Very in Pieces (5 page)

As soon as the packet lands on my desk, I begin to flip through it to see what poems are included. Past Emily Dickinson, past Elizabeth Bishop, past Plath. There she is.

I exhale: none of the sex poems she's so famous for. Nonnie's exploits are okay by me, but I really don't want to discuss her sex life in English class.

Ms. Staples folds herself back into her chair. “To say good-bye to summer, I'd like to start off with one of Imogene Woodruff's poems. Page seventeen of your packet. Now then,” she says cheerily. “Why don't we read it aloud?” She surveys the room, looking for a reader, and I feel people's eyes on me. I make a show of looking away so that Ms. Staples knows that I really, really don't want to read.

Dominic saves me by raising his hand. Ms. Staples claps joyfully. “A volunteer!”

He clears his throat and holds up his paper. “Fireflies.” He reads the title, nods at Ms. Staples, and begins reading:

I shed my cardigan sweater

Slip out of my sensible shoes

Leave them on the sun-charred grass

And march

Past the summer garden

Gone to waste,

Past the pine tree garlanded

By student words

—Always words, words, words—

Past the puddles of feint praise.

I go to join the pixies

In their

Polyester nightgowns.

(You scoff.

The wry smile tells me you

think I'm telling you tales.

Yet this time it's

Truth.)

They hold glass jars

And capture tiny lights

Detain dancing fireflies

Until their light fades.

(And what I want to say to you is:

You cannot catch my lightning in glass.)

Dominic lowers his paper, and, once again, looks right at me. He has figured out, I am sure, that I am one of the pixies. I shift in my seat, and stare at the poem, trying to reread it, but the words just swim in front of me.

I know the cardigan she mentions. It's army green and she wore it rolled up because the sleeves were too long. A moth ate a small hole through the front pocket. The polyester nightgowns, too: mine had a rainbow, Ramona's a winged unicorn.

These are details that people would like to know. They would like me to share my insider view of the poem, but I won't.

The class discusses the poem's meter (could one be discerned, and the places where it broke it, and why), the allusions and metaphors, and the emotion underlying it.

In town, you can buy her books everywhere, even at the grocery store. The college store sells postcards proclaiming Essex to be “Woodruff Country.” Every year, we have to attend the Woodruff Festival, where Nonnie gives an award to some aspiring poet who proceeds to read one of his or her (usually dreadful and quite long) poems. Everyone thinks they know her. I just want my memories of the woman who braided my hair and brought me down to the large outdoor swimming pool—which was really more of a swimming hole—and sipped gin from a
water bottle while she watched me and Ramona splash around. She always traveled with gumdrops, and would pick out the white ones for me because she knew they were my favorite. She told me that men weren't worth the bother, unless they were particularly handsome, and then they'd be worth it for only a week or two, which made me giggle and say, “What about Daddy?” To which she replied, “I suppose we can keep Dallas around. He makes a good Manhattan.” Analyzing her poems in class made her less my grandmother, and more of the world.

“Ms. Staples, I take issue with this whole unit.” It is Hunter's voice that breaks into my reverie. “Separating the women out like this is a form of ghettoization.”

“Ah, yes!” Ms. Staples says. “A common argument. Now here's my retort: if we didn't celebrate them separately, they might not get included at all.”

“Okay, but why these particular women? I mean, like, Sylvia Plath, she's most famous for killing herself. And Imogene Woodruff. I know she's like our local pride or whatever, but I just don't think she's worth all the fuss.” Hunter sucks on the end of his pen for a moment. “I mean, she's an okay poet, but she's really more famous for who she slept with. She couldn't even write a pastoral without talking about taking off her clothes.”

Britta glances at me sideways and makes a frowning, uncomfortable face.

It is Dominic, though, who says something: “Watch yourself.”

Hunter smirks. “I mean, no offense, Very, but when someone
puts themselves out there, they open themselves up to criticism.”

It's not like I go around harshing on their grandmothers' cookies or knitting or whatever a typical grandma does. Sure, she had affairs, and it isn't like that's something I would recommend as a general course of action, but people do it all the time. At least she's honest about it. “Whatever,” I say. I want it to come out icy, but I just sound cowed.

“So far you've only criticized the author, not the poem,” Dominic says. “You still haven't offered up any reason why we shouldn't be studying her work.”

“Well, this one, for instance, it's all Robert Frost–y. Like all we do in New Hampshire is sit outside and enjoy nature, don't you think?”

Which is hilarious because “nature” and “enjoy” aren't really two things Nonnie puts together. We went out and caught fireflies; that was true. Ramona never punched enough holes in the lid of her jar, so eager to get collecting, and typically hers all died by the morning.

Serena has her desk pressed right up against Hunter's, and his arm is resting on the back of her chair. Her legs are pulled up into her desk, and she curls over it, sketching. She almost never speaks in classes. But today she unwinds herself and says, “I like her poetry. I like the way it moves over you like a river. You don't always know where you're going, but it's good to be carried along.”

Hunter smirks, but Serena gives me a small smile before she coils herself back up, like a snail retreating into its shell.

v.

As Mr. Tompkins wrote in his letter to Essex College, “The limits of the Essex High math program have been reached by Very. In fact, I used L'Hopital's rule because her mathematical limits are at this point indeterminate.” Despite that awful pun, I still got into the college's Advanced Calculus class that meets right smack-dab in the middle of our day.

I jostle my bag in the hopes of shaking out my car keys, which always seem to find the wasteland in the bottom of the pocket, when someone falls into stride with me. “You don't seem like the playing-hooky type.” Dominic. Fabulous. Absolutely, precisely what I do not need.

“I'm not playing hooky. I've got a class up at the college.”

“That's right. I'd heard you were some sort of prodigy.”

“Not exactly.” A prodigy is a child who is able to perform at the level of a highly trained adult. “Gifted is more precise.”

“Is that modesty?”

“It's accuracy.”

He grins his wolf grin.

My hands close around my car keys and I click on the fob to unlock the door.

“Give me a ride, then,” he says.

“Where?”

“To campus.”

“Why?”

“Maybe I've got class, too.”

“In what? Badass posturing?”

“Oh, she wounds me,” he says, and places his hand over his heart. “I'm enough of a badass that I was the only one who stuck up for you in class. Everyone else was going to let that prick stomp all over your grandmother's reputation. Are you going to thank me?”

Prick. That's a good slang word. Sounds just like what it is.

“Maybe I didn't need you to stick up for me. And it wasn't me, by the way. It was my grandmother you were defending, and Serena was the one who actually said something nice about her poetry.”

“A thank-you would be nice either way.”

“Thank you.” I want to get in my car, but he's standing between me and my door. “I'm going to be late.”

“So drive me.”

“Maybe I don't want to be an accessory to truancy.”

“It's your first time,” he says, still grinning. His right canine overlaps the tooth next to it just a little bit. “You'll get off with a wrist slap.” I start to protest and he leans back against my car. “I'll tell them I forced you to do it.”

“How did you force me?”

He cocks his head to the side and examines me. “How?” he repeats.

“If we're going to go into this criminal partnership, I want to know what my alibi is going to be.”

“I'll say I told you that my mother teaches at the college and I just got a call that she's fall-down drunk in front of the class.”

“Implausible.”

“There's always the classic carjacking. How about we say that I pulled a knife on you? Oh! Or that I smacked you upside the head. Look, you're already getting a bruise!”

I rub the sore spot on the side of my head and wince. “You'd wind up in prison for that.”

“Would you miss me?”

This game is getting old. “I really do need to be going.”

He doesn't move. “I'm stubborn. Truculent, even.”

I raise my eyebrows. How does he know the word that tripped me up on the SATs? Coincidence, I decide. “Fine,” I say, because I'm late and it's already a big enough deal that there's a high school student in this math class. Every single head turns when I walk in the door, so I try to be early. “Let's go.”

He hops up and around to the other side of the car. “I knew you'd let me in. You're a good egg, Very.”

“A good egg? What does that even mean?”

“You're nice. You like to help people. We're alike in that way.”

I slip the key into the ignition. His sweet pot smell is filling my car and I wonder if he's high right now. But that would mean he'd also been high during English class. “I don't think we're very much alike at all,” I say, backing out of the parking place.

He reaches for the handle that reclines the seat and lets himself drop way back. “But we are, Very. You help people by being friendly and joining clubs and doing community service. I help people forget their problems.”

I'd laugh if I weren't so annoyed. And shocked that he's
more or less admitted that the rumors are true: Dominic Meyers is a small-time drug dealer. “What do you know about my extracurriculars?”

“You almost make it sound dirty, Very.”

I roll my eyes.

“Athlete. Student council. Yadda yadda.”

Yadda yadda
. That about sums me up in most people's minds. Very Sayles-Woodruff doing the things she needs to do to round out her application to Stanford or MIT or wherever. And I will swear to you up and down that I don't do the things I do to fluff up my apps. But the deeper, darker, coalish center of me wonders if people are right. I'm on the Community Service Committee (president, actually) and in the peer counseling group, not that anyone ever comes to us for counseling. I swim in the winter and play doubles tennis with Britta in the spring. And the math team, of course, not that I'd ever bring that up to Dominic Meyers.

“How do you know all this about me anyway? You seem too cool to care.” I almost said too cool for school, which would have been on par with, say, crashing the car in terms of embarrassing things to do.

“I watch. I observe. Like today in English class. I noticed that you were deeply uncomfortable—”

“Because you were staring at me.”

“Uncomfortable once we got the poetry packet. You flipped right through it and then your whole body just relaxed. You were looking for your grandmother's poems, right?”

Instead of answering, I spray the windshield washer fluid on the glass and let the wipers sluice it away.

“And after I read, you smiled this minuscule hint of a smile. And then Hunter started being a dick and—”

“Why do you even care?”

He blinks his green eyes and looks offended. “I'm just making conversation.”

“Why?” I demand.

He laughs. His head tilts back and the sun catches his face in a way that almost makes his pale skin look both translucent and angelic: a jellyfish angel. “You're funny, Very,” he says. “I never would have guessed you were so funny.”

I'm not sure what he found so amusing. “Whatever,” I say. “Thanks.”

It's a straight shot to the college now. Right through town and then there's the campus. I pull into the lot closest to the math building. He leans closer to me. “That's going to be a hell of a bruise.”

I reach up and graze the spot on my face where the soccer boy's head hit. “You should see the other guy.”

“Good one. Classic.”

“What are you even going to do here, anyway?”

“It's not where we are, Very. It's where we aren't.”

“How profound,” I say, reaching around for my bag on the backseat. “Any more platitudes you want to spill?”

He puts his hand on my forearm. His palms are smooth where Christian's are rough. “I think you take things for granted.”

“I don't—”

“I don't mean like you're entitled or anything. I mean that things are the way they are and they're pretty good for you, so you don't question it. But things could be different. That's all I'm saying.”

There are always other interpretations
.

I tug my arm away, bumping him with my bag.

I shove the door open and step out into the hot sun, doubly warm after the air-conditioning in the car. I hear him shut his door and I turn to face him. “I'll talk to you later, Very.” His repetition of my name is getting annoying.

“Sure, okay,” I reply.
Sure, okay?
He grins again and lopes off into the parking lot, and I am left with the unshakable feeling that Dominic Meyers is not through with me. What's worse: I'm pretty sure I don't want him to be.