In class, I logged onto Facebook. When I couldn’t think of an update to post, I scrolled through my text messages.
Hav u got my fav blu sweater? Selena asked.
Blu sweater? It was hanging in my closet at this very minute.
The 1 that goes with the gry skirt u pinched fr J.
“Who do you talk to all the time?” Cleo was unpacking her bag as carefully as always. “A boyfriend?”
“Shut up!” I said. “Just friends. From my old school.”
Gry skirt? I texted. This could go on all day.
“You know it can be an addiction?” asked Cleo. “Social media. Email, texting, online searching, games,” she recited. “Twitter. Facebook. All that stuff.”
“Everyone does it,” I told her as I typed in Wear the green 1 u pinched fr me. “Anyway,” I said to Cleo, “how would you know? I’ve never seen you with a phone.”
“Remember books?” she asked. “Newspapers and magazines? Internet addiction is all over them these days. Articles, studies and such.” She fingered one of the flowers on her hat. “I know all about addictions.”
There didn’t seem to be a proper response to this. But I couldn’t help asking anyway. “You do?”
“Not me. But my dad, he’s an alcoholic,” said Cleo. “Nine years dry, but still an alcoholic. He knows everything there is to know about addictions.” She counted off her fingers. “Heroin. Gambling. Alcohol. Chocolate. Internet use.” She looked at her hand. “There are tons more too. Shopping. Hand washing…”
“I am not addicted.” The words were hardly out of my mouth when my phone beeped.
I made a face. Cleo laughed.
Okay, I laughed too. “Technology is important,” I told her over the ringtone. “My dad says it levels the playing field. We all have access to the same information, thanks to technology. He works in the Sun’s printing plant. He knows all about technology. Now look what you’ve done. I’ve missed my call,” I said.
“That’s elitist,” said Cleo.
“What’s elitist? What do you mean?”
“It assumes that everyone has access,” she said. “Poor people. The elderly. Homeless…”
There was no time to get into it with her. The English teacher strode through the door reciting, from a book. But she never looked at the page once. On and on she went, her eyes scanning the students as the words poured from her mouth.
How many poems could one person memorize?
The class soon settled and fell silent.
“Good. Thanks, everyone.” Ms. Watson closed the book and put it on her desk. I held my phone on my lap to google a few words I recalled from the poem. Later, I would teach Cleo the importance of access to information by telling her who wrote the poem and when.
“That poem Ms. Watson was reciting? I checked online,” I told Cleo after school. I held out my phone to show her the Wiki article. “It’s by the same guy who wrote The Just So Stories. Did you read them when you were a kid?”
She didn’t bother to check the screen. “Sure, I know Rudyard Kipling. The poem’s called ‘If.’ Any fool knows that.” She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and put down her bag. When she shook back her hair, the purple tassel on top of her hat shivered. “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” she recited. “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you / But make allowance for their doubting too…”
It didn’t take long for Cleo’s performance and her weird getup to attract an audience. A guy in a hard hat and dusty work boots whistled. A woman wearing runners with her business suit looked up from her phone.
“Okay. I get the message.”
Cleo ignored me. “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue / Or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch…”
#? poems do u know? I texted Selena.
WWTK? Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The Hiwayman. Is this a test?
I loved “The Highwayman.” But even between the two of us, we could never remember all the words. More ltr. GTG I texted her when I realized Cleo had finally wound down.
She picked up her bag and tugged her hat. “I should have passed this around to make a buck or two,” she said as two women walked away smiling.
“Doesn’t that ring in your lip hurt?” I asked.
“This?” As Cleo tugged on it, her lip stretched out, showing the moist skin inside.
I winced. “It hurts just to look at it.”
“I forget it’s there.” Cleo slung her bag across her shoulder. A bunch of kids at the bus stop stared at us, muttering as we passed them.
“Don’t your parents care?” I asked.
She pulled on her lip again and peered down at it cross-eyed. “When I was twelve, they told me that if they put no limits on me, I would set them myself.” She grinned. “So I got pierced. And a tattoo, which I had to do myself. I’ll show you sometime. Last Christmas, in our last house, I spent the day painting my room black and playing the Grateful Dead. Better than lentil loaf with the rellies any day.”
“You can do anything you want?”
“It may sound like freedom,” said Cleo. “But Mom and Dad still run the show. No red meat or smoking tobacco in the house. No aerosols. No TV.”
“You’re kidding!” The new flat-screen Dad bought when we moved took up a whole wall of the living room.
“It’s no big deal,” she said.
“You can download stuff, though, right?” I asked. “Movies? Documentaries, even? Music videos?”
“We don’t have a computer.”
“No computer?” What planet did this girl come from?
“But they know me well at the library.” Cleo grinned. “The one here has fourteen computer stations. Back in Westbank, only three!”
“What about a phone?”
“Course I have a phone.” Cleo grinned and slapped her forehead. “Silly me. You mean a cell phone, right? No.”
No red meat was one thing. But no cell, or smartphone or iPad? “How do you keep in touch with people? With what’s going on? How do your parents check up on you?”
“I’m supposed to be where I say I’m going to be. And be home when I say I’ll be home. I had a bunch of buddies in Westbank. But the place was so small, we hardly ever needed to phone each other. It won’t take me long to get connected here.” Cleo grinned. “I already met you, didn’t I?”
“Sounds so…I dunno,” I said. “I could never live like that, disconnected from everything.” I could have told her about the Cool Code of Conduct. But that was something between Selena and Josie and me.
“I guess it goes back to when my grandparents lived in a cabin on a creek with no running water, maybe,” said Cleo.
How very Little House on the Prairie!
But Cleo’s family story was fascinating, the way she told it. Her grandmother had been a potter. Her grandfather, a Vietnam War draft dodger. They had lived on a mountain, “off the grid.” According to Cleo, this meant no running water or electricity, let alone phones or TV. Talk about disconnected! They grew all their own stuff. Self-sufficiency, Cleo called it. They passed their values on to Cleo’s mother.
The way she told it, her family lived the kind of life I thought had died out about the time of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
My phone alarm buzzed. I grabbed Cleo’s arm. “What’s the time?”
“What’s the panic?”
“The kids I babysit.” I took off running. “I have to be there when they get home.”