Split Just Right (3 page)

One thing I like about Portia is how easy it is to read her moods, like when she gets mad, she absolutely roars, and when she’s sad, tears squirt out of her eyes like watermelon seeds. Portia can’t fake anything—unlike me, who will try to smile right through my meanest thought or my worst day.

Also, Portia has this knack for not letting other people’s opinions matter to her. She’s never the person who rolls her eyes if she’s caught talking to nerds, or changes seats if she’s not sitting with her friends in assembly or at the lunch table. Sometimes in tennis class Portia even voluntarily teams up with class pariah Paige Outer, who sneak-snitched on her own classmates last year when some of us wrote our Latin declensions on our wrists. The note to Mrs. Perez-Torrez was signed “Anonymous,” but everyone knew.

“Paige has a great backhand,” Portia says.

“Probably from all that practice backstabbing,” I tell her. It was a good comeback, but the bottom line is Portia doesn’t care what anyone thinks. And basically, our class respects that kind of not caring. It’s why Portia’s always voted class vice president, even though this year she’s flunking biology and technically shouldn’t hold an office. Deep down, I know I’m pretty lucky to have Portia as my best friend, since even the most stuck-up girls in my class respect her and have to think twice if they’re going to say or do anything against me.

What’s less lucky is how Portia counted on our friendship to bully me into taking fencing class with her for my Wednesday activity, and now there’s this whole stupid assembly that is going to use all the time I’d needed to study for math. My stomach is beginning to hurt and it’s not even eight thirty. I wish I hadn’t drunk that coffee, which is blasting through my stomach like acid.

In homeroom, I scribble up a crib sheet to study through my morning classes, even though I’m already anticipating the usual C+. My last hope is that we have English SSR—sustained silent reading. Dr. Sonenshine lately is a big fan of SSR, because we’re reading
The Odyssey,
which no one wants to finish.

“This is a boy book,” the class complained after the first chapter.

“This is a classic.” Dr. Sonenshine had stared like an angry owl from behind her glasses.
The Odyssey
is a real snore, although I kind of like the part about Penelope weaving and unraveling her tapestry so that those free-loading suitors can’t marry her. Sometimes, Dr. Sonenshine reads sections of the book out loud in her low, twanging voice and you can feel the whole class sort of slipping back into those wine-dark sea days. But mostly we hate it.

I’ve gone to the Bradshaw School for Girls since kindergarten, when Mom first got her job there. Part of her salary is that I get free tuition. If you can forget about wishing that someone like Ty Amblin were around to liven up classes, a school like Bradshaw isn’t as bad as it sounds. Girls get to be the captains and leaders of everything, which never happens in a school with guys in it. I’m captain of the freshman basketball team and ninth-grade student council representative, and Portia’s president of the stock market club, which are all positions guys would probably snag if Bradshaw went coed.

Some people call the school “Breedshow,” as a joke, I guess because the school and students look so well groomed. My public-school friends say Bradshaw’s for snobs, and I guess that’s my biggest complaint against Bradshaw, too. Some of the girls, like Lacy Finn and Hannah Wilder, are spoiled beyond help. The worst of them also tend to clique around together and talk about stuff like whether the skiing’s better in Saint Moritz or Sun Valley. I think the day Lacy Finn found out I didn’t even own a pair of skis was the same day she stopped talking to me. But that’s only one type of Bradshaw girl. There are plenty of better types, like Portia.

Mom generally likes Bradshaw, too, but she has problems with Mr. Lemmon, the fine arts director. The two don’t get along even in the best of times, but lately I’ve heard Mom’s standard pronouncement, “Dwight Lemmon is a world-class jackass,” thrown around a lot, because of this spring’s play. All Mom wants to do is direct this Tom Sawyer musical, but since Mom is just a part-timer, and since her loud opinions don’t exactly ratchet her up to number one on Mr. Lemmon’s list of favorite faculty members, he is resisting. I think she’s going to wear him down, though. Last year, when Mom was the assistant director for Mr. Lemmon’s deadly dull production of
Saint Joan,
she got all the Bellmont Players to come watch. If it hadn’t been for them, there would have been practically no audience, so Mr. Lemmon owes her one.

“Can’t you just see it?” she’ll ask me whenever she’s obsessing over
Tom!
which has been for a couple months now “A bare stage, with all this—this
space
for the girls to just
express
themselves, and think of the choreography! Cartwheels, full-stage ensembles, straw hats, overalls. A play about energy. A play for athletes,” she suggests, to draw me in.

Frankly, I can’t see it, and I guess neither does Mr. Lemmon, whose taste runs toward more serious productions, like
Our Town
and
Inherit the Wind.

When I read “English class is SSR, in the library” on the blackboard, I want to shout for joy. Dr. Sonenshine passes back our creative-writing essays and corrected quizzes on
The Odyssey
as we file out. She pulls me aside just as I’m priming to sprint down the hall.

“Danny, may I chat with you a second about last week’s assignment? That short story you wrote, ‘The Darkest Man’?”

“Um, was something the matter with it?” I feel a squirm coming on but I look at Dr. Sonenshine straight on. Mom is the master of the deadeye, go-ahead-I-dare-you face, but I’m pretty good at it, too—especially with rude salespeople and whistling construction workers.

Dr. Sonenshine’s eyes widen behind her glasses. She wears her brambly gray hair caught on each side by large silver combs and her black freckles He scattered like pepper across her brown skin. She smiles at me now.

“Not at all, Danny. Matter of fact, there was plenty that worked just fine, just fine.” Her southern voice twangs banjo-style through her vowels. “And that’s why when you look over my comments, and I know we’ve talked about this before, but with your talent, I just wish you could write something”—she exhales a papery cough into her fist—“something more true to life.”

She pulls my paper from her pile and I stuff it into my book bag, not looking at the grade, to show her how I don’t care. True to life. A slow burn brushes across my cheeks.

“Can I go? I need to get a library carrel.”

“Go ahead.” Dr. Sonenshine frowns slightly and steps aside as though I might need a lot of extra room to pass by her.

I don’t take out “The Darkest Man” until I’m sitting all by myself in an upstairs carrel. Tiny squirts of red from Dr. Sonenshine’s pen have rained air over the three and a half pages of my story “Watch verb tense agreement.” “New paragraph.” “Pls. use spell-check.” I can barely look at the tightly curled 82 in the bottom corner. A sideways-crawling comment takes up most of the page, but I don’t feel much in the mood to read it. What kind of talent could I have to get an 82, a mediocre grade, a Lacy Finn and Gray Fitzpatrick kind of grade. But now there’s no way I can concentrate on math. And with the fencing assembly this afternoon, I feel myself giving up (a
role that dangled entirely out of her grasp
…), so I stuff my books back in my book bag and leave the library. There’s one thing I know I can do—my last-resort tactic.

Mom’s in the faculty lounge, writing vigorously in a spiral notebook.

“Hey,” I say listing in the doorway She looks up and raps her knuckles lightly against her forehead.

“I’m remembering everything about the Tom Sawyer pitch. Lemmon won’t know what hit him. What’s up?”

“I can’t …” I wave my math book. “The test’s at one fifteen, I need more time to study, I have this stupid fencing assembly I didn’t practice for, I don’t know what to do.”

“You want a note for your teachers? Then take the train home?”

“I think so.”

Mom nods and flips to a clean sheet of paper. “Back injury?”

“How about just a headache?”

“No one will believe a headache; we’ve used it too many times before,” Mom says impatiently. Then she lowers her voice. “Look, I tell you what. Just walk out to the front hall where Ms. Luff and Dr. Polanski are. Act like you’re going to get a drink of water, then just go, okay—watch.”

Mom springs out of her chair and a look of unimaginable pain freezes her face. She twists her body into an S shape and her hands lurch wildly around behind her, as if searching for a knife lodged in her spine. “My back,” she moans. “I think I just heard something snap or twist … something. Agh—there it goes again.”

“Mom, they’ll believe a headache, too.” I glance at the door. “Cut it out, okay?”

“What have I done to my back?” she cries again, grimacing.

“Susan?” Mr. Sallese, who has been hovering out by the faculty mailboxes, dashes into the room. “Are you okay?”

“Pete, no, yes, I mean I’m fine.” She straightens up. “Really. It’s an old ice-skating injury.”

“I have Tylenol.”

“I’m fine.” Mom smiles, absently rubbing the small of her back with one hand, as if the pain is subsiding.

“I didn’t know you ice-skated. You know, I live right near the big duck pond out in Ivycroft. Sometime when there’s some ice maybe we could—” Mr. Sallese suddenly notices me, lurking behind Mom, a giant storm cloud ready to block his sunny little proposal. I give him the deadeye.

“That might be fun, Pete.” Mom’s smile is unreadable. Mr. Sallese nods and then, after another awkward moment, leaves the faculty lounge.

“Come on, Danny,” Mom whispers, watching him go. “If you just say headache, they’ll think you’re lying.”

“I’m not, anymore. It’s pounding, right over my left eye.”

Mom rips the piece of paper from her notebook and scratches out my standard excuse, then hands it to me with a sniff of dismissal.

“Good luck,” she says.

Mr. Sallese stops me just as I’m dashing down the hall. “Your mother—you think she’ll be okay?”

“Only if she doesn’t exert herself too much. She really can’t do things like go ice-skating anymore.”

“Oh, sure, I understand.” Mr. Sallese’s head and Adam’s apple bob together in agreement. His glance slides toward the faculty-room door, and I can tell he wants to ask me something else about Mom. I turn and run.

Over the years, lots of guys have used me to figure out Mom: what she’s like, what she likes, if she likes him. Except for Warren the gemologist, who hung around a couple years—I remember he used to give me rides to school on his motorcycle when I was in fourth and fifth grade—Mom hasn’t dated anyone seriously for a while.

Gary—or lots of times Elliot, before—has always been the guy who takes care of the dad responsibilities. Gary’s who I take to all the father-daughter lunches, father-daughter picnics, and once even a father-daughter flag football game. Gary was pretty brave through that one. It seemed as if every time I turned around another aggressive Bradshaw dad had pounced on him and knocked him to the ground.

“Bradshaw parents haven’t exactly opened their arms to the homosexual community,” Gary explained when Elliot and Mom saw the bruises.

“Not yet,” Elliot answered, always the optimist. That was before Elliot got sick, when they were thinking of adopting a kid since they thought they were doing such a good job helping Mom raise me.

Mom even told me once, although she wasn’t supposed to, that after Elliot died Gary named me the primary beneficiary of his will, since he doesn’t speak to his parents in Louisiana and doesn’t have any other family.

“Don’t ever say I told you. Never, never say anything about it.” Mom had pressed her hand to her heart and closed her eyes dramatically, but I knew that Gary’s gesture pleased her, which was why she had blurted out the secret to me in the first place. Thinking of Gary’s will can give me the creeps and a safe, protected feeling both at the same time.

But it was Elliot who used to get mad whenever I came home on fake sick days or when I skipped classes with bogus notes from Mom. Since Elliot was a play and movie critic, he used to work at home, so he always knew when I cut out early. I used to have to climb the fire escape and jimmy open my bedroom window to avoid him, and even then he would catch me if the TV or radio was turned up too loud.

“School’s not an optional activity, Susan,” I overheard him say once.

“Don’t tell me how to raise my daughter,” Mom had snapped back. At the time, sitting in my room, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream, and reading magazines, I’d thought, Yeah, Elliot. Don’t tell Mom how to raise me.

But days like today, as I’m sneaking out the side-door exit of the middle school lobby and then leaping like a fugitive down the road to the train station, I feel a twinge of guilt to be cutting school. And deeper inside me, there’s that familiar hurt of missing Elliot, knowing that I won’t ever need to sneak up the fire escape again.

H
OME.

The oven clock reads 12:16. I drop my book bag and the mail on the floor and drag myself to the couch, where I turn on the talk shows and bask in the lucky break of a March sun. Sunlight pours in through the eggshell curtains. I push my hair back from my face. Maybe I can get an early tan for the Spring Fling. I throw my legs over the arm of the sofa. Nothing’s better than an unexpected day off from school.

Rick Finzimer smiles at me from the bookshelf. “Nice work cutting school, Danny,” I imagine him saying. “Couldn’t have planned a better escape myself. She makes it almost too easy, don’t you think? But your mom always was a pushover.”

“Shut up,” I mutter. For some reason, I tend to imagine Rick Finzimer having this snickering, nasty personality. Who knows why; it’s not like I’ve spent any time hanging out with the guy, and he looks friendly enough in his picture. But it makes me feel safer, I think, having this idea that my father is a little bit snarky, because it puts me off missing him. Which I guess I do, in a way—although less intensely than I miss Elliot. It’s strange that Rick Finzimer’s absence should bother me at all, though, because why should I miss someone I’ve never known?