The View From Who I Was (9 page)

“Sure.” Corpse simmered with apprehension; she'd had a hard time with her
own
applications. These kids were plenty smart; she'd seem like a fool.

“Good. We have twelve juniors applying next year.” Louise shook her head. “I wish we could get all twenty-one to apply. Let's plan for you to meet with three students each afternoon. Tomorrow you'll meet with … ” She walked to an appointment calendar on her desk and ran her finger to tomorrow's box. “Pauline, John, and William. See how I've listed the schools under their names?”

Corpse scanned the paper and nodded.
William
.
Beauty Repellent
.

“Excellent. Here's the computer you'll be using.” Louise walked to where the two upholstered chairs had been pushed apart, a short wooden table squeezed between. “When they're finished, please print off their applications and store them in here.” She pointed to a folder. “Save them on this flash drive too.”

“Are you sure they need my help?”

“Can't hurt,” Louise said without looking at her.

Corpse flushed. Louise and Mr. Handler were just creating something for her to do. She wondered what the staff was telling the students about why they'd have to endure this with her. I pictured them sitting there, bored, humoring her, thinking the whole time how screwed up she was. She wished she'd never come.

“Okay,” Corpse said. She took a pencil from a tin can next to the computer and marked hashes next to
Pauline
,
John
, and
William
. She drew back the folding chair at the computer and sat down.

Louise returned to her desk.

Corpse pulled up the first school under the first name and began to navigate the site. The upholstered chairs on either side of the desk seemed like pudgy guards. From the inch-wide opening to Mr. Handler's office, voices trickled out. If Corpse strained, she could make out words, but she concentrated on not listening. I loitered around, nervous about Corpse's comment at breakfast.

She was well into the second college site, Gustavus Adolphus, when Roberta swooped out, wiping her cheeks. Right through me.

She missed a step and froze.

I shot to the ceiling, jolted by her fury and confusion. Her touch mirrored Corpse's, yet emitted such sexuality.

Mr. Handler leaned against his office door frame. Roberta scowled over her shoulder like Corpse was a disease, then bolted. The screen door clapped behind her. Mr. Handler looked a hundred years old. He smiled sadly at Corpse and Louise.

Louise shook her head. “You're a god, Perry.”

He patted Corpse's shoulder and disappeared back into his office. The chair's creak as he settled into it seemed part of his sigh.

Fifteen

From Oona's journal:

In the moonlight falling directly onto the crystal clear water … the large trout disappeared in the jet of the waterfall, which glistened like falling metal. I saw it … dancing in a wild spinning movement … It then came out of this spinning movement and floated motionlessly upwards. On reaching the lower curve of the waterfall, it tumbled over and with a strong push reached behind the upper curve of the waterfall. There, in the fast flowing water, with a vigorous tail movement, it disappeared.

—Viktor Schauberger

Though I'd willed Corpse to stay in that warm bed, she strode up the double-track through murky early light, partly to get warm, and partly because she didn't want Angel to see her. She was huffing when she reached the halfway point where she'd called Gabe the day before. It seemed a week ago that she'd made that call rather than yesterday.

She kept going. All this walking was great practice. Her missing toes still shouted, but her stride was definitely smoothing. What we'd thought was the top was actually a swale where the mountain flattened before continuing up. Angel kneeled in a clearing, facing east with her head bowed, silhouetted by a rising sliver of sun that ignited the horizon and the mountain's ascending edge. Corpse prowled behind a juniper and peered through its scented branches.

Angel began chanting in a language we didn't understand, and Corpse suddenly felt like a peeping Tom. She turned the other direction and picked a blue-gray berry. Sliced it with her thumbnail. Held its sharp, clean smell to her nose. It reminded her of the cleaner Sugeidi used on the woodwork of Chateau Antunes. Across Corpse's chest, a stick of longing seemed to connect her shoulders and tug toward the maid she wasn't supposed to call.

Angel grew quiet, and Corpse turned as Angel rose, brushing off her knees. She spotted Corpse and Corpse froze, looking like an idiot.

“Are you spying on me?” Angel said.

Corpse stepped out, but I stayed in the tree. Twenty yards stretched between them, and Corpse held up her palm to shield the sun. “When you tell a person you dreamed about her, it gets her attention. But I didn't spy; I turned my back.”

Angel wore the same gray sweatshirt and navy sweatpants. She blew out her breath and started toward the road.

“Why do you do it?”

“I'm showing him I'm ready for the day. And worthy.”

I wondered what the sun saw when it looked at Corpse.

“Do you do it every morning?” she asked.

“Most mornings. Sometimes I'm lazy.”

“Do they greet the sun back home?”

“Yes,” Angel said.

“Do you miss it? Home?”

“A little.”

“Where's home?”

“Fort Defiance, Arizona.”

“What do you miss?”

“What is this? Twenty questions?”

“Sorry.”

Angel shrugged, but it seemed more like something inside her giving up. “I miss my family. Especially my grandfather.”

“I used to hate my mom.”

“You don't anymore?” Angel looked interested for the first time.

A breeze rose from the valley, draping Corpse's hair across her face. She hooked it back with a finger and returned that hand to blocking the sun. “I understand her now.”

“What changed?” Angel said, really looking at her.

“I tried to kill myself.”

Angel nodded. Her eyes swerved to me in my tree.

Corpse's hand dropped, and she went limp all over.

Angel glanced at the sun. “I've got to get going.” She took two steps. “Want to come?”

No!
I said. Enough was enough.

Corpse couldn't move. Her mouth barely worked. “I need … to make a call.”

Angel traced Corpse's sagging outline with her eyes. “See you at breakfast?”

“Breakfast.”

Corpse listened to Angel's footsteps descend the double-
track till they disappeared. I hung back, nervous. After a long time, Corpse turned to the sun. “What do you see? A dead girl? Bullshit?” She shut her eyes, and red ignited their lids. Her thoughts turned to flame, her hands made fists, and she rocked back and forth. “What's wrong with me?”

She willed the sun's energy to scour her like a laser beam. She imagined that searing beam inching from her toes to the top of her head, smoke rising off her.

Two magpies landed in a nearby tree and started a racket. She stumbled back like a drunk and opened her eyes. She reached her hands up and yelled, like sending a long ray back at the sun, and the magpies took to squawking flight. For a long time she stood, arms outstretched, her eight digits reaching like twigs. It was freaky, and I hoped nobody could see her from below.

She pulled out her phone. On the third ring, Sugeidi said “Hello,” the word like a box in her mouth.

“
Hola, Sugeidi. Es Oona
,” Corpse said.

“
Sí, Oona. Cómo estás?
You are no hurt?”

“No, I'm fine.” Corpse's voice rose to that kid voice. “I just missed you. That's all.”

Before the muffled sound of fingers over the mouthpiece, she heard Sugeidi's breath catch in her throat.

At breakfast Corpse didn't talk much. She felt limp, exhausted, like she'd trudged a thousand miles. She wondered if it was from getting up so early and hiking up the mountain these last two days, but she knew better. This fatigue was from what had happened up there. Angel eyeing me in that juniper kept playing in her head like a song. Corpse sensed me sensing her and poked at her eggs with her fork. She felt Angel's eyes on her now. At a table behind them, those same two white women, the ponytail one and the scrub-brush-haired one, murmured, the only other people in the room.

“Did you already know I'd been dead?” Corpse said.

Angel shrugged and glanced my way.

“Try me,” Corpse said. “If I'd said I was an urban Indian, would you tell me?”

Angel's face hardened. She rose and gathered her tray.

“Can I join you tomorrow? To greet the sun?”

Angel closed her eyes and sighed. “It's private.”

Corpse set her hand on the table and studied her missing fingers.

Angel watched her, seeming to weigh things.

Corpse longed to ask about the dream.

“See you,” Angel said.

Corpse watched Angel walk across the common area toward the big building. The women still murmured behind Corpse, and she peeked over her shoulder at them. They leaned close. Their hushed voices lured her attention.

“I'm just not sure what I'll do next year,” the ponytail woman said. “This has been a great experience, don't get me wrong. But it's been a wild ride, and I've never been able to forget, even for a minute, that I'm an outsider.”

“Don't you think you're overreacting?” the scrub-brush-haired woman said.

“Did I ever tell you about my first week here?”

No response. Corpse imagined Scrub Brush shaking her head.

“I think it was the second night. And one of the girls came banging on my door, whimpering about witches and
something
in her room.”

“What? Like a ghost?”

“I don't know. It was the middle of the night, for God's sake, and I tried to calm her. I mean, a witch? I eventually got her to sleep—she spent the night in my room—and in the morning she seemed fine. At lunch Yazzie took me aside. Apparently I'd handled it all wrong. When something like this happens, you inform him immediately, and they call a medicine man.”

No response again.

“I read the faculty handbook. It doesn't say anything about this kind of thing.”

“But now you know. I'll take this place any day. I taught at this boarding school for at-risk teens outside Chicago. Talk about challenges. Every school—”

“And then,” Ponytail continued, “there was the time I was directing
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. I had all these kids that were sprites, and I was trying to get them to
sprite
across the stage. They were having a hard time with it, so I said, ‘How about if I play some drum music?' Well, they all rolled their eyes and got pissed off, saying, ‘Just let us be teenagers!'”

“Exactly. They're just teenagers,” Scrub Brush said.

“No. Every day it's something. I won't ever get things right. I need to make up my mind. Oops, it's 9:10. See you at lunch,” Ponytail said.

Students and adults entered the common area, most headed somewhere. Five students loitered together on the yellow grass. William was one of them, and he laughed, his whole big body shaking. The bright sun pushed sharp shadows from their feet.

I thought about being part of that joke on him. How you could hurt someone and never know. How hard it would to be to face him this afternoon. Corpse thought about living in Angel's dreams. She wondered how many selves she had out there in the world. She again felt caught in some weird dream. I hadn't known she was capable of thoughts like that.

“Lone Ranger.” William nodded to Handler and then eyed Corpse like he was a fish that might dart away. She felt the same. William became more like a whale, though, as he settled into the chair at the computer, making it seem like a kindergartner's.

She looked at the two colleges Louise had listed below William's name: University of Colorado and Western State College, also in Colorado. I hovered in the ceiling's corner. Still in shock from Angel's glance and the talk of witches.

“I'm from Colorado,” Corpse said.

How stupid—she'd come here with Mr. Handler. And hadn't William been with that first group of students we'd met, when Louise introduced her?

Corpse sighed at me.

William nodded.

She remembered his soft, high voice and thought of his grandmother. “Do you like Colorado?”

Could he hear how her words quavered?

Corpse glanced at me.
Go away!
she thought.

I turned silent.

“My dad lives there.”

“Really? Where?

William typed in “CU Boulder” and clicked on the site. “Leadville,” he said. “He works at the Climax Mine.”

Corpse had no clue where the Climax Mine was. Hated to sound dumb again, so she just said, “I'm from Crystal Village. That's about an hour from Leadville.”

“I know,” William said. “Mansions. Fur coats. Good ice cream.”

“Do you ski?” she said.

“Me? Ski? Nah. You?”

She started to say yes, but stopped. “I'm not sure anymore.”

William looked at her funny. Louise milled about behind them, and Mr. Handler shuffled papers in his office.

“My uncle drives a snowcat at Taos. He took me out once.” William shook his head. “I was like an elephant on roller skates.”

“Oh,” Corpse said.

Laughter rolled out Mr. Handler's office.

“Okay, here's the site,” she said. “Now, see this tab for Freshman Students? Click on it.”

William took the mouse and clicked the tab as she tried to imagine him in glitzy Crystal Village, then in Leadville's thin 10,000-foot air. A hundred and fifty years ago, Leadville had been a booming mining city. Today it was a shell of its glory days. It had a neat main street, but most of the rest of town was run down, and all of it was cast in the odd slant of that high-altitude light. So different from here.

“Okay,” she said. “Now open Forms and Downloads.” She pointed at the button on the screen, then dropped her hand into her lap. William's eyes followed it. She held it up. “A dumb mistake.”

His eyebrows rose and he studied her hand. Then he looked at the screen. “Application Packet?”

“Yes,” she said.

A photo of CU's red-brick campus in summer appeared, the Flatirons, giant fins of red rock, jutting up against the mountainous background. Across the screen's top it said,
Find Your Place …

Those words froze Corpse. She felt William watching.

“I'd like to fill out the CU application instead of the Common one,” he said.

Corpse nodded. “You don't need my help.”

William scrolled down and said, “My dad's missing a pinkie. He lost it in the mill at the mine.”

“Oh,” Corpse said.

He typed his personal information on the application. When she'd worked with the two students before him, their personal histories had already made her say “oh” a lot. One had both parents; the other was raised by her aunt. Each had filled out an
Application Fee Waiver Request Form
because they couldn't afford the application fee. To qualify, a student's family had to earn less than $27,000 a year with two dependents. That's kids. Mom probably spent that much in one year at spas.

Corpse remembered Gabe's white sock peeking through the hole in his sneaker that first time he'd walked us home. What was his dad's income? How poor were those immigrant girls who sat on the steps of school each morning? How much did Mom pay Sugeidi? Sure, we'd studied the rest of the world in school, but we'd never considered the poverty around us.

“What's a Major Code?” William said.

“It's what you want to study.”

“I want to be a doctor.”

“Okay, then pre-med. I'll look it up.” Louise had tons of brochures, and she'd set the ones for CU and Western State on the table. Corpse opened the index and searched for Major Code. After a minute she read him the number. She sat back and pictured William in a doctor's coat.

When he got to the household income boxes, he clicked one in the middle:
$35,000-59,999
. Under
Next of Kin
he typed “
Gina Cheveyo
,” and for relationship he checked
Other
, then typed “Grandmother” in the space provided. When the application said
Indicate the highest level of formal education attained by your parents or guardians
, he checked
High school graduate
. At
Academic Honors
, he paused.