Undercover (5 page)

W
HEN A DAY STARTS like that one had, all you can hope for is that it’ll come speedily to an end. That one didn’t. It dragged on through math, it dragged on through science, it dragged on through Spanish, where I could not conjugate one single verb. In the cafeteria they were serving macaroni and cheese. I forced it down with two cartons of milk. I didn’t go anywhere near Theo and Lila, not even close. Stayed away from Jilly. Watched Sue and Mr. Sue, who had both brought sandwiches from home. They were trading halves, as lovers do, splitting the Cheez Doodles.

But it was hard not to get a burn off of Margie’s glad glare, which attached itself to my every swallow. Hard not to remember another humiliation, two summers ago, when Margie and I went like always, just the two of us, to see the Fourth of July fireworks show, in the football field behind the high school, where there were already so many people and blankets, sparklers and little miniature flags, and those light-up tubes in neon colors that people wear around their necks at night. The town shoots the fireworks off the tennis courts each year. They keep two fire trucks standing by. When the fireworks go off, you try to give each one a name—that’s a tadpole; that’s a rocket; that’s a dandelion loose in the wind. No one sits through fireworks alone. It just isn’t done, where I’m from.

Except that night when I was smoothing Margie’s purple blanket across the thirty-yard line in the field, and Margie went off to the concession stand to get us Cokes and never did come back. She was gone a long time before I understood, gone
even longer before I believed it. The sun was falling down, and then it was gone, and then people started fizzing up their sparklers, and then someone starting singing the national anthem over the P.A., and still Margie wasn’t back; I was alone. And then the first rocket wheeled high and split the sky in two, and then it banged big and there were all those bits of fire floating. Then that one rocket was followed by all the others, by the screaming, streaming bangs of light, until the sky was burn and color and the air smelled like pop guns, and it was almost like being at war all of a sudden because Margie had gone off to get us Cokes and she wasn’t coming back, she’d found another crowd to hang with, kids so much cooler than me. She’d found her chance and taken it that night. I wouldn’t answer the phone when she called after that. I wouldn’t listen to her apology. I still have her purple blanket, balled up in the corner of my closet.

By the time fifth period rolled around, I’d gone forty days and forty nights in misery. All I wanted
was to be alone and especially—especially—I did not want to be in class with Theo. It’s one thing to be invisible, and it’s another to be dismissed. Theo was crazy if he thought he was ever getting another Lila poem off me. I walked the long way to my chair, through the blaring of the bell, and I slumped down to painfully unload my things.

“This is Honors English,” Dr. Charmin was saying. “I expect you to read like adults. Think like adults. Thinking adults read ‘Sonny’s Blues’ slow. They listen for the sound of the words, not just their meaning.

“The opening lines, please, Margie,” Dr. Charmin continued, and Margie, in her squeaky-trombone voice, began reading James Baldwin’s words: “‘I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. I stared at it in the swinging lights of
the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.’”

“What is the author doing here?” Dr. Charmin prodded. “What is he doing? Margie?” I looked at Margie with her reddish hair and freckles and thought about how once these things had bonded us like sisters. Something can go to nothing in no time flat.

Margie was snapping a huge wad of gum and taking her time with the question. “Saying the same thing over and over?” she finally offered.

“Talking about a character reading the paper on a subway?” Jonah perked up. And he was being serious.

“Staring like this?” Sarah Waxner said, doing a cross-eyed stare until half the room cracked up. As if any of this were funny. Suddenly I was feeling sorry for Dr. Charmin, who was trying her best.

“Turning the sentences into a song.” There was no other choice. Again. So I said it.

“Okay,” Dr. Charmin said, tipping a smile at me, glaring at Margie and Jonah and Sarah and all the others who had not raised their hands. “That’s a start. At least one of you is listening. Now concentrate, please, on the passage I’ll now read. Close your eyes and listen. This is coming much later in the story, just a few paragraphs from the end. We already know about the troubles Sonny’s had. We already know how he’s suffered, and yet—the tragedy he writes of is inseparable from its beauty.

“‘All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.’”

Something caught in Dr. Charmin’s throat, and she stopped. She looked up, and in the corner of one eye there was the wet smudge of a tear.
“Making and roaring,” she said. “Making and roaring. What’s my point, Elisa?”

“That it’s art.”

“What is, Elisa?”

“The making and the roaring.”

“Yes,” Dr. Charmin said. “Yes. Something like that. Thank you. Making and roaring is the primal act. It’s the world we create out of the world we are given. It’s the first word of a story, and the last.” It was almost embarrassing, the way she talked—this pale, fragile woman, ripe as fruit.

“So what’s the assignment again?” Margie piped back up, with her impatient-trombone voice.

“A poem.” Dr. Charmin sighed. “The assignment is a poem.” She turned her back to the class and wiped some chalk off the board. When she turned again, she was her tougher teacher self. She was far away from us in her mind, I could tell, just going through the motions.

“About what?” Mike Simpson asked. Mike was a heavy kid who chewed to the lead of his pencil.

“A poem about anything that moves you. Anything that roars.”

“How long does it have to be?” Theo asked, and I nearly killed him with my eyes. I burned a hole into the back of his ridiculous head. I cut his furry monkey loose and made it dance.

“The right length,” Dr. Charmin answered.

“Well, how long is that?” Sarah asked, turning back toward the class again and rolling her actress-big eyes.

“Long enough to tell a story. Short enough to persuade me it’s true.”

“Very helpful,” someone sniggered. And almost everyone in Honors English groaned, then started collecting all their goods. I myself didn’t move an inch. I was waiting for Theo to scat.

A
FTER SCHOOL I was three of my eight blocks from home when I heard Theo calling my name. “Hey,” he said, “wait up.” A couple of times, he called me; but I wouldn’t turn. Theo lives in the other direction from me, where they’re turning cornfields into houses. All you would find if you were digging where he lives is seeds, or maybe an old Indian arrowhead, which makes my part of town, and also everything about me, vastly superior and never ever once again a thing to be dismissed.

I didn’t stop walking, but he was running. There was the smell of snow in the air.

“Could you just wait up?” he called. “Elisa?”

You know how in movies the girl is always running from the guy, and the guy catches up, and then it’s romance? Well, that was not what this was about. “What’re you doing here?” I called behind me. “Your house is that way.” I pointed.

“Come on, Elisa,” Theo said, and from the corner of one eye I saw him slipping on slicked snow, catching his balance, and still running. His face had turned a chap-burned red. His jacket was unzippered, his monkey dancing.

“What do you want, Theo?” I was walking faster and faster, and I still had speed in me. Every time I breathed in, I burned my lungs with the winter air. Every time I breathed out, I made a cloud. The faster I walked, the faster he ran. He kept on shortening the distance.

“I don’t want anything, Elisa. Just hold up.”

“Wouldn’t be you if you didn’t want something,” I said.

“Give me a break, Elisa. Give me a minute.”

He was a half a step behind me now. He reached his hand up to my right shoulder and pinned it there. “Aren’t you afraid someone will see us, Theo?” I asked. “Mistake us for friends or something?”

“Shut up, Elisa.”

“‘You don’t actually like her, do you, Theo?’” I did my best imitation of dumb-as-a-doorknob Lila. “‘
Like
her?’” Now I was imitating Theo. “‘How disgusting,’” I exaggerated. “‘How thoroughly, totally fur ball. No, I don’t like her. No, I couldn’t like
her
. She is smaller than a squiggly thing in a microscope to me.’”

“I wanted to explain about that.”

“That’s nice, Theo. Really. Is there something to explain?” Theo had turned me around so that we were facing each other. He’d put his second hand on my second shoulder. I stared straight past him.

“That I do like you, Elisa. You’re my friend. I made a mistake back there.”

“I’m your
Cyrano
, Theo. Not your friend.”

“Maybe it started out like that. Maybe—”

“Give it up, Theo. What do you want? More stuff for Lila? Help with Dr. Charmin’s poem? A new thesaurus for your birthday?”

“Why are you being such an idiot, Elisa?”

“Me?” I said. “That’s a good one.” I wrested my shoulders free of his grip. I turned and started running, and after a while, after a block or two, I stopped and looked back, but Theo had disappeared.

One moment changes everything. One moment, and everything you almost had is instantly, mournfully gone.

I
COULD NEVER TELL YOU all the names of every TV skater I ever envied, but I can tell you about this one I won’t forget. She was gorgeous and dark and a little strong, and it didn’t matter whether she was gliding or leaping or spinning or bending, it was the music that carried her from the rink’s one side to the other, the music that made her beautiful. Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song. That’s how it must have been for her. That’s how she made it seem.

In the woods that night the old snow had turned to slush and the muck of animal tracks, and there were sapphire shadows between the trees. The sound was my boots in the snow, maybe the hoot of a winter owl. The sound was the thin trickle beneath the stream that had mostly frozen over. I was running fast as a fox, running and running and not for one second caring if I fell, or if I tripped, or if my hair was wicked wild, and sometimes there was the snap of twigs from way up high, or right beneath my feet, but all I cared about was the frozen pond and the pair of stolen skates I’d left in that old abandoned shack. All I wanted was to glide from the pond’s one end to its other, over the head of the immovable marble girl, with one foot down and the other one stretched out and high behind me, my arms like wings. I would bend my knees and I would jump right up to the big and starry, inexhaustible sky. I’m not talking fancy stuff—no way. Not axels, not pick jumps, not fancy spins. I’m just talking about what a girl might do
by her lonesome, on a pond, in the dark.

Here are some of the names, for the record, of the moves I’ve so far mastered: crossovers (which is just a way of rounding bends), Mohawk (which is a way of turning backward), spread eagle (which is pointing your one foot east and your other west and leaning back into a curve), spiral (which is holding one leg high behind you), waltz jump (which is the littlest nothing hop of a jump, but still a version of fantastic when you’re me), lunge (which is dragging one foot behind on the ice), the basic posture of an Ina Bauer (which is easier, I am finding, than a spread eagle), and your very basic blurring spin. Here is how I skate: with music spilling directly through my bones. When I’m on the ice, I’m where the story begins. I take an Ina Bauer on the diagonal and arch back so that I’m dialoguing with the moon. I bend my knees at the launching of the waltz jump and hold that leaping-forward part until gravity hauls me down. I ride the middle of my blade when I ride a spiral, and when I spin, I pull the whole world in tight, until I’m all wrapped up in love. I don’t
care how I look, you see. I just care how I feel.

It is a fabulous thing, skating at night. I can think of a song, and the song will turn itself on, and it is the only thing that matters for a while. I can lift up my arms and my soul drifts. I can bend and my knees will be percussion. I can twizzle and my hips will be a mash of the divine. Maybe I’m beautiful when I’m skating at night. Maybe I’m the queen of the stars.

That night I rode a Bauer down the center of the pond. I put a spiral on an edge, then lunged. I did a waltz jump and another waltz jump, until I had gravity in my pocket. I skated for what felt like hours, then sat for a while on the dock. Out in the woods I could hear the crunching of sticks beneath the feet of squirrels, the hooting of an owl, the wind. If there were deer between the trees, they hid in the shadows. If there were raccoons, they were one hundred percent stealth. I didn’t know where the ravens had gone. I imagined them clumped up in trees.

The moon and the stars and the distance went by. I thought about Dad in the hills of San
Francisco, about Mom in the house, about Dr. Charmin alone in her house with a hundred million smelly books, about Margie and her new friends, about the girl in the pond and the mystery I still had not decoded. I thought about Theo and about Lila, about invisibility and dismissal, about running away and maybe, although I didn’t know it myself, hoping to be caught. And then the tears came back and I couldn’t think anymore. Making and roaring, Dr. Charmin had said. Write about something that’s true. Skating is true. Skating and the music in the hollow of my bones.

In the woods the crackle of breaking twigs and crunched-over snow was becoming a more noticeable sound. A whole gang of squirrels, it seemed to me, maybe a deer, maybe a sleepwalking, smudge-faced raccoon, but when I looked out toward the woods, the only thing that I could see was lots of trees and shadows. Nothing, and yet how should I explain the sound that was coming toward me, moving forward? Then, finally, I saw it.

It was like two incredibly tiny stars fallen straight
down from the sky. Just the smallest fractures, little reflections of light that twinkled on and off, like Christmas lights. They were lights, but they weren’t lights. They were stars, but they couldn’t have been, and suddenly I understood that what was coming closer and closer was a pair of eyes. The eyes of a dog fox headed for the pond, but where was the vixen? I scanned the woods. I held my breath. I waited.

Have you ever had a fox call out your name in the middle of the woods at night? Have you ever been talked to by an animal? Because that night this is what happened to me: a fox called out my name. “Elisa,” it called in a voice that seemed familiar. “Hey, Elisa.”

I sat there on the edge of the dock, paralyzed.

I sat there, and the dog fox kept walking.

“Theo?” I said after a minute. “Theo?”

“Hey,” he said. “Lord, it’s cold.” And kept on walking in my direction, like it was no big deal, like he had not just somehow undergone a fox-to-person metamorphosis, like I hadn’t run from him for hours, like I hadn’t been dismissed. He had black gloves on
and a black cap. He was acting as if he belonged.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. He had rounded the pond by now and was coming up the dock, and I was facing him, still sitting down with my mother’s skates on, my mouth gaping open, my hair gone wild.

“Does a guy need an invitation?” Theo said after he’d finally made it to where I was sitting. He plunked down. He rubbed his gloves together and blew some air at them. He pulled his cap lower on his head. I knotted my arms across my chest. “I followed you here,” he said. “I’ve been watching a long time. Cold out here.”

I stared straight across the pond. I slithered over to the left so that our shoulders wouldn’t be touching. I’d thought he was stars and then I’d thought he was a fox. I had thought I’d been alone, but I hadn’t.

“I had to come because you wouldn’t listen.”

“Wouldn’t listen?”

“This afternoon, Elisa. Remember?”

“Lila know you’re here?” I asked after a minute.

“I don’t tell her everything.”

“Well that’s a real tall glass of comfort,” I said.

“Do you have to be so hard, Elisa?”

“Hard like the ice, Theo, or hard like complicated?”

“You’d qualify for both,” he said, and maybe it was the way he said it, or maybe it was that he’d come, or maybe I was sick of being stuck so hard with my own hard self, but all of the sudden I wasn’t angry anymore. I turned my head and took a good look at Theo in the moonlight, at the silver circle in his ear, at the black cap that made him seem just that much older. How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment? Hold the moment is what the skating pros on TV say. Keep yourself over your blades. I couldn’t remember being this close to a boy ever before.

“You’ve been watching me skate all this time?” I started the conversation again, after a while.

“Sort of. Yeah.”

“My mother’s skates,” I said, dangling my feet
out in front of me. “I stole them.”

He didn’t say anything at first, and then he laughed. “You’re one of a kind, Elisa Cantor.”

“The one and only,” I said, and then there was nothing more to say, so we sat together staring out at the woods, at the blue between the trees.

“So what do you want?” I finally broke the silence. “For real?”

“I want you to believe me.”

“Believe what?”

“That I’m sorry for this morning. Shouldn’t have happened. Bolten’s a schmuck. And Lila—she just gets jealous.”

“That’s a good one, Theo. Lila jealous of me.” I laughed when I said it, snorted the words straight through my nose.

“You have something they don’t have,” he said, after saying nothing at first.

“Like really bad hair?” I heard myself say, and again I started to laugh, and this time Theo started laughing too, so I raised both hands and pushed
him. “I’m the only one who can laugh at that,” I warned him, and I jumped down off the dock and started off across the pond, over frozen-in twigs, fish eyes, wings. I skated all the way to the opposite end, and Theo kept getting smaller, until finally he was on his feet as well—running across the pond in his big black boots, tripping like a fool, falling down, sliding. He looked like some comic-strip monster trying to dance on tiny toes. He looked nothing like a fox with his fair skin. I could have skated circles around him, and soon that’s how it was—me cutting in front of him and throwing a hop of a waltz jump, me taking off and jumping whenever he got close. Finally he just sat down in the middle of the pond, all curled over, breathless.

“You need a pair of skates, Theo,” I told him, and he said, “I suppose I do.”

And I said: “You better not tell a soul.”

“About what?”

“About my pond.”