At school on Monday, people talk and laugh and slam lockers and walk to class. Maybe I’m not here at all. Maybe I’m dreaming about walking down this hallway, maybe the sounds of the chatter around me and the lockers slamming and the screeching of the bell are recycled memories creating the fabric of this dream.
Maybe when the hallway clears and I am left alone, I will hear another sound behind me, a humming, singing sound, and I will turn and there they will be, the virgin martyr saints, all in a line, and at the end of the line will be Apollonia, one breast bared.
???
Our Literary Form projects were due last week, but I didn’t hand mine in when everyone else did. I had it tucked inside a folder in my bag, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull it out, to place it on Mr. Whitbey’s desk, to give it over to him. It would have felt like pulling out my heart and pretending it was just a stack of papers. But I’ve brought it with me today, and I’ve steeled myself to hand it in. It’s a dozen stories long. Some are my remembering of the bedtime stories Mom says she never told me, about the virgin martyr saints. Some are my dreams. Some I’ve just made up. I’ve named the project Conditions.
Okay, so the stories aren’t all technically magical realism. I don’t know what the hell they are, only that I made them, and that they are ugly and awful and pieces of me as surely as my tonsils. But for all their ugliness and awfulness, these stories I’ve written—they’re good. Even though I don’t really know what I mean by them, I know they are good.
But as soon as I place the stapled pages on Mr. Whitbey’s desk, he uncaps his pen and scrawls Late across the top of the cover page, right over the title and my name.
I stand, staring down at my project and the way he’s defaced it. He doesn’t notice at first, but eventually I guess my being there makes him uncomfortable, because he looks up at me and says, “Well?” and then, “Find your seat, Ms. Faye.”
Standing there, pinned between the gaze of the class at my back and Mr. Whitbey at my chest, I do the math. This project is worth ten percent of my grade. I’ve got a 96% going in. I think about the cost of taking it back, and I think about the cost of letting him read my heart, the cost of allowing him to determine its worth.
I watch my hand reach out. I watch it grasp my project and pull it across the desk, back toward me. Mr. Whitbey slaps down a too-small hand and says, “We don’t have time for games, Ms. Faye. Take your seat.”
“I think,” I begin, and I pull on the papers, “I’ll just keep this.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s past due already, Nina.” He tightens his grip on the other edge of my project, and now it’s like we’re playing Tug of War.
“I know,” I say. “But, listen.”
“If you don’t turn it in, I’ll be forced to give you a zero.”
“But I did the work,” I say. “Look.” I yank hard, and finally he lets go. I fan through the pages, seeing the blurred words flash by—vagina, egg, break. And maybe Mr. Whitbey sees them too, because he sits back in his chair.
“I can’t give you a grade without reading the thing,” he says, but he sounds like maybe I can convince him otherwise.
“Maybe you can’t give me an A,” I say, “but I’ll bet you could give me at least some points. Like Pass/Fail, or something.”
“Why not let me read it?” He sounds like he’s really curious.
“I just think maybe you’re not the right audience.”
This makes him smile. “All right, Nina,” he says. “The project is worth a hundred points. I’ll give you fifty points for having completed the work. How does that sound?” He reaches into the top drawer of his desk and pulls out his grade book, flips to the page with my name on it, and finds the box where the grade for the Literary Form project belongs. He uncaps his red pen and it hovers over the box.
If he read the project, I am sure it would get a lot more than fifty points. But I find I am deeply uninterested in being graded.
“Do what you’ve got to do,” I say. I watch him write the number “50” in the box. Then I take my project and I find my seat.
My heart pounds, my armpits suddenly drip with stinky sweat, and I feel like I’ve stolen something. Other kids are looking at me like I’ve lost my mind, but I feel also like I’ve pulled back the curtain and seen that the Great and Powerful Oz is really just a little man with a red pen. He can’t save me, but he can’t hurt me, either.
???
When I go to the bathroom after class, I find myself alone with Apollonia. She’s at the sink, washing her hands. She looks up and sees me in the mirror, behind her. I see myself seeing her seeing me.
“Back for another picture?” It’s the first thing she’s said to me all year. She sounds congenial. Like maybe it’s all a big joke.
“No,” I say. “Actually, I owe you an apology. I don’t know what—”
“You don’t get to explain,” she says to mirror-me. Then she turns around. I can see the back of her head in the mirror behind her; I can see her red velvet hair ribbon.
“I just want to say I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter to me what you want.”
“Look, I know it’s been a long time. I should have apologized last year. I never should have done it in the first place. What I did was awful, and I just—”
She laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, actually. It’s loud and unrestrained and it makes me wish that I were making her laugh for some other, better reason. That we were sharing a joke. I’d like to know what makes her laugh, outside this moment.
I wish there was a button I could push, a page I could flip, to undo what I have done, and the way I’ve hated her. I want to know things I never thought to care about before—why did her family move here, to antiseptic Irvine, all the way from Portugal? What does she think of it here? What is the significance of the round gold medallion she wears on a chain around her neck?
Apollonia makes it perfectly clear that I won’t get to know any of those things, and that she isn’t about to grant me forgiveness.
She brushes past me like I’m of no significance at all, and she pulls open the bathroom door.
“Wait,” I say, and I swing my backpack around from my shoulder and I yank out my project. “Look,” I say, “I want to give this to you.” I hold it out to her with both hands.
She stops and turns around and looks at my folder.
“What is it?”
“It’s a collection of stories I wrote. It’s just some things I’ve been thinking about, lately. I don’t know . . . I just want to give it to you.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Whatever you want,” I say. “You can throw it out. You can burn it. You can read it, if you want.”
Apollonia takes my project. She turns the title page and I watch her eyes scan back and forth over the first few lines of the first story. Then she looks up at me, flips the title page closed, and leaves.
???