i

It is the sixth week of high school, and I have already landed myself in the guidance counselor’s office.

There are four other people in the room with me; a twitchy girl who plays with a lighter--I stay away from her--a boy with a spiky green mohawk, two other boys who are holding hands tightly. We are here because we have Behavioral Problems and we Disrupt Class. I know this because I opened the letter addressed to my father yesterday, filled with the usual ‘expressing concern’ shit. I read it twice and then ripped it up, because I would rather my father didn’t know that I have Behavioral Problems.

The guidance counselor is a woman with an anxious face and an expensive suit. She introduces herself as Ms. Melinda Hardy but you can call me Mel if you’d like. I don’t like. I think she is the kind of person that would like to dress in skimpy outfits and go to nightclubs and drink colorful alcoholic beverages with umbrellas in them, if only she weren’t afraid of being caught.

She is thin and birdlike. She looks more like a Harpy than a Hardy, which conjures up images of wholesome young men who solve mysteries. I keep expecting her to be startled into nervous flight, but I don’t think she is scared of us like the middle school guidance counselors were. Maybe it’s just stress.

She tells us to introduce ourselves, and is greeted by a sullen silence. Nobody wants to be here. There are other lunchtime discussion groups, kids who are neatly divided into categories: the food freaks, who are bone-thin or huge, the druggies, whose pupils are never quite the right size, the depressed weirdoes, who sleep in class and wear long sleeves and sometimes dress in black, the abandonment complexes, who have a parent in jail or are adopted or something. We are the bizarre, the eccentric, the crazy, who are not diagnosable.

Finally Harpy sighs and points at the twitchy girl, who rolls her eyes but nevertheless says, “Amanda.” Then she flicks her lighter. She has a pack of matches in her pocket. Why has no one taken them away? Her big, black, menacing combat boots thunk angrily against the carpeted floor. I try not to squirm, but it’s difficult. The orange contraption I am sitting in, which resembles but is not quite a chair, shifts back a few inches.

Amanda looks at me. “Have a problem?” My mouth is sewn shut.

Harpy looks at us with a strange, intense interest. She is probably taking notes in her head. She looks like the type. One of the boys interrupts; he is Nick, the other boy holding his hand Alex, the one with the mohawk, Drew. “Sophie,” I say.

Harpy looks at us, one by one. She seems mostly sincere, but it’s hard not to laugh when she does something so stereotypically attributed to psychiatrists. “Please, tell me something about yourselves.” Honestly.

Amanda rolls her eyes again. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a sarcastic wit here. Please applaud. She still opens her mouth first. Maybe she figures the faster she answers the faster we get out of here. Or she is floating down a river in Egypt and secretly wants help. Whichever.

She looks straight at me. “I like to start fires. They’re pretty and they make me happy. But I’m not a pyro or anything.”

Right. A girl in my health class last year did a project on pyromania.

Nick says, “We’re here because we’re . . . overly affectionate in the hallways.” Alex nods. I have seen them: they sit near my locker some mornings and don’t so much kiss as attempt to eat each other’s faces.

“Apparently I mouth off,” is Drew’s contribution.

I don’t really know why I’m here, other than that I keep to myself; it’s not like I’m failing any classes or anything. I finally settle on “People don’t talk to me,” which is true enough.

“Why do you think that is?”

Oh, please. Enough with the B-movie lines. “I don’t know.” I do, actually, but I’m not telling. I draw my knees up to my collarbone and play with one of the painful red half-healed scabs on my hand. The other one is still too raw to touch; the band-aid fell off sometime last period.

The rest of lunch is taken up with small talk. It is too uninteresting to participate.

o

ii

Last night I forgot to finish putting dishes away.

My legs hurt

o

iii

I fall down the stairs on the way from the orchestra room. There are more bruises on my legs and a blue-green monster on the left side of my ribcage. It hurts when I bend over to to unlock my school-issue padlock on my gym locker. It is a stark black silver white against the ugly pink that seems to haunt female locker rooms everywhere. The girls stare at me when I change, but that isn’t all that unusual. It is easy to pretend.

Coach Kater is tall and his muscles strain at the sleeves of his customary gray tee-shirt. Legend has it that he used to be a bodybuilder. We run around the gym for eight minutes at the beginning of every class, but most of the girls wimp out halfway. I used to until I realized how stupid it was to get a B in a class as straightforward P.E. As long as it looks like you’re trying to get near the ball and you don’t forget your clothes, your GPA skyrockets.

I don’t like running as a rule, but it’s good for forgetting: focus on the pain in your thighs, maybe your calves, your breath coming hard, and you don’t have to think. I am getting faster. Coach Kater smiles at me once in a while now.

Forty-five minutes of hardcore soccer later, the bell rings. It is the last game, tied 0-0, and Coach Kater lets us stay to finish. I am muddy all over and there are only three members of my team left, but the ball finally goes in the other team’s goal.

I like soccer. Kicking something hard without worrying about consequences always feels good. Playing defense is familiar, and it feels good to block goals when school-regulation soccer does not call for goalies. And my feet never hurt with anything harsher than blisters.

I get a late pass for French on a page ripped out of my geometry notebook.

o

iv

Blesser: to hurt.

Pleurer: to cry.

Fuir: to flee.

Tuer: to kill.

Rêver: to dream.

o

v

Harpy sighs. It is our fourth meeting and still no one talks without the proverbial cattle prod. It is probably frustrating.

Nick speaks up, finally. Maybe the silence bores him. Maybe it presses on him and forces words out of his mouth. “So,” he says. Scintillating, really. “How’d everyone’s weekend go?”

Oh, yes. Original.

Amanda coughs. “Not so good.”

Harpy stays unusually quiet. I guess she wants to see Teenage Interaction in live technicolor.

Someone gets up the nerve to inquire. She shrugs. “My ex-step-dad came over and had a big fight with my mom and her current hubby. No big deal, but hell on sleeping patterns.”

Someone else says, “I’m sorry.”

Amanda shrugs again. “Not your fault.” She shifts like her shirt is itchy. “Nobody’s fault. What about you?”

The shadow on the floor that is Nick scratches his arm. He is silhouetted by the fluorescent lamp behind him and the shadow is dark. “Okay, I guess.”

Alex smiles. “Better than okay.”

“Yeah.”

Dear deity of choice, save me from the lovebirds. “You are poisonous cotton candy.” Then, because etiquette requires it, “No offense meant. Or anything.”

Harpy looks over at me.

“I’m not trying to be malicious. It’s sweet. In a sickly kind of way.”

“You,” Drew says, “need to take your foot out of your mouth and stop digging before you reach China.”

Someone giggles. My hair is covering my face.

o

vi

English is a brainless class. The essays are ridiculously easy for an honors course. Metaphors are taken farther than they were ever supposed to go. Mr. Mannboe is just out of college and passionate. He is called Mr. Manboy behind his back and the name fits.

The desks are arranged in pairs because Mr. Manboy is fond of group presentations. Angela Prodson sits next to me. She is naturally thin and naturally blonde and naturally nice. She does not say like unnecessarily. She does not have a crush on Mr. Manboy, but I am starting to think that she does have a thing for the English language. She lets me use one of her pens when I forget mine and when I came back to school after a few days’ absence she let me photocopy her notes.

She is (was) new. She moved here from Chicago. She told me this in September when we were originally assigned seats. Then she smiled at me. I think I smiled back, but I can’t remember.

Mr. Manboy is keen--although his hair is gel-spiked and his sleeves are rolled up, he seems to exude a fifties innocence that calls for words like keen and neato--on creative writing. He gives us forty-minute essays because he has to, but he says that once a month he will assign us something “fun.” Angela sighed. The rest of us groaned. I say his resolution will last until February. That seems to be the time when the snow turns gray and slushy and gross and everything else follows suit.

He assigns us to write a favorite childhood fairy tale; well, he corrects himself, rewrite, actually. Angela raises her hand.

“Yes?” he asks. He likes Angela because she cares.

“May we do nursery rhymes?”

He blinks. Teacherschool does not prepare you for the thinkers. Then he nods enthusiastically. “Yes, if you’d like to!” You can hear the exclamation point. Only an English teacher could pronounce punctuation.

One of the boys raises his hand. Arthur Something. “Can we write the real versions? With the blood and stuff?”

Trust a guy.

“If you feel that’s the best way to let your emotions out, by all means.”

Trust a teacher.

In fairy tales, the bad guys get what’s coming to them, eventually. Everyone else might die in the process, but the readers get their dancing in hot-poker shoes in the end. I read them all the time in elementary school until Mrs. Kimmers told me I needed to write about things that I understood. I didn’t know what she meant because in fifth grade I knew more about peasant girls and kings and magically altered domesticated animals than real life. I don’t know how an eleven year old is supposed to understand real life. I started reading Beverly Cleary anyway, to make her happy.

We get back to Great Expectations.

Estella and I would get along well.

o

vii

This morning I watched a boy kill a moth. I know that it should have been gruesome and maybe obscene, but I couldn’t dredge up enough energy to care.

I guess I really am a horrible person.

o

viii

Someone has scrawled something in a dark and permanent ink across my locker. It is probably rude, but that is forgiven because it is also illegible. The lab bell rings and a million heartbeats flush out of the classrooms around me. They are not thinking of anything more than chemicals and their awaiting tuna fish sandwiches, but that doesn’t matter to my subconscious, who is self-conscious.

Harpy taps my shoulder. She moves like a ninja. Her fingernails are sharp.

“We were waiting for you. We were worried.”

Maybe you were, Call-Me-Mel Harpy, but that calls for a different pronoun.

“Come on.”

No.

She grabs my elbow. I guess my telepathy isn’t quite as strong as I wish it were. Her fingers aren’t particularly tight but they hurt my skin anyway.

o

ix

We have upgraded to eleven minutes of running a day. This upsets everyone because it gives us less time to play volleyball. It is hot and stuffy inside, with everyone sweating and breathing hard, so I exchange my pants for shorts. This is a stupid move on my part.

After six minutes, Coach Kater stops me. Everyone else gives me dirty looks.

“Sophie,” he says. He sounds like Harpy. “What are those bruises on your legs?”

Oh. There are a bunch of them. I forgot they were there.

“Nothing,” I say.

He looks at me.

“I fell.” This is not a lie.

“I see,” he says.

“I fall a lot. I’m very clumsy.” My father tells me this all the time. I suppose it’s true.

“I see,” he says again. I do not think that he does, but I stay quiet. It seems to work better in the end when I do not talk.

He had better not say anything, either.

o

x

Mr. Manboy makes us read our fairy tale-nursery rhyme projects out loud. I am tempted to incite a riot at this breach of our first and fifth amendment rights, but I can’t see anyone rallying behind me.

Angela took Mother Goose apart and then made a collage of the feathers. It is the kind of thing you would see published in an underground magazine. If I could draw I would make spooky pictures to go with it.

Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie
kissed the girl and made her cry.
When the boys came out to play
Georgie Porgie ran away.

What Georgie Porgie didn’t know
was that the girl he kissed despised him so.
What he did know all too well:
she’d go to the other boys and tell!

To stop her, he hurt her, scars riddled galore
and sent her sailing through the glass kitchen door.
He put on his jacket, barely breaking a sweat;
he said, “Don’t you worry, I’ll be back yet.”

Along came a hunter, and in true fairy tale fashion,
promised he’d fight for her with a passion;
but when Georgie came back, with a pocket of smokes,
the hunter found that, under much stress, he choked!

He ran away, cigarettes flung at his back,
sorry for the girl but too afraid to attack.
Bruises were dangerous; Georgie used the back of his hand
so one never could tell where the smack would land.

In the house in the suburbs, to this very day
the girl sits in her living room, hiding away.
Her shirt sleeves are long, her pants to her ankles,
and she sits in her room and is silently rankled.

The hunter never came back, instead stayed at home:
never again has he wanted to roam.
The boys stopped finding reasons to come over
and Georgie, he knew that he was in clover.

That was my poem. I have to read it in front of the entire class and it hurts, sharing.

The only people who clap voluntarily are Anna and Mr. Manboy. The rest of the class appears to be in shock and only applaud when Mr. Manboy glares at them. They clapped for everyone else.

Go figure.