Hold Still (5 page)

After being there and seeing her drink champagne and talk with this low voice to a bunch of impressed people, I could just feel how lame we all must have seemed to her. All of us except Ingrid, who was actually talented. Like last year, we had an assignment to photograph something that was meaningful to us. I guess she expected us to turn in pictures of really profound things—I can’t even think of what—because when she started coming by our desks to see what we came up with and saw a jock’s picture of his baseball glove lying on the grass, and a girl’s pom-pom against the gym floor, she just about lost it. That smile vanished. She walked back to her desk and put her head in her hands and didn’t speak for the rest of the class.

She looks more optimistic today, calling kids over to her desk, one by one. I’m in the far right corner, alone, of course. She starts with Akiko, who is sitting in the front left of the room. I assume that she hopes she’ll run out of time before my turn comes. I lay my head on my desk and shut my eyes.

Forty minutes later I wake up.

Everything is muffled, but it only seems like that because I’m disoriented and kind of embarrassed that I actually fell asleep. When I lift my head and see that nothing new is happening, that everyone is still sitting together at their tables and Ms. Delani is meeting with Matt, I just close my eyes again and listen to people talking. Meghan and Katie are writing notes to each other and whispering,
Oh my God!
and
No he did not!
Dustin and James are talking in low voices about some new skate park.

I hear Katie saying, all importantly, “Henry’s mom is the real estate agent who was showing the house they bought, and she told Henry that the family was nice but just not the kind of people who belong in our community.”

“I heard she’s a
lesbian,
” Meghan says. To judge by her tone, she might as well be saying,
I hear she digs garbage from trash cans and eats it
.

“I heard that, too,” Lulu whispers. “I heard she got kicked out of her old school for making out with a girl in the bathroom.”

I realize they’re talking about Dylan, and for some reason it really pisses me off.

“Excuse me, but some of us are trying to sleep,” I say, glaring at them.

They look at me, then at each other. They stop talking for a moment. Meghan runs her hand down one side of her neatly combed brown hair. Katie buttons a pearl button on her sweater. They look like miniatures of their mothers.

“Caitlin?” Ms. Delani says. She’s scanning the classroom, like she called my name off a random list and she doesn’t know who I am.

“I’m over here,” I tell her.

“Will you come to my desk, please?”

I look at the clock. There aren’t even two minutes left.

I get up and walk to her desk. She has a folder of my photographs from last year and she’s looking at them through her little glasses. She sighs, tucks some of her straight black hair behind her ear.

“You definitely need to work on your use of color this semester. Look at this one,” she says, but I don’t.

I look straight at her face. She doesn’t even notice.

“Do you see how there is no contrast here? If we were to convert this image to black-and-white, you would see that all these colors would be the same value of gray. It has a dulling effect.”

I keep looking at her and she keeps looking at my photo. Last year she wasn’t like this. She may have paid more attention to Ingrid, but she talked to me, too.

She sifts through the stack. “Your compositions are sometimes good, but . . .” She shakes her head. “Even they need quite a bit of work.”

I want to say,
Fuck you,
Veena
. They were obviously okay with you last year, because you gave me an A
. But I don’t say anything. I’m just waiting for her to look up at me so she can see me glaring. The bell rings. She looks up at the clock, back at the stack, and says, “Okay?”

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I shake my head.

“But what are my goals?” I ask. I just want her to look at me.

“Color,” she says, staring at my pictures. “Composition.”

I’m about to ask her what she means, how I can just get better, where I should start. But she’s already turned and walking to her back office. The door shuts.

12

I’m headed up to the science building, holding a cold slice of greasy pizza. On my way through the quad I see Jayson Michaels. There are only a few black kids at our school, so he stands out. Plus he’s really popular—track star, runs the mile in 4:20 flat. We went to the same junior high and had homeroom together in sixth grade, and the only thing that I really remember about it was that when we were discussing segregation the teacher randomly asked Jayson how he felt about it. She asked him right there in the middle of everyone. As if a sixth grader who had lived his whole life in this practically all-white town would feel like being a spokesperson for Black America. And anyway, what a dumb question. What’s he gonna say?
Well, actually, I feel pretty good about it. It’s pretty uplifting that people like me couldn’t get served in restaurants or use public bathrooms.

Now he takes a step toward me. I haven’t seen him this close for years. His eyes are lighter brown than I remember. His face is smooth and he has a nick on his right cheek, at the jaw.

I can’t remember a single thing that Jayson and I ever said to each other. Still, I know these personal things about him because he told Ingrid and she told me. Like he has a sister who’s in college, who he talks to on the phone a lot. And he lives with his dad alone. He loves to run because it makes him forget about everything else. When he trains, he listens to old groups like the Jackson Five.

Now he looks at me like he knows me.

And I get this feeling. It’s like my head suddenly gets lighter, fills up with air. I want to talk. Jayson opens his mouth. Then he closes it. Then he opens it again.

“Hi,” he says.

It’s the saddest
hi
I’ve ever heard.

We hesitate, but it only lasts a moment.

Then we keep walking, away from each other.

13

It’s the weekend again, and even though I know I should be building something with the wood that’s been waiting in the backyard all week, all I want to do is lie on my bed and listen to music. I keep getting these songs in my head that I want to put on, but I have to get up to change tracks because I can’t find the remote to my stereo. After I’ve done this about twenty times, I finally decide to just look for it. It isn’t buried under the covers. It isn’t under all the clothes piled on top of my chest of drawers, or sitting on top of my CDs or my desk. I get down on the carpet to look under my bed. I stick my arm under and feel around, find a couple mismatched socks, a progress report from school that I hid from my parents last year, and something I don’t recognize—hard and flat and dusty. I pull it out, thinking maybe it’s a yearbook from elementary school, and then I see it and my heart stops. Worn pages, bird painted on the blue cover in Wite-Out.

Ingrid’s journal.

For some reason, I feel afraid. It’s like I’m split down the middle and one half of me wants to open it more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything. The other half is so scared. I can’t stop shaking.

Did it get kicked under the bed one night by accident?

Did she hide it?

She carried it with her everywhere. I know this sounds stupid, but I felt kind of jealous of it. Whenever I had to figure something out or vent, I would just call her up, so I couldn’t understand why she needed to have this book that was so private. But here it is, in my hands, and I’m holding it like it’s some alive thing.

I stare at it in my hands forever, just feeling its weight, looking at the place where one Wite-Out wing is starting to flake off. Then, once my hands are steadied, I open to the first page. It’s a drawing of her face—yellow hair; blue eyes; small, crooked smile. She’s looking straight ahead. Birds fly across the background. She drew them blurry, to show movement, and across the top she wrote,
Me on a Sunday Morning
.

I turn the page.

As I read, I can hear Ingrid’s voice, hushed and fast, like she’s telling me secrets.

I shut the book.

My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.

I know I should want to keep reading but I can’t. It’s too much. I put her journal in my chest of drawers, not in the top drawer where everyone puts things they want to hide, but buried in clothes all the way at the back of a drawer near the bottom. But after a few minutes I move it. That place doesn’t seem right. So I put it on a shelf in the walk-in closet I painted purple a couple summers ago. I slide a shoe box full of photo negatives in front of it.

I stand in the doorway of my closet and look in at the shelf. I almost expect to see the shoe box rising and falling with the journal’s breath. But it’s just a journal. It isn’t alive. Something is wrong with me.

An hour later I reach up and touch it to make sure it’s still there.

After lunch I move it again. This time, I put it back under my bed, because that’s where it’s been for the past three months. I try to do homework. I try to watch TV. But all I can think about is Ingrid’s journal, in my room, and if it’s still there, and what if someone finds it, and why I don’t want to read it, and how I know I need to.

The next morning, already dressed, shoes tied, hair pulled back in my perpetual ponytail, I stand in front of the closet again. I want to walk out the door but I can’t. I don’t mean
I can’t
like
I don’t want to
. I mean,
I can’t,
like something is physically making it impossible for me to leave my room without it. So I crouch over my backpack and find an inside zipper pocket. The pocket’s pretty small, so I don’t know if it will work, but I take Ingrid’s journal from the shelf and try to fit it in, and it turns out to be perfect. It rests there, hidden.

I close my backpack and heave it over one shoulder, then the other. The journal makes it so much heavier, but the weight feels good.

14

On Mr. Robertson’s stereo, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are singing the word
love
over and over. He lowers the volume to let the song fade out, pushes the sleeves of his worn-in beige sweater up to his elbows.

“When I was a kid, my parents used to play ‘All You Need Is Love’ on our record player almost every night,” he says, perched on his desk, looking out at us. “At the time I thought it was just something to dance around to. I memorized the lyrics before I even considered what they meant. It was just fun to sing along.” He reaches for a stack of papers next to him, and walks in between the rows of desks, handing the papers out to us. “But if you look here at the lyrics, you’ll see that it has many elements of a poem.”

He sets my copy on my table and I look at his wedding band and the little hairs below his knuckles. I wonder what his wife is like, and if they dance around their house at night listening to the Beat les or other old bands. I try to imagine their house, how they have it decorated, and I think they probably have lots of plants, and real paintings on the wall painted by people they’re friends with.

“Caitlin.” Mr. Robertson smiles at me, interrupts my thoughts. “Show us one poetic element in this song.”

“Okay,” I say. I read it over quickly, but I’m so worried about taking forever to answer that I don’t really absorb anything. “If you look at it,” I say, “you’ll see that there is a . . . pattern? Things repeat a lot?”

“Great. Repetition. Benjamin, what else?”

“Uh, like a theme?”

“Of what?”

“Love, I guess.”

“Okay. What’s another theme of this song? Dylan?”

I glance at her and wonder if she really got kicked out of her old school for making out with a girl. She’s wearing the same black jeans, but today with a light blue shirt with some words on it that I can’t read. She has bulky leather bracelets on each wrist and she’s sitting with one elbow on the desk, holding her handout in front of her face.