Fly Away (37 page)

He backed away and slammed the door shut. It was the last time he came to my bed,
but not the last time he hurt me. All I had to do was look at him and he hit me. And
I lay in bed every night now, waiting, worrying, wondering when he would change his
mind and go back to his old ways.

School was worse when I got back from the sanatorium, too.

I survived it, though. I kept my head down and ignored the pointing and the snickering.
I was damaged goods and everyone knew it. There was an odd comfort in it. I no longer
had to pretend.

My mother couldn’t stand the new me, with my baggy clothes and untended hair and sleepy
eyes. Whenever she saw me, she would purse her lips and mutter,
Ach, Dorothy Jean, have you no pride?

But I liked being on the outside, looking in. I saw so much more clearly.

We were poised on the cusp of a new world in California at the end of the plastic
decade. The suburbs were opening up; forming a new American dream. Everything was
spic-and-span, Mr. Clean, wash-and-wear. We had shopping malls with Tomorrowland-style
rooftops, and hamburger drive-ins. As an outsider, I saw things with the clarity that
distance provides. It wasn’t until I lost my way that I noticed the factions that
inhabited our school hallways. There were the “it” kids, the popular ones who dressed
in the latest fashion and popped gum bubbles as they talked to one another and drove
their parents’ shiny new cars along the strip on Saturday night. They gathered in
bubbling, laughing pods at Bob’s Big Boy and drove up and down the street at night,
waving and racing and laughing. They were the kids the teachers loved; boys who threw
the winning touchdowns and girls who talked of college and spent their parents’ money.
They followed the rules, or seemed to, anyway, and to me they seemed golden somehow,
as if their skin and hearts were impervious to the pains that assaulted me.

But by the spring of my junior year, I started noticing the other kids, the ones I
hadn’t seen before, the ones who lived on the wrong side of the tracks. One day they
were invisible like me, and the next day they were everywhere, dressing like James
Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause,
greasing their hair back, rolling packs of cigarettes in their T-shirt sleeves. Black
leather jackets moved in alongside the lettermen’s sweaters.

Hoods, we called them at first, and then greasers. It was supposed to be an insult,
but they only laughed and lit their cigarettes and mocked their “betters.” Almost
overnight, rumors started swirling of fights and rumbles.

Then a “nice” boy was killed in a drag race and our community erupted with the kind
of swirling, ugly anger I hadn’t imagined was there before.

It spoke to me, that anger. I didn’t realize how angry I’d been until it was in the
air, infecting everyone. But as always, I held it inside. While I walked down the
hallways—alone in a crowd, my books held close—I listened to the two groups taunting
each other, the boys in black leather yelling out,
Here, chicky-chicky,
to the girls in pleated skirts, who bristled and walked away faster, their gazes
hot with superiority.

On the Monday after the accident, I remember being in home ec, listening to Mrs. Peabody
drone on about the importance of a stocked cupboard for a young housewife. She positively
glowed when she told us how we could impress our drop-in guests with only Vienna sausages
and a few other handy ingredients. She promised to show us how to make a white sauce,
whatever that was.

I barely listened. I mean, who cared? But the “it” girls—the ones who spent their
days draped in lettermen’s sweaters and tossing their heads like horses in the starting
gate, they were perched on the edges of their seats, taking notes.

When the bell rang, I was the last to leave the classroom. It was always better that
way. The popular kids rarely bothered to look behind them.

I made my way cautiously through the minefield that high school hallways could be
for the unpopular.

It sounded like traffic buzzing around me, only it wasn’t cars making all that racket,
it was the popular kids, talking all at once, making fun of everyone else.

I walked woodenly to my locker, hearing their voices raise. Not far away Judy Morgan
stood by the water fountain, surrounded as she always was by her bouffant-haired pep-squad
friends. A golden virgin pin decorated her Peter Pan collar.

“Hey, Hart, nice to see your hair is growing back in.”

My cheeks flamed in embarrassment. I put my head down and fumbled with my lock.

I felt someone come up behind me. Suddenly the hallway went quiet. I turned.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with enough curly black hair to set my mother’s
teeth on edge. He’d slicked it back, but still it wouldn’t be controlled. His skin
was dark—unacceptably so—and he had strong white teeth and a square jaw. He wore a
white T-shirt and faded jeans. A black leather jacket hung negligently from one hand,
sleeves draping on the floor.

He reached for the pack of smokes in his rolled-up sleeve.
You don’t care what a bitch like her thinks, do yah?

He lit his cigarette, right there in the hallway. The glowing tip sent fear slicing
through me, but still I couldn’t look away.

She’s crazy,
Judy said.
Perfect for you, greaser.

Principal Moro came bustling down the hallway, pushing through the crowd, blowing
her silver whistle and telling everyone to get to his or her classroom.

The boy touched my chin, made me look up, and it was like seeing a different guy altogether.
He was just a kid with slicked-back black hair, smoking a cigarette in a high school
hallway.
I’m Rafe Montoya,
he said.

Dorothy Jean,
was all I could get out.

You don’t look crazy to me, Dorothy,
he said.
Are you?

It was the first time someone had asked, really asked, and my first thought was to
lie. Then I saw how he was looking at me and I said,
Maybe.

The smile he gave me was sadder than anything I’d seen in a long while and it made
this ache start up in my chest.
That just means you’re paying attention, Dorothy.

Before I could answer, Principal Moro was taking me by the arm, pulling me away from
Rafe, dragging me down the hall. I stumbled along beside her.

I didn’t know much about life back then, but I knew one thing for sure: good girls
from Rancho Flamingo did not talk to boys with dark skin named Montoya.

But from the second I saw him, I couldn’t think about anything else.

It sounds cliché, but Rafael Montoya changed the course of my life when he said those
words to me.
It just means you’re paying attention.

I said them over and over in my mind as I walked home from school, studying them from
every possible angle. For the first time ever, I wondered if maybe I wasn’t crazy
or alien. Maybe the world was as unbalanced as it felt to me.

For the whole next week, I moved through my ordinary routine in a daze. I slept, I
woke, I dressed and went to school, but all of that was a camouflage. I was always
thinking of him, looking for him. I knew it was wrong, dangerous, even, but I didn’t
care. No. That’s not right. I
embraced
the wrongness of it.

I wanted to be a bad girl, suddenly. The good-girl thing had been such a disaster.
I thought that being bad might break me out.

I agonized over my hair, straining to make it look like the popular girls’. I ironed
it and curled it and teased it. I plucked my heavy brows until they were perfect arches
above my eyes. I wore one pretty Peter Pan–collared dress after another, with coordinating
sweaters tied casually around my shoulders and belts cinched tight to show off my
small waist. I bleached my tennis shoes until they were so white they hurt to look
at. Instead of being the first into every classroom and the last out, I did the opposite,
not caring that kids stared at me when I rushed into class with the bell. Everyone
noticed the change. My father’s eyes darkened every time he saw me, but he kept his
distance. He was afraid of me now, as afraid of me as I’d once been of him. I was
unstable and I let him know it—I was crazy enough to do or say anything.

Boys started following me around, but I barely cared. I didn’t want the kind of boy
who wanted a girl like me. I hovered in the hallways, looking for him.

I felt myself changing. It was as if, in his absence, I took myself apart and reorganized
the pieces in the image of what I imagined he would want. It sounds crazy—hell, I
was
crazy—but it felt perfectly sane to me. Saner than I’d been in years.

My father watched me closely. I felt his observation and refused to wilt beneath it.
Desire had given me a new strength. I remember having dinner one night, sitting at
that mustard-flecked green Formica table, eating my mother’s tasteless Welsh rarebit
with tomato slices and little sausages. My dad smoked through the whole meal—alternating
a drag of his cigarette with a reach of the fork. He talked in staccato sentences
that sounded like gunfire.

My mother chatted into every silence, as if to prove how happy and normal we were.
When she said the wrong thing—asked me about my new hairdo—my dad slammed his fist
on the table, rattling the white Corningware plates that were my mother’s latest purchase.

Don’t encourage her,
he hissed.
She looks like a tramp
.

I almost said,
You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
and the thought of saying it scared me so much I lurched to my feet. I knew that
one wrong word could send me back to Loonyville. Just
wanting
to speak scared me.

I ducked my chin into my neck and began clearing the table. As soon as the dishes
were done, I mumbled something about homework and bolted into my room, shutting the
door behind me.

I can’t remember now how long it went on, me waiting and hoping and looking. Two weeks
at least, maybe longer. And then one day I was standing by my locker, concentrating
on the numbers, when I heard him say,
I’ve been looking for you
.

I froze. My mouth went dry. As slowly as I’ve ever done anything, I turned around
and found him standing too close, towering over me.
You looked for me?

And you looked for me. Admit it.

H-how do you know that?

In answer to my question he closed the space between us. The black leather jacket
he wore made a crinkling sound as he slowly lifted his arm and used one finger to
tuck the hair behind my ear. At his touch, I felt this flare of longing. It was as
if, for the first time, someone
saw
me. Until that second, I didn’t know how much my invisibility had hurt. I wanted
to be seen. More than that, I wanted his touch, and wanting it terrified me. All I’d
known of sex was pain and degradation.

I knew it was bad to feel the way he made me feel, and dangerous to be excited by
this boy who was wrong for me. I should have wanted to turn it off, to look away,
to mumble something about it being wrong, but when he touched my chin and made me
look at him, it was already too late.

His face was all hollows and planes beneath the hallway’s harsh light. His hair was
too long—greaser long—and almost blue in places, and his skin was too dark, but I
didn’t care. Before I met Rafe, a suburban-wife future lay open to me.

And then it closed. Just like that. Anyone who says that one second can’t change your
whole life is a fool. I wanted to break the rules. Anything for him.

He was the picture of cool, standing there smiling cockily down at me, but in him
I saw the same emotions that had turned me into someone new.

Dangerous
. That’s what we would be together. I knew it to my bones. We would push each other
every second to feel like this again.

Be with me,
he said, reaching out.
Don’t care about what they think.

“They” were everyone—my parents, the neighbors, the teachers, the doctors who had
treated me. None of them would approve of us. It would scare them all, and I was crazy,
too.

Dangerous,
I thought again.

Can we keep it quiet?
I asked.

I could tell my question hurt him, and I hated that. It wasn’t until later, when he
took me to bed and taught me about love and passion and sex, that I told him all of
it, every sordid detail of my barren, ugly life. He held me and let me cry and told
me he’d never let anyone hurt me again. He kissed the tiny constellation of starburst
scars on my chest and arms. Then he understood.

For months, we kept our relationship quiet and hidden … until I realized I was pregnant.

Twenty-two

People think high school girls didn’t get pregnant in my day, but we did. Some things
in this world are givens, and teens having sex is one of them. The difference was
that we disappeared. There were always rumors and innuendos. Girls were simply gone
one day—off to visit an elderly aunt or an ill cousin—and back sometime later, thinner,
usually, and quieter. Where they really went, I never knew or cared.

I loved Rafe; not in the breathless schoolgirl way of our first meeting, but thoroughly,
utterly. I didn’t yet know that love was fragile and your future could turn on a dime.
One night in late May of my junior year, my father came home, uncharacteristically
smiling, and informed my mother and me that he’d been promoted and that we were moving
to Seattle. He showed us a picture of the house he’d purchased and gave my mother
a peck on the cheek. She looked as stunned as I felt.

On a dime.

July first,
Dad said.
That’s the day we will be leaving.

I had to tell Rafe everything. There was no more time to worry or plan. My future—unless
Rafe changed it—would be in a place called Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.