Rosethorn (22 page)

I say nothing back, feeling naked beneath his gaze, so we dance in silence. The salsa music ends, and he continues to hold me. Another song comes on with a faster beat, but we dance slowly. He starts softly singing along to the music in a horribly high falsetto.

“Have mercy on a poor boy like me

You know I’m falling, falling, falling at your feet."

He suddenly starts laughing and I laugh too. We're both ridiculous. “You should leave singing to your brother.”

“I’m begging you for a little sympathy
,” he continues. “I love this song. Ever see Fleetwood Mac in concert?”

I shake my head.

“Me either. They’re my new favorite band." His tone is light and an easy smile is on his face. I want to be angry and I want to walk off and make good on my promise to leave, but I can’t, or won’t, let go of him.

“And this is going to be our song
,” he tells me as holds me tight. Our feet step together in perfect rhythm. “’Say That You Love Me.’” 

I toss my head at him, my lips firmly closed.

“Someday you will,” he insists. I don’t deny it.

The song ends and we come apart. I turn away and face Daniel, who looks stricken. I smile at him and avoid his eyes at the same time.

Alex drives us home and all three of us are quiet. I stare at the back of his neck as he drives and he meets my eyes through the rear view mirror.

I still can’t stop shaking.

Chapter 16

"Are you going to tell me where we're headed?” Sera asked.

Andrew's profile was stony, his eyes not swerving from the road while both hands were firmly grasping the wheel. They had left Fairfax's town limits and had been maneuvering windy roads for half an hour.

"It's a surprise.” 

Sera hung on to the door handle and tried not to be sick. Andrew usually let her drive if they were on curvy roads, after having to clean up her vomit off the floorboard of his mother's van on a trip out to Stinson Beach that summer. His ominous silence and curt tone when he did speak and the fact that he was driving fast on hairpin turns and zigzag curves indicated punishment. She said nothing more as waves of nausea started to engulf her.

Tree-covered green hills blurred with the sky out the window. They were ascending, and beyond the two-lane road was an increasingly steep plunge to the sea or lake, she wasn't sure. She was already dreading the ride back where her side of the car would be inches from the precipice.

Apart from a few early-morning mountain cyclists, they were the only ones on the road. She did not know what he had in store for her, and usually this was part of what made their adventures exhilarating. He had not looked at her once since he had picked her up shortly after dawn. His face was tense and the veins in his neck were pulsing. The silence in the car was tinged with menace.

She closed her eyes for the rest of the ride and only opened them when she felt the car slow down to make a sharp right turn. They were on a narrow bridge across a lake and entering a road that cut through a thick forest of soaring Redwoods.

Andrew parked the car a couple hundred feet after crossing the bridge, on a dirt shoulder barely wide enough for the Mustang. The engine was still running when Sera jumped out and slammed the door shut. She inhaled the cool, woodsy March air and paused for a moment to settle her stomach.

As her nausea subsided, her fury rose. She saw a trail marker across from the car and quickly headed for it. She did not wait for Andrew or listen for his footsteps following hers.

They were by an icy blue lake almost surrounded by the hilly forest. Ordinarily, she would have been taking pictures, but the camera was in her backpack in the car and the stunning landscape could not slow her down from hiking up the dirt trail. It rained the day before so the ground was slippery and the dense foliage around them was heavy with dew.

The sun was making its morning ascent, its rays striking the lake in cold, white brilliance. The trail was carved out of the rising emerald hill of forest, seldom trodden during winter, it seemed, for ferns and delicate wildflowers grew in the middle of some parts, unharmed.

She, and now Andrew, for she heard his footsteps not too far behind her, seemed to be the only two creatures amidst the trees. Perhaps she didn't hear anything else due to the noisy hot anger in her ears and her panting as she went up the steep trail. Once or twice she slipped in the mud, but she quickly got up and kept on going, and Andrew didn't hurry to help her up or ask if she was okay. She clenched her hands in furious dirty fists and focused on the dirt trail in front of her.

Parts of the trail continued in worn wooden steps set against the hill, other parts in crumbling flats of rocks, but mostly it was of slushy mud that would have been impassable had it been raining. Sometimes she had to climb over trees fallen from the winter storms. Sera steadily kept going, not looking back or saying anything to Andrew, who trudged below her. The trail led to a wooden bridge that crossed a boisterous river of spring runoff tumbling against jagged rocks, after which it became noticeably sharper.

Although she tried to keep a brisk pace, Sera began to slow, her ragged breaths in time with each strenuous step up the precipitous slope that bordered a sheer drop to the river.

They ascended this way for some time when the river began to sound different, louder, like approaching thunder. As she rounded the bend, Sera was startled by a roar that grew more ferocious as the trail began a sudden descent around the curve of the hill.

She quickened, running down and trying not to slip at the same time, hearing before seeing, as she rounded the next bend, a towering fall of white foamy water that emptied to a crystal green pool surrounded by velvety moss-covered rocks.

She skidded to a halt, speechless, her fury dissolving like the mist that hung about the air where the water struck worn rocks. She turned to Andrew, who strode past her and went off the trail down the steep bank. She followed him, slowly and awkwardly making her way down to a promontory that jutted from the side of the hill.

He stood on its ridge, arms crossed as he looked out to the jade pool below. He had placed her backpack on the ground, along with the jacket she had been too angry to remember to take with her. She was cold, now that the heat of fury had left her. Shivering, she put on her jacket and meekly sat on damp stone with her torn and muddy knees drawn up.

The noise of rushing water and awakening forest sounds inadequately filled the strained silence between them. She leaned back against the gray outcropping of rock behind her, watching Andrew with his back to her, standing as still and tall as the redwoods.

Still with his back to her and arms crossed, he said, "This won't last past spring. It only exists for a few weeks during the rainy season.”

Before she could respond, he turned around and looked down at her, his eyes dark and harsh, "You could have told me about the article before it was printed, Sera.”

"For your permission?"

"No," he said his voice rising, "so that I would know ahead of time when my girlfriend calls me racist for the whole world to read."

Sera quickly stood up. "I didn't call you racist---"

"You might as well have.

"I didn't even mention your name. And it's just the school paper, not the whole world."

Instead of answering her, Andrew reached into his pocket and unfolded a page torn from the Pony Express. He started reading out loud in a clipped tone:

Is our school a hotbed of hatred? Are we, as the news portrays us, intolerant? I was there in the bleachers last Tuesday night during the basketball game with Tam High School that has launched our school in the national headlines, not for academic or athletic acclaim, but for shame. And I do feel shame, shame for being a student from Venetia High and for being a resident of Venetia.

I was there when white students wearing Afro wigs (supposedly because it was 70s spirit day) started taunting the black players from Tam High as they came on the court, with the N-word. And no, Principal Gates, they were not chanting "Yanger," as you said in the 6:00 news, for Rick Yang, who was on the bench and not even playing. And no, as one player said, Tam High was not making this up because they lost the game. In loud, clear, and ugly voices, students were yelling the N-word.

I heard and the whole world has heard. The Examiner claims our campus has a "climate of intolerance" and a British paper, as in a country thousands of miles away, compared Venetia to a town in Texas where recently a black man was dragged to death by KKK followers.

It's not just because of the incident Tuesday night or the graffiti of swastikas that was in the boys bathroom for a year before finally being removed, but because of all the ugly events in the past couple of years, starting with a gay student being jumped on and having the word "fag" scrawled on his chest last year, the suspension of three students after putting on a skit that depicted a golf caddie wearing an Afro wig and whiteface, and an Asian student being called a "Gook" and told to "Go home to China" when he was at McDonald's.

Like everybody else, I cringed at our reputation for being "rednecks" and "hicks," with more dirt and hay than grass on campus, being across the street from a horse ranch, and the way our school always smells like manure. But now the whole world thinks of us as not only unsophisticated and backward, but racist as well.

I saw Rick Yang being paraded yesterday at the Pep Rally as evidence of our school's diversity, and like a good team player, he stood up with his team. See, we're not racist, we have one Asian guy, one minority in the otherwise all-white basketball team. No one mentioned that he's only played about five minutes the entire season. One has to wonder, was he picked just so that our school would seem diverse and so that visitors would think we were cheering for him, when in reality we were yelling words of hatred?

Was yesterday's pep rally too little, too late? Was our school just paying lip service and trying to seem tolerant on the surface when underneath ugliness simmers?

A freshman has been cited, our school is on probation, and eventually the news cameras and reporters will stop invading our campus. When the eyes of the world finally turn away from us and when all the tolerance assemblies are over, will any of have this have made a difference? Will we truly be changed? Or are we always going to be known, not as home of the Mustangs, but home of Hatemongerers?

When he finished reading, Andrew crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the pool below. They were both standing up now and facing each other.

"You're littering."

"That's where it belongs."

"Why are you so pissed off?"

"I might ask you the same question."

"You don't think that what happened last week and everything else on top of that shouldn't make me pissed off?"

"You misquoted me, Sera. I didn't say that Tam High was making it up, I said that would the parents have sued if they had won and gone on to the playoffs?"

"I know what you meant---"

"That's not what I meant.” Andrew held up his hand. "Let me finish. You got to tell the whole world how you feel, now let me say my piece. I'm not denying that it happened. But for you to lump me together with those idiots--You made it seem that Rick got onto the team to make us look better and that we’re not playing him because we’re racist.”

"You're the captain," Sera challenged. "You have a say on who plays."

"We're not playing him because he injured his hamstring and you would have known that if you'd
only talked to me before writing that shit. And he didn't get on the team because he's Asian, he got on the team because he--”

“Because he’s good with assists?”

“Because he makes almost every single one of his three-pointers. Didn't your hero, Mr. Leach, tell you to get your facts straight before putting anything in print? Why would you even imply that I'm racist? Me?”

"You can't be racist because your girlfriend's half-Asian?”

“Well, if I was, I must only be half-racist because you’re half-white,” he spat out. Andrew shook his head as he looked at her, his mouth in a tight line. She could see the veins pulsing at his neck again.

"Do you really think I'm racist? Yes or no.” He crossed his arms and stood perilously close to the edge.

"Of course not."

"Then why, Sera?"

"I didn't tell you because I knew you'd be angry."

"Why wouldn't I be angry, you sold me out for your article! Of all the people you could have pointed your finger at, you pointed it at me and said I'm part of the problem."

"I didn't point my finger at you."

"When you talk about my team, you talk about me. All we did was play ball. We had nothing to do with any of that stuff. I know I can't write 600-word articles but I can read between the lines. I'm not dumb. You put me in a position where I have to defend you to my team, to the school, about something where you make me out to be a bad guy. Does that seem right to you?"

“Don’t defend me, then! I don’t care what people say about me. I'm proud of what I wrote. Maybe it hurts, maybe it’s uncomfortable for people to read, but it’s the truth.”