Little Fires Everywhere(23)

At the podium, Mrs. Peters took a long swig from her mug of coffee. “Offenbach,” she barked, raising her right hand. Around the room students riffled through their sheet music.

Twelve bars into Orpheus, Mrs. Peters waved her arms.

“Someone’s off.” She pointed her bow at Deja Johnson, who was at the back of the second violins. “Deja. Play from measure six.”

Deja, who everyone knew was painfully shy, glanced up with the look of a frightened rabbit. She began to play, and everyone could hear the slight tremor from her shaking hand. Mrs. Peters shook her head and rapped her bow on her stand. “Wrong bowing. Down, up-up, down, up. Again.” Deja stumbled through the piece again. The room simmered with resentment, but no one said anything.

Mrs. Peters took a long slurp of coffee. “Stand up, Deja. Nice and loud now, so everyone can hear what they’re not supposed to be doing.” The edges of Deja’s mouth wobbled, as if she were going to cry, but she set her bow to string and began once more. Mrs. Peters shook her head again, her voice shrill over the single violin. “Deja. Down, up-up, down, up. Did you not understand me? You need me to speak in Ebonics?”

It was at this point that Izzy had jumped from her seat and grabbed Mrs. Peters’s bow.

She could not say, even when telling Mia the story, why she had reacted so strongly. It was partly that Deja Johnson always had the anxious face of someone expecting the worst. Everyone knew that her mother was an RN; in fact, she worked with Serena Wong’s mother down at the Cleveland Clinic, and her father managed a warehouse on the West Side. There weren’t many black kids in the orchestra, though, and when her parents showed up for concerts, they sat in the last row, by themselves; they never chitchatted with the other parents about skiing or remodeling or plans for spring break. They had lived all of Deja’s life in a comfortable little house at the south end of Shaker, and she had gone from kindergarten all the way up to high school without—as people joked—saying more than ten words a year.

But unlike many of the other violinists—who resented Izzy for making second chair her first year—Deja never joined in the snide comments, or called her “the freshman.” In the first week of school, Deja, as they’d filed out of the orchestra room, had leaned over to zip an unfastened pocket on Izzy’s bookbag, concealing her exposed gym clothes. A few weeks later, Izzy had been digging through her bag, desperately looking for a tampon, when Deja had discreetly leaned across the aisle and extended a folded hand. “Here,” she’d said, and Izzy had known what it was before she even felt the crinkle of the plastic wrapper in her palm.

Watching Mrs. Peters pick on Deja, in front of everyone, had been like watching someone drag a kitten into the street and club it with a brick, and something inside Izzy had snapped. Before she knew it, she had cracked Mrs. Peters’s bow over her knee and flung the broken pieces at her. There had been a sudden squawk from Mrs. Peters as the jagged halves of the bow—still joined by the horsehair—had whipped across her face and a shrill squeal as the mug of steaming coffee in her hand tipped down her front. The practice room had erupted in a babble of laughter and shrieking and hooting, and Mrs. Peters, coffee dripping down the tendons of her neck, had grabbed Izzy by the elbow and dragged her from the room. In the principal’s office, waiting for her mother to arrive, Izzy had wondered if Deja had been pleased or embarrassed, and she wished she’d had a chance to see Deja’s face.

Although Izzy was sure, now, that Mia would understand all of this, she did not know how to put everything she felt into words. She said only, “Mrs. Peters is a total bitch. She had no right to say that to Deja.”

“Well?” said Mia. “What are you going to do about it?”

It was not a question Izzy had been asked before. Until now her life had been one of mute, futile fury. In the first week of school, after reading T. S. Eliot, she had tacked up signs on all the bulletin boards: I HAVE MEASURED OUT MY LIFE WITH COFFEE SPOONS and DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH? and DO I DARE DISTURB THE UNIVERSE? The poem made her think of her mother, doling out her creamer in a precise teaspoon, flipping out about pesticides if Izzy bit into an apple without washing it, rigidly drawing restrictions around her every move—and made her think of her older siblings, too, of Lexie and Trip and everyone like them, which to Izzy felt like everyone. So concerned about wearing the right things, saying the right things, being friends with the right people. She had fantasies of students whispering in the halls—Those signs? Who put them up? What did they mean?—noticing them, thinking about them, waking up, for God’s sake. But in the rush before first period everyone funneled past them up and down the stairwells, too busy passing notes and cramming for quizzes to even glance up at the bulletin boards, and after second period she found that some dour security guard had torn the signs down, no doubt perplexed by these missives, leaving only flyers for Youth Ending Hunger, Model UN, and French Club. The second week of school, when Ms. Bellamy had asked them to memorize a poem and recite it in front of the class, Izzy had selected “This Be The Verse,” a poem she felt—based on her fourteen and a half years—summed up life quite accurately. She had gotten no further than “They fuck you up, your mum and dad—” before Ms. Bellamy had peremptorily told her to sit down and given her a zero.

What was she going to do about it? The very idea that she could do something stunned her.