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In the meantime, there’s Vanessa Martinez to contend with. She runs at least two miles every morning, and I am already late for the routine. She has to make do with a single mile, and I can almost hear her chiding me for it. At breakfast, though, nobody else says anything—Vanessa’s parents and sister seem genuinely afraid of her.
This is my first tipoff to something I will see evidenced again and again throughout the day: Vanessa Martinez is not a kind person.
It’s there when she meets up with her friends at the start of school. They, too, are afraid of her. They’re not dressed identically, but it’s clear they’ve all dressed within the same sartorial guidelines, dictated by you-know-who.
She has a poison personality, and I feel that even I am susceptible to it. Every time there’s something mean to be said, everyone looks to her for a comment. Even the teachers. And I find myself stuck in those silences, with words on the venomous tip of my tongue. I see all the girls who aren’t dressed within the guidelines, and see how easy it would be to tear them all apart.
Is that a backpack that Lauren has on? I guess she’s acting like she’s in third grade until her chest fills in. And, oh my God, why is Felicity wearing those socks? Are those kittens? I thought only convicted child molesters were allowed to wear those. And Kendall’s top? I don’t think there’s anything sadder than an unsexy girl trying to dress sexy. We should have a fund-raiser for her, it’s so sad. Like, tornado victims would look at her and say, “No, really, we don’t need the money—give it to that unfortunate girl.”
I don’t want these thoughts anywhere near my mind. The weird thing is that when I withhold them, when I don’t let Vanessa say them out loud, I don’t sense relief from any of the people around me. I sense disappointment. They’re bored. And their boredom is the thing that the meanness feeds on.
Vanessa’s boyfriend, a jock named Jeff, thinks it’s her time of the month. Her best friend and number one acolyte, Cynthia, asks her if someone died. They know something’s off, but will never guess the real reason. They certainly won’t think she’s been taken over by the devil. If anything, they’re suspicious that the devil’s taken a day off.
I know it would be foolish of me to try to change her. I could run off this afternoon and sign her up to volunteer in a soup kitchen, but I’m sure when she arrived there tomorrow, she’d only make
fun of the homeless people’s clothes, and the quality of the soup. The best I could probably do would be to get Vanessa into a compromising position that someone could blackmail her about. (Did you all see the video of Vanessa Martinez walking through the hallway in her thong underwear, singing songs from Sesame Street? And then she ran into the girls’ room and flushed her own head in a toilet?) But that would be stooping to her level, and I’m sure that using her own poison against her would cause at least a little of it to fall back inside me as well.
So I don’t try to change her. I simply halt her ire for a single day.
It’s exhausting, trying to make a bad person act good. You can see why it’s so much easier for them to be bad.
I want to tell Rhiannon all about it. Because when something happens, she’s the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.
I have to resort to email, and email is not enough. I am starting to get tired of relying on words. They are full of meaning, yes, but they lack sensation. Writing to her is not the same as seeing her face as she listens. Hearing back from her is not the same as hearing her voice. I have always been grateful for technology, but now it feels as if there’s a little hitch of separation woven into any digital interaction. I want to be there, and this scares me. All my usual disconnected comforts are being taken away, now that I see the greater comfort of presence.
Nathan also emails me, as I knew he would.
You can’t leave now. I have more questions.
I don’t have the heart to tell him that’s the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions.
The only way to survive is to let some of them go.
Day 6018
The next day I am a boy named George, and I am only forty-five minutes away from Rhiannon. She emails me and says she’ll be able to leave school at lunch.
I, however, am going to have a harder time, because today I am homeschooled.
George’s mother and father are stay-at-home parents, and George and his two brothers stay at home with them each and every day. The room that in most homes would be called the rec room is instead called “the schoolhouse” by George’s family. The parents have even set up three desks for them, which seem to have been left over from a one-room schoolhouse at the turn of the last century.
There is no sleeping late here. We’re all woken at seven, and there’s a protocol about who showers when. I manage to sneak a few minutes at the computer to read Rhiannon’s message and send her one of my own, saying we’ll have to see how the day plays out. Then, at eight, we’re promptly at our desks, and while our father works at the other end of the house, our mother teaches us.
By accessing, I learn that George has never been in a classroom besides this one, because of a fight his parents had with his older brother’s kindergarten teacher about her methods. I can’t imagine what kindergarten methods would be shocking enough to pull a whole family out of school forever, but there’s no way to access information about this event—George has no idea. He’s only dealt with the repercussions.
I have been homeschooled before, by parents who were engaged and engaging, who made sure their kids had room to explore and grow. This is not the case here. George’s mother is made of stern, unyielding material, and she also happens to be the slowest speaker I’ve ever heard.
“Boys … we’re going to talk … about … the events … leading up … to … the Civil … War.”
The brothers are all resigned to this. They stare forward at all times, a pantomime of paying perfect attention.
“The president … of the … South … was … a man … named … Jefferson … Davis.”
I refuse to be held hostage like this—not when Rhiannon will soon be waiting for me. So after an hour, I decide to take a page from Nathan’s playbook.
I start asking questions.
What was the name of Jefferson Davis’s wife?
