A Map of the Known World (3 page)

Rachel puts her hand on my arm and squeezes. “Ignore them,” she whispers. “Hey, guess what’s happening this weekend?”

“What?”

“The LGH Bonfire! We have to go.
Have to.
Everyone who’s anyone will be there.
Everyone.
” Rachel still has the funny valley girl twang, and she has actually said the words “everyone who’s anyone.”
What?

I shake my head as vigorously as I can without totally messing up my already messy ponytail. “Uh-uh, no way, lady. Not in a million years. Besides, my mom will never let me go.” For once, I am thankful for my mother’s crazy, overbearing rules.

M
Y
M
OM’S
R
ULES
:

1. No drugs (fine, makes sense)
   
2. No alcohol (also reasonable)
   
3. No riding in cars unless a parent is driving (a little bit overprotective)
   
4. No going out without a parent at night—ever (kind of crazy, right?)
   
5. Permission to go out without said parent on daytime outings will be given on rare occasions only (seemingly very,
   very
   crazy)
   

“What do you mean?” Rachel whines. “You
have
to come with me! I can’t go alone. Puh-leeeese!”

“I’m telling you, my mom won’t let me. I’m not allowed out after dark, remember? I might turn into a pumpkin or something.”

“No, seriously, you cannot miss this. And I can’t go without you. Please, just ask her. If you don’t, I will,” Rachel threatens.

“Yeah, good luck with that.” I smirk. “Anyway, I don’t even want to go.”

“What do you mean? How could you possibly mean that?” Rachel squeals.

“I don’t know. I’m just not…” My voice trails off as the teacher begins to call roll.

“Just ask your mom, okay?” Rachel wheedles.

“Fine, I’ll ask! Jeez.”

Rachel shoots me a wide smile, and I can’t help but return it.

After homeroom, Rachel and I split up and head to our first classes. I edge into the surge of students, bodies pressing tightly together, pushing and fighting through the halls. I have geometry. When I arrive in the classroom, the teacher, Mr.
Lane, announces that everyone will be sitting in alphabetical order.

His voice drones on as he calls the names, “Allan, Andrews, Ballans, Belson, Bradley—” He looks up, looks around. “Bradley? Any relation to…” He doesn’t finish. I had begun to raise my hand, and I drop it too quickly, so that it slaps the wooden desk with a resounding clap. I can tell that he had been about to say something smart-alecky about my brother, but stopped himself when he remembered. My face is hot, and the nausea has returned. I stare at the ground.
Really?
Did this
really
just happen?

The class shifts uncomfortably, and the silence stretches on.

“Uh, sorry, Miss Bradley, for your loss. Your brother was quite a character—a, uh, fine young fellow.”

I can’t even begin to find my voice. I just nod my head and feel my ears catch fire. Seriously?
A fine young fellow?
I cannot believe this is happening.

The rest of the morning passes relatively smoothly—relative to the humiliating debacle of geometry class. My classes will be challenging, and there is sure to be a serious load of homework for each one. But I can’t shake the feeling that my teachers are examining me, looking for signs of—I don’t know—grief, similarity to Nate, craziness. Who knows? But I can sense that they’re treating me carefully. So are the other kids. A few girls I used to be friendly with B.T.A. (Before The Accident), like Callie Rountree and Carolyn Wright, have said
hello to me, but I can tell they want to run away from me as fast and far as possible. Like I have leprosy or something. I pat my nose. Still there. No crumbling body parts.

At lunch, Rachel and I sit together as we have done since the first day of first grade. I bought the hot lunch and I cast around the tray for something edible. The chicken is simultaneously stringy and rubbery and strangely gray. The green beans are cold and rubbery, and the rice pudding is stringy and also gray. To be expected from a school-issue lunch. While we sit at our end of the lunch table, next to a wide window, Rachel keeps darting looks across the cafeteria at Josh Mills, one of the boys in our grade. We’ve known Josh for as long as I can remember—that’s how it is with most of the kids in our class, we’ve been together since we were babies—but we’ve never counted him as a friend. I mean, he is probably decent enough, but he’s definitely more interested in soccer than in girls. His hair is shaved close to the scalp, and his ears stick out like half moons on either side of his head.

He is laterally friendly with the Nasties, meaning his friends are friends with the Nasties, and he is allowed to sit at their lunch table. Important fact: He has never participated in the Nasties’ merciless shredding of other classmates. He’s never stuck up for any of their victims, either. (Well, neither have I, for that matter.) Still, I figure the fact that he’s never joined in the Nasty choral renditions of calling Rachel “McFattie”—her last name is McFadden—is a plus.

“So, I just have art left this afternoon. Thank goodness,” I remark.

“Mmm,” Rachel mumbles distractedly.

“They put me in Advanced Art, you know, with mostly upperclassmen. They hardly ever let freshmen into the advanced classes,” I tell her.

“Cool,” she mutters, clearly not interested even a little bit in what I’m saying.

“So, what do you have after lunch? History?” I ask, trying. Really trying.

“Don’t you think Josh got cute over the summer?” Rachel finally asks in a hushed voice. “Like, supercute?”

“Supercute? Really?” I repeat stupidly.

“Oh my gosh, yes! Are you not seeing?” Rachel continues. “I think I have the biggest crush on him!”

“
Josh?”
I ask. I am dumbfounded. I can’t see past the big ears and the Nasties.

“Yeah! Don’t you think?” Rachel carries on, not waiting to hear my opinion. “I mean, he must have grown like three inches.”

“Hmm,” I murmur.

“Do you think he’ll be at the bonfire?” Rachel asks.

“Well, you said everyone who’s anyone will be there,” I snicker.

“You’re right. He’ll definitely be there,” Rachel agrees, not noticing my tone. “You have to call me as soon as you ask your mom, okay?”

“Uh-huh,” I answer without really paying attention to the question. I stare out the window at the cars in the parking lot and the broken glass glittering on the sidewalk like diamonds. It’s funny how a blown-out windshield can look beautiful.

Nervously, I make my way to the back of the high school, where the art studio is tucked away in a light-filled corner hallway. I enter the classroom and peer around. The walls are covered with a messy flood of color, cutouts from magazines and books, all kinds of images, paintings and drawings and photographs of sculptures, some of which I recognize, many more that I do not. Easels people the room, draped with canvases and drawing tablets. Students are perched on rickety stools stained with paint and dotted with spots of glue.

I settle down in the far corner of the room, near the windows, which are filthy and tall, reminding me of some neglected cathedral. Then I hang my smock, one of my dad’s old work shirts, on a hook at the back of the room.

There are fifteen other students in the class, mostly a mix of sophomores and juniors. Including me, there are eleven girls and only four guys. The teacher, Ms. Calico, looks young. She is wearing khaki bell-bottoms and a flowery blouse with a long silver chain and a thick wooden pendant hanging down by her belly. Her brown hair is messy—like mine, I think—short
and tucked behind her ears. She is standing by her desk at the front of the room, flipping through a magazine.

Suddenly, a shadow fills the doorway. Ms. Calico looks up, then smiles. “Just in time,” she says.

I look up to see who’s come in with the bell. And I feel my stomach plummet into my feet. I stand up quickly, knocking my stool over. I’m frozen and I look away from the dark gray eyes that are now staring at me curiously.
Work, feet,
I plead silently. I bend down and pick up my stool, then sit and huddle behind my easel.

It’s a strange sensation, feeling all the color drain away from my face. The blood runs away slowly, leaving a sickening shiver in its wake.

Damian Archer. I glance up, and see him still standing in place, staring at the floor, a queasy grimace on his face.
Good,
I think,
I hope he feels worse than I do. Maybe he’ll feel so bad, he’ll leave.

How can I be in a class with Damian? I can’t sit here in the same room as him. I just can’t.

Damian was in the car with Nate that night. The night of February 8. Nate died. Damian walked away.
Walked away.
My mom said it was Damian’s fault, his influence that made Nate do such a terrible and foolish thing. And looking at Damian in his black combat boots, black jeans, black trench coat, I’m inclined to believe it, too.

“Okay, everyone!” Ms. Calico’s voice cuts through my nausea, and I glimpse Damian taking a stool at the front of the room, as far from me as possible. Thank goodness.

“Welcome to Advanced Art. I have a couple of announcements to start with,” Ms. Calico continues. “First, there will be a school-wide art show at the beginning of February, and while it’s not mandatory that my students participate, I highly encourage all of you to think about submitting pieces to the show. The second piece of business is that I have information for a couple of summer art programs at my desk. The applications are due in mid-November for most of them. If you are interested in more information, please see me at the end of class.”

Summer art programs. An art show. Oh my gosh. I look around and all of the other kids in the class look so much older than I am, so much more…capable. Even if they’re only a year or two older, they just seem more confident than I feel. I don’t have the nerve to ask about the art show or the summer programs. Anyway, Ms. Calico was probably talking to the upperclassmen, not to me.

I glance up and catch my breath when I catch Damian peeking at me around his easel. How am I going to share art class with Damian? It was the one class I was excited to take. Now, though…
Does he hate me as much as I hate him?
I wonder.
He must hate my whole family.

I go straight home, just as my mother had commanded me to do. I have at least three hours before my parents get back, so rather than starting on the homework I seriously cannot believe the teachers had the gall to assign on the first day of school, and rather than think about the first day of high school at all, I go straight to my bedroom. I move to turn on my computer, but I stop to consider the map of the world.

This map is a little—or a lot—out-of-date. The shapes and borders of many of the nations have changed…entire pieces of the world have switched hands, been broken apart and put back together differently since this piece of paper was printed. All of it, the world, home, life, just keeps shifting, keeps on moving.

Idly, I let my fingers run over continents and mountain ranges and oceans. There is so much. There is no land that remains to be discovered, no continent left unexplored. Still, the whole world is out there, waiting, just waiting for me.

Oh, I want to do things—I want to walk the rain-soaked streets of London, and drink mint tea in Casablanca; I want to wander the wastelands of the Gobi desert and see a yak. I think my life’s ambition is to see a yak. There is just so much, so much to see, to touch and taste and explore. And above all, I want to
do
things, things that will mean something, that will matter. More than anything else, I am terrified I won’t have that chance.

So, I do what I always do when the fear of being trapped
here in Lincoln Grove for the rest of my life wells up in my throat and threatens to choke me. I escape to my refuge.

I take out a tablet of drawing paper and cradle it in my lap. As I stare up at the continent of Asia, I let the soft graphite follow the lines of China and Mongolia, Russia, then move south, to Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, Malaya, Sumatra (I told you the map was outdated), Borneo. I look north again and study the vastness of Siberia. I know the Russians used to exile criminals—revolutionaries—at various points in the country’s history to Siberia. I imagine an empty ice field, barren and cheerless, inhabited by a solitary woman in a sable fur cap and coat, a countess, marching by herself to a looming, frozen doom. How dreadful. Lines meet and capture the bent shape of a cold and lonely woman as my pencil flies over the paper, tracing this scene inside the boundaries of Siberian tundra.

I move back down the map again, pausing at Sumatra, which I think is a part of Indonesia now. I picture lush green jungles, dense with shiny leaves and vines, rich black soil, and eyes of varying colors peering out from among the trees. My pencils scratch across the page, the paper wrinkling finely. I don’t mind when the paper looks crumpled—it gives the drawing an old map quality. I love watching the supple gray line chase the point of the pencil. Strokes and strokes giving shape to a great, wild, jungle life, monkeys and frogs peeping from between leaves.

The sudden grumbling of the garage door opening pulls me
back, back to Lincoln Grove and my bedroom and the sound of tire wheels squeaking on the smooth concrete of the garage floor. My dad is home. I feel my whole body tense up as I wait for him to enter the kitchen, as I wait for the greeting I know won’t come, and as I wait for the inevitable clink of ice cubes.

The door slams, footsteps. Then I hear the cupboard bang shut, a glass slams onto the countertop, the refrigerator opens and closes, the freezer door swings open…pause,
clink, clink, clink,
and close. Then footsteps into the den, and silence. My fingernails have been digging into my palms.

When I was in middle school, B.T.A., my dad would come home, race up the stairs—the thudding of his footsteps like a happy waltz—and he’d knock, saying, “Shave and a haircut,” to which I’d answer with a shouted “Two bits!”

“Hey, Rabbit, how’s the homework coming? I know I’m old, but need any help?” he would ask. It was like a dance that we’d performed over and over, so many times for all thirteen years of my life. Till now.