Looks Over(Gives Light Series) (21 page)

I'd stayed in Janet's apartment once before--almost a year ago, before I went to live with Granny.  Back then there had been five of us in the apartment at once: four kids and one Janet.

I squinted, dizzied by darkness.  I'd forgotten how dim the apartment was.  There was only one flickering, fluorescent light hanging between the squashed living room and the cold and doorless kitchen, the kitchen filled with plastic garbage bags.  The carpet was grungy and gray.  I couldn't tell whether it was supposed to be gray or had simply deteriorated with age.  A spider had made its home on the wall; and sitting on the couch was a teenage girl.

"You're sleeping with Noel," Janet said.  "CPS says you're not supposed to room with a girl, so don't tell anyone, or they'll take my check away.  And don't get her pregnant."

I balked at Janet's candor.  Neither of those was likely to be a problem.

"Eat a TV dinner or something," Janet said, and she went into the kitchen to listen to her compact radio.  I saw her pouring wine into her coffee mug.

I cast a look at the teenage girl.  I thought I might have gone to school with her in the past--Rumez, or Ramirez, or something like that.  No, definitely Rumez.  Her hair was crazy, curly--crazier than mine.  Her nose was pierced.  She opened her mouth when she snapped on her bubblegum, and I saw that her tongue was pierced, too.

"What are
you
looking at?"

I shrugged and sat on the far end of the couch.  I unzipped my duffel bag in search of Dad's beeper.  With a twinge of remorse, I thought about Balto.  I hoped he didn't think he'd been abandoned again.

I took my plains flute out of my bag.  I pushed aside Kaya's cornhusk doll.

I felt, before I saw, Noel gawking at me.

"What's that on your neck?" she said. 

She reached out with stubby fingers and prodded the rigid red scars on my neck.  Her nail polish, bright blue, was peeling and chipped.  I tensed, but smiled.  Aside from Rafael, I didn't like anyone touching my neck.

Come on, I thought, my head bent over the duffel bag.  Where's that beeper?

"Is that a
butterfly
?"

She meant the tattoo on my arm.  It was an atlas moth, and all too visible while I was wearing short sleeves.

"You gonna get your punk ass kicked, you walk around with a
butterfly
on your arm." 

I think she was being helpful, in an obtuse way.  I didn't really feel like thanking her, though.

That night was probably the most disquieting night I'd ever spent.  I lay on someone else's bed--no frame, just a mattress and a box spring--and held Dad's beeper over my head, willing it to light up.  I'd never felt so alienated from the people I loved, knowing that I couldn't run to them, that my own stupidity had gotten them into trouble. 

I fell asleep with the beeper in hand.  And I woke up to Noel screaming at me.

"Get up!" she yelled.  "School!"

It's not the ideal way to start your day.  I jumped awake and fell out of bed, my heart in my throat.

"Come on!  School!  I'm late again, they'll kick me out!"

My head was killing me.  I wished I had Granny's feverfew tea, a great headache remedy.

Noel tore off her pajamas.  I shielded my face to give her some privacy.  I heard her heels on the floorboard seconds later, fast and heavy, and knew she had run out of the room.  I dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.  I grabbed a couple of notebooks from my duffel bag.  I guessed Janet wasn't going to let me go to school on the reservation.

Janet wasn't even in the apartment.  Maybe she'd run out of Lambrusco.  I followed Noel into the kitchen and she tossed me a granola bar, cursing, hopping as she tugged her shoes on, snatching up her schoolbag and dashing out the door.

I pulled on my jacket and tugged the sleeves down my arms.  Atlas moth or not, I didn't much feel like getting my ass kicked.

John J. Calamiere High School was tall and towering, crammed between a video rental place and a butcher's shop.  It's funny, I thought, staring up the length of the building.  I went here for two years and I managed just fine.  Now I felt nauseous.  Kids sat on the cement ledges alongside the front steps and on the wrought iron gates dividing the school from the sidewalk.  I kept my head down and followed Noel into the sickening, cream-colored lobby.

I stopped by the principal's office to figure out my class schedule.  The principal, a tall and crickety guy with a gray comb-over, wasn't surprised to see me.  He and I went pretty far back.  "CPS faxed over your records!" he said loudly.  He had a way of talking at you, not to you.  He'd always struck me as a pretty angry guy.  And something else struck me at that moment, too:  This wasn't make-believe.  This was the law, and the law said I had to go to school without my friends and live without my family.  I was here, and for the foreseeable future, I wasn't going anywhere.

I hate to admit how despondent I felt.  I felt the way a bull calf must feel when the farmers separate it from its mother.  I felt like a southern oak uprooted from its grove and planted among beeches; familiar in only a cursory way, lost otherwise.

I thought about Rafael, how lost he'd looked the other night.  I realized how profoundly he'd changed me.  He'd given me friendship, he'd given me a voice, and then, when I'd thought he had nothing left to give, he'd taught me how to love someone I didn't have to love.  Maybe the most profound and scary way he'd changed me was:  I didn't know how to be a Skylar without a Rafael anymore.  I was supposed to be with Rafael.  I was supposed to make him laugh when he was scowling and quell his stormy moods.  Who else was going to remind him of the goodness in his heart whenever he felt dwarfed by his dad's shadow?  What was he doing right now?  Who was he talking to?  At least he still had Aubrey and Annie.  In remembering that, I felt happy.  If I couldn't look after him myself, at least I knew he wasn't alone.

I was supposed to shadow Noel until the principal fixed my class schedule.  I followed her to the first period classroom, where a group of boys were adamantly engaged in an all-out paper airplane war, and heard a couple of kids call my name.  Mostly they were jeers along the lines of:  "Skylar!  Ew, quiet kid's back," and "Wow, I forgot about him."

I retaliated with goofy, exaggerated eyerolls and slid into the empty seat at Noel's side.  I opened a notebook, hunched over, and started writing.

I was the master of invisibility.  At John J. Calamiere, you don't want to be too different from the herd.  Stick out like a black sheep and you become a prime target for weird rumors and gut punches in the locker room.  A mute guy tends to stick out just by virtue of being mute.  But there's a trick to being invisible:  Pretend you're always busy.  If you're busy catching up on notes, or frantically scanning the bulletin board, or you've got your head buried in a monster of a textbook, or you're looking for the ever-elusive philosophy professor, nobody's going to walk up to you and start talking; and if they do, you can just wave them away.  I always looked busy, even when I wasn't.  Consequently, nobody tried to talk to me.  Nobody knew me well enough to dislike me.  I wasn't even sure they knew I was mute.

Pretending you're busy for seven hours straight is exhausting.  I was exhausted by the end of the day.  Noel and I walked the streets back to Janet's apartment complex.  Noel had this weird compulsion that made her step on all the cracks in the sidewalk.  Maybe she was trying to break her mother's back.

"You gonna make a run for it?" she asked me.  "My last foster brother ran away.  What was his name, Jordan something."

I shook my head.  Cooperating sounded like my best bet.  I didn't want Granny getting into trouble.  I wanted social services to see how compliant Granny and I both were.  Maybe then they'd have to let me go back to the reserve.

My spirits lifted.  Maybe I'd be back on the reserve by the end of the week.

I wasn't.  The teachers at John J. Calamiere lent me battered old textbooks to take back to Janet's place and I found myself studying with Noel for a history test I had no place taking.  I was pretty sure I was going to fail it.  I fell asleep, miserable, on the bare mattress and box spring, Dad's beeper in hand.  I woke in the middle of the night to its faint, clear whistle, the digital screen glowing with a blocky message.

Love you, Cubby.

My chest felt tight and my eyes felt hot.  I tucked the beeper under the threadbare pillow and went back to sleep.

On Saturday, I holed myself up in the bedroom and played the plains flute.  I was afraid that I'd forget the Native songs if I didn't hear them everyday.  It was ridiculous, I knew, considering I'd only been gone from the reservation for a week.

Noel bounced into the bedroom in hoop earrings and a denim miniskirt.  She was kind of chubby, I thought, in a cute way.

"I'm gonna get some weed.  You wanna come?"

I couldn't tell if she was serious.

"Freak," she said, and flounced from the room.

I had a thought just then.  It wasn't a very good thought, but it occurred to me nonetheless.  Mary used to take a wide variety drugs.  I didn't know whether she still did.  I hoped she didn't.  But whoever Noel's dealer was--maybe he could get me in touch with Mary.

I hurried out of the building after Noel.  I followed her down the sidewalk and across the street.  She whistled when she took note of me.

Noel's dealer was a skinny guy in his twenties.  He had a weird soul patch, skull cap combo going on.  We met with him at the back of a video game arcade, behind a busted pinball machine.  I don't mean to imply that I'm the paragon of virtue, but that really pissed me off.  There were kids in the arcade.  And if the nametag on his shirt--"Dale"--were to be trusted, he was an employee.

I didn't have anything to write with.  I'd been in such a hurry to follow Noel that I'd left my post-it pad back in Janet's apartment.

"You buying?" Dale asked me.

I wasn't interested.  I've always thought that if you have to poison your body just to have a good time, you've got bigger problems than boredom.

"Skylar?"

I looked up with surprise.  It was Officer Hargrove in her plain clothes--it must have been her day off.  I saw her kids standing by the whack-a-mole station, Jessica whining softly whenever her mallet missed the mark.

Officer Hargrove's face screwed up with realization.  "What the--  Is that weed?"

Dale dropped the bag and darted toward the fire exit.  Officer Hargrove was a lot stronger than her small physique suggested; she seized him by his shoulders and threw him into the broken pinball machine.  He gasped and buckled with pain.  Officer Hargrove put her foot on the marijuana bag and grabbed Dale's wrists, wrenching his arms behind his back.

"DeShawn, honey," she said, "get Mommy's cell phone, would you?"

Five minutes later and Noel and I were sitting on the curb outside the game arcade, Noel shooting sour, acidic looks at me.

The colored lights on top of the squad car flickered.  Officer Hargrove waved to whoever was inside as they drove away, Dale in the back seat.  She approached Noel and me and literally looked down her nose at us.  It wasn't that she was being condescending.  It's just that we were on the ground and she was standing.

"What the
hell
were you thinking!"

I tried to keep my face blank.  I didn't want to get Noel in trouble.

"And Skylar, what are you doing off the reservation?"

"What reservation?" Noel asked.

Officer Hargrove rubbed her forehead.  Maybe she could have used some feverfew tea herself.  "Just...  Ugh, never mind.  Give me your mom's number," she said to Noel.

DeShawn scurried forward and thrust the cell phone into Officer Hargrove's hands.

"I don't know it," Noel said.  "She's in jail."

Officer Hargrove looked from Noel to me with dawning.  I smiled wryly.

Officer Hargrove drove Noel and me back to the apartment complex.  Officer Hargrove told us to wait in the hallway outside the apartment; and then she went inside and started yelling at Janet.  I could hear her through the door, thick as it was supposed to be.

Noel suddenly swore.  "I'm gonna be expelled!"

I gave her a swift look.  No, she wasn't.  She hadn't actually bought the marijuana.

"That's terrible," DeShawn said somberly.

"What's expelled?" Jessica said.

I was worried that that was the last I'd be seeing of Officer Hargrove.  But she came back the next day when Noel and I were listening to the stereo in our bedroom.  She stuck her head inside and gestured to me.

"Let's go, Skylar," she said.  "You're staying with me now."

My heart leapt, and for a variety of reasons.  The first and most obvious was that Officer Hargrove was in touch with Granny and Dad.  By living with Officer Hargrove, I was one step closer to home.  And the second...  Well, I really liked Officer Hargrove.

"What about me?" Noel said.

I reached over to squeeze her shoulder.  She smacked my hand away.

"You're getting a new foster home, too," Officer Hargrove said to her.  "I don't like the
atmosphere
of this place."