Things still happened that year, of course, like any other year — they were pretty much all the same, Ellen guessed; what was a year, anyway; floating around the sun in the straight line, really, of a circle; it felt sarcastic to keep count — just mostly by accident, or else by momentum, by implication and solution of past things (like a math equation, trying to solve itself, as what was the world, the unstoppable mass of it, but one of those long division problems in seventh grade that went on, annoying and blameless, forever?).
Ellen herself had knocked down a No U-Turn sign. She was sixteen and didn’t have a permit and didn’t want one — driving was bad for the environment, she had no money for a car, and she didn’t want to stand in line five hours to fail whatever stupid test — but had craved alfalfa sprouts with balsamic vinaigrette one night when everyone else was asleep, and so had washed her face and ran out to the street, to her brother Steve’s Honda Civic, the keys of which were left on the dash (more depressively, Ellen thought in a tic of imposition, than stupidly). After knocking down the No U-Turn sign she panicked and drove for a time on the wrong side of the road, where, after a vision of crash test dummies, she felt a vacuum-sealed sort of calmness — the sound-reducing serenity of breaking a traffic law, of going metaphysically back in time, to a truer place, where every direction was equally legal; probably this was not unlike meditation, Ellen thought gently — then cut across a median, knocking the right rearview mirror against a tree so that it banged shut against the window, and drove back to her neighborhood. At her house, thinking, Destroy the evidence, she parked, put the keys back on the dash, and then was wrenching the damaged rearview mirror off the car, though not without a lot of difficulty — and not without realizing, after a moment, that there wasn’t actually anything wrong with it, it just needed to be adjusted back into position; but continuing, still, with two hands, now, in a sort of rampage — and then was running across the street and lobbing the half-melon of the thing over a fence, into someone’s backyard. Back in her house, she walked around carefully, civil and perceiving as a saint. She saw her brother, Steve, asleep on the sofa. In the kitchen her two little sisters were eating a bowl of something, which they hid as Ellen walked by, into her room, where she crawled onto her bed and lay on her side, and, for a long time, then, until she yawned and closed her eyes and fell asleep, stared, a bit objectively, without mood or judgment — though self-consciously so, feeling while doing it a bit empty and melodramatic — at the other side of her room, where the bookcase, the computer, the desk, and the stereo were.
That was in the wintertime, and then it was Spring, and some nights, now, in bed, feeling very bored and a little lonely, Ellen would let herself worry that she had hit a person — that the person had looked like a No U-Turn sign; was wearing a cowboy hat, or something — and then have imaginary conversations with kids at school she wished she were friends with, the ones who listened to punk music like she did and who always dressed prettily and had very beautiful and vividly dyed hair.
“I think I hit a person.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I knocked down a No U-Turn sign. That’s illegal.”
“You’re being honest right now. You can use that to cancel out the sign.”
“I’ll tell the judge, ‘We’re even now.’ ”
“The judge will be like, ‘Fine then. Uh, I mean case dismissed.’ ”
Alert and awake, under her blanket, having these conversations, she would sometimes feel so yearning and friendless and unhelpable — each moment of being herself, she knew, was a strengthening, an adapting, of who she was; and she didn’t want to be who she was — that she would squeak a little.
In Ellen’s English class someone said, “I hope those motherfuckers die.” The substitute teacher seemed a little confused then grinned. Someone had overheard her in the parking lot calling her boyfriend a motherfucker. There were eight weeks of 10th grade left.
Ellen raised her hand. Usually she never spoke in class but no one was paying attention today. A group of kids were playing a board game on four desks pushed together. “We should use nonviolence,” she said.
“I hope those motherfuckers get really fair trials so they get what they deserve and die.”
“I guess,” Ellen said. She wasn’t sure. Didn’t the terrorists just want to be happy like everyone else? When people ate at McDonald’s weren’t they killing people — by supporting McDonald’s and enabling it to open more restaurants in places like Japan, where the kids would then grow up fat and diseased and get heart attacks or cancer and die — just like terrorists? Weren’t the terrorists at least less circuitous, a little more honest? Why didn’t the news care that much when all those Africans killed each other in Rwanda? Why didn’t McDonald’s open free restaurants in Africa and save people? Why was the teacher letting everyone say ‘motherfucker’?
“What is the theme of 1984?” said the teacher. They were discussing 1984.
Ellen raised her hand. “I think it talks about how the government can trick us and control us. Like they’re doing right now. Because they’re making us think that American lives are worth more than British lives and that British lives are worth more than African lives.” She blushed.
The teacher nodded a little. She picked up the yardstick and pointed it at someone, who looked blankly at her.
“In the end they play chess,” someone else said. “After they use the rat on him they play chess.”
“Chess is boring,” said the teacher. “Does anyone else think chess is boring?” She was just out of graduate school, and she didn’t care. In the parking lot she had called her boyfriend a ‘motherfucker.’
“People who play chess could be spending their time growing tomatoes in their backyard,” Ellen said. “Remember the news this morning when they said that two people in London died? If I did the news, I’d say that people who play chess killed five hundred people in Africa because of being apathetic and not helping with their own gardens. That’s true. That’s a fact.” She did not want to argue with anyone. She was just saying things that were true.
“I think if they make the movie—1984, the movie — I think everyone should have long hair and listen to heavy metal,” said the substitute teacher. “And wear those dyed shirts and have holes in their jeans and sit around watching The Breakfast Club.”
A few kids laughed, and then Ellen raised her hand. “Why are you acting like that?” she said.
“Like what?” said the substitute teacher.
“I don’t know,” Ellen said.
“Speak to me after class,” said the substitute teacher, then drew a caricature of George Orwell on the blackboard. It was pretty good, but the class had lost interest in her, and began to talk to each other about Family Guy, online role-playing games, and how it would be fun to wear football helmets and light fireworks and then hit the fireworks back and forth with tennis rackets at each other’s heads. “If I don’t do that tonight I’m beheading myself looking in the bathroom mirror,” someone said.