The Impossible Knife of Memory(16)

“So?”

“You promised that you would do it.”

“Did not.”

He pulled into a parking space between a Lexus and a minivan. “I’ve given you two rides this week.”

“I only asked for one. Why are you such a pain in my butt? You don’t even know me. Do you always bully strangers into doing stuff they don’t want to do?”

As the words came out, I knew I didn’t mean them but I couldn’t figure out how to unsay them.

Finn shifted to park and turned to look at me. “Were you going to blow off school today?”

“Why do you care?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “This place sucks.”

“No kidding. You have any homework for Cleveland?”

“Didn’t do it. Spare me the lecture.”

“What’s your average?”

“Can a negative number be an average?”

“How about this—I’ll do your math if you write the article. Right now, in the cafeteria.” He cut the engine. “Then we’ll be even and I won’t bug you anymore.”





_*_ 23 _*_

I wrote the stupid article.

I made up names of databases, I put in quotes from students who didn’t exist (Paige Turner and Art T. Ficial), and devoted a paragraph—deep in the story—to the “special shelves” where all the banned and challenged books were held. (“‘ That’s where you find all the sex stuff,’ said Art T. Ficial.”) By the time I was finished writing (and cracking myself up), I was actually in a less-than-cranky mood. The fact that Dad had woken up before noon and taken off in the truck was a good sign, I decided. A great one. He was coming out of the dark place where he’d been hiding for the last few weeks. It was all part of the big adjustment of living normal instead of moving around the country like we were being chased by phantoms. He was having a good day and I was going to have a good day and before I knew it, I’d written a sidebar piece to the library article filled with the URLs of made-up websites for students who wanted help with their homework.

Finn did my math, though I wasn’t quite sure how. Every few minutes a new horde of girls would buzz over and bug him about tickets or T-shirts or swim practice. I put in my earbuds and cranked the music.

“Are you a man-whore?” I asked as the loudest group of them teetered away on their high heels. (High heels? Really? At seven thirty in the morning? Shouldn’t you actually have breasts before you start wearing heels?) “Or does that stink spray make you irresistible to baby-zombie-bitches?”

“Yes.” Finn grinned, eyes glued to the b-z-b butts. “A nd yes.”

But he did my homework. And the look on Mr. Cleveland’s face was worth putting up with Finn. Cleveland hadn’t gotten around to grading our tests yet, so I left second period feeling almost, kind of, a little . . . happy.

Who says miracles don’t happen?

The day only got better after that. Brandon wasn’t in English, and Ms. Rogak showed a movie that lasted the entire period. I was awake enough in study hall to finish my Chinese homework and then health turned into an accidental study hall because the teacher was sick, so I was able to get a nap after all. The sub in forensics was a retired cop who told us real stories about blood-spatter patterns and estimating when a murder had been committed by the age of the maggots and flies on the corpse. Nobody fell asleep.

In Chinese, Ms. Neff gave me and a girl named Sasha extra points for our pinyin homework because we were the only people who had done it. As Sasha high-fived me, I decided that I might do more homework if they made it into a competitive sport.

Even social studies sort of rocked. Mr. Diaz was teaching about the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and he neglected to mention the Chickasaw people. I raised my hand (politely) and pointed out (respectfully) his error. His face turned angry red, but he spent a minute typing on his computer, then reading the screen, and then he said, “Thank you, Hayley. You are correct. The Chickasaw were forced to walk the Trail of Tears, too.”

I raised my hand. He grimaced, but called on me again.

“Because thousands of native people died on the Trail of Tears, shouldn’t we call it a ‘genocide’ instead of a ‘forced march’?” I asked. “If an African government today did the same thing to their indigenous people, we’d be screaming about it in the United Nations and raising money for the victims, wouldn’t we?”

The debate that followed was so awesome I didn’t doodle in my notebook once.





_*_ 24 _*_

I should have known better.

The laws of the universe dictate that for every positive action, there is an unequal and sucky reaction. So the fact that Thursday had been a somewhat decent day meant that Friday was required to go up in flames.

It started just after midnight. I’d been half sleeping on the couch, waiting, because Dad had gone out for milk and bread right after I got home from school and hadn’t returned. Spock barked, that’s what startled me awake. The lights of the pickup truck flashed through the front window as it pulled into the driveway.

Spock went to the door, tail wagging. A few moments later, the door opened. Dad smiled when he saw me, grin lopsided, eyes not quite focused. Drunk. When I asked him where he’d been, he called me his sweet girl. He sat down next to me on the couch, leaned his head back, and passed out.