The Yearbook (9 page)

“So I'm crazy? That's really funny. Everything you do is half-crazy, Lola. Everything you say is half-crazy. You don't see it. You talk to yourself and you dress up like a freak. I heard you were in the gym the other day doing some freak dance by yourself. Maybe that's what Brent Gaynor's into—the freak factor.” Danielle smiled. “But I guess it isn't your fault. It must be in the blood.”

“Shut your stupid mouth,” Lola said, grabbing Danielle hard by the shoulders. The feel of the sharp bones just under the surface of Danielle's skin sent a wave of disgust through Lola. She let go of her and moved to the other side of the little room, as far away from Danielle as she could get. But the person she wanted to get away from was herself. How could she have been so stupid as to tell Danielle about her mother's illness and suicide? She jerked open her dresser drawers and started stuffing things into a duffle bag. “We're done,” she said quietly.

“What's that mean?” Danielle shot back.

“I'm taking the empty room down the hall,” Lola said. “You can notify Graham for me. And tell her why.”

Danielle watched and chewed her fingers. “Lola, wait.”

But Lola was furious, stung. “Watch out. Fingers have a lot of calories,” she said. It felt so good right then to be mean.

“There aren't any blankets on that bed,” Danielle whimpered.

Lola ignored her and cinched up the top of the duffle. Her hand was on the doorknob when Danielle began to sob.

“Don't leave me alone!” she screamed.

Then she was at Lola's side, clinging to her clothes, pulling her away from the door. “If you go, I don't think I can stand it.”

Lola wriggled away, but Danielle pursued her.

“I was jealous. I am jealous. I've tried so hard to get Brent Gaynor to like me, but he just doesn't yet. And then you don't even try or even care and he's totally into you. But you can date him. I swear it. You can have him. I won't stand in your way. I'll help you, even.”

Danielle was shaking now. Lola felt frightened by the outburst but still angry. She threw down the duffle. “Listen to me. Listen,” she said.

Danielle took a few convulsive breaths and stopped crying.

“Brent Gaynor doesn't give a shit about you. He never has and never will. He cares about himself and basketball. Are you listening?”

Danielle nodded and sobbed.

“You have to stop thinking about him.” She made her voice hard but was softening at the sight of Danielle's breakdown. “Think about something else.”

Danielle went limp. “I will. I promise. It's over,” she sobbed. “How could I like him now? I couldn't.”

Lola sat down on her bed and stared at a chipped floor tile. “That thing you said, about how I'm half-crazy. I wish you hadn't said that. I wish you hadn't.”

“I didn't mean it,” Danielle said softly. “You aren't crazy. You're the sanest person here. You're my best friend. Not Beth. You. I'd never do anything to hurt you.”

Lola looked at the clock. She had no time for a scene like this. She wanted to type her envelope.

She sat with Danielle a few minutes more, reciting all the worn-out slogans about friendship and forgiveness and healing she could remember. This was hard going, because Lola hated nothing so much as an inspirational motto:
Be all that you can be. Try, try again. Strangers are just friends we haven't met.
She could just about vomit hearing stuff like that, or worse, seeing it embroidered on a pillow or stuck up on a poster in somebody's office. Before long, however, she had convinced Danielle that an evening at the pottery wheel was just what the doctor ordered; it would distract her from Brent Gaynor and help her forget their fight. Finally, Danielle stopped crying.

“Someday we'll look back on this and laugh, won't we, Lola?” she said, blowing her red nose. “Someday, when I live in an A-frame house on the beach in Florida with silk flowers on the table. And a white couch, one of those pit groups. And a big TV. And we'll be so tan.”

“Yeah, we'll laugh someday,” Lola lied. “And we'll be tan.”

Finally, finally, Danielle left.

Lola watched from the window until her roommate boarded the bus, looking like a scarecrow in a sweatsuit. As soon as the bus disappeared around the corner Lola got out the typewriter and addressed and sealed her letter.

Voices in the front office woke her from a light doze sometime later. The letter was still clutched in her hand. Sound carried strangely in the old house, and Lola could often hear muffled conversations from Graham's office. But this was clear, loud, and angry. Lola opened the door and peered down the staircase. There stood the last person she expected to see, the last person she or probably anybody would have wanted to see: Mr. Terry. He was shouting at Graham in his curdled yellow voice.

“I insist on seeing her right now.”

“It's after hours. And it's against the rules.”

“You ignore my phone calls for days and now you're trying to blow me off. I came all the way over here,” Terry said. “On my own gas money.”

“I'm sure we can sort this thing out,” Graham began.

“There's nothing to sort out. She stole my money. One hundred dollars. I'm prosecuting to the full extent of the law.”

Lola had almost forgotten about the two fifty-dollar bills. The event seemed so distant, it was like somebody else had done it.

“And you've got proof of this accusation?” You could tell from the tone of her voice that Graham couldn't stand Terry either.

“You think I'd be here if I didn't have proof? You're not talking to some dumbo here. I have a master's degree.”

Proof? Lola held her breath. What proof could he have? Fingerprints? A hidden-camera video? Or was he just bluffing? Probably the latter, but she couldn't count on it. She had to get out. Immediately.

“Look, Mr. Tracy.”

“It's Terry. Gary Terry.”

“Yeah. Mr. Gary. Calm down. It's pretty late,” she heard Graham say. “Why don't we talk about this—”

“Don't tell me to calm down. Is she here? Is she upstairs?” Terry cut in, his voice getting louder, angrier.

“That's none of your business.” Good old Graham.

“I might as well inform you that I've called the police,” she heard Terry say, and as if on cue the front buzzer rang.

Lola rushed to the window. A squad car had indeed pulled up in front of the house. Terry must have some proof. She was in trouble. And she was trapped. She couldn't go out the front with Graham and Terry standing there. The back and side doors would trigger an alarm. All was lost, Lola thought, unless . . . She looked out the window again. The branches of the oak tree reached out toward the windowsill like two friendly arms. She had noticed the handy position of the tree before—the reflex of a girl who'd escaped from four foster homes. But were the branches strong enough this high up?

She could hear the voice of the policeman now and the three of them emerging from Graham's office. A set of footsteps sounded on the stairs, and then another, and another. All three of them were coming up.

Lola shouldered her knapsack and from under the bed yanked her suitcase from the Yesterday Boutique; she wouldn't leave her things behind for prying eyes. She held her breath and leaped.

Twigs attacked her on all sides. She heard the ripping of cloth and knew she'd torn her jeans. Rough bark scraped her palms. But her basketball treads expertly gripped the trunk. Even with the suitcase and knapsack the descent was easy enough, and in less than five minutes Lola was moving through the shadows of the neighborhood. Her thoughts turned to hiding places. The burned-out house by the library? That protected spot she'd once noticed under the Ashfield Trail Bridge? Then she hit on the perfect place, somewhere warm and dry and safe: the reserve room. It would do nicely, at least for the short term. She turned west, toward her destination. The fifteen blocks between the group home and Ashfield High lay deep in the hypnosis of television, video games, and computers. No one saw her.

The bank clock down the street was chiming eleven when Lola arrived at the borders of the campus. She hid behind a shaggy spruce across the street for a few minutes and looked for the night watchman. Finally, he appeared. It was that same traitorous slob who'd turned her in before. He was orbiting the grounds in a bored clockwise circle. As she watched, he sheered off to the parking lot. Soon she saw the flash of a cigarette lighter inside his car. He was smoking. Lola couldn't believe her good timing. She kept out of his line of sight as she raced onto the campus. She rounded the back of the building, passing the double gymnasium doors and the headless mermaid, and came up on the reserve room. The window was open, just as she had left it, and a low concrete wall boosted her up. The suitcase went in first, then the knapsack. She scrambled in after them over the sandstone facade.

Inside, it was velvety dark. Lola navigated by touch to the squeaky folding chair. She felt drained but triumphant. Nobody would ever find her here. Nobody came in the reserve room, not even Dubois, who was in charge of it. She wasn't sure Dubois could get in even if she wanted to. Lola still had the door key in her pocket. She placed her knapsack on the table for a pillow. Soon she was asleep.

She woke up. How close was it to dawn? For a while she sat in the dark and replayed the escape, felt the thrill of it again, and reveled in visions of Mr. Terry's face when she was discovered missing. She wondered if his eyes had bulged out when his sweet moment of revenge was denied him, and whether he had screamed in agony, or perhaps even suffered a mild stroke. But soon her mind turned back to the situation at hand, and she began to question the security of her hiding place. Would this be the day that the custodians decided to remove the damaged shelves? Hadn't Dubois mentioned they were slated for a trip to the dump? In any case, the custodians probably did show up early. Maybe some of the staff did, too, and those cheerleaders, to tape balloons to each other, or whatever it was they were always doing.

She ought to clear out, just to be on the safe side. Maybe she could return again the next night, but for now it was best to go.

She braced a foot on the bookshelf and hefted herself up to the window. The suitcase went out first, landing with a light scrape on the ground, followed by the knapsack. Lola hit the ground running. She scooped up the suitcase and raced into the windy fall night. She didn't bother to look for the guard. He could never have caught up with her or identified her in such darkness.

Soon she was free of the campus. She thought of Hershey. What would she say when she found out? The social worker's voice seemed to speak to her in the whine of the wind:
It's nearly too late, Lola. You'll be an adult sooner than you think. You have to pass these classes. What will you do without a high school diploma? What will you do?

She stumbled and fell. Her hands landed in sharp gravel. She got up and looked around. Was she still facing the right way? It was too dark, the darkest dark she could remember. She doubled back, but after a few minutes the silhouette of Ashfield High reappeared. No direction seemed right.

She was tempted to sit down and wait for daylight, but then she remembered the guard. He might spot her, report her again—the dumbass—filling in his form with her name and the details of her odd behavior. She wondered if he would choose the same old tired adjectives:
disoriented
, for example, or
incoherent
.
Hostile
was a sure bet.

Again she tripped on something—a rock?—but this time was propelled into a tree. The impact knocked the wind out of her, but she was happy to find the tree. It was like an old friend, solid and reliable, or a buoy after a shipwreck. She clung to it. For an instant she saw the picture she must have made, a girl with an old suitcase, hugging a tree, in the dead of night. It looked crazy, unless you knew the context.

She couldn't just stand there and wait to be caught. She tried to think of other places she'd hidden before, in the dressing rooms of a public pool, or that slimy ditch. In one of her most desperate moments she had hid up at Eagle Rock Park. Eagle Rock was known for three things: drug dealers, illegal garbage dumping, and an infestation of large black rats. Even the craziest kids from the group home thought twice before going up there. Last winter, two people had been killed in a drive-by shooting in the middle of the parking lot in broad daylight.

A distant rumbling made her stop thinking and listen. The noise came from somewhere beyond the school, and it was getting louder. She crouched against the tree. It was a motor. A car was coming. A pair of headlights swept around the corner.

Lola watched the car pass, and never before had she seen such a contraption. It was rectangular and long, with dark blue paint, red spokes spinning on narrow tires, and headlights jutting out like a pair of old-fashioned spectacles. As the twin beams swept over the roadside, Lola confirmed that she was on Quarrier Street but saw that the long rows of townhouses were gone, replaced by an open field. She watched the car putter away into the dark.

Her head swam. She wanted to laugh, to scream, with joy. She steadied herself on the tree. She was back.

Graham and Hershey were no longer of any consequence to her. They were somewhere in the next millennium, along with the night watchman and Mr. Terry and her failing grades and everyone and everything else that had ever, ever bothered her in her entire life. It was all erased, everything, down to her own history. For at least ten minutes she stood, bathed in a kind of staggering euphoria, until finally the brisk air brought her back to the business at hand. The first thing to do was change clothes. She ducked behind the tree again and with trembling hands opened the old suitcase. Soon she was dressed head to toe in Yesterday Boutique merchandise, her regular clothes packed away.