The four ovens all smelt of hazelnuts and baked dough. Ms Enn moved from sink to sink in the name of supervising the washing up. We'd managed to bake cookies.
Have I seen many things that weren't real over the past few weeks?
I would have found the prose style of the recipe insulting, but the results proved it was correct enough. The banal simplicity and the childish typeface felt a realistic touch. I passed down a clean mixing bowl to Jenessa and her dishcloth.
"Hazelnuts are my favourite," I heard Julia say slowly; and Rafe's reply that he liked chocolate. Not that I needed to know. Ms Enn sat on a high stool, tapping a heel every so often while she watched us. She glanced at her watch.
"Just in time for the next class. Bring them out."
"Go ahead, kitchen hand," Jenessa said, and flung up the cloth off-aimed to me.
"Well done, Rafe," Ms Enn said, speaking down to him. "You get an A for today. You too, Julia."
"Cinnamon," Jenessa mouthed up at me from her lower table, extra ingredients she'd improvised in spite of Ms Enn's raised eyebrow. She hadn't needed the lesson at all; Mrs Jansen, Grandma Jansen, and Uncle Burt Jansen had allegedly all won cooking awards and appeared on shows for it.
"B plus," Ms Enn finished over our trays. I plucked out one of the cookies; it burned the roof of my mouth, untasteable, moderately crumbled. Rafe and Julia exchanged a high-five between them.
"Pack them up," Ms Enn said vaguely. She set us free to head to the next class.
ARE YOU DITCHING THE ASSEMBLY? Jenessa asked. NATURE DAY. THE SLIDES AREN'T BAD, AND THERE'S USUALLY FREE STUFF AFTER. BETTER THAN CLASS.
"What assembly?"
NOTICEBOARDS? LAST WEEK'S THING? CAN'T YOU READ? IT'S MRS CULLEN. SHE WHOM BODHI FAMILIARLY REFERS TO AS "THAT COW MY BROTHER MARRIED."
SHE'S PRETTY BORING, BUT HEY, FREEBIES, Jenessa typed.
Lots of people; chances nobody would notice or care; the way I didn't particularly care for the subject matter, or the family.
I don't like large crowds; but I can be in them; Ms Enn should know that it does not rule over me.
"If I find a spare seat at the back."
RIGHT, SEE YOU. I'M SITTING WITH SOME FRIENDS. Jenessa wheeled herself on.
This time there was a white projector over the bandstand, a black curtain draped above as a roof below the cloudy sky. Potted plants were lined up in a row, spilling earth on the stage; some of them were tall enough to be potted small trees. Misha's bulk stood out in the far front this time, Erin's fair hair by his side; I could see Val's cornrows too, by them. I didn't need to look for people; I sat safely apart and waited. Everyone talked loudly, but above the sky was an even grey in the clouds. I opened a book.
The microphone shrieked, discordant-crashing-yellow-blue. I put a hand to my ear. Mrs Cullen tapped it three times and then began to speak. Her voice was soft and could have been gentle; but it was only nondescript. The first slide was a picture of trees not unlike those I saw about the town, an interesting shape of an enclosed grove lush with rain and ripe leaves, two branches shaping themselves almost like a watching eye in a lower corner. The Olympic National Park; temperate rainforest; picture of a vast toppled red cedar tree...
People fidgeted over the talk; the plain voice rarely changed its tone. Like a brook, perhaps, or like a flute, if the brook were through a streambed of flawless unchanging geometry and the flute were dull pewter instead of silver. Mrs Cullen's words held together and she moved from one paragraph to the next with some reason for each of the environmental protections she wanted people to keep. As a book it might have been worth one read.
Helen Cullen herself was a still woman, her face light-skinned though not so pale as Bodhi's. Her red-gold hair crowned her, plaited into a thick coronet: she could have seemed glorious, but she looked as if she was a watercolor copy of some vivid painting, or as if thick glass covered her and blurred her away. Her dress was plain beige as her voice, a ribbon-like scarf knotted in a complex pattern at her neck, the same color as blouse and knee-length skirt. I supposed her shoes were a gardener's: flat and practical.
She could pass for somebody's mother, I thought; then I remembered that she had four foster children and a sister-in-law. Bodhi occupied two seats instead of one toward the left of the audience, legs splayed to take up room, talking loudly to those around her. Her other relatives sat below, pink-haired Alora seeming to whisper something to her friend during the speech.
"Continue to be aware. We all have the privilege of the largest temperate rainforest in the world. We must work to keep our balance of nature." Mrs Cullen lowered her microphone and waited patiently for vague applause.
"...and we...we t-thank you for the new p-plants, and all your s-support of Forks High School N-nursery over the years..." Erin stuttered through a planned speech, looking down at her feet, light reflecting off her braces. Ms Harper watched approvingly by the wings.
That wasn't bad, I thought, and made sure to be among the first to leave.
—
We'd had to present Ms Harper with a summary of Helen Cullen's speech in payment for missing class; then the blood-typing lab. I'd imitated Gordon's signature on the form out of habit of filling forms for my mother. Erin, looking pale and as if resigned to some horror, set out the applicator and microlancet.
"I s-still..." she whispered. "I've done it before and given blood, but you can be a l-little nervous..."
"Funny, it involves a single pinprick," I said.
"And I've d-done the pig's heart dissection, and f-frog lungs...it's not so bad." Erin smiled weakly below the curtain of her hair.
"Fix your hair back in pracs, Erin, it's unsafe and unhygienic to wear it that way," Ms Harper said, sweeping around the room, stepping in front of one station after the next. "One droplet of tap water per test panel. Who can tell me why we wouldn't use a saline solution? Thank you, Erin, that's correct. Next, you'll be taking a drop of blood from either your finger or earlobe. Use the gauze pad first to sterilise your skin. Touch the blood drop on all four prongs of the applicator; then scrape across the indicator... Bodhi, I'm well aware of your doctor's note; you're free to leave this class." She paused over Bodhi and Val's table.
"I'm a big tough girl, Mizz Harper. I do my own spiked heels up and everything. Nothing I can't handle watching." Bodhi glared black-eyed around the room, folding her arms. She'd been not-so-very driven out of Ms Harper's class for the last three lessons or so.
"Be that as it may," Ms Harper said coldly. "After you've used the applicator, carefully expose all four pins to the indicator squares. Then answer your blood type and fill out the punnet squares..."
Erin brushed down her forefinger with the alcohol-scented gauze and determinedly raised the lancet. I reached for my own materials to do the same. I could remember how blood ought to look below a microscope, rounded red blood cells floating in plasma, white blood cells larger and more grainy and few among them. Blood type was measured on the surface of red blood cells; depicted as carbohydrates surrounding the cell in a protective ring, with antibodies in the plasma fending away the opposite type. A square of the regular patterns where it all made sense. I skewered my own finger and let the prongs drip red.
There was a high shriek and the clatter of an overturned chair. I couldn't help but look up to see Bodhi Cullen rolling on the ground, groaning melodramatically.
"I was wrong, Mizz Harper, I was wrong! God, I think I'm going to faint—nurse's office—"
So she dislikes blood? Val's hand was paused on his applicator beside her. Some people do.
"Erin, take her to the office," Ms Harper ordered. "Everyone else well enough? Eyes on your work. Don't stare at her." Erin rushed over and knelt by Bodhi, whispering to herself. She spoke so swiftly that the stutter disappeared.
"Fainting—the course said to lie with your legs high and your head below heart level, check if airways are clear—it'll be all right, Bodhi, you'll feel better soon—loosen any tight clothing—"
"And you'd like that way too much, wouldn't you, Craterface?" Bodhi shouted at her. "Stupid birdbrain emptyheaded bimbo, the hair color's really accurate, isn't it? It's called a fucking vasovagal response, you dumb blonde, fucking take me to the office just like your dear precious Mizz Harper says—"
"Erin, help her out," Ms Harper said. "Concentrate, class. No comments, finish the lab..."
"You'll be all right," Erin repeated, placing Bodhi's arm over her shoulders. "And...and I'm pretty sure it's j-just called a vasovagal response..."
B negative, like Mom. The blood had stayed bright red in all but the second of the panels.
—
The words for Coach Kagin's driving theory test lined up in my head. Use lights, use headlights, two arrows and triangle with dotted line indicate added lane...
He glanced over it, looked suspiciously at my sleeves and the backs of my hands, and dismissed me. Lately I'd been sent to run laps in his class; far easier than the team sports with loud groups.
"No doctor's cert yet? Not behind the wheel, being a head case and all. —ger off."
I was grabbed outside Coach Kagin's shed, though she let go quickly. "You've got spare time, I see," Maggie said. "Now I want the painting cleared off the schedule by the twenty-fourth, since then the real work will have to start if we're to have a hope of finishing in time, your rendezvous time is sixteen hundred and fourteen..."
This is voluntary; I could refuse her. I was calm and it was not difficult. And one could not deny the force of Napoleon's personality.
Grey paint covered wood once again.
"Some meltdown she had in Ms Harper's class," Val interrupted. He looked slighly sheepish when I glanced across. "I know, I said I don't talk much. Maybe Maggie told me to be friendly. I've gotta run for football practice soon anyway."
"What's there to talk about? Some people are afraid of blood and many other things," I said.
People in large groups. Silverfish coming up through dirty drains. Losing yourself. People touching too close.
I'd forgotten about Bodhi's fears until he'd mentioned them.
"With a doctor's note you have to believe her," Val said. "Problem is she tells so many wild stories. If something was really the matter with her, and I hope there won't ever be, it'd be the boy who cried wolf over again. Girl."
"She's boring," I said vaguely, painting a corner, wondering when the daydreams would come. I heard a low, brief laugh.
"You might be the only person in school who can say that," Val said. "Man, she's—they call her the crazy hot chick—but, yeah, I'm glad you're saying that." He straightened up. "It's not nice to follow 'round people who don't like you, you know?"
"I don't follow people. I'd rather—" I said. Well, I would rather. "—Stay alone."
Then it went mostly quiet again; Val finished his wall and kept the appointment with the sports team. If I work at this longer, I'll finish earlier, I supposed; I stopped when I'd started painting the building's wall next to the false walls. Walk the hills—take a long detour before returning before it is dark. Read, and write.
—