Keep Holding On (2 page)

My last class is precalc. The anticipation of freedom in forty-six minutes almost makes me like math.

I dart to my desk in the second row. I’d much rather sit in the back. But I had to move up this year. Some of the things teachers were writing on the board were starting to look blurry.

These two rowdy boys who sit in the back bust in right as the bell rings. They’re wearing almost identical polo shirts. Everyone
dresses the same around here. Everything is The Same. All of the big suburban houses are practically identical, with their saccharine front yards and indistinguishable driveways and uninspired architectural designs. People in this town hate anything different. No one is allowed to diverge from conformity. Original thoughts, interests, and style choices are strictly prohibited. And if you disobey these rules? There are consequences.

My town is like thousands of other American towns. You might have heard of it: Middle of Nowhere, USA.

Welcome to suburban wasteland.

As if subsisting in a town that’s ultra conventional and entirely devoid of culture weren’t enough fun times, this is the kind of suburbia that borders on the country. So it’s remote enough not to be close to anything interesting. The city is an hour away. Which might as well be twenty hours away without a car. If I had a car, I could escape this hateful town whenever I wanted. I’d drive to the city every day after school and stay until it got late.

I don’t know why we live here. We don’t even remotely fit in. We rent the second floor of a little, dilapidated house from an old lady who’s lived here forever. The carpet, kitchen appliances, and wallpaper didn’t get the memo that 1964 is ancient history. Newer, bigger houses have gone up all around this one.

I cannot wait to leave this place and never look back. Maybe I’ll live in the city. Or in another city even farther away. I don’t want to see any of these people ever again. Except Sherae. I’m lucky to have a good friend. She hates how cookie-cutter everything is around here, too.

Every day is a countdown to graduation. That day I’m set free will be the Best Day Ever. The calendar on my wall has a countdown to the end of the year. I did the same thing last year. Next year will be the last one.

I want to help make the world a better place when I am far away from here. Because if we’re not improving the world in some way, then what’s the point?

Things will get better after this.

They have to.

Sherae is still
having nightmares.

“I’ve been up since four,” she says. She looks even more exhausted than she sounds.

“I wish there was something I could do,” I tell her. I’d do anything to take her pain away. But I wouldn’t even know how to begin saying the right things to her.

Sherae is staring into her locker like she forgot what she was looking for.

“Maybe I should have told someone,” she says.

I definitely think she should have told someone. I really wanted her to. But Sherae just wanted to forget about it and move on.

I’m still hoping she’ll change her mind.

Graffiti in the second-floor girls’ bathroom, written in black marker on the wall above the first sink:

Noelle Wexler Is Corroded

There’s this thing I do with Matt Brennan. It’s a secret thing. Something Matt said I can never tell anyone. I really want to tell Sherae. But I promised him I wouldn’t.

Matt Brennan and I make out.

We sneak away when we’re supposed to be in study hall. Not every day. Just a few times a week. It’s not like we’re missing anything. And the monitor is so spotty about taking attendance that we usually aren’t even marked absent. We meet behind the stone wall across from the tennis courts. No one ever goes back there. It’s not a nice place to hang out. It’s just a scraggly patch in the middle of some trees. There’s nowhere to sit. It gets muddy when it rains. But it’s good for making out. And when I’m kissing Matt, I can block out everything else.

Matt has a bad-boy reputation. But just because someone always wears a black motorcycle jacket and looks angry most of the time doesn’t mean he’s trouble. I heard he was into some hardcore stuff like dealing drugs, but he told me those are just rumors. Only, Matt also told me that his parents suspended his allowance, and that’s why he’s working at the gas station. He wouldn’t tell me why he got in trouble. Even though we’re close physically, there’s this distance between us that never seems to go away.

We don’t say much when we get together at our place. We just start kissing. We haven’t started kissing today, though. I’m still mad about what happened last week.

“I said I was sorry,” Matt reminds me. “What else do you want?”

“Um, I don’t know. Not to be your dirty little secret anymore?”

Matt puts his arms around me. He hugs me close.

“You know it’s not like that,” he whispers.

I want to believe him. I really, really do. But he didn’t even tell me it was his birthday last week. I had to find out from overhearing his friends talk about his party. Which I wasn’t invited to.

“Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?” I ask.

“No!”

“Then why can’t we go out and do things like normal people?” I push away from him. This isn’t how a boyfriend is supposed to act after you’ve been together for a whole month. Matt should want us to hang out with his friends. He should want to take me places. But I can’t give up on him. I’m lucky to have him. And I know he can change.

“You want to go somewhere?” Matt says.

“Yes.”

“Fine, we’ll go somewhere.”

“When?”

“Next Friday. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Then Matt starts kissing me. I forget all about the birthday present for him in my bag.

I have Spanish right before lunch. My stomach always growls in class. When I feel a growl coming on, I’ll do something like cough or flip pages loudly to hide it. It’s so obvious what I’m doing, though. The worst is when we’re taking a test and we have to be quiet for the whole period. I get so nervous that my stomach’s going to growl. Which of course makes it start growling.

The fact that Julian can hear my stomach growling makes me want to run away and never come back.

Luckily, it’s a very noisy day in Spanish. Mrs. Yuknis started the class by playing some music. Then she pointed to where the music came from on the South America/Spain combo map. George asked if the music was going to be on the test.

At the beginning of the year, everyone was assigned a Spanish name. Noelle doesn’t translate to anything, so I got Belén. Julian is Julio. Anything’s better than what George got. He has to be Jorge. Which sucks for him because it’s pronounced “whore-hey.”

“Entonces,”
Mrs. Yuknis says. Then she says a bunch of other stuff in Spanish. I’m totally lost. I know I should know what she’s saying by now. But I’m still clueless most of the time.

Mrs. Yuknis is wearing the same pants she wore on Monday. She’s done this Monday/Thursday wearing-of-the-same-pants thing before. When the pants make their second appearance of the week, they are considerably more wrinkled. Does she not know we know? Doesn’t it bother her not to have more pants? I think her limited wardrobe is ridiculous. She can buy more clothes any time she wants.

I know this sounds weird coming from someone who hates
school, but I want to be a teacher. I want to reach out to kids who need help. How cool would it be if my class were a place where students could be themselves? I mean we’d still do work and everything, but there wouldn’t be all this stress and nervousness involved. I could connect with kids who feel like outsiders. They’d be able to trust me because I’d know what I’m talking about. Maybe showing them I care will make them feel less alone.

I have a list called Things to Remember When I’m a Teacher. I always keep it in my binder. You never know when inspiration will strike. After observing Mrs. Yuknis’s pants trend, I added this to my list:

My list is getting long. I started it last year after Carly ripped up my spiral notebook in history. Ms. Herrera totally saw. She didn’t even say anything. She just sat at her desk ruffling papers and pretending she wasn’t looking. But she totally was. Carly stood right there next to my desk tearing my notebook apart. The pages fluttered to the floor in shreds. I was shocked that Ms. Herrera didn’t do anything. I even looked at her like,
Why aren’t you doing anything?
Ms. Herrera looked confused. And scared. Like if she made Carly stop, maybe Ms. Herrera would leave school one day and find her tires all slashed. Or her flower garden ripped up. It’s so lame. If grownups won’t stand up for us, who will?

After Carly finished ripping up my notebook, she stomped on the shreds as she went back to her seat. Then I added this item to my list:

Why is that so hard for us to do?

Mother looks exhausted at dinner. She always looks exhausted. As if just being alive is too strenuous.

There are only a few things mother makes for dinner. Tonight we’re having mushy spaghetti with cheap sauce and prepackaged garlic bread.

I bite into a piece of garlic bread. It’s still cold in the middle.

My stomach is a tangled ball of knots. You never know what mood mother will be in. This one time last year, she came home really late and woke me up when she slammed the front door. Then she whipped my door open. I could see her glaring at me, the light from the hall illuminating the hate in her eyes. She didn’t say anything. She just slammed my door. Then she opened it and slammed it again, harder. I pulled the covers up. I watched my door for a long time, shaking on my thin mattress.

Dinner wouldn’t be so stressful if I could eat in front of the TV. I got away with doing that for a while. But then mother started yelling at me to come to the table. If we eat dinner together, she can pretend we’re a real family.

“Work is killing me,” mother complains. “You wouldn’t believe the idiots I have to deal with all day.” Then she proceeds to vent about a customer who was trying to return a toaster without a receipt. That kind of thing happens a lot at Retail Rodeo. It’s this massive discount store about half an hour away. Mother works in customer service. I can’t think of a worse person to work in customer service.