Grace (10 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

BOOK: Grace
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She and Ty had been friends since kindergarten, but only hooking up for a couple of months when she got pregnant. His family lived one block behind her family; her mother used to send her to his house to play when she and her father first started their real estate business. She'd loved him since they used to catch toads behind his house, and after twelve years he'd
finally
loved her back. But now she was pretty sure he would go right back to not loving her again. And he probably wouldn't even be friends with her anymore. She knew that's what that plus sign really meant. It didn't mean having a baby as much as it meant giving up Ty. And she was right. Now she watched Ty move away from her, down the hallway, backpack slung over his shoulder. She couldn't believe how easy it was for him to walk away, to pretend like everything they'd been through didn't matter anymore. She made her way to first period, past the whispers, to her desk. She had to let go. Get back to
normal,
like the doctor had promised. She looked at the scratched surface of the desk, smelled the medicinal scent of the floor cleaner, listened to the humming fluorescent lights overhead. Here was her old life back. Only it wasn't her old life at all. It was worse. It was awful.
AP English used to be her favorite class. She and Ty used to write lines of poetry in ballpoint pen on each other's jeans. She still had one pair of jeans she couldn't bring herself to wash, knowing that the ink and the words would disappear. It didn't matter; they didn't fit anymore anyway. She took a deep breath, inhaling the smell of chalk dust and pencils and whatever that crap was they used to wipe down the desks. Then she opened her book and tried to concentrate on the lines that blurred in front of her leaking eyes.
T
he art room used to be the old auditorium, before the school built the brand-new one a few years ago. The rows of seats had been excavated, leaving only their metal stumps, but the stage was still there, and that's where Mrs. D. projected her art slides. The heavy blue and gold velvet curtains still hung on either side, and there was a giant screen like at the movies at the back of the stage, except it had a big gash down the center. Sometimes, Mrs. D. would let Trevor run the projector, and she would go up on the stage with her long wooden teacher's pointer and explain what they were seeing to them. Trevor loved slide-show days. He liked the quiet whir of the projector's fan and the click as each slide fell into place. He liked the hush as everyone stopped talking to listen. He liked the tap, tap of the stick against the screen. It was like music, he thought. Like a quiet song.
“Is that your camera?” Angie McDonald asked.
At first Trevor didn't think she was talking to him.
Nobody
talked to him. But he and Angie were the only ones sitting at the front table. He looked up at her and nodded. “Yeah.”
Angie always looked like she had just rolled out of bed. Her hair was messy and her clothes wrinkled. It was amazing to him that her art was so tidy. Everything she drew was so precise, even her watercolors. She was working on a watercolor picture of a house. The bristles on the small brush she was using whispered across the page, the colors bleeding slowly, carefully, into the fibers of the paper. Watercolors frustrated him, the blur. The way they seemed to have a mind of their own. But she seemed to be able to control the paint.
“You like photography?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“That's cool,” she said, smiling. “Me too, but I'd rather make up my own pictures.”
The lunch bell rang, startling him.
“Hey, do you want to sit together at lunch today?” she asked, dipping her brush into the Mason jar, the colors bleeding into the water.
“That's okay,” he said, shaking his head, and as she put away her work, he lingered at the art table.
She shrugged. “Okay. See you later.”
Mrs. D. came over to him after all of the other students had filed out of the classroom. “You plan to spend lunch with me again?”
He nodded.
“Well, I could use some help sorting through these slides,” she said. “Think you might be able to help?”
He sat at the long, scarred wooden table near the front of the room where Mrs. D.'s desk was and peered at the slides using the light box she'd gotten out of the storage closet for him. Mrs. D. needed to locate a good selection representing the early history of photography. She'd let him borrow some books, and he'd read them quickly, absorbing everything, touching the old photos with his fingers. He recognized the names, the photos, as he flipped through the slides.
Daguerre
.
Talbot
.
Rinehart
.
“Where's your lunch, Trevor?” she asked.
Trevor shrugged.
“Can I get you something from the cafeteria?” she asked, peering over his shoulder at a photograph of a Victorian wedding. The bride scowled miserably next to her husband in his top hat.
Trevor shrugged again. He'd already spent half of his lunch money on a bag of chips in the vending machine. But before he could say
No thanks,
his stomach growled loudly, betraying him, answering her question.
“Well then,” she said as though she were speaking to his stomach. “I'll be right back.” And then she shuffled to her desk, where she grabbed her big patchwork bag.
A few minutes later, she came back carrying a tray with a cheeseburger and fries and two chocolate milks. She waddled over to where he was working and set the tray down. Then she went to her desk and pulled out her own lunch bag from a drawer.
“Thanks,” he said, feeling guilty. He'd assumed she was getting herself lunch too. “You didn't have to do that.”
She brushed the air with her hand as if she were swatting a mosquito away. “Phooey.”
Trevor unwrapped the burger and took a huge bite. He was starving, and it tasted so good. He'd been trying to figure out a way to pack a lunch, but his mother was always puttering around the kitchen in the morning, making his father's and Gracy's lunches, fixing breakfast. He had made such a case about wanting hot lunch at the beginning of the year that he wasn't sure how to tell her he'd changed his mind. But at the same time, he knew that if he was able to avoid the cafeteria, he was able to avoid Ethan and Mike for most of the day, except for during recess and math. He needed to figure out a way to pack himself a sandwich or something.
“You know you can't hide in here forever,” Mrs. D. said, carefully unwrapping her own sandwich from its wax-paper envelope.
“I'm not
hiding,
” he said, feeling defensive, thinking of Gracy playing hide-and-seek, squeezing her eyes shut and counting as high as she could while he hid from her.
“Can I tell you something?” she said, setting down her sandwich and wiping daintily at the corners of her mouth with her napkin, as if she were one of those Victorian ladies in the photo.
Trevor nodded.
“My brother had the same sort of, how shall we say,
difficulties
you have in school.”
Trevor thought of Gracy.
D-I-F-F-I-C-U-L-T-Y.
“He was a lot like you, actually,” she said, and her voice sounded misty. Like fog on water. Like somebody trying to explain a dream.
Trevor looked up from the slide and cocked his head. No one had ever told him he was like anyone else. As far as he was concerned, there wasn't
anybody
out there who was like him.
“And because he was different, because he preferred to paint and draw and make music to roughhousing or playing sports, he had a terrible time fitting in. Children can be so unkind. He came home crying nearly every afternoon.”
This made Trevor's ears feel hot. He didn't want her to think he was some sort of crybaby.
“But then one day,” she continued, “he grew up and he moved away, and he made friends who appreciated him and all those qualities that nobody before had ever valued. He found someone who not only accepted him but
loved
him.”
His ears still burning, Trevor felt squirmy inside. Embarrassed. Something about Mrs. D. saying the word
loved,
he guessed. This whole conversation was making him uncomfortable.
“What I'm trying to say, is that this world you live in ...” she said, gesturing around the darkened room, “might feel unkind, but the world is bigger than this. It won't be like this forever. If you can just survive this, someday I promise you will be appreciated. And happy. And
loved
.”
Trevor nodded and peered down at his giant hands; they were trembling.
“It's like this,” she said, gesturing to the slide he picked up. She held it up in her hand. “What do you see?”
“I can't see anything,” he said.
“What about now?” she asked as she laid the slide on the light box, illuminating the photograph.
“A castle?”
“A
cathedral
. It's Notre Dame in Paris. And it is magnificent. But without the light there is nothing. It simply needs the right light behind it.”
After math, which passed quickly and, thankfully, without incident, Trevor felt his spirits lifted. His whole body buzzed and hummed; his footsteps clicked across the linoleum like slides slipping into a projector. He found himself smiling despite himself. There was only one period left, science, and then he could go home. He wanted to go to the woods with his camera, take some pictures of the river, the new green tops of the trees. He thought about the church that looked like a castle. A cathedral in the light. He pulled his camera from his backpack and peered down the long hallway through his viewfinder.
“Hey, it's the Abdominal Snowman,” Ethan Sweeney said, stepping in front of Trevor, his face filling the frame. He'd gotten his hair cut, and it stuck up from his scalp in sharp red spikes. His freckles looked like spaghetti sauce splatters on a white stove top.
“It's
Abominable,
” Trevor said, quickly shoving his camera back in his bag. What an idiot.
“That's what I said,
asshole
.” Ethan's already squinty eyes closed into slits like a snake. Then Ethan put his face close enough to his that Trevor could smell what he'd had for lunch. “Stupid faggot asshole.”
And Trevor could feel it happening. Taste the metal filling his mouth, practically hear the clink clink clink of the bones in his hands as they also curled into fists. But just as he pulled his arm back, Mr. Douglas was standing between them, shoving both of their chests with his meaty hands, acting as a wall between them, looking back and forth from him to Ethan like the referee in a boxing match. “Do we have a problem here, fellas?”
He wasn't sure why Ethan and Mike were always pushing his buttons. If he tried, he could level them both.
Old habits die like a sonuvabitch,
Pop would say; they'd both been giving him a hard time since second grade. They probably figured he was still too afraid to really fight back. He used to just cry when they started in on him. Run away.
After the final bell rang, Mrs. Cross called Trevor over in the hallway. “How are we doing, Trevor?” she asked. He hated how she spoke in the plural, as if saying “we” made them on the same team. “I hear we had another run-in with Mr. Sweeney this afternoon?”
Her perfume was making him light-headed. He stared at the floor, at her toes poking out of her high-heeled shoes. At a wad of green gum stuck to the floor.
“Do you think it might be a good idea to have a little sit-down to talk about whatever it is that's going on between you two? Maybe if we can get some communication going between you boys, we can get to the root of this.” Mrs. Cross looked awfully proud of herself, as though she'd just figured out a way to bring peace to the Middle East, though Trevor thought that might be more likely than getting Ethan Sweeney to stop bothering him.
Mrs. Cross put her hand across his shoulder as if to steer him down the hall, but at her touch his shoulder jumped, jerking her hand away. He caught his breath as her eyes widened; she looked at him in disbelief.
“I didn't even do anything!” Trevor said, feeling bile rising in his throat, and then he was running; he could hear his sneakers squeaking across the linoleum, feel his hair blowing away from his face, see the tiles moving beneath his feet. He knew if he were to look back now, Mrs. Cross would be standing there, shaking her head. He ran all the way down the hall to the exit, his backpack slamming against his spine.
“Tomorrow afternoon, Trevor. Three o'clock. Sharp. In my office.” Her voice chased after him.
K
urt sat down at the kitchen table after supper and reached for the stack of bills on the counter. He'd just sent off the tax bill to the IRS; there would be no refund this year, and the numbers in the checkbook were far lower than he was comfortable with. He knew that one unexpected expense, one emergency visit to the pediatrician, one trip to the shop for Elsbeth's piece-of-shit car, could mean another major ding in their already beaten-up credit. He divided the bills by delinquency: thirty days past due, sixty days, ninety plus, the ones threatening collections. He paid the utilities first (those things they could not live without: electricity, water, gas). He opened something from their mortgage company next, tearing into this envelope with a vague sense of foreboding. He knew their ARM was coming up soon, and that he really needed to talk to the bank about some refinancing options. But since the market had plummeted, and the house was worth far less than they owed, he figured refinancing again was probably out of the question. He quickly realized it wasn't a bill at all but a notice. The ARM was apparently set to adjust at the end of the summer, and the mortgage premium was going to change accordingly. His eyes raced across the fine print, his vision swimmy, and his chest heaved as he looked at the figure for the first balloon payment. It was
double
their current payment.
Two times
the figure that already caused him monthly anxiety attacks. This couldn't be right. There was no way. No one at the bank had explained this when they refinanced the first time.

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