Deepening

Things are different, but so much the same.

Day Three

 

As Danielle’s dad drives her down to the bus stop, they notice a blond girl walking along the road. She stops where they do.

When the bus comes up, the girl gets on it. Danielle follows, wondering why she hadn’t gotten on the previous two days if this is what she normally did.

The bus is drafty, and the morning air is cold. Danielle spends the ride shivering. When she arrives, she briefly considers looking for Chloe again, but another gust of chilled wind convinces her otherwise. She heads into the Tower building, remembering its strange warmth, but her fingers feel frozen even there.

In the middle of English class, Danielle is called down to the guidance office. She’s confused as to why, but glad enough for the excuse to miss class.

“Do you know where to find it?” M4 asks before she leaves.

“Yeah,” Danielle replies proudly, glad to know her way to at least one place.

On her way, Danielle begins to wonder if she’s being called down for her negative behavior in Spanish class the previous day. She remembers being sent to the guidance office at her old school – of course, a memory recalled reluctantly – for walking away from the Spanish teacher in the middle of a conversation about her unwillingness to take notes and her poor attitude. She’s never been a very amicable person.

Once in the guidance office, she’s directed to the smaller office of a male counselor. She sits, and he explains to her, basically, that the Spanish teacher is worried she’s not smart enough to take Spanish 4. She’s grinning as soon as she catches on to who sent her here. What is it with Spanish teachers?

Danielle asserts that she’s used to high-level classes and will be fine, disregarding his overly concerned attitude, and then takes the opportunity to have him correct her name in the database. It somehow ended up as Dianelle or something similarly ridiculous, much to her mother’s anger and confusion, as she swears that she printed her daughter’s name very clearly.

Danielle’s summer paper is on her desk when she gets back from the office, and she ignores the teacher to read his comments on it. He tells her she did the MLA format wrong, which Danielle is a bit disgruntled about, and also calls the paper as a whole ‘unfocused.’ Well, what did you expect? she asks the teacher mentally. We had to pick three different aspects of the book and explain their deeper, literary meanings. The topics to choose from were so unrelated that my friend actually suggested transitioning with “Speaking of stuff…” She moves on, and is slightly appeased when he calls her observations about Jim Casy ‘insightful.’ He even draws a curly bracket to indicate her comments about his last words being similar to the words of Jesus on the cross, and writes “good!!” with a smiling mouth under the double exclamation points. She’s almost completely assuaged when she reaches the end and sees that it’s scored as an 80, the lowest grade she can get without feeling like a failure. She scowls, blames the incorrect MLA, and stuffs it in her purse.

English ends, and second block begins. As Danielle crosses the threshold into the auditorium, she notices a temperature drop of about ten degrees. She wishes for a warmer sweatshirt and then looks around, anxious to find Blake and ask him what happened yesterday. Only a few other students are there at the moment, so she sits and bounces lightly in her seat until Chloe arrives.

Danielle can’t contain herself. “Where’s Blake?” she asks, even though she doubts Chloe will know.

“Didn’t you hear?” Chloe hisses back in a whisper.

“Hear what?”

“Blake didn’t come back. He’s gone missing,” Chloe discloses the secret.

“No,” Danielle whispers, breathless. Had he somehow disappeared inside the auditorium? Had he chosen that moment to run away from home via the door leading outside, right in the middle of class?

Chloe nods, excited. “They called his parents yesterday to tell them he ditched school, and then this morning because he was absent in his first class. The mother told them he hadn’t returned home last night.”

“No,” Danielle repeats, feeling jubilant about the mystery and guilty for regarding it so happily – the kid could be dead, for all anyone knows. “No, no – what could have happened? Do you have any ideas?”

Chloe shook her head. “I don’t know what to think.”

Ms. Grey calls the class to order then, proceeding as normal – normal for her, anyway. This time, the students have to yell out “Woohoo!” in response to attendance being called.

Danielle listens to the ceiling sounds again during the relatively quiet attendance. She suddenly makes a connection. “Hey, you know what that sounds like?” she asks Chloe, gesturing up again.

“What?”

“It’s like the sound of a spotlight being turned on.”

Chloe pauses, listening. “…You’re right.”

Danielle listens for the rest of the attendance. When there’s a rapid succession of the spotlight sounds, they lose their individuality and end up sounding more like popcorn popping…and somewhere in the clamor, she swears she can hear the sound of cruel laughter. She shivers.

Ms. Grey walks into the auditorium (where the audience sits, that is) and holds a hat out to the students. They each pick a slip of paper from the hat. She explains as she’s walking that they’re going to do a scavenger hunt in which they need to locate parts of the theater. Danielle picks ‘house,’ so she just stays where she is. Chloe gets the apron, so she gets up and goes to sit cross-legged on it.

Once everyone is in their place, Ms. Grey calls out the names of students and asks them to identify their part of the theater. The process is quick, and then more bags are presented.

Danielle actually gets the opportunity to go first. She pulls out her wolf charm, which she had just recently found by some miracle of searching (called packing to move). It had been lost for years. It’s something dear to her, a representation of a promise, a secret, and a bond shared between her and her best friend, currently and as always located about a hundred miles away from her. She only says to the class that it represents her obsession with wolves. She pulls out her wolf magnet next, and explains that this is a representation of her friendship with her best friend. She leaves out the story behind it – how she met Olivia at a craft fair, how Liv’s parents’ craft was magnets, how their friendship was accelerated through the discussion of Liv’s imaginary world, how Liv wanted to give so many things to Danielle at their parting…so she stole the magnet from her parents and gave it to Danielle. Liv had eventually paid for it, but it was still something…wrong. It’s a very accurate symbol of their friendship in this sense – Liv had failed to mention to Danielle that her imaginary world was, in fact, imaginary. And so their bond had been based on something wrong; a lie. It was something that would come back to haunt both of them much later on.

As Danielle sits in theater class presenting her bag, Olivia is somewhere far away, on the campus of her new college. Danielle’s realization that Liv had lied to her had occurred only a few months ago, after a pathetically long five years and nine months of misplaced belief. She’s gotten over it unusually quickly, but it’s still there, a tiny wedge between them – a missing bond. This coupled with Liv’s move to college and subsequent emotional distance due to the change to make their friendship as rocky and uncertain as it had ever been. It hurts Danielle to think of Liv, but she’s in the middle of a presentation and doesn’t have time to feel much. She goes on to pull out a box of much-abused crayons, representing her childish side and her belief in never growing up on the inside. The front of it has paint on it, from the night she had gotten the sudden urge to paint and used the crayon box as an impromptu art pallet. She tried washing the paint off last night (washing cardboard, another brilliant idea) but hadn’t really succeeded in getting any off, even when she had scrubbed it with an old toothbrush. She then takes out earphones, representing her love of music, and a pen, representing the fact that she’s a writer. She hears and sees Eva, the other writer, gasp in delight at this, and smiles into her bag. “And…then, since I didn’t have an actual picture of myself, I put in a picture they take of you while you’re riding on a roller coaster at six flags,” she says, holding up the plastic keychain. Nobody can see it from this distance, however.

She goes back to her seat and shows Chloe, so that someone can appreciate it. Chloe laughs at the expressions on the faces…Danielle’s face, her parents’ faces, and Olivia’s face. It had been from the week and a half in the summer of 2006 that Danielle and Liv had gotten to see each other; they had taken the trip to six flags because Liv had only ever been before when she was five, and that had ended disasterously when she ended up stuck on a kiddy ride.

Danielle turns her attention to the other bag-presenters. Amazing Al apparently has won a silver medal in some sort of national throwing competition; amazing indeed. Another girl needs to have everything in her purse separated into individual plastic baggies. There are a surprising number of dog-owners and writers (enough that someone pulls out a writing utensil and says “I don’t have to explain what this means”). Somewhere during the presentations, Danielle begins to think about how unique and interesting people really are, even if they appear just like everyone else on the surface. We are all weird, she thinks.

Ms. Grey has the students do the scavenger hunt again once the bags are finished with. Chloe gets the house this time, but Danielle gets stage right. She opts for downstage, stage right, as far forward as she can manage without being incorrect. The darkness behind her makes her skin crawl, and when she looks up at the lights on the grid, she quickly looks down again. What happened to the majestic theater of yesterday?

When they return to their seats, Ms. Grey informs the class that they will be watching a recorded play called Our Town. While everything is being set up, Danielle leans over to Chloe. “How did you learn what happened with Blake, anyway?” she asks.

Chloe smiles. “I know the right people,” is all she says.

The play begins, and it’s interesting for the most part, although Danielle can feel her lack of sleep once again pressing in on her near the end of class; she only got six hours this time. The bell rings unexpectedly again, and the students get up and leave while the play is still running.

The rest of the day crawls by. At lunch, they’re serving a steak dinner as one of the options, complete with mashed potatoes and a large broccoli. Danielle buys it out of sheer disbelief. It’s a bit difficult to cut the steak with a plastic knife, but she manages.

Chemistry is interesting again. Mrs. Peyton has a machine that demonstrates the way atoms move in solids, liquids, and gasses, and they spend a good deal of time watching her operate it. Apparently, even the atoms in solids move, though they simply vibrate and don’t actually separate and tumble over one another as they do in liquids. Gasses fly, free of any bonds except the most fleeting and accidental.

During Spanish, juniors with last names between A and L are called up to the gymnasium to get their pictures taken. The calling has been going on all day, but Danielle is actually in this group, so she gets to leave for a decent amount of time. Her picture comes out looking stupid, as usual, but she shrugs and says “sure” when the photographer asks her if she likes it.

A while after Danielle returns to Spanish, there is an immense rumbling sound above that causes the teacher to stop talking. She asks what it is in Spanish.

“Estudiantes?” Danielle replies, realizing she’s right.

“De la gimnasio? Dios mio,” the teacher responds.

The thundering footsteps make Danielle suddenly feel as if she is far underground. In Hell, maybe. The class from Hell. She smirks.

When the final bell rings, Danielle doesn’t bother looking for Chloe. She sits down at the oak from yesterday, now unoccupied, and begins her homework. The wait for her bus is long enough that she gets a good amount done.

When Danielle gets off the bus, the blond girl from the morning gets off with her. Out of obligation, the two strike up a conversation, and somehow, it’s not awkward at all. The girl’s name is Ellen, and now that Danielle is closer to her, she can see that she has snake bite piercings. She’s a sophomore. She has been at a friend’s house for the past two nights, explaining her absence from the bus stop. She lives in the house right next to Danielle’s. Before they reach their houses, she even offers an invitation for Danielle to come over her house, right then. Danielle replies that she can’t, because of her homework, and acts surprised that Ellen would offer something like that so quickly.

Apparently, it’s not that big of a deal to her. “People are always over my house, and I have no idea who they are,” she says, smiling.

When they part ways, Danielle is smiling hugely for many minutes afterward. Ellen seems to be the most promising friend-type she has met so far.