Mysterious ways, p.5
Mysterious Ways, page 5
Maya looked into Maddie’s greenish eyes to see if she really knew, knew or if she signed up for peer counseling and dreamed up Room 143 to amp up her college résumé, to create her brand: the hot girl with a heart. It was all about the branding. On the Common App, she would be Mental Health Maddie™. Maya scanned Maddie’s memory banks, searching for a chink in the hot-girl armor: a learning disability, perhaps? A controlling mother, a deceased father, a disabled sibling, a battle with cancer, a dead pet, divorce? Did she know any of these things? Did she know true pain? And then she found it, because True Pain™ walked by in his chinos and oversized flannel right then, and Maddie flinched. Voldemort in a pair of Vans. It wasn’t worth it to report him, she heard Maddie remind herself. Of course he thought I wanted to. But I didn’t want to. I just have to get through this year. They all did.
Room 143 was the last place Maya wanted to be; she’d just been released from hearing the sad thoughts of a whole hospital full of depressed children, but she needed to show her mom she was trying. And after what she’d just learned about True Pain, she wanted to show Maddie some support, so she said, “Thanks, Maddie, I’d love to see that.”
They, the powers that be, didn’t have a ton of real estate to share with Maddie and her wellness-room initiative. It wasn’t a thing (like football!) that attracted the big donors. So they gave her an old closet beneath the stairs, like the muggle Dursleys gave to Harry Potter. Still, as young people are wont to do, they made the best of it.
Strands of beaded macramé hung in the doorway, and Maya rattled them as she ducked in. Painted on the cinder block back wall were the numbers 1-4-3 and, above them in a rainbow shape, I LOVE YOU. It was Mr. Rogers who was obsessed with the number 143 because of the “mystical” (coincidental) connection to the number of letters in I Love You, and apparently Ms. Hirsch, Maddie’s faculty advisor who was raised on reruns of Mister Rogers and whose moral code was entirely Mr. Rogerian, came up with the idea to name the room “143.” She took it as a sign that there hadn’t already been a room 143 in the school’s initial floor plan. There was also a small poster of Mr. Rogers, inexpertly laminated and peeling up a bit in the corners, that depicted him smiling in his red sweater. WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? in big seventies bubble letter font spread out in an arch over his head. It was soothing, Maya had to admit. The world could use more neighbors. Someone, lovingly Maya hoped, had given him a Sharpie mustache and soul patch.
A circular mandala rug sat in the center of the floor of 143 and was held in place by dark green cushions arranged as if this were a beach campfire. Instead of a fire, in the center stood a potted plant, offering oxygen to the humans slouched on the paisley couch strumming an old acoustic guitar. A mini fridge in the corner held the promise of healthy snacks. Requisite rolled-up yoga mats hung against another wall in a smart-looking rack made of recycled wood. What caught her mother’s attention was the record player in the corner and the Post-its stuck at random onto a mirror that read, You’re amazing. So Smart. I see you. Be Bold. Today will be the best. Breathe. Etc.
“This is great, isn’t it, Maya? I wish they had this at your old school.” This is what she said. But what Maya assumed she thought (she couldn’t actually read it like she read everyone else) was Oh great. She’s going to sit in here all day wearing her headphones. Just what she needs, another basement hidey-hole. Maya particularly hated that phrase for some reason, and she visibly cringed. “We can donate some records. Only happy ones, of course. We own the record store over in New Hope.”
“Cool. But sad ones are okay, too. We strive to acknowledge all of our feelings,” said the boy strumming the guitar.
“Yeah. Sometimes we come in here and listen to breakup songs for an hour and just cry our eyes out,” the girl next to him agreed. She had big round brown eyes and a sheet of ombré hair that was dip-dyed light blue, like the bottom of a beachy skirt.
“Great,” said Stacy. “Do you have Leonard Cohen’s ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’? I think I have a forty-five. Can you play forty-fives? He wrote it for Janis Joplin, you know. And you need ‘Hallelujah.’ Also Leonard Cohen, but I will allow the Brandi Carlile cover, in spite of her unfortunate name. The i at the end just kills me. But her voice. Warbly. Appalachian. Gorgeous.”
Maya watched the couch-people take her mother in. The flared jeans, the earthy brown T-shirt (was she wearing a bra?), the dozens of mostly organic beaded bracelets, the thumb rings, the too-long-for-her-age wavy strawberry-blond hair. They tried to process it. Who is this person? they thought. Do we like her? She seems desperate. Do we trust her? Maya saw the thoughts as they pinged around the kids’ brains like pinballs. No, they decided. Tilt. Game Over. They got back to whatever they were doing before Maya walked in.
Great, thought Maya. She was already persona non grata in “the neighborhood.” And these could have been “my people.” They were at least striving for emotional intelligence. She was searching for signs of any kind of intelligence, particularly in people who didn’t “borg.” These could have been her “friends.” That was her goal here. Maya only needed one or two people and a diploma. Why couldn’t her mother keep her mouth shut?
Stacy looked at Maya then, and Maya could see the pain that wove itself in and around all of her mother’s organs like a net. Her entire insides were enmeshed in a thick white net of pain and fear, like a salted imported ham hanging in a deli. Maya saw the same thing in all the mothers who came to visit their kids at Whispering Pines. The mothers felt their kids’ pain more acutely than the kids themselves did. They walked into group therapy with heavy steps, barely able to move their limbs and remove their trendy handbags from their shoulders. Kids weren’t supposed to notice it, but Maya noticed everything. She’d have to double down on the plan to become a Normal Teenager™, if only for her mother’s sake.
“I’m okay, Mom,” Maya told her as they stepped back into the bustling hallway.
Maya felt Stacy’s breath catch for a second, snagged on a rare psychic outcrop of her own empathy. “You have to do this, but high school really is often a piece of shit, Maya. Things will get better. Later. When you’re released from the group-think. When so many people aren’t judging you all the time. When there’s less pressure to be the same as all these idiots.”
“I know. I can do this. And they’re not idiots. And people will always be judging us all of the time.” This was something she knew for sure. The trick was not to care, which she knew wasn’t as easy as it sounded. “You should go.”
And off her mother trudged, her bracelets jangling a little, looking down so Maya wouldn’t see her tears. It was like being dropped off for the first day of kindergarten.
* * *
School. Maya walked away from room 143 and into the stream of it. Other people’s thoughts rushed into her head. Most of them were I’m going to fail. I need to copy Abby’s notes. I have six minutes to finish my essay. I forgot my baseball glove. I don’t know my lines. I have no idea what’s going on in Calc. Then she had a thought of her own. What if people stopped pushing kids to complete the learning of college in high school? What if everyone just did high school in high school and college in college and slowed everything the eff down? What if we all just did that? Then we wouldn’t need room 143. Everyone just slow down. She almost screamed it out loud when two lacrosse players rushed by her, and the backdraft alone pushed her into the lockers.
She fought the urge to cry. The weight of everything gathered in the back of her throat, pushed upward, threatening to erupt through her tear ducts. Do not cry at your new school! she told herself. But that made it worse. She shook her hair in front of her face and moved onward, sloshing through the student soup. Why hasn’t he opened my Snap? I hate my hair today. She’s such a bitch. I hate her. I wish she would die. Why can’t I be like Isabel. Look at that fine ass. I need her to sit on my face. I’m starving. I’m fat. A C−???? Fuuuckk.
She reached in her bag for the Bible she’d stolen from Whispering Pines, wondering briefly about the moral implications of stealing a Bible. Spreading “the Word” would probably trump “Thou shalt not steal”? Or at least cancel it out. She had developed a habit of soothing herself by flipping the soft pages past her thumb. Basically, the Bible had become her “wubby,” which was probably not an authorized use of a Bible. But there it was. Everyone needed to self-soothe somehow.
She flipped the soft pages against her thumb and randomly stopped at 1 Samuel, chapter 16, verse 23.
And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.
It looked like there was some other stuff going on between David and Saul, too. David and Saul were definitely doing it. She vowed to investigate further to squelch all the homophobia that was rising up again in these parts. But the main gist of this particular passage was: Music soothes the savage beast.
It was the perfect reminder for Maya to put on her headphones. She had promised herself not to use them as a crutch, but just this once, just to get her down the hall to math class, she plugged in to her Spotify playlist for The Invoking of Immediate Chill that was mostly populated with Khalid, and trudged onward down the hall.
MADDIE
The shoebox took a full hour to decorate. She cut a slot in the lid wide enough to accommodate a thick envelope, hypothetically filled with a three-page letter, say, and perhaps an encouraging insert, like a sticker that said You got this!, or a patch with a smiley face on it, or a fidget spinner, or a photograph from happier times. These were the instructions she delineated in her Sunshine Club newsletter:
… PLEASE FOLD YOUR LETTER AND PUT IT IN AN UNSEALED BUSINESS-SIZED ENVELOPE. FEEL FREE TO DECORATE IT. IN THE LETTER, INCLUDE PLAYLISTS, BOOK AND PODCAST RECOMMENDATIONS, COLLAGES, ENCOURAGING MEMES, STICKERS, AND OTHER CHEERFUL MISCELLANY.
The letters needed to be unsealed so “the staff” could check for drugs, pornography, or other contraband that could be used for self-harm or the injury of others.
She wrapped the shoebox in red wrapping paper that she’d found in her mother’s closet. It was covered with brightly colored hedgehogs and hailed from a different era when hedgehogs were trendier than mushrooms. Everything now was covered in mushrooms.
She installed the box on a shelf in the cafeteria next to the cereal bins where everyone would see it, and she labeled it in loopy script from bright gel pens, Cheer for Bobby!
She sent out five reminders on the LISTSERV.
Two days after the fifth reminder, she collected the box in a rush after spring rowing practice and threw it in the trunk with her gym bag. It did feel a little light, but there were things sliding around inside it, so she was emboldened!
At home, she prayed for at least seven letters. Bobby could really use the support. He was suffering a bout of such severe depression that he had been hospitalized for a few weeks, which could happen to anyone, Maddie knew. There was no shame in it.
She took a breath and lifted the lid.
Inside was
a condom,
a slice of ham from the sandwich bar, curling slightly around the edges, and
a tightly rolled joint.
Mortification set in quick. The very outside layer of her epidermis (the stratum corneum, she remembered, because what was all this for if not to eventually get into med school?) burned with humiliation, while the rest of her body felt blank. Other feelings crept back, and she felt sad for Bobby, and she felt sad for herself, because neither of them, even when teamed together, were popular enough to elicit a modicum of sympathy. Meanwhile, every time quarterback Aidan Fiorello got concussed, people waited in line to bake him cookies and do his homework for him.
A fat tear wormed its way to the corner of her eye and pressed against her duct, but she blinked it away. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said, then she lit the fucking joint, and got to work.
She scrolled and scrolled and scrolled through the Instagram feeds of all Bobby’s followers, printing any screenshots she could find of Bobby in a big group. She cut them out and glued them with her little sister’s glue stick to different pieces of stationery and construction paper. She cut out encouraging words and snippets of positivity from the headlines of her Cosmo. She created caring, thoughtful collages, wrote letters in the small chicken scratch of boy-writing and the fat, luscious loops of girlhand, and she wished Bobby well in twenty distinct voices, then collapsed at 4:00 A.M. without even touching her homework.
She thought a few times of what people might say if Bobby thanked them, but figured she’d cross that bridge when she came to it. She’d deliver the box. And hope that Bobby felt seen.
Group Project or Maximum Glow
Math class.
Guess what was new in the world of pedagogy for teenagers? Design Thinking! Project-Based Learning! Which meant there was no instruction, per se. Which meant teens were left to figure things out by themselves. Which meant Group Projects. Which meant what it has always meant: One person did the work, and no one else in the group really learned a thing. But this was how they did it at MIT. If you chose to work on a project by yourself at MIT, you could only achieve 80 percent of the possible points.
So, this was what they’d started to model in high school. And people here wanted all the points. Everyone wanted 100 percent of the points all the time. Their points were even publicized on the school website so that everyone knew each teen’s rank, value, and inherent worth to the rest of society. And this wasn’t even a dystopian novel. This was real life. In real life, all the teenagers were publicly ranked and set against one another to fight to the death in math class. At least this was what it felt like in A/B Pre-Calculus. A fight to the death. Because even when they were mathematicians and should realize things about probability and number theory and how there could only be one person at the top and it was usually random chance that got that person there, they were still intent on being number one.
Maya was placed here because, well. She knew all the things. She could do all the maths. It just made sense to her. But her GPA had transferred over from her old school, which meant that she had very few of the points. If you wanted to find her and her sorry GPA on the school website you’d have to scroll for a long time until you got to the bottom. She and a person named John Ackroyd were neck and neck, duking it out for last in class. She hadn’t seen John Ackroyd yet and wondered if they just put him there as a phantom placeholder so that no one felt terrible about finishing last. That was okay, though, because she was not here for a blue ribbon. She was striving to stay here and finish with one of those pathetic white ribbons they hand out at kiddie swim meets that say: PARTICIPANT.
The room was organized into four different tables, one for each group, and Maya didn’t know where to sit, so she just kind of awkwardly stood in the back and waited, her crazy hair accidentally erasing tiny threads into the Expo marker formulas written on the whiteboard. The thoughts of the pre-calc class drifted through the static air of the classroom and wedged themselves up beneath the padding of her headphones: Loser, What is she wearing?, I’d tap it, Eyeroll.
Instead of visibly rolling their eyes, some girls simply thought Eyeroll while others thought Bring it, as if by simply showing up, Maya had thrown down some kind of psycho-social gauntlet. The straight boys separately, dully, almost obligatorily thought about which appendage they wanted to stick into which of her orifices. Maya instinctively crossed her legs and hugged her arms around her chest. The teacher, a thin white man in his twenties who had the kind of pristine microbiome that supercharged his metabolism so that he could eat foot-long steak bombs for lunch but still keep his 29W belt buckled on the tightest setting, rushed in and set his laptop on his desk. He scrolled through it before looking up and seeing Maya standing there in the shadows. He shuddered for a second, he was so disturbed by her appearance. Ugh, he thought. I’m a math teacher, not a sociologist. Where am I going to put her where she’ll best fit in? Then he actually ran some numbers from his grade book in his head, wrote down some formulas on a Post-it, and mathed the heck out of the situation, gathering data, before announcing, “Maya, you’re in ‘District Twelve.’ Lucy will get you up to speed.” To their credit, “District Twelve” did not audibly groan. To her credit, Lucy stood up for herself.
“Mr. Randall, I do not have an inherent ability for math just because my ancestors were Korean. I’ve never even seen an abacus.”
“Ha! Abacus,” shouted Eddie Jacobs, blond white wrestling phenom with cauliflower ears, who somehow heard the conversation through the AirPods wedged into them. He slid into his seat and kicked off his plastic sandal slides (thankfully he was also wearing black crew socks) to watch the drama.
“First of all, this has nothing to do with your ancestral background,” said Mr. Randall. “I’m asking you for a favor. Just bring her up to speed. It says in your file that you tutor.”
“In history,” Lucy replied. “I suck at math.”
“Okay, Kevin…”
“Also Asian!” Lucy said. “God.”
“Fine,” said Mr. Randall. “Victoria…”
Maya looked over at Victoria “Tori” Williams and instantly knew her story. She was the star of every production here at NTHS and was often auditioning for American Idol or The Voice or whatever when she wasn’t constantly hawking her new studio-produced single, “You,” on her social media channels. She got up at five every morning because her expert makeup routine (she could contour like the best of them) was extra grueling. It made her tired and cranky and impatient.
Maya stared at Tori and her makeup. She looked as if she lived inside the Juno filter, everything smooth and soft and perfectly lit. She used the highlighter so expertly that it caught the light in the right places on her face, but didn’t make her look shiny and metallic like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. A lot of unfortunate highlighter incidents walked these halls, everyone trying to achieve maximum Glow. Maya wished she could swipe left and see Tori’s actual #nofilter human face. Sadly, she could hear her no-filter thoughts.
