What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Read online

  “That’s what they renamed the cafeteria last year.”

  “Thanks, man.” Jesse nodded and headed that way, while the senior stood looking after him as if he had just talked with somebody famous or scary or both. A bunch of senior girls stared at him as he went by, too, and went into an Urgent Discussion Huddle as soon as he’d turned the corner.

  By the time we found our homeroom and got our schedules untangled and had lunch, the day was pretty much over. None of the teachers ever expect to get anything done the first day. Lily’s in most of my classes and we both have Drivers’ Ed, even though Lily already has a license. Drivers’ Ed is what you take in the tenth grade no matter what. I wonder if they’re making Jesse Francis take Family Living with the rest of the seniors. That’s the class where they have them carry a raw egg around all day and pretend it’s a baby.

  Turns out that Jesse Francis is in my art class. He was sitting by himself on the first day, folded up on a stool with his elbows on his knees. The studio is about half student desks and half stools at the work table. I was late and everybody else had dumped their bookbags and stuff into the empty seats and no one looked inclined to move their stuff for me, so I climbed up on the stool next to Jesse.

  He gave me a grave nod. He has huge dark eyes under dark brows and his skin looks like it’s stretched just a little too thin on his face. I nodded back.

  Mr. Petrillo, the art teacher, said that we were going to do freehand sketches of this apple—he held it up—just to get limbered up. So we did that, while he walked around the room looking at our apples.

  “Nice line … think shape, remember, this thing is round … don’t try to photograph it, child, loosen up … you, too, it’s not a blueprint …”

  I snuck a look at Jesse’s apple. It looked as if he had drawn it without ever lifting the pencil off the paper, just run the point around and around some real apple that wasn’t visible to anybody else.

  “That’s really cool,” I whispered. “How did you do that?”

  He shrugged. “It’s just a trick.”

  Mr. Petrillo liked it. He pinned it up on the board as one of the ones that had captured the essence of apple.

  “What are you doing in beginning art?” I whispered.

  He shrugged again. “I needed an elective.” He kind of smiled. “It’s better than marching band.”

  “Oh my God, I would think so,” I said, and then thought that might not have been the best thing to say. But he cracked a smile.

  “The leg makes me walk funny.” He lurched his shoulders from side to side like Frankenstein.

  I didn’t try to pretend not to know what he meant. Everybody in school knows, and he knows they know. “And the uniforms are dorky,” I suggested.

  “And the uniforms are dorky.”

  “Angie, a little more attention to your drawing, please,” Mr. Petrillo said.

  We didn’t talk anymore that day, but the next day when I saw him in the hallway, he grinned at me and gave me a little wave. I was kind of flattered he remembered me. Then at lunch we saw him sitting at a table by himself, a stack of books at his elbow, reading Modern U.S. History and eating soup out of a microwave cup. He still had that sense of empty space around him. I saw a couple of boys head for his table and then sort of bend around it at the last minute like they were being deflected by some kind of invisible force field. The only other person eating lunch by himself was the D.A.R.E. officer. I raised my eyebrows at Lily. We hadn’t staked out any lunchroom turf yet, and don’t really belong to any recognized group.

  “Sure.” Lily hefted her tray and we plopped down across the table from Jesse. He looked surprised.

  “We’ll go away if you want,” I said.

  “Why do I want you to go away?”

  “We’re just sophomores,” Lily said.

  He kind of smiled. “What’s your name? I know this one.” He nodded at me.

  “Lily Reinder.”

  “Reindeer?”

  Lily rolled her eyes. Everyone always does that. She spelled it for him.

  “I’ll just call you Rudolph.”

  “You’ve got soup on Dwight D. Eisenhower there,” Lily said.

  He glanced down at the book and picked a noodle off the page. He’d doodled a little wandering maze pattern all around the border of the picture.

  “They’ll charge you for the book if you write in it,” I told him.

  “Looking out for me?”

  I could feel my cheeks go hot. I must have sounded like a doofus, about twelve.

  “It’s okay, I probably need somebody to,” Jesse said.

  I thought maybe he did. I could feel the gaggle of senior girls at the next table giving us the X-Ray Vision stare, but none of them had sat down next to him.

  Something made a huge bang and a thump and we all jumped. Not that there isn’t enough noise in the cafeteria to rattle hell already, but this was not a usual noise. I stood up on my chair because everybody else was standing up too, but I still couldn’t see. Mrs. Richardson, the principal, was pushing her way through the crowd with an exasperated look on her face, and the D.A.R.E. officer was putting down his cheeseburger. The big trash can with the swinging lid that sat by the kitchen door was on its side, and there was gunk everywhere—with Noah Michalski sitting in the middle of it, chili running down his ears. The bang had apparently been the can going over with Noah in it. A little red-haired junior was staring at the garbage on her khaki skirt like she was about to cry, and two senior boys were looking around as if they had just happened to be by the trash can at the wrong time and hadn’t really tried to stuff Noah in it on a dare.

  Noah’s face was bright red and he looked furious. He jumped up and shouted something I couldn’t catch, except for the words “blow you all away—” And that’s when all hell broke loose. The D.A.R.E. officer snapped to attention and grabbed him by the arm. The fourth period bell went off, and then the fire alarm bell on top of that, and then there were campus security cops all over. Someone started giving totally unintelligible instructions over the intercom. I climbed off my chair and saw that Jesse was flat on the floor, under the table.

  “Line up!” someone yelled. Jesse didn’t move. I bent down and shook him, and his face was pure white when he looked up at me. He got to his feet and lined up with the rest of us without a word, and we all marched out into the parking lot. There were sirens going off now, and cop cars rolling into the lot, and we all stood around waiting for someone to tell us what to do next, and speculating.

  “It’s a bomb threat.”

  “Nah, that kid had a gun.”

  “Someone pulled the fire alarm.”

  “Dude, I swear, a gun—I saw it.”

  Jesse had some of his color back. We were standing under a pepper tree at the end of the lot. He leaned back against it and exhaled slowly while a Channel 10 News van rolled by us.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  “Oh, Christ. I didn’t think I would do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Hit the floor like a fool. I thought it was a bomb.” He looked around us carefully, like he still wasn’t sure, but he said, “Now everybody will know I’m a headcase.”

  “Considering it’s Noah, it might have been a bomb,” Lily said. “He got suspended last year for blowing up one of those big cans with a cherry bomb.”

  “It wasn’t his fault this time,” I pointed out. “Those seniors started it.” And then Noah, of course, being Noah, had to say something stupid and send everyone into a panic.

  Exciting stuff gets around a small town fast. Car after car was pulling into the lot, and the school rent-a-cops were stopping them and trying to tell them nobody had been shot, but the cars were full of parents and they weren’t listening.

  “Nobody was paying attention to you,” I said to Jesse. “They were all too busy gawking at Noah.”

  He shrugged. It hunched his shoulders up like a bird sitting in the rain. “Doesn’t matter.” But he looked like it d
id. “My shrink says I’m not supposed to worry about what people think. I was there, and they weren’t. I’m me and they’re not.” There was a tic beside his right eye. He shot a glance at Noah and said, “Asshole.”

  That was when Ben and Mom showed up, at the same time in separate cars, and screeched to a halt right next to each other.

  4

  “Angie!” Mom flew over to me. Her hair looked like an explosion, some kind of alien shrub, and she kept pushing it out of her face.

  “It’s okay, Sylvia,” Ben said. “I got her. You need to get back to class.”

  Mom turned away from me and glared at him. “And how exactly do you know what I need to do?” she asked, while I stood there totally mortified, hoping the ground would open up under them, not me.

  “I assumed that you were in class,” Ben said to Mom. “You always are, this time of day.” He gave her that reasonable look that he uses when they fight because he knows it drives her nuts. “I can be more flexible, so I figured I’d better come get Angie.”

  “Angie is not going home with you!” Mom snapped.

  “I live there,” I said.

  “We’ll talk about that! Oh never mind, I’ll take you back there for now.”

  “Who’s taking care of your class?” Ben asked her.

  “Not your business! I’m just as capable as you are of being flexible when my child is concerned.” She grabbed me by the arm.

  “Okay, now I can’t ever come back here again,” I said as she towed me to her car. “Maybe when I’m forty-five. I might live this down by then.”

  Mom’s lips were pressed together and she was really pale, like she might throw up. “Angie,” she said, “just be quiet.”

  “Are you taking me to Ben’s?” I demanded as we got into the car. I wouldn’t put it past her to kidnap me and drive me to Wuffie’s.

  Mom started threading her way between all the other cars trying to get in or out of the lot. There were three cops in a huddle, but no one was directing traffic. “Yes,” she said after a minute, between her teeth. “I’m taking you to Ben’s.”

  I took a good look at her then. “Mom? What’s wrong?”

  She took a deep yoga breath and let it out again.

  “Don’t close your eyes,” I said. “You’re driving.”

  “They said there was a shooting,” she said carefully. She still looked like she was about to puke, and I realized she’d been scared to death, not just mad at Ben.

  “It was just some morons having a fight.” I tried to sound soothing.

  “With guns?”

  “No guns. Honest.” We turned the corner onto Signal and I said, “It was cool of Ben to come get me.”

  “He is not your father!”

  I wanted to say, he ought to be. He’s absolutely an improvement on my actual father, who just went off and forgot all about me. But I thought better of it. I thought maybe she was rattled enough that I might get some information out of her, though, so I said, “Why are you so pissed off at him? Not about him coming to get me. I mean, pissed off enough to divorce him.”

  She took another deep breath. “That is not your business.”

  “It is so! Don’t you think I care who I live with? How do I know what moron you might marry next?”

  “I am not going to get married again, believe me.”

  Well, I didn’t. She’s already done it three times, and at least two of them on the spur of the moment, including the one to my father. Wuffie says he was a gangster. On the other hand, Wuffie thinks most of my friends are gangsters, even though it’s just the clothes. So I don’t know. Mom says my father knew some scary people and he’s probably dead by now. She says it like that’s the reason she divorced him, but now she’s divorcing Ben, who is absolutely respectable. Why can’t she stay with someone?

  “What did he do?” I asked her again.

  “He stole something that was mine.”

  “Stole something?” I couldn’t see Ben stealing her money. He makes way more than she does. Had he been wearing her underwear? Maybe I could convince her that transvestites are just normal guys, except for that. Doctor Phil says so. “What kind of something?” I asked, edging up to it.

  “Something I told him.”

  Oh.

  “He put it in a script. I told him something private and he put it in a Goddamned movie!”

  “Did you ask him to take it out?”

  “Yes, I asked him to take it out!”

  “You mean he wouldn’t?” Unfortunately, I can believe that. We know a bunch of writers besides Ben and I would believe that of any of them. One of them actually put his girlfriend’s hemorrhoids into a script.

  Mom parked the car in Ben’s driveway and jerked the parking brake up. “He said nobody would recognize it and it was good. It was just what he needed.”

  “Um. Well, what was it?”

  “I’m not going to tell you!”

  “I’ll find out when the movie comes out.” If it does. The death rate for scripts in Hollywood is huge. We know writers who have made a living for years and none of their scripts have actually been produced. Producers buy scripts and then abandon them, like somebody who buys too many purses. I don’t know where all the money comes from.

  “I’m sick of the movie business,” Mom said. “It’s inhabited by shallow creeps. I work myself to death trying to teach kids to speak actual English and everywhere we go, when people find out what Ben does, they latch onto him and I might as well be the housekeeper.” She glared at the house as we pulled up, although Ben wasn’t in it. “And for that, on top of it, I’m paid practically nothing.”

  “Would you really want to work in Hollywood?”

  Mom ran her hands through her hair and then dropped them onto the steering wheel. “Honestly, no. But it’s the principle of the thing. And then he had the nerve to tell me my novel needs work.”

  “He writes movies,” I said. “They blow up cars and save the world in a hundred and twenty minutes. Does he really know what he’s talking about?”

  “I doubt it,” Mom snapped.

  Grandma Alice came out of the house wiping her hands on her apron and waving a spatula. “I just heard on the television,” she called. “They’re sending everyone home from all the schools!”

  “Oh, Lord,” Mom said. “I’d better get back. It’s going to be chaos there, too. Honey, call me tonight, okay? If you really want to talk about this, I will, but you won’t change my mind.” As soon as I got out, she backed down the drive. I saw Ben pull in as she turned the corner; he must have been lurking behind the oleanders, waiting for her to leave.

  I thought about cornering him and trying to get him to tell me what he’d put in the script, and to take it out, but I figured he probably wouldn’t do either one. And if he did tell me, Mom would go postal. So I just focused on calming him and Grandma Alice down, promising there hadn’t been any guns, and let it go for now.

  Ayala High School was all over the news. We ate dinner in front of the TV while the cameras showed bomb-sniffing dogs and everything, not finding any bombs. The sheriff made a statement and Mrs. Richardson the principal made a statement and Noah’s mother made a really furious statement about the sheriff and Mrs. Richardson. I called Lily and she said her parents had been freaked, too, which really isn’t like them. They’re pretty laid back.

  “There’s been so much of this stuff,” Lily said. “People going crazy and blowing strangers away. So everybody overreacts. That’s what Dad said, once he found out it was just Noah Michalski mouthing off.”

  “But how do you know when it’s just Noah, and when somebody just like Noah has gone nuts?” I asked. That’s the part that secretly worries me. How can you tell?

  We analyzed it all some more, and then Jesse Francis of all people called me right after we’d hung up.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. How about you?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t tell if he meant that. But it was extremely cool to have a se
nior call me and check up on me.

  I called Mom, too, but I didn’t hound her about Ben yet because I knew she was still mad.

  “How was everything at school?” I asked her.

  “Madhouse,” she said. “Parents having hysterics in the halls. I could wring Noah’s neck.”

  “It wasn’t all his fault,” I said, to be fair.

  “I know Noah,” Mom said. “I used to know somebody just like him.”

  “Who?”

  “Long time ago,” she said, in a tone that told me not to ask, and hung up in a hurry.

  Hmmmmm.

  Noah got suspended, but not actually arrested because he didn’t actually do anything. Mrs. Richardson called an assembly to tell us all that this was an excellent example of what happens when you make poor choices, as if life is a multiple choice test and one of the options is Make a bomb threat in the cafeteria.

  I thought about talking to Felix about how Jesse hit the floor like that, but figured it might encourage him if he’s still seeing Mom. But the upshot of the whole thing is that no one paid much attention to Jesse Francis for a while. Now that it’s all settled down again, he’s just somebody you pass in the hall, not the Freak of the Week. Lily and I eat lunch with him every day. We’ve bonded into a cafeteria trio. I think he likes it that we treat him as if he’s still a high school student and don’t ask him stupid questions like did he kill anyone. All the kids he went to school with his last year here are in college now, or have gotten married and have babies and jobs. They don’t cross paths much with people who’re still at Ayala High carrying eggs around in their pockets.