Damascus, Arkansas, was a little shit-hole town home to nothing except for the Little Rock Air Force Launch Complex. Fifty-some miles from Little Rock. Thirty-some miles from here was a secret thing that everyone here always knew was in the ground. That became a government cover-up.
My dad spent a lot of time in the bunker there, and then he spent a lot of time in the bunkers at the other nine missile silos around us. There were eighteen missile silos around Arkansas total. I didn’t see Dad a lot anymore. Mom was too preoccupied with Dennis to worry about my psyche, so I focused on school. It was the only thing that made any sense in my life.
On our first day in class, Mr. Truitt laid down the rules:
1. No eating or drinking.
2. No long sleeves.
3. Tie back hair.
4. Wear protective glasses.
5. Wear protective apron.
6. Wear closed-toe shoes.
7. Don’t smell the chemicals.
8. Don’t play around.
9. Wash your hands.
10. Do not pull the safety shower string.
If someone pulled the safety shower string, water would flood the room. Everything would get wet, and the person responsible would see the principal and be doing worksheets for the rest of the term.
While others thought about it or pretended to pull said string, I never did—but now that string was freedom.
I got up from my stool, leaving Rodney on his own, and went over to the shower and pulled. And it rained. It rained hard.
I had done it. I did the one thing that made the vein on the right side of Mr. Truitt’s neck pulsate. Oh boy, was he mad.
Talk of suspension. Talk of calling my mom. I was looking at hard time—
But I would pull that string again.
I was done with partners and raising the GPA of my fellow classmate. They wouldn’t use me anymore. No longer a tool for some trophy. Laura Ratliff was free of the oppressive regime of Griffin Flat athletics. Worksheets, lots of worksheets, would be in my future.
“Laura Ratliff, principal’s office. Now,” Mr. Truitt screamed, his finger pointed at me and then the door.
Oohs and aahs followed me out.
“Dead girl walking!” Max said, giving me a thumbs-up. He was trying to suppress his laughter and failing.
I sat in front of the principal. He stared at me through his glasses, the lenses so thick his eyeballs were magnified, and then at my permanent file, which was also thick. Thick with accolades, not demerits.
“Laura—” Principal Parker started, leaning back in his chair. His tie sat on his belly, and his mustache still had crumbs from this morning’s breakfast. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said, tapping his left hand’s fingers like he was playing a piano. The faint spot on his finger where a wedding ring once sat was hardly visible now. His wife had died. She didn’t leave him like my mom left my dad. “Truly disappointed.”
Disappointed was something my mom would say.
Principal Parker looked at me and shook his head. And it wasn’t meant in a sarcastic way.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lying through my teeth. But I knew that was what he as the principal wanted to hear.
The principal’s office was one place not to talk back—even if you knew deep down in your heart that you did the right thing, not just for your sanity but for the athletes in this school to finally do their own work. Fight the power—oh, whatever, it didn’t matter. Principal Parker was talking suspension. A day. Worth it.
But then he brought up Mrs. Martin, and I felt my heart sink as I slumped into the chair.
Mrs. Martin was the supposed confidante for all students at Griffin Flat High School, but she was the one in danger of having a nervous breakdown. And according to Principal Parker, pulling the safety shower string that resulted in gallons of H2O being sent down in a waterfall and flooding a portion—a tiny portion, I may state as fact—of the chemistry lab classroom meant that I, Laura Ratliff, was on the verge of going full-on cuckoo, as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest[10] cuckoo. And I guessed liability issues deemed that I needed to see Mrs. Martin. Now, she had seen me in her tiny closet of an office before, ever since that Monday after the town found out about the dissolution of my parents’ marriage by way of a third party.
Mrs. Martin always talked in questions. “How does it make you feel?” was a given, but “What are you going to do about it, Laura?” was one of her favorites.
We’d talk about my parents’ marriage and how I wished it would have been. I wanted parents like Jennifer and Jonathan Hart. I wanted parents who loved each other. I wanted a grandfather like Max. I wanted a dog like Freeway. I guess I wanted to be Laura Hart, not Laura Ratliff. But like Hart to Hart,[11] my family was canceled prematurely.
I moved from Principal Parker’s office to down the hall to see Mrs. Martin and sat in front of her, trying to figure out what her angle was going to be this session. I didn’t think anyone forced me to sit there. I mean, not really. I was not obligated at all to be here. Yes, the administration had to get permission from my parents. But I had the right to say no. Well, at least I thought I could. Though I never tried.
“Laura Ratliff,” she said, taking my file out of her filing cabinet and laying it on her desk. Then she pulled out a new yellow notepad from her bottom drawer.
I grabbed a Snickers from her bowl of candy, tore it open, and popped it in my mouth.
“Congratulations,” she said, sitting at her desk and finding an ink pen that actually worked.
She collected pens, especially ones that held no ink.
“Thank you,” I said. “It was my finest moment. Honestly, I probably should have pulled it sooner.”
“No, on being caller number nine,” she said, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t have pulled the string to the safety shower.”
“Shouldn’t have, but—”
Mrs. Martin knew of my tendency to be a smart-ass. “You know better than that.”
I grabbed another Snickers.
“Laura, where should we start?” she asked.
She started the discussion. I went back to eating another Snickers. When I didn’t answer her question, she took away the Snickers bowl.
“You pulled the safety shower. Does it have anything to do with being caller number nine?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“I need you to talk to me,” she said.
I twisted my scrunchie around my wrist.
“Remember, The Day After[12] was only a movie,” she said, repeating the one line that she told me after I came in crying last November. The time when I broke out in a cold, shivering sweat, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.
It’s only a movie. Just like it’s only a game.
“Do you believe everything they tell you?” I asked.
“Laura—”
I sighed, reaching for the bowl of Snickers, but then realized she took that away, just like the politicians were doing with my hopes and dreams.
“No, it has nothing to do with that—though that subject appears nightly in my nightmares,” I said.
“Laura, how does that make you feel?”
That dreaded question that people who get psychology degrees and decide to head-shrink for a living ask.
How does the fear that adults with the power to flip a switch are going to mess it up before I got my chance sound to you? Not good. We were living in a nuclear soap opera.
“How does it make me feel?” I said, repeating her question.
“I asked you,” she said.
“It makes me feel—”
There were two camps: the holy beep, we all could die and the maybe things won’t be so bad. I fell into the first camp. The camp that knew it had fifteen minutes to accomplish everything it wanted to before it died. That did weigh on your psyche.
10
It’s a 1962 novel by Ken Kesey and a major motion picture starring Jack Nicholson. It takes place in a mental institution.
11
It premiered in 1979 and stars Robert Wagner as Jonathan Hart, CEO of Hart Industries, and Stefanie Powers as Jennifer Hart, a freelance journalist. They jet-set around the world solving crimes. I wanted to be part of that family. I would have gladly walked Freeway.
12
On November 20, 1983, 100 million people dropped everything to watch
Terrence said he watched half of it at his mom’s house before he got bored and did homework instead. He missed the mushroom cloud, the firestorms, the wind, the skeletonized people, the buildings exploding, people vaporized, the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands, the radiation poisonings, the panic, the savaging, the pillaging, the government not knowing how much to dig in the irradiated farmland, the possibility of deformed infants, no medicine, no cures, no hope, only despair. We don’t even know who shot first. But as John Lithgow said in the movie, it doesn’t matter.
After the movie they said it would be much worse than what we saw—there would be vomiting with acute diarrhea, and much, much more.
Max’s parents confined him to his bedroom and checked on him to make sure he wasn’t watching it. He had little to add to the conversation the next day at school. The movie was scary. It left me feeling nothing. I was hollow inside. I was afraid. I still am.