This was the part she couldn’t bear to picture. Someone—was it Maxine, was it Aarathi, Donna, Cindy?—someone had climbed on the bench in the next shower stall and peered over the wall at naked Laura Ciardi in the shower. Laura’s eyes were closed because the shampoo was in her hair. She kept trying to rinse it out but the suds wouldn’t go; they were the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of liquid Prell soapsuds. They kept coming and coming. She would be late. There was giggling. Finally she tore the curtain open. The other girls were all dressed and dashing for the locker room door.
She was alone, dripping. Her clothes were where she had left them except her training bra and her underpants, nowhere. Her hair was more rubber than human.
The bell rang as she skidded into the doorway. “Oh, something new,” said Miss Parsley. “Last in, first up, Laura! We haven’t heard from you all year. Slap right to work, girls! Deliver your weekend, tell me what happened and what it signified, and that means we are new people, we are ready, girls, to be ourselves in a new way for this whole new week, girls! You have ten minutes.”
Her classmates had set her up, out of no other impulse than meanness and boredom. They wanted to see her suffer.
The girl turned and looked around at the class as Joan of Arc might have done, inspecting the arrangement of kindling at her feet. It was braided like a wreath, and she was the upright pillar of wax in the middle, ready for the match.
(Oh, that was good. Laura sat up in Mary Bernice’s chair and said it again to herself.)
She was the upright pillar of wax in the middle of the wreath of kindling, turning like Joan of Arc might have done, to inspect her murderers. “Better get your pen out, we can’t wait to hear about your weekend,” sniggered one of the girls. Miss Parsley didn’t catch the sarcasm. The girl asked to go to the bathroom. “You’ve just come from the gym,” said Miss P. “My hair is still sticky, it wouldn’t wash out,” said the girl, raising a hank as an exhibit, dropping it with disgust. “That’s Italiano for you: greasy,” murmured a back-seater. “Back in four minutes, and you’re still on deck for this assignment,” said Miss P. “We all want to hear what you’ve been up to.” “Hear it and see it,” someone snorted. “Show us everything. Why not bare your soul, since you’ve already bared your behind?”
The girls didn’t take against Laura Ciardi in the locker room because she had done anything to them. Except ignore them, perhaps. They took against her because they could. Because Laura stood out the most, which conferred a practical normality to all the others. Laura with no parents. Laura with no brother to come home at Christmas. No boyfriend. And a history of belligerence if pushed.
Last Monday, during third period, Laura had lingered in the girls’ room as long as she dared, hoping Parsley would give up waiting and ask someone else to read her paragraph. As Laura finally was going back to English, she found herself passing Maxine’s locker door. Laura checked out the corridors in both directions, peeked in the locker, and found the treasured Bobby Vee album wedged in at an angle—slanting above Maxine’s stash of illegal makeup. Laura had lifted the album out and closed the metal locker door without making any noise.
But what to do with it? It was too wide to carry around with her schoolbooks and notebooks. Luckily she had worn a big old cardigan of Nonno’s to school that day because the heat in the library was on the fritz. Into the wooly brown sweater she wrapped Maxine’s present for her Big Brother Sugargarten—his name was Spike or something—and tucked it under her arm with her other books. More sloppy than usual, but who looked at Laura Ciardi enough to notice?
Her campaign to avoid having to write something and read it aloud had worked, but the impromptu theft had come to light by lunchtime. Maxine Sugargarten was sobbing in the school cafeteria so dramatically that Miss Adenoid, or whatever her name was, the school nurse, had to be summoned. “He’s my brother,” gasped Maxine Sugargarten, as if she were talking about Bobby Vee and not Spike Sugargarten. “And he’s been off at basic training for months! And we’ve been writing letters about this stupid Bobby Vee album, and it is a personal tribute to my loving friendship with my brother!”
“If anyone knows anything about this missing LP,” said Mr. Grackowicz over the public address system, “please bring such information to the attention of the front office. And I might add that for someone to snitch someone else’s Christmas present is not a very nice thing to do in this season of peace on earth, goodwill to men. End of transmission.” Mr. G. had been in the navy.
After lunch, Laura hunched in the cold library with her grandfather’s sweater folded under her chair. She was supposed to be doing a biology project on anatomy. The subject was bones, which was mostly copying drawings from the acetate overlays in the World Book Encyclopedia. Laura had asked if she could do a drawing of a bird wing rather than a human arm, and label all the parts. It would still be a reticulated diagram. Miss Frobisher had held out for the human arm as being more pertinent to the subject of Human Anatomy, Fall Semester. Laura had thought that was small-minded of her because we all came from birds way back. Back when we could fly.
The human arm was repulsive, really, when you thought about it. That coronoid process, and the shading where the ulna turned. How slender, how easily broken. The very airiness of a wing so much more useful—more flexible, more giving.
When the bell rang she saw she had only doodled seagulls flapping above a single-line horizon. The Human Bone had failed to emerge any further than an outline. Laura had slapped her stuff together and headed up toward Remedial Reading.
The luck of high school traffic patterns brought Maxine Sugargarten and Donna Flotarde heading down the steps of Staircase B just as Laura was starting up. Maxine’s face looked like a Halloween fright mask, tracks of tears betraying her illicit eyeliner. Maxine was dragging her heels. By now everyone in the school knew Maxine was Trauma Case Number One for the day, and she’d be given some leeway. But Donna Flotarde had too many demerits to be late again, so she was leaping ahead. Finding herself alone with Maxine, Laura made her big mistake. “I am so sorry about your lost record, Maxine.”
Maxine halted at the landing. She was just one of the pretty thugs who plagued Laura, she wasn’t any kind of friend. Laura hurried a little to pass her. “I just mean, you have a brother, that’s the good part, I guess,” Laura said, pausing at the top.
“Of course it’s the good part, but my surprise is ruined,” snapped Maxine.
“I mean at least he’s coming home.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Oh, she’d gone too far. “Nothing. Wow for your brother, wow. Great. See ya. I’m going to be late for Pretzel.” (Miss Prelutsky.)
Maxine’s snake-eyes had narrowed. “You’re awfully interested in my brother.”
“I’m not at all interested in any brothers of yours.”
“You never even met him.”
“How could I meet him, he’s at basic training you said. I don’t care about him.”
“What do you have under your sweater? Laura? Did you take my Bobby Vee?”
“You’re medically off your rocker, Maxine.” Laura hugged the sweater to her bosom. The second bell had rung and they were alone in the stairwell, Maxine still paused at the halfway point, and Laura frozen on high alert at the top landing.