Perhaps I overreacted. Maybe this is what my father was talking about when he warned me to stay away from emotion and al of its messy extremes. But I couldn’t get over Perry. While he was running errands for the substitute teacher, a ful y grown woman who would never kiss him in the band room, I used an eyedropper to add bleach to his tanks of brine shrimp. I didn’t put in enough to kil al the ugly little creatures, but just enough to confuse his research. My mother had been right. I was a precocious child. A bitter woman at age fourteen.
A little bit of justice was meted out. Perry’s project failed to qualify for the citywide fair, and I was tapped to go. My work, “The Effects of Acid Rain on the Germination of Some Selected Seeds,” would represent the ninth- grade class of the Benjamin E. Mays Academy for Math and Science.
Perry moped in the practicum room as the magnet director encased my project in Bubble Wrap to get ready for my big day. “I just don’t understand it,” he said, thinking of his brine shrimp and maybe thinking a little bit about me and why I wouldn’t talk to him anymore. I didn’t say anything, although I think it would have given me some satisfaction to explain myself. But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.
MY SESSION WITH the judges was not chal enging. They seemed mostly concerned with whether or not I had done the work myself, trying to confuse me by quizzing me about the procedure for blending chemicals. They didn’t even ask me what I thought about the issue of acid rain and whether I thought it was going to destroy the whole world.
Irritated, I tossed my hair around while answering the questions. Girls my age would hem me up in the bathroom for flaunting my excel ent head of hair, but the men on the committee fidgeted in their chairs as I shifted my curls from one shoulder to the other. Against my mother’s advice, I had applied a coat of liquid eyeliner, electric blue, to the pink rim above my lower lashes. It burned like crazy, but I just wet my lips and tried to look bored as tears leaked from my irritated and iridescent eyes.
One of the judges, a heavyset man with processed hair, said, “How did a pretty girl like you get so interested in science?”
The woman judge said, “Michael, that’s out of line.”
The other male judge said, “Michael, that’s a misdemeanor.”
I said, “I care about acid rain. It’s going to destroy the world.” The three judges exchanged glares while I pul ed on my rabbit-fur jacket.
“Nice coat,” the woman judge said.
“My daddy won it for me in a poker game,” I told them, rubbing my eyes with the backs of my hands.
I knew I wasn’t going to win a gold key. I could tel by the way that the judges looked at one another as I was leaving the smal room. I searched the hal way for my sponsor, but she was nowhere to be found. The civic center was swarming with kids, al excited about the competition. Everyone from Mays High had to wear baby blue and gold shirts. I wore mine, as it was the only way I could participate, but I kept my rabbit-fur jacket buttoned and belted even though the building was warm.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see the woman judge.
“You put together a good project,” she said. “But you real y need to work on the way that you present yourself.”
I raised my penciled eyebrows.
“Don’t get defensive, dear,” she said. “I am tel ing you this for your own good. Woman to woman.”
I didn’t say anything. She gave my coat a little pat as though it were a pet and then she walked away.
I went out and stood in front of the civic center, holding a pencil to my mouth as though it were a cigarette. It was a goofy habit, a little tic I had picked up from James. He was always taking short breaks from whatever he was doing to smoke one of his Kools. Even though my mother let him smoke in the house, he sometimes stepped outside to light up, and I often went with him, standing on the patio and watching him hold the match behind his cupped hands. When he did it, it was like the only thing that was happening in the world was taking place just inches in front of his face.
It was November and freezing already. Spending my fourteenth-and-a-half birthday this way couldn’t have been a good sign for the year to come.
Since I was hidden behind a white pil ar, I went al the way and ground out my little golf pencil on the heel of my penny loafer. Commingled with the noise of cars zipping down Piedmont Avenue, was the sound of mewing. Peeking out from behind the pil ar, what did I see? Chaurisse Witherspoon standing right in front of the glass doors, crying like her heart was breaking.
I wasn’t exactly shocked to encounter her at the civic center. Al the public schools sent a few students to the fair. As my mother would say,
“People are going to see people.” So the sight of her wasn’t what had me al discombobulated. The thing that set off twitches at the corner of my mouth was the fact that Chaurisse was wearing a waist-length rabbit fur, too.
Shivering behind the column, I tried to think of a story that would let me believe that my father hadn’t lied to me when he gave me the coat. Why James would go to so much trouble to deceive me this way? It wasn’t like I hadn’t known al my life that I wasn’t his main daughter. If he had just admitted to buying the damn jacket in a store, I would have been prepared, in a way, for the possibility that there was one for Chaurisse, too. Why had he burst into my home in the middle of the night, letting me believe that he had seen this coat on the poker table, spread over a pile of chips, and thought of me, and only me?
It’s funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury. I thought about my father kissing my cheek with his rum breath. I thought about the guidance counselor and her smug talk about exclusivity. And who was the female judge to tel me anything about the way I handled myself? I looked out again at Chaurisse. The coat looked terrible on her, as it was my size, not hers. She couldn’t even button it up around her round middle.
I emerged from behind the pil ar stil woozy with rage, but I only planned to look at Chaurisse. I was just going to fil my eyes with her as I walked through the double doors. This was al I had in mind. Who would believe me, but this was al I had planned to do. No talking, no touching, just a good look.
This, I now know, is how people go crazy and do things they regret. Look at the woman who almost kil ed Al
