B0160A5OPY (A) (2 page)

That stung.

I did what she said. I bought the camera and I learned how to work it (no mean feat, given the number of buttons and settings), so now I take pictures and, actually, I quite enjoy it. I don’t know that I’m any good, but I
can
confirm that a nice big camera, held with hands on either side, covers up most of the photographer’s face. It also makes people self-conscious about themselves when you point a lens at them, and then they stop staring at you in a hurry.

At our last session, Eileen gave me more homework. And this assignment is going to be a lot tougher than clicking off a few pics. She got me, by dint of persuasion, arguments of logic, appeals to emotion, demands, pleas, and every other kind of therapeutic manipulation, to agree to come out of the camouflage closet. Today, when I started at my new school, I had to stop disguising my scar and show my whole face.

I have been in hiding – there’s no denying that. Like a winter creature in hibernation, I have stayed close to my den of an apartment. My venturing out has mainly been online and inside. When I have
had
to brave the world, to go to my weekly therapy session or for a doctor’s checkup, I’ve spent hours in front of the mirror on disguise detail. I ordered this thick, skin-colored goop called
Derma Cover
from an online shopping site. Whenever I go out, I smear it over the scar and the rest of my face. From a few feet back, it looks okay, but there is no denying that up-close, it looks nasty-ass. Like I have a gross skin disease. So I have taken to putting it on not quite so thickly – there’s no way to fill in the dent of the scar, anyway – and resorting to other disguises: giant J-Lo type sunglasses, carefully draped scarves, and hair styled to hang in a wave over my right cheek. I briefly toyed with the idea of getting one of those Groucho Marx plastic moustache-nose-glasses disguises but, while it would hide my identity, it would do nothing to cover the scar.

“This camouflage is not necessary. You would care less what people thought of you if you knew how seldom they did,” my shrink said. She says this often.

“They stare,” I always reply.

“They’re probably staring because you wear sunglasses inside, scarves in summer and keep your head permanently tilted to cover your face with hair like some Wookie!”

“People stare,” I merely repeat, nestling my cheek in my hand to ease the crick in my neck which the head tilting has given me. Resting your cheek in your hand is also a good hiding trick, but I can confirm that it looks weird if you do it while walking or standing.

People
do
stare. I don’t get angry at them – well, not anymore. I know they’re just curious. I see how they try to avert their eyes immediately after the first shock and I know they mean no harm. Heck, I would probably stare, too – if the scar was on the other face. But it means I can never forget. I can never lose myself in a moment or an experience because their stares always remind me of what happened. I am tethered by the scar to that day, the day when everything changed.

The me I was then is gone. It’s like an alien spaceship hovered over my life, sucked me up, transmogrified me and then spat me out into another existence. I’m different – inside and out. Those girls I used to hang out with, with their silly preoccupations and worries – I don’t belong with them anymore. They came, some of them, to visit me in the hospital, but it was obvious they felt uncomfortable. They couldn’t look me straight in the eye, couldn’t see past the injuries and didn’t know what to say. I didn’t encourage them to return and when I told them I needed to be alone to heal, they didn’t force the issue. After I left the hospital and moved to my new apartment, I ignored their calls and allowed them to drift away. There were a few messages on my seventeenth birthday, but eventually the calls stopped.

I have become my scar. It is what people notice first and remember last about me. Out of embarrassment, or perhaps fear of embarrassing me, they look away quickly and whisper to their gawping children not to stare. They look around me, behind me, to the side of me – anywhere but directly at me. It is as if I am both glaringly obvious and completely invisible. Those who stick around beyond the first few seconds don’t last much longer. They try – I can see them almost breaking out in a sweat with the effort of it – not to look at the red slash. But it pulls their eyes irresistibly, a magnet on iron filings, until they look, and then look again and then give up and move off to something or someone less exhausting, less riveting, less ugly.

But I have promised Eileen, and made a vow to myself, to start this school year differently. This is the trade-off for giving in to the temptation to run away from my old school and begin somewhere new instead.

And so here I am, at West Lake High, having my bare face stared at by a whole new set of faces and eyes. Or, to be more accurate, having my bare face glared at by Luke.

4

Freaks

When Luke leaves the English classroom, air rushes back into my lungs and I can find enough of my voice to get directions to the next class – Art – from the teacher.

As I walk into the art room, I notice two things. One,
he’s
not in this class. (Of course not – he’s probably brushing up his skills in an advanced program rudeness tutorial.) And two, there’s an empty desk about halfway up the row alongside the hallway wall, where the scarred side of my face would offend only the beige paint. I make a beeline for the seat while the teacher – a skinny woman who smells of cigarette smoke and peppermints and wears several layers of floaty clothes – introduces me to the class. This, according to my schedule, is Miss Ling.

“This is Sloane Munster,” she announces, wasting no energy on smiles or enthusiasm.

“Sloane Monster, more like.”

It’s a whispered comment which comes from one of a group of girls I recognize from English class. There are four of them, fashionably dressed and carefully made-up, with perfect hair and unscarred faces, and they are clustered at the back of the room, riding their chairs. The wisecrack is met with a few smug giggles. The girls are reassured by my obvious disqualification from the beauty stakes.

“Hi.” The girl seated in front of me has turned around and is smiling at me. “I’m Sienna.”

She is tiny. She looks too small to be a senior. She has a heart-shaped faced, mocha skin, round brown eyes and a halo of corkscrew curls which bounce when she nods her chin in the direction of the girls.

“Don’t mind them. They’re a bunch of no-talents who only signed up for art class because they thought it would teach them how to apply their make-up better.”

“Hi, Sienna. Sloane,” I say, pointing a thumb at my chest.

Miss Ling calls the class to order and is about to close the door when a boy walks in. He takes up most of the doorway and when he sinks into a chair a few desks in front and to the left of me, he overflows. He’s big. Not fat, exactly, but bulky and somehow out of proportion. His hair is cut very short around a face with a doughy pallor, and his head seems too small for the massive body beneath. He wears jeans, heavy Doc Marten boots and a red plaid shirt.

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m alright, I work all day and I sleep all night.” The girls at the back sing the chorus softly.

“No singing in this class,” says Miss Ling. To the boy, she says, “You’re late.”

He doesn’t reply. He drops his bag on the desk with a thud that makes me jump. Loud noises still do that to me, as do the sounds of breaking glass and screeching brakes. But I am not going to allow the pressing memory into my mind right now.

The Shrink taught me that staring hard at an object is a useful way of staying grounded in the present, so right now I focus on the big boy’s bag. It’s a plain, gray, rectangular bag, with a single shoulder strap. A peace symbol, which looks like it’s been wrought from barbed wire, has been sketched in black ink over the whole of the front flap. Written underneath the graphic, in rough lettering, is, “Give peace a chance”.

Miss Ling walks between the desks, handing out sketch paper and chalky pastels in a range of earth colors. The big, dough-faced boy says nothing, merely looks down at the paper that is deposited onto the desk in front of him. He picks up a dark umber-colored pastel and draws a series of crossed lines over the back of one hand.

Miss Ling places a narrow earthenware vase on the table. It is filled with stalks of dried wheat and barley. She removes a few of the stalks and drops them carelessly alongside the base of the vase.

“I would like a sketch of this still-life by the end of this double lesson,” she says. “Pay particular attention to shading and cross-hatching. And try to keep the noise down.”

She sits behind her desk, plugs in the ear-buds of an iPod, and closes her eyes, resting her head against the back of the chair and putting her feet up on the desk.

“Laziest teacher ever,” says Sienna. “But at least you can do what you like in her class. She doesn’t ever actually teach, but she doesn’t interfere either, and she always passes everyone.”

I sketch a few lines of the vase and glance around the class to see what the others are doing. The girls at the back are drawing vases of flowers – childishly doodled roses and daisies which bear no resemblance to the vase of dried grasses. Sienna is right, they are not artistically gifted. To the left of me, a pale boy with dark hair and long sideburns quickly draws a tiny vase with cramped, narrow strokes in the bottom corner of his sheet, then he flips the paper over and rapidly doodles a series of big, bold Anime cartoons of the kids in the class. He gives me flowing straight red hair and oriental eyes, but I recognize myself from the slashed line across one cheek. The girls at the back of the class are all hair, teeth and boobs in his rendering.

The big boy’s drawing looks nothing like Miss Ling’s vase, but it shows real talent. He has made the vase angular – a series of jagged, spikey slanted lines like the broken-mirror pattern of lights that crosses my vision when I get a migraine. He has drawn the wheat and barley as articulated chains of nuts and bolts and nails.

“He’s good,” I say to Sienna, nodding at the mechanical graphic.

“Yeah, he’s got skillz,” she replies.

“Hey, El-Jayyyy,” calls one of the girls from the back. “How’s your drawing coming on? Wouldn’t you rather be, like, chopping trees?”

This provokes giggles and a fresh round of the lumberjack song.

“What’s his name?” I ask, speaking softly.

“L.J.”

“How do you spell that?”

“Like the initials, L.J. Don’t ask me what they stand for – because nobody knows and he’s not telling. Even the teachers have called him that ever since he started high school here.”

“We call him Lumber-Jack,” says a busty blonde girl from the back. She makes no effort to keep her voice down.

“Why?”

The girl looks at me like I’m stupid. “Have you seen how he walks?”

I get it then. He lumbers. The red plaid shirt doesn’t help either, I guess, if he’s not trying to look like a frontiersman. Apparently, I am not the only freak in this school. I wonder if Luke glares at this boy, too. I look back at L.J. His wide shoulders ripple and twitch as if he is trying to dislodge an irritating fly, but otherwise he does not respond to the taunts from the back of the class.

Sienna’s sketch is coming on well, but she is dissatisfied.

“I’m not that good at drawing and painting, if you want the truth. Photography’s my thing. I know a good picture when I see it, and it’s easier to capture it in pixels than pastels.”

“I just got a digital camera,” I say, smudging the shading on my vase with the tip of a finger. “I’m having fun with it, but I don’t really think I know what I’m doing. It’s hella complicated.”

“I can give you a few tips, if you like,” volunteers Sienna.

“That would be great.”

“There’s also a photography club here at the school – maybe you’d like to join that? It meets on Friday nights at the Pizza place down the road. They’re a nice crowd. You’d like them.”

I hesitate. I’ve avoided clubs and groups since … well, for most of the last year. I don’t know that I’m brave enough yet to plunge back into a full social life.

“Are you a member?”

“Nah, it’s a bit basic for me. Sorry – that sounds really arrogant – it’s just that I’ve been doing this for years, and the club is more for people just starting out.” Sienna grabs my paper and holds it up to admire the sketch. “Hey, you’re good, too.”

“It’s okay,” It’s no Van Gogh, but at least my wheat stalks don’t look like kindergarten daisies. “So do you do the photography for something in particular, or just for fun?” I ask Sienna.

“I have an online blog – it’s called
Underground West Lake
. The school has this really boring e-newsletter here, called the West Lake News. It’s a weekly newsletter, but it’s written mainly by the staff and it’s just sports events and results, and rah-rah pep-talks about building character in difficult times, and don’t forget to bring canned soup for the next charity drive. Riveting stuff like that. So I started the blog. It’s supposed to be subversive, but it’s mostly a lot of gossip, and some humor. Keith here –” she gestures to the boy drawing the Anime cartoons and he waves an absent greeting at me, “does cartoon panels for us. We have ‘10 best and worst’ lists, and it’s linked to a twitter feed. I’m the web-mistress-slash-editor, but I also do a lot of pics, photographic essays, sneak-shots – just to give a feel of life at the school, you know?”

“It sounds amazing!”

I am impressed. How does anyone have that much energy? It takes everything I have just to get through each day.

“I think it’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself.” Sienna grins. “You should go online and check it out.
www.undergroundwestlake.com
.
Let me know if there’s anything you can contribute – an article or maybe some photos. You could bring a fresh perspective. You know, a noob’s view of this place.”

“Maybe,” I say.

So far, my day confirms my belief that this place is pretty much like any place. This could be Somewhere High, Anywheresville. There are the usual mix of people: nice, nasty, pretentious, humble, lazy, talented and weird. There’s only one unpleasantly abnormal person here. And it’s not L.J. Or me.