Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Five


Lemmingville





As promised, Sarah’s note is waiting for me, taped to the inside of my locker door. The morning note is a long tradition between us, established after my family moved to Farm World. We talk on the phone all the time and text each other constantly, but that’s not enough somehow. Besides, in this age of technological wonders, actually writing words on paper using your own hand and that crude device known as an ink pen (or in Sarah’s case, a manual typewriter) seems really cool and countercultural.

We got that idea from Emma, of course. We get all of our cool, countercultural ideas from her.

Dear Janiesayqua, the note begins, and continues, Janie say wha—? Please get it through your head that this is going to be a most fantabulous day.

Typical Sarah. She’s disturbed that I’m still eating lunch in the library after two months of high school. She thinks I should be past that by now. This is easy for Miss A lunch to say, she who has spent every lunch period since the first day of school surrounded by our old friends from Wheeler Middle, she who has algebra with Lauren Basco and Sonia Meeker, English I with Rebecca Wade and Hannah Anders, and PE with all of the above plus Marcy Wilder, Wren Briggs, and Hannah Wolfe.

Please eat lunch in the cafeteria today! (See, what did I tell you?) There’s a really cool girl in PE named MacKenzie who has B lunch. She went to McDougal for middle school, but she isn’t scary at all, and she has a lot of friends who did Battle of the Books last year, so you know they’re our kind of people.

I fold Sarah’s note and put it in the front pocket of my backpack. I like to stretch it out over the course of the morning, saving a big chunk of it for lunch, the social nadir of my day.

The halls are not just crowded. They are not merely packed. They are overrun, like termite-infested logs. That anyone can actually move at all is a miracle of modern physics. Manneville High School is famous for the state of its bursting seams. New subdivisions pop up on the outskirts of town on a daily basis, feeding more and more lemmings into the stream of public education, and yet no one can quite work up the interest to build a new high school.

I’ve volunteered to quit, just to make more room, on several occasions since the beginning of school, but my parents think I’m joking.

I’m not.

I duck my head and begin the seemingly uphill climb to Algebra I with Mrs. Gina Redfearn, the oldest teacher in captivity, and maybe the meanest. “I’m old school, people,” she warned us the first day of class. “I’m not here to make friends.” And she’s really not, as she made abundantly clear on Day One, when she gave us a pop quiz immediately after calling roll. The first day. And it counted.

I’ve found the secret to surviving Algebra I with Mrs. Redfearn is to keep your head down. Literally. She takes direct eye contact as an act of aggression and responds in kind. There are just enough do-gooder straight-A types in this class, kids who are all about direct eye contact and class participation, to keep Mrs. Redfearn occupied through the entire forty-three-minute period.

Today, first thing, there’s a quiz on graphing linear equations, which makes perfect sense, since we haven’t actually begun our unit on linear equations. After I turn in my paper, an inventive little number that’s sure to earn me a juicy red zero, I return to my seat and train my eyes on my Algebra I notebook, thus rendering myself invisible for the rest of the period.

There are other kids in the class who have figured out this trick, though some make the mistake of falling asleep, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Mrs. R. Among those of us who manage to keep our eyelids propped open, there are a fair number of doodlers, a handful of thorough note takers, two math geniuses who get started on their homework for the following day, not needing any of Mrs. Redfearn’s algebraic insights to help them along, and the occasional outlaw text messager. I’m an in-betweener, taking notes for as long as I can stand it, then falling into doodleland.

Today I start doodling Mrs. Redfearn, wondering, as I have many times before, about Mr. Redfearn, what his life must be like, or if in fact there is a Mr. Redfearn at all. I doodle a picture of an old man who comes out looking like Mr. Pritchard. It’s impossible to imagine Mrs. Redfearn married to someone like Mr. Pritchard, though. Mr. Pritchard, while eighty-nine and imprisoned in a nursing home, still embraces life and all its wonders. Mrs. Redfearn is an anti-life force if I ever saw one.

I draw Mrs. Redfearn standing next to Mr. Pritchard, then quickly turn her into a tree. I cannot, even in a doodle, subject Mr. Pritchard to my algebra teacher. I like him too much.

“He’s a pretty good old boy, isn’t he?” my father remarked on our way home Saturday. He has this way of talking after we’ve visited with Mr. Pritchard that reminds you he grew up in Rome, Georgia, that my dad is, in fact, a redneck for peace. At other times, while you’d never mistake my dad for, say, a native New Yorker, his southern roots sort of hide under his tweed jacket and professor’s briefcase.

I nodded, although “pretty good old boy” doesn’t do Mr. Pritchard justice. He was a civil rights lawyer back in the 1950s and ’60s, and even had a cross burned on his front lawn. “Me and the wife, we just got out the marshmallows and roasted them over the flames,” he told us during our first session. “Went back inside when they started shooting at us, of course.”

My dad wasn’t actually interviewing Mr. Pritchard about his involvement in the civil rights movement. He was interviewing Mr. Pritchard about his yard art (Mr. Pritchard had left the cross on the lawn and used it as a trellis for morning glories). My dad teaches in the folklore department at the university and is always doing oral history projects on obscure but strangely fascinating topics, like snake handlers and barbecue pit masters and fast-track go-cart racers.

The first time we went to see Mr. Pritchard was six months ago when he still lived in his own house. My dad had asked me to come along to help him set up his recording equipment and monitor sound levels. I’d been helping him out since I was eleven, lugging in mic stands and sound monitors from the back of my dad’s truck like a roadie, standing by silently while my dad talked to people—in this case, most of them elderly, yard art being a dying art—about their tire planters and washing machine doghouses, their venom tolerance and theories about chopped pork versus pulled. Sometimes it was boring, but I always tried to look interested as a professional courtesy.

But Mr. Pritchard was anything but boring. He’d start telling my dad about the bluebird houses he’d built for his backyard, and before you knew it he was describing the death threats he’d gotten during particularly contentious cases. “Old Ellis Watkins called me up trying to disguise his voice, said he was going to chop me up and feed me to his hogs for supper.”

When we went to see him at the nursing home on Saturday, Mr. Pritchard was napping in a chair beside his bed. My dad tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Harlan?” and Mr. Pritchard startled awake. “Hazel?” he mumbled, looking around for his wife, who’s been dead for five years. He shook his head, noticed my dad, and said, “Oh, Mike, it’s you. How you doing, son?”

My dad gripped Mr. Pritchard’s shoulder in a kind of guy mini-hug. “You’re looking good, Harlan. How the ladies treating you?”

Mr. Pritchard calls all the female nurses and aides at the nursing home “the ladies.”

“They can’t resist me, Mike,” Mr. Pritchard told him, pushing himself up from his chair, which he offered to me. I shook my head, nodding toward the two boxes of equipment, which I began to set up. “Got to beat ’em off with a stick.”

Mr. Pritchard walked over to his bed and boosted himself up. His legs dangled over the side like a little kid’s. “My voice isn’t feeling all that strong today, Mike. You want to sit next to me on the bed while we talk?”

I set up the mic stand in front of Mr. Pritchard and positioned the microphone so it was angled toward his mouth. Pulling the monitor over to the chair next to the sink, I sat down and began adjusting the sound levels, feeling competent and tech savvy as I twisted and turned the knobs, although this is the only technical expertise I actually possess, and only because I’ve been helping my dad with his interviews for years now.

After my father announced into the mic the date and place of the interview, and that the interview was with Harlan Pritchard of Manneville, North Carolina, he began with his questions. “Now, Harlan, last time we were discussing the medicinal herbs that Hazel grew for teas on the east side of the house. Tell me some of the names, if you would, and how Hazel propagated plants, that sort of thing.”

Mr. Pritchard shifted forward toward the mic. “Well, sir, Hazel was a seed collector. If you had a plant she found interesting, she wouldn’t waste any time asking you to fill her an envelope up with some seeds.”

After an hour, Mr. Pritchard’s voice began to grow raspy, and it was easy to see he was getting tired. “I’m not much good to you today, Mike,” he said finally. “Couldn’t sleep at all last night. Some old girl down the hall was crying for her babies. Saddest thing you ever heard. I’m glad my Hazel never had to go through this”—he waved his arm around the room, pointing at the heart monitor next his bed and the bedpan on his bedside table. “Terrible way to finish things up.”

I can’t stop thinking about Mr. Pritchard, the way he stays so cheerful even with the bedpans and the crying, and by the time the bell rings to release us from first period, my doodling has grown into a full-fledged portrait. He’s standing in the middle of his front yard surrounded by birdhouses filled with bluebirds. Mrs. Pritchard, who Mr. Pritchard has talked about so much I feel like I know her, peeks around from the corner of the house, a bouquet of flowers in her hands. I’ve seen her picture, so I know to make her eyes all crinkly. She ends up looking like Emma.

I tear out the page from my notebook and put it in my backpack, next to Sarah’s note. As I stand and scoop up my books, I remember something Mr. Pritchard told me about Hazel—she was a teacher. She wasn’t a public school teacher, though. She taught people how to read and write so that they could register to vote.

“Got a window shot out for that,” Mr. Pritchard recalled when he told my dad about it. “Got shot at too. But Hazel wasn’t afraid. Only thing that ever made her afraid was that the bad guys might win in the end.”

Hazel Pritchard. I grab my notebook out of my backpack and scribble her name under Marie Murray’s. Then I duck my head and shoulder my way toward world history, occasionally glancing up to see if anyone’s interested in making eye contact in a welcoming, “maybe we could be friends” sort of way.

Guess what?

They aren’t.