Every Day

Is that a backpack that Lauren has on? I guess she’s acting like she’s in third grade until her chest fills in. And, oh my God, why is Felicity wearing those socks? Are those kittens? I thought only convicted child molesters were allowed to wear those. And Kendall’s top? I don’t think there’s anything sadder than an unsexy girl trying to dress sexy. We should have a fund-raiser for her, it’s so sad. Like, tornado victims would look at her and say, “No, really, we don’t need the money—give it to that unfortunate girl.”

I don’t want these thoughts anywhere near my mind. The weird thing is that when I withhold them, when I don’t let Vanessa say them out loud, I don’t sense relief from any of the people around me. I sense disappointment. They’re bored. And their boredom is the thing that the meanness feeds on.

Vanessa’s boyfriend, a jock named Jeff, thinks it’s her time of the month. Her best friend and number one acolyte, Cynthia, asks her if someone died. They know something’s off, but will never guess the real reason. They certainly won’t think she’s been taken over by the devil. If anything, they’re suspicious that the devil’s taken a day off.

I know it would be foolish of me to try to change her. I could run off this afternoon and sign her up to volunteer in a soup kitchen, but I’m sure when she arrived there tomorrow, she’d only make fun of the homeless people’s clothes, and the quality of the soup. The best I could probably do would be to get Vanessa into a compromising position that someone could blackmail her about. (Did you all see the video of Vanessa Martinez walking through the hallway in her thong underwear, singing songs from Sesame Street? And then she ran into the girls’ room and flushed her own head in a toilet?) But that would be stooping to her level, and I’m sure that using her own poison against her would cause at least a little of it to fall back inside me as well.

So I don’t try to change her. I simply halt her ire for a single day.

It’s exhausting, trying to make a bad person act good. You can see why it’s so much easier for them to be bad.

I want to tell Rhiannon all about it. Because when something happens, she’s the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.

I have to resort to email, and email is not enough. I am starting to get tired of relying on words. They are full of meaning, yes, but they lack sensation. Writing to her is not the same as seeing her face as she listens. Hearing back from her is not the same as hearing her voice. I have always been grateful for technology, but now it feels as if there’s a little hitch of separation woven into any digital interaction. I want to be there, and this scares me. All my usual disconnected comforts are being taken away, now that I see the greater comfort of presence.

Nathan also emails me, as I knew he would.

You can’t leave now. I have more questions.

I don’t have the heart to tell him that’s the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions.

The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

Day 6018

The next day I am a boy named George, and I am only forty-five minutes away from Rhiannon. She emails me and says she’ll be able to leave school at lunch.

I, however, am going to have a harder time, because today I am homeschooled.

George’s mother and father are stay-at-home parents, and George and his two brothers stay at home with them each and every day. The room that in most homes would be called the rec room is instead called “the schoolhouse” by George’s family. The parents have even set up three desks for them, which seem to have been left over from a one-room schoolhouse at the turn of the last century.

There is no sleeping late here. We’re all woken at seven, and there’s a protocol about who showers when. I manage to sneak a few minutes at the computer to read Rhiannon’s message and send her one of my own, saying we’ll have to see how the day plays out. Then, at eight, we’re promptly at our desks, and while our father works at the other end of the house, our mother teaches us.