Later they put me in this school run by a bunch of old hippies. The hippies didn't care what you did so long as you were on campus. It was supposed to be revolutionary, make us want to learn.
They had the kind of trees that are good for sitting under. That is what the school made us want to do.
The teachers would come out--"We're having algebra now."
"Yeah."
Then, a little later--"Time for English," they said.
"Okay."
"We'll just be inside, having class. Okay!"
We came in the morning, hung around all day. Left in hordes at 3:08. We were going to graduate without learning anything.
The kids who did go inside for classes, broken down victim types with giant eyes like starving dogs, they went inside and made terrible drawings on butcher paper. They did worksheets as a class, with teacher saying things like, "15 is probably A. What do you think? 15--A? Okay. " The margins were extra size, in case you were stupid on top of everything and couldn't write well.
I lived outside, waiting for every day to be over. Sometimes inside they would sing old protest songs. The hippies were teaching them. Weak, ineffectual people, who had never gotten anything done: you could hear all of it through the windows.
We used to ball my jeep around the lot doing donuts. Drive between apartment buildings, over deck chairs, to the grocery where we walked down the aisles punching bags of bread and opening jelly jars. Behind the grocery store we experimented smoking different things. Wasteful, harmless: these things are not counted.
One of my friends was beautiful. He had black cigarettes that smelled like incense, he had long slinky hair like a girl, he had a face with bones like Johnny Depp. On my first day he came over to me.
"My name's Jack," he said.
"Okay," I said. We shook hands, very formal. It was a transaction. I was quiet, not interested in talking. But he sat with me anyway. He stayed.
A couple times he brought his guitar. He was bad at it.
"I used to love a girl named Paula," he says.
"Yeahh, they're out there," I said.
"Yeah, love." he said. The air was suddenly cool on my face. The leaves were ochre on the grass, like tiny leather jackets.
"I don't believe in love." I said. "I don't think it exists. I think people talk about it so they don't feel simple like animals."
"I guess there's nice things about being an animal," he said. "Only needing to think about the next three minutes. Not so bad."
I was sixteen years old. "You want to go someplace?" I said.
There were people lying in the grass beside me. "We can go to my place," Joshua said.
Joshua's parents weren't around, didn't care. I heard he'd had a lot of fucked up things happen to him and his brothers when they lived with this weird uncle. One day they pulled the uncle over pushing a shopping cart full of bloody scythes and doll hair through the neighborhood. Turned out he was the KC Ripper. You never know a guy.
The way you find out has somebody been molested, you have them sing the ABCs. Your voice stops at how old you were the day you were first molested--even if you are as old as thirty-two you will still sound as if you are six, getting fingered under the stairs by your eighth grade babysitter. This is true, it always works. It comes in handy. I didn't know about it then.
Anyway, four of us crammed into Jack's truck to go to Joshua's house. The seats smelled like incense, were covered in Indian fabric.
Jack's arm around me, I could feel him breathing. His fingertips making circles on my shoulder, rough from playing the guitar, they made sounds against my coat, and I liked it.
Joshua was against me on the other side. He had these diabolic eyebrows that went up on the ends like he was going to do something. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know what happened to any of them.
So Joshua was into bugs--had a bunch of them in boxes, stacked in his closet, and one by one he kept taking them out for us. Jack sits in a chair and closes his eyes. The room is cold, strange smelling. I keep my coat on. The other girl walks to the window and stares outside.
"Hold this one," Joshua says. "Madagascar hissing cockroach," he pronounces, and it must have cost him a lot of money.
I am terrified of it.
"No, she's sweet." He cradles the giant bug shiny against his cheek. "She even knows who I am. She recognizes me."
"Don't they chew out from the boxes?"
"Sometimes. But we've got this dog--it always gets them. You have to hold this one, though, okay?"
The next box was a tarantula.
"He's a teddy bear. Look at him."
"Ah, teddy bear, yes." It looks at me with a stuffed animal expression: blank, stupid eyes, vaudevillian fangs--giant, fuzzy. "It has fuzzy teeth!"
"They don't bite people," he lies. "Too big, they can't get their teeth around."
We cup our hands together. The spider crawls delicately from Joshua to me.
"Evil ballerina," I say, feeling fucking clever. The thing standing in my hands, very light.
"See?" he says. I give it back.
"You know they don't have bones?" he says. "If you drop them, they shatter."
"Have you tried it?"
The front door slams. A woman's voice, and then there are people mumbling angry, confused. A crash of something shudders the walls. The girl standing over by the window jerks like a puppet.
Jack stands up. "Lets drink some whiskey," he says.
There's dogs in the alley, walking silently in the trash, the damp leaves. They run away, the pretty one looking back black-eyed at me, looking backwards over her shoulder like a bright swan. You know how sometimes, even if you don't believe in reincarnation, there are moments, when everything is almost possible? It was like recognizing a lover. I wished she was mine.
The white, scalding sky: I wanted to climb to the top of something, to be lost in the whiteness--
"It's raining," I say.
The whiskey sears out from in me like a sacred heart. I radiate love, I am backed against the fence kissing Jack in the cold coming down rain, our burning faces. My ovaries are twisting worms, sucking holes: fill my spaces, be my lover.
Joshua sits on a rock with the bottle, laughing at us, my nipples in Jack's hands through my shirt.
"Paula," Jack says. "Now I have you."
I slug the drink, Joshua smiling sick-faced at me and I wish he'd leave. There had been that girl with us but somewhere in there she'd gone away, and I can't remember--
"Where'd that girl go?"
"What girl?"
"With the--hair," I said, my fingers together, indicating very long hair.
"It's just been us," Joshua says. Jack looks at me. Maybe we should sit in his truck for a minute?
"Okay," says Joshua. "Don't leave, I've got to get something, okay?"
We blast the heat and sit kissing with the radio on, fogging the windows. Jack's lips are chapped rough, metallic with smoke.
"I know your mother," he says suddenly. "She teaches at Pinckney?"
"Yeah."
"Haydon, Mrs. Haydon, that's it, right?"
My mother the teacher. I don't know what she wants from people. Why would anyone want to teach? This is why nothing new ever happens. Teachers filling our heads like balloons with other people's ideas. We live our lives making things easy for other people. You know smiling, in dog language, is like--'Please Jesus do not hurt me.'
I don't know what I mean.
-what I mean is, I want to be free, to catapult high and explode into a thousand melting stars across the wide sky. I don't want anyone to ever catch me, to ever have any part of me.
It seems like you should do what you wanna do, which is I don't know what, not yet, nothing exact, except it should be something very large and immediate, although not right now, because I am unable. I am unable of anything right now, but there will be a day when I am, when I am able.
I'm thinking all this while Jack is touching my hair, softly. He puts the car into gear.
"What's in your head, little girl?" he says, even though he's only two years older.
"Nothing," I say. "just junk." My hands blurred watercolors in my lap--streaks from my hands on his window I do not remember making. "Poor Joshua, huh?"
"He's okay."
"Hey, you want to see my mom? She always works late--we can catch her. You can show me where you used to sit. It's all still the same, I think."
"Really? -I don't know, she hasn't seen me in a long time." He looks out the window.
"It's okay. Never mind."
His hand moist through my jeans on my thigh. I close my eyes.
Later he tells me he didn't see the sign and because of the rain he thought the bus was still moving.
The last time I ever saw him, looking not like he used to, he said actually he didn't know you have to stop when buses have their lights on and the stop sign out.
It is because of us that there are those stickers on the buses now, the stickers that say 100 fine, even just for passing and not actually going that fast, because sometimes there are girls that run out into the rain from those buses, not looking,
their long black hair in their faces, these little Vietnamese girls who are so precious, so small, so small really, with such tiny pelvises, like tiny birds.
This tiny person like a bird screaming in the street in Vietnamese: and me squatting beside her, fucked out of my mind because I had not been out all that long, really, and this just blew it for me, this girl writhing, terrified, and her little feet naked.
Little bright pale sneakers like angels in the rain on the pavement.
"Here's one, honey, I'm sorry I can't find the other one but I'll keep looking. Listen, I'm sorry-I'm sorry, okay?" and she was scared, scared of me, do not touch her, do not take the hand, smaller even than my littlest sister, because I am the oldest of six, I had to take care of them all the time when we were growing up, and really I could be okay and normal and help you, girl, if you would just relax. Let me comfort myself comforting you.
Then there were lights and the bulls with their notepads, they were nodding, recognizing me. Shaking their fat heads.
The girl believed I was a demon. Her voice was pure, glistening, like a bell. She wished me ill.
They picked up Jack three blocks away. He was just standing there. I don't know how they knew he was involved. People driving by, they must have witnessed it. We were witnessed.
He'd run from the car, didn't even close the door--I'd had to put it in park. I guess he lost his boner for me pretty fast. It was bad for him because he had something from before. "What were you doing with him?" That's what they said.
And I must have mumbled something back, and then one of them told me I needed to sober up. "I'll give you a chance, kid, because I know who your family is," he said. He turned around.
They had a hard time putting that girl back together, the way she was broken and how small. It was in the papers. Maybe you saw it.
But she was so young. She probably healed quickly. Probably does not even limp.
A couple years later they closed the Alternative School. Now, if high school doesn't work out for you, you can just drop out, like they do in regular cities.
Sometimes I see the old hippies downtown. Then all of us wave, like the old friends we are.
