“Gaa,” I croak.
Rosa looks at me strangely, because there are rules to responding to her sarcasm, and one of them is, you never take anything too seriously. And in addition to making weird, incoherent sounds, I’m sure I look seriously disturbed. I can feel the blood draining from my face—my skin is normally about two shades paler than Rosa’s, but now it’s probably more like fifty. And I can’t seem to regain control. My eyes refuse to stop bugging out; my jaw just keeps hanging.
Rosa pounds me on the back—evidently she thinks I’m choking.
“Relax! Calm down! You’ll get tons of scholarships. It’s the C students who really have to worry,” Rosa says.
Even though her voice seems to come from a million miles away, I understand: She thinks I’m just worried about paying for college.
What a relief.
I shake my head, throwing myself into full acting mode.
“Sorry,” I mutter. “Panic attack. College just never seemed real before, you know?”
Rosa is still regarding me with the same kind of curiosity she usually reserves for the daily ups and downs of the popular crowd.
“My sister warned me everyone freaks out about college senior year, but I didn’t think you’d be the first victim,” she says.
I’m saved from having to answer because Mr. Gordon bangs on the podium again.
“Okay, people, now you have the handouts, so look at the first page,” he orders.
Rosa obeys. I pretend to forget the difference between “first” and “last,” and flip my packet open to the article with my father’s picture. I just intend to glance quickly, to make sure I wasn’t imagining it was him and panicking over nothing. But I can’t help skimming the opening of the article:
Infamous scammer Roger Jones, who bilked innocent victims out of millions, tried to justify his crimes with the excuse, “How else could someone like me be able to afford to send his own kid to college?”
Obviously that was the wrong approach, as Jones is now serving time in prison. But other parents, faced with college costs that escalate at a pace far beyond inflation, might be tempted to turn to similarly desperate measures. The reality is . . .
As far as I can tell from reading quickly, that’s the only mention of my father in the whole article. Why did they even use his name or show his picture? My gaze drifts to the offending image.
Daddy . . .
I’m pretty sure this picture was taken the day of the verdict, as he was being taken in to court. It’s a fuzzy reproduction, so I can just barely see the handcuffs glinting around his wrists. He’s holding his head high, a cocky expression on his face. It looks like he was thinking, You people do not have the goods on me! You may have caught me, but you don’t really have enough proof now, do you? Or maybe he was just thinking, I have to look like I’m confident I’m going to get off. Act cocky! Maybe inside he was terrified.
Oh, Daddy . . .
Probably millions of people have seen this picture in the past three years, and probably practically every one of them thought, What a jerk! That guy deserves to be punished! It’s a shame they didn’t catch him sooner! But I see the man who pushed me on my backyard swing set again and again and again when I was a preschooler; I see the man who introduced me to rocky road ice cream; I see the man who bought me practically anything I ever asked for . . .
With other people’s money.
Rosa jabs her elbow in my side.
“Do not go all loca on me about paying for college!” she whispers. “You know Clarice and Stuart and Lakshmi are going to be psycho all year long about whether or not they’re going to get into Harvard—I’ve got to have someone sane around me!”
I shrug apologetically and try to keep my hands from shaking as I flip the packet back to the first page. But that page might as well have been covered in random squiggles, for all I read of it. I don’t hear Mr. Gordon’s droning voice, either.
What if, when we get to that last page, and Mr. Gordon has everyone staring at that picture of Daddy . . . what if someone says, “Hey! Doesn’t this guy look like Becca? And his last name is Jones, too! What do you bet they’re related?”
I do look a lot like Daddy. We have the same chestnut-brown hair, which he always wore a little bit too long for a typical suburban dad. And mine streams most of the way down my back now. That’s mostly just because haircuts cost money—I stopped thinking of my long hair as a disguise a long time ago. But now . . .
So what if we have the same hair color? That’s a black-and-white picture! No one’s going to be able to tell what color hair Daddy has!
But Daddy and I also have the same wide-set eyes, the same high checkbones, the same slightly arched nose. We even have the same teeth. The only feature I inherited from my mom was my heart-shaped chin.
Stop it! Think of a good comeback! How about, “Yeah, of course two people named Jones would have to be related. Because Jones isn’t a common name at all.” Deliver that with the right tone, and you’ll be fine.
In the past three years, ever since my freeze-up at new-student orientation, I’ve perfected all sorts of comebacks. If anyone asks where I lived before Deskins, I say, “Oh, here and there. I’ve moved around. Nowhere that really stuck with me.”
If anyone asks, “Hey, don’t you kind of have a Southern accent?”—though I’ve done my best to get rid of it—I shrug and say, “You know, I pick up accents so easily! I always sound like the last person I talked to! I talk to Rosa for five minutes, and you’d swear I was born south of the Rio Grande!”
If anybody asks, “What’s your father do?” I say, “Enh, he’s not really in the picture. It’s just me and my mom.”
The trick is to sound so bored with my answer that nobody wants to ask anything else.
I’m just not sure I can pull that off right now, after looking at the picture of Daddy, after reading those words. After feeling, once again, that everything was my fault.
Rosa elbows me again.
“Wh-what?” I ask, jarred.
“You liked this assembly so much, you’re going to sit here until they do it again for next year’s seniors?” she asks.
I look at her blankly.
“It’s over! We’ve been released from the torture del día,” she says. “It’s time for lunch.”
I realize I’m the last senior still seated. Everybody else is fleeing. Shannon Daily walks by with her head down, her face red. She looks like she’s holding back tears.
I was right. The queen bee has been deposed, I think.
Being right doesn’t make me happy.
• • •
Rosa and I have the same lunch period as three of our other friends: Stuart, Oscar, and Clarice. As Rosa drops her brown-paper lunch sack onto the table, she begins surveying the crowd: “Everybody feeling okay? How’s your blood pressure? Your pulse? Nobody’s stressed out yet, are you?”
“Of course I’m stressed out!” Stuart snaps. “I’ve got eighteen college application essays to write between now and January first—six of them before November first, if I do early action at Chicago and Georgetown and Yale. And AP calc is going to ruin my GPA, but I can’t drop it, because that will look like I’m just being lazy. And the band director says when we get close to contests, we’re going to have to practice an extra hour every night, which I don’t have time for, but I can’t drop that, because then I won’t have the marching band president position to put on my college applications, and—”
“Stuart,” Oscar says. “Shut up.”
Rosa shoots me a triumphant look.
“It’s starting,” she sings. I think she’s trying for the same eerie effect as a narrator in a horror movie.
“Guys,” Clarice says earnestly. “Promise me we are not going to be mean to each other over this. My brother said some kids in his class stopped speaking to each other for a while over who got into which schools and who got which scholarships and . . . we’re not doing that, okay?”
“Dream on,” Stuart snorts, even as he reaches out and tries to smash Oscar’s head into his french fries and ketchup. But Oscar sees him coming and dodges the shove. Stuart ends up with ketchup on his hand.
I signed up for honors and advanced classes freshman year because I thought smart kids would be nice. And this is what I got?
Honestly, at first it seemed like they really were nicer. I was just a timid mouse who sat at the back of every room—no threat to anyone. But even Stuart, who was a total stranger to me then, kindly patted me on the back when he saw I got a 79 on my first writing assignment in honors freshman English. “You’ll do better next time,” he said. He got a 98.5—he could afford to be magnanimous. (And condescending. He’s always been very good at condescending.)
But then a funny thing happened. Did you know that if you can’t afford a cell phone and you don’t have a Facebook page and you’re scared to let even your closest friends know too much about you—and you can’t even try to be popular—then that really doesn’t leave much for you to do except homework?
And, surprisingly enough, homework is actually kind of important in high school?
On my second writing assignment in honors freshman English, I got a 96.
Stuart got an 89.
When he saw my grades, he shoved his face near mine and yelled, “I hate you!”
This struck me as so ridiculous that I started laughing.
“Next time, Jones,” he threatened, actually shaking his fist at me. “Next time we’ll see who dominates!”
I kept laughing. It didn’t even occur to me that he might be serious until he’d left the room, and Clarice and Lakshmi crowded around me, speaking to me for the very first time.
“Are you all right?” Lakshmi asked, as skittish as a bird. She kept darting her gaze around, as if she feared Stuart would come back and she wanted to be ready to fly away if he did.
“That boy is just nasty!” Clarice declared, shaking her head. “But—is it true? Did you get an A? The only A in the class?”
And I saw something I hadn’t known before: There were other things to want in high school besides popularity. The kids who were chasing high GPAs and top class ranks could be just as cutthroat as the Shannon Daily mean-girls crowd. But the proof of their success was more . . . absolute. I’d learned in eighth grade that you could go from being the most popular girl in school to being a total pariah in nothing flat if, say, oh, I don’t know. Maybe your father got arrested? Maybe his picture was all over the news and people called you up pretending to care when they really just wanted ammunition for making fun of you? Maybe you swore and double-swore and triple-swore and quadruple-swore—even on a stack of Bibles, even though you felt kind of wrong about it—that he really was innocent, just wait, everyone would see?
Only, he wasn’t?
Meanwhile, an A on your report card—nobody could take that away from you.
You might think having Stuart yell, “I hate you!” would have scared me away. But it didn’t. It made me want in, all the way. It made me want to beat him again.
And it made us friends, to the extent that you could say anyone at Deskins High School was my friend, when nobody knew a thing about me.
Oh, and when I brought home my first high school report card, covered in nothing but A’s? Mom burst into tears of joy.
“Then—you’re going to be okay,” she exclaimed, simultaneously crying and laughing into my hair as she hugged me a little too tightly. “This proves it. You’re not going to start doing drugs, or dressing all in black, or cutting yourself, or—”
I shoved her away.
“You thought I would do any of that stuff?” I demanded. “Really, Mom?”
“I-I was joking,” Mom stammered, still reaching out, her arms hugging nothing but empty air. “I was working up to ‘holding up liquor stores,’ and, um, I don’t know, ‘cheating on your taxes . . .’ ”
Both of us froze, and she let the words dribble away. Cheating on his taxes was one of the things Daddy did.
And I could see it in her face, the shock exposing her like a camera’s flash: She really had been afraid for me. Of course. My father was in prison. I was being raised in a single-parent home. I was “at risk.” All those things that hadn’t even occurred to me were the things she’d been terrified I would do, the person she was afraid I’d become.
Or worse.
Was it because she thought I was too much like Daddy?
“Oh, thanks, Mom. Thanks a lot,” I exploded. I was shaking. My words slurred together, self-propelled. I wanted to hurt her as badly as she’d hurt me, just by the way she’d looked at me. Just because of what she’d feared for me. “What else are you going to accuse me of? Are you saying I must have cheated to get these grades? At least Daddy always thought I was smart!”
That was the nuclear weapon of comebacks.
And in my memory, it was nuclear winter in our apartment for weeks after that, both of us like survivors picking their way through radioactive wreckage, each of us too alone in her own misery to reach a charred hand to the other person. We said nothing deeper than, “Are we out of cereal?” and “Which days are you working next week?” and “Where’s the remote?”
Let me translate: What we were really saying, either one of us, anytime we spoke—or even when we didn’t—was, “You huuurrt me. I’m in paaaain.” And, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Mom started going to church again.
I refused. And, to my surprise, she didn’t force me.
Mom started apologizing all the time: for having to sell the TV, for keeping the heat in our apartment set barely above freezing, for serving macaroni and cheese several days in a row, for “everything else.”
The second or third time she apologized for “everything else,” I said, “Okay! I heard you! Just forget about it, all right?”
And that’s how we left it.
But before, in that cold, dark, ashen place that was my life freshman year, I thought about all the things I could do just to serve Mom right—to serve both my parents right. Anybody who spent more than five minutes at Deskins High School could tell who the drug dealers were; even in the honors and advanced classes I heard about parties where kids stayed drunk all weekend long. I heard about kids who went joyriding in stolen cars, kids who hooked up with anybody they could find, kids who walked away from school and just never bothered coming back.
I did none of those things. I made geometry my drug of choice; I drowned my sorrows in Rebecca and The Great Gatsby and Things Fall Apart, in the League of Nations charter and the laws of thermodynamics. I piled up golden A’s around me like I was building a fort.
Did I really have to work that hard just to prove Mom wrong? (Or . . . right? Which was it?)