“I’m going,” I snapped.
I slid from the front seat and jumped over a mitten drowning in a puddle of slush. Jimmy walked a few steps ahead with his head down and his hands deep in his coat pockets. Once we hit the lobby he practically dragged me to the office. “Catherine, please take a seat,” Mrs. Tenley said, glancing up from her computer. I sat in the cleanest of the stained chairs that lined the wall. Jimmy gave me a two-fingered salute, Dad-style. As he was leaving, the office door swung open, jangling a cluster of bells around the doorknob. Marlena. Jimmy’s face.
“The Bobbsey Twins,” Marlena said.
She leaned over the barrier above Mrs. Tenley’s desk until her feet skimmed the floor. “Hello,” Marlena told her. “I’m here!” As usual, no coat. The back of her black dress scooped below her shoulder blades. Between them, a network of blue veins cat’s-cradled across her spine.
“I see that, Ms. Joyner,” said Mrs. Tenley. “Cher will be with you in a moment.”
“Do you believe in life after love?” Marlena sang, obnoxiously loud. She hurled herself into the chair beside me. She smelled, slightly, like kitty litter. Jimmy was gone.
“Well, I really don’t think I’m strong enough,” I said. “But?”
Marlena laughed, an easier, open-mouthed version of her normal laugh. Her Cat-laugh. She twined a strand of hair around her finger and tucked it into the loose knot on top of her head. Four pointillist bruises climbed up her neck, each one precisely quarter-sized.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said to Marlena, quietly.
“I wasn’t going to make you do this by yourself.” Marlena pulled a legal pad from her tote bag and wrote: this place will be my death. The pad looked as if it’d been dipped in water and then laid out on a heater to dry. With all the shit I was in, I didn’t dare write back, so I tried to give Marlena a me-too nod only she would notice. I was positive Mrs. Tenley could see the note, though it wasn’t possible, really. Marlena flipped to a clean page and drew a girl getting attacked by arrows from all directions. At the bottom she added, at least Hen House will look STUNNING at my funerel … THAT OUTFIT. I took her pen and scribbled lichen + dental floss = that sweater.
Marlena took off the pin on her chest, the one she always wore, and opened it in her lap, shielding it from Mrs. Tenley’s view by crossing her legs. She tipped out a pill and quickly popped it in her mouth.??? I wrote on the pad. Head hurts, she wrote back, and then drew her pen through the words so many times she tore the paper.
Now? I was writing, when Principal Lacey stuck his head out of his office and nodded at me.
“Don’t forget the balls,” said Marlena.
“Fuck you,” I mouthed, hooking my backpack over one shoulder.
I sat on a couch adjacent to Principal Lacey’s desk. A window overlooking the football field framed his head. Person by person, the marching band formed an N-shape in the snow. Principal Lacey pressed his palms onto his desk and burrowed into my eyes with his watery blue ones. He was talking about fish—how they started small, showing up in his office after missing a few days of school, coming in late, but how they got bigger and bigger, skipping assignments, getting caught with weed, hanging out with the wrong crowd. I couldn’t keep myself from imagining the chubby redheaded woman in the picture by his lamp kneeling before him in the center of the room. I was going to kill Marlena. Sweat tingled on my upper lip. As he talked, I picked one of the pimples on my chin until blood smeared my fingertip. The N dissolved into a square that expanded and contracted. From so far away, the marching band sounded like an asthmatic elephant. “Then bam,” he said, and smacked his palms against the wood so that I jumped. The picture of the woman fell facedown. He righted it. Now I was directly in her gaze. The kneeling scene cropped up again and I shifted, uncrossing and recrossing my legs. “Next thing you know, I’ve got a killer whale on my hands.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said, kind of meaning it. “I don’t think that’s me.”
“What was your GPA at your previous school?”
“Three point eight seven.”
He whistled. “Three point eight seven. Three point eight seven. Do you want to go to college, Catherine?”
“Yes,” I said automatically.
He said something about how this was a big boo-boo, and that word in his mouth made me want to die. He clapped his hands, rubbing them together so they made a whispering sound. He’d talked to my Concord counselor. Because of her testimony and my strong freshman year record, all I had to do to make up for my absence was attend one month of detention, to be fulfilled before or after school; commit to biweekly meetings with Cher to discuss my progress settling in and anything else that popped into my head; and coordinate makeup projects with each teacher. There was also a general proviso about making choices that reflected my potential. I’d made a big mistake, but no matter how it felt, the school didn’t want to punish me. They wanted to help.
“Thank you,” I said, standing. I tugged my sweatshirt as low as possible and resisted an urge to lift my hood and disappear.
“Catherine?” Principal Lacey asked. He smiled like he meant it. Crooked yellow teeth. Creases spidered from the outer corners of his eyes. A smoker. “Be one of my little fish, okay?”
*
The halls were empty. An electronic clock above a set of water fountains informed me that I was nine minutes late. My phone vibrated in my sweatshirt pocket. A text from Jimmy. You can do this. I knocked on the door to Botany/Soil Ecology, peering through the window. Tons of kids, all slouched at tables that looked like they were made out of chalkboard. Tidbit and Greg were in the row closest to the back wall. I was surprised to see Greg—every day I’d skipped and hung out with Marlena and Ryder, Greg had been there too, at least part of the time.
“Come in!” the teacher shouted. I looked at my schedule. It took me a minute to fully register his name. The letters seemed to exist individually, as if each one belonged to a different word. “Come in, I said.” Mr. Ratner was holding open the door. I walked in.
He was middle-aged, middle-tall, his features completely regular. I expected him to look like a rapist, but what did that mean? Even his hair was a kind of nonparticular brown, a composite of every shade that had ever manifested on a human head. Hawaiian shirt tucked into khakis. “Your phone.” It took me a second to understand what he meant. A snicker: girl, second row, snub blond ponytail, smushed-together breasts framed by the V of her T-shirt’s neckline. Mr. Ratner winked at her, waggling his fingers. “Please,” he said. I placed my phone on his palm, wanting to call him what I knew he was. “Why don’t you tell us a little something about yourself?”