A Heart Divided (5 page)

They were gone before I realized I still didn’t know what he’d been looking for under the table. But maybe, in some cosmic way (which under ordinary circumstances I
so
don’t believe in, but it was already clear to me that this was not ordinary), what he was looking for was me.

mom’s let’s-find-out-if-Kate-is-Rodin phase, she enrolled me in a sculpture class at the North Jersey YMCA. Other kids sculpted flowers, a human hand, a ballet dancer. I made a snake. If you took that clay-gray snake, made it a gazillion times larger, and gave it square edges, it would look just like Redford High School.

On the first day, I parked my very used Saturn (my parents felt guilty enough about the move to buy me a car) in the jammed parking lot of this giant, clay-gray snake of a school and headed toward my fate.

Two Civil War-era cannons guarded the main entrance.

Overhead, an American flag hung limp in the stillness of the late-August morning. At the base of the flagpole, about fifty kids were huddled together, holding hands. It took me a moment to figure out that they were praying. The only thing kids at Englecliff High ever prayed for was a fire drill in the middle of a math test.

Following my school map and a printout of my schedule, I reached room 114 for my first class, advanced drama. If I said I wasn’t hoping to run into Jack, I’d be lying. Inside the classroom, kids milled around, noisily reconnecting after the summer. It seemed as if everyone knew everyone except me. No Jack. I slid into an empty seat near the windows. Took out a pencil just for something to do. Pushed some hair behind one ear. Fiddled with the post on one earring.

I looked around. Everyone was white except for two black kids, a girl and a guy. She had high cheekbones and the carriage of a dancer. He was all sharp angles and baggy clothes. They stood near the door, arguing. And then, almost as if I had willed it, Jack walked in. My skin tingled as he slid into an empty seat and started to chat with friends. Then, as if drawn by some magnetic force, he looked right at me. A moment later, he excused himself from his friends to cross the room.

“Hey.” He squatted by my seat. “We meet again.”

“Hi.”

“Redford looking any better to you yet?”

Oh, yeah. “Not really.”

He playfully put his hand to his heart as if wounded.

“You know, you never did tell me what you were doing under the table,” I reminded him. “In the library, I mean.”

The bell cut him off before he could answer. He gave me a what-can-you-do shrug and headed back to his seat as our teacher, a bony woman in her forties, shut the door. She introduced herself as Miss-not-Ms. Bright, then laughed with the class because everyone but me already knew her.

Miss Bright had very expressive hands; if you didn’t know better, you’d think she’d invented a new kind of sign language. As her hands flew around, she reminded the class—and informed me—that to fulfill the requirements for advanced drama, we each had to do a minimum of fifty hours of work on the school play. “I like to think that y’all would work your little hearts out anyway,” she said. “Copies of the script will be available in the library as of tomorrow.” Then she went on to tell us that we’d begin by doing some sharing exercises designed to build trust in the other members of our “drama family.”

All righty, then. She told us to buddy up with someone we didn’t know very well. I swung toward Jack, but a short girl in a shorter skirt had already corralled him. The black girl stepped over to me. She stuck her hand out. “Nikki Roberts.”

I shook it. “Kate Pride.”

Miss Bright continued her instructions. We had two minutes to find out as much as we could about the other person.

Nikki laughed. “She made us do the same exercise last
year. So, you transferred here from someplace in New Jersey, right?” She knew this, she explained, because she worked part-time in the office and had put in an hour before school. I was the new student from the farthest away, except one guy from Mexico City.

I told Nikki about my family, why we’d moved to Red-ford, and about my playwriting. She told me Nikki was short for Nicolette (a name she loathed). The black guy in the class was her twin brother, Luke, named for their father, pastor at Columbia Pike Baptist Church. And her boyfriend, Michael, had graduated from Redford High last year; he was now a freshman at the University of Louisville.

“One minute left, people!” Miss Bright called over the buzz.

“Okay, one more thing about you and one about me,” Nikki said quickly. “She’ll make us stand and deliver, so be prepared.”

“My best friend’s name is Lillith,” I said. It was the first thing that popped into my head.

“I can tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.”

I laughed. I liked her. We still had forty seconds. I sneaked a look at Jack; his female partner was gazing up at him as if he’d just stepped down from Mount Olympus.

“Do you know that guy?” I asked Nikki, cocking my head toward Jack.

She shot me a look. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Why, who is he?”

“Royalty,” she said.

“Translation?”

“That’s Jack—”

Miss Bright summoned us back to our seats, and started asking people to tell the class about their partner in the exercise. Nikki was one of her victims, so everyone heard about me. She called on Jack. It turned out his partner was new, too. Her name was Pansy Clifford. She’d just moved to Redford from Memphis, where she’d been cotillion queen at her old school and competed in equestrian events with her horse, Belle.

After that, we did a few basic theater games, stuff I’d done years earlier in my first playwriting class. “Great first day, people!” Miss Bright sang out when the bell rang, clapping her hands as if we’d just given a performance. Jack left without a backward glance. I was disappointed.

“So, what’s the school play going to be?” I asked Nikki as we joined the teeming masses in the hall.

“Whatever it is, Miss Bright wrote it.”

I was surprised. “She’s a playwright?”

Nikki hesitated. “In the sense that she writes the school play every year.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Let’s just say that requiring her students to work on it boosts the participation level. Catch you later.”

As Nikki took off down the stairs, I was already working out a plan. Maybe Miss Bright would let me write a play instead of working on hers. I’d do what I loved to do and get credit for it at the same time.

Chemistry was next. I found the lab on my map—it was clear on the other side of the building. I wondered why Jack hadn’t even looked at me before he’d left class. I wondered if he’d be in any more of my classes. I wondered why I couldn’t stop wondering about him.

Lunch. I sat at the top of the football stadium bleachers, dining alfresco on M&Ms and taking in the local color.

This part of Redford High was familiar: Every group had its own turf. On the football field, jocks did wind sprints. Nearby, Jack’s girlfriend, Sara, and a perfectly groomed raven-haired beauty were talking earnestly to four or five girls who looked like freshmen. Beyond the north end zone was the multipierced crowd; near the south goalposts were the Hacky-Sackers, Ultimate Frisbee types, and guitar players. The geek contingent sat on the home bench, drinking slushies from Mapco, which, I quickly learned, was the nearby gas station slash junk food emporium. I glanced directly downward. Under the bleachers, the bad bleached-blond brigade sucked their lunchtime cancer sticks.

One thing about the setting, though, was definitely not familiar: The football stadium was built directly against one of the rolling hills that characterize the topography of middle Tennessee. You could see the summit from anywhere in the stands. It was barren, save for an enormous
rock slab. Painted on the slab, in huge letters, was
GO REBELS!
and an enormous Confederate flag. The same phrase and flag were stenciled on the gridiron.

My eyes slid back to Jack’s significant other. She and her friend were now leading the younger girls across the football field. As I watched, they tore sheets of notebook paper into tiny scraps and tossed them into the air. Then they turned back to the underclass girls.

“Don’t you see that litter?” I heard Sara ask. “Have some respect for your school. Don’t just stand there. Pick it up!”

Immediately, the younger girls scattered and dropped to their knees in a vain effort to gather up Sara’s handiwork as it flew around in the breeze.

“Hey.” It was Nikki Roberts. She sat next to me. “How’s it going?”

“Are you watching the Sara show?”

She pulled a PowerBar out of her backpack. “Hard to miss.”

“So why are those girls picking up her garbage?”

“Sara Fife is president of Crimson Maidens.”

“Which are?”

“In theory, a girls’ service club,” Nikki said, biting into her PowerBar. “In practice, a sorority.”

“Pardon me while I barf up my sleeve.”

“A rich,
white
sorority,” she added.

“So they’re the cool white chick clique, is that it?”

Nikki nodded. “Anyone can go to their meetings at
school, but that’s basically a front. It’s the whole out-of-school social thing that really makes you a Crimson Maiden. For that, you have to be asked.” She nodded toward the girls on the field still attempting to gather up Sara and her friend’s confetti. “What you see down there is part of the unofficial hazing. Trust me. What they do off-campus to new pledges is a whole lot worse.”

I popped another M&M into my mouth. “Scary.” My gaze wandered up toward Redford Hill and the big flag painted there. “But that’s even scarier.”

“Welcome to the South,” she said.

“My friends back home will not believe this.”

Nikki shrugged and took a last bite of her PowerBar. “There are just as many racists up North, you know.”

“Wait. Are you defending that thing?”

“Hardly. Check it out.” She handed me a flyer from her backpack about a meeting she had organized to change the school team name and emblem to something that better represented the entire community. “You should come. It’s tonight at my church.”

“Maybe I will.” I stuck the flyer in the back pocket of my jeans. Two African American girls passing by the base of the stands scowled at us. “What’s up with
that?”
I asked her.

“What do you think?” Nikki rezipped her backpack.

“Let me take a wild guess: Our skin colors don’t match.”

Nikki shrugged. “Some of my friends have a thing about it.”

“Why would you want to be friends with them, then?”

She gave me a frosty look. “Who are you to question who my friends are? I grew up with them. I’ve known you for five minutes.”

That what she said was true didn’t make it sting any less. “Fine.” I got up and started down the bleacher stairs. “Whatever.”

“Look, you just have to know how it is,” she said, following me. “At this school, mostly kids hang with their own.”

“Then why were you just hanging with me?”

“I said
mostly.”

We walked together to the building, where Nikki gently touched my arm. “Kate, listen. You’re new. I’m trying to do you a favor. This school can be…” She hesitated. “Let’s just say I suggest you watch your step.”

I laughed. “I studied playwriting in a New York neighborhood with more drug addicts than there are people in this whole town. So pardon me if I’m not quaking in my new-girl boots.”

Two white guys in varsity jackets glared at us. What fun; equal opportunity racism. Near them, I saw Jack. He was taking some books from his locker. Just a simple glance at him caused a seismic disturbance. But Jack had a girlfriend, albeit a bitchy one. And I’d had cute boyfriends before. So what was it about this boy that took my breath away?

“Gotta run, late for sociology,” Nikki said, pivoting away.

“Wait one sec.” I edged closer. “You were going to tell
me about him.” I indicated Jack, who was now slamming his locker. Sara had materialized to take possessive hold of his arm. “What did you mean about him being royalty?”

“That’s Jack Redford,” she explained. “As in Redford, Tennessee.” She let that sink in for a moment. “Welcome to his world, baby.”