The Museum of Intangible Things

A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright 2014 © Alloy Entertainment

The quotation in the chapter “Coping” is from Robert Holden,
Shift Happens
(Carlsbad: Hay House, 2011). The quotation in the chapter “Freedom” is from Todd Parr,
It’s Okay to Be Different
(New York: Little, Brown, 2001).

Produced by Alloy Entertainment
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New York, NY 10019

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ISBN: 978-1-101-60448-9

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For my mother, who taught me how to be a friend

Greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.

—
JOHN 15:13

Lithium really is stardust. It is the third to last element that an exploding star expels before it goes nova. Only hydrogen and helium come after.

—
LAUREN E. SIMONUTTI

I am a freshwater girl. I live on the lake, and in New Jersey, that’s rare. The girls on the other side of town have swimming pools, and the girls in the south have the seashore. Other girls are dry, breezy, salty, and bleached. I, on the other hand, am dark, grounded, heavy, and wet. Fed by springs, tangled in soft fernlike seaweed, I am closer to the earth. Saturated to the bone. I know it, and so do the freshwater boys, who prefer the taste of salt.

I come from a long line of downtrodden women who marry alcoholics. All the way back to my Lenni Lenape great-great-great-(lots of greats) grandmother, Scarlet Bird, a red-haired New Jersey Indian who married William Penn.

I know this to be true because of the red highlights in my hair, and because, if you ever see the statue of William Penn in Philadelphia, the one that dictates the height of all the buildings in its perimeter, you will notice, if you look at him from behind, that he and I have the exact same rear end.

Which is pronounced, as rear ends go. And teeters dangerously on the fence between “athletic” and “unacceptable.”

My best friend Zoe has a perfect rear end and stick legs, and long, silky black hair. She is obviously not descended from William Penn. There are no dowdy pilgrims in her ancestry. Whereas I am grounded and mired in this place, she’s like milkweed fluff that will take off with the first strong breeze. Stronger than fluff, though. She’s like a bullet just waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

When we were ten, we took a break from searching for crawfish underneath some rocks at the edge of the lake. We retreated to our fort beneath the branches of the weeping willow, and we made a pact. We wrote it on some bark. And then mashed it into a stew with forsythia flowers, petroleum-streaked sand, seaweed, and a dead fish. And we vowed: never to let each other down.

There is no stronger bond than the one that gets you through childhood.

This is our story.

They say the middle class is fast disappearing, and in our town by the lake, it wasn’t very well established in the first place. Our hold on it, the middle class, is precarious and slippery, and though it’s beautiful in the woods—and though we are only forty-five minutes from Manhattan—a whole lot of us are not going to make it here.

We’ve heard about the milky-skinned Corinne MacNulty, who, after barely graduating, now pole dances at High Heels, bending over backward for the liquored-up, potbellied friends of her father who used to drive her to cheerleading practice.

Or Michael Garudo, who died in Afghanistan because he had no other options.

Or Jonathan Bruder, who just walked into the lake and drowned because here, when you go off the deep end, there is no one left to rescue you.

If we were at the right place at the right time, Zoe and I actually could have rescued him. At fifteen, we had dreams of becoming lifeguards. Me because of my love for the lake, and Zoe because she looked good in a red bathing suit. So we signed up for daily two-hour life-saving classes at sunrise, where we learned to drag limp victims through the frigid water by their hair. We had to practice on each other. And we never learned what to do if the victim happened to be bald.

Since then, funding for lifeguard lessons has dried up.

No one is teaching lifeguard camp or writing grants for us or finding us Big Brothers or Big Sisters. No one is donating wings to our school or funding after-school programs for our enrichment. The philanthropists cannot find our public school in the woods. We no longer have gym at Johnson High. Aside from our own efforts with spray paint, we no longer study art. We cannot learn a foreign language, or take advanced math, or study science that’s not biology. In fact, if you get above a certain score on the standardized test, you no longer have to stay in school after lunch because they have no funding for anything that isn’t strictly remedial.

This leaves us with a lot of free time.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way she spends her free time. Zoe and I spend it eavesdropping, which we do pretty much from the eaves of Sussex Country Day School.

Sussex Country Day sits on the top of a hill in a renovated farmhouse and barn on seven acres of immaculately groomed grass. It has his-and-hers lacrosse fields, a stable filled with shiny-coated horses, and courts for fancy games they don’t show on TV, like squash and fencing.

The kids here don’t have a lot of free time, and since they have a biological need to rebel even though their lives are absolutely perfect, they do it by taking extra Ritalin or refusing to iron their monogrammed shirts. They do it by wearing black lipstick or raising the hems of their maroon skirts so high that the pleats barely graze the bottom of their dimpled butt cheeks. They have the diseases of the leisure class, like bulimia and attention deficit disorder, and for some reason, with all their fine education, they don’t realize that they are the most boring of all clichés.

Zoe and I come here for different reasons.

I am here to learn, and Zoe is here to learn more about Ethan Drysdale. Plus she does a good business here. She is the one who hems the skirts.

Luckily, Ethan Drysdale’s afternoon schedule coincides with my interests in learning Spanish and calculus.

“
Hola, estudiantes
,” says the sable-haired Sra. Vasquez. I like her. She’s the only one at Sussex Country Day who insists on calling the kids students and herself Señora. The rest of the teachers agree to be addressed by their first names, like servants. Zoe and I can see and hear perfectly from our perch in the attic behind the slats of an air vent.

We found ourselves in the attic one day because Sussex Country Day offered to donate some barely used microscopes to our biology lab. Ms. Brennan, the only teacher left at Johnson High who cares anymore, asked me and Zoe to help her transport the boxes of pity microscopes back to our school. While we were up there, I could hear the lesson going on underneath us in C-12.

They were learning about Euripides’
Medea
and confidently discussing the feminist implications of the woman-scorned motif. They were basically digesting the stuff that would keep us forever apart. “Us” with our jobs at the phone company and buying chips for the big game on Sunday and “them” with their SoHo lofts and weekend houses in the Hamptons.

I vowed to come back. Even though I knew I’d never leave this town, I was curious about how they get out.

And now Zoe and I come here every day. We wear uniforms that Zoe’s clients have loaned us, and we walk into the school like we own the place. This is easier for Zoe than it is for me. I have to fight to tear my eyes away from the rich red Persian rug donated by the Arnejian family and the cluttered trophy case donated by the Smiths. Zoe just walks in snapping her gum and filing her nails. We saunter through the front door and walk past the office, and no one ever asks us for a hall pass, because here, the students really do own the place.

The entrance to the attic is in the Early Education room, so we have to time it so that the four-year-olds are taking their naps. We slip through the door, climb up onto their plastic play structure, open the hatch, and hop up, sliding the plywood hatch back in place after us. Inevitably one of the little ones stops rubbing his ratty blanket against his nose and looks curiously at us. They are all in love with Zoe, though, and all she has to do is wink at them and hand them a lollipop, and they keep quiet. A few times after nap, we’ve heard Ella C. talk about the girls who climb into the ceiling, but the teachers just assume she’s been dreaming.

We’ve made the attic our own little hangout, with a fake bear rug on the floor, spare sets of slippers for moving around, and a Flight of the Conchords poster on the ceiling. I’ve created a desk out of two file cabinets and a plywood
CAR WASH
sign that the cheerleaders use for their yearly fund-raiser. The attic has become my favorite place to be. The aromas of dust, glue, and freshly cut two-by-fours evoke a mixture of nostalgia and possibility.

“Oh my god.” Zoe sighs. “I
love
when he sits like that. It’s like his thing is so big he needs to stretch out his legs just to be comfortable.”

From between the slats we can see Ethan sitting in the back row, practically spread-eagle at his desk with the tops of his shoulders against the seat back. His splayed-out, khaki-clad legs do seem to leave room for the bulges of fabric that may or may not be his “thing.” His brown hair, piecey and textured with product, hangs loosely in front of his left eye. He has just enough scruffy facial hair to outline his superior jawline. His insanely thick black eyelashes frame eyes that are copper. There is no other way to describe their color, so whatever box he checks off for his driver’s license is wildly inaccurate.

Zoe snaps her gum.

“Shhhh. They’re going to find us,” I mime, flailing my arms around insistently.

I am the type A half of our operation. At least about getting in trouble. I don’t like trouble. At all. Getting caught, at anything, makes me cry. Which is why I began paying attention in school in the first place. To avoid conflict. And now I have all this brainpower and nothing to do with it.

Zoe mimes something back to me just to show me how ridiculous I look and sticks her tongue out. Then she gets back to searching for Ethan’s picture in the stack of old yearbooks in the attic and encircling them with Sharpie hearts. She uses her Sharpie to send me a note:

DEAR ANNE FRANK: What are they saying?

Sra. Vasquez has created a fake hotel and is asking in Spanish if random
estudiantes
have reservations.

They’re in a hotel,
I write back.

The conversation below us turns to Ethan then, who happens to have been raised by a Guatemalan nanny. Sra. Vasquez asks him if he has a reservation, and in perfect Spanish, he replies, “You know we do,
mi amor
. I have reserved our usual room for three hours.”

Sra. Vasquez turns bright red, and the rest of the room knows enough Spanish to start caterwauling and wolf whistling.

WHAT DID HE SAY?
asks Zoe with the Sharpie.

Never mind,
I write back.

Tell me!

He asked her back to his fake hotel room,
I write back.

“Oh my god, he is so hot!” Zoe squeals out loud just as the class is settling down.

I’ve never seen Zoe lose her cool about a guy the way she has about Ethan. She flirts a lot, though. “Hypersexuality” is part of this thing she has. We hate labels, but the doctors like to call it a thing that rhymes with
hi-molar schmisdorder
or
zanic oppression
.

I’m not totally convinced she’s bipolar. I just think she’s more alive than the rest of us.

Sometimes she feels itchy, invincible, and irritable. She feels everything at the same time and often uses boys as a distraction to calm her down. They’re a way for her to channel her energy.

She knows how to handle boys, even the jocks, because she expects nothing from them. She has taught me that, to hang out with a jock, even the ones mothered by “feminists,” you have to expect that no matter what you do with them, they will lie and exaggerate to their friends about it the next day. You have to expect that a kiss on the cheek will become a blow job in the locker room. And because they have to lie about you in the locker room as part of their survival, they can never again acknowledge you or talk to you in the hall.

Which is usually fine by Zoe. She isn’t in it for the conversation. She’s usually so cool about it all.

With Ethan, it’s different. Perhaps because he is just barely out of her reach. Perhaps because he is notorious in his nefarious ways with women. I think she’s attracted to the danger of him, which brings us into new territory and makes me nervous that she’s reeling toward another “episode.” It’s never boring being friends with Zoe.

And now she has totally blown our cover. The entire mostly-white-in-spite-of-the-school’s-diversity-policy class turns and looks toward the slats of the air vent.

We don’t have time to replace the hatch.

Instead, we grab on to the far edge of the rectangular hole in the ceiling, swing down onto the red plastic slide, and speedily slip to the alphabet rug. We’re out the preschool’s emergency exit, dashing across the playground, and scrambling down the big grass hill toward the woods when Sra. Vasquez, putting two and two together, her fuchsia scarf blowing behind her in the wind, screams, “Girls. Girls! There are scholarships!” Except with her accent it sounds like she’s talking about smart lambs. We know about their scholar sheeps. We don’t want them. Because. Well. Because screw them, that’s why. Screw them and their beach houses and their ski trips and their insulting noblesse oblige.

Zoe and I pant and giggle behind a big rock. But once the adrenaline wears off, reality sinks in.

“Do you think they’ll seal it off?” I ask her. “The entrance to the attic?” Something about that space makes me feel safe. The way the dust dances in the sunbeams. The thought of losing it feels like a punch in the stomach.

Zoe’s not the athletic type, and she’s doubled over trying to catch her breath. When she finally looks at me, her eyes even brighter turquoise than usual, her sparsely freckled cheekbones blushed from the fresh air, she guarantees me: “No one will take that away from you.”

I believe her because she’s protected me and my stuff since kindergarten when she kicked Gavin Gilmore in the balls for taking the Mexican jumping beans I brought in for show and tell.