much about existential theatre or post-modern literature, but they know everything that goes on in Dellwood, no matter where it goes on. Gossip is what they do when they’re playing golf and shopping and sitting in the sauna together.
“Oh, I know they’re not,” I said equally quickly. “It’s just that it’s very personal stuff…”
“My parents were really moved by your mother’s story,” said Ella. “It made them think.”
I smiled at the telephone. “No one’s suffering is ever in vain,” I softly intoned.
After I hung up, I took a shower, touched up the purple nail polish I was wearing that week to match the lining of my cape, and went to my bedroom to get away from the grunting and shouting of the other members of my family while they played Monopoly in the living room.
When I look back on myself that day, going about my life as if I didn’t have a care in the world, it almost makes me weep. How innocent I was! How naïve! The poet was right: ignorance is truly bliss. There I was, laughing, talking, working, making spaghetti, eating, going over my script, doing my nails and cleaning my teeth, totally oblivious to the fact that a catastrophe of cosmic proportions was hurtling towards me.
It took me a while to get settled. That’s because my bedroom isn’t really a bedroom, it’s really a sun porch. At least it was until we moved in. My mother, trying to stop the twins from acting so much like twins, decided that each of them should have her own room. So I got the sun porch. (Ordinariness isn’t the only thing I have to fight against in my house; gross injustice is another.) Anyway, there isn’t any heat in my room, so I had to close all the curtains, plug in the minute and ancient electric heater, and find the chenille bathrobe I got at the Salvation Army so I wouldn’t freeze to death. Then I had to go back to the kitchen because I’d run out of candles. Then I had to get my diary out of its secret hiding place where I keep it to safeguard it against the prying eyes of my mother’s other children. My father, who is a worrier by nature, is convinced that I’m going to torch the house some day by burning candles, but I prefer candlelight to electric. It’s so much more atmospheric. Especially when I’m telling the events of the day to my diary. No matter how busy I am, or how exhausted from the slings and arrows of the last twenty- four hours, I write in my diary every single night. My life is extraordinary; I don’t want to forget any more of it than I can help.
By the time I was finally in bed with the radio on, my candles lighted, my diary on my lap, and my pen with the lilac ink in my hand, it was nearly ten forty-five. I started the entry for March 5th. I had a lot to tell, as always.
I’d had another fight with my mother about my hair at breakfast. My mother thinks that the only suitable hair colours are brown, black, blonde and auburn. She was refusing to let me dye mine blue. She never got over me cutting off all my hair in my Joan of Arc phase and she still hadn’t really come round to the ring in my nose, so she was being especially stubborn this time.
But there were up things, too. My new cape had attracted its share of admiring looks, and Mrs Baggoli herself had wished me good luck for the auditions the next day. I innocently took these events as good signs.
I’d only gotten as far as everything that had happened in maths, my last class of the morning, when the world came to its sudden and horrible end. It wasn’t water, and it wasn’t ice, and it wasn’t even fire. It wasn’t even a neutron bomb. It was an announcement.
And then the song that was playing ended, and George Blue, my most favourite DJ in the whole universe, began talking again. I started to listen when I heard the name Sidartha. I almost wish I hadn’t; that the moment had passed right by and left me ignorant but happy for a little longer. I sat there, rigid with horror, the pen dangling from my hand like a withered flower on a severed stalk. I glanced at myself in the mirror next to my bed. If I had to describe the look on my face I would say it was the expression of a young woman who has lost every reason for living.
“Oh, my God!” I screamed back at the radio. “It can’t be! It just can’t be! You might as well shoot me now and get it over with!”
“That’s right, guys,” said George Blue. “You heard it here first. Sidartha is no more. The boys are going to pursue solo careers.”
After I recovered from my initial shock, I raced back outside to call Ella and tell her the earth-stopping news. Ella was devastated. She hadn’t been listening to George Blue, she’d been washing her hair. Like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
“Oh, my God,” wailed Ella. “We never even saw them in concert…”
The rest of her sentence hung silently in the miles between us:
“I don’t know how I can face another day,” I said softly, trying to hold back the volcano of tears welling inside me. “I just don’t know.”
My mother was passing on her way back to the living room with a cup of tea. She glanced over at me.
“If you don’t get off that phone soon you won’t have to face another day,” she informed me.
“Five minutes,” I begged. “Just five more minutes.”
Ella and I got as far as agreeing to dress in mourning for the rest of the week when my mother came out and did her talking-clock impersonation (“Do you know what
I don’t know how I ever managed to sleep that night, but I must have dozed, no matter how fitfully, because I knew the instant I was awake: the pain began again.
I can’t go on with my story until I’ve explained a little more about Carla Santini. But in order to explain about Carla, I first have to explain about the social structure of Deadwood High. Life is like that, I find. Complicated.
I think of Deadwood High as an eco-system. It has its groups, and each of them feeds off the others. There are, of course, small grouplettes on the fringe – dopeheads, a couple of retro-hippies, a few biker types (but largely without bikes), metal heads, the total untouchables – but basically there are three main groups.
The first group is what I call the BTWs: Born to Wins. These are the kids who think of school as a social event. They’re popular, attractive, very busy and usually get a monthly allowance that would support a family of five for a year in Cuba. Their grades may not be the greatest, but they’re good enough. The boys are usually all-round athletes and the girls are usually on every committee. Parents and teachers wish these kids would buckle down a little more and treat maths and English as though they were as important as the Homecoming Dance, but otherwise they don’t mind them. They know they’re not going to be astrophysicists or anything like that, but they also know that they’re unlikely to wind up collecting bottles to get the deposit back so they can buy cheap wine.
The second group I call BTRs: Born to Run Everythings. They’re the brains and very goal-oriented. They either dress like the professionals they plan to be, or they’re super-cool with artistic and intellectual pretensions. They’re always seen reading the “right” book or listening to the “right” music. Parents and teachers love these kids.
The BTWs and the BTRs don’t interact at all with any of the fringe groups unless it’s to torment them, but they’re usually civil with each other.
The third group are the Independents. Unlike the kids on the fringe, who are either closet wannabes, or just resigned to the fact that they will never be accepted by any of the “in” groups in this lifetime, the Independents don’t care. Because they don’t care, they don’t get hassled or bullied and are more or less accepted by everyone, if only superficially. Achieving Independent status isn’t easy, so there aren’t many of them. Maybe eight or ten in the whole of Deadwood High.
I’m an Independent. It’s easier for me because I didn’t grow up with these kids. Ella should have been a BTR – she’s at the top of our class and she lives in the right neighbourhood – and she would have been if she were a little more like her parents, but Ella was not only very shy and repressed before we met, she was also
