Teach Me (14 page)

the dripping years

“Here.”

Schuyler hands me a cup of water.

He didn’t skip on Senior Skip Day, either. Today he’s playing office aide.

I can see the reflection of my own devastation in his eyes, the way the blood has drained from his face. “Now what is—?” he starts.

“Wait,” I say. “Please.”

I can’t bear to look him in the eye.

Instead I look into the paper cup and sip. Sip again. My hands are trembling so much, the water pulses in concentric circles. The forest fire of my anger has settled down to a few smoking embers. I’m coming back into myself, realizing the horror of what I’ve just done.

The clock on the wall makes a sound like a blade coming down with each tick.

I know he’s aching to talk, but I appreciate that he is letting me have a moment to collect myself, survey the carnage.

Zeb Greasy and the other People Who Count are behind closed doors debating my future. His door is thick, but not so thick we can’t hear the subsurface rumbling of their voices.

At the other end of this narrow space is Ms. Jackson. She’s the person who checks students out for doctor appointments, field trips, attempted homicides. Her desk is surrounded by American flags, desperately misshapen bald eagles, wooden slogans:

I’m supposed to be cheered by this display. Ms. Jackson never looks up. She’s not a color.

I look up. Schuyler’s holding a pen above some official-looking documents.

“Talk to me,” he says.

“No.”

He leans forward and whispers, “Don’t worry about her.”— Ms. Jackson—“Just talk to me.”

“It’s too much. I don’t know what to say.”

“But what did you do? What’s going on?”

He knows I’ve never been in trouble before, not for the slightest infraction, going all the way back to seventh grade, when Ms. Collins caught me chewing gum.

I take another sip, put the cup down. “Just fill out the papers for me, please. I can’t do it. I have to get out of here, Schuyler. You have to trust me. I’m losing it. I can’t stand it anymore. I’ll go crazy.”

I can’t tell him everything, not now. We have to have each other. That’s all we have. Nobody else knows us at our centers. If Schuyler finds out about Mr. Mann—I’m so terrified maybe I won’t even have him anymore. Not in the same way. Best friends don’t do this to best friends. It will never be the same again once he knows. And I’ll be all alone, stuck inside here. Stuck inside my head. No way out anymore.

He opens his mouth but is drowned out by the squawk box on the wall ordering all the graphics geeks to multimedia. As if the world hasn’t just come to an end.

“Come on. Talk to me, Nine.”

“Please. You know what to write; just do it.”

“Okay. Name, rank, serial number.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Schuyler scratches away for a while. Have they called my folks? Does it matter? This is a dream. That’s it. Just ride it out, daylight will come.

A door opens in the dream and God appears. No, it’s not the Almighty, it’s Zeb Greasy. Dream over. The look on his face says he’s extraordinarily disappointed. The blotchy red spot on his cheekbone says to my horror that I nailed him a good one; my knuckles are still smarting. He motions me inside.

Schuyler reaches across the counter and gives my hand a squeeze just before I go in; this makes it infinitely worse. I slip through the door, let it swing shut behind me like a vault.

“I saw her just before it happened,” Zeb is saying to the assistant principal, Mr. Pendergraff, as if I’ve gone deaf. Mr. Pendergraff is the Head Butt-beater and Discipline Guy. “I knew something was wrong.”

I can’t think anything but the most basic thoughts. A person who shares my name is in tremendous trouble. For some reason I’m here, watching. Part interested, part stupefied.

Now Zeb Greasy’s addressing me, my hearing miraculously healed.

“You want to talk about it, Carolina?”

I don’t speak, don’t even shake my head. Do I ever want to talk about anything again? I don’t know. Will they beat my butt? They can’t do that these days.

Zeb’s office is large. Lots of polished, beveled wood: his desk, his nameplate, lacquered copies of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights.

“Have a seat.”

Zeb gestures and I sit. His chair makes an officious farting noise as he settles into it.

I turn my attention to Mr. Pendergraff. He remains standing. He is just the opposite of Zeb Greasy. Small featured, small boned, small voiced. If they lock us in a cage together, he’s a dead man.

Mr. Pendergraff creases his flat butt against the edge of a table. He’s wearing colored prescription glasses that scream Gamblers Anonymous. His wrinkly skin has no snap; surely he must be a smoker.

“I’ve called your parents, Carolina,” Mr. Pendergraff says. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” He’s mouthing the words as if I’m a lip-reader or buzzed on Ecstasy.

I devote just enough juice to the question to allow me to weakly nod. This is happening to someone else in a galaxy far, far away. Through some tangle in the space-time fabric of things, I’m able to witness the destruction of this strange, obsessed girl.

“You physically assaulted Mr. Deason,” Mr. Pendergraff says. “Like to tell me why?”

“No. I can’t.”

So they think this is all about me and Zeb. They don’t know what happened in Mr. Mann’s office. Don’t know I almost wanted to kill him.

Where is he? What is he thinking right this moment? Is he terrified, praying I won’t tell? Or maybe he doesn’t pray.

Maybe he needs to start.

“You realize, don’t you, that we could expel you for this, Carolina,” Mr. Pendergraff says. “Technically. You know what that means, right? No diploma. Repeat of your senior year.”

My heart plunges into my sneakers.

“But to tell you the truth, we don’t want to do that. I’ve pulled your file—” Mr. Pendergraff touches a manila folder on the table with the tips of four fingers. “You’ve never given anybody a lick of trouble. Straight As since the eighth grade, which is as far back as our college reporting goes. Perfect attendance five years running. You don’t even skip on Senior Day. So tell me about it. Why did this happen?”

“I can’t—it just—happened.”

“Talking is always better, Carolina. Believe me. I’ve been at this thirty-five years. Talking is better.”

Nothing.

I won’t do it. I refuse to make this easy for Mr. Mann.

“Look, I’m not here to make your life miserable,” Mr. Pendergraff says. “I’m here to help. Mr. Deason says you were called into the counselor’s office just before the—ah—incident. Now, what’s said there is private, I know that. But a student like you—a girl!—just doesn’t go off like that for no reason a few days before she graduates. Something sparked it. I need to know what that something is. You’ll feel better once you get it off your chest. Trust me.”

I wish I could cry, scream, anything to get him to shut up and just get it over with. But he marches on.

Thirty minutes later, it’s still on my chest and I’m still not in a trusting mood. Mom is in the outer office. Dad can’t be reached; he must be out at the test stands again.

All I know is, it is finished.

School. For me, at least.

I’m suspended the last three days of my senior year.

A permanent blot on my perfect, stainless record. Surely not even Hub Christy could manage this achievement.

Mr. Pendergraff assures me I can still attend graduation and the baccalaureate at the Civic Center.

“The police—”

Did he really mention the police? But why would they be interested? For the first time, the full consequences of what I’ve done sink in. I’ve assaulted a faculty member. Two, if truth be known. He promises not to call them.

Why can’t I stop? Why can’t I just tell them, End it all now? Do I really want to take Mr. Mann’s head, push it under, hold it there until the bubbles stop rising? What am I turning into? What is he?

Where is he?

Mom.

She breaks down, collects herself, breaks down a second time. Finally is able to talk to the Head Butt-beater, then we talk together, Mom getting more and more stridently hysterical. Why do adults think teenagers will heed their words of wisdom if they repeat them three times? Four? A hundred? At top volume? Do they really believe we are that thick? We heard you. The first time. We’re beating ourselves up worse than you could ever imagine.

Shame.

I’m rolled up in it. Festering, smelly, crazy with fear, nuclear embarrassment, self-loathing. I’ve transformed myself from the sweet, perfect daughter she knows into something lower than a hairy clog in the bottom of a bathtub drain. Worse, I’m afraid for her, afraid she will blow up some important plumbing in her head with all the weeping and pleading.

“Darling, darling, tell me something!” she begs.

“Mom. Mom. Mom.” I want to shake her, hold her, crush her unnaturally curly head into my arms.

“What?”

“Please, let’s just go home.”

“But we have to work through this, sweetheart! Mr. Pendergraff—”

“Doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“But won’t you tell us why you did this thing? What’s happened?”

“I can’t, really I can’t. But please don’t worry, okay? It’ll be okay, it will.”

Will it?

She daubs at her eyes with a hay fever tissue. Her words come out between gulping sobs. “How can you tell me not to worry, sweetheart? It’s impossible. Your principal! Impossible. I knew something was happening, I knew it! But I can help—your father and I, we can help. But you’ve got to talk to us, darling. Don’t shut us out.”

She starts to say something else; it becomes a wail of despair instead.

Is this how it happens?

All those people who do dumb, crazy, idiotic things—does it start with something like this? I’m getting stupider and stupider. By some reverse alchemical process, my forehead has been transmogrified into a substance thick enough to block gamma rays.

Thank goodness they’ve sent Schuyler up the hall on an errand. He’s not here to see this, to watch us stumbling along like victims of an air crash as Mr. Pendergraff escorts us out.

Mom clutches my middle as we stagger up the hall, putting her head against my shoulder. She’s desperate to make me ten again, the last time she could truly understand me. Or take me in her arms without my chin resting on her forehead. I’m aware of the tendons radiating out from my neck, the pressure she is putting there.

In the parking lot I’m suddenly hammered with the realization: This is it.

This bleary, insane mess is the culmination of twelve years of steadfast, unrelenting effort; over thirteen thousand hours, eight hundred thousand minutes, untold millions of separate moments, mostly forgettable, others that made all the difference.

This place I’ve been so familiar with, the faces, walls, doors, smells, sounds, angles of light—I haven’t been in the library in a week—now I’ll never see it again. Not once. Everything is over. It’s my turn to wail.

Mr. Pendergraff waves at us from the double doors.

“Goodbye, young lady,” he says. “I hope you’ll think about what we’ve said here today.”

Young?

Goodbye, indeed.

critical mass

It’s bad.

But I can’t help it. Mom is so trusting.

But I’ve got to escape. This is killing me.

She’s in front of me in her daisy-yellow Bug, driving ten miles an hour below the speed limit, left blinker stuck in the on position. Three times I’ve nearly rear ended her.

At the next intersection, I turn right without signaling and let her go.

With any luck, it’ll be blocks before she notices. This is mean, even monstrously cruel, but I don’t care. I can’t face them both. Right now I’d rather worry them to death than answer their questions. My whole life I’ve been a Good Girl. I’m ready to be a little bad.

I don’t know where I’m going. I fight to keep from turning down the road to Sunlake. No.

Clouds are gathering. We could use the rain. A torrent, a flood, something to push me off the road, carry me into the ocean, where I can slip beneath the waves. Just park and watch the fish swim by as I rot.

Have I eaten? What day is this?

I’m nearly out of gas. Maybe I should drive straight out of town, see how far it takes me, then get out and walk into the woods. There are places where you can walk for miles without seeing a road or another human being. Is this true or just my fervent wish?

Why do people need other people so much? Why can’t we just do our work and go home? Why do we have to talk and touch and dream together?

This feels like something pretending to be my life.

How could things have gone this wrong so quickly? It was his choice; all he had to do was stay the course. He destroyed everything.

I’m driving too fast; does that matter? It’s an act of will to keep Wilkie between the lines. But hasn’t that been what I’ve always done up to now? Lived between the lines? What made me think I could go outside them? How could he have given me that kind of courage and then pulled it all away?

Is he thinking about me now?

I can taste tar blowing through the vents.

Vacation.

Just like Mom wanted, I’m suddenly ten years old again.

I can see the ocean.

We’ve driven a million miles to get here.

North Carolina, the Outer Banks National Seashore.

I’m walking down a sharply descending strip of sand; the surf comes in very rough here. A little ways out the bottom suddenly drops, becomes a long wedge of hard sand, a place where the edge of the continent is about to crack off. You can see it plainly when the sea pulls back between waves. This is where the surf strikes each time it falls, where the ocean sucks at every particle of sand, water, weed, makes them broil on top of this knife cut in the bottom.

I wade out to see what it’s like. Suddenly I can’t move my legs.

I see Mom and Dad a football pass away, but they might as well be on Mars. They can’t reach me, can’t even hear me because of the crashing surf.

The earth tumbles beneath my feet. I’m going under. God has just sat down in his bath. I’m rolling on the knife edge beneath the waves; there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m going to be rolling on this underwater ridge forever. Until I’m beaten microscopic, become a part of the sea, scattered. Still, I fight it, clawing at the sand. It’s scratching and tearing at me. Finally my lungs are bursting; I can’t battle the pull anymore. I let go.

Suddenly I’m up in the light, flung far from shore.

They had to get me with a boat.

Blink.

Where am I?

Suddenly it’s there again, not the ocean, but the road in front of me. I’m driving. I’ve traveled an unknown number of miles without seeing anything but memories. There’s a billboard up ahead, huge and orange-yellow, with a line of painted green mountains in the background. The lettering is ominous, large, black:

Alicia’s father. Mr. Sprunk.

I remember that awful lizard face. From the wedding.

The road blurs; I’m weeping again.

This is the thing about life I’ve never really understood until now: we try so hard to control it, but bad things happen anyway. The only real control is an anti-control, a letting go. Like I did at the ocean when I was ten. That’s what nature really wants.

Okay.

The steering wheel is loose in my hands.

I let it slurry back and forth, feeling Wilkie’s tires shimmy on the pavement. A dull tingling starts at my temples. Spots are spreading across my eyes.

My hands leave the steering wheel.

I don’t know if this is a conscious act.

There’s a long moment when everything is perfection; Wilkie’s alignment is Good and True. I run straight down the road, an electron in a particle accelerator.

Then.

Wilkie swerves, nearly jumps the median, recovers valiantly, slides across two lanes, heading for a group of corrugated buildings. Horns blare and rubber squeals.

Emily.

 
Good-by to the life I used to live,
And the world I used to know;
And kiss the hills for me, just once;
Now I am ready to go!