Reconstructing Amelia (37 page)

“What?” Julia’s eyes were wide. “Sylvia, what are they talking about?”

“No.” Sylvia shook her head. “I helped her get out of Woodhouse’s office, but then when I came out of the bathroom afterward, she was gone. I don’t know where she went.”

Lew nodded, looking down at his notepad without writing until the weight of his silence grew unbearable.

“I don’t know anything else, really,” Sylvia added, caving to the pressure. Her eyes had welled up, and her voice was scratchy. “I swear.”

“Except that I think you do.” Lew pulled a page out from his back pocket and held it out to Julia. “I think you know a lot more than you’re telling us.”

Julia looked down at it, confused. “I don’t understand. What is this?”

“It’s a report tracing some anonymous texts that Sylvia sent to Kate,” Lew said. “The texts said that Amelia didn’t jump. Isn’t that right, Sylvia?”

There were tears streaming down Sylvia’s face now. She tried to speak but only sucked in air. Then she dropped herself down onto a kitchen chair and put her head in her hands as she sobbed. Julia went over and knelt beside her daughter.

“Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out,” Julia said, rubbing Sylvia’s arms. “But you have to tell them, honey. You have to tell them why you wrote that.”

Finally, Sylvia sniffled hard and looked up. Her brown eyes were wet and red-rimmed, her cheeks still slick.

“After Amelia died, I started walking by your house sometimes after school. I stayed on the other side of the street so you wouldn’t see me,” Sylvia said to Kate. She was hugging herself now. “One time, it was, like, late afternoon, and you were standing there in your doorway in a robe. Just standing there, staring. At nothing. Maybe you went out to get the paper or something, but then it was like you’d forgot what you were doing. You were frozen. And it was totally”—Sylvia was staring at a blank space on the floor, as if she were seeing it play out there again—“awful. Like, so much worse than you crying at the funeral, and that was really bad.” Sylvia shook her head and pulled in a quaky breath. “I thought maybe if you didn’t think she’d jumped . . . if you didn’t think it was your fault . . . maybe that would make it better for you.”

“So you pretended you knew,” Julia said, sounding relieved. “To make Kate feel better.”

“No,” Sylvia said, her wet eyes were still locked on Kate’s. “Amelia didn’t jump. I know that she didn’t.”

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OCTOBER 24

Amelia Baron

“A ghostly roll of drums, remorselessly beat the measure of life . . . and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Amelia

OCTOBER 24

When I poked my head out of Woodhouse’s office, I could see Sylvia there, in front of Mrs. Pearl’s office next door, blocking her view of the hallway and of me as I made my escape.

“What I’m
saying
is that it makes me kind of uncomfortable that Grace Hall doesn’t offer alternatives to evolution.” Sylvia was talking loudly, and in this really superior voice. She was waving an index finger through the air. “Where’s the intellectual
dialogue
if you only present one point of view?”

“This
is why you had to be excused from biology to come down here immediately?” Mrs. Pearl asked.

“I happen to take my religious beliefs
very
seriously,” Sylvia said, sounding appalled.

I noticed Sylvia’s other hand down behind her back. Her fingers were waving me out of the office. I ducked down and made my way toward the door.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Golde, I must have missed the memo about you being born again,” Mrs. Pearl said sarcastically. “And here I’d been thinking this whole time that you were Jewish.”

“I am Jewish, and I am
also
born again,” Sylvia said as I stepped out into the hall and tiptoed past Mrs. Pearl’s door. “You have something against interfaith marriage, too?”

I pressed myself against the wall, praying that Sylvia would hurry up before someone noticed me hanging out there in the hall in the middle of third period.

“Okay, that’s officially enough, Ms. Golde,” Mrs. Pearl began. “You need to return to class and—”

“Fine, I was about to leave anyway.” Sylvia said. “But this isn’t over. I won’t be marginalized for my beliefs.”

When Sylvia finally dove down the hall toward me, she had a huge grin on her face. It made me smile. And I would have sworn at that moment that I would never smile again.

“Come on,” Sylvia said, grabbing my hand and yanking me down the hall.

“I can’t
leave
.” I whispered. “Woodhouse is going to come back. If I’m not there, he is going to be really pissed off.”

Sylvia stared at me then. “So what?” she said. “Let him be. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“They can kick me out of school.”

“Hello? You are the victim here. Woodhouse will back off the second you tell him that Zadie and her friends were harassing you for being gay. It is the truth, after all.”

She did have a point, except that was leaving out the part about the Maggies going after her.

“Come on,” Sylvia said, tugging my arm again. “We both need some cheering up, and I have a plan.”

The first stop was the Grace Hall auditorium, which was so fancy and huge, it was shared by both the Upper School and the Lower School next door. With its cushy, newly upholstered seats and polished mahogany stage, it was nicer than a lot of Broadway theaters.

“If I’d known this place just sat here, open all the time,” Sylvia said, her left hand smacking down the back of the seats as she made her way down the center aisle, “I would have totally had sex up on the stage.”

“Ugh, Sylvia, gross.”

“Oh please,” she said as she neared the stage, “don’t even try to play that prude crap with me anymore. You and I both know it’s bullshit.”

I followed her, but more slowly. The good girl in me still didn’t like being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. And we definitely weren’t allowed to be in the auditorium unattended. There was a reason the place stayed so nice. Sylvia ran up and onto the dark stage and stood in the shadows at the center. The glow from the few lights made her look spooky, but in a pretty way.

“What are we doing here, Sylvia?” I called from the first row of seats.

I’d tried not to sound nervous—Sylvia would just make me stay there longer—but I kind of did anyway.

“We’re going on a tour of some of our finest moments, my dear maiden,” she said from center stage with a bad English accent and a dramatic flourish of her hands. “I’d say we both need a reminder of how utterly fabulous we are.
This
, my fair lady, is your first stop.”

I was smiling and shaking my head. Sylvia was nuts, but sometimes in the best possible way. She was also a great friend. Despite everything I’d done, all the lies I had told, there she was. At the exact moment I needed her most.

“How is this one of my stops?” I asked. “What does the auditorium have to do with me?”

“Come up here to center stage, madam,” she said, calling to me like a circus announcer. “And I will show you.”

I climbed the steps onto the stage, feeling self-conscious even though there wasn’t a soul in the audience.

“Okay,” I said, once I was standing next to her under the ghostly lights. I stared out over all those empty seats. “I think maybe you have me confused with someone else because this seriously isn’t ringing any bells.”

“Just wait,” she said, putting her hands on my upper arms and staring out past my shoulder at an imaginary crowd. “It was here that I decided you had to stay my best friend forever. Second grade, Ms. Ritter’s class, Presidents’ Day presentation. You were scared shitless to go out onstage, even though it was going to be with everyone else and all you had to do was hold up your sign that had the letter
G
on it. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, you actually had to go throw up beforehand. You
must
remember that.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, feeling kind of sick just thinking about it. I’d blocked it out, mostly. But I did have this vivid image of Ms. Ritter handing me tissues and asking me if I always threw up when I was nervous. “Now I remember. Thanks, yeah, that was awesome times.”

“It was seriously like a marquee moment for me.”

“Me throwing up is your big defining moment? That’s so pathetic.” Looking out over all those empty seats, I was starting to feel hollow. The high that had come from jetting out of Woodhouse’s office was fading. Whenever this little field trip of Sylvia’s ended, all of it—the plagiarism, the Maggies, Dylan, my embarrassing e-mail—would still be there waiting for me. “By the way, I’m still totally terrified to be onstage. It’s making me nervous right now, and there’s not even anyone in the audience.”

“It wasn’t the throwing up, stupid,” Sylvia said. She crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. “It was what you did afterward.”

“And what was that?”

“You came back from the bathroom with this, like, wad of tissues and this, like,
True Grit
look on your face, you went right out onstage with the rest of us. Not a whimper, not a shake, nothing,” Sylvia said. “You were totally my hero.”

“Thanks, Sylvia,” I said. “I still think it makes me kind of lame, but thanks.”

And then I remembered something else about that day. Once I’d gotten out onto the stage, I had actually kind of started to waver again. I’d looked back at Ms. Ritter, and when she’d ignored me, I’d looked for a way out on the other side of the stage. But then I saw my mom, rushing in the side doors, fifteen minutes late as usual, looking all panicked and frazzled and lost. But she was there, and when she finally spotted me—back row, left side, big
G
pressed against my chest—she had this look on her face. Like I was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen. It was her looking at me like that that had really kept me standing out there.

I was still lost in the memory when there was a sound at the back of the auditorium: the doors opening.

“Shit, come on,” Sylvia said, grabbing my hand and tugging me off the stage. “We’re headed to the cafeteria.”

The cafeteria was empty, except for two janitors mopping the floor.

“You can’t be in here,” one of them barked, without looking up.

“We’re doing research for a book report,” Sylvia said, waving him off. “This is where you told Whitman Price to fuck off. You do remember
that
, right?”

It took a second for that to come back to me, too, but it did. Back in the sixth grade, Whitman had been, like, the ringleader of a pack of boys who had picked on all the girls. He’d pointed out one girl’s too-big ankles and the ugly mole on someone else’s neck. He’d called us too fat or too skinny or misshapen. Of course, Whitman was kind of fat himself, with an acne-dotted face, but everybody was too scared of him to point that out. Luckily, he’d moved away back in eighth grade when his parents got divorced. I hadn’t thought about him in years.

But now that I had, I did remember the day he came over to the table where I’d been sitting with Sylvia and a few of the other less popular girls. Whitman had stood at one end of the table and started giving each of us a score on how cute or not cute we were. Most of us weren’t cute, according to Whitman. Then he let us know what it was exactly about the way we looked that had kept our score down. He was trying to help us out, he said. By the time he got around the table to me, a couple of the other girls were crying and a half dozen other boys had come around to watch.

“And you,” he’d said, pointing at me, “you’ve got a horse face. It’s, like, all long and flat and like three times normal size.”

I’d never been the type to stand up to people. But on that day, with Whitman picking us off like we were fish in a barrel, something in me had snapped.

“And you’re really fat, Whitman,” I’d said. “So fuck you.”

I’d never said a swear word out loud before. Much less
that
swear word. It felt like my mouth was going to burst into flames.

“Oooh, snap!” one of the other boys had hooted.

“Damn, Whitman, she called you
out
,” somebody else had said.

And Whitman had looked so mad, I’d thought for a second he might punch me. But then he’d just turned around and disappeared into the crowd. He was back at it a few days later. Not the next day, though. That next day he’d stayed by himself, far on the other side of the cafeteria.

“Come on,” Sylvia said, stepping toward the door. “We’ve got to get out of here. I think one of the janitors just went to call somebody.”

We went on like that through the school, dodging and weaving and ducking our way past teachers and staff and administration. Sylvia took me to where I’d once won the science fair with my project on magnetism and plants, and the place where, in eighth grade, Chris Mellon had told me he liked me. We stopped at the place on the second floor where I’d told Sylvia—in the seventh grade—that I was going to be a writer someday, no matter how hard it was.

None of the stops on Sylvia’s tour could change anything. They didn’t make Dylan love me, or swap my excellent
Lighthouse
paper for that copied one. None of the memories took back all the awful things Zadie had done or erased the embarrassment of everyone’s seeing my e-mail.

But the tour did remind me that my life had been bigger than just that one moment. One girl. One set of words on paper. That I had gone through other things before—good and terrible, funny and awful—and I had survived.

We were back in the hallway when the bell rang. We dove into a janitor’s closet to hide while classes changed, pressing ourselves against the wall next to the mop and bucket. We held our breath for as long as we could so we didn’t choke on the bleach smell.

“Thank you,” I said to Sylvia, when the hallway was quiet again and we were about to head back out, “I needed this.”

“We’re not done yet,” Sylvia said. “It’s my turn now.”

Crap
. I should have been thinking of where to go on Sylvia’s tour. Because totally nothing was jumping to mind. What had been her marquee moments?

“Don’t worry,” Sylvia said, reading my mind. “You’re off the hook. I’ve already got where we’re going all worked out.”

From the closet, we hit an empty classroom in the north wing, then the library and the courtyard, visiting Sylvia’s most important places—which mostly (no, all) had to do with boys—giggling as we dodged teachers and staff. It felt as if we were little again, wrapped tight in our own pretend world.

But by the fourth of Sylvia’s stops, things had started to take a turn for the worse. Every place we were stopping wasn’t just about a guy. It was where a guy had
broken up
with Sylvia. At first she didn’t seem upset, but then all of a sudden it was like she’d hit some kind of tipping point and she looked all shaky and sad.

“None of them deserved you,” I said as we headed toward the fire door. “You’re better off without them.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m reminding myself.”

But I didn’t believe her. It was like the awesome light inside her had been snuffed out.

“Where are we going now?” I asked as we headed up the stairs, hoping we were going to end her little merryless march of men soon.

“To the roof,” she said with a sad smile, trudging onward. “And cheer up. It’ll be the last stop on Sylvia Golde’s trail of tears.”

I stopped. That was exactly what I’d been afraid of. She was really upset, even if she’d been trying to act like the whole thing was about how
not
upset she was.

“Sylvia, come on,” I said. “What do those stupid boys know about anything anyway?” My mind was racing, trying to think of anyplace maybe I could take her. Someplace she had done something remarkable. But I was coming up totally blank, even though there had to be cool things Sylvia had done. Big, like, impressive moments she’d had. Except I seriously couldn’t think of any. “You are mad creative and supertalented. You are a crazy style icon. You’re going to be an amazing fashion designer someday, I just know it. It’ll be like you and Steve McQueen at fashion week together.”

“It’s Alexander McQueen.” Sylvia rolled her eyes. “And he’s dead. So is Steve McQueen.”

“Fine, then Donna Karen.”

“Donna Karen? Seriously? She might as well be dead.”

“Come on, Sylvia.”

“I know, I know, you’re trying to make me feel better. But you know, you actually sound kind of desperate,” Sylvia said, trudging on up the steps without looking back at me. She shrugged. “And it’s okay. I know who I am. I accept it. You don’t have to try to cover for me. Now come on.”

When we were finally at the top, Sylvia pushed open the door to the roof and we stepped out onto the south side of the building.