Bad Apple (8 page)

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It’s Grandpa Joe’s first time cooking a turkey, so he gets one of those giant birds so monstrous with hormones that, if it were alive, it wouldn’t be able to stand up by itself. It comes complete with a magic button that tells you when the turkey is done. We worship at the altar of the oven, waiting for the button to pop. It never does. Finally, we get the brilliant idea to find the meat thermometer. By the time we take the turkey out, it’s so overcooked, it’s lost about three pounds and its puny wings have fallen off.

“Good thing I made a lot of gravy,” Grandpa Joe says.

We sit down at the table. For our Thanksgiving dinner, we are serving the desiccated monster turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green-bean casserole, cranberries from a can, biscuits from a can, and barely suppressed rage.

We are still doing the nontalking talking, but it’s more
non
than it is
talking
. Mom hasn’t been able to look at me since the school-board meeting, but for today she manages to blather on about her job as a marketing manager, how she’s only one person, how her bosses think they can get blood from a stone, and how unfair it is that people in Europe get six weeks of vacation when she has to content herself with three. Mr. Doctor tells a story of a kid who threw up on him while they were trying to get molds of the kid’s teeth for braces. (Mr. Doctor seems to think this is the kind of funny story one relates while others are eating sweet potatoes.) Madge spits out the latest injustice at the community college, where she is taking a course on the Holocaust. The injustice has something to do with getting yelled at for being late to class. She gets mad when I tell her the way not to get yelled at for being late is to not be late.

“This is college,” she says. “It’s not supposed to matter if I’m late or not.”

“Who told you that?” my mom says.

“Besides,” says Madge, “I had a good reason.”

“What reason?” says Mom, but Madge won’t say, clams up tight. And then Mom gets mad because Madge won’t say and reminds her that her very expensive therapist, an M.D.
and
a Ph.D., suggested that Madge share more with her family, that if we understood what was going on in her head, we might relate to her better. Madge pokes at her turkey. Mr. Doctor suddenly finds the cranberry dressing
utterly fascinating and reads the ingredients from the can under his breath. Grandma Emmy starts to clear the plates even though none of us is finished, and slaps my hand when I grab a slab of turkey with my fingers. Grandpa Joe starts to cough, pounding his chest.

“I don’t like the sound of that cough, Dad,” my mom says.

“I don’t like it, either,” Grandpa Joe says between coughs. “But it’s nothing a little cough syrup won’t cure. What can you do?”

“You can go to the doctor.”

Grandpa Joe rolls his eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Dad.” Mom sounds as if she’s talking to Madge or me instead of her own father, and everyone stops poking or clearing or muttering to stare at her. “You should have that looked at. Where’s your doctor’s number? I’m calling him right now.”

“It’s Thanksgiving, Anita,” Grandpa Joe says. “And it’s just a cough. There’s no need to overreact.”

“I am
not
overreacting,” my mom barks. “I’m simply doing what has to be done. I don’t know why people don’t understand that. There are things that need to be done, and no one else seems to be interested in doing them. So I’m doing them, and I don’t care who hates me for it. Now, what’s that number, Dad?”

After a joyous holiday weekend that I spent mostly hiding in my room, I’m back at school. The board meeting
hasn’t improved my social standing. But it has electrified TheTruthAboutTolaRiley.blogspot.com. June shows me on the NASA phone. There are hundreds of new comments. There’s a reporter who wants to write a book about student-teacher love affairs. She plans to include a chapter on me. Commenters debate a title for the book. I debate moving to Mexico. My stomach churns, trying to eat itself.

Due to the rotating schedule, art is my first class. I bring in the brown canvas I call
The Skin of the Marquis de Carabas
. The new sub, an older man who appears to have colored his hair with black shoe polish, takes one look and sniffs, “I prefer more art in my art.” He sets up a pear and a large wheel of cheese on his desk. We spend the rest of the period sketching them. In my drawing, the pear is cut up in slices, a knife plunged into the center of the cheese.

Later, I have math. Everyone else in the eleventh grade has some sort of precalculus. I have a class called Mathematics and You. It should be called Nothing Will Ever Add Up for You, Loser. Mrs. Worksheet is trying to get us to understand the real meaning of big numbers. She asks us how long it would take for us to reach 1 million pennies if we got one penny a second. Answer? Eleven and a half hours. Then she had us calculate how long it would take to reach 1 billion pennies. Thirty-two years. We also discover that 1 billion pennies will fit into five school buses and that
we haven’t even lived for a billion seconds yet. It just feels that way.

When the bell rings, I run to biology. Time to dissect the poor baby pigs. The pigs were delivered to our classroom in large tanks of formaldehyde. Me and my lab partner, LaDonna Rowan, name our pig Baloney in honor of Mr. Anderson.

Because our school system has a fondness for alphabetical seating, I’ve been paired with LaDonna Rowan in class since the sixth grade, and she has spent all these years perfecting her life plan:

1. Graduate from high school ranked number five or better.
   
2. Attend Cornell University as her father and her father’s father and her father’s sister-in-law’s brother had.
   
3. Get into a first-rate or any other medical school.
   
4. Become a world-class heart or plastic surgeon (whichever makes the most money).
   

I have no idea how LaDonna is going to achieve her grand plan if she’s stuck in Science for Dummies like me. But I look down at that poor fetal pig staked on the wax dissecting tray, sickly pink and lumpy as a pickle. “Considering you’re going to be the surgeon, LaDonna,” I say, “you might as well make the first incision. You should probably make all the incisions.”

So, as LaDonna Rowan hunches over Baloney, breath
ing in the toxic fumes and poking around in the little pig belly, trying to live up to her own legend, I sit there on my lab stool, holding my nose. I feel woozy. It’s not the fumes or the sight of all those tiny pig innards. It’s that meeting. It’s my mom. It’s
me
, dragging myself from class to class the same way I always have. How is it possible that I stood up in front of everyone and said, “No, no, no, I am not hurt, I am not a victim,” and they refuse to hear? How can all those people at TheTruthAboutTolaRiley keep telling stories using my name, if they’re not really about me? Am I so small, so insignificant that my own story doesn’t need me anymore?

I break down and ask for the bathroom pass. I probably look ill, so Mr. Anderson doesn’t argue. I slip into the nearest girls’ room. It stinks of cigarettes, but it’s empty. I splash my face with water and dry it with a scratchy paper towel. I decide that my green hair is ridiculous. That’s why no one would listen to me. Who would listen to a girl with green hair?

And Seven. Well. He must have felt sorry for me. A green-haired girl with a crazy cat and a crazier family. He’d be wise to stay far, far away.

I would.

I crumple the paper towel and toss it in the can. No sense hiding in the bathroom. No sense hiding anywhere.

I throw open the bathroom door.

And bounce off the huge chest of Chelsea Patrick. She fumbles with her cell phone and almost drops it.

“What the hell are you doing?” she hisses. Then she sees it’s me. And smiles. “Look who it is! The little fairy whore.”

My blood starts to hum. “Get out of my way.”

She tips her head and considers me. “No.”

I move to go around her, but she just steps in front of me. I try again, and again she blocks me.

“Stop,” I say.

“Stop what?”

“We used to be friends. Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” she says.

I want to scream,
Screwing with my head! Screwing with my life!
But I just stand there, my fists clenched so hard that my fingernails cut into my skin.

“You should be sorry,” she says.

“Sorry for what?”

She holds out her cell. “Speak into the microphone.”

I don’t care. “Sorry for what? I didn’t do anything.”

She smiles. “You’ve done lots of things. I have proof of some of them.”

“Proof?” What kind of proof? What is she talking about?

“Or maybe I don’t,” she says.

I feel like a punctured tire. “Look, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. People grow apart,” I say. “It’s just what happens.”

“That’s nice,” she says. “You hear that on a talk show?”

“I’m going to tell the school board that it was you. That you made the whole thing up about me and Mr. Mymer.”

“I did? Are you sure?” she says, her grin even wider. “Aw,
don’t look so sad.” She slips the cell phone in her pocket.

Before I know what she’s going to do, she reaches around and grabs me by the back of the neck. She yanks me close. I try to push away, but she’s too strong. With her free hand, she pops the cap off a red lipstick. “Stop wiggling,” she says. “You’re going to ruin it.” She holds me still as she scrawls something across my cheeks and mouth and rams two dots into my forehead.

She holds me still as she inspects her handiwork. “Much better,” she says. She lets go. I’m too shocked to move. She pulls her cell from her back pocket and takes a picture of me. Then she strolls off, daring me to try to do something while her back is turned.

I don’t. I run into the bathroom.

She’s made me into a smiley face.

Have a nice day.

When I get back to class, Mr. Anderson snatches the pass from my hand. He stares at my face—flushed and damp from the scrubbing. “If you’re going to be sick again, take yourself to the nurse. If not, join your lab partner and try to make yourself useful.”

I try to control my breathing as I watch Miles Rosentople take his fetal pig and pull its legs over its head.

“Yogi Kudu!” he says. He named his pig after a yogi that had been featured on YouTube (the yogi folded himself into a suitcase). Miles Rosentople thinks he’s very, very funny.

“Try to get the arms over the head, too. He’s not a real yogi until he can do that,” I say. Miles Rosentople does what I tell him, just like he’d eaten worms when he was eight and tried to light his own farts on fire when he was eleven and stole painkillers from his dad when he was thirteen—all on dares. I know about Miles Rosentople because his dad would come over to our house and complain to my mom about it. Sometimes sans shirt. In addition to the hairiest back you’ve ever seen, he also sports droopy little old-guy boobs.

Shudder. I don’t want to think about Mr. Rosentople’s old-guy boobs. I don’t want to think at all. I feel for the victims in this sad excuse for a biology class. Looks like the
CSI
version of “The Three Little Pigs.” The pig that LaDonna is hacking at stares at me with its dead eyes.
Help me
, the eyes say.

Then they say,
Oh, never mind. I’m already dead.

“Are you okay, Tola?” LaDonna wants to know.

“Fine,” I say.

The pig keeps talking.
When I grew up, I wanted to be in a petting zoo. But no one wants to pet the pigs. Too dirty. But we’re smart, you know. As smart as a three-year-old. Smarter. I myself am a genius. I was just thinking, for example, that if everyone’s so convinced you’re such a delinquent, why not start acting like one? Show them! A performance piece to beat them all.

Miles is having a hard time twisting the pig’s arms behind its head because they’re so short, and his lab partner, Tim Corcoran, is getting annoyed.

“We’re gonna fail if you keep doing that,” Tim says.

“Nah,” says Miles. “You only fail if you molest other people’s pigs. Mr. Anderson didn’t say anything about molesting your own pig.”

LaDonna looks up. “You’re the pig,” she says.

“Oink, oink,” he says. “Kiss my curly tail.” He waggles the twisted pig at LaDonna, who scowls and goes back to Baloney. For a future surgeon, her hands aren’t too steady. Baloney looks like he’s been attacked by a pack of angry kindergartners armed with grapefruit spoons.

“Okay, my friends, time to wrap it up!” says Mr. Anderson. “All pigs in their pens.”

LaDonna pulls the pins out of Baloney’s legs, closes the flaps on his belly, and ties the plastic tag that identified him around one of his feet. Then she brings the tray up and slips him back into one of the tanks. Miles is still struggling with Yogi Kudu.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says to Tim, who’s wrapped up everything wrappable and watches anxiously as Miles pulls the pins from the pig. “I’m not going to do anything to the pig.”

“You already broke both its arms,” says Tim.

“We had to break the arms to pin them to the tray anyway. Forget it.”

Just then the bell rings, and Mr. Anderson yells impatiently, “Rosentople! Corcoran! Let’s go!”

“Go on, Tim, I’ll finish it,” Miles says.

“I’ll stay and help him,” I say. Tim’s even more anxious but backs away from us as if we’ve just pulled knives on him.

“Okay,” he says. “But don’t…don’t twist him up anymore.”

“Oh, man, just get out of here already!” Miles says. Tim turns and walks out the door, followed closely by LaDonna, who glances back at me with one eyebrow cocked, like
What are
you
up to?

“Bye, guys!” I say, waving. “See you!”

Miles closes Yogi’s belly flaps. “What are you hanging around here for?”

Mr. Anderson is busy shuffling papers at the front of the room, and kids are streaming in for the next period, talking and laughing. I suddenly feel like I’m standing on a cliff overlooking a deep, dark ocean and my mind is whispering:
Come on, you know you want to. Just a few more inches and you’ll walk right off the edge.