After (12 page)

“Haylee?”

“Stadium.” Another whisper from beside her. The girl with the braids kicks Devon’s chair and laughs softly. “What a crap heap.
Hate
that place.” She leans close and whispers. “Bet
you
love it.”

“Karma?”

“Oh! Right here, Ms. Coughran!” The girl with the braids straightens, her voice practically singing the words, pure sarcasm. Ms. Coughran pauses, watching Karma for a moment before moving on.

“Keesha?”

“Here.”

“Lexie?”

Devon looks over at the girl with the braids.
Karma, huh
? Talk about a name setting someone up for failure. Their eyes meet. Karma smirks. When Devon doesn’t look away, Karma makes a crude gesture with her tongue.

Karma’s unfortunate name makes Devon think about her own ridiculous one again. Take away the oppressive “Sky” part, and there’s still the embarrassing “Devon Davenport.” Her mom’s subtle attempt to set Devon up to become a soap opera star. Or Broadway diva. Or fashion designer. Things that Devon’s mom had always dreamed of one day becoming herself. Things that Devon would refuse to do even if held at gunpoint.

“And, finally, Tana.”

“Here.”

Ms. Coughran drops the clipboard onto her desk. “Okay.” She pulls up a silver travel mug from the mess that’s her desk and cups her hands around it. “Rule time.”

“Snore,” Karma murmurs beside Devon.

“We do this every morning so people new to the class know what’s expected. And it also serves as a nice reminder for the rest of us. Because everyone needs reminders, don’t we, ladies? Repetition aids learning.”

Ms. Coughran goes through the rules and expectations. No curse words of any sort are allowed, including what she calls the three “
s
-words”:
stupid
,
shut up
, and
sucks
. “Respect yourself and one another,” she says. “Words hurt, and ‘shut up’ can be like a slap. Profanity is offensive and contributes to illiteracy. If you don’t have anything nice to say, talk about the weather. Don’t interrupt when others are talking, especially me. Don’t discuss your charges, where you live, or anything else about your personal life on the outs with anyone in here. Unless the person who’s asking is me.” Ms. Coughran takes a sip from her travel mug. “Now let’s talk about behavior.”

Ms. Coughran goes over more rules, about not bringing court papers into the classroom or writing letters to boyfriends while in class or leaving the classroom without permission, the bathroom included. Devon half-listens, but mostly she allows herself to look around, to get the information she needs about the room through her eyes.

The small space resembles a kindergarten class, not anything close to what Devon had imagined “school” would look like here—if she’d allowed herself to think about it. Bright pictures cover the walls: watercolors of rain forests, tissue-paper American flags, pastel drawings of zebras, and crayoned coloring book pages of Disney’s various princesses—Snow White, Cinderella, the Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty. The Disney display strikes Devon as very out of place, considering the kind of girl who goes to school here. Crammed bookshelves of different heights take up most of one entire wall. A long table across the back holds five turquoise desktop iMacs all in a row. Then there’s the filing cabinets, plastic milk crates stuffed with art supplies, the TV and DVD player on a rolling cart, the overhead projector and globe and boom box, all stashed in the remaining available space. And, of course, Ms. Coughran’s cluttered desk at the front beside the big whiteboard. Cozy chaos.

“Do not bring
anything
in here,” Ms. Coughran is saying now. “No hygiene items, no combs, no cups. Nothing in your socks and nothing in your pockets. The only thing allowed in your pockets is lint.”

Devon hears Karma groan beside her. “God!”

“Keep your hands to yourselves. And,” Ms. Coughran says, “M.Y.O.B.—that’s ‘mind your own business.’ That will take you far. Any questions?” She looks around the room. “Any answers?” She waits. “You ladies are all so good with the answers. I know there’s at least one comment out there.”

Devon looks around the room, too, but cautiously. The girls are all very busy watching their hands or the tabletops or the empty space in front of their faces.

“Nobody? Well, okay. Then let’s hit it, people!” Ms. Coughran downs the rest of her drink and slams the mug on her desk. “Jenevra? Evie? You two pencil count and pass them out. Casie, get some paper and hand one piece to everyone. Please.” Ms. Coughran turns her back to the class, faces the whiteboard. “Quickly, ladies.”

Devon watches as two girls walk up to Ms. Coughran’s desk and count pencils from a canister. The girl on the left, the one with the shaved head, moves like an athlete. Devon suddenly recognizes her; she’s that girl Devon had seen her first day here, waiting on the plastic seats to go into court.

Ms. Coughran is writing a column of words down the whiteboard:
shadow
,
imagine
,
stars
,
twist
.

“You can kill someone with a pencil,” Karma whispers in Devon’s ear.

Devon doesn’t respond in any way. Pretends like she didn’t hear her. Or, even better, like she couldn’t care less.

“There’s lots of ways to do it.” Karma laughs to herself. “Aren’t you wondering why they’re counting out those pencils oh so carefully?”

Devon says nothing.

“It’s so when we break for lunch and they collect them back, they’ll know how many they had in the first place. If the numbers don’t match, we all get Lockdown and searched.” Karma’s breath is hot, and Devon wants to shove her away. “Makes it very tough to kill someone around here. But”—she kicks Devon’s chair—“it’s still possible. Totally possible.”

“Karma?”

Karma pulls back from Devon, her voice sweet again. “Yes, Ms. Coughran?”

Ms. Coughran is leaning against the stool now, her arms crossed. “You have something you want to share with everyone in the room?”

“Sure. I’m just explaining to . . . to . . . ”—Karma snaps her fingers—“. . . um . . .”

“Devon,” Ms. Coughran says.

“Oh, yeah!” Karma says. “Sorry! I was just explaining to Devil—”

“
Devon
, Karma.”

Laughter erupts around the room, some of the girls repeat it: Devil. DevilDevilDevil.

“Oops, gosh. So sorry, Ms. Coughran,” Karma says. “I was just telling
her
why it is we count out the pencils.”

“I’m sure you were,” Ms. Coughran says. “But next time, let me do the explaining. All right?”

The noise in the room drops to quiet and still.

“
Absolutely
, Ms. Coughran. As my friend Anonymous always says, ‘The less you say, the more you don’t have to apologize.’ It’s good advice to put into practice.”

Ms. Coughran holds Karma’s gaze a long moment before turning back to the class. “Now, ladies,” she says, “direct your eyeballs to the board.” She tells the girls how they’re to use the list of words in a poem, explaining that poems don’t always have to rhyme. “We call it a poem, but it’s really like a story, a story that ties together into one theme. Try to use as many of the words up here as you can, okay? If you can’t do anything else with them, at least use each word in a sentence. And you can use any form of the word, in any order.”

Devon looks up at the board.

One girl raises her hand; she doesn’t know what
twilight
means. Another wants to know if it’s
sail
as in boat, or
sale
as like at a store when stuff’s cheap.

Are these girls really that dumb? To not know the meaning of simple words? Devon sighs in exasperation.

Devon hears the sound of pencils rubbing across paper in the otherwise silent room. She has a piece of paper in front of her and a pencil, the eraser worn down flat. She sees Karma working beside her, her own pencil moving over her paper, her arm shielding her work from prying eyes.

Devon doesn’t need an eraser because she can’t write, not this assignment. She won’t even pick up the pencil, hold it in her fingers. She doesn’t like poetry, not anymore. Poetry makes her feel and remember too much, and she doesn’t want to remember. Or feel. Not about poetry. Not about that night, that first night, with him.

Devon sits there in her seat and stares at the blank paper.

The moonlight is overhead, spilling onto the walkway and illuminating the poetry etched in concrete under their feet. The water ebbs and flows softly against the shore like a whisper, its frothy white foam a delicate lace.

“Really cool idea,” he says, “whoever thought of doing this.”

Devon looks at him. “Um, sorry. What?”

“The poetry.” He points to the sidewalk.

“Oh. That. Yeah . . .”

They are quiet and shy, now that they’ve left the noise and distractions of the restaurant. It had been easy to talk then, to tell him about playing soccer and the music she liked, the concerts she’d been to, the movies she’d seen. Easy then to laugh at his jokes and nod and smile at all the appropriate times while he told her about Denver, where he lived with his mom, and the summers he’d spent in Tacoma visiting his dad, and playing baseball.

But now, in the quiet dark, with him walking beside her along Point Defiance, where the land gently juts into the Sound, she has nothing to say. It’s one of those uncomfortable moments when two people are walking together, but not touching. When they aren’t saying much, but the silence is not companionable. When they’re trying to read the other’s signals, trying to figure out what the other is thinking, feeling. The tension is there, the fluttering is there, the wanting to initiate
something
is there, but the fear of making the wrong move holds them back and to themselves.

Then he does the perfect thing; he begins reading the sidewalk poetry aloud.

They stare down at the words.

“Well.” He grabs Devon’s fingertips with his and laughs. “Isn’t
that
an upper?”

But Devon doesn’t say anything, not immediately. That last line about the slippery grip on life. That is so like her mom—always reaching for something, but that something is always slipping out from between her fingers. No matter how tightly she holds on, she’ll always, always, lose it.

But that’s not Devon. She has a grip. She knows what she wants and where she’s going. Devon shakes her head. She doesn’t want her mom’s intrusion here.

Devon smiles up at him. “Yeah, losing your grip—not a good thing. A definite downer.”

“How true. So much better to hold on.” He suddenly grabs her hand then, fully encloses it with his. “Right? Nice and tight.”

They laugh together, a little awkwardly, and move on. She steps slightly closer to him, lets her shoulder brush his arm as they walk hand in hand. Lets her hip bump his. Once. Then twice. Will he notice? And what will he think of her if he does? Does it matter? The night air breezing over them from the water is cool; she can feel the warmth of his body beside her through his clothes.

Oh, what is she
doing
?

They move forward, stopping at each poem as he reads them aloud. After some time, he drapes his arm loosely around her back, his fingers lightly touching her shoulder. They send tingles through her body, gentle electric waves. She feels herself lean into him.

“My turn,” she says the next time they stop. “I’ll read this one.” She nudges him playfully. “You’re being a poetry hog.” Her voice is higher. A flirty girl voice. The one her mom uses when she’s met a new guy she likes.

Devon clears her throat, first scanning the words so she won’t stumble over them.

His hand drops down to her waist, and he pulls her closer, his thumb through her belt loop as together they study the poem in a brief silence.