The school psychologist leaned in, asked if I was angry.
I shrugged.
He asked if I liked school.
I nodded.
He asked if I liked reading.
I nodded.
He asked if I liked to play sports.
My head tipped, then returned to its socket.
“Which ones?” he wanted to know.
“Baseball and street hockey,” I said. “Sometimes football.”
“Tackle or touch?”
When I said both, he asked what position I liked in baseball, and when I said pitching, he asked why that might be, and after I said I liked throwing, he said “hmmmm” and asked whether I liked to throw the ball hard or soft.
“Hard,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” he said again, this time with more emphasis, then leaned back into the chair with the orange plastic cushion. The chair creaked as he pushed his pen between his lips and looked at me as though I were a bug that had just crept into his kitchen. I sat still, wondering why he’d plucked me from class.
Earlier that year, a similarly inclined man had pulled me from class to inquire about the blisters on my arm—blisters I hadn’t even noticed until he and the nurse had pointed and looked hard at my face for an answer. “I don’t know,” I answered, mush-mouthed, only to realize halfway through the interview that the blisters must have come from sleeping near the radiator; my arm often flopped onto it while I slept, and sometimes burned. I told them that we had radiators, that we pushed our mattresses against them in winter. They seemed only partly satisfied by the radiator-burn explanation, but let me go. So, sitting in front of the man in the creaky orange chair, I wondered whether perhaps I had another blister on my arm.
One I hadn’t noticed.
The blisters really had come from the radiator, but clearly there was the look of a liar about my face, a certain dip and tug in the eyes often mistaken for guilt.
“So you like to throw things, do you?”
I looked around the tidy office for clues to the right answer, and, seeing none, decided to take his lead.
I nodded.
“Is that why you kept slamming the door at Ms. McDonough’s last night—even after she expressly told you not to?”
At the mention of “Ms. McDonough,” my mind caught up, and finally, I understood.
I was living with Kara McDonough and the Johnson children. Ever since the fire, the family had been split up during renovations, and Steph and I had been assigned to Kara’s place.
He repeated his question, “Is that why you disobeyed Ms. McDonough?”
“I guess so.”
I slept in Vicky Johnson’s room, where the night before, she and I had talked about boys and clothes and kissing—what made some French and some just plain kissing.
I had closed the door, though Kara had said not to. Her ears must have caught the click of the door as soon as it shut, because two seconds later, the door was reopened, with Kara standing there, staring at us as if an apology was expected.
“God, can’t we have some privacy?” I said and sucked my teeth.
Kara said she wanted the door open, and when I asked why, she answered that’s just how things were, and I’d better get used to following rules.
Kara was strong—a social worker who spent her days looking into swollen faces and sad stories. Unrelenting lines were painted onto her broad Irish face.
Me, I had nothing but my mouth to back me up.
My mouth, and the overwhelming desire to try Vicky’s blusher in private, to ask about what boys say when they’re trying to get up under her shirt, to listen to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” while prancing around in high heels and pink satin shorts.
So, once again, I closed the door.
And Kara, strong-willed and silent, opened it.
I closed.
She opened.
Back and forth. Over and over, until she grew tired and left the door closed, so that I thought I’d won, only to find the door off its hinges when we woke.
We had giggled that morning and Kara seemed only mildly annoyed, so I thought it was done, but clearly, I was wrong, because there I was, sitting in front of a blunt-faced man who seemed to know all about the door and Kara, and was asking whether I liked to throw a ball hard or soft.
Now that I knew why I was there, I explained.
I admitted to being angry that the fire had consumed my entire bedroom, including the new maple bunk-bed set my mother had just taken off layaway. I said I missed my family, my street, all my old things, and that’s why I was behaving badly.
He nodded his head and believed.
Though I was lying. The fact was, I loved Kara’s house—the well-stocked fridge, the sparkling microwave, piles of clean towels. New clothes had replaced worn plaid pants and a “Put the Lid on Rats” T-shirt featuring a flesh-tailed rodent creeping his way into an open garbage can. The toothy critter was a free decal given to city kids to enlist their support in Rochester’s antirat campaign. I’d ironed the rat and his garbage can onto a white T-shirt and wore it till the rat was cracked and the cotton gray. Gone now, the rat shirt had been replaced by crisp whites and yellows, turtlenecks with rainbow decals.
In truth, my life had only improved at Kara’s. After all, Steph was the only one I’d ever really needed, and she was right there with me. With all the bright walls and balanced meals, Kara’s suburban neighborhood was like a TV commercial for laundry soap.
Still, the psychologist nodded and talked about separation from family and how hard it could be, and I hung my head and tried to look sad, but the only sadness I could conjure was the memory of Steph’s pile in the front yard.
To stop the blaze, the firemen had hosed out our upstairs, and the pile of gifts that Steph had saved all summer to buy slid out from under her bed through a blown-out window and landed with a slap on the front lawn.
That she had a pile of gifts hidden under her bed, waiting to be given on Christmas day. That she’d raked yard after yard, shoveled driveway after driveway, to earn the money. That all those presents had become flat, wet piles melting into the earth, more ashes than gifts. That her face never crumpled over such things (even as I howled over the loss of a double-belt—the one I’d bought at Larry’s Bootery after raking only two lawns). Only these things made me sad.
I thought of my strong sister, of her kindness, and her losses. And other than these things, I could think of nothing so bad about our house catching fire.
But I said I missed Lamont Place anyway. Because it explained the door, and the man in front of me with the flat-lined smile was waiting for an answer. I looked at the floor while he leaned forward in his creaky chair, forced what he must have imagined to be a concerned look into his eyes, touched my shoulder, and let me go.