She knows who did it.
But now it’s been so long that if I bring it up, I’ll look like a girl who can’t let go of things. Teenage girls always have to let go of things. If we bring up anything, people say we’re bitches who can’t just drop it.
Anyway. There’s nothing we can do about it.
That’s what Miss Smith said when I found it. She said, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
I’m sixteen years old and this is the main idea the adults in my life have given me. Whether it’s seaweed in Mexico, missing art projects, or Dad shrugging, the message is clear: The older people get, the less they can do about things. They seem to be stuck. They seem to be glue.
Restructuring
Dad comes down for lunch and makes himself the same lunch he always makes himself and then takes it back upstairs to his room. He doesn’t say hi to Mom or me. I think we’re supposed to be understanding that he is a man who has been restructured and that he is pretending to be in his office at work, with us not there. So we don’t say hi to him, either.
Mom says she’s going to the grocery store for a few things. I say I have to call a friend.
Since Dad is in his room—or office or whatever it is now—I can’t call Bruce from my room. I have too much to say.
I decide to go outside and sit in the spring sun and talk to him there.
He picks up on the first ring.
“I’m so glad you called back.”
“Me too,” I say.
“I thought about you all night,” he says. “I should have said so many other things yesterday. I just didn’t know what to say. It’s been six years. You don’t know anything about me. I probably don’t know anything about you.”
“I sang ‘Eleanor Rigby’ this morning,” I say. “I haven’t changed as much as you think.”
“I can’t believe they told you I got baptized in a river.”
“It was Dad, I think.”
“How’s Mom?”
“Still working the night shift. She told me this morning that she can get me an excuse for not going to school. So that’s cool.”
I don’t want to tell him it’s a mental health break because even though I know that breaking your brain is the same as breaking your arm, I’m still ashamed that my brain is broken.
“And Dad?”
“He got laid off or something this weekend. As of today, he’s working from home.”
“Hm.”
“I have a lot to say about Dad,” I say. “I have a lot to say about everything.”
“So?”
“Lately, I’ve been connecting with the old me—the girl you knew,” I say, careful not to somehow spill that ten-year-old Sarah is real and is coming to eat tacos at my house tonight. “I think I’m remembering some stuff about how Dad is. Or was. Or maybe why everything fell apart with you and him and us. I mean, I can’t really remember it, but I’m starting to.”
“He has a lot of problems,” Bruce says.
“He came downstairs to get lunch today and didn’t even say hi to me or Mom. We were sitting right there.”
“He’s probably freaked out over his job. Shit. He worked that job since college. He doesn’t know anything else.”
“Yeah. That’s what I figured, too.”
“So why are you skipping school? Can you tell me that?”
“Nothing ever really happens,” I say.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning nothing original or new ever really happens and school is just a place where we all pretend like we’re new and original and we’re not. We’re all the same.”
“Did something happen?”
I wish people would stop asking me this question. “Yes. Something happened.”
“Did a guy do something?”
I think: Why does everyone think a sixteen-year-old girl’s problem has to do with a guy? “No. It’s nothing like that.” See? This is the other reason I can’t talk about the headpiece. In the weekend that passed between showing up at the annual art show and the day I found the headpiece in the art room, so many horrible things happened to people in my school. Not like I know the details, but I know the statistics and I hear the rumors. Between violence, depression and suicide, rape, bullying and all of those really heavy things, my problem is like a hangnail. I wonder if this is how Vicky-the-grand-prizewinner feels. I wonder if she even realizes that what she’s doing is illegal. Miss Smith treats it like a hangnail, anyway. Miss Smith treats everything like it’s a hangnail.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Not really.”
“I was looking at flights this morning and I can be there tomorrow or the next day depending on whether I can get a guy to cover me at work.”
“That would be awesome,” I say.
“But you’d tell me if I came there?”
“Yeah. It’s not all that exciting, though. So don’t think it’s a big deal or anything.”
“It’s a big deal if you stopped going to school because of it.”
“Nothing ever really happens. That’s why I stopped going to school.”
“We’ll talk about it when I get there,” he says.