Inferno Page 3

  I consider it. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. “Maybe. But I don’t think most people would really think about it that much. I mean, look at the flyers you handed out.”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, what did they accomplish?”

  Parker’s lips part in a slow, wide grin. “You’re here.”

  “Yeah, but...”

  She leans toward me, her voice low and intense. “That’s how change happens, Dante. One person at a time.”

  A strange tingle runs down my spine. I swallow and try to stay cool. “I guess.” Her eyes hold mine and I give in. “Okay. Okay. It’d be pretty cool.”

  Parker whoops and holds up a hand for a high five. “I knew you’d be game.”

  “Me? I said it’d be cool; I didn’t say I’d do it.”

  She shrugs like she doesn’t much care either way.

  The wooden sign looks very solid and heavy. It is maybe four feet long and two feet high, and it sits low to the ground in the middle of a bunch of shrubs and flowers.

  “It’d weigh a ton,” I say. “I don’t think it’d even fit in your car.”

  Parker rolls down her window, lights a cigarette, inhales and blows the smoke outside. She keeps her arm hanging out the window, and I watch the smoke curl upward into the still air. “That’s okay. I’ve got a couple of other friends who will help.”

  “Oh. Well, good.” I feel a bit hurt, which is stupid, but I’m not going to risk getting a criminal record just for a few laughs.

  She pushes her white-blond hair away from her face and tucks it behind her ear. “I wish you were coming too. I’m sick of being the only girl.”

  “Maybe another time,” I say. It sounds lame and we both know it.

  Parker drops me a block from my house, right around the time I usually get home from school. I check for messages, in case someone has called to tell my parents I cut class, but there are none.

  Which is good, because Mom would flip.

  I head up to my room and turn on my computer. Beth hasn’t sent me any messages. It’s been three months; I’m crazy to think she still might. I log on to Facebook, click on Beth’s profile and stare at her picture on the screen. Two thousand miles away, she must be sitting at her computer too. She changed her status just a few minutes ago. Now it reads Beth loves her new school.

  I stare at her picture on the screen. It’s an old photo; one I know well. I took it last summer. She’s standing at the end of my driveway, wearing a tank top, running shorts and sneakers. She’s laughing—openmouthed, head thrown back. Her teeth are Hollywood white, her slight overbite pushing her upper lip forward, her eyes dark slits, a long dimple curving in her left cheek.

  I wonder if it means anything at all that she’s still using a photograph I took. Probably not. I write a long message to her, telling her all about how Mom is driving me crazy, and about my haircut, and about Mr. Lawson and Parker. I tell her how much I still miss her and how I think about her every single day. Then I delete the whole thing before I’m tempted to hit Send.

  Clearly, Beth has already moved on. I wish I could.

  “How was school?” Mom asks at dinnertime. “Good day?”

  I hate it when people ask questions like that—when they give you a little prompt to tell you what your answer should be. Mom does it all the time. I guess she’d rather avoid the truth if it isn’t what she wants to hear.

  “Sure,” I say. “Good day.”

  Mom is short and fine-boned, with fair hair and brown eyes. It’s hard to believe we are related. I’m definitely my dad’s kid though. I have his wiry dark hair—now cut the same as his, come to think of it—his tall, broad-shouldered build and his blue eyes.

  I have my dad’s obsession with books and reading too. When I was little, he used to read to me all the time: The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan and Wendy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The original unabridged texts, never the Disney versions. When I was in first grade, we moved on to The Jungle Book, Treasure Island and Gulliver’s Travels. Poetry too—T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll. We memorized The Hunting of the Snark together. I used to spend hours reciting it to myself.

  None of which really equipped me to deal with classmates raised on morning cartoons and after-school sitcoms. It was probably just as well that I’d also inherited Dad’s loner tendencies.

  “Anything interesting happen?” Mom asks, ever hopeful.

  I think about my day. “Not really.” Unless you count cutting class and going to the Juvenile Detention Center with a girl with no eyebrows.

  She starts dishing the bright orange soup. Clearly she is on a health kick again. I suspect one of her magazines is to blame for this rather toxic-looking dinner. Maybe it’s supposed to make my hair grow faster.

  “What are you up to this evening?” she asks. “Any plans?”

  “Nope.”

  “Homework?”

  “Some. I might just read.”

  “You read too much. You always have your nose buried in something.”

  “So? I like reading.”

  She presses her lips together. “It doesn’t seem right. You’re a beautiful girl, Emily. You should be going out with friends, buying clothes, talking about boys...”

  She’s unreal. “Mom, are we seriously having this conversation?”

  “When I was your age, I’d have loved to go to parties and dances and all that.”

  “Right. Mom, I’ve been to parties, okay? Everyone plays drinking games and gets wasted. Then they either make out or have stupid boring conversations about nothing. I’m so not interested.”

  She looks a little shocked. “I’m sure not all the parties are like that.”

  “Yeah, well. Just be glad I’d rather read.”

  “Oh, honey. Of course I’m glad you like to read. I just don’t like to see you spending so much time on your own.” She hesitates. “There’s a course I was looking at...”

  “Really? You’re going to do a course?”

  “No, no. For you.”

  I should have guessed. “What kind of course?” I ask.

  “It’s a...well, a social thing. A group for girls.” She shifts in her chair and looks at Dad instead of me. “Self-esteem. Social skills. That kind of thing.”

  Dad looks at me, eyebrows gathered and forehead wrinkled. “First I’ve heard,” he says apologetically.

  I ignore him and glare at Mom. “Please. My self-esteem is fine. My social skills are fine.”

  “Of course they are, sweetie. I just thought it might be a good way for you to make some new friends.”

  “Yeah. If I wanted friends with low self-esteem and poor social skills, I’m sure it’d be terrific.”

  “Emily...”

  “I’m going up to my room.” I push away my orange soup and stand up. “To be anti-social in private.”

  Upstairs, I lie on my bed for a while. I check my e-mail. I do a hundred sit-ups and fifty push-ups. The big old-fashioned clock on my wall ticks away loudly. I wonder if Parker and her friends are going to steal the sign tonight. I realize I never got a phone number from her. I don’t know her last name or where she lives. For some reason, this makes me feel horribly depressed.

  I get up and go down to the basement. Dad is setting up a miniature historic battle of some kind, meticulously arranging hundreds of tiny painted figures on a large landscaped table.

  I touch the smooth hard surface of a lake. “Cool. How’d you do that?”

  “Epoxy.” He glances at me. “Don’t touch it; you’ll leave fingerprints.”

  “No I won’t.” I wipe the surface with my sleeve. “Is Brad coming over?”

  “Later. Yeah.”

  Dad’s friend Brad lives a few blocks away, in a house that is absolutely identical to ours. Once a week or so, they get together and play these war games until about three in the morning. It’s a little weird, but I guess it’s something to do.

  “Dad? This course Mom wants me to take...”

  �
�Mmm.”

  “Can you, like, talk her out of it?” I know it’s hopeless but I have to try.

  “Oh. Well. You know, when your mom gets set on something...”

  “Yeah, but...”

  He frowns. “Maybe she’ll forget. If it’s just a passing thought, you know, it might be better not to mention it.”

  He just doesn’t want to argue with her. He hates conflict. Most people wouldn’t consider a slight difference of opinion to be conflict, but he does. He’s a wuss.

  I pick up a little soldier and pretend to examine him closely. “Okay, I won’t mention it.”

  Dad frowns again. “Make sure you put him back in the same place.”

  I sigh, put the soldier back and head upstairs. Mom’s sitting on the couch watching TV. She pats the couch beside her. “Come and watch with me.”

  I shake my head. “I’m going for a run.”

  The rhythm of my feet against the smooth road calms me. I run past a hundred identical houses, head into the next subdivision over and run past a few hundred more. Thousands of houses that all sprang up at once, a virtual forest of conformity that stretches all the way to the highway. Surely it wouldn’t have been that much more work to vary them a little. Although we do seem to have one of the few houses with no pool. If I have to be stuck here, a pool would have been nice.

  Dante Alighieri should have designated a special circle of hell for the builders who designed this place.

  I think about Dante’s Inferno a lot. It’s funny, because it’s all about the afterlife, and my family isn’t at all religious. My dad says he’s a humanist, and my mom says she believes in some kind of higher power but not in heaven or hell. As for me, I’ve been an atheist since I was about eight. There’s something appealing about Dante’s vision though: everything laid out so neatly, a circle of hell designed for every kind of sinner, the punishment tailored to fit the crime.

  The builders should be sentenced to an eternity in the suburbs. Backyard barbecues with Jell-O salads and pineapple cheese bakes. Bumper stickers that say Support Our Troops and I heart my honor student. Inground sprinklers in every lawn, all controlled by a central unseen switch. Stepford wives at every front door.

  I slow down, thinking of Parker and how she’d echoed my thoughts about GRSS, right down to the high school movie idea. I wish I could tell her about Dante’s circles of hell. I bet she’d like it.

  SIX

  When I arrive at school the next day, the first thing I do is look around to see if Parker has brought the sign. But there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening. Just the usual crowd of people hanging around, waiting for the bell to ring. Pavlov’s dogs, minus the drooling. I sigh and kick a pebble along the asphalt.

  “Hey.”

  I look up, hoping for a second that Parker has come back. But it’s just Linnea, one of my stoner acquaintances. Closest thing I have to a friend now. “Hey.”

  “I loved what you told Mr. Lawson yesterday. About your name? That was awesome.” She giggles. “The look on his face. Classic.”

  “I can’t stand him.”

  “Me neither.” Linnea flicks the ash from her cigarette and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “So, I heard Beth moved away this summer. That’s a drag for you, huh?”

  “Yeah. Kind of.”

  “You two were pretty close, weren’t you?”

  There’s something about her tone that suddenly makes me feel cautious. I shrug. “Well, we used to run together most days.”

  “Uh-huh.” Linnea drops her smoke and grinds it under the heel of her boot. She is looking down, and her dark hair hangs forward, hiding her face so I can’t see her expression. “I heard you guys were real close.”

  Mind your own business. “Are you getting at something, Linnea?”

  She looks up at me, blue eyes wide and innocent, red lipstick dark against her pale freckled skin. “No. Just, you know. I guess you must miss her.”

  “Sure,” I say flatly. “I miss her.”

  Linnea drops her eyes. She’s too polite or too chicken to ask directly, but I guess she’s heard the rumors too. The stupid thing is that there’s no way anyone should know that me and Beth were more than friends. We never told anyone. It’s just because we hung around together all the time and neither of us had a boyfriend. Then one day last spring, I passed her a note in class—nothing important; I can’t even remember what it said—and that bastard Lawson intercepted it. “A love note?” he asked, sarcastically. Everyone laughed. That’s all it took to get a rumor started.

  I figure that’s why Beth never wrote to me. She couldn’t handle anyone knowing about us. She wanted to leave all that behind.

  By Thursday, the sign from the juvenile detention center still hasn’t appeared. I start to wonder if Parker and her friends have picked another school. There’s no particular reason for them to bring it to GRSS. When I get home, I check the local paper, reading through carefully in case there are any reports of vandalism or theft on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. There’s nothing.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be in the paper anyway.

  I check for messages. None. Beth’s updated her status again. Beth has joined a running group.

  It figures. She was always more of a joiner than I am. Most people are. I liked running with Beth, but for me the idea of a group takes all the appeal out of running. To be honest, much as I miss Beth, I actually prefer running on my own. I kind of like to let my mind wander when I run.

  Glad you’re still running, I write. GRSS still sucks. The teachers suck, the kids suck and the school feels like a prison. I remember Parker’s lime green papers: School. Jail. Can you spot the difference? I wonder what Beth would think of Parker. Probably she’d think she was crazy. Then, since I’m not sending the e-mail anyway, I let it all spill out. I miss you so much. We were together almost a year— don’t you miss me at all? How come you just disappeared? You could have written and told me it was over instead of letting me keep writing and waiting. I feel like an idiot, still thinking about you all the time. It’s been three months now, so I guess I should get over it. I just don’t understand though. There’s still rumors about us at school, but it’s old news now. No one really cares anyway, except you. Is that why you never wrote to me? Are you trying to pretend nothing ever happened between us?

  I stop writing and stare at my words on the screen, imagining actually sending her this message. I wonder if she’d even read it or if she’d just delete it unopened. My fists clench, nails digging into my palms, and everything inside me feels clenched tight too; my jaw and chest and stomach ache. It’s so hard to let go of her without even having a chance to say good-bye.

  Mom has made another brightly colored soup for dinner. Green this time. It’s very thick and rather slimy-looking.

  Dad pokes it with his spoon. “Um, what is this, honey?”

  “Okra, swiss chard, broccoli and cucumber soup,” Mom says.

  Okra. That would be the slime factor.

  He takes a mouthful and swallows. I can see his Adam’s apple bob up and down convulsively. “Delicious.”

  “It’s high in free radicals,” Mom says. “Or wait—are those the bad ones? Was it anti-radicals? Anyway, the ones that prevent cancer.”

  “Good, good.” Dad fetches the salt shaker from the kitchen counter and dumps about a tablespoon of salt onto his soup.

  Mom shakes her head but says nothing.

  I taste mine. Gross. “Pass the salt, Dad?”

  Mom looks at me. “Emily...sorry, honey...Dante?”

  “What?” I shake salt on my soup before she can object.

  “Ahhh...Dad and I were talking and we decided it would be a good idea for you to go to that group. You know, the one I mentioned the other night?”

  My heart sinks. “Not the social skills thing.”

  She nods.

  I glance at Dad. Traitor. I bet he didn’t even try to talk her out of it. “Aw, no. That’s crap. Really.” I look across the table at Mom. “I’v
e got friends, okay?”

  “Well, I’ve never met them.”

  She hasn’t met them, therefore I must not have any. Oh wait, right, I don’t. “I’m fine, Mom. My social skills are stellar.”

  “Oh, honey. It’s not a criticism of you. It’s just...well, I remember how hard it was to always be on the outside, you know?”

  I push my chair back from the table and stare at her. “Mom! I am NOT YOU, okay?”

  Dad frowns at me. “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”

  This is typical: Dad only seems like he isn’t paying attention. Anytime I criticize my mother even slightly, he wakes up. I take a deep breath and lower my voice. “I am not you, Mom. I am not a social outcast. I am not getting bullied or left out or made fun of. So if you want to take your inner adolescent to a social skills class, be my guest. But leave me out of it.”

  “Actually, I signed you up already,” she says. She meets my eyes nervously, her cheeks pink and eyes slightly wet. “Just give it a try, all right? If you don’t like it after a couple of weeks, you can stop going. But I want you to try it.”

  I put my elbows on the table and rest my chin on my hands. There is zero point in arguing with my mother once she makes up her mind. She’s steel. No, she’s titanium. The tears are just another weapon in her arsenal, and they always defeat me. I can’t stand to make Mom cry. “A couple of weeks? So I have to go twice?”

  “At least twice,” she says firmly. “The first session is tomorrow evening.”

  “Friday night? Seriously?” I shake my head in disbelief. “It’s going to be a bunch of losers sitting around talking about being losers. You do realize that?”

  “You’re not a loser and you’re going.”

  “Because you’re forcing me to.”

  Mom blinks a couple of times and gives me a bright smile. “I bet you’ll have fun,” she says.

  The next morning, I look for Parker at school, but she isn’t around. The sign isn’t there either. I wish I’d said I’d go and steal it with her.

  Sitting at my desk is torture. I wonder what circle of hell this is and what I did to deserve it. Mr. Lawson drones on and on. I have restless legs. My knee bounces up and down like crazy, like there’s too much energy inside me and stray sparks are shooting off everywhere, twitching my muscles. I feel bored and restless and impatient. I want something to happen.