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  For Teresa

  one

  IN MY WESTERN CIV CLASS this year, I worked out a concept for a new superhero action figure. I call him Irony Man. He’s a superhero who exists only to help others. Irony Man rescues those in distress—maidens on railroad tracks, cats up trees, victims of natural disasters, hostages—but then he always delivers them to a worse fate than if he just left them alone to begin with and let them figure their problems out themselves. Needless to say, Irony Man doesn’t receive the kind of love he feels entitled to, and this makes him vengeful, and lonely. Sort of like Mr. C., my Western Civ teacher. Because I work on my superhero action figure during class and have to look like I’m paying attention, Mr. C. ends up being the model, and Irony Man comes out balding, with thick black glasses, earlobes that rest on his shoulders, and a big cross banging around his neck. Not the kind of guy you want to see coming at you in a cape and tights.

  So on my final exam I sketch him in. Today, it’s my grade that needs rescuing. I need a perfect score on this test to pull my grade out of the deep muck, pass the class, and turn into a senior in high school. Before I begin my quest for perfection, I stand up and look on my best and only friend Melody Grimshaw’s final exam. To see how she’s doing, I have to crane my head around the swollen neck and shoulders of Junior Davis, the alpha male of Colchis High. Junior has worn his football jersey to the final, so he can advertise his IQ in school colors. He has decorated the back of Grimshaw’s head with lilac blossoms and is now keeping himself occupied by wrapping a lock of Grimshaw’s hair around his pen. Aside from lounging in her chair and gazing out the window at a squirrel eating the end of a hot dog bun on a branch of this big pine tree, Grimshaw is hardly a bustle of academic activity. She has long brown hair, which spills down her back and over his desk, so the obvious thing for him to do is to wrap it around his pen.

  Grimshaw is bored—by Junior, by the final exam, by history, by life. She wants to go somewhere, but she doesn’t know where, and if she did know, she wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get there. She wants to be a dancer, that’s all she’s ever wanted to be, but she doesn’t know what that means she should do. There are no professional dancers in Colchis, not like the kind she wants to be, anyway, so she can’t ask them what they did to get there. It’s a dream for her, like a god she prays to. Nothing else matters to her. My family used to get her ballet lessons for her birthday down at Monique’s Dance Academy, a Christian dance studio owned by one of my mother’s church friends, on the condition that her family take her to them, but you can’t really count on Grimshaws for anything. Her brothers are numerous, but when you need them they are always ending up in the emergency room, or jail, or needing her to babysit, or their cars have issues. Now my mom buys her subscriptions to dance magazines, which get delivered to our house, so it keeps the dream alive that way.

  She doesn’t have anything written on her paper. Mr. C. catches me looking.

  “Miss Velasco,” he enunciates.

  “I’m not cheating.” I sit back down. “But other people might be.”

  He stands up and scans the room, which interrupts these two vicious cheerleaders who are sitting in front of me and passing misinformation back and forth.

  The cheerleaders give me dirty looks, and I smile at them. The football player who is playing with Grimshaw’s hair belongs to one of them.

  Mr. C.’s gaze comes back to rest on me. His eyes narrow. “Miss Velasco,” he says again, with his usual complement of sarcasm. “I assume you’ve done the math.”

  “Yes.”

  “You need to hand in a perfect exam today if you expect to achieve one of your Ds and come back in the fall as a senior.”

  “I know.”

  Mr. C. stares out the same window as Grimshaw. “We know you know everything already,” he says, “but what we don’t know is if that’s an asset or a liability.”

  I accomplish the short answer questions in less than ten minutes. Mr. C. is right: since my grade in Western Civ is currently a deep F, I do have to ace this test. Around me, my classmates are sighing while the grinding of the motor in the clock on the wall gets louder and louder. Grimshaw has picked up her exam and is staring at it with profound disinterest. Junior is still keeping busy with tying her hair into little bows. Junior’s cheerleader girlfriend looks pretty upset about all the attention he’s putting into Grimshaw’s hair, but he ignores her.

  Mr. C. paces the aisles a few more times, so I try to focus on the essay questions. The directions say to pick three out of five. The sixth, for extra credit, is actually fairly interesting.

  “Is democracy a failed experiment? Pick another failed social experiment and compare.”

  This one is a soft pitch to me. I start by stating the obvious, which is that to determine whether or not an experiment has failed, you first have to define success. And then I introduce my favorite subject to talk about, which is communism, although I do point out that putting communism next to democracy like that often leads to sloppy thinking because one is an economic system and the other one is political, and they could go together, theoretically. And then I get into it. I drop the big names—Lenin, Marx, Mao—although strictly speaking, I don’t know what they did or thought or said. I just know you’re not supposed to like them, and that’s good enough for me. I like how their names sound; they ring with this upsetting clang, like a pot dropped in the kitchen of an upscale restaurant, disturbing the dignity and repose of the capitalists at lunch. Or at least they should. My father was a radical political economics professor and had some theories about oppression and human liberation, which is all I know about him. By the time I’m two pages into my essay, though, it’s not about my father. As I cover page after page, everything else disappears, the noise from the wall clock, the depressed sighs of the other students. One thought leads to the next thought until I’m scrawling down things I didn’t even know I knew. It’s like I’m learning something, maybe from myself.

  “Miss Velasco.” Mr. C. is standing next to my desk.

  “What?” I look around. The classroom is empty. I’m the only one left. I slam the test down on his desk and run out of the room.

  Outside, it’s started to rain.

  I thread my way down the stairs in front of the school, through groups of kids standing around in front of the buses on their last day of classes. Nobody says a word to me as I go by. Grimshaw and I are a pair of pariahs, like a virus in a lipid envelope. She’s poor and I’m smart, so between the two of us we’re practically an un-American activity. On the other side of the line of buses, Grimshaw is waiting for me on our bench.

  When I sit down next to her, she puts two cigarettes in her mouth, lights both, and hands one to me. Every year at the end of the last day of school, it’s our tradition to smoke a ceremonial cigarette on school property.

  “A wet menthol,” I comment. “Yum.”

  Today, Grimshaw
has an enormous formerly pink suitcase next to her. The suitcase means she had a fight with her mother this morning and is running away to my house. The suitcase has a bumper sticker on it from Niagara Falls, which dates from her parents’ honeymoon.

  “We’re free,” I announce, taking my first pull.

  “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” she sings as she exhales her first drag. Grimshaw speaks mostly in lyrics from prehistoric rock and roll, especially if the song is about getting free. She’s obsessed with getting out of the Minnechaug Valley, which is our very small corner of New York State. She’s never been anywhere else, so she’s sure it’s better there.

  “Do you think you passed?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “I didn’t really get the essay questions.”

  “Did you write anything?”

  “I sure as hell didn’t write a book.”

  “As long as you wrote something. It’s not like he gave you much space to fill. I had to use extra paper.”

  “I know. You didn’t even look up when I left. What did you write about? The usual?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You never learn.”

  “Neither do they.”

  Grimshaw grinds out her cigarette as she walks toward the bus. “I’m not coming back, anyway,” she says. “I’ll be eighteen. After that, what’s the point?” I pick up her suitcase and follow her. I know what’s in it—her toothbrush, toothpaste, and a set of rose-printed flannel sheets. My mother bought them for Christmas last year, a gesture that offended her mother. Mrs. Grimshaw doesn’t drive, so one of her sons brought her over to our house to return them. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Grimshaw hardly ever leaves her house, and so coming over to my house and yelling at my mother was kind of a big outing for her. But of course, the next time Grimshaw spent the night at our house, she picked up the sheets again, so here they are. She walks ahead of me, still humming a tune. Her white T-shirt has fallen off one shoulder, revealing a shiny black bra strap. With her, it looks like an invitation. It’s something about the way she moves. If her big ambition to be a dancer dies, plan B is to be a stripper.

  “Slut,” somebody says as we pass by a group of cheerleaders. I turn around. Of course—it was Junior Davis’s girlfriend, no doubt pissed that her boyfriend spent the Western Civ exam playing with Grimshaw’s hair and ignoring the death-looks of his girlfriend.

  “Bitch,” I say back, even though they weren’t talking to me. “Cheaters.”

  “Like you don’t,” she says to me.

  “At least we’ll pass.”

  Grimshaw just keeps humming and gets on the bus.

  Do you ever notice something, something that nobody else notices, you don’t know why, something just makes you notice it, it catches your attention, it gets on your radar screen, and you pick out this little detail from far away? It doesn’t even register as significant; you don’t even know why you notice it. But you do. This gold Corvette struck me that way, like, why am I noticing that gold Corvette going so slowly down that street? It’s too far away to see who’s driving it, but it catches the afternoon sun and glints before it disappears, so I notice it and watch it move by.

  “You coming on?” the bus driver calls down to me, and then I follow Grimshaw onto the bus.

  “Hello, Prof,” Grimshaw says cheerily, mounting the steps of the bus.

  “Afternoon, darlin’,” says the bus driver. “Miss Serena, how was history?”

  “It’s over,” I tell him. “We passed.”

  “Remember what they say,” he cautions with his finger in the air.

  “What’s that?”

  “If you don’t remember your history, you gotta repeat it.” He laughs heartily at his own joke.

  With the completion of our Western Civ exam, we are now seniors in high school, and strictly speaking, mature young ladies such as Grimshaw and I shouldn’t be riding the school bus, which is really a rolling day care center. If I were more like my older sister, Allegra, I would be driving home with friends. But I’m not Allegra, and I don’t have friends with cars. With all Grimshaw’s brothers, we could have our choice of a whole rusty fleet of Blazers and pickup trucks, but she never took Driver’s Ed, so she doesn’t have her license, and I’m not old enough to drive.

  I park the suitcase in the seat across the aisle and sit with her next to the window and get a book out of my backpack. I always keep a book in my backpack for the long ride home. I’m kind of a history nerd. I should really be in Honors classes, but Foundations is much livelier and funnier, so I make sure I keep my average at a D so I can be in there with Grimshaw. Today’s book is called The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which I took out of Mr. C.’s room. Reading a fat book guarantees that nobody will talk to me. Except for Prof, who usually has read it, too, and talks to me about what I’m reading. He’s the kind of guy, if he sees you reading a book, he wants to know what it is. My mother told me that way back when, Prof got a PhD but had too many controversial opinions, and so here he is, an old black man driving white kids home every day on the school bus. Grimshaw sits down in the front seat and starts filing her nails.

  “Fight with your mom?” Prof asks Grimshaw, looking at the seventh graders in the rearview mirror. Then he lets off the air brake and we lurch away from the high school behind the other buses. “What happened this time?”

  “Well,” she says. “First my brother gets busted.”

  “Dale?”

  “Who else?”

  Prof whistles. “That’s too bad.”

  “So then Lisa gets mad and leaves.”

  Prof shakes his head. “She take the kids this time?”

  “I wish.” Grimshaw decides her nails are fine, and then gets up and flips through Prof’s music collection, which he keeps in a cardboard shoe box under the dashboard. “Nope,” she says. “Those kids always get left behind. With me. Because it’s not like I have a life. So my mom wanted me to stay home and watch them today. But I told her I can’t, I have these two big tests, first English and then Western Civ, like, hello, finals? Like pass the year and come back as a senior? So she gets mad and tells me it’s time I get a job and help out with rent.”

  “School’s important,” Prof says philosophically. “You gotta finish school.”

  “So is Junior Davis after you now?” I ask her while Prof is exchanging good wishes for the summer. “You still have a lilac blossom in your hair.”

  “Be serious,” she says, looking through the shoe box. “He’s owned.”

  “His owner wasn’t very happy with you just now. She had a bad word for you.”

  “It’s the only word she knows. I would never go out with him. Junior Davis is poorer than I am. He doesn’t even have a car.” She holds up a CD and considers it. Prof rotates his CDs a lot, so there’s always something new in the shoe box. “Is this one any good?” she asks Prof. “Marvin Gaye?”

  “Put it on,” Prof says. “You’ll find out.”

  The school bus passes by the vacant mall in the middle of Colchis, the empty stores, and then under the shadow of the four smokestacks of Franklin Arms, where they made guns until they went bankrupt last year. Across the street from the entrance to the Arms is a bar called the Crossways Tavern, which has a neon martini glass with an olive that is already blinking on and off when the school bus passes it every day at three o’clock. Colchis is a special place to live. It’s one of four small and grimy factory towns crammed together in the Minnechaug Valley. The others are Minnechaug, Bavaria, and Linerville. Although the towns appear uniformly depressing, each one is in fact unique, with its own history, extinct industry, and adjoining vacant mall.

  Grimshaw is still telling Prof about her domestic woes. “So, anyway,” she says as she puts the music on, “I’ll be getting off at her house today.”

  “I have a name,” I say to the window.

  “Uh-oh,” Prof says. “Your mom complains about that. She worries.”

  “Right.” Grimshaw sits
back down next to me. “Maybe I’ll get kidnapped by the principal.”

  “Sst!” I throw an elbow into her ribs. “Careful with the state secrets, there.”

  “Will you relax,” Grimshaw hisses back at me. “Nobody even cares.”

  Grimshaw’s mom doesn’t like me. There are a number of reasons for this. First is the issue of my mother’s continuous faux pas. Second is that Grimshaws never graduate from high school. Around age fifteen and a half, they quit, and then let the clock run until the attendance specialist from the district gets tired of facing the Rottweiler mixes chained to the car wrecks in front of their house. Now, under my evil influence, the last Grimshaw is within a year of ruining her mother’s perfect record.

  After Prof disgorges half his passengers on the way out of town, we start climbing the highway into the country, past the dead farms and the double-wides. We pass the new church where my family worships. Well, except for me: I put a condom in the offering plate once, so they thought it would be better if I didn’t go anymore. The farther we get from town, the smaller and shabbier the houses get. Eventually, we pass a driveway that you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know it was there. It’s the junkyard where Grimshaw lives. Her brothers make money by dragging old cars in there, fixing some, and selling parts out of the rest. The house used to be part of a dairy farm. There was a big barn there, and an old farmhouse, too, covered with graffiti and filled with broken glass, and as you drove by, you could look through the empty windows at the pastures growing over with thistles. Grimshaw never gets off the bus there. She is embarrassed that she lives in a junkyard.

  “The blackberries are blooming now,” I remark as we pass by. She’s listening to Prof’s story of the time he saw Marvin Gaye play Cleveland, and how good he looked in his white suit.

  “He sang real history, too,” he is saying. “Not just entertainment. He was the real thing.” As we pass by her house, I catch a glimpse of something in the rearview mirror. Is that that same gold Corvette again? I turn around and watch it slow down and signal to turn in her driveway.