Rodent (2 page)
In front of me, balancing a tray of empty wrappers and an apple core, is a girl with bright-red hair. Blunt bangs and long wavy curls down her back. Translucent white skin. She just stands there, not moving. How long is this going to take? I glance over her shoulder.
Three girls block the garbage can, smiling. I’d know that sort of smile anywhere, in any grade, in any school. The kind of smile that makes my stomach clench up.
The blond in the middle has thick, round shoulders. Stocky build, like an ox. Her shiny hair falls in a curtain over her shoulders. Small squinty eyes that look like a pig’s when she smiles. The brunette on her right is tall, athletic. She’d be gorgeous except her makeup is so thick she looks like a pole dancer. I recognize her from my Social Studies class. On the other side stands a black girl with an impressive afro and shimmery eye shadow. Silver bangles and purple-painted nails.
“Pick it up,” the blond says, still smiling, nodding to a crushed milk container and ketchup-covered napkin on the floor.
“It’s not mine,” the redhead says, all breathy.
“It is now, so pick it up.”
“No.” She sounds a bit edgier now, like she’s either going to stand her ground or start to cry. “I don’t want to.”
I don’t know if it’s the blond’s smug expression or her petty show of authority, but I feel like jamming that milk container right down her throat. When she takes a step forward and opens her mouth to speak again, my words fly out all by themselves.
“Pick it up yourself,” I say in a quiet voice that somehow echoes through the entire cafeteria. Every table within twenty feet falls silent. My heart starts to pound.
The ugly smile slides from the blond’s face as she glances past the redhead to the stranger behind her. She looks me over. Probably doesn’t think much of what she sees: wiry, on the small side, long brown hair and hard, hard blue eyes. I don’t blink.
“What did you say?” she whispers. Her two friends start to shift, looking around.
“Pick it up yourself,” I say again, louder. Something grinds inside me. The redhead flees.
It happens in an instant. The blond narrows her eyes and moves to take a step toward me. Between the eye-narrowing and when she lifts her foot, I form a fist. I know how to make a decent fist. My cousin Jacquie taught me—thumb on the outside, knuckles not too tight. It has served me well, especially at these ghetto schools I usually end up in.
The blond opens her mouth to say something, shoulders squared for a fight. Before she can get the word out, I slam her in the face. She staggers back into the arms of her friends. Grabs her nose to stop the gush of blood spraying down her
turquoise tank top. Shock is all I see on the face of every single person, including her. They weren’t expecting this. Ice floods my gut. Tears form in her squinty eyes. Then something else, something I recognize instantly: rage.
She twists herself away from her friends’ arms and straightens up. Eyes locked on mine, face on fire. Here it comes. As she’s about to spring, a woman in a hairnet shows up beside me, gripping my arm. “You, come with me,” she barks, dragging me through the door. “Take her to the nurse!” she calls over her shoulder to the blond’s friends.
She marches me through the half-empty hallway, every person turning to gawk. I feel like I’m being dragged to a public hanging. Hairnet woman is still squeezing my arm in her bony fingers, so I yank myself free. She turns like she wants to grab me again but sees the expression on my face and lowers her hand. Maybe she’s afraid I’ll slug her too.
“I’m capable of walking by myself, thank you,” I say in my coldest voice.
She purses her lips and marches ahead of me. I consider making a break for it, but to where? I still have to pick up Maisie at three thirty. Don’t exactly want to hang out in a locker or bathroom stall for three hours. No, better to face these things kicking and screaming.
We round a corner, and we’re back at the office again. The admin assistant who assigned me the locker looks up and stops typing as we parade by.
“Sit.” Hairnet points to a punishingly hard wooden chair outside an inner office. A black plaque on the door reads
Andrew Talmage, Principal
. Hairnet knocks and slips through, giving me one last evil eye before she shuts the door behind her. I sit for an eternity. The phone rings endlessly, and the admin assistant answers a long list of the most boring questions and requests imaginable. “He won’t go on the bus today then? Okay, I’ll let him know to meet you out front…” “The students are dismissed at 3:25…” “If you paid your fees, we have no record of them. You’ll have to send another check…” My knuckles throb.
Why am I sitting here? How easy would it be to just get up and leave? I could walk a few blocks down, to where no one would see. Get on a bus to anywhere. Disappear. Never come back to this stupid office and this hard-as-a-rock chair, never listen again to people go on and on about the trivial crap in their silly little lives. No one would even notice.
Then I picture Maisie standing at the door of her second-grade classroom as all the other moms come with soccer uniforms and homemade muffins and whisk their precious babies away. And Evan, stuck with the Donkey until Child and Family Services is called. Shipped off to some foster home where they keep him in the basement and feed him Wonder bread and water three times a day. Or worse. My cousin Jacquie spent six months in a foster home a few years back and said the wife couldn’t keep her hands off her, beating her black and blue. The husband couldn’t either. No way I’ll let that happen.
The heat starts rising in my gut again, so when Mr. Talmage opens the door and peers down at me, I’m ready to scratch out his eyes too.
In his office, he gestures for me to sit on another rock-hard chair, then settles behind his desk in a cushy leather one. Reclines. Stares. I know this trick well—the I’m-just-going-to-stare-at-you-for-a-while technique, used to arouse shame and discomfort.
Sorry, buddy, but have you got the wrong girl.
Two can play this game
.
I lean back in my wooden chair and try to appear as comfortable as possible. Which is a feat. I smile and look around, like I’ve never been in a nicer place. I even manage to work in a sigh of contentment.
Mr. Talmage raises two beefy fingers to his lips and continues his contemplation. He looks like an ex-
NFL
player gone to seed. His hulking body barely fits in the chair. Square jaw beneath the jowls. Wisps of gray in his sideburns. A comb-over that’s downright embarrassing.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” he says. Ah, the kind-counselor approach, waiting to pounce on an admission of guilt.
“I defended myself,” I say, staring straight into his eyes.
“From what I heard, you were the only one doing the punching.”
“She came at me to hit me.” My voice is a little edgy now.
He stops and does some more staring, which is starting to unnerve me more than I’d like to admit. “Is it possible she was just going to say something to you?”
As he says the words, I’m forced to admit the truth that comes bubbling to the surface. Something akin to guilt starts to dampen my anger. I push it away. If she wasn’t going to hit me at that moment, she would at another. That look doesn’t just fade away to nothing. I’d pay sooner or later.
“It didn’t look that way from where I was standing,” I say.
Mr. Talmage takes a deep breath. “Miss Bennett,” he begins, and I know this is where kind counselor turns into parole officer, “I don’t know how things were at your last school”—when he says
last school
, his lip curls slightly—“but here at Glenn Eastbeck, we don’t just
whack
someone when they look at us in a way we don’t like.” He pauses, either for effect or to let me respond. Which I don’t.
“I’ve tried to reach your mother,” he continues, examining my face. “Any idea where she is?”
“Sleeping it off,” I say. I can tell by his scowl that he doesn’t believe me. Which is why I said it.
“You want to try that again?” Still the parole officer.
Well, he didn’t believe the truth, so I try a lie. “At work.” The standard answer for what most adults do during the day. No one seems to question that one. When he asks me
where she works, I tell him it’s a sports bar, and I don’t know the name or phone number because it’s a new job. Ironically, the more honest I am with this man, the more I seem to annoy him.
“You don’t know the name?” he says. I shake my head. “Well, Isabelle, I will be talking to your mother personally. And you”—he takes a breath to make sure he has my attention—“you have a two-day suspension to think about your actions.” He runs his tongue over his fat lips. “Consider this your final warning. If we meet again under these circumstances, it will be to discuss your expulsion.” He raises his bushy eyebrows, nodding slowly to give me time to digest his words.
I try not to smile. He threatens me with my mother—who’s nearly impossible to catch both awake and sober at the same time—and gives me two days off school. I don’t want to push things at this point though. I nod back—slow, serious.
“Wait outside my office until I can reach her,” he says, gesturing to the door. He turns back to his computer before I’ve even left.
This is the real punishment, having to sit around listening to everyone else’s stupid conversations while my butt goes numb. The admin assistant talks to the custodian about her nephew’s new baby boy, who is just so extremely precious, as though people don’t have babies every day.
“Can I collect my stuff from my locker?” I ask her. She’s done an excellent job of ignoring me up to this point. She gives a furtive look toward Mr. Talmage’s closed door.
When she doesn’t answer, I tell her, “I’ll come right back.” Trying to sound as innocuous as possible. She nods.
I get my books and jacket from my locker and return to my jail chair in the office. At least I have some reading material now, in the form of my English textbook. I spend the rest of the third block—supposed to be Biology—reading about some fool getting buried alive, one brick at a time, behind a cellar wall.
Mr. Talmage sticks his head out the door right before the last bell and tells me to get my mother to call him. I take it he couldn’t get her out of bed to answer the phone. “You won’t be returning to school until I have that conversation,” he says, as if that’s a threat. Like there aren’t a hundred other crappy schools in this city to choose from. He starts to say something else, but the bell cuts him off mid-word. I get up and walk away before he can repeat himself.
Across the street, Maisie’s waiting in her classroom like I told her to. She hops up from a circle mat and runs to my side. She shows me a craft she made with cotton balls and pipe cleaners. I have no idea what it is but tell her, “That’s really nice! Now get your sweater. Evan’s waiting.” She waves goodbye to Mrs. Williams, who’s lost behind an enormous stack of papers on her desk.
On the bus to day care, I ask her about her first day of grade two.
“I made a friend. She’s called Emily, and she has a loose tooth.” Maisie raises her hand absently to her own very intact teeth. “But I had to sit by another boy who was pokey.”
“What do you mean,
pokey
?”
“He poked me in the arm with his finger,” she says. “I didn’t like it.”
“Well, if he ever does it again, give him a smack and tell him to cut it out.” I know I should be giving her some motherly advice about talking through conflict, using words to express her feelings, or telling a grown-up. But I give her the advice she’ll actually need to survive eleven more years in this jungle. “And if he doesn’t,” I add, “tell him your big sister’s coming after him.”
Maisie considers this and nods.
Evan brightens at the sight of us in the doorway. It seems that he and his buddy, Patrick, are in the middle of a squabble over the best truck in the room, and we’re his reinforcements. As usual, Elaine hasn’t helped at all. Too busy cutting out apples from construction paper in the corner.
“C’mon, Evan,” I call. “I’ve got to get to work.”
Evan lowers his chin and stands his ground. He knows that to leave now is to concede and lose it all.
“Now!”
He comes slowly, dragging his feet across the carpet. “I bet you can play with the truck first tomorrow,” I say as we head down the hallway to his cubby. He doesn’t believe me and makes me put on his shoes and sweater without lifting his arms and feet to help.
I half-drag Evan and Maisie, one in each hand, down the block to our apartment, through the lobby, into the elevator.
They start fighting over who gets to press the button for our floor, so I do it myself. Which makes them both sulk.
I pause outside our apartment door. What I’ll find on the other side is like a choose-your own-adventure story. I turn the key and push the door open, standing in front of Maisie and Evan.
Mom’s in the kitchen, drying her damp hair with a towel, a ratty bathrobe stretched across her generous hips and chest. She smiles. I exhale.
Maisie and Evan run to her. “My teacher let us use the paints!” Maisie says.
“Patrick took the best truck.” Evan tugs on her terrycloth belt.
As she starts to ask them about their day, I say, “You’ll make them supper?” She nods. I grab a piece of bread and dash for the door. She calls me back.
“What?” I say, sounding like a cat getting stepped on.
She pushes her face close to mine—coffee breath this time. The skin around her light blue eyes is puffy, creased by crow’s-feet. She finger-combs her damp platinum hair, a shock of mousy regrowth at the roots.
“Well,” she says, “how was your first day?”
“Oh, fine. I got the classes I wanted.”
“Good.” She brightens and shifts away. I feel a twinge of guilt. Just for one second.
I say goodbye to Maisie and Evan and jog down to the convenience store right beside our apartment building. I started working there three weeks ago, just a few days a week.
Two hours after school, during rush hour, before Mom leaves for her shift. I stock the shelves and clean up. They’ve started training me on the till too, except for lotto and cigarettes.
