It was a strange morning. I was heading back to a school where the principal hated me, the student body thought I was a crazed lunatic, three girls could resort to their old tricks and make me miserable and I was hiding secrets from every member of my family to protect my neglectful mother. But I shocked both my mom and my sister as I jumped out of bed, took in another quick shower and took a little care in fixing my hair. And, as I fixed a bowl of cereal for breakfast, I hummed the song I had danced to when I was stuck in the music box. They sat there, staring at me as if I had changed into an alien from another planet overnight. I didn't care. For the first time in a long time I was happy. It didn't matter what happened at school, it didn't matter that my new class was the refuge of the dead, it didn't even matter that, should I put a toe out of line, I would be expelled in a heartbeat.
Roland was safe, and I had a feeling we had done more than agree to an uneasy truce that night. I honestly thought we might have ventured into the unfamiliar territory of friendship. I had a friend. It didn't matter that he was imaginary; a figment that only existed in my dreams. It felt like someone out there cared for me. And if I could ignore his blind sense of justice, I could have a respite from my loneliness for a while.
The day started out normally. I still sat alone on the bus, despite my new look. No one noticed the care I had taken getting dressed, nothing had really changed. Mr. Daniels was still standing at the door as I came in, but I bounded so happily past him I know I saw him frown. He was sure he was going to find a broken girl walking by, and instead he got the new me. It took all the wind out of his sails. I sat down in first period, all ready to learn about complex equations. Mrs. Craft for one was happy to see the change in my demeanor. She smiled at me, and I smiled right back instead of looking down at a book like I always did. I think I frightened my classmates more by being in a cheerful mood. Maybe this was the calm before the storm, my final joyous episode before I set the joint ablaze.
The day didn't trudge by like it usually did. I got the work in my other classes done before everyone else, leaving me enough time to sketch Roland's face from my memory. It was so ridiculous, but this guy who tried to arrest me on several occasions had suddenly become a damn good reason for surviving the real world. It didn't hurt that he was uncommonly good looking. His shoulder-length brown hair, his beautiful blue eyes, his very masculine body; everything just fit together to make him perfect. And I found myself longing to be back there in that cold wilderness with him.
At lunchtime it occurred to me I still have unfinished business pertaining to one of my classmates. After I retrieved a tray with limp French fries and a slice of greasy pizza that resembled a colorful piece of cardboard I walked out to assume my place at the end of one of the long tables, with no one sitting around me for at least five seats or so. As I made myself comfortable at the last seat down the long stretch of stool-like seats, I spotted her.
She sat at the corner table all alone. All of the other tables were set up in long lines in the cafeteria so many people could congregate together at once. It got crowded sometimes, and if you wound up sitting beside someone who decided a shower after gym was a complete waste of time then you spent your entire lunch in an odoriferous misery. That girl, on the other hand, sat at the only table in the entire building that was small and round, four real honest-to-goodness chairs spread around its perimeter.
On any given day a sane person would have considered the small "visitors" table to be a little bit of paradise, what given the crowded nature of the long bench tables. And since parental visitors were unheard of at the high school level and other visitors usually wound up having business lunches with the faculty at the downtown mall, the table was open to anyone who wanted to sit there. Problem was, nobody ever sat there. Those who dared to plant their behinds in one of the cushioned seats risked complete ostracism. But if you were already ostracized, what did it matter?
Her head was bowed low, her stringy blonde hair dangling so far it draped across the table like ribbons from an opened and discarded present. She never spoke to anyone. When she did speak it was only after she was forced to by a teacher, and it was always the right answer, no matter what class it was. But it was the only time anyone ever heard her whisper-quiet voice. She was shy, she was depressing. And she was the only girl who was considered a bigger freak than me.
It was the first time I had ever noticed her sitting there. Of course I had so many other things on my plate and before I began Life Skills class I scarcely knew she existed. Then again, I walked with my head bowed low and avoiding all curious looks just the way she did. It was no wonder I didn't know about her and she didn't know about me. I don't know what possessed me to give up any shred of human decency I had left that day. The status of "crazy kid" had afforded me zero friends in that school, but it had also gained me a little bit of peace from the cyber crap that had been happening. People were terrified to make fun of me. So I kind of relished being the girl at the end of the reject table, occasionally listening in from five seats away to the daily arguments of "Hufflepuff versus Ravenclaw" or "Team Jacob" versus "Team Edward". After all, most of the kids at that table were deluded souls who thought their owls to Hogwarts were only days away or the Cullen clan would walk in at any day to make them a member of the family, even years after anything Harry Potter or Edward Cullen had lost its relevance.
But I didn't want to make any additional waves at school. With all the problems that were being attributed to me, the next stop on my fantastic voyage was an alternative school or juvenile hall, so why tempt fate? Besides, Jennifer, Peyton and Sasha had stopped harassing me, treating me more like a disease than a human, but it was preferable to being tagged for open season so I figured, why rock the boat? I'm still not sure what made me look over at that particular table on that particular day. But I did, and what I saw took me back to a lot of pain. I saw Jordan, hunched over her plain bologna sandwich, but the hunch was interrupted by the occasional sudden rise and fall of her shoulders. She was crying. I could tell from tables away she was crying, and from the looks of it she was crying pretty hard, though I could tell she was trying to hide it. I watched her for a moment mesmerized, remembering all the times I had cried to myself, having just been tormented and knowing that, even if I expressed my displeasure over my lot in life it would do no damn good. Nobody was interested in the hysterics of a teenaged girl. At least not teenaged girls like me...or like Jordan.
I'm sure if it was one of the Terrible Two or their cohorts in deep emotional pain the entire faculty would be wringing their hands, wondering how to fix a broken cheerleader or the principal's daughter. Girls like us however, we were on our own. So, standing there for a mini-infinity, tray in my hands, butt inches away from the safety and security of the last stool at the reject table, the sound of the age-old argument of "Who would you sleep with if you had the chance...Harry or Draco?" barely reaching my ears, I suddenly reversed course, steering both butt and tray toward the almost-empty table in the corner. There I dropped my tray on the table and planted my rear firmly in one of the other three seats. The chairs were so nice and ergonomic. I suppose for the lucky few adults who sat in them who suffered from hemorrhoids or muscle aches, who knows? But I felt so uncomfortable in this cushy seat, longing for the comfort of the tiny round circle that had been my former place of residence. No turning back now.
"Hey Jordan, what's up?" I asked, probably a little more chipper than I should have been, because much like one of those Animal Planet specials where the photographer sneaks up on a defenseless animal and the animal gives them a glazed, startled look before bolting into the wilderness, Jordan's tear-stained face jerked up, looked at me and she started clutching her books and her unfinished lunch in order to make a clean getaway. I grabbed her hand and said, "Hey, hey, calm down. I'm not going to bite. I just wanted to check on you."
"Could you please go away?" Jordan almost whispered, still clutching her lunch bag, her sandwich now crumpled up in a ball and tangled in the paper under her iron grip. Maybe she had heard of me, which is why she looked so cornered right now. Or maybe she was just that shy. Either way I wasn't all that concerned. I had just surrendered the last of my dignity to come sit at the pariah table in order to check on this girl out of the goodness of my heart. I didn't care what she wanted; she was going to sit down and talk to me.
"No, I can't go away. I want to know you're all right. What's going on?"
Jordan glared at me. "What do you care?" She demanded. "Besides, I'm fine. Now will you go away?"
This girl just didn't get it. "Nope. You gotta tell me what's got you crying first. If you don't, I'm going to follow you all over school."
"No you won't." She mumbled. "Nobody is that stupid."
I laughed. "Apparently you haven't been paying any attention around here. I'm the resident psycho. Didn't you know? Me following you around school would probably be one of the more normal things I've ever done, according to the powers that be." I chanced a glance over at Jennifer and her unholy crew. As expected, they were staring at me and laughing their heads off. I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to Jordan. She was looking over in their general direction as well.
"I hate those girls." was her quiet reply. I couldn't believe she'd just said that, and from the look on her face neither could she. She seemed like one of those kids that was too mousy to hate anyone. Like Carrie White, pre-prom burning. Maybe they made her pray in a closet. The way she reacted made all these wild ideas run rampant in my head about her home life. I honestly thought she might pass out from fright and the regret that arose from what she had just said.
"Yeah, me too." I replied. She relaxed very slightly, looking less panicked. "But you don't know about what they've been doing to me, do you?" She shook her head. Jordan wasn't one to keep up on the school gossip. "Welp, so far I've had my wrist broken and I've been made a laughingstock on the internet. Not to mention Sasha's jerk of a father is trying to have me expelled. How about you?"
"They told everyone in our History class I was a....I was a..." she looked around to make sure no one could hear what she said. "They said I was a....lesbian."
I nearly laughed. If that was all they could come up with for poor Jordan then she was doing good. But I realized something. With her being a very religious girl, being called a "lesbian" might not be a good label to live with. "Oh, I'm sorry about that." I responded. "But it's pretty obvious you aren't. You're just shy."
Jordan smiled through her tears. "I didn't care what people in class thought. Nobody in this school ever liked me anyway. It's my dad. If he thought it was true, I'd probably get kicked out of the house." She stopped again, shocked she was being so open with a total stranger. I wasn't about to betray her trust. She was the first person in this lousy school who had spoken to me in a couple of months. It was an added bonus to what started out as a great day.
"Well, I think Jennifer and Sasha are a little too close for comfort, if you get my drift." Jordan almost snorted her milk.
"That wasn't a very nice thing to say." She reprimanded me.
"Yeah, you're right. Calling those two 'gay' is an insult to gay people." I apologized. "I've never known anyone who was gay to be such bitch...er, I mean jerks." I figured I better watch what words I used around her out of respect.
"Do you know gay people?" Jordan asked, acting like she was interviewing an archaeologist who had discovered a lost tribe. Apparently knowing gay people made me a scientific discovery.
"Yeah, sure. Don't you?" I asked. She shook her head furiously. "Well, I'll tell you Jordan. You probably do, you just don't know it." I took a bite out of my sandwich, leaving her to ponder that amazing factoid. "Believe it or not, being gay is really not a big deal. Now, being one of them," I nodded in the Terrible Two's direction; they eyed me suspiciously, "now that's a terrible thing to admit!" Jordan laughed, despite herself. The group surrounding Jennifer and Sasha looked like they could murder the pair of us, but I could have cared less. We were talking and having a great time. Lunch was an enjoyable experience for once.
For the next few days I found myself falling asleep and having dreamless nights. I desperately missed it. More to the point, I desperately missed him. It was strange. I barely knew the guy, actually kind of despised him, yet I had saved his life and gotten to care about him in the span of just a few hours of being anywhere near him. Roland had quickly become the only reason I wanted to sleep, the only reason I wanted to dream of despair and devastation. If I had told one of my counselors that they would have had more than sufficient grounds to have me committed. Delusional troublemaker, that's what they would call me.
Only I never gave them that sort of ammunition. During my weekly sessions with Dr. Tonsch and Ms. Martin I played the model student. When they asked me to tell them about why I made up stories to garner attention, I would tell them about my bruised psyche, what with coming from an abusive mother and all, and how I wanted so much to fit in with my classmates and to make my teachers proud of me and blah, blah, blah. I spilled just enough guts to give Ms. Martin limitless hope and Dr. Tonsch no end of disappointment. He was hoping I'd be put under just enough duress to blow up, to lose it under the strain of being called a liar, a manipulator and a fraud. I never did, and I'm sure every time he went to Mr. Daniels with his findings it was always, to their chagrin, bad news for the district. You could never have found a more willing subject for change. I even rubbed salt in the wound by talking about how much I loved the new class, and how I was learning fascinating new things every single day. I felt badly for lying to Ms. Martin, who saw my progress as nothing short of miraculous, but she helped them railroad me in the first place, so as far as I was concerned, screw her.
Besides, I actually was learning some very fascinating new things in that boring, awful class every day. Not from Coach Jones and his stellar fifteen minutes of looking up to teach us the proper way to balance a checkbook or boil a pot of water, but from my new friend Jordan. The day after I talked to Jordan in the lunch room, I took the vacant seat behind her in class. Coach Jones didn't even notice I had moved, which made me thankful for the clueless lout for once. We began writing notes back and forth during class; little things like are you as bored as I am? Or a movie about not doing drugs? In high school? Is he for real? Turned out Jordan wasn't as withdrawn as she appeared on the outside. She just never had anyone to really talk to before me. Lunch had become the best part of the day for us, and the reject table became our safe haven. Every now and then Jordan scanned the lunch crowd regularly to see who was staring at us. "Do you think they're talking about us?" She wondered.
I looked for a moment, but I honestly didn't care much if they were. "Maybe." I responded. "But if they are, they honestly need to go out and get a life! What's worse, the two rejects or the people who are overly fascinated by them?"
Jordan giggled nervously. "My dad is always telling me I need to make more friends. Then he's always telling me how sinful most of the people here are and how I should shun their behavior and continue to look to God for solace. It gets really confusing sometimes."
Jordan had told me a little about her dad over our lunch breaks. Her dad was one of the most notorious, fire-and-brimstone, hard-ass Pentecostal preachers in the area. He was just one step down from those crazy people in Kansas who protested military funerals. Jordan was ordered to hate everyone who wasn't exactly like them, which from what I could tell was everyone not associated with the Marshdale Church of the Pentecost.
Don't get me wrong. I would never question a man's faith for anything in the world. They have no business in my life; I have no business in theirs. But I did have a tendency to get angry at the man for what he was doing to his children. His daughters, the three oldest children, were left to keep house and present the picture of perfection to his congregation. His oldest son, Jacob, was already at fourteen being molded into a mini-Earl, quite against his will but it did maintain peace in the Gowens household. The younger kids, two nine-year-old twin boys and a three-year-old girl, were alternately raised by their mother and their eldest sister Miriam. And the only times they saw their father was when he was sweeping in to yell at them for keeping a dirty house, for letting dinner get cold. His presence, when he could manage to tear himself away from his ministerly duties, was almost always unwelcome.
After that day in the cafeteria, Jordan opened up to me like the waters behind a crumbling dam. I think she needed to talk to someone, anyone. She obviously had nobody at home to confide in, and as for school she and I were basically in the same boat. The only difference was she had managed to be invisible throughout her high school career. I couldn't keep my big mouth shut long enough to avoid detection. For the next week I felt the stares and the glares of the students around me, heard the chuckles coming from the royal table echoing as if they were permeating every wall of the lunchroom, and the more I hung around Jordan, the less I cared.
Throughout the days after that moment when we discovered our mutual loathing of the bitches two, she began to trust me, something I don't think she had done with another human soul. She had brothers and sisters galore, and thanks to her dad she couldn't trust any of them. But she trusted me. And I, for the first time in forever, began to trust her. She told me about her family life, how her father could never find a reason to be happy with their tireless work. How once upon a time their mom would try to stand up for them. But several very loud fights from the bedroom, accompanied by the sounds of their mother getting hit or flung around the room, broke her soon enough. The next day her mother would come out wearing as much fabric as possible to hide the bruises, and if any of them dared to offer to confront her husband she would practically beg them to back down. And eventually she stopped standing up for them altogether.
Yes indeed, Earl Gowens led a blessed life. And he paraded his future pastor son Jacob around town, proud as a peacock that his religious teachings had produced such a fine son worthy of his love. It was Jacob's job to keep his father happy. Because deep down he knew if his father was content, maybe all those problems at home he wasn't supposed to publicly accept would somehow get better. It was the best he could do for his sisters, and even though his father had no idea of his true intentions, Jacob tried his best to make peace in his troubled family.
In return for her confidence in my ability to keep her family secrets, I told Jordan the secrets I've kept in for my entire life. I told her how my mom hated me from birth, how my dad denied me and how my sister was humiliated by me. I gave her the entire scoop on what happened between Peyton, Jennifer, Sasha and me, how Mr. Daniels had mistreated me and why I was such an outcast. We realized we brought some of our problems upon ourselves by not taking a stand for our own dignity. Jordan wished she could tell her dad to shove off; I wished I could tell a long list of people the same. It was the best therapy I could have ever received, talking to and listening to an honest-to-goodness friend.
In the end both of us agreed that we would never allow another human being to define who we were anymore. She vowed to get out of her house the moment she turned eighteen, and I decided to move out with her. After all, I was getting kicked out not long after I turned eighteen, so why not plan now for the future? It was pretty established that my eighteenth birthday present would be my walking papers. Perhaps Grandma would take in two refugees from Marshdale instead of one.
We made plans at those lunchroom meetings. It made us happy to have a direction in life. We had hope again, even if it was only for thirty minutes at a small lunch table. The only thing I was still reluctant to share with my new best friend was Psitharis. After all, she was still very religious despite her denunciations about her father and I was quite certain a land of make believe and daydreams was a little too much for her to handle at this point. Some things needed to stay private.
Both of us paid a pretty high price for our newfound friendship. We became the reverse of the "it" couple, nasty rumors circulated of how we enjoyed each other's company far too much, were just way too friendly with one another. Even though there were hundreds of friendships formed in the high school with one or two friends, even though there were openly gay couples walking the halls on the daily, because we were the exiles of the school our friendship was twisted and perverted somehow. Jordan's long skirts and long sleeves and my need to pull a religious fanatic into a web of iniquity made us quite the pair. It still didn't matter. We were best friends, and no one could change that no matter how hard they tried. And they tried as hard as they could.
Instead of telling Jordan about Psitharis, I wrote about my adventures in a journal that I kept in my nightstand. I started with the very first image of Roland's shadowy figure standing above me, sword in hand and wrote all the way to Anastasia's death and my very close contact with the man determined to see me face justice. I read over it sometimes, reliving the more pleasant moments and putting the traumatic moments, like the blade of a sword bursting through the front of a girl's chest, swiftly out of my mind, exorcising it to the pages of my little notebook. I couldn't share Psitharis with anyone, but I could keep it in that book for myself.
