Black Ice (15 page)

I looked at Doug. He looked great. He and his crowd would sashay into the examination refreshed, their minds clear to write about all the ideas I was hanging onto by the hair of my chinnychin-chin.
They’d do fine and I would miss out on my HH!

“Sure,” I said coolly.

“Really?” Doug seemed surprised. Immediately, I had second thoughts. Maybe he’d had a bet with someone. “Nah, Libby’ll never party with you.” Maybe I had just provided the evening’s entertainment.

“Aw, cool,” he added in the nick of time. “That’s great.” He seemed sincere.

“I don’t have anything to give you for this,” I said. Was I incurring financial obligations? I wondered. Would I be required at some time to pay back?

“Oh, please.” Doug made a dismissive movement with his head, as if I had tried to hand him a dollar for driving me to the supermarket in a Porsche.

Off we went, out the side door of the cloister, along the
gritty, ice-packed path, down the wooden snow steps, across the bridges over the pond, and around the hockey rink into the woods.

Half a dozen students assembled in a tiny clearing and got down to business at once. Until the little pipe came round to me, I watched my new pals. They seemed not to mind. They were watching me, too. I decided to take a hit.

“No, you’re wasting it all,” someone told me.

“Take it like this—” Doug took the pipe from me carefully, so as to avoid burning his fingers on the hot bowl of the pipe or dropping it in the snow. He sucked in a mouthful of smoke, and then, instead of breathing out, inhaled again a few times, short, tiny breaths, as if to force the stuff deeper into his lungs. “Try it.”

The figures around me (I could barely see their faces) were becoming impatient. Smoke that trailed off into the air could be going into one of them. I took a puff. The wad of weed crackled in the bowl. Heat from one inhalation traveled up the stem to burn my lips.

“Whoa!” someone said. “It’s steaming now!”

“Great, give it here.”

I handed the thing away and sucked in as Doug had done. Tears sprang to my eyes. Furry smoke curled at the back of my nose and throat. Should I choke it down?

“Suck,” Doug whispered.

I drew it in until the burning went beyond my throat and into my lungs. I felt as if it would drown me to inhale again. I let out my breath in tiny bits, afraid that the burning would come back up.

“How’s that feel?” someone asked me.

“Does it feel great?”

“I feel dizzy,” I said. Actually, I felt stupid. I couldn’t regain the rhythm of my own breathing.

The pipe appeared again. I had cleared up by now. If I could
only get this thing right, I thought. Again it burned. “Hot lips,” I croaked.

They laughed hysterically and lifted the pipe out of my fingers. I didn’t feel like laughing.

Doug asked me for a cigarette. The get-high folkways had it that smoking a cigarette would extend the high. I passed cigarettes all around, thinking in that way to attenuate my debt for my two gulps of weed, and still hoping that the lovely feeling would kick in.

I did have a delayed response to drugs, after all. It had taken a double dose of anesthetic to get me under for my tonsil operation when I was a kid. As I stood with my feet in the snow like the Grinch on Christmas morning, I remembered the hospital in South Philadelphia when I was seven. I remembered dozing lightly and waking up in the hallway outside a big, noisy room with white lights. That was the operating room, I had thought. A tall black man was standing over me, ready to roll my bed into the room. He was wearing a green cap, gathered around the bottom and puffed out over his head like a Victorian night cap. People in the white room were laughing and talking together casually. I had never heard doctors speak like that. “Hey, wait a minute,” the man yelled to the doctors and nurses. “This child is still awake.”

“She is?”

“Are you awake?” he asked me.

I nodded yes. I had been trying to go to sleep like a good girl. I had lain “still as death”—one of my old relatives (I wondered who) had always used that phrase, and that’s what I had tried to do. I had been able to doze, ever so gently, but not sleep. I couldn’t get my thumb into my mouth. What had they done to my arm? I couldn’t sleep without sucking my thumb. Then the man with the green gown and cap smiled at me and rubbed my cheek with his forefinger. It felt good to be rubbed. I was glad that he was not as angry as he had seemed
when I’d opened my eyes. Then they gave me another needle. “You’ll be asleep in a minute, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”

When I awoke, my throat hurt. It burned. I was alone in a gray room. Not alone, there were other crib beds with other sleeping children. I could look out a big window and see the hallway. A nurse walked by. I tried to call her to ask where my mother was, but she walked fast and did not look my way. I tried to put my thumb in my mouth, but I could not. The doctors had a cast on my arm. I looked at my hand. It was no more than a foot away from my face. I could not get it any closer. I began to cry. My throat felt as if it would tear open with each sob.

I snapped out of my reverie when I felt the hot pipe being pressed into my hand again.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m afraid that that stuff just doesn’t work with me.”

“Doesn’t work, eh? You look pretty wasted to me.”

“Could be that it affects your body differently,” one of the girls theorized dreamily. “Do you have other allergies? Food allergies? Respiratory?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m allergic to everything.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“Or maybe it’s just that it’s your first time.”

“Lib! Is this your first time getting high?”

“Or not getting high.”

They giggled a great deal.

“Well, if it’s not doing any good, don’t waste it. Pass it here.”

“You are
so
greedy.”

“Who’s greedy? I haven’t had any more than you have.”

“One potato, two potato, three potato, four—”

“Shhhhh.”

We all went silent. “What?”

“I think I saw a match.”

“Oh, God,” I moaned.

“Shhhhh.”

Even people who didn’t party knew what a match in the woods meant: Sr. Ordoñez. He was thought to go walking in the woods to bust people. He carried his little package of imported cigarettes with him, they said, and you could avoid him if you watched for his match.

“What’re we going to do?”

“Run!”

“Are you kidding? And attract his attention for sure?”

“I know. We’ll hide.”

I looked around desperately. The woods were bare.

“We’ll be munchkins!” one of the girls said in a muffled shriek.

“Right!”

“Quick!”

“Down!”

“Under the snow!”

The girls were first. They lay on the snow and scooched around in it like huskies settling in for sleep. Then they scooped snow on top of themselves. Little mountains of snow piled up.

“I can’t breathe!”

Giggles and puffs of steamy breath floated up from the mounds like spirits out of fresh graves.

I lay in the snow, too. I did not own a parka with a hood, nor was I wearing a hat. The snow nuzzled into my collar and melted down my neck. I felt it smash against the back of my Afro and work toward my scalp.

“I gotta go,” I said. No one responded. I got up and shook myself. I do not remember whether anyone noticed my leaving or spoke to me. I only knew that I had to get out of the snow. It felt like a trap, like I’d be trapped for good. I had to get back to my house, back to my warm bed with my red-and-white afghan and the alarm clock ticking beside me.

I came to a creek that burbled under its icy coating. To cross it, I had to traverse two logs laid lengthwise over the place where the creek dropped a foot to empty into the pond. I was not sure that I could negotiate the crossing, but I could not summon the resources to look for another. I stepped onto the logs. The crust of snow slipped off one log to reveal a thicker crust of ice. My foot plunged over the edge of the log toward the creek. I saw sharp rocks in the creek bed, and felt my calf scratch against the log.

“You could die here,” I said to myself. “See those rocks? You could slip over and hit your head and die.”

I sniveled with shame. I slipped and crawled and clawed my way over and ran when I got to the woods on the other side. Again, the voice inside chided me. “Running now? Couldn’t run back in the fall, when the sun was shining, and the ground was flat and the grass was green. Uh-unh. No. It was so hard to run, wasn’t it? Bet you’ll run now.”

I’d sign up for Señor’s class next year, that’s what I’d do. So what if I was scared of him? Better to be scared of him in class than running away from him in the woods.

Back in the house, the lights in the hallway blazed at me. For some reason, I wanted to see Janie, but she wasn’t there. I couldn’t think what to do next, so I walked along the third floor and back, and then down to the second floor and back. I ran into Mandy Butler, and I noticed, with some resentment, how attractive and petite she was, how at ease with other boys and girls.

“I’m looking for Janie,” I said.

“Janie? I think she may be down in Mr. Hawley’s,” Mandy said.

“Oh.”

“His door was open, and I heard voices. I bet he’s having a feed, or snacks or something.”

“Oh. Maybe I’ll go down.” I did not feel capable of sitting
with a ginger ale on Mr. Hawley’s rug and impersonating myself.

Mandy peered at me. “Libby, are you OK?”

“I don’t feel so hot. I just wanted to see Janie.” Why was I repeating myself?

“Libby!” She got up close to me. “Libby, you are high!” Mandy Butler whooped. “That’s a riot!
You
are high. You
are
, aren’t you?” Tiny bubbles of spittle collected at the corners of her mouth.

“I guess so.
Please
stop shouting.”

“Oh, my God! This is a
scream!”

I turned to go down the steps.

“Don’t go to Hawley’s.” She grabbed my elbow. “What are you doing? Use the back staircase. I can’t believe this.”

When I got to my room, Pam Hudson popped her head in from next door. “Where have you been? I thought you were going to come back and study for English. I’ve been here grinding away waiting for company. Were you at the library or—”

Pam’s voice, husky and full of good-natured scolding, filled me with blubbery remorse.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Libby, what’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry. You were here waiting for me, and I said I’d be back to study English, and I should have been studying English.” When the tears came, they burned my eyes, and I wondered why.

“Aw, don’t get upset. Listen, don’t
cry
about it.” Pam could be big and maternal when she needed to be, what with that deep voice and those square white fingers and folksong-gray eyes. She came and sat next to me on the bed and put her arms around me. Pam always smelled as if she’d slept in her clothes, and I breathed in the scent of her, familiar and comforting as a sleeping bag. “Hey, look at me.

“Libby? Libby!
You are high.”

“Oh, Christ, shut up, Pam.” You could talk to Pam like that sometimes.

“Aw, Lib, now you’re going to have a crying jag.” She said it with true compassion even though she was laughing.

“Jag” sounded like a bad word. I’d heard it before, and I knew what it meant. “I’ve got to wash my face,” I said, “and then we’ll study for English.”

She looked at me and laughed outright. “Go the hell to bed,” she said.

“I have to brush my teeth first.”

“The hell with your teeth. It takes years to grow a cavity.”

Pam threw my clothes into a heap. I lay down and allowed her to tuck me in. “Take it,” she said, as I tried to straighten my own bedclothes. “Just shut up for once and take it.” She rubbed me a little and turned out the light.

“Pam,” I asked, feeling my stomach churning, “would you wind my clock and set it for six?”

“What, are you crazy?”

“No, really, please. I’ve
got
to get up early.”

“OK,” she said in a singsong. “But don’t blame me if you end up losing another clock.” I’d ruined two clocks that year by chucking them across the room in my sleep. When I was sure Pam was gone, I listened to the ticking. It was like the loud tick-tock in my great-grandfather’s room. I thought how I would have disgraced him, disgraced my whole family, if I’d been caught, suspended, expelled. The other kids would apply to Andover or Exeter, no doubt, but I’d be back home, on my behind. When the alarm rang, I awoke to find my thumb in my mouth.

Everyone was cleaning, girls filling and then overfilling trash cans with accumulated exam-week waste—papers, notebooks,
hated texts, tissues, empty tampon and cookie boxes. I went to the refrigerator at the end of my short corridor to clear out my edibles: a dried-out piece of cheese that I refused to eat after some girl had had the temerity to nibble it, and the cold, miniature cans of pear nectar that my grandmother sent. (Pear nectar was never pilfered.)

I felt a resentful regret as I passed a pair of skis leaning against the wall between the refrigerator and Sara’s room. I had lacked the money and the gumption to learn to ski that winter. Here I was in New Hampshire, and not learning to ski. I might never have another chance. I looked into Sara’s room and envied her her long, slim legs and feet, their strength and skill.

I wished that I could be satisfied with what everyone said was a good, solid start at a St. Paul’s career, but I couldn’t. I wanted skills it took years to learn, experiences I would never have. I wanted to have what they had, just in case I needed it, like big vocabulary words.

I seem to remember the cold, solid knowledge that caught me occasionally during adolescence that the seasons came and went according to the rhythm of nature. What I missed I would never chance on again; some things were final; some experiences could not be shared. I thought of a girl back home who had become pregnant the year before and had had an abortion. We corresponded, and I saw her when we were able, but it was hard to talk sometimes.

“Oh, Libby, are you cleaning out the fridge?” Sara asked me. “It’s so gross when people forget to do that.”