Total Constant Order Read online

  Total Constant Order

  Crissa-Jean Chappell

  For Mom and Dad

  Contents

  Part 1: September

  Chapter 1: Volcanoes

  Chapter 2: Swimming

  Chapter 3: Technicolor Apocalypse

  Chapter 4: My Instinctive Reality

  Chapter 5: Legally Blind

  Chapter 6: Perfect Rhythm

  Chapter 7: Happiness of the Garden Variety

  Chapter 8: The Glowing Pickle

  Part 2: October

  Chapter 9: Balancing

  Chapter 10: Gossip

  Chapter 11: Guinea Pig Girl

  Chapter 12: They Have No Idea

  Chapter 13: Awake Still

  Chapter 14: Protected Species

  Chapter 15: Attention Deficit

  Chapter 16: Total Constant Order

  Part 3: November

  Chapter 17: Chester Copperpot

  Chapter 18: Tagging

  Chapter 19: A Perfect Day for the Answering Machine

  Chapter 20: Round Numbers

  Chapter 21: Split Ends

  Chapter 22: Union of the Senses

  Chapter 23: The Order of Things

  Chapter 24: Lint Pickers

  Chapter 25: Prismacolor

  Chapter 26: Useless One

  Part 4: December

  Chapter 27: Archaeological Evidence

  Chapter 28: Secrets

  Chapter 29: What He Told Me

  Chapter 30: Escape

  Chapter 31: Frida Kahlo

  Chapter 32: Manatee

  Chapter 33: Someday We Will Go to the Moon

  Chapter 34: Fin

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SEPTEMBER

  19 5 16 20 5 13 2 5 18

  Volcanoes

  In ninth grade, I learned that the world is made of lava. My science teacher, Ms. Armstrong, illustrated this fact with candy corn.

  “One, two, three,” she counted, crunching each color. “Crust, mantle, core.”

  I munched the stale, waxy-tasting candy and gawked at the pictures in my earth science textbook. I thought about volcanoes belching, stars exploding. It’s a wonder people didn’t stumble around, knocking into one another.

  I slouched in the front row, drawing stars on my desk. My nearsighted eyes had grown so bad, I was legally blind without contacts. The blackboard shimmered. I squeezed my pencil into my palm, leaving pointy marks that hurt and felt nice at the same time. I clamped my hands extra hard when Ms. Armstrong called my name.

  “Fin, are you paying attention?” she asked.

  She didn’t know the truth: I paid attention to everything.

  On the outside, I was quiet and still. Inside, I was churning. Nobody could guess what was happening inside my head. I was trying to control the beat of my wiggling desk, the spaces in the whispers around me, the rhythm of Ms. Armstrong’s creaky footsteps. Numbers, with their constant order, would do the trick.

  I counted backward: five, four, three, two, one. Every star I drew had an odd number of points, though for some reason this didn’t bug me. It was like making a wish. When I finished, I leaned back in my chair, putting a punctuation mark at the end of my ritual.

  The desk wobbled figure eights whenever I shifted my weight. You could tell it had been a living thing at one point. I tried guessing its age by counting rings, the tree’s fingerprints. Too many students had scratched their current love interests into its planetary whirls. I thought about all those names drilled throughout time. Together, they added up to nothing.

  With my pen, I traced my thumb on the desk. After the right hand (which always came first), I would trace the left, making sure my fingers added up to ten. I could feel the thick stare of Ms. Armstrong, aimed in my direction.

  “Young lady,” Ms. Armstrong said. “All six feet on the floor.”

  This meant the chair’s feet as well as my own. I thought of a rumor I’d heard about a boy who had leaned his chair back too far and fell. He had split his noggin, watermelon style, after plunging to the rock-hard floor of the classroom next door.

  That’s when she noticed my drawings.

  “Who did this?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Did you deface school property?”

  I thought about that word, “de-face.” The desk didn’t have a face until I gave it one.

  “What is this about?” Her eyes swept across my felt-tipped cosmos.

  I didn’t have a clue.

  “Why?” she wanted to know.

  Who? What? Why? I strung their letters together like a chain: three, four, three.

  I had no answers. But I was smart enough to know that something was wrong with me. Until I figured out what it was, I’d keep quiet.

  Ms. Armstrong clucked her tongue. She gave me a note to take home. I folded it five times and stuffed it in my book bag.

  During lunch, I was left alone in the classroom. Ms. Armstrong made me wipe down all the desks with Windex—an activity that I converted into a new ritual. I would spray twice, wipe three times, and count again.

  In the back were three floor-to-ceiling bulletin boards. Ms. Armstrong had covered them in a giant National Geographic map of the Everglades. Our desks were shaped in a double U to invite class discussion. We had only one skinny window. It was smothered with cactus plants, as if looking there were dangerous.

  Outside the boys were playing tennis. Every so often, the ball whacked against the window, which Ms. Armstrong had covered with two strips of duct tape. A giant X. My teacher was a worrier too. She always wore a hat to shield off cancerous solar rays. The class made bets on when she’d take it off. She never took it off.

  Whack, whack. One, two. I got up and peeked out the window. For some reason, their idea of tennis involved a lot of running around the court. To them, it was baseball with rackets.

  I flicked the light switch a couple times. Something made me go around the room and touch all the corners. It was like being trapped in a box. The only way I could climb out was through counting. I eased myself into Ms. Armstrong’s chair, swiveling back and forth…one, two…one, two…making windshield-wiper noises. I was listening hard to the noise in my head.

  On her desk I found a photo of her middle-age son puffing on a trombone. Ms. Armstrong said he’d performed for the Queen of England. This didn’t mean much to our country. Forever he’d blow a note that nobody could hear. Forever was a long time. Infinity. The only number whose size and shape I couldn’t imagine.

  In back of the picture frame were two bolts. I touched them once, twice, then unscrewed them. The photo fluttered out. I noticed that one of the corners was torn, as if a giant roach had taken a bite out of it. I considered ripping the other corner, just to make it even. The thought grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go. I felt that familiar pressure building inside me. Before I realized it, my fingers were busy shredding. But the bottom half needed to match, so I tore it, too. When I tried to stuff it back inside the frame, it no longer fit, so I tore the entire thing to bits.

  I tucked the empty frame in Ms. Armstrong’s drawer. I opened my desk and dumped the shreds inside. As I slammed it shut, I noticed faint outlines of my stars and comets in number two pencil. Even after wiping the desk down, I couldn’t see myself in its shine, as the TV ads promised. Smudges clouded the surface. Rust bubbled down the desk’s legs like barnacles. You could cut yourself on them.

  The tennis-ball noise didn’t go away. It grew so loud, I looked out the window. And then I saw him. The weird boy, Thayer Pinsky, who carried an inhaler everywhere and never stopped coughing. Nobody sat next to him on the picnic bench. Not tha
t he seemed to care. He wore jeans so baggy their cuffs dragged on the floor. His dreadlocked hair was the color of sun-bleached grass. In his hand he clenched a fat Magic Marker. He was hunched over the bench, scribbling away.

  Like the rest of the freshmen in Miami Dade High, I avoided Thayer. I’d heard that he wasn’t a real student. He was a much older actor rehearsing the role for a cable movie. That would explain why he always brought a tape recorder to class. I was thinking so hard, trying to organize my brain, that I forgot to keep counting. The other players were flinging the ball, letting it bounce off the wall behind him.

  Sharon Lubbitz came and joined the boys. She could shoot a ball far. She had roofed a few that the janitor had to fetch down. Now she was beaming it at Thayer, the human target. He didn’t even look up.

  I leaned against the window, with its masking-tape X. The urge to peel off the tape burned inside my fingers. Before I could begin, I saw the weird kid snatch the ball out of the air. He didn’t toss it back to them, no matter how much they yelled.

  Maybe he was the boy who had tilted too far in his chair.

  The others waited on the court. Then Thayer pitched the ball sideways. The window above Ms. Armstrong’s desk exploded into jagged pieces. Glass spilled out of the frame, along with curly strips of masking tape. The ball was lost somewhere inside the classroom. I couldn’t help looking for it, despite the shards twinkling across the floor like cool, clear water.

  I watched Sharon and the boys run, scattering into corners. Thayer got up and walked away.

  It was 12:53 in the afternoon. Lunch was over, detention done. A hundred and seventy-seven minutes to go.

  Swimming

  I was drawing in the bathroom, counting stars on the wall and waiting for P.E. to end. Sketching was the best way I could control the noise in my head. For me, all numbers had rhythm. For example, I could have traveled to the moon on the number eight, which soared with the speed of a rocket. Zero drifted in space.

  Three was the pace of planet Earth, spinning on its axis. We lived three planets away from the sun, in three dimensions. Everywhere I looked, I saw threes. I kept count like a magic spell. I counted my footsteps, my breath, and even my heart thudding under my ribs. If I didn’t keep count, I worried that it would stop beating.

  In late September, we were finally beginning our swimming course. The school’s pool was Gatorade green, despite the gallons of chlorine they dumped in it. After dog paddling for an hour, my eyes reddened and burned. For the rest of the day, my hair would stink. I could almost picture the fumes, like quivery lines in cartoons.

  After P.E., I quickly changed in the nearest bathroom stall. I stared at the unflushed toilet filled with someone else’s pee. Smelling it made me feel like contaminated molecules were infiltrating my body. I scooted into another stall.

  The bathroom door slammed.

  A herd of jock girls poured in. I’d recognize their Nike-clad footsteps anywhere. It was Sharon and her clones—Jessica Conway and Colleen Hurst. They wore sneakers studded with metal spikes. Their hair was braided like rope. But these jocks turned heads, even with a mouthful of metal.

  I came out and washed my hands. I wanted to sniff them, just to make sure they were clean, but Sharon, the alpha female, was waiting. My fingers still felt germy. I needed to wash them again.

  She pushed me. “Get out of my face.”

  I wanted to say something, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I pumped some liquid soap. One, two, three. Scrubbed for three seconds. Rinsed until my skin tingled.

  “Move, you stupid freak.”

  She tapped my arm, making me lose count. This meant that I had to start over. One, two, three.

  Sharon reached for the soap. The lid clattered on the floor and sloshed pink ooze. Now what?

  “I said move.” Sharon shoved me aside. She turned the faucet on full blast.

  I wanted to yank her braid and twist it around her throat and tell her to stop acting like a mutant. She didn’t know what it was like, having to perform these stupid rituals. My hands tingled.

  “Hey, Fin,” said Sharon. “If you didn’t wear those ghetto hoop earrings, you wouldn’t look like a chonga from Hialeah.”

  If anyone looked like a “chonga,” a girl who rolled with the thugs at Dolphin Mall, it was Sharon, who cinched the waistband of her miniskirts to make them even shorter. One minute, hoop earrings dangled from every girl’s earlobes in first period. Now they belonged in the same category as bangle bracelets or claw-length fingernails. I couldn’t keep up with the rules. They always changed.

  Sharon kept talking. “No guy is ever going to ask you out.”

  Before we moved here last year, when my family lived in Vermont, I had what Mama called male buddies. I had played with all the boys in kindergarten, my brief moment of popularity. They invited me to come over and battle Sega games like the Mean Bean-Steaming Machine and Sonic the Hedgehog. The only game the girls wanted to play was House. It seemed like a big waste of time. I’d join them only if they’d let me be the family dog. Out of all the things you could imagine, I couldn’t believe they’d pretend to be grown-ups.

  Back in the ladies’ room, Sharon was telling me to pluck my eyebrows.

  “Yeah, her eyebrows are major,” said Jessica.

  They talked about me in the third person, like I wasn’t even there.

  “Do you think she cuts her own hair?” said Sharon. “Or does her mommy cut it for her?”

  “She’s probably had the same hairstyle since first grade,” Jessica added.

  It was true. My dirty blond hair was geometric, as if a scissors-wielding maniac had plopped a salad bowl on my head and snipped around it. I was wearing my stupid black denim skirt and a Members Only jacket. At my old school, nobody would’ve cared. Here, girls got suspended for wearing low-rider jeans and showing off their belly buttons.

  “Her skin is so pale. You can, like, see the veins in her wrists and everything,” Sharon said.

  I stared at the pink ooze on the floor. I wanted to scream all the craziness out of me. Instead, I counted to three and pushed past the girls. As I slammed the door, I could still hear them laughing.

  Technicolor Apocalypse

  My mother didn’t teach me to count. She didn’t zip flash cards in front of my nose. I taught myself what I needed to know: Thirty days has September, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

  Mama taught me to draw. She bought number two pencils and Mr. Sketch Markers that smelled of licorice. I practiced on paper bags: F for Frances. I for Isabelle. N for Nash.

  I was named after Mama. Fin is her nickname for me. It means the end.

  “The end of what?” I’d ask.

  “Of children,” she’d say. “I told your father, I’m not having a baby. I’m having a hamster.” This was her idea of a joke.

  By the time I was born, my parents had traded their high school rings for wedding bands. Dad wanted to christen me Noël since I was born on Christmas Eve. Mama toted me home from the hospital in a fur-lined stocking. That night it snowed. When we lived in Vermont, it used to snow all the time. That was before Dad dragged us to Miami and everything changed.

  Mama said I was a surprise. I knew exactly what she meant. I had her washed-out blue eyes but I didn’t see things like she did. I had her mouth, which required brute force to keep shut, but we spoke a different language.

  Mama said, “At least you got your father’s giraffe eyelashes.”

  Did giraffes have eyelashes?

  Dad used to joke, “Would you rather have a million dollars or Fin’s head full of pennies?”

  I couldn’t even count that high.

  Mama said he was full of it. She called me her magnum opus.

  “Promise this,” she whispered. “Don’t grow.”

  I must have grown. Even Mama’s high school yearbook photo looked nothing like me now. Signatures circled the margins of the book like closed captions.

  David is the class clip. In physics, he’s a pip.


  I studied the photo of David, a sweaty boy with a military crew cut. He might’ve been thinking, “Try to make me show my teeth.”

  “Who’s that, Mama? Your boyfriend?”

  “Your father,” she said.

  During the warm, yellow summers, Dad took me for walks along Lake Champlain. I would dawdle along, my bare feet slapping the shore, a moon terrain of misplaced junk.

  “Look,” I told him. “Look, look.” Dad would look at whatever I excavated from the dirt—rusty soda tabs, a necklace of fishing lures with realistic eyes.

  One afternoon, I stepped on a hornet’s nest. Dad slapped mud on the swelling.

  “That’s what Indians do,” he told me.

  I hiccupped and sobbed and finally believed him.

  Dad carried me home on his shoulders. When we ducked through the door, Mama said the hornet was his fault. After that, we didn’t go for walks anymore.

  Before we moved to Miami, I’d always heard a voice in my head ordering me to listen. The rules changed constantly. Once, I spent an entire day stepping over cracks. Another time, the voice told me to enter every room with my right foot forward. If I forgot and used my unlucky left, I started over. When I heard my parents arguing, I tapped the light switch on and off to keep us safe.

  I was always in danger of doing something wrong.

  My Instinctive Reality