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Detention.
Saturday detention.
Honestly, whoever thought this up must have been seriously traumatized as a child. Detentions are fine, she’s used to detention, but she prefers to keep her after-school specials confined to the after school, thanks very much.
Saturday. Gross.
Sarah stalks her way into the library, all leather jacket, unbrushed hair, and serious attitude. Is any of this expressly necessary on an over-warm Saturday in May? Possibly not, but then again, neither is a Saturday detention.
She hates everything.
It gets worse the second she steps through the library doors. For one thing, Mrs. S—assistant principals are the worst—is standing guard. For another, there are four faces staring at her with varying levels of slack-jawed disinterest. Sarah bites down hard on her tongue.
Bad enough, to be stuck at school for upwards of eight hours on the weekend. So much worse, having to share airspace with four bitches who have your fucking face while you’re at it.
The geektastic one, Cosima, fires a bright smile her way. Behind her, Alison Hendrix (captain of the cheerleading squad, head of Prom committee, all around vaguely psychotic honor roll bitch) wrinkles her nose.
“Who invited the burnout?”
“Mornin’, Princess,” Sarah replies, pumping as obscene an amount of cheer as she can manage into her tone. She flops down at one of the tables, slings her bag onto it, grins toothily at Mrs. S. The woman looks astonishingly displeased. Go figure.
The other two, she’s even less familiar with. One is some kind of knock-out talent from the football—soccer, she reminds herself dully—team. The other…
She doesn’t even want to know about the other. Scraggly blonde hair, manic eyes, a permanent sneer curling her mouth. If Alison is psychotic, this one is…
The girl meets her eyes and all but lights up. Sarah jerks her attention back to the front of the room.
“Rules of the day are simple,” Mrs. S is saying in her sharply accented, no-nonsense voice—the one that mostly just makes Sarah want to make a break for the nearest window. “You sit. You stay.”
“For eight hours?” Alison sounds traumatized by the very idea. The soccer girl elbows her lightly.
“Shh.”
“You can’t shush me, Childs!” Alison squawks, and Sarah resists the impulse to thunk the meat of her hand against her forehead. Of course. Beth Childs, God’s gift to Shermer High Athletics. How could she have forgotten such glory?
“All of you would do well to shut up,” Mrs. S drawls, clearly unimpressed. “Sit. Stay. No speaking, no sleeping—that means you, Manning.”
Sarah turns on her most winning smile. Cosima snorts, then waves her hands spasmodically, as if to clear the air of some foul-smelling smoke.
“Sorry, sorry, ignore me.”
“And,” Mrs. S goes on, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I expect a one-thousand word essay from each one of you by the end of the day, detailing exactly who you see yourself to be.”
The groan that goes up is both collective and eerily identical. Sarah almost wants to laugh, until she realizes that one-thousand words is approximately 850 more than she’s generally willing to pen in a school essay. Ah, well. Not like another detention for skivving it off would be out of her range of expectation.
“Any questions?” Mrs. S caps off, striding toward the door. The scraggly-haired blonde jerks a hand into the air. Fascinated, Sarah watches both blood and patience drain from Mrs. S’ haughty face.
“Yes, Helena?”
Helena leans forward against her desk, arm dropping down to join its twin. There’s something eager about the way she’s smiling, and something genuinely off-putting about that eagerness.
“When is lunch?”
Mrs. S grunts. It’s not a particularly attractive sound. “Noon.”
Helena looks mildly disappointed. “Snack?” she requests hopefully. Mrs. S rolls her eyes.
“Helena, you are in detention. This is not kindergarten.”
The blonde girl shrugs and lowers her chin onto the desktop, blowing the hair out of her eyes with a sharp upward huff. Mrs. S pushes against the library door with one open palm.
“Hey, hey, wait up,” Beth calls, an irritating bossy tone underlying the steadiness Sarah is already bored with. “Where are you going? Aren’t you supposed to watch us?”
“You’re adults,” Mrs. S points out, already halfway out the door. “Or near enough for my measure. Watch your own bloody selves.”
They listen in silence to the echo of her heels ca-clacking their way down the hall. When she is a clear and safe distance away, Sarah swivels in her seat, bounces out of it, and settles her ass comfortably atop her table.
“So,” she says with false cheer, delighted to see the displeased narrow of Beth’s eyes, the crooked smile dancing around Cosima’s lips, the horrorstruck expression taking up the whole of Her Majesty, The Bitch’s face. “What do losers like you do for fun around here?”
***
Is she particularly surprised to find she’s been saddled with a bunch of wastecases and fools for the afternoon? No. But Alison likes to believe some people deserve better in life, and when those people are pretty, popular, and have a remarkable amount of AP homework to finish this weekend, detention really does fall low on the list of priorities.
Where Sarah Manning or that…Helena person are concerned, detention is probably the best they can hope for, but she has better things to do with her time, thank you very much.
At least Beth is here. Not that she likes Beth. Not that they run in at all the same circle, because Beth is one of those push-and-shove solemn jock girls, the ones who are always being mistaken for lesbians, and who stop at nothing to drag themselves to victory. Beth is even worse than most of them, really, because she appears to have no sense of humor whatsoever. She didn’t even smile that time Alison told her she could benefit from a nice trek through the women’s section of JC Penny.
See, it was funny, because no one can benefit from JC Penny. Honestly. What is she thinking?
No, she doesn’t particularly like Beth, who is dressed today in a pair of sweatpants and a blue tank top, and whose hair is dragged back out of her face in a reckless ponytail—but she does sort of admire her. In a way. Because, though she is tough, and sturdy, and far too adult for words, Beth is successful. In the high school hierarchy, she’s at least third tier, which is not too shabby. Not shabby at all.
That geek girl with the dreads and the wiggling fingers is probably only tier two, at best, and Sarah Manning is…
Sarah Manning is in the basement.
She accidentally catches Sarah’s eye now, and looks determinedly away. She can do this. All she has to do is pull out a pen and start writing this fiendishly stupid essay, and before she knows it, she’ll be out the door and off to greener pastures, where—
“Oi, Princess. What’d you do?”
Raising her chin, Alison sniffs. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
Sarah shrugs, hands linked behind her head. “Maybe I’m makin’ it my business. You forget, I practically built this city.”
She sweeps a gaze around the room, grinning, and Alison huffs. “That isn’t anything to be proud of. Detention is tacky and pitiful.”
“And yet, I see you here.” Sarah wiggles her eyebrows. “Funny how that works out, yeah?”
“Leave her alone,” Beth says stiffly, staring down at her hands on the table. Sarah arches one of those wiggling eyebrows.
“Got something to say, Beckham?”
“Oh, drop the punk rock crap,” Alison snaps. “Everybody knows you’re a pissy foster kid who went and got herself knocked up last year.”
Some of the sardonic amusement drains out of Sarah’s face, and Alison allows herself a moment of pride for it. Good. Someone needs to take that little criminal down a peg or two, and if Beth won’t stand up and do it—
“I’d watch my mouth, were I you,” Sarah growls. Alison sniffs.
“You’re not so tough.”
“Yeah? How many cons have you pulled this week, Hendrix?”
“Woah, woah.” Cosima wrinkles her nose, easing the bulky plastic frames of her glasses up an inch higher, and sweeps her hands through the air. “Let’s not go fighting, guys, okay? We have to spend the next—“ She glances up at the clock. “—seven hours and forty-nine minutes together, so we might as well make the most of it.”
“And how,” Alison asks her witheringly, “do you propose we do that?”
“We could leave,” Sarah suggests. There’s still something snappish in her voice that makes Alison’s stomach clench cheerfully. This day may not be a complete waste, after all.
“We could,” Cosima agrees slowly, reaching up to absently tug on one of her ridiculous dreads. “Or we could sit it out, write our essays, and not piss off Mrs. S any more than we have to!”
She looks rather proud of having given voice to this option. Sarah smirks.
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Cosima raises her head, meets her gaze, smiles. There’s something about that smile that Alison doesn’t entirely dislike—it’s charming and warm, as if there is nothing Cosima likes better in all the world than to simply be happy—but it makes her uneasy all the same. Cosima is a weirdo. The kind of weirdo you don’t mind copying off of in class, but would never want to actually hang out with in the real world. If there is a spectrum of high school engagement, Cosima falls neatly in the middle somewhere, too brainy to be accepted by the burnouts who couldn’t care less, and too goofy to situate herself comfortably at the popular table.
And too genuinely delightful, apparently, to give a rat’s bum either way.
Alison isn’t quite sure what to make of that.
“Well,” she’s saying now, easing herself out of her seat and giving the blank notebook on her table a long, considering look. “I don’t know about leaving. But I do know a little about fun…”
Alison knows—just knows, from the concerned pull of Beth’s eyebrows, and the open curiosity on Sarah’s face—that this can go nowhere but straight down on the fast track to Hell.
***
How she ended up here, in detention, on a Saturday morning, Elizabeth Childs is disinclined to consider. She knows how it happened, technically speaking; you snap on one girl after practice, and things can get a little hairy. She needs to work harder on keeping her cool, on not sweating the small stuff. She gets that.
Mistakes happen. You can come back from mistakes.
Usually.
But to end up here, cross-legged in a corner of the school library with Alison Hendrix on her left and a very-baked Cosima Whatshernuts on her right…
And with a joint in her hand, to boot.
For God’s sake, she’s in the pre-law program.
She takes a hit, coughs, and passes the blunt on. Cosima is sitting with her head back against one of the shelves, blowing smoke rings with a careless ease. Sarah’s eyes are closed. Alison’s posture suggests she is trying her very hardest to stay strong, but she’s taken a couple of hits herself—mostly under the guise of warding off Sarah’s chicken, Princess? Comments—and her face keeps relaxing into a dopey smile when she thinks no one is looking. It makes Beth laugh.
Or maybe that’s the weed.
Does it matter?
The last of them, Helena, is swaying from side to side, humming to herself as she traces shapes in the carpet with the tips of her index fingers. Beth watches her distractedly, her initial unease a distant memory. Sure, the girl is probably dogshit crazy. Sure. But hey, she punched a girl in the face to wind up here, so who is she to judge?
It makes her wonder aloud:
“Why are you all here?”
She half-expects another knee-jerk mind your own beeswax response from Alison, but it doesn’t come. There’s something of an awkward silence as Cosima collects the remnants of the joint and files it carefully into a plastic baggie, and then Sarah says, thinly, “You go first.”
She’s stoned, but she’s not that stoned. “No way.”
Sarah snorts. “Don’t ask if you won’t tell.”
“I kissed a girl,” Cosima says suddenly. All heads twist toward her, each expression identically bewildered. She twitches her shoulders, half-smiling. “I mean, that’s not totally why I’m here. Might’ve also done a little hacking to…uh. Clean up the girl’s grades. A little. But yeah. Turns out they kinda frown upon that. Go fig’, right?”
Helena is staring at her, her eyes wild. “Kissed?” she repeats, except, with her accent, it comes out keesed? She looks utterly baffled by the idea, and Beth wonders idly if this girl has ever been kissed in her life.
Probably not. I’d be surprised if she had a mom who actually hugged her once in a while.
The thought makes her unexpectedly sad, and she’s all set to scoot over to Helena and place a comforting hand on her knee—when the other girl whips out a small switchblade and begins to carve her name into the nearest shelf, the letters rigid and blocky. Beth takes a huge mental step backwards, shaking her head.
O-kay, let’s maybe not mess with Shakira McCrazypants over there.
“Yeah, kissed. Y’know, with, like, lips,” Cosima is telling Helena, without a single trace of edge to her voice. She looks calm, and happy, and not at all perturbed to be trapped in detention. Beth isn’t sure whether she ought to be amused by her or totally wigged out.
“Gay?” Helena asks hesitantly, jabbing a clumsy finger in Cosima’s direction. Cosima shrugs.
“Halfsies, or something. It’s a spectrum, you know.”
“Spec-trum,” Helena repeats thoughtfully, and smiles. It’s a surprisingly charming smile, though some of that charm is shunted aside when Helena pulls an unwrapped Starburst from the bottom of a coat pocket and stuffs it into her mouth. Alison makes a revolted face.
Maybe it’s the weed, or maybe it’s the fact that she’s spending a Saturday she’d been reserving for a hefty training schedule trapped in her school library (with four other girls who share her face, no less). Maybe it’s the way Cosima flutters her hands dreamily while describing the girl who got her put away today, or maybe it’s the grin Sarah wears as she pokes Alison repeatedly in the side of her stiff, neatly-cut hair with the tip of a pen. Maybe it’s just how stupid all of this—detention, a mindless essay hanging over their heads, Mrs. S—is. Maybe.
She starts laughing, and finds herself quite unable to stop for several minutes. And that is good, somehow. She can’t remember the last time she let go. Can’t remember the last time she felt safe enough to let go.
Safe. With these lunatics. With a geek, and a lunatic, and a burnout, and a Prom queen. Go fucking figure.
She laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
***
Cosima doesn’t expect this. She’s not really the kind of girl who gets detention—not with her 4.3 GPA, and her multitude of college credit courses, and her aptitude for skipping grades and acing science exams—so she supposes she’s not sure what she had expected…but not this. Not these girls.
And not to get along with them.
Except, okay, let’s be fair, kids; she gets along with pretty much everybody. It isn’t hard. People skills aren’t exact a strong suit, in the most technical sense of the word, but they aren’t impossible. She’s good at girls, at least, and teachers, and that’s really all that matters in this environment.
‘Girls’ usually doesn’t boil down to genetic double types, though. This is a whole new land of Ozian proportions, and sometimes, Cosima thinks she would like nothing better than to shut all five of them in a room together and document the results.
So, basically, this detention is all kinds of nerd-fantasy fulfilling.
Especially now that everyone is slightly baked, and decidedly more cooperative. She has to admit that she doesn’t particularly know any of them—because seeing them around isn’t knowing, because Sarah Manning elbowing her out of the way in the hall without even looking at her, or Alison Hendrix scoffing at her skirt after school, or Beth Childs being paired with her for a science project and letting her do most of the hard parts, isn’t knowing—but she kind of likes them anyway. The diversity of them. The wonder of them. She kind of likes the little glances they steal at one another when they think no one’s paying attention, like they’re trying to map out some complex equation to which only one variable is truly understood.
She wants to know them, to make sense of them, because people are fascinating, and people who look like her automatically twelve times more so, but she doesn’t ask. People don’t like to be pestered by The Science Dweeb. People like to copy off of The Science Dweeb and then walk away, completely ignorant to the pressures and the frustrations that—
But she isn’t talking about that now.
She isn’t talking about any of it, because they’re dancing.
She can’t quite say how they got to this point, because one minute, they were talking about Alison’s boyfriend, and Beth’s soccer nerves, and Sarah was studiously avoiding Helena’s extremely potent gaze—and then this. Dancing. She guesses it’s her own fault, for jacking her iPod into the P.A. system, but she didn’t think they’d actually follow her lead.
(“This is a terrible idea.” Sarah, arms crossed over her chest.
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Beth, frowning until that little line eases between her brows.
“Nope.”
“Mrs. S is not going to like it.” Alison, smiling a dark little smile.
“Mrs. S isn’t going to hear a thing. I can wire it so it’s only our P.A.”
“Oh.” All of them, in eerie unison.)
And then Sarah had grinned her manic, punk-rock grin, and that strange shadow of the mom she never quite learned to be had faded away. And Beth had twisted on her heels, fingers snapping, and Cosima had thought, You need this. An outlet. You’re going to go crazy someday, without it. And Alison had grasped Helena’s hands, surprising the hell out of all of them, and spun them both in mad circles, and Cosima had laughed, twirling at their side.
She’s never seen any of them dance. Alison is the closest, with her cheerleading routines, but to see the rest of this way is…oddly thrilling. Sarah headbangs, her fists clenched white around the staircase railing, one motorcycle boot slamming against the floor in time to the stuttering beat. Beth rocks back and forth, snapping her fingers, slamming the palms of her hands against her sides, head tipped back. Helena staggers and writhes, arms above her head, hands in her hair, keening along to the music in a way that is disturbing, but not entirely without its charm. They move like no one’s watching them, like, for the first time in their lives, no one is grading them, waiting for them to trip up, fingers crossed for calamity. And in these dances, Cosima thinks she sees the reality of who they are.
She thinks she can see Sarah-the-mother, buried deep beneath Sarah-the-criminal. She thinks she can see the humiliation of a pregnancy in high school, the shame and desperation and hope of watching her own stomach balloon with life in the bathroom mirror. She thinks she can see the dreams Sarah had hardly allowed herself to dream for this child, and the shattering that took place—would have had to take place—the second the little girl was born and handed off. She thinks she can see it, in the stutter of Sarah’s boot against tile, in the heavy-handed jerk and spasm of her fist in the air. This is Sarah Manning. This is the broken, the shamed, the hopeful. The rest is just a game.
She thinks she can see Beth’s reserve cracking wide open, and the thin layer of delight beneath. She thinks she can see past the rigidity of her shoulders, and the sharp line of her mouth, and the expectations that drive her every action. She thinks she can see her wish to be beyond this school and this town, her wish to step off the soccer field and out of the high-priority classrooms, and into something…what? What does Beth want to do with her life? Cosima doesn’t feel right guessing, but she senses it etched there in the slope of Beth’s back, in the turn of her hips and the rapturous expression on her face. Something bigger than this. Something real. Something that would make a difference, the way shouldering people out of the way and scoring goals can’t do.
She thinks she can see Alison’s semi-violent need to belong, to carry her shoulders just so, to dress right, and act right, and step in all the right footprints—and she thinks she can see it dissolving. There’s something else there, beneath the clipped smiles and shorn bangs. There’s something like brutality, something like the raw good humor of a woman with nothing left to lose, and it scares her a little, yes. There’s something terrifying in the snap and crack of Alison’s arms, whipping through the air, something that makes Cosima wonder where she’ll go when this is all over, when the Princess card has been worn thin, thinner, clean through. She thinks Alison knows it can’t last. She thinks the melting, shifting state of the hours burning away is clear on Alison’s face, in the grit of her teeth and the arch of her back. She thinks Alison knows what’s coming for her—the land of thankless motherhood, wifehood, womanhood, the land of too-soon marriages and too-bitter divorces—and she thinks Alison is strong enough to veer left instead of right, making her way around it unscathed. She thinks. She wonders if Alison is aware of her own strength.
And then there’s Helena.
She has no idea what she’s seeing in Helena’s whip-crack arms, in the roll of her pelvis and the wild tangle of her hair. She has no idea who Helena even is, on the surface. A ball of crazy. A basketcase. A mess. Helena doesn’t talk much at school, doesn’t volunteer answers or make friends. More than once, Cosima has studied her in silence, wondering if there’s something there—something like autism, something keeping her separated from the rest of the world. Maybe there is—or maybe it’s just Helena. Maybe Helena doesn’t want to interact, to engage, to run the marathon that is high school like everyone else. Maybe Helena doesn’t care. Does that make her mad, or enlightened, or just apathetic? Cosima can’t say. But she’s curious. Watching Helena now, not making eye contact, just staring up at the ceiling and spinning in slow, almost soporific circles, she wonders what could have happened, to make a girl like this.
They dance, and twist, and sing, and laugh, and somewhere in the midst of it all, it occurs to Cosima that maybe they’re friends. Not always. Not once this day is over, probably. But for this moment, in this room, with Sarah wearing that t-shirt, and Alison smiling that smile, and Beth’s hands held out in just that manner—maybe they’re friends. For the moment.
And maybe there’s something gorgeous in a moment like this.
***
“I punched a girl.”
They turn to gape at Beth, whose head is pillowed on her bent arms, her knees drawn up to her chest. Helena studies her carefully. Strange girl. Sad girl. She thinks she could smile at her, but what difference would it make? Beth isn’t looking at her.
“She was running her mouth in the locker room,” Beth goes on, “and I punched her. I don’t really remember doing it. High adrenaline situation, I guess sometimes you black out, or block out, or whatever. But I did. And they sent me here. My father is…”
She trails off. Sarah grunts.
“Least you’ve got a father.”
Helena twists her head and watches Sarah now, reading the lines of her body, the tilt of her posture. Sarah is sad, too, but it’s a different kind of sad. A more real kind of sad. Beth’s sad is deep, and weak, and unfortunate. Sarah’s sad glows like fire.
Helena thinks she could get along with a sad like that.
“You’ve got,” Beth begins, but Sarah narrowly cuts her off.
“Foster family. Latest in a long line. They don’t want a screw-up from across the pond, turns out, ‘less it’s a little screw-up with big ol’ eyes. I don’t fit the market type. Anyway, I don’t like ‘em much. The guy shouts a lot, and the lady’s a piece of work in her own right. I’m shelling out of there the second I turn eighteen.”
It’s more than Helena has heard her say in a single sitting. No insults, no smart mouth; just Sarah. She likes Sarah. Privately thinks maybe Sarah is the best of all of them, if only because she is so broken inside. Broken makes people strong. Sarah is extremely strong.
But Sarah doesn’t look at her for affirmation, doesn’t smile, doesn’t reach out a hand. That’s a Cosima thing, the reaching out. She’s doing it now, cupping Sarah’s knee lightly, and Helena feels a stab of something resembling unease. Envy? Revulsion?
She isn’t good at this thing, this people thing.
“What did you—“
“I’m always here,” Sarah says with a shrug, heading off Cosima’s unasked question like it doesn’t matter. She leans her weight back against the wall, boots upturned, and sighs. A long sigh. Helena imagines the arc of it, spiraling, spinning, turning pink and blue and violet in the air. “Not on a fuckin’ Saturday, usually, but it’s all the same in the end. Last week, it was smoking in the courtyard. This week, a mix-up with the fire alarm. Next week, hell, who knows. Maybe I’ll chuck a rubbish bin off the roof for kicks.”
She doesn’t look particularly concerned about any of this, and it makes Helena admire her with an unfamiliar ferocity. Admiration is for God. Admiration is for the strong. She doesn’t find people that strong around here.
“I left,” Alison says suddenly. Helena bares her teeth, but no one notices. She doesn’t mind. Alison is strange, and vulgar, and displeasing. Alison makes her skin crawl. She thinks if ever there was a person this room would be better off without, it’s Alison, because there is a shroud around Alison’s soul. Alison is hiding, cringing, lying. Alison is not real.
“You…left,” Sarah says slowly, uncomprehending. Alison is inspecting the smooth curve of her manicure.
“Yes. Middle of the day. Everything was just getting so…” She hesitates, then plunges on, looking suddenly young and small and tired. “Everything gets so exhausting.”
“Right,” Sarah drawls. “Being popular sucks the big one.”
“It does.” Alison’s eyes, so similar to the rest of theirs, flash. “Do you know what it’s like, to have to play a part every single day? To pretend like you aren’t tired, and lonely? To have everyone looking at you all the time, every minute, just waiting for you to trip up and land on your face?”
They watch her, evenly. Helena chews her lip. This is strange. This is unexpected.
This is interesting.
“So, I left,” Alison says briskly. “Yes. And I don’t feel guilty, either. Even though I missed a meeting of the Prom decoration committee. Even though I can’t afford to do things like that. Even though Donnie was supposed to be there, waiting for me, and I blew him off—but I needed it. A mental health day. I would have gone crazy without it.”
Aren’t you already? Helena wonders, and grins behind her hand. Alison is staring down at her twined-together fingers. Doesn’t see it. That’s good.
“Guessin’ they didn’t appreciate that,” Sarah tells her, and Helena thinks she senses a bit of admiration there. Maybe more than a bit. Her stomach clamps upon itself unhappily. Sarah has never sounded that way with her.
“Guessing they didn’t,” Alison agrees stiffly. “Seeing as I’m here.”
“That’s stupid,” Beth tells her. Alison’s eyes flash.
“I was feeling—“
“Not you,” Beth dismisses sharply. “Getting detention for that. That’s stupid. They could have just given you a write-up, or an essay or something. It’s not like…”
Punching someone, she doesn’t say, though Helena believes she wants to. She’s beating herself up about it. This is a clear image, a clear logic Helena understands. Punishing yourself is a powerful thing. Punishing yourself is sometimes the only thing.
“Hooky isn’t so bad, compared to hacking a report card,” Cosima says, almost wistfully, and grins. Helena has decided she likes Cosima’s grin—not the way she likes Sarah’s sad, but all the same, it’s pleasant. Cosima grins like the whole world is funny, and fascinating, and brimming over with depth. Cosima grins like nothing can bring her down. Helena is amazed by that idea.
And yet…isn’t there something sad in her, too? Something well-buried, in a carefully dug hole, with carefully placed dirt and boards keeping it underground? Cosima is hiding a sadness, too, and it is somehow different from Sarah’s, or Beth’s, or—
Alison sniffs. “There’s a certain…expectation in my family. We don’t do things like play hooky and get caught.”
“You do,” Sarah points out, smirking. Helena giggles.
Like a flash, four eyes are on her, startled and perhaps a little bit stunned. They have forgotten she is here, Helena realizes, and giggles again, though the pit in her stomach is flexing and expanding magnificently. People forget her a lot. It’s easy to do, she supposes.
“I was bored.”
The words are vaulting off her tongue before she can stop them, and she guesses that’s all right. They haven’t asked, because people never do, so why not volunteer the information? She’ll likely never speak to any of them (Sarah) again after this day, because they all (Sarah) have better things to do with their schooldays than to mess around with the town freak.
Some great, unholy misery threatens her. She shoves it back down, bares her teeth at it, snarls. It slinks away. Good.
“You were…” Beth raises an eyebrow. Cosima is pushing her glasses up on her nose, leaning forward. Helena smiles.
“Bored. Saturday. Nothing to do. So I came.”
“You came,” Sarah repeats, dumbfounded (and a little amused? Hard to tell. Hard to read), “to detention on a Saturday, because you were bored?”
“Yes,” she says simply, and that’s all it takes. It gets Cosima giggling, and then Beth, and Alison. Sarah is the last to dissolve, her whole body shaking with the effort of it.
They’re not her friends, Helena senses. She doesn’t have friends. She’s all right with that, has it all squared away in the corner of her head where things like social interactions are stored. There are bigger things in the world, bigger dreams and prayers. Bigger people to impress. She will, someday, impress them all.
For now, she’s all right with this, too. With cold, nasty Alison, even. With Beth’s appraising expression. With Cosima’s open interest. With Sarah…
Sarah is important, she believes. Sarah has potential that far outstrips the rest of them. Who could Sarah be, if she gave up the fire alarms and teen pregnancies and actually strove for something?
She wonders.
She smiles.
Tentatively, uneasily, Sarah smiles back.
***
“Ah, shit,” Cosima cries, so abruptly that they all jump. Sarah, who has been playing a strangely engaging game of Never Have I Ever with Beth (Beth has done an odd assortment of things that are, Sarah supposes, perfectly befitting of a jock who lives for other people’s expectations, but she is nowhere near Sarah’s level), looks up.
“What?” she snaps. Beth, who has just admitted to having once swiped a Xanax from her mom’s medicine cupboard, frowns.
“The essay!” Cosima bumps a hand off her own forehead. “We forgot about the essays!”
“So?” Sarah drawls, relaxing. Mrs. S likes to assign essays. Sarah, just as cheerfully, likes not to do them. It’s a sort of ritual between them by now, like mocking the woman’s endless array of blazers, like narrowing her eyes and pretending the running commentary on her failures at motherhood don’t get under her skin. Mrs. S is kind of a bitch. She doesn’t deserve an essay.
“So,” Cosima says frantically, “it’s almost three! Mrs. S is going to want it in an hour, and none of us have—“
“So,” Sarah says again, grinning. “You write it.”
“Me?” Cosima blinks somewhat buggishly behind her glasses. “We each have to do one, Mrs. S said—“
“Piss on that,” Sarah dismisses. “You write it. Just the one. You write about all of us.”
“Why me?” She has to hand it to the little geek; she looks pretty put out. But she’ll do it, Sarah knows. It’s in her blood. Can’t ignore a teacher. Can’t ignore an assignment. The brains are always so predictable that way.
“Because we won’t,” Sarah tells her, and nods to Beth, who gives her a conflicted shrug.
“We won’t?” Alison repeats snippishly. “Since when do you speak for all of us?”
“Have you started yours yet?” Sarah asks. Alison lowers her gaze slightly. Were she a less prissy girl, Sarah suspects she would begin chewing her lip. Instead, she flaps a hand in the air.
“Fine. Just the one. But she doesn’t have to write it alone.”
Cosima glances up, clearly surprised. Sarah doesn’t have to wonder if Alison has ever spoken to her before today.
“Yeah,” Beth agrees. “We’ll all help.” She gives Sarah a warning look. “All of us.”
“All,” Helena says softly. Her eyes, gleaming like lamplights, are fixed on Sarah’s face, her mouth twitching in a smile Sarah doesn’t entirely feel comfortable with.
She thinks she’d agree to just about anything, if it would mean Helena giving that smile to someone else.
“Fine,” she snaps. “All. Jesus, you’re a bunch of losers.”
“Yeah, but we’re your losers,” Cosima says cheerfully, and Sarah can’t help but laugh, because—for the moment—it’s sort of true. She’s not used to having people around her, unless Felix counts as people (and he doesn’t, because brothers are for life; it’s one of the only things she believes in, and she does so mostly because she knows he agrees). She’s not used to friends.
She settles herself on one side of Cosima’s table, and the others follow suit. Alison, adjusting her delicate chain bracelet thoughtfully. Beth, rubbing her jaw. Helena, chewing a pen with almost revolting vigor. All different. All the same.
They expect things from us, she thinks with jarring clarity. They expect each of us to fit inside a carefully molded little box. A genius. A jock. A princess. A burnout. A freak. They expect us to look, and sound, and walk their way, and if we don’t, we’re wrong. Hell, we expect it from each other. Ridiculous.
“Why are you smiling?” Alison sounds suspicious. Sarah raps on the desk.
“Okay, losers. Here’s what we’re going to say.”
***
Mrs. S releases them at four on the dot. She seems startled when Cosima presents her with a single sheet of notebook paper, covered in her neat, spikey scrawl. They didn’t use a thousand words. They didn’t need that many.
Sarah will be back in this library by Tuesday, she knows. She can’t resist pushing buttons at this school. Can’t resist making a show of herself. Felix tells her to sit down, to keep quiet, to graduate and go off to find Kira. Felix tells her a lot of things. Maybe someday she’ll listen.
Alison will go home tonight and set to work on her outfit for Prom. Donnie is expecting her input on his own color scheme by the end of the weekend. Donnie always does what she wants, in the end, following her trail. Donnie understands the pressures of being the Golden Couple, the laws of the land. Dress nice. Stand straight. Smile. Donnie understands. Alison sometimes thinks she can’t stand that about him.
Cosima will not give up showing off in the name of pretty girls. It’s stupid, she knows; she should put all of her energy into those scholarships, into getting out of this small town and into the best doctorate program her brain can buy. She should. She will. But there’s this French transfer student who keeps wiggling her fingers in greeting. A super-hot French transfer student, who probably doesn’t need her report cards hacked into. All the same…Cosima doesn’t think she ought to close any doors just now.
Beth will stay on the soccer team. She will play her hardest, fight for the wins, earn the trophies. Her father will be proud. Her mother will smile daintily. Beth will keep her head up, her hair knotted in a fine ponytail, her jersey clean. Beth will work her way into a good college, a good law program, a good future. She will earn her keep, and her family will shine with pleasure. This is good. She will be good. She will not black out again. Will not punch anyone else. She hopes to whatever god might be listening.
Helena will spend the rest of the weekend meandering. At some point or another, she will stop by the church between the 7-11 and the bus stop. She’s due in Father Tomas’ confessional. She’ll have to tell him about today, about being in detention. She’ll have to tell him about lying to Mrs. S to get in. She won’t have to tell him about Sarah Manning—but she will. She likes Sarah, and she trusts Tomas. Maybe he will know how to get past Sarah’s guard. Maybe he will help her find a friend.
They may speak on Monday. They may not. Sarah would not be earth-shatteringly surprised if Alison raised a hand to say hello in the hall; she would be equally unsurprised to find Alison laughing at her from behind a safe gaggle of idiot girls. Cosima does not expect Beth to brush her shoulder in their history class after lunch—but if she does, that would be all right. Alison has no plans to sit beside Helena in the cafeteria…but if she happens to see the girl alone, and happens to have an extra bag of Oreos in her lunchbag, would it be such a shame, to pause for a second and hand them over?
They are not friends, but nor are they strangers. A small gift, maybe. The smallest. But a gift nonetheless. Sarah wonders, grinning to herself as she strides across the football field toward home, just how pissed Mrs. S would be, to find that out.
We are not your box, Cosima had written. We are not your dream. We are not your expectations. We are not your most convenient definitions. We are, in your eyes, fully conceived. Fully molded. Fully adapted. But we are not the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, the criminal. We are not. We will never be. We are so much more.
You cannot make us in your image.
We are better than that.