The Queen of Everything (4 page)

32

I snatched my hand out of his. Fine," I said. I
slammed the car door. I don't even know what I was so mad about. Of course some
things were his business. It's not like he was in the habit of telling me all
about his private life anyway.

All day I felt weird. I hoped maybe an hour
with Ms. Cassaday might shake off the bad feelings I'd carried around through
science and French and PE with that pervert Mr. Bartlett, who I swear was always
looking at our butts.

"It's meant to be for children," Melissa told
Ms. Cassaday, before reading the story she'd written. It was called "Freddy Fir
Visits the Lumberyard." I'm not kidding.

"This is a children's story?" Ms. Cassaday
boomed after Melissa finished. Melissa had the little fir getting plucked from
the forest, sent to the factory, and made into wood chips. Melissa was my
friend, but even I could see that sometimes she was one taco shy of a
combination plate. When someone disagreed with her, her best argument was
usually, "Yeah huh!"

Ms. Cassaday clutched her heart. "Somebody call
the paramedics. My
God!"
I don't think she was supposed to say
God
in school. Ms. Cassaday said things she probably wasn't supposed to all the
time.

"It's got an environmental message," Melissa
said defensively.

"All right, all right," Ms. Cassaday
said.

33

"Does anyone have a comment on
this?"

"I liked it," Chantay West said, which was no
surprise.

Chantay was always ready to pucker when it came
to Melissa's ass. We always made fun of her name behind her back. Chantay, a
drugstore perfume. One of those girl groups from the fifties--the
Chantays.

"You
liked it. Would a child? Think of
your audience. This could give a kid nightmares. This could give
me
nightmares." Ms. Cassaday paced, as if her feet and her brain were having an
argument about the exact place she should be. "My God, I can see it now!" She
slapped her palm against her forehead. With her batik skirts and jiggly arms and
numerous half-drunk cups of coffee on her desk, she was a bit like my old
teachers at the alternative school, but I found her strange and fascinating. I
could watch her all day, the way you can watch and watch someone you could never
imagine being. The way you sometimes can't turn the channel when it's those TV
preachers with big hair on Sunday mornings.

"Think of this," Ms. Cassaday thundered. "Pop
is reading Junior his bedtime story. Here's little Freddy Fir with his nice
little family in the forest, then wham! You've got saws buzzing and sparks
flying and Freddy in the back of a truck. Freddy is about to be annihilated!
Freddy is

34

heading to a
death camp!
Okay, Junior,
take your drink of water and go to sleep now."

The class snickered. Melissa looked as though
she wanted to send Ms. Cassaday through the chipper next. A lot of people hated
Ms. Cassaday. I wouldn't admit it out loud, but I thought she was great. With
Ms. Cassaday I felt that secret glee you get when you're with someone who goes
around being honest all the time, saying all the things you wished you
could.

"This was supposed to be about preserving our
forests then?" Ms. Cassaday asked.

"It was my mom's idea," Melissa said. I
believed it. Diane always did things like pack Melissa's lunch in that plastic
Barnes & Noble bag with Langston Hughes on one side and Tennessee Williams
on the other. Larry Beene got it on a trip to Seattle once and bought the canvas
version for himself. I think they liked it so much because not only did it show
that the Beene family was okay with gays and minorities, but that they recycled,
too. I doubted Mr. or Mrs. Beene had had a thought of their own since the
seventies, when thinking was safer.

"Well, there's the trouble.
Your
ideas
are what we're after here, not your mother's. You did a great story last time
about the girl who didn't want to go to college. Here, though, you start with a
moral. You lost sight of all the fine points. Didn't see the forest for the
trees, we

35

could say." Ms. Cassaday raised her eyebrows up
and down.

More snickers. "Okay. Moving along." Her eyes
roamed around the room then settled. "Mr. Kramer." Kale Kramer cleared his
throat. Kale was one of the guys at school that you were supposed to drool over
with desperate wanting. Most girls did; good looks, I guess, have a way of
making some people overlook little things like stupidity and cruelty. Kale had
perfect features-- his nose, mouth, and eyes might have been designed to meet
exact factory specifications. He was athletic and muscular, but he was short.
Short was the thing that probably gave him the pissed-off air, like somebody had
messed up in manufacturing and he wasn't going to forget it. He was popular, and
there were always rumors about him: that he once killed a cat in some brutal
fashion, that he had a tattoo on his penis that said i get a rise out of you .
For some reason those stories only seemed to add to his allure. Melissa was
crazy for him. Kale worked at the Hotel Delgado docks on the far end of the
island, where boaters cruising the islands got together for parties and to use
the showers. Melissa would walk her dog, Boog, out there to try to get Kale's
attention, even if this meant driving way out to the other side of the island
and basically carrying poor old Boog around under one arm.

36

'"The Bad Killers!" Kale read. He paused and
grinned at the class before looking down at his paper again. In his story a
couple of guys were walking into a diner, talking. I watched Ms. Cassaday. She
stalked to the window, crossed her arms over her chest. She listened to him
read, and I could see her cheeks flushing red.

Finally Ms. Cassaday whirled around. "Enough!"
she shouted. '"The Bad Killers,' Mr. Kramer?" She stood over his desk. Her ears
were turning red now too. I'd never seen anyone's ears turn a color like that
before. Kale Kramer peered out from the brim of his hat and shrugged.

"Hey," he said.

"Poor, poor Hemingway. Like he wasn't depressed
enough. You think I wouldn't recognize
Hemingway?
Even butchered to
hell?"

"Oh man," said Mathew Bukowsky, who sat next to
me.

I thought the same thing. I wish she wouldn't
say
hell.
I could just see Rosemary Lewis going home and telling her
mother, getting Ms. Cassaday in trouble.

"And what exactly is this?" Ms. Cassaday tapped
the brim of Kale's painter's cap. "Besides a nice floral? No caps in school, am
I right? Even if they're
pretty?"
She looked around the class as if
someone might actually speak up. "I begin to understand Hemingway's despair when
I think

37

of a kid in a flowered hat stealing his
work."

Kale Kramer looked exceedingly pissed off. You
got the feeling he and Ms. Cassaday despised each other. For a moment his eyes
flashed anger, his jaw muscles clenched. I thought again of my father and me
that morning. Kale's fingertips grabbed the edge of the desk as if he might
knock it over. Then a smirk returned.

"Hey, this is a fashion statement," he said,
stretching the elastic of his hat with his thumb.

"Oh, and what's the statement? How much you
like marigolds? You stole from Hemingway. I'd like to send you to jail for
theft," Ms. Cassaday said. "Or twist your perfect nose off your pretty little
face," she said. She picked up his paper and ripped it in half, made a show of
tossing it into the wastebasket. "Since I can't do either, you'll have to give
me ten pages by tomorrow. Okay, everyone, pack up."

The class groaned in Kale's behalf. "But I
work," he said as we filed out.

"Life is hard," Ms. Cassaday said. "Sometimes
the shits," I heard her mumble after her back was turned. She sounded as if she
meant it. Behind me I heard her sigh. In the narrow rectangle of glass on the
door, I saw her at her desk Ming coffee cups, trying to figure out which one was
still warm.

"Dyke," Melissa said to me outside in the hall.
Loudly, and more for Kale's benefit, I

38

guessed, than mine. I thought about seeing Ms.
Cassaday and our old typing teacher, Elaine Blackstone, working at the oyster
farm last summer. I thought of Ms. Cassaday's troubled sigh.

"What do you expect from a lesbo," Kale Kramer
said. "Hey." He nodded his head to me. "Catch."

Before I knew it, I was looking down at his
cap, which I held in my hands. He grinned at me. 'I'll call you tonight," he
said, as if we were Mr. and Mrs. Kramer and he was just leaving to go to the
office. He turned and went down the hall with his friends. I was left with this
hat in my hands. I could see a dirty ring where his forehead had touched the
elastic. I felt odd, as if I was suddenly left holding a bedroom slipper or a
cantaloupe or some other strange thing in the middle of school. I didn't know
what I was supposed to do with it. Besides, I'm not fond of
marigolds.

Afterward that stupid hat was all Melissa
wanted to talk about. Lucky me, we had plenty of time for it too, as it was
Friday and our day off at True You. "What does this
mean?
He gave you his
hat!
Why'd he give
you
his hat? You don't even like
him."

"He's got a hundred girls all following him
around with their tongues hanging out. Maybe I'll auction the thing off and make
a few bucks."

39

"You've got to come over," Melissa said. "We've
got to talk about this. My
God."

"Okay, but I can't stay long," I
said.

"You want to get back for
the call,"
she
said. She sounded both mad and interested at the same time, the way she sounded
when my mom tried to make peace by taking me to a Jimmie Dix concert in Seattle
last summer. Jimmie Dix was one thing Melissa and I were in one hundred percent
agreement about. Even though most people we knew listened to those groups with
names like Snoop Doggy Doo on Shoe, we both said you had to be made of ice, or
dead, if you didn't get the shivers watching Jimmie Dix sing "Battleground of
Love" in that video where he's with the woman on the beach.

I was not anxious to get home for Kale Kramer's
call. I was anxious to get home to see where things stood between my dad and me,
but I wasn't about to tell Melissa that. I'd realized by then that confiding in
Melissa about the big things was about as helpful as if I bared my soul to her
dog, Boog. Maybe
he
would even get my point, who could tell? Besides
that, I felt it was my duty to act at least a little interested in Kale Kramer.
Since Kale had thrown me his hat, my stock price had split. Wendy Williams had
even said hi to me in the hall. I've known her since the seventh grade, and the
only thing she'd ever said to me was "Je-sus!" one time when I

40

bumped into her going around a corner. All
afternoon Melissa had been clinging to me like we were trying to escape from a
burning building and I was the fireman.

Melissa worked the key into the lock of her
front door. It was one of my mother's complaints that before all the people like
the Beenes moved onto the island, no one locked their doors. In fact people
would just leave their keys in the ignition of their cars in case a neighbor
needed to borrow it. But no more.

We took our shoes off before we went inside
Melissa's house, as was expected. Diane said it was important to integrate the
traditions of other cultures into our own lives, but I suspected she just wanted
to keep her carpets clean.

"Mother, have you lost your mind?" Melissa
said. The Beene couch sat in the middle of the living room. Diane stood on a
chair, wrestling with the end of a long, mossy tree branch.

"Oh, good," she said. "Girls, would you each
hold up an end of this? I want to get an idea of how it'll look." Diane hopped
down and handed her end of the branch to Melissa. She brushed her hands clean.
"I saw this on the Home Decorating Channel. Natural curtain rods. Here, Jordan."
She handed me my end. Diane tended to get carried away. The whole house was
stenciled: the kitchen with a rim of baskets overflowing with grapes, the
laundry room with a smeary line of

41

lemon-colored ducks. Melissa's room was done
almost entirely in men's red-and-blue handkerchiefs--curtains and pillows and
even the bedspread. If you had to blow your nose in there you'd have it
made.

"Higher girls," Diane said.

"My arm's about to fall off," Melissa said.
"Mom, you got crap all in your hair."

Diane absentmindedly brushed at the bits of
moss and leaves that had hightailed it out of the forest via the blonde poof on
her head. She looked at us, then tilted her head and squinted her eyes. I guess
she saw something other than I did, which was two girls power-lifting a log that
stank like wet leaves. "Okay," she said, and nodded, pleased.

"Don't tell me you're really going to stick a
tree branch on our wall," Melissa said.

"To each his or her own," Diane sang. "Just set
it down there on that plastic sheet."