Cornered (35 page)

Most mornings my thoughts pinball round in my brain, making it impossible to get any shut-eye. If I happen to doze off, I wake with a start and remember my life sucks. Curious I'd even allow myself to forget, for even a second, that I've been miserable since school started up about a month ago. Kids call me “dyke” as they pass, and I have a daily appointment to get the crap beaten out of me by none other than Kyra Connors—a girl who is a foot and half taller than me. She and her friends roam the hall, smoke by the trash bins, talk back to teachers, and threaten anyone who dares to challenge their authority. My mom would call them roughnecks if they were boys, but since they're girls she just refers to them as
popular
.

I've been losing sleep about it. I guess you could say I'm
depressed. But the possibility of a world in which there is no hiding out in the girls' bathroom, no hits to my head or jabs to my ribs, no kids calling me names—no
nothing
—sounds amazing. So rather than lie wide awake on my bed, sick with dread for the coming day, I look forward to floating up near the ceiling of my room and gazing down on my dead body. I've read about this on the Internet; people who've died and come back to life always say how peaceful their lifeless bodies appeared as they watched. I want that kind of peace. In fact, I can't wait. Even now I'm imagining eternal rest, the ceiling, the floating, the end.

I didn't kill myself. Obviously. But that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it. After yesterday, I'm pretty sure it's the best alternative.

After school, I was taking my usual shortcut through a tragic strip of parking behind the KFC. I do this everyday to avoid running into the likes of Kyra Connors. But there she was with her posse, all of them staring me down.

“Hey there, loser,” Kyra drawled.

My tongue felt as large and dry as a loaf of bread. “Maybe we could talk about this and work something out?” I suggested, amazed I could even get the words out.

Kyra snorted. “The only way to work this out is to have a fistfight.”

“Why?” I asked her. “Everybody here knows you can beat my ass. So why bother bruising your knuckles?”

Kyra squinted at me hard, making each one of her eyeballs look as mean as a buckshot. There was tittering from her badass girl-group, because for a split second it seemed as though I had the upper hand. But she responded by lunging forward and took a swing at me with her fist. She missed and I fell to the ground, grabbing my face like I'd been injured. Kyra walked over and kicked me hard in the shin to seal the deal.

“Bloody murder!” I screamed ridiculously, at which point her posse began pulling her away.

“She's already down,” one of them argued.

“Yeah. Even dykes deserve some mercy,” another said with a laugh. Had I known this unsaid rule, that it was unfair to beat up on someone who was already down, I would've hit the ground the moment I laid eyes on Kyra.

• • •

Back at home, I found Mom standing in my bedroom with her arms crossed and a black cloud over her head. She was pissed. While cleaning my room she just
happened
to read something that I'd been typing on my computer.

“What does this mean?” she asked, pointing to the glowing screen. “Explain it to me.”

Apparently, it's not enough to get beaten up; I also have to endure the fact that my mother is a snoop who reads my e-mails. It was a confidential e-mail that I would have sent to
my best friend—if I still had a best friend—but last month Fiona texted me that we were “getting a little too close for comfort” and that she “needed to step back a bit.” Since then I haven't had anyone in whom I can confide. So there was my e-mail, just idling on the screen, my deepest and most intimate feelings that my mom feels like she can come along read whenever she wants to.

“My private life is none of your business,” I told her. “And maybe I'm crazy but it seems to me that I ought to be able to have the freedom to express my own thoughts in my own room on my own
personal
computer.”

“Really?” she said in a tone that indicated we did not share the same opinion. “Here's the deal: until further notice you are too young to have any kind of a life that doesn't concern me. Personal, private, or otherwise. Is that clear?”

I didn't answer right away because I was busy looking out the window.

“I'm your mother,” she said louder than was absolutely necessary. “And in case you haven't noticed, I am in charge of your life.” Then, because she knew what I was thinking, she added, “And your stepfather too.”

I stormed out of my own room, which was a pathetic move leaving me nowhere else to go other than the garage. I sat out there for a good long while and thought about the injustice of being a teenager, deciding the only option left was to run away. I didn't leave a note or have a plan in mind. I simply packed a bag, snuck out of the house and headed toward the airport. I
only got as far as the local carpet outlet known as the Rug-A-Rama before my legs began to feel as though they might give out. So I sat on the curb thinking until Mom's car pulled up. I couldn't tell whether I felt happy or hopeless, but either way I was glad when she got out of her car wearing only her nightgown and tattered pink slippers. She ran up and hugged me hard around the neck, nearly choking me, and I immediately burst into tears.

“Just get in the car,” Mom said, holding back her own tears. And then when I didn't move she pleaded with me. “Emma. Please.”

Even after I was belted into the passenger seat, Mom continued to sit there in silence gripping the steering wheel and staring at the Rug-a-Rama.

“I'm very, very, very worried about you. . . .” I couldn't believe she actually used three
very's
. “And I'm definitely going to have to tell Gary about this as soon as he comes home from St. Louis.”

“Mom,” I said in an effort to change the subject, “I've had a really terrible day. Could we talk about this some other time?”

”You know what we need to do?” she asked. “We really need to get down on our knees and pray. As a family.”

I said a silent prayer that this would not ever happen. As we drove through town, I tried to explain to her that she was making a big deal out of nothing because what I wrote on my computer was completely normal.

“I was simply asking myself a question that we've been
pondering for weeks in English class, a question that Shakespeare was asking way back in a time when men wore tights:
To be or not to be, that is the question
.”

“Pondering?” Mom said as she raised her eyebrows at me. Mom totally missed my point: that posing such a question is part of the human condition, and to wonder about our existence when our lives have become unbearable is our right as thinking individuals. I explained all this to her.

“I am exploring the question as part of my report on Shakespeare.”

“Are you telling me that your life is unbearable?” she wanted to know. When I didn't answer right away, she said, “Are you?”

She so doesn't get it.

“No,” I barked as we pulled into the driveway. And then as I unbuckled my seat belt and jumped out of the car I explained. “I'm talking about
HAMLET
!”

In the play, Hamlet describes Man as the quintessence of dust—and okay, I wouldn't go so far as to describe myself in those terms, because surely I am more than that—but I still love the way it sounds. And I've thought a lot about the flip side of it too. I mean, aren't I also (as Shakespeare goes on to say) the beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? In form and movement how expressed and admirable? Aren't we all? Both man
and
woman?

Sometimes I look and look at myself in the mirror, but I never see much beauty, nothing like an angel, and forget being
a paragon of anything. I'm not hideous. But maybe I'm overlooking some essential element that makes me a standout, makes people want to kick my ass. Is it my practically black hair cut short like a boy's? Could it be that my two blue eyes are set kind of close together? I wonder if my thick wrists and ankles, paired with shortish legs and arms, might add up to a message that only brutes can recognize and respond to. My clothes are standard issue—shirt, jeans, and Converse. Okay, so maybe I tend to go a bit too boyish, but is this a reason for someone to pick a fight with me? Why should Kyra care what I wear, what I look like, or how I act? And what made her decide that yesterday was the day to have it out with me?

Meanwhile there's no one around to point out my better qualities or to notice where there's been some slight improvement. And that's why lately I've been thinking—
not to be.

No word from Fiona.

This would be an ideal time for me to off myself, because Gary is away on one of his business trips. I'm not exactly sure what Gary does when he's gone, or what he does
at all
for that matter, though I do know it has something to do with convincing people that they ought to give him their money before something bad happens.

Sometimes Mom gets all dolled up and has to parade around for the benefit of Gary's boss. It's not an activity she's
in favor of. Last time Gary proposed one of these outings and emphasized its overall importance to the continued well-being of his job, Mom announced that she was not going to be trotted out for a bunch of suits to gawk at. He countered with an offer to buy her a new outfit and a pair of fancy earrings. She then smiled, kissed him on the lips, and said, “In that case, I'd be willing to walk through Hell for you.”

Married life.

Later Tyler took me aside and asked, “But wouldn't Mom's clothes get all burned up if she walked through Hell?”

Tyler is the youngest in our family, and he's at that stage in life when everything is understood literally. He'll probably take my death hard; but I'm not too worried. Tyler is always the last one to wake up in our house, and I'm confident that Mom and my older brother, Sam, will figure out how to break the news to him so that he won't be totally scarred for life. Besides, Tyler's still young enough so that he'll probably forget all about me by the time he reaches high school.

It's late. Mom is still up, and I can hear her; she's standing in the backyard calling for our cat to come in.

“MR. T. . . . YOO HOO. MR. T. . . . COME HOME, GIRL.”

Mom named our cat after a TV personality from the 1970s before we knew she was a lady cat. Regardless, Mr. T. is a terrorist, but rather than target a mouse or a wren, she spreads her enmity all around to include everything and everyone.

I've read stories on the Internet about how cats are supposed to sense when a person is close to death. Apparently
household cats have extrasensory powers or something that tells them to sleep outside the door of the soon-to-be-deceased. Possible? Sure. But no one's able to prove it. I think it's just an urban myth, the result of a weird aura that cats give off like swamp gas. In any case, Mr. T. would not be the right cat to prove this premise because on any given day of the week, she could care less whether I'm dead or alive. Like everybody else in this house, Mr. T. has no idea what I'm planning for myself. I imagine that if I actually go through with it, she'll hardly alter her daily routine. Life, as they say, will go on. But I will be spared the torture of having to face Kyra or another day at school. I'm counting on this whole charade being over and done with so I can settle into some kind of eternal silence. It'll descend on me like snow falling on Christmas morning.

Today on my way to second period Kyra stopped me in the corridor by standing in my way. She got in my face and said something about a fistfight, but I was distracted by her halitosis. I didn't want her to see me gag, so I looked down and focused on her shoes, which looked like they could use an upgrade.

“I will not be trifled with,” she said. “And if you know what's good for you, you'll take my challenge serious.”

I knew she wouldn't dare haul off and hit me right there in broad daylight. Mrs. Sweeney was standing not more than twenty feet away.

“So listen,” I replied, trying to appeal to her sense of fairness. “If you're going to go around threatening people you ought to consider using the English language correctly. Maybe
start with Shakespeare. Study his sonnets, which are possibly his greatest works. . . .”

Kyra stood there and looked at me as though I had just burned off all my hair. “What're you talking about?”

“If I know what's good for me I will take your challenge
seriously
,” I replied, “not serious.”

Judging from the expression on Kyra's face, she was pissed. Seriously. And to prove it she said: “If I ever catch you looking at me sideways, I will kick your lezzie ass. Got it?”

I've been thinking—What if death isn't the end? And when I say
thinking
I actually mean
worrying
. A lot. I mean no one knows for sure what happens after we die, right? So what if I'm forced to hang around as a ghost or whatever and witness the whole unhappy course of events following my demise? What if I'm doomed to have some kind of fly-on-the-wall experience where I watch as Mom deals with my dead body, makes the funeral arrangements, buries me wearing a dress, and cries her eyes out. That would be awful. I went through it once with her when Dad died. I'm not sure she'd survive a second time.