In Search of the Rose Notes (4 page)

The
Looking Glass
was Waverly High’s lit mag, which Charlotte had edited at one point.

“Cool,” I said, “that you’d go back to that.”

“Oh, go ahead and say it. It’s pathetic. Full circle. A really, really small circle.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I protested weakly.

We were silent for a few minutes. Charlotte turned on the TV and handed me the remote, then continued her grading. When she was finished with one full pile, she rummaged in her overstuffed tote once more.

“I wanted to read you something. It’s my favorite thing from the
Looking Glass
so far.”

“Okay,” I said. I tried to arrange my face into a look of interest. Something about this conversation was stranger and sadder for me than the one about Rose’s bones.

She didn’t look up from her papers but started reading animatedly: “ ‘A giant clothesline in the sky— / so far up you can barely see the ground. / You’re hanging on to a thin T-shirt. / It’s about to tear, / so you have to pull yourself, hand over hand, / to the next garment— a red terry-cloth robe. / But the wind is blowing, and you flail so hard / that when you snatch it, one of the clothespins snaps off / and the robe nearly throws you into the ether.’ ”

Charlotte stopped reading and looked up at me, one eyebrow raised, her mouth twisted self-consciously. She was expecting a response.

“That’s cute, I guess,” I said. “Different.”

Charlotte chewed her lower lip. “It’s not finished.”

“Oh.”

“ ‘You’re hanging so low now / you’re sure you won’t be able to reach the next piece— / a sturdy, flesh-colored bra. / You look ahead, and the rest of the clothesline is filled / with your mother’s bras, for as far as you can see. / You don’t know why, but you laugh to see them. / Your concentration crumbles, / and as you reach for the closest bra, / your giggling makes you miss. / The second pin snaps, / and now you’re sailing toward the concrete below.’ ”

I paused. “And that’s the end?”

“Yes.”

“I like it. Are they gonna put it in?”

“Who?”

“The kids? Are they going to put that in the magazine?”

Charlotte hesitated. “We’ll see.”

“You have a pretty fun job, Charlotte.”

“It has its moments.” She looked glumly at the TV for a moment. “Nora?”

“Yes?”

“Even when we were apart, when I was so… busy in high school, I thought about you. I wanted you to do well. I always wanted you to be happy, even though we weren’t really in each other’s lives anymore. I wished that more people knew who you really were.”

I was startled. Why would it occur to her to say this now? Maybe the
Looking Glass
made her think of high school. Maybe, in her line of work, everything made you think of high school.

“I know that,” I said. “You wrote something in my yearbook to that effect.”

Charlotte sucked in a breath. “Of course,” she said. “How silly of me. My students often tell me how I tend to repeat myself.”

I ignored the hint of sarcasm in her voice. I hadn’t meant to be short with her. I just wasn’t quite ready for this subject on my first night back—how we’d been in high school.

I gazed into the corner of the room, where Mrs. Hemsworth’s fish tank stood. Impressive that she still kept goldfish after all these years. She always had five or six going. They died regularly, and replacing them had been one of Mr. Hemsworth’s regular chores, like clipping the hedges or defrosting the fridge. Charlotte had checked the tank daily for dead ones, always hoping for a weekend trip to the pet store. Now that Mr. Hemsworth was gone, I wondered who replaced the goldfish.

“It’s okay,” I said. I wanted to do something more—to reach out and touch her on the arm, perhaps, to emphasize the sincerity of my words. But my hands, which so often know what to do before my mind does, wouldn’t move.

“It’s okay,” I said again anyway.

Mind Over Matter:

October 1990

Charlotte and I had fish sticks for dinner, since it was Friday. Charlotte’s mother was a pretty devout Catholic. My own mother rarely served me fish sticks. But at Charlotte’s—where eating fish sticks on Friday was something one did for God—dipping them in ketchup felt special and ceremonious.

Charlotte’s mother wasn’t home—she was, as usual, working the night shift at the hospital.

Charlotte’s dad had us help clear the table, and when we were finished, she said, “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we watch a movie?”

“When I’m finished watching the news.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

For as long as I could remember, Charlotte had always used people’s names or titles more often than other kids, as if she’d been born with customer-service training.

“
Jaws
okay, Nora?” she asked as she set up the air popper, plopping about half a stick of butter in the plastic melting cup.

“I guess,” I answered sadly.

I hated
Jaws.
We’d watched it several times already, because it was part of her family’s relatively small video collection. It really disturbed me, watching people screaming and panicking on the beach, watching swimmers’ bloody, dismembered arms and legs float to the bottom of the ocean floor. Charlotte claimed she loved the movie because of her interest in marine biology. This interest was probably sincere—evidenced by the fact that on her birthdays she usually begged her parents to take her to Mystic Aquarium, rather than the roller rink or Chuck E. Cheese—but never seemed to me good enough reason to subject me to two hours of secret terror.

Jaws,
like Charlotte’s Mysteries of the Unknown books, was something she got away with because she had a much older brother. This sort of thing ended up in Charlotte’s house because her brother brought it in with his own money, and because he was too old to have their parents monitoring his reading and viewing anymore.

I endured the movie that night as usual, but I did myself the favor of sneaking down the hall to the bathroom right before the grizzled old shark hunter gets bitten in half by the giant shark, screaming and vomiting blood. This scene always made me feel as if something inside me were being torn to shreds along with the poor man.

In the bathroom I lingered by the sink for a while, first admiring Mrs. Hemsworth’s jarful of shell-shaped soaps, then staring at my reflection and listening to Charlotte yelling at the great white, “Haven’t you had ENOUGH?”

I sighed and sat on the toilet, yanking down my jeans. And when I did, I discovered, to my horror, a familiar stain. It was only my second period. My first had been three months earlier, and it had been a shock. I was only eleven and a half, after all. But I had started to think, once a month passed without its returning, and then a second, that maybe I’d gotten away with something—that maybe the first had been a fluke and it would just go away and leave me alone for a couple more years.

My heart thudded. Not here. Not at Charlotte’s. I breathed in and out. No need to panic. I carried pads with me everywhere, in case something like this happened. My mother had prepared a brown-paper-wrapped package of them for me to keep in my backpack at school, and there were still a couple of pink-wrapped pads crammed into a pocket of my duffel bag from the last time I’d slept over at Charlotte’s.

I slipped out of the bathroom and into Charlotte’s bedroom, where my duffel sat next to my rolled sleeping bag on her bed. I unzipped the front pocket, shoved one of the pads into my jeans pocket, and raced back into the bathroom.

“Oh, GOD! Gross!” Charlotte was screaming now. I wondered if she could really be grossed out by this scene after watching it so many times already or if she was doing this for my benefit, so I could picture exactly what I was missing.

Of course I couldn’t just leave the pad’s wrappings in the wastebasket, where Charlotte or her brother might see them. So after I was finished in the bathroom, I ran into the bedroom with the wrapper and the backing from the pad, stuffed it into my duffel bag, and returned to the living room in time to see the shark blow up.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

After the credits began to roll, Charlotte hit “rewind” and turned to me.

“I forgot,” she said. “I have something I wanted to show you.”

We settled in her bedroom with a tube of Pillsbury cookie dough we’d bought for the occasion, taking turns spooning mouthfuls out of the sticky plastic wrapper.

“Hold on a sec,” Charlotte said in a low voice after we’d both had several bites. She left me alone with the plastic sausage. I helped myself to a giant gob and was struggling to get it down when Charlotte returned holding a folded piece of notebook paper.

“I found this on Paul’s desk,” she whispered. “Rose wrote it.”

“Do you think we should be reading something like that?” I asked.

“Well, I already read it. That’s why I’m showing it to you.”

“Oh.” It was pointless to ask Charlotte why she was going through Paul’s stuff. She did that sort of thing all the time—although she rarely found anything good.

Charlotte opened it and handed it to me.

Paul,

I really need to talk to you about Friday. I can’t talk to Aaron about it. But I’m hoping we could. Remember, it wasn’t your fault. If we let people know, I will make sure everyone knows that part. But please please be willing to talk. We need to figure out what the right thing is to do.

Call me, or let’s talk tomorrow when you get home.

XO,

Rose

I had to admit this was quite a find.

“Did she just write this today?” I asked.

“No. I found it yesterday. I don’t know when she wrote it.”

“Oh.”

“Do you think this means they’re gonna get together?”

“Umm…” I looked at Rose’s words again. It seemed possible, but I didn’t want to give Charlotte any ideas. Then she’d start talking about Rose marrying Paul someday, and her being a bridesmaid or something, and the two of them being like sisters. The very idea might drive me insane with jealousy.

“No,” I said firmly.

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.” I considered some of the sitcoms I’d seen with teenage characters, and the sort of trouble they got into on very special episodes. “Maybe they shoplifted something.”

“Paul doesn’t
steal,
” Charlotte said defensively, taking the note and the cookie dough from me. “I’m gonna put this stuff back before I brush my teeth.”

“All right,” I said, rummaging distractedly for my own toothbrush.

It wasn’t until I came back from brushing my teeth and changing into my pajamas that I saw the slippery pad backing sticking sideways out of my bag, stuck to a sweater. I’d mashed the wrapper down into the duffel bag pretty good, but that slippery little paper backing hadn’t stayed put. Now it was poking out like a little flag, announcing my embarrassing menstrual status with
“Always”
written on it sideways, over and over, in light pink.

And of course Charlotte was staring in its direction, looking thoughtful. I folded my jeans on top of it and pretended not to notice it.

“I’m tired,” I announced.

Charlotte narrowed her eyes at me. “Now I get it,” she said.

“Get what?”

Charlotte slid off her bed and walked over to her closet. I wasn’t surprised that she was going straight for her black books. In fact, I felt a little sorry for her. It was starting to feel ridiculous, the way she’d pull out one of those books at every opportunity. Everything reminded her of something in the books—kind of like how everything in Toby Dean’s life reminded him of something in those
Police Academy
movies he was always quoting.

I unrolled my sleeping bag and got in. Maybe, I thought, I could get to sleep before Charlotte had a chance to turn my embarrassment into a conversation. She and I never talked about stuff like this, and I certainly didn’t want to start now.

Charlotte finally found the book she was looking for and sat next to my sleeping bag on the carpet. She flipped past pictures of Uri Geller, misshapen spoons, fallen-over bookcases, and a half-burned teddy bear.

“See this girl?” she said.

I looked at the page she’d found for me. On it, an older girl in ripped jeans was seated on a recliner, against a dark-wood-paneled living-room wall. There was a surprised expression on her face, and a telephone receiver was leaping across her lap.

“Yeah?”

“She had a poltergeist. She was fourteen.”

“That picture looks fake,” I said, twisting away from Charlotte.

“Explain how she could have faked that.”

I ignored the question and heard Charlotte flipping pages.

“Psychokinetic phenomena,” Charlotte explained. “It happens a lot around girls in the early stages of puberty.”

I couldn’t tell if she was reading or stringing together a bunch of memorized phrases. Either way, I didn’t understand what she’d said. But I could feel tears of embarrassment forming in my eyes, mortified that she’d just used the word “puberty.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Charlotte asked.

“No!” I said, letting a hot tear fall off the bridge of my nose and onto my pillow.

“Have you ever seen
Carrie
?”

“No.” I sniffled.

I knew what she was talking about, though. I’d seen the movie box in the video store, with its picture of that bony, bug-eyed girl covered in blood and surrounded by fire. If Charlotte made me watch that someday, it would surely be even worse than
Jaws.

“Ever have funny things happening at your house, Nora? Lights flickering or things falling down without anyone touching them?”

“No,” I said, wiping my eyes quickly before sitting up. “No, I don’t have a poltergeist. Now, let’s just shut up about it.”

“But you have some telepathic powers,” she said.

I was too embarrassed already to argue with that statement.

“That’s not the same thing,” I said.

“But these things are all connected. People who have telepathy often have telekinetic powers and, if they’re lucky, clairvoyance and even precognition.”