Beyond Clueless
Authors: Linas Alsenas
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alsenas, Linas.
Beyond clueless / by Linas Alsenas.
pages cm
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Marty Sullivan attends an all-girl Catholic high school while her best friend, Jimmy, goes to public school in a different town and when he comes out of the closet, he finds a new group of friends while Marty finds connections—and also confusion and uncertainty—through her school’s fall musical.
ISBN 978-1-4197-1496-2 (hardback)
[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Catholic schools—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Gays—Fiction. 6. Coming out (sexual orientation)—Fiction. 7. Theater—Fiction. 8. Musicals—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.A46264Bey 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2015005780
Text copyright © 2015 Linas Alsenas
Book design by Alyssa Nassner
Act I Opening – Part 1
Hello Little Girl
I Know Things Now
Your Fault
from INTO THE WOODS
Words and Music by Stephen Sondheim
© 1988 RILTING MUSIC, INC.
All Rights Administered by WB MUSIC CORP.
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted with Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
Published in 2015 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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FOR BERT
CONTENTS
M
artha. Wake up!”
My eyelids pressed down hard onto my eyeballs, feeling like lead blankets at an X-ray. Slowly I managed to pry the lids open.
Derek’s face, full of concern, hovered above me.
“Wh-wh-what’s—” I stammered.
He shushed me. “It’s OK, it’s OK. You fainted.”
I was having trouble focusing. Fainted . . . fainted. Me? I fainted?
Inside my skull, it felt like my brain was expanding, pushing against my ears in the same rhythm as my heartbeat. I turned my head left to look around the room, and—
Urinals?
Reality came rushing back at me, at full force. I suddenly understood that my head was resting on the gross tile floor of the men’s bathroom. I gasped, struggling for air, despite the sharp smell of disinfectant. About two feet away from my face was a moist clump of dust, dirt, and hair that shivered with my every breath.
Eww.
Do not hurl, Marty. Do not hurl . . . again.
I turned back to look at the ceiling. Then I slowly became
aware that I was crying, makeup streaking across my face and pooling in my ears.
Basically, I was a hot mess.
It wasn’t just the throwing up and the fainting. In the past half hour I had literally
stumbled
across a series of insane surprises that still sent my brain into a tailspin.
Ohhh. Oh, yes. It was all coming back to me now. And all my friends hated me.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that
this
, this moment here, was a truly low point for me. And on this, the most terrible day of my life, I just could not understand: How had I ever gotten here?
What had I ever done to deserve all this?
Well, for the sake of context, I guess the most logical place to start is at the very,
very
beginning, four years ago, at Chippewa Elementary, where I met Jimmy Caradonna in fifth-grade phys ed. There are three different classes within the grade, but they had to combine two classes at a time for phys ed because the gym was also the cafeteria, and there weren’t enough periods in the day to let every class in the school have its own gym period.
So, imagine fifty eleven-year-olds going nuts playing kickball. Horrific, isn’t it? Well, at least that’s how Jimmy and I felt about it, and for some reason we were the only ones who did. Everyone else thought kickball was God’s greatest gift to humanity. I kid you not, there would be rumors about whether we’d play kickball later in the day. And
if we ended up doing ring toss or relays or whatever instead, kids would actually get their parents to call the school to complain. I’m not lying. Really.
OK, so there’s me and Jimmy, trying to lie as low as possible while our classmates worked out whatever deep-seated aggressions they had on a purple rubber ball. We were always picked last, of course—not because we were the worst athletes, but because the team captains were always afraid that our attitudes would infect the rest of the teams’ spirit and, therefore, oh, my
God
, cause them to lose.
But since we were always the last ones picked, Jimmy and I were never on the same team. We had never spoken to each other before—Jimmy had moved to Bracksville from Michigan at the beginning of the year—but as the only Kickball Infidels, we obviously each knew who the other was. He was the skinny kid with short black hair and really blue eyes, and I was the blond dork who was obsessed with musicals, especially
Rent
and
Assassins
at the time.
But after all the fifth graders were required to learn the American Sign Language alphabet during Difficulty Appreciation Week, Jimmy and I started commiserating across the kickball diamond by sneaking hand gestures. When one of the team captains caught on to what we were doing, she complained to the teacher that we were plotting to ruin the game. Then Jimmy communicated his feelings toward the captain in a different kind of sign language—and got us both sent to the principal’s office.
We’ve been inseparable ever since.
Well, sort of. Until a few months ago. Which, by the way, was after four blissful years of best-friendship. Dozens of slumber parties, hundreds of nicknames, and thousands of inside jokes later, Jimmy, like all normal human beings in Bracksville, started school at Bracksville High. I, on the other hand, was shipped off to Our Lady of the Oaks School for Girls. Yup: Oaks. Girls. Our Lady of. No, this is
not
1953, as the name might suggest, but the school definitely still thinks it is.
You see, my family is Catholic, and my parents both went to Catholic schools, so they “firmly believe, based on experience, that a single-sex high school education in a Catholic setting is the most fertile ground for a budding intellect that [they] can provide.” Did you get that? Single-sex. Fertile budding. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to submit to the malicious will of two religious zealots without a struggle. But after a number of shrieking fights, two hunger strikes, and more than a few calls to Social Services later, I was forced to accept the tragic reality that every fourteen-year-old in this land of so-called freedom has, in fact, none. I was going to Our Lady of the Oaks, and there was nothing I could do about it.
So the end of last year was a time of tearful good-byes, hysterically scribbled yearbook notes, and desperate promises to keep in touch. OK, maybe I took it a little far—most people assumed I was getting shipped off to a Romanian orphanage or something. But the pain of separation was real: I was like a monarch butterfly about to be pinned to a musty
old corkboard. A musty old corkboard called Our Lady of the Freakin’ Oaks.
Let me give you a visual, just so you understand the true depths of my suffering. To get to Our Lady from Bracksville, you have to drive twenty-five minutes
in the opposite direction
of the city. Mind you, Bracksville is already a thirty-minute commute to Cleveland—you do the math. The school itself is on about two acres in the middle of millions of acres of corn. Not the pretty rolling hills of corn on the labels of vegetable shortening, but the flat, dry, cricket-ridden cornfields of Ohio. Field of dreams this was not. In fact, when the school was built in the mid-1950s in that oh-so-pretty style of beige brick and turquoise metal panels, they realized how sadly ironic Our Lady of the Oaks would be without any trees. So they planted about fifty oaks around the lot. Thanks to some fungus that causes “oak wilt,” there is now one remaining oak that gets sprayed down with DDT (or something equally deadly) once a week by Sister Joan. And, thanks to the fact that it’s the tallest thing around for miles, it has become the county lightning rod, which means there are only about seven leaves left on the poor thing.
