Sister Mischief (27 page)

About a week and three or four dodged Chem classes later, I resolve to go to a full day of school, because this is post–9/11 America, after all, and you can’t let the terrorists win. The morning goes passably; the hissing in the halls has reduced to a dull simmer. After AP English and the pressure of avoiding eye contact with Rowie, I drag Marcy out for a walk around the school to recuperate after Precalc. She smokes a Parly. I try to breathe regular. We don’t talk. I start to feel edgy about Chem, needing a release.

“Can we go to your car and have a dance party really quick?” I blurt out.

“What?” Marcy says. “Now?”

“Yeah, now. I just — I just need to dance really hard for a minute.”

“Okay.” Marcy shrugs, heading for the James. She reaches in and starts the car. “What’s your poison?”

“Your choice,” I say. “Just something with a beat.”

Marcy cranks Brother Ali’s “Forest Whitaker.” I reach into my hair with both hands, ratting the curls out into my best Jew-fro, and start to shake my shit sans abandon. I jump around, loosening my arms, dancing from my core. For three minutes, I don’t think about Rowie, don’t think about school, think only about being in my body. Marcy laughs and busts some moves with me.

“Shake it, girl,” she hollers.

The song ends and I’m breathing hard, my heart racing. I throw my arms around her.

“Thank you,” I say. “I needed that.” I’ve worn myself out a little bit, and it makes me feel less keyed up. We trudge back to the school entrance.

“Meet me by the gym after last period,” she says casually as we throw a what-up to Mrs. Higgiston, the nearsighted attendance lady. She smiles and waves — for some reason, if you’re nice to her, she never gives you shit about coming and going at will. It makes me wonder if she’s lonely. Maybe she just feels invisible.

“For what?” I ask, stomping dirty slush off my hand-painted Timbos.

“Just something I had cooking while you were AWOL. No bigs.”

“Whatever, dirtbag. Later.”

I summon my courage, one foot in front of the other, and walk into AP Chem. Rowie’s there early, of course, already taking notes from the whiteboard, and she’s sitting at our table. Breathe. Breathe.

I sit down and she looks at me as though we’ve never met, as amazed as if I were a stranger boldly taking the seat next to her on an empty bus. She’s wearing all black again. This is the fifth day in a row that Rowie hasn’t worn a single color.

“Um. Ez?” she croaks.

“Let’s not,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, looking back down at her notebook.

The bell rings. I look up and realize twenty-six pairs of eyes, including Mr. Halverson’s, are trained on Rowie and me. I resist the urge to flip them all off.

I lean forward on the lab space, widening my eyes.
“Boo.”

The room is a tomb for a moment, my crack falling flatter than the drive from Minneapolis to Fargo, until Halves the Calves clears his throat and starts his lecture.

About two minutes after the bell, who should saunter in but Prakash Banerjee in the flesh, and he’s walking toward me. The situation rapidly goes from bad to worse. He’s standing next to me. He’s leaning in —
revulsion
— to tell me something.

“Esme,” he trills, “you’re in my seat.”

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.

“Are you
for real
?” I fix him with a withering stare. “Isn’t Jane your partner? Where is she?”

“She got switched into a special section that’s taking the AP test this year instead of next year, and you weren’t here, so Halverson reassigned me to Rowie, and you to a single table. Over there.” He’s practically singing.
You will pay for this, nerd,
I vow silently.
Rockett wrath remembers.

Halves is clearing his throat again. Navy-blue sneakers today, but no point in noting it.

“Yes, um, Esme, if you’ll just move to that table over there, you and I can go over the work you’ve missed after class,” he says.

I can’t believe this. Humiliation churns like vomit in my middle as I pick up my stuff and march it over to the single table — the
single
table — on the other side of the room, where I have a perfect view of Rowie and Prakash. I would rather have a million of Chuckles’s babies, literally rather be barefoot and pregnant making Tater Tot hot dish in his kitchen for the rest of my
life
than be in this class right now. After a few minutes, I put my head down on my crossed elbows, watching the cracks of light between my arms, breathing in the antiseptic smell of the table.
Maybe I can just hide here for a while,
I think.
Maybe when I look up, it’ll all have gone away.
No such luck. I look up and Prakash is leaning over Rowie’s notebook just the way I used to; she gives me a guilty look when she sees me seeing them.
⁶⁰
Miserably, I turn my attention to Halverson’s drone, making a halfhearted attempt at taking notes. I’m such a phony. Rowie knows I never take notes.

60. Text from Rowie:
I’m so sorry. We got switched when u weren’t here. Super sorry.


Ten thousand years later, the bell goes off in a soul-saving scream and I’m on my feet before it’s finished ringing. I barely pause at Halves’s desk to pick up the pile of papers he has waiting for me and flee, taking third lunch instead of my usual first, because more face time with Rowie is out of the question today.

I merge into the lunch line. All I want is French fries. At the cash register, I grab a handful of ketchup packets and a Coke, and scan the room for a good, removed place to sit and read. God. I haven’t read through lunch since elementary school. Some days Marcy would make me play kickball with her and the boys at recess, but most days I curled up against the side of the school and buried myself in a book. I spot an empty corner of the cafeteria and head for it, trying not to make eye contact with anyone.

“Esme!”

I hear my name and have an off-kilter moment of searching for its source. Turning around like a dog bedding down for the night, I finally see Jane waving at me, motioning for me to come sit at her table. I melt in relief.

“Hey, dude,” I greet her, taking an empty seat. Jane’s sitting with Angelo and a senior girl whose name I’m pretty sure is Courteney. “How’s it going?” I wave to them. “I’m Esme. Courteney, right?”

“Right.” Courteney smiles. “What’s good?”

“You know, not a lot right now, but I’m trying to be optimistic,” I answer honestly.

“Girl,”
Jane responds in a rush. “I feel so bad about the other day. I’m so sorry I spilled the beans like that. And then I heard Halverson made Prakash Rowie’s lab partner when I switched my section, and I felt like I had probably just ruined your whole life.”

I wave her apology away. “Don’t sweat it. The lab thing isn’t your fault, and as for Rowie and Prakash, I would have found out anyway. I’m sorry I was so weird when you told me.”

“Oh, my God, don’t even worry,” Jane says. “This shit about you, like, will not die. I’m pretty much sick of hearing about it, so I can’t even imagine how you must feel.”

“Oh, snap,
you’re
the one everyone’s talking about?” Courteney asks. “Damn, even I’ve heard that shit.”

“Yeah,” Angelo adds. “People are saying some crazy shit. I heard you tried to feel up Mary Ashley Baumgarten at a pool party and that you were, like, secretly dating Rowie Rudra.”

I laugh for the first time all day.

“Wow,” I say. “First part, very false. I did once tell Marcy I wanted to have hate sex with MashBaum, but that was before I really knew what it was. Or what she was.”

They laugh, which feels even better than laughing myself.

“Second part, true. But I’d kind of appreciate it if you guys didn’t feed the gossip flame too much, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“No worries there,” Angelo chimes in. “You should hear the shit they say about
us.
”

“For real?” I ask. “Like what?”

“Okay, you know Mary Ashley’s little flat-assed friend Annaleigh?” Courteney launches in. “So I was on the danceline with her for a semester before I realized all those bitches were no-talent white girls — no offense — who’d get laughed out of auditions at my old school, and one time I was at a party with them and this girl Annaleigh, like, got so wasted on Malibu shots that she lost her Tiffany’s bracelet with the little silver heart on it, and she accused me of stealing it in front of the whole team. Like, hold up, hide your valuables, we got a Negro in the house. I almost decked her.”

“Seriously?” I reply, dumbfounded.

“Welcome to the outside,” she says, toasting me with her Diet Coke.

“Yeah, and then there was that rumor that we’d all just gotten out of juvie and our house was like a halfway house,” Angelo remembers. “That one was kind of funny until all the white girls started switching sides of the hall when they saw me coming.”

“Damn,” I say. “That’s cold.”

“Yeah, especially ’cause we all actually had to get good grades to get into the”— he sighs —“ABS program.”

“Dude, do you, like,
hate
that name?” I say.

“Yeah, it’s bad,” Courteney says. “But you can’t let that shit get to you or it’ll make you crazy.”

“Yeah,” I say, not sure if I’m actually agreeing with her or not. “Well. I was gonna ask you guys how you like Holyhill so far, but I guess you already answered that.”

“Pssshh, I’m just here because I wanna get into college,” Angelo says. “Colleges love A Better Shot. Especially when Holyhill has the best AP program in the state.”

“More so if the ABS kid’s
in
the best AP program in the state,” Courteney teases him. “Some of us are taking one for the team there more than others, friend.” She takes one of my fries and looking at me all
Can I take this?
I nod, chuckling.

“Whatever, Harvard girl,” Angelo says. “You can tell Cornel West what up for me when you get there. I don’t gotta put myself through that shit to get a good scholarship at Madison or the U of M.”

“Cornel West’s at Princeton,” Jane says.

“You already know where you’re going to college?” Jesus, I’m facing all kinds of dragons today. “I have no fucking clue where I want to go.”

Angelo jerks a thumb toward Courteney. “I still got a year. She just applied to Harvard.”

“And about fifteen other schools,” Courteney says, sizing me up. “For you, offhand, I’d say small eastern liberal arts, serious but not
too
serious, maybe a girls’ school. Like Vassar, maybe? You’d probably pull down more ass at Smith.”

Jane giggles. “You’re so snap judgmental. I’m getting more of a Berkeley vibe. You know, smoke a little ganja, talk some lit theory, hit a protest or two, go to class when you feel like it. I could see that working for you.”

“That’s funny,” I say. “Both my parents went to Berkeley.”

“Ah.” Jane smiles. “That explains it.”

“Christ on a bike, you guys are better than the
Princeton Review,
” I marvel. “I should be taking notes.”

Oh!” Jane claps her hands. “I almost forgot to ask you. Are you going to Marcy’s hip-hop thing after school?”

“She told me to meet her after last period, but she didn’t say why,” I say. “What the hell does that girl have cooking?”

“Oh, no! Maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you.” Jane looks worried, gun-shy after her faux pas about Prakash. “Marcy was trying to get some people together for a meeting of Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos. We’re meeting in the warming house after school today.”

“Oh, God.” I dissolve into laughter. “I can’t believe she got it together for another meeting without me knowing. That girl is something else.” As I laugh, I feel a strange edge of tears rising, out of exhaustion, or gratitude again. Thank God for Marcy, that fearless beast.

“Are you coming? I was trying to talk these guys into coming too,” Jane tells me earnestly.

“Hold up,” Courteney says, waving her hands. “Hip-hop for
who
? What the fuck is going on in the suburbs right now?”