The False Friend (7 page)

“Maybe it’s the school phone line,” Noreen mused, “but your voice sounds exactly like it used to. Your high school phone voice.”

“Really?”

“This morning when I told Beverley that you were coming, we dusted off the yearbook from your senior year and took a look. I forgot how cramped the guidance suite used to be.”

“I’m glad I finally get to see your new office.”

“Not so new anymore. I got a ride with Lynne so you could have a car. She said it’s no trouble for her to drive me all week.”

Celia had overlooked that forgoing a rental meant depending on her parents for transportation for the first time since she’d turned sixteen.

“What time are you coming?” her mother asked.

Celia reset her watch. An hour of morning was swept away. “Would eleven fifteen be okay?”

“I told the ladies at the main office that you’d be stopping in, but you’ll still need to show ID. Everything has become much more bureaucratic.”

Through the receiver Celia heard the click of a door being shut. The ambient office sounds at the other end of the line ceased. Celia’s mother had been cubicle-bound until the head counselor’s retirement. Noreen had been dismissive of the promotion, which automatically went to the most senior employee. Most counselors stayed on just long enough to learn they wanted a different career, a process of disillusionment that lasted anywhere between one and four years.

“Celie?” she asked, as if uncertain her daughter was still there. “Did you sleep all right? Last night you looked so … tired. I got the feeling that your father and I had tuckered you out.”

Celia was thankful there was no witness to her expression, which she’d last worn with hairspray and raspberry lip gloss.

“I slept fine, Mom. See you soon, all right?”

“There might be one hard-boiled egg,” Noreen said. “Check the cold cut drawer on the left-hand side.” Celia did not want an egg. After hanging up she opened the drawer. There was the egg, the very last one.

Even had Celia not spent four years remanded to her mother’s place of employment, Jensenville High would have been easy to find. The school sat on a hill above the banks of the flood-prone Chenango like a giant box waiting to be filled with unwanted kittens and tossed in. It had been built in the
energy-conscious 1970s, when a windowless building had seemed like a forward-thinking idea. Most people took it for a prison. On a neighboring hill, the graceful onion bulbs of the town’s Eastern Orthodox church curved against the skyline with all the beauty the school did not possess. Since graduation, Celia had returned there only in her sleep.

The sight of the parking lot was both familiar and strange, like a gap-toothed former babysitter who had gotten bridgework. In Celia’s day, the student lot had organized itself around Accords and Volvos that had sweetened sixteens in Jensenville’s hillside neighborhood, and retooled Camaros and pickups from the floodplain side of town. The SUV had demolished these distinctions. Rarely had teenage tastes dovetailed so smoothly and universally with parental priorities, insulating car-infatuated children from their own inexperience and poor judgment with a ride guaranteed to annihilate anything it hit, scraped, or ran down.

The school building itself was utterly unchanged. A familiar sense of dread settled in Celia’s belly as she approached, a reflex born of countless mornings sacrificed to its shadow. Only the front plaza was different: to the right, a bench gifted by the class of 1995 faced a bust dwarfed by its pedestal. On closer inspection, the bust—inscribed with the name William Jensen, gift of the class of 1996—was only slightly smaller than life, but the class must have spent their entire gift budget on its commission. The base was a donation, a monumental thing that turned the town founder into a pinhead. The opposite edge of the walk displayed a gray boulder the size of a crouching child. On it were carved the words JENSENVILLE HIGH, G
IFT OF
C
LASS OF
1993, above which hovered the school’s mascot, the Jensenville Jay’s wings outspread in its trademark gesture of capitulation. The rock reminded Celia of a marker designating the future resting place of herself and her former classmates, all of them to be interred beneath in eternal, obligatory reunion.

Having already funneled its students to their respective classrooms, the school’s front hall was empty, its glass showcase in the same neglected spot outside the front office. Its plaques, trophies, and newspaper photos were indistinguishable from the detritus of achievement that had filled it in Celia’s day. She looked at it briefly, her eyes sweeping over the faces of students whose adult trajectories would lead them either to gloss over these moments or to spend their lives pining for their return. Celia’s vague recollection of the school’s main office was sharpened by the wait to be acknowledged from behind its counter. Within minutes, the muscles of her face remembered its supplicatory smile. There were three desks, which seemed like two more than necessary. Celia saw a bottle of nail polish on one, a paperback on another. Forms were shuffled, phone receivers picked up and replaced in a show of busyness. Finally, as if it had only just occurred to her, the nail-polish secretary turned toward the long, narrow counter that represented the length and breadth of her domain. Once Celia had signed in, cries of “Oh, you’re Noreen’s daughter!” were followed by mutual visual inspections. Two of the secretaries wore the hoop earrings, acrylic nails, and hand-drawn eyebrows of blue-collar Jensenville; the third, the French manicure and gold studs of the hillside middle class. The younger two still wore their hair long, but once they hit menopause they too would
go short like the secretary with hair like Celia’s mother. Celia’s appraisals were no less mercenary than the secretaries’ raking stares. This was what high school did to people.

The older one said, “Back to visit your mom?” in a voice that evoked a smoke-damaged June Cleaver. A voice like that had logged Celia’s late arrivals but she couldn’t tell if this was the same one. In high school she’d never bothered to discern individuals among ambient personnel over thirty. Celia nodded, and gazes returned to desks in a collective vote of disappointment. Barring the dispatch of a behavior problem to the vice principal, it looked as though the day’s highlight would be confined to lunch from the new take-out place. Without ceremony, the daughter of Noreen from Guidance was granted an adhesive tag and ejected into the hall.

Celia had arrived in the middle of fourth period. The only visible students stared out from class election posters decorating the hallway. For a portion of a portion of a second, Celia was fifteen again and late to English. Then the feeling disappeared, and she was once again a thirty-two-year-old examining homemade flyers taped to a wall. The current crop of aspiring presidents and treasurers showed the same bluster that had passed for experience when Celia was a sophomore, but with more ethnic variation. One of Celia’s private embarrassments after moving to Chicago was a late-blooming awareness of her childhood’s uniculture. Born to a brick monolith, she had not known to miss windows.

The school’s guidance suite was at the far end of the second floor. As a freshman, Celia had climbed back stairwells to avoid passing it on her way to class. Even now, her internal
awareness of the place remained her personal magnetic north. She could feel the assertion of that private compass point—lying to her left as she crossed the first-floor hallway, moving center-right as she mounted the stairs. Jensenville was small enough that a few of Celia’s classmates had been the children of teachers. Celia suspected they thought she had gotten the better deal, but to her teenaged mind a teacher was less embarrassing. It was the word
counselor
that did it, binding her to a mother professionally certified to dispense advice.

The guidance suite’s location above the music room had earned it carpeting. Tufted broadloom easily squelched the treble atrocity of Flute Choir—a concession to the chronic popularity of the instrument (so thin!) among dieting girls—but even deepest shag would not have muted the marching band. On rainy afternoons, or when the outside temperature dropped below 45 degrees, thumps and screeches radiated upward. The first thing Celia noticed was that brown carpet had been traded for blue. There were fewer cubicles, the school’s guidance personnel having dwindled along with Jensenville’s student population. Geometric lines of darker carpet color marked where the cubicles had been, a shadow grid of deeper blue compromised by fewer coffee stains and blots of trampled gum.

Celia’s arrival was met by anxious glances from two girls sitting inside the door, but their faces relaxed as soon as they judged her to be irrelevant. One wall of the waiting area was given to posters eschewing drugs, suicide, and sex, the other to glossy college photos. Celia wondered if there was significance to the girls’ position beneath the wall of vice.

“How can I help you?”

The guidance suite secretary asked the question in a way that did not leave Celia feeling as if she was being appraised for gossip or entertainment value, a quality Celia suspected had impressed her mother when Noreen was deciding who to hire for the job.

“Wait a minute, you must be Celia!” the secretary revised. “You’re just a perfect grown-up version of your yearbook picture. I’m Beverley. You’ve got your mother’s eyes.”

On hearing the word
mother
, the heads of the girls turned.

“This lucky woman is Mrs. Durst’s daughter,” Beverley explained. To Celia’s mortification, she found herself blushing.

“For real?” one of the girls said. At first glance, Celia thought her baby doll T-shirt spelled
NUBILE
in gold across the front. Celia had forgotten how pristine teenagers were—their bad habits still nascent, their bodies still indefatigable. Celia blinked. The T-shirt read
NUBIAN
. The girl could just as easily have been freshman or senior. Somewhere in the intervening decades, Celia had lost the ability to tell.

“Is she guiding you, like, all the time?” the girl asked.

“Not so much anymore,” Celia said. She tugged at the hem of her shirt, pulling it smooth across the front, but Nubian’s attention was already elsewhere, one less witness to the reappearance of Celia’s high school self.

The office door that read
NOREEN DURST, M.A
., opened onto a room about the same size as one of the parking lot’s larger SUVs. A bookcase along one wall contained the run of yearbooks marking Noreen’s tenure, a collection of college catalogs,
and a shelf lined with titles like
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul
. Celia’s mother sat behind the same desk Celia remembered from the cubicle era, on which rested the same framed photo of herself and her brother from 1981. The only obvious new addition was a sealed glass cylinder containing small liquid-filled glass globes, submerged at various levels in what looked like water.

“Do you like it?” her mother asked. “It’s a Galilean thermometer. Your father gave it to me I don’t know how long ago, after I complained for the zillionth time about working in a windowless building. It’s supposed to help me appreciate my marvelously climate-controlled environment, but mostly I just like the way it looks. Read the temperature on the lowest globe, the red one: it says sixty-eight degrees. Winter, fall, or spring—unless there’s a broken duct or something—it’s always sixty-eight degrees in here.”

“That’s good, I guess,” Celia offered. She closed the door behind her and sat in the chair opposite her mother’s desk, its defeated vinyl cushion collapsing beneath her.

Noreen nodded. “Different things work for different people. Ms. Tompkins actually keeps a full-size photo of a window on her wall. She’s got four photos, all of the same view, one for each season. She usually changes them when you’d expect, but sometimes spring will be up when it’s fall, or winter when it’s spring. A few years ago when she and Dick almost divorced, it was winter for quite some time in April. She’s a little cockeyed, but they all are—therapists, I mean. She’s good at what she does, better than most we’ve had. And she doesn’t just
work with adolescents—she runs a private adult practice on the days she’s not here.” Celia’s mother made an encouraging face that Celia chose to ignore.

“Mommy, when we were talking about Djuna yesterday afternoon, you mentioned how my being so young made it hard to know what to do.”

Celia paused, conditioned by yesterday’s postponements to be stopped as she had before, but Noreen sat at her desk, waiting.

“What did you mean when you said that you and Daddy didn’t want to do me more harm?” She understood why her mother had asked her to come. The windowless walls, the carpeting, and the closed office door created the feeling of a cloister, the world within kept separate from everything else.

Her mother sighed. “After what happened to Djuna, you got quiet. And not just about that. You used to love to talk … to the mailman, the doctor, your stuffed animals at naptime. When you were very little, I even recall you having a long conversation with a button.”

“I don’t remember,” Celia said.

“It was like a tap had been turned off. No more coming home and going right into your day, or chattering about food or TV shows or the neighbors. Now you had to be asked first, and even then you didn’t always answer. Your father never forgave himself, said we helped to turn you from a parakeet into a regular mute swan. Then came junior high, and all of a sudden you were busy. All those clubs and meetings. I worried at first that you were taking on too much, but your schoolwork
didn’t suffer and you seemed happy again. I was so grateful that I made sure not to do or say anything that might shut you back down. I suppose we should have gotten help for you back then. But at the time, I thought you were dealing with it in your own way. Kids are so resilient, and I—”

Celia shook her head. “This isn’t about what you didn’t do.”

“But as a parent, as
your
parent, I can’t help thinking about what I might have done better. You’ll find this out for yourself, someday, when you and Huck—”

Celia shifted in her chair and Noreen waved her hands over her desk as if trying to dispel smoke.