Casey Barnes Eponymous

Casey Barnes Eponymous - By E.A. Rigg





1



Ten minutes before he came in and everything started again, Casey was not, for the first time in weeks, thinking about him.

She was focusing on that day’s target.

The target was a girl, a fellow sophomore, on the other side of the library. She was skinny, blonde, and in a sweater from a mall store. At first the girl ignored what Casey slipped her. Most kids did. A piece of paper in a library book was generally assumed to be a leftover from a prior reader. Some kids shoved it back in the book without looking. Others crumpled and aimed it at the nearest trashcan.

In those moments she dashed over and announced they were supposed to read the information on that paper. That it was a song list. After her proclamation, there was a look with a string of questions behind it. A what? Why? And who are you?

At that point in high school Casey was known to her friend Leigh, teachers from freshman year who could not forget her choice comebacks, and kids from those classes who remembered her for the same reason. But sophomore year had only been going on for a few weeks. She had yet to lay down real tire marks. Except for Leigh, those teachers, kids, and him, most people did not know who she was.

“Just read it,” she would respond.

Then they would. The skinny blonde glanced at the paper. The title caught her eyes. Song list for 9.20.10. It was that day’s date. The girl looked more closely.

1. A pop song…For when the blonde girl accessorized other sweaters from that dumb store. For the morning, when mom was making toast and the promise of a new day was as fresh as the coffee percolating beside it. Like marshmallow fluff, a pop song would smooth over negative residue from the day before. Party invites not issued, looks not returned from boys. The sweater said a lot. A pop song would make her think that day would be different. Because that was what pop songs did: stuck you in a daydream and kept the cotton candy stick swirling until it yielded a mass of sticky sugar. Until it felt like even your toes had sugar between them and the high was so great there was no way your day would not be better than the one before.

Sometimes, that was all it took.

It would have to be an interesting pop song though. A subtle push in the direction of hip. Give a girl a fish and you feed her for a day. Teach a girl to fish and you feed her for a lifetime.

This was, after all, why Casey made the lists. The path to more free candy, happiness, and overall cool for the participants in the current and outstanding hell that was high school would not be created by popular kids. No, that road would be plowed by music. And not the crapola on pop radio in between commercials for tanning salons either. Rather, the kind of music you had to be in the know to know about. She flunked the test on the American Revolution and cheated on the one about the French. But on revolution through music she would get an A.

1. A pop song - “Home” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. California retro-hip with a hint of irony. Just what the doctor ordered. The target looked around the library. Casey would bet a vinyl copy of Sgt Pepper’s that the target had never heard of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. As the girl’s eyes reached her, she grabbed the book she was supposed to be scanning and opened it.

From his perch a few feet away the librarian Mr. Cole glared at her. She responded with a hang ten sign. Mr. Cole’s glares and Casey’s hang ten signs constituted over half of their communication. They had since the fifth day of school. That was when Mr. Cole, a Libertarian with a short fuse that caused his facial veins to turn purple when kids in the library spoke too loudly, asked her to remove the N.W.A. sticker from her notebook.

“‘F*ck Tha’ Police’ should have got ‘em sent to Gitmo ages ago.”

“But Mr. Cole they weren’t sending bad guys to Guantanamo when that song came out.”

Mr. Cole looked from the sticker to a pair of scissors lying a few inches away. If the conversation went the wrong way the scissors would make waste of that sticker in seconds.

“Anyway,” she forged on, “I assume that as a patriot you support an artist’s right to exercise his or her first amendment rights.”

He looked from the scissors to Casey. She did not feel unafraid. Yet she continued. “I’m stirred you know N.W.A. wrote ‘F*ck Tha’ Police’! How’d you know that, Mr. Cole?”

She really was impressed. But the compliment did not accomplish its intended task. Mr. Cole got steamed all over again. “Watch your language, young lady.”

“But you’re the one who said ‘F*ck Tha’ Police’--”

“I said--”

“--in the first place.”

“Don’t you have work to do?”

She cocked her head to one side. Of course she had work to do. That was the whole reason she was in the library in the first place. Students at her school had to do a semester’s worth of volunteer credit at one point in their four-year career. Most got it out of the way by helping with school plays or setting up for sports games. But not Casey, whose mother Tricia was an attorney from whom high marks in school had flown like water from a tap. Tricia could not fathom why Casey’s report cards contained numbers beginning with 6 and 7, occasionally 8, and never 9. She insisted that Casey get her credit by being library assistant, an über-geek volunteer gig if ever there was one. Old Lady Barnes’ theory was that it would provide her with enforced studying time. Did Casey have work to do? She had a quiz in biology the following day and a history paper due in two.

She looked at Mr. Cole. “No I don’t have any work to do. And I’m guessing I’m not gonna get a straight answer from you about how it was you knew N.W.A. wrote ‘F*ck Tha’ Police’?”

At any rate it was at that moment, on the fifth day of school, that communication between Casey and Mr. Cole broke down. After she shot him the hang ten sign she looked back to the blonde. The girl’s eyes had returned to the list.

2. A rock song - “Blues from Down Here” by TV On the Radio. Something edgy for lunchtime. For when the promise of the a.m. sugar high did not quite pan out. Something to say okay maybe you’re not going to become a queen bee today but disappointment does not have to be as bad as it seems. It can even make you edgy. And edgy sounds good.

The skinny blonde did not have anything by TV On the Radio either. That Casey knew. But maybe, not right away, but in a few hours, a few days perhaps, that song would make the girl realize that some sweaters are best donated to the Salvation Army sooner rather than later.

Leigh walked through the door. Leigh and Casey were best friends, even if neither was the kind of girl inclined to label each other as such. They had been since the beginning of junior high, when they bonded in English class over their shared observation that girls in the popular clique dressed alike. They did too, even if it was in the way they did not dress.

Leigh wore baggy jeans and shirts with paint stains from her art classes. Casey wore T-shirts featuring punk rockers, mini jeans skirts that barely passed the school dress code, and Converse sneakers. On her favorite T, Sid Vicious’ right middle finger was in the air and his left hand held a bottle of whiskey. Most kids at her school in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C., did not know who Sid Vicious was. She liked that. The shirt got her sent home when she forgot to wear a sweater over it in front of the principal. She liked that even more.

Casey had long dark hair that, more often than not, needed a shampoo and good combing. Kids sometimes asked her if she was growing dreads. She had big dark eyes and was not unattractive. Some might even say she was pretty. In a scruffy, girl-skate-rat-who-doesn’t-actually-skate kind of way.

Leigh’s skin was pale and freckled, eyes blue, and hair stick-straight and strawberry blonde. Except for when she was in art class, Leigh was shy. In art class, however, where she created vibrant paintings that quickly won admiration, she was confident.

As opposed to Casey, who pissed off teachers and got into trouble an average of four days a week, Leigh did not tend to break rules or speak back to authority figures. But every once in a while she rebelled, and rebelled hard. During the last week of junior high she broke into the school’s public address system and announced that Shakira was in the library and would be signing autographs after school. She got grounded for a month, during which time she did what she always did in the aftermath of a bad girl incident, i.e. bottle it all up and act perfect.

The summer prior to sophomore year, something had happened again.

Leigh approached the library desk. She visited once a week. They told Mr. Cole it was because Leigh’s teacher sent her. Casey slid a paperback biography of Janis Joplin over to her. Mr. Cole folded his arms over his chest. “I find it suspicious that your teacher sends you here every week.”

Leigh’s face turned red. She found Mr. Cole scary and weird. Casey did too, but she did not let it break her stride. “Her teacher needs the Janis J tome, Mr. D. They’re studying the sixties.”

“Yeah right,” Mr. Cole snapped.

Out of the corner of her eye, Casey noticed the target looking around the library. She had not yet come up with an apt way to describe the third and last song. Its purpose was more abstract than those of the others. Once she labeled it A college song. The songs she chose for the third slot were more moody and cerebral than the others, the kind of music she imagined college students played while talking about Russian philosophers. But then it occurred to her that not everyone’s vision of college was the same. What if some people read ‘college song’ and thought about frat houses and televised football games? The third song was, thusly and simply, the third song.

3. A third song - “Maybe Not” by Cat Power. Cat Power, aka Chan (pronounced Shawn) Marshall had a voice like salted caramel. The lyrics of “Maybe Not” were about freeing your mind. The album was called You Are Free. The target’s eyes came to rest on Casey. She looked away. Leigh, who knew about her playlists, raised an eyebrow.

“I want you out of here when I get back,” Mr. Cole said to Leigh. He stalked to the other side of the library, where he spotted a kid attempting to hide a contraband iPod in his jacket flap.

“My ticket’s gone missing,” Leigh hissed.

Casey frowned. She knew right away what Leigh was talking about. It had to do with her act of rebellion the summer before. “What do you mean?”

“It was in my duffel,” Leigh began, “I threw it in there when I packed on the last night. But now I can’t find it.”

“Don’t sweat it. No one ever finds anything when they’re bugging.”

“I wasn’t bugging!”

Mr. Cole started to walk back. “You better go--” Casey began to say, but she did not get any further with her sentence because he entered the library. She froze.

Leigh turned. As soon as she saw what caught Casey’s eyes, she looked at her. “Pretend you didn’t see him. Look the other way, grab a book, and don’t make eye contact.”

Casey did not budge. “Case,” Leigh said.

The blond girl approached the desk. This was usually the part where the targets asked Casey if she slipped the list into their books, she said yes, they asked why, and she told them to just listen to the songs. But as the girl got closer and began to say, “Did you put…,” Casey walked away from the desk.

“Don’t,” Leigh pleaded.

She was already halfway to him. He paused inside the library door to check out the magazine rack. She reached his side. And for the first time since the school year began, they spoke.