Crystal Caves (12 page)

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

He sighs and turns the car again. We’re going around the park. My school is not very far from the boys’ if I were to walk, but driving requires us to go along a really strange route because, Ron said back when he first started driving me, there’s no direct way from here to there as the crow flies.

Took me a while to realize there was no crow, either.

“Talking outta school,” he says, “means saying stuff you’re not supposed to say. So I didn’t say it, okay?”

“Um, okay,” I say.

“Like, confidential between us, you know?”

“Oh,” I say. “Like me and Megan.”

“Exactly,” he says.

We pass the usual grocery stores and bodegas that crowd the blocks near my school. Then he turns the car on the side street in front of the school. Other cars are lined up so that their kids can get dropped as close to the doors as possible.

He doesn’t look at me. He keeps watching the road, like someone’s watching us.

“You asked how come I’m helpful,” he says, “which is just sad. I mean, they should all be helping you. You come in all excited from Greece and expecting them to be family, and they don’t treat you so good. And I hate that. Because you ain’t done nothing wrong. You’re a pretty girl, the spitting image of your mom, and she’s just not willing to…”

He stops, shakes his head just a little, then smiles slightly.

“What I mean is that you don’t need more trouble. And that nose ring? It’s trouble. It’s like you’re inviting it.”

“Maybe I am,” I say.

He sighs. “That kind of attention, it don’t get you nowhere. Better to put your head down and work hard, learn some things, and show your mom what’s what.”

We ease forward in the car line. Another car has pulled in behind us.

“I don’t know what you mean, ‘what’s what.’”

“Be better than her,” he says. Then he shakes his head a little again. “What’m I saying? You are better than her. But be better in a way she notices, and regrets, you know what I’m saying?”

“Not exactly,” I say. But it’s an intriguing idea. Impress Mother? How do you impress someone who doesn’t want you?

We’re finally in position. He is going to get out to open my door, but I grab the handle. He moves one of his hands below the dash, so no one can see, making that gesture which means
hold on
.

“Take out the nose ring,” he says quietly. “Leave the diamond studs. They break the rules too, right? But you can always say you just forgot you had them. I don’t know how you could forget about the nose thing.”

It’s a choice. I look over at the school. It’s not a pretty building. It’s made of this red brick that someone washes like once a week with a gigantic hose. Once you’re inside, it’s not so bad. It’s done up—according to Agatha—to look like an English country house. The courtyard is really pretty and kinda restful, or it would be if it weren’t filled with kids on break all the time.

“You don’t wanna get tossed out,” Ron says, sounding kinda desperate. “You’re in one of the best high schools in the country. I know it’s probably not so good as your school in Greece, but I’d give my left nut—arm—”

“Nut’s okay,” I say, with a smile. “I’ve heard worse.”

“Thanks,” he says. “But I’d give my left you-know-what to get my kids in a place like this. The schools they go to got razor-wire around the perimeter, you know what I mean?”

I turn toward him. “Razor wire? Like prisons?”

“Only they’re not in prison,” he says, and I realize he’s telling me that because he actually understands how little I know of this world. “They’re in a public school, and a not-too-bad one, but not-too-good neither. It would take all my salary to get them into a place half as good as this, for just one kid.”

I had no idea he had children. “How come you don’t ask for a raise?”

He chuckles. “I get paid pretty good, young lady. It’s just these schools, they’re so expensive, they cost more than some colleges. You go learn something. You’re smart enough. Go be the smartest kid in school.”

“And what’ll that get me?” I ask. I want to add,
Especially since I’m going home in a few months.

“Learning? It gets you all kinds of good places. You don’t end up driving cars for people who think they’re better than you.” He smiles. “Present company excluded, of course.”

“I’m just going to go home,” I say.

“Now?” He moves the car to the final drop-off point. “You not feeling so good?”

“No, I mean in the winter. I’m going home. Mother and I agreed that we’re done.”

His face softens. “She don’t know what she’s got. Forgive me, but your mom is dumber than rocks sometimes.”

“Nothing to forgive,” I say.

“You want me to stay, since they’re gonna kick you out for that nose thing?” he asks.

I grin at him, then reach up and take the nose ring out. I put it in my purse. Then I let myself out of the car. I almost close the door when I realize I didn’t do something.

I lean inside and say quietly, “Thanks.”

“No need to thank me, Miss,” he says.

“Yeah, there is,” I say. “And it’s not just for the ring.”

Then I slam the door shut, my mood surprisingly better. Someone actually paid attention, and that, more than anything, mattered the most.

TEN

I DON’T USUALLY meet up with M, V, & A until second period study hall. We don’t have to go to a designated hall (which confused me. Most of the terms around this school confuse me).

Instead we meet in front of Veronica’s locker. She has a good one, near the covered stairwell leading to the really pretty second floor. The lockers here aren’t like lockers on TV. In fact, Agatha says most public schools don’t even have lockers anymore because kids hide drugs in them, to which Veronica said, “Well, duh,” and waved a bottle of pain pills she cadged off her folks.

Veronica doesn’t take the pills, but she sells them so she can augment her wardrobe with stuff that Melanie says she’d look good in.

I get there first, but hang out near the corridor leading to the science wing. I don’t want to seem too eager, but I’m always afraid M, V, & A will leave without me.

Veronica shows up first, then puts her books in her locker. Mine are already in my locker, but I have my book bag anyway—I don’t like going without my iPad. It feels like low-level magic to me, something that answers all my questions and tells me how to find things.

My phone feels the same way, but I don’t like using the small screen as much as some kids do.

I amble over, just as Melanie comes down the stairs. She reaches me before either of us get to the locker. She touches my barrettes.

“Wow,” she says. “Bows and diamonds. Next thing you know, you’ll be wearing makeup.”

They’ve teased me about makeup from the start. Mother wants me to wear it, M, V, & A want me to wear it, but I hate how it feels on my face. Plus, when I look in the mirror, I don’t look like me. Since everything else familiar’s been taken away, looking like me has become more and more important.

It takes me a minute to realize that Melanie’s not wearing a white blouse with her uniform. Instead, she’s wearing a cream shell that shines. She has her blazer over the shell so no one can see that she doesn’t have sleeves, but I know the minute we leave, she’ll take the blazer off.

Her skirt is the proper length today, but she’s wearing tight leggings instead of knee socks.

Little things, things you don’t notice unless you look hard. Because the leggings are black like the knee socks. Unless you’re trying to look up her skirt, you don’t see that the leggings go all the way up.

Agatha shows up before I have to say anything about the makeup. Agatha’s uniform always looks a bit rumpled, and her hair usually needs combing. At least once a day, Veronica will comb Agatha’s hair, in what Melanie calls the daily grooming session.

Agatha looks tired, and if I ask about it, she’ll tell me about some rally her dad made her go to, or some protest her mother has organized. Her dad’s really close to the new mayor, and they’re having some political troubles that I can’t even pretend to understand. I’m not even sure what a mayor is except that he’s like the king of the city, only he doesn’t
run
the city, there are bureaucrats for that, which I’m pretty sure Hera would call minions, but I don’t ask.

It’s always better if I don’t ask.

“You look pretty,” Agatha says to me with more surprise than I want to hear in anyone’s voice when they say that sentence.

I say thank you as we approach Veronica. Today, her blonde hair is piled in curls on top of her head, except for one long strand that loops over her shoulder. That strand has just a little glitter in it, not enough to catch a teacher’s eye, but enough to make the strand seem like it has its own magic.

She grins at me. “Oh, look,” she says. “Our Crystal is growing up.”

She grabs a sweater from her locker and closes the door. We follow her outside. She usually determines where we go for the next forty-five minutes. Sometimes she has to deliver “product,” and sometimes she has to pick it up.

Mostly, though, we head to one of the stores that’s not too far from here, places that are so expensive Agatha says they charge for the air. For the past month, they helped dress me, and, with Melanie’s encouragement, I always bought extra for Agatha and Veronica. They would put the clothes in their lockers and change into the clothes after school, never taking the clothes home.

Melanie told me once it was nice to have someone else in her circle with an unlimited charge card so she didn’t have to buy everything for her friends.

I usually didn’t mind, although today, I didn’t really feel like shopping.

“Got stuff to deliver,” Veronica says, and leads us into the courtyard.

The courtyard looks like an extension of Central Park. It’s got well-tended grass and lovely fall flowers of a type I can’t identify, and tables everywhere, usually littered with students. There are staircases that lead to fountains, and a really strange statue of the school’s founder right smack in the middle of the whole thing. No one sits near the statue. Agatha says that’s because no one wants to be associated with a prig like that (her word, which I had to look up), but Melanie says it’s because the birds always sit on the guy’s head.

Which they do. The entire area around the statue is littered with bird crap. It’s like the only place in the courtyard that has birds, so I think both Melanie and Agatha are right: Someone is making a statement.

Veronica hurries across the courtyard toward a buff blond guy named Brock I’ve seen her talk to before. This time, she leans into him and kisses him, catching him and everyone by surprise. As he raises a hand to—I don’t know, maybe put it on her or something—she catches it with her own, and I realize she’s passing him one of those pill bottles that she has in her locker.

Then she pulls back, grins at him, and holds out her palm. He stuffs something in his book bag and grabs some cash, counting it out ostentatiously.

“I wish she wouldn’t do that here,” Agatha says. “She’s going to get in trouble.”

“How else is she going to pay for things?” Melanie asks. “She’s on
scholarship
.”

As if that’s a bad thing. Once I started understanding how money worked, it seemed kinda neat that some stranger would pay for things just out of the goodness of their heart. But M, V, & A don’t see it that way. They think anyone on scholarship is automatically a loser, and Veronica strives really hard to avoid loserdom in all its forms.

“Maybe we should just go and get coffee or something,” Agatha says. “If my dad finds out what Veronica’s doing—”

“He’ll what?” Melanie asks. “Make it a campaign promise to get drugs out of schools? Oh, wait! He’s already made that promise, just like every other politician in every other race since the dawn of time.”

I think they’re wrong. No one talks about drugs up on Mount Olympus. Even Bacchus prefers alcohol—wine, in particular. He says it’s better to have flavor than to pop a pill. I guess he would know.

“It’s a problem, and she’s not making it better,” Agatha says.

“It’s not a problem,” Melanie says. “Brock is an athlete and he needs extra pain medication so he can play through the pain. She’s helping, not hurting.”

“He’s not doing that, and you know it,” Agatha says. “He has rainbow parties, and Veronica just wants to get invited.”

Melanie shrugs.

“You’re always invited.” Agatha’s pushing and I’m not sure why. “You don’t know how it feels to get left out.”

This conversation is making me uncomfortable.

“I think coffee’s a good idea,” I say, and head back into the school so I can take the right exit to the street.

“Wow,” Melanie says, “bows, diamonds, and a spine. Who did you wake up emulating today, Crystal?”

I turn toward her. “Huh?”

Melanie gives me a grin that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “You’re so quiet and mousy. You don’t usually make the decisions.”

I’m getting the sense she’s kinda mad that I even suggested something.