Suddenly, as if hit with a brick, Polly felt very strange. A fierce, hot energy surged through her body, from her feet to her head and everything went numb. She looked down to see if her feet were on the ground.
“My feet!” she said, “I’m floating.”
Everyone laughed in slow motion. It was like a movie, where a camera slowly pans over a crowd, first Breanna next to her, then the tallest boy, then the quiet boy, his tight Poison T-shirt moving in slow motion over his stomach, then the little one with acne who had the joint, his wiry body bobbling while his feet grounded him. They were laughing so slowly, and now Polly couldn’t hear them either, just see their mouths opening, their heads leaning back. Maybe they weren’t making any noise, thought Polly.
“Let’s cruise the strip,” someone said. Polly wasn’t sure who said it, but she was glad she was able to hear. Somehow she managed to get in the back of the van. Someone had helped her, had lifted one leg and then another, to make them crawl into the back of the van. She lay on her back and Breanna was next to her. The boys were in the front of the van; she couldn’t see them. Occasionally she heard them say something: “Turn on the radio.” “Give me a cigarette.” There was laughter, lots of laughter. From where Polly lay in the back of the van, she could see out the back window, a blur of red and yellow lights. Her feet were not floating anymore. She looked at her arm and tried to lift it, but couldn’t. What happened to her arm? She tried to turn her head to face Breanna, but she couldn’t do that either. Somewhere deep inside her was a core of fear and panic, but it was wrapped tightly with layer after layer of fog and bewilderment. She tried to say, “Breanna,” but nothing came out.
She heard the boys up front. Her ears worked. Her eyes could see. Nothing else worked. She heard one of them close to her now, as if his mouth were right against her ear. He said, “You’ve done been dusted, little girl.”
Then there was quiet for a while. She stared at the lights out the back of the van. Again, she tried to say, “Breanna.” It didn’t work. Then a voice from far away said, “To Eric’s house, motherfucker. It’ll be a lemon pussy night! Drive, motherfucker.”
Polly kept her eyes on the window. She had no choice really. But it soothed her, too, the blurry red lights. Like this, staring out the window, mesmerized, she fell unconscious.
When she came to, the van was backing up from her alley into a grassy part of the field. Polly wanted to say something. This is the field, she wanted to say. This is my alley, she wanted to say.
Then she felt their hands on her. They were rolling her, rolling her out of the back of the van. She fell with a thud in the wet, cold grass. Breanna was next to her, but she wasn’t moving either. She felt Breanna’s cold arm against her own and it felt like the coldest thing in the world. She tried to move away from her friend, but she couldn’t move. Then the van lurched forward, and she watched the red taillights and listened to the crunch of the wheels on the black gravel of the alley.
“Meet me down the alley,” the song came to her, and she saw her father singing it to her, his eyes wet with tears. “Dad,” she had asked, “can I go to the field to play kick the can?” This was before Jefferson, before her nipples burst, but after the chicken pox. “Sure thing, sweetheart,” he said, and then he sang to her, his arms outstretched toward her as she ran out the door to go play. He sang, “Come on and meet me down the alley, one last time … Come on and meet me down the alley, we ain’t too young to die … Come on, meet me down the alley, to say goodbye.” And she’d play and play, damp with salty sweat, running, hiding, kicking the can, relishing the scrape of metal on cement, her heart pumping fast, listening for those words, “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” She was down the alley, she was in her field. But it all felt wrong, because she couldn’t move, she couldn’t climb the boysenberry tree. The lights above her, the stars, pulled her eyes to them. They glittered just like the lights of the ferris wheel, like the coming and going lights of the cars snaking along the strip. She watched them, trying not to think how cold she was. She tried to turn her head to look at her friend, but she couldn’t. And so she did the only thing she could do — stare above at the heavens and pretend they were the taillights on the strip.
outsiders
RUTHIE WATERS ENTERED HER DORM ROOM AT LYNDON PREPARATORY ACADEMY WITH A SUITCASE FULL OF WRONG CLOTHES AND HEAVY METAL ALBUMS. She sported thick black eyeliner, a lumpy, obviously padded bra, and perfectly feathered hair. She was fourteen years old, from South Bend, Indiana, and when she spoke, her Midwestern accent marked her out. But all of this had changed by Thanksgiving. The curling iron she’d feathered her hair with was buried in the closet, the albums quietly placed in a Dumpster. She had tried desperately to speak differently, and eventually she had.
In Condon Hall, there were sixty girls: the lower mid class, to which she belonged, and the mid class, which was much larger. Her roommate, Alicia Camp, was the only black girl in the dorm. They were the only two not from Park Avenue or Greenwich. Ruthie’s grandmother from Memphis was paying her tuition while Alicia was full scholarship. In fact, Alicia had grown up oftentimes homeless on the streets of Atlanta, her mother mentally ill, or occasionally taken in by her grandmother. She never knew her father. While Ruthie had very little in common with the Park Avenue girls, she didn’t exactly have much in common with Alicia. And yet, they were both outsiders. Which was something.
That they had both been star students at their respective schools and now struggled at Lyndon was another. Alicia worked very hard and still got poor marks. This crushed her. Ruthie, not accustomed to working hard, fell in with a few girls in the mid class that liked to smoke pot all the time. She worked very little which never had been a problem before, but didn’t do the trick at Lyndon. Nancy White and Melissa Carter, a year older than Ruthie but a lifetime ahead of her, lived across the hall and schooled Ruthie on how to smoke weed in boarding school, which was very different than standing in some alley in South Bend, passing a joint around.
They introduced her to the bong. What a wonderful device! They showed her how to use a hit towel. This involved rolling up a bath or hand towel into a tightly coiled tube, and after sucking down a bong hit, pressing your lips firmly against the towel to exhale. This left a perfect brown impression of lips on the towel, but kept the room free of the aroma of weed, which of course was necessary if one did not want to get expelled. And for all the bitching about Lyndon that went on, no one really wanted to get expelled.
One Friday night, after the hall teacher, a sour middle-aged woman named Miss Cranch, who was both the field hockey coach and a lousy math teacher, had checked all the rooms and turned in, Ruthie, as planned, snuck over to Nancy and Melissa’s room. The bong hits of boarding school! There was nothing like it. The wealthy simply had better drugs. The weed was expensive and beautiful — tightly coiled balls of bright green with tiny threads of red in it. They all got incredibly stoned. Both Nancy, from Park Avenue, and Melissa, from New Canaan, wore Lanz nightgowns. Ruthie was in a pink T-shirt from JC Penney and her white cotton underwear. They all sat cross-legged on the floor in an intimate circle and whispered, just in case, but also because they were high as kites which for some reason made people whisper.
“We need to get you a nightgown,” said Nancy, leaning toward Ruthie, her dark eyes focused but not unfriendly. She had the shiniest, thickest, black hair. Ruthie stared at her hair. She was beginning to understand so much at Lyndon. Like how the thickness of one’s hair was a testament to coming from a “good” family.