Someone I Wanted to Be (15 page)

Mr. Calvino read an excerpt of
The Odyssey
out loud. He read slowly, pausing and stretching out words, like he’d fallen into the story and we weren’t even there. He looked up and found thirty kids staring at him like he was insane. Only LaTeisha and I didn’t stare. I fiddled with my pencil.

“Oh, my apologies,” he said. “I got a little carried away by the language. Let me check my pacing guide and see what my instructional best practice should be.”

Mr. Calvino jumped off his desk, and his striped oxford shirt came untucked from his orange pants. He popped open a Diet Coke. He guzzled the entire can, and his huge New Jersey Adam’s apple bobbed up and down on his unshaven neck.

He swung around and raised his fist. “That was a literacy event, kids. An act of literacy, as the Colorado Board of Education likes to phrase it!”

“You’re so cute, Mr. Calvino,” said LaTeisha. “Can I read the class my favorite passage? It’s from Book Twenty-Three, when Penelope and Odysseus reunite after twenty years, but she doesn’t recognize him at first because he looks so nasty.” Mr. Calvino was giving us thirty extra-credit points for reading the whole book.

“Yes, LaTeisha! Bless you, LaTeisha. Yes, please read.”

LaTeisha serenely smiled as she paged through her text. She had dozens of Post-it notes stuck between the pages and an emerald chip on a gold band on her ring finger.

Before lunch, I stood with Kristy at her locker. It felt like a hundred years since I last saw her, but it was only Tuesday and yesterday had been Monday, and that was the day Kristy’s mom unzipped her PJs and showed me her scar, and that was the day that Kristy drove to Damien Rogers’s house and screamed that I wanted his body, and the same day I met Kurt King in the parking lot of 7-Eleven at 10:45, but that was like a dream.

It was like a dream, except that he had her picture on his phone. It was a picture from the night she wore her tank top and no jacket, even though it was cold. Every time he turned on his phone, he saw Kristy.

I lifted a tangled curl of Kristy’s hair. “You’re getting a rat’s nest.”

“God, don’t touch me.” Kristy jerked away and smoothed her hair. It was flat and snarled. Since I’d seen her the day before, she’d painted her fingernails a bright metallic blue and put on thick blue eyeliner that made her eyes look even smaller. She had purple rings under her eyes. Her face looked skinny and her nose even bigger than usual. Her camisole was inside out.

“My God, just look at them.” Kristy squinted across the hall. “He’s using her. If he really liked her, he’d ask her to be his girlfriend.”

Corinne stood with her head tipped back as she smiled up into Jason Coulter’s sunburned face. He had a long scrape on his arm from the last baseball game. The video shot of him sliding into home plate had played on the school’s daily news show in a repeating loop both mornings that week.

The crowd in the hallway suddenly opened up. Kelsey Parker and her friends made their way through the mob.

Kristy stiffened. Her chest and neck got splotchy. “Hey, Kelsey,” she said, waving her little hand.

Kelsey glanced at Kristy. “Skank,” she said, and continued with her friends down the hall.

“Wow, I wonder what’s up with her. Hope everything’s OK. She’s usually so sweet.” Kristy tore at the lacy neckline of her camisole and stared after Kelsey and her friends.

“Are you kidding? She’s always like that.”

“Not to me, bitch. She and I are actually pretty close.” Kristy yanked open her locker door and all her stuff slid onto the floor. She crouched down and picked up a folder. “Damn it! Could you help?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I don’t want to be late for lunch. They ran out of pizza yesterday.” I set down my books, tugged up the back of my jeans, knelt, and started packing the stuff back in. Kristy stood up.

“Kristy, I’m not doing this all by myself.” I picked up purple pens, broken pencils, notebooks with glittery covers, the backs scribbled on in purple pen in her huge, messy handwriting. She dotted her
i
’s with circles, sometimes hearts. Candy wrappers, candy-flavored lip gloss, a pink comb, hair bands, a bottle of dried-up green nail polish. It was all little-kid junk.

“Quit looking through my shit!” said Kristy. She glared at Corinne and Jason Coulter. Jason bent over Corinne, who was pressed against the lockers. “Jesus, get a room!”

“Come on, Kristy, leave them alone. I closed her locker door and stood up with my books. “You’re welcome.”

Corinne pulled herself out from under Jason and trotted over with her hands folded under her chin. She joyfully clicked her nails together. “He wants me to go to his game a week from tomorrow and then we’ll hang out afterward. I’ll probably be able to go!”

“Great. Fantastic. Wonderful for you, Corinne.” Kristy turned, unsmiling.

Corinne immediately adopted a serious expression, though her face was still rosy with happiness. “Kristy, is everything OK? You look really tired. How’s your mom?”

Kristy coughed, opened her locker door, then kicked it shut. “Not great, Corinne. Not great. They put her on more pain meds, and now she’s doing really inappropriate behavior. I’m like, Mom, I know you’re really sick and everything, but could you please try to keep it together when my friends are around?”

I dropped my head down. “Yeah, yesterday when I was over, Kristy’s mom unzipped her pajamas and showed me her surgery scar. It goes from here to here.” I put one hand on my neck and the other on my stomach. “It looks really painful. . . .”

“Why are you lying, you dumb fat bitch?” Kristy stared at me.

Keeping her eyes on me, she said, “Don’t listen to Chubs, Corinne. For whatever reason, maybe because she has such a boring life, Leah loves making up stories. But she doesn’t bother to stick around and see if my mom is OK when she goes to the emergency room. That shit is sick, Leah.”

There was a tile missing next to my foot. Gravel, hair, and the shreds from the edges of notebook paper were stuck to the dirty adhesive. Heat spread over my body. My face felt like it was boiling. But what could I say? The scrawny little bitch’s mom was dying, and this was my punishment for pretending to be a skinny girl with long blond hair. Kristy shoved her face into mine. She obviously hadn’t brushed her teeth because her breath was terrible. “Keep away from my mom,” she said. She took off at a jog down the hall.

Corinne covered her face with both hands. “God, she’s so crazy! Can’t we have one day of peace? Leah, she’s losing her mind. I just feel so sorry for her. . . .” She gave me a hug and trotted after Kristy.

“I’ll talk to her!” she called over her shoulder.

Kristy was just turning the corner with her hair flying. She yelled, “We’ll save you lots of pizza, Fatty!” Corinne caught up with her, and they disappeared.

I stood as if paralyzed and studied the cover of my notebook until everyone in the hallway was gone. A fluorescent tube sizzled and popped over my head, and the light went out.

The assistant principal came winging around the corner and blew his whistle. “What are you doing in the hall? You’re either supposed to be in class or at lunch.” He stared up at the ceiling. “When did that damn thing go?”

The assistant principal had a beefy face with a thin topping of carefully combed brown hair. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning and he already had a five o’clock shadow. His white polyester shirt had yellow sweat stains in the armpits. The shirt stretched so tightly over his chest and belly, you could see his nipples through his sleeveless undershirt. He had one thing going for him — dark-blue eyes with black lashes. The story was that he’d once been a track star and prom king at our high school.

“I have lunch now, but I feel sick.”

There was a ripple in the blue of his eyes; possibly it was sympathy. “Grab your stuff. Let’s go to the office. We can try to get ahold of a parent.”

“My mom can’t be reached except in an emergency. Maybe I could just lie down for a while.”

I followed him down the dingy pathways of hell and became mesmerized by the jingle of his keys and by the jaunty movement of his butt in his black polyester pants. He walked like a jock.

He led me into the office. The office lady looked at me over her bifocals. “What’s wrong with this one?”

“I found her in the hall. She said she’s too sick to eat lunch. She looks a little off to me.”

It was the office lady with the drawn-on eyebrows, orange hair teased in a fluffy cloud, and armloads of silver jewelry.

“Follow me, sweetheart,” she said. She led me to the nurse’s room and frowned at her tiny turquoise-studded watch. “The nurse will be back from lunch in twenty minutes. Lie down until she comes.”

I set my backpack on the floor and lay on the cot. I closed my eyes. Faint noises came through the half-open door — the phone ringing, the whir of the copy machine, a blur of voices. Maybe if the nurse documented what an incompetent mother I had, the authorities would let me live in this room, at least temporarily.

I’d put up Bruno Mars posters. I could eat breakfast and lunch here and just skip dinner and get skinny. The toilet always worked in the teachers’ bathroom, and they brought in lotion and antibacterial soap. There was junk food stashed in the teachers’ lounge. After all the sports and clubs and community ed meetings had ended, I’d run up and down the halls and sing Bruno Mars songs at the top of my lungs.

When there was a home game against Arapahoe, I’d watch from the center of the stands. I’d sit there just like the senior girl Stacy Ross, who always wore tight baby-blue turtlenecks. She sat on the bleachers perfumed by Obsession and her own perfection like she was the queen and the whole world and everything in it honeycombed off her.

During a time-out, Damien Rogers would look up at the crowd and spot me. He’d stare and think,
Where do I know that girl from?
After the game, he’d push past Kristy to get to me. Because everyone had finally realized that Kristy wasn’t really beautiful. She was just an ordinary kid and way too skinny.

I was woken by someone shaking my shoulder. “Come on, sweetheart. Sit up.”

It was the school nurse, who did double duty as the school counselor. She told the kids to call her Shannon. She had freckles, brown eyes, and red hair cut in a seventies shag. She sometimes wore purple mascara. “Open up. Sorry about that, the ear thermometer is broken.”

Shannon had black circles under her eyes. She was old, at least forty, but everyone said she stayed up late smoking pot. She knew the words to every song in the musical
Rent
and sang them as she walked through the hallways.

“OK, open up. . . . Let’s see. . . . You’ve got a slight, a very slight, temp. We can’t get ahold of your mom? Most places allow parents to pick up sick kids. It’s kind of the law.”

I pushed my hair behind my ears. “My mom works for an asshole.”

“Oh, that’s too bad! We’ll just skip it, then. I’ll write a note that you should probably stay home tomorrow so you can rest and your body can fight this off. Probably a virus.”

I sighed and shrugged as if I were disappointed. “I’ll give it to my mom.”

“Just go back to sleep,” said Shannon. She patted my forehead and left her hand there for twenty blissful seconds. Then she briskly stood up, turned off the lights, and stopped in the doorway. “I’ll wake you when school’s over.”

A dream catcher slowly turned over the cot. A little gray-and-white feather ruffled in blowing air I couldn’t feel.

Shannon would be an OK mom, though probably annoying. We’d have hummus and carrot sticks for dinner too many nights, and she’d read my texts when I was asleep, for sure. Cindy could have been a cool mom, but she was too busy drinking wine and painting her nails.

There was a commotion outside the door. Shannon stuck her head in. “Leah, sorry to bug you, but we need to store some boxes for Mrs. McCleary until the end of school. OK, sir, right in here. Sorry, it’s our sickroom!” A skinny man in blue pants wheeled in some boxes and stacked them in the corner of the room. The boxes appeared to contain slides, test tubes, a couple of new microscopes. Mrs. McCleary was going to be thrilled.

He paused on his way out and looked down at me. “Got anything catching?”

“Yep.” I coughed hard so he’d leave. The door shut. I was alone.

Shannon woke me at 1:50. I hunched on the edge of the cot for a few minutes, then stuck my feet into my shoes and picked up my backpack.

Anita stood in front of the office counter. She was wearing a Black Veil Brides T-shirt and was balancing a stack of graphic novels against her stomach. When she saw me, she blinked real slowly. She opened her mouth and moved her jaw around like she had a jaw ache. She looked away from me and stared at the giant district calendar that hung behind the secretary’s desk.

For a second, I couldn’t move or speak. I started to count. If I got to a hundred and twenty and she didn’t look over and say something, I’d leave and never try to talk to her again. One, two, three — I counted silently in my head like I was doing sit-ups. At ninety-three, she turned back to me.

She looked me over like she was trying to assess whether or not I was human. She’d gotten her nose pierced and had a tiny blue stone in her left nostril. “What are you doing here? You sick?” she said.