The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door (17 page)

I collapsed into the bush and sighed.

After a few deep breaths, I made my way back along the side of Drake’s house and then through the neighbor’s yard and back to the street. There was still an hour until the final bell rang, and I had to kill time at the park so that I wouldn’t get home before school was out. I sat on a swing and thought about going to New York and wished I had my poetry journal to comfort me. It made my skin crawl to think about Sandy and Mandy reading it.

I had exhibited some shocking behavior since high school started two weeks ago. I had ignored assignments, got detention, stolen a cell phone, forged a text message, and just now, skipped all my afternoon classes. But nothing compared with going to New York without my mom’s permission. This was another level of bad.

As the swing moved back and forth, I weighed my options. I would be in a mountain of trouble if I went. But I owed Drake in a huge way after outing him at school. Still, Drake was planning on moving back to New York, and I would still be here with a probable suspension and angry parents to deal with and no best friend. On the other hand, if I was grounded after Drake was gone, it’s not like I would be missing out on any social time. I would have nothing to do anyway. I swung back and forth, while my brain did laps around a track of my skull.

Finally, when I had wasted enough time to get dizzy, but not to make a decision, I walked home.

× × ×

My mom’s car was in the driveway. I knew she was working the night shift and wouldn’t need to leave for hours. I prepared myself for parental small talk, hoping I hadn’t gotten busted for skipping my last three classes. Not every teacher takes attendance. When I opened the front door, I found my mom standing at the coat closet.

“Oh, hi, June Bug,” she said. “How cold is it out there? I was just trying to decide which coat to wear.”

“Um, medium,” I answered cautiously, throwing down my backpack inside the door. So far, so good. That’s when I noticed we weren’t alone. There was a man with blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses sitting on our sofa. He stood up when he saw me come in.

“Celia,” my mom said brightly, “this is Simon, my friend from the hospital. Simon, this is my daughter, Celia.”

Simon offered me his hand to shake and smiled widely. I did not smile back, and I did not shake. It was the guy from the mall.

“Mom, is he a date?” I asked in a Dark voice.

“Celia!” My mom snapped. “Don’t be rude. Can I talk to you in the kitchen for a moment, please?”

I followed her through the swinging door with my hands folded across my chest. “That was snide, Celia. Simon is the first friend I’ve made at the hospital, and you just embarrassed me.”

I thought about how people kept assuming that I was dating Drake, but he was just my friend. “Is he gay?” I asked.

“No, he isn’t,” she said, sighing. “Enough with the rude questions. He’s a friend and that is all you need to know. Simon came over to have dinner and go to a movie before my night shift, and I was wondering if you would like to join us.”

I felt something finish hardening inside of me, like water that can officially be called ice. There was a decision hanging over my head when I walked through the door and, in that moment, I made it. “Mom, I have a ton of homework, I’d really rather stay home,” I said.

She stood looking at me. “Are you sure? I’m afraid that I leave you to eat alone too much. We’re going for Difari Pizza, and I know you love that place.”

“Yeah, that does sound great, but I have a big paper due,” I said casually. “I’ll just have a turkey sandwich here.”

“Okay,” she relented. “Bed by ten o’clock. No later.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said, smiling. “Sorry.”

“Well. Thank you, Celia. That is very nice of you to say.” She patted my arm and looked at me curiously.

I followed her back into the living room. “Nice to meet you, Simon,” I said, waving. “Have fun tonight.”

“Nice to meet you too, Celia,” he said, standing up from the couch again and waving back.

“Have a good night, June Bug,” Mom said, and put on her coat. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’m going to school early to hit the library before English, so I might leave before you get home.”

“Okay.” They left through the front door.

Then I went to my room to start packing for New York.

CHAPTER

29

I pulled out a duffel bag and started with socks and underwear. Then black leggings, black T-shirts, a couple of black skirts, and an extra hoodie. I added the novel I had started reading,
Looking for Alaska
by John Green, and begrudgingly found a brand-new composition book to start another poetry journal. It made my bone marrow boil again to think about Sandy and Mandy reading my poetry. But I couldn’t afford any more thoughts of revenge. My glorious revenge had gotten me exactly fifty minutes of satisfaction before Sandy did something worse to me. And she hadn’t just aimed for me this time, she’d targeted Drake, too. Instead of tossing another grenade, I needed to focus on triage.

I went to my computer. Although I was reasonably alienated from both of my parents, I had no desire for them to sit around thinking I had been abducted by a biker gang or polygamous sect. I thought of someone safe I could tell.

Re: Your eyes only

From: Celia ([email protected])

Sent: Thur 9/23 4:05PM

To: Dorathea Eberhardt ([email protected])

dorathea,

For a good and just cause that would take way too long to explain, i need to go somewhere for a day or two. i will be perfectly safe. i’ll be with a friend.

I’m not going to ask mom and dad for permission, but I don’t want them to worry. will you wait until after 10 a.m. tomorrow and then tell them i’m safe and i will get in touch with them? i can’t say where I’m going, but i can say that i have to go.

THANKS!

celia

I got up from my computer and flopped on my bed. There were seven hours between Drake and me. I made a to-do list that included: make sandwiches, find money, shower, nap, and try not to panic. I managed all but the last two. I was panicking too much to take a nap. I remembered that my mom keeps emergency cash in the freezer, because if your house burns down, the refrigerator might survive. Imagine a ranch house burned to ashes, and the milk is still cold on its shelf. I brushed the ice crystals off three hundred dollars and concealed it in several locations on my person. After that, I spent some agonizing hours staring at the ceiling and checking the clock, and then it was finally quarter to twelve.

Grabbing my duffel bag, I left through the front door. The neatly manicured sidewalks of our subdivision with their flat slabs of creamy concrete transformed into an eerie stage set at midnight. Directors of horror flicks know there is nothing creepier than exaggerated perfection. The streetlights alternated lighting up sections of the road every few minutes, and televisions flickered in a few dark houses like strobe lights. I had never been in the neighborhood by myself this late at night before. With every step I took away from my house, I felt like my life belonged a little less to my parents and a little more to me.

I took the same path behind the neighbor’s fence to Drake’s backyard. Instead of tossing a pebble, I stood in the flower bed and knocked on Drake’s windowpane. His grandmother’s house, like mine, is just one story, so all the bedrooms are on ground level. As soon as Drake had opened the window, he leaned right through and hugged me. He had to hang halfway over the ledge to do it.

“I knew you would come,” he whispered. Even in the darkness, I could see that the bruise on Drake’s cheek had gotten darker.

I passed him my duffel bag, and he helped me climb over the sill. Luckily, Drake’s grandmother’s house has a brick façade, and it’s pretty easy to find a foothold on brick.

“My first break-in,” I said as soon as I was safely in his room, dusting off my skirt and hoodie from climbing through the window.

“Most robbers aren’t given a hand getting over the sill,” Drake replied. He suddenly gripped both of my arms and looked into my eyes. “What is the title of the fifth chapter of
Dream It! Do It!
?”

“Um, I dunno,” I said, feeling awkward about the way he was looking at me.

“Fearlessness,” Drake repeated back. “The first three lines go like this.” Drake closed his eyes like he was channeling a spirit. He recited.

“Chapter Five: Fearlessness

“You are Dream Warriors. Your Dream demands that you move boldly through the world. This is the part where you stop Dreaming and start Doing!”

“The bus leaves for Harrisburg at two a.m., and it gets in around four.” He went to his desk drawer and produced a train schedule. “Then the train for New York leaves at five, so we’ll be stuck at the station for a bit. I’ll bring cards. We can buy our train tickets to New York once we get to the station. The earliest train of the day never sells out, even on a Friday. My parents are planning on getting the train that comes in from New York at ten.”

Drake walked over to his bed and put the train schedule into the backpack lying there.
Dream It! Do It!
was on the bed, too, lying open. It was my first time in Drake’s room, which, in truth, didn’t look like a teenage boy’s bedroom so much as a grandmother’s guest room that a teenage boy was trying to inhabit. The rug was robin’s egg blue, and the walls were papered in a deep red fabric. Thick, heavy curtains hung over the windows, and there were two wood dressers and a full-length mirror. There was even a stand with an antique quilt draped over it. The only signs of youth were a pile of sneakers parked next to a skateboard by the door and a bunch of notebooks sitting out on the desk. Drake’s room reminded me again that in Hershey, my new best friend was a guest.

“I wish I could do something about my eye,” Drake said, looking into his mirror at the dark bruise blossoming there. You could count the individual knuckle prints where Joey’s balled fist impacted Drake’s face.

“Did it hurt?” I asked him
.

“Not as much as you would think.” He kept looking in the mirror. “All the adrenaline makes your body numb. It hurts more now than when it happened.”

“So, how long’s your suspension?” I asked, flopping down on the bed near Drake’s backpack.

“Three days,” he said. “So school won’t notice I’m missing tomorrow, but Gran will figure it out when she calls me for breakfast. As soon as she realizes I’m gone, she’s going to call your mom.”

“My mom will think I’m at school when she gets home from her shift.”

“They should both know we’re missing by around nine,” said Drake, “depending how late Gran plans to let me sleep. They won’t know where we’ve gone, so we shouldn’t have to worry about getting caught on the train. We’ll be halfway to New York.”

“Won’t Japhy be in school when we get there? How will you get to him?”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” Drake turned away from the mirror to look at me. “I can’t decide if it is better to go to his school and wait for him outside until the bell rings, or to kill time until after school and go to his house. His parents would definitely let me in and he would have to talk to me, but he might feel more awkward about seeing me with his parents there. I don’t know.” A shadow passed over Drake’s face. “Buddy will have advice for me. I need to read some more on the train.” He picked
Dream It! Do It!
up off the bed and added it to his backpack.

× × ×

When Drake finished packing, he stood in the middle of the room and turned around and around as if he was memorizing the look of each of the four walls. Finally, he picked up his knapsack, turned to me and said, “Okay, Celia, we’re going back out through the window.”

It was harder getting out of the house than it had been getting in. Still, I perched on the ledge and jumped safely into the grass without snagging my tights.

Drake tossed both of our bags through and then looped two legs over the sill. He got footholds on the brick, gripped the window frame with one hand, and used the other to pull the sash down as far as possible. Then he hopped off into the grass. We made for the street, looking around the way cat burglars do on television shows. Our plan was to walk to the bus depot, since we couldn’t call a cab to come to Drake’s house. We went the long way, weaving through the neighborhoods and staying off of main streets.

The night air was cold, reminding me that winter would be here soon. We walked quietly for a while past the four different models of houses in our subdivision. The thing about planned communities is that you don’t get a lot of surprises. A homeowner is really thinking outside the box if he decides to add a porch or a two-car garage. In Hershey, even the houses just want to fit in. We left the neighborhood and started walking along Cocoa Avenue, cutting through parking lots when possible to avoid being spotted by passing cars.

I switched shoulders when my duffel bag got too heavy and refused Drake’s offer to carry it, starting to wish that I had worn sneakers instead of boots. “What will you say to Japhy when you see him?”

“I keep imagining that moment,” said Drake, walking beside me since he had left his skateboard at his grandmother’s house. “I think when he sees me with a black eye, I won’t have to say a lot. I feel like he will just know. Buddy says that ‘your Dream is looking for you as much as you are looking for your Dream.’”

We turned off Cocoa Avenue and then I saw them, blinking through the dark, the fluorescent lights of the bus depot.

Bus stations are not very friendly environments, especially in the middle of the night. We got there just before two a.m., and the station agent looked at us sideways for a moment but didn’t seem that curious. Of all the people who are hard to surprise, I bet people who run bus stations are high on the list. Even as we purchased our tickets at the adult rate, swearing that we were over sixteen, the man looked jaded, like he knew we were lying and also couldn’t care less.

We sat in orange bucket seats that were connected on a long, metal rail while we waited to board. They looked like something I imagined would furnish the holding room of a jail. The fluorescent lights kept flickering. I half expected the police to walk through the station door and the station agent to point to us and say, “There they are, officer. I knew that girl wasn’t sixteen.” But it never happened. Instead, the agent announced that the bus to Harrisburg was ready for boarding, and we climbed onto the bus along with ten other people.

Drake and I chose a row in the middle of the coach. The seats were covered with heavy carpet-like material, and luggage racks were suspended over our heads. The windows were as wide as my outstretched arms, but they showed only streetlights and store signs and darkness. I had never traveled anywhere without my parents. Part of me felt like it was the start of a great adventure, like I was jumping on board a pirate ship in a comic book. But part of me felt like a bully had drawn a line in the dirt and dared me to cross it, and I had just walked over and planted both feet. I wanted the moment to be vibrant in my memory, to recall every detail, but as soon as the engine of the bus fired up, I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the redbrick train station of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Drake held my hand as we crossed the bus parking lot and went through the giant glass doors of the station, which is one large hall, like a waiting room built for a giant. The walls are polished wood and there are white columns that appear to be holding up the ceiling on their great, singular arms. Long, wooden benches line the walls.

The station was surprisingly busy for so early in the morning; it wasn’t even four a.m. yet. “Commuters to New York and DC,” Drake muttered as if he had heard my thought.

We bought our tickets with Drake’s credit card and walked to one of the smooth, worn benches to wait until our train left. We had almost an hour to kill until boarding, so we sat cross-legged and played Go Fish because it’s a game you could play without having gotten any sleep.

“Do you have any twos?” I asked, halfway into our second game.

“Yes.” He handed me two cards. He didn’t seem to care that he was losing.

“How about threes?”

“So now everyone at school knows about me,” Drake said instead of “go fish.”

The statement stung. “I’m so sorry about the poem.”