Lying frightens me.
I’ve tried to do it, but it’s like looking at a tree and trying to see a house or a boat or a monkey. Besides, once I tell myself that the tree isn’t a tree, the possibilities are limitless. The tree could be anything—a whale, a lion, a hot-air balloon, an army tank, a soldier with a machine gun…
I stared at page sixty-five of The Outsiders and wondered if I could lie about gym. Perhaps I could say I was sick, like Emma, a girl in my old school who had hated gym.
Something touched me. I jumped, jerking my gaze from page sixty-five of The Outsiders.
I do not like to be touched.
I turned. The guy across the aisle was leaning over, holding a piece of paper. He jerked his head toward the girl behind me like he had a neck spasm.
He was chewing gum—spearmint—and his mouth made a rhythmic squelching sound. I took the paper. It had a name scrawled on it: TARA.
“Alice, are you writing notes?” Ms. Burgess asked.
Ms. Burgess is the English teacher. She never allows talking on phones in her class. She walked down the row to me. She smiled. A smile can mean that a person is happy or glad or even excited. I wondered if she was happy, glad or excited.
“Answer me! Are you writing notes?” Ms. Burgess tapped her fingernail on my desk (five times). I shook my head.
“Then who is?”
“Him,” I said.
The boy drew his eyebrows together and made a gesture I will not describe, as it is against the rules. He also said a swearword, which I will not write because it is also against the rules.
Ms. Burgess went red, not a solid color but mottled with white patches near her mouth and spattered across her cheeks and neck.
“I will not have that language in my class!” Her voice was high.
Then she told the boy to come with her to the principal’s office. They left together. Ms. Burgess’s heels click-clacked into the distance, followed by the heavy, slower clump of the boy’s boots.
“What a rat!” The girl behind me stood, pushing her desk into mine with a clunk.
I looked at the floor. I am not afraid of rodents, as they do not bite humans unless rabid, although I don’t own any myself because their cages smell.
Someone laughed. “She’s, like, looking for a rat. What a moron.”
Then I realized that the girl was using an idiom and meant that I was the rat. Rat can mean an individual who tells someone in a position of authority about someone else’s misdeeds.
I do not like idioms.
The girl stood in front of my desk. She put both hands on it and leaned over. She smelled of hair spray and perfume.
“Do you get off on getting other people in trouble?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Which was true, because I did not know what get off meant. My heart was pounding. I looked down at my desk and counted the lines in the grain of the fake wood.
This didn’t work because the lines were wavy and merged into each other. My face felt hot and sticky. My breath came quickly, as though to keep pace with the thump-thump-thump of my heart. My stomach squeezed into a tight, hard ball. I felt myself start to sway, to rock.
I knew that if I rocked or banged my head, they would laugh more.
I squeezed my hands together, pressing them against my thighs. I tried to count.
“You talking to yourself? You mental or what?” the girl asked. She spoke loudly, even though she was standing close to me.
Megan said, “Leave her alone, Tara.”
I hadn’t even realized Megan was in the classroom.
For a second the others grew silent.
“Why? She’s a nasty little snitch,” Tara said.
“Just leave her alone.” Megan cracked her knuckles, one at a time.
The silence seemed to grow.
“You gonna make me?” Tara asked.
“If I have to,” Megan said.
I think she stood. I heard the scrape of chair legs, the jingle of her belt and the clunk of her boots. I looked up. She was coming down the aisle toward Tara, who had straightened, lifting her hands from my desk.
“Catfight!” someone yelled. (I think this is another idiom, as there were no cats about. I do not think the principal allows cats or dogs inside the school building.)
The bell rang, but no one moved.
“Well?” Megan asked.
“Whatever. I’m out of here.” Tara grabbed her backpack, swinging it around so that I felt the air stir. Her runners squeaked as she walked between the desks and into the hall. The door banged shut.
People laughed. I didn’t know why. People laugh at jokes or clowns or funny movies, but this wasn’t any of those things.
Then everybody moved and talked at once. Feet shuffled. Books banged. Chairs scraped. I didn’t move. The rule is to stay until the teacher dismisses us, and Ms. Burgess hadn’t come back.
Besides, I didn’t want to move. I didn’t even know if I could move. My legs and arms felt floppy. My heart still beat too fast, and my armpits were sticky.
At last the room became silent except for slow footsteps. I looked up. Megan was walking toward me.
“She could have rearranged your face, you know,” she said.
From the hall outside, I could hear the muted noise of walking and talking and the clanging of lockers. Someone had carved JKR into the fake wood of my desk.
“Tara could have rearranged your face,” Megan repeated.
How did someone rearrange a face? I stared at the J. It was carved with sharp angles, no curves. I rubbed my fingers over it, feeling the roughness of the groove.
“You could say thank you,” Megan said.
I said nothing.
“Or not.”
The classroom door opened. I knew this without looking up because I felt a breeze and the noise from the hallway suddenly amplified.
“Hey, what are you kids still doing here? School’s out.” It was Principal Harris.
“Outta here,” Megan said.
I looked down, watching her boots leave and counting her footsteps. Then I heard the squeak of Mr. Harris’s shoes as he crossed the linoleum floor toward me. I stared at the J.
“You too.” He’d reached my desk. He leaned forward, putting his hands over the JKR. He had stubby fingers with short nails and dark hairs at the knuckles. Coffee laced his breath.
“Hey? Are you okay?” His hand lifted, touching my shoulder, and then everything—the touch, the coffee breath, the squelching spearmint gum, idioms, rats, Ms. Burgess, Ms. Lawrence, Tara, Megan, Kitimat, Mom being a sandwich, buses that changed names and Dad wanting me to be average in type, appearance, achievement, function and development—became too much.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t even see properly. The chairs, the desks, the windows and even Mr. Harris jumped and swirled in a jerky, panicked dance.
I got up. I must have hit my thigh. I found a bruise the next morning, big and blue and purple.
Then I ran. Past the principal, the desks, through the door and into the hall.
But the hall was worse. It smelled of molten metal from industrial ed, burned food from cooking class, sweat, socks, perfume and hair spray. Lockers clanged. The intercom crackled. People laughed and shouted.
I couldn’t get through. Their bodies were made huge by backpacks, and thick winter coats clogged the hallway.
Like a wall. Of bodies. Of flesh.
I couldn’t stop running. I had to get out. I had to get away. I pushed through them, still running, weaving through the blur of faces, not stopping until I’d burst into the cold outside air.
And still I ran. I ran across the entry to the parking lot, down the grassy hill, across the spongy wood-chip track, stopping only at the edge of the empty field.
I doubled over, gulping. My chest hurt. My heart pounded. My eyes stung. My legs wobbled as I let my body slump until I was on my knees. The dampness of the earth soaked into the denim of my jeans.
Then I curled into a ball and squeezed my eyes tightly, tightly shut.
***
“I brought your backpack out.”
I curled tighter. But I could hear noises now—the distant purr of traffic, a bird, a car door. I opened my eyes. It was dark, not pitch-black but a wintery dim.
“The bus should be here soon,” Megan said, putting my pack beside me.
“The—After-School—Special?” I pulled myself into a sitting position.
“No, it’s gone. You’ve been here for, like, an hour. But the City Center bus goes to the same place.”
I swallowed. I heard the glug in my throat. I looked past the field to the wet road and the passing cars, their lights making streaks of brightness in the gray afternoon.
Megan sat on the grass. The chains around her neck and waist clanked.
“What do you have?” she asked.
“Have?” Have means to possess or own. “A cell phone, my agenda, my mask, one pencil, two pens, a scientific calculator, my math binder, my lunch bag, my bus pass and twenty dollars for emergencies,” I said.
“No, I mean, why are you like this? Why do you act like this?”
I couldn’t remember anyone ever asking me that question. Usually they asked their moms, or their moms asked my mom or the teacher.
“Asperger’s,” I said. “What do you have?”
“You think I have something?” Her mouth curved upward.
“You have bad hand-eye coordination,” I explained.
I know the term hand-eye coordination from the occupational therapists’ reports. I’ve had three since kindergarten. My hand-eye coordination is not great, but not as bad as some kids who have Asperger’s.
“Hand-eye? Why do you think I have bad coordination?” she asked.
“The bruises.”
She laughed. I didn’t understand why, because I had not told a joke or acted like a clown. Her laughter was high. “The bruises?” she repeated.
“Do you have a designation?” Another word I’ve known since kindergarten, like other kids learn shapes and colors.
“Yeah—terminal idiot from a line of terminal idiots.” Her laughter stopped suddenly, like it was switched off. She stared toward the road. There was a green Toyota Camry, six streetlamps, eight trees, nine houses.
Maybe she was counting them too.
It was quiet, so quiet I could hear the feathered movement of a bird flying overhead and the rustling scuffle as Megan dug the toe of her boot into the earth.
I liked that she didn’t keep talking.
And that she didn’t smell.
Not of sweat or perfume or shampoo.
“We should go to the bus stop,” she said, breaking the hush. “You gonna be okay to take the bus?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know if I would be okay. I did not even know what okay meant, because it is one of those words without a clear definition—plus it comes after mineralize.
“I take the After-School Special every day,” I said.
“The City Center bus goes to the same place as the After-School Special.”
“How do you know?”
“I take it,” she said. “I get detention every day.”
At the far end of the road, I saw a bus turn, its headlamps twin beams of light. I heard my breath quicken. I wished there were more cars or houses or streetlamps to count.
I shook my head and hugged my knees more tightly against my chest.
Megan shifted. I heard the rustle of her clothes. “You’ll miss it if you don’t go now,” she said.
I said nothing, pressing my face onto my knees.
“Here,” she said.
I looked up. She held out her hand. A necklace of black beads lay in the center of her palm. A metallic skull hung in the middle. Perhaps she collected skulls. In Vancouver, my mother had had a friend who collected decorative mushrooms. She had mushroom plates, mushroom salt shakers and even mushroom egg cups.
“Take it,” Megan said. “You can count the beads.”
“I like to count,” I said.
“I know. Mom too.”
“Does she have Asperger’s?”
“No.”
I took the beads. They felt warm from her skin, smooth and polished. I curled my fingers about them. I counted them…one…two…three. There were sixty-six, which is divisible by three. “C’mon, we can still get it. I think the driver gets a five-minute break here.”
I got up, and we walked across the damp green grass of the school field toward the bus stop.
“I take the After-School Special,” I said again.
“Think of City Center as another name for After-School Special.”
“It has two names?”
“Kinda. Besides, if you look down, you won’t be able to see the sign, you know,” Megan said.
So I kept my gaze fixed on the patches of dirty snow interspersed with muddy puddles and spikes of grass. I heard the door open with a wheezing squeak of hinges.
I hesitated. It sounded the same as the After-School Special.
“It’ll be okay,” Megan said.
And even though I don’t like the word okay because it doesn’t have a clear definition and comes after mineralize, I put my foot up and stepped onto the bus.