Jagged Little Pill, page 3
Her eyebrow quirks up, and it feels like the hallway is getting narrower.
“Oh, no, I can’t, I have . . .” I glance back at the classroom, at Frankie getting ready. “The club meeting and all.”
“It’s all right, next time.” And just like that, she’s off down the hallway in a twirl. A little wave of guilt crests over me. My girlfriend is right behind me, and here I am, falling apart over my eternal unrequited crush, whom I’ve been swooning over since junior high.
It’s just a silly, flustery crush, though. That’s allowed. Not like I’m doing anything about it, or ever would if I could. Kelsey is out of reach, like a Christmas decoration on top of a tree. Beautiful to look at, but I’m not capable of making that stretch. Honestly, I’m not even sure how someone like Frankie Healy has fallen for me. She is exquisite, and even though I tell her this all the time, and hear much the same back, I still don’t feel like I’m quite enough.
How does anyone grow into believing they deserve anything? When does that happen?
I walk into the classroom, and Frankie is busy sorting out the posters. She’s gritting her teeth, like she’s working out and not just moving paper around.
“So . . . rough day?” I ask, trailing the edge of the desk with my finger.
Her eyes flit up and she exhales, shaking her head.
“I’m taking that as a yes?”
“It’s just more of MJ,” she huffs, and sits on the desk, patting the surface. I sit next to her, and she leans in, kissing me softly, giving my lower lip a small nibble. She sighs. That was the exact moment I was hoping to pluck away from the time we’ve got in here.
“This. This is where I want to live. Not in that house.” She reaches out and runs her thumb over my lips and down to my chin. “Right there.”
“Yeah.” I exhale, the guilt of eyeing up Kelsey irking its way through my chest. “Maybe one day. Did something happen with Nick?” I nod at the door to the classroom, like he’s still there.
“No,” she groans. “Yes? I don’t know. He’s fine, but MJ had this meltdown at home, and he didn’t really have my back, and . . .” She shakes her head. “I guess that’s not totally true. He was worried you might have been still upstairs and wanted to plot out a way to get you out without MJ or Dad seeing.”
“Really?!” I sputter out a laugh.
“Yeah.” She smiles a little and then her brow furrows. “But he’s still leaving. And he’s still spending all that time away with his friends, and every day MJ finds a new way to remind me that Nick is her greatest accomplishment and I’m the adoption fail—”
“Frankie, come on.” I sigh. “You know he’s going through his own shit right now too. With your mom, and honestly, probably with you.”
“Shut up.” Frankie playfully scowls at me, squinting her eyes. She softens. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”
“It’ll be okay. I’ll still be here, you know?”
“Me and you?”
“You and me.”
I look out toward the empty classroom, all the barren seats, the walls with pops of color from all of Mr. Martinho’s posters. References to historical young adult books he keeps trying to get us all to read and people from history he thinks we should be familiar with. Thankfully, not a collection of dead white guys, but poets from the Harlem Renaissance and modern icons of queer resistance. Couldn’t ask for a better history teacher, truly.
It’s our club enrollment that could use some improvement.
“So . . . full house?” I nod at the chairs, and Frankie bumps her shoulder into me.
“People will show up for this thing eventually.”
“It’s December.” I laugh. “The year is half over.”
“Listen, we’re an indie sleeper hit, thank you very much. SMAAC is only available on vinyl.” Frankie grins and her smile deflates a little. “Sorry I . . . earlier. I know I shouldn’t complain about my parents, but—”
“Shh.” I shake my head. “Your feelings there are valid, even if most of your mom’s drama has to do with her melting down over getting the wrong salad delivered from Grubhub.”
“I just can’t believe she got worked up about these.” Frankie tugs a little at her shorts, which look great, halfway hidden by her thick, multicolored knit sweater, fraying at the bottom edges. There’s a little enamel Haim pin on one of the pockets that makes me smile, from a concert we snuck off to last year at Mathur College’s freshman orientation festival, just a ten-minute drive away from us. It was the first time I felt like we were really shifting away from being best friends to something a little bit more, as she held my hand while they performed “Now I’m in It.”
A song about not being able to pretend you’re just friends anymore. God. It was so on the nose that it hurt.
“Like, yes, it’s December, but it’s also almost seventy degrees outside,” she continues. “Might as well enjoy the climate crisis.”
“You do have on a sweater.” I grin.
“Shut up.” She laughs, swatting at me again.
“It could be worse, you know. Your mom just yells at you. Mine prays. ‘Dear Jesus, please guide my daughter through her temporary teenage identity crisis. And may she emerge as the straight Disney princess femme-bot I always dreamed she would be. In the name of Fox News, amen.’” I glance back up at Frankie, a little smile cracking at the corner of her mouth.
“She’s still holding out hope, huh?”
“This morning she was like, ‘Why would you choose to look like that?’ And I’m like, ‘Why would you choose to look like the Talbots catalog threw up on you?’”
Frankie sputters out a laugh, which cracks a smile out of me. It’s hard, though, all this. I just want to be . . . myself, whoever that is. My mom doesn’t see me entirely, and really, Frankie doesn’t either. But I’m not sure I’m ready to be completely seen.
“I want you to talk about your frustrations, I do . . . but there’s a difference between thinking your shorts are too short and thinking your clothes are ‘too gay,’ as my mom says.”
“Jo—”
I wave her off, hopping off the desk. It’s my mom’s usual snarky remark to my enamel-pinned-up jean jackets and track pants, thrift store T-shirts and beanies.
“It’s fine.” I always say that. It’s fine. And it is. At least for the two of us. It’s not fine for me, but I don’t want Frankie, my best friend and . . . girlfriend, I think? I don’t know, we’ve yet to say it out loud, but I know how I’ve come to define us these last few months. The last thing I want is her feeling like she can’t talk about her problems at home, even if she thinks they pale in comparison with mine. Because while her mom might make everything into some kind of contest with winners and losers, that’s not what this is.
It’s just different.
And that’s okay.
I put one hand in my pocket and pull out the gift I’ve been waiting to give her today. An early Christmas present. I know my parents, and we’ll be taking the long drive to visit my various uncles and aunts in New Jersey and staying out there for who knows how many days. Not much to look forward to there, save for unwrapping whatever not-great-but-well-intentioned presents the people in my family have half forgotten to get me. Last year someone got me a bowie hunting knife. The year before, a handle of Grey Goose vodka, like I wasn’t underage. The brass of Frankie’s gift is cold in my hand and between my fingers, and I hold the fountain pen up and out to her like a magic wand.
“Surprise.” I smile.
“What’s this?” she asks, reaching out to take it like it’s something precious. Before I can answer she uncaps it and gasps, turning to me, her eyes wide. “Jo!”
“For your journals and poems and stuff.” I shrug and fish out a small box the size of a tiny matchbox. “There are some ink wells in here too, for when it goes dry. Which it will quickly, knowing you.” A bit of warmth fills my cheeks under her gaze, after she takes the box and looks up at me. It’s unfair, the way she looks at me like that.
Like I’m everything, in these little stolen moments. In an empty history classroom with a club that has no membership. Late at night, on her parents’ couch, a living room lit by streetlamps outside and iPhones on a coffee table. Hands brushing between classes in a hallway.
I wonder when we can stop stealing them.
Chapter Three
Phoenix
As far as lies go, I think the whole “you’ll make friends fast!” line is one of the biggest Mom has ever handed out, paired right up there with how my hamster, Antonio, went to go “live on a farm” in third grade. I get the intention behind it, the love that’s there and meant to reassure me. But it doesn’t make the truth hurt less once it inevitably bubbles to the surface.
Like how when you’re the “new kid” people don’t exactly throw themselves at you, pleading for your friendship. No one has come barreling down the hall, begging to be my new best friend, save for this kid Nick who wants me to come to some party tomorrow night. No, those people are back home in Danbury. Patrick, Saundra, Lisa, Nwayieze, Mitchell . . . all ever-present in my texts and social media feeds, while we’re here for the next, well, however long it takes for Ruby to get better.
If she gets better.
I shake the thought away and try to get comfortable in my seat at the back of this classroom. The walls are like a monument to the students here and those who have come before, fading pages full of typewritten text tucked away behind glass display cases, next to crisp white papers with oddly formatted sentences. Poetry, probably, though I can’t really read any of it from here. The entire classroom smells like ink and old paper, and I wonder how the teacher has managed that. It’s just printer paper behind that glass, and there isn’t exactly a collection of vintage books on the shelves here. Whatever the mystery of the smell is, it’s a pretty significant contrast from the rest of the school, which mostly has this just-cleaned Lysol scent nearly everywhere. Even the gym.
Back at home, our gym at least had the decency to smell like old socks and soon-to-be-crushed dreams. And back there, students were always on time for class.
How am I the only one here?
And who shows up early for a creative writing class where they have absolutely nothing to present? I pull out my phone and flip through my feeds and end up scrolling through Saundra’s Bookstagram, shot after artfully taken shot of what she’s been reading lately, arranged with flowers and candles and fanciful paper. Something called washi tape that she spends a lot of her money on. With the amount of care she puts into those pictures of books, I just know she’s going to do the same when she starts writing them.
God, I miss our little writing group. Our favorite coffee shop downtown, Locke and Tea, with all the little padlocks on the fencing outside. Our poems that were clear overshares, read with earnestness over way-too-sugary lattes and tea doused full of honey. The owners and their cats that seemed more like dragons, with different-colored eyes, and that moved like liquid smoke between tables and chairs and legs.
I rummage through my backpack, plucking out a beat-up notebook I’ve carried with me just about everywhere since I started school. I flip it open toward the back, my scrawled-out poems and attempts at short stories staring at me from the weathered pages. This notebook has seen some things, but then again, so have I.
I run my hand over a note in the margins, on the latest poem I’d been working on.
This is good. Keep going.
The handwriting, all awkward and a little all over the place, is Ruby’s. From just a few days ago, when we got her situated in the hospital. She’s always asking to read whatever I’m kicking around, and her bright red pen shines out against the black-inked pages in the best way possible. It’s not a grade or a mark.
It’s an exclamation.
It also reminds me that I need to scan in the last bundle of pages. I do my best to make sure I do that as often as possible. Mom makes us watch this old Christmas movie, Love Actually, every December, and it has successfully scarred me for life. There’s this scene where Colin Firth has his whole hand-typed novel blown into the air and into a lake, and he had no copies.
No copies? What kind of psychopath does that?
I pick up my phone to take a photo with my scanning app, when the bell rings, a weird low droning sound that startles me in my seat. It’s going to take me a really long time to get used to that here. Back at home, the bell was this merry-sounding thing, and here it sounds like a funeral dirge.
Suddenly the hallway outside the classroom is bursting with life. Some students filter into the room, talking to one another in quick, flitting bursts, wrapping up conversations, taking seats. Every single person is a new face and vanishes just as quickly from my memory as folks who walk by me on the street do. I sit and stare at the back of two dozen heads, some of them already bowing down and fussing over some writing. It’s just a lot of hair and shoulders hidden by jackets and sweaters, as the teacher fumbles her way in through the door, a massive bundle of papers and books in her arms. She flops everything onto the metal desk with a loud bang, jostling the would-be writers out of their focus.
“Whew,” she says, huffing and sitting on her desk. “Sorry I’m a little bit late, my darlings. Had to make copies of your pieces and there was a line at the printer. Miss Vicente was photocopying algebra assignments.”
A number of students boo at the mention of algebra, and the writing teacher grins. That’s the name of the teacher whose class I had earlier today, where I met that Nick kid. I look around the room for his . . . I don’t know. Jacket? Backpack? I don’t see anyone who looks like him, though.
The teacher digs in her desk and pulls out two enormous candles and sets them on the surface. She walks over to the classroom door and peers outside, before shutting it and lowering a little shade over the classroom door window. That’s when she pulls out a lighter and lights those candles, and after a second or two, the room smells powerfully of old paper again.
I squint at the big candles and make out “used bookstore” as the smell.
Hm. Neat. Though I suspect the cautious stepping around the door and shade probably have to do with open flames being a big no-no in schools. Back at my old high school, this guy Andres in one of my history courses tried to make his girlfriend, Darlene, swoon on Valentine’s Day with candles and flowers in an empty classroom and set off all the smoke alarms. We had to have a whole assembly about it. Andres. What a legend. Always doing over-the-top romantic things that ended somewhat poorly. I wonder what he’s up to now.
The teacher wafts a little of the smoke from the candles with her hand and glances up at the room, squinting a little, before she settles on me. Her eyes go wide.
“Ah!” she exclaims, walking my way.
Oh, great. I hurry and shut my notebook, shoving it back into my pack.
“Seems like we have a new student.” She stops at my desk, and the entire class turns in their seats to stare at me. Their uniform shuffling sounds like a battalion of soldiers shifting formation in a war movie. I press myself back into my chair, like maybe if I push hard enough I can vanish into the wood and steel, but most of them turn back around just as fast, interest lost.
“Miss Rishi,” she says, placing a pen and a notebook on my desk. I’m confused, and she must catch my expression. “Every student gets a Moleskine notebook at the start of the class, to fill up as our time together wears on. I’m sorry you’re here for the last week of our class, but it didn’t feel right not to give you one.”
I reach out and take the notebook, the surface of the cover rough and a little scratchy. Is this teacher rich or something? These kinds of notebooks are expensive, and how many classes does she have? Black and simple, paired with a gel pen, these books are still, like, what, twenty bucks a pop? It’s hard not to be immediately struck by the gift that, really, this teacher gives to everyone, when it’s the last thing either of my parents would give to me. Dad always thought the writing group was impractical. Take up a hobby that could become a proper job. Writing wasn’t that. Mom’s at least a bit more encouraging, but that’s because she sees me every day. Dad, more or less on holidays. Definitely on the less side of things.
With Ruby’s medical bills piling up and this move to a new city for better, longer-stay treatment, everything my mom and dad do revolves around planning for the most cost-effective way to keep us afloat. And this notebook just reminds me that I really need to take a stroll downtown to start hunting for any kind of retail job, to help support Mom in our new home. Dad’s never late with support, I’ll give him that much. Nothing about our situation is like a Lifetime movie or anything. But he didn’t come with us, and Mom is solo in a new town, while he’s off on the West Coast someplace, and Ruby is in the hospital.
Hm. Maybe it is a little Lifetime-movie-ish. Though his girlfriend would have to turn out to be a murderer or something.
You’re gonna have to contribute, Dad said, before we moved. Like he was coming along and would be pitching in to do the actual work, but that’s not the case at all. He’s far away, not dealing with what’s happening to Ruby and what’s going on with our little family as a result of his absence. We’re all just falling apart.
Sigh. I’m trying.
“Thanks,” I say to Miss Rishi, forcing myself to sound grateful regardless of all these swirling feelings. When I open the notebook, it makes that satisfying crunch noise that new journals often do.
“There’s a lot of time between now and then,” Miss Rishi says, tapping a blank page of the journal with a wellmanicured hot-pink nail. “Whether we’re talking about the year ending or this time you have in high school.”
I glance up at her.
“You live, you learn. Fill it up.” She smiles.
I smile back just as the classroom door flies back open, hitting the wall with a bang. A girl wearing a fraying multicolored sweater, shorts, and large combat boots walks in, a few books in hand, and looks at the door with a wince. “Excuse me.”
