Empire Falls (13 page)

There, Janine thought. Now I’ve thoroughly depressed myself. Because the truth was, she liked Charlene, who’d had four bad marriages and her own share of heartache, and never once during the years that Janine and Miles were married had she encouraged his crush, any more than she encouraged the college boys. It was her body that drew them, and she couldn’t help that. While it was pleasurable to consider that Janine was winning her own body war at about the same rate that Charlene was losing hers, Janine was too smart not to see the end of all this, which was that they would both lose. The competition for the love and admiration of men like Walt and Miles would be passed like a torch to some other girl, some kid, really, who’d look at Janine and Charlene and never even suspect that they’d been there and done that. The sad, fucking truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, will get your fill.

In full possession of this wisdom, Janine slipped her left hand beneath the counter and into the front trouser pocket of the Silver Fox, who smiled slyly and slowly rose to the occasion. That Walt was fifty
did
worry her a little. She was getting started late, orgasm-wise, and it’d be just her luck for Walt to shut down early. He wasn’t exactly leaping to attention at the moment, but he was getting there.

Down at the other end of the restaurant there was a table full of young women from the Dexter County Academy of Hair Design who came in most afternoons a few minutes before closing and hunkered down in the far booth, chattering and whispering and eating pie. Studying these girls, she wondered if one of them might be the next Charlene, the next Janine. A couple were almost pretty if you imagined them without the big hair and the extra pounds that already, in their early twenties, were weighing them down. No, maybe Janine’s days, like Charlene’s, were numbered, but at least there didn’t seem to be much competition on the immediate horizon, which meant that for a while she’d have the field, such as it was, to herself.

Janine was smiling when the door to the kitchen swung open and her daughter appeared, announcing that she was ready to go home.

Walt, apparently forgetting there was a friendly hand in his front trouser pocket, damn near leapt off his stool, twisting Janine’s wrist in the process.
“There
she is,” he cried, ignoring his fiancée’s distress. “There’s our little beauty.”

CHAPTER 4

I
N ART CLASS
, the five long, rectangular tables are all color-coded, seven or eight students at each, and Tick has been assigned to Blue. Mrs. Roderigue, the art teacher, is a large woman with a massive shelf of a bosom, of which she appears to have no knowledge. When she enters the classroom and one of the boys says, all too audibly, “Bah-zoooom!,” she never seems to connect her own appearance with this too predictable utterance. Though Mrs. Roderigue is about Tick’s father’s age, she seems older, perhaps because she wears her hair in a style that Tick associates only with elderly women.

As a teacher, what Mrs. Roderigue prides herself most on is her organization. “There are forty of you,” she told the class after they were all seated that first day, “and so it will be imperative that we
get
organized and
stay
organized.” Normally classes are not allowed to grow so large, but an exception is made for art—unspoken acknowledgment, Tick suspects, that nobody considers art to be a real course, like history or math. Mrs. Roderigue isn’t even full-time, teaching afternoons at the high school, mornings at the middle school, her teaching strategies identical regardless of her audience.

For Tick, the interesting thing about Mrs. Roderigue’s color coding is that the tables themselves are all steel gray, so the only way to differentiate Blue from Red that first day was to read the signs—
BLUE, GREEN, RED, YELLOW
and
BROWN
, carefully lettered in black ink—taped to each. On the second day all the signs came down and were slipped into plastic baggies before they could be dirtied or wrinkled. Art, she told her students, was the study and practice of order. There was no such thing as Sloppy Art. Artists, she claimed, first had to know where they were, and in Mrs. Roderigue’s class the first thing you learned was whether you were Blue or Green and so forth. If you were Blue, you were supposed to remember where Blue was, though
why
Blue was Blue, and not, for instance, a number, like “one” or “two,” remained a mystery.

Nonetheless, at the Blue table, Tick sits next to Candace Burke, who favors trendy, girlie clothes—baggy jeans, tight shirts, pink Adidas shoes. Also, white eye shadow and lots of mascara. Today she’s wearing her unicorn T-shirt. Either she’s got two of these or she washes the one right after she’s worn it. She’d worn it the first day of school and now, Thursday, she’s wearing it again. “Oh-my-God-oh-my-God!” she exclaims, looking at Tick’s painting. “You’re almost done. I haven’t even started. Help me, okay? What’s my most vivid dream?”

“I don’t know
any
of your dreams,” Tick points out.

Candace shrugs, as if to suggest that that makes two of them, but this problem occupies her for no more than a split second. “So how come you’re in here with the morons?” is what she’d really like to know. Though Candace has asked this every day, and been answered too, she either keeps forgetting or else is suspicious of the answers she’s been given. Her persistence reminds Tick of a movie she saw once in which a man was interrogated for hours, asked all sorts of things, but one question, in particular, over and over. His answer was always the same, but his questioners must have suspected something, because they kept coming back to that one question. Finally, they killed him—out of frustration, apparently. You never found out whether the man was telling the truth or not.

Candace is openly using an Exacto knife she stole during the first day of class, carving the name of her boyfriend, Bobby, into the back of the wooden chair she’s turned around and is sitting in the way older men sometimes do in the Empire Grill. Tick’s proximity to this dangerous-looking instrument and the use to which it is being put are making her more than a little nervous, especially when Candace stops carving and gestures with the blade for dramatic emphasis. Tick half expects her to put the knife to her throat and hiss, “Why are you
really
in here with the morons? Who sent you? Tell me the truth or I’ll—”

What Candace is trying to reconcile is that Tick is a high-track kid, whereas she herself and all the rest are “Bones,” kids who take the lower-track versions of required courses like biology along with guaranteed GPA boosters like art. One reason Candace has befriended her, Tick suspects, is that she enjoys showing strangers around Bone World, an academic sphere populated by those who can’t learn grammar or solve math problems and see no reason why they should. The majority are boys, who don’t at all mind being referred to as “Boners.”

Candace herself prefers “moron.” She confessed to Tick that it’s also her mother’s favorite word, one she applies to Candace on a wide variety of occasions, such as, “What’s up, Moron?” or “You learn anything in school today, Moron?” or “Hey, Moron, you didn’t walk off with my goddamn car keys again, did you?” or “I swear to fucking Christ, Moron, I catch you in the damn liquor cabinet again, I’m going to take you out of where you are and put you in Mount Calvary with the damn Christians, let you drink the Blood of the Lamb for a while and see how well you like that shit, and I can tell you right now you won’t, so just stay
out
of my fucking vodka.” As far as Tick can tell, Candace has concluded that the word is a term of endearment applied to kids like herself who happen, everyone seems to agree, to have no future.

Still, Tick wonders if she should voice her objection to the “moron” label before explaining why she happens to be among those thus classified. But since Candace doesn’t appear to expect this, she decides not to. “I like art,” Tick says weakly, just as she has every day this week, aware, as always, that the truth isn’t much of a substitute for a good answer.

Tick almost didn’t take art because it wouldn’t fit into her schedule, being offered only at times when the high-track kids had required courses, like chemistry and calculus, or were at lunch. When Tick proposed that she could take art if she were allowed to eat lunch in the cafeteria during sixth period, the idea was vetoed until her father went with her to see the principal, Mr. Meyer, who pointed out that the cafeteria closed after fifth period. Even if Tick brought a sandwich with her and got a soda out of the machine, she’d have to eat it all by herself in the big, empty cafeteria, which would be locked after she entered, and she’d be on her honor not to let anyone else in, because there would be no monitor.

When Mr. Meyer asked Tick if she could live with these provisos, she wondered, as she so often did, at the strange world adults seemed to inhabit. Did they all suffer from some sort of collective amnesia? You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know that he’d been the kind of fat kid everybody made fun of and that lunch had surely been a torment to him. He’d either gravitated naturally to the leper table or sat by himself at a table designed for sixteen, a target for all the kids overcrowding the cool tables, the tables that were identified as cool by who had a right to sit at them, codes established the first day of school, the rules clear to everyone, no need for color-coding. You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know he’d spent all his high school years getting hit in the back of the head with all manner of throwable food, yet here he was worried that Tick was going to miss out on the important “socialization” aspects of a good secondary education. Some damn thing must have hit him in the back of his pointed head pretty hard during one of those lunches, Tick decided, because the man honestly seemed to have no recollection of them.

Therefore, he had no idea how thrilled Tick was at the prospect of eating lunch by herself. She didn’t mind in the least waiting until sixth period to eat her sandwich. School twisted her stomach into knots anyhow, and this way at least she wouldn’t have to endure the humiliation of not having a place to sit. Which certainly would have been her destiny. She’d broken up with Zack Minty over the summer, meaning she would no longer be welcome at the table dominated by his circle. And she knew better than to try to crash one of the cliques at the popular girls’ table. Far better to be alone in an empty cafeteria, Tick thought, than to be alone in a full one.

“Did you know Craig was going to buy me
The Beatles Anthology
for my birthday?” Candace wants to know now. “Before I broke up with him, I mean?”

Tick tries to ignore her. The first assignment is to paint your most vivid dream, and Tick’s is the one where she’s clutching a snake in her fist. The painting is going pretty well. The snake started out looking like an eel, but now it’s less flat, more serpentine, except it’s not as scary as the snake in her dream, which, no matter how tight her grip, manages to squirm up to where it can turn and look at her. In the dream she’s safe as long as she can hold the snake up near its head, but each time it manages to slither through her grip. When it turns to look at her, she wakes up with a start. From this dream Tick concludes that she’s learned something useful: whatever means you harm will look you over first.

“Are you listening to me?” Candace says.

“Who’s Craig?” Tick asks, suspecting she’s supposed to know, that he’s somebody Candace has mentioned before, probably more than once. The good news is that Candace never minds repeating boyfriend stories.

“He’s the one I broke up with for Bobby,” she explains, preferring this subject to the task of beginning her thumbnail sketch, which she will later be required to transfer to a large piece of paper and then, finally, to paint. It doesn’t appear to bother Candace that she’s behind everybody in the class. More interesting, it doesn’t seem to bother Mrs. Roderigue, either. All week long Tick has been expecting the woman to come around to the Blue table, see that Candace has done exactly nothing, and read her the riot act, but so far she’s stayed strictly away, as if she’s already determined that Blue is trouble and therefore doesn’t exist.