1:45 p.m. A School Day
My last name put me here. It’s the last period, in the last row in the chair by the closet door. Julie croons about the benefits of waitressing in a low-cut top. She shuffles an inch-thick stack of one’s around in the endless abyss that is her purse. But her Sundays dissolve into coffee transfers — hand to hand to hand to hand to…her words are eaten by the bellow of Señora Hatfield.
“¡Clase, attencion! Abra sus libros a pagina dosciento tres, ahora por favor.”
Julie loudly pops an engorged bubble of Big Red.
“Hey, mind sharing that?” she gestures towards my textbook with a grin so wide and white it almost distracts me from the rosy wad of gum squeezed tightly between her teeth in the corner of her mouth. It reminds me of Play-Doh and I wonder if she’s the kind of person who will hurriedly flatten the moist lump behind her two front teeth in hiding when the teacher strolls down our aisle and eerily peers over our shoulders.
“Um, ye–”
She doesn’t wait for my answer and begins to scoot closer to me. Her desk legs scream in agony as their bent aluminum scrapes across the checkered linoleum.
“Qué es este ruido?” Señora stomps over my seat, knocking three pencils, one pen and an eraser off of the neighboring desks. I mentally note the path of destruction and calculate the dangerous potential of her wobbly gate and unwieldy large butt. I quickly grab my pen and travel dictionary off the desk and toss them into my lap.
“Alright, stop talking so much, stop chewing gum and stop forgetting your textbook,” she says, violently counting off each of my imagined indiscretions on her fingers. “But first, you get to conjugate 10 irregular verbs in the imperfect tense for the class. Ahora.”
I rise as slowly from my chair as is socially acceptable. In my head I imagine I’m half-sloth, half-human and am lazily eating a bundle of leaves. This thought calms me, but then I’m disturbed as to why. Julie gently picks up my textbook and dutifully opens it to page 203, as ordered. Her face half-shaded by its dulled orange cover, she slinks down in her chair with a crooked grin.
“Thanks friend.”
I roll my eyes to the chalky surface of the board and mentally apologize to it for the horrendous misspellings of –ir and –er Spanish verbs that are about to mar its surface in dusty scratches. I find it hard to remember where the floating accents go, but whatever language we speak here, I understand it now.
3:45 p.m. A Trip to the Dentist
“You’re fucking arrogant, you know that? Hope someone else takes you home…”
He basically spat the word “home” at me as the Subaru’s wheels chewed up the pavement and tore away in a fog of exhaust. Walking home would take an hour. I could call….well, no one. Mom’s at work upstate and my friends can’t drive yet. The cops? Who does that. Buses don’t run in the suburbs; everyone drives or works for people that do.
A thick line of fat carpenter ants meander around my Chucks. Usually I’d want to smear them into a paste, but today I’m feeling generous. Perhaps more tired than generous really. Folding my legs Indian-style beneath me on the concrete curb of dentist’s parking lot, I try to avoid the curious gaze of a portly, freckled kid.
He’s greedily eating M&Ms. A moist collage of rainbow smears stain his palms. He promptly wipes them on his mother’s white coat. I hate him. I pray to the God and the tooth fairy that his mouth is wracked with cavities in his permanent teeth.
Ok, maybe just the baby teeth. People can change, right?
“Alright, get in.”
“I still think that you parked in the nurse’s parking space.”
“Just shut the fuck up before I decide to leave you here for good.”
I practically jumped through the cracked window into the passenger’s seat. The free blue toothbrush that the dentist doles out as a concession to his patients for unnaturally picking away at their gums with a pointed metal stick narrowly escaped.
“So…what’s for dinner Dad?”
“Pizza. I got you a sausage deep dish slice….”
“My favorite.”
“You’re welcome.”
He grumbled. He’s always grumbling. But he lets me change the radio station whenever we drive together, and that’s all I need sometimes.
11:34 p.m. A Scrabble Game Between Sisters
I won.
I’m going to say those two glorious words slower in my mind so as to be fully absorbed and encompassed by the murky, abstract mist that is my ego.
I. Won.
“The letter ‘x’ is not worth 16 points. I was definitely winning before those last two words and there is no fucking way that ‘xenophobia’ put you over the top like that.”
“Dear, sister, I do declare, I think you’re suffering from a smidgen of jealously at my impressive vocabulary and Scrabble skills.”
“Sam, everyone knows the fucking word ‘xenophobia’. Where are the directions with the point system? Did you lose it again?”
She’s rummaging about the attic as if she’ll find anything of use in the dusty, crumbling cardboard boxes that make our board game cave. I like that she covered our heads with her old baby blanket. When illuminated by a desk lamp it almost looks as if we are in a wind-beaten tent on in the Sahara. Almost. Sometimes I bring popcorn and my laptop up here and watch ’80s B movies and paint my nails when I can’t sleep.
If I told her, she’d laugh at me. She’d also tell me to stop stealing her polish, “Arctic Rose”, and to get a boyfriend. Two things that do not look probable in the near future.
“Eh, they’re gone for good. Don’t even bother looking for them.”
“Whatever, you probably just added wrong anyway.”
“I passed math this marking period!”
“Oh, congrats. Moving up in the world there.”
She arched the delicate blonde hairs of her right eyebrow in a powerfully judgmental gesture. Why did she have to get that gene? I’ve practiced in the mirror for nearly three years now and I can only manage to appear surprised or akin to a victim of excessive plastic surgery obsession.
“Screw you. Stop permanently PMS-ing. One more round?”
“I need to get up early for senior graduation planning committee.”
“And I didn’t think you could be lamer…”
“Fine. Let’s play.”
I don’t know whether or not I was more excited to actually play, spend time with her, or to feel the rush of slowly dipping my hand in the velvet bag of wooden Scrabble pieces. So much possibility, even if I don’t usually win.
I love these cool tiles, the slight indent of their engraved letter, how each and every one has a purpose, a clear designation of worth.