Alone at 90 Foot (10 page)

“I don't usually show up until at
least
half an hour after I'm supposed to. It's good to keep a guy hanging on. But I do need the time to freshen my makeup.”

Oh, right. No doubt for him fresh makeup is worth the half an hour you make him hang around waiting. Linda has a drama practice. And me? Well, I don't really have much to do. I told Dad I'd clean the bathrooms after school. But I can sit here and wait. In fact, I think I'd rather.

Mr. O doesn't want to hear any of our excuses anyway.

Know something? I know who did it. It was Justin Randall. I saw him stuffing matches into a blue pen at lunchtime. I passed him in the cafeteria. He was sitting in a corner by himself and that's what he was doing. He was keeping it low, between his legs. It was the goofy expression on his face that made me look to see what he was doing. When he saw me looking, he turned his back. But he continued to assemble the stink bomb. I don't think anyone else saw him. I've been wondering this afternoon when he was going to set if off.

Mr. O is right about one thing. Justin Randall has never grown up. I think his brain sort of cut out somewhere around fourth grade. I often wonder what he's doing in grade nine. Nothing seems to make any sense to him. And he stopped asking questions three years ago. Which, in a sad sort of way, was good. His questions were usually really stupid and took up a ton of class time. But he still shows up, I guess because he has to. He doesn't do
anything. He just sits there at the back of the room and amuses himself. He mostly draws. Pictures of sports cars and hot rods with sparks and lightning bolts flying out. Actually, they're really quite good. And colorful. If you happen to like that kind of stuff. Once in a while, he hands something in. With no content to speak of, but with some intricately drawn, far-out title page. And at the end of the year, he's moved up a grade.

I feel him looking at me. I glanced at him just a few seconds ago. He gave me this dark, supposed-to-be-terrifying, Freddy Krueger warning look. He's way too slow to be subtle. To maintain a poker face. So I won't look at him anymore. Don't worry your short-circuited brain there, Justin. If you don't give yourself away, I won't. I'm in no rush to clean the bathrooms.

The final bell goes. Out of habit, we all stand up. Mr. O only has to look over his glasses to make us sit down again. We fold our binders and stuff them into our backpacks. May as well be ready to leave when the culprit confesses. If he does. We watch out the window as the mature adolescents spill onto the school grounds. Laughing, yelling, gobbing on the sidewalks, punching each other, hanging from the trees. After about fifteen minutes Mr. O looks up from his book again. “Well? Is anyone ready to fess up?”

Nope. No one is ready to fess up. But Mr. O, if my dad wasn't dating her, you'd get along just fine with Jennifer Reid.

Joanne and I are writing notes back and forth. What's with Shauna Whittaker's bra showing? Couldn't she find a shirt big enough to cover it up?

I look at Shauna's backless halter top. Hmm. I write back: Well, if she's going to have her bra show, she should at least tuck in the label, instead of advertising her size.

Linda and Darla are also writing notes. Man-deep is asking Danny about our math homework. John is rolling paper into balls and hurling them at the garbage can. Two rims and one swish! Carl Jenkins is eating a bag of nachos. The cheesy smell combined with the stink bomb is enough to make me sick. Danielle is filing her fingernails. And Justin Randall is working with his head down. He's intent on his sketching. I think he's already forgotten it's because of him we're all still here. Another fifteen minutes passes. Danielle has finished her nails. She takes out a compact and checks her makeup in the mirror. She adds a little more color and snaps it shut. She looks at her watch.

“I have to go,” she says, standing up.

“Sit down, young lady,” is Mr. O's answer. “No one leaves until someone takes responsibility for that stink bomb.”

“Well, it's not like I did it. Mr. O, I think you and I both know that!”

“Sit down.”

“This sucks.” Danielle grudgingly sits down at her desk. “This is stupid.” She looks at her watch. “Why should I have to sit here? I didn't do it. Look.” Danielle peers around the room. She bounces to her feet again. “Whoever did it, just say so. Okay? I have to go.”

The request is so self-centered, some of us start to laugh.

“It's not funny.” Her eyes narrow on Mike Ortega who is laughing the loudest. “Mike, was it you?”

“No.” Mike's laugh dissolves into a frown. “It wasn't me.”

“Danny?”

Danny looks up from his homework. “Go away.”

“John? John Robbel? I could see it. I bet it was you.”

John flings another ball of paper. “It wasn't me, Higgins. Why don't you just sit down.”

Mr. O still holds his book as if he's reading. But his glasses are lowered as he watches us from behind his desk.

Danielle continues to scan the room for a likely suspect. She spies Carl Jenkins munching nachos in
the corner. She faces Mr. Overhand. “Alright. I'll tell you who did it. But only if you make sure he stays away from me.”

Mr. O doesn't agree, but taps the infamous pen, which was the stink bomb, on his desk.

“Carl Jenkins did it.”

“Huh?” Carl's hand freezes on the way to his mouth. He hears his name spoken, but at that moment isn't quite sure what he's done.

Mr. O stands up. “Is that true, Jenkins? You set the stink bomb?”

“What?” Carl stops chewing. He struggles to sit up in his desk. “What are you talking about?”

“You did so!” insists Danielle. “I saw him making it. He set it off while you were passing out the worksheets.”

Carl finally clues in. “I did not! Higgins, you're full of it. Don't listen to her. She's making it up.”

Mr. Overhand frowns as he looks from one to the other.

“Oh, yeah? Well, I can prove it. Mr. O, look closely at that pen in your hand. My guess is it's an aqua-blue Paper-Mate.”

Mr. O looks at the pen. It
is
an aqua-blue Paper-Mate. But then, so is mine. And so is Danielle's. We'd all been given them by Mr. Bartell. He'd set out a box during our last exam.

“She's right, Jenkins. This bomb was made from
a Paper-Mate. Alright, all of you can go. Except you, Jenkins. You stay right where you are.”

Danielle is the first one out the door.

“And don't forget your homework, the ten review questions at the end of chapter fourteen.”

“But she's lying! She's making the whole thing up! Look, Danny's got a Paper-Mate! Linda's got a Paper-Mate!”

Save your breath, Carl. Reasoning at this point is useless. By now, half the class has left the room. No one is going to listen to you. Mr. O has his culprit. And we have our freedom.

“Carl Jenkins, you and I are going down to visit Mrs. Lofts.”

Why didn't I tell Mr. O what I knew? I watched Justin Randall look up and notice for the first time that everyone was gone. He placed the winged hot rod he was drawing in a notebook. He slowly packed his books away and wandered out the door. Maybe I should have. But I knew Carl Jenkins had enough going for him that he could take it. He was sharp. He'd get out of it. Justin Randall wouldn't have a chance. If what he did had hurt someone, then definitely, I would have said something. But a stink bomb? It was the work of a childish mind trying to have some fun.

June 7th

Do you ever get so sick of everything in your life, you just want to quit? Like when you look in the mirror in the morning and you see the same dull face stare back. Or you go into the kitchen and you hear your dad's same old voice. Or you walk down the hall at school with your so-called-friends, talking about the same old stuff. Or you go from boring class to even more boring class, predicting with one-hundred-percent accuracy what's going to happen next. Like, Mr. Bartell is going to tell Rudy Lantz
to put his penknife away. Rudy's going to ignore him. Mr. Bartell's going to say it again. Rudy's going to say, “Make me,” and Mr. Bartell is going to march him down to see Mrs. Lofts. And you're thinking, like, so, this is it? My big excitement for the day is watching Rudy Lantz butt heads with Mr. Bartell? Maybe you don't get like that. It's probably just me.

That's how I've been feeling this week. I'm lying on my bed with my headphones on. I'm listening to The Wallflowers. Not even the jars of nature on my bookshelf can cheer me up. I look at them, sitting there, classified by material. You know, like earth, water, minerals and stuff. Then alphabetical by place. I just realized something. I don't have a jar of Ninety Foot. I never thought to get one. Maybe that's what I'm missing in my life.

I don't have any friends again. Ever since Joanne and Tony Lasserman stumbled onto each other in the Canyon. They've been hanging around together every night. Getting to know one another after all this time. So near, and yet so far. “He picks his little sister up from day care after school. He helps her on with her coat. Pam, he's just, like, this really sensitive guy!”

It's enough to make me gag.

Mandeep and Danny have this thing going on. Ever since I had them for dinner. They just really hit it
off. And Linda's hanging out with Darla Miller. She's decided she likes Darla's brother. That one's a littler harder to get. He wears combats. Not sometimes. But all the time. Like they really mean something. And this spiked dog collar around his neck.

Everybody's noticing everybody. Except me. It's like this major thing to get involved before Mike Ortega's year-end party. So you don't show up alone. Good thing I don't have to worry about it. Seeing as how Joanne got me involved for me. I know I don't have to go along with it. But I don't care enough to care.

Besides, I have an excuse. I'm weird.

“How can you not be excited?” my former friends ask me. “We're graduating from junior high!”

“Yeah? So? It's hardly like the biggest event of my life.”

They just shake their heads. “Pam, sometimes you act so weird.”

Joanne's been wearing so much black around her eyes lately, she looks like some kind of ghoul from
Night of the Living Dead
. Linda dyed her hair lime green and is wearing it spiked. She had her ears pierced right to the top. She pierced her nose, one eyebrow and, since hanging out with Darla's brother, her belly-button too. For all I know, there could be other places. And I'm weird.

Maybe it's true. But I just can't get excited about
anything. It doesn't appeal to me to put goop all over my face. I can't shriek with excitement when someone does something different with their hair. I like my life calm. I like it arranged. If I get through the day without anything abnormal happening, it's good. I'm getting by being boring. It works. To survive, I guess I don't need anything else. Still, I'm getting real tired of my same dull face.

When I was ten, my grandma, Mom's mom, died of multiple sclerosis. She had it all my life. She lived in the extended-care unit of the hospital. I used to visit her with Mom. We went at the same time every Saturday after lunch. We brought her the same kind of cookies and the same kind of novels so she would have something to read that week. Grandma was always sitting in her wheelchair at the same table in the cafeteria. She could only move her head. In front of her was one of the books, propped open on a music stand. Paper clips were attached to the pages. When Grandma finished a page, she bent forward and, catching the paper clip, turned it with her nose. She spoke very slowly, taking lots of breaks. And when she finished, she was always out of breath. I could not understand her, but Mom could.

I would look around the room and see the same people doing the same thing. Mr. Cruikshank was always shaking the tray on his wheelchair. Trying
to break out. He'd been in a car accident and was missing a piece of his brain. Mrs. Grewal was always dancing by herself in a corner. To music only she could hear. A man in his twenties lay on a bed with his eyes closed, soaking up the sun. He was surrounded by pictures his three-year-old daughter had drawn for him. Mr. Jones, a very, very old man, a pilot in the war, sat in a corner and smoked a pipe. He blew smoke rings in the air. And a girl my age, with big scared eyes, lay very still in a large crib, watching something, I don't know what, maybe just the shadows dancing across the walls.

At one o'clock the physical therapist would come in. She would have them do exercises. Lift a finger, nod their head, make a circle with their foot, whatever they were able to do. At one-thirty she would leave.

“Mom,” I said one day as we left the hospital. “Those people are always doing the same thing. It's like they're waiting for something to happen. Just sitting there, passing time. They need some excitement in their lives.”

“No, Pam. It only seems that way to you and me. They are content. They need the routine. It may be hard for you to understand, but they do well when their days are arranged. They know what to expect. Some of them have lived through more excitement than anyone needs in their lives.”

And they continued like that. Every time we went, it was the same old thing. I got so bored, sometimes Mom would send me down to the gift shop to buy a comic or a magazine. Then at Christmas, Santa Claus came. He ho, ho, ho'd around the cafeteria, passing out presents, bellowing out Merry Christmas in his big booming voice. There were many relatives and little children running all around. The Boy Scouts put on a skit and a choir from the nearby United Church sang carols, inviting the relatives to all join in. There was food and punch and lots of noise. Too much noise for Mr. Cruikshank, who began to scream and bang on his tray. Too much for Mrs. Grewal, who rolled herself in a ball and cringed against the floor. Mr. Jones gave up smoking and returned to his room. And the girl my age, with her big scared eyes, opened her mouth and made an almost-silent terrified noise.