Two years ago, on the day we started ninth grade, the first thing we did as high schoolers was herd into the auditorium for a welcome meeting and getting-to-know-you games. Mrs. Radcliffe said we were young adults now, with opportunities and responsibilities. She said high school was an adventure we were lucky to be embarking upon. She acknowledged that this would be the last school many of us would ever attend. She said we were rockets sitting on a launch pad, and from here, we would blast off to college or to careers or to parts unknown, worlds unexplored, mysteries unfathomable. We were all pretty sure she got this speech from a book because there was no way she wrote it for Bourne High. Then she had us write down and sticker to our shirts two adjectives that best described us.
Mirabel’s words were “perspicacious” and “immured.” If Mirabel were studying for the SATs, she wouldn’t have to study for the SATs.
Monday’s were “yellow” and “yellow.”
Petra’s were “here anyway,” which now I’m pretty sure are adverbs, but it was only our first day of high school so we didn’t know much yet.
Mine were “bored” and “boring.”
Bored because it is dumb to play get-to-know-you games with a bunch of people you got to know at birth which is true not just of the ones I shared a womb with but everyone else in that auditorium as well. Bored because there is nothing to do in Bourne. Bored because high school is supposed to be a fresh start, and there were no fresh starts happening that day. Or any day.
But much more than bored, I am boring. If you asked anyone I know to describe me, they would say, She’s the normal one. I’m not short or tall, skinny or fat, buff, buzz cut, braided, or dyed. I’m not pierced, tattooed, or even mascaraed most days. I’m a boring straight white girl, but I don’t think much about race. (Maybe so. I’m a boring straight white girl so I don’t think much about race.) And my sexuality doesn’t matter since there’s no one in Bourne for me to date anyway. I am ordinary, unremarkable, average, your typical American teenager. Picture a high school girl. That’s me. That girl in your head right now? Me exactly. I could not be more normal if I tried.
But here? That makes me weird. “Weird” would also have been a good adjective to describe me.
If Mrs. Radcliffe had chosen my word for me, she’d have gone with “indebted.” Track A has a tutoring credit, one of those requirements Pooh was so skeptical about, like we have to take history and we have to take English and we have to take math. We have to tutor. Since it’s after school, you’d think they couldn’t make us, but you’d be wrong. Some of us get out of it because there’s football practice (never mind it’s only touch because no one here wants to risk a head injury, and it’s only intrasquad because there’s no one else to play). Some of us get out of it because we have after-school jobs (never mind after-school jobs are discouraged in Bourne where there aren’t even enough jobs for the adults). There aren’t many of us left after that, but the rest of Track A tutors a few days a week after school, in pairs. So at least Petra and I get to do it together. It’s not that I don’t get how many birds this kills—the kids who need job experience get job experience; the kids who need extra help get extra help; the kids who need occupying and distracting after school get occupied and distracted—but even free labor is only worth the cost if you know what you’re doing. And none of us do.
When Mrs. Radcliffe explained that first week that it was Track A who would staff the tutoring center after school, there was a lot of whining and moaning and protesting and complaining until she cut us off by hissing, “You are the lucky ones. This is the least you can do,” and stood before us, arms crossed, daring us to disagree. We would have, vehemently, for Bourne is nothing if not a study in how it’s not that simple, but there is no arguing with overworked, underpaid guidance counselors, and we accepted our lot just like everyone else.
Today when Petra and I walk into the tutoring room five minutes after the last bell, Nellie Long is sitting at her desk, gazing at the ceiling with a huge smile on her face as if there’s something wondrous up there. (I check. There’s not.) But I ruin her good mood as soon as I suggest we get to work.
“I don’t want to read Lord of the Flies.” She scowls at me like I assigned the book.
“Why not?”
“It has nothing to do with my life.”
“It seems like it’s just about boys,” I concede, “but really it’s about the human condition.”
She looks at me blankly. “I am not a fly,” she says.
“Or a lord,” Petra adds from across the room. I glare at her.
“How about your history essay?” I offer Nellie.
She sighs and agrees to this reluctantly, hands me her essay, watches the worry accrue on my face as I read. “See, what I’m trying to say,” she explains, “is that even though World War II happened thousands of years ago, it’s still relevant now.”
“Okay,” I say. “How?”
“How?”
“How is World War II still impacting our lives today?”
“Obviously because”—her expression suggests maybe I’m the one who needs tutoring—“I have to write this big report about it.”
Kyle M. and Kyle R. are wrestling on the floor instead of letting Petra help them with geometry. Petra is doing her nails. When Mrs. Radcliffe shoots her a dirty look, Petra says, “I’m not getting in the middle of that. I’m a pacifist.” When I shoot her a dirty look, she raises her eyebrows and says, “Trade you?”
I look at Nellie’s essay. She’s written “World War Too” a dozen times already, and she’s only got three paragraphs.
“Deal.”
The Kyles are likelier to pay attention to me than Petra anyway because they want to get in good with my sister. They like Mirabel. Everyone likes Mirabel, but them more than most. They’ve had a crush on her since we were little, though it would take a lot more than being nice to me at tutoring for her to be interested in either one of them.
I stand over the Kyle-ball and try to be as fierce as possible though I am small and they are huge, though I am one and they seem many, though I am standing still and they are rolling around like drunk puppies.
“Liar,” Kyle R. spits.
“You’re the liar,” Kyle M. retorts.
“Liar,” Kyle R. says back. Limited vocabulary. They should study with Petra and me. Actually, I guess that’s what tutoring is, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
“I saw it.”
“You didn’t.”
“My dad saw it.”
“Then he’s a liar too.”
Petra rolls her eyes at me. I smile at her. She smiles back.
“Go for it,” she tells me, because sometimes the only way out is wading over to the other side.
“What did you and your father see?” I ask Kyle M.
They stop, part, and sit up, panting, still drunk puppies.
“Moving truck,” he wheezes. “We both saw it. Down by the library. A moving truck.”
Petra’s mother does not leave her house. It might be that what happened broke something in her brain, or it might be that what happened honed something in her brain so that she realized she was safer inside, but in any case, it’s been five years since she went outdoors. She used to leave on Sunday mornings to go to church, but she’s Sikh, and though Pastor Jeff did his best, she felt she could do just as well on her own at home. She’s perfectly loving and involved in her daughter’s life, but only in her house.
Petra’s father lives in New Jersey but works in New York, which he calls “the city,” as if there’s only one. This sounds glamorous, and might be for all I know, but Petra reports that he lives in a dark one-bedroom apartment with a view of a parking lot, spends hours commuting on a train that smells like summer feet, and then does other people’s taxes all day for not even enough money to be able to afford to get an apartment large and non-gross enough that his only child could at least visit more often.
Since Petra’s mother only lives in her house and Petra’s father only lives in New Jersey, they bought Petra a car. It is older than we are, at least fifty percent mold, and also smells like summer feet, but it is better than my car which is a bicycle.
After tutoring, I climb into the passenger seat, and with absolutely no discussion, Petra heads toward the library.
If I could have one wish for Bourne, it wouldn’t be enough. It would be too hard to choose. But in the running would definitely be a coffee shop. Maybe it would change everything, having a warm, bustly place to sit and chitchat wittily in oversized cushy chairs and make smart observations about the world going fascinatingly by, someplace to get a part-time job, know all the regulars, find yourself the recipient of all the good gossip, and save some money so you can leave one day.
But we don’t have a coffee shop.
We have a donut shop. Ham Roland’s imaginative name for the place was Donut Shop, but the sign he ordered arrived with a typo. They told him they’d redo it or he could have a refund, so he got his money back and kept the sign as is, and now we go to the Do Not Shop sometimes after tutoring. But it’s not the same.
We have a pizza place, but even though I have nothing to compare it to, I still know it isn’t very good. I wave at Lena behind the counter as we drive by, but she doesn’t look up from her book. We have a hardware store and a laundromat, a diner, a drugstore, a grocery, and a church. Donna’s Nursery and the bar and the Fitwit.
Downtown Bourne was modest even before. That was part of its charm I think: compact and cozy and cobblestoned (this was before so many of its citizens needed wheels). There was never a coffee shop, but there used to be other kinds of shops—knickknacks, knitting supplies, candy—plus an ice cream place and a couple cafés. Those storefronts are still there, waiting patiently, hopefully. Emptily. What’s left full is threadbare and torn maybe, but still kicking.
At the far end of downtown, the stores peter out and then the asphalt does. The church is the last thing before there’s nothing. It’s got peeling wood siding, a giant white spire, an oddly short red door that must have been put in before the whole building was finished or even planned out all the way because it’s nowhere near center. It’s hard to decide if those long-ago Bourners were so eager and enthusiastic they put the door in first, or more like too clueless to realize you don’t need a door if you don’t have walls yet, but it’s nicer to think of them as just that welcoming.
Petra steers onto the gravel, lets the clutch out with the car still in gear, and stalls to a stop. In front of us is the bridge: stone, weathered and impressive, bearing in iron the name of its benefactors, Grove—the old wealthy family who used to own half of Bourne back when Bourne used to have old wealthy families—and its construction date, 1904, to remind you they built this thing without computers, cordless drills, even a pocket calculator. It spans what we call the ravine, which makes it sound like the kind of place teens wreck their cars trying to leap over when they’re drunk or at least like some kind of picturesque valley with sheer cliffs and dramatic waterfalls. It’s not that. It’s more like a ditch, a greenbelt maybe if you’re feeling generous, with a tangle of vines, thorns, and dead brush. And there, on the other side, is the library.
The library is beautiful but closed now, empty like the storefronts, pretty and vacant like cheerleaders on TV. The building kind of matches the bridge—worn and majestic—and makes you think there must have been a time before. It has a giant stained-glass window like a church, but this one shows people with books: a couple reading on a tandem bike, a bunch of people reading under a tree with books dangling from its branches, a family—mom, dad, and three little kids—all reading on a picnic; even the dog is holding an open book in its paw. It’s a building you would call noble, even historic, but it’s been closed for over two years now, dark and shuttered, its hedge brown and crumbling, weeds commando-crawling up from the banks of the ravine and threatening to consume the place completely.
At least that’s how it was last week. Now suddenly it’s different—except nothing is ever different in Bourne—and even though I’m seeing it, I still don’t believe it. This is why people have reported construction equipment but no construction, delivery vans but no deliveries. The library is on the far side and the opposite shore of a mostly empty town, and since it’s closed, no one comes here anymore, but now we can see that we’ve missed something. The weeds have been hacked away; the desiccated hedge is gone like it was never there. Fresh dirt you can actually smell, dark and damp, surrounds the front walkway and harbors something new and green and blooming. Every light is on, every door ajar. The library looks open, in use, alive. In the parking lot, two enormous moving vans idle like teenagers. We watch out the windshield and cannot say a word, but eventually we have not said a word for long enough that Petra’s engine has cooled, and she climbs out of the car and onto the hood. I follow. The hood is still warm through my shorts as is Petra’s leg where it presses against mine—it’s a very small car—but I can’t stop shaking.
“You’re bouncing,” Petra complains.
“Your car’s bouncing.”
“Because you’re bouncing it.”
“I’m shivering,” I admit.
“It’s ninety degrees out here.”
“I’m algid.”
She turns to look at me. “Have you been doing SAT prep without me?”
“Only a little.”
“Does ‘algid’ mean crazy?”
“‘Algid’ means cold.”
“You’re not algid”—we are sweating against each other—“but you might be crazy.”
“Pusillanimous,” I offer.
“‘Pusillanimous’ means fearful. I’ve known you for sixteen years. You’re not fearful. Timorous maybe.”
Shit. “I forget ‘timorous.’”
“That was in last week’s flash cards. Do them again.”
“I will,” I promise. This is my pact with Petra. We will get into college. We will get out of Bourne.
“Afraid,” she supplies.
“How is that different from fearful?”
“You’re not afraid as a personality trait. It’s just weird as shit what’s happening over there right now.”
We’re quiet, watching. We can just make out people moving inside. “I think ‘pusillanimous’ and ‘timorous’ might mean the same thing,” I say.
“Maybe.”
Petra grasps my hand in hers, and I slowly stop shaking. We watch a little longer, but there’s nothing much to see. We can’t tell how many people there are or anything about them. We can’t imagine who they might be, and we really can’t imagine what it might mean that they’re here.
“Heteroclitic,” I say finally.
“What?”
“Week before last,” I remind her. “Weird as shit.”
We lean back against the windshield and shift our hips away from the wiper blades and watch in silence as our lives change forever.