The Suburban Strange (2 page)

“You saw the new wing?” Ivo pointed along one side of the huge building. “As if this place weren’t large enough already.”

“You won’t be swimming in the new pool, then?” Brenden said to him, and Ivo feigned horror.

Their conversation was dotted with names and topics that were foreign to Celia. She forced herself not to fidget.

“Do you have a mix for us?” Liz asked Brenden.

“Of course I do.” Brenden opened his bag and pulled out a slim stack of jewel cases. “Everything is better with the right soundtrack.”

“Even something as depressing as the first day of school?”

“Especially something as depressing as the first day of school.” Brenden passed the CDs around.

“We have to make the most of it—it’s our last year together,” Ivo said, studying his copy. “You put ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ on here! That’s perfect!”

Brenden turned to Celia, one CD left in his hand. “I thought you might like one, too,” he said, smiling.

“Thank you!” Celia accepted it and studied the track list along with the others. Few of the artists were familiar to her, and those only because Regine had begun her initiation into the group’s musical tastes a few months earlier.

“I have a good feeling about this year,” Marco said. “It’s going to be great.”

Celia looked around. Other kids who had parked nearby were staring curiously at her group. It was obvious, though, these five dark friends didn’t care. When the Rosary started toward the building, they walked purposefully and slowly, just as they had driven, carrying themselves with a careful indifference. They didn’t look at the other kids, and they spoke quietly so no one else could hear. Celia did her best to mimic them. She was surprised to note the intrigued, even mystified respect from the others for the Rosary. Before she had met Regine, whenever she was in public, Celia had wished to be invisible, but there was no point in holding on to that desire now. If this morning was any indication—the procession of cars, the austere clothes, the deliberate manner—the Rosary cultivated mystique deliberately. And if it weren’t for a chain of unlikely events, Celia would have been on the other side, the outside, staring at this group, unsure and alone. By some strange chance, here she was in their midst, and she hoped she looked at least a little as if she belonged, even though she felt like an imposter. It was completely new, and a little thrilling, but she was scared she would drop something, or fall down and be exposed as a fake. Then they would just walk smoothly away from her . . .

Suddenly, ahead of them a girl broke away from her two friends, zigzagging across the pavement with her head ducked and her arms flailing around her face. “No, no, no!” she shrieked. Collectively the Rosary stopped walking, and Celia stopped with them.

“What are you doing?” the frantic girl’s friends called, laughing and confused.

“Ai!” The tormented girl jumped, her whole frame tensing. Then she came down, knees bent, and turned around slowly to look at her friends with wide eyes. She had left them behind, and they stayed put, unsure whether they wanted to be associated with such spastic behavior on the first day of school.

The girl had stopped near a jock in an orange T-shirt. “Hey, Elsie, what’s wrong?”

“A bee stung me!” Elsie held one hand to the side of her neck. “I’m allergic!”

“Whoa—we have to get you to the nurse!” The boy took her arm, but she sank to the asphalt. Her hand waved around her face again as she gasped for air.

Celia glanced at her group. Each of them stood calmly, unaffected by the girl’s plight. Where she was sprawled, the stung girl blocked their path to the school, and the Rosary only seemed to be waiting for the way to be cleared before they continued. Even from twenty feet away, Celia could see that Elsie’s face was swelling noticeably. The girl’s two friends had rushed over, and the jock had dropped to his knees next to her, his hands hovering uselessly around her as he scanned the parking lot. He called out, “Help! Somebody get the nurse!” Several kids took off running into the school.

Still the Rosary didn’t move. Celia couldn’t fault them for not getting involved. There wasn’t anything to do that wasn’t already being done, and there was no point in crowding the poor girl. But Celia was bothered by her feeling of helplessness and her friends’ seeming indifference to Elsie’s plight. Everyone else in the parking lot had stopped in their tracks, too, but they screamed and pointed, telling each other what was in front of them.

“What’s going on?” A young teacher came running toward the heaving girl.

“She’s allergic to bee stings!” the boy in the orange shirt told him as the teacher crouched next to him. But the teacher didn’t seem to know what to do, either. He stared at Elsie, and after another moment the jock urged him, “We have to get her that shot, what’s it called?” He looked around again and shouted, “Does anyone have that shot for allergic reactions?”

“I have an EpiPen!” Another boy came running out from a row of cars, digging in his satchel. He pulled out a small plastic case and handed it to the teacher on the ground by Elsie.

But the teacher stared at him, saying, “I’ve never . . .” The boy took the case back, popped the cap and pushed Elsie’s skirt up her leg, then jabbed the syringe into her thigh and held it there. He spoke in a low voice to the girl, who nodded and gasped. The boy tried to keep her hair out of her eyes.

The tension began to drain from the air. The spectators began to move again, and Elsie’s body started to relax. The nurse lumbered into the parking lot and looked relieved to find that the critical help already had been administered. In another minute the nurse and the teacher helped Elsie to her feet, one on each side, and escorted her into the building. Her friends collected her things and trailed behind her.

The jock stood up, his bright orange T-shirt the last bit of crisis left in the parking lot. He said something to the boy who had provided the EpiPen, and they nodded seriously at each other. The boy went off toward school, but the jock looked over in the direction of the Rosary. “Hey, Liz,” he said. “That was kind of intense.”

Liz opened her mouth and spoke a few syllables that didn’t add up to words. As if on cue, the Rosary began to walk again. Liz strugged to maintain their sedate pace as they stalked past the jock, who looked disappointed, but not surprised. Celia couldn’t decide what was strangest: that such an alarming thing had happened right in front of her on the first day of school, that this gloomy clique had been so aloof throughout it, or that a jock would feel as though he could engage Liz in a conversation.

They reached the school lobby without further incident, and Celia listened for them to comment about what had happened outside. “What did you say about it being a good year?” Ivo said to Marco. “If that was any indication, this year is cursed already.” They traded wry smiles, but in the next moment this group to which Celia was both a stranger and a ward had moved on to more unfamiliar names and things she didn’t understand. She gave up trying to follow the conversation and looked around.

Suburban High School wasn’t nearly as dark and glamorous as she suspected the Rosary would have preferred. The tile walls and textured plaster ceiling looked antiquated, and their colors were too drab to have names. When the group parted ways and Regine walked her upstairs, Celia found that the sophomore hall had all the sophistication of a strip mall or a jail. Against this backdrop Regine looked even more exotic than she had in the black sedan—even more exotic than she had in the summer drawing class where the two of them had met two short months ago. Celia glanced down and reminded herself she looked exotic now, too.

“So you see how we are, right?” Regine said to Celia. “Some kids might give you a hard time, and some kids are going to want to be friends with you just because you’re friends with us, and all I’ll say is you should use your best judgment. You decide if they’re smart enough, and if they look good enough. You decide who is worth your time.” Celia had never thought about it that way. She always had been on the receiving end of those evaluations. She had a hunch that if anyone else at Suburban met the standards Regine had laid out, the Rosary would have befriended them already.

“Do you know that girl?” she asked Regine, who looked at her uncomprehendingly. “The one who got stung?”

“Not really,” Regine said.

Celia’s concerns shifted away from sympathy and back toward herself. In a moment Regine was going to leave her, and the prospect of continuing alone floated up the same fears Celia had forced down several times already that morning.

She said goodbye to Regine and turned to her homeroom door. The room was full of kids in jeans and sneakers and brightly colored shirts who all fell silent when she walked in, looking her over. The air seemed to change, becoming drier and hotter. No longer could Celia pretend to be exotic—she was simply out of place. She considered running back out the door, but she was sure Regine would disapprove of such a display of weakness. This new moment had all the substance of a nightmare, and the next moment would be even worse.
What are they going to say?
she thought, realizing she had stopped cold a few feet into the room.

Celia knew her outfit was a little morose, and her dark eye shadow didn’t help. She knew she wasn’t making herself any more approachable than her sloppy jeans, faded T-shirts, and hunched shoulders had made her at her old school last year. She had spent all of ninth grade—all of middle school, even—trying to disappear but never quite succeeding, and that impulse still lurked just under the surface. During the summer, with no other kids around, Celia had been able to ignore the risk she was taking by making these bold changes to her appearance. Now she felt the risk like a blast from a hair dryer down her back. It was the same hot gust she had felt whenever more than one of her old classmates had looked at her at the same time. It was the precursor to something bad. If they were merciful, it was only ridicule: She was too tall. She wasn’t savvy enough to conform. She wasn’t strong-willed enough to defend herself. Her best friend was a sketchbook.

Celia had hoped a new high school would somehow be different, but now she thought of course it wasn’t—at least, not in the ways she needed it to be. Had she made a fatal miscalculation with the new strategy she had chosen? These dark clothes? Her dark straight hair, carefully blown even straighter, which now reached midway down her back? The hours spent in front of the mirror learning to make her eyes look smoky instead of blackened? She might match the blackboard now, but she couldn’t expect to fade into it.

The misgivings she had entertained at home less than an hour ago were nothing compared to the panic and despair she felt now. This was not at all like walking into the studio at the art institute. She was alone in a crowd of kids who looked exactly like the ones she had fled at the end of last year.
Stork,
she thought;
pencil-girl
.
Ghoul
—there would be new names for them to call her now:
goth freak
,
vampire
. The epithets careened around inside her head, and she waited to hear them.

No one said anything to her. She saw a seat off to the side and willed herself to walk as deliberately as possible over to it. Her ankle wobbled a little, but she pretended everything was fine. She sat down and heard the conversations around her start back up. Then she pulled her sketchbook out of her bag, opened it to the first blank page, and wrote,
What is going to happen?
She looked at the question for a moment, then crossed it out and wrote another.

What is happening to me?

Celia summoned back the confidence she was trying to learn from Regine, and memories of the recent times she’d succeeded in feeling mysterious and exotic, qualities she never had possessed before. She pushed her shoulders back a little farther, hearing Regine’s voice in her head admonish her for slouching. She thought back to the summer drawing class where she had met Regine.

THE ART INSTITUTE HAD BEEN
the first and was still the only foreign place Celia ever had walked into without desiring to disappear. She was one of the youngest students in the class, and while she wasn't about to go up to strangers and start talking, this was a place where a battered sketchbook was a badge of honor and her felicity with a pencil would work in her favor. The drawing class had been her mother's suggestion. Celia had understood it immediately as a transparent attempt to find something she would do that included other people in the room. She had agreed, in the way someone who is fluent in French condescends to take a conversation class. For once she believed she was on solid ground, and she entered that studio full of strangers knowing that some of them might draw as well as she did but that it was unlikely any of them drew better. On the first day of class Celia enjoyed a rare taste of confidence, like the spatter of carbonation on her tongue that went to her head and made her a little giddy, though no one would have been able to tell from looking at her.

The instructor had built a towering still life on a round table in the middle of the room, and after a cursory introduction he told the class to choose anything to sketch so he could assess their individual skill levels. Celia considered the depressing pile of props, but nothing inspired her. She always drew things that were alive, and the table had the look of a wake, somehow. Less than five minutes in and she panicked—was she going to fall flat in this place where she had dared to imagine she would fly? The others were starting to draw. She stared at them, and then at the still life, and then at her empty pad. She looked around again, and her attention was drawn to a striking girl on the far side of the circle who had pulled off a pair of dove gray driving gloves and was digging in her case for a pencil. Before Celia made a conscious decision, her hand captured on her pad the girl’s shiny black hair, which hung in a severe bob, framing her Latin eyes and heart-shaped face. Celia used a few crisp lines to describe the girl’s white collar, which lay atop her black cardigan, and a few more for the short-sleeved cuffs that peeked out from rolled sweater sleeves. She roughed in the plywood box on which the girl sat, and her black jeans, which tapered to oxblood penny loafers. Celia softened the girl’s pose, removing the tension in her frame as she labored over her own drawing. And there she was, alive on the paper: the intriguing girl at work on a drawing, her face serious and somehow meditative, the studio light slanting across her body.