Yes, I could do this. I started to write furiously.
Which amendment . . . Yes, I knew that. I’d obviously just found the few stupid pages before and now I was back on track. They’d see that I knew my stuff—after all, if anyone knew about Congress, it should be me, right? I stopped writing and frowned at this thought. Why should I know about Congress?
“Ten more minutes,” the bird-woman said.
I went back to writing and then there was a snapping sound and the finely sharpened tip of my pencil broke off. I stared at it in dismay. I tried to write with the stub but it was impossible.
A bell rang, jangling loudly above our heads.
“Leave your papers on the desk and file out in silence,” the bird-woman said.
Reluctantly I left my unfinished government paper and joined the line. I saw a couple of kids take a look at me and then snigger. I joined them as they walked back down the six hundred hallway to the stairwell and fell into step beside a studious-looking girl. She was wearing glasses and was dressed in a dorky manner, like me, so at least I figured she’d be someone I could talk to.
“Hi,” I said. “What was that exam all about? I mean, did you know that crazy stuff?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I read the study sheets ahead of time. It was a cinch.” She went to walk on ahead of me.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m new here and I don’t like it.”
“Don’t like it?” She looked as if she was about to smile. “That’s funny. Do you think anyone likes it?”
“Then why put up with it? There are plenty of better high schools around. Normally, I go to Oakmont. It’s great. Very modern. Very academic.”
“I don’t know of any Oakmont.”
“Near the civic center and the freeway.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is the high school.”
“Well, I’m not staying. Can you tell me the way out?”
“Way out?” She looked puzzled.
“Yeah, the way out.”
“The way out?” she repeated, and she started to laugh.
“What’s wrong with you? Do you happen to have a cell phone on you so I can call my parents?”
“Cell phone?”
There was something seriously strange about this girl, or about this school, or both. “The office then, so I can call my parents to come and get me.”
“Nobody can come and get you, don’t you know that yet?” She pushed past me and almost ran to escape from me. I followed her down the stairs, staying close to the handrail because a tide of students was coming up.
“Out of the way, freak.” A boy in a letter jacket deliberately knocked into me. Luckily I held on or I’d have gone tumbling down.
This is like a nightmare, I muttered. Nobody will tell me how to get out. An exam with questions I can’t possibly answer. Then I stopped halfway down a flight of stairs, making those behind me barrel into me and start cursing. And I actually laughed. A nightmare. Of course. It was the classic nightmare that had plagued me all my life—the exam I was perennially late for. The exam with questions I couldn’t possibly answer. The strange building with no way out. That was it. I was dreaming. Now it all made sense. I’d been in some kind of accident and I was in a coma or something. And I’d wake up and everything would be back to normal again.
I finished the flight of steps with an almost jaunty tread. All I had to do was keep reminding myself that it was all a dream and I could handle anything. The students now seemed to be streaming along a different hallway.
“Where is everyone going?” I asked, hopeful that it might be the end of the school day and time to go home.
“Lunch, stupid,” a skinny freckled-faced boy said.
I followed along, although I didn’t feel hungry. The cafeteria was a huge subterranean room that echoed with noise, the clash and clatter of plates competing with the shouts of students. What’s more, it smelled terrible, like drains and boiled cabbage. I stood in line with the rest and inched my way toward a counter. Someone took a tray, so I did. A plate was banged down in front of me.
“Stew?” a helper behind the counter asked, and before I could answer, a great ladle of grayish, glutinous stuff was slopped into my plate. The helper gave me a toothless grin. “Vegetables?” she asked and dropped some gray boiled cabbage on top of the congealed mess.
“Wait,” I said, fighting back revulsion. “Is there a choice? Pizza maybe?”
The toothless grin widened. “Do you want it or not?”
I was pushed forward to where an old woman sat at a cash desk. “Five dollars,” she said.
“Five dollars? For this—” I went to say “crap,” then swallowed down the word at the last second. Then I remembered. “I don’t have my purse with me.”
“No matter. Put it on your tab, Miss Weinstein.”
How did they all know my name with all these thousands of students?
I carried my tray and looked around for a place to sit. Hostile stares or stupid giggles greeted me. I found an empty table far in a corner and sat down. I’d really have to do something about the way I looked. If this was a dream, I’d dream myself better looking. Better still, I’d dream Sally Ann into my dream and she could help me get back to my real self. I sat alone at that table and thought wistfully of Sally Ann, the first real friend I ever had. The only one who cared about me when I was a fat, clueless freshman and other kids picked on me or teased me. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d never have changed. I might not even have lived because when she came into my life I was seriously thinking of suicide. I’d started reading up on how many pills it takes to kill a person and I’d begun stealing my mother’s sleeping pills and my dad’s heart medication. Then she’d arrived and suddenly everything was fine.
“Hey, you.” A figure loomed over me. She was a gorgeous blonde, wearing a cheerleading outfit. “You’re sitting in my seat.”
“I didn’t realize we had assigned seats,” I said.
Her friends had come up behind her now, more cheerleaders and a couple of jocks in letter jackets. They burst out laughing.
“Are you totally clueless?” the blonde said. “This is the table we want and so you move. Got it?”
“Why should I have to move?” My fighting spirit had returned.
“Because we say so and we count and you’re nothing. Go on, beat it.”
“And if I won’t move?”
“I do this,” the girl said and before I could dodge she grabbed my head and rammed it down into my plate. Hot rancid fat went up my nose and I coughed and gagged. I fought to sit up as she held me down.
“Let her up, Tracy. Or she might die,” one of the other girls said and they roared with laughter.
The girl released me. “Got the message?” she said. “Go on, get lost.”
I got to my feet, wiping my eyes with my hand because I didn’t seem to have a napkin.
“You guys need to learn that bullying is not acceptable,” I said. “I’m going right now to report you to the principal and to make an official complaint.” I looked around, noticing that the cafeteria had become suspiciously quiet and that other kids were watching us. I turned to them. “What’s wrong with this place?” I demanded. “Don’t you realize that it’s so much nicer if we all get along? If we can’t be kind to each other in a school, in a community—what chance do nations ever have to live in peace because the whole of society is at war. Gangs, cliques, police brutality—what do they achieve except to make one person feel superior and others angry and inadequate?”
There was dead silence and the thought struck me that I’d made this speech before. I saw myself on a podium and the crowds were cheering and applauding. “I made this speech when I was running for Congress,” I said and even as the words came out I realized how ridiculous they sounded. The kids burst out laughing. I was about to go and find a bathroom that wasn’t inhabited by a wolf pack when someone near me called out, “Hey, Joshua! Dave’s looking for you.”
And it was as if I’d been struck by lightning. Dave. That name meant something to me—I’d been married to Dave and our baby son had been named Joshua. Suddenly I saw it all clearly—the apartment on the Upper East Side and the sun streaming in through the window with the view of Central Park and Dave saying, “It’s no use. It’s not working, Amy. You’re married to your ambition, not to me.” Then he put a hand on my shoulder. “It was never the same after Joshua died, was it?”
I stepped out into a deserted hallway, digesting this vision. I wasn’t really in high school. I was grown up and I’d been married and Dave had left me because Joshua had died and he couldn’t handle it. And I was a successful lawyer who was running for Congress. And I wore high heels and designer suits and had my hair styled by the best stylist in the Village. And I remembered the accident now—driving too fast because I was late and the van that came unexpectedly from my left. . . .
A hand grabbed my shoulder. “The principal wants to see you,” a voice said. “This way.”
“Fine,” I thought. What could the principal do to me? I’d tell her she was only a figment of my imagination and pretty soon I’d wake up.
Down the stairs we went. It was hot and stuffy down here and it crossed my mind to wonder why the principal chose this part of the school for her office. The boy who had been escorting me knocked on a door. It read, “Ms. Fer. Principal.”
“Enter,” said a voice.
“The girl you wanted, Ms. Fer,” the boy said and shoved me inside. Ms. Fer was sitting at a polished mahogany desk. She looked like an older version of me—immaculately dressed in a black suit and white blouse, hair streaked with gray but perfectly cut, face still unlined, gold pin in her lapel, long red fingernails.
I was horribly conscious of how I must look—the purple sweater now streaked with congealing stew, my hair sticky, my face a mess.
“I don’t really look like this,” I said. “Some bullies jammed my face into my plate.”
“I heard you caused a disturbance in the cafeteria.” Her voice was low, smooth and commanding.
“I caused? Listen, I was sitting there, minding my own business.”
“I hear you’ve been nothing but trouble since you arrived, unprepared, this morning. We don’t tolerate troublemakers here.”
“Then expel me. I’m not staying anyway. And if you really want to know, this isn’t the real me. I’m not even a high school student any longer. I’m grown-up and successful and I look great and you’re just in my hallucination, so I don’t really care what you say.”
“So you never really looked the way you do now?” She leaned forward as if she was interested.
“Well, yes, I guess I did. When I first went to high school I was overweight and a dork and clueless about clothes and I had no friends. And people picked on me, just like here.”
“You were desperately unhappy.”
“Yes.”
“So much so that you were thinking of taking your own life.”
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“But you decided not to.”
“I made a friend. And she took me under her wing. She rescued me.”
“Tell me about this good friend of yours.”
She leaned forward, smiling encouragingly, seeming to give the impression that she was on my side, a pal.
I found myself smiling, too, at the memory. “Her name was Sally Ann. She was Chinese American—really attractive and petite—and spunky. She wasn’t afraid of anyone. You should have seen the quick answers she came up with to the bullies and jocks. She could wipe the floor with them.”
“A bad girl, then?”
“No, not bad. Stretched the rules a bit. Taught me how to sneak out of class undetected, how to write my own excuse notes. That kind of thing. Oh, and taught me how to smoke. But nothing too terrible. It was just that my whole world changed when she took me under her wing. She told me she could make me popular like her and it was true. By the time she left, I was in with the popular kids and I never looked back.”
“A good friend indeed.”
“Yes, but . . .” My smile faded. “She left suddenly and she never said good-bye. So all my life I wondered what happened to her . . . whether she got pregnant or into some other kind of trouble? She had a bad home life, she told me, so I wondered if there was something with her parents that forced the family to leave or made her run away.” I paused, a clear image of Sally Ann coming into my brain. She was laughing as we climbed up the hill behind my house together, her black hair blowing out in the wind. Not a care in the world. And the next Monday she hadn’t shown up for school. “If only she had contacted me, I’d have wanted to help her,” I finished.
“Tell me about the time she made you the offer to help you become popular,” Ms. Fer said.
Suddenly I could see it clearly, almost as if a movie were playing inside my head. She is sleeping over at my house and she says, “You know, you could be really pretty and you’re smart. All you need is a little help. I could lend you some clothes that are too big for me, and help you diet and teach you how to act cool like me. In no time at all I guarantee you’d be popular.”
“Are you serious?” I ask.
“Trust me. It will be a cinch.”
“I’d do anything,” I say.
She laughs. “You mean you’d sell me your soul and your firstborn child?”
I’m laughing, too. “And anything else you’d like. Willingly.”
She takes a piece of paper. “We have to do this formally,” she says and she sticks a pin into my finger. “Ow,” I say as a drop of blood falls onto the paper. “Go on, sign your name,” she says, and I do it. Then she signs hers.
I look up and realize that Ms. Fer has been watching the same scene unfold. “And what happened after that?”