Teen Spirit Read online

  2. CLARK

  My mom and I rented a two-bedroom apartment in the southern, not-so-fancy end of Beverly Hills because my mom liked the school district. I didn’t mind changing schools; I didn’t have any close friends at Hollywood High and I was going to graduate in a year anyway. I had been thinking more about my college applications to Stanford and UC Berkeley as a psychology major than about the fun I’d have senior year. But I hated the apartment, which was rundown and too small for most of our things. When we moved, we hauled off boxes to Goodwill and Out of the Closet. We got rid of most of my grandmother’s possessions as well. China plates with roses and gold trim, china figurines, glass snow globes, table fountains with miniature gardens, heart-shaped cloisonné boxes full of hairpins, collections of paper clips and rubber bands, classical and world music CDs, yoga DVDs, books and books and books. Most everything we touched, if we paused to think about it, made us cry, so we sent it away quickly, without thinking. I really only kept the family photographs, some poetry books (Keats, Whitman, the Barrett-Brownings, Donne, and Dickinson of course), a bottle of Shalimar and a vial of lavender oil, the china lamp my grandmother had as a girl, and what was left of the vintage clothing and jewelry; there wasn’t much—she’d given most of it to me already and my small closet was stuffed to overflowing.

  Our first night in the apartment I was putting sweaters away when I came across something in one of the built-in drawers in my bedroom.

  It was an old Ouija board. Perhaps the former tenant had left it behind.

  I’d never had one as a kid; my mom, in spite of, or maybe because of, her writerly interest in the supernatural, said they creeped her out. “What if it works but it brings something unwanted back?” I’d heard her asking my grandmother once. I had always liked ghost stories and my mother’s TV episodes about spirits. The supernatural intrigued me, but I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. Now my interest was piqued.

  I examined the Ouija board in my hands. It had old-fashioned, embellished black lettering arcing across the shiny light-gold-colored surface, a smiling sun, a sinister moon, shadowy, long-fingered people playing with their own board in the lower corners, and the ominous words GOOD BYE written on the bottom. I imagined the heart-dropping sensation you would experience if the marker on the board swept down to those words before your question had been answered.

  On the other hand, what if the Ouija board did answer your question? People used them to communicate with the dead, didn’t they? With spirits? Could I possibly connect to my grandmother this way? Could I learn what she’d wanted to tell me? Maybe I’d found the Ouija board for a reason.

  Almost as soon as I’d had the thoughts, I dismissed them. For one thing, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Did I? And if ghosts were real, what if “something unwanted” came? Maybe my mom’s reaction from years before was influencing me or maybe I was just feeling the cool breeze coming through the windows, but I shivered from the nape of my neck to my tailbone. I put the Ouija board in my closet, hoping to forget about it, but at the same time, not quite ready to throw it away.

  That night I left my grandma’s lamp on. It was a china statue of a little girl standing on tiptoe to blow out a large candle, the flame of which was the lightbulb.

  But the lamplight wasn’t comforting and the air felt hot and close. Giving up on sleep, I went and got the urn of ashes from the living room. It was cool and heavy in my hands as I knelt by the bed, eyes closed, praying to Grandma Miriam to help me rest and to visit me in my dreams.

  The prayer didn’t work; I couldn’t remember anything in the morning. It just felt as if I’d been pummeled by invisible fists all night and hadn’t really slept. Every sound made me cringe—the dogs in the alley, the neighbor clicking around in high heels upstairs, a siren going by. I squinted out the window with over-sensitized, sleep-deprived eyes at the too-bright light in the palm trees and felt cold in the space between my ribs, as if I were holding my grandmother in my arms, waiting again for the ambulance to come. I wanted to hide from the world.

  But I couldn’t hide. It was both my first day at Beverly Hills High and the first day of the semester. B.H.H.S. was a public school, but it looked like a private academy; the lawn was spread out in a vast green carpet before the white, red-roofed, French Normandy-style buildings. As I walked past the pink-flowering trees and up the crowded front steps, I kept my head down and tried to be as invisible as possible in my black cashmere sweater and trousers. I wasn’t exactly popular at Hollywood High, but I fit in better there among the geeks and punks than here, where there was so much wealth and beauty you felt like you were in a skin-care or sneaker commercial. Many celebrities had attended these hallowed halls, including Angelina Jolie and Lenny Kravitz, and movies from It’s a Wonderful Life to Clueless had been filmed on its campus. In the first film, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed had jitterbugged into the Olympic-sized pool, built under the gym’s sliding floor, and started a dance riot. I had much simpler aspirations; I just wanted to survive the first week.

  In my math class, the teacher Mr. Mandelbaum’s voice droned on and on, and I had to struggle to keep my eyes from closing, although I could usually concentrate pretty well in class. Just as I was losing the fight, a hand touched my arm.

  At first I couldn’t see who it was because of the bright green light flooding my vision, the color of the lawn of our old house in the afternoon sun. Was the sun in my eyes now? I blinked.

  The boy next to me gave me a snaggletoothed smile. There was something disarming about that smile, something almost audacious about its lack of self-consciousness. His cheeks were flushed and he wore glasses like mine, and a Buffy the Vampire Slayer T-shirt.

  What a geek, I thought affectionately.

  “Don’t fall asleep yet,” he whispered. “It’s only the first day.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Nice glasses.”

  “Yours, too.”

  On the way out, a blond girl passed us in the hall and I recognized her as Ally Kellogg from fifth grade. She had moved away for middle school, but I didn’t know where she’d gone.

  “Hi, Julie?” she said. I was shocked that she recognized me. “You go here now?”

  I nodded.

  She tossed me a “Cool, see you” and hurried off.

  I expected the boy in the glasses to turn his head and forget about me, but he didn’t seem to notice her at all. Instead he flashed me that grin, and ambled down the hallway.

  He was in my health class as well, and as I ate my lunch in the quad, he came over and asked if he could sit with me.

  “Your hat sort of reminds me of a moose,” I said as he took a seat on the cement bench and brought a large ceramic pot out of his backpack. The headdress in question was brown wool with long earflaps.

  “Thanks!” he replied as if I’d complimented him, which I guess I had, in a way. He made a cute moose. “I was going to wear this hat that’s a wool monkey, but my mom thought it was too weird for my first day.” His voice was kind of high and young sounding.

  “Yeah. She was probably right. You might have to work up to that one.”

  Three cheerleaders approached a nearby bench. He smiled at them and waved, and they moved away to sit somewhere else.

  “I’m not even wearing my monkey hat,” he said.

  “Maybe you just scared the cheerleaders with your smile?” I offered.

  “Or my kicharee.”

  What?

  He lifted the lid off the pot in front of him. A rich, savory smell came out of it. “An Indian dish of grains and beans. I made this one from brown rice and vegetables and coconut oil with spices. It’s very healing. Want some?”

  “No thanks. You carry that big thing around all day?”

  He nodded at my metal Munsters lunch box. I hadn’t touched the sandwich inside it yet. “I wouldn’t talk,” he said.

  In spite of my desire to be invisible at this school, I hadn’t been able to give up my lunch box. “It’s retro and kitsch.” />
  “Well, homemade vegan dining is the food of the future,” he explained. “And not only that. I don’t get why people think smiling is weird. Is smiling weird?”

  I shrugged. “Not really, in and of itself, smiling isn’t weird.”

  “But you’d think people would like you if you smile at them. It’s better than frowning. Or, let’s say, spitting.”

  “It is better than spitting, I’d agree.”

  “I’m kind of doing an experiment about why people are uncomfortable with self-expression. Especially in high school.”

  A group of boys in basketball jerseys walked by and he flashed the same grin ostentatiously at them. They ignored him, thank God.

  “Is it an experiment in self-expression or masochism?” I asked.

  “You’re funny. I’m trying to see if it’s regionally influenced.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Why did you move here? Just to experiment?”

  He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. His nails were gnawed down and his cuticles raw, which, in contrast to his easygoing manner, surprised me, though he wasn’t smiling now. “My family wanted a change.”

  “How’d that monkey hat go over in Chicago?”

  He grinned again, and I felt an odd, unexpected sense of relief. “Not bad. It’s cold there, so . . .”

  “So everyone needs a hat.”

  “Yeah. And I think people might be nicer in places where it’s cold because they have to coexist more. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t miss the cold. I’ve stored enough cold in my bones forever. But they have something to bond over besides their favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes or whatever.”

  I nodded at his shirt. “You’re into Buffy?”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m a total nerd.”

  “Me too, then, I guess. Joss Whedon is pure genius!”

  “What’s your favorite episode?” he asked me.

  I didn’t have to think long. “Where her mom dies. The way they don’t use any music for the whole episode.”

  “It’s so much scarier than any monster,” he said. “Death, you know?”

  We didn’t speak. I slid back the ruby-studded skirt of my grandmother’s silver lady-shaped watch pin to reveal the time. Lunch was almost over.

  “Hey, I’m Clark.” His hands were big and he had a good grip when we shook. I felt badly that I hadn’t paid attention when his name was called in class, especially when he said, “You’re Julie. Some of us were actually awake in math.”

  BY MY LAST PERIOD, I had a second wind of energy, maybe because it was AP English. The teacher, Ms. Merritt, looked like Emily Dickinson with her brown hair in a bun, her buttoned-up blouse, and small, bird body. There were portraits of famous authors all over the walls and a corner reading area with a bookcase full of leather-bound volumes, a big leather arm chair, and a Tiffany lamp. I liked her right away.

  “We’ll be studying a lot of poetry this term,” she said, “and we’re going to start by writing an in-class essay about your relationship to poetry in your life so far.”

  Everyone grumbled, but I thought of my grandmother and knew there was at least one place at school where I’d belong, besides at lunch with the nerd-of-all-nerd boys.

  WHEN I GOT HOME from school, my mom was curled up on the couch in a fetal position wearing her pajamas.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. Her face looked pinched, and there were shadows under her eyes like she’d applied smoky makeup upside down.

  “Everything is fine, really. I just have my period.” But I knew she was upset about her job and the house and my grandmother. How could I be honest about the strange things that happened since Grandma Miriam died, when my mom couldn’t even admit what was really going on with her?

  I went to get her something to eat, but when I opened the refrigerator, there was nothing except some expired milk, a jar of pickles, and ketchup. Either my mom didn’t have enough money for groceries or she was just too depressed to go shopping, which wasn’t exactly a consolation. I threw out the milk, got a plate of crackers for each of us, and then went to my room. She didn’t even ask me how my first day of school was.

  That night, unable to sleep, I got up to get a glass of water. My mom was at the kitchen table on her laptop; when she saw me, she minimized her screen.

  “What?” I said.

  “What what?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for a job. Why are you freaking out, Julie?”

  “You shut off the computer when I came in.”

  She swiveled her chair around to glare at me. “So what?”

  “Mom!” I said. “What’s going on? Don’t lie to me. Whatever it is . . .”

  My mother sighed and touched the keyboard so the screen lit back up. There was a dating website on there. Her picture, self-snapped, smiling, wearing too much makeup, looking expectant and vulnerable. GHOSTWRITER/F/SINGLE/48/BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA.

  “I need to have a life,” she said.

  Then get a job, I thought, but it was too mean to say out loud.

  “I’m too dependent on you. What happens when you start going out with boys?” she went on.

  This made me almost wish I’d cut her off with the job comment when I had had the chance. “I don’t want to go out with anyone. There isn’t anybody I like that way.”

  “How about him for me?” she said. I guess she hadn’t really been listening. She was suppressing a smile as she clicked on a thumbnail of a man with long, black hair, blue eyes, and a cleft in his chin. DESCENTMAN/M/S/41/LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.

  “Too young,” I said.

  “See, I knew I shouldn’t have showed you.” She looked sad again and I wished I hadn’t been so negative.

  “He’s kind of good-looking. What does he do?”

  “He has a band,” she said, and my negativity unapologetically returned.

  “A band? What is he, seventeen?”

  “Mick Jagger was born in ’43,” she said.

  What? I didn’t see how that applied. “Does he have a day job?”

  “I don’t know,” said my mom over the scream of an ambulance siren going by outside. “I have to meet him and find out.”

  I couldn’t even have a real conversation with her about guys. How could I share anything serious with her even if I’d wanted to? She had never seemed so far away from me.

  THE NEXT DAY IT was hard to get out of bed—my muscles felt dense and heavy, rigid as bones. It was pouring rain. I pulled the covers over my head to muffle the excruciating clamor of the drops on the thin roof of our apartment building. When I finally got up, there was a small puddle on the floor. I put a pan under the leak and went to tell my mom, but she was sleeping. I remembered when she used to make me waffles and bacon and scrambled eggs and fresh-squeezed orange juice for breakfast and we’d sit at the kitchen table in the old house and talk about our dreams from the night before and what the day would hold. Since my grandma died, I had cornflakes by myself almost every morning and sometimes for dinner. The thought of pouring the cold milk on the cold cornflakes made me want to bury myself back in bed. I could have stayed there all day; it had been another rough night of restless sleep.

  I couldn’t find an umbrella, so my grandmother’s old leopard-print coat was drenched by the time I got to school (why had I worn it?), and I was late. I saw a tall person run toward me up the big front steps. His glasses were spattered like windshields in spite of the big yellow umbrella he was carrying. And he was wearing the monkey hat in spite of my discouraging remarks.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi, Clark.”

  “You remembered my name. Awesome. I overslept.”

  “Me too.”

  “Care to share my umbrella-ella-ella?”

  I ducked gratefully under it with him in spite of the bad Rihanna imitation. I could smell the spices from his kicharee coming out of his backpack. He was smiling.

  IN HEALTH CLASS, MR. R
oston had us pick partners for a project. As I watched everyone pair off, Clark tapped my shoulder. I was relieved not to have to endure the rejection of a roomful of strangers any longer and nodded at him. The teacher handed out a list of topics for us to choose from.

  “How about ‘sudden cardiac arrest’?” I said, looking it over, thinking of my grandmother, of course, then immediately wondering why I would want to do a project that would upset me so much.

  “I’d like to do it on teens killed in drunk-driving accidents,” said Clark.

  I pulled my sleeves down over my hands as an inordinately powerful chill shook my shoulder blades. Maybe it was because my sweater was still damp from the rain or maybe I was freaked out by the idea of teens killed in drunk-driving accidents. But I was glad to have a topic that didn’t make me think of my grandma’s death. This boy had made me grateful three times in one day and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

  AT THE END OF English, Ms. Merritt took me aside. “I read your essay about poetry, Julie. I really liked how you wrote about the way your grandmother introduced it to you.”

  I thanked her without meeting her gaze because I was afraid my eyes would tear up at the mention of Grandma Miriam.

  “You have a lot of talent for writing and your test scores are very high. Have you already thought about where you’ll be applying to school next year?”

  I told her Stanford and Cal, in psychology. “But I don’t think I can afford them.” I didn’t add that I was worried about my mom being able to buy groceries.

  “Those are great choices. And there’s financial aid available. You should get the applications online.” She looked at me closely, reading my face like a poem. “Please let me know if I can help you out at all.”