I slipped out the side door after school, avoiding the parking lot where Malcolm and his thug friends would be hanging. Truthfully, I was avoiding Zach too. I wasn’t really in the mood to recap this shitty day.
I pulled my oversize headphones out of my bag and turned up the volume on a song with a heavy drumbeat to drown out the after-school sounds of chatting students who hadn’t gotten a bathroom beating or a lecture from a teacher today. I didn’t want to hear them, and I wished I couldn’t see them, either.
But then I noticed something that made me glad for my twenty-twenty vision.
Isabel Ortega.
She was leaning against a bike rack in a pink T-shirt that creased where it pulled tight across her chest and jeans that hung low on her hips.
Seriously, it should be illegal for girls to be shaped like that.
She was alone, probably waiting for some lucky guy, braiding her long dark hair in a bored sort of way. And she was right in my path.
I turned down my music the way people do when they’re driving past a car crash, like somehow the lower volume will help you better assess a tricky situation. But I kept my headphones on so it wouldn’t be too awkward when I walked right by her without saying anything.
Because what could I possibly say to Isabel Ortega? I love the way you pronounce your name, EE-sah-bell. It turns me on when I hear you speaking Spanish to your friends, because your language is as beautiful as you are, and oh, by the way, I’m flunking because I can’t figure it out. Lo siento.
I ducked my head as I approached the bike rack, partly to avoid making eye contact with Isabel and partly to keep watch on my own feet to make sure they didn’t do something embarrassing like trip me. Misty always said girls want you to look them in the eye, but I figured that was just because she’d made a career out of inviting men to look a little lower.
When I was safely clear of Isabel and the bike rack and the noise of my classmates, I finally slowed my pace. I cut through the cornfield across the road from school, picking my way around its tiny, new green buds, laid out in neat rows that narrowed into infinity in the distance.
If only I could put off telling Dad about Spanish for infinity … but Haver had a policy of calling parents when students were failing a course. Señora Vega had warned that call would be coming tonight.
‘Maybe languages are not your strength,’ she’d said.
I wanted to tell her I spoke a language made entirely of ones and zeros that was infinitely more complicated than her language, but instead I had just dug my nails into my palm and said, ‘Yeah, maybe.’
I paused now, in the middle of the cornfield. The thought of the binary code had reminded me of the mirror message, and I reached for my phone to study the numbers in the picture.
Adrestia. I confirmed the translation for myself – much more slowly than Zach had – then Googled the word. I couldn’t stop a smug grin when I saw I’d been half-right. Adrestia was a girl’s name. Unfortunately for me, this particular girl was a Greek goddess and not so much a student at Haver.
I made a mental note to do more research later, but for now I needed to leg it home. If I beat Dad there, maybe I could intercept the call from school and delay the inevitable. I had never failed a class. I didn’t know if it meant summer school or repeating sophomore Spanish or public flogging or what … but I knew this much: Dad was going to go completely apeshit.
*
Misty was all over the kitchen when I got home, bouncing around in tiny cutoff shorts, dancing to some song that didn’t sync with the one blaring through my headphones. I paused my music and pushed the ’phones off my ears. The tune coming out of the speakers on the kitchen counter was some awful chick-rock anthem with a girl cheering about how she’d crashed her car into a bridge and didn’t care.
When Misty came to live with us, my life had crashed into a bridge, and Dad didn’t care.
But at this moment, it was better to have Misty home than Dad.
Misty was always home. She claimed she wanted to get a job, but Dad said her job was to take care of me and the house, since work kept him away so often. He made it sound like Misty was supposed to be a gift to me. Here, Eli, I got you a doll. You can call her Mom. Pull her string, and she even talks! Too bad you couldn’t remove the batteries to make her shut up.
Misty gave an embarrassing shake of her butt, spun around, and finally spotted me. She shrieked and jumped back, startled; then she let out that explosive laugh of hers – kind of hoarse and deep, as if years of cigar smoke and artificial fog from the strip clubs had climbed into her throat and never left. The coarse voice didn’t go with all her tiny blondness.
‘Busted!’ she laughed.
She turned off the music, and the silence that settled over the kitchen made it sound like Dad was home, even though he wasn’t. Things always went a little quiet when Dad got home. Until Misty inevitably filled up the quiet spaces with her jabbering, which she started doing just then.
‘How was school? Are you hungry? I went shopping and got those little pizza-bite things you like.’ She reached for the freezer door and pulled out boxes one by one. ‘I also got some Popsicles. I can’t believe how hot it’s getting already. It’s only April and feels like Florida in August – minus the hurricanes.’ She tossed the boxes of frozen goodies on the kitchen island. ‘What looks good?’
I started to answer ‘Nothing,’ but she cut me off.
‘Oh! How was the thing for Jordan? Was it sad?’
I bristled at the way she said Jordan’s name like she knew him – like she’d ever even met him. She seemed to think watching his story on TV gave her permission to be on a first-name basis. And she sounded genuinely sad when she talked about him, like she wasn’t even aware she was just another one of those gross people who enjoy a tragedy.
‘It was fine,’ I said. I kept my body turned at a careful angle, so she wouldn’t notice the redness still lingering around my eye. Then, hoping to distract her, I added, ‘I’ll have a Popsicle. It’s too hot for the pizza bites.’
‘It is too hot!’ Misty put the bites back into the freezer and started babbling on again about the weather.
Conversation successfully detoured.
By the time she turned around to hand me the Popsicle, I had already left the kitchen and was halfway up the stairs. Behind me, I heard her voice, softer than usual.
‘Oh. Okay. Maybe later.’
I paused, a tiny thread of guilt – fragile as a strand of hair – trying to tug me back down the stairs, but I shook it off easily. It wasn’t my job to entertain her while Dad was off working all the time. She had to be pretty dumb if she didn’t get that those long hours paid for our house and all the fancy clothes and stuff that she liked.
Still, Dad always insisted she was smart. He claimed she’d been on her way to some double-degree in Biology and Communications when he’d swept her off her feet. I couldn’t imagine Dad sweeping anyone off their feet – especially not someone who looked like Misty. No offence to Dad, but skinny and bald didn’t usually land the beauty queen.
The one thing Dad had was money. Not like millionaire money, but he had enough to live large in a small place like Haver, enough to impress the dancers at Florida strip clubs, enough to make them quit college and move to middle-of-nowhere Iowa.
Misty’s lame chick rock started up again just as I reached my room, and I slammed the door behind me to shut it out. I dropped my book bag on top of the overflowing laundry hamper, tossed my headphones on the cluttered desk next to it, and flopped facedown on my bed, wishing the covers would swallow me up.
When my comforter didn’t turn into quicksand, I dug around in the bed for the remote control and flipped on the TV.
‘… marks one year since fifteen-year-old Jordan Bishop committed suicide by fire at Haver High School.’
A picture of Jordan slid across the screen in slow motion over blurry background video of a cemetery while some lady on TV tried her best to sound as sad as Misty about a boy she’d never met.
‘The tragedy triggered a national debate over cyberbullying and whether schools are within their rights to monitor students’ online activity …’
Monitoring? More like spying. The internet regulations that had popped up in the wake of Jordan’s death were oppressive at best and downright criminal, if you asked me. Kids could hardly post a selfie online these days without getting flagged by school cybermonitors.
Actually, maybe that part wasn’t so bad. I was pretty sick of selfies.
I turned off the TV and tossed the remote to the end of the bed, but I overshot and it landed in the trash can next to my desk. Just above the trash, my backpack hovered, teetering on top of my mountain of dirty shorts and socks. Somewhere inside that bag, a crumpled ball of paper with a flaming red F was just waiting for Dad’s disapproval.
I could already hear the lecture – too much time on the computer, blah blah, every subject counts, blah blah. And his favourite – better to be a jack-of-all-trades than a master of one.
Personally, I think that’s just something people say when they haven’t mastered anything.
I dragged myself out of bed and over to my desk, but instead of turning on the computer like usual, I spun in the chair, trying to remember when Dad’s authoritarian phase had started. Growing up, he was always the fun dad – too fun, according to my aunt, who told him I had no discipline. Then he’d spent a few years burying me in gifts. It was around the same time he’d changed jobs and started travelling so much. Guilt, my aunt said. Any gadget or game I wanted back then was mine. Every day was Christmas … except Dad was never home for the holiday.
I stopped spinning to stare out the window at the big green sugar maples that shaded our backyard. They were all over Haver, and in the fall they turned a million different shades of orange and red, so it looked like our yard and the entire town was on fire. Fun Dad would rake the fallen leaves into piles for jumping. Santa Dad hired someone else to rake them. And this current version of Dad would gladly cut them down to spare himself the hassle, if Misty hadn’t begged him not to.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, shaking me out of my backyard gazing. Before I could grab it, it beeped … then dinged … then played a song. It was like every alarm was going off at once. By the time I got the thing out of my pocket, I had twelve alerts from text to email and on every single social media account. I clicked through them, one by one, but it only took the first few for me to realise the messages would all be exactly the same.
It was a single line, and despite the warm spring sun streaming through the window, it chilled me to my core.