A Bad Day at School

5.30 (afternoon nap)

Mama, because I have no car, has driven me out to the high school where I work. I ride the escalator up from the parlor of a dark restaurant-esque storefront in downtown. In the dark room, the clerk asks me not to disturb the elderly men and women preparing for their certification exam. Upstairs the halls bustle with activity and noise unseen and unheard below. The tinted few windows have become clear as air and wide as the ceiling, lit with bright magnesium light bulbs.  I spy John K——- and Emily C——- among the students attending to their lockers. They smile at me, and I them. In button up shirt, slacks, polished shoes I descend the far-side escalator to the lower floor where waits Mr. Noechel’s room. He is out today, and I go searching through his desk for the worksheet I need to complete. My sister is there helping me, but we cannot find it. In a leather-bound black folder containing a variety of test results and letters and bills, I find the letter I had written Noechel five years ago when I graduated High School. Sitting in his swivel chair, I become disoriented. Had I not just been looking for my own assignment, being Noechel’s student? Or was I looking for the lesson plans he left for today, being his substitute teacher? I began to feel ill, dizzy. My sister tells me to stay in the chair and rest a bit until next period.

I do not exactly sleep, but I relax my mind’s grip on the room around me. The tall windows become like mirrors that stretch down the wall. There are no desks any longer. I am not sitting, but standing in front of a very tall, hairy fat man. He is enormous to me, at least twice my size. This is a memory from my childhood training in Tae Kwon Do. In my blue belt, dobok, bare feet I am practicing my roundhouse kicks in the air. I am fit and my technique is good. I have been in many fights, have made some people bleed. This tall man kneels in front of me, tells me to practice striking a person when I kick. Kick me in the belly, he says, Kick as hard as you can; I won’t feel it! I begin to cry. I can’t kick him. He’s not wearing a pad, and I can’t kick him. I’m all twisted up inside, but I can’t say why… I have all of my words there, but no way to speak… I feel hurt and angry and frightened and ashamed. I feel this and say this with my face and my tears, but there are no words, and they do not understand. I do not understand. The fat man puts on a pad. I kick him roughly and with glee. Later, my father comes to pick me up from practice. The older boys in class take me asside to play, but I see the instructor talking to my dad in the mirror. I don’t like those boys after that. In the car my father asks me if I had a bad day. “Yep,” is all I say. That’s all he needed to hear.

I wake up in the chair at my desk. The bell has just rung for the next class. I must get to class. My eyes have trouble focusing. Some of the windows are still mirrors even as I walk down the hall. My eyes do not clear when I rub them, but grow ever stronger the more I blink. I go around the corner back into the dark parlor. The old people have irradiated themselves, and are partially transparent. Their test is some kind of practice before transitioning into a state of pure information: a spiritual sarcophagus with gamma rays. In my backpack behind the bar is the worksheet I needed. I go back around the corner and up to the foot of the second escalator I took earlier. Waiting in line for the students to clear the way, I recognize a face in the crowd. It’s Annie K—-… and Stephanie B—– … and there’s Ellen and Annie H. and Charlotte, Laura, Niki, Lena! All of these just-friends from my past, who I at one time or another felt a strong attachment to, likewise notice me. They turn their faces to me and smile, knowingly, as if amused that I had taken so long to see them there. But they do not look long, or try to talk, or even come greet me. “Stephanie!” I say, “Annie! You’re here! I missed you guys so much!” Stephanie B— looks around someone else (another student) with her big cheerful smile, “Oh, Justin T—-, you know we’re not actually here.” I look to Annie. She’s smiling at me. “Sorry, hon. Love you.” Then everyone starts to walk away up the escalator. I follow, pleading with them to wait, to explain themselves. None acknowledge me, I cannot see their faces. Following the girl I believe to be Charlotte down the hall, I tug at her sleeve and beg her to stop and wait. She is aloof, irritable, sharp-witted,  just as I remember her. Suddenly she is not. She is frightened, air-headed, immature. From blond curls to brunet; from long green dress to puffy pink coat she transforms between my blinking from a high school girl into a memory and back. John K and Emily C see me doing this. They no longer smile at me. Katrina Z—-, a student who admires me, walks just in front of my blind spot. I glance back at her look of fear and worry. I realize that I have gone manic, that I must still be dreaming, must not have rubbed enough sleep out of my eyes. I let the girl go; she runs away. I begin clawing at my eyes, but I see faces of people I knew from home dispersed in the crowd. I’m hallucinating badly. Nothing I do can control it. Sleep, I tell myself, you just need to get somewhere safe and sleep. But I can’t I’m frozen in panic: anxious about what the girl will tell the security officer, uncertain about which High School I am in, frightened that I am losing control, ashamed of what John, Emily, and Katrina will say. My breathing starts to hurt my chest. I see Katrina try to catch me as I fall to the ground.

I wake up in my mother’s passenger seat. It’s dark, and I am stiff from lying still so long. My sister is in the back seat. She says she brough Noechel’s worksheet with her, says my teachers will let me make up the work I’m going to miss. “Have a bad day, Honey?” asks my mother. “Yep. Bad day.” I am sour inside, and weak. I have a load of laundry we need to have cleaned at a laundromat. Mama decides to stop by the one closest to the High School instead of the one near our house. “It’s like I always say,” says my mother. “Meet me where you’re coming from, and I won’t have to go as far.” I still don’t know what she means by that, but while she was inside the laundrimat, a song with those lyrics came on the radio. I let the quarters in the cup holder slip through my fingers. Other than this I am silent, brooding, numb, and cannot even explain to myself what happened or why.

The Girl in White

5.29 (Morning of)

I was visiting my friends at PMI up in the mountains. I recklessly drove my new car to where I couldn’t see where I was going, and crushed it on a tree. The car was ruined, and I knelt there by it panicking. My friends stood around in a circle and laughed.

5.30 (Morning of)

I had just come back from the exhausting trip to the mountains and found my apartment in total disarray. A note from Kate, my former roommate, said that the water was leaking. I had shut off the power to everything non-vital before I left, and apparently that caused some plumbing problems. After turning the power back on and shutting off the water, I felt really depressed about the state of my place. There was chalky dust and crumbled plaster everywhere, layering on top of piles of junk and dirty clothes/dishes strewn about. I decided to spend the day cleaning, so I went down Caroline street to borrow a vacuum cleaner. The neighbor-girl I decided to borrow from was having a party at the same time, and she invited me in for a minute. I didn’t have a chance to explain why I was there when I saw a very pretty girl across the room. She saw me too with beautiful brown, round eyes and long black hair. She reminded me a lot of Laura, but hungry somehow, and alive. She walked over to me and made casual conversation, but there was a kind of nervousness behind it like someone getting ready to jump out of a plane. She was younger than I, and slightly shorter, so in the midst of our conversation when she leaned in to kiss me, she stood on her toes. She was so soft and sweet, so knowledgeable and yet felt everything as if it were completely new. There was some danger in this, I knew, but I ignored it. I keep my eyes open long enough in my shock to see that her friends are all rolling their eyes. I don’t care.  I return her affection. Suddenly she pulls away after such a moment of spontaneous connection. She says something to the effect that she should not be the only one to  pursue, and so begins to pace the party. I follow her, noting to myself how lap-dog-ish I trot along. I push this aside however, and ask her where she’s going. She’s going to the auction, and will be outside in a couple of hours if I want to meet her again. I ask her name, so I ‘ll know who to ask for. She tells me simply, “I’m the pretty one in white.” Then she goes, and I let her. I turn to go back to my place to clean a little before I try to find her again, but I am stopped by my talkative mentor, S. G.  SG is an older woman who is considerably shorter than I.  SG stops me to talk about Bryan C—– (a common student at the high school) who I note has been hanging around outside my street quite a lot these days. He seems like he’s becoming more of an adult in recent weeks, and SG notes this. We talk a long time, SG and I, until hours have passed, and suddenly the girl in white comes screeching to a halt in a very fancy but very old white-with-rust-spots convertible. Without saying more than a curt goodbye to SG, I climb into the passenger seat. “What do you want to do?,” the girl in white asks me. She is cool, and I think it’s more likely that she stole the car than bought it at auction. Her question has implications behind it. “Right now, just drive. We have time for everything else, but right now, I just want to drive,” I say. As we speed through the night under the clustered electrical cable towers, I feel happy and exhilarated. I feel free, and so overwhelmed that I have to stick my hands up into the wind above the front glass to cool off my excitement. She drives us to a parking lot going way too fast. Her brakes clearly did not work very well, and when she tried to stop, she plowed two cars out of their parking spots with enough momentum to then crush her engine around a light post. Police, who had been in the lot the whole time, descend upon us. She asks if I’m alright. I look at her and say, “I think I love you.” We smile, and then the police yank us from the car.

The next morning, I’m walking out to meet with the police representative for a formal questioning, and SG stops me to say hello. I’m thinking about the girl in white, and don’t even hear her talking. Bryan C. sees me, and offers to walk me to the station. He knows all of the details from the gossip lines, and asks me questions about the night and about the girl in white. At the station, I recount tersely the story of meeting this girl, still not knowing her name. They don’t know either, I found out. The place where the question me is like a big library set up in the foyer of a major city police station. She comes in after I’m done talking with the officer, now wearing the orange jump suit. She is as beautiful as before, but does not see me or does not look. On my way home, I stop by that original neighbor’s house to borrow that vacuum. I see in all of my neighbor’s photos that girl is nowhere to be found– omitted or just a stranger. My mind turns away from the girl in white for the last time: something dangerous indeed. I go home, depressed, having wasted the weekend chasing after the girl in white instead of cleaning house.