Things I’ll Never Say by Ann Angel Read Free Book Online Page B

Sometimes a boy came to me. Sometimes he didn’t.
    After one of those nights at Dorrian’s, I fell asleep in Mrs. Jefferson’s class again, and I wound up back in the shared faculty office after school. I stepped into that dark, echoing room and felt some sense of loss, as though Mr. P. and I had shared something real in there, something worth remembering. I saw him. He was hunched over, grading exams. Not that long ago, he’d made me feel wanted. The sight of him there, at that same desk, in that same chair, sent an electric current from my coccyx up my spine. I walked by him and sat in a chair next to Mrs. Jefferson’s desk to wait for her. She came in and gave me a pile of handouts to copy. I sauntered past his desk again and again. Not once did Mr. P. look at me.
    The next afternoon he didn’t, either, but I was sure he sensed me there. The following day it went the same way. But on Thursday, Mr. P. leaned back in his chair, and our eyes met across the room. My heart skipped. For a moment I was at Dorrian’s again, and this time his friend wasn’t there, my friends weren’t there; it was just us. He turned away.

Ruthie Kepner carried a Hello Kitty pencil case. She asked teachers questions just before the bell rang at the end of every class. And she had no idea that Kurt Cobain had just left America a suicide note. In April 1994, when Ruthie and her mother moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, from Mississippi, we were between national tragedies. My friends and I had been born too late to remember Kennedy’s assassination or Vietnam, and 9/11 was still years away. The Berlin Wall was down and stocks were up, and the girls at Watson Junior High found only two passionate causes to unite them: mourning Nirvana’s handsome lead singer and making fun of Ruthie.
    My seventh-grade classmates shared the same styles, the same friends, even the same opinions. Ruthie was different. We called her “Crazy Kepner,” and from the day she transferred to our school, we found the divide between us both astonishing and threatening. A group of girls who’ve known one another forever, who think and act alike, will sometimes turn, hive-like, on a newcomer. Will leave her out of every game and conversation. Will laugh and point and gossip. That’s what we did that spring.
    If she minded, Ruthie didn’t show it. She moved in an envelope of childish goodwill, smiling at us when we mimicked her slow drawl, ignoring the way our ranks closed against her at recess. Day after day, she floated by our tight-knit circles, her neon kneesocks a badge of courage, her untamable cloud of hair shooting careless wisps into the air.
    I never questioned my allegiance to our cruelty. I was only eleven then, a whole year younger than most of my class, and I was in constant fear of talking, walking, or acting differently from the sleek, giggly girls who ruled my world. I didn’t look very different from most of them, so it was only a matter of camouflaging my interior life: I kept the song lyrics I scribbled hidden in a notebook in my closet, and I never confided my secret to anyone, never shared my desperate dream of being a rock star. While my friends announced their futures as nurses or teachers or anchorwomen, I pictured myself a bitter poet-songstress like Courtney Love. If you had adored Kurt, of course, you were not supposed to like his loud and funky widow. But I was mad for her, and all my songs, like hers, were tortured howls about death and underwear.
    Did you see the outfit Crazy Kepner wore today? Would you believe those sneaks? Where’d she get that hair?
It was easy to make myself one of the Chosen by talking about Ruthie, by repeating the things I heard my mother whisper to my father.
Mrs. Kepner lost her job in Jackson, and they got kicked out of their apartment. It’s for sure they’re on welfare. Guess how many wine bottles were in their garbage last week?
    I owed such