All Adults Here(72)
“Congratulations,” Cecelia said. Talking to a teacher outside of school—even just in the faculty parking lot—felt like acknowledging something that everyone spent their lives pretending wasn’t true, which is that teachers were people with whole lives, not just puppets who slept in their supply closets, eating only apples and dreaming of lesson plans.
“You just socked Sidney Fogelman in the nose, is that right?” Ms. Skolnick stopped. They were standing next to a small blue car. Ms. Skolnick unlocked the driver’s side, climbed in, and then pulled up the lock on the passenger side. Cecelia looked at her blankly. “This is how cars used to work, in the olden days. Get on in.”
A few other teachers were in the lot now, and Cecelia could see cigarettes and vapes in their hands, ready for the second they were off school property, or maybe in the safety of their vehicles. Mr. Davidson had put on a denim jacket, which made Cecelia feel sad, for reasons she couldn’t quite identify. She walked around the back bumper and pulled the door open. Ms. Skolnick was already blasting the air-conditioning, pitched forward as far as her belly would allow.
“She really deserved it,” Cecelia said. “I can’t say why, but just believe me. She’s pretty much the devil. Like, if there are nice people, and then there are medium-nice people, and then there are people who would trip you at the top of the stairs, I think that last one is Sidney.”
“Unofficially, I don’t doubt that. Officially, I am equally supportive of all my students.” Ms. Skolnick moved her face from side to side. Her cheeks were magenta. “I’m friends with your aunt Porter, did I tell you that already? How is she doing?”
Cecelia fingered the zipper on her backpack. Gammy hadn’t yet followed through on her offer to teach her how to drive, and Cecelia wasn’t sure she wanted to learn, anyway. It seemed like too much responsibility for one person, being in command of so many thousands of pounds of steel. Horsepower, they called it, as if a horse could do to a human body the same thing that a car could.
“I think she’s okay,” Cecelia said, knowing the minute that she said it that she had no idea how her aunt was, not really, not in this topsy-turvy world where grown-ups were allowed to act like teenagers. “You know, pregnant.”
Ms. Skolnick shifted the car into reverse and they sped backward onto the street.
Cecelia had never punched anyone before. Not in boxing gloves, not in jest, not ever. Her knuckles hurt. Sidney had been so surprised that she’d dropped her phone, and it had clattered to the linoleum floor, the glittery pink rubber case winking up at them. August had slid behind Cecelia’s back, and someone toward the front of the room had cheered. Whether they were cheering the fact that Cecelia had punched Sidney or just the fact that there had been a punch at all—talk about spicing up math class!—she wasn’t sure. She definitely would have been kicked out of school in Brooklyn for this—it happened from time to time, fights, and that was it. Zero tolerance. When that wasn’t mentioned immediately, Cecelia felt like she’d crossed into the twilight zone. It was a genuine math problem—whatever she hadn’t been guilty of before, was she guilty of it now? If her biggest sin had been the threat of exposure, and she had just thwarted exposure with violence, was that in the plus column? She didn’t know.
What made her feel the most weird was that Cecelia felt, not for the first time in her life, that she had been not only neglected in the way that bohemian parents sometimes did, letting their children fall asleep in their clothes at a restaurant dinner party, small body lain across a pile of coats, but also in the less glamorous way, where her parents just couldn’t focus on her, couldn’t focus on her, couldn’t focus on her, and so forgot about her instead. Where the fuck were her parents? They texted and sometimes called, but what the fuck? August’s parents waved at him—at her—when he—when she—got on the bus every morning, and made her dinner at night. Even jerky Sidney’s dad had hurried over to school, as if he’d been sitting in his car, key in the ignition, just waiting to be called into action. But her parents—separately!—hadn’t even picked up the phone. Cecelia imagined herself as a ten-foot-tall dragon, red-scaled and fire-breathing. She imagined herself as Godzilla, stepping on the Big House and crushing it with one giant webbed foot. She imagined walking through the Hudson River until she got back to Brooklyn and then crushing it too. The whole thing. Parents were supposed to be there. That was their whole job. Good, bad, whatever—the very lowest job requirement was to be there.
When they rounded the final turn into the Big House’s driveway, Ms. Skolnick screeched to a stop. Astrid’s car was barreling out backward and stopped just a few feet in front of Ms. Skolnick’s windshield. Cecelia took a deep breath. “Go on,” Ms. Skolnick said. “They aren’t going to hurt you,” as if she knew such a thing, as if that was a promise anyone could make, but Cecelia opened the door anyway and stepped out, her sneakers crunching the gravel. Astrid swung open the driver’s-side door to her car, and Porter swung open the passenger side, and they both sprang out, hands reaching for Cecelia. She watched them move toward her cautiously, hunters tracking a new species: Girl in Trouble—place of origin: Methodist Hospital, Brooklyn, New York. She didn’t smile. She wanted to make this second last as long as possible, when all the adults in her life were waiting on her next word.