Undercover (6 page)

A
T SCHOOL MOST PEOPLE kept their distance more than usual. Sammy Bolten was making like I didn’t exist, like I had never blown right by him. Mr. and Mrs. Sue were Mr. and Mrs. Sue, oblivious, and Margie talked to the new friends she had behind a freckled hand—little puffs of heehaws and giggles. Whenever I saw Theo and Lila together, I mostly saw Lila, wrapped tight as a vine or maybe a snake around Theo—showing who was whose, curling the loose parts of her hair around a finger, kissing the soft part of Theo’s unpierced ear, acting like she’d never worry a day in
her life about losing any microcell of her latest locked-down possession.

Still there were the mornings, before Lila’s bus rolled in. Still Theo passed me at my locker, sometimes stopping if there was no one else about, sometimes telling me some dumb joke he’d heard, or some new old news about lacrosse, and when he did that, when he was just mine and nobody watching, I felt something hopeful crack inside me, something almost miserably sweet that made me want more than a girl like me ever has the right to want. I wanted to be strong, my own person, not Theo’s Cyrano. But most of all I wanted Theo, or the sort of proximity to Theo that friendship brings. I hated myself for ghosting those poems. And I knew I’d hate me even more if I weren’t Theo’s confidante.

And then one morning, when I was handing Theo a new batch of my very best metaphors, Lila came earlier than she was supposed to come, striding down the hall with a big trifold poster for health class. Someone had dropped her and her awkward
cargo off, obviously, and it flapped and slapped her as she walked the hall; its cardboard wings stretched out, snapped back, caught wind. She wasn’t the least bit happy to see her Theo at my locker with a bunch of something in his hands. She telegraphed her condemnation from fifty lockers down. She was all dark stare and steam rising.

“Give them back,” I said to Theo, who seemed frozen all of a sudden.

“What?”

“The poems. Give them back to me, Theo. I swear.” It was as if he had forgotten what he was holding in his hands—proof of his duplicity, and of mine—and if a mean little corner of my heart maybe wanted to be found out, maybe wanted Lila to be forced to choose between Theo as he actually was and Theo as she thought him to be, I also knew that being found out would force a choice for Theo. We were undercover friends, Theo and I. Our cover was Honors English. If Lila knew about the metaphors, it would destroy our covert standing.

“What’s she doing here?” Theo said. “I mean, this early?”

I would have grabbed the metaphor stash from his hands myself, I would have slapped him into action, but now too much time had passed. Now any rushed or guilty-looking thing that happened between Theo and me would be seen for what it was and prosecuted. There was only one thing to do, and that was to make like the moment was run-of-the-mill. Make like the little words in Theo’s hands were part of protocol.

“Hey, Lila,” I said, because going on the offensive is always better, Dad says, than being forced to defend.

“I swear to God, Theo,” Lila said, ignoring my greeting entirely.

“Skeletal system?” I said, taking a quick glimpse at her poster.

She wouldn’t look at me. She stared at Theo.

“I did my health poster on vision and perception,” I said. “But that was back in ninth grade.”

“Will you shut her up?” Lila said, not lifting her dark, violet-shaded eyes from Theo for half a second.

“Hey,” I said. “We’re done here. Don’t worry.”

“You’re done what?” Lila said, still not looking at me.

“Same old same old,” I said. “Honors English.”

“Metaphors,” Theo said, snapping back to life at last. “We had to grade each other’s homework.”

“Yeah? Well? This poster’s heavy,” Lila said, thrusting her trifolded bones Theo’s way. “You saw me coming, Theo. You should have helped.”

“My bad,” he said.

“Here, Theo,” I said, nodding toward the metaphors, “give me those.” As if I were trying to take a load off his hands so that he could help the princess with her towering bones. He pushed the love bits back at me, held the trifold like a shield. Lila saw someone she knew and waved. Theo threw a quick smile my way.

“See you,” I said.

“Around,” he said.

The thing about
Cyrano
is that Christian dies just after he and Roxane marry and long before the two ever do know each other. Christian never has to confess. Roxane can hold fast to her preposterous fantasy. Cyrano’s the only one who knows the truth, and Cyrano says nothing. He allows—
encourages
, even—the memory of the handsome poet. He leaves Roxane with her falsely footed memories.

All through school that day I was thinking about this—about Cyrano not telling what he knew. I was thinking how puny the human rib cage is when it has to hold something as huge as that within. When you’re undercover, you have to keep things to yourself. You have to go around with a who-cares? slouch even when there are fists of anger, fists of wanting, all inside you, pounding. I had a right answer for Mr. Marcoroon and made like it was easy. I wrote a letter to a fictitious pen pal in Spanish, revealing nothing. I read a
book at lunch and never once looked up at Margie. I gave Theo the thumbs-up in English when he thumbed-up at me. And when Dr. Charmin asked to see me after school that day, I simply said okay.

So that’s where I was—in her classroom after school that day, with my undercover operative posture on. When Dr. Charmin asked if I could wait one moment, I started counting the books on her piled-up desk, the number of pieces of chalk in the box, the variety of pens and rubber bands and markers. The stacks of sticky notes. I started counting, and it was a way to stop feeling the fists that kept pounding, pounding me.

“Thank you,” Dr. Charmin finally interrupted herself, “for coming to see me.” She looked up at me and sort of smiled. She looked as if she could use some sun; the woman was positively ghostly.

“Sure.” I shrugged.

“It’s about your poem.” She stood now, maybe so that I could see her better, or maybe so that she
could see me. She wasn’t very tall, that Dr. Charmin. But she had presence.

I looked at my feet, at my beat-up, snow-stained canvas shoes, at the ugly speckles in the linoleum floor, at nothing. I looked at the floor, and I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.

“‘Vixen’ is lovely,” she said at last. I looked up to see if she was telling the truth and saw the thousand crisscross lines on her forehead. Her eyes were the color of a storm, and honest. She had a jeweled Christmas tree on her lapel.

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.” I breathed in, and I breathed out.

“You have talent,” Dr. Charmin continued. “Do you know that?” Which is a very funny question to be asked, and not like funny ha-ha, but like odd. My dad says you have to master two things in life: modesty and confidence. You can’t answer a question like that and score in both categories. I went for saying nothing.

“What are you going to do with it?”

I shrugged my shoulders, glanced again at the floor. “I don’t know.”

“What are you doing with it now?”

I shrugged again. “Nothing much.” I was feeling like maybe Dr. Charmin was onto me and my stupid ghosted love notes. Maybe she’d interrogated Theo or something, or maybe she just knew. Maybe you can look at an invisible person and see that she’s not there.

“You’re in tenth grade, Elisa. It’s time to start thinking about your future.”

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. I waited for that shock of being known. But if she wasn’t going to mention my love notes, I certainly wasn’t going to either. “Okay.”

“I’d like to help you do that.”

I didn’t shrug this time. I couldn’t. It had never occurred to me—never once—that she could be an ally.

“So let’s begin with this,” she was saying. “What are a writer’s two best friends?”

Writers don’t have friends, I almost said. That’s how they get to be writers. But instead I guessed the obvious. “The imagination?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “And words.” The crisscross of lines on her face smoothed to stillness. There was actually a little color in her face. And now she removed a book from the top of one pile and walked around to my side of her desk. “This,” she told me, “is my own Book of Words. I started it when I was about your age, and I’m still adding to it.”

She placed what she’d been holding in my hand. It was a dull-gray journal with a ton of what seemed to be coffee mug stains on the front and a dark-blue spine that was ungluing at one end. Inside it had words and definitions written in a thousand different colors. Sometimes the words were in cursive, sometimes they were not. Every once in a while there was some one long thing set out in quotation marks, or a bunch of arrows chasing each other in a circle. None of the entries were alphabetical. You’d
have had to remember where you’d put them in the first place ever to find them all over again.

“Cool,” I said.

“I have so many favorite words,” she went on, but not really to me. I slipped off my backpack, sat down in Margie’s chair, and opened up the journal. I flipped the pages backward and forward, forward and back, then finally stopped at one:

“When,” I asked Dr. Charmin, looking up at last, “did you write this page?” It hardly resembled her chalkboard writing. There were cross-outs and
smudge marks. It was messy.

She came toward me and I gave her the book. She flipped back a few pages and squinted. “That was 1974,” she said, after she’d decoded something. “Freshman year of college.”

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t picture that. I couldn’t picture her in jeans or anything. I couldn’t picture her being younger than she was. I needed work, it was clear, on my imagination. “What did you do with the words?” I asked her.

“I learned them,” she said. “I made them part of me. I used them to help me understand the world—and then I used them to name things. That’s what writers do. And that’s what you are—a writer.”

“So the words belong to you?” I asked her, thinking about my pond, thinking about the marble girl in the bottom of the pond, reading the book that had no words.

“No. The words belong to anyone. To anyone who cares. And I think you care, Elisa.”

I felt my whole face go hot, the skin turn red beneath my freckles, my hair doing a triple somersault away from my head. I could hear the minute hand of the classroom clock tocking off the time and the sound of a basketball being warmed up in the gym across the hall. Dr. Charmin herself was frighteningly quiet, just standing there with her arms folded across her chest, waiting for something. Waiting for me to say the right next thing, I guess, but how could I know what that was?

“I like to write metaphors,” I finally confessed. “And similes. I like to take what I find and make it an equation. Like colors are flavors. Or seasons are stories. Or clouds are ideas. I like to see what I see and turn it into words, but I think it’s getting harder. Or maybe I peaked. Or maybe there’s nothing new to be said. I don’t know.” I shrugged.

“What do you mean?” Dr. Charmin untied her arms and leaned against her desk. She smiled, and now something new was happening with the lines in her forehead. I had never talked to a teacher like this.

“Like in the ‘Vixen’ poem I couldn’t think of what I could put in the hips, so I guess I sort of cheated,” I finally confessed. “‘A little bit of something in my hips.’ Sorry,” I added. “That was lame. I guess.”

“So you need more words,” Dr. Charmin said.

“Maybe.”

“That’s what I thought.” She turned and started picking through the stacks and clutter on her desk, placing her own journal in one corner. I drummed my fingers on the bottom of Margie’s chair, wondering what was next. I had that can’t-swallow feeling on the top of my tongue, a knot that wasn’t hunger in my stomach. “Never any time like the present,” she said at last, turning back toward me, “to begin.” I took what she was handing to me. I opened it up and quickly flipped through. It was a book made up of all blank pages. Just page after page of white blankness.

“There’s nothing in here,” I said.

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? You have to find
your own words that fit. And when you do, this is where you’ll keep them.”

“Is this homework then?” I asked, though I should have just said thank you.

“No. It’s a challenge. See how far you can take things.”

“Okay.” The clock on the wall said 3:35. The game had begun across the hall; I could hear the whistle of the referee, the cheering of the parents in the stands. The sky outside was hanging low, full of cold and weather. I stood. I gathered up my things and hung my backpack on my back. I held the wordless book in my right hand.

“Find the words you need,” Dr. Charmin said. “Write more of your own poems.”

“My own poems,” I echoed.

She looked at me with those big storm eyes.

She said, “You know what I’m talking about.”