Very in Pieces Read online

  “Ms. Staples, I take issue with this whole unit.” It is Hunter’s voice that breaks into my reverie. “Separating the women out like this is a form of ghettoization.”

  “Ah, yes!” Ms. Staples says. “A common argument. Now here’s my retort: if we didn’t celebrate them separately, they might not get included at all.”

  “Okay, but why these particular women? I mean, like, Sylvia Plath, she’s most famous for killing herself. And Imogene Woodruff. I know she’s like our local pride or whatever, but I just don’t think she’s worth all the fuss.” Hunter sucks on the end of his pen for a moment. “I mean, she’s an okay poet, but she’s really more famous for who she slept with. She couldn’t even write a pastoral without talking about taking off her clothes.”

  Britta glances at me sideways and makes a frowning, uncomfortable face.

  It is Dominic, though, who says something: “Watch yourself.”

  Hunter smirks. “I mean, no offense, Very, but when someone puts themselves out there, they open themselves up to criticism.”

  It’s not like I go around harshing on their grandmothers’ cookies or knitting or whatever a typical grandma does. Sure, she had affairs, and it isn’t like that’s something I would recommend as a general course of action, but people do it all the time. At least she’s honest about it. “Whatever,” I say. I want it to come out icy, but I just sound cowed.

  “So far you’ve only criticized the author, not the poem,” Dominic says. “You still haven’t offered up any reason why we shouldn’t be studying her work.”

  “Well, this one, for instance, it’s all Robert Frost–y. Like all we do in New Hampshire is sit outside and enjoy nature, don’t you think?”

  Which is hilarious because “nature” and “enjoy” aren’t really two things Nonnie puts together. We went out and caught fireflies; that was true. Ramona never punched enough holes in the lid of her jar, so eager to get collecting, and typically hers all died by the morning.

  Serena has her desk pressed right up against Hunter’s, and his arm is resting on the back of her chair. Her legs are pulled up into her desk, and she curls over it, sketching. She almost never speaks in classes. But today she unwinds herself and says, “I like her poetry. I like the way it moves over you like a river. You don’t always know where you’re going, but it’s good to be carried along.”

  Hunter smirks, but Serena gives me a small smile before she coils herself back up, like a snail retreating into its shell.

  v.

  As Mr. Tompkins wrote in his letter to Essex College, “The limits of the Essex High math program have been reached by Very. In fact, I used L’Hopital’s rule because her mathematical limits are at this point indeterminate.” Despite that awful pun, I still got into the college’s Advanced Calculus class that meets right smack-dab in the middle of our day.

  I jostle my bag in the hopes of shaking out my car keys, which always seem to find the wasteland in the bottom of the pocket, when someone falls into stride with me. “You don’t seem like the playing-hooky type.” Dominic. Fabulous. Absolutely, precisely what I do not need.

  “I’m not playing hooky. I’ve got a class up at the college.”

  “That’s right. I’d heard you were some sort of prodigy.”

  “Not exactly.” A prodigy is a child who is able to perform at the level of a highly trained adult. “Gifted is more precise.”

  “Is that modesty?”

  “It’s accuracy.”

  He grins his wolf grin.

  My hands close around my car keys and I click on the fob to unlock the door.

  “Give me a ride, then,” he says.

  “Where?”

  “To campus.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I’ve got class, too.”

  “In what? Badass posturing?”

  “Oh, she wounds me,” he says, and places his hand over his heart. “I’m enough of a badass that I was the only one who stuck up for you in class. Everyone else was going to let that prick stomp all over your grandmother’s reputation. Are you going to thank me?”

  Prick. That’s a good slang word. Sounds just like what it is.

  “Maybe I didn’t need you to stick up for me. And it wasn’t me, by the way. It was my grandmother you were defending, and Serena was the one who actually said something nice about her poetry.”

  “A thank-you would be nice either way.”

  “Thank you.” I want to get in my car, but he’s standing between me and my door. “I’m going to be late.”

  “So drive me.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be an accessory to truancy.”

  “It’s your first time,” he says, still grinning. His right canine overlaps the tooth next to it just a little bit. “You’ll get off with a wrist slap.” I start to protest and he leans back against my car. “I’ll tell them I forced you to do it.”

  “How did you force me?”

  He cocks his head to the side and examines me. “How?” he repeats.

  “If we’re going to go into this criminal partnership, I want to know what my alibi is going to be.”

  “I’ll say I told you that my mother teaches at the college and I just got a call that she’s fall-down drunk in front of the class.”

  “Implausible.”

  “There’s always the classic carjacking. How about we say that I pulled a knife on you? Oh! Or that I smacked you upside the head. Look, you’re already getting a bruise!”

  I rub the sore spot on the side of my head and wince. “You’d wind up in prison for that.”

  “Would you miss me?”

  This game is getting old. “I really do need to be going.”

  He doesn’t move. “I’m stubborn. Truculent, even.”

  I raise my eyebrows. How does he know the word that tripped me up on the SATs? Coincidence, I decide. “Fine,” I say, because I’m late and it’s already a big enough deal that there’s a high school student in this math class. Every single head turns when I walk in the door, so I try to be early. “Let’s go.”

  He hops up and around to the other side of the car. “I knew you’d let me in. You’re a good egg, Very.”

  “A good egg? What does that even mean?”

  “You’re nice. You like to help people. We’re alike in that way.”

  I slip the key into the ignition. His sweet pot smell is filling my car and I wonder if he’s high right now. But that would mean he’d also been high during English class. “I don’t think we’re very much alike at all,” I say, backing out of the parking place.

  He reaches for the handle that reclines the seat and lets himself drop way back. “But we are, Very. You help people by being friendly and joining clubs and doing community service. I help people forget their problems.”

  I’d laugh if I weren’t so annoyed. And shocked that he’s more or less admitted that the rumors are true: Dominic Meyers is a small-time drug dealer. “What do you know about my extracurriculars?”

  “You almost make it sound dirty, Very.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Athlete. Student council. Yadda yadda.”

  Yadda yadda. That about sums me up in most people’s minds. Very Sayles-Woodruff doing the things she needs to do to round out her application to Stanford or MIT or wherever. And I will swear to you up and down that I don’t do the things I do to fluff up my apps. But the deeper, darker, coalish center of me wonders if people are right. I’m on the Community Service Committee (president, actually) and in the peer counseling group, not that anyone ever comes to us for counseling. I swim in the winter and play doubles tennis with Britta in the spring. And the math team, of course, not that I’d ever bring that up to Dominic Meyers.

  “How do you know all this about me anyway? You seem too cool to care.” I almost said too cool for school, which would have been on par with, say, crashing the car in terms of embarrassing things to do.

  “I watch. I observe. Like today in English class. I noticed that you were deeply uncomfor
table—”

  “Because you were staring at me.”

  “Uncomfortable once we got the poetry packet. You flipped right through it and then your whole body just relaxed. You were looking for your grandmother’s poems, right?”

  Instead of answering, I spray the windshield washer fluid on the glass and let the wipers sluice it away.

  “And after I read, you smiled this minuscule hint of a smile. And then Hunter started being a dick and—”

  “Why do you even care?”

  He blinks his green eyes and looks offended. “I’m just making conversation.”

  “Why?” I demand.

  He laughs. His head tilts back and the sun catches his face in a way that almost makes his pale skin look both translucent and angelic: a jellyfish angel. “You’re funny, Very,” he says. “I never would have guessed you were so funny.”

  I’m not sure what he found so amusing. “Whatever,” I say. “Thanks.”

  It’s a straight shot to the college now. Right through town and then there’s the campus. I pull into the lot closest to the math building. He leans closer to me. “That’s going to be a hell of a bruise.”

  I reach up and graze the spot on my face where the soccer boy’s head hit. “You should see the other guy.”

  “Good one. Classic.”

  “What are you even going to do here, anyway?”

  “It’s not where we are, Very. It’s where we aren’t.”

  “How profound,” I say, reaching around for my bag on the backseat. “Any more platitudes you want to spill?”

  He puts his hand on my forearm. His palms are smooth where Christian’s are rough. “I think you take things for granted.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I don’t mean like you’re entitled or anything. I mean that things are the way they are and they’re pretty good for you, so you don’t question it. But things could be different. That’s all I’m saying.”

  There are always other interpretations.

  I tug my arm away, bumping him with my bag.

  I shove the door open and step out into the hot sun, doubly warm after the air-conditioning in the car. I hear him shut his door and I turn to face him. “I’ll talk to you later, Very.” His repetition of my name is getting annoying.

  “Sure, okay,” I reply. Sure, okay? He grins again and lopes off into the parking lot, and I am left with the unshakable feeling that Dominic Meyers is not through with me. What’s worse: I’m pretty sure I don’t want him to be.

  three

  i.

  THREE DAYS LATER MY bruise is purple and tinged with blue. Nonnie says it looks like a mottled plum. I say it looks like hell. A hell of a bruise. I’ve figured out that if I part my hair more severely to the right it hangs down and mostly covers it, or at least puts it into shadow. My head still rings, which convinces Britta that I have a concussion, so she makes me promise to go see the nurse twice a day to get checked for continuing symptoms—sleepiness, headache, irritability, and a bunch of other things that seem fairly common among the general high school population.

  Christian takes me for my first check before chemistry class, and then we head toward Mr. Tompkins’s room. “If you still have the bruise for Halloween,” he says, “You could be Gorbachev and I could be Ronald Reagan.”

  “I think Gorbachev’s mark was more on his forehead, wasn’t it?”

  “And Reagan was white,” Christian says with a shrug. “I just want to do something clever. Something unusual. Guys are always so lame about it, and girls just use it to be trampy.”

  “I could be sexy Gorbachev,” I tell him.

  “That’s an image I really don’t need in my head.”

  He holds the door to the classroom open for me. We share a lab table in the first row. Nurse’s orders that I sit up front in all my classes, not like I would’ve been sitting in the back anyway.

  Mr. Tompkins is writing a chemical equation on the board when we arrive. He wears khaki pants and a button-down shirt with a pink tie. He seems to have cut himself shaving—he has a nick right on his jawline, still red with blood. The smile he gives me when I come into the room is a mix of hope and guilt, like maybe he’s realized it was a bad idea to convince me to take this AP chem class. “How’s the head?” he asks.

  “Prognosis is good,” I tell him.

  “I think she’s holding back this concussion by force of will,” Christian adds.

  Mr. Tompkins slides his dry-erase pen into one of the loops on a tray that he wears, no joke, like a holster on his hip. Total nerd squad. But Mr. Tompkins is not a geek. He’s young and handsome in a sort of hipstery way—heavy-framed glasses, grandpa cardigans—and more than one girl has professed her undying love for him on the stalls of the second-floor bathroom.

  Adam Millstein comes in and nods at both of us. He’s on the hockey team with Christian, but they don’t really hang out much, and now that Adam has maybe given me a concussion, I think he’s too embarrassed to even talk to Christian.

  Once class starts, some of the guys get Mr. Tompkins off-topic by asking about relativity and space travel and if you went out in a spaceship at the speed of light, when you came back, would anyone else even still be alive?

  One time Ramona declared that she was on a solo space mission and we had to walk like we were in spacesuits, fighting zero gravity.

  “If it’s a solo space mission, then I wouldn’t be there,” I told her.

  She looked at me strangely. “Well of course you’d be there.”

  We walked side by side. I’m sure we looked more like lumbering giants than weightless explorers. Mom saw us out on the lawn and she and Dad came out to the patio to watch. Mom held a hand up to shield her eyes. We floated over to them.

  “We’re on the moon,” I told her.

  “Mercury’s moon,” Ramona added.

  “Mercury doesn’t have a moon,” I corrected.

  “Jupiter’s moon,” she said, unfazed.

  “I hear it’s nice there this time of year,” Mom said.

  “Oh it is!” Ramona agreed.

  “Well then, I just may have to get in my rocket and join you. Coming, dear?” she asked Dad.

  “Am I properly dressed?” Dad pointed at his bare feet.

  “Oh, the moons of Jupiter are very casual,” Mom replied.

  They buzzed around the lawn, and then, throwing open the door of the imaginary spaceship, she called out, “Would you look at that view!”

  They began to spacewalk with us. It was Ramona who got the giggles first. Little titters.

  “Astronauts don’t laugh,” Mom told her, straight-faced. “This is serious work.”

  “It is,” Ramona agreed, and pressed her lips together.

  It was no use, though. The titters boiled up in her again, and the next thing we knew, the four of us were on the ground, holding our stomachs. Dad rolled over to Mom and grabbed her in his arms so they were tumbling together across the lawn. “We have to rescue her!” Ramona called out. We leaped to our feet and ran over to them, trying to loosen Dad’s arms from around her waist, but his arms were long, and we were ticklish. He embraced Mom with one arm while tickling each of us in turn until we all collapsed tangled together like mice in a nest.

  We came inside and Nonnie had gone to the fish market and brought home lobster and steamers because “what’s the point of living in New England if you don’t get fresh seafood?” She got oysters, too, and we watched as she shucked them, jamming the knife between the lips of the shell and prying them open. Ramona’s eyes grew wide. “Doesn’t that hurt them?”

  “Yes,” Nonnie said. “But we’re going to eat them, which will hurt them even more.”

  “And maybe we’ll find a pearl,” Mom said.

  Nonnie handed us each a shell. We slurped the oyster out of it; I don’t think I even chewed before swallowing the slippery mollusk. Ramona and I exchanged a glance as if deciding together what we thought. The flavor was salty and smooth and even a bit sweet. “I think I l
ike it,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Ramona agreed.

  “Good,” Nonnie said. “I never trusted anyone who refused to eat an oyster.”

  Looking back I wonder if she was teasing us somehow. Still, it was such a lovely day. We ate the lobsters out on the patio and Mom said it always felt like you should be hosed down after lobster, so Dad pulled out the hose and chased her all around. Then he set up the sprinkler, and Ramona and I ran through it just in the clothes we were wearing.

  I should have collected these moments—pinned them down so they wouldn’t slip away like nymphs disappearing back into the forest. But maybe Nonnie is right and you can’t catch the light of fireflies in jars.

  ii.

  Why do you divide sin by tan?

  Just cos.

  We spend our first math team practice of the year telling math jokes. That’s mine.

  Ramona takes the bus home and I don’t see her until I pull my car up the driveway. She’s crouched on a large rock in a half circle of trees. It’s like she is that space explorer again, investigating the surface of a moon. I practically bound from the car and start lumbering toward her. “It’s very nice on Jupiter’s moon this time of year, wouldn’t you say?”

  She looks up, frowning. “What are you talking about?”

  “Remember the day with the space walking?”

  She shakes her head. I guess maybe to her all of the imaginary games ran together.

  “Nonnie got us lobsters and oysters,” I prompt.

  “I don’t remember.” She looks into the trees. Her profile seems etched against the sky. Her narrow nose and her pouting lips are both pronounced. She’s grown so thin it’s like she isn’t even there. The dark circles under her eyes are the only thing about her with any gravity.

  “You really don’t remember the oysters? We ate raw oysters for the first time.” She has to remember, doesn’t she? It had been her game, her idea.

  “I just don’t, okay?”

  Her tone is as sharp as a January icicle, so I say, “Okay,” and back away. Ramona grabs a low limb of an oak tree and begins hauling herself up and away from me.

  Inside the house, I cross through our sunken living room and head for the library. It’s a dark room, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on every wall and an old leather chair next to an ashtray stand.