I wasn’t sure if I could still smell it. Through the cloud of diesel and old chewing gum and cracked leather seats in the very back of the school bus, I thought I could still faintly smell Charlie’s urine on the cuffs of my sweater. It was under a layer of synthetic lilies, courtesy of the half bottle of detergent my mother poured over the shirt, but still, I thought it was there. I leaned my head against the bus window, scanned the road up ahead for signs that we were getting closer to Courtland County High School.
The night before, I’d carefully chosen my new school clothes—a polka-dot blouse and stretch stirrup pants and a white hair scrunchie—and laid them out on my bed. I had scrutinized every part of the outfit, weighing one against the other, hoping they might equal up to something that could be read as good. My mother, Charlie always with her, came to inspect the final choice and as she pressed her hands against the seat of the pants, testing to see if they were too sheer, Charlie unhooked his leg from her side and a stream of piss dribbled from the corner of his diaper and down over my outfit.
“Oh, Charlotte, oh honey, I’m sorry.”
My mother was full of contrition, but Charlie didn’t care. He only watched her calmly as she knelt and gathered up my clothes and doused them with the detergent and then perfume and then finally sprayed them all down with air freshener. In the morning, I sniffed the damp sleeves and breathed in the ruin and I would have worn something else, but there was my mother, asking hopefully, “How is it?” and I pulled the shirt over my head.
“It’s not bad. I can still wear it.”
She sighed, relieved.
I was the only student on the bus so I was not able to tell if the stink was real or part of my imagination. I was not sure yet if it was going to spoil the only good thing about moving to the Toneybee Institute. Here, in Courtland County, I had the benefit of being unknown. Back home in Dorchester, I had been with the same kids since kindergarten and they all remembered me as the know-it-all who got uppity and insulted everyone in a secret language she spoke with her hands. At the start of eighth grade, some of the other girls spread a rumor that my signing was not to be trusted. They said it wasn’t much different from what Jamal German did when he looked you in the eyes and rubbed on himself in public. After that, every time I lifted my hands to sign, the girls all turned away. They squealed to each other, “Ooh, she nasty.” They didn’t even bother to say it to me.
In Courtland County, I would be new. And I thought, for sure, that I would be the only black girl. I decided this would be an advantage. These kids had probably never even seen a black person before. There would be no other real black people to compare me to, only the ones on TV. And every television sitcom I had ever watched had told me that black kids were infinitely cooler than their white counterparts and that white kids knew this. I’d never had white classmates, but I took these plots as an article of faith. Back home, I only learned what was cool by listening to others’ conversations. Here, I reasoned, those scraps of intelligence could be worked into a social genius. They wouldn’t know I was a mess. My clothes would seem up to date in the Berkshires, not horribly out of fashion. My hollow brass door-knocker earrings strained my earlobes and knocked against my neck as the bus jerked. But I had to believe that out here, in this wilderness of whiteness, everything I wore would stand in stark relief, become urbane sophistication, the trump card of biologically ordained, racially innate coolness.
But Charlie’s accident. I sat in the very back of the bus. I had claimed the seat of rebellion, but at each stop made, no one sat next to me. A few boys would start toward it, ready to claim the last seat for themselves, but when they saw me sitting there they stopped halfway down the row, slid into the first free bench, their eyes skidding over me. They couldn’t possibly catch it from that far away. I kept my forehead pressed to the glass of the window, the grease from my braids making a gauzy halo on the pane.
The leather of my bus seat creaked. A girl eased in beside me. She was grasping a stack of books to the front of her faded purple fleece jacket. Tortoiseshell glasses were perched on top of her head like a crown and she had a silver canteen in her hand. When she unscrewed it, I smelled fresh coffee. I was instantly impressed. Back in Dorchester, nobody was that adult. Even the bad kids, the ones who dragged on cigarettes before class, even those kids only drank hot chocolate.
The girl dumped her books on the expanse of seat between us. She gave me a guarded smile. “You’re new.”
“Yeah,”
“I’m Melissa. You live in Spring City,” she declared.
“No,” I said, confused. “I live here, in Courtland County.”
“Where?”
I didn’t want to say the Toneybee Institute. I vaguely pointed to my left, toward the highway underbrush dashing beside us. “Back there.”
“It’s okay if you’re from Spring City. I volunteered there this summer at the food bank. I’d much rather be from there than boring Courtland County.”
“I’m from Boston,” I said.
“But didn’t you just say you live in Courtland County?”
“Yeah, I do. Now.”
Melissa studied me over the lip of her canteen. She took in the earrings, the scrunchie, the front of my shirt. She swallowed her coffee. “Okay,” she said.
She thought I was lying and what was worse, for some mysterious reason, she had decided she should humor me.
She sat her canteen down between us and opened a book. I turned toward the window and pretended to write her off.
Boys were always easier to figure out. Whenever I spoke, their eyes opened wide, as if I had pulled down the collar of my T-shirt and my nipples sprouted mouths that spit my words out for me.
The boys looked at you like they knew something about you, but you knew they didn’t, not really. They only thought they did, and though their stares were unsettling, there was nothing to actually be afraid of in them. What they thought they knew about you wasn’t real, was some story they made up behind their eyes, easily guessed at, predictable, and ordinary, as mysterious and complex as the plot of a Road Runner cartoon.
It was always the girls who were different. Melissa’s expression was the same as the girls’ in Dorchester. Their heavy-lidded eyes would light first on their friends’ faces, then on the better-looking boys’, then quickly to the front of my chest. Their mouths would harden, register something mysterious in the upturned curl of a lip. The Dorchester girls sucked their teeth—one long thin whine of displeasure—tossed their heads, and then their gaze flitted away again.
I wanted more than anything to know what they were thinking. I knew that, for just a moment, I had entered their consciousness, but how and where I entered I could not tell. They looked at you like they knew a secret about you that you didn’t even know yourself yet. Like they’d picked up some scent that you didn’t know you carried, emanating from some sincere and deeply embarrassing gland, secreted away in an obscure fold of your skin, pushing out an unfiltered, humiliating stink that bloomed with rude honesty, announcing the precise condition of your very self.
Courtland County High School was like a tidy office park. It was a slate building, all sharp angles and darkened windows. The lawns out front were the same oppressive green as the woods around the Toneybee. The grass was immaculate: not a single stray potato-chip packet, not even a muddied footprint near the sidewalk border.
Inside, things were just as officious. It was especially odd to have a locker to myself, and even stranger that the lock worked, was not angrily bent over on itself by some unknown fist.
In homeroom, the teacher, Mr. Carroll, made me stand up in front of everybody and introduce myself.
“Charlotte Freeman.” I began to sit back down.
“And you’re from Spring City?”
Half crouching in the desk I turned to the class at large. “No,” I announced. “Courtland County.”
Mr. Carroll frowned down at the list in front of him, checking up to make sure I wasn’t lying. When he bobbed his head I saw he had a little ponytail curling at the nape of his neck. The sheet must have had my address listed because he looked up again eagerly.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve heard all about you.” He raised his voice, “Everybody, please listen carefully.”
The room became only slightly quieter.
Mr. Carroll announced, “Charlotte lives at the Toneybee Institute. Charlotte, tell the class.”
The faces nearest me were bored. The kids farthest from me still weren’t paying attention. I said to the shifting, coughing mass of them, “I moved here from Boston last month. I live in the Toneybee Institute because my parents work there.”
“On something very interesting,” Mr. Carroll prompted.
“Yes.”
He waved his hands. “What is it?”
“What’s what?”
“What is it your family is working on?”
“We’re living there and my mom is teaching sign language.” I sat down with a bump of finality.
“To whom?”
“What?”
“To whom are you teaching sign language?” Mr. Carroll was smiling knowingly now.
“To a lot of different kinds of people.” Each word sounded much sharper than I wished it to be. The room was paying attention now—a few of the girls looked expectantly at the two of us.
Mr. Carroll tipped his head back until the tip of his pigtail grazed his collar. “That’s enough, Charlotte.” Then he turned to the blackboard and started writing.
My palms pricked with shame. I thought I was going to cry. I’d never been openly rude to a teacher like that before. I told myself that this was perhaps the start of being better—the triumphant denial of authority. But when the bell rang and I stood up, nobody would meet my eye.
The next class was biology, with a Ms. Simpson, who asked me no questions when she read my name from her roster. I started to take the lab station at the front of the class, but I stopped myself, moved one seat back. I didn’t want to seem too eager. The room filled up, some kids three or four to a lab table, but the seat beside me remained empty.
We were fifteen minutes into class when one more student walked in. To my dismay, I saw that she was black.
“Adia Breitling,” Ms. Simpson declared, “is late.”
Adia mumbled her apologies, slinked toward the lab benches. She didn’t choose to sit next to me. Instead she took the empty space in front of me. She dropped her canvas tote bag down and spilled her books and papers across the table and bent her head over the mess she’d created.
I studied the back of Adia Breitling’s head and I prayed that none of these white people would compare her to me. Her scalp was shaved into a boy’s fade, with two quick lightning bolts nicked above her left ear. Ms. Simpson had a stack of handouts for the class and gave them all to Adia, to start the round. Adia turned to pass the stack to me and I saw her face fully for the first time. She’d kept a crop of close-knit curls just above the center of her forehead. I also saw that her face was beautiful. High cheekbones; full lips; wide-set, hooded eyes. Even Adia Breitling would not look directly at me.
She turned back around. The purple feather earrings she wore brushed her shoulders. Even for the Berkshires, these had to be out of style. I touched my own brass bamboo bangles. She hunched over and I studied the back of her baggy black T-shirt: a long list of cities with dates beside them and the name of a band, Living Colour, stenciled over the top. She had a long, patchwork jean skirt that stopped right above the steel toes on a pair of violet Doc Martens. The whole class, I read the length of Adia Breitling, from the curling ankh to the flop of that heavy skirt, and I thought that I knew her. I knew, at least, why she was alone in biology lab. To be that beautiful and also that willfully strange did not make sense. It was certainly unfair, almost an insult, I thought. Either way, it meant I could never be friends with her. I was determined to leave strangeness behind at the Toneybee.
Adia turned my way when the bell rang, lifted her heavy eyelids, and pointedly read me over. She took in my too bright hair elastic, my white tennis shoes, and the pin straight braids that ran orderly down my back with the one bit of hair left free at the front. That morning, I’d pressed that scrap of hair around a pink foam curler, forming it into a stiff, fat egg roll to match the bangs that white girls wore on TV. Adia did not take the brass bamboo earrings into account and narrowed her eyes at the bangs. She saw the eagerness in my disguise and she thought she knew me, too.
When she finished her appraisal, she raised her eyes to meet mine. I pointedly gazed ahead of her. I didn’t want her to get the idea that we should be friends just because we were both black.
As I walked through the halls to my next class, I felt the sinking stone of loneliness. In Boston, at least, my unpopularity had been accompanied by a running commentary of jibes and sharp observations. The other girls called me bougie, would loudly critique my clothing, cataloging every uneven hemline and accidental spot of food. But Courtland County felt worse. Nobody outright tormented me, and this was the problem. The most I got were glances made up of equal parts pity, curiosity, and indifference. I didn’t matter enough to be called out.
I saw my father in the hallway up ahead. He was talking to a group of four older boys, two of them were much taller than he. They were trading jokes back and forth: one of the shorter boys would say something and then glance quickly up at my father’s face to see if he laughed. Sometimes he did. He wasn’t paying them much attention, only steadily scanning the hall as people walked past. I ducked into the bathroom before I was spotted.
Inside the bathroom, the facade of Courtland County High School broke. Scraps of toilet paper littered the floor, piled into great heaps, as if some bird-boned freshman, harried with the task of making a nest, had savaged every roll in every stall, collecting the softest bits for herself. The bathrooms in Dorchester weren’t this dirty—but then, we weren’t allowed toilet paper. When you had to use the bathroom there, you had to ask a teacher for four squares, which she would begrudgingly give you from a drawer in her desk.
I went to the biggest stall, the handicapped one, and I locked the door behind me. The schedule on the inside of my binder said I had English next, but I already knew I wasn’t going. There was no place to sit in the stall except the toilet, so I took down my pants and sat on the cold ring. I rested my chin on my hands and studied my leggings where they lay in a tangle at my feet. I stretched my shirt over my bare knees and hunted for the stain Charlie pissed into it. Even in the flickering fluorescent light of the bathroom, I could make out a dark patch at the front.
Maybe, I thought, I should become tougher to get the girls here to like me. I would have to get better at swearing out loud. Abandon the signs. The girls back in Dorchester had a way of swearing that sounded like music. Obscenities made them more girly. They’d say five dirty words really fast, so fast you almost missed them, and then hold out one really filthy syllable as long as possible, making it sing. “You dumb-ass, motherfucking, deaf dumb bitch,” they’d sometimes say to me, and that last word, even with its lone, hard, bitter syllable, sounded like the top note of a love song.
My behind was getting cold. I corrected myself in my head: my ass was getting cold. I circled my ankles first one way, then the other. Very low, I was sure it was under my breath, I started chanting the words to a Bell Biv DeVoe song. I’d never heard the song myself, but all the girls in Dorchester quoted it with a fervor that boarded on the religious. Around them, sometimes it seemed that everything that happened in the world could be interpreted through the lyrics of “Do Me!” I tapped out a stuttering beat on the fat of my thighs and chanted, far, far off rhythm: “The time was six o’clock on the back porch, No time to kill, can’t be late, got a date, whoooaa . . .” This last part I sang into my cupped hands, trying to hear a little echo. Before I could finish the verse, another girl’s voice called, “Hello?”
I cradled my knees to my chest, scrabbled with my pants still hanging low to the ground. I balanced on my hip bones and gathered all the fabric up so that all of me was hunched in an awkward U, no part of me visible from under the stall door.
“I heard you.” The voice was coming from right in front of my stall. I looked down and saw a pair of purple Doc Martens squarely pointing at me. The door rattled.
“I know you’re in there,” Adia said.
I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut. It did not seem fair that I’d spent the entire day mostly invisible only to be discovered now.
I could hear her panting. It echoed off the tile.
She wasn’t going to rush the door. In Dorchester, she would have rushed the door by now. But this girl maybe didn’t have the nerve.
“If you’re gonna be like that . . .” She left the threat unfinished.
My arms were beginning to shake with the strain of holding up my legs. I slid on the toilet seat again. I thought I had won.
But then I watched, with alarm, the skirt above the Doc Martens begin to pool on the floor, then the black T-shirt came into view, then the unsmiling, beautifully somber face of Adia Breitling, who craned her head beneath the bathroom door to gaze up at me, huddled with my pants down on the toilet. She didn’t even smirk. She only said, her voice hushed and serious, “You got the words wrong.”
“What?” I tottered uncomfortably, too startled to lower my legs.
“The words to the song. You messed them up. You did a mondegreen.”
I lowered my feet. “What’s that?”
Adia put her hands on her knees and sighed. She stood up, so I could only see her shoes again. “It’s when you mess up the words of a lyric, like you just did.” She said it with such disdain, I felt a flash of shame for misremembering the words of Bell Biv DeVoe.
She stayed beside the stall door for a few moments, as if waiting for me to apologize. When I didn’t, she sighed, and then I saw her purple Doc Martens shuffle away. When I was sure I was alone I pulled my pants up and flushed the toilet, just to hear the water in the bowl clap over my shameful exit.
In the cafeteria, there she was again, sitting alone at a table, watching the door for my entrance, staring me down as I made my way through the lunch line. The empty seat in front of her was a challenge. I took my tray and walked straight toward her, holding her gaze the whole time. She sat up a little straighter as I approached, but when I put down the tray and pulled out the seat, she hunched herself over until she was almost lying on the table and cast her eyes down to the sketchbook in front of her, began circling huge, sprawling curlicues across the blank page. I ignored her and began to eat.
Adia gouged at her sketchbook with the broad side of a thick pencil until she sat up suddenly, sucked on her thumb, and began rubbing at her drawing.
To the paper she said, “You smell like a zoo.”
“Excuse me?”
She kept rubbing steadily. “You heard me. Like the zoo does when you get too close to the animals. Nobody’s told you that before?”
I bit into my hamburger. I chewed very, very slowly, my eyes stinging the whole time. My mother always made us count: thirty-six chews, to make sure we digested correctly. Charlie, of course, couldn’t be taught to chew thirty-six times.
Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six. I swallowed. I took a long sip from my carton of milk. Adia smirked. She knew I was stalling. I swallowed and sat my empty carton on my tray.
“That’s rude.” I crushed the empty milk carton. “It’s not my fault I smell like a zoo. It was an accident.”
“You smell like a zoo by accident?”
“Yeah.”
Adia scratched at her notebook some more. I moved on to the limp salad on my tray. I looked up and Adia looked back down at her paper. I pierced a tomato with my fork, brought it to my mouth, sucked in its sour seeds.
Adia shut her notebook, hunched herself even farther forward. She rested her chin on her elbows, fixing me with a hard stare.
“You’re from Spring City.”
“No,” I said. “Why do people keep asking that? Isn’t this Courtland County High School? Wouldn’t that mean everyone is from Courtland County?”
“No,” Adia explained patiently. “All the black kids here live in Spring City. They get bused in. Well, the good ones get bused in. All the white kids live in Courtland County.”
“But there were white kids on my bus today.”
“Those were the poor kids. They take the bus. Them and the black kids.”
“So you take the bus?”
“No,” Adia said. “I live in Courtland County.” She was so definitive that it seemed impossible to challenge her earlier logic that only white people lived there.
She closed her notebook. “What type of music do you like?”
The test. Always the test. Invariably, I failed it. I would flail around, naming anyone and everyone who had ever graced the cover of my father’s Jet magazine: the Commodores, Roberta Flack, Richie Havens—each one somehow wrong. Or I would accidently name the artist who was secretly white. “Whitney Houston!” was shrieked back at me, in disbelief.
I cleared my throat. “I don’t really listen to music.”
“You don’t listen to music?” Adia made that sound worse than a mondegreen.
Annoyed at her, annoyed at myself, I pointed to the front of her T-shirt. “I changed my mind. I like Living Colour.”
Adia looked down at the band logo on her chest, looked up at me. “Nah,” she snorted. “That’s funny.” She allowed herself a real smile. “What do you like?”
Adia was so beautiful when she smiled that, despite her hostility, it made me want to please her. But I had no good answer. I sighed, resigned myself to the snorts of laughter.
“Prince, I guess.”
Adia narrowed her eyes slightly, but she nodded, let it slide. She was working up to her real question. She barked, “What did you mean when you said smelling like a zoo was an accident?”
“You heard me.” I grinned now. I knew I had her. It was about the wrong thing, but it was the first spark of curiosity I’d gotten from anybody my own age all day. “An accident.”
The bell rang. We walked side by side to the trash can. She shoved her garbage in first, then turned on her heel and abruptly walked away. I walked quickly in the opposite direction. I didn’t want it to look like she was the one leaving me behind.
“I HAVE ONE teacher. Her name is Miss Lowry and she made me talk about Charlie.” Callie took a swig of her fruit punch. My mother sat beside her, signing everything Callie said in Charlie’s direction. She’d asked us each to recount our first day of school to the dinner table.
Callie sat down her glass. She had a faint red sugar mustache across her upper lip. She took a deep breath. “So I told them all about Charlie and how he’s a chimpanzee and how he’s like a little brother. And one of the kids asked if he was my real brother, like, if you gave birth to him, like, that kind of brother, and I said, that’s impossible, people can’t give birth to chimps, but he said maybe he was my real little brother and everybody laughed.”
My mother stopped signing. “A boy said Charlie was your real brother?”
“Yeah.”
“And then the class laughed?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think he was making fun of you?” my father asked carefully.
Callie thought for a moment. “No, I’m pretty sure he’s just, you know, slow. I think maybe they’re all kind of slow.” She rubbed her upper lip with the back of her hand. “I think all the kids here are maybe stupid. Anyway, I had two hot dogs for lunch. They let you get seconds at school here. I think I like geography the best.”
My parents looked at each other.
“Charlotte, you’re next,” my mother said.
“It was fine.” I kept my head down, held up one hand to lazily sign fine in Charlie’s direction.
“Just fine?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you make any friends?”
“No.” I took a bite. “This chicken tastes nasty,” I announced.
“Charlotte, if you can’t describe something in a way that is acceptable to everybody at this table, you can’t talk.”
I lifted my right hand, signed fine again. Charlie worked his way through a bowl of rice, five grains at a time. His lips moved up and down slowly, and he opened his mouth too wide. I could see the pink and black of his gums, the cakey yellow of his front teeth, all of that mashed up with the white of boiled rice. I caught my mother watching him, warily.
“What are you going to do about that?” I said.
She sighed. “We’re working on it.”
Charlie pinched his second helping of chicken breast between two fingers and tried to fold it into his mouth, but the piece was too big. It flopped out of his hands and fell onto the tray of his high chair. My mother snatched up the extra meat and placed it on her own plate to cut it for him. Charlie watched her steadily, then bowed toward her, opened his mouth, and snapped his teeth at my mother’s hand. It was just a feint, but he was pleased with himself.
With one swift movement, my mother leaned over and lightly bit Charlie back, behind the ear. He screeched.
Callie gasped, rapturous. “Oh, do it again.”
My father was queasy. “You did that real fast, Laurel.”
And it was true. She bit Charlie as if it was the most natural movement in the world.
My mother said, “I’m a quick study.”