Vibes (2 page)

"That's nice." I take a swig of my coffee. Sweet lifeblood.

"I'm getting the braces you can't see? The invisible ones?" he says, spraying me with saliva.

Good thing I'm wearing umbrellas.

"Maybe braces will act as a splashguard for your mouth," I say as I wipe myself off.

"Sorry. I'm paying for them myself. Dad says the American preoccupation with straight teeth is a waste of money." Jacob's parents are English, but that's not the reason they're weird. They're so pale that when you first see them you think they're dead, and when you get to know them, you wish they were.

"Your parents are preoccupied with American preoccupations.'"

"Tell me about it! Anyway, I earned enough at my job at the library over the summer to save up for orthodonture," he spits.

"That's enterprising." We're almost to the school building. I have to drink my coffee fast. As I pour it down my throat, I get a flash of Jacob imagining me drinking coffee under a waterfall in Hawaii. Poor bastard.

"Do you think I'll look better if I get braces?" He grabs my arm and turns me to look at him. He smiles wide, his pale lips framing snaggly teeth. I lean away so I can be objective.

"Yes, but you also need to work out and wash your hair every day," I say.

"Great idea!" he says, as if I just suggested he wear a tuxedo to school.

Suddenly I'm sideswiped by a deeply bitchy vibe:
Why does she wear those horrible outfits?
I don't have to turn because I can see her from the corner of my eye. Eva Kearns-Tate, a.k.a. Evil Incarnate. Without looking at her, I flip her the bird.

"Jesus, Kristi!" screams Eva. "Get a life!"

"What was that for?" Jacob glances timidly at Eva. He fears the wrath of the cool.

Smiling at Eva, I blow on my fingertip before slipping it into an imaginary holster.

Eva huffs and marches up the stairs into the school, her long black hair wagging behind her. It's not fair that the gorgeous get more gorgeous when they're pissed, while the ugly just get more hideous.

"Why are you so mean to Eva?" Jacob asks.

I pretend I don't hear and slip on my headphones. As we walk into the school I turn up Maria Callas as high as I can without risking permanent hearing loss. Opera is the only way to dampen the vibes ricocheting around me.
What a bitch! She's got such fat ankles! She probably smells. Her hair is so ugly. God, her nose is stubby! Look how her arms jiggle! I don't care what her dad did, there's no excuse...

And on and on and on.

Gee, I love high school.

We all head to the activity center, where we form a nonhierarchical circle. I notice Gusty Peterson talking to Eva. He has one arm folded over his middle, which makes him look weirdly insecure. Today he's wearing normal pants and a green rugby shirt that somehow brings out the gold highlights in his perfectly wavy hair. He murmurs something in Evil Incarnate's ear, and she giggles. Her dark eyes wander over the room until they rest on me. Gusty looks at me, too. His thought sails across the room at me, pinging off people's words and fears to land right in the cup of my ear:
Sick.

I look away. This is nothing new. He thinks,
Sick,
every time he looks at me. I don't care what Gusty Peterson thinks, anyway. He's a moron.

Everyone except me is talking and laughing while we wait for Brian to start the meeting. Brian stands off to the side with the other teachers, his hands tucked under his chin, a big smile on his face. He's all the way across the room under the basketball hoop, but I can still see that his teeth are slightly green. Everything about Brian is
slightly.
He's slightly tall, slightly fat, slightly smart, and slightly hostile. His eyes are slightly too far apart, and one of them is always looking slightly off to the side, so that all the expressions on his face seem extreme. When he smiles it's like his whole face is splitting with happiness, and when he's mad his face shortens until you have to wonder how his brain isn't getting squished. He's a weird-looking dude, but everyone pretends to revere him, including the parents, because he founded the school. I've even heard people refer to him as a pedagogical genius. I think he's more like one of those traveling professional hypnotists who mesmerizes entire crowds. He talks in a really soothing voice and always holds his hands out in a calming gesture while he smiles his way through a speech about love, common values, and inner peace.

Slowly Brian walks to the center of the circle and smiles at the floor for a while. We're all supposed to quiet down, but everyone keeps talking. It's easy to take advantage of a nonauthoritarian principal. Soon he begins to laugh as if he's absolutely delighted with the way we are enjoying ourselves, but I sense a twinge of frustration beneath his tight smile. Then he starts waving his hands at the floor and walking in a little circle. He looks so freaky, people stop to watch him. The murmuring peters out and everyone focuses.

"Good morning," he cries, as if he were the first person to come up with just the right words to describe a perfect day. He holds out one hand to someone in the crowd. "Mallory, come join me."

A super tall guy wanders over to Brian in the center of the circle. He looks shaky as he scans the crowd. His hair is neon orange, and it's bushy and very long. He has it crammed into a ponytail, but it looks like any second the rubber band will explode and his hair will escape to roam the earth, staging military coups and taking high-profile hostages. He has the absolute worst acne I've ever seen, and the redness of it vibrates against the orange of his hair so that he's almost difficult to look at. He's quite grotesque. But I like his white jeans and his white T-shirt and his white bomber jacket. He's clearly a reject from some other private school. Journeys is the stopping-off spot for a lot of kids on their way to juvenile detention.

"This is Mallory, everyone, who's come here from the Learning Center. Let's welcome him to our community."

"Welcome, Mallory," everyone drones.

Mallory scratches at his neck just where the pimples are the most swollen. Brian stares at him until Mallory clears his throat and mumbles, "Hi." Then he practically runs for the outer rim of the circle.

Brian smiles kindly at Mallory and then calls to the ceiling in joy: "Does anyone have something special to share?" My ex-friend Hildie Peterson raises her hand, and Brian smiles warmly at her. "Yes, Hildie?"

"I just wanted to say that I noticed the tree at the edge of the schoolyard is blooming." She twinkles her slanty eyes at Brian, who twinkles right back.

"Yes! We're so lucky to have an autumn cherry tree on our campus! I think everyone should make it their business during Afternoon Personal Time to go and enjoy those gorgeous blooms! See how they smell, stroke them, lie under the tree and notice how the sun dapples your body with light." He stretches out his arms as if the entire universe is giving him a massage. "Let's all thank Hildie for this wonderful reminder of how beautiful our world is!"

I'm not kidding. This is Morning Meeting. This is my daily hell.

"Does anyone else have something to share?" Brian trains his eyes on the crowd. (Well, he trains one eye on us, one at the wall, but I'm pretty sure he's trying to look at us.) Most of us look at the floor, but to my disgust and horror Jacob raises his hand. Brian smiles at Jacob with a mixture of revulsion and pity. "Yes, Jacob?" he coos. "What do you have to share?"

"I've decided on my individual project for this year." Jacob sprays the poor girl standing next to him, but she's too nice to wipe it off right away. "My individual project is me."

"Oh?" Brian asks, raising one eyebrow with delight. I guess he isn't delighted enough to raise both eyebrows.

"Yes!" Jacob says eagerly. His entire skinny body practically vibrates with excitement. "My individual project this year is going to be self-improvement."

Brian claps his hands. "Wonderful! I think it was Aldous Huxley who said, 'There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is yourself.'" Brian slowly rotates in the middle of our circle so that he can make precious eye contact with each and every one of us. When his eyes meet mine he thinks,
Troublemaker.
"I think we should all be supportive of Jacob's efforts this year! Let's give him a round of applause!"

Everyone claps for Jacob Flax, and a few people start whistling and catcalling, including Gusty Peterson, who shakes his fist while yelling, "Yeah! Yeah!" Evil Incarnate holds up her hands over her head and claps super enthusiastically. I watch Jacob to see if he understands what's happening, but he is blushing and smiling with glee.

He has no idea he is being mocked.

After Morning Meeting I head to my first class, Explorations of Nature, which is biology in disguise. Every one of our classes is supposed to be interdisciplinary, which is another word for "confusing." Math is called "The Language of the Universe," and English is "Story as Cultural Artifact." I have Maria Callas warbling in my ears, but that doesn't keep me from hearing my ex-best friend, Hildie Peterson, think,
Why does she have to sit so close to me?
when I take the chair behind her. I'm sitting here because it's the only padded chair left, but of course she's so self-centered, she would never think of that.

Our school doesn't have desks in the classrooms because Brian thinks they conceal our inner states and inhibit the free motion of our bodies. I glance at David, who is seated on his teacher stool, staring out the window and stroking his goatee. All the girls think he's totally hot, and they all flirt with him, which is pathetic, but what's even more pathetic is that he flirts right back.

"Hi, David!" Hildie calls, flashing her blond hair at him.

"Hildie," he says in an intimate tone. His black eyes practically rub against her as he smiles.

I don't know
how
he hasn't gotten fired.

Today David has written another Robert Frost poem on the board. The poem says:

Then when I was distraught
And could not speak,
Sidelong, full on my cheek,
What should that reckless zephyr fling
But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!

Either David likes Robert Frost or Frost is the only poet he knows. That's okay, because I actually like him. Frost, not David, who I especially dislike today. On the little table in front of him is a mutilated caterpillar. What used to be a cute, fuzzy, green little wormy animal has become a science exhibit for how gross nature is. Class hasn't begun yet, but I don't care. I raise my hand.

David pretends not to see me. I can hear him thinking,
Oh God, not again.
This does nothing to stop me. I wave my hand in his face. The second his eyes flicker over me, I launch into it: "What right do you have to kill that poor defenseless creature?"

"I didn't," he says wearily. "I found it dead on my lawn." I catch a brief flash of the caterpillar lying helplessly in front of David's Birkenstock sandal, motionless. But I can't tell from the image if it was really a goner yet.

"How did you
know
it was dead?" I hear sniggering behind me, and a whole wave of thoughts rushes over me.
Not this again. Why can't she shut up? God, her neck is fat.
This only strengthens my resolve. "Maybe it was just stunned."

"It was dead."

"Did you hold a tiny mirror up to its nose to see if it was breathing?"

"Kristi, I can tell when a caterpillar is dead."

"Did you try to resuscitate it?"

"How do you suggest I do that?"

"You could get a tiny straw."

"Surely you're not serious."

I open my mouth to assure him that I am quite serious (I'm not), but he holds his hand up in my face. "So, how is everyone today?" David asks the class at large.

"Better than that caterpillar," Casey Spinelli says in his squeaky voice. Everyone laughs.

Ha ha ha.

David pretends to be amused as he leans over the tiny cadaver. "I found this poor little guy this weekend. He'd frozen the night before. I thought this would be a great opportunity to begin our unit on anatomy."

I look around the room to see if anyone is buying his story about the caterpillar's natural death. Last year, when he tried to show the tenth-graders the internal organs of a frog, Brian stormed into the room, red-faced, and gave David a lecture about the sanctity of all life. David is no longer allowed to use animals in his classes. We can't even have bug collections. This is the one thing I agree with Brian about. How would you feel if a huge frog drugged you, cut you open, and splayed you on a corkboard so the tadpoles could jab at your liver?

"Crowd around, everyone," David says as he waves us up. We all stand around him while he pokes tweezers around the caterpillar's eensie-weensie internal organs. We trade off with magnifying glasses so everyone can get a big, gross eyeful.

Once David is done with the caterpillar, he hands out a chart of human anatomy. I see what's coming, so I raise my hand and stand right in front of David's face. Whenever I feel partner work coming on, I go to the bathroom so that by the time I come back everyone already has a partner and I can work alone. I practically beg David with my eyebrows,
Please let me go!
But he's onto me, because he thinks,
Not this time, Kristi,
just before he announces, "Everyone find a partner and quiz each other about internal organs."

Time for Plan B:
Initiate isolation sequence.

I discreetly slip my earphones on. Maria Callas is getting to the first big crescendo when I feel a pressure on my arm. Hildie is standing over me, and when I look at her she rolls her eyes. "Everyone else has a partner. David said I should work with you." This is when I notice that Bella Polokov is not here today, which means that poor Hildie is without her usual ally.

I would rather be consumed by a million caterpillars in an act of misguided revenge than work with my treacherous former best friend, but all I can do is shrug. She sits next to me, crossing one perfectly toned leg over the other. She looks at me uncertainly as she thinks,
I may as well make the best of this.
"Who first?" she says.