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?”
And below that headline, there’s a picture of my father.