Allison Reynolds also had Mr. Winger for English on a Monday. She wasn't in Bender's class-she'd only seen him once in passing before meeting him on Saturday-because Winger also taught in Advanced Placement, which is the version of the class she took. If Allison had had any friends at Shermer, she would've lied about being in an AP class. It made her feel out of place to sit in the same room and belong with the nerds and the preppy kids, but English was one of the only things she really excelled at in school. It was simple; she sat at the back of the class, just like Bender did in his lower English class, avoided speaking up or showing signs of listening, but always proved herself in the written work.
Winger was the only person in the class that actually knew and remembered her name, purely because he'd been persistent in trying to coax it out of her. When he had began teaching the class back in September of '83, Allison was just another one of his students in an early period on his least favourite day of the week. But consistently, Allison came out with high grades in almost everything she did. She found poetry the easiest of them all, because, as Mr. Winger had once put it, she had a very 'broad and vivid imagination'. If Allison had any friends, she would tell them that this was his reasoning for her constantly turning in lines about death and depression.
Despite the intellectual differences between Winger's English classes, although whether it could be proved there truly was any was questionable-according to Allison, at least-he still recited the same poem to them on Monday the 22nd, and Bender wasn't the only one whose attention was caught by it.
"No man is an island."
Allison looked up from her notebook at her teacher, through her strands of messy hair, and actually found herself focusing on him for once. She wrote the sentence down, repeated it a few times in her head, and even scribbled the word 'woman' above man on her paper to make it more identifiable to her.
It didn't take a genius to figure out the meaning of the poem, and it definitely didn't require much discussion in AP English. Maybe if Allison had any friends, she would've discussed it with them. But that was the thing, and that was exactly what the poem was getting at. She thought she didn't have any friends, but she did. Well, she would perhaps use the term loosely for them, as she was still unsure about how to approach any of them now it was no longer Saturday. It wasn't that she didn't know how to act around people. Quite the contrary, her therapist was her best friend. But she'd never had anyone to go to straight away with her thoughts or her problems. Whenever anything happened to her, she would bottle it up in an imaginary box in her head, seal it up until she got to Friday, when she would go to see her therapist once a week. Only then would she reopen that box, never any time before that. Not even when she was alone in her room, not even when she was daydreaming, not even when her parents did take the time to ask her how her day had been. Sometimes, Allison wished she could have been born mute. She would've got on tremendously.
If anything, she was more of an island than anyone else. More than John Bender, definitely more than Claire and Andrew, more than anyone she knew. Even her parents, who were so busy they barely spoke to her or each other, always slept in the same bed and sat in the same room, meaning they had somebody by their side. But who did Allison have? A weekly therapeutic session with a complete stranger, whom she knew nothing about, while he knew everything about her?
She blew her hair out of her face, and earned a look from Mr. Winger.
"Allison, at the back. What do you think John Donne was trying to put across with this poem?" Allison held her breath, a habit she had when people expected her to speak to them. Even worse when they expected her to speak in front of more than one person. She glanced around at everyone around her and realised to her slight delight that nobody was even looking up at her. It was if she was sharing this conversation privately with Winger, or neither of them existed to the class around them.
"I think… he was an optimist. He didn't understand why some people choose to live alone, which is wrong of him."
"Don't you think that every person makes an impact on the people around them? Even if they do live alone?"
"I think people only make an impact if they're allowed to do so. Nobody can impact anybody if they don't let it happen." She pressed her lips together, and decided she was finished talking for the day. It was a start, and she was doing way better than when Vernon had spoken to her on Saturday and she'd buried herself in her thick coat hood. The memory flashed in her mind and it made her think back to the argument she had just given Winger. Nobody can impact anybody if they don't let it happen.
She had spent the rest of her weekend after getting out of detention thinking about Saturday, thinking about the people she met and the impact they had on her. She let them do that. It was her fault she couldn't stop thinking about all of them. It was her fault she rocked her own system by actually opening up to someone other than her therapist and now she had to face the consequences. And those were losing her own island, and having to secure herself to land.
She suddenly felt an indescribable feeling of being extremely overwhelmed. While many felt desperate as soon as they felt alone, Allison felt desperate as soon as she realised she'd found people. She'd found her own friends. People she could tell lies to about her AP classes, and lie about her private life, and even her sex life. Was she, at 16 years old, truly ready for that?
Then there was Andy, and that was something she couldn't exactly figure out. She certainly hadn't predicted that she would go into detention and leave having had her first kiss. Her mom had asked questions as soon as she had climbed into the car, and she liked that Andrew made her parents notice her again. Even though her mom dropped it soon after Allison refused to talk, it was a start to something. When she had come downstairs for breakfast that morning with her hair pinned back and a letterman badge sewn to her brown denim jacket, her dad asked her if she had stolen it from someone. Andrew Clark made people notice her again, because he noticed her first.
One thing that she couldn't shake from her mind, though, was wondering if he would still notice her in the hallway if she went back to how she dressed before Claire altered her. They had argued and she'd sworn blind at him, but as soon as she walked in the room showing her face, he didn't have anything to say other than through giving her a kiss outside the school. What if he didn't react the same way if he saw her today. She doubted it. She'd still tried to make an effort to stick to what Claire showed her. Less black on the eyes, hair back, a broader range of colours would bring out her complexion. The only range she had was black, grey, navy and brown. And if she was honest, she didn't want to start wearing obnoxious pink sweaters that would even make the likes of Claire Standish jealous. So brown was as close to broad as she could get.
As much as it sickened her, she hoped he'd still notice her today.
She hoped that when she walked down the hallway, he would turn his head away from his dumb group of friends and actually acknowledge her as a person. Better yet, what if she was the one to approach him? Then he wouldn't be able to run away from her, or pretend like nothing had happened. Maybe it was wrong of her to doubt Andy so much, but she really didn't know him that well and he'd managed to capture her first kiss. And although she never wanted to be one of those girls, it meant something important to her. A civil agreement would at least be better than nothing.
She didn't want to be her own island anymore.
Unlike John and Claire, it didn't take long for Andy and Allison to cross paths. They had completely different schedules, but some of Andrew's jock-y friends always hung around by the water fountain near Allison's locker. It was close to the end of 3rd period and Allison was leant up against the metal lockers, feeling them dig into her back but honestly not minding. She made it look obvious she was waiting for someone to show up, but that was the sort of person Allison was.
Before Andrew could made an appearance, though, Brian's figure walking past her shook Allison from her thoughts. He was with his group of friends, all of whom were guys who looked as brainy as they came, and he hadn't noticed her stood alone against the lockers. Either that or he had ignored her. Allison frowned at him and folded her arms.
"Brian!" He stopped in his tracks and looked around quickly at the mention of his name, quickly spotting Allison as the source of the sound. Inside, Brian's stomach did a complete turn. It wasn't anything to do with the fact that it was Allison, who looked quite pretty today in a strange unconventional way, or that she was a girl, though it was quite cool for a girl to speak to him in front of his friends who were definitely not Casanovas themselves. It was the fact that Allison was and always would be in Brian Johnson's mind: a member of the Breakfast Club. The catchy name that he had coined had sprung into his mind many times over the course of the weekend, and he predicted always would every now and then, even if he no longer saw the club anymore. But what could Brian predict at 16? Life changes and it doesn't stop for anybody, even cool as cats Allison who was grinning at him because she'd managed to startle him so much. A smile spread across his face, a genuine one, and he tried his hardest to wave at her in a way that didn't make him seem completely awkward. Because she had kept her word, and she actually acknowledged the fact that she knew he existed. And for Brian, that meant a lot.
Allison nodded at the boy in a motion that told him she wanted him to come over and speak to her. He sheepishly looked around at his friends and shrugged his shoulders, still attempting his cool act, and went to greet Allison. She smiled with her teeth but then bit her lip to hide them again when he joined her.
"Hey, Allison. How was your weekend?"
"It was okay, except I went to some lame day long detention on Saturday and met a bunch of people even weirder than me," she said, her voice a monotone, the sentence a dare towards Brian to see how he would react. But in the short time they spent together, he got to know Allison more than she realised, and he didn't expect anything less from the girl. So he smiled again and shook his head.
"Funny, I did the same thing." And that made Allison smile.
It was around this time that Andy and three other guys walked up to the water fountain to get a drink. Brian's eyes drifted over to watch him and Allison's smile fell when she noticed Brian was distracted, so she followed the direction until her sight fell onto Andrew. Today he was wearing his letterman jacket, except it was missing something from its arm. Allison knew the culprit, and so did Andrew, but Allison wondered if he would have told anyone the story of them. Them. That was a heavy load.
"There's Andy! We should say hi to him." Brian looked hopeful when Allison looked back at him, and it made part of her sad. For as great as Andy looked and actually was as a guy, with his soft looking hair and really strong arms and surprisingly great dance moves, Allison always had the ability to see the bad in a person. She thought back to Saturday, recalling herself telling him to eat shit, remembering hearing Brian telling Andrew that she was an island as she walked away. Her mind went back to the poem and she couldn't push it away.
No, she wasn't an island. Not since detention.
"Wanna watch me freak him out?" she asked Brian, though it was more of a rhetoric let out into open air before she sauntered towards Andrew, giving Brian a view of her back and more importantly the letterman patch.
Andy was just about to lean down for a drink when Allison approached and got in before he could.
"Hey! I wa-" but he cut himself off before he could finish, because he, too, saw the letterman patch on her jacket.
Allison drank from the fountain for what felt like an eternity, knowing eyes were on her and she was probably causing something, and she wasn't even thirsty. Finally, she finished, stood, turned to face the boys behind her and wiped the dripping water from her mouth. The guys who were accompanying Andrew looked confused and slightly perplexed, perhaps mistaking her for some sort of klepto who stole jock's badges, but Andrew wasn't looking at her like that at all. He was looking at her in the way he had just before he had kissed her and when he had seen her for the first time with her hair brushed away from her face. It was a look of slight confusion, as if he was constantly trying his hardest to figure her out, and also a look of concentration, as if he was trying to look right through her. It made her feel confident and shy all at the same time and she didn't know how that worked and she wasn't sure if she wanted to find out.
"Hey there, sporto," she said, and smiled at him.
"Andy? Who is this? Why does she have your patch?" one of the guys asked. Allison looked at him-more like stared at him-and he broke eye contact with her quickly.
"This is Allison."
"Yes, it is," she said, then stuck up her pointer finger at Andy like it was a gun, and she mimed aiming and firing it at his chest before turning and walking away from his group. She continued down the hall taking big strides, tapping Brian's shoulder as she passed him, then turned around the corner and was gone. Andrew's eyes didn't leave her once, and in his head he began to hear the song Radio Ga Ga by Queen, because that was the tune she reminded him of.
When lunchtime came, Andy was looking for any excuse to go over and sit with Allison at Brian's table. He had been looking for her since he saw her during 3rd period, and it was just his luck that the next time he saw her was in the crowded cafeteria where he was supposed to sit with his friends, who had already given him stick for letting her take his badge in the first place. Who'd have known that the girl was notorious?
As soon as she had walked away, the questions began. They wanted to know how he knew her, who she was, why she was important. He'd already predicted this to happen way back on Saturday, when Brian asked if they would all be friends. He'd even run it through his mind when he got home, what he would do if he saw any of them around school. He played two versions out in his head, one where he had the guts to speak to them all, and the other where he ignored them all and it was like it never had happened. In that version he went back to his stupid life before and nothing changed. And that thought scared him more than the one in which things did change.
But obviously Allison was never going to let that happen, and he expected that much from her. She was unlike any other girl he knew or had been with before. She was unpredictable, and part of that was made up by the fact she had to tell a lie seemingly once ever half an hour. He found that he didn't even mind her dark clothing and dark hair and strange eating habits. They all made up Allison.
But Allison liked to be alone, she could handle having no one to talk to and going to places unaccompanied. He admired that quality but it also made him slightly nervous. What if the stunt she had pulled earlier wasn't her showing she still wanted to see him, daring him to come see her again, but was supposed to scare him away? Maybe she wanted to keep up her rouse of being alone, being an island to herself. And she couldn't carry that on with Andrew Clark sniffing around at her ankles.
And Andy was the opposite of an island. He was always on land, surrounded by a million people at once but always somehow feeling like he was separate from it all. Like he was drifting away.
He wanted to drift towards Allison's island in the middle of the sea.
That's why Andrew was so thankful when he spotted Claire not too far from him, also watching the same sight as he was; that sight being Allison and Brian sitting together. The fact it was Claire, self-proclaimed most popular girl in the school and running in social circles closely linked to his own, meant that he had found an excuse that wasn't so out of character to talk to one of the people he had met on Saturday. His friends didn't even seem to notice him leaving the table because they were too engrossed in their conversation about the upcoming game.
Claire didn't take much persuading to go over, and for that Andrew was very thankful.
It was't until they had almost reached the table and Brian had noticed them walking over that Andy realised he hadn't got any goddamn idea what he was going to say to Allison. Nice to see you and how do you do? They'd skipped way past the formal introductions now, surely. He'd had her soft lips pressed against his, touched her skin and felt her face, and if he was truly honest to himself she was only the second girl he'd done that with. In a stupid, sappy way that made him want to kick himself, he felt like it mattered some. He didn't just want to never speak to this strange girl again.
Andrew never found time to think of what to say to her before he had sat down beside her. Brian's friends were growing more confused by the moment at the arrival of the new people on their lunch table, and if Andrew had been Claire he might've suggested it was because they looked up to them, but he was avoiding that train of thought. Instead he focused on the fact Brian's face was the same color as Claire's red hair, and Allison was staring at him with an unreadable expression on her face. Perhaps he shouldn't have sat next to her.
"Well, I'm not going to say that I'm not happy to see you all here… because I am… but it's rather unexpected, and this table is kind of small for all of us to fit on it…" Brian began, his head moving rapidly to turn to each person surrounding him. Allison and Andy didn't even look away from each other.
"I like what you did with the patch," he said.
"Thanks," she replied.
"Is that the reason you stole it?"
"No… I have a problem. I steal things. I'm a kleptomaniac."
"On top of being a nymphomaniac, too?"
"I'm a lot of things." Allison smiled quite smugly, and Andrew raised his eyebrows.
"Yeah, I can see that." He allowed himself to look away from her eyes momentarily, and look all over her face. Her hair had been pinned back neatly when he'd seen her earlier, but now strands were falling away and the small amount of black she had used around her eyes-because not even Claire could keep her from using it-had smudged more than maybe she'd meant it to, but he still liked what he saw.
"I can see what you are, too," she began.
"Oh yeah?"
"You're a sporto, a jock, and you've been following me." She was looking at him in a way again that almost read 'go on, I dare you'. He wanted to question her, ask why on earth he'd want to do that, answer her dare, but he said something else before he could even stop himself.
"I wanted to talk to you again."
"We're talking now."
"No, I mean… I imagined this conversation to be slightly different."
"How about a do over?"
"Do over?"
"Yeah, like… Hi, my name is Allison. No, I didn't butt in front of you at the water fountain earlier today. And even if I did, it was revenge for when you physically assaulted me on Saturday." Andy was taken aback at the harsh statement, but Allison was smiling at him in a way that showed him this was her sort of humour.
"You mean the kiss? You didn't seem to hate it too much at the time."
"Oh, I despised it. It was awful. Absolutely terrible." And the smile on her face lit up more, which made Andy's do the same.
