Empire Falls (14 page)

Most teachers, Tick has learned, feel no great compulsion to confront trouble. They’re never around when drugs are being bought and sold, for example. The mystery of the Exacto knife stolen after the first art class, its theft announced over the loudspeaker during homeroom, would be solved if Mrs. Roderigue ever visited Blue, where Candace openly uses it on her “Bobby” carving. Tick can’t help but wonder if Mrs. Roderigue is as afraid of the knife as she is. Fear, often irrational, of the sort that paralyzes Tick, is something she’d like to think she’ll outgrow. Adults, by and large, seem free of it. Even her Uncle David, whose car wreck nearly severed his arm at the elbow, seems almost carefree when he gets behind the wheel. No, most adults are more like her father, whose fear, if he feels any, has been replaced by a kind of melancholy. Her mother’s a different story, though. Sometimes Tick sees a fleeting look of panic on Janine’s face when she doesn’t know she’s being observed, but then she swallows hard and subdues whatever it is by sheer force of will. That’s a trick Tick would be glad to learn, because dread is her more or less constant companion.

“So, should I wait for my boyfriend,” Candace wants to know, “or go back with Craig for a couple weeks?”

Bobby, the one Candace may or may not wait for, is in jail. He was arrested at Fairhaven High, according to Candace, and it was not a righteous bust. Why she thinks this is not clear to Tick. Candace actually seems to believe the cops came for him because he took a dollar from his mother and only paid back seventy-five cents. Supposedly he’ll be released in a couple weeks, in time for homecoming. Tick doesn’t know how much of what Candace tells her is true. She’s not sure, for instance, if the boy is really in jail. Or if he exists at all. Or if the other boy, Craig, ever really promised to buy her
The Beatles Anthology
. Vagaries of this sort make it hard to give good advice.

If she’s to be believed, Candace has a very dramatic love life, which is fine with Tick, except that when she has finally exhausted the subject of her own romances she’ll want to know about Tick’s, which are singularly lacking in drama. Or maybe just singularly lacking. On Martha’s Vineyard she’d met a shy boy from Indiana who was visiting friends with his mother while her divorce from the boy’s father became final; if Tick were to steal an Exacto knife and carve a boy’s name in the back of her chair, the name would be “Donny.” When he told her about his father, who was moving to California, his eyes filled with tears. His father was moving right then, that very week, and Donny had been packed off to Martha’s Vineyard, he’d confided, so he wouldn’t have to watch him leave home. Donny also told her he’d have preferred to live with his dad, even though he was the one at fault, for falling in love with another woman.

Tick told him that this had been pretty much her experience, too; after her parents split up, nobody had asked her who she wanted to live with. Of course, in her case nobody was moving to California, and although she technically was living with her mother, she spent almost as much time with her father. Donny found it hard to believe that Tick’s mother and father still lived about three blocks from each other; his father, apparently, had selected San Diego as his new home because it was as far from Indianapolis as you could get without leaving the continental United States. Tick explained that her parents probably just didn’t have enough money to put much distance between themselves.

This intimate conversation had taken place on the beach on their last night together, and Donny had taken her hand as they watched the orange sun plunge into the ocean. They hadn’t even found the courage to kiss, and early the next morning when they’d said their good-byes, they’d shaken hands there in front of Tick’s father and Donny’s mother, unsure that anything more would be allowed them, their fingers icy-cold with disappointment.

Anyway, it wasn’t much of a story to tell someone like Candace, even if Tick was inclined to share it. She suspects it’s mostly evidence of her own stunted emotional and romantic development, as is the fact that she can’t seem to stop thinking about how good it was to sit there on the warm sand in the gathering dusk and just hold hands with a boy she liked. Sure, she wishes now that they’d found the courage to kiss, but at the time they’d both been content. Their mutual understanding, even though it was an understanding of grief, had at first been thrilling, then quietly reassuring, though she doubts Candace would see it that way. She’s already made several references to going down on Bobby. Tick is almost sure she knows what going down on a boy means, and if she’s right, Candace won’t be impressed by an encounter that climaxed with hand-holding.

“I mean, Craig’s not so bad, and he loves me and everything … and he really wants to buy me
The Beatles Anthology
, so, like, what should I do?” Candace wants to know.

Before Tick can say anything, they’re interrupted by a boy named Justin who’s sitting at the far end of their table.

“What, Candace?” he says, pretending she’d spoken to him. “You say you want to make out with John?”

John Voss, also at the Blue table, never even looks up. Of all the kids at Empire High, he seems to Tick the most unknowable, and for this reason he scares her a little. It isn’t so much his strange, thrift-shop clothes or his hair cut in patches, as if he’d done the job himself. It’s his silence. So far this week, he hasn’t spoken a word. Were he not referred to every now and then by Justin, who pretends to narrate the comatose boy’s thoughts, everyone would forget he is even there. John Voss is painting something elaborately filigreed in the shape of an egg, which is also confusing and frightening Tick. Who dreams of eggs? Watching him work makes Tick think of analogies of the sort she encounters on standardized tests. This one would read:
John is to Justin as
BLANK
is to Candace
. The answer would be
Tick
.

“John says you should come over to his house today after school, Candace. He says he’s got something he’d like to show you.”

“Shut up, you asshole!” Candace shouts, startling Tick. The panic in her voice results, Tick knows, from Justin’s attempt to link her romantically with this boy who is at the very bottom of the high school’s social hierarchy. Since Candace isn’t so far from the bottom herself, she must guard against any misunderstanding of this sort. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Roderigue,” she says when everyone from Red, Green, Yellow and Brown turns to look at her, “but Justin is always embarrassing me.”

Mrs. Roderigue has indeed straightened up and is now glaring at Blue, as if everyone at the table were equally responsible for Candace’s outburst. Her disappointment and displeasure seem to include, for instance, Tick herself and John Voss, who still hasn’t even looked up from his egg. “I hope,” the teacher intones, “that we will have no more outbursts from the Blue table.”

“I
said
I’m sorry,” Candace responds audibly, rolling her eyes as if to suggest that it’s hard for her to imagine what the woman could possibly want from her that she hasn’t already given.

“If you require a model for acceptable behavior,” Mrs. Roderigue continues, as if she imagines that this might truly be the problem, “you need look no further than Green.”

The Green table, Tick notes, is decimated by absenteeism today. Normally it has eight students, but four are missing; two of those present are reading their algebra books in preparation for a test next period, and another is fast asleep with his head on the table. If she didn’t know better, Tick would like to raise her hand and ask Mrs. Roderigue precisely what it is about the Green table that’s so worthy of emulation. Even Candace, using a stolen Exacto knife to carve her jailed boyfriend’s name in ornate letters, memorializing her affection for a juvenile delinquent and thereby defacing school property, comes closer to fulfilling the implied objectives of an art course.

“So, how come you broke up with Zack Minty?” Candace asks, once Mrs. Roderigue has returned her attention to the creative efforts of the favored Red table.

“We kind of broke up with each other,” Tick says, which is true in a way. When she’d told Zack she didn’t want to go out with him anymore, he’d said fine, that he didn’t want to go out with her anymore either. Like, who did she think she was, anyway? He’d called the next day to tell her he already had a new girlfriend, naming a girl who seemed to hate Tick, despite their never having exchanged a word.

“I think you should get back together with him,” Candace says, apparently uninhibited by knowing virtually nothing about the relationship. “I mean, he still really loves you.”

Tick swallows hard, tries to concentrate on her snake, which suddenly feels wrong in some way she can’t exactly put her finger on. True, it
is
looking less like an eel, which is good, but there’s something definitely wrong about its proportions, as if the lower part of its body were drawn to one scale and the upper, including its head, to another. She wishes she could justify this as perspective. A lot of bad art, it seems to her, gets excused as intentional.

“I doubt it,” Tick says, resorting to the absolute, unadorned truth this time.

The odd thing was that before she went to the Vineyard, she hadn’t known what to do about Zack. Summer was one thing, but it was much harder to be friendless during the school year when as a friendless person you were constantly on display. Losing Zack wasn’t so bad in itself. At least she didn’t have to wonder every day what kind of mood he was in, whether he’d be nice or mean, his behavior about as predictable as the wind. So being without a boyfriend was okay, even though she doubted she’d find another anytime soon. What worried her more than losing Zack was losing his friends, the whole Zack network. While they were together,
his
friends had been
her
friends, but as soon as they broke up, she discovered the truth: that they were
his
friends, every one of them. Not that they disliked her. She suspected that a couple of them actually liked her better than they liked Zack, or would’ve been happy to remain neutral, had the rules permitted any such thing. But they didn’t, and Zack wasn’t someone you wanted for an enemy. Right away she’d started getting calls from his friends urging her to get back together with him, hinting that she wouldn’t be welcome in their group otherwise. A couple of the boys sounded almost afraid, like they couldn’t imagine the kind of recklessness she was contemplating. One of the girls even volunteered that Zack might be willing to break up with this new girlfriend if Tick came back, maybe, though it wasn’t for sure.

Until Martha’s Vineyard she’d seriously considered doing so, but now she was pretty sure she couldn’t. After being with a boy who actually liked her, she was willing to be friendless, at least for now. What saddened her was the cost of this new knowledge. Could it be that getting the taste of affection, so sweet and new, from somebody who wasn’t your father or mother, meant that she’d have to forgo other companionship entirely?

“I mean, he totally does
not
care about Heather,” Candace is saying. “You should, like, see the way he treats her.”

“I know how he treats her,” Tick says, studying her snake critically. What it needs, she decides, is a tongue. “It’s how he used to treat me.”

“He’s changed,” Candace says, looking at her now. She’s stopped carving entirely and is gathering up her things in anticipation of the bell. Her sudden interest in Tick’s romantic life confirms what Tick has been fearing: that Candace is befriending her because she was specifically commissioned by Zack to sound her out on the subject of a possible reconciliation. Tick has seen blessedly little of him since school began, but that’s because of football practice, which he has to attend every day after classes. If it weren’t for that, he would have been tormenting her nonstop. The other thing saving her is that Zack screwed up so badly last year that he was booted out of the high-track courses. Otherwise he’d be sitting right behind her in chemistry and American lit, and she’d be feeling the weight of his wounded, angry eyes all day long.

Now that Tick is sure about Candace’s motives it angers her, and before she can consider the wisdom of doing so, she says, “I’ve changed, too. The biggest change is that I don’t like him anymore.”

Candace’s response to this is to let loose the loudest scream Tick has ever heard. John Voss, at the other end of the table, actually looks up from his egg. Something metallic rattles onto the floor next to Tick’s clog, and Candace, howling oh-my-God-oh-my-God, holds up her hand, which is gushing blood from a deep gash that extends from her thumbnail almost to her palm. The blood is everywhere—down her arm, in the elaborate grooves she’s been carving in the back of her chair, even a small pink drop on Tick’s snake. Looking at all the blood, Tick feels her own left arm begin to throb the way it always does in anticipation of hypodermic needles at the doctor’s office, and at horror movies when somebody gets slashed.

Candace, still screaming, wraps her thumb in the palm of her other hand and bends rapidly back and forth at the waist like one of those mechanical birds sipping water at an imaginary pool. There’s blood down the front of her unicorn shirt now, and the cowards at the Green table have all gotten up and moved away to the back wall.

Tick’s left arm now hurts so bad that she’s beginning to feel light-headed, and the whole room takes on an odd sheen, blurred at the edges like a television dream sequence. She leans forward, resting her forehead on the cool metal table and listening to Candace shriek until another voice, sounding far off, joins in and a new pair of feet appear next to Candace’s. Tick identifies them as Mrs. Roderigue’s, and way off she hears the woman shouting, “Take your hand away so I can see, child.” And then, “Who did this to you?”

Now Candace is screaming, “I’m-sorry-oh-my-God-I’m-so-sorry.” Tick, confused, concludes that Candace must be talking to her, apologizing for acting as Zack Minty’s go-between. “It’s okay,” Tick says, or imagines saying, probably, since she’s unable to lift her head from the table to speak. In any case, it’s what she would like to say, because she’s the kind of person who forgives easily, who in fact cannot bear to think of a person wanting to be forgiven and having that forgiveness withheld, and so the words “it’s okay,” spoken or unspoken, ring in her ears along with the rush of her own blood. When it seems the pain in her left arm can’t get any worse without the arm itself exploding, the pain peaks and then everything gradually becomes vague. Tick, now sweating and shivering, fears that for things to right themselves again, she’ll have to cross back through that territory of pain, and the truth is she’d rather not. She’d rather pass out.