Speak Read online

  “Looks good, though,” I say. “It’s kind of spooky. Not creepy, but unexpected.” I hand back the sketchbook.

  Ivy pokes her pencil into her bun. “Good. That’s what I’m trying for. That turkey-bone thing you did was creepy, too. Creepy in a good way, good creepy. It’s been months and I’m still thinking about it.”

  What am I supposed to say now? I bite my lip, then release it. I pull a roll of Life Savers from my pocket. “Want a piece?” She takes one, I take three, and we suck in silence for a moment. “How’s the tree coming?” she asks.

  I groan. “Stinks. It was a mistake to sign up for art. I just couldn’t see myself taking wood shop.”

  “You’re better than you think you are,” Ivy says. She opens to an empty page in the sketchbook. “I don’t know why you keep using a linoleum block. If I were you, I’d just let it out, draw. Here—try a tree.”

  We sit there trading pencils. I draw a trunk, Ivy adds a branch, I extend the branch, but it is too long and spindly. I start to erase it, but Ivy stops me. “It’s fine the way it is, it just needs some leaves. Layer the leaves and make them slightly different sizes and it will look great. You have a great start there.”

  She’s right.

  GENETICS

  The last unit of the year in biology is genetics. It’s impossible to listen to Ms. Keen. Her voice sounds like a cold engine that won’t turn over. The lecture starts with some priest named Greg who studied vegetables, and ends up with an argument about blue eyes. I think I missed something—how did we leap from veggies to eye color? I’ll copy David’s notes.

  I flip ahead in the textbook. There’s an interesting chapter about acid rain. Nothing about sex. We aren’t scheduled to learn about that until eleventh grade.

  David draws a chart in his notebook. I snap my pencil point and walk to the front of the room to sharpen it. I figure the walk will do me good. Ms. Keen sputters on. We get half our genes from our mother and half from our father. I thought my jeans came from Effert’s. Ha-ha, biology joke.

  Mom says I take after Dad’s side of the family. They’re mostly cops and insurance salesmen who bet on football games and smoke disgusting cigars. Dad says I take after Mom’s side of the family. They’re farmers who grow rocks and poison ivy. They don’t say much, visit dentists, or read.

  When I was a little kid, I used to pretend I was a princess who had been adopted when my kingdom was overrun by bad guys. Any day my real parents, Mr. King and Mrs. Queen, would send the royal limo to pick me up. I just about had a seven-year-old heart attack when my dad took a limo to the airport the first time. I thought they had really come to take me away and I didn’t want to go. Dad took taxis after that.

  I look out the window. No limos. No chariots or carriages. Now, when I really want to leave, no one will give me a ride.

  I sketch a willow tree drooping into the water. I won’t show it to Mr. Freeman. This one is for my closet. I’ve been taping some of my drawings on the walls. Any more classes as boring as this one and I’ll be ready to move back in there full-time. My leaves are good, natural. The trick is to make them different sizes, and then crowd them one on top of another. Ivy was right.

  Ms. Keen writes “Dominant/Recessive” on the board. I look at David’s notes. He’s drawing a family tree. David got his hair gene from his dad and his eye gene from his mom. I draw a family tree. A family stump. There aren’t that many of us. I can barely remember their names. Uncle Jim, Uncle Thomas, Aunt Mary, Aunt Kathy—there’s another aunt, she is very recessive. She recessed herself all the way to Peru. I think I have her eyes. I got my “I don’t want to know about it” gene from my dad and my “I’ll think about it tomorrow” gene from my mom.

  Ms. Keen says we’ll have a quiz the next day. I wish I had paid attention during class. I wish I were adopted. I wish David would quit sighing when I ask to copy his notes.

  TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL

  1. You will use algebra in your adult lives.

  2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away.

  3. Students must stay on campus for lunch.

  4. The new textbooks will arrive any day now.

  5. Colleges care about more than your SAT scores.

  6. We are enforcing the dress code.

  7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon.

  8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals.

  9. There is nothing wrong with summer school.

  10. We want to hear what you have to say.

  MY LIFE AS A SPY

  Rachel/Rachelle has lost her mind. She has flipped. She went to the movies with Andy Beast and her exchange friends and now she follows after him, panting like a bichon frise. He wears her buddy Greta–Ingrid draped around his neck like a white scarf. When he spits, I bet Rachel/Rachelle catches it in a cup and saves it.

  Rachel/Rachelle and some other twit natter about the movie date before Mr. Stetman starts class. I want to puke. Rachel/Rachelle is just “Andythis” and “Andythat.” Could she be more obvious? I close my ears to her stupid asthmatic laugh and work on the homework that was due yesterday.

  It is usually easy to do homework in class because Mr. Stetman’s voice creates a gentle, white-noise sound barrier. I can’t do it today, I can’t escape the arguments circling my head. Why worry about Rachel/Rachelle? (He’ll hurt her.) Had she done a single decent thing for me the whole year? (She was my best friend through middle school, that counts for something.) No, she’s a witch and a traitor. (She didn’t see what happened.) Let her lust after the Beast; I hope he breaks her heart. (What if he breaks something else?)

  When class is over, I slide into the middle of the pack pushing out the door before Mr. Stetman can bust me for the homework. Rachel/Rachelle shoves past me to where Greta–Ingrid and a short kid from Belgium are waiting. I tail them, always keeping two bodies between us like the detectives on television. They’re on their way to the foreign-language wing. That’s no surprise. The foreign kids are always there, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they’ll choke to death on too much American.

  Andy Beast swoops over their heads, folds his wings, and sets himself between the girls as they start up the stairs. He tries to kiss Greta–Ingrid’s cheek, but she turns away. He kisses Rachel/Rachelle’s cheek and she giggles. He does not kiss the cheek of the short Belgian. The Belgian and the Swede wave “ciao” at the office of the Foreign Language Department. Rumor has it that there is an espresso maker in there.

  The friendly momentum keeps Rachel/Rachelle and Andy walking all the way to the end of the hall. I face a corner and pretend to study algebra. I figure that’s enough to make me unrecognizable. They sit on the floor, Rachel/Rachelle in a full lotus. Andy steals Rachel/Rachelle’s notebook. She whines like a baby and throws herself across his lap to get it back. I shiver with goose bumps. He tosses the notebook from one hand to the other, always keeping it just out of her reach. Then he says something to her. I can’t hear it. The hall sounds like a packed football stadium. His lips move poison and she smiles and then she kisses him wet. Not a Girl Scout kiss. He gives her the notebook. His lips move. Lava spills out my ears. She is not any part of a pretend Rachelle-chick. I can only see third-grade Rachel who liked barbecue potato chips and who braided pink embroidery thread into my hair that I wore for months until my mom made me cut it out. I rest my forehead against the prickly stucco.

  THIN ATMOSPHERE

  The best place to figure this out is my closet, my throne room, my foster home. I want a shower. Maybe I should tell Greta–Ingrid. (My Swedish isn’t good enough.) I could talk to Rachel. (Yeah, right.) I could say I’d heard bad things about Andy. (It would only make him more attractive.) I could maybe tell her what happened. (As if she’d listen. What if she told Andy? What would he do?)

  There isn’t much room for pacing. I take two steps, turn, two steps back. I bang my shin against the chair. Stupid room. What a dumb idea,
sitting in a closet like this. I flop in the chair. It whooshes out old janitor smells—feet, beef jerky, shirts left in the washer too long. The turkey-bone sculpture gives off a faint rotting odor. Three baby-food jars of potpourri don’t make a dent in the stink. Maybe there’s a dead rat decomposing in the wall, right near the hot-air vent.

  Maya Angelou watches me, two fingers on the side of her face. It is an intelligent pose. Maya wants me to tell Rachel.

  I take off my sweatshirt. My T-shirt sticks to me. They still have the heat running full-blast even though it’s warm enough to crack open the windows. That’s what I need, a window. As much as I complain about winter, cold air is easier to breathe, slipping like silver mercury down my lungs and out again. April is humid, with slush evaporating or rain drizzling. A warm, moldy washcloth of a month.

  The edges of my pictures curl in the damp. There has been some progress in this whole tree project, I guess. Like Picasso, I’ve gone through different phases. There’s the Confused Period, when I wasn’t sure what the assignment really was. The Spaz Period, when I couldn’t draw a tree to save my life. The Dead Period, when all my trees looked like they had been through a forest fire or a blight. I’m getting better. Don’t know what to call this phase yet. All these drawings make the closet seem smaller. Maybe I should bribe a janitor to haul all this stuff to my house, make my bedroom more like this, more like home.

  Maya taps me on the shoulder. I’m not listening. I know I know, I don’t want to hear it. I need to do something about Rachel, something for her. Maya tells me without saying anything. I stall. Rachel will hate me. (She already hates me.) She won’t listen. (I have to try.) I groan and rip out a piece of notebook paper. I write her a note, a left-handed note, so she won’t know it’s from me.

  “Andy Evans will use you. He is not what he pretends to be. I heard he attacked a ninth-grader. Be very, very careful. A Friend. P.S. Tell Greta–Ingrid, too.”

  I didn’t want the Swedish supermodel on my conscience either.

  GROWING PAINS

  Mr. Freeman is a jerk. Instead of leaving me alone to “find my muse” (a real quote, I swear), he lands on the stool next to me and starts criticizing. What is wrong with my tree? He overflows with words describing how bad it sucks. It’s stiff, unnatural, it doesn’t flow. It is an insult to trees everywhere.

  I agree. My tree is hopeless. It isn’t art; it’s an excuse not to take sewing class. I don’t belong in Mr. Freeman’s room any more than I belong in the Marthas or in my little-girl pink bedroom. This is where the real artists belong, like Ivy. I carry the linoleum block to the garbage can and throw it in hard enough to make everyone look at me. Ivy frowns through her wire sculpture. I sit back down and lay my head on the table. Mr. Freeman retrieves the block from the garbage. He brings back the Kleenex box, too. How could he tell I was crying?

  Mr. Freeman: “You are getting better at this, but it’s not good enough. This looks like a tree, but it is an average, ordinary, everyday, boring tree. Breathe life into it. Make it bend—trees are flexible, so they don’t snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch—perfect trees don’t exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.”

  He has this ice-cream voice like a kindergarten teacher. If he thinks I can do it, then I’ll try one more time. My fingers tip-tip over to the linoleum knife. Mr. Freeman pats my shoulder once, then turns to make someone else miserable. I wait until he isn’t watching, then try to carve life into my flat linoleum square.

  Maybe I could carve off all the linoleum and call it “Empty Block.” If a famous person did that, it would probably be really popular and sell for a fortune. If I do it, I’ll flunk. “Be the tree.” What kind of advice is that? Mr. Freeman has been hanging out with too many New Age weirdos. I was a tree in the second-grade play because I made a bad sheep. I stood there with my arms outstretched like branches and my head drooping in the breeze. It gave me sore arms. I doubt trees are ever told to “be the screwed-up ninth-grader.”

  GAG ORDER

  David Petrakis’s lawyer had a meeting with Mr. Neck and some kind of teacher lawyer. Guess who won. I bet David could skip class the rest of the year if he wanted and still get an A. Which he would never do. But you better believe that whenever David raises his hand, Mr. Neck lets him talk as much as he wants. David, quiet David, is full of long, drawn-out, rambling opinions about social studies. The rest of the class is grateful. We bow down to the Almighty David, Who Keeps the Neck Off Our Backs.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Neck still gives tests, and most of us fail them. Mr. Neck makes an announcement: anyone who is flunking can write an extra-credit report on a Cultural Influence at the Turn of the Century. (He skipped the Industrial Revolution so he could drag our class past the year 1900.) He does not want all of us in summer school.

  I don’t want to see him in summer school either. I write about the suffragettes. Before the suffragettes came along, women were treated like dogs.

  • Women could not vote

  • Women could not own property

  • Women were not allowed in many schools

  They were dolls, with no thoughts, or opinions, or voices of their own. Then the suffragettes marched in, full of loud, in-your-face ideas. They got arrested and thrown in jail, but nothing shut them up. They fought and fought until they earned the rights they should have had all along.

  I write the best report ever. Anything I copy from a book, I put in quotes and footnotes (feetnote?). I use books, magazine articles, and a videotape. I think about looking for an old suffragette in a nursing home, but they are probably all dead.

  I even hand it in on time. Mr. Neck scowls. He looks down on me and says, “To get credit for the report, you have to deliver it orally. Tomorrow. At the beginning of class.”

  Me:

  NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

  There is no way I’m reading my suffragette report in front of the class. That wasn’t part of the original assignment. Mr. Neck changed it at the very last second because he wants to flunk me or hates me or something. But I’ve written a really good report and I’m not going to let an idiot teacher jerk me around like this. I ask David Petrakis for advice. We come up with a Plan.

  I get to class early, when Mr. Neck is still in the lounge. I write what I need to on the board and cover the words with a suffragette protest sign. My box from the copy shop is on the floor. Mr. Neck walks in. He grumbles that I can go first. I stand suffragette tall and calm. It is a lie. My insides feel like I’m caught in a tornado. My toes curl inside my sneakers, trying to grip the floor so I won’t get sucked out the window.

  Mr. Neck nods at me. I pick up my report as if I’m going to read it out loud. I stand there, papers trembling as if a breeze is blowing through the closed door. I turn around and rip my poster off the blackboard.

  THE SUFFRAGETTES FOUGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO SPEAK. THEY WERE ATTACKED, ARRESTED, AND THROWN IN JAIL FOR DARING TO DO WHAT THEY WANTED. LIKE THEY WERE, I AM WILLING TO STAND UP FOR WHAT I BELIEVE. NO ONE SHOULD BE FORCED TO GIVE SPEECHES. I CHOOSE TO STAY SILENT.

  The class reads slowly, some of them moving their lips. Mr. Neck turns around to see what everyone is staring at. I nod at David. He joins me at the front of the room and I hand him my box.

  David: “Melinda has to deliver her report to the class as part of the assignment. She made copies everyone can read.”

  He passes out the copies. They cost me $6.72 at the office-supply store. I was going to make a cover page and color it, but I haven’t gotten much allowance recently, so I just put the title at the top of the first page.

  My plan is to stand in front of the class for the five minutes I was given for my presentation. The suffragettes must have planned out and timed their protests, too. Mr. Neck has other plans. He gives me a D and escorts me to the authorities. I forgot about how the suffragettes were hauled off to jail. Duh. I go on a tour of the guidance counselor’s office, Principal Principal’s, and wind up back in MISS. I am back to being a Discipline Problem ag
ain.

  I need a lawyer. I showed up every day this semester, sat my butt in every class, did some homework, and didn’t cheat on tests. I still get slammed in MISS. There is no way they can punish me for not speaking. It isn’t fair. What do they know about me? What do they know about the inside of my head? Flashes of lightning, children crying. Caught in an avalanche, pinned by worry, squirming under the weight of doubt, guilt. Fear.

  The walls in MISS are still white. Andy Beast isn’t here. Thank God for small favors. A boy with lime-colored hair who looks like he’s channeling for an alien species dozes; two Goths in black velvet dresses and artfully torn pantyhose trade Mona Lisa smiles. They cut school to stand in line for killer concert tickets. MISS is a small price to pay for Row 10, seats 21 and 22.