In Zanesville (16 page)

The detention buzzer goes off and they light out down the hall. That’s where I remember the second kid from.

“Hey, why did you say you look like modern art?” Patti asks me.

“My features are asymmetrical,” I explain.

She looks at me keenly. “They are?”

“She
thinks
they are,” Felicia says.

“Do you think they are?” Patti asks Felicia.

“If you measure them, yes,” Felicia admits, “but if you just look at her, no.”

“She thinks
she
has a bubble butt,” I tell Patti.

“Turn around,” Patti says.

“No,” Felicia says.

“Don’t worry,” Patti says. “I wouldn’t have invited you if you did.”

Sometime midweek, while the rest of us were bending steel and taking math tests, Luekenfelter’s cousin’s mother died. It happened
during the afternoon, while the cousin was at school and one of the neighbors was over, keeping an eye on things. The mother
and the neighbor were watching a series of soap operas over the course of the day, the mother taking one pain pill after another,
trying to get some relief, until the whole bottle was gone and the neighbor was watching the soap operas alone, without knowing
it.

For some reason, instead of going to glee club after school, the cousin got on the early bus and went home, where the neighbor
lady was upstairs running the sweeper. She actually
sat in the chair next to the sofa where her mother was and ate a Pop-Tart before figuring it out.

“How could they not know?” I ask.

“I guess the eyes were open,” Luekenfelter says, and then starts crying. “This is my aunt we’re talking about, and she wasn’t
supposed to even
have
the bottle of pills, but the neighbor didn’t know that.”

We’re in the cafeteria, but no one is eating. Poor Jane, the cousin.

“She’s acting like nothing happened!” Luek says. “We were out there last night, and if I started to cry, Jane would go”—Luek
demonstrates, opening her gray eyes wide with a look of annoyed surprise—“and at one point when someone hugged her and then
stared at her, like,
Why aren’t you crying? Your mother is dead,
she goes, ‘I’m not sentimental, I guess.’ Her dad sat in an old Firebird the entire time we were there, parked in one of
the Quonsets.”

“She’s probably in shock,” Yawn says. “I’ve seen her cry before—when her mother had surgery and it didn’t work, she cried
when she told me about it.”

“She did?” Luek says.

“Remember when we were at your house and we were watching the show where the woman who wore all the scarves was dying and
no one could help her? When you went upstairs to get pillows, your cousin rolled over on the couch and was crying. I asked
her if she was okay, and she said that her mother had surgery and it didn’t work.”

At this, Luekenfelter puts her head in her arms and sobs, right at the lunch table.

Felicia walks up to the counter, gets a handful of napkins, and brings them back.

“You should be able to go home from school,” Maroni says.

“Really?” Luekenfelter asks her, pressing the napkins to her face. “If it’s my aunt?”

“In this case, yes,” Maroni assures her. “Because your cousin is like a sister to you, which means your aunt was like your
mother, in a way.”

“She looked just like my mother,” Luek says, and then stares around at us, red eyed. “I’ve known her my whole life. She made
them get a pony for me when I was six. She
made
them.”

Yawn fiddles with her hall pass. She doesn’t even have lunch this hour, but Luekenfelter is her best friend.

“I never knew you had a pony,” I say.

“It was kept out on their farm but it was mine—I called it Little Brownie and I rode it all during the summers.”

“What happened to it?” I ask.

“They had to tear down that barn, and in the new one there were no stalls; it was one long aisle with stanchions for the milk
cows,” Luek explains, accepting the piece of bubble gum Yawn gives her before heading back to class. “Thanks. Ponies can’t
be kept outside year-round, so they were sold. Mine went to a man who had a little girl with one leg, but they had rigged
up a saddle where she could ride anyway.”

“Really?” Felicia says, picking up her hamburger and looking at it but not taking a bite.

“That’s a good ending for somebody’s pony.” I tear the end off my long john and place it on the waxed paper.

“Jane’s went to people in their town, so she got to see it whenever she wanted to. And ride it.” Luekenfelter shakes her head.
Her hair, which is usually bouncy, hangs lankly around her ears, like mine. “To tell you the truth, I never really believed
the story of the one-legged girl.”

When she picks up her hot dog and takes a bite, the rest of us quickly stuff our food in our mouths and sit chewing.

“But who would lie about something like that?” I say finally.

“A bunch of A-holes, that’s who,” Luekenfelter snaps. With that, she gets up and walks out of the cafeteria, not taking the
side route but going right past the row of boys eating hot dogs and judging girls. Their heads turn as she stomps past, a
sturdy, flat-haired girl in a pleated skirt and kneesocks.

We look at one another.

“I’ll do her math homework tonight,” I say.

“I’ll finish her history paper,” Maroni says.

Felicia thinks. “I’ll take her tray back,” she says.

From the dining room table I can see the television in the living room, but I don’t even feel like watching it, it’s such
a relief to be doing regular math again—a whole page of Luek’s equations that look difficult but aren’t. It’s like double-Dutch
jump rope: from the outside it looks complicated, but once you’re in there it’s just basic. Like so many things, it’s designed
to make people seem more talented than they are, which is how I got into my current gifted-math mess.

I’m working far beyond capability now, in a classroom where they roll maps and screens down over the blackboards so regular
people won’t have to see what’s up there. I haven’t known what was going on from the first minute I sat down and saw who I
was in there with: Velda Burnett, who carries an enormous plastic pocketbook; two twin boys with butch haircuts who are so
smart they come across as retarded; Larue Varrick, first flute; Toby Merkel, a kid with a mustache; and then the usual pack
of beautiful ones, known for being good at everything from honor roll
to hitting a hole in one during golf week to giving a speech to the principal on Turnaround Day to making a soufflé that stays
inflated until the teacher sees it. They’re the ones with money, for the most part, the rich cream that rises and is eventually
skimmed off and sent somewhere else.

At my house, we’re still the opposite of rich—my mother is sick over the fact that right now all of us kids need things and
there’s no money to buy them. She blames my father, who responds by going out to the garage in the dark and staying there.

Which is fine with her if he wants to walk out in the middle of a conversation. And if he isn’t going to work to support this
family, then maybe she won’t either. She can sit on her ass as well as he can sit on his, instead of every morning of her
life getting up and going to that office and listening to people talk about how they’re doing this and that to their kitchen,
how they’re buying a boat for the river, how their kids are going all the way to Spain as part of some school group. She doesn’t
care about herself, she always expected she’d have to work for a living, but what she would like is for her kids to have the
things they need. Apparently too much to ask.

“I can’t do homework when people are yelling!” I yell.

Tammy hops up on the dining room chair next to me, puts her chin on the table, and stares at the centerpiece, a long canoe-shaped
seedpod filled with plastic fruit. I offer her a tangerine and amazingly she takes it, hops down, and trots away. I have to
go after her, right after I finish the problem I’m on.

“That goddamned dog has my fruit!” my mother yells.

“Mom! Shut up a minute, will you?”

This is Meg, trying to watch TV. There’s a pause, and then my mother materializes in the doorway between the dining room and
living room.

“I didn’t mean shut
up,
I mean just be
quiet
for a minute until this show is over,” Meg says.

My mother walks over and turns the television off.

“I hate this house!” Meg yells. She looks across at me in the dining room. “And she’s laughing at me, the B-hole!”

“I’ve heard enough. Get to your room,” my mother says evenly. She glares at me and I get up and go crawl behind the couch,
take the tangerine out of Tammy’s mouth, and bring it back to the seedpod. My mother comes over, picks it up, and looks at
the bite marks on it.

“This is ruined,” she says, but puts it back anyway, alongside a pear that also has bite marks—human ones, but she doesn’t
know that.

Overhead is the sudden sound of chaos, a shattering noise followed by a series of bellows. Raymond, in the bathtub, has shot
at the overhead fixture with his squirt gun until he finally hit the hot lightbulb, causing it to explode, plunging him into
darkness and raining slivers of glass down into the bathwater. It’s not the first time this has happened, and my mother hollers
at him to stay put while she fishes around in the junk drawer for a flashlight.

“You’re going to have to go to the garage,” she says to me, heading up the stairs. “Tell your dad to give you the flashlight
out of the car, if he can put down his drink long enough.”

I can’t go out there. I don’t want to catch him with his brown paper sack.

“I’m in my socks!” I call up the stairs.

She comes back down to the landing. “I have a boy sitting in a bathtub full of glass,” she tells me icily. “If you can’t go
out there, then why don’t you yell from the back door—you’re good at that.”

He appears in the dark garage doorway but can’t hear what I’m saying, or won’t, and I have to hop down the sidewalk in twelve-degree
cold. “She needs a flashlight for Ray,” I tell him, and hop back to the door.

Nothing.

Then he appears again, weaving slowly down the sidewalk, shining the beam on the snowbanks and the bird feeders. This is how
he picks fights—by driving the other person mad with his palpable, infuriating reluctance.

“I held off on filling the big feeder because the raccoons empty it during the night,” he says.

“We have a boy sitting in a bathtub full of glass,” I tell him icily, taking the flashlight out of his hand.

“What?” he replies placidly.

I push the back door shut in his face.

I have terrible dreams all night—a professor in a black coat with numbers all over it lecturing me with a piece of chalk,
a raccoon riding in a bicycle basket, my mother staring down into a crystal ball that explodes in her face, flying monkeys
wearing clothes that I currently have on layaway. I feel like dog crap at school the next day.

“Why would I have
Wizard of Oz
dreams when I haven’t been thinking about
The Wizard of Oz
?” I ask Maroni, whose locker is two down from mine.

She thinks about it for a moment. “It’s a menstruation dream,” she says, slamming the door shut and twirling the knob.

That’s why I feel like shit! I can’t believe she knows that. How could she know that?

“It’s the ruby slippers,” she explains.

I always loved the ruby slippers, although I didn’t care for the little blue ankle socks she wore with them.

“Do you need anything from my locker?” Maroni asks pointedly. She offers tampons to people the way missionaries hand out Bibles.
She believes in them.

“I have the other kind in my gym locker,” I tell her. Our last box of napkins had in it a soft vinyl napkin-carrying case,
lavender with an embossed girl holding a finger over her lips—
Sssh, don’t tell anyone there are two giant napkins in this lavender thing.

“Good luck, Lena Gibb,” Maroni says.

Lena Gibb is a girl who had to be called out of class by the nurse after walking around half the day with a growing stain
on the back of her dress. Nobody told her before that because her personality was such that everyone was afraid to. She thought
of herself as a witch and put elaborate hexes on people—nobody believed in the hexes, but it was embarrassing anyway.

My first class is art, where I share a table with a boy named Steve who thinks I’m funny and nice. I think he’s funny and
nice too, although not as funny and nice as he thinks I am. In fact, our whole friendship is based on him telling me what
he and his friends have been up to and showing me the drawings he does of race cars with rats driving them, and on me responding
with funny comments about the escapades and nice comments about the drawings. He may not even know my name; he may think it’s
Joan.

Today we’re continuing to work on our papier-mâché sculptures. Mine started out as a giant chicken, but I couldn’t get it
to stand on its legs, and so I’m giving it human hands for feet. I used Steve’s hands and wrists to model them, and now he’s
in love with the chicken, as is the teacher, even though it still won’t stand up.

“Ever heard of surrealism?” Mr. Ringgold asks the class, which hasn’t. “A guy named Salvador Dalí? Your minds would be blown
instantly! I mean, this guy turned it around, in terms of how he saw time—his specialty was the melted clock, but it didn’t
end there by a long shot.” Ringgold usually seems depressed, but the chicken has livened him up. “Another guy, Magritte, turned
it around in terms of space—ever see a painting of very ominous-looking silver spheres floating over a landscape?” No one
has. “Again, blown minds everywhere. Time, space, and here with this chicken we see incongruity.”

Suddenly I feel the warm, creeping sensation that means I need to get to my gym locker. Weird, because usually I have about
five hours of warning, starting with a sense of doom and ending with spine-crushing cramps.
The Wizard of Oz
has done me different this time, sending it without warning, like a tornado, when I’m wearing light blue. I lean slightly
to the left, rolling onto my hip, and casually tug my skirt away.