Sure enough, the next day—her seventeenth birthday—the little charmers started tagging her locker. “Bitch.” “Slut.” “Cunt from hell.” “Jess Winters spreads.” Jess walked past the locker as if it wasn’t hers. She didn’t try to cover it, let the words scream into the hall. She didn’t tell on them. She wouldn’t tell her mother. By midmorning the custodians had scrubbed it clean, leaving faded marks on the paint. When Principal López called her in to ask if everything was all right, squinting at her over his bifocals and tugging at his bushy mustache, she said she was fine. No, sir, she had no idea who was writing on her locker. No, sir, she didn’t need a new one. She was fine, thank you. No, sir, she didn’t need to talk with a counselor. Yes, she was going to apply to colleges. Yes, she had signed up for the PSAT.
Because of that meeting, she was late to Humanities. Ms. Genoways was already hot in the middle of reading out an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem. She wore silver rings on every finger, even her thumbs, and her hair looked as though someone had snuck in and given her a perm while she was sleeping. Before Jess could hand her the late pass, Ms. G held up her arm to Jess’s face and said, “See? The shivers—now that’s literature.” She went on to tell the class that Millay and other authors such as Oscar Wilde were banned all the time for their risqué content. She went on to say that love and all its permutations—she paused and wrote it on the board, “LOVE = permutations”—was the great question at the root of all literature. Was it Capital L Love? Or lowercase? Or lust, or longing, or loneliness, or loss? What was the difference? How did we know? A great big beating heart of a puzzle, she said. The great unknown.
Jess slid into her seat, ignoring the glares from the girl she’d knocked back, ignoring Angie’s averted eyes. She found a spot on the wall: a poster of James Baldwin, who was shown sitting in front of a bookcase with his chin in his palm, looking away from the camera. She focused her gaze on the twin grooved lines between his brow. Deep, like a river gorge.
After class, Ms. G told her to wait a minute, so Jess hung back near her own desk. She caught Angie’s eye and gave a quick wave, and Angie smiled before ducking her chin. After the last student left, Ms. G turned to Jess.
She tilted her head. “I let a couple of students have lunch in my classroom. Not everyone. Those who might need—” She paused, considering. She twisted the ring on her thumb. “Some space. You’re welcome, okay? If you like.”
Jess started to say, “Thanks,” but her throat seized up. She nodded and hurried out the door to her next class. The St. Vincent Millay lines Ms. G had recited ran through her mind: but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply. The words were wet and warm under her tongue, and sure enough, the hair rose on her arms.
That night Jess’s mother brought home pizza and a birthday cake from Bashas’. White frosting with blue trim, a blue bird in the lower left corner with a large speech bubble: “Happy 17th birthday, J-bird,” it read, as if the bird were talking.
At the kitchen table, her mom lit the single candle. “February 17. Your golden birthday.”
Jess looked at the flame. The inside of the cake, she knew, was marble, her and her father’s favorite. Her father had sent a birthday card—in Caroline’s handwriting. “To My Beautiful Girl, With Love from Dad, Caroline, and baby sister Noelle.” Capital L Love. Jess had torn it in half and tossed it in the wastebasket under her desk.
She tried to smile. “A regular pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Little leprechauns are just shitting gold.”
“Jess.”
“I know. Sorry.”
Her mom sat down across from her and started to sing “Happy Birthday.”
Jess looked at the cute talking bird on the cake, at the candle beginning to melt. She started crying. It was just so sad, Capital S Sad, the two of them sitting there, with the little candle dripping blue wax on the frosting.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said.
Her mom got up and hugged her. “It’s too much. It’s too much for anyone. But we’ll get through it. I promise.” She squeezed herself on the chair next to her, holding her tight, and Jess breathed in her familiar scent, a salve of mint gum and clean sheets.
She rubbed Jess’s back. “You have your whole life in front of you. This is a blip on the radar. I know you don’t see it, but you have this glow about you.”
Jess sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “Radioactive.”
Her mother laughed. She tugged on a strand of Jess’s hair, pulling the curl straight and then letting it spring back. “No. You’re my Starshine, my strong blue-winged girl.”
Before bed, Jess wrote herself a big note in her notebook, in bright purple marker: “Capital P Perspective. Get some! Also: Get a job. And a CAR.” She wrote a sloppy draft of a poem based on the prompt Ms. G had given them: “Write a poem or scene that includes the sky.”
When we weren’t looking
the sky talked the land into switching places.
(The sky’s sly that way.)
So now we walk on patches of blue,
knock stars from our shoes,
skate around the corona of the sun.
Look up.
Boulders move fast across the dirt,
and the trees are setting.
Their veiny leaves burn on the horizon,
and the grass is in our eyes.
She wrote: “write more. do better.”