Hyacinth Girls (23 page)

Grandma answered her phone that night after the sixth ring. I could hear the sound of her lighter, and then the suck of her breath.

“I saw you,” I said. “I know you were home. I saw you and that lady. Why wouldn't you let me in?”

“You came at the worst possible time,” Grandma said. “I was getting my treatment.”

Her voice sounded fake, and right away I didn't believe her.

“What treatment?”

“What do you think? For my breathing. My lungs.”

“Who was that lady?”

Grandma coughed like she'd swallowed a volcano. “What were you doing here, anyway? Why weren't you in school?”

“I was home sick,” I said. “Who was that lady?”

“Home sick! I bet The Enforcer doesn't know you were out.”

I told Grandma that I didn't care; she could go ahead and tell her. Then I asked her again who that lady was.

“My nurse,” she said, and somehow I knew it wasn't true. I knew my grandma. She never wanted a nurse.

“You're lying,” I said, and I got ready for more lies. Let us both be buried under an avalanche of lies.

“If I tell you something, you can't tell The Enforcer I told you,” she said, and then I really couldn't breathe. The truth was hot lava.

“Your dad was engaged to someone else when your mom got pregnant. He was engaged to that woman you saw at my house. They got married before you were born. I haven't seen her for a long time. But that's who she was—your dad's wife.”

My brain was dry as dust, and everything was crumbling, but I tried to follow the words coming out of Grandma's mouth. My dad had an affair. That was with my mom. That woman was his wife. They'd never told me.

“Your dad wasn't a bad man. He was just in a lot of pain. You don't need to be a bad man to do what he did.”

To do what he did. I knew and I didn't know. I understood how it could happen. It was happening to me, too.

I found Rebecca in her room and thought about blurting out what I knew. That my dad was married and she'd lied to me all these years. I always just figured my parents were dating, and she'd let me think that. I didn't know they were cheaters, which made my birth a cheat, too. Then I saw what she had in her hand. A plastic bag. She'd gone out that afternoon after my doctor's appointment, acting so secretive I thought maybe she had a date. But no—she'd gone to the cemetery. I saw the outline of my note.

I was a mistake, just like I'd written, and I
wasn't
meant to be here, but I didn't want her to know—to find out like this. She must've checked Mom's grave, found my message. The worst timing ever. Then I remembered my way out.

“Did she come back?” I asked, and Rebecca
had
thought it was Robyn. She didn't recognize my handwriting. It was Robyn she pitied.

“I think everyone can be helped,” Rebecca said, and I felt half brain-dead.

On Wednesday, I had to go back to school. My doctor had told Rebecca I was fine, so I left my new-old shirt under my pillow, then I put on makeup and pretended that I was still DH because Rebecca was paying attention. I hoped school would be easier now that I'd found a way out, but by the time I got to first period, I was a mess. Everywhere I went they found me. Rancid grins, plagues of laughter, deadly words I didn't understand. On the wall outside my homeroom there was a poster on the wall:
DALLAS PRICE
4
FRESHMAN CLASS PRESIDENT
.

Credit
, I reminded myself.
Credit
. I wished I'd done it yesterday, then I wouldn't be here today. I walked down the halls and imagined I was sinking. Water filled up my chest and it felt so good.

In social studies, they were waiting for me. Their phones were ready to record every last moment of my life. I went to my chair and saw the diaper. Something rattled inside me. Then water was rushing into my ears and I felt the choke in my throat. A brown mess had been rubbed across my desk and I could see them grinning but I couldn't hear them laugh. My legs took me out of there. Miss Laing shouted something at me as she came in and I broke inside.

“Fuck off.” I ran down the hall. I ran outside. I headed toward the trees. Then there was a hand on my arm. I looked at the man in a sweatshirt. “Fuck off,” I said.

He walked me back inside, down the hall, to the principal's office. People said things to me. They told me to sit in a plastic chair and I sat there looking at my wrist. My veins were like roots I was ready to cut. Purple branches in the shape of a
Y
. Equations, symbols, values. On my wrist, under my skin, I'd found the answer. There were no more questions. I looked at my wrist and knew it was the same thing my dad discovered. A square root. Equations, loss, and an answer. It was the first true thing I'd known about him.

They said I'd smeared the chocolate on my desk and I went along with it. The principal wanted to know why I'd sworn at Miss Laing and I couldn't tell him. They explained I'd have to write an apology and spend the rest of the week in in-school suspension, and I tried not to smile. I couldn't have planned it better. I would have my own vacation for the next two days. I'd just given myself a little more time to work out the details.

After school, I headed back to the trees. As I walked, I remembered the things I learned at camp when I was younger. Leaves created the sugar that kept the tree growing, and then in the fall, the tree had to let the
leaves die and drop off. One of our counselors told us how Native Americans used trees, and then he made us stand in a clearing with our eyes shut. He told us to imagine we were living through all the seasons as a tree, with our roots reaching out twenty feet below us. There was the hot sun on our bark and the sap in our trunk and the cold rain on our branches. We were supposed to rock back and forth when the wind hit us, and when he said our leaves were turning colors and then getting torn off, I felt each perfect creation falling to the earth around me like it never meant a thing. Then it was spring and we had tiny buds growing, and all the animals and bugs came back to live in us. “You create half the oxygen in the world,” he told us, and afterward he asked how we felt. Some of the kids said “tall” or “strong” or “beautiful,” but for me, it was different. I felt sad. It had something to do with the leaves. I didn't want to have let go of them so easily. I wanted to crouch down and collect them from the ground, like each one of them was still a part of me, alive—and I knew this was stupid. Trees had to drop their leaves because they would die if they didn't. They couldn't understand what they had lost, and even though I knew this, the more I thought about it, the sadder I got.

Now that I was older, I understood it wasn't sad. You could see the true shape of a tree only when it was stripped clean, standing naked in the wind and cold. I'd been stripped the same way, and I saw what I was. Calm, pure medicine. The antidote to their poison. I'd found credit and I was going to change everything.

I followed muddy footprints along the path, and decided to collect leaves one last time. I held them in my hands and stuffed them in my pockets. Small sharp ones like fallen stars, and soft broken ones like skeletons. I didn't have to go home or do anything yet. I carried more and more and walked farther and farther, filling myself up, holding on to everything I touched.

That night, Rebecca sat me down for a big talk. There was a grapey flap of skin on her lower lip that I wanted to peel as I answered her questions. I said I'd got lost and had run outside by accident. I told her the swearing had come out of nowhere. She kept talking and talking, with the grapey flap hanging there, and I wasn't tempted to tell her the truth. Telling would feel good only for a second, like a hug in a heat wave. Arms closing around you, snuggling close, your head drooping:
Poor baby, you needed my help!
She'd take me into her heart and I'd be trapped there forever, weak, pitiful, a little loser bullied at school.

“Well, do you think one of Robyn's friends could've left it?” she asked. “That girl Lucinda?”

I started scratching my arms and I thought of Evil McFrenzy, how she changed what everyone saw. A little blond girl turning into a monster.

“…you're allowed to make mistakes,” Rebecca said, “but this isn't like you.”

She had started rubbing her Mom tattoo and it made me sick to my stomach. She kept everyone too close, and she held on too tight. A tree that couldn't let go of its leaves would die eventually. I needed her to stop clinging—I wanted to fall like my dad.

“Stop pressing that,” I told her. “I know what you're thinking.”

She took her hand off her chest and looked at me like I was crazy, and then I was turning into a beast, the rawest sewage draining away.

“I'm not like my mom!” I shouted. “Maybe I'm more like
him
!”

I knew that everything had a limit—love included—but Rebecca was still following me as I ran into the kitchen. I pushed my hands under the faucet. My nostrils were streaming. Her love was never mine anyway—she loved me for someone else.

“I smashed the chocolate because I
wanted
to. Not everyone does things for a reason. Sometimes we just DON'T have a conscience.” Rebecca still hadn't walked away. I could hear her breathing behind me, and I hated how she wouldn't leave me, how she always had to be there. She'd taken care of me for so long without knowing anything about me. Without knowing what I could do, the hurricanes I could make. She followed me into my room and I heard her voice trying to help me, and I hated that this was how I had to throw it all away. But I didn't have a choice. There are limits to everything. And even Rebecca couldn't love me past a certain point.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: (no subject)

Date: Wed, Sep 16 2009, 23:10:07

Robyn,

It takes 7 minutes to drown, I read that on the Internet, but it's hard to do it on purpose because your body tries to survive. That's probably why Autumn Sanger got drunk—so her body would be relaxed. It wouldn't start fighting back and she could sink the way she wanted.

I wouldn't want to be alone. I wish you could be there with me. I'm alone all the time and now I know how it was for you. It's like nobody can hear you and you're sinking deeper and deeper and there's so much pressure that you have to let go.

I feel like I'm disappearing and you're the last one who can see me. If you're there, just say something—just let me know. C

In-school suspension was in the C wing at school, and I signed in with the teacher who sat at the front of the room. There were three students sitting in different corners, and the teacher pointed at a desk in the empty back corner where I would spend the day. He handed me a folder with work from my teachers and I sat at the desk. There was a sign at the front of the room.

NO TALKING WHATSOEVER
.

NO GUM, NO FOOD, NO DRINKS, NO PHONES
.

IF YOU NEED TO USE THE BATHROOM, YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR A CHAPERONE
.

NO LEAVING UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
.

The other students in the room weren't working. They had their heads down on their arms like they were sleeping. In the other back corner, a boy with spiky hair looked at me without raising his head. His eyes met mine and I looked away. I put my head down, sniffing the clean Clorox smell, looking at the dried water marks where a sponge had swiped the desktop in half-circles. I would give myself until Sunday: Sunday night. In the meantime, I'd go along with everything. I'd do whatever it took to avoid getting caught. I'd plan out my messages and write a letter of apology to Miss Laing. Maybe I'd even call Grandpa Pat—my mom's dad—to say good-bye.

The boy looked at me again and I wondered if he knew about Babyshits. I hated that any stranger could see what was happening. Every day more people were joining in the fun. There were hundreds and thousands, soon there would be millions. Watching and laughing, disgusted
by me. I'd even had one message telling me to report it. The girl's picture showed praying hands that glowed with white light.
You don't know me, but I saw the page they wrote and I think you should report it. Friendship & peace. Lana Hebe
. I wished for a second that Lana was Robyn. If she told me to report it I'd do it for her. But I knew you couldn't just report it and escape that easily. Even if you tried deleting it, it would pop up somewhere else. Things on the Internet followed you for life. All our teachers had warned us: if you tried to get a job, your employers would Google you. If you applied to college, they checked your pages online. If I moved to another state, another country, another planet, I'd still be in their trap. Somebody there would know.

I looked at the skin on my elbows. It was dark and wrinkly like an elephant's hide. Even if I escaped, I wouldn't forget what they'd done. If I let them keep their sharp sticks, they would go on forever. They'd attack harder and faster and never stop. Dallas would be elected class president and Ella would lead the swim team, and they would go on destroying lives just because they could. I was the only one who could stop them and I had to make them pay.

There was no stress in in-school suspension. When the bells rang, we stayed in our seats. After the regular lunch period was over, a teacher walked us to the cafeteria, which was quiet except for the sound of the lunch ladies, pushing around rolling trash cans and wiping up splattered food. We bought our sandwiches, and then the teacher put us each at separate tables. I ate my cheese sandwich in silence.

That afternoon, I started planning out my message for Josie Dixon.

Hi Josie

Do you remember when you were in 7th grade and some girls were assholes to you? I was one of those girls, but I'm not
anymore. First, I want to say sorry. You didn't deserve what happened. Your face was fine, you were a pretty girl, and there was no good reason for what we did.

We were trying to make you feel like vomit, and now I know how you felt. I learned how it is to be left behind because everyone's joined up against you. They do it because they don't have a conscience. Or because they want to feel like they're part of something bigger. Or because they think you don't matter.

But everything matters. You matter a lot. I want you to have a happy life wherever you are and I don't want you to end up like me.

Most of all, I want you to know that Dallas and Ella and all the other kids who hurt you are going to regret it. They're going to change, because I changed. I think people without consciences can get them, because I didn't have one and now I do. You're part of my conscience, and I hope you understand what I mean.

Credit,

Callie McKenzie