tried to turn and get off, but I was wedged in. I almost knocked a baby out of her mother’s grip in the effort. The trolley doors shut and bang — Elton and I were two feet from each other, separated only by a slightly smelly guy who looked like he was probably from the art school. (He was wearing a big striped scarf. Only an artist guy wouldn’t change his look on a ninety-five-degree day.)
This was the closest I had gotten to Elton all this school year. He still had a tan. He had stopped spiking up his hair in the middle. It was longer now, a bit more romantic and shaggy, sweeping over the tops of his round glasses. I could see the pattern of his T-shirt through his white Sebastian’s dress shirt — it was his ‘Geek’ shirt. I had gotten him that shirt last Christmas, back when I had no hint at all that things would soon blow up and change.
‘Hey, Jane,’ he said. But it wasn’t a friendly ‘Hey, Jane.’ It was a ‘You are staring at the spot where my heart is located with an intensity that unnerves me’ kind of ‘Hey, Jane.’
‘Oh, hi,’ I said. Though there was no way he would ever believe I hadn’t noticed him, I still tried to pretend like I hadn’t. I stared at the art school guy’s book (it was called The Waye of the Witch, if you’re interested) until he saw this and turned away.
In my mind, I said the best things to Elton. I wrote countless excellent notes that I never sent. I came up with clever and highly detailed imaginary situations in which we were thrown together and somehow made him realize that life without me was a hollow shell. but he didn’t look like a hollow shell. He looked like he was back on the soccer team, all calf muscles and lean body. He looked sane and full of life. He was not, as I had hoped, pale, consumptive, and constantly weeping and mumbling my name.
And neither was I. Not anymore. But none of those wonderful things I had scripted out came to mind. Instead, what I blurted was, ‘Allison puked today.’
‘I heard,’ he said. And because he was Elton and not an ordinary, snorting Sebastianite, he seemed genuinely concerned. ‘Hope she’s okay.’
I nodded and found myself staring at the floor, unable to continue the conversation. I tried. I searched every part of my brain for something to say, but it was an empty vault. So I took the easy route out — I excused myself and got off at the next stop, then walked a mile home.
It was, in short, a terrible day. But it was behind me.
Here, for your edification, is Jane’s first law of lateness. Given that
a. you don’t fall asleep until 3 a.m. because you sit up all night writing e-mails to your ex-boyfriend that you are never going to send,
b. your power goes out somewhere around four in the morning because of freak wind and rainstorm,
c. your obnoxiously loud green alarm clock doesn’t go off because you haven’t changed the backup battery since you got it (Christmas, age twelve), and
d. you wake up with a sudden start and a horrible feeling in your stomach because you haven’t been blasted halfway across the room by the screaming antics of Boston’s most annoying morning DJ (station chosen expressly for this purpose),…
the time will be exactly (and I do mean exactly) four minutes before you have to leave for school.
Why four? Partially because five minutes is an accepted unit of time. Four minutes is just short of an accepted unit of time. But because you technically have some time because you aren’t late yet, you think you can use that time and do all the things you normally do… just a little more quickly, with the fine points ignored. But the truth is, you just make yourself later in the process.
Joan was in the shower, so I made a pathetic attempt at washing myself up with peach-scented dish soap at the kitchen sink. I evaded any questions from my father, who was standing at the counter slicing a pile of grapefruit. I was still ten minutes late in leaving. I forgot my keys in the process.
The weather was foul. It was pouring down rain. The trolleys were a mess, so I tried to walk. The wind blew my umbrella upside down halfway to school, and I couldn’t really get it to turn the right way again. And as a final gesture, I was so busy running up the school driveway that I didn’t even try to avoid the countless holes that I couldn’t see because they had filled with water. I went right into one, soaking one foot completely and banging up both my knees. Sister Rose Marie passed me a demerit in the lobby for ‘throwing open the door with excessive force.’
I checked in at the front office with Sister Mary Bernadette, the principal’s secretary. Everyone loved Sister Bernie. She was a tiny slip of a woman, probably ninety years old, with a high, cheerful voice. One of the few blessings in the school was that if you were late, you checked in with Sister Bernie, who had endless sympathy for any story and believed that everyone told the truth. I once tested this famously boundless faith sophomore year, when I overslept. I came in and told Sister Bernie that a pack of dogs got loose from a dog walker and pinned me in between some Dumpsters for half an hour. Sister nodded sadly and patted my hand and said, ‘Poor dear. Dogs can be so unpredictable. Mother Mary was with you, though, and kept you safe. No demerits. And stop down in the cafeteria and have something to eat to calm your nerves.’
Needless to say, I felt like such an evil heel after that, I brought Sister a bag of assorted chocolates on Christmas and her feast day every year from that point on. And I still couldn’t look her in the eye.
Today I just told her the truth. She gave me some tissues to help me dry off and let me go with no more demerits. There is mercy in this world.
I walked down the hall as silently as I could, considering that my school shoes were squeaking. It always gave me a very bad feeling walking around between classes. When the halls weren’t filled with other people and movement and noise, that’s when I noticed all the statues. I think we had more statues than the Louvre. But they weren’t statues you would want to find peeking out at you from a dark corner. They were all either clumsy ceramic renderings that managed to make saints look like rejected characters from Star Wars, or they were highly detailed, highly accurate images of saints in intense pain, like the one at the end of the hallway I was in — the one that showed you, in graphic detail, St. Sebastian as he was struck by a dozen arrows at once.
I rounded the corner and found myself facing an entire wall of flyers. These flyers weren’t on the bulletin boards, which in itself was a shock. We were only allowed to use bulletin boards for flyers, and then only for official school club announcements. Someone had actually had the guts to plaster an actual wall with their own flyers. And they were all exactly the same, containing only one sentence. They read: WILL YOU BE ASKED?
I followed the line of flyers with amazement. There was no way that anyone would have been able to do this without being noticed. I instinctively sped up. I didn’t want to be seen anywhere near these flyers, not with my recent warnings. They wouldn’t have even liked it if I was tacking up signs that said: SEX SUX! GIRLS’ SCHOOL RULES!
The door to English was closed, of course. The period had started fifteen minutes before, which was well beyond the point of recovery. Our school hated lateness in general, but Sister Charles hated it in a very particular sort of way, like we were deliberately stealing time from her life and she planned on extracting it back from us somehow.
As I opened the door, I heard her saying, ‘The overall poor quality of the last batch of essays you turned in makes me wonder if any of you know how to read, much less write…’
She trailed off as
