A Soft Place to Land (11 page)

It didn’t matter that the Eight seemed to have no idea that either of them existed; in Ruthie and Alex’s desire for popularity, they had turned against each other. Alex began pointing out pimples on Ruthie’s skin, asking sweetly if her mom had considered taking her to the dermatologist. And Ruthie’s teasing about Mrs. Love’s many rules—no R movies, no TV during the school week, no soda—took on a mean, bullying edge.

And then after the accident, Alex’s attitude shifted toward Ruthie again. Alex became alarmingly sweet. She developed a habit of smiling encouragingly at everything Ruthie said—the way one would with a crazy person—even if Ruthie was just complaining about Mrs. Stanford giving them a pop quiz in math, or the fact that it had rained for five days in a row. Alex would just beam at Ruthie, her eyes widened as if in perpetual surprise, her lips stretched upward, her long white teeth prominent.

Sometimes she would give Ruthie’s arm a little squeeze of encouragement and Ruthie would yell “Ow!” just to startle her.

Ruthie definitely preferred the scheming, plotting, competitive Alex of the pre-accident days, rather than this saccharine version. Ruthie wondered if future interactions with others would always feel so fake, if no one would ever again know how to strike up a conversation with her for fear of accidentally reminding her that—oh yeah—her parents had died.

As if she could forget.

When she finally made it to homeroom, which was also her English classroom, Mr. Roman gave her a squinty look of concern and motioned for her to come to his desk.

Being summoned by Mr. Roman was cause for much stomach fluttering. He was just so gorgeous, with his green eyes, his square jaw, his light brown hair that he kept just an inch past respectable. He was a young teacher, twenty-six or twenty-seven. He had been in the Navy after college, and the girls in his class—at Coventry the middle school English classes were segregated by sex—would whisper about how cute he must have looked in his Navy blues. He had been in an a cappella group in college, and on special occasions he would sing to the girls.

She walked over to his desk, where he sat with his attendance book in front of him. Ruthie noticed that he had marked her on time for that day, as well as on Monday when she had also been tardy.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“My sister accidentally turned off the alarm clock, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

Mr. Roman smiled, revealing his dimples. “Don’t worry too much about it. I know there’s a lot on your plate right now. A lot on your sister’s, too. Just check in with me, okay? Let me know how you’re doing.”

Since the accident all of Ruthie’s teachers had been really kind toward her, which felt weird. The middle school teachers at Coventry were in general a cranky, prickly bunch. But Mr. Roman’s kindness was different. It did not feel fake. It did not seem to be a cover-up for his own discomfort with grief.

Just as Ruthie had predicted, by the end of first period everyone in the seventh grade knew about Laney’s loose tampons. But the rumors didn’t end there. People were saying that when Laney got on her hands and knees to retrieve them there had been blood on the seat of her pants. The fact that the back of Laney’s jeans was perfectly clean was irrelevant. The stain existed in everyone’s mind, and that was all that mattered.

Laney Daley. What a cautionary tale. Laney, by negative example, had taught Ruthie everything not to do when dealing with the popular kids at Coventry.

Lesson one: Do not appear to be trying too hard. This was Laney’s gravest sin. Waving frantically at the Eight whenever they walked by, sitting near them during assemblies, attempting to sit at their table in the cafeteria, despite the fact that day after day they chirped, “Sorry, that one’s taken,” at whatever seat she tried to claim. And every day Laney acted surprised by their rejection.

Lesson two: Be wary of sudden, unexpected friendliness, especially from Eleanor Pope, the prettiest and the meanest of the Eight. That past February Eleanor had slipped Laney, through a crack in her locker, an invitation to a slumber party at her house. Only the invitation was a joke, a gag, listing a fake address on Valley Road, giving a fake telephone number to call to RSVP.

Did Eleanor intuit that Laney would be so thrilled to receive the invitation that she would forego the formality of phoning to say she could come and would instead rush up to Eleanor, surrounded by friends at her locker, and tell her that yes, yes! She would be there. If only she had phoned, it would have been an automated operator who announced, in a cheerful voice, that the number she was trying to reach was not in service. Or maybe the number Eleanor gave Laney did work, was some stranger’s number, was perhaps the phone number of an old man who would answer on the fifth ring, confused and disoriented. Would that have been enough to clue Laney in? Would that have prevented her from having her mother drive her up and down Valley Road—one
of the ritziest streets in Buckhead—searching for an address that did not exist?

Lesson three: Never show your pain.

The Monday after the alleged slumber party Laney Daley marched up to Eleanor Pope and, in what surely was a line provided to her by one of her parents, demanded, “What, exactly, was the big idea behind all this?”

Eleanor, so pretty in a black dress that looked like a polo shirt, only longer, raised her brows slightly and said with mock surprise, “Oh my gosh, you didn’t get that it was a joke? You really thought I’d invite you to my house? That’s so funny.”

Ruthie, whose locker was two down from Eleanor’s, had witnessed the interaction. And when Eleanor smiled at her, a smile that expressed both pity and contempt for Laney’s cluelessness, Ruthie smiled back, and rolled her eyes in agreement.

She was rewarded that afternoon. Eleanor said “hi” to her as they passed in the hall. But Ruthie had learned not to expect any promises from small gestures of friendliness (lesson two). Just because Eleanor said hello one day did not mean she would do it again. It was all so tricky. It was all so exhausting. More exhausting even than making good grades at Coventry, which simply required a tremendous amount of study.

When Ruthie returned to school after the funeral, she surprised herself by feeling grateful to be back in the midst of Coventry’s strange social labyrinth. She was grateful for any distraction from the haunting thoughts that had lodged themselves in her brain. She thought obsessively about the last few moments of her parents’ lives, when they realized the plane was going down. A loop of images ran through her head—her mother screaming, her father trying to shield Naomi with his arms before the pilot barked for them both to put their heads against their knees. And with those images came a series of unanswerable questions:

Did they know they were about to die, or did they fool themselves into thinking that somehow things would turn out okay, that once again Phil would cheat death? Did they think about
her and Julia, about what would happen to them? Did they regret the instructions left in the will? Were they scared of death itself or just the pain of dying? Did they wonder if there might be a heaven or a hell? Did they pray? Did they kiss? Did they cry?

Compared to this echo chamber of her own imagination, Ruthie welcomed returning to the land of the bitchy girls, the land of the cranky, demanding teachers.

But the accident had a ripple effect even at Coventry. When Ruthie returned to school after the double funeral, everyone was kind and solicitous. Teachers and students alike. The members of the Eight smiled at her sweetly in the hallway. Her math teacher, Mrs. Stanford, who once had asked if she was “trying to sound stupid,” started calling her “dear.”

The last class of the day was English with Mr. Roman. Both Eleanor Pope and Laney Daley were in the class with Ruthie. Ruthie was a little surprised to see Laney still at school. If it had been she who was caught picking up twenty rolling tampons, she who had been rumored to have blood all over her pants, she who had been asked loudly at lunch, by Trevor Jackson, whether or not she had anything he could use to stop up his bloody nose, Ruthie would have gone home sick.

But there sat Laney, in her assigned seat in the second row, wearing acid-washed jeans—which went out of style years ago—and a Coventry T-shirt.

Eleanor walked in just before the second bell, her long dark hair pulled into a high ponytail. Still tan from spring break in Barbados with her family, she wore a white denim miniskirt and a turquoise scoop-neck top with three-quarter-inch sleeves. Around her neck was a half-inch-thick silver chain. In her ears, big silver hoops. She was chewing gum. She was wearing heels. She looked about eighteen years old, her blue eyes widened by liner, her angular cheeks even further defined by blush.

They were reading the
Odyssey
. Not the modernized version, but the classic. It was a seventh-grade tradition at Coventry,
God knows why. The language was so dense, so confusing, that Mr. Roman only assigned three pages per night. Still, Ruthie struggled. It was like reading a foreign text without having taken any language classes. And the print was so small, the pages so thin. And what did she care about the adventures of Odysseus anyway? The only character she liked was Penelope, who promised her unwanted suitors that when she finished weaving a shroud for her dead father-in-law she would accept that Odysseus was dead and choose one of them as her new husband. But every night she secretly undid that day’s weaving.

Mr. Roman was talking about the sirens who sang to the sailors, making them veer off course, making them crash against the rocks. Wise Odysseus, knowing the lure of the siren song, told his sailors to lash him to the stern of the boat so he would not give in to the seductive music.

“Do y’all think there are still siren songs today?” asked Mr. Roman. “Temptations that steer us off course?”

Ruthie thought about Julia in the front seat of Jake’s car early that morning. “Fuck yeah,” she had said when he asked if she wanted to get out of there. Everything was a siren song for Julia: boys, cigarettes, alcohol, pot. They all called to her. They all made her veer off course. But what could she tie herself to that would keep her from turning toward danger?

Ruthie. If Julia could be tied to Ruthie, Ruthie would make sure her sister stayed on track.

Casey Floyd, who was not a member of the Eight but sometimes sat with them at lunch, raised her hand. “What’s your siren song, Mr. Roman?” she asked.

He grinned, raked his hands through his hair. “Ladies,” he said, “I never stray off the course.”

“Yeah, right,” said Eleanor.

“My wife would probably say Häagen-Dazs ice cream. I always tell her I’m going to cut out sweets and then I pass by those pints in the freezer section of the grocery store and I just can’t help myself.”

“What’s your favorite flavor?” asked Suzy Branch.

“Chocolate chocolate chip,” Mr. Roman said. “Gets me every time.”

A buzz was felt in the room. Mr. Roman was letting them get off topic. This was something he usually curtailed the girls from doing, but it was a warm spring day and maybe he was as ready to be done with school as they were. Maybe he would even sing for them.

“Will you sing us a siren song?” asked Casey.

Mr. Roman grinned, flashing his ultrawhite teeth.

“Come on,” said Casey. “Sing us a song that will veer us off course. It will be like a real-life example.” She was famously bold.

“Well, I’ve got one that kind of fits.” Mr. Roman stepped out from behind the podium where he had been lecturing, tucked his hands into the pockets of his chinos, fixed his gaze somewhere above the girls, and began singing in a clear, unwavering voice about a desperado who needed to come to his senses.

The girls burst into giggles and scattered applause.

Laney turned and grinned at Eleanor, as if they were friends. “I think he’s wicked cute!” she said.

“I think you’re wicked dorky!” Eleanor whispered, exactly matching Laney’s breathless tone.

Mr. Roman was still singing. Ruthie wasn’t sure if she was supposed to keep smiling or just watch him the way she’d watch a movie, straight-faced but interested. He was singing something about the queen of diamonds, the queen of hearts.

“I want to bear his children,” whispered Casey.

“Dare you to tell him,” whispered Eleanor.

He kept singing, his gaze just above the girls, his eyelids half-closed.

“No way.”

“I’ll do it!” volunteered Laney.

Oh my god.
She would. Ruthie knew it in her bones. Laney would tell him that she wanted to have his children. On the day that she dropped twenty tampons in front of the junior high, she
would declare her desire to be impregnated by her seventh-grade teacher. Ruthie wanted to lean over and tell her to shut up, just shut the hell up. Just keep your head down and get through this year and things will get better.

Julia said that in high school everyone calmed the fuck down.

Ruthie squinted her eyes, looked at them, at Eleanor and Casey smiling wickedly, encouragingly, at Laney. At Mr. Roman, in his button-down oxford shirt tucked into chinos, crooning at his seventh graders. Singing the entire song, slowly. At Laney, in her terrible acid-washed jeans, her Coventry T-shirt. Her permed hair, which might have been the style at her prior suburban public school but was certainly not in fashion at a place like Coventry. Her use of the adjective “wicked” to mean good.

Laney was going to yell out that she wanted to bear Mr. Roman’s babies, and no one would ever, ever stop talking about it.

Except Ruthie wouldn’t be around to hear. In less than two months, she was going to be out of this place. All of these people, so real in this room right now, would be reduced to memory.

She squinted so that everyone looked blurry, fuzzy. She imagined them receding into the distance as she boarded a plane that took her away from Coventry, away from Atlanta, away from this world. She had a glimmering realization: Soon none of this would matter. These people, these sadistic girls, they would be so far away.

Mr. Roman had (finally) reached the apex of the song, the repeated line, sung with gusto, demanding that the desperado accept love.