Bliss Read online

  The thing is, the energy I sense from the dead girl is “wrong” itself. Off-kilter, like a rotting jack-o’lantern with a slipping-down smile. Like maybe she was crazy.

  I never did tell the girls of my experience, and I don’t plan to. I’m sorry for the dead girl, but I want nothing to do with her, and by staying clear of Hamilton Hall, I’m mostly able to ignore her.

  What’s harder to ignore are certain right-out-in-the-open vibrations given off by my classmates and teachers. Not about everything; just about some things. Like race. It’s confusing to me that visible wickedness—because that’s what racism is, wickedness—is in some ways harder to fight than whiffs of blood and ancient bones. I’d think it would be the opposite.

  I’m grappling with this during my cultural studies class today, because Mr. Harris is pacing back and forth at the front of the room, talking about this very issue. He wants us to think about what we, the new generation, can do to restore the South’s reputation as a bastion of grace and gentility. As an example of what needs to change, he brings up the case of Ruby Bridges, one of the first black students to attend an integrated Southern school. He reminds us of the protest that occurred that first day: how a mob of angry whites gathered to hurl insults, flaunt Rebel flags, and wave white sheets.

  “Now was that any way to treat that little Nigra girl?” Mr. Harris says in his thick drawl. “She had to be escorted by a U.S. marshal. Think on that a minute: A U.S. marshal had to protect the safety of a six-year-old.” He shakes his head. “Do y’all see what a mistake it was, forcing integration on folks that just weren’t ready?”

  I’m so floored by his words that I have to put down my pencil. Mr. Harris is my teacher—a college-educated man—and here he is telling a room full of white students that, yes, it’s wrong to terrorize a black child, but the situation could have been avoided altogether if “the little Nigra girl” had stayed where she belonged.

  Jolene’s in Mr. Harris’s class with me, and afterward, I ask her about the white sheets. I’m pretty sure I know what they meant, but I’m not positive.

  “The Ku Klux Klan,” Jolene responds without hesitation. She walks to the end of the hall and goes out the door, stepping into the sunshine. “You know what that is, right?”

  “Of course,” I say. My next class is in the Woodward Building, which we just left, but I stay with her so we can keep talking. “Only I wasn’t sure the Klan still existed.”

  She laughs. “Are you kidding?”

  “Not here in Atlanta, though. Right?”

  She laughs again. “Um, yeah. They meet at Stone Mountain.” When I frown, she says, “Stone Mountain? Largest granite outcropping in the whole United States? What, you’ve never heard of it?”

  I haven’t, so she explains that Stone Mountain is thirty minutes outside of the city, and that stoneworkers are hard at work carving a Confederate memorial into the rock. As we cross the quad, she tells me that the end result will be a ninety-foot-tall bas-relief of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis.

  “The Klan has their Labor Day picnics there,” she tells me. “Hoods, robes, the works. They burn crosses, too, but not till the night.”

  “That’s awful,” I say. “It’s . . . sick.”

  “I know,” she says, but not with any degree of passion. It’s the tone someone might use in response to being reminded that it was leftover day in the cafeteria or that there was a history quiz that afternoon.

  “But . . .,” I say. “I mean . . .”

  We’ve reached Hamilton Hall, the very building I’ve gone to such pains to avoid. Jolene pauses on the steps. “What?”

  I can’t find the words to say what I want to say, probably because I don’t know what I want to say. I feel like I’m in some spooky mirror world where all the rules of right and wrong are reversed, and no one except me seems to notice. Also, being this close to Hamilton Hall is making my head hurt, as if someone is pushing on my brain.

  “Is your father in the Klan?” I ask queasily. It feels crazy to even voice such a question.

  “My daddy? In the Klan?” Jolene’s appalled, and it makes me feel better—like yes, it is a crazy question. “My daddy has opinions, sure, but Bliss, Klansmen are bad news. They hurt people.”

  “They lynch people,” I say.

  “My daddy would never lynch anyone,” she says.

  Students stream past us through the main door, chatting and laughing. Jolene joins the flow of traffic, and after a moment’s hesitation, I follow her. It’s just a building, I tell myself. And if within this building there’s a dead girl, well, she’s just a dead girl.

  “There is Klan presence at Crestview, though,” Jolene says in the hall.

  A chill trembles through me. “Where?”

  “What do you mean, where?”

  “The Klan. At Crestview. Do they meet in one certain place?” As I say this, a thought sighs through my mind like a rattling breath: It’s the dead girl’s voice. The blood voice. It makes my own blood seem to thin out.

  “Bliss, what are you talking about?” Jolene says as she enters the stairwell and starts up.

  I trail her. My body doesn’t like mounting these stairs. The dead girl plunged from the third story, that’s what they say. I don’t want to go up and up. I don’t want to go closer.

  says the blood voice.

  “Ohhh,” Jolene says. “They don’t meet here, silly. Not in this building.”

  It’s an effort to focus on Jolene. “But you said—”

  She giggles. “No, you goof, they don’t meet anywhere on campus. Good heavens! I just meant that certain fathers of certain students . . .” We exit the stairwell on the second floor, and she breaks off, as if remembering there are people around us. Her voice, when she next speaks, is stilted. “That’s just what I’ve heard. I don’t know anything.”

  My body feels so strange. So airy. I need to leave this place before I no longer want to. “Okay,” I say. “I better go to class—and it’s back that way, so I better run.”

  Jolene frowns, perhaps puzzled as to why I’ve come all this way with her. “See you at lunch?”

  “Yeah.” I force a smile because I don’t want her to see how upset I am. Flying V used to tell me I felt things too strongly . . . but shouldn’t we feel things strongly, especially when those things are wrong?

  When I double back to the stairwell, it’s empty. Everyone’s gone to class . . . or rather, everyone but me. My footsteps echo in the chilly passageway. So does the blood voice:

  My heart beats faster, and I can’t . . . I can’t feel my head exactly right. Or my lungs, they’re so floaty . . .

  I can’t hear my footsteps. Is my tread so light that I no longer make sound, or has my flesh taken on new form?

  Out, I need out. I need air and sunlight and noise. I hasten down the last few steps, but as I round the bend, I see someone in the shadowed recess. I freeze. It’s a boy—a boy possessing a broad back, strong shoulders, and a muscled black neck that extends above the collar of his Crestview shirt. Lawrence.

  I process this in a flash, just as I see, in the next flash, that Lawrence isn’t alone. He’s murmuring to a girl with honey-colored hair. He leans in, and his lips brush hers.

  I suppose I suck in my breath or make some other noise, because they jerk apart. Lawrence steps protectively in front of the girl, but it’s too late. I’ve seen her and she’s seen me.

  “I said don’t,” Sarah Lynn says sharply, and her voice breaks through my fog and brings me back hard. She shoves him. He’s bewildered. My skin is tingling, but I’m no longer disoriented, and this I know: They were kissing. It was mutual. Then I stumbled on them, and suddenly he’s a plaything to push away.

  Sarah Lynn strides out of the stairwell. Lawrence watches her go. The door slushes shut behind her, and he turns to me with a tightened jaw. I want to tell him No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. I don’t care if you kiss a white girl. I don’t care if you love a white girl. I just wish you’d cho
sen a white girl worthy of your love.

  Lawrence’s Adam’s apple jerks up and down, and I realize that in addition to whatever else he’s feeling, he’s scared. He’s in love with the darling of the school, Sarah Lynn Lancaster, and he’s afraid I’ll expose his secret. I give a tiny shake of my head, wanting him to know he has nothing to fear, not from me.

  echoes the blood voice, fainter than before.

  I hurry past Lawrence and flee this cursed building.

  esley Hall is the prettiest of all the buildings on campus. You enter through the foyer, with its black-and-white marble floor. It’s like a giant chessboard, only so shiny you can see yourself in it. On both sides of the foyer are railed marble staircases that spiral to the second floor. That’s where the actual classrooms are. If you bypass the twin staircases and choose instead to cross the gleaming foyer, you reach two ornate wooden doors that lead to the loveliest chapel I’ve ever seen.

  Unlike the rest of the building—and I find this strange, but nice—the chapel itself is simple and unassuming. Its wooden pews are the color of caramel, and stained-glass windows cast rosy shafts of light through the room. Motes of dust glitter in the air like memories. I’m glad that the nuns, back in the olden days, had this place to worship in.

  According to Thelma, Wesley Chapel is no longer used—she was surprised I’d even peeked inside. But I found it beautiful. Sacred.

  My music appreciation class is on the second floor, in a low-ceilinged room that has no charm whatsoever. For fifty minutes we listen to Bach, and then the bell rings, and all at once everyone’s pushing back their chairs and chattering. I collect my books and head toward the door with the others.

  I’m moving with the throng down the marble stairs, humming and wondering what it would be like to be a butterfly, when I hear a cry. My eyes fly to the opposite staircase, where I see a girl tumbling down the bottom five or six stairs. It’s an ungraceful fall, full of thuds and limbs and books, and it seems to go on and on. She lands in a heap, her skirt in disarray. Her underwear is exposed.

  She lies there, stunned, and everyone stares. I stare too. I stop short, though I made no conscious decision to do so, and I think, That poor girl, is she okay? And also, Pull your skirt down! At least sit up and fix your skirt!

  It’s shameful that that’s what I think about—her sad, exposed underwear—when she could be brain damaged, for all I know. She could have broken a limb! But everyone else must be thinking about her underwear too, because they’ve started to snicker. The girl who fell is a snicker-at sort of person—I don’t know her, but she’s scrawny and frizz-haired and obviously clumsy—but that’s no excuse. Not a single person helps her. Everyone just laughs.

  I force my way through the students in front of me, accidentally elbowing someone in the process.

  “Hey!” she says indignantly.

  I get halfway down the stairs, but by then—finally!—someone else is striding to the girl. She’s a big girl, this Good Samaritan, and when she squats beside the fallen girl, there’s an audible ooomph. The snickers grow downright gleeful, and the big girl looks up and glares.

  Good for you, I think, rooting for the sole Crestview student decent enough to reach out to another. You show ’em. In solidarity, I glare at the girls to my right. One of them pulls a face, as if I’m the one being juvenile.

  The big girl leans over and speaks quietly to the girl on the floor. The girl seems too addled to be comforted. Her eyes are big, and I think of a mutt Mom once brought to the commune—all fur and mange, its expression glazed.

  The big girl leans in to whisper something else. This time she must hit the right note, because at last the girl on the floor pushes herself up. She takes in the double staircases of laughing students. Her face turns scarlet. She scrambles to her feet, tugging at her skirt, and runs straight out of the building, neither gathering her books nor thanking her benefactor.

  With the show over, the crowd disperses.

  “Too bad it wasn’t Sandy who fell instead of Gayla,” a slender girl says as she pushes down the stairs in front of me. It’s the girl who made a face at me moments earlier.

  Her friend titters. “Are you kidding? If Sandy had taken a fall like that, she’d have brought the whole place down.”

  “True,” the slender girl says. “I take it back.”

  I’m filled with distaste for both of them, and I think what a small difference there is between scrawny and slender, fallen and proud.

  “Did you see Gayla’s panties?” the friend says.

  “Didn’t everybody?”

  “Imagine if it had been Sandy—and everyone had to see that!”

  The slender girl shoves her friend’s shoulder. “Marla, ew!” She shoves her again, because apparently once wasn’t enough. “Seriously—ewww!”

  I want to shove them both. Instead, I tell myself they’re pathetic individuals who aren’t worth my time. The Good Samaritan, whose name I now know to be Sandy, has more class in her pinky finger than they do in their whole bodies.

  Someone rams into me. “Watch it,” he says.

  “Oh, sorry,” I say.

  I pick up Gayla’s books and deliver them to the front office, and the secretary tells me what I nice young woman I am. Then I go meet Thelma and Jolene on the quad. The three of us have fourth period free, so we usually study together, or pretend to.

  Today, we don’t even pretend. I tell them about Gayla’s fall, and their eyes widen.

  “Her skirt flew all the way up?” Thelma asks. Her shock is threaded through with excitement. “People saw her underpants?”

  I nod.

  “Poor Gayla!” Jolene says.

  “I know.”

  That Jolene would care, and not just for the thrill of the scandal, makes me feel better.

  “So what happened then?” Thelma wants to know. “Did she just lie there for all the world to see?”

  “No, a girl named Sandy helped her,” I say. “And then people laughed at Sandy, which made me so mad. She’s helping someone in need, and everyone makes fun of her for it? Why would they do that?”

  Neither Thelma nor Jolene answers. Instead, they share a look.

  “What?” I say.

  Thelma sighs. “They made fun of her because she’s Sandy, that’s why.”

  That’s no answer; in fact, it just makes me madder.

  “You mean because she’s plain?” I say. “Because she’s . . . large? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Jolene fidgets. “That, and she’s just . . .”

  “Sandy,” Thelma fills in. “She’s just Sandy, and let’s just say”—she smiles brightly—“well. Let’s just say nothing, okay?”

  Later, Jolene tries to temper Thelma’s nonexplanation. She lets Thelma get ahead as we walk to our next classes and says, “About Sandy . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not because she’s unattractive. She can’t help that. She’s just . . . strange, that’s all.”

  “Ohhh,” I say. “Well, thanks for clearing that up.” I speed up, ready to leave the subject behind.

  “Wait,” Jolene says. She grabs my arm. “You know how some people just . . . rub you the wrong way?”

  I shrug her off. “No,” I say, although actually I do. Only the girls who rub me the wrong way are girls who judge others, not girls who go out of their way to help others.

  “And she has B.O.,” she says uncomfortably. She blushes. “Sandy, I mean. Someone left a stick of deodorant on her desk, it was so bad.”

  “That’s cruel,” I say.

  “Is it?” Jolene says. “Wouldn’t it be worse not to tell her?”

  “Did someone tell her? Or did whoever it was just leave out the deodorant?”

  Jolene drops her eyes and hugs her books to her chest. “Anyway, she’s queer, that’s all. She doesn’t have any friends.”

  I’m disappointed. Doesn’t Jolene see that Sandy’s lack of friends is even more reason to be nice to her?

  At the same t
ime, I’m glad I’ve started wearing my Secret. I’m glad I bought it on my own, saving everyone the trouble of alerting me to my own stench.

  here’s a boy at Crestview who makes my lips curve into a smile whenever I see him. I don’t mean to smile; it just happens. Giddily. Happily. Uncontrollably.

  I don’t know the boy’s name, but he’s beautiful, with disheveled brown hair that grazes his collar. Were it any longer, Dr. Evans would have to write him up for violation of the dress code.

  He carries around a paperback copy of On the Road, which has a coffee stain on its cover. He slouches. The back of his neck is both strong and vulnerable, and I would touch it if I could. If he were asleep, for example. If I were an angel, visiting him in the night.

  Only he’s the angel, with his dark, soulful eyes. He always looks sad, even when he’s talking with his friends and his lips quirk into his sardonic smile.

  I spot my angel-boy after lunch one day. I don’t tell Thelma or DeeDee or Jolene. But my heart beats faster, and I miss whatever it is that Jolene is saying to me.

  “Hmm?” I say, pulling my eyes from the boy. It’s warm, we’re on the quad, and Thelma has slipped her hand under her shirt to scratch her belly.

  “I said sing it for us,” she repeats.

  “Sing what?”

  She groans, and DeeDee giggles.

  “The song you were telling us about? About people living perfect little lives in perfect little boxes.”

  “Oh. ‘Little Boxes,’” I say. The boy is coming our way. He’s walking up the sidewalk, and his head is bobbing as if maybe he’s singing a song of his own, silently to himself.

  “Yeah, that one,” Thelma says. She and the others think it’s so funny that I know all these folk songs. I think it’s funny that they don’t.

  My angel-boy is close now, as in five-feet-away close. There’s no way I’m going to burst into song in front of him. But then the contrary part of me says, You’re going to let a boy keep you from singing out loud? Sing, sister! Sing!