A Little Bit of Spectacular (2 page)

THE WRITING IN THE STALL

The next morning I slid into my desk, pretending to sort through the papers in my folder. That gave me something to look at while the girls in the desks around me chatted with one another. I heard someone say that Mica Norris's mother got a speeding ticket for going 80 miles per hour and somebody else said it was 120 miles per hour. I set a pencil and a pen neatly on my desk. I made sure the pen cap was on very tightly. Someone else said she had eaten octopus the night before and somebody else said gross, and a third person said octopus tasted like chicken.

I slid a piece of paper into my binder pocket. My least-favorite time in school was those few minutes sitting at my desk before the bell rang. It took a lot of effort to look busy.

They talked about sushi for a while. Then someone said that if everyone in China jumped at the same time, the world would spin off its axis.

That's crazy, I thought.

“That's crazy,” said Rachel Brock, who sat right behind me.

At least one of them isn't an idiot, I thought.

I heard a pencil hit the floor and roll. When I looked down, I saw a yellow mechanical Bic right by my foot. I reached down and picked it up, turning in my seat toward Rachel. She was dark haired with freckles, and she was one of those people who looks cute with freckles. They were scattered just the right way across her nose and cheeks.

“Is this yours?” I asked.

She nodded and held out her hand.

“Thanks,” she said, and she smiled. She smiled at me like you smile at the guy who bags your groceries—nice and polite and distant.

I turned back around. I couldn't come up with any more words. I wasn't even sure I wanted to come up with more words. These girls' conversations weren't all that interesting.

And I was never included in them anyway.

Rachel and her friends weren't like the horrible girls in the movies—they didn't play mean jokes on me or make up insulting nicknames. They just weren't friends with me. Which made sense, I mean, I'd hardly said ten words to any of them. A month ago they didn't even know who I was.

Making friends had never been a problem in Charleston. I didn't need to make them—I'd known everyone forever. I'd met my best friends, Malaka and Evon, in second grade. I still got to call them once a week, but talking was different on the phone. There were weird pauses that were never there when we were face-to-face.

The thought of their faces made me smile. I made fun of Evon for doodling all the time, and I made fun of Malaka for being scared of babies. They made fun of me for being way too neat. They used to pull clothes out of the drawer in my old bedroom and toss them on the floor, then see how long I could stand it before I picked them up, folded them, and put them back in the right drawer.

“One, two, three, four . . . four seconds!” Evon would squeal at me. “You couldn't make it past four seconds? Malaka, throw the skirt!”

Now I sat at my desk and clicked and unclicked my binder ring. As I straightened my already tidy notebook I wondered what if—what if—these girls sitting behind me were perfectly nice and interesting? What if they were really funny like Evon and really smart like Malaka? What if they would like to get to know me, but, like Gram said, the problem was that I wouldn't let them?

Still, how was I supposed to let them get to know me? Just stand up and start telling them my favorite color (purple) and my first pet (a guinea pig) and my most embarrassing moment (the time when I was five and forgot to put on underwear before I went to church and then did a cartwheel in the parking lot and was scarred for life because practically the whole choir saw me)?

That was not going to happen. I did not tell stories involving my underwear.

I put my head down on my desk and wished for the bell to ring. It's sort of interesting how the world changes when you close your eyes—you can hear all sorts of things you didn't notice before. I could hear running footsteps and laughing in the hallway. I heard Rachel banging the heels of her sandals together, and someone across the room dropped their backpack with a thud. I felt the cold hard plastic of the desk against my cheek and I smelled a whiff of chewing gum and erasers.

It was all sort of cozy. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. My first thought was that Rachel wanted to start a conversation. Not that I was hoping for her to talk to me or anything.

Instead I looked up into the pleasant, wide face of my teacher, Mrs. Snellhawk. She had a mole the size of Brazil on her right cheek. I know that's rude to mention, but it was very hard to ignore because this was the other thing about Mrs. Snellhawk: She liked to get right up in your face when she talked to you.

“Is everything okay, Olivia?” she asked, and I could actually feel her breath on my face. I suspected she'd had orange juice for breakfast.

“Fine,” I said.

“Are you feeling sick?”

I had a strong suspicion that my grandmother had told my teachers about Mom. They all had been very nice to me. Too nice. Too
concerned
.

“No, ma'am,” I said. “I'm fine.”

“If there's anything you need to talk about, you know I'm right here,” she said. “Before school or after. We can chat, just hang out a little.”

I never liked it when adults said “hang out.” And I did not want to chat with Mrs. Snellhawk. She looked at me like she really expected me to open up and share my darkest secrets with her (for example, pantyless cartwheels). I gave up trying to be polite and let myself stare at her mole, which was soft and textured and a little bit like the surface of some faraway planet. I imagined tiny astronauts planting a flag in the middle of Mrs. Snellhawk's mole.

She kept looking at me, all kind-eyed like a deer. I had trouble keeping the image of the tiny astronauts in focus, and instead I thought of Mom's narrow feet peeking out from under her sheets. I blinked.

“May I go to the restroom?” I asked.

She seemed disappointed, but she let me go.

When I got to the bathroom, I washed my hands, even though they weren't dirty. I heard the stupid bell finally ring. I considered myself in the bathroom mirror, wondering if you're born with moles or if they can spring up with no warning. Or if they're like pimples and you can put some cream on them or squeeze them the right way and make them go away. I guessed Mrs. Snellhawk would have tried that already.

I ran a hand over my hair. It's a nice enough dark brown, but it's also big and curly. I've made my peace with it. I don't even try to argue with it anymore—it does what it wants, and I do what I want, and we just agree to disagree. I have no freckles (or moles). Mom once told me my skin was the color of a vanilla latte, which I took as a huge compliment.

I heard footsteps and heard the door start to open. I had this sudden panic attack that it was going to be Mrs. Snellhawk coming to chat with me, and I darted into the nearest open stall.

Pretty soon I realized it wasn't Mrs. Snellhawk—it was a couple of girls whose voices I didn't recognize. I didn't want to make conversation with them, either, so I thought I'd stay still and give them a few seconds to close themselves in their stalls. I waited. I stared at the toilet paper holder, which was barely attached to the wall by two loose screws. I reached for one screw, wondering if I could twist it back into the wall. I didn't even bother to look at the walls—the school bathrooms were never anywhere near as interesting as Trattoria. Really, if I judged the student body based on what they wrote on the walls, I'd have sworn no one had a creative bone in their bodies. Not even a creative toenail or a creative arm hair. That was why I was entertaining myself with the toilet paper holder. But as I was working a fingernail into the wiggly screw, I noticed one line of tiny handwriting in the middle of all the boring stuff, and I knew it had not been there the last time I looked.

I squinted.

Neatly written in what looked like purple Sharpie, it read:

We are Plantagenet. We are chosen.

And below it, there was another line:

We will never grow old.

I stared. My mouth went dry, and I swallowed. I thought it looked like the same handwriting I'd seen in the bathroom of Trattoria Centrale. I pictured a blurry figure, a man, probably, a man in a trench coat and a hat. Possibly with a cane. That's the kind of person who left clues to be solved. A man hunched over in the bathroom stall, looking both ways, writing his secret message as fast as he could, desperate to escape before he got caught. Desperate for someone to see the message and solve the clue.

Why would he be desperate? Why this particular sentence? And why—here is where my whole fantasy started to fall apart—would a man in a trench coat be writing anything in the girls' bathroom of a middle school?

Okay, so it probably wasn't a mysterious man. There probably wasn't a trench coat. But something was going on.

I stared at the writing a bit longer. It was neat and loopy, kind of elegant. It looked like the handwriting examples on those work sheets you got when you were first learning to write in cursive. It looked like a teacher's writing. It was too perfect.

I waited until the other girls left, then I started working my way down the line of stalls. There were six total, so I started at the one closest to the door and scanned from the top of each wall to the bottom. All I saw were the usual collection of phone numbers and I-love-blah-blah-blahs and the reminders that somebody was here. (Julia wuz here, Everley was here, Jason was here—wait, huh? Hello,
girls
' bathroom. I made a mental note to be very suspicious of anyone at school named Jason.)

No other mention of Plantagenet. No other weird messages at all, unless you counted “Marty Webster has been Bieberized.”

I considered the facts: I had read the same highly unusual message in two different bathrooms. It could have been a coincidence. It was probably a coincidence—maybe some girl at my school also hung out at Trattoria Centrale. And that girl was . . . oh, extremely proud to be working at a new store called Plantagenet. A new store that sold antiwrinkle creams. And the girl had super-neat, too-beautiful handwriting like no kid I'd ever met. That was possible.

But as I stood there looking at the lime-colored bathroom walls, the white tiles, and the sinks with big flower-shaped rust stains, I realized that I really, really hoped those words were more than a coincidence. I wanted them to mean something. I spent most of my time feeling like I hardly knew anyone or anything in this city. I wanted to know something. I wanted to have discovered something.

I wanted to be chosen.

I headed back to class before anyone could come looking for me. As I walked through the door, I paused for a split second before I turned and headed to my desk. I glanced at Rachel and her friends, who all looked up briefly when I appeared at the door, then looked back to Mrs. Snellhawk when they realized it was just me. From the corner of my eye I saw Mrs. Snellhawk at the board, drawing some kind of graph. The only sound was the marker on the Dry Erase Board.

I remembered all the times back home when Malaka and Evon and I started laughing at something stupid. We were bad about getting the giggles in class. And I always got in trouble for talking. My grades were good, but my teachers used phrases like “a little too social” and “a bit of a chatterbox,” or, if they were really nice, “good with words.”

I plunked into my seat without even a whisper of sound. I would make A's in conduct here for sure. I watched the graph taking shape on the board, and as the lines rose and fell, I saw Rachel ease her sandal partly off and dangle it from her toes. Evon used to do the same thing when she was bored in class.

Mom used to do it, too, when she was wearing high heels and they got too tight at the toes. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her wear anything but bedroom slippers.

We are Plantagenet. We are chosen. We will never grow old.

Of all the things I could think about, Plantagenet was by far the most pleasant.

ALIENS AND ARSON

When I got home after school, I stuck my head in Mom's room and saw that her eyes were closed, then I headed straight to Gram's computer, which was about a hundred years old. It took forever to power up. When it finally did, I got online and typed “Plantagenet” as my search term.

If this whole message thing was just some advertisement for a new store in town, I'd find out soon enough.

In a split second, I had 9,250,000 results. That seemed either really good or really bad. I scanned through the first couple of pages and found no references to Plantagenet and Birmingham at all. The first result was about a line of kings who ruled England for over three hundred years, from the 1100s to the 1400s. King Henrys and King Richards and such—lots of battles and marriages and pieces of land. I read:

Plantagenet (Plan-ta-juh-nut) was the family name of the ruling house of England from 1154 to 1485. The line started with King Henry II and ended with King Richard III. The Plantagenet reign covered fourteen kings and 331 years.

The Plantagenet line originated when Geoffrey, count of Anjou, married the Empress Matilda, the daughter of Henry I. The term “Plantagenet” was originally derived from the Old English word for plant. There is some thought that the name came from Count Geoffrey's habit of wearing a sprig in his hat or of planting greenery to provide better cover for hunting.

I got a little caught up reading about how one of the Plantagenet families supposedly had demons for ancestors, but I caught myself and got back on track. I didn't see what kings had to do with bathrooms.

There was an Australian winery named Plantagenet and a county in Australia with the same name. There was a Plantagenet medieval archery and combat society in England, which sounded cool, but not really relevant. I came across another society, this one for people who were actually descended from those kings who used to rule England. The website explained that if you were “lineally descended from one or more of the Plantagenet kings” you were encouraged to apply for membership.

Geez. Talk about a snobby club.

There was a Plantagenet type font, a Plantagenet marketing firm (also in Australia), a Plantagenet dog breeding farm, a Plantagenet brand of fertilizer. As I scrolled down farther, the word “aliens” caught my eye. I clicked on the link.

A dancing line of little green aliens bobbed across the top of the screen as I read:

ARE THERE ALIENS AMONG US?

Have You Ever Felt As If You Were Being Watched by Eyes That Were Not Quite Human?
It's Not Your Imagination.

The basic tenets of alien-conspiracy theory are well known—strange lights in the sky, flying discs, electrical disturbances, people abducted against their will and used as test subjects for horrifying experiments.

These notions are blatantly ridiculous. Laughable. These so-called UFOs are figments of overactive imaginations. The true story of alien invasion is much simpler. On February 3, 1832, a ship from the planet Plantagenet crash-landed on Earth in a suburb of Chicago. The ship was not disc-shaped—it most closely resembled a flowerpot. The Plantagenets were not ruthless invaders—they were stranded victims with no way to return to their home world.

Our alien visitors look very much like humans, but they are recognizable by their cerulean eyes and silver hair. They have four hearts and three ears, but the third ear is typically hidden underneath their large hairstyles.

Since the nineteenth century, they have lived among us with nothing but benevolent intentions. The Plantagenets want to help humanity. In fact, they have been responsible for some of the greatest technological advancements: television, airplanes, cell phones, vibrating massage chairs.

Well-known Plantagenets: Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Betty White, and Anderson Cooper. . . .

I stopped reading, even though I was interested. I had to look up “cerulean,” which, it turned out, meant “blue.” That was a little disappointing, because I'd hoped the aliens had laser eyes or glowing eyes or maybe eyes growing on tentacles, but, apparently, they just had blue eyes. Still, the idea of aliens communicating through bathroom stalls was sort of cool. Unexpected.

But not very believable.

It was so hard to stay focused when there were hundreds of different directions I could go.

Finally, on the sixth or seventh page of results, I saw “Birmingham” in a sentence involving Plantagenet. The link took me to an old article from the
Birmingham News
.

Local High School Burns to the Ground

January 20, 1995

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama—Bradford T. Plantagenet High School burned to the ground last night after firefighters fought for hours to contain the blaze. Police suspect arson, though no arrests have been made.

The high school had stood vacant for the last seven years since it closed due to structural issues in 1988. Plans to renovate and reopen the school never materialized, despite occasional proposals from the city school board. Police Chief Lisa Woodard said that it's likely a vagrant started the fire, trying to keep warm. Preliminary reports suggest the fire started in the first floor bathrooms.

Built in 1935, Plantagenet High School was known for its high ceilings, polished wood floors, and luxurious library. The high school remained an architectural gem for its first decades, though dwindling funds, roofing problems, and a lack of repairs led to it eventually being condemned.

Next to the article, there was a black-and-white photo of the school with lots of old cars parked in front of it. The building was three stories tall with towers at each side, plus arched windows and even a few gargoyles along the roof. It looked like a castle and a school got married and had this building for a baby.

I reread the article once more and closed the computer. It wasn't as exciting as aliens or secret societies, but it made the most sense. The article was from nearly twenty years earlier—a lot could have changed since then. If this Plantagenet High School had been rebuilt and reopened, the signs in the bathroom would make some sort of sense. Just a girl from some rival school hanging out in our bathroom, maybe? “We Are Plantagenet” did sound a little like a school cheer. As much as I'd rather the explanation be less boring, I had to admit that was more likely than dead kings or aliens with extra ears. I kept scrolling and clicking for a while, looking for any sign of plans to reopen the high school. But I couldn't find anything.

All of a sudden it occurred to me that I had a resource even better than Google right here in the apartment—Mom had grown up here, and she knew everything about everything. She surely knew something about this old school.

I checked Mom's room again and saw she was sitting up.

“Hey, Mom, have you ever heard of Plantagenet High School?” I asked as I walked into her room.

She turned toward me. I wondered if she'd taken some pain meds recently—her gaze didn't look quite focused. I counted the days in my head—it had been almost two weeks since her surgery. Should she still be taking meds? Should she still be in pain? She said she walked around the apartment like the doctor told her she should, but every time I came home, she was lying in bed. Should she still be there? Should she still be so tired?

I didn't know. I just knew I didn't
want
her to be in bed anymore. I had a flash of a memory of Mom diving into the pool at the Y in Charleston. She's always loved pools more than I do. When we'd go to splash around during the hottest days of summer, all the other moms would sit in lounge chairs and work on their tans, but my mom would be racing me from one end of the pool to the other. She loved to dive, and I could see her toes curled along the edge of the concrete, her arms curved toward the water, her whole body tensed and strong and ready to slide in with hardly a ripple.

It had been four months since I'd seen Mom look strong. That was when she started feeling tired. Then there was a whole bunch of other stuff—passing out, throwing up, bleeding—that came after the tiredness, and eventually the doctors found the tumors, which are the real reason we moved to Birmingham.

Mom found out that the doctors would have to remove the tumors and the parts the tumors were attached to, and she'd need six weeks to recover. At least. No climbing the stairs in our building, no lugging piles of books around at work. It's strange how it takes one little ring of the phone and a voice that says, “This is Meghan from Dr. Ledbetter's office . . . can I speak to your mother?” and life as you know it falls out from under you.

We were behind in the rent already because Mom had been so sick she couldn't work. She said we needed help. So she called Gram, and there was a long conversation I couldn't hear very well, and then we were packing up the apartment and renting a U-Haul truck and then we were here.

She smiled at me from her bed, her arms limp at her sides.

“Plantagenet isn't too far from here,” she said. “I mean, it wasn't far from here. It was right at the on-ramp for I-20.”

“Have you heard if it's going to reopen?”

“Oh, I can't imagine that it would. There's not much more than a foundation there now. I drove past
it a few years ago and it was all overgrown and awful looking. I don't know why the city doesn't bulldoze it and start from scratch.”

She scooted over and made room for me next to her. I sank into the mattress, not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. I'd thought I might have solved the mystery. But if I had, where would that leave me? Back to having scones as the highlight of my day.

“What makes you ask?” asked Mom.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just wondering.”

I toyed with the sheets, smoothing them over my left leg. I shifted and noticed a bit of red by Mom's arm. I looked closer and saw it was a tiny splotch of blood. Smaller than a dime.

“You're bleeding again,” I said.

Mom looked down. She licked her lips and rubbed a hand over her eyes. Eyes that seemed a little swollen.

“It's nothing, Mario,” she said. “It's normal. The doctors said there could be a little bleeding while I healed.”

I couldn't look away from the red splotch.

“I'm fine, honey.” She flipped the sheet over the bloodstain and patted my knee. “I am going to be totally fine. I keep telling you—there's nothing for you to worry about.”

“I know,” I said, which is what I always said when she promised she would be fine.

When Mom first got her diagnosis of fibroid tumors, it's funny what things popped into my head. In
Mysteries of the Strange and Unexplained
, I read about Queen Mary of England, who thought she was pregnant twice, but both pregnancies vanished without a trace. She supposedly had giant fibroid tumors instead—tumors in her belly growing big as a basketball. I kept wondering how big Mom's tumors might get before they operated on her.

Once, right after Mom went to the doctors for the first time, I found a wadded-up towel on the bathroom with blood all over it. It made me think of when Malaka threw a vanilla candle at me so I could smell it, but it hit me in the nose instead. Blood gushed out and turned my white shirt red. That's how much blood was on that towel.

I asked Mom about the towel and she said she was fine.

There's more trivia about tumors than you might think. I didn't realize how much until Mom got diagnosed, and then a bunch of it popped into my head like it had been stacked on shelves at the back of my brain until I needed it. There was a man in Vietnam who had a two-hundred-pound tumor removed from his leg—it had been growing for twenty-eight years. I think he turned out to be okay. There was a woman over eight feet tall from Missouri who was already over six feet tall by the time she was my age. Scientists now think it was a tumor on the pituitary gland that caused her to grow that big.

People used to think sharks couldn't get tumors, but it turns out they can.

Goldfish with tumors were once highly prized by Japanese royalty.

Tumors are strange and mysterious things. They appear from out of nowhere. I found it impossible to believe that there was nothing to worry about. That Mom was—
poof!
—totally fine again.

I decided I should sit with her just in case that blood splotch turned out to be serious. I liked to watch her sleep, to watch her chest moving up and down. Taking oxygen in and out.

“You don't need to stay in here,” said Mom, her eyes starting to droop. “Go have some fun. Get outside. Go to the park. See some friends. Oh, here's an idea: Do your homework.”

“Done,” I said. “I'll just sit here another minute.”

“'Kay,” she said, slurring a little, eyes totally closed. She rolled onto her side, wrapping her arms around herself, like she was giving herself a hug. She always slept like that.

I eased off the bed, not wanting to disturb her, and scooted against the wall. I rested my chin on my knees and watched my mother breathe. Thoughts of Plantagenet High School danced through my head, like sugar plums in that Christmas poem. Being in my mother's room seemed to give me even bigger, crazier fantasies than usual. Maybe I was focusing on the wrong story: The high school might have nothing to do with the writing on the walls.

Plenty of British people had moved to America—there could be descendants of those Plantagenet kings living here in Birmingham. Maybe they were starting a new branch of that snobby club, although it still didn't seem like the kind of club that would promote itself on bathroom walls.

I was more into the idea of the archery society. I hugged my knees closer to myself. Now, really, that could be a clever way to disguise a more interesting kind of club. Archery and horses and medieval weapons. I thought of that article Gram had been reading about the robber who had been hit over the head and left for the police to find. Could there be a group of people out there—secretive, highly trained, of course—fighting crime? I imagined knights in armor clunking criminals over the head with giant hammers.