Mom and Dad usually get home pretty soon after me. Mom is teaching full-time for the first time since I was born. The little kids adore her.
I run all the way home, go straight up to my room and turn on my computer to send Beth a message. How was your first day back, mine sucked, blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter what I write, because I’m not going to send it.
When Beth told me she was moving, I hadn’t kidded myself that we’d stay close. Two thousand miles is a long way, and while computers and phones are great, they’re also pretty limited. Even when Beth was here, she wasn’t a big talker. Still, I figured we’d at least stay in touch. Tell each other what we were up to, who we were hanging out with, what movies we’d seen, stuff like that.
For a few days after she left, I sent her long e-mails telling her how much I missed her and talking about how much GRSS was going to suck without her there.
She didn’t reply. I figured she didn’t have her computer set up yet, so I waited a couple of days. Then I noticed that she’d updated her Facebook profile. So she was back online. I poked her a couple of times and sent her some virtual fish for her virtual aquarium. But I didn’t hear from her, and it gradually began to sink in.
She wasn’t going to write back. Not ever.
I stare at the computer screen and hold down the backspace key, erasing my e-mail to Beth one letter at a time. I wonder if she even thinks about me anymore. I log in to Facebook. I keep expecting to find that she’s deleted me from her Friends list, but she hasn’t yet. Maybe she just hasn’t got around to it. Or maybe it hasn’t occurred to her that I’d be checking her profile to see what she’s doing. She doesn’t write much, but she changes her status every day or two. Right now, it reads: Beth is listening to cool tunes.
It’s pathetic. I feel like a cyber-stalker.
Mom knocks and opens my door without waiting for a response.
“Do you mind?” I say. “Maybe if my door is closed, it’s because I actually want privacy. What if I was getting changed or something?”
She just laughs and walks across the room toward me. “Sorry. What are you doing?”
I close the window before she can see what’s on the screen. “Nothing.”
“Oh.” She is quiet for a moment. “How was your day?”
“Fine. I guess. Mr. Lawson’s a dickhead but whatever. Apparently it’s not a problem if a teacher can’t be bothered to remember a student’s name.”
“I’m sure he means well.”
She says this about absolutely everyone. She thinks the Pope means well, despite the fact that he’s a complete idiot who thinks using birth control is, like, evil. Whatever.
“Are you making any friends?” she asks. “Since Beth left you don’t seem to talk to anyone.”
“That’s because all the girls in my class are obsessed with stupid celebrities, Mom.”
She sighs. “It isn’t right that you spend so much time alone.”
“Yeah, well. There are plenty of things worse than being alone.” Like wasting my time talking about tabloid gossip.
“You’re okay though? Right?”
“I’m fine.”
She drives me crazy. I know she means well, to borrow her own phrase. Really, she’s not a bad parent or anything. She loves me. It’s just that because she loves me, she thinks she owns me. She thinks that she should be able to dictate and control everything about my life. All in my own best interests, of course.
Between school and my parents, there isn’t a single square inch of my life that is really, truly my own. The only time I feel even remotely free is when I’m running. And for some reason, that gets me thinking about the no-eyebrows girl and the weird notes she was handing out today. Obedience school. Sit. Stay. Don’t get up until the bell rings. Woof, woof.
I have to admit, she has a point.
The next day, I look for the girl when I get to school. I don’t really expect to see her, but there she is, standing outside, wearing a thick multi-colored sweater and tight jeans.
I walk over to her. “Hi.”
She grins at me. “Hi.”
Up close, her eyes are pale blue. Sled-dog eyes. “So...” I feel off balance all of a sudden. “I was just wondering...”
“Wondering’s good.” She’s holding a stack of papers, and she peels one off to hand to me. Lime green. Two identical buildings are roughly sketched on it and underneath, in all caps, it says: HIGH SCHOOL. JAIL. CAN YOU SPOT THE DIFFERENCE?
I raise my eyebrows. “That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”
She grins again. She has skinny cheeks and a wide mouth that’s too big for her face and those weird pale eyes, but there’s something about her face that is hard to look away from. She’s kind of pretty in a fragile, no-eyebrows way.
“Think about it,” she says. Her voice is husky and surprisingly low for someone so small. Nothing fragile about it. “Rules about where you can go and when. Asking permission to speak. Scheduled time each day to go out into the yard. Punishments if you don’t do what you’re told.” She shrugs. “That’s fucked up.”
My mouth is probably hanging open. She’s pretty much summed up how I’ve been feeling lately. I nod slowly and for some reason—don’t ask me why, I never shake hands with people—I hold out my hand. “I’m Dante.”
“Parker.” Her hand is dry and warm, almost hot. “Good to meet you.”
“You don’t go to this school, right?”
“No. Thank Jesus. This has got to be one of the weirdest schools I’ve ever—”
I cut her off. “I know. It’s bizarre.”
“It’s unreal.”
“I know. I know.”
“It’s like something out of the movies,” she says.
“I know! I mean, everyone’s walking around like they’re auditioning for a part.”
Parker nods. “The cheerleaders, the jocks, the nerds...”
It’s like she’s been reading my journal. “I was so blown away by it all when I started here,” I tell her. “Now I’ve simplified it to the Elites, the Athletes, the Academics, and the Deviants.”
“Hah.” She grins appreciatively. “So where do you fit in then?”
“I don’t.” I grin back at her. “What school do you go to?”
“I don’t believe in school.”
“You don’t believe in it.” I repeat her words flatly. It hadn’t occurred to me that school was something in which I could or could not believe. Like fairies or Santa Claus or God.
“I mean, as an institution. I don’t support it.”
“So what are you doing here? I mean...” I nod at her stack of lime green papers.
Parker lights a cigarette and offers me the pack.
I shake my head. “I don’t believe in supporting tobacco companies.”
She laughs, lights up and watches me through a veil of smoke. “I’m trying to make people think, that’s all. I visit different schools.”
“You mean...”
“Hand out flyers, hang around, talk to people. People who are open-minded enough to question things.” She waves her cigarette in the direction of the school doors. “People who haven’t had every last spark of curiosity stomped out by years of education or incarceration or whatever you want to call it.”
I feel a prickle of irritation. She is a bit too sure of herself. Like she thinks anyone who is still in school is an unthinking idiot. It’s just not that simple. I mean, what choice do I have? “So how’s it going then?” I ask. “Are many people interested?”
“Some are. Most aren’t.”
The bell rings. Through the glass doors I can see a rush of kids milling down the hallway toward their classrooms. “I guess I’d better go,” I say.
“Up to you.”
I look at Parker. She waits, non-eyebrows raised, and I wonder if she shaved them off. “Nah. I don’t skip classes. Not worth the hassle,” I tell her.
“Like I said, up to you.”
I start to walk away. Then I turn back. “You really don’t go to school? How old are you anyway?”
“And your parents? I mean...did they freak out?”
“Yeah, pretty much.” She looks down at her hands. Her nails are short and ragged-edged. “You’d better go,” she says. “If you’re going.”
“Yeah. See you around.”
“Maybe.” She turns her head and blows a cloud of smoke away from me. “Usually it doesn’t take long for them to kick me off the school grounds.”
For some reason, the thought that I might not see her again bothers me. A group of kids pushes past me, and I find myself still hanging back.
Parker laughs. “Tempted, are you? Thinking about a jailbreak?”
My next class is with Mr. Lawson. Another hour of being called Emily and being publicly accused of lying. Just thinking about it makes me want to run as far and as fast as I can. “Yeah,” I say. “Screw it.”
“You up for a drive?” she asks.
“I guess. Where to?”
“Tell you when we get there.”
I make a face at her, exasperated, but she just laughs and I’m too curious not to go. “Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”
Parker’s car is a total beater. An ancient Honda Civic that used to be blue and is now mostly rust colored. It has a tape deck instead of a cd player. I buckle up and Parker turns on the radio. Some guy with a British accent is interviewing a woman about terrorism.
“You can’t trust the media,” Parker says. “Most of it’s just a bunch of lies to keep us in line.”
“Us?”
“Everyone,” she says darkly. “To make sure we do what we’re told and don’t ask too many questions.”
I think about that for a minute. “What about nine-eleven though? I mean, you can’t say that didn’t happen.”
Parker looks sideways at me, pale eyes unblinking. “Who knows who did it or why. I don’t trust what we’re being told, that’s all.”
“Well, there’s no way everyone can be lying.”
She rolls down her window and sticks her arm out to signal a left turn. “Sure, but how do you know who is?” She turns on to the highway, speeds up and switches the radio to a station playing some old, heavy metal song.
I suck on my bottom lip and watch Parker’s profile out of the corner of my eye. I wonder where the hell we are going and why I am skipping class to hang out with a crazy girl with no eyebrows. Then I wonder why it feels so alarmingly good.