It feels wrong to shut a lock around something that only has air inside. I consider waiting until I have something worthy of locking up, but this is a prize: it’s the northernmost locker in the northernmost building of Vista High. If I walked out the door now, I would be on the sidewalk. If I crossed the street, I wouldn’t be here anymore. And maybe it’s the idea of escaping that makes me realize the perfect thing to make this locker my own.
I don’t have any tape, so I bite off half a piece of gum and chew it for a second, take it out of my mouth, and stick it to the back of Ingrid’s hill photo. The locker has a dulled, scratched-up rectangular mirror inside. I am careful not to make eye contact with myself, but I can’t help catching a glimpse of straight brown hair, a few freckles. My face is hazy, narrower than it used to be. I press the picture over the mirror and I’m gone. What’s left is this pretty, calm place.
Someone leans against the lockers next to me. Dylan. Her hair is even messier up close. Strands stick out all around her face.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hi.”
She stares at me for so long that I start to wonder if I look weird, if there’s ink on my forehead or something. Then she gives me this smile that’s hard to pin down. It’s sort of amused, but not in a bad way. Before she leaves, she rummages in the bag she’s carrying and slams her lock onto the empty locker next to mine. She stomps away and I’m alone again. I shut the door slowly, listen to the hinges groan. When I close my lock around the handle, it makes a neat, soft click and claim it as mine.
7
I’m just a few steps off campus when Mom pulls over in her Volvo station wagon.
She leans out the window and yells, “Caitlin!” as if I might not have noticed my own mother pulling over, like the car she’s been driving all my life and the peace is PATRIOTIC bumper sticker didn’t tip me off. I do this awkward skip-walk to the car while all the other kids drive past me to meet up at Starbucks or the mall. I toss my backpack onto the passenger’s seat and follow it inside.
“Why aren’t you at work?” I ask, slouching so I won’t be so conspicuous.
Mom has the most presidential name ever—Margaret Carter-Madison—and even though all she runs is a small elementary school, people are always clamoring for her time. It’s amazing the things she has to deal with—parents who are obsessed with their six-year-olds’ social development; Mrs. Smith, who’s this warped fifth-grade teacher who insists dinosaurs never existed; occasional lice epidemics—sometimes I don’t understand how she can handle the pressure of it all. Somehow, though, she always manages to stay calm. She has a voice that’s a little quieter than most people’s, so you have to pay closer attention when you listen to her, and instead of sitting in the audience during the little kids’ productions, trying to look interested, she plays the piano for them. She gets all excited, even though the songs are the same every year.
She’s not answering my question, so I say, “I thought if you left Riverbank Elementary before seven P.M. the results would be disastrous.”
“Well, it’s your first day back,” she says, sounding a little too cheerful.
“And that means what exactly?”
“I thought we’d go to our Japanese place. You’ve just begun the second half of your high school career. We should celebrate.”
I get kind of squirmy when she says that. I don’t know why she’s trying so hard. I mean, our Japanese place? We haven’t been there since I was a kid. We used to go sometimes back before she became a principal and started working all the time, when I could still order the children’s special bento box. I don’t know how to respond, so I open up the glove compartment and dig around in it, just for something to do. Tic Tacs. A pair of old sunglasses. The car manual.
I pop a Tic Tac in my mouth and offer her one. She accepts. I keep eating them, one by one, crushing them to minty dust between my teeth. By the time we pull up to the restaurant, I’ve finished them. I toss the empty see-through box back into the glove compartment before I get out.
It’s that slow, in-between time—too late for lunch, too early for dinner. Mom and I are the only customers, which is something I hate. Whenever there are no other customers in a restaurant, I can’t stop thinking that if we weren’t here, the waiters would probably be eating or talking on the phone or turning the music up, so I feel like we’re ruining what should be their downtime. I especially hate it when they hover in a corner, waiting to refill the water glasses. That really depresses me.
The whole time we’re looking at our menus, and ordering, and pouring green tea from a hot metal pot into tiny cups, I can feel Mom preparing to say something. I don’t know how I know exactly, it’s just this feeling I get. She keeps looking at me and smiling.
“Who did you eat lunch with at school?”
I pick up the tiny cup and start to take a sip. Too hot. I set it down and stare at the wet circle it made on the paper place mat.
“Guess,” I say.
She doesn’t.
I trace the circle with my finger. “Come on. It’s obvious.”
“Not to me.”
I roll my eyes. “Obviously, I ate with no one.”
Mom’s cheery mood disintegrates.
“Caitlin,” she says.
She says my name all the time, but this is different. It’s all disappointed-sounding, like I had a choice, like there were a million kids lined up to eat with me and I was like, Sorry, I’d rather eat by myself.