrows crease inward again. “Damaging because you insinuated it would be a bad thing.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You weren’t going for the laugh? You weren’t trying to wound? Your words were meant to hurt. Not just Father Simon, but anyone who could have been listening. What if one of the boys sitting around you yearns to be with a ‘dude,’ and you just made it clear to him that that option is repulsive?”

“But—but that’s not what I—”

“Just answer this question: What was the purpose behind what you said? Was it to wound? Was it to hurt? Did your words come from a place of hatred?”

To Hannah’s horror, her eyes start to sting with tears. Her face and neck heat with blood.

“I wasn’t—” she croaks. “I wasn’t trying to—”

“I know,” Ms. Carpenter says. “And I know you weren’t acting like yourself. I’ve known you for four years and I’ve never heard you say anything like that. But Hannah—we have to take ownership for our words. Words are powerful. They can be devastating. If your words carry hate—if they shame others, if they make them doubt that they are loved—Hannah, you don’t want to own words like that.”

Ms. Carpenter pauses to watch her for a moment. She offers Hannah the box of tissues on the corner of her desk. Hannah does not take one. She looks away from Ms. Carpenter and swallows down the bad things in her throat. “Can I go?”

Ms. Carpenter nods quickly and repeatedly, as if remembering herself. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ll see you later.”

Hannah hurries out of the room and into the empty hallway. She pushes into the bathroom and checks the floor beneath the stalls to make sure there are no pairs of saddle-shoed feet in the room. Then she shuts herself into the handicap stall, leans her head against the cold tile, and breathes.

“I heard you got in trouble in Ms. Carpenter’s class today,” Joanie says after school. She stands across from Hannah in their mother’s yellow kitchen, snapping pretzels in her mouth. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing.” 

“I heard you said some shit about Father Simon.”

“Everyone’s been saying shit about Father Simon.”

“So did Ms. Carpenter give you detention?”

“No.”

Joanie snaps hard on a pretzel. “What’d she do?”

Hannah turns her back on Joanie to heat a bowl of leftover rice in the microwave. “She just talked to me.”

“Talked to you? What, like, lectured you?”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“Ms. Carpenter’s so cool,” Joanie says. “I can’t wait to have her next year.”

“She’s alright.”

“She’s awesome. You’ve been saying that for years.”

Hannah shrugs.

“Jeeze, what’d she do, shout in your face?” Joanie says. “I thought you loved her.”

Hannah pushes the microwave to stop it from beeping. “She just spewed a lot of bullshit.”

“Bullshit,” Joanie repeats. “What kind of bullshit?”

“Jesus, stop being so nosy. She just irritated me, okay?”

Joanie bites a large pretzel in half and stares Hannah down. “You’re probably just pissed because she was right about whatever she said.”

“Shut up, Joanie.”

Hannah takes the rice up to her bedroom and shuts the door with her foot. She sits on the end of her bed and stares across the room at her bookshelf.
A Separate Peace
.
To Kill a Mockingbird
.
The Catcher in the Rye
. All the books she read as a freshman in Ms. Carpenter’s English 1 Honors class—back when Ms. Carpenter still taught freshmen, before she switched wholly to seniors—stand side-by-side on the top shelf. They are small and unassuming, their spines crinkled in a way that makes Hannah nostalgic for the 14 year-old girl who had not yet opened them. The other books that Ms. Carpenter gave Hannah to read outside of class—
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
,
The Book Thief
,
The House on Mango Street
—books that Hannah then passed on to Baker—stand next to them. Hannah sets her rice bowl down on the bed and walks over to the bookshelf, running her fingers across the tops of the books, touching the dust that has settled over them to prove to Hannah just how long ago she read them, just how long ago she was that bright-eyed freshman girl. She trails her finger down the spine of
A Separate Peace
and remembers, with the soft coloring of memory, the first moment Baker existed in her world.

Hannah can still see the configuration of the classroom—the plastic-topped desks separated into two rectangular formations, each one facing the center of the room. She can still see Ms. Carpenter, the first teacher who showed them that high school would not be scary, sitting on her wooden stool in the middle of the tiled floor. And she can still see the back of the head of the girl sitting in the desk in front of her—the girl wearing a yellow headband over her long dark hair—who, on the third day of class, when they were supposed to be taking notes on Ms. Carpenter’s discussion of
A Separate Peace
, turned around and looked at Hannah with big, anxious eyes.

“Can I borrow a piece of paper?” she had asked, her voice nervous but earnest. “I gave my last piece of loose-leaf to someone in first block. I can just use, like, a torn-off piece of your paper—” she had pointed at Hannah’s sheet—“if you want.”

“Sure,” Hannah had said, sliding her paper forward, “but are you sure you don’t want
a separate piece
?”

Baker had faltered for the briefest second, not getting the joke, but then she had smiled like she’d just found the best surprise in the world. Hannah had given her a fresh sheet of paper, and after class they had walked to the cafeteria together and waited for each other in the lunch line, and by the end of the day Hannah couldn’t remember what life had been like before her.

Hannah closes her eyes against the memory and leans into the bookshelf, breathing in the musty scent of the books. Her mind drifts to a different memory of Baker—the one from the bathroom at the party on Tuesday night—and her heart and body hum to life before she can shut the memory down.

“No,” she whispers through gritted teeth. She weaves her hands into her hair and tugs hard. “Stop it.”

She leaves the rice on her bed and pulls her skirt, blouse, and knee socks off her body. She turns the shower on with the faucet switched all the way to the left—heat—and waits for the humidity to seep across the bathroom, hiding the mirror and drawing sweat from her body. Then she steps into the near-scalding water and sucks air over her teeth in response to the pain.

There is an ache in her chest. It stretches from the left side of her torso across to her right. It hurts but she doesn’t know why. It feels like the tears inside of her are trying to breathe but can’t.

She presses her forehead to the tile wall. The burning water pelts her body and she knows her skin will be pink and raw when she looks at herself in the mirror. She studies the water droplets that cling to the shower wall and she wishes she could cry out thousands of tears to stick there with them.

She lathers soap over her hands and scrubs at her heart, at her stomach, at her inner thighs, eradicating earliest evil from her body.

Things go back to normal with Baker. They talk at their lockers and laugh at inside jokes at lunchtime. They work together in Ms. Carpenter’s class and hang around each other’s cars in the parking lot. They spend the last day of February working on papers at Garden District Coffee, and when Hannah looks up and sees Baker mouthing words at her laptop, a large mug of dark roast clutched in her hand, she has a hard time remembering the girl from the bathroom: all she sees is her best friend.

The only new thing—the thing that’s not normal—is the unspoken new rule: they can never talk about it.

Chapter Five: Girl and Boy

During the first full week of March, when Hannah drops by the student council office after school, she finds Baker holding a single red rose in her hand.

“What’s that?” Hannah asks, the scene not making sense to her.

“Clay asked me to prom,” Baker says, leaning back against the whiteboard and twirling the stem around her fingers.

“Prom?”

“Yeah,” Baker smiles.

“And he gave you a flower?”

“A rose. Look, smell it.”

Hannah holds the rose up to her face, but she can’t smell anything. “Awesome,” she says, the word scraping up from some hollow place inside her stomach.

The door opens and Michele hurries into the office, heading straight for the vice president’s desk without looking at either of them. 

Hannah hands the rose back to Baker. “I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll call you about the AP Lit homework,” Baker says, her eyes touching Hannah’s only briefly before she looks at the rose again.

Hannah has her hand on the door when Michele’s grating voice stops her. “What is that?”

Michele is looking at the rose. Her jaw hangs loose from her face.

Baker eyes her without blinking. “It’s a rose…” she says slowly, as if speaking to a child.

“Who gave it to you?”

“Clay. Why?”

Michele pushes her tongue against her front teeth. After a long second, she says, “Did he ask you to prom?”

“Yes,” Baker says, “and I don’t see why you care. He broke up with you almost six months ago. And then you ratted him out to Father Simon. Remember?”

Michele’s face flushes pink. She breathes heavily through her nose as her eyes fill with tears.

“He asked me to go with him,” Baker continues, her eyes still unblinking, “and I want to. So I’m going.”

Michele wrenches her booksack off the desk and storms out of the room, pushing Hannah with her shoulder in her haste to get out the door.

Baker blinks very fast, her eyelashes fluttering like bird’s wings. She sets her lips hard against each other and tosses the rose onto her desk.

“That wasn’t like you,” Hannah says quietly.

Baker drops down into her chair and slumps her shoulders over her desk. “A lot of things haven’t been like me lately,” she says.

On Thursday morning, when Hannah pulls into her parking spot, she notices Clay standing with Baker at her car. Baker holds a skinny, rectangular white box in her arms.

“What’s he doing here?” Joanie frowns. “He never gets here earlier than us.”

“’Morning,” Clay says when they step out of the car.

“Hi,” Hannah says. “You’re early today.”