Becoming Herself
Chapter One
The senior year in high school went off to a bad start. Cady failed her English quiz on Ethan Frome, which she had been required to read over the summer. During her first math test, the girl next to her kept asking what the quadratic formula was. Cady wanted to bite her, but couldn't do anything; she just attempted to ignore the whispering. But, being unable to concentrate on nonexistent limits and the tangent of cosine over the secant squared due to her neighbor's persistence, she shouted out, "The square root of negative b squared minus four A C all over two A!" Mr. Hashbram took up her paper and gave it a round 0.
Then, Mark Hagen, the new cute guy, accidentally spilled spaghetti over Cady's lap during lunch. She tried to say it was okay, but it came out all weird, and even if it hadn't he would've thought she were weird. So Cady ran to the bathroom and got cleaned. Thank goodness it hadn't been Cady who spilt spaghetti on Mark, but still…she felt embarrassed.
And one of the freshman junior Plastics seemed to have a crush on her. The girl's name was Emily Grisham, and she claimed kinship to John Grisham, the famous novelist of several court-related books of fiction and Skipping Christmas. She had short brown hair, and she often made kissing faces in Cady's direction when the latter walked by. One day Cady tried to tell her that they couldn't be a couple, because Cady wasn't a lesbian. For a second Emily would look crestfallen, but her friend, Madison Peakes, informed her, in a loud voice so that Cady when catch it, "She'll come around to love you someday, Em. Just be patient."
Yeah, right. Cady would never become a lesbian. She didn't even know if you could change sexual orientations. And she had always been a heterosexual. Boys were her thing, not girls. She expected that it would always be this way.
But two things happened to change it. First, a train killed her mother. Mrs. Heron had been making a mountain out a molehill by worrying over the confectionary sugar she had bought when she needed brown sugar to make cinnamon basticchos, a very sweet delicacy she had found in a cookbook translated from Urdu. But they had to be made by the next day, causing her to drive extremely fast to the store. The car ran over a railroad track and the split second that the tracks closed. So she was trapped. And the door was jammed with the seatbelt due to some glutinous substance she could not recognize. Then it was too late; a train came smashing into the car, ripping her neck apart. She was dead and would never rise again.
When Cady heard about this, salty tears ran down her face. Her father was very stoic for himself, but he tried to calm her down, to no avail. She cried and cried. It took her three days to get past that part. Then she began writing in her journal incessantly.
October 16th
Mother is dead. I hate the world. I wish I my tears could form a river that I could drown in. Why does God take people away from us like this? Is he cruel and merciless? I prefer the African deities who ask for human sacrifice. They don't break hearts the way the Christian God does. Oh, blood, I imagine blood…an ocean full. I didn't see my mother's blood—they decided to cremate her and burn the ashes. Oh, foolish Maker! He didn't even let me say farewell to her! Not to mention Father's letting them do that to the corpse so soon. The funeral's in two days. I plan to listen to dirges for the rest of my life. No happy songs for me. Maybe Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but none of this Jessica Simpson offal. There, I used 'offal' in a sentence! Mrs. Chalkingwhite will be proud. I guess I'd better do my homework, though I don't feel up to it. Till later.
October 17th
I hate my life! Sparky broke the Mathlete trophy I won last year. I intended to show that to my children! That stupid Dalmatian; why did Dad buy a firehouse mutt? It would've been better if we had a Chihuahua—at least they aren't puissant enough to knock a trophy off a mile high dresser by banging into its sides. Oh, what am I kidding? I'm supposed to be thinking about the female parent I'll never see again, not some stupid hunk of bronze! Oh, Mom, I hope you are in Heaven, playing the harp or making basticchos for angels. It must be a pleasant place. I wonder if I shall join you there, or plummet to Hell with my miserable existence. There is so much--
October 18th
I broke off yesterday because that mongrel made such a clatter by banging open the dishwasher door and slamming plates on the ground. It got to its third plate before I arrived on the scene to slap it. It better not do that again.
Today was Mom's funeral. There were roses and dirges and ghost cookies. I want her BACK! My mother, who has always been there with me, when we traversed Africa, through my first year of public school—she has been shirked away from me. And I'm not ever sure what "shirk" means, but it sounds nice. Why was I born into this bitter world of loneliness? Is this place only life and death? Some comfort must come, but I cannot imagine it. No, now I'm being optimistic. This is the worst of ALL possible worlds!
October 22nd
Mom, how dare you abandon me on this world! You left me here to endure pain and suffering instead of taking me with you. If only I had been in the car with you so that I could've perished in the train accident as well. I'm thinking of suicide so that I can join you wherever you are. Mr. Jorston, my Physics teacher, called on me today and asked me to demonstrate refraction. I tried to do something with a tuning fork; but he just laughed at me. Many of the kids were polite enough about it, but Harper Brown guffawed in my face. He's rather pigheaded when it comes to science. But that pales into comparison to that annoying Emily Grisham, who asked me to the Dory Poggins' dance, in front of half the senior class! Mark now thinks I'm a lesbian, I'm certain of it. I could make Emily pay for this!
But she didn't make Emily pay. Neither did she attend the Dory Poggins' dance with her. Something good came of it this incident, even though she knew Mark would never accept her as an eligible girlfriend. A new exchange student came to the school. She was from Colombia and had the name Mercedes Fasha Marquez. And she was the most beautiful girl Cady had even laid eyes on, with her petite figure and svelte fashions and hair that fell to her waist. Mercedes had protuberant eyes instead of tiny ones like most Hispanics Cady had formerly met. Best of all, her English was really swell, for a girl who grew up in a country where Spanish was the first language.
Some other girl—Katrina Novack, was signed up to escort Mercedes around. But Cady begged Mrs. Yutsin in the counselor's office to grant her permission to show Mercedes the ropes instead. Mrs. Yutsin appeared more than happy to do it, for Katrina had complained vehemently about babysitting a girl from South America who probably didn't speak English fluently. (The staff had not told her that Mercedes was reported to have superb English skills and that she wouldn't even require ESL courses, because they had yet to believe it themselves.)
Cady introduced herself to Mercedes.
"Hello," said the Hispanic. "Pleased to meet you."
Cady's heart fluttered when she heard this voice, though she didn't know why. She proceeded to show Mercedes the hallways, the library, the cafeteria…the whole school. Sometimes she said idiotic things like, "That's a water fountain. Well, of course it's a water fountain, they don't make ones that spout orange juice or Sprite, do they?" But Mercedes always reassured her. Once the whole school had been exhibited to the new student, Cady took her to her current class as noted by Mercedes' schedule, saying a quick goodbye and an "I'll see you around."
At lunch, Janis was busy with her boyfriend, so Cady sat at a table with Lynn Vaughn and Jamie Glascow, two girls who had shown interest in her after the school year had recommenced and the reign of the old Plastics had concluded. Then she saw Mercedes alone as she had been when she first came to high school. She asked Lynn and Jamie to excuse her, and sat with the Hispanic. They chatted quite a bit, and when the bell rang signaling that lunch was over, Cady felt angry that her time with Mercedes was cut so short. This shocked her, for she had never felt this way before, especially about someone she had just met. But she went meekly to class and tried to focus on finding derivatives of complicated math expressions. It wasn't easy, for images of Mercedes kept blocking her memory of what the derivative of negative cosine was.
Every day at lunch she sat with Mercedes, and before school started they spoke, too. Mercedes was upset that the school had placed her in ESL classes though her former institution had faxed her outstanding English scores to them. Luckily, she only had to suffer until the end of the semester, for it was proven that she had more competence in English than the instructor, who had grown up learning the language. Once, Cady asked Mercedes how she had become so fluent in English.
"Oh, I'm such a scholar. A pedant, I guess you could call me. I wanted to learn the top two languages spoken by the most people, which are Mandarin Chinese and English. So I did. It was hard work at first, but I managed at the end."
"You speak Chinese?"
"Well, actually, only a little. I used to have the rudiments of Chinese down pat, but now I can only remember the numbers (ling through shi), how to say hello (Ni hao), and stuff like 'mei mei,' which means 'little sister.' I realized I'd never go to China, so there was no point in keeping up with those studies."
"But you enjoy studying?" Cady inquired. Then, thinking that the studiou usually don't date, she blurted out, "Did you ever have a boyfriend?"
Mercedes eyes flared. "What would I want one of those for?" she asked, and stormed off. Cady had no idea why Mercedes should get so angry over a simple question.
For the next two days Cady never once saw Mercedes. She wasn't in the cafeteria at lunch time. Cady feared she might be sick, or have a ton of work to do and be spending all her moments in the library because of it. Though why Mercedes wouldn't answer the phone when Cady called her, she could not fathom. Then, on the third afternoon ensuing this incident, Emily reproached her.
"How could you say something so insensitive to the exchange student?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Cady said, huskily.
"You asked her if she ever had a boyfriend." The last word was uttered with such contempt and disgust that Cady never heard it used before.
"So? Girls have boyfriends in Colombia just as they do here."
"Maybe they do, but not one of our kind," Emily said. She snorted, then walked away.
At first Cady couldn't understand this statement, for the "our" had emphatically included herself and Emily Grisham, suggesting that Mercedes was like them but not like other girls. What could that mean?
It wasn't until after dinner that night that comprehension dawned on her. Mercedes couldn't have a boyfriend, because she was a lesbian! No wonder she had gotten so angry. Cady decided to e-mail her and apologize, though without mentioning that she knew about Mercedes' orientation.
Since she did not see Mercedes in the morning or at lunch, Cady surmised that her friend hadn't read the e-mail yet. But after school ended the Hispanic ran up to her, and embraced her in a giant hug. Then she held Cady's face in her hands, and brought her lips to Cady's own.