In Search of the Rose Notes (7 page)

“No, no,” Toby rushed to say. “It’s not stupid. I just mean, is there any particular reason you’re looking to get your hands on that? You didn’t write for it, did you?”

“No. It’s not that. It’s… well, a long story.”

“And isn’t Charlotte the person to ask? I remember she was involved. Wasn’t she in charge of it or something?”

“Yeah, but under the circumstances I can’t ask her right now. She might be playing a little trick on me. It’s hard to explain… .”

Toby balled up his rag and stuck it in his pocket. “You two haven’t changed, I guess. I remember how she liked to screw with you.”

“Oh, well, she’s not necessarily—”

“Yeah,
right,
Nora,” Toby teased. “Listen, you can tell me the whole story over a beer.”

“Yeah,” I said, taking my cue to turn for the door again. “Good idea.”

“And, Nora?” Toby called after me when I was halfway out the door.

“Yes?”

“I’d try the library.”

Toby was right, of course. I remembered now that the school administration made a big deal of filing the yearbook, the quarterly school newspaper, and the
Looking Glass
in the town library, as if this would motivate us to take all these publications seriously—and to justify censorship of F-bombs and nose-picking candids.
They will represent you as a class, and they will be accessible to everyone in town. Think about how you want to be represented years from now.
As if posterity gave a crap.

I got into my car and hopped back onto Main Street. Just before the library was the high school. I found myself smiling as the long brown building came into view—smiling not for bittersweet memories but to think that Charlotte was in there right now, probably denying a kid a lav pass at this very moment. It made the place seem innocently absurd somehow, rather than menacing, as it had always been in my memory. The semicircle of hedges was neatly trimmed in the front. An outsize American flag flew proudly above the faculty cars, Charlotte’s Saturn among them.

At the library I hesitated before approaching the skinny library lady behind the counter. I remembered her. Her frizzy brown hair was now a little gray, but she still had that same odd cone of curly bangs hanging across her forehead, into her right eye.

“Good afternoon,” she said, catching me looking at her. She spoke so cheerily that I thought for a moment she recognized me, too. “Can I help you?”

“Hello,” I replied, trying not to look at her hair. “Um. I was actually wondering if you still by any chance keep copies of the Waverly High lit magazine? The
Looking Glass
?”

“Of course,” the cone lady said, springing from her chair. “Are you a wolverine?”

“A wolverine? No.”

“The wolverine is the Waverly mascot,” she explained, leading me to a dark corner past the magazines.

“I know,” I said. “I graduated from Waverly High, actually. I just never considered myself a wolverine.”

She gave me a thin, unsurprised smile. “I understand. Well. Here they are. These green binders. And these tapes below them, they’re all the senior musicals on VHS, going back to 1988. With the exception of 2001, which unfortunately melted in someone’s car.”

“It’s okay. I’m mostly interested in the
Looking Glass.
”

“I’ll leave you to it, then. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Thanks,” I said, and she left me in shadows. There was a binder for every five years. I pulled out the binders labeled 1990–1994 and 1995–1999. It didn’t take long to flip through the booklets for my years at Waverly High—1993–1996, looking at pages eleven and twelve of each. In the last—1996—I found what I’d expected. The anonymous “You” piece (“A giant clothesline in the sky…”) and “Dandelions” on page eleven, Kelly Sawyer’s poem on page twelve. I opened the rings of the binder and relaxed into the chair with the
Looking Glass, 1996.
Our junior year.

I flipped back to the first page. A few of the names in the editorial section were vaguely familiar, but Charlotte was the only one of them I really knew.

On page five there was something else titled “You,” also attributed to Anonymous. An error on Charlotte’s part? Or the layout person’s, whoever that had been? But this poem, despite the identical title, had a completely different text:

You

You are running through a sunlit field.

A red Datsun is chasing you,

revving its engine, plowing through

grass and wildflowers.

You’re breathless and sweaty

as you reach the end of the field,

where a round stone entranceway guards a thick wood.

The car nearly reaches you

just before you run through the gate,

but once you’re in the woods,

it can’t touch you.

It revs and snorts and honks at the gate,

but it can’t fit through.

You stand on the other side and cry.

Tears plop loudly off your chin and onto your shirt—

you look down.

These are not tears—

but ants, crunchy and black.

But you don’t scream—

you just let them slide out of your eyes and nose

and crawl down your face.

Because you know you’re in the forest now—

where anything can happen.

Hmm. Someone playing chicken on an acid trip. Not your typical Waverly High fare. Too bad I didn’t really read the
Looking Glass
in high school—apparently I’d been missing out.

Then, on page eight, another piece titled “You”:

You

In his bedroom,

beneath the blueberry wallpaper,

you kiss till the sun goes down.

You see the darkness fall in the windows.

You have no idea when you’ll go home.

And what you’ll say when you get there.

You reach up and pull a berry off the wall.

“Are these poison?” you ask.

“Should I eat one?

And sleep forever?”

He shakes his head.

“They’re not sweet.

They’re not poison.

Sorry, honey.

They’re not even real.”

It seemed odd to me that Charlotte and the rest of the magazine staff would have allowed the same anonymous person so much space. But then, submitting to this magazine wasn’t exactly considered cool. They probably had to take whatever they could get to fill the pages. (They did, after all, print several poems from Kelly Sawyer.) Perhaps a member of the staff had even written these things for that very purpose—filling space.

There was the clothesline story on page eleven, and the next “You” piece was several pages later:

You

You are knocking on his door this time—

a perfect cabin on a lush green hill

with fruit trees and sunshine

and pinafored children hugging smiling lions.

When he opens the cabin door,

his face is warm and his eyes forgiving,

and he touches you softly on the face.

But then his hand moves up your chin and into your mouth

and pulls out one of your eyeteeth.

He holds it up for you to see, and you say,

“You can keep it. You can have as many as you want.”

He pulls out a front tooth, too,

and drops both teeth on his welcome mat

as if to say,

You can keep your stinking teeth,

and slams his bright red door in your face.

Ick. I kept going. On page thirty-three there was another:

You

The gym mats are a painfully cheerful blue

but hold the sweat from a decade of asses and forearms.

Probably swirled with an invisible ringworm,

which you can almost feel slithering beneath your knees.

You’re kneeling at the end of the mat,

and you curl it toward your chest,

swaying and straining until it moves.

Slowly at first—an inch, then another.

But then the mat hits the air and the gym below you disappears.

Hot Pants waves her arms, yelling for you to come back,

but her voice fades fast, she quickly becomes an ant, and then nothing.

The blue of the mat suddenly makes sense, now that it’s airborne.

It’s a perfect match to the color of the sky.

This was always its purpose, to surf the clear blue sky.

You just never knew it before.

I stifled a gasp as I read, then squeezed my hands into tight fists and held them over my mouth to hide my surprise. I feared that Cone Lady’s eyes were probably upon me.

Rose’s dream. It was something I might not have remembered if she hadn’t disappeared. But her absence anchored that dream in my memory. Long after she’d gone, I’d often remember chewing my pen and gazing at her, wondering what she was thinking. I thought of it most often in high school while stretching—or pretending to stretch—on those same gym mats Rose had probably used. Miserable in purple-and-gold gym shorts, praying not be last in the timed run around the track. Praying not to be humiliated by a volleyball in the face or my inability to yell
Got it!
because who could really be that confident of anything? Too smart, though, to pray to fly away. Rose had already gone and done that, ruining it for the rest of us.

I didn’t know what it meant that Charlotte had written this. For a moment it put me back into that afternoon in her parents’ kitchen. I hadn’t thought of that day much in recent years, but these words made it feel closer, just out of reach—a time before anything much happened. Before wondering about Rose became a terrifying exercise, and then maybe something worse. I ran my hand greedily over the page as if I could grab that afternoon, tear it out, and save it in my pocket.

Apparently that afternoon had meant as much to Charlotte as it had to me. The question was what she’d been trying to communicate about it all those years ago, when she’d anonymously slipped Rose’s dream into a poem written for her literary magazine. And was she still trying to say something to me now—bringing it up again but afraid to say that it was hers?

I flipped through the remainder of the booklet. No more “You”s after that. I read each poem once more, then closed the binder and filed it next to its dusty companions.

Alien Encounters:

October 1990

“I got you guys a movie, but I forgot it,” Rose said as she rinsed her dinner dish. “I borrowed it from Joe. It’s in the VCR at home. My dad wanted to watch it.”

It was Sunday night, Columbus Day weekend, and I was sleeping over at Charlotte’s. Mr. and Mrs. Hemsworth had gone out to a movie, and Paul was off somewhere with friends. I’d managed to wrangle permission from my mother without her asking if the Hemsworths would actually be home.

“It’s about this farmer who was visited by aliens.”

“Is it real?” I asked, rinsing my own dish.

“Of course it’s real. It’s a documentary. I don’t mess around.”

“Then I’m not sure I want to watch it.”

So far Charlotte hadn’t chimed in yet. Rose had baked us Banquet chicken in the oven, and Charlotte was picking every last bit of fried crust off her thigh carcass.

“Well, we don’t have to watch it. But it won’t be any less real if you don’t watch it. Only difference will be you’ll know what you’re up against.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it sounded like maybe the point was that I was being a wimp.

“Let’s at least go get it,” I said. “We can read the box and then decide.”

Charlotte didn’t get up.

“Is it rated R?” she asked, licking her fingers. “I’m not allowed to watch rated R.”

“Of course it’s not rated R,” Rose said. “I don’t go baby-sitting, bringing R-rated movies. Come on, Charlotte.”

“But you swear in front of us.”

I was trying not to stare at Charlotte’s glistening fingers, or the way she was gnawing little chicken-skin bits out of her fingernails. My mother would’ve killed me if I’d eaten like that.

“That’s different,” Rose said. “Swearing isn’t damaging, like sex or violence. Swearing is just a harmless hobby of mine. Let’s go.”

It was already dark, so I tried not to worry about my mother or Mrs. Crowe seeing us walk by with Rose. But I was worried that one of them would hear us.

“Shhh,” I whispered as we started across the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Crowe’s house. “Let’s be very, very quiet.”

Rose and Charlotte glanced at each other, and Charlotte giggled softly.

“Are we hunting rabbits or something, Nora?” Rose whispered.

I kept my mouth shut till we were way past the house and nearly all the way past Mrs. Shepherd’s house. And I fumed the whole rest of the way to Rose’s. You’re weird if you explain yourself and you’re weird if you don’t. Why did I have to seem like the weird one just because they needed everything spelled out for them?

This was only the second time I’d actually been in Rose’s house. I’d loved the Bankses’ house from the outside, though. It was less old-fashioned than Mrs. Crowe’s but more than the Hemsworths’. It was a ranch like Charlotte’s, but with no garage. The paint job—dark red with bright white trim—always reminded me of an old barn. It seemed like a house where cheerful things happened—where you could imagine kids sprawled on the carpet playing Operation, or snickerdoodles coming out of the oven.

Rose led us up her driveway, up the brick steps, and through the heavy white door.