Firegirl (6 page)

I didn’t see Jeff until the morning bus on Monday. He was waiting at the stop. He seemed more or less okay, but quiet.

“So, how was your weekend in New York?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “My dad gave me some of his stupid old comics. I don’t even know why he has them there, but his girlfriend wanted them out. That’s pretty much it.”

“Yeah. What kind of stuff did you do —”

“I never do anything there,” he snapped, finally looking at me. “The guy can’t wait for the weekend to be over and for me to be gone.”

“Really? Sorry,” I said.

He looked past me up the street to where the bus would come from. “We’re supposed to do all kinds of stuff. It’s supposed to be different when I go there. But all he wants is to go places with his girlfriend. The jerk.”

“What, they do stuff alone?” I asked. “What do you do?”

“Nothing. I just wait. Plus, they live in this really tiny place. It’s such a waste.”

When the bus finally came, he stomped up the steps and slumped into a seat. I sat down next to him, but he just stared out the window. I wanted to ask about the car again, but bringing up his uncle didn’t feel right just then. When the bus was weaving around the streets near school, he suddenly ripped out a piece of loose-leaf paper and began to scrawl something on it. Then he balled it up and threw it to the floor under the seat. “Jerk,” he said a few times.

He jumped off the bus, pretty much just stormed to the classroom, and slapped his notebooks down on his desk. Jessica wasn’t there yet. Our bus must have been first because Courtney wasn’t there, either.

Shaking his head, Jeff looked over at me again. “I mean, Deb, his girlfriend, is okay. But so what? You wouldn’t believe the tiny, tiny place they have. I have to sleep on the couch with my feet practically in the oven. Plus, it stinks of bug spray. He keeps saying it’s all he can get because my mother is forcing him to pay for school for me, and I should go to public school instead. He says I would probably even like it better. When I got home last night my mother was on emergency shift anyway. I didn’t see her till this morning. So she’s not even there, either. So who even cares?”

Jeff let all his breath out.

It sounded really horrible for him. I couldn’t picture it all because things were okay at my house. It was like trying to understand what it felt like to have cancer or something. I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. But it seemed like after every visit, he hated his father more and more. It made me feel guilty that I had both my parents. “Sorry it stinks so much,” I said. “You could come to my house after school maybe. There’s food at least.”

He shook his head. “My mom always leaves me food. She just works a lot. Plus, you don’t have any good stuff. The only comics you have are the ones I gave you.”

It still seemed so incredibly dumb to talk about cars when he was having such a bad time at home, so I just said, “Yeah, you have better stuff.”

Class started, and Jessica came in twenty minutes later. She was quiet and stayed to herself as usual. Since it was now only two weeks before the actual election, the whole project began to take up more and more class time. The day started with a half period of what Mrs. Tracy called the “background” part of the project. Talking the whole time, Samantha Embriano and Kayla tacked their extra-credit poster project about primaries to the bulletin board. It was drawn with lots of different colored markers. Right after them, Darlene marched up with a better one, a flowchart with little orange Halloween lights fitted through the poster board. The lights showed how candidates for an office start up a campaign, how they raise money, how they get nominated, and how elections are done.

Mrs. Tracy wouldn’t allow us to campaign for class president until the end of each day, when we could get up and present five-minute speeches about ourselves. But Darlene, at least, started right from the beginning. She wore a homemade “Darlene” button every day, and she brought in brownies for lunch two days in a row. “Just because,” she said. “The ones with nuts are marked with a nut on top. The others are plain.”

Eric LoBianco came in on Wednesday with his own plate of cookies. He said he baked them himself, which Darlene didn’t believe. When the cookies were found to not be very good, Ryan said it was probably true that he made them after all.

Finally, it was time for the speeches and the real election posters to come out. Mrs. Tracy wanted everybody to do something, but not everyone did. Some kids just didn’t want to run and said so. I didn’t want to run for anything, but I didn’t say so because no one asked, so I just watched and listened.

Karen talked about write-in candidates, which is when the person who votes can write in the name of someone who hasn’t been officially nominated. It was a dual presentation with Melissa. They were thinking of running together as co-presidents, and Mrs. Tracy said that was okay, for now.

At the very end of the day on Wednesday, Courtney gave her talk. I listened to every word. She spoke the same way she did at the reading group, her voice going high and low. She looked at index cards some of the time, but didn’t for quite a bit of it. She told us about how the people who hold office really need to listen to the people they represent, even if they don’t say much. She said that listening was what being elected to a position was really all about.

“It’s the heart of the democratic process,” she finished.

When she said
heart
I think I shivered. Her face did a little frown when she prounounced the word, as if she meant everything the word could mean. She looked out at the whole class but at no one in particular when she said it. Then she nodded once and sat down.

Jessica was out that day and the day before. I thought at first that she went into the hospital for more graftings, but then I thought that maybe she just had a cold or wasn’t feeling well or something. Mrs. Tracy didn’t say why.

Mostly because my mother kept at me to get out there and get involved, even though I didn’t want to, that night I made a small poster with my name stenciled under a blown-up photocopy of my last year’s school picture.

We were all around the kitchen table after dinner on Wednesday night looking at it.

My mother frowned. “It needs more.”

“It needs somebody else,” I said.

“Just a little pizzazz,” she said, making a face at me.

We were all thinking of things, when my father’s eyes lit up.

He sat upright in his chair, a smile growing on his face. “I’ve got it,” he said. Then, not to me, but to my mother he said, “A vote for Tom is a vote for tomorrow. Except that the t-o-m of tomorrow is capitalized. So that it reads —” He moved his hands over the poster on the table in front of us. “A Vote for Tom is a Vote for TOMorrow. Get it?”

He looked at me now.

I looked at my mother. “What?” I said.

“That’s good,” said my mother.

A few minutes later, the poster was done.

A Vote for TOM is a Vote for TOMorrow!

I didn’t like the slogan. I didn’t like it because I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. How do you vote for tomorrow? What would a vote for tomorrow look like? Isn’t tomorrow just a big question mark? They always say tomorrow never comes, right?

The more I thought about it, the more I believed the slogan might mean nothing at all. And after Courtney talked about the whole democratic process thing, and frowned when she said
heart,
how could I put up a poster that didn’t mean anything?

I looked at it in my room later, propped up against my backpack and ready for school.

“Tom … T-O-M,” I said. “Get it?”

That night, as I lay in the dark, I kept replaying the scene where Courtney would look at the poster and frown.

“What does it mean?” she would ask me seriously.

My mind would go completely blank. Then I would suddenly stare past her to the end of the hall, where the tiles began popping up out of the floor.

My father stopped me on the stairs the next afternoon. “How do your friends like your poster?” he asked.

“They love it,” I said. “It’s funny, but also true.”

He seemed to like that. “Did you do your talk yet?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

The idea was that I would talk about how politicians were in office for two or four or six years and were supposed to leave office with things better than when they got elected. If politicians kept doing that, the world would really become a better place.

I felt bad, but there was no way I was going to talk in front of the class, and I sure didn’t want to show the poster to anybody, not even Jeff. I had already decided to keep it in my locker until after the election.

In the meantime, Joey Sisman kept threatening to nominate himself if no one else did and vote for himself, too.

On Friday morning, Jessica came in just after prayers. I think she timed coming in so she wouldn’t have to be there for that. The day was a warm one again, and while I helped Mrs. Tracy hook the window pole on the latch of one of the upper windows, wondering whether tomorrow was going to be sunny, too, I thought I saw Courtney and Jessica talk to each other when Courtney was handing back papers. I remember I felt all nervous in my chest and guilty, as if I’d done something wrong again and was going to be found out.

They probably just said a couple of words, like “here you go” and “thanks,” but it made me think that even though she’d been there for two weeks already, no one had really said much to Jessica. What I’d told my mother the week before was still true.

I hated it, but everyone (the whole class and me, too) seemed happier the days she wasn’t there.

Then, in the three minutes between subjects on Friday morning, while Mrs. Tracy was chatting in the hallway with another teacher, something else happened.

Chapter 11

As everyone put their religion books away and got out calculators and pencils for math, Jessica reached under her seat for her pencil case. Her fingers fumbled a bit in it, and as she leaned over to peer into the case, a pencil and a photograph fell out of it. The photo landed face up near the foot of my desk.

“Oh,” she said. She reached for it, but it was nearer to me.

I lifted the picture from the floor. It was an odd size, almost exactly square. It was a picture of a girl. She was short and pretty and blonde and looking straight into the camera. Propped on her left shoulder was a tennis racket. Behind her stood a man in a white sweater and shorts. He had a big smile on his face. Squarely behind them both was a big shingled building that looked like a fancy beach club in the summer. The right side of the photo, next to the man, was clipped off. But my eyes were drawn to the girl.

Her eyebrows were cocked at a slight angle, and her eyes were big and beautiful. Her lips were half-curved in a little, cute smile.

“Who’s she?” I found myself asking at the same time a shiver went right up my back. For a split second it occurred to me that the picture might actually be of her.

That girl might be Jessica.

Idiot! How could I blurt out,
“Who’s she?”

I began to feel really nervous again, but I tried to make it pass. It couldn’t be her. This girl was smaller, much smaller. With my hand trembling, I started to give it back.

But Kayla stopped me, practically lunging at my hand and stopping it. “Oh, my gosh,” she whispered. “Is that her?”

Her?
My stomach began to roll now, and I thought I was going to be sick all over the place. You idiot. Jessica’s right here!

“Here,” I said, trying to hand it back again, but Kayla wouldn’t let go of my wrist. It was insane. This little girl was holding onto me. Mrs. Tracy was talking intently with Darlene and Dave now, and then began digging in the bookshelves under the window and didn’t notice what was going on. Samantha Embriano suddenly rose from her desk to look at the picture now. Rich Downing was sliding out of his seat, too.

“Hey, that’s the guy that picks you up!” said Rich, pointing his finger at the man in the picture, hut at least talking to Jessica. “That’s your father isn’t it?”

Jessica said nothing, so I said, “Maybe. Here.” I still tried to move my hand.

“It’s my sister,” said Jessica quietly, reaching for the photo. “That’s my sister. Anne.”

We were all quiet. Her sister? That was the first we’d heard about a sister. Not that we ever asked or anything.

“Anne,” said Kayla. “Cool.”

Samantha Embriano suddenly said something completely out of nowhere, but it was kind of good. “I used to play tennis. That’s a good racket she’s got there. You can tell from the
P
on the face of it —” She practically touched the photograph. “I know, because my tennis teacher has one like that.”

“You have a tennis teacher?” Rich asked.

“Since third grade,” she said.

“Your sister’s really cute,” said Kayla, finally releasing my hand.

Her sister. Anne. I don’t know what Jessica thought about all this. Since we were all bunched so close together it was impossible to look at her without seeming to stare into her face. Plus her head was down, so it was hard to figure out what she was thinking.

But I know what I was thinking. I was thinking that she probably couldn’t believe any of this. I couldn’t believe it! All these words at once. It was more than anyone had spoken to her since she came to our class. So many words!

And I knew why.

We had all been waiting so long for things to be more normal again. It was what everybody felt when Jessica wasn’t in school for a day. Only this was a hundred times better. We didn’t have to pretend she didn’t exist. We suddenly found a regular thing about her — her sister.

Her sister wasn’t burned. Anne was a normal girl. A really cute girl, in fact. And now that we saw this picture and we knew about her, we had found out another thing about Jessica … lots of things, in fact — normal things that we could think about and talk about. Tennis. The beach club. Summer vacation. Their father. About anything. It was as if someone had opened a window in a hot room and cool air was rushing in over us.

Jessica hadn’t moved during all of this and said nothing, but I almost felt happy for her. Wouldn’t it be so much easier this way? We could show that we could be friends with Jessica, by being interested in her sister. This was it. We could almost be normal again.