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Authors: Karen Finneyfrock

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BOOK: The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door
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that he liked boys instead of girls, it’s been easier

to love him. Loving him feels like counting or using

the phone or something else that’s effortless. I’m like

a leaf with nothing to do but fall.

 

I recognized the curly handwriting above my poem instantly. After all, it had tormented me since the eighth grade. I flashed back to standing at Mr. Pearson’s desk, receiving my A minus, while my backpack lay unprotected at my chair. I remembered the strangely smug look on Sandy’s face after the quiz, and the way she wasn’t in Spanish class. While I thought I was so clever stealing Mandy’s cell phone, they had taken my poetry journal.

I heard a boy’s voice down the hall saying in a mocking high falsetto, “I’m like a leaf with nothing to do but fall.” Other boys laughed. The black hole in my chest was growing at an alarming rate. I felt like I might be sucked into it entirely, never to be seen again. The goldenrod paper trembled in my hand, and a few people bumped into me trying to get past.

Something inside of me gave up. Being Dark hadn’t protected me. Revenge hadn’t rescued me, it hadn’t even worked. Now everyone would be talking about the poem instead of the text message, talking about Drake instead of Sandy. I was the same old Celia who could be picked on and humiliated. The only difference between this and the eighth grade was that I had managed to bring Drake down with me. I finally got a best friend, and I had betrayed him to the whole school. After promising I would never tell anyone that he was gay, I told
everyone
. I started melting like a stick of butter. Soon I would be nothing but a puddle on the floor.

That’s when two firm hands found my shoulders and a deep voice said into my ear, “You head down the hall and I’ll go up.” Those hands pushed me firmly toward the wall where the pages were hanging. I looked behind me and watched Clock tear down a yellow page and add it to the stack he already had in his hand. I stared as he walked on to the next one, pushing away a couple of freshmen who were trying to read it. “Oooh, so shocking,” he said to them mockingly, “we live in the suburbs and we don’t know any gay people.” He tore the paper off the wall right in front of them.

As if someone had held smelling salts up to my nose, I came to life. I turned to go up the hall in the direction of the library, pulling down posters furiously as I went. “Excuse me,” I said rudely, pushing people out of my way. “Just collecting my intellectual property.” I tore my poems down like they were old birthday streamers. “Correcting copyright infringement,” I barked, stomping into the next hall, which was also coated in copies.

I yanked down twenty more photocopies before I thought of Drake. What if he had seen them? Or worse, what if he
hadn’t
seen them and was innocently sitting on the grass eating lunch, just waiting to be humiliated? I tore down three more of the posters as I raced off through the building toward the outdoor picnic tables.

Comments bounced through the hall as I ran. An upperclassman said, “Is that her?” and pointed. A freshman boy yelled, “I agree with gravity, too.” There was plenty of general laughter. I just wanted to get to Drake and explain what happened, to tell him about the poem before he saw it on the wall. I hit the door to the lunch area and ran past the picnic tables to our usual spot on the grass. To my dismay, Drake was already on the basketball court with the other boys.

I stopped at the edge of the asphalt, praying for the gift of telepathic communication. It wasn’t like I could run onto the court and talk to him in front of everyone. Reacting to the drama any more would only make it worse.

They were still choosing teams. Drake appeared to be deep in thought, but I couldn’t tell if it was his normal reserved demeanor with the boys or if he was thinking about how much he hated me for telling the whole school he was gay. Would he be playing the pickup game if he already knew? Was he trying to be cool, act unaffected, or was he completely unaware of what was posted in the halls?

Clay called Drake’s name as he picked him for his team. Also looking absorbed was Joey Gaskill, who got picked last for the other team.

I stood helplessly on the side of the court as the game began. Drake played better than usual, with more aggression in his stance. When he guarded another player, his eyes bored into their elbows and his hands pushed roughly at the ball. The players’ long bodies spread out over the court like starfish. The offense turned into arrows while the defense transformed into shields. When someone stole the ball, all the players would shape-shift again, shooting themselves one way or the other down the court.

Drake was guarding Greg Baker, a sophomore on the JV team who was in my gym class. Drake blocked all of Greg’s attempted baskets, but every time Drake went for a layup, the ball might have been a magnet. He couldn’t miss. Drake scored ten points before anyone else on either side had a basket.

There were more spectators than I had ever seen for a pickup game. Hershey High’s version of a celebrity scandal was enjoying a public moment on the blacktop. “He doesn’t play like a fag,” I heard a boy say from another spot on the lawn. I tried to look unaffected.

Humans must be natural followers like the famous cliff-jumping lemmings. Actually, it is a misconception that lemmings commit suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs in mass numbers. I learned about it in a book from the public library called
Mythical Anthropomorphism: Urban Legends of the Animal Kingdom.
What really happens is that as lemmings migrate in large groups and approach a cliff, the first lemmings to the edge try to stop. But the follower lemmings keep crowding in behind the leaders pushing them one by one off the cliff and usually to their deaths.

As the crowd watching the game grew, the game got more intense. A couple of other players made baskets. Drake seemed to grow two feet taller on the court. I was gripping the straps on my backpack so tightly that I had marks on my hands where the nylon was digging into my skin. My hands were sweaty, and my heart was beating hard. Part of me was on that court with Drake. There was no sign yet of Mandy or Sandy, although I kept scanning the lawn for them. I had no idea what I would do if they showed up.

Joey Gaskill’s game was off, no steals or baskets. His shirt was soaked with sweat in huge circles around his armpits. One of Joey’s teammates passed him the ball, and Joey made an impressive run down the court, followed by the boy who was guarding him, with Drake and Greg right at his heels. Their four sets of running shoes seemed to fight each other for a place to land. All of them reached the basket at the same time, ringing around it and gazing up. Joey sprung from his heels with one knee in the air for the jump shot. Joey’s guard, Greg, and Drake all sprung, too. It could have been a ballet if there was less grunting. They all leapt together.

Just as Joey’s hand released the ball into a perfect arc ending at the basket, Drake’s hand made contact, halting the ball’s momentum and sending it off the court. The bodies of all the boys continued their path back toward the earth, propelling Drake and Joey right into each other as they crash-landed back on the court in a tangle of legs and feet.

Despite his slowness on the court, Joey was the first one off the ground. “Get off of me, you fucking
faggot
!” he yelled, pulling his legs apart from Drake’s and hurling the words at him. The crowd went silent, and the words hung in the air like fireworks. They were huge.

Drake shook his head for a moment, like he was trying to brush cobwebs off of his face. I watched his eyes take in the size of the crowd around him. The next second he was on his feet, one arm swinging out to his side like a wrecking ball. It was a wide, wild swing, and it landed on Joey’s face like a spaceship splashing down into the ocean.

Joey thudded onto the asphalt. But that didn’t satisfy the demon that possessed Drake. He leapt on top of Joey and landed two more solid punches to Joey’s torso before other boys jumped in to pull him off.

A roar went up from the bloodthirsty crowd.
“Fight, fight, fight!”
they chanted. I could feel the thrill on every side of me. Their basketball game had morphed into a boxing match. The people on the grass jumped to their feet after the first punch. No one wanted to risk being asked for the details of the fight in their next class and not being able to provide any. After the second punch, kids flooded toward the basketball court, hoping to get a front-row seat for the wreckage.

I had to get to Drake. I grabbed my backpack and started to force my way through the mob. Everyone was pushing. I couldn’t see the court anymore for all the tall boys around me. The crowd was like quicksand. I started shoving harder.

I got to the inside of the circle just in time to watch Principal Foster, Coach Scott, and Mr. Pearson finish tearing Drake and Joey apart and then lead them by the arms back into the school building.

I stood in a throng of bored, desperate, horny, mean, giddy teenagers and watched as the best one of us was dragged away to be persecuted.

CHAPTER

28

 

Schadenfreude
is a German word that means “delight in someone else’s misery.” It’s one of the words I learned in the book
Foreignisms
. It is the feeling of thrill we get when we read gossip magazines about a starlet getting a DUI. It’s the reason we want to see the mug shot, examine her shame-filled eyes surrounded by dark, half-moons of skin. Sometimes high school pulses with it.

As soon as the teachers led Drake and Joey away, the bell rang for class and the mob outside thinned until I was able to breathe. I considered running, just leaving school property instead of going back inside. But Drake was in there, and I didn’t want to abandon him. I pulled the hoodie up over my head, opened the door to Hershey High, and went into battle.

I didn’t see any more photocopies of my poem as I walked down the hall. Clock must have gotten them all. I headed straight for Mr. Fish’s European History class. I didn’t stop at my locker for my book, even though it might mean a lecture from Mr. Fish. A lecture didn’t seem like my biggest problem.

I could feel the
schadenfreude
buzzing around me. I heard the names
Drake
and
Joey
repeated by almost every group of students. Two boys were reenacting the fight for a group of girls. There was a carnival atmosphere in the halls, a palpable glee running through the freshman class. A chorus of heads turned to stare at me as I walked by.

I timed my entrance to history so that I could sit down right as the bell rang. That way, no one could attempt to talk to me. My heart was beating so loudly in my ears that I almost couldn’t hear Mr. Fish start class. A voice in my head was attempting to sort out what just happened, but Mr. Fish kept drowning it out.

“Okay gang, settle down,” he boomed. “Open your books to page forty-three and continue reading the chapter on the French Revolution. I heard we had big excitement at lunch but we are still here to learn.”

After giving me a disappointed look when he noticed I had come to class unprepared, Mr. Fish let me borrow a classroom copy of our textbook. I settled in and opened to page forty-three, trying to make it through one paragraph.
“Even after the attempted flight of the royal family, Emperor Leopold von Habsburg of Austria, brother of Marie Antoinette . . .”
I must have started reading that sentence twenty times. The words just looked like words. Nothing made sense.

“Okay, gang,” Mr. Fish said to all of us, although I was pretty sure that I didn’t belong to the gang. “We are going to continue our section on the French Revolution by dividing up into discussion groups.”

Oh no!
screamed the voice in my head. Any discussion group I was in wasn’t going to focus on the French Revolution. Everyone was going to ask me about the poem or the fight. It would probably be the most popular moment of my high school career.

My hand shot up into the air before I consciously thought to raise it.

“Yes, Celia,” said Mr. Fish.

“I need to go to the nurse,” I said.

“What for?” Mr. Fish sighed.

“It’s private,” I said in my most adult voice. A couple of kids laughed. Kids always know when other kids are faking sickness. It’s funny that adults don’t. He let me go.

The halls were clear outside my class, no students or teachers in sight. I didn’t know where I was going, but it wasn’t to the nurse. I pulled my hoodie up over my head, held on to both straps of my backpack, and decided to walk toward the principal’s office.

Just as I rounded the corner to the main hallway, I caught a glimpse of Drake’s grandmother walking in the direction of the main office. I ducked back behind the wall before she noticed me. She was walking quickly, her shoes making clicking noises on the floor. I waited there until I couldn’t hear the shoe sounds anymore and then peered into the main hall again. I wasn’t surprised the school had called Drake’s grandmother; fighting was a serious offense. They probably called his parents, too.

A kid holding a pass walked around the corner and past me. If I kept standing in the hall, I would risk seeing more students, or, worse, a teacher. It was time to make a decision. I had no intention of going back to history class and facing other kids for two more periods, and I couldn’t get to Drake while he was in the principal’s office. I did the only thing I could think to do. I turned into the main hallway, walked to the set of doors that led to the side of the building, and exited into the daylight.

My boots thumped against the concrete on the familiar walk from school to our neighborhood. I reasoned that if they called Drake’s grandmother, they were probably sending him home with her. We all knew the penalty for fighting.
Suspension
 . . .
expulsion
, both words contained the terrifying sound of
shun
. I had to get to Drake, to tell him what happened, to help, to do
some
thing. I planned to walk to his house and wait for him to get home.

All I could do on the twenty-block-long march was wonder what was happening at school. Was everyone talking about the poem, about the fight, about Drake or me? Would it just be the freshman class, or would the whole school be interested? I thought about what happened in eighth grade when Sandy started the Book. I couldn’t go through that again, and I certainly couldn’t watch Drake go through it. Not because of me.

Drake’s grandmother’s car was already in the driveway, so she must have taken a different route since I didn’t see her drive past. I was on the sidewalk just outside of his house when she opened the door.

“Hello there, Celia,” she said, but not in a nice-to-see-you voice. “I’m sorry, dear, but Drake can’t talk to you right now. He is grounded. I have unplugged his computer, so there will be none of this emailing.” She managed to make emailing sound sinister. “And I have taken this.” She waved Drake’s cell phone over her head. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Is he okay?” I asked, choosing to ignore the question about school.

“Pfft,” she said, throwing up her hands. “Can a child be called
okay
who is hitting other children and breaking noses?” So Joey Gaskill’s nose was broken.

“Will you tell him I stopped by?” I asked in my most not-Dark voice.

“I’ll tell him. If you aren’t going back to school, you’d better go home.” She shook a finger at me.

I turned toward my house. It’s just like adults that when something traumatic happens, and the thing you need the most is to talk to your best friend, they decide to punish you by not letting you talk to your best friend.

I looked hopefully at Drake’s window, my brain spinning like a Ferris wheel, then walked a little farther along the sidewalk and paused by a neighbor’s lawn two houses down. The house next to Drake’s had a wooden fence surrounding it, but the house next to that one didn’t. There were no dogs or people moving around, so I ducked down and ran along behind the first neighbor’s fence in the direction of the wooded lot. Then I circled around to the back of Drake’s house and crouched down behind a bush to look for evidence that his grandmother might still be outside. Finding none, I crept right along the side of the house to Drake’s window and pelted it with a tiny stone.

No answer.

I picked up a larger rock and tossed it. The curtain drew back, and Drake’s head appeared at the window. I chanced a wave. He looked at me and shut the curtain again. Picking up a larger rock, I was just about to target the glass a third time, when the window opened. Drake leaned out and whispered, “Hold on,” and then pulled his head back inside.

I waited behind the bush, trying to figure out what to say to Drake. I would have to tell him about the poem, if he didn’t already know. My intestines tied themselves in a bow. After a few minutes, the window slid open again, and Drake looked out. “I was on the phone with my parents,” he said irritably in a loud whisper.

“Are you in trouble?” I asked.

“Are you for real? Yeah, you could say I’m in trouble.” As the sun caught Drake’s face, I could see a bruise starting to form over his right eye. Joey must have gotten in at least one punch.

“What did they say?” I asked, postponing the thing that
I
had to say.

“They’re more worried than mad, it’s not like I’ve ever gotten in a fight before. But I’m still grounded . . . and suspended.” His head disappeared inside the window again and then came back. “I thought I heard Gran.”

“So, I wrote a poem—” I finally started, but he cut me off.

“You mean the poem that outed me to the whole school? Yeah, I’m pretty familiar with that poem, nice imagery with the leaves,” he said in a sarcastic whisper. “It was so great to read that on the way to lunch with other people standing around. That was awesome.” So he did know. His voice was dripping with rage.

“My poetry journal got stolen—” I started.

“I don’t fucking care if it got stolen. Why would you would write a poem about me being gay and then bring it to school and leave it lying around! That’s either stupid or . . . just . . . stupid.” He was gesturing with one hand while the other clutched the windowsill.

“It wasn’t lying around, it was in my backpack. Drake, I would never—” I started.

“He called me a
faggot
in front of the whole school.”

“You already knew about the poem, and you still played in the game?”

“What was I supposed to do? Hide in the bathroom? Act ashamed? I’m not ashamed.” Drake ran a hand through his hair and then rested his head in that hand.

I sat there in miserable silence.

“I’m so sorry—”

“My parents said I can’t come to New York this weekend.” He let out a long sigh. “They said they want to come here instead and talk to Principal Foster tomorrow. Mom’s trying to get the day off.”

“But you’re supposed to see Japhy this weekend.”

“Yeah, no kidding. What am I going to do? I
have
to go to New York,” said Drake, slamming one hand on the sill and then glancing nervously back inside the house. “I need to talk to Japhy. He’s the only person who can understand.” Drake whipped the back of his hand across his face and winced when he touched the bruise. “Ouch, fuck. If I could just see him, he would look at my face, and he would know how hard it is coming out. He would know that I understand the way he acted.”

A dog started barking a few houses away. I tried to conceal myself more fully behind the bush. “Maybe they will let you come up next weekend,” I offered.

“Timing is everything, Celia. Dreams have a ripeness just like fruit, and you can’t let them rot on the tree,” he said. He didn’t credit Buddy, but I was pretty sure he was quoting. “Getting outed at school, the fight. It’s a sign. I need to go talk to Japhy
now
. I can’t wait.”

“Maybe your parents will change their minds?”

“No, I can’t risk asking permission.”

“I am so, so sorry, Drake,” I said quietly, overcome with guilt again. I pressed my body into the bush and resisted the urge to cry. There was a silence.

“Come with me.”

I shivered.

“I’m leaving for New York tonight before they get here tomorrow. I’ll get in trouble, but I’m already in trouble. After Gran goes to sleep, I’m sneaking out. Come with me,” he said again.

“I’ll get suspended if I skip tomorrow,” was the first of ten reasons I thought of for why I shouldn’t go.

“I’m already suspended. There are worse things.”

“My mom would freak—”

“We’re not running away. We can call your mom as soon as we get there, and we can stay at my family’s apartment. I’ve got my keys. We’ll never be in actual danger.”

“What happens when our families wake up and call the police to declare us missing?”

“We can leave some kind of note, something they’ll find once we’re on our way and they can’t stop us.”

Drake was leaning farther out of the window, both hands now supporting him on the sill. His eyes were red and bloodshot and his nose was running. I could almost feel how sore his face must have been.

“We’ll need money,” I tried.

“I use Mom’s credit card to buy all my train tickets. I’ll buy yours, too.”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

“Our Dreams are going to require bravery—” He turned his head sharply and then disappeared inside again. When he came back, he said, “The phone’s ringing, it’s probably them. Come back at twelve o’clock. Gran goes to bed at nine, and she takes her hearing aid out, so you can knock on the window,” he whispered quickly. “I checked the schedule and we can get the bus to Harrisburg and make the five a.m. train. Coming, Gran,” he called into the house. Then he looked back at me and said, “Twelve o’clock . . . please come,” before pulling down the window and closing the curtains.

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