The Yearbook (4 page)

She skidded up to the group home and locked her bike to the rack. Coming in so late was a serious crime, but that was a problem she'd face some other time. She swiped her keycard in the lock. It would record the time of her arrival: 3:51
A.M
. Would Graham bother to look at the log? You never knew with her. Dottie Graham ran the Wrigley house with about as much animation as an iguana, but every once in a while she'd come to life and make a drug bust or enforce a rule. Lola crept up the stairs, encountering no one, and entered her room as quietly as she could. Danielle, her roommate, was asleep. Lola sat down on her bed, unzipped her knapsack, and brought out the yearbook. She couldn't wait until morning to look at it again. She found her miniature book light on the bedside table and switched it on.

Again she looked at the senior class, lingering longest on Peter's serious face. She closed her eyes and remembered the strange, warm shock that had passed between them. She paged forward and found a section dedicated to various school events: a homecoming game, a debate club tournament, a class picnic. Near the bottom of one of the pages she noticed the caption, “Fall Frolic, 1923.” She moved the light closer. It was a big dance in the gym, with an orchestra. The musicians were the most prominent figures in the photo, and she began to examine them. The drummer with the long moustache was unmistakably the same one she'd seen at the dance. And the singer who'd gone humming into the dark, she recognized him, too. What if . . . ?

The dance floor was a blurred mass of heads and legs; she could identify no one. Then she saw it: a dark object on a chair. Could it be her cap? Yes, she thought, it had to be.

A thin, drowsy voice came from the other bed: “Lola?”

Lola jumped and found herself juggling the book light. The beam swept crazily around the room. “Danielle. You're awake.”

“You yelled,” Danielle said.

“No. You were dreaming.” The upturned beam of the book light shone full on Lola's lap.

“What's that?”

“An old book I found in the trash.”

“Lemme see it.”

Lola slid the yearbook back into her bag. She didn't like the idea of anybody else touching it.

“You can't read it in bed like that.”

“Why not?”

“It's delicate. It'll fall apart.” Lola zipped up the knapsack and hung it on its usual hook between the beds.

“You weren't in the dining hall,” Danielle said. She was more awake now.

“Yeah. I fell asleep in the library. Nobody woke me up, so I was there a long time.”

Danielle glanced at the clock. “Oh my God, it's almost four in the morning.” She seemed to be scrutinizing Lola now. “Where have you really been? With a guy? It's a guy, isn't it? Tell me.”

“I did tell you,” Lola said. She wanted the conversation to end so she could think. She changed into an oversized T-shirt, got in bed, and turned off the book light.

“You're hiding something from me,” Danielle said. Lola heard her roll over. Seconds later she was snoring softly.

But Lola was spinning, confused, sparkling, afraid. She felt she would not sleep that night, might never sleep again. Theories were forming, dissolving, reforming faster than she could process them. Her cap was in that picture. That meant she must be in that swirling crowd, she and Peter. It was impossible, ridiculous, but it had happened. She closed her eyes and seemed to hear the music again, bouncy, carefree.

Every morning, every evening, ain't we got fun?

For a long time she listened to it and seemed to feel his hands again, holding her feet under the water. The fireworks came again, this time somewhere deep in her chest. Just before dawn she fell asleep.

The next day was Saturday, the day of Lola's morning shift at Golden Recipe Fried Chicken. She stayed in bed. Work seemed irrelevant now. Everything seemed irrelevant, repulsive, even. She'd defied the laws of the universe and now she was supposed to go fry chicken in a strip mall?

Danielle was so curious about Lola's funk that she trembled like a Chihuahua around her bed, yapping out questions. “Where were you last night? Where were you
really
? Is that why you're in such a bad mood? You have to go to work. Terry'll fire you for sure. He was thinking about it, you know, after you chucked that biscuit at the wall. Don't you give a shit? You're not pregnant, are you?” At last Danielle gave up and went down to breakfast, then left to meet her cousin Beth, who lived in town.

As soon as Danielle's bus vanished around the corner, Lola brought the knapsack down from its hook and took out the yearbook. She wanted to immerse herself in it the way she'd done in the night, wallow in it, drown in it, but she couldn't even open the cover. The mere feel of the thing in her hands brought on a scorching grief. She put it away.

All morning she lay in bed, staring at the grid pattern on the ceiling with its brown water stain in one corner that looked like a rat. The secret seemed to be growing like a parasite inside her, getting heavier and bigger. She could almost feel it pushing at her skin, pricking and prodding and itching. The feeling had been so strong that morning that she'd nearly dropped a hint to Danielle. But she'd held back. Danielle was the wrong person to tell. She couldn't keep her mouth shut. What Lola needed was someone discreet and open-minded. A nuclear physicist. That was it. Maybe she could phone a radio call-in program and speak anonymously with an expert. They could go over the facts point by point. She sat up sharply and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Maybe she could find a program on Public Radio, and then . . . who was she kidding? They would only think she was nuts, or that it was a prank call. She dropped back down on the bed and curled up in a ball. For several hours she lay still, and refused to come down for lunch.

Danielle and Beth showed up in the afternoon, and Danielle chattered, silly and flushed, about Brent Gaynor, her longtime unrequited love, for what seemed like twenty-four hours. Beth, a big girl with hairy forearms and lots of pimples, hung on every word as Danielle described Brent Gaynor's walk, his “cute” gestures, his new jeans, his “sublime” butt, his latest haircut, then his butt again. Danielle sketched a diagram in two colors of ink showing the happy points where their class schedules intersected, and the sad points where they did not. For at least twenty minutes, the girls tried to decrypt the meaning behind Brent Gaynor's “How's it going, Danielle?” greeting of last Friday, which had replaced his customary “Hey.”

Several times Lola thought she might literally have to vomit. At last the cousins went to Taco Bell and left her in peace.

Graham barged in that evening to see what was going on. Lola said she'd caught a virus, and tried to sound congested. Graham accepted the story and promptly excused herself;
Makeup Disasters
was about to come on. Secretly, Lola had decided never to get out of bed again. She could not imagine any point to anything. Had she glimpsed that other life, tasted it, tried it on, only to be shut out of it forever? At night she could not sleep and spent the long hours while Danielle snored teasing apart every nuance of that Friday night in 1923.

The days went by. She found it agreeably numbing to hold still, like the Earth's axis, and let everyone else spin around her. Morning buses picked people up at the bus stop below her window, and afternoon buses dropped the same people off again. Danielle got dressed and undressed and dressed again. The sun made its daily transit around the ceiling.

And then, on Wednesday, Hershey showed up.

“I know you aren't asleep,” the social worker said, standing at the foot of Lola's bed. “It's not a bad performance, but I've seen better.”

Lola heard the springs of Danielle's bed creak and realized Hershey was parking herself for a while. This didn't bode well.

“Want to talk about it?” Hershey said.

Lola rolled over to face the wall. “About what?”

“The reason you haven't been in school for three days. You look like a zombie, by the way.”

Lola knew from ample experience that no good lie could be told without eye contact. She rolled back over and opened her eyes. Hershey was sitting there chewing an extra-strength Rolaids. As usual her glasses were smudged and her sweater was buttoned wrong; Hershey was kind of a mess.

Sound sane
, Lola told herself.
Sound normal
.

“I thought I was getting an ulcer,” Lola stated. “I kept getting these stomach aches every time I ate something, see. That's why I decided to stay in bed.” She tried for that congested voice again, but it didn't sound as good as when she'd used it on Graham. Any voice would be okay, she thought, as long as it wasn't a crazy-sounding one. She would not risk sounding crazy. Not ever. It was what everybody expected of her, what they were all watching for, and she wouldn't give it to them.

“An ulcer,” Hershey said. “Uh-huh.” She got up and wandered around the room, looking at Lola's hairbrush and her Kleenex box and the other personal items on her bureau. Finally, she sat down at the foot of Lola's bed. “Maybe you'd like to talk to someone.”

Lola sat up
.
“I'm not crazy, goddammnit!” she screamed. She had vowed not to scream and now she had. She hated herself.

“Calm down. No one said you were crazy.”

“I won't go to Hillside. I won't set foot in there.”

“Not even to talk? An informal chat? Just to get things off your chest? Hillside does have some very qualified people.”

Lola wrestled her way out of the tangled sheets. “I was about to do my laundry. The migraine's mostly gone and—”

“Migraine?”

“Ulcer. The ulcer brought on a migraine. I've got school tomorrow, so if you don't mind—”

“You wanna know what I think?” Hershey interrupted, recrossing her legs.

Lola braced herself for some “tough love” or perhaps an inspirational slogan:
Turn your wounds into wisdom. Life is what you make it. Never quit.

“I don't think you've got an ulcer, or a migraine. I think maybe your pain's somewhere else. Like in here.” Hershey indicated the ruffle on the front of her polka-dot polyester blouse. “It's been hard to adjust to the group-home setting. It doesn't feel like a home. Maybe nowhere feels like home. But think of it this way—someday you'll make a home. It's something you can look forward to.

“People like me don't have homes,” Lola said. She'd managed to keep her voice down this time, but inside she was screaming:
I think I know where my home should be! I saw it, but I can't get there! I can't get home!
Because the long days and nights since the dance had led Lola to a devastating conviction: She did not belong in this time. Her place was in another century, and the powers of the universe had conspired to reveal this mistake to her. In that other place, she'd fit in. She'd felt new and clean, her true self.

Hershey talked on and on, perched at the foot of the bed, but Lola didn't hear anything. She didn't need to hear anything. She was trapped in a “now” that had nothing to do with her, where she would always be something grotesque, a joke of a person. Her thinking always circled around to the same question: What could she do with this knowledge, other than be tortured by it?

It seemed like about four hours before Hershey finally stood up, and another two before she shut up and disappeared out the door. But Lola knew she'd be back, and soon. Like it or not, her time in bed was over.

She scraped some random clothes off the floor, got dressed, and dragged herself down to the dining hall. She tried to look ordinary as she picked at her square of lasagna, but the grief was worse than ever. It sat like an anvil across her shoulders, pressing her toward the floor. She was a ratty-haired phantasm in a stained sweatshirt, and everybody stared at her, even Jared Fantino, the guy who'd sneaked a stick of dynamite into the bowling alley and generally had no interest in anything whatsoever.

She moved through the next day in a fog. At school, she accepted the make-up assignments with a nod, all the time certain that she was too far behind even to attempt them. Hershey's voice was a low buzz in her ear:
What will you do when you turn eighteen? It's less than two years from now. You'll be an adult then. What will you do? What will you do? What will you do?

Lunch seemed nauseating and pointless—why eat?—so she went to the gym and sat on the bleachers. She closed her eyes. With a little concentration she could bring forth the silly, happy music that had played in that very room.

Every morning, every evening

Ain't we got fun?

Not much money, oh, but honey

Ain't we got fun?

She descended the bleachers and stepped to the center of the gym. Her feet began to move
. One-two-three-and-four
. The Lindy Hop. She remembered it perfectly. Her arms reached out for her invisible partner.
Five. Rotate. Seven-and-eight.
The orchestra came closer, clearer, until it seemed to be assembled just on the other side of a flimsy partition. Soon she could pick out the individual instruments: a clarinet, a trumpet, a pair of saxophones that wove in and out like ribbon candy. And then from somewhere entered giggling that didn't belong.

Lola stopped dancing.

A group of freshman girls in basketball uniforms had come in from the locker rooms. How long had they been watching her? The music warped and faded as Lola fled the gym. Her throat constricted. The tears came and wouldn't stop. She ran all the way to the parking lot, to her bike. She would miss algebra and a history test, but she couldn't worry about that now. She'd worry another time.

Safely back in her room with the door shut, she pulled out the yearbook. It still hurt to look at it, but the hurt was good now, like seeing a picture of home when you're far away. The mermaid appeared on page 1. The fall dance was pictured on pages 28 and 29. Peter Hemmings appeared on pages 6, 11, 17, 24, and 26. His page numbers were like the combination to a treasure vault.