normal revulsion she directs toward me and my family, but then it’s gone, replaced by the mask of anger and contempt she’s worn nonstop since last fall.
Unlike my sister and me, she doesn’t hesitate to get out of her car. As I watch, unable to tear my eyes away, she pulls off her seat belt and throws open her car door in one oddly elegant motion.
My heart is ripping in two inside my chest. Gwenie and I are trapped like rodents in the car, and I don’t know where to direct my eyes. I’m sweating; my shirt’s gonna be a mess. And we haven’t even gotten out of the car yet. This is a fucked-up way to start the new semester, but fucked-up is pretty much par for the course these past few months, thanks to our lovely mother.
I glance in the rearview mirror and see Rosa, her back rigid, walking quickly away. A small hand slips into mine, and only then do I realize that I’m trembling something fierce.
Gwen and I sit there silently in my car, trapped, waiting for the coast to clear.
I’m fucking sore.
And tired.
Tired and sore. Biking home from the lawyer’s house took way too long last night.
And now I’m driving to school. For the first time in almost a year.
Not Carter, of course. They closed that building down a few months after, because the air inside was full of ghosts. Bad ghosts. Pained ghosts. My brother’s ghost.
No, I’m driving to some other high school in the Valley—a school we used to play in sports occasionally, I think. I never knew anyone who went there. It was too far away, and Los Angeles traffic is beyond shitty. This morning it’s taken me over forty minutes to get here, and it’s less than ten miles away. Quincy Adams High School. It sounds so bougie. So fucking lame. Lucy says it’s been weird—all the Carter kids keep to themselves, and the QA kids let them. She says it feels like they’re afraid of us. Like we’re infected by what happened. Apparently, last semester the administration tried to force interaction by doing stupid assemblies where they would do team-building exercises and shit. That went over about as well as you’d expect.
Last year, for a few months right after the shooting, they tried to keep us at Carter, which was an extremely stupid idea if you ask me. Toward the end of the semester, things got so bad, with breakdowns and fights and people dropping out left and right, too afraid to go back to that place, and they finally decided a fresh start was better for everyone.
Hence, their decision to transfer half of the leftover kids from Carter here at the beginning of the new school year and half to Miller, the next closest high school in the Valley. This is where I ended up when my parents and Dr. McMillen decided homeschooling wasn’t working out. Wasn’t working out…so sue me if I couldn’t take that whimpering homeschool teacher seriously as she sat in front of me, clutching my textbooks in her aging hands, barely able to hold them up. Couldn’t take her seriously as we both sat there ignoring the ever-present ghost of my brother, which draped itself over everything in the house, over furniture like ill-fitting slipcovers, over conversations like a heavy fog, over every fucking interaction like an anchor pulling us down, down, down to the bottom of the ocean.
Last fall, the Executive Decision (vom) was made that it would be better for my mental health (again, vom) if I was around people. Not homeschooled, since my parents couldn’t (read: wouldn’t) be there with me to make sure I was, you know, actually doing stuff and not just ignoring the teacher they’d brought in, who had failed at her “job” pretty miserably.
Principal Rose-Brady somehow convinced the school board to let me back in, even though I’m pretty sure she had to field several angry phone calls after that decision from parents of kids who I may or may not have punched in the face at some point in the past. Honestly, though, how could those parents fight my reenrollment? The fact is: I’m a SURVIVOR.