Audacious (3 page)

We make love

(That part is hard to imagine)

It's his first time too.

He has a tattoo and a pierced navel.

And calls me
Mi Bella

Because the brown eyes mean he's Italian I suppose.

We take his money

And steal away

East into the night

East until we reach the sea.

We embrace on the sand

Salt water swirling around our feet.

Then I become a mermaid

And swim away.

DREAD

Dawn sears through my eyeballs

At a godless hour

And makes me think

Here on the Plains

With no trees or mountains

To filter the sun

Maybe all the hours are godless.

One school day done

288

Or so

To go

Until I graduate.

288 days to find

A niche, a hidey-hole

A slot to fit into like a coin.

288 days to avoid the kind of crisis

That always seems to find me.

Dad bolts out of the house

Briefcase swinging

Grinning.

Kayli swishes off

With a girl from two streets over

Giggling.

Mom sips coffee

And unpacks another box

Sighing.

I walk to the bus stop

Eyes down, determined

But dreading.

TUESDAY

Lacks the promise of Monday

The resignation of Wednesday

The despair of Thursday

The full strength stop-me-before-I-gouge-out-my-
    own-eyeballs-with-a-blunt-piece-of-chalk

Of Friday.

Tuesday is the day he says:

I saw you at Starbucks, right?

MANDALAS: PART ONE

Ms. Sagal, who teaches art—

Miz,
she emphasizes if we slip

And say Missus

I am already privy to the gossip

That she's a single mother by choice—

Gives us squares of blank paper and pencils

And instructs us to draw.

The page must be filled
, she says.

We scratch away.

I sneak a look through my bangs.

Puffy Blond is drawing a sunset

Freckle Arms is drawing a flower

Buzzcut is drawing a cross section

Of the
Enterprise

Not the Starship, understand,

The aircraft carrier.

I carve my paper in quarter sections

Then line by line

Dot by dot

A mandala blossoms

Like frost on glass

And fills my page.

An hour passes.

Sign your drawings,
Ms. Sagal says,

And pin them on the board.

Although he sits well away from my desk

Starbucks boy has drawn a mandala too.

And signed his name:

Sam.

TENURE

Dad was a high-school history teacher

And ran a camp for nerds in the summer

Night-owl nibbling at his PhD.

Now he is a professor

Full Professor with tenure

Whatever that means except

I'm pretty sure it means a lot more money.

He used to work school hours

But over The Bridge

So he'd trail in

Slug-tired

Traffic-addled

About an hour after Kayli and me.

Now he works strange hours

Night classes

Meetings

And grading in his den

At midnight.

He has a club

For Byzantium enthusiasts

That meets on weekends

And four graduate students

Who call almost every day

Tenure: from the Latin
tenere
, “to hold”

They certainly seem to have a hold on him.

LATCHKEY KIDS

We were latchkey kids, my sister and I

We walked from the school along the beach

Then eight blocks up. She'd want to try

To turn the lock, but I had to, since she couldn't reach.

Mom loved books, you see, and wasn't happy

Baking treats or mopping floors or growing roses

And nor were we, with her always feeling crappy

Nothing more exciting in her life than snotty noses.

She bought a suit on sale and some shoes

And ventured out in search of inspiration

Because a woman is allowed to choose

Exactly where she wishes to apply her dedication.

The public library was the beneficiary of her gifts

And we two girls soon learned survival skills.

Housewifery's like that, I hear, some it uplifts

The rest, like my poor mom, it nearly kills.

All this has a point. In this new city:

The library has no jobs,
Mom says at dinner

My dad looks up, and says,
Oh? That's a pity.

And this is when my mom starts getting thinner.

DERIVATIONS

Freckle Arms and Puffy Blond don't like me.

This has been made clear in several ways:

They snigger when I come into French class

They nudge each other in the hallway when I go by

They sneer at me in the lunchroom

A silent warning:

Don't sit here

As if I would even try.

I'm wary of them

Their glossy lips hide sharp fangs

And I have been bitten

One too many times.

Freckle Arms and Puffy Blond

Think they're popular

I recognize the desperation

The careful measuring of every word and move

The calculation

Can I afford to slip today?

Where am I on the populometer?

They recognize me too

A liability with my mismatched shoes.

Which I wore BY ACCIDENT

Believe it or not.

Me, they know, they can't afford

At all.

What's Ella short for? Elephant?

It's a cowardly attack.

We're alone in the art room

Apart from Sam.

Shut up, Eugenia,
he says.

Not all names are short for something.

Freckle Arms, who signed her flower “Genie”

Glares at him

But shuts up.

They scuttle to their seats

Like scorpions.

Sam leans forward.

What IS Ella short for?
he asks.

I hesitate

          …Raphaelle

The strange name floats above my desk

Like an unfamiliar scent

A wisp of frankincense.

Sam nods.
Biblical,
he says,

The way some kids might say “radical.”

You can talk “Samuel.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth

I try to gasp them back.

Sam smiles and sits back.

Actually, it's Samir,
he says.

Oh,

I say.

Oh.

SAMIR

It's a Muslim name—NOT Italian.

I looked it up.

I'm ashamed to say

I never met a Muslim before today.

Catholic School is my excuse.

We had some Chinese kids

Who didn't pray

And once a Jew, but she moved away.

MANDALAS: PART TWO

Ms. Sagal talks about our mandalas

She asks us why we chose

To draw something abstract.

I'm feeling bold.

I like them, I say,

The process is meditative

It feels primal.

Someone get me a dictionary,
Freckle Arms whispers.

I try to smile congenially

I mean, what have I got to lose?

But Ms. Sagal nods.

Excellent insight
, she says.

I turn to Sam

Expecting him to share my pride

But he's frowning

And when Ms. Sagal asks him

He only shrugs.

MIZ

She sometimes brings her daughter

Who sits in her wheelchair

In the back of the art room

Drawing wild swirls

With her spindly

Unpredictable arm.

How old are you?

I say to her after class.

She's fourteen

Ms. Sagal says.

She doesn't speak.

Cerebral palsy.

But she's very smart

She goes to a private school

They're closed today.

Marika is her name.

She smiles at me

A bit lopsided

But beautiful.

THE SHOWDOWN

She actually started to say it:

As long as you're living in this house, young la—

But she couldn't finish.

She laughed

And so did I.

It's something we do as a family

It's boring.

It's important to your father

No it isn't.

What would your Nana say?

She's dead.

Don't you have anyone you want to pray for?

This one stops me.

I could pray for Puffy Blond and Freckle Arms

To stop being so vapid.

I could pray for Kayli

That her asthma would get better

Or her feet would stop growing.

I could pray that someone

Would sit with me at lunch.

I could pray for Samir.

Aren't we supposed to pray

For the conversion of the infidels?

Or is that how he

Is supposed to pray for me?

REGURGITATION

Mom

          threw

                    up

                              after

                                        Sunday

                                                       brunch

It's not worth mentioning except

                                                       She

                                        snuck

                              upstairs

                    to

          do

it

And I don't think she's really sick.

chapter four

PORTRAITS

HOT CHOCOLATE

It comes over me on the bus

A fug, a mizzle of discontent.

Puffy and Freckle called me fat today.

Not directly

That would be gauche.

They said I looked like an old TV star

Who is famous for being fat.

They said it in front of everyone.

It festers all afternoon

And on the bus it overwhelms me.

Fat.

Useless.

Ugly.

Boring.

Stupid.

Gullible.

Ella short for elephant.

My eyes sting.

At Starbucks, I ring the bell

Stumble off.

Through the glass I can see Samir

The last person I want to see me this way

But my feet seem to feel differently.

They take me to him, smiling behind the counter.

He takes in my expression.

Are you okay?

Hot chocolate, I say.

And bless him,

He seems to understand.

Double chocolate, extra whip?

I ask him how he knows.

Everyone has bad days,
he says.

OXYGEN TENT

Kayli starts wheezing at dinner.

Mom walks away from her full plate

And prepares the nebulizer.

Kayli crawls onto the couch

Curls up, looking small.

Play tent with me
, she says.

We used to do this with a lacy crocheted blanket

Thrown over our heads.

She would wheeze behind the mask

With me concocting tragedies.

Two Dickensian sisters wasting with consumption

A mother and daughter poisoned by toxic gas

(From where was never clear)

Gasping through their last minutes

Or our favorite imagining

Siamese twins

One hale and healthy, one near death,

An arrow in her breast.

Oh the sorrow, the desolation, the wretchedness.

The crocheted blanket cannot be found.

I improvise a plain white sheet.

The effect is dramatic

Without the lacy holes,

We can't see the outside world

And no one can see in.

So instead of tragedies

We share secrets.

I cheated on a math test
,

She whispers through the mask.

A boy in French offered to sell me pot, I counter.

I think my history teacher is a lesbian,
she says.

And then coughs until Mom lifts the sheet

Gazing pucker-browed as the coughs subside

Then lets the sheet waft back into place.

Mom looks thin again,
Kayli says

Although this is no secret.

VEILED WOMAN

She yells at him outside Starbucks.

I linger

Out of sight.

I'm not really spying.

I just don't want him to see me

And be embarrassed

Or something.

She yells in a throaty language.

I wish I could understand

What she's saying.

I'm not really spying

I just want to know what is going on

And maybe help him

Or something.

She yells in front of everyone

And when she turns and strides away

I see her face.

I'm not really spying

I just want to know who she is

And what she means

To him.

An olive-skinned glaring moon

Surrounded by a carefully fixed black veil

She climbs into the back of a black car.

She's young and pretty.

I'm not really crying

I just have dust in my eye

Or something.

FORBIDDEN

I saw you watching me
, he says.