“Fancy!” Mom chirps, and the two of them go upstairs in a fit of adolescent bliss.
An hour later they’re gone, and Dad disappears to the garage again on some vague errand, which means he’s going to toke up. I wish he didn’t act this way. He’s like some kid, and I’d much rather he knew that I know and I don’t care.
I’m the only one who’d be halfway cool about it. Ellis would probably cry and turn him into the D.A.R.E. cops. Mom would freak out. My mother has never held back on how she feels about stoners. Hippies. Do-nothings. Druggies. “All those brain cells!” she’d say. “What a waste!”
Frankly, the more I read about the philosophers of ancient Greece, the more I think her life is a waste. What’s she learning? What’s she questioning? She knows everything, which means she doesn’t know anything.
I mean, yes, at the beginning of humanities class, I thought most philosophers were a bunch of entitled Greek guys sitting around thinking up crazy shit (like Zeno) while the women and the slaves did all the work. But then this week we started to learn about Socrates.
Socrates lived in the fifth century BC in Greece. He didn’t write anything, which means most of what we know about him comes from what other people said (a little like living in Unity Valley). His favorite thing to do was to prove to people that what they thought was truth might not be true. This did two things for Socrates: (1) It earned him the label “one of the founders of Western philosophy,” and (2) it eventually annoyed enough people that they put him to death by making him drink hemlock.
A lot of what we know about Socrates comes from his most popular student, Plato, who wrote many things, including The Republic, which is an imaginary discussion between Socrates and a few others in order to demonstrate the Socratic method. The Socratic method is what Ms. Steck wants us to practice most during this class.
She said, “This will be a time of asking questions and not rushing to answer them. A time of poking holes in your own theories. A time of thinking and not knowing.”
Perfect for me right about now. I am the not knowing queen.
What I do know is that the original idea I had about philosophers is somewhat accurate. Women had it pretty bad in ancient Greece. Married off at puberty by their fathers. To older men. So they could bear sons. But Socrates thought women could be educated and should be included. While many of his peers owned slaves, Socrates said, “Slavery is a system of outrage and robbery.”
But he didn’t have a job. He was poor. He didn’t even write down his own amazing ideas. All he cared about was truth and living a good life—while trying to define what a good life meant.
So if we go by Mom’s standards, Socrates was the biggest loser of all time.
I put my coat on and go out to my picnic table. The sky is lit up with streetlights, so I can’t see many stars, but I can still see the planes blinking overhead. I can hear the bar down by the fire company. I can hear the traffic on Route 733—the road that links this small town to the next, and the next, until it meets with a road that might lead somewhere bigger.
I think about Kristina and how she’s at Atlantis—the only gay bar in the nearby city. I think about why I haven’t gone yet.
I stare at the first plane that’s cutting the sky in two. I stare and I send my love. I send it to the woman in seat 5A who is worried about something. I send it to the man in first class who’s not feeling well. I focus on the stars, and I send love to the aliens flying millions of miles from me in outer space. My brain people like to think that one of these days, they’ll be coming for me.
I concentrate back on the plane and gather more of my love. I send it to the pilot, who is tired and who misses his family. To the flight attendant and to the crying baby whose ears hurt. To the guy tapping away on his laptop computer.
Am I asleep? Am I still outside? I can see blue. Blue like in the deep end of a swimming pool. Blue like if I lived in a bubble in the sky. I say to the approaching creature, “Thank you for coming to rescue me. I knew I didn’t belong here. Please take me to my real family.” Instead, it pulls out a long metal bar and sticks it into my belly button.
I wake up to Ellis standing right above me, saying something. I jerk up and instinctively guard my abdomen. I nearly head-butt her in the process.
“Jesus!” she says.
“Sorry.”
“Out here long?”
“I don’t know. What time is it?”
“Eleven thirty.” I can smell wine on her breath.
“She let you drink again?”
“They didn’t card me.”
“They don’t card people like you in fancy restaurants, Ellis.” I look at her. She’s wearing Mom’s prized jewelry—the diamond teardrop earrings and pendant. Stuff Mom saves for bigwig parties and award ceremonies in the city. Ellis is wearing a black velvet dress most people around here would wear to prom. But she looks sixteen. No doubt about that.
“Wanna stay up and watch a movie or something? SNL is on in a minute,” she says.
“I have to leave for work at five.”
She lets out a judgmental chuckle through her nose.
“What?”
“You could have quit after summer.”
“It gets me out of here, doesn’t it?”
“Your loss.”
I get up and hop off the table. “Well, we can’t all have Mommy and Me nights out at the club, you know.”
She smacks my arm. “You have no idea what it’s like to get drunk with Mom and listen to her bitch the whole time,” she says.
I want to ask her bitch about what? But I know what. There are always inside jokes during the week after a Mommy and Me episode. About Dad. About me. About girls on the hockey team. “You could always say no,” I say. “No one has a gun to your head.”
“I couldn’t,” she says. “Then I’d be just like—uh.”
“Just like me?” I say.
“Yeah. I guess.”
I feel bad for perfect Ellis. She thinks she has it all figured out inside her safe little bubble. She doesn’t realize yet that one day she’s going to fail at something, and our mother will be there to critique exactly how she failed, step-by-step.
In the bathroom, I look at myself in the mirror for a long time. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know I’m different. I brush my teeth. Wash my face. With my hair pulled back like this, I look again. And I can see it. Behind my eyes. Something is in there. Something Ellis doesn’t have. Something Mom and Dad don’t have.
I close the door to my room and I turn off the light. I pretend I’m in an airplane. I pretend I’m drinking orange juice in seat 23A and I can feel a stream of love shooting right through the body of the plane from some lonely girl lying on a picnic table in a small town no one has ever heard of before. I send love back to her, but I’m not sure if she can get it.
I think: If I’m on an airplane, then where am I going? I come up with answers. New York City. Los Angeles. Paris. Melbourne. Far enough away that this is okay. Far enough away that no one here will ever know.
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