Read Online After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page B

red-faced, furious, and embarrassed, fumbling to retrieve it, except now that it has fallen onto the stairs, people are kicking it and stepping on it, I’m desperate, pleading, “Give it back, give it back, please,” and finally the cap is returned to me, a girl has picked it up, slaps dust off it, hands it to me with a pained little smile: ”Here, Jennifer.”
    To my embarrassment, the girl is Christa Shaw. Who seems to feel sorry for me, not hate me.
    I can only murmur thanks, pull the hat down on my head, and escape.
     
    Wrapped in a wad of aluminum foil, kept in a secret compartment in my backpack, are the last three OxyContin tablets I’ve been saving for such an emergency. Risking Mr. Feldman’s seeing, I take one of the tablets, trying to hide my mouth with my hand, swallowing the big tablet dry, and praying I won’t choke or start to cough and be discovered.

14.
    Never! Never tell my secrets.

    Never tell my aunt how miserable I am at school. How my face shuts up tight as a fist even when a part of me wants to be friendly. How it’s so much easier to stare straight ahead than make eye contact in the corridors, at my locker, in classes. How I dread seeing Crow, or his friends who laughed at me. How I dread being called on by Mr. Feldman and Mr. Farrell, who hate me for sitting silent, sullen, down-looking in their classes. How it’s getting harder and harder for me to concentrate on schoolwork, even subjects I used to like, history, English, science. How in gym class I can’t keep up with the other girls—I’m afraid of feeling pain. And anyway, everything is so trivial. And anyway, I know that I will fail, what’s the point of trying? I’ve gotten dependent upon wearing the grimy sailor cap even indoors, against the “dress code.” Anxious that if I don’t wear something on my head, people will see the ugly scars in my scalp from the wreck, my hair isn’t thick enough to disguise them, this baby-fine hair that I hate, that I’m ashamed anyone might see and think it’s mine. And tiny nicks in my skin, in my forehead and on the underside of my jaw that I can’t stop running my fingertips over and over. And how hard it is to walk without wincing if my ankle hurts, or my knee…. You know what you look like? Like somebody who’s been in a car crash.
    My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Terricotte, takes me out into the hall to ask about my hat. “Jennifer, why? Is there some reason why you are always wearing that hat?” Mrs. Terricotte’s pebble-gray eyes are wary. There’s something in my face and in the set of my jaw. Maybe she’s been warned by Mr. Goddard or by my other teachers. Explaining the reasons for the school dress code. How most of the boys would be wearing baseball caps, reversed on their heads, so there has had to be a regulation against any kind of cap, hat, or scarf, a regulation that was established by the school district years ago…

    I’m wearing my grimy sailor cap. I will wear my grimy sailor cap. I tell Mrs. Terricotte that I have to wear it, my head was shaved a few months ago, my skull was sawed open to reduce the pressure of cerebral bleeding, my scalp is covered in ugly, ripply scars that my hair isn’t thick enough to hide, my voice is low and rapid and almost Mrs. Terricotte can’t make out my words, she has to stoop to hear me, it’s an awkward moment, she’s feeling sorry for me, very likely she has heard about me, why I’ve come to live with my aunt and uncle, why I have transferred to Yarrow Lake High from a private school in Tarrytown, how lonely I am here, how unhappy, until finally Mrs. Terricotte relents: “Jennifer, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize. Of course wear the hat if you’re more comfortable wearing it.”
    Touching my arm in a gesture of comfort. Warily.

15
    Another secret. No one will ever know.
    In the local telephone directory I discover two listings:
    Saint-Croix, Roland
    655 Deer Isle Rd, Yarrow Lake
    Saint-Croix, Roland
    Carpenter &