My Time as Caz Hazard (6 page)

“Will you get over it? It's a shirt. The world is not coming to an end.”

She ignored me and sniveled louder. Amanda stepped closer again.

“Hello? Earth to Dodie? It wasn't even that nice in the first place. Nice compared to your cardigans maybe, but let's not use that as a common fashion denominator, okay?”

Dodie didn't look up, just stood there hiccuping. Then she was bawling and pretty soon sobbing big, messy sobs. I could tell that the more she acted like a baby, the more it made Amanda mad. Soon she was going to be wailing so loudly that the whole school would turn up in our classroom. Then Amanda slapped her. Hard.

She jerked backward and her eyes popped wide open. She stopped crying, though. For a minute she stood absolutely still. Then she turned and ran from the classroom.

My eyes followed her out the doorway — and found Brad. He was stopped in the hall outside, obviously soaking in the scene. Amanda saw him too. She immediately gathered her books and sashayed by me.

“Like I said, I'm done with this loony bin. On to bigger and better things.” She didn't stop to acknowledge Brad on her way out, but I could see his eyes follow her down the hall.

When Ms. Samuels finally arrived, Rocker Rob and I were the only ones left in the room.

Dodie wasn't at school on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Ms. Samuels asked about her, but I shrugged. Amanda wasn't there to answer.

“How should I know?” Jaz scowled, newly returned from his week off.

Our class was actually more peaceful without Dodie. I knew that if I looked at her, I'd feel guilty for not stopping Amanda. I mean, she was unbelievably annoying, but
Amanda had taken things too far. At least with both of them gone I could put the entire incident out of my mind. Besides, I had to concentrate — I had an essay due for history. Ms. Samuels had already read a first draft, and she was helping me rewrite it paragraph by paragraph.

“Think of each part of a paragraph like a part of a hamburger,” she said, drawing a giant burger on the board. As if on cue, Jaz's stomach growled. I couldn't stop a giggle and even Ms. Samuels smiled.

When she turned back to the board, she started drawing arrows to her illustration. “The top half of the bun is your topic sentence,” she said. “That's where you tell the reader exactly what they're going to find inside.” She added a few little sesame seed dots to the bun while she spoke.

“The meat of the burger is the meat of your paragraph. Explain your first sentence. Offer facts to support it.”

“Your conclusion,” she said, “is the bottom of the bun. This is where you summarize what you've said.”

At some point, without realizing it, I had started to like Ms. Samuels' class. I mean, I still tried to duck into the room without anyone seeing me, as if I were visiting a sexually transmitted disease clinic. (Not that I ever have.) Once inside, though, things were starting to seem more achievable.

She might not have been a sped anymore, but that didn't stop Amanda from turning up at my locker after school. She was just in time to find me contemplating the eight crisp hundred-dollar bills in my wallet. I took one of them out and waved it under her nose.

“A little shopping?”

Her eyes goggled and she tried to grab the bill. “When did you win the lottery?”

“This isn't for me. It's for a new couch,” I told her, pulling the bills out of her reach. “I can spend up to eight hundred dollars and we've decided that it should be green.”

Amanda groaned. “Eight hundred dollars to spend and you have to buy a couch? It couldn't be jewelry?”

Keeping an eye out for the security guard who'd chased us before, we strolled into the department store at the mall and made our way to the fifth floor — home furnishings. Amanda immediately stretched out on a three-thousand-dollar black leather sofa, calling, “Bring me a martini, will you, dahhling?”

Ignoring her, I wandered through the displays. Each couch was surrounded by its own living room — rugs, end tables, lamps, TVs. I could imagine a family of four squishing onto the big plaid couch to watch sitcoms, or a group of elderly women having tea, perched on a set of flowered sofas.

Amanda found me again just as I was testing a model that I liked. It was pale green velvet, squishy enough to be comfortable but not squishy enough to swallow me.

I stood up and, after being ignored for a few minutes, managed to wave a sales-clerk over.

“I'd like this one.”

“If you can give us fifteen percent off,”

Amanda said, elbowing in front of me. “It's a bit over our budget.”

I gaped at her, and the clerk cleared his throat nervously. Amanda looked at him confidently until he said, “I'll check with the manager and see if there's anything we can do.”

“What are you doing?” I hissed at her as soon as he left.

“Trust me. You're supposed to bargain for these things.”

The clerk reappeared. We both tried to look nonchalant. Like we bought couches every day.

“It looks like this item may go on sale in a few weeks. I can give you an early discount of five percent.”

Amanda made a dissatisfied sound.

“We'll take it,” I said, “if you'll include these two lamps in the price.”

Twenty minutes later I walked out of the store with a receipt, a warranty and forty dollars and change still left over. The couch (and lamps!) would be delivered in two to three days.

“Come on, that was way too tame. One little adventure before we leave the mall…” Amanda teased.

I shook my head, too pleased with my purchase to risk any adventure. “I've got to head home. Thanks for your help though, Master Bargainer.”

“Booorrring!” She called after me across the parking lot.

When I got home, Mom was standing on the front walk again. Not yelling this time, just tapping her foot impatiently. Ted stood with his back to the door, arms crossed over his chest.

Mom looked relieved when she saw me. “Listen, I don't want his key and I don't want inside the house. I just came to see if I could take the two of you for coffee.”

“Like we're going to believe that,” Ted mumbled.

Mom ignored him, appealing to me instead. “You can't just lock me out for the rest of your lives. You don't want to move in with me. I get it. But at least come for coffee.”

I looked at her closely, my eyes narrowed. “You're going to have to be nice to me the entire time,” I said.

Her lips narrowed into a thin line, but she nodded.

“Excessively nice,” I said.

She nodded again.

“I can't believe you're agreeing to this!” Ted spit, looking at me as if I was crossing enemy lines.

“Look, you stay here and wait for Dad to come home,” I told him. “Think of this as a scouting mission. Like in your video games. If all is safe, maybe you'll want to go next time.”

He rolled his eyes at me and opened the front door. Then he slammed it closed behind him.

When I got home, he was waiting in the hallway for me, tapping one foot and looking very much like Mom had earlier in the afternoon. I could hear Dad doing dishes in the kitchen.

“So?” Ted demanded.

“So it was okay. I mean, the whole apartment looks like it sprouted from the pages of a magazine. It could use a few of your dirty little fingerprints.”

He still looked suspicious. “Was she nice?”

“She was,” I assured him. I didn't tell Ted that Mom had known about the fifty dollars that I took from the dresser. She had talked to me somewhat nicely about it. Once I promised her that I wouldn't grow up to be a criminal, she had seemed surprisingly cool. Maybe actually making the leap and getting her own place had relaxed her a bit.

I grinned at Ted. “After I made her repeat her promise to be nice, I showed her this.” I flashed my new belly button ring at him.

Ted's eyes grew round. “You got…” he started to yell. Then I put a hand across his mouth and tickled him until he promised not to tell Dad.

It had been an amazingly good day — one of the best that I could remember. Even Dad's dinner was edible.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked into the school on Thursday morning. The homeroom bell was still five minutes away, but the halls were quiet. Clusters of kids stopped talking when I walked by, their eyes following me.

I went to my locker and rummaged for my books, trying to figure out what was going on. When I didn't hear anything, I made my way to Amanda's locker. She saw me coming and grinned wickedly.

“Got arrested last night.”

“You what?”

“I stayed at the mall and tried to lift a pair of earrings.”

“And you got arrested for that?”

“That security guard has a baton up his ass,” she said, not looking at me. “He went on and on about lack of respect, how I was going to grow up to be some hardened criminal, blah, blah, blah. If the cops hadn't arrived I might have puked on his polyester pants.”

“What did they do?”

“They took me to the station and called my foster mom. Then I got another speech about disappointing people. Apparently the store is still deciding whether to press charges.”

“Does that have anything to do with people acting weird this morning?”

Amanda raised one eyebrow quizzically. She didn't have to say anything — I knew it was a dumb question. The moods of the student body were not exactly governed by Amanda's criminal record.

“People are acting weird?” she asked, only half interested.

Before I could answer, the bell rang.

“Hey, guess who called me last night,” Amanda asked as I turned to go to class.

I looked back.

“Brad. He thought I might want to hook up for coffee.”

The world was getting stranger and stranger. And I still hadn't figured out what was going on in the school. When I got to class, Jaz, Rocker Rob and I sat waiting in silence until Ms. Samuels walked in.

If she weren't a teacher, I would have thought she'd been crying. Her eyes were rimmed with red, as if she hadn't slept.

“What's going on?” I asked quietly.

“Dodie Dunstan died last night,” she said.

Strangely, my first thought was that Dodie had a last name. Other than Doorknob, that is. Dodie Dunstan. Was that how you talked about a dead person? You used her full name?

Ms. Samuels' voice caught, but she continued. “The police don't suspect foul play.”

“That means…” Jaz said.

Ms. Samuels nodded.

“That means what?” I asked, confused.

“She offed herself. Suicide,” Jaz said, turning his intense stare in my direction for the first time all morning. He pursed his lips, considering. “She seems like the pill type to me. She wouldn't want to see blood.”

Ms. Samuels looked like she wasn't sure how much to tell us, but eventually she nodded. “It was an overdose.”

“Did she leave a note?” Suddenly all I could think of was my lipstick graffiti on the bathroom mirror. It burned neon red in my head.

Ms. Samuels shook her head. “They haven't found a note. Classes are cancelled for the rest of the day. There are grief counselors available in the gym, the auditorium and the office. I think everyone should speak with one.”

Jaz was practically out of the classroom before Ms. Samuels finished speaking. I followed slowly, though with no intention of visiting the counselors. What would I say? We were so mean that it killed her?

The funeral was on Monday.

I had spent the weekend cocooned inside the house, watching TV from the living room floor until the couch was delivered on Saturday afternoon. Then I watched TV from the couch.

Amanda called five times. Ted took messages for me. I think she swore at him the last time she called, but he didn't tell me that. Just said, “You should call her soon. She's starting to sound a little mad.” I thought about calling Mel, but she'd made it pretty clear that she didn't want to talk to me.

Dad patted my head once, which I think was supposed to be comforting. Then he left me alone.

On Monday I skipped school and arrived at the church to find the parking lot filled with other kids. Girls who would never have been caught dead talking to Dodie sobbed and clutched each other. Even Brad's posse was there. One of them was talking to a TV reporter about how “regrettable” the situation was. I glared at them as I passed. The whole scene reminded me of when Princess Di died. All of a sudden, millions of people around the world were mourning like she'd been their best friend. “You didn't even know her!” I wanted to scream. That's what I wanted to yell now, right into the news camera.

I was halfway to the stairs of the church when I saw Amanda. She was heading inside, with Brad's arm slithering around her waist.

At first I thought it must be someone else. Someone who looked like Amanda from the back. But at the top of the stairs they stopped. He murmured something into her ear. She turned toward him and I saw her profile. I saw her hand, adorned in its heavy silver rings, reach to smooth his shirt. The world was getting stranger and stranger.

After that I stood in the middle of the parking lot and let everyone swirl around me. It seemed like every kid in the school was there. There were teachers, too, and people I didn't recognize. At the end, a black car purred up to the stairs and a haggard-looking woman stepped out with a little girl, a smaller
version of Dodie. The woman glanced at me for a second. Then someone stepped out of the church to take her arm, and they disappeared inside. The parking lot was quiet.

I'd never been to a funeral before. Not that I went to this one. Instead I sat on the front stairs of the church, my legs tucked close to my chest and my coat wrapped tightly around me. It had rained earlier in the morning. Now it was windy and the clouds were low — one of those days that seemed dark even in the middle of the afternoon.