Even on the days I showed up at school, the walls no longer felt real to me. I began to miss more school, weeks at a time.
I took to leaving after my first few classes, or at least by lunch. I’d shove my books into a locker and walk out of the building, counting on the fact that I looked like someone who was doing what she was supposed to be doing. At the large urban school, I was better than invisible; I was a white girl who’d never caused a scene. I’d just breeze out the door, and no one ever seemed to mind. Until a drizzly day in March when a sentry noticed and asked me to stop.
“Where you going?” he asked, fingers strumming the radio strapped to his belt.
I didn’t answer. I just kept walking toward the door. I heard him following, could feel him on my heels.
“Hey, girl,” he said, “wait up,” and, when I did not stop, “just who the hell do you think you are?”
His voice became louder. He cursed to himself and began talking into the fuzz of the radio.
“I’m gonna need some assistance by the main doors.”
I walked faster.
I was no real threat, of course, but he couldn’t have someone walking away while he was talking. It was a power thing, and I had no choice but to keep walking.
I pushed through the glass doors and saw Annmarie and her old Volvo waiting for me in the loop.
I ran.
The baby blue of my skirt cupped my behind as I stretched my legs toward my friend, who saw me coming and started the engine.
“Don’t stop,” I said as I slid into the passenger seat. And though another sentry had come from the other set of doors, and two men slapped their hands onto the glass of her windshield, Annmarie put her foot on the pedal and gunned out of the loop.
“What’s going on?” she wanted to know.
“Just go,” I answered, trying to keep my voice level.
I didn’t know what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop.
We drove to the mall, where I filled up on cookies and shoes and tried to forget the scene I’d caused back at school. But once the shopping trip was over and I headed toward my job at the transportation council, I worried about what had happened, and half-expected the police to greet me at my job.
I was so afraid of being caught that I missed school for several weeks. The Girls called. Used to seeing me at least a couple times a week, they were worried. Eventually, my worry about failing overtook my fear of arrest, and I was ready to face school again.
I looked both ways as I stepped through the doors of East High and tried to cloak myself in the crowd of students. The sentry was nowhere in sight.
When I didn’t see him in between the first few classes, I breathed a bit easier, but still hunched over and made myself as small as possible while walking in the hallways. Until lunch, when I heard that the sentry had lost his job a week prior for trying to pimp out high-school girls.
My relief was thorough, if fleeting.
The boundaries continued to blur.
The following week, I mouthed off to the film studies teacher and was kicked out of class.
“You needed that credit,” said my guidance counselor.
Mrs. Wylie had the look of an aging leprechaun. Orange hair leapt from her head and was set off by smiling green eyes. Despite the urgency in her voice, she did not seem overly troubled by my loss of credit. She smiled as though it were just another day, confident that she’d be sipping a gin and tonic by four fifteen, whether someone in her alphabetically-assigned caseload was missing an English credit or not. Still, she tried.
“If you want to graduate,” she continued, “you’ll have to take an English class at night school.”
She leaned in and said this with a wink.
As though we shared a secret. We were partners, it seemed, Mrs. Wylie and I, and as I completed the papers for night school, she softened some, and touched me on the shoulder.
“It’ll be fine,” she said, “just show up.”