In the Forest of Light and Dark (12 page)

First Day at School
 

The first week of September had rolled around and I have to admit it had snuck up on me. I really thought that at some point before the end of summer, Tucker would’ve come up to visit me along with maybe Lettie and Marzie, but there was no chance of that happening now.
     I had spent most of last night feeling anxious about my first day at a new school. It was a first for me. I’d never had to walk into a place not knowing anyone before. Well, I shouldn’t say that.
I’ve already met the bitches.
     A few days before school began I’d received my class schedule in the mail and had already figured out by then that I would be walking to school being that it was so close to my house. (It’s not like I could’ve driven to school in a kick-ass Trans Am or anything like that, right Step Daddy Cade?)
     The morning of my first day I had made myself a couple of strawberry pop-tarts and began my walk a little after 7 a.m. My mama had offered to drop me off because she was on her way out to run errands in the village anyway but I had told her, “No thanks, I think I’ll just walk.” Only because I had seen her grab the keys to the Truckster off the kitchen counter instead of the keys to the Caddy and I wasn’t about to make myself endure the humiliation I would have surely received after showing up to my first day in the lime-green whale.
     As I apprehensively made my way down my street I found myself being joined by a couple of strays that appeared from out of the shrubs that lined parts of the roadway. One was brown with light, black stripes similar to that of a tiger. The other white with green eyes and had a patch of matted, clumped up fur on its belly that made it look like it had rolled around in muck or shit. I wanted to pick him up—well, I think it was a boy—and try to see if I could clean him up a little, but he wasn’t having any of it. Every time I would try to get near him, he would dart away from me. I don’t think he seemed scared of me. It was more like he was just playing with me. Like me trying to catch him was some sort of game.
     When I had reached the front steps of the school, I had stopped to tell my new friends that I had to go into the building. And while doing so, I caught a few of the other students looking at me funny. Like I was a crazy bag lady who hoarded them or something.
    
Screw them,
I thought, but then turned my attention back to the cats.
     It was weird, but the cats seemed to have understood me as they both began to slowly turn around and sulk away from the school. Heading back towards wherever they had originally come from.
     As I watched them gradually leave a third one shot out of the bushes that flanked the school’s central staircase and it quickly joined the others. I then continued on watching them for a long moment wishing I could go with them. But alas, I let out a sigh and dragged my sorry butt inside.
   After only a minute or two of searching the halls I had found my homeroom and took a seat near the back, close to the windows. I had reckoned that at least looking out the windows would’ve kept me occupied until the next bell rang.
     Homeroom kicked off with the usual socialization of,
How was your summer?
amongst the masses. During which time, none of the other students so much as even bothered to talk to me or even acknowledged that I was there. Which was fine by me.
     As I looked around the room, I could quickly tell that school was going to be ‘school’ no matter where I lived. There were the jocks all decked out in their school football jerseys and letter jackets. Then there were also the pretty but prissy girls that pretended as if interested in every stupid thing that came out of the jocks chowder-head mouths. I did notice one or two burn-outs in the room, though, and thought it might be good to get to know them for recreational purposes. After that, the rest of the room filled out as Average Joes, metal heads, and hoity-toity academics.
     I had successfully made it through homeroom when the bell rang, and then I started down the hall looking for my next class. There were only four minutes in between classes. Clearly not enough time to get to my locker, grab my stuff, make my way over to the other side of the school to where I believed my next class was, and do it all without being tardy. It was an almost insurmountable task to have accomplished in just four minutes. Especially with not yet being familiar with the layout of the place. And, forget about stopping off to take a piss. That was out of the question. Yeah, making it to my classes today on time was certainly going to be a hard row to hoe. So, by the time the clock had struck 8:05 a.m. I was already late for my first real class. Physics with Mr. McLaren.
     By the time I had found which room it was that I needed to report to, all the hallways were nearly deserted. Completely void of other students and had been so for at least the last couple of minutes. So, I knew already that I would be walking into physics with all eyes on me. An unsettling feeling to say the least.
     After finding the place, the door to the room was still open. So I did my best to just nonchalantly walk in as surreptitiously as I could as I quickly gazed out over the room for an open seat. I had spotted one still abandoned in the far recesses of the room tucked away underneath a poster of the periodic table that hung on the wall slightly crooked. I took my seat, careful to keep my head down, not wanting to look up and see everyone’s eyes on me. But after a long moment of silence, I force myself to pick up my head and take a look around.
     Mr. McLaren… Well, the thirty somethingish man who I had assumed was Mr. McLaren was standing at the front of the room with his arms crossed while looking directly at me. “And
you
are?” he asked with a touch o
f
condescension to his voice while giving a little head shake that only a gay man or black woman would do.
     “She’s Cera Singer from Saraland.” A voice called out from somewhere else in the room.
     I looked around to see who had said it. And,
of course,
sitting two rows and two seats, up from me was Keri Mahan, the little bitch. “She’s new. Just moved all the way up here from Alabama.” She added while peering back at me with a smug smirk that suggested that she’d just informed everyone in the room that I was a deep-seated hick.
     “
Well, Miss. Singer.
” Mr. McLaren began in a huff as he unfolded his arms only to throw them dramatically up in the air. “This class begins exactly at 8:04. So, I will expect you to be on time from here on out, and certainly not sneaking in late only to disrupt my class.”
     “Yes, sir,” I said feeling completely abject and wanting to just disappear.
     Mr. McLaren then went on to give an incredibly boring lecture on relative motion while I found myself precariously waiting for the bell to rescue me. At least after it had finally come, the rest of my morning had started to go a little better. Well,
at least without another major incident that is.
     Fifth period eventually had rolled around, and it was the one that I had dreaded the most. Lunch.
     It wasn’t that I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I was truly famished. It was just that lunch is the one period of the day where you knew you were walking into the no-man’s-land known as the cafeteria, and I was an army of one.
     After I had eventually found the lunchroom. I found that my impressively bad luck was about to strike again. Because I had been seated for only a few minutes at an unoccupied table tucked away near the corner of the room when Keri, Laurie, Hallie came in. They’d been followed by who I would come to find would round out the male side of their crew, Harlin Tapp, Donnie Reese, and Erik Myers.
     Keri and Hallie sneered at me while also exchanging whispers as the group walked on by and I felt the sudden urge to just get it over and start throwing haymakers at them. I had always figured that the best thing to do when you find yourself in such a situation was to whip someone’s ass right away, letting everyone else know that you’re not one who should be messed with.
Well, at least that’s what they say you should do in prison.
But unfortunately, I didn’t have the nerve to do anything that drastic though. So, I just sat there with my head down pretending to read a book until they passed. I mean, it would have been six-on-one. What chance did I have?
     As the clock seemed to slow to a crawl I found myself barely being able to choke down my turkey sandwich. So, I discarded it. Electing to spend the rest of the period just staring out the window while making a sincere effort to avoid any accidental eye contact with the real witches of Mt. Harrison. It was excruciating waiting for time to pass, and I had hoped-to-no-ends that the bell would ring soon. Because every time I glanced away from the window, I thought—although it could have been just paranoia—that I saw about a third of the kids in the cafeteria looking over at me. They would quickly avert their eyes to avoid being caught staring at me, but I knew they were.
     At the table next to me sat a small group of girls. At one point during the period I had thought I heard one of them whispering something along the lines of, “She’s a Barrett.” to which another girl concurred and then added, “Yeah, she is. At least that’s what Keri Mahan says.”
     Eventually though, the bell had finally gotten off its ass and did its job. It couldn’t have come soon enough either as far as I’d been concerned. I then swiftly slipped out of the cafeteria as fast as my Keds would take me. After that, I eked my way through my last four classes before ducking out of the school a few minutes before the final bell had even rung.
     When I had gotten home my mama had seen me come into the house so she of course had asked me straight away how my day was, and I felt myself instantly wanting to go off. Telling her all about what little bitches Keri, Laurie, and Hallie were. But not wanting to disappoint her I lied, telling her my day was
fine. I didn’t want her to worry about me. The last few months had been tough enough on my mama already.
     As I made myself a PB&J Step Daddy Cade came into the kitchen to grab a can of beer out of the refrigerator and while doing so he ended up also asking me how school was. So, I gave him the same answer I had told my mama that, “It was fine.” But, he knew
that
wasn’t going to make a horse dump, and he gave me a reserved look as if to say,
Yeah, right kid. I can smell bullshit a mile away.
But he didn’t say anything else. He just took a long swig from his beer and then went out on the deck.
     “I’m glad to hear that at least you had such a good day today, Cera.” My mama then said, speaking up as she fumbled through her purse on the kitchen counter. “Because mine couldn’t have been any worse,”
     “What happened?” I asked as I poured myself a glass of sweet tea from a Kool-aid man pitcher I’d found in the refrigerator that was half-chilled with frost.
     “Oh, nothing. It was
just a little altercation I had with some idiot in the pharmacy.”
     Instantly I had thought of Caroline Hemstock and her crazy outburst she had on us at the diner
.
     “So, what happened?” I asked prying a little further.
     “
Oh, it was nothing.
” Mama replied after having finally found the receipt she’d been searching the depths of her purse for. “Just some guy who tried blaming me for his kid being sick is all.”
     “
WHAT?
” I asked now completely intrigued by the story and not willing to let my mama get away without telling it.
     “Well,” She began and then paused as if not knowing where to begin. “I was running my errands like I had told you I would be doing before you left for school this morning. And, I had stopped at the bank to have a letter notarized for Adam Brown, and—”
     “Adam Brown. He’s one of the estate lawyers grandma hired right?” I quickly asked my mama cutting her off mid-sentence while I added another couple of tablespoons of sugar to my tea.
     “Yeah, Adam Brown, he’s the Brown in Schlitzmeyer and Brown. And, well,
anyway… 
I had stopped at the supermarket and then the post office after a brief stop at the bank. And after all those stops I was at the pharmacy when this man just walks up to me and says kind of curtly, ‘Hey, you’re Janine Barrett, aren’t you?’ At first, he’d startled me, but then I said, ‘Yes… Yes, I am. Can I help you?’ And, he says to me, ‘WHAT THE HELL DID YOU HAVE TO COME BACK HERE FOR?’ all gruffly, almost shouting at me, his voice was so loud.”
     “No way,” I then interrupted again before taking a sip of my tea that still wasn’t sweet enough. “Who was he? What did you say to him?”
     My mama, then sighed and shrugged a little before saying, “Well, I hadn’t any clue as to who he was. And, by now I was a little frightened by him, so I just said, ‘Excuse me?’”
     Then, my mama said to me that the man said to her, “YOU HEARD ME!” even louder and more bombastically then before, and then he said, “Why the
hell did you have to come back here? Things had finally been getting better around here ever since that old bitch mother of yours dropped dead, and now you show up and shit is starting all over again.”
     “So whatchya say to him then?” I asked fully anticipating my mama to tell me that she’d turtled, but hoping-to-God that she had told him to fuck off.
     But my mama had said that she had asked him what-on-God’s-green-earth was he talking about and he had replied, “You know damn well what I’m talking about! Everything was getting better around here once you Barretts were gone. And now that
you’re
here, things are starting to get worse again. All this crap is happening all over.”