Black Box (10 page)

41

“Hey.” Dora’s friend Lila stopped me in the hall by a long row of lockers. It was a Wednesday in late October. Dora had been home for eleven days. “I just thought I should mention something. You know, maybe it’s none of my business. But Dora isn’t in class as often anymore.”

“She’s been taking some sick days,” I said. “And sometimes she has a doctor’s appointment. It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Lila removed a hair from her sweater. “But I’m talking about the days when she’s here at school. Like today. She’s in the building somewhere but she isn’t in class.”

“What do you mean, she isn’t in class?” I felt as if my entire body had been dipped in a vat of cold water.

“We’re in the same math and the same science,” Lila said, “and she used to cut class once in a while, but now it happens a lot. She wasn’t there last period. She missed yesterday, too.”

Someone bumped into me with an armload of books. I looked at Lila’s perfect smooth straight black hair and the perfect clothes she had picked out that morning, the beaded necklace and bracelet that matched.
This could have happened to you,
I thought.
This could have happened to you instead of my sister.

“I have to go,” Lila said. “But I wanted to tell you. You know, in case.”

In case of what?
I had always liked Lila but now I wanted to uncap the marker I kept in my pocket and write something obscene on the front of her sweater. “Do you know where she goes?” I asked. “When she’s not in class?”

Lila was already walking away. “I think she hangs out in the bathrooms sometimes,” she said.

42

“Dora? Are you in here?”

There were two girls’ bathrooms on the first floor, one on the second, and one on the third. It took me nine minutes, running up the stairs, to look in each one.

“Dora?”

No answer. I didn’t even know which classes she had decided to cut.

43

“Don’t flip out on me,” Dora said. “I’m not ditching that often. I just need to think sometimes.”

“Oh,” I said. “About what?” We were walking home from the bus stop. It was almost Halloween, and a couple of little kids in costumes were running around on the neighbors’ front lawn.

“I can’t sit there hour after hour with people talking at me.” She moved her hands in the air like little puppets. “It all seems so pointless.”

“Why is it pointless?” School could be boring sometimes, I thought, but as long as you went to class and read and learned things, it was hard to argue that it didn’t have a point.

Mr. Peebles was waiting on the front porch for us, cleaning his whiskers and looking annoyed.

“I think I’m failing French,” Dora said.

I dug my house key out of my pocket. “You could get a tutor.”

“Yeah. Except that I’m also failing chemistry. I hate Mrs. King. She’s a walking fossil.” Dora picked Mr. Peebles up and scratched his furry stomach. “You probably have all As, don’t you?”

“No.” I had a B in biology. I opened the door; the house was quiet. “How are you ditching and not getting caught?” I asked when Dora put Mr. Peebles down. “Doesn’t the office call home when you’re missing?”

“They only call if you don’t have a written excuse.”

“And?”

Dora paused, then opened her backpack and showed me a note on my mother’s new monogrammed stationery:
Please excuse Dora Lindt at 11:35 today; she has a doctor’s appointment.

I looked at the signature; it was almost perfect. “You could get in a lot of trouble for this.”

“Maybe. But the only way that would happen”—Dora tore up the note—“would be if someone found out and told the school.”

44

“I think being at school is hard for her,” I said to my mother while we were folding laundry. It was Saturday and I had offered to help. Matching socks was generally acknowledged to be my specialty.

“You worry about your schoolwork, and Dora can worry about hers,” my mother said. “You look like you’re turning into a statue.”

I had started playing a mental game that involved touching each sock only once: after a sock had been touched, I had to find its mate without touching any other article of clothing first. I was holding a white gym sock in my hand; in front of me on my parents’ bed were about a hundred other white socks.

“I’m not talking about schoolwork, though,” I said. “I’m talking about being in the building. For seven hours in a row—it’s pretty stressful.”

“She can hardly stay
outside
the building,” my mother said.

“Yeah. That would be weird.” I picked up another white sock—luckily it matched—and folded the two elastic tops together. “The thing is,” I said, but just then my father came into the bedroom. He kissed me on the forehead and handed my mother two bottles of pills. “Where’s Dora?” he asked.

My mother tilted her head in the direction of Dora’s bedroom door, which was closed. We could hear loud music, mainly the throbbing bass of the speakers.

I picked up a sock. “What are the pills for?” I asked.

“Dora’s prescriptions,” my father said. “They’re going to try something new.”

“What kind of pills are they?”

My father opened his mouth to answer, but before he could say anything, my mother held up her hand: “I don’t think Elena needs to know that.”

My father closed his mouth and pretended to zip it.

“Why are they trying something new?” I asked. “How would they know if something was wrong with the old pills?” I held a striped sock in one hand and a plain one in the other.

My mother tucked the pills in her pocket and shook out a pillowcase with a snap. “What are you getting at?”

“Nothing. So are the new pills antidepressants?”

“I’ll be downstairs if anyone needs me,” my father said. He left the room.

I decided to segregate ankle-from kneesocks. “Maybe you should get Dora a different psychiatrist,” I said.

“I don’t think so.” My mother shook out another pillowcase.

“Jimmy’s mother hated Dr. Siebald.”

“That’s enough, Lena.”

“Jimmy says the doctors at Lorning just lock the kids up and give them drugs, and if we don’t even know whether the pills Dora’s been taking do her any good—”

“I said
that’s enough!
” My mother was clutching the rim of the laundry basket. “Whatever you’re trying to say, I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t help to have you latching on to half-baked theories that you’ve picked up at school from people who wouldn’t know a hospital from a hole in the ground. I don’t have time for that, Elena.”

Maybe you should make the time,
I thought. I left the socks where they were and went back to my room.

About ten minutes later I heard my mother carry the laundry basket downstairs. I listened for footsteps and the clink of dishes in the kitchen. Then I went into my parents’ room and opened their closet and unzipped the outer compartment of my mother’s blue suitcase. She always hid our birthday presents inside it. I found the two bottles.
Lindt, Dora,
each of them said. I copied down the information from the labels and zipped the prescriptions back into the suitcase.

The music pounded, louder and louder, in Dora’s room.

45

The new pills (she started taking them the next morning) didn’t make Dora drowsy. They made her angry. She called my father a jackass.

“You people don’t give a crap about me,” she said.

I’d already promised she could trust me. Who did she mean by
you people?

46

“Were you checking the bathrooms again?” Jimmy asked.

I had just flopped down at the desk next to his. We were in Mr. Clearwater’s room, supposedly reading the morning paper. Every Monday we spent the first fifteen minutes of the period trying to find relevant or “stimulating” articles about current events. Most of the kids read the comics or did the puzzle.

“If you keep this up, your teachers are going to think you’ve got dysentery.” Jimmy crossed his legs at the knee and leaned back in his chair, the newspaper open on his lap. He actually read it; other than the faded long-sleeved T-shirt and the partly shaved head, he looked like a businessman on his lunch break. “Besides,” he said, “didn’t you tell me that you hate to miss class?”

“I should probably be checking the locker room,” I said. I was still breathing hard. “But Dora doesn’t like gym.”

Mr. Clearwater decided to get out from behind his desk and circumnavigate like Columbus around the room. He was jiggling a piece of chalk in his hand. “Mr. Zenk? I’m sure you won’t mind if I ask you to cease and desist from all conversation.”

“Right,” said Jimmy.

“Ms. Lindt?” Mr. Clearwater paused beside my desk, still jiggling his chalk. “Are you finding anything illuminating or relevant in this morning’s news?”

I pushed my hair behind my ears and stared at the newspaper on my desk. “I’m still looking,” I said.

“Good. You don’t want to give up.” Mr. Clearwater leaned toward me, his pointed mustache approaching my face, and turned the page. Only after he was back in his chair at the front of the room did I notice that he had left a chalky thumbprint in the left-hand corner of an article about depression.
Teenage Epidemic?
the headline asked. And beneath the headline, in smaller letters:
How Safe Are the Drugs?

I tore the article out (Mr. Clearwater pretended not to notice) and wrote Jimmy a note in the upper margin:
Vcnm ml vjg zsq?
Then I watched him slowly puzzle it out.
Talk on the bus?