Ask Me (3 page)

I gave up and dropped my skirt, looked directly at her, and repeated: “Some things can only be confided to the earth.” Not that I had a choice.

I shrugged, a slight apology for intruding where I wasn’t wanted. I had nothing to add, no explanations. I didn’t know what it meant. Who talks to dirt?

They both looked at me, Delilah slightly bug-eyed and Jade with her eyes swimming behind more tears.

“Yes,” Jade finally said, nodding slowly. “Some things are better left unsaid, aren’t they?”

“The damage has already been done,” I responded. “What you choose now only determines the extent.” My voice rumbled and caught, my throat burning. I didn’t know what her secret crisis was, but it had to be a big one. I swallowed to alleviate the sudden dryness in my mouth. Jade was staring intently at me, like she could find an answer in my ravings. I threw the remains of the paper towels in the garbage. “I’m sorry,” I said again, eyes down. “I should go. I hope your crisis works out. Sorry.” I grabbed
my book bag and hurried out the door, just catching Delilah’s “What the hell was
that
?”

I squashed my lips together, but the word “truth” leaked out all the same. The swish of the door closing covered it up. I ran on to class, the hallways almost empty, my footsteps echoing and my skirt plastered wetly to my leg like a shroud.

I didn’t think any more about Jade until the next day. Delilah grabbed my arm outside of my fifth-period biology class while I was fumbling with my earphones. Tank had elbowed me in the back as he shoved past me through the door. Perhaps I should paint a target there to make it easier for him and his friends. Twenty-five points for a dead-center hit. Ten for a shoulder. Fifteen if they catch a rib and make me wince.

“Have you seen Jade?” Delilah asked me, her bright red fingernails cutting into my elbow.

“Not me, no, not I. Not today, not today, she’s gone away.” I bit my tongue, hoping there were no more verses. I hated the singsong answers most of all.

Delilah dropped my arm. “God, I don’t know why I asked you anyway.” She backed away from me, like my weirdness might rub off on her. But I could see worry in her eyes.

Before I could reconsider, I touched her shoulder as she turned away. “Is something wrong with Jade?” It was dangerous, inviting conversation. On the other hand, Delilah was taking a social risk seeking me out.

“I don’t know,” she said, eyes darting up and down the hallway, searching. “She’s not here today, and I haven’t been able to get her on her cell since she left school yesterday. I thought you might know something after that thing in the bathroom, whatever that was.” She paused in her hunt to look at me, but I shook my head and she returned to scanning the halls. “If you see her, please tell her to text or call, okay? I’m worried. She was really freaked out, and she wouldn’t tell me anything. I’m sure it’s
his
fault.” She glared down the hall and then stomped away in the other direction, ending our brief moment.

I followed her glare, but I wasn’t sure which “he” she meant. Alex Walker was hunched into his locker, trying to shove an over-full gym bag inside, and Will Raffles was strolling toward me down the center of the hallway.

I understood, though.

Alex was only a junior like me, but the word in the halls was that Jade was doing more than tutoring him in statistics. (He was also Dale Walker’s nephew, the same Dale Walker Granddad loathed and wouldn’t put past a hit-and-run.) Everyone had been buzzing about Alex and Jade, because Jade had been going out with Will off and on since freshman year. If the rumors were true and she and Will were over, as a senior, she had crossed an invisible class line.

The two boys were alike and unlike at the same time. It
was easy to see why Jade could be interested in both. Will had perfect sandy blond hair; Alex’s curly hair was dark brown and unruly. But each had a physical presence about them that few other boys in school approached. Where Will’s manifested in a casual swagger, Alex was a big guy and comfortable with it: imposing and physically
there
. You felt that presence when either entered a room. Kings among men. Men among boys.

As I watched, Alex managed to shove the bag into his locker and slam the door shut.

He straightened and glanced up and down the hallway once as if he, too, was looking for someone. Maybe Jade? His eyebrows were drawn down and his lips pressed together in a thin line. It was hard to tell what he was feeling. For all I knew, he was constipated. He glanced in Will’s direction and straightened his back, pushing his muscular chest out at the same time, but the display was for nothing. Will didn’t even spare him a look.

I had never really spoken directly to either of them. Still, I knew things about them that other girls would love to know. Random answers to overheard questions. Like how Will often slept in the nude and Alex’s favorite poem was
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
. Or how the smell of mint made Will inexplicably happy or how Alex felt deeply guilty for that time he’d played mailbox baseball with some other guys from the team. In the end, though, these snippets were just jagged pieces of a meaningless puzzle. I couldn’t put them together into a bigger picture any more than I could for the other kids who roamed these halls, Jade included.

ALEX WAS IN MY
final period art class. He always seemed out of place there; his big hands delicately grasping paintbrushes when they were genetically predisposed to handling a ball of some kind. He wasn’t as beefy as Tank, but he was well over six feet tall and solid, like a tree trunk. He dwarfed poor Kirby Williams, who sat next to him, one of those funny vagaries of alphabetic seating. Kirby weighed less than I did. Not that Alex ever did anything intimidating, and he never seemed to notice Kirby’s discomfort.

The two of us were alike in one respect; neither of us talked to anyone else in class if we could help it. I knew why I didn’t, and I could guess why Alex chose silence, too. He was well-liked enough for his athletic prowess. You could tell the changing of seasons by the changing of his uniforms. Then his link with Jade had pushed him even higher. But he had a big reason to hide. It was no secret that his father, Frank—Dale’s older brother—was an alcoholic. But it wasn’t something you mentioned in Lake Mariah. Not given the circumstances. After a weeklong drinking binge a couple of years back, a fire burned down the Walker house, killed Alex’s younger brother, and drove their mother away. No charges were ever pressed—it turned out to be faulty wiring, nothing to do with Frank’s drunkenness—but everyone in town still knew, and everyone in town blamed Frank for how the family fell apart.

MRS. ROGERS, THE ART
teacher, actually allowed me to use my MP3 player during class so long as she wasn’t giving a lecture. Today I left it off to save my batteries. Lucy Monroe sometimes sat with me at our table in the back, but she was absent today and I didn’t really need it. Not that she talked to me anyway. She was a friend of Shelley’s. Besides, everyone was working on the mixed media self-portrait project Mrs. Rogers had assigned us last week. The quiet in the room was broken only by the scratching of pen and pencil and paintbrush.

I had gotten nowhere with mine. My canvas was blank save for the background. I had spent two days so far covering the white with alternating layers of grey and green. It was a dismal mess with no form. Mrs. Rogers was always telling us art had to come from inside us, and as long as I was doing
something
, she would let me be. Apparently there was nothing inside me that wanted to come out that wasn’t a blobby muddle of bleakness.

I went to the “salvage” cupboard and was debating a spool of flaxen thread almost the color of my hair when someone reached over my shoulder to pick up a handful of white feathers. I dropped the thread, and it rolled under the cupboard. I dove for it and managed to catch an end, but the spool kept rolling, the thread unwinding. I lay down on the floor and stretched my arm out, but I couldn’t quite reach it. Pulling on the thread made it unravel more.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

It was Alex.

“You didn’t scare me,” I said, looking up. From my
vantage on the floor he looked impossibly tall. “You just … startled me.”

“Here,” he said. “Let me.” He pushed against the side of the heavy cabinet, lifting it up at an angle. I grabbed the spool and retreated, putting the bins between us. He set the cabinet back down, letting out a big breath as he did. I began the task of winding up the thread.

“Thanks,” I offered.

Alex dug into a box and came up with a handful of feathers. It looked like he was holding the remains of a plucked chicken in his big hands, the way the feathers poked out between his fingers. He paused for a moment. I prayed he would walk away and leave me be, but then he asked, “What are you going to do with the thread?”

“Weave a web, a tangled curtain, end to end, with no beginning. Knotted and twisted, snarled and straight, tying me, binding me, binding us all.”

I didn’t even try to explain. What was the use? There was a moment of silence as he watched me winding the thread. I thought about dropping it back in the bin and walking away, but I could actually picture in my mind what my words were saying. Maybe I had found inspiration for my portrait after all.

“What a tangled web we weave,” he finally said, hesitantly.

“When first we practice to deceive?” I finished the line. I looked up at him. Was he calling me a liar? Freak I was used to. A liar was the one thing I definitely wasn’t.

“Sorry,” he said again, this time with a small private smile. “It was the only vaguely poetic thing I could think of that kind of went with what you said. Was that from something?”

“Sir Walter Scott,” I said, though he was probably asking me about what I’d said and not the famous quote.

“Yeah, I know,” Alex said. He shot me a quick glance. “We studied him in English.”

“Right,” I said. A silence started to build up around us. Should I keep talking? “Um … I like Edgar Allan Poe’s stuff better.” We’d studied him recently. His poem, “Alone,” had really struck a chord with me. It felt like my life.

Alex nodded. I stared down at the thread. Any minute now the “freak” would be coming out. I should have stopped talking and let him walk away.

“Yeah. He’s cool. I like how he did those things with those letter poems, you know?”

“Acrostics,” I blurted.

“Right. Hiding the truth in plain sight.” He dug through a bin and pulled out another feather. “Anyway, I think I see where you’re going with your portrait.”

I couldn’t help but ask. I wasn’t entirely sure myself. The image in my mind was too new and fluid. “You do?”

“Yeah. Well, it’s a self-portrait, right?”

“A window into the soul,” I responded. At least Mrs. Rogers had said something similar, so I didn’t sound like I was completely coming out of left field.

“Right. And you’re always kind of hiding behind your hair. That whole tangled curtain thing.”

I looked down, and some of my hair fell forward over my face. I reached up to put it behind my ear, even though the movement felt unnatural. Maybe he was right, but still. I had my reasons.