|
“Don’t push me.” Like an unattended cancer spreading through my body, my voice quivers from the inside out. Sharp cold leaks through the seams around the back door, holding against the January winter winds. He and I face off in the unlit hallway. Yellow light from the kitchen behind me scratches at the space between us. Sterile white light peeks around the half opened door of the laundry room behind him, casting a shadow over his face. His eyes burn.
My feet don’t leave the ground, but it feels like they do; he pushes me again. My back hits the wall.
“Don’t push me.” I tell him again, with every ounce of defiance and courage that a thirteen year old can have. My brown eyes, the almond eyes that my mother loves, don’t waiver against his dark round ones. His tan face is covered in black stubble and gray strands sprinkle throughout his thick black hair. If only this was just a friendly staring contest between my stepfather and me. But nothing has ever been friendly between us.
My head is its own entity. It sways as I make contact with the wall again.
The smallest measure of time before “none” fades.
My fingertips dig into the unmarked paths of my hand. From my shoulder to my thumb I create the only fist I’ve ever used to strike another human being. His brow, his eye socket, his cheek are made for this.
Before I can breathe, before he can realize what I’ve done, I strike his face a second time. His brown eyes tear at my skin. Without a word, the layers of my childhood give way.
The new guy is coming today. He is British, which is surprising since we’re in Madrid, but Spaniards usually send their kids to public schools instead of our private one. The air stirs with electric excitement. The class can barely sit still. We fidget, doodle, wonder what he will look like. We only have twenty people in our grade; and once every few years we get a new student. This is a big deal.
“Class!” Mr Powell, the headmaster, arrives and we automatically stand up. He is tall and authoritative, hair greased back, dressed in his usual dark gray suit and red tie.
“You have a new student,” he states in his firm British accent. Everyone ogles the new boy as he enters the room, dressed in the same white collared shirt, dark gray slacks, and blue striped tie as all the other boys. His face is round and white. It probably feels like pudding. His lips are bigger and redder than any I’ve seen and it looks like he’s balding. His eyes are dark and quiet. He’s really cute.
“This is Guy Money,” Mr Powell states, never cracking a smile.
“Say hello.”
“Hello, Guy Money,” everyone repeats. Guy Money smiles, awkwardly. Michael and Richie snicker at his name. They’re always snickering.
“You may sit.” Mr Powell leaves as Mr Bennet, our Latin teacher, appears. We are silent. I can hear water drip from a faucet in the bathroom.
Guy sits down next to Sweety. She doesn’t acknowledge him and scribbles furiously away in her notebook. My eyes widen. Only girls sit in the back row of the room.
Mr Bennet scratches his patchy, charcoal beard and then rubs his balding head which means he is about to lecture. He clears his throat and begins:
“Caecaelius et Metella sedent…” I sigh. Latin is as exciting as the tombstones it’s written on. I glance over at Guy. He stares blankly at Mr Bennet before catching my eye. I quickly turn and look out the window. The late April sun has started baking the earth. The dry, dirt football pitch is so much more inviting than this gray, fluorescent lit classroom. Craggy, ashen blue mountains gleam in the distance.
“Mr Bennet, sir?” Sweety’s dark eyes are serious behind oval glasses.
“Yes, Sweety?”
“I’ve run out of blue ink. I was wondering—well—could I write in black instead?” I gawk at her. Why is she asking this stupid question? What is Guy thinking?
Mr Bennet chuckles a little. “Of course, Sweety. You don’t always have to write in blue. Black or blue is acceptable.” She pats her long broom of black hair and sits up straight. Sweety Utamchandani will go down in history as the most OCD brainiac in all of Spain.
I peek at Guy again. His skin is so chalky. Most of the other boys have dark, Mediterranean skin. He is obviously fresh from Mother England. There are surprisingly few British boys in this British school.
At break the other English boys chat awkwardly with Guy. Their accents have been watered down by Spanish and crack a little. Guy’s is posh, deep, untouched. It sounds like fancy butter. Puberty smothers the room. We girls huddle in a corner, adamantly avoiding him behind shy, girlish facades. Even Kate, the class’s loudmouth blonde flirt, keeps quiet. We all want to talk to him, though. All six of us.
He turns and approaches us. I pretend to wipe dust off the window pane. My armpits feel moist.
“What are your names?” He asks. Kate begins to giggle. She sounds like pots and pans clanging under a cabinet. Tuchi, the hottest girl because she has boobs, shakes his hand. Eileen blushes quietly under Irish eyes. Sweety nods to him and Nitya ignores him, stroking her waist-long, greasy black braid and then pulling up her navy sock. She has the longest leg hair I’ve ever seen.
“I’m Megan,” I say, avoiding his eyes.
“Are you American?” He asks, surprised. I nod. “Whoa, wicked! You a cowboy from Texas?” He has a terrible southern accent. The girls giggle except for Nitya, who keeps her arms crossed. I feel like a crass seagull with my accent.
During art class Guy sits between Kate and me. He smells like sweat and shoe polish. I watch Mrs Halbert doodle something on the white board. She’s always unfocused behind her golf ball size glasses and looks frazzled because of her unbrushed, mousy hair. Her voice sounds like an out of tune harmonica with laryngitis.
“Hey, Megan,” Guy says quietly. My heart pounds.
“Yeah?”
“Will you go out with me?” I gawk at him, again.
“No!”
“Why not?”
“I don’t even know you!” I blush.
“So what? My name is Guy Money. That’s enough."
“No thanks, Guy.” He shrugs and I pretend to listen to Mrs Halbert lecture about line quality.
My heart is beating way too fast. Was he serious? Oh gosh, I blew it. He could have been the boy of my dreams. I’m thirteen, and he could be my first kiss. I could be Megan Money in ten years. I love you Guy!
“Hey Eileen, will you go out with me?” Guy whispers. My head swings around and I gape at him. Eileen stares at him as though he had just asked her to give him a lap dance. She shakes her head violently.
“You, Kate?” Kate snorts and gleams behind deceptively sweet blue eyes.
“Yeah, yeah, Guy. I’ll go out with you.” She replies sarcastically. In the next half hour he asks every girl out. Even Nitya.
“Caw, blimey, what’s the matter with you dames?” He scoffs. “I just want to go on a bloody date!”
Did he really just call us ‘dames’? He’s definitely weird. The sun begins to wane quietly.
“Hey Megan,” he murmurs. My heart flutters at the sound of my name. Maybe he’s not desperate. Maybe he really does want to go out with just me, and he only asked the other girls as a cover-up, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed.
“Yeah?”
“My middle name is Jurassic.”
I blink. “What?”
“Yeah, Jurassic.”
“No it’s not!”
“It’s true. Guy Jurassic Money. I chose it myself.”
Is that a pick up line? My shoulders quake with laughter. How could I have ever wanted to be Mrs. Money? What was I thinking? I hate being thirteen and skinny, awkward and American.
Somewhere, there are pictures from my eighth grade dance: my too-long tie, sagging pants, bursting pimples. But the girls … they had foundation … lipstick … breasts. My date was tall and reflective of light. I had to be strong and flaccid, respectively.
When a balloon in a paper bag popped, I didn’t cringe, or stop my awkward swaying. It wasn’t until the music shut off and the DJ yelled, “Everyone, get down!” that I looked away from the girl and saw the panic.
Andy Wurst had a gun.
Andy Wurst was some kid in my grade - fourteen, like me, and pretty alright. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing with a gun: shooting, presumably, but why?
My date and I crawled underneath a table. She kept pulling on the back of her dress, making sure I didn’t get an early glimpse of pantie. But even if she’d flashed pink silk, I wouldn’t have noticed.
Mr. Gillette was a tall, awkward man with the low stop-start voice of a walking bass line. He tried to disarm Andy, got shot, and died on the floor of the middle school dance hall. We watched him die. There was nothing we else we could do. Andy Wurst had a gun.
Afterwards, people said a lot of things. Moms who should’ve known better blamed music. Sculpted news anchors I’d watched from birth wrapped their stoic lips around an unfamiliar phrase:
“Video games,” they said. As if that were an answer.
I know the real answer: Andy was bored. He was bored out of his mind. His world was small; nothing in it was solid. “You’re all robots! Nothing’s real!” He screamed as a bewildered policeman hauled him past dazed chaperones and into the police car.
Mr. Gillette taught science. It was his job to make Andrew’s world concrete, to show him the myriad laws that make it so. Instead, Gillette was chained to a curriculum that makes the inner workings of reality boring.
Politicians talk about preventing violence—then they spend all but one-sixth of the budget on the military: guns.
It starts with “hyp” and ends with “-ocracy.” And good teachers on their payrolls die.
|
