The Unknowns (10 page)

She was facing the opposite direction from me now, with the chains of her swing twisted around one another. A couple of stray curls had fallen over her face, and through them she surveyed the monkey bars and the seesaw as though from a great and tragic distance.

“And so now whenever they see me, they just start laughing,” she said. “In social studies they passed me a note with a picture on it—it was horrible.”

I was slightly shocked at the mature themes that had entered our conversation. I didn’t know how a girl might “do it” with a plastic toy, although if pushed I would have guessed that it had something to do with inserting it in her vagina. And I was still reeling from the revelation about Leo Garson, who was in my homeroom and was known for doing a retarded character he called Special Ross. I hadn’t expected Tara to tell me she loved me, but I’d hoped I was at least sufficiently on the map that she wouldn’t casually tell me she loved someone else.

“They sound terrible,” I said.

“They are terrible,” she said. “They’re so mean.”

“So why would you want to be friends with them?”

She looked at me with pity. “Everyone wants to be friends with them,” she said.

“I don’t want to be friends with them,” I said with total sincerity. The cryptic remarks about the My Little Pony had frightened me.

“That’s fine for you,” she said sadly. “You’ve got… you’ve got your own stuff going on.” What stuff was she referring to? “But I’m not like that. I wish I could just be like,
Oh, whatever, Michelle, if you’re going to be friends with
Louise
then I can’t be friends with you
. But, you know, if I tried to be all tough like that, she wouldn’t care, she’d just be like,
OK, fine, whatever
. I mean, what am I going to do, be friends with Cheryl Palatino and Emma Price again? I can always be friends with them, they’ll be friends with anyone. But I don’t want to hang out with them. Why would I want to hang out with them? So I’m going to hang out with nobody.” A look of resignation came over her face. It seemed sad, the idea that if Michelle Kessel wasn’t going to be your friend there was no one else in the world.

“I should get back,” she said suddenly. “I’m supposed to be in yearbook right now.”

We began walking back toward school. “You’re really special,
you know that?” she said. “You’re a really good listener. You’re a really good person.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I felt like I might be about to sprout wings and soar above the school, up over Denver and into the mountains. And then we were at the corner of the parking lot behind the school building, and Tara headed off across the lot along the diagonal. I watched her heading for the building’s rear door, occasionally raising her hand to wave at a carful of departing kids. I kept walking straight on Randall, alongside the parking lot, beside the school building, and toward the front steps, where my mother had been waiting for half an hour.

“I have no idea what you’re thinking” was what she said when I climbed into the car. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I was talking to a friend,” I said, feeling somehow self-righteous. “I was talking to a girl who was really upset, and she needed to talk to me.” This seemed like a valid justification.

My mom let out a long sigh as she turned the key in the ignition, and I had the feeling that she would have been angrier if she hadn’t been so tired. We drove home in silence. When we got home I went straight into my room and took out my notebook. On Tara’s page I wrote,
Beautiful and deep. Truly a good person. Likes LG—serious? Too sensitive for the everyday social world—wants to make a deeper connection
. Under Michelle’s name, where it said
Lots of makeup
and
Popular
, I added
User
. Under Louise’s I wrote
Mean
.

During most classes I split my brain in two: half of me tracked the material being covered while the other half revised and expanded my girl database. The exception was Combined Math, a two-semester dash through geometry, trig, and algebra designed for math-adept freshmen. Only two of the girls in the class were listed in my notebook, and the content consumed all of my attention. The teacher, Mr. Gestetner, was a rumpled man with a genius for exposition:
you left his class palpably smarter than you were before. Kids like teachers who are good at teaching, but teaching is difficult, so a lot of teachers settle for being friendly.

Gestetner assigned quizzes every few weeks, with extra homework for anyone who performed unsatisfactorily. We were leaving the classroom after one such quiz when I heard Graham Neale’s voice behind me. Graham was the boy from my homeroom with the split-level haircut. In math he sat in the back and didn’t volunteer, although when Gestetner called on him he always produced the correct answer with no evident struggle.

“That was brutal,” he said over my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said, slowing to fall in with him. In fact I had enjoyed it.

“The number of quizzes in this class is a fucking joke,” Graham said, coming down on the penultimate word with savage relish.

“I know,” I said. “It sucks.” I was trying to use words like
sucks
more. And then I heard a croaking voice calling my name, and Bill Fleig was hurrying out of the classroom after us. From a distance of more than ten years, I can see how he recognized me as a kindred spirit: my dull wardrobe; my habitual look of beatific concentration; my unfortunate haircut, which swooped out from my ears in smooth shallow curves describable by quadratic equations. But at the time it felt like he had arbitrarily chosen to mark me by association.

“Do you know Pascal?” he asked. He had a way of jumping straight to the substance of conversations, treating greetings and pleasantries as noise.

“Nuh-uh,” I said as Graham looked on.

“I was talking to Mr. Gestetner,” Bill said. “He says he’ll teach Pascal classes after school if I can find one other person who wants to do it.”

This proposal was not without its appeal. I was frustrated with the limitations of BASIC and eager to become a more sophisticated
programmer. But allying myself with Bill, or publicly expressing an interest in computers, would be a catastrophic error.

“Pascal is retarded,” I said, proud to be disowning my nerd impulses. And then Graham gave me a quizzical look and I realized my mistake: I should have said,
What the fuck is Pascal
? Instead I had outed myself as someone who had opinions about programming languages.

“So does that mean you won’t do it?” Bill asked. “Because if I can’t find someone else, Gestetner won’t teach the class.” Graham was heading off toward his locker.

“Well, boo hoo,” I said, and turned my back on Bill Fleig. Feeling defeated, I grabbed my coat and books and made my way out of the building to the school’s front steps where my mom would pick me up. Plastic bags and sheets of loose-leaf paper soared and sank in the wind. I waited on the bottom step, at the far left, where my mom always looked for me, and watching the cars I realized: they were all driven by other students. That’s when my mom’s pale blue Nissan pulled up, and she leaned over the passenger side and waved, and there I was, the only kid at my high school getting picked up by his mom. As I got in, it was as if some adult version of me, someone capable and self-reliant, was watching and protesting:
That’s just a kid! That little kid is going around pretending to be me
!

When I started at MLK Mom had, temporarily and with great bureaucratic effort, adjusted her schedule at the doctor’s office where she worked reception. We’d anticipated that I would meet other kids who lived in Sheridan and my mom would arrange a car pool with their parents. But I had not yet met any such kids, and if I had I don’t think I could have said,
Hey—you live in Sheridan? We should carpool
! Most of the older kids drove or got rides with friends; the younger ones took the municipal bus. But then, most of the kids at MLK didn’t live in Sheridan, off the city bus routes.

It was warm in the car. “Hey, sugar,” Mom said. She pulled away
from the curb, humming with the radio. We stopped at the end of the street as a gaggle of kids crossed in front of us.

“So how was school?” Mom asked me.

“It was fine,” I said, slouching in my seat, hoping I wouldn’t be seen.

“I was thinking of doing tuna casserole tonight,” she said. “And
L.A. Law
.” My mother and I enjoyed this show, but I wasn’t in the mood. For the first time, the fundamental syllogism of adolescence occurred to me:
Your mom loves you. Your mom is biologically obliged to love you, even if you’re a total loser. Therefore her love means nothing, and you probably are a total loser
.

“That’s great, Mom,” I said. “That sounds great. Um, I need to talk to you about something.”

She shifted instantly into concerned mode, which comes more naturally to my mom than any other mode. “What is it, sweetie?” she said.

“I don’t want to ride home with you anymore,” I said. I wasn’t even looking at her, but everything suddenly felt different, and I knew I’d hurt her badly.

“I just… no one else rides home with their mom, you know?” I said. A long pause.

Finally she said, in a voice almost entirely devoid of inflection, “So how does everyone else get to school?”

“They get rides with other kids,” I said. “Or they take the bus.”

“I’ve always said you can get a ride with someone else’s mom,” she said. “That was the whole point. And if there was a bus for you to take, believe me, I’d be more than happy for you to take it.” I didn’t say anything. “Do you think I like spending an extra forty-five minutes every morning and forty-five minutes every evening in the car?”

I remained silent, partly because I had believed that she did enjoy it. She always seemed happy to see me, and happy to be driving
along listening to the radio, just the two of us. I wasn’t sure if she’d never liked it at all, or if she was pretending because I’d hurt her feelings. We drove the rest of the way in silence, except for the radio: “More Than Words,” “Justify My Love,” commercials for local mattress stores. Of course there was no way for me to get to school without her.

My mother parked on the street and I shadowed her into the house. She put her handbag heavily down on the kitchen counter and, still in her coat, began grabbing cans of food out of the cabinets. I skulked past her and into my room, where I took off my shoes and sat on my bed with my knees tucked under my chin. For a long time I played out the conversation we’d just had in different ways: sometimes I said,
Thanks for driving me to school, Mom, I really appreciate it;
other times she said,
Well, we’ll just have to move somewhere closer to a bus line
. After running both versions half a dozen times without much satisfaction I gave up and reached for my backpack. I had a few new pieces of information to add to the notebook: Danielle Orr had said hi to me in the hallway, and Rebecca Castillo seemed to have dumped Steve Papp for Dave Breuer, a definite trade-up. I unzipped the bag and flipped through the items inside: my ring binder, my chemistry textbook, my paperback copy of
Stranger in a Strange Land
. I couldn’t see the notebook at first, but this was not unusual because it was smaller and thinner than most of the books I carried to and from school. I went through the bag’s contents again, more systematically, and felt an abyss of panic open beneath me. I pulled the books and folders out of the backpack one by one. I held each upside down by its spine to allow anything hidden between the pages to drop onto the bed. I reached my arms into the empty backpack and ran my fingers over the interior’s nylon surface, peering inside and taking in the rubbery scent. I unzipped the small pocket on the front of the backpack, although the notebook wouldn’t have fit inside, and removed my wallet, my calculator, the house keys I
carried in case of an emergency, two black pens, a green marker, two Jolly Ranchers, a Jolly Rancher wrapper, and a dime. I stopped and looked at the pile of objects on the bed. None of them was the notebook.
It’s probably in my locker at school
, I thought.
Or if it’s not I can always kill myself
.

It wasn’t in my locker. I unpacked the contents—textbooks, binders, two sweaters, returned homework—and scrutinized each item before setting it on the checkerboard linoleum in a pile that Ron Nathorp, at the locker next to mine, kicked over with the back of his heel. Kids packed the hallway, bumping and shouting, and I expected each one who passed to say something like,
So, Danielle really likes Guns N’ Roses, huh
? or
Yeah, how about Vicki Gordon’s tits
? or
You must be the lamest person in the world
!

I tried to recall every step I’d taken since the previous lunchtime, when, in the privacy of a third-floor toilet stall, I had added a datum about Karen Longnecker and Julia Mossman. (Many of the observations in the book, to my surprise, described the friendships between girls.) I thought I remembered replacing it in my backpack afterward, although in these situations it’s impossible to know whether you’re recalling a specific event or just appropriating memories of similar events from other occasions. I didn’t believe the backpack could have come open by itself: it was sturdily built, and the zipper was made by YKK, which is the sign of a reliable zipper.

I walked into homeroom with something large and fleshy in my throat but, to my relief, no one paid me any attention. By third-period English I found I could go without thinking about the notebook for minutes at a time, although eventually my thoughts would land on Gwen Vries or Nancy Chang and I would experience the urge to write something in the notebook and once again I would be filled with the dull certainty of imminent disaster.

Class ended, and we all joined the flow down to the cafeteria.
Each stairway doubled back on itself at a landing; on a trip from the fourth floor to the cafeteria you changed direction seven times. Between classes this was chaos, since we didn’t self-organize into a file going up and a file going down, so every little flight of fourteen steps between a floor and a landing resembled two medieval armies colliding on a steep hillside. Before lunch, though, it was a different kind of chaos: the entire student body hurtling downstairs, gathering reinforcements at every floor. You could get swept down the last couple flights without effort, as if your feet had been lifted off the ground. One or two kids struggled upstairs like climbers in an avalanche.