Pew(33)

It didn’t sound like anyone was in here, she whispered.
She looked at me awhile and I looked back at her. Her hair was tangled. She went to the medicine cabinet, got out a little blue tube. She squeezed something thick out of it and smeared it across her face as she stared in the mirror.
Everyone’s talking about you at school, she said to her reflection. Not that you should care. They’re all so stupid. Jack started it. He’s such an asshole. He knew he wasn’t supposed to talk about you except with people from church who already knew, but he told pretty much everybody. He’s so dumb.
She had covered half her face in a thick sky-blue paste when she stopped and examined herself more closely in the mirror.
Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.
She turned to me.
Well? Don’t you think so, or what?
She turned back to the mirror, kept applying the pale blue paste to her face.
Mom said I would talk to a wall if I felt like it was listening. Anyway it’s her dumb idea I have to put this stuff on because she caught me sneaking one of her cigarettes and got mad at me because she said it gives you premature wrinkles and gray hair. I have a gray hair—do you want to see it?
She washed the stuff from her hands and began combing her hair, staring into the mirror.
There! She came toward me, leaned over the tub, and pinched a single white hair. See it? Mom saw one on the back of my head a couple weeks ago and she yanked it out so I have to hide this one so she doesn’t get it. I like him.
Annie sat on the tiled floor. The paste was turning pale and dry at the edges. Some of her hair clung to it.
Anyway. You’re lucky they don’t send you to school. I almost wanted to be mad about why they sent me home today, but I was just too glad to leave.
She leaned back onto her elbows and looked up at the ceiling.
It was in science class. She was teaching us about flower reproduction and she said that everything that was alive could reproduce, and everything that could reproduce was either male or female and I raised my hand and even though she saw me, she didn’t call on me, so after a while I just interrupted her and said it wasn’t true, that some things that reproduced didn’t have a sex. I’d been studying about this on my own because of something I saw on TV about starfish—that a starfish reproduces all by itself without having to mate or anything. And snails. And there are plants like that, too, and some animals even switch back and forth, and I always thought that was just something that happened in science fiction but it’s not just in science fiction. So I said this, I said to Mrs. Goldwater, I said, What about dandelions and how they’re all asexual and reproduce all by themselves? And Mrs. Goldwater just said, Maybe that’s why they’re considered to be a weed. But she didn’t even know what she was talking about, and she just said that so the class would laugh and they did, even Jeremy, who I know is gay because he told me himself, plus everyone can tell, so I kept asking Mrs. Goldwater about the starfish and about how seahorses do it the other way around, and the boy seahorses carry the babies, and most of the class was laughing because they’re so dumb and then I got sent to the principal’s office.
Annie lay fully on her back and was quiet for a while.
In the library I also found a book about revolutions that had a whole section just about people who set themselves on fire as a protest. It makes you wonder, don’t it? Makes me wonder.
She got up to look at her face in the mirror. The paste had mostly dried out and turned faintly gray. She touched it.
Almost. She hoisted herself to sit on the edge of the sink and kicked her feet into the air for a while, then stilled them and looked at me.
So are they going to make you go to the festival?
I just looked at her awhile, then said, I don’t know.
How old are you?
I sat up a little. I don’t know.
I’m fifteen. Do you answer everything with I don’t know?
Sometimes.
That’s really Nelson’s thing, you know. He hates talking.
Annie turned around and rinsed her face clean in the sink, speaking into the water as she worked. And how come you were sleeping in that church? Was it just because you don’t have a home or did you pick our church in particular? Or did you run away from somewhere?
She stood up and dried her face with a white towel. For the first time I could almost remember where I’d come from before all the walking, before the searching every night for a place to sleep. I wanted to tell her something. I wanted to begin speaking and not know what I was going to say, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak.
You know, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I’m not trying to make you tell me anything, you know. My dad says I ask too many questions anyway. It’s just that, if you don’t have a home, I think that’s really … well, it upsets me, that’s all. It makes me sad and I wish I could do something about it.
She dropped the towel onto the floor and went over to the window, peeked between the blinds she parted with two fingers.
In civics class last semester we had to write these essays about something we could do to make the world a better place. It was only supposed to be a page but I wrote seven and a half pages about how everyone should get exactly the same stuff—everyone could live in the same normal-sized houses, and there should only be public schools that everyone can go to instead of private ones that only rich people get to go to, and when people die, they shouldn’t be able to give all their money to their kids. It should all get split up between the poorest people because otherwise rich people’s kids start out way ahead of everyone else just because of where they were born and poor people’s kids start out worse off than everyone else just because they were born somewhere else. And anyway, I had all these other ideas in there because it was seven and a half pages, typed up and everything. But guess what happened when my teacher read it? She said I had to go talk to the school counselor because I was a communist. And I told her I never said I was a communist and she had my essay and she held it up and said, Miss Goodson, this is very troubling, and I said, Because I want people to be treated the same, and she said something about how ideas were dangerous and I really needed someone to talk some sense into me before it got worse and this is not how the world works and I said that I knew that wasn’t how the world works but it was how I think the world should work, then she wrote me up for talking back. Isn’t that stupid, too, getting in trouble for talking back? No offense to you because you can do whatever you want, but aren’t we supposed to talk back to each other? That’s like—a whole half of discussion. It just seems to me that part of some people having a lot of things depends on other people having less things. The school counselor wasn’t much better and basically she made me so mad that I threw a chair across the room, which I know wasn’t the right thing to do, but it ended up proving one of my points about how everyone gets treated unequally because when a guy did that last semester, he got suspended but the school counselor just laughed at me. Didn’t even write me up or nothing. Which isn’t fair.