"I can't write essays."
"I never do well on exams."
"Even if I study for hours, I fail."
"I always fail."
"What if you can't read my handwriting?"
"Canweplease,pleasewriteinpencil?"
Alex and Suki
They were looking for Will Bliss again. They put on their lightweight coats despite the weather. They gave up on matching gloves but found good hats. They were taking long steps up Park Avenue, midnight by the clock, Alex and Suki, walking into the wind with their tiny coats wide open. Tube skirts, boots, candy striped, goofy hats with pom-poms. The snow, another snow, another storm predicted, had begun to fall. The big flakes seemed to be swinging in their descent, seemed to splash they were so large, and the ticklish pelt of them made the girls laugh, and it was hard to see for all the snow caught and melting on their eyelashes, watery drops on their cheeks, tears. They had given up on chemistry and Dr. Meltzer. Blue books, pencils, boxes of Kleenex.
CHF
A—
I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll
understand it now. Please do. Not everything can be
funny.
I'm not even bothering to study.
kisses,
C
Mothers
Mrs. Forestal told the school nurse that she was doing everything she could to get Carlotta help. Carlotta had a nutritionist and a psychiatrist. "We have a cook. I sit at the table with her as often as I can, but I can't watch her every meal."
"Yes," the nurse said. "That's the hard part."
"Yes," Mrs. Forestal said. Why should she understand what the nurse was saying when she couldn't make sense of her daughter? The most recent poem she had been given to read didn't make any sense to her. So her daughter didn't like her body? Fine. Who did?
She reread her daughter's poem: "…and covering my eyes with tea bags, listened to the menagerie of bears, pigs, puff-white lambs, and crumpled tissues swarming the sheets." What was this all about? And why would anyone in her right mind admit to a "zoo-ish fragrance"? It made her think of apes. Was Carlotta trashing her father's place again? Now at least it looks as if somebody lives here: Carlotta's defense. Mrs. Forestal felt helpless and a little bored with Carlotta's bullish enthusiasms and clumsy lows. Maybe after exams.
Siddons
The snow that had fallen on Sunday was added to again on Wednesday, but by then Marlene Kovack had taken the math exam.
Miss F defended Marlene's grade, saying, "Marlene must have studied. She sees Astra Dell, and Astra could have helped her with discrete math."
Poor Astra Dell was the general feeling. The girl would have been in AP calculus if she weren't sick. "I mean, she's in it," said Dr. D. "She just won't take the exam, I guess."
Exams were over in a sentence and returned just as fast.
Romance
Marlene
Marlene looked into Astra's letter basket and saw Car Forestal's hand, and she read the note because Astra was out of the room on some test. Marlene read:
A—
I've fixed this. I think it's better. I think you'll
understand it now. Please do. Not everything can
be funny.
I'm not even bothering to study.
kisses,
C
Marlene was still in Astra's room, so she took up Car's latest letter, and she put it in her pocket. A note on a note card: It wouldn't be missed. Would it, would it, would it?
Sometimes when Astra turned the white radiance of her attention onto Marlene, when Marlene saw Astra considering her openly and clearly and fairly, then Marlene knew what it was about Astra Dell that made her feel possessive of the sick girl. Marlene wanted Astra to herself and resented even the intrusion of Astra's father, although she was polite enough when she saw him.
"Hello, Mr. Dell. Astra's a little sleepy today."
A Daughter
Lisa told Josh (he had asked was she gay or not) that she was only experimenting with Janet Wilkes and Queens and all of it. "It turned me on for a while, but my mother ruined it. What happened was I'd be with Janet somewhere and I'd think I'd see my mother."
Siddons
"What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?"
"A present for your girlfriend?"
"Try a bag of tests." Whenever he spoke, Mr. Weeks smiled or seemed to smile or was just about to smile, and the little girls and big girls, girls of all sizes, loud and silly, guileless and gentle, smiled back. The youngest faces were clean as how they came; the older were subject to hormones. Oh, hormones! That klieg light word they knew; hormones meant adolescence and suffering. "My hormones, Mr. Weeks!" Girls were bleeding all over the place, or that was how it sometimes seemed to him.
"Why are you crying?" one girl to another. "What did I say?"
"Why are you crying?" another to another.
"Why?"
"We didn't know you were coming."
"I tried to save you a place."
"She couldn't invite you; she could only have six friends."
"My parents are going to kill me."
"My grandmother is really sick."
The hallway's backdrop of posters: roundly muscled, oily heroines on the GAA board, drawings of the family—ma mère, mon père—from French V class. In-school polls and graphs for math. Popular after-school activities: Look at the pie and see what the middle schoolers do after school.
"Mr. Weeks? Do we really have to have a test on the explorers?"
"We do the explorers every year, Mr. Weeks."
"Why can't we just have a discussion?"
"You're so unfair!" said smiling.
"Why aren't you married, Mr. Weeks?"
"Do you have someone in mind?" he asked.
Unattached
Tim Weeks said his best and favorite year in school had been sixth grade, and he still felt like a sixth grader, which went some way in explaining his delight in the company of sixth-grade girls of all sizes: middle school, a mishmashed time, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, class by class, grossly uneven rows of dangerous bodies, bodies in motion, sharply angled, full of feelings, bawdy, brazen children asking anything. "Was that your girlfriend?" — pointing to someone pretty when they had surrounded Tim Weeks on the street outside of school. In some ways, he was always in school. "We knew it was you on the street, Mr. Weeks."
"It was your walk."
"Sexy," from someone in the back, in a small voice but heard.
"What's in the bag, Mr. Weeks?"
"Is it something for us?"
"Yes." Yes, yes, yes, yes, from many sides, and each girl laughing and jouncing closer. Mr. Weeks, ringed by girls, girls jamming sidewalk traffic. Everyone in the middle school knew that Gillian Warring, the Sarah Bernhardt of the eighth grade, was going to marry Mr. Weeks. Even Tim Weeks knew of Gillian's plans. He had seen Gillian in the lunchroom looking at him as she spoke, insisting on herself. I am. Watch me.
He is so cute! from the entire eighth-grade class.
Mrs. Archibald, head of the middle school, told Mr. Weeks that Gillian was too smart for her own good. Mrs. Archibald liked best the girls who still wore undershirts and read mysteries. If not mysteries, then something funny. Funny. As far as Mrs. Archibald could see, funny did not much enter into the English department's curriculum. Had Miss Mazur ever considered reading Wodehouse? Why did Miss Mazur insist on that depressing Lord of the Flies? Mr. Weeks, on the other hand, loved P. G. Wodehouse. He liked mysteries and crosswords, Scrabble and show tunes. He knew a lot about Jane Eyre because the eighth-grade girls read it every year, and they told Tim Weeks about it. They told him they did not think, as Miss Mazur thought, that every object was phallic. That was a sexy word to know, wasn't it? Some of the eighth-grade girls believed Miss Mazur was oversexed, and some of them believed she was really sex starved!