chapter 4
The day dragged on, and I continued sleepwalking. I hated to admit it, even to myself, but I felt lost. It hadn't been so bad at home, where I could put myself on autopilot and coast through the weeks, but seeing other people carrying on with their lives made me feel hollow. I was missing out, but I had no right, as the one left behind, to have anything more.
I needed a quiet place to think, instead of being surrounded by the laughter and chatter of other people going about their carefree lives, planning parties or after school activities, or the bullying of Hell's finest.
Jenna and I always spent lunch together, gossiping about teachers and other kids, about the pathetic spooky lunch themes that ran year-round, like terrifying tacos and monster meatloaf, better suited to an elementary school than a bunch of teenagers.
Instead of even trying to find a table, I traded my crumpled dollars for a bag of chips and a bottle of pop (I needed the caffeine to stay awake), and headed out into the front hall. Technically we weren't supposed to eat out there, but I hoped no one would notice.
Certain I would be alone, I was in for a surprise as I stepped in the hall. Through the glass partition I saw a boy standing in the vestibule. A black hooded sweatshirt was pulled up over his head, and he seemed to be staring out of the window, slumping over. Frumpy that I wasn't alone as I had wanted, I sat down in one of the cubbies lining the sides of the room. My bag of chips opened with a pop, but I had absolutely no appetite.
Your love is all I think about read graffiti on the cubby seat. Predictably, someone had tried to scratch out "love" with a pen and drew a little arrow to "sex".
I opened my history book on my lap and flipped through it, black and white photos of women in long, impractical gowns, and crudely painted battle scenes on the pages. I wondered whether Jenna's fan page had been updated. I made a note to check it later on. Not that there would be any new information. Over the summer, I developed a junkie compulsion to refresh the page every ten seconds, and had to ban myself from the computer.
The front door opened with a blast of air and vestibule boy stepped in. My first thought was that I hoped he would walk on down the hall and leave me be. My second thought was that he was extremely cute. I made myself busy with my very fascinating textbook.
"Why did I come here?" he groaned out loud. He had a deep voice compared to many of our male classmates, who were caught in the throes of puberty. I looked up, reacting as though he had spoken to me, although it had obviously been rhetorical.
"I should have stayed at home," he continued to himself.
He tinkered with his phone, oblivious to the fact that I was even there. I felt a little embarrassed for both of us. Him for possibly being mentally unbalanced, and me for thinking it had anything to do with me.
Stowing the phone away, he looked up, and our eyes met. The smile that appeared on his handsome face was so huge and bright it was almost goofy. His dark eyes lit up as though I were the most interesting person he'd ever seen. I wondered if I had ink smeared on my face or something, and rubbed my cheek.
"Sorry to inflict my inner monologue on you," he said, tilting his head in my direction. "I have a bad habit of having full conversations with myself."
"That's okay," I said softly, not knowing what else to say. I didn't do well with attractive boys. And I really had no interest in them now. I figured he'd go on his way, so I could get back to zoning out. But he didn't leave.
"Ridiculous that I'm this late for my first day, huh?" he asked, and then shrugged. "I can't think of an excuse, either."
To my surprise, he came and sat in the cubby to my left.
"The truth is, I slept in, but I don't think I can tell them that," he continued. "Do you have any ideas that could help me in my situation?"
"Nope, fresh out," I said matter-of-factly, keeping my eyes locked on the words in my textbook, even though it was impossible to read them with him talking to me.
"Okay, how about this..." He held his hands out as if framing the scene. "I was trying to save a possum caught in the middle of the road..."
"Make the animal cuter," I offered. I didn’t know why I was helping him.
"Okay. I was trying to save a rabbit from being squashed. And once I saved him, I had to find his home. So I went trampling through the woods, and forgot about the time." He dropped his hands. "Do you think the ladies in the office will buy it?"
The tone of his appealing voice was low, like we were conspiratorial partners. His lips were full and moved interestingly as he talked. I scolded myself for noticing that.
"Actually, I think it's terrible," I admitted. "Your pants are spotless, which they wouldn't be if you had been running around the woods. Just tell the office people your parents had car trouble like a normal person."
"I'm not really a normal person," he divulged, and the silly smile was back. It made him look even more attractive, his eyes crinkling. It was the kind of smile that any other person would immediately return, but he got on my nerves with his perpetual good mood. It was mostly annoying because I couldn't reciprocate.
"Pretend to be. That's what I'm doing," I said.
"Interesting," he said, leaning closer, his brown eyes inquiring. "Mind telling me why?"
"Not really," I said. "Since I don't know you." I told myself I just wanted him to go away. Part of me didn't, however. I tried to ignore that part.
He stood up and started walking towards the central office, then turned around and said, "I'm Henry Rhodes. I'm the village idiot where I come from. There — now you know me."
I was silent for a second, studying him. He was possibly the strangest boy I'd ever met.
"I'm Ariel," I replied.
He nodded his head in my direction again with a smirk, and continued on his way to go spout some lame excuse to get out of a half day's worth of tardies. He practically had a strut to his step as I watched him disappear.
The name clicked two seconds after he walked away. Henry was the boy Lainey had claimed.
I walked into Honors American History later that day, and was surprised to see Henry sitting in the back row. Several jock guys sat in the desks surrounding him, football players and swimming team stars. It was almost as though we sat on two different sides of a chess board, with a bunch of pawns in between us.
Thinking he would finally ignore me, and not knowing exactly how I felt about that, I walked in. When he spotted me, however, he smiled again. I turned away from him, my face heating up. There was no way that our little interaction was going to go anywhere. I wouldn't consider getting in the way of Lainey and lipgloss, let alone Lainey and a boy.
"Hi, Ariel," Mr. Warwick, the teacher, said brightly. He'd been Hugh's friend for years, and had been over to our house for dinner countless times. He made a mean corn relish at our barbeques. "So you finally made it to my side of the hallway?"
"Looks that way," I said.
"Seating chart is on the blackboard. I believe you're right in the front."
I took a peek, and saw that he was correct. I pulled out my thick History textbook and opened it up again. My heart thudded a little as I noticed it was the same page I'd been eyeballing when Henry spoke to me earlier.
"Welcome to Honors American History," Mr. Warwick said once the bell rang. He stood up from his roost on the desk and shut the door. "We're going to learn things about the civil war you never thought possible. We may even get past it by the end of the year!"
I had heard lots of positive things about his goofy teaching style and laid back attitude. From everything I knew about Mr. Warwick, it rang true. Most students called him Wick. It felt too weird to me, so I always just called him the Mr. Warwick. Probably odd considering my use of my parents' first names. But everybody has quirks.
"For instance, the battle of Bunker Hill? Not fought at Bunker Hill. It was actually fought on Breed's Hill. Now when you go home and your parents ask you what you learned, tell them that. I'm sure they'll be impressed, and you don't have to pay attention for the rest of the day."
He winked while the class snickered. I had a feeling this would be one of my favorite subjects now. There was hominess about the room everywhere else in school lacked. Warwick felt like a family member, but not one of the ever-watchful ones I had at home.
Henry ended up being in my English class, too, though I tried not to register it. Because both classes were Honors classes, a lot of the same students were in both. English remained my most anticipated subject, since it had always been my favorite. Two bookcases crammed full of every book I had ever owned filled the corner on my room at home.
But I was soon disappointed.
The silver-haired teacher, Ms. Fellows, parked herself next to the antique overhead projector in the front of the room. A student shut off the lights. The blinds were already pulled down, and shadow descended over our desks. Ms. Fellows looked incredibly bored, like she was ready to go to sleep. She droned on about grammar, scribbling her speech down with dry erase markers and smearing it with the side of her hand.
I couldn't stay present in the dark. My mind drifted, and my thoughts came to rest where they often did, on the last night I saw Jenna. I'd turned over every word I remembered in my head a thousand times like an old coin, but I still felt like I was missing something. The exact phrase or moment that Jenna decided to leave for good, if that was truly the case, always escaped me. It didn't help that for starters she was furious that night, a ball of sizzling anger.
"What do you mean, you're going out?" I'd asked, sitting on my checkered bedspread.
The day had been warm, holding steady in the low eighties. But after the sun went to sleep, the temperature quickly started to drop. Still wearing shorts, her tanned legs were bare. Not clothes that she typically wore out after dark.
"The words have one meaning, Ariel. Not difficult to understand," she said impatiently, spitting out her words like they had thorns.
"It's after ten," I protested, my voice sounding pitifully like a whine. I never would have worried about looking immature in front of her before. But now it was all I could think about.
She wouldn't look at me. She stared at her own eyes in her reflection; putting her curly hair up in a ponytail and taking it back down. She had on her dress-to-impress makeup, a double layer of mascara and champagne-colored eyeshadow. I wondered if she was meeting up with a boy.
"What is happening to you?" I asked finally. I couldn't stop myself. "I feel like I don't even know you anymore."
She glared at me, and her blue eyes were icy. I had never seen her look at me with so much contempt. I wondered what horrible thing I'd done, flickering quickly through the possibilities.
"I don't have time for this," she said, stomping out of my room. Then she headed for the outside door.
"Take your sweatshirt, it's getting cold," I said. Jenna always complained about being chilly.
She sighed at me, the dampener on her good time, grabbing her yellow sweatshirt off the back of a chair.
"Anything else you need, mom?" she asked, rolling her eyes at me as she stood impatiently by the open door.
A tear rolled down my cheek and I wiped it away.
"Stop acting like a baby," she commanded sharply, bracing her arms against the doorway. "I'll be back before midnight. You'll never even miss me." She swung outside into the night, but she made sure I heard her next words.
"I won't miss you."
And with that she was gone. Out of my life, possibly forever. Would I always wonder what I could have done to stop her from leaving that night? If I'd known she wouldn't be back, I would have chased her outside, but she would only have become angrier with me.
She hadn't always been cruel. In fact, for years we'd been thick as thieves, our personalities the exact right fit. I patiently listened to her stories, almost never pointing out how she embellished her dates to make her life sound more exciting. But in the months before she left, she changed. Sometimes I felt like whomever she had been vanished before my eyes, long before she stepped out into the night.