The Yearbook (3 page)

“I'm afraid tonight was our last performance.” Lola snapped her fingers. “Too bad. It
was
swell.”

“A play and a dance, and all in the same night,” Peter said. “You're a social butterfly.”

Lola smiled at him. What kind of eyes did he have, that he could see her that way? In her short life she'd collected a number of labels: socially awkward, socially unacceptable, social outcast, Social Services client. But social butterfly?

“I am fairly active socially,” she said. “It's my nature.”

The longer the dance went on, the harder it was for Lola to accept that she could be dreaming. The exertion had brought a mist of sweat to her forehead, and she keenly felt her heart beating, her lungs sucking in the perfumed air. She looked at Peter's hand in hers, at the blue veins just visible under his skin. Everything was utterly solid and consistent. She had never felt more awake.

“You've got me beat,” Peter was saying. “I've been rather a hermit lately, holed up with my inventions.” He whirled her in and out.
One-two-three-and-four. Five. Rotate. Seven-and-eight.

“What do you invent?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. It's a hobby. I want to be a scientist.”

“What kind of a scientist?”

“I want to disprove bunkum.”

“What's that?”

“Séances, necromancy, fortune telling, spiritualism, all that.”

Lola nodded. “Oh. You mean bull. Stuff that's a crock.”

“No, no. This has nothing to do with cookery. What I mean is, people have no business clinging to Medieval superstitions in 1923. It's just willful ignorance to keep on turning away from what science has brought us and . . .” Peter kept talking, but Lola didn't hear the rest.

He said 1923. And I'm here. I am not in a dream. How did I get here? How many years ago? Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty. No. Start over. Subtract twenty, forty, seventy, eighty, ninety. I can't get it. I need a calculator.

“You're shivering,” Peter said. “Is anything wrong?”

“No, no. Not shivering.”
Should I say something? Alert somebody? Of course not. They'd have me hauled away in a straitjacket. And I wouldn't blame them.

Peter put a hand on her shoulder. “You
are
shivering. They've got hot cider tonight. Come on. Let's have some.”

Peter filled two cups with dark brown cider. Lola took a gulp and shuddered. Somebody had spiked the cider, too. The warmth flowed down into her insides and steadied her nerves.
I need a plan
, Lola thought. But she couldn't begin to think of what kind of plan a person should make under such circumstances.

“There,” Peter said. “That's better, isn't it?”

He talked on about his scientific ideas, and Lola steered the conversation away from herself. What, after all, could she say now that was true? Not even her vital statistics were necessarily valid. Her birth date? It had not happened. Her history? There was none. She began to feel weightless and free, like a kite whose string has snapped.

“I think I get what you mean by bunkum,” she said. “Like people who say aliens suck them up in their spaceships and do experiments on them.”

“I haven't heard anything like that before,” Peter said. “But I wouldn't discount it entirely. I'll bet there are moon men and Martians up there, millions of them maybe, going about their business, eating supper and driving their automobiles just like we are, and one day they might pay us a call. It only stands to reason.”

Lola nodded politely and swallowed her mouthful of cider to keep it from shooting out of her nose, then pulled Peter back onto the dance floor. Despite the colossal weirdness of the situation, and the absolute violation of the laws of physics, she was enjoying herself very much—the music and the glitter and mainly this teen scientist in a man's suit. At last the orchestra played its final chord, and the dancers broke into applause.

“Don't go yet,” Peter said. “Let's look at the stars.”

A full moon lit up the campus, and the lawns glowed silver-green. Couples strolled along the paths. Snatches of their chatter floated along on the autumn-scented breeze.

“Here's a nice spot,” Peter said. He brushed some leaves from the edge of the fountain and they sat down. Above them, a bronze mermaid—a mermaid with a head, a beautiful head with curly bronze tresses—spouted water through parted lips. The water bubbled and tinkled into a pool strewn with wishing pennies.

“Where do you live, Lola?”

“Quarrier Street.” She was glad to be telling the truth at least this once. “I just moved in.”

“You'll be attending school here at Ashfield, then?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That is wonderful news. I hope you won't think us too dull. I mean, after New York. I'll bet our new dances are old hat to you.”

Lola rubbed her ankles and made a face. “But they're all new hat to me. Couldn't you tell?”

“It's those French hobo shoes. They're no good for dancing the Lindy Hop. From a structural point of view, I mean. May I?”

He stretched Lola's right foot onto his wool-covered knee and pulled off her shoe and sock. The night air tickled her foot. “This is a peculiar stocking,” he remarked, stretching the twenty-first-century microfiber up and down. “Stays up by itself, doesn't it? Is it rubber?”

“It's from France,” Lola said. “Pretty soon—”

“I know, we'll all be wearing rubber socks.”

He placed her bare foot under the cascade of cool water from the mermaid's mouth and rubbed the tendons with firm fingers. She closed her eyes and watched the fireworks exploding on the backs of her eyelids. Every thought, every fear, was knocked from her brain.

“May I make a personal observation?” Peter said.

“Go ahead.”

“You seem foreign. I mean, not only from out of state but, I can't put my finger on it, like someone from another country. You're from far away. Am I right?”

“No. Domestic. Not an import,” Lola said, but she loved that he'd asked. She looked foreign to him, exotic. Having been told it, she began to feel it.

“Maybe something about the way you talk. Something's different. I'm sure I'm right.”

He put Lola's foot down and started in on the other one. All the while he watched her steadily. Finally, he shook his head and chuckled to himself.

“What?” Lola said.

“You're such a beautiful girl,” he said. “I haven't bothered to look at the stars.”

Members of the orchestra now moved across the lawn with their instrument cases, toward the dark street. “Closing up, kids,” the singer called to them, then faded down the path until there was nothing left of him but his hum:
Every morning, every evening, ain't we got fun?

“It's still early,” Peter said. “We could go to my workshop and I'll fix your necklace. My house is down on the corner of Elm and Maple, just near here. Then I could walk you home, if you like. Or we could meet up with some of the kids at the picnic grounds. We could get my telescope or—”

He held out his hand, and she took it, and a shock ran from her forehead to her toenails, as strong as a jolt of electricity but warm, thrilling. She knew he'd felt it, too, because he forgot what he was saying about the telescope and stared down at their clasped hands.

“Will you come, then?” he said shyly.

Lola nodded and stood up. “Let me grab my bag.”

“Lola,” he said as she moved away, carrying her shoes. “I almost didn't come to the dance tonight, but I'm so awful glad I did.”

“So am I,” Lola said.

“I'll wait for you,” he called. “Right here, by the mermaid.”

Lola raced into the gym. Groups of flushed and happy dancers jostled her as they filed out. Her bare feet slapped along the hallway. She rounded the corner, entered the library, and passed through the low doorway into the reserve room. She snatched her knapsack from the table and read the words
YOU SUCK
.

The room had returned to its previous condition, with the moldy air and overflowing garbage bin. The long sofa was gone, along with the reading lamps and wide oak desk. She knew Peter would be gone, too, but she ran from the room to look for him, along corridors that had lost their sheen.

Voices, happy voices, echoed from the direction of the gym. The dancers? Could they still be there? She ran faster, her feet slapping painfully now on the cold floor.

She entered the gym. A stocky girl in a red vinyl mini-dress stood on a ladder, laughing at the disco ball that wouldn't come down, and the same student council doofs she'd seen earlier yanked at streamers and popped balloons. They all turned to look at her.

“It's over,” the girl on the ladder shouted down to her. “Nobody's allowed back in.”

Lola raced straight through the gym and out into the courtyard. In a second she was at the fountain, looking into its dry basin at a thousand dirty wads of gum. She dropped her shoes and sank to her knees in the dewy grass. Sweat trickled down her back. She was dizzy and held onto her hair with both hands to steady herself. The clock tower down the street tolled faintly. It was midnight. After a while she heard the one o'clock chime, and then the two o'clock, and then, after what seemed only a few minutes, three chimes came.

She noticed that she was shivering. If only she could go back inside, into the gym, for just a few minutes. She stood up. Her limbs were stiff and cramped. She got to the door and pulled on it. It wouldn't open. She yanked harder and then kicked it. An alarm went off, loud and grinding.

She staggered back over to the fountain and sat down on the edge. A jingling made her look up. “Peter?” she called out.

A night watchman was approaching on the walk. “Who's over there?”

“Lola.”

The beam of a flashlight struck her in the face and she turned away. She saw that the dew on the grass had turned to frost.

“Lola what?” the guard said.

“Lola Lundy.”

“You alone?”

“Yeah.”

“Who's Peter?”

“Nobody. I'm alone.”

“Did you scream before? I thought I heard a scream.”

Lola's ears rang as if she'd been at a rock concert. She wasn't sure if she'd screamed or not. She might have, she thought, when the alarm went off. She didn't answer.

“Whatcha doin' here?”

“I was helping clean the library. I think I fell asleep. I'm new.”

“It's three-thirty in the morning. Did you know that?”

The alarm grated on and on. The guard raked his beam over her seated figure. The light lingered on her bare feet. “You been drinking alcohol this evening, Lola?”

“No.” she lied, remembering the spiked cider.

He jingled the keys again. He had a potbelly that sagged over his belt. “You smoking anything, then?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh. Where's your shoes?”

She looked around. The shoes were next to her in the grass. She held them up and tried to smile. “Here they are. I was just rinsing off my feet.”

The guard pointed at the cracked, revolting basin. “In that?”

“I mean, I was going to wash my feet, until I saw it was empty. I'm new. I'm going home now.”

The guard slowly nodded. He had accepted the story. He'd especially liked the ending, this weird girl's exit from his territory. He said a few words into his walkie-talkie and the alarm stopped ringing.

“You got a ride or something?”

She nodded toward the parking lot. “That's my bike over there.”

“Yeah? Okay, then.” He watched her get up.

She couldn't find her socks. She jammed on the shoes and started toward her bike.

The guard's voice came after her, through the dark. “By the way, you can't park there. That's staff only. Hey!”

Lola pedaled like crazy away from the school, not because of the night watchman but because she had suddenly remembered the yearbook. It was in her knapsack and she had to look at it, right away, now. At the first intersection she stopped under a streetlight and pulled out the book. Crumbs of paper flaked from the edges of its old pages and shot off into the wind as she leafed quickly through the senior class photos:
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-Haley-Hansen-
Hemmings
-
Higgins-Hill. Peter Hemmings.
Peter looked at her from out of an oval frame, serious and grown-up in shades of gray. He had on the same suit he had worn at the dance; she knew the soft feel of its woolen sleeve. Her hand holding the page shook. “There you are,” she whispered, but then she reread the heading on the page:
CLASS OF 1924
. It couldn't be “are.” It had to be “were.” But she had just seen him, just now, just danced with him, felt his hands, warm and alive and young, massaging her feet under the waterfall. Somewhere, she felt sure,
he
still has to be
, somewhere nearby, but hidden.

She paged through the rest of the portraits. She found Luther “Thumbtack” Matthews, the image faded but recognizable, and then Whoopsie Whipple, looking solemn as a saint in her junior class portrait. Her real name was Mary.

A minivan passed through the intersection and startled her. She'd almost forgotten she was standing on a road. She thought of how she must look, a teenage girl loitering under a streetlight in the dead of night. The minivan dorks had probably reported her, and there she sat, breaking curfew in the most obvious available spot.

She zipped up the yearbook in her knapsack and veered down a side street. The detour passed through Fairview, a decaying neighborhood where it was dark and dense and easier to travel unnoticed. She and her mother had supposedly lived in a trailer park around here once, but she had no memory of it. She skimmed past ramshackle apartment buildings, vacant lots, and dark storefronts.

Soon she saw the abandoned brick factory ringed in barbed wire that marked her halfway point. A weak yellow streetlight shone down on the spooky ruin, and Lola read the familiar sign carved into the stone front:
GADD BRICKS
. The rhythm of her pedaling, the chilly wind, helped her calm down. How, she asked herself, had it happened?
How
does a person fall asleep in the twenty-first century, wake in 1923, attend a dance, turn over her favorite possession to a stranger with thrilling green eyes, and then, without any sort of warning, end up back in the present, barefoot, staring at the words
YOU SUCK
scratched into a tabletop? But these were questions for the head of NASA, not for somebody who had flunked gym.