Twisted Fate (7 page)

I think Graham had been a lonely kid this past year and he needed to process and understand what he went through. I think that was true the last year in Virginia too. I won’t have people saying it was the art—that it was the art that caused all our sorrow. The truth is some of his art is the only consolation. It’s the only thing that still remains.

I
saw her waiting as usual in her black jeans, that alert, funny, “I’m about to be in trouble” look on her face. “Tate!” I called to her, and she looked up and grinned sheepishly, walked in, and sat down as I shut the door. This was becoming a pretty common ritual with Ms. Tate.

I try to be a good example, but my office is pretty cluttered. They keep us busy at RHS and I had stacks of folders nearly dwarfing my desk. I always kept a jar of black licorice candy out for students, which for some reason was still three-quarters full.

“Tate, how’s things?” I asked, and then went on without waiting for her usual smart-aleck answer. “I got this report here from your social studies teacher that says you’ve already missed six classes this quarter. What’s up, girl?”

“Six classes? Sure you’re not talking about my sister?”

“Ha! C’mon, don’t give me that line again. I mean it, what’s up? You’re a straight-A student at risk of failing
because of absences, detentions, and mouthing off. Doesn’t quite make sense somehow. What can we do to fix it?”

She shrugged. “It’s sixth period. Sometimes I take a long lunch.”

I laughed. “Oh, I hear you, sometimes I want to take a long lunch too, but you know what?”

“What?” Tate asked.

“I don’t.”

Tate didn’t know what to say for once. She smiled awkwardly and shrugged. I really liked this kid. She was one person who I thought about when the last bell rang. Wondered how she was doing and if she was going to make it out of Rockland High okay.

I leaned in close to her and whispered. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said. “Everyone kinda hates high school. Unless they are a little bent. But once you’re out, you’re out, and it’s a whole new world. You fail social studies, I mean, you do something stupid and just stop showing up, and you’re gonna miss getting to that new world fast. You’ll end up trapped somewhere you can’t stand for even longer. Does that make sense?”

She rolled her eyes. I’d been telling her similar things last year too, until she came in with a list of successful high-school dropouts and handed it to me. “I hung this over my desk at home,” she’d said. “Thought you might want a copy.” Still, I wasn’t about to give up trying. I got it about why she didn’t want to be in school. She wanted to live in
the world instead of sit at a desk. And she didn’t know why she had to show up at all if she was getting good grades. And nobody had yet been able to make her see the logic in it. I also knew Tate got high, which, honestly, as long as she still did her work and didn’t become a slacker, I didn’t really care that much about. The thing I wanted her to do was show up. I wanted her to pass. I’d seen enough kids go through the system, and seen enough friends still working at Pizza Hut, to know that there were plenty of ways some seemingly innocuous drug could drag you down, but Tate’s problem was being there at all.

“Well, look,” I told her. “Whether it makes sense or not, promise me you’ll go to class tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She looked up and nodded at me. “All right.”

Tate left the office but lingered around outside. She really didn’t want to go back to class—there were only fifteen more minutes anyway, and she could just as easily study a little right now by herself. And besides, something about hanging around Richards’s office made her feel more relaxed. Syd liked Richards because she often saw her smoking on the way from the parking lot to the school, had a loud musical laugh that you could hear in the hallways, and wore black skinny jeans every day. Jeans and a pretty designer blouse. You could tell she didn’t want to dress up at all.

And Tate could easily picture her wearing black lipstick
and a ball-chain necklace back when Richards was in high school herself. Now the woman wore a small string of pearls every day, but Syd considered it just a professional costume. She knew that Ally actually admired the pearls and blouse—tried to dress like that herself. Ally described her as “caring but professional,” and Syd had to admit it was a good description. There was something about Richards that both girls liked.

Syd sat on the floor across the hall, where she could still look through the door. She watched Richards pull a file out of her drawer and look at it.

Principal Fitzgerald peeked his head into her office. And Syd watched from the hallway—waiting for him to tell her to get back to class—but he didn’t seem to see her at all.

“Still pondering the fate of Tate?” he asked her.

Richards looked up. “She’s a good kid, Dan,” she said.

“That’s the attitude we hired you for, Mandy.”

“She
is
, though. I really think she could go on to a top ten. If something besides skateboarding could hold her interest for more than a week and she’d get herself to classes.” She played absently with her pearls as she looked back down at the file. “Her standardized-test scores are high. Her teachers say this kid could be half there or dominate the class, bringing in all kinds of information or doing special reading or extra-credit projects. She’s smart as hell. And she’s always got that joke, ‘You must be thinking of my sister,’ when she’s getting in trouble or getting particular praise. She’s an interesting kid. Mercurial.”

Syd could feel her heart beating harder listening to their conversation. She wanted to hear more and wanted to get up and leave before they said anything that might be upsetting or weird.

Fitz put his hand on the doorframe and leaned there. “Yeah,” he said. “Her best friend Declan—maybe he’s her boyfriend—has the same attitude. Kid’s an incredible wiseass but clearly headed to Harvard. He’s one of those geniuses who goes on to be a professor or gets scooped up to work on a government project. I wish they could be like their friend Becky. She’s such a sweetheart, never in trouble.”

“C’mon, Dan, it’s harder for some people to pull off that intellectual rebel thing. Declan gets away with more because he’s a boy. Becky has a little more poise for some reason, I suspect ’cause she gets a little more parenting. But Tate’s got a lot of pressure. Hell, you know it’s still a harder world for girls, and for some reason this kid with everything going for her is making it even harder on herself.”

“And she’s been making it harder on herself for years,” Fitzgerald said.

“Anybody ever have a nice long talk with her parents?” Richards asked.

He shook his head and laughed. “If we could track them down,” he said, and Syd felt butterflies in her stomach and the hair on the back of her neck go up as he talked about her parents. “Funny family,” he said, scratching his head. “Never available. Rarely home. Her father’s a builder. Salt-of-the-earth, back-country Mainer who made good. But
y’know, sometimes even
I
can barely understand what he’s saying. Accent so thick. The money comes from her mother’s side, and that family owns half the state. Apparently they met when Mrs. Tate was home from college and he was doing some work on one of her parents’ houses in Kennebunk. Or that’s the gossip, anyway. Can’t say I’ve been able to have a decent conversation with either one of them. Even back when Tate started that fire in the chemistry lab freshman year. I told them about it—the mother said, ‘I see,’ and a week later we had an anonymous gift for state-of-the-art lab equipment. But no change in the kid’s behavior at all.”

Richards shook her head. “That is the last thing in the world a kid like that needs. No consequences.”

“Tell me about it,” Fitzgerald said. “Between her and Declan we got just about no authority. It’s hard to tell kids their grades will suffer if they screw off when the two of them are like the poster boy and girl for the benefits of having an attitude problem. Sure to be valedictorian and salutatorian—one or the other of them, and they’re both little pains in my ass. Never seen anything like it.”

“Trick is to keep them busy,” Richards said. “Find a way to direct them, maybe.”

“Well, that’s true for Declan,” Fitzgerald said. “Soon as the Model UN or chess club starts he’s out of everyone’s hair for a while and his detentions go down. But Tate? She’s a special case. You’ll see, Mandy, you’ll see.”

00:00–13:42—Swing set

15:04—Cheerleading practice

18:51—Pine Grove Inn

Dear Lined Piece of Paper,

If they would let me stay home from school, I could get so much done! Already in the days since we’ve moved here I feel like I am on to something that’s made me feel better than ever. It might be the drugs, sure, of course it could be the new drugs, especially given the fact that I’ve decided to adjust my own dosage! Not sure how Dr. Adams calculates these things but I was reading online and actually nothing major will happen to my liver if I take even
four times
as much as they have me on. That means FOUR TIMES as relaxed. And FOUR TIMES as focused and FOUR TIMES better at getting everything done. So it might be the drugs but I think it’s actually a whole
new way of thinking about life!

I always believed it was best to see life from a distance, record it from a distance. And then watch it. We think we remember the way things are but we don’t. That’s why I don’t even understand why I’m supposed to go to Dr. Adams. If he wants to know what happened he can just look at the footage. How am I supposed to talk about what I remember from years ago? Those things might not be accurate. Anyway, now I think I can get it right. I just need the perfect subject. I need the perfect character. I need someone who is brave and sweet and full of life, like Eric! I need a partner! And I know just the person. I don’t know how I’ll be able to put the camera down to go to school. But I figure I can get myself a smaller camera. Something tiny I can carry on a lanyard. Something people won’t even notice. I’m not just trying to document my life. I’m trying to make sure I know who I am. And that when that moment comes again I’ll be able to capture it perfectly. The problem with people as far as I’m concerned is they make up these phony personas. They walk around trying to make sure no one knows who they are—wearing whatever everyone else does, listening to whatever music is on the radio, but who are they really? They create whole fake versions of themselves for Facebook.

But on film—in the way I film them—there is a point where the facade breaks down, where you can see who they really are. What I’m giving people is a gift! And it’s a gift I want for myself too! I want to know who I am. I don’t think I’ve ever felt all that scared—shy, yes; pathologically shy, maybe, according to some—but scared? No way. Maybe someday I’ll be able to scare myself,
but so far it hasn’t happened. When it happens I’ll have it on film, that’s for sure. I’ll be able to see exactly what it looks like when whatever facade I’ve created for myself breaks down. Even if I don’t know it’s there. There’s something inside of me and I feel like I am closer to getting to it than I’ve ever been before. Four times closer. LOL.

The main thing now is I need more money so I can do all this stuff without asking Dad and Kim to buy me equipment. Fortunately due to my superior reasoning (FOUR TIMES BETTER REASONING SKILLS) I’ve worked out THE PERFECT WAY to make some cash. I’ve set up a PayPal account and also an Amazon wish list so that people who download my films can pay me directly or buy me what I need and then just ship those things to me. You would not believe how interested people are in my films. It’s amazing to me that I’m not already some kind of international superstar. I am like Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick all rolled into one.

So anyway, Kim is home all day but she’s in her studio working and she has never once brought in the mail that I know of. So no one will know if I get packages or not. When I finish this project it will all make sense to everyone. Especially to me. I will understand things the way I couldn’t before.

Between “finding my calling,” as Dr. Adams would say, and working on the Austin Healey, I think life in Rockland is shaping up to be okay. And the neighbors! Beautiful Tate! I want to talk to her. I want to see her. I want to make her the star of all my films!!