Boy, Snow, Bird (26 page)

Aunt Clara thinks I transcribe interviews at a newsroom in the city. Uncle John thinks the same, and so does almost everybody else except Mouse. Mouse knows I didn’t even make it past the first day of secretarial college and so efficiently transcribing a series of interviews would actually be a little beyond me. I told Mouse because I had to tell somebody, and also because I know a couple of things about her that she doesn’t want me to tell anybody, so that makes her less likely to spill.

Bird, here’s what happened on the first day of secretarial college:

I got there half an hour early. Near the entrance I was given a clipboard and a square tag with M
ISS
S
.
W
HITMAN
printed on it. I went up a staircase and into a sky-lighted auditorium—it was as big as an auditorium, anyhow—filled with row after row of desk-and-chair sets, each chair attached to each desk with a gray bar. There was a black typewriter set on each desktop; more typewriters and desks than I could count. Seven or eight other girls had already taken their seats, looking straight ahead of them as if they’d already begun the march into infinity. I remember feeling doubtful about the bun I’d twisted my hair into just an hour before. I patted it, and it was more or less the same as theirs, not too high, not too low. The desks at the back were designated for Adamses and Allens, so I walked and walked until I found the Walkers and Williamses. There was a blackboard at the front of the room, hung on the wall like a picture frame. I found M
ISS
A
.
W
HITMAN
and thought, Almost there. It felt as if my legs would buckle under me from all the walking I’d done.

M
ISS
B
.
W
HITMAN
was next. Then M
ISS
C
.
W
HITMAN
and M
ISS
D
.
W
HITMAN
. Immediately followed by Misses E., F., G., and H. Whitman. None of them had taken their seats yet. “Who are all these girls?” I asked aloud. “Who the hell are they?”

M
ISS
K
.
W
HITMAN
was the last straw, she was the moment I realized the secretarial college had an alphabet’s worth of us. Mouse says I was surely hallucinating, but I know what I saw. I removed my name tag, left my clipboard on K. Whitman’s seat, and went shopping with the money I’d saved to pay for the next month’s classes. I bought lipstick and peaches and cigarettes and a ticket to a theater matinee. After the matinee I went home and was asked how college had been and I said: “It was fine.”

I left the peaches in a bowl on my bedside table, and spent the next day filling out forms at an employment agency. There was an additional cover sheet that asked you to declare your race. The woman at the front desk said that it was just for the agency records, that it wasn’t information they passed on to employers, but the girl next to me said to her: “You people need to think about what you’re doing to us. You’re bad people . . . you’re making us paranoid. You’re driving us crazy. Every time I don’t make it through to interviews I’ll be wondering whether it’s because there are better candidates or because of color. Color, color, color; what you’re doing is illegal and you know it. I should find myself a lawyer who’s ready to make an example of you.”

The woman at the front desk had heard it all before and she recited something about it being impossible to obtain any proof that employers were shown the information agency clients provided on the additional cover sheet. The girl who’d talked about suing the agency couldn’t make up her mind. First she crumpled the cover sheet up in her hand, then she smoothed it out again and ticked her box. I left mine blank; I knew that I was within my legal rights not to say. Ms. Front Desk pushed my forms back across the table to me and said I had to fulfill all of the requirements. I told her, “None of these options say what I am,” and she rolled her eyes. “Every day. Every day a philosopher walks in off the street and makes my job that little bit harder to do.”

Then she said: “Why won’t you say? Hmmm?” and I had to tick “colored” to show Aunt Clara I wasn’t ashamed, even though Aunt Clara wasn’t there and would never know what box I ticked. When I got home, I said college had been fine, and I counted up the remainder of my money and wolfed down the peaches. If I hid them and saved them for later, they’d only have rotted away. They were already getting too soft and my fingers sank through their flesh and closed around their stony hearts. The agency couldn’t seem to find anything for me to do and I kept back from the brink of paranoia by reminding myself that I had no experience. I sort of happened upon my real job about a week later. The details of it don’t matter, but it involves a hell of a lot more deceiving, with and without words.

You just hang on to that paper route.

Snow

Snow,

You don’t have to tell me anything about your job if you don’t want to, but can you please just answer me this—is it dangerous? I mean, is there a chance you could get hurt? Yes or no?

I’ve been trying to see things from your point of view. Maybe it looks to you as if a whole bunch of things are expected of you. Maybe you’re trying to live up to what you think people expect. But people really don’t expect all that much. You should see how happy it makes Gee-Ma Agnes to get a note from you, just a little sign that you’ve been thinking of her. I’m guessing you’d go pretty far to make sure you don’t disappoint anyone. But look . . . you don’t have to prove anything.

I’m also guessing you might not like to be hearing all this from your younger sister. Well, I read about fifty pages of advice columns before sitting down to write to you, so really this is the wisdom of Dear Abby.

Bird

PS—Speaking with spiders and other things you call unusual . . . there’s no special trick to it. When something catches your attention just keep your attention on it, stick with it ’til the end, and somewhere along the line there’ll be weirdness. I’ve never tried to explain it to anyone before, but what I mean to say is that a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can’t pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen. Let me know how it goes if you try it. And if you’re thinking I’m going to grow out of this, you’re wrong.

Hi, Snow,

I’m in detention again. It’s been five weeks since I last heard from you. According to Dad, you’re not only alive but getting prettier and more gracious every day, et cetera, but what I want is an answer to the question in my previous letter. One word: yes or no?

A thing you should understand about me is that I won’t keep a secret just because it’s a secret. I’ve been told that this makes me a bad friend, but I actually think it makes me a better friend than the secret-keepers. (Time will tell.)

If you don’t answer within the week, I’ll show your previous letter to Dad.

I’m sorry to have to threaten you like this. Really, I am.

Bird

Stop fretting, Bird. I’m in no more danger than you are. And right now I’m feeling embarrassed for both of us. I was a fool to write that other letter. It was too much for you—don’t try to tell me it wasn’t—and I’m sorry. Get ready for Thanksgiving . . . I’m coming with Aunt Clara and Uncle John and an assortment of baked goods and trinkets, and the first thing I’m going to do when I arrive is give you the biggest squeeze you ever had in your life.

Snow

—

over at the bookstore
I asked Mom if she was really going to let Snow come home for Thanksgiving. That’s exactly how I asked it: “Are you gonna let her?”

Mom was deciding on prices for some books that had just come in the day before. Mrs. Fletcher had taught her to do this by smelling the paper and rubbing the corners of the pages between her fingertips.

Her hair was in her face, her eyes were closed, her nose was pressed to a coffee-brown page. “It’s been discussed,” she said.

“And you said yes?”

She wrote a number down on her notepad. Three figures, a pause, then she added another ninety-nine cents. “If you’re saying yes, then I’m saying yes.”

“Really? Well . . . I am saying yes, Mom.”

“That’s what I figured. Needless to say I’ll be watching her every move. Kidding, kidding . . .”

She wasn’t kidding. I asked her what Snow had ever done to her, and she said it was a good question.

5

i
never knew a Thanksgiving that took so long to come around. I guess Louis Chen got tired of hearing me repeat those words, because he said: “You know, the way you’re talking is getting kind of creepy.”

Aunt Mia told me not to get my hopes up. Dad made chain mail, little scraps of knitted electrum with circles of blue crystal peeping through the links. He cut the crystals in deep Vs and the surfaces were dull until you tried to look down to the bottom of them and almost cooked your eyeballs. It wasn’t really jewelry—he couldn’t sell it, could only give it away. He handed me a piece and told me to hit my hopes right out of the ballpark.

Mom stopped going to Grammy Olivia’s coffee hours. “The gloating,” she said to Aunt Mia.

Everyone who remembered Snow seemed glad to hear she’d be back. “So pretty,” I kept hearing. “So well behaved.” No one said they’d missed her. Take Christina Morris who worked at the bakery—she’d been in Snow’s class at school, and when Dad told
her Snow might look in on her, she said “Hurray!” just as if she’d been told Miss America was coming to town. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d give to news about someone who’d really been part of your life. I wanted to hear someone say they’d cried when they found out she wasn’t coming back to school. It would’ve been good to hear that somebody had done what I did last summer when Louis went away to summer camp. I went after him that very same afternoon, through fields and over low bridges in the direction I’d seen the bus take, running, then limping. I got as far as the fire station in Marstow, two towns over, then the sun set and I realized I didn’t know where to go next, so I walked back home with stones in my socks and was grounded for two weeks. I wanted somebody to say they’d done something like that because of Snow (who’s about a hundred times prettier than Louis, after all) but no one did.