Strays Page 10

  “This is all so excellent! What if I added ‘sexual awakening’? What would you say?” asked Perry.

  “I’d say it sounds good to me!” Roy Jones bellowed from across the circle. Everyone laughed.

  The girl next to me, one of the students who had been ready with her pen, looked perplexed. Perry noticed right away.

  “What’s on your mind, Alexa?” Perry asked.

  “It just seems to me that pushing some sort of sexual agenda onto stories meant for kids is…well, just kind of out there.”

  Perry took her point seriously. “Interesting and valid response. Fair enough. Some people ascribe to the notion that fairy tales were written for kids as a means of exposing them to, and letting them work through, their deepest fears. But there are other theories as well. What if I told you that a theory stands that fairy tales were not intended for young children but were actually meant to regulate young adults such as yourself?”

  “You mean, fairy tales were like old-school sex ed?” asked Roy.

  “Exactly!” Perry said, pointing at Roy.

  “Can you be more specific?” asked Alexa, eyeing the pen she had left on her desk as though she wanted so desperately to pick it up and write all of this down.

  Perry was right—when you stopped taking notes and focused on really listening, things changed. Not that I was saying much in this conversation, but I was still equally a part of it, just by being there.

  “Let’s look at Cinderella. We all know that one, right?” asked Perry.

  Everyone nodded. Who didn’t know the story of Cinderella?

  Perry took a seat on top of her desk. “Bruno Bettelheim, who subscribed to Freud’s theories of sexuality, believed that a story like this was a metaphor for sexual awakening. So in this story, can you guess what represented Cinderella’s sexuality?”

  “The pumpkin?” I offered, turning a bit red.

  “Good guess. I’ll give you a clue; it’s something she loses.”

  “The glass slipper!” Most of us shouted out at the same time.

  I couldn’t believe I was being encouraged to talk about literature and sex in English class.

  “So, according to Bettelheim, the glass slipper is Cinderella’s lost virginity, never to return. A caution to girls everywhere to…” Perry’s voice trailed off as she waited for a response.

  “Never lose their shoes!” said Roy.

  “Metaphorically speaking.” Perry winked. “So, those of you eager to pull out those pens will be happy to know that now I’d like you all to get out a piece of paper and, through the use of any familiar fairy tale you’d like, brainstorm about what you think Bettelheim would say about the story in relation to a young woman’s sexuality.”

  I was still in shock that this was summer school. Perry didn’t want regurgitated facts. She wanted our ideas. I immediately began scanning my brain for fairy tales I knew. Were there any others about young women who lost something? Then my thoughts turned to my mom, who always had to wake me for school before I knew how to operate my alarm clock. She’d crawl into bed with me and run her fingers through my hair, saying the same thing every morning: “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. It’s time to greet the world.”

  Something I hadn’t been eager to do in a very long time.

  *

  By the time the bell rang, I had written six pages about how the needle of the sewing machine that Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on represented some sort of phallic symbol, and her punishment for daring to be curious was falling into a never-ending sleep. I didn’t know if this was right or if it was even what Perry wanted. But it felt good to be here in this moment, without distraction. Maybe I did understand why Kevin kept comparing me to Roman. Could it be that Roman and I had both become too tangled in our histories when all we really had was the moment before us?

  Perry handed out a list of fairy tales, and our homework was to revise what we had worked on in class as well as pick an additional story to analyze at home. When Perry gave instructions, not one student groaned. As I scanned the various fairy tales I had grown up with, I wondered: Where in the world were all these girls’ mothers?

  *

  At home, on a whim, I decided to call Ashley. It had been nagging at me—seeing her in front of Pergolesi the other day without so much as an acknowledgment of my existence. Maybe I could just work it all out with a conversation. When I tried her home line, her mom picked up.

  “Iris, Ashley isn’t home right now,” she said, although I could clearly hear Ashley singing in the background.

  “Okay, just tell her I called,” I said.

  I couldn’t believe she had refused to speak to me.

  Moments later, my cell phone chimed. It was a text from Ashley. I’m so sorry…my mom is…scared of you. She just needs some time to cool down. Promise.

  *

  “I nailed it!” said Dad when he poked his head into my room later that night. It was after ten, and I was already in bed.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Big things are gonna be happening around here, Iris! You’ll have your new bike by the end of summer!”

  His last declaration got me excited.

  “Then maybe we can go for a big ride…maybe down to Monterey for a week,” said Dad. He knew that I’d like nothing more than to take a biking vacation—to the world’s best aquarium, no less.

  “That would be awesome!” I said, feeling a sudden closeness to my dad. “When do you find out about the job?”

  “A week or two. They have a couple of other candidates. Rick assured me it’s just part of the process. They have to look like they gave everyone interested a fair shot.”

  I fell asleep that night thinking about my new bike and our trip to Monterey. I was so entrenched in my fantasy world that I hardly noticed the neighbor’s dog, howling to be let in.

  *

  I worked my way through Perry’s class all week, analyzing Anne Sexton’s poem “Rumpelstiltskin” and working on a small group project in which we had to write a rap from a fairy tale character’s point of view. Luckily, Roy volunteered to present it to the class. He began beatboxing into his hands before rapping: “I’m big and green and kinda tall/If you climb up my beanstalk, you know you’re gonna fall.”

  The class loved it.

  Perry talked a lot about how various fairy tales had gone through many different incarnations. Cinderella could be traced all the way back to Roman times. In a Chinese version of the story, the girl’s mother comes back as a fish whose bones have magical properties. And it wasn’t until Charles Perrault’s version that the pumpkin and glass slipper were added.

  “Just like each of you are all unique, these stories have taken on different personalities,” said Perry, handing out yet another assignment to complete.

  I liked this idea of taking something and making it my own. It kind of reminded me of genetic mutations. You get a copy of something, but it’s not an exact copy. But you still have the essence of what was once there. I hadn’t seen the relationship between English and science before, but now I realized they could be linked. A biological cell was like a word. Molecules were like sentences. And bodies were like the essays made up of millions of cells.

  Which reminded me I had a ten-page paper looming in my future. But before I could worry about that assignment, Perry launched into our next task.

  “It’s a fun assignment,” she assured us. “And it involves a field trip.” I hoped it wouldn’t be too far, considering my only transportation was a bicycle.

  “Instead of coming to school tomorrow, we’re going to meet at Central Branch on Church.”

  A library. The absolute last place I wanted to be.

  Perry continued, “I’ve broken you up into small groups meeting at various times throughout the day. I’ll be there all day to help. I’ve already informed the librarians you’ll be coming, and they will be ready to assist you. From this list, I’ll ask you to focus on one of these writers. What do they all have in common? They�
��ve each rewritten fairy tales. Or reinterpreted them—putting their own spin on a classic. The ways in which they’ve rewritten the tales change their meaning completely and put them in a cultural context, reflecting concerns of society.”

  Her words began to melt together, and all I could focus on was the fact that tomorrow I’d be in a library. My mom’s domain. Yet another place I’d been avoiding. I tried to distract myself by thinking about how I’d soon be at a bonfire with Oak. I couldn’t tell which I felt more strongly about…terrified about the library or elated about the bonfire.

  nine

  As I approached the entrance to Central Branch Library, I thought about what Doug, my counselor, had said during our last session: It was okay for me to feel angry. Anger wasn’t my enemy, but I had to take control over the way I dealt with it. I tried my best to let all of the emotions flooding my system—anger, anxiety, sorrow—wash over me like a wave as I entered the building.

  But inside, the familiar mustiness overwhelmed me. It amazed me how the smell of stale books could make all of the mental preparation I had done completely disappear. I was living proof of an olfactory phenomenon I had only read about in my science books. It all came down to my emotional brain. Scientists were studying whether or not other animals possessed the ability to recall emotions via smell. As the scent traveled up my nostrils to my head, my palms grew sweaty and I froze—a prisoner of my own memory.

  “Everything I’m feeling is okay,” I reminded myself, plagiarizing from an affirmation Doug had repeated during each session, and I headed toward the computers. I remembered that when I was little they’d still used the old-fashioned card catalogues—large wooden pieces of furniture with rows and rows of mini-drawers filled with little three-by-five cards that listed each book alphabetically by author. Computers made things a lot easier, but Mom would always talk about the glory days of the card catalogue. When her own library went digital, she lobbied to take one of the empty files home, and she placed it in our entryway. Over the years, we filled it with all sorts of knickknacks—items found at the beach or on our walks through Topanga: a bird’s nest in one, seashells in another. It was her personal treasure trove.

  What had happened to that piece? Had Dad just up and sold it when we moved without even consulting me? Yet another way he was showing me he totally didn’t care—that my opinions didn’t count.

  Sitting at the new and improved computer catalogue system, I typed fairy tales, which directed me toward shelves upon shelves of books. The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen—they were all there, altered versions of the same story told over and over again, just as Perry had explained. I thought about Perry’s instruction to have us look at these stories differently, from an original point of view, in order to glean something new from the story. I liked that idea.

  “Hey, Iris!” It was Bettina from my class. She had just arrived with Lorrie, the one who had refused to sit next to me on the first day of summer school.

  A librarian emerged and immediately brought a finger to her lips, shushing the offending shouter. Lorrie had spotted other classmates, who waved us over to their corner table. I approached cautiously, a little on edge, taking in the library environment and trying not to think too much about my mom.

  “Hey,” I said, taking a seat. “What are you guys doing?”

  “We were talking about the fact that the summer school crowd is unequivocally hotter than the non-summer schoolers,” said a girl from class.

  Now there was a mangled theory.

  “I totally agree,” said Bettina. “Delinquents are just better looking.”

  I was glad that I wasn’t the only one who considered herself a delinquent.

  “And we’re also talking about the assignment,” said Perry, who sat down with a pile of books that she fanned across the table. “I’ve played matchmaker here, trying to pair you up with texts that I think you’ll get the most from.” She handed out various books to people around the table, doling out the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Aesop, and John Francis Campbell. Soon everyone had a book but me.

  “This is it.” Perry passed the book to me, and I held it in my hands. “The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. She’ll help you get an A.”

  “I’d pass the class with a C-minus,” I said.

  “Better to at least try for that A.”

  I scanned the cover. It gave me the creeps. Rapunzel was in her tower, screaming her head off. The tower was resting on what looked like an ocean of blood. The whole scene was kind of disturbing. I tried to imagine how this book could help me do anything but have nightmares.

  “Take the next little while to read around your books,” Perry instructed. “And then make some predictions on paper about how your particular author might interpret fairy tales. What kind of spin have they put on them?”

  For the next thirty minutes, I was what my court-appointed therapist would refer to as a “healthy griever.” I was going about my business in a place that reminded me of my mom on a sensory level, and I was surviving. This was a big deal.

  But when Perry left our table to seek out some “lit crit,” as she called it, the conversation turned.

  “I’m so tired. I was hanging out on Pacific. I didn’t get home until two,” said Bettina.

  “What were you doing?” asked Lorrie.

  “My brother snuck me into the Catalyst to see Modest Mouse. It was awesome!” said Bettina. “What did you do last night, Iris?”

  Summer break. Sixteen years old. Surely I could come up with something other than hammering a wall and watching nature shows. But before I could fabricate a fabulous Thursday night, Lorrie interrupted. “Beat anyone up lately?”

  The group looked at her, stunned that she would let anything like this slip.

  I had been doing my best just to fit in—go by unnoticed. That was it. I slammed my backpack down on the table. The noise it made was amplified by the fact that the library had been so quiet.

  I got in Lorrie’s face, as close as I could. I could feel her breath exiting her mouth.

  “You really want to find out what I can do?” In that moment I felt as though I could have ripped her face off.

  Before I could say anything more, Perry ran over and held both of my shoulders. I aggressively shrugged her off. “Don’t touch me!” I yelled.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said.

  “Aren’t there rules about this?” Lorrie asked.

  Before I knew it, I was outside, my chest heaving in and out, a tightness taking hold in my throat.

  “Just breathe,” Perry said.

  Part of me wanted to push her away. I was good at doing that. But instead, I went with my instinct and moved toward her, just a bit. It was enough to get her to move closer to me, arms open. And there we stood, her arms wrapped around me tightly, and she made a slight shushing in my ear while I cried with such force, I thought I would never be able to stop.

  And then that moment passed, like a paper bag that had gotten caught in a temporary gust of wind before landing once again on the ground.

  “Lorrie is just a bully. You can’t let someone like that take control over you,” said Perry.

  “Why do you care what I do?” I asked.

  “It’s my job,” she said.

  I thought about other teachers at Santa Cruz High who didn’t take their jobs seriously—teachers like Schneider who thrived on students’ public humiliation. And others, like Ms. Kaminsky, who had always been too busy to talk to me. If only they all had the same standards as Perry.

  Perry handed me a tissue. “How did you end up here?”

  “I failed English.” She must have known that already.

  “I know, but I mean here in Santa Cruz. At this school?”

  I told her the whole story, sparing few details. I didn’t try to protect her from my grief or the tragedy of the situation.

  Perry listened thoughtfully. “I don’t know your dad, but why did you let him take you away?”

  “What do yo
u mean?” I asked, even though I fully understood.

  “It sounds like he made you run away from everything you knew. Everyone you loved. It’s hard enough to have a parent die. He didn’t have to kill your whole world.”

  I’d spent so long making excuses for my dad, I’d neglected my own entitlement to happiness. He was the adult. It was his idea to move.

  Maybe Perry was right. Maybe things wouldn’t have turned out so awful if I had stayed in LA, at my school, with my friends, at our house, with miles and miles of beaches. I had spent so much energy being angry that I didn’t even take the time to figure out what in the world I had been angry about. And yet Perry was able to articulate it so easily.

  “It’s just not fair,” I said. That’s how life was sometimes.

  “I’ll go back inside and grab your backpack for you, and then you can take off early.”

  I accepted Perry’s kindness.

  *

  My route home took me past Pergolesi again. The smell of roasting coffee made me circle around the block to do a drive-by to see if Ashley was there. No sign of her. I could safely get a cup of coffee without another confrontation.

  It felt good to be in my favorite coffee shop again. But as I waited in line, Ashley emerged behind the counter, tying an apron to her back.

  “Can I help you?” she asked before looking up.

  “I’ll have a latte, please,” I said.

  She recognized my voice right away, and our eyes met.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What’s up? Actually, can you make it a double shot? I’ve kind of had a rough day,” I said.

  I was relieved that we weren’t making lame small talk with each other; instead, I watched in silence as she retrieved my drink. But at the same time, I wanted more of an interaction. I wanted something real to pass between us.

  As I went to pay, she put her hand up. “It’s on the house,” she said. She was about to say something more, but just then a gaggle of moms pushing their babies in strollers descended upon the counter, and I just waved good-bye and headed toward my bike.