Bliss

Let’s pretend you’re Jesus, I imagine Liliana telling poor Elizabeth.

  Charles Manson has claimed, at different times, that he is Jesus.

  Stop, I tell myself. I don’t want to think about Liliana or Charles Manson. There is nothing I can do about either of them except stay away—and as far as Liliana goes, this has been unexpectedly easy. I haven’t heard her slithering whisper for days now. Perhaps she’s forgotten about me. Perhaps, now that I know her secrets, she has retreated in shame.

  Although based on what I learned from Agnes, Liliana didn’t know the meaning of shame.

  “If you sense that someone feels disconnected, reach out to them,” the speaker urges. “Buy them a soda. Compliment their new hairdo. It’ll make them feel better, and you’ll feel better knowing you’ve been a channel of grace.”

  Jolene leans over and whispers, “My pen is feeling disconnected. Will you be a channel of grace and get it for me?” She points to the floor near the end of the bleacher.

  I slide off my seat and kneel, reaching for the pen. I work on a witty retort, something along the lines of how we don’t want her pen falling into a bad crowd, now do we?

  But when I rise, my seat is taken. Jolene has taken it, and Thelma and DeeDee have scooched over so that there’s no room left for me.

  “Hey!” I protest.

  “There’s a seat behind you,” Thelma whispers.

  I glance back at the next row. I feel myself blush. “No.”

  “But he’s feeling disconnected,” Jolene says. “Even more than Pen-Pen.”

  “Pen-Pen?” I say.

  She plucks her pen from my fingers. “Oh, Pen-Pen, I missed you!” She covers it with smooches. Then she drops it into her purse and says, “Go. Sit. Converse!”

  I glower, but my crouching posture has caught the attention of a teacher, and she’s rising from her spot. I stand, flick Jolene hard, and climb one row up.

  “Hi, Mitchell,” I say, sitting as far to the right as I can. My cheeks are still hot. I can’t bear to look at him.

  “Hi, Bliss,” he says. “Have you decided to bear my children yet?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’ve taken a vow of celibacy.”

  He chuckles, and I risk a peek. And omigosh, he’s got the cutest dimple in the world.

  “I’m not so impressed with our man here,” he says, leaning close. “Does he think Charles Manson wouldn’t have murdered those people if only they’d offered him a soda?”

  “Well, they couldn’t have complimented his hairdo,” I say. I’ve seen pictures of Charles Manson—by now the whole world has seen pictures of Charles Manson—and his long hair is oily and uncombed.

  “You don’t like the devil-may-care look?”

  “I don’t like the unbathed look,” I reply. “Nor the unbathed smell, for that matter.” Mitchell, for the record, smells of pine trees and wonderfulness.

  Jolene peeks over her shoulder and grins. She gives me an un-sly thumbs-up, until Thelma yanks down her arm.

  “Sheesh! Give the lovebirds some privacy!” she says.

  I about die.

  Mitchell laughs, and I meet his eyes and grimace as if to say, Sure, sure, take pleasure in my pain.

  “Relax,” he says. “I think you’re cute.”

  “You do?” I squeak. Good heavens, since when am I a squeaker?

  “I do. Want to know why?”

  My heart races. He shifts positions so that our legs touch, and I try not to faint. “Um . . . I don’t know. Do I?”

  “Because unlike the other girls at this school, you’re not a beauty queen,” he says.

  I laugh. “Gee, that’s just what every girl wants to hear. Next time say something nice about my hair, would you?”

  “Wait, I didn’t mean it as an insult. I just . . . what I meant was—”

  I pat his leg. I don’t think about it; I just do it. “It’s okay. I have no interest in being a beauty queen.”

  His shoulders relax. “My point exactly.”

  He takes my hand—the one on his thigh—and we sit, fingers laced, through the rest of the assembly. His friends nudge each other and snicker, and when Jolene sees, her smile nearly splits her face. She elbows Thelma and gets her to look, and Thelma’s eyes bug out to such a degree that I think they’re going to bounce into my lap.

  But Mitchell holds on, and so do I. I’m thankful for the war protests, and I’m thankful for President Nixon. For those minutes, I’m even thankful for Charles Manson, though I’m quite content for our relationship to remain one-sided.

  hen the assembly ends, Mitchell gives my hand one last squeeze, then lets go. Booooo. But he winks at me before going off with his friends, which makes everything all right. I’m so giddy, I could fly.

  “Chelsea, quit picking at your scab,” a girl in front of me says to her friend as we file out. “It’s gross.” Then she gasps in mock horror. “Or maybe it’s a cry for help! Be strong, Chelsea! Stay with the living!”

  A guy from my geometry class nudges his friend and says, “Hey man, got any weed?” He makes his eyelids all droopy, trying to look like a stoner. Actually, it’s not a bad impersonation, and I grin. I can’t stop grinning, to tell the truth.

  Thelma, DeeDee, and Jolene catch up to me, enveloping me in squealing delight.

  “Omigosh, you and Mitchell are going to get pinned—I just know it!” Thelma says, clutching my arm. “You really are going to have his babies. Omigosh!”

  I laugh. “Ow, you’re hurting.”

  “He is so cute,” DeeDee says, wide-eyed. “I mean, I didn’t used to think so, and he’s not really my type. But he is so perfect for you!”

  “I know,” I say. “I agree.”

  “You owe me big-time,” Jolene says.

  “Meaning what? Next time I get to bump you off the bleacher and steal your spot?”

  “If that means I end up holding hands with a cute boy . . . then yes!”

  Over spaghetti and meatballs, they discuss possible names for Mitchell’s and my children. Jolene likes Barbara for a girl and Mike for a boy. Thelma can’t decide on a girl’s name, but for a boy, she likes Rock.

  “Rock?” I say.

  “Like Rock Hudson,” DeeDee explains.

  “Only the hunkiest man on the planet!” Thelma says.

  A strange current in the air draws my attention, and I look up to see Sandy standing several feet away, staring at me. Just staring, with a wooden expression on her face.

  I’ve neglected Sandy a bit since our visit with Agnes, because to tell the truth, her fascination with Liliana disturbed me. Her outright admiration for Liliana, I should say. Likewise, her admiration for Charles Manson. I know that in neither case does she admire their actions; she admires their refusal to play nice just because society said to. Still, I didn’t enjoy that time with her in Agnes’s room.

  I shouldn’t ignore her, though. That’s unkind. I lift my arm to call her over, but Thelma pushes it back down.

  “What,” I say, “she’s not allowed to sit with us?”

  Thelma looks at DeeDee, who looks at Jolene, who looks at the table.

  “It’s not a good idea,” Thelma says.

  “Why?”

  “It’s just not.”

  I’m exasperated. Do they find Sandy so repellent they can’t even bear to share their table with her?

  “Fine,” I say, pushing back from the table. I pick up my tray.

  “Bliss,” Jolene says unhappily.

  I shake my head. I refuse to lose my good mood over this, but I also refuse to be party to their exclusion. If Sandy hadn’t noticed me raising my hand and beckoning . . .

  But she did. What’s done is done.

  Sandy has taken up residence at her customary table, so I walk across the cafeteria and join her.

  “Hi,” I say. “I didn’t see you in assembly. Where were you?”

  “Why’d you leave your girly friends?” she says.

  “Because I did,” I say. “Why weren’t you at assembly?”


  She stabs at her noodles. “I got sent to the principal’s office.”

  “How come?”

  “They made me take a personality test. It was so lame.”

  “A personality test? Why?”

  “‘I am neither gaining nor losing weight,’” she says in a monotone. “True. ‘At times I have fits of laughing and crying that I cannot control.’ False. ‘I sometimes hear voices.’ False.” She looks at me from under her pale lashes. “I lied, basically.”

  “Meaning you do hear voices?” I ask, astonished to find that I’m not the only one at Crestivew who does. Liliana, before she receded, spoke with such intensity that I assumed I was the first person she was able to communicate with. Well, that and the fact that no one else ever seemed to react to her blood-drenched utterances.

  “Ha, ha,” she says, as if she suspects me of making fun of her.

  I’m disappointed—and then I’m not. It’s just as well that Liliana can’t communicate with Sandy. Sandy would prove far too responsive an audience, I’m afraid.

  “Seriously, why’d they make you take a personality test?” I ask. “Are we all going to have to?”

  “I doubt it. Just the losers like me.”

  “You’re not a loser,” I say automatically.

  “Just the potential unstable psychopaths,” she says. “They think I have no friends, but they’re wrong. They’re totally wrong. I told Dr. Evans that, but he didn’t believe me.”

  “What do you mean, he didn’t believe you? Why would he not believe you?”

  “I don’t know.” She bites her lower lip.

  “Oh, please, you’re just being paranoid. And don’t worry, you’re not a psychopath. You might be weird, but you’re not a psychopath.”

  “I might be,” she says peevishly.

  I can’t help but laugh. “Sandy. My parents had to fill out personality profiles once, and they’re not psychopaths.”

  “Who made them?”

  “The psych-ward people, when they were brought to the county jail.”

  “Your parents went to jail?” she says.

  “Yes, but they were released. Actually, they were given a probationary warning and assigned to do community service, but—”

  “I don’t care about that. Are you going to tell me what they did?”

  I consider. The thing is, I know she’s going to dig it, what I’m about to say, and with Sandy, that can be a dangerous thing. Like with Agnes and the relic.

  I shudder, seeing those hairs still attached to the flap of scalp. Eughh. I force my thoughts in a different direction.

  “Um, it was when we lived in Oregon,” I say. I exhale. “You remember me telling you that we lived in the basement of Oregon State for a while?”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “Well, we were living there without permission.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning no one knew we were there.”

  Her eyes gleam. “I could use a place like that.”

  “See, the scientists in the immunology department were trying to develop new methods of chemical warfare,” I say. “And my parents were big into SDS, at least that year, so—”

  “SDS? What’s that?”

  “An antiwar group called Students for a Democratic Society.”

  “Your parents were students?”

  “Will you let me finish? The SDS chapter in Oregon didn’t like the whole chemical-warfare thing, and my mom and dad were buddies with lots of the students. So they agreed to live in the basement for a few weeks, just to mess things up. Like, they let rats out of their cages and spilled stuff on the data logs, stuff like that.”

  “Ah,” Sandy says. “The warfare folks were experimenting on rats.”

  “Sick, huh?” I don’t agree with everything my parents do. In fact, I don’t agree with most of it. But I did agree on this one: Torturing animals is wrong, case closed.

  “I don’t get why you had to live there, though,” Sandy says.

  “We camped out in the lab sometimes, that’s all. Like on the weekends, when we knew no one would be coming in. There was a faculty lounge, and a drink machine, and it was either crash there or on someone else’s floor.” I shrug. “The lab smelled like rat poop, but it was air-conditioned.”

  “How’d you get in?” Sandy asks. “Didn’t they keep the lab locked?”

  “My mom made a key from a wax mold.”

  Her eyebrows go up. She makes a circling motion with her hand, like go on, go on.

  “You take a key and press it into a slab of wax,” I explain. “And then you make a copy of it out of Bondo—”

  “Bondo?”

  “It’s something mechanics use. It’s an epoxy.”

  “Bondo,” Sandy repeats.

  “It’s not firm enough to actually use as a key, but it’s stronger than the wax. So then you’ve got a replica. After that, all you have to do is get a blank key and file it down so that it matches.”

  “Where do you get a blank key?”

  “Why, are you planning to do some burgling? Steal from another old lady?”

  Her denial is immediate and indignant. “No. No!”

  I smile a little, because usually it’s Sandy giving me a hard time, not the other way around. The tease would be funnier if Sandy didn’t have a record, though.

  “You can get blank keys at a hardware store,” I say. “But just to be clear, we got caught. That’s why my mom and dad got hauled off to jail, and even though they weren’t charged with anything, they could have been.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” Sandy says.

  I shake my head and grin. Whatever else happens, she will always be Sandy.

  “Um, hi there,” someone says, and I look up to see Sarah Lynn Lancaster standing by our table. The Sarah Lynn Lancaster.

  The color drains from Sandy’s face. She goes from ruddy to tombstone pale in less time than it takes for my own smile to fall away.

  Huh, I think, noting almost as a disembodied observer the sweat that’s popped out in my armpits. This is going to be interesting.

  arah Lynn smiles awkwardly. My own smile blossoms back, more out of reflex than intention. I recall her kindness at the department store.

  “So, Bliss, did you like your makeover?” she asks me.

  “Kind of,” I say, preferring not to think about my jellied Lancôme lips. I’m glad she remembers my name, though.

  “You looked really pretty,” she tells me.

  Sandy snorts derisively. It flusters Sarah Lynn.

  “I mean, you look really pretty anyway,” she says. “But I love makeovers. They’re so fun, don’t you think?”

  “Um, yeah,” I say.

  Sandy snorts again. I wish she would be quiet.

  Sarah Lynn shifts her weight. “You know what I realized after we got to Woolworth’s?”

  “What?” I say.

  “I never did any of the peer mentoring stuff I was supposed to do with you, did I?” She wrinkles her nose like she knows she’s been bad. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. She’s making it sound as if it slipped her mind, when the truth is that she passed me off on Thelma squarely and fully. Still, I appreciate her apology.

  She turns to Sandy, who radiates ill will.

  “So, Sandy, are you ready for the math quiz?” she asks.

  Sandy scowls and fiddles with the salt shaker.

  “I hear it’s supposed to be superhard,” Sarah Lynn says.

  Sandy still doesn’t reply. The silence is long and obvious, and Sarah Lynn and I share a look, which Sandy sees. Sandy kicks me, and I say, “Ow.”

  “Well, I know you’ll ace it,” Sarah Lynn says gamely. “You always do.”

  Sandy twists her face like rotten fruit. My stomach muscles tense, because I’m afraid she’s going to start in with the bluhbluhs. I try to nonverbally communicate my embarrassment to Sarah Lynn, and Sandy kicks me again.

  “Ow!” I say. I reach below the table to rub my shin.

>   Color rises in Sarah Lynn’s cheeks. “Well . . . bye,” she stammers, and hurries off.

  “Bye!” I call.

  A long few seconds tick by, and then I turn to Sandy. I hold my hands out, palms to the ceiling, and choke out a sound that basically means, What the . . . ?

  “‘I know you’ll ace it,’” she says in a fussy falsetto. She switches back to her own voice, throaty and full of fury. “Yeah, right. And you’ll ace it too, Little Miss Priss, because if you don’t, you’ll burst into tears, and Mr. Carson will rub your shoulders and give you a big, fat A.”

  “Sandy,” I start. I have to shake my head and try again. “Sarah Lynn was perfectly nice just now. You were the one who was a jerk.”

  Sandy’s eyes follow Sarah Lynn as Sarah Lynn joins the food line. “That’s right, wiggle your widdle bottom in your fancy panties,” she says under her breath. “Your widdle ham hock, that is.”

  My mouth tastes sour. I really wish I’d never told that ham hock story. I also decide that maybe it’s time to take a good hard look at myself, and not do the same thing to Sarah Lynn that Thelma and the others do to Sandy. Because yes, Sarah Lynn treated me poorly on the first day of school. Since then, she’s been nice. Shouldn’t I give her a chance?

  “Why are you so intimidated by her?” I ask Sandy. “I get it that she was a jerk to you in fifth grade. I do. But don’t you think it’s time to let it go?”

  An ugly flush mottles Sandy’s face. “I am not intimidated by her! You think I’m . . .?” She works her mouth, but no words come out. Then, sounding strangled, she spits, “I can’t believe you would betray me—for her.”

  “What?!” I say.

  She glares. Her chair scrapes the floor with a hard noise, and she strides out of the cafeteria without a backward glance.

  I can’t believe her. I refused to trash Sarah Lynn for coming over and being friendly. Ooh, I’m sooo despicable.

  I turn my head toward the front of the cafeteria and look at Sarah Lynn, who is chatting with another girl in the lunch line. Sarah Lynn’s smiling, but it’s a tamped-down sort of smile. Is her pensiveness due to the way Sandy treated her just now? For that matter, what in the world made her come over in the first place? Surely she knows Sandy hates her.

  I sense someone’s gaze, and I glance across the cafeteria. Thelma and DeeDee are absorbed in conversation, but Jolene is staring at me intensely. Her expression is . . . disapproving? Smug?