What Janie Saw

Senior year.

Janie loved those two words. Since the milk carton, her life had been chaos. Yet here she was, safe inside senior year, the two final semesters every teenager daydreamed about. All bad things were behind her.

Yet as September moved into October, she felt that the other kids were growing more aware of her. She was being watched.

Janie was easy to spot: a mass of tangled red curls took up more than their fair share of hair space. But it wasn’t her hair they turned to look at. It was her kidnap self.

For a few weeks, Janie had been able to convince herself that everybody in this school was used to her.

But they weren’t.

It was bad enough to be stared at by kids she barely knew, but even her friends were watching her intensely, as if they were about to paint her portrait and needed detail.

Talk about paranoia
, thought Janie Johnson.
Your usual abnormal person thinks her enemies are after her. I think my
friends
are after me
.

She made herself smile when people eyed her. She did not duck behind tall classmates or hunch down in a sea of shoulders.

She considered the possibility that she was going crazy. Crazy people thought everybody was looking exclusively at them. Sane people knew that everybody was way too busy.

Fifth period one October day, seniors were to attend a presentation about college applications. Only a year ago, Janie Johnson would have said that dorm
life on some distant campus was not a possibility. She needed home and home needed her.

Now the word “college” was exhilarating and the word “home” wore her out.

Several hundred kids converged in the main hall. Janie moved slowly among them, trying to find Sarah-Charlotte, with whom she always sat.

Near the central auditorium doors stood the principal with a very well-dressed woman, presumably a guest speaker. The principal turned aside to deal with some wild behavior. Two girls whom Janie knew slightly murmured to the guest and nodded in Janie’s direction.

“Really?” said the guest. She stared openly at Janie.

It’s back again. I’m not ordinary after all. Senior year isn’t safe. There was some TV event I missed. Some ugly news I haven’t heard
.

Janie wanted to run screaming out of the building, but she refused to let them see how shaken she was. She drifted past without making eye contact, walked down the corridor, threaded through the crowd and out a side door.

It was chilly. The sky was blue and cloudless. The wind was clean and sharp. She stood for a minute, hidden by jutting brick walls and shrubbery. She was panting slightly, the way she did when the world fell apart.

I’ll walk around the building
, she told herself.
Exercise will calm me down. I’ll slip into the auditorium from the other side
.

Instead her feet took her over the grass toward the student parking lot. Wind tossed fallen leaves in swirly bright circles over the dark pavement. Janie never saw autumn leaves without thinking of Reeve, her half boyfriend, who had kissed her for the first time when they collapsed on a heap of fallen leaves
they’d been raking.

Her car was facing the sun. When she opened the door, heat rushed out to meet her. She sank into the driver’s seat. Okay, she was going to be late for the assembly. So what? For Janie there was an upside to the creepy celebrity that surrounded being a kidnapping victim: she could get away with anything. She would give herself a ten-minute vacation from staring eyes.

Janie put the key in the ignition. She did not start the engine but powered up the radio. The joy of radio had been damaged when Reeve had betrayed her on the air, but time had eased the pain. She could listen without cringing. Radio had returned to itself: a wash of music that filled her mind.

She leaned back and checked messages on her cell phone.

Sarah-Charlotte had texted, of course.
Where r u?
she wanted to know.
I’m on the right aisle, halfway down
, she added, because Sarah-Charlotte always saved a seat for her best friend.

Reeve too had texted. He attended college in Boston, and communicated with Janie so often she felt as if she entered all his classrooms at his side, as if she too decided against doing laundry and gave most of her attention to the next meal.
Miss you
, he had written.
Coming home for the weekend
.

Reeve was perfect. At least, he had been perfect, until he revealed a large imperfection. He’d gotten a talk show slot at his college radio station and used Janie’s personal life as a soap opera story to narrate night after night to the city of Boston. When Janie found out, she didn’t kill him, mainly because there was no opportunity. Reeve had spent a year trying to make up for his actions, and she usually told him he was halfway there.

“I don’t want to be half a boyfriend,” he would tell her, his brown spaniel eyes pleading.

She would smile halfway. “Selling me out reduced us to half, Reeve, and here we stand. Half of what we were.”

Sarah-Charlotte said Janie needed to get over it. “Reeve adores you. He’s said he’s sorry a hundred times. He can’t sell you out on the air again even if he wants to, because the college can’t afford the station anymore and it folded. But the key point is, where will you ever find a boy as good as Reeve again?”

It was a problem. Boys as good as Reeve were rare.

On the other hand, boys as rotten as Reeve were rare. So for her senior year, Janie was traveling with a crowd. She had not attached herself to any boy in particular, and when asked about Reeve, she would say, “We’re still half interested in each other. We’ll probably spend half our vacations together being half in love.”

Nobody knew what that meant, and neither did Janie, but it hid the fact that her heart remained broken. Reeve had been with her every step of the milk carton nightmare. He had held her, comforted her, driven her anywhere she asked in his Jeep. And yet knowing her agony had not prevented him from capitalizing on it.

On the car radio, another song began.

Janie hadn’t been listening to the DJ’s announcements, but the band was recognizable from its intro.

Visionary Assassins were a classic case of a garage band going from two listeners to twenty million overnight. They were a particular hit with younger
kids. Parents and talk show hosts expressed concern over whether Visionary Assassins were appropriate for innocent children.

Their opening measures were always a throbbing, headachy collection of percussion. Deep, angry beats like oncoming trucks.

And then Visionary Assassins’ intro was over. The melody and the words began.

Janie’s chest became a hideous messy whirl, as if her heart and lungs had been thrown into a blender.

No
, she thought.

No!

Two thousand miles away, the woman formerly known as Hannah entered a motel room. She had cleaned five of the sixteen rooms assigned to her. This one stank of grease and sausage. The occupants had left pizza boxes and crusts all over the place. As for the bathroom, it was disgusting. How could anybody create this much mess in one night? Of course no tip lay on a counter to make up for it.

Hot, buzzing rage seized the woman. Scrubbing bathrooms was not her destiny! It was that girl’s fault. That girl had butted in and destroyed everything, and no matter how many years passed, nothing got better.

The woman yanked on a new pair of disposable gloves. Everybody else in housekeeping wore gloves to protect their hands from rough cleaning fluids
and filth. Hannah wore them so she wouldn’t leave fingerprints.

She turned on the radio for company and considered finishing off the cold pizza remains, ignoring the tooth marks of strangers. But she couldn’t risk the supervisor seeing her forage like a dog.

They had already had difficulties at the morning meeting. She used a different name wherever she went and had forgotten the name she was using at this job. “Evelyn,” the head housekeeper kept saying. Evelyn didn’t answer. Finally the housekeeper shoved herself in Hannah’s face. “Evelyn!”

I’m Evelyn
, she remembered. “Not enough sleep,” she excused herself.

“You awake enough to do your job?” demanded the supervisor.

“Of course I am,” she snapped back. But now every room she cleaned would be checked. She could not lose this job. Jobs were hard to find, especially when you had to use a fake identity. Which was
her
fault! That girl’s fault!

The woman formerly known as Hannah gathered the trash. Stripped the bed. Pulled the vacuum into the room.