wait for Miss Olivia to go into lockdown mode, because no one, not even her pinup boy, is allowed into her forbidden realm. I know that she will summon Miss Chaney, who will then suspend Tyler. And probably put me on probation for not dying to prevent access to the sacred excused-absence slips. But instead of turning into a shrieking lunatic, Miss Olivia bubbles out, “Tyler Moldenhauer, how can I help you? Do you need an excused absence?” She snaps at me, “Get Tyler an excused absence.”
Get Tyler an excused absence?
I begin to understand why varsity players never have to come to the attendance counter. I guess administration doesn’t want anyone seeing the special treatment they get.
“Stay right there, Ty-Mo,” Miss Olivia orders, then chugs around to the entrance at the far end of the office that admits only the officially approved.
“OK, I’m out,” Tyler says. And just like that, like a flea disappearing from one spot, he hoists himself back onto the counter and is gone before Miss Olivia circumnavigates her way around to our station.
She is huffing a little when she reappears. “Where is he? Where did he go? What did he need?” When I don’t answer, she informs me, “Aubrey, that was Tyler Moldenhauer.” Her voice and face are like she just said, Aubrey, that was Jesus.
“OK …” I give a vague nod, acting like I can’t quite place this Tyler Moldenhauer person she speaks of.
“All-state three years in a row? Runs the forty in four-point-five? His junior year he was two thirty-two of three sixty-eight for three thousand ninety-four yards with twenty-seven TDs and only six interceptions? He’s met with recruiters from six Division One colleges already, and I have excused absence requests for him to meet with two more.”
Everything she tells me is obviously a giant deal on Planet Football. But it all just makes me wish that the person she is referring to didn’t have all sorts of numbers attached to him. That he was just an ordinary boy who smelled like the ocean on a cold day.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Under the Book of Palms is an assortment of Aubrey’s old school papers, book reports, stories, assignments. They are festooned with stars and happy faces, thumbs-up stickers, and rainbows. Notes scribbled in the margins exclaim over what a good writer Aubrey was. I pick up an essay from sixth grade on the topic of school uniforms, written in her careful cursive.
I know that there will be many who will attack school uniforms and say they are a bad idea because they hinder a person from being an individual. I disagree and say the exact opposite. School uniforms would actually help someone be who they really are. Instead of being forced to choose a group and try to fit into it through a certain exact kind of clothes, everyone would start off on an equal—
“Are you searching Aubrey’s room?”
“God, Dori, don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“If by ‘sneak up’ you mean pound on your front door, then come in and yell, ‘Cam! Cam! Oh, Miss Cam Lightsey! Hello! Are you in here!,’ then, getting no response whatsoever, come back here in order to start CPR or locate your corpse, then I’m sorry that I ‘sneaked up’ on you.” Dori’s sproingy curls, dyed a mauvey brown this month, quiver as she whips her head around. “You are, aren’t you? You’re searching Aubrey’s room.”
“No,” I answer, and she joins me in searching Aubrey’s room.
I had been friendless for more than a year when Dori showed up for back-to-school night at the start of first grade. Dori and I never would have been friends back in the city, where her tattoos and transgressions would have made her blend in rather than stand out. But, like two Americans who wouldn’t have talked to each other in their homeland, Dori and I became fast friends in the alien land of Parkhaven. We bonded over being single outcasts in a place where everyone was paired up like they were boarding the Ark, and over our shared amazement that none of the other mothers had any lives—past or present—outside of being supermoms obsessed with their children and with Parkhaven Elementary.
When I met Dori, I was still smarting from being dropped by the inner circle of Parkhaven moms, and I knew the instant I saw the armband of tribal tattoos encircling her biceps and the crescent of diamond studs curling around the top of her ear that she was my soul mate.