Lock and Key (8 page)

“As you know,” she was saying, walking over to a table in front of a large dry-erase board and hopping up onto it, “we’ll be doing several assignments over the course of the rest of the year. You’ll have your research project on the novel of your choosing, and we’ll also be reading a series of memoirs and oral histories.”

I took a minute, now that I felt a bit more comfortable, to look around the room. It was large, with three big windows on one side that looked out onto the common green, some new-looking computers in the back of the room, and instead of desks, a series of tables, arranged in three rows. The class itself was small—twelve or fourteen people, tops. To my left, there was a girl with long, strawberry-blonde hair, twisted into one of those effortlessly perfect knots, a pencil sticking through it. She was pretty, in that cheer-leader /student-council president/future nuclear physicist kind of way, and sitting with her posture ramrod straight, a Jump Java cup centered on the table in front of her. To my right, there was a huge backpack—about fourteen key chains hanging off of it—that was blocking my view of whoever was on the other side.

Ms. Conyers hopped off her desk and walked around it, pulling out a drawer. With her jeans, simple oxford shirt, and red clogs, she looked about twelve, which I figured had to make it difficult to keep control in her classroom. Then again, this didn’t seem like an especially challenging group. Even the row of guys at the back table—pumped-up jock types, slumped over or leaning back in their chairs—looked more sleepy than rowdy.

“So today,” she said, shutting the desk drawer, “you’re going to begin your own oral history project. Although it isn’t exactly a history, as much as a compilation.”

She started walking down the aisle between the tables, and I saw now she had a small plastic bowl in her hand, which she offered to a heavyset girl with a ponytail. The girl reached in, pulling out a slip of paper, and Ms. Conyers told her to read what was on it out loud. The girl squinted at it. “Advice,” she said.

“Advice,” Ms. Conyers repeated, moving on to the next person, a guy in glasses, holding out the bowl to him. “What is advice?”

No one said anything for a moment, during which time she kept distributing slips of paper, one person at a time. Finally the blonde to my left said, “Wisdom. Given by others.”

“Good, Heather,” Ms. Conyers said to her, holding the bowl out to a skinny girl in a turtleneck. “What’s another definition? ”

Silence. More people had their slips now, and a slight murmur became audible as they began to discuss them. Finally a guy in the back said in a flat voice, “The last thing you want to get from some people.”

“Nice,” Ms. Conyers said. By now, she’d gotten to me, and smiled as I reached into the bowl, grabbing the first slip I touched. I pulled it back, not opening it as she moved past the huge backpack to whoever was on the other side. “What else? ”

“Sometimes,” the girl who’d picked the word said, “you go looking for it when you can’t make a decision on your own.”

“Exactly,” Ms. Conyers said, moving down the row of boys in the back. As she passed one—a guy with shaggy hair who was slumped over his books, his eyes closed—she nudged him, and he jerked to attention, looking around until she pointed at the bowl and he reached in for a slip. “So for instance, if I was going to give Jake here some advice, it would be what?”

“Get a haircut,” someone said, and everyone laughed.

“Or,” Ms. Conyers said, “get a good night’s sleep, because napping in class is
not
cool.”

“Sorry,” Jake mumbled, and his buddy, sitting beside him in a Butter Biscuit baseball hat, punched him in the arm.

“The point,” Ms. Conyers continued, “is that no word has one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life. So the purpose of this exercise will be to take your word and figure out what it means. Not just to you but to the people around you: your friends, your family, coworkers, teammates. In the end, by compiling their responses, you’ll have your own understanding of the term, in all its myriad meanings.”

Everyone was talking now, so I looked down at my slip, slowly unfolding it. FAMILY, it said, in simple block print.
Great,
I thought.
The last thing I have, or care about. This must be
—

“Some kind of
joke
,” I heard someone say. I glanced over, just as the backpack suddenly slid to one side. “What’d you get? ”

I blinked, surprised to see the girl with the braids from the parking lot who’d been running and talking on her cell phone. Up close, I could see she had deep green eyes, and her nose was pierced, a single diamond stud. She pushed the backpack onto the floor, where it landed with a loud
thunk
, then turned her attention back to me. "Hello? ” she said. “Do you speak?”

“Family,” I told her, then pushed the slip toward her, as if she might need visual confirmation. She glanced at it and sighed. “What about you?”

“Money,” she said, her voice flat. She rolled her eyes. “Of course the one person in this whole place who doesn’t have it has to write about it. It would just be too
easy
for everyone else.”

She said this loudly enough that Ms. Conyers, who was making her way back to her desk, looked over. “What’s the matter, Olivia? Don’t like your term?”

“Oh, I like the term,” the girl said. “Just not the assignment. ”

Ms. Conyers smiled, hardly bothered, and moved on, while Olivia crumpled up her slip, stuffing it in her pocket. “You want to trade?” I asked her.

She looked over at my FAMILY again. “Nah,” she said, sounding tired. “That I know too much about.”

Lucky you,
I thought as Ms. Conyers reassumed her position on her desk, a slim book in her hands. “Moving on,” she said, “to our reading selection for today. Who wants to start us off on last night’s reading of
David Copperfield
?”

Thirty minutes later, after what felt like some major literary déjà-vu, the bell finally rang, everyone suddenly pushing back chairs, gathering up their stuff, and talking at once. As I reached down, grabbing my own backpack off the floor, I couldn’t help but notice that, like me, it looked out of place here—all ratty and old, still stuffed with notebooks full of what was now, in this setting, mostly useless information. I’d known that morning I should probably toss everything out, but instead I’d just brought it all with me, even though it meant flipping past endless pages of notes on
David Copperfield
to take even more of the same. Now, I slid the FAMILY slip inside my notebook, then let the cover fall shut.

“You went to Jackson?”

I looked up at Olivia, who was now standing beside the table, cell phone in hand, having just hoisted her own huge backpack over one shoulder. At first, I was confused, wondering if my cheap bag made my past that obvious, but then I remembered the JACKSON SPIRIT! sticker on my notebook, which had been slapped there by some overexcited member of the pep club during study hall. “Uh, yeah,” I told her. “I do. I mean . . . I did.”

“Until when?”

“A couple of days ago.”

She cocked her head to the side, studying my face while processing this information. In the meantime, distantly through the receiver end of her phone, I heard another phone ringing, a call she’d clearly made but had not yet completed. “Me, too,” she said, pointing at the coat she had on, which now that I looked more closely, was a Jackson letter jacket.

“Really,” I said.

She nodded. “Up until last year. You don’t look familiar, though.” Distantly, I heard a click. “
Hello?”
someone said, and she put her phone to her ear.

“It’s a big place.”

“No kidding.” She looked at me for a minute longer, even as whoever was on the other end of the line kept saying hello. “It’s a lot different from here.”

“Seems like it.” I shoved my notebook into my bag.

“Oh, you have
no
idea. You want some advice?”

As it turned out, this was a rhetorical question.

“Don’t trust the natives,” Olivia said. Then she smiled, like this was a joke, or maybe not, before putting her phone to her ear, our conversation clearly over as she began another one and turned toward the door. “Laney. Hey. What’s up? Just between classes. . . . Yeah, no kidding. Well, obviously can’t sit around waiting for you to call
me. . . .”

I pulled my bag over my shoulder, following her out to the hallway, which was now bustling and busy, although at the same time hardly crowded, at least in terms of what I was used to. No one was bumping me, either by accident or on purpose, and if anyone did grab my ass, it would be pretty easy to figure out who it was. According to my schedule, I had Spanish in Conversation next, which was in building C. I figured that since this was my one day I could claim ignorance on all counts, there was no point in rushing, so I took my time as I walked along, following the crowd outside.

Just past the door, on the edge of the quad, there was a huge U-shaped sculpture made of some kind of chrome that caught the sunlight winking off it in little sparks and making everything seem really bright. Because of this effect, it was kind of hard at first to make out the people grouped around it, some sitting, some standing, which was why, when I first heard my name, I had no idea where it was coming from.

“Ruby!”

I stopped, turning around. As my eyes adjusted, I could see the people at the sculpture and immediately identified them as the same kind of crowd that, at Jackson, hung out on the low wall just outside the main office: the see-and-be-seens, the top of the food chain, the group that you didn’t join without an express invitation. Not my kind of people. And while it was kind of unfortunate that the one person I knew outside of Perkins Day was one of them, it wasn’t all that surprising, either.

Nate was standing on the edge of the green; when he saw me spot him, he lifted a hand, smiling. “So,” he said as a short guy wearing a baseball hat skittered between us. “Attempted any great escapes lately?”

I glanced at him, then at his friends—which included the blonde Jump Java girl from my English class, I now noticed—who were talking amongst themselves a few feet behind him.
Ha-ha,
I thought. Moments ago, I’d been invisible, or as invisible as you can be when you’re the lone new person at a school where everyone has probably known each other since birth. Now, though, I was suddenly aware that people were staring at me—and not just Nate’s assembled friends, either. Even the people passing us were glancing over, and I wondered how many people had already heard this story, or would before day’s end. “Funny,” I said, and turned away from him.

“I’m only kidding around,” he called out. I ignored this, continuing on. A moment later he jogged up beside me, planting himself in my path. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry. I was just . . . it was just a joke.”

I just looked at him. In broad daylight, he looked even more like a jock than the night before—in jeans, a T-shirt with collared shirt over it, rope necklace around his neck, and thick flip-flops on his feet, even though it was way past beach season. His hair, as I’d noticed last night, was that white kind of blond, like he’d spent the summer in the sun, his eyes a bright blue.
Too perfect
, I thought. The truth was, if this was the first time I’d laid eyes on him, I might have felt a little bad about discounting him as a thick jock with a narrow mind-set and an even tinier IQ. As this was our second meeting, though, it was a little easier.

“Let me make it up to you,” he said, nodding at my schedule, which I still had in my hand. “You need directions? ”

“Nope,” I said, pulling my bag higher up on my shoulder.

I expected him to look surprised—I couldn’t imagine he got turned down much for anything—but instead he just shrugged. “All right,” he said. “I guess I’ll just see you around. Or tomorrow morning, anyway.”

There was a burst of laughter from beside me as two girls sharing a pair of earphones attached to an iPod brushed past. “What’s happening tomorrow morning?”

Nate raised his eyebrows. “The carpool,” he said, like I was supposed to have any idea what he was talking about. “Jamie said you needed a ride to school.”

“With you?”

He stepped back, putting a hand over his chest. “Careful,” he said, all serious. “You’re going to hurt my feelings.”

I just looked at him. “I don’t need a ride.”

“Jamie seems to think you do.”

“I don’t.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, shrugging again. Mr. Easygoing. “I’ll come by around seven thirty. If you don’t come out, I’ll move on. No biggie.”

No biggie
, I thought.
Who talks like that?
He flashed me another million-dollar smile and turned to leave, sliding his hands into his pockets as he loped back, casual as ever, to his crop of well-manicured friends.

The first warning bell rang just as started toward what I hoped—but was in no way sure—was Building C.
Don’t trust the natives
, Olivia had told me, but I was already a step ahead of her: I didn’t trust anyone. Not for directions, not for rides, and not for advice, either. Sure, it sucked to be lost, but I’d long ago realized I preferred it to depending on anyone else to get me where I needed to go. That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened—good, bad, or anywhere in between—it was always, if nothing else, all your own.

After school, I was supposed to take a bus home. Instead, I walked out of Perkins Day’s stone gates and a half mile down the road to the Quik Zip, where I bought myself a Zip Coke, then settled inside the phone booth. I held the sticky receiver away from my ear as I dropped in a few coins, then dialed a number I knew by heart.

“Hello? ”

“Hey, it’s me,” I said. Then, too late, I added, “Ruby.”

I listened as Marshall took in a breath, then let it out. “Ah,” he said finally. “Mystery solved.”