The Impossible Knife of Memory (17 page)

Finn was right; we didn’t need a tour guide. He’d memorized every inch of the campus from the website. He showed me the new behavioral sciences building, the athletic center, where one vast room was filled with treadmills, each with its own television monitor, and a massive swimming pool, and a student center filled with people who looked impossibly comfortable and happy. When he told me the number of books in the library, I didn’t believe him, so I asked at the reference desk, and the dude showed me a screen with a summary of their collections. It made me so faint I had to sit with my head between my knees for a while.

Better than all that was the simple act of walking down hallways where classes were being held. We lingered by a few open doorways, catching random bits of lecture and arguments about Kant and Indonesian history and bonding equivalencies and scansion and
King Lear
. We peeked through the windows into lecture halls and argued about whether a board filled with symbols was physics or astrology.

Finn gradually transformed from
Grumpasourous maximus
into my hot, skinny, almost-boyfriend. (I hadn’t decided if I was using that word yet.) We used our coupons to buy lunch and sat underneath an ancient oak tree in the middle of the quad feasting on subs, chocolate milk, and a peanut butter cookie the size of my face. Halfway through the cookie Finn lay back in the combed grass with a sigh.

“Nerdvana?” I asked.

“Not yet, but I am slightly less despondent. You were right. It was a good idea, coming here.”
The bells in the clock tower boomed. I pointed at a dude riding a skateboard from one end of the quad to the other, typing on his phone. “You really want to be like him?”
“If he’s here on a full scholarship and majoring in political science, I’d give my left nut to be that guy. Maybe minus the skateboard.”
“Then go,” I said. “Be nice to the admissions receptionist and ask if you can get an interview with somebody. Anybody. Give it your best.”
“But if I get an interview and apply and get in, what do I do then? And worse, what if I apply and they turn me down?”
“If they can’t see that you’re perfect for this place, then they suck. And if you’re smart enough to go here, then you should be smart enough to find a way to pay for it, right? Now go.”
I watched until he’d disappeared inside the red stone castle (practically skipping), then I stretched out on the cool grass. This was not hallowed ground. It was dirt, brown dirt, crawling with ants.
I found the college’s website on my phone and looked up the application. Stupidest thing ever. How could filling in a bunch of blanks and writing a fluffy essay about the “moment of significance” in my life let them know if I was good enough to go here? The other essay prompts were just as bad:

recount an incident or time when you experienced failure.
reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea.
discuss an event that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.

Who wrote these things? What the hell did they have to do with how smart a person was or how ready she might be for college?

I tried to hop on the school’s Wi-Fi because we couldn’t afford the data charges. The passwords I guessed (welcome, guest, wanderer, spoiled, nerdvana) failed, which pissed me all the way off. I wanted a map so I could find a some shortcut to get home.

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52
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I gave Ms. Benedetti a Swevenbury Owls pencil at the end of fourth period the next day.
“What did you think?” she asked. “Want to go there?”
I snorted. “No way.”
“There are lots of scholarships,” she said, her forehead wrinkled into the earnest lines of sincerity.
“Not for me,” I said on my way out the door. “But thanks.”

After school on Thursday, we parked in a secluded place and made out until the alarm on his phone went off. We adjusted our clothes and buckled up.
“Do you know what you’re going to wear tomorrow?”

he asked as he started the car.

A simple question, right? Maybe it should have raised a flag or something, but I was still swooning, because
daaaang
that boy could kiss. He could have asked me anything, like what’s the specific gravity of honey or what kind of bra did Marie Antoinette wear, and I would not have found it odd.

“Hayley?” He waved his hand in front of my eyes. “I said, do you know what you’re wearing tomorrow?”
I blinked, still not getting it. “No, not yet.”
“I know, right?” he replied.
Had I been less swoony it might have struck me as weird that he was asking about my wardrobe, but a block from my house we parked again and got tangled up in a good-bye kiss and I forgot all about it.
My Chinese homework, that was partly to blame, too.
I’d started it, but then I had to go online to look something up and one thing led to another and suddenly I found myself gaming with Finn in a distant galaxy. Totally pwnd him. His manly pride took offense at that and so we had to play again. And again. We would have played until dawn— me winning, him losing—except that I got a text from Sasha, who had become my drill partner in Chinese, asking me if the test was just going to cover chapter four or everything since the beginning of the year.
I don’t know what came over me. You could blame the kissing, I guess. His saliva had infected me with a strain of Finnegan Ramos Conventional Success Syndrome. I stopped gaming and stayed up past three trying to memorize eight weeks’ worth of Chinese characters.
I woke up with my face on the keyboard, my phone screaming inches away from my nose.
“I’ve been waiting out here for ten minutes,” Finn’s voice said. “Are you okay?”
I hadn’t changed into pj’s the night before, so I didn’t have to waste any time getting dressed. I grabbed my stuff, staggered out the front door, down the street and into the Acclaim, which smelled more like burning oil than ever.
My first glance at Finn made me wonder if I were still asleep.
“Like it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.
I was speechless.
He pointed to the cardboard cutout of an old-fashioned pipe sitting on the dashboard. “Can’t you guess who I am?”
“What’s on your head?”
“A deerstalker,” he said. “It’s a detective hat. This,” he plucked at the ugly gray thing he was wearing over his shoulders, “is a cape. I should have on fancier shoes but they don’t fit anymore. Looks good, huh?”
“I just woke up, Finn. You’re confusing me. What’s going on?”
“Elementary, my dear Kincain,” he said in a lousy British accent. “It’s Halloween!”

* * *

He filled me in on the details as we drove (almost reaching the speed limit for several thrill-filled moments), but I didn’t believe him. My mistake.

Our principal was dressed as a spider. The secretaries were all convicts. The janitors had transformed themselves into Luigi clones. All of the teachers were in costumes. The cafeteria ladies, too: beehive hairdos and poodle skirts from the 1950s.

Gracie was wearing a T-shirt that said disfun on the front. Topher’s T-shirt said ctional. They were as keyed up as six-year-old kids at a birthday party with unlimited candy and cupcakes.

“I don’t understand,” I said again. “Why is the staff more dressed up than the kids?”
“Because they get to make the rules,” Gracie said.
“Because the students all wanted to be inappropriate,” Topher said.
“It’s a game,” explained Sherlock Finn Holmes. “A game afoot! The challenge: to walk the thin line of costuming that separates what the administration has labeled—”
All three of them made bunny-ear quotation marks with their fingers: “Distractions!”
“And those that are merely, ahem . . .” Sherlock stared at me.
“Lame,” finished Gracie. “Your ignorance is mind-boggling. What time should we pick you up?”
“Who is ‘we’ and why are ‘we’ picking me up?” I asked.
“Trick or treating, duh!”
The entire day was surreal. Ms. Rogak taught English dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein. My Chinese teacher was a ham-and-cheese sandwich. She canceled the test and let us watch a movie. My forensic science teacher was dressed as a crime scene, dusted with fingerprint powder, sprayed with Luminol, and wrapped in yellow police tape. As the day wore on, I found myself liking it, actually loving it. Halloween—the day when we could pretend to be whatever we wanted—seemed to be letting everyone be who they really were. Wearing face paint and masks gave everyone in school permission to drop the zombie act. Even the kids who were hinting at actual zombification by the way they walked and moaned seemed more human to me than ever before.
When I was called down to the guidance office at the end of last period, I took my sweet time getting there so I could admire the decorations that made the music hall look like the palace of Versailles. (The chorus teacher and band instructor had dressed as Mozart and Scarlatti.) If every day could be like this, I bet test scores would go through the roof.
Gerta, the guidance secretary, was completely covered by orange rubber fish scales. An enormous clam, opened to show a pearl inside it, sat on her head.
“No costume?” Gerta asked as I signed in.
“I’m going to wear something different tonight,” I said. “Right now I’m disguised as a rebellious, irritating teenager.”
“Very convincing. I hardly recognized you.”
Ms. Benedetti, dressed as an old-school, guaranteed-topiss-off-the-Wiccans witch with a pointy hat, wart on the chin, cobwebs and plastic spiders nestled in her wig, opened her door.
“Ger-a agh-agh allowee,” she mumbled, beckoning me in and brushing aside the thick cobwebs that drooped from the ceiling. “Ome ee.”
I had to squeeze by an inflatable cauldron and step over life-sized plastic rats to get to the chair.
“I o oou own my—” Benedetti began.
“Ma’am.” I interrupted and pointed at her fake teeth. “Would you mind?”
“Oh.” She pulled out the teeth and took off her hat. “Feels so natural, after a while you forget you’re wearing them.”
It took all my strength, but I resisted the temptation to comment.
She pushed a plastic orange bowl across the desk. “Candy corn?”
I didn’t want to take anything from her, but my stomach overruled my head and I snagged a handful.
She waited until my mouth was full.
“Hayley, we have a bit of a problem.”
I stopped mid-chew, mind racing with the countless disasters that could follow an opening statement like that.
“I had a meeting with Mr. Cleveland,” she continued.
I started chewing again.
“He said he’d set you up with tutoring.”
I nodded, hoping she didn’t notice the blushing because my tutoring sessions no longer had anything to do with math.
“And yet your grade hasn’t improved at all.”
I shrugged and took another handful of candy.
“He said you had shown some interest in helping revive the school newspaper, but that has fallen by the wayside, too. In addition—”
“Did you tell my father about Trish?” I asked. “He said he talked to you.”
“We didn’t talk about Trish,” she said. “We discussed her concerns.”
“What were those, exactly?”
“Most had to do with your father’s unconventional approach to your homeschooling. He confirmed that he had not been entirely truthful about your lessons.”
“Was he angry?”
“Not at all. He simply asked if I thought you were struggling in any subjects. According to your teachers you haven’t had any problems with the material, with the exception of math, of course.”
“You said ‘most.’ What else?”
“In trying to understand the whole student, it’s helpful to have a picture of the larger family dynamic.”
“That sounds like a load of crap,” I said. “Did you ask Dad about this ‘dynamic’?”
“I tried.” She picked up a piece of candy corn with her fingernails. “I got the impression that you’d have more to say about that than your father.”
The final bell cut her off.
I jumped up. “Can we talk about this on Monday?”
“I imagine so.” The witch sighed and popped the candy in her mouth. “Be careful tonight.”

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53
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Our washer and dryer stood at the bottom of the basement steps. I led Gracie past them and opened the door to the rest of the basement.

“Whoa,” Gracie said. “It didn’t used to look like this.”

When we first moved in, Dad had spent an afternoon trying to deal with Gramma’s old stuff in the basement. I helped him until we got in a stupid argument about some ancient books of his. They stank of mold and I said we needed to throw them out and he’d yelled at me so I’d stormed out. This was the first time I’d ventured past the washer and dryer since then. It looked like Dad had stopped working as soon as I’d left.

“I swear to you this wasn’t here then,” Gracie said, pointing at the rickety metal shelving unit half filled with plastic tubs and cardboard boxes. “There was a little round table and three chairs, and a rug and a toy chest—”

“Knock it off, will you?” I asked. “You’re freaking me out. Your memory is unnatural. I bet you have a brain tumor or something.”

She stuck her tongue out at me. Her mood had been better since her parents had declared a temporary truce after their family therapist had threatened to quit.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “We’ll never find anything. How about I just carry an open umbrella and say that I’m a rainstorm?”

“Such a pessimist.” Gracie pulled a bin from the shelf, set it on the ground, and opened it. “Eww! Old wigs and mouse poop.” Two bins later, she shrieked in triumph; she’d found our old dress-up clothes and a box of arts and crafts supplies that were free of rodent turds. I pointed out that we had grown a bit in the past decade and she called me an ungrateful bitch and we dumped everything on the floor and started pawing through it to figure out a costume for me.

“How about Sexy Princess?” Gracie asked, putting a bent tiara on her head.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“Sexy Cowgirl?” Gracie held up a kid’s holster and six-shooter.
“I’d rather be warm than sexy,” I said, holding up an old shawl. “It’s going down to the twenties tonight.”
She rummaged in another bin. “Feathers!” she shouted triumphantly. “You could be Sexy Big Bird!”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
Before she could reply, heavy footsteps hurried down the wooden stairs. My gut tightened.
“Dad?” I called.
He stopped in the doorway. “What are you two doing down here?”
“I need a Halloween costume,” I said quickly. “Gracie asked me to help her take her little brother trick or treating.”
“It’ll be supersafe,” Gracie added. “We’ll only go to the houses of people we know and—”
She stopped when my father held up his hand.
“That’s great, sounds like fun,” he said, “but where’s the vacuum cleaner?”
“What?” I asked.
“The vacuum cleaner,” he repeated. “I can’t find it. Or the thing you use to clean the toilet.”
“Toilet brush is in the holder in the garage. Vacuum cleaner is in my closet.”
“Thanks.” He studied the mess we’d made on the floor. “What time are you heading out?”
“I’ll make dinner before I go,” I promised.
“Don’t worry about that, I got it.”
“Remember, I’m spending the night at Gracie’s,” I said.
“I remember!” he called. “Have fun!”
“You can count on that!” Gracie whispered as she danced a few steps.
“Shh!” I warned. Finn’s mother had taken an unplanned trip to Boston because his dad had the flu. She wasn’t going to be home until Sunday night. Maybe Monday. So we had an empty house for the whole weekend.
“Hey!” Dad’s footsteps thudded back down the stairs, and his face poked around the corner. “No parties and you don’t go near the quarry, understood?”
“Of course it is, sir,” Gracie answered super sincerely. “My parents have the exact same rules.”
“Good,” Dad said. “Glad to hear it. You girls leaving soon?”
An alarm bell clanged in my head.
Michael
.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “Maybe I should come back here. What if a million little kids show up or some idiots egg the house? It’ll drive you nuts. If I stay, you won’t have to deal with any of it.”
“You go,” he said firmly. “I’m having a friend come over for dinner. Between the two of us, we’ll take care of it.”
Definitely Michael.
My heart sank. Would it be better to spend the night here to make sure that creep did not cause a catastrophe or go to Finn’s and spend all night worrying?
“Mr. Kincain, do you have a date?” Gracie teased.
Instead of losing his temper or being rude, my father grinned and cleared his throat. “Well, maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. I’ll let you know tomorrow, how’s that?”
Dear gods above. Michael has hooked my father up with a skank piece of trash
.