“Take a look, Rosebush. It’s your future talking. After you fail out of school, we’ll get married and have a barrelful of kids. We’ll feed them cat food and squirrels and pray every night before we go to bed that little Festus won’t burn down the neighbor’s house. My father’s hit the road, so you won’t have to deal with him getting drunk and groping you at the wedding. Hey, wait a minute—do you think that’s why your dad left? Shame? Do you think he’ll give a toast at our wedding?”
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” cried Rosebush. She stood suddenly, escaped the grasp of Jenny Stiles, and began beating her little fists against Blackhat Roy, who backed away slowly, hands in the air to show he was not fighting back—a cruel, bemused expression on his face.
Then, as I watched, others intervened. Petey Meechum was there first, pushing himself between Rosebush and Roy.
“Stop!” he said to Roy. “Leave her alone, asshole.”
There was a sudden stillness as everyone waited for Roy to explain himself. He looked around, and a sourness crept into his face. What he said was this:
“Cunt.”
That was another magic word, I realized that day, because of the power it had over people. They cringed as if struck, as if that single syllable were a weapon more powerful than teeth or fists. It was a dangerous word.
Blackhat Roy walked away then, but I heard something else that maybe no one else heard. It was something he said to himself, under his breath, while everyone else was rushing to Rosebush to comfort her.
“She doesn’t get to cry,” he said.
I didn’t understand what he meant, but then again I did. Still, I felt sorry for Rosebush and her gone father and her C.
It was the very next period when I did something I never would have done if I had had the time to really think it through. The class was history, and we were taking a test. Rosebush sniffled miserably over hers. Me, I answered the questions without much difficulty. It was all material that I had put on flash cards for myself earlier in the week, while, I imagined, Rosebush’s father had been moving from room to room in his house identifying what was his and what was his wife’s.
Blackhat Roy was also in that class, and when he asked to use the bathroom I had an idea. I waited two minutes, then asked if I could use the bathroom as well.
Outside the room, I turned left down the empty hallway toward the boys’ room rather than right toward the girls’. I could smell the smoke coming from the restroom, so I knew he was in there. There was a fire alarm on the wall to the left of the door, and then I watched my hand rise up and pull the red lever down. I ran the other way down the hall so that I could be seen emerging from the girls’ room while everyone poured into the hallways amid the screeching bells.
Funny. Sometimes the whole world moves just for you.
But why did I do it?
For one thing, it saved Rosebush. The history test, having been compromised, would need to be rescheduled. But that wasn’t really why I did it. Not really.
What happened was this. The principal called Blackhat Roy into his office and accused him of pulling the fire alarm. No one thought to accuse me of anything, even though I was also out of the classroom at the time the alarm went off. I was Lumen Fowler. I was a good student. I was childlike of stature, and I was unimpeachable.
They couldn’t prove Roy had done anything, but they didn’t need to. In the process of being accused, he grabbed a glass paperweight from the principal’s desk and threw it through the window of the office onto the lawn outside, where it almost struck a fourth grader passing by. That was enough to get him suspended for two weeks.
Rather than simply being subject to them, I had wanted to know what it felt like to be one of the forces in this world.
*
But Petey Meechum saw. The next day he found me tucked into the back carrel of the library, where I liked to be with my books.
“You did it,” he said. “I saw you.”
I panicked. I gathered my books, stuffed them quickly into my knapsack.
“Why did you?” he said. “I just want to know. Did you know he’d get in trouble?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to get around him. I didn’t like being cornered.
“Wait a minute,” he said as I pushed my way past him. “I won’t tell anyone,” he called after me. “I just—I didn’t know who you were.”
Of course we had known each other for many years, but he meant something bigger. See how easy it is to become someone else? It happens all of a sudden—just like that. A ticktock of motion.
So who am I now?
*
The year that Polly went breach, I had not yet figured out that life sometimes requires contingency plans for the loss of those close to you—that the more people you have buffering you against solitude, the less catastrophic it is when one of them disappears. Among people my age, I only really had Polly—and when she went breach, I no longer had her. She didn’t turn on me. It’s not that. She had simply been initiated into a corps I wasn’t part of. More frequently than not, our casual conversations in the school hallways (usually on the topic of test scores and the relative fairness of teachers) were interrupted by other students who shared giddy stories with Polly about what outrageous things had occurred during the most recent full moon. These others acknowledged me always with a curious, questioning look in their eyes, as if they were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know my name.