A Step Toward Falling (2 page)

“Really?”
she says. Everyone laughs. “Meatloaf, I guess. But I don't know why.”

Everyone claps. Francine smiles and takes a bow.

“Thank you for doing a wonderful job with that, Francine,” Mary says. “Harrison, your turn to introduce Emily.” My heart races as he stands up. I wonder if he'll say,
Emily seems like she feels very uncomfortable being here.

But he doesn't. Instead, he says, “The week Emily was born in 1996, the number-one hit song on the Billboard charts was ‘Because You Loved Me,' by Celine Dion.”

I'm stunned. As we finished our interview, he asked for my birthday with the year, but could this possibly be right? Everyone laughs and claps as if this is another inside joke. Harrison smiles, bows, and sits back down. Mary asks what my birthday is and goes over to her desk in the corner to check on an iPad. “You're right, Harrison! Well done, sir!”

Everyone claps again, this time with a few whistles.

I'm not sure what just happened. Apparently Harrison isn't just blind, he has a savant's ability to memorize the entire history of Billboard number-one songs and their dates. It wasn't about me, but it also wasn't terrible. We've gotten through it fine, or at least everyone has overlooked the awful job I just did my first day in this class.

L
ATELY
I'
VE BEEN WATCHING
Pride and Prejudice
a lot. Not the new version starring Keira Knightly, but the old one that takes longer to watch and stars Colin Firth. It's the only boxed DVD set that Nan owns but she says that's okay, it's the only DVD set she needs. Nan loves Mr. Darcy who is also Colin Firth and so do I.

Lately I've been watching it all day long instead of going to school.

I go to Westchester High School but this is my last year, which means I am supposed to be having a great time. My first day of school this year Mom played a song called “Anticipation,” because she wanted to make me feel less nervous. The singer kept saying, “Stay right here 'cause these are the good old days,” which made me think maybe I should stay right there at home and not get on the school bus because sometimes at school, I do
not
feel like these are the good old days.

I got on the bus, though. Then I sat where I always sit,
in the first seat behind the driver. Some years the driver changes and instead of a man named Carl, we have a woman named Sue. Even if this happens, though, I never change where I sit, which is right behind the driver. Behind the driver means no bus jerks can make fun of me or do their jokes where they pretend to be my friend and then give me candy that's been on the dirty bus floor. Behind the driver means I usually sit near seventh graders who are scared, too.

I've been going to school so long it shouldn't scare me anymore but sometimes it does. Before the first day of school, Nan reminds me of the things I love about school, like my job in the main office, which is sorting paper for recycling and delivering mail. Nan also makes a list of all the teachers I love like Rhonda, Carla, and Ms. Culpepper. By then, I usually remember other things I love like the mandarin oranges from the cafeteria, the art display cases, and listening to band practice. Nan helps me remember those things better than Mom, who tries but sometimes forgets stuff.

Now everything is different. Now Nan is trying to help me forget. Instead of going to school, she lets me stay home every day and watch
Pride and Prejudice
. If Mom asks her when I'm going to go back to school, Nan says, “For God's sake, Lauren, let her be. At least we know she's safe here.”

Usually Mom and Nan don't fight in front of me. Usually they don't fight much because Mom has limitations and depression. Mom does what she can to help me but
I don't need much anymore so she doesn't do a lot. For instance, I used to make my own lunch and pack it in my zipper lunch bag. But that was back when I went to school and took a lunch. Now I don't go to school anymore so I don't pack my lunch either.

I watch the screen, where Jane is trying not to cry after Mr. Bingley leaves town without saying so much as a word. Just watching her try not to cry makes me start to cry. Even in
Pride and Prejudice
people are mean. They don't think about other people's feelings. Usually I like imagining I am Elizabeth, but today I close my eyes and feel just like Jane, who thought she'd made a friend and turned out to be wrong.

Sometimes I do things that make other people have uncomfortable thoughts. If I talk too much about Colin Firth, for instance, it gives teachers uncomfortable thoughts. Once Rhonda, my speech therapist, told me her uncomfortable thought: “I'm bored with Colin Firth! I don't know him. He lives far away and I don't want to talk about him anymore!”

We both laughed even though I didn't think what she said was funny. I can't imagine being bored with Colin Firth. That's because I love him and sometimes when he looks out at me from inside the TV screen, I'm pretty sure he loves me, too.

I know I'm not supposed to say this out loud. Because then people will think many uncomfortable thoughts like I'm crazy. They'll say I've never met Mr. Firth and that means he can't love me. And I'd have to say what my mom
told me: that love is a
feeling.
And you don't always kiss people you love. “Sometimes you just love them,” she said.

When I asked her, “Does that mean they love me, too?” she said, “Oh sure, Belinda. Everyone loves you.”

I think she meant teachers at school mostly, but I think it could also mean Colin Firth. When he looks at me, I feel it. I just do. I know it in my heart.

Rhonda, my speech teacher, doesn't agree: “He's a character. He's not real. He's on TV but TV isn't real.”

I'm not sure what to say to that. To me he's real. Doesn't that make him real?

I don't always watch
Pride and Prejudice.
Sometimes I watch different old movies. I like
Gone with the Wind
and
The Sound of Music
except I don't like it when Maria and the Captain kiss because he's too old and looks like her father. I like Liesl and Rolfe's song even though Rolfe turns out to be a Nazi which is a terrible thing to be. In my mind afterward, I make him not a Nazi and I let them get married and live happily after.

Same with Scarlett from
Gone with the Wind.
In the beginning she loves Ashley who has a girl's name but is a man. Ashley is very nice but doesn't love her back. Then she meets Rhett who is dangerous and handsome and loves her right away. In my imagination, I make Ashley change his mind and decide to love Scarlett. Then she'll have someone she knows she can count on. She can't count on Rhett. He is exciting but not dependable. Sometimes exciting is exactly what you
don't
want in a boy.

I learned this from other movies about exciting but undependable boys. You have to be careful with them because a lot of times they're handsome, too. So that's confusing.

“I get around some of those men—they're so handsome, I can't talk,” Mom says. “I mean it. My tongue gets all dry. It's like someone put glue in my mouth.”

I know this feeling. I have it every time I watch
Pride and Prejudice
starring Colin Firth. I can't talk at all. Sometimes I try to watch without blinking and I can't do that either. I get light-headed which my mom says happened to her once on a date. When she stood up to go to the ladies' room, she fell back into her chair and felt embarrassed.

“That's what happens when I like the man,” Mom says. “I don't act very likeable.”

I know how this is. I've had it in real life, too, not just watching Colin Firth. I felt it every time I was around Ron Moody. Sometimes, just being near him, I felt like I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Or my heart might explode.

I didn't feel like myself. I felt like someone having a heart attack. Except it happened every time I saw him so it wasn't a real heart attack. It was love. That's what Mom said when I told her about him. “You're in love, Belinda, and that's a wonderful, special feeling . . .”

She didn't say it was bad to feel that way, or wrong. She didn't even say, “Be careful, Belinda,” which she probably should have. She said, “You deserve love as much as anyone else,” which got me confused for a while. It made me think maybe Ron loved me, too.

T
HE TRUTH ABOUT
L
UCAS—AND
why we're being punished—is a little more complicated than I want to admit to anyone, especially Richard, who loves to hate what he calls “the heteronormative class structure embodied by the football team.” I'm not sure exactly what he means by this, except for the obvious part. Football players have too much power at our school, especially this year with their winning record. I've seen lunch ladies wave them through the line without paying a dime for a full tray of food. I've seen kids they don't know buy them sodas and carry their backpacks; anything to win three seconds of a football player's approval.

Richard thinks our group of friends is different but we aren't really. We might not prostrate ourselves to win the football team's attention, but we still spend some amount of time every lunch period staring over at their table. Just because we can
see
the problem doesn't mean we aren't part of it.

Lucas and I have never talked about what happened with Belinda, so I have no idea if he feels guilty the way I do or if he feels like he's being unfairly punished. I assume it's the latter—that he thinks what happened was terrible, of course, but not his fault. At the very least, he probably thinks it's more my fault than his, which—though I don't
admit this to anyone—might be true.

It's still hard for me to understand what happened.

On the surface, it's a simple story. Three weeks ago, I was at a home game with my four best friends: Richard, Barry, Weilin, and Candace. Ordinarily we aren't big football fans, but this year everyone goes to home games. Every week, with every victory, the crowds get bigger.

That night, I was in a terrible mood, though I feel stupid admitting it now. Toby Schulz, a boy I thought I'd been flirting with for the last two weeks with funny texts and Facebook messages, was sitting two rows down from us, on a clear and obvious date with Jenny Birdwell, a cute sophomore with a blond ponytail. Three days earlier he'd sent me a message saying, “We should do something some time,” which I had stupidly thought meant
with each other
. Apparently it didn't. Apparently it meant
we should sit near each other at a football game and wave hi while I'm on a date with someone else
.

It wasn't that I was so in love with Toby. He'd seemed smart and a little more engaged than our typical new recruits to Youth Action Coalition, who usually show up angry about one issue and bored by all the others. At the first meeting Toby came to, he stayed after to say he was impressed by the range of our “actions” and all “the cool things we were up to.” He had curly brown hair and slightly crooked teeth that for some reason made him even cuter. LGBT support wasn't his main issue, he told us, not looking at Richard, but he was certainly on board with that. His main issue was the environment. He loved
backpacking and wanted the mountains to still be around for his children to enjoy. How could I
not
get a crush on him? And when he messaged me three times over the next week, how could I
not
think maybe he liked me back?

If I'm being honest, though, I'd have to admit: it wasn't Toby being there with a cute sophomore that bothered me as much as a long series of Toby-like misjudgments on my part. It felt like I kept making the same mistakes over and over—thinking classroom joking was flirtation, thinking guys who asked for my phone number to get a homework assignment wanted my phone number more than they wanted the assignment.

I partly blame Richard for this. He loves to pretend that everyone is at least a little bit gay and might have a crush on him. He'll sit beside Wayne Cartwright, our gorgeous quarterback, in the main office waiting for a late pass and claim their arm hairs were reaching out for each other. He knows nothing will happen but he still dwells on these moments. “Arm hairs don't lie. They can't, actually. They don't have individual brains. Just instincts.”

For him it's funny. Nobody expects Wayne Cartwright to miraculously come out of the closet and mix arm hairs with Richard, but when I try to dream big and jokingly say, “I think Toby Schulz wants to ask me out, but he's too shy,” it's sad the next week to sit behind the evidence of how unshy he is. Richard didn't say anything, which made me feel even more pathetic, if that was possible. Like suddenly I'd become someone people tiptoed around.

This is one of my explanations for what happened that
night. Not an excuse or a justification. Just a way for me to understand how I could be such a disappointment to myself. Toward the end of half time, I slipped away from my group to buy a soda at the snack stand and on the way back to my seat, I started to cry. Ridiculous, embarrassing tears of self-pity. I never cry in public—ever—and I didn't want my friends to see, so I went around the back of the bleachers. I thought if I let myself cry for a minute, I'd get it out of my system and be fine for the second half.

Then I couldn't find my way back. I was near the field house where the players spend half time. It was late; the team had run onto the field to thunderous applause five minutes earlier. We were behind by seven points, which was different for us. We'd gotten so used to winning by comfortable margins that the crowd was anxious and screaming and stamping their feet.

Even with all the commotion, though, I heard a strange noise under the bleachers. It sounded like an animal. A dog maybe, who'd fallen and was stuck in the latticework below the bleachers. That made no sense, of course, but that's what it sounded like. It was dark under the bleachers, and striped with light, which meant my eyes took a minute to adjust. I couldn't see anything at first, so I moved closer.
It must be a dog,
I thought. I could hear a whimpering sound. Then gradually, in the darkness, two figures took shape. I recognized one. Belinda Montgomery, a girl I'd known years earlier in a children's theater program, was pressed against a fence with a boy standing in front of her. It looked like her hair was caught and her dress was torn. For a second I
thought:
She's stuck on the fence and he's lifting her off.