Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (17 page)

26. When you’re alone …

The weekend passes, I am incapable of writing my poem, and Kayla doesn’t call. By Sunday night I’m determined; I’m not going to follow her down to her basement lair tomorrow to drag the details of the date out of her. I’m not going to chase this friendship. If she wants to be friends, she can make an effort. And if she doesn’t, well, I’ll deal with it. I’m more than a Kayla-appendage.

Okay, so now it’s Monday and my bus is inexplicably early, and the halls are filled with people clumping up in knots comparing hangovers or whatever people do when they do things over the weekend that do not involve making crazy-eyes at the mirror or crying into cookie batter with the school loser. I’m alone. I make a half-hearted attempt to clean the locker, but it’s really not all that messy, so it only takes like two minutes. Kayla’s coat hangs there, its thin black wool exuding a faint odor of cigarettes and secondhand store, so I know she’s down there in the art room waiting for me to come and find her, like I always do. Or worse. Maybe she’s not waiting for me at all. Maybe she’s actually hoping that I’ll take her brush-off to heart and stop hanging on her. I slam the locker door on her stupid stinky coat. I guess I should be glad she hasn’t kicked me out of our locker yet.

I look around for Emily Friar, but she drives to school now, which means she can get here whenever she wants. My stupid parents and their stupid rules. Even hanging out with Cordelia would be an improvement over standing here all alone, clutching my books to my chest like a big loser. I wonder, for a second, where Darin goes in the morning, but I dismiss the thought quickly. He barely knows who I am outside of English class, probably. Maybe I should go down to the art room after all. Maybe she couldn’t call me because she got in trouble or something. Maybe.

I suppose I could go to homeroom early, but that would be so out of character that Ms. Franklin would probably try to talk to me. Maybe she’d call a guidance counselor or something. I’d tell her I have homework, but that would mean I’d have to actually work on some homework. I could finish my stupid poem, since I’m probably going to fail the class for real if I don’t finish it by noon today. And by finish I guess I mean start. But I don’t feel creative, not right now. Not yet. Maybe I’ll write it during English class. Or lunch, I guess, if I’m desperate. Noon. I can do this.

I could go down with the orchestra geeks and practice my violin or whatever, but I can’t imagine. I haven’t brought it home to practice since, like, November. I’m not sure I could play a scale, to be honest. I open my locker again and take my backpack off the hook, dropping it onto the floor. Maybe it needs some organizing. I crouch down and unzip the top, peering doubtfully into its chaotic depths. Okay, so. Will this be less painful than being a loser?

“She’s here! OMG, Cassieeeeeeee! The newspaper looked so awesome!” A barrage of squeals, and I turn to see Annika and Britney leading their posse of wind-up girls, who are all cooing and making a fuss, though their eyes are on Annika, not me.

I smile. “I didn’t do much. Plugged stuff into the holes, that’s all.”

“Oh, you’re too modest,” says Annika, grabbing my arm. “Come on, Cassie, what are you doing here in the loser hall? We’ve been
waiting
for you. Let’s go.”

“Go?” She pulls me to my feet, but my backpack tips over in the process; all my junk spills out across the floor.

She tosses her hair. “The Commons, duh. Where else?”

“I’ll throw this away for you,” says Britney, picking up a tube of lip gloss that rolls away from me. “Wrong color.”

“No, I—” I like that color. Whatever. I smile and wave my hand. “I guess you can toss it.”

The Commons. Duh
. I don’t go there if I can help it. It’s where the jocks leer and make comments and give ratings to girls’ asses while the girls toss their bright, shiny hair over their shoulders and laugh so loudly I’m sure they’re laughing at me. The school made a big fuss about it at the beginning of the year, made us all discuss how we feel in homeroom; the outcome of the whole deal was that they put teachers in the Commons to supervise, so now, instead of having a number or a letter grade shouted out and laughed over and forgotten, you get this prolonged murmuring game of disgusting telephone. Gross.

“What’s this?” Annika bends to pick up a packet of folded pages that has fallen out of my pack—gray, lined pages with pink writing.

“Give it to me!” Of course, that’s the wrong thing to say. The wrong tone, too urgent. Let me go back in time a couple seconds and I’ll get it right. “Oh, I dunno,” I’ll say, totally nonchalant. “Something from my little sister, maybe.”

“It’s
poetry
!” Shrieks of laughter, as Annika hands the pages around to the group.

Okay, so no big deal. It’s not my poetry, anyway. Besides, most of these girls can’t even read. I fold my arms over my chest and sigh. “Give it back, Annika.”

“Oh, this is so adorable,” says Britney. “So
precious
, Cassie, really.”

“The kindness in your
eyes
, is my greatest
prize
,” says a girl whose name I don’t know, exaggerating the rhyme. She makes an equally exaggerated gagging sound.

“No, no, don’t make fun,” says Annika. “This is Cassie’s heart on the page, guys. Don’t tease her. Her ‘heart is squeezed like it’s in a
vise
, waiting for your words to be
nice
.’” She covers her mouth with her free hand, making a show of her struggle to keep a straight face.

“Give them back, you guys. Please?” I try to stop myself from pleading, try to take away this power they think they have over me, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to diffuse this.

“Tell us who you wrote these for, and we’ll stop.” Britney’s eyes gleam greedily.

“Yeah, tell us, Cassie!”

“We’ll tell him for you. We’ll totally make this happen!”

“Is it Flynn? It’s got to be Flynn. Everyone loves Flynn.”

“No, it’s that weird Darin kid. I’ve seen you talking to him.” A hand, shoving me. They’re surrounding me, waving the pages in front of my face.

“No, please … ” I hope Darin’s locker isn’t nearby.

“Him?” Cruel laughter. “Don’t you mean
her
?”

“Yeah, everyone knows Cassie’s got the hots for Giant Goth Girl!”

“Who? That girl with the eyeliner?”

“Cassie’s a lesbian?”

“The girl who draws that weird comic that
nobody
understands.”

“Cassie’s a lesbian!” Sing-song taunting.

“Listen to this one, you guys, it’s
darling
.”

“
Stop it!
” I tear the poem out of the girl’s hand. “They’re not mine, okay? They’re not my poems.” If I could go back in time, I’d stop here. “They’re not mine! They’re Drew Godfrey’s. She wanted me to submit them for her, to the newspaper.” I hate myself.
I hate myself
.

Oh no. The blondes all go quiet at once, awaiting further orders. “Oh, that is so awesome,” says Annika, and she collects the pages, each girl handing them over without a word. She takes a poem out of my hand, and I’m too disoriented to react until it’s too late.

“Wait—what are you doing with them?” I hold out my hand for the poems, but Annika only smiles.

“You said she wanted to submit them,” she says. “So consider them submitted.”

The girls giggle in unison, the clucking, automatic sound of a robotic army of chickens.

“Yeah, but I don’t think she wanted … ” I don’t know why I feel like such a betrayer here. I mean, Drew did want me to submit them. “She wanted them to remain anonymous, you know?”

“Oh, sure,” says Annika, with those wide eyes. “We’ll make sure nobody knows they’re hers.” She turns to the rest of the girls. “We could sign them Stinkygirl. The Stench Wench? Dirty Hairy?” More clucking responses from the mechanical girls.

“She … ” I’d like to be the one who defends her. The one who stands up to the mean girls. The one who puts them in their place. But that’s just the thing. They already know their place. All their wide eyes narrow at once as I face them, a strangling in my throat made up of words unspoken and tears unshed.

“She can’t know it was me who told you.” My voice is a squeak, a squawk, the cluck of a chicken, and I merge into the circle of hens, Annika’s hand tight on my elbow as she steers me toward the Commons.

27. Something
you regret saying …

“Sign this.” Kayla slaps a paper down on my desk and turns on her heel, heading over to her seat. Mr. Dawkins claps his hands to signal the start of class. It’s the first time Kayla’s spoken to me all day, and now she’s all “sign this.” What the hell? I try to catch her eye across the room, but she’s doing that thing where she pretends she’s paying attention to the teacher.

“Whoa. What’s her issue?” Darin reaches for the paper, but stops when Mr. D clears his throat and shoots us his patented
shut up for the love of god
look.

I sneak a peek at the page. It’s a petition to save the Winter Carnival. A petition to save Martin Shaddox and his sculpture contest from the God Squad. I sign and slide the page over to Darin. “Pass it on,” I whisper. He does.

Did you check out that tarot card blog from the newspaper?
Darin writes on a piece of scratch paper with his neat block letters.

No. Is it cool?
Lies.

Really interesting. And there were metaphors.
“You should totally try it,” he whispers. He underlines
metaphors
twice.

“Try what?” I raise my eyebrows in what I hope is an innocent way, but wow, he’s right. There was totally a tree metaphor. Trees are pretty clichéd. Still, even a cliché is better than an F …

Try asking Divinia for help with English class.

I laugh. “It’s not a homework help line,” I whisper. “Be-sides, it’s due in like an hour.”

“Well, it’s too bad about the assignment, but what she says about you could spark some creativity, maybe. For life beyond this class.” He draws a little stick-Cassandra having a lightbulb moment.

“Ha.” I draw a big X over the bulb. “I don’t think creativity and I exist in the same universe.”

“Cass? Darin?” Mr. Dawkins stops his lecture and turns to us. “I hate to be that guy who stands up here and asks you if you’d like to share whatever’s so interesting with the class, but I seem to be lacking attention from the two of you, and I’m about to give some instructions, so if you could … ” Mr. D trails off and then turns to the white board, where he’s pulled up a William Carlos Williams poem off the Internet. The plum poem, the confession. “This is Just to Say.”

“So, as I was going on about in what I believe to be a very captivating manner, we’ve been studying the transcendentalists, and
most
of us have tried our hands at writing a little transcendentalist poetry of our own.” Here he pauses to give me what feels like a very pointed look.

I will kill myself if he makes us write another poem.
I scrawl my suicide note with Darin’s pen.

“Today we’re going to try our hand at a very different type of poem, one based on this well-known WCW poem … ”

Darin draws a comic of a stick girl poised on the roof of a skyscraper.

“ … But before you all freak out about having to write poetry, please understand that William Carlos Williams is all about simple language and straightforward imagery. All you need to write is a confession, or an apology.”

Darin scribbles a thought bubble above the girl’s head.
This is Just to Say / I have been melodramatic in English class!
/ WOE IS ME.

I roll my eyes. Okay, so he’s right. The plum poem isn’t nearly as bad as “Song of Myself,” that’s for sure. I can write an apology, right? A confession?

“Go to it,” says Mr. D, and I realize I’ve missed the specific directions for the assignment. “Ten minutes.”

“What? What does he mean, ten minutes?”

Darin shrugs. “We have to read our confessions in ten minutes.” To my surprise, he’s already filled several lines, which he hides with a casual motion of his hand.

“Out loud? To the whole class?”

“Yeah, he said that’s sort of the point. Confessing.”

“What is this, church?” I can’t write a confession, an apology
—not for the whole class. Seriously, Mr. D, are you trying to kill me? What is with all this ridiculous poetry writing?

“Cass. Don’t think about it. Pick something you want to apologize about and write it down. Put it into three stanzas if you can, like that poem, and maybe use some of the same words. Don’t think about it.”

Don’t think about it. That has to be the most useless phrase in the entire language. Okay, so what can I confess? I don’t know why, but Drew Godfrey jumps to mind. I push the thought away. I haven’t done anything to her. I’ve been
nice
to her. At least … I’ve been nice enough. Right?