Rosethorn (23 page)

“The truth as you see it, Sera. You just like stirring shit up. You don’t care about the truth or else you would have checked your facts.”

“Even without the part about Rick Yang and the basketball team, Andrew, you have to admit, when you add up everything else---"

“I agree, so why did you have to put that in there? You didn't need us to make your point, but you did anyway. Everyone's talking crap about our school already, why'd you have to join in?"

"I don't know how I could have written it any other way, Andrew. I didn’t make our school look bad. Those losers at the game did. Or maybe you'd rather I didn't write anything at all."

"I'm not saying that. You could have been more positive, instead of kicking our school when it's down. We’re already being punished. Our first playoffs in four years and it looks like they’re going to take it away from us because of this shit.”

"More positive, you mean like the pep rally yesterday? Have more school spirit like Vanessa Sadler, whose brilliant idea it was, by the way, for the cheering section to wear Afro wigs to the game?” She sneered.

"Don't start.”

Sera took a few steps closer, taunting, merciless.

"Is that what you wish I was like, to stand in front of the school in a little cheerleader uniform, full of sunshine and positive thinking and la-di-da, we're all great, so let's not feel bad about ourselves?"

"You know, that would be nice for a change.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand
,” she said coldly. “You don’t know how it feels.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No one’s ever treated you like shit because of the color of your skin.”

“Noo
,” Andrew said slowly. “No one ever has. But that doesn’t mean that I’m racist. And as far as I know, no one’s tried to make you sit in the back of the bus. I don’t see why you’re taking all this personally.”

Andrew stood only inches from her but he suddenly seemed far away, unfamiliar. The image of him falling to the rocks below flashed in her mind momentarily and in the next, she felt prickling in her eyes. She looked down and blinked rapidly.

“Sometimes, I don’t even think I know you.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

She started shaking. “It wasn’t too long ago, Andrew, that there were signs up and down this state saying ‘No dogs or Filipinos allowed.’  My people have been persecuted--”

“’My people?’”

“Don’t mock me!”

“Oh my god!”  Andrew held his head in his hands. “Look, I’m sorry about Tam High. I’m sorry that I can’t ever seem to say anything right. I guess slavery, prejudice, and the Holocaust can be dumped on me because of the color of my skin.”

He made a move towards her but she turned away, disgusted. She knelt down to her backpack.

"What are you doing?"

She felt for her camera, then put the strap around her neck. Unscrewing the cap from the lens, she moved to the precipice, her palms sweating as she realized the sheerness of the drop. “Apathy and Ignorance, Andrew. Apathy and Ignorance.”

“I’m sorry for being white! Is that what you want me to say? Have you forgotten that you’re white too?”

"Excuse me.” She brushed past him to get to the other side for a better angle. She knelt on one knee and took a few pictures of the falls, but was dissatisfied with the angle. After scanning the embankment below, she grabbed her backpack and started going down the treacherous slope.

"Wait.”

Sera pretended not to hear him and kept going down, sliding a little in her haste. She was crouching by the edge of the pool and taking her pictures by the time Andrew caught up to her.

"Why am I always chasing after you?"

"So don't."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him stoop to pick up a stone and throw it into the pool.

"Chase after Vanessa instead."

She heard him growl through his teeth.

"You know, that’s starting to look like a good idea. After all, she’s ‘my people.’  And she probably wouldn’t blame me every other second for everything that’s ever gone wrong in the world.”

She kept clicking on her camera, even when the scene in the viewfinder started swimming. She didn't know what she was taking pictures of anymore, but she couldn't stop either.

"Would you stop that and look at me?” She ignored him. He advanced towards her and roughly snatched her wrist away, letting her camera hit her chest.

"Let go, Andrew."

"You're bleeding.” He held up both her bloodied and dirty palms tightly by her wrists. "You wouldn't have hurt yourself if you'd only gone slower or maybe waited for me. After all, I'm the one who drove you here.” He started dragging her to the edge of the pool as she twisted and turned in his grasp.

"You're hurting me."

"Good.” He pushed her to the ground and plunged her hands in the water. Sera bit back from yelping at the iciness that stung her scratched palms.

He shook his head and let go of her hands. “You know for once, I just wish you'd say you’re sorry, just once admit that you’re wrong.”

“Oh baby, I am sorry,” Sera said softly as she crept closer to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. She smiled as she looked up at his wary blue eyes. "I'm sorry for getting you wet," she said sweetly as she shoved him into the pool.

She looked down at him with a cold smile as he sat half-submerged in the water, shocked and furious.

"This is not fucking funny! It's cold as fuck!"

"Karma's a bitch, isn't it
?” she said over her shoulder as she started going back up to the trail. The echo of his curses followed her. When she heard him clamber up the bank, she started running, heedless of the mud and her throbbing knees, her still bleeding palms.

"I don't know where you think you're going, I have the keys to the car
,” she heard him yell out below her.

Her head ached and her stomach rumbled angrily but Sera's anger had returned to her so she made short work of the now downhill trail. It took her only 10 minutes to reach the lake.

Pausing to catch her breath, she waited for sounds of Andrew following her. A pair of birds trilled in the trees above and the lake shimmered, untroubled. She tightened the straps on her backpack and, breathing deeply, she started purposefully down the road back to town.

A few cars passed her going the other way, its passengers looking at her curiously while she walked on the shoulder, her head stiff and upright. About half a mile from the lake, when the road started sloping up through the hills, she heard the Mustang's rumble behind her and immediately straightened her back. She did not look when it slowed to keep pace with her.

"Get in the fucking car.” She glanced sideways at Andrew, one hand tightly gripping the wheel as he leaned towards her. His face was red, his mouth in a snarl.

She kept walking.

"It's eight miles to Fairfax, Sera, I'm not going to play this stupid game for eight goddamn miles."

A car came up behind the Mustang, honked angrily, then passed, its passenger shouting at them. Sera looked up at the sky and started whistling.

"You wanna walk? Fine. I'm tired of this shit.”

The Mustang peeled away from her in an angry squeal. She stopped in her tracks, her nose smarting with the smell of burnt rubber. As the dust and smoke cleared, she saw with disbelief the Mustang's tail disappearing around a sharp curve ahead. She watched the road through hot, pulsing tears, waiting for the Mustang to turn around and come back. When no one came, she wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve jacket and looked around her. The placid lake below and forest surrounding her with its miles of concrete that wound through hills in narrow, snakelike ribbons lay ahead.

She was all alone in the midst of what should have been one of their special places, like the hidden cove at the beach he showed her during an unusually sunny December day, reachable only in low tide, the ruins of an old paper mill in the middle of West Marin, the cavern carpeted with black mussels set within paprika and saffron-colored cliffs--"Heart's Desire" Andrew had told her and she had found it so wildly romantic and beautiful.

All she would have to say was "Take me somewhere," and like a magician who had been saving a wonderful secret up his sleeve, Andrew would drive her somewhere new and different, finding the exotic in familiar places.

"Stupid, stupid!” she whispered angrily to herself as she walked, drained of righteous anger now, but plodding in slow, tired steps.

A waterfall should have been a delightful surprise, she was forced to admit. Andrew had surpassed
himself for it was one of the most amazing things he had shown her.

It could have been a welcome respite from school and how suddenly infamous she had become, seemingly more hated than the lone freshman out of the jeering crowd at the basketball game that had been cited for yelling the N-word. Although she had loyally followed the basketball team the entire season, yesterday, Rick Yang and two other players passed by her with dagger-like looks. One of them had coughed what sounded like, "Traitor.”

At lunch, she sought refuge with Allison in Mr. Leach's classroom. Allison tactfully didn't ask if she was hiding from Andrew. "I'm sure Woodward and Bernstein had their bad days, too," she said with her dependably sunny smile.

Mr. Leach patted her on the back. "Consider it your initiation into the world of truth-telling. Nobody likes to look in the mirror and see Hitler looking back, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't hold it up anyway.”

Allison and Sera had looked at each other in confusion and laughed.

Had she been solely focused on truth-telling, she now asked herself. Or had a part of her wanted to get Andrew back? As soon as he got the Mustang and became captain of the basketball team, he seemed overnight have become part of them, being invited to parties where she sat miserably in a corner watching as everyone got shitfaced, Andrew included.

Suddenly, too, Vanessa Sadler seemed to have discovered Andrew, and Sera had to watch as she jumped up and down with her bouncing breasts and gravity-defying butt during the basketball games, her blonde hair in a perfect ponytail, smiling and kicking her long legs seemingly just for Andrew. Sera would sit in the bleachers, feeling inadequate as she realized that painting her face green and yellow to show support for the team was nowhere in the same league as Vanessa in her cheerleading outfit.

Their idyllic summer days where it was only the two of them seemed distant now. The world had intruded and highlighted the differences between them that had been absent in the beginning.

“You’re paranoid,” he had said, when she told him that his friends disliked her, maybe not calling her a “crazy” to her face, but she could see it in their eyes. The feeling of not belonging was felt sharply by Sera as she hung out with Andrew and his friends. She didn’t get their crude jokes, couldn’t find anything in common with their girlfriends. If it weren’t for Andrew, they wouldn’t even say two words to her. Andrew had accused her of being deliberately standoffish and not even trying.

Perhaps her attempts to win them over were half-hearted, for the differences between herself and Andrew became even more apparent, at least to her, once she had discovered her mother’s diary.

Her eyes had finally been opened and she saw everything as it really was, even herself. She saw that she had been a blank page before, not knowing who she was or where she came from. But now her mother’s words had written themselves on her, giving her history. Her mother’s dreams, her experiences, her troubles, and the insults she had borne had become part of Sera, changing how she viewed the world.

It also changed how she viewed Andrew. And with the ugly Tam High incident, nothing seemed simple anymore.

Sera kept her head down as she walked, trying not to think of what she must look like to the weekend hikers that were now driving up. After an hour, a van pulled over and its occupants, a hippie couple, offered her a ride to Fairfax. Although she was sore and hot by then, for the morning sun had started beating down on her, the strong smell of weed that wafted out when they rolled down the window made her decline reluctantly.

No one else stopped to offer her a ride, not even the sheriff's car that passed by her a couple times and received her most hopeful looks. Mountain cyclists, singly or in pairs, slowly grunted past her as they ascended, casting her only one quick glance as they pushed on. She was too proud to hitch her thumb out, thinking of those dubious, dirty people she would see by the freeways with cardboard signs.

No longer grumbling, her stomach was now on full protest. The brunch she had made for them was in a paper bag in the backseat of the Mustang. Her mouth watered as she thought of the slices of French toast, the bunches of grapes, the tin foiled sausages, and carafe of hot chocolate. She looked through all the pockets of her backpack, but couldn't even find a piece of gum.

She wondered if Andrew would eventually come back for her or just make her walk all the way to a bus stop in Fairfax to teach her a lesson. Lately, it seemed that a week didn’t go by where they weren’t in a fight. The longest he had ever been mad at her, mad enough to spit when he talked or sit fuming in red-faced silence, was overnight. He hadn't called her until the next morning and by then he had been the one to apologize, even though he said he still didn't know what he had done wrong.