After Dakota Part 3

Cameron: "Seven."

Geoff: "I can't go higher than five."

Bryce: "You're crazy. I'd do her in a second and slap myself for waiting so long."

Tanya Vigil.

Cameron: "Six. Maybe six-point-five." The others nod; sometimes things are just objectively true.

Nicole Steinbach. Terri Watson. Rach.e.l.le Wilson.

Bryce says, "Oh. My. G.o.d. Susannah got new jeans over the summer."

"How do you know?" Cameron asks. Susannah Kramer and her less-attractive girlfriend take their place in line, both of them wearing side ponytails like twins from a Dr. Seuss book.

"Please. I memorized every outfit she wore last year."

"We know what Bryce is gonna be thinking about when he milks the eel tonight," Geoff says.

The three boys have F.T.E. written in Sharpie on their backpacks. Fight The Establishment. Cameron and Bryce became known among their teachers as The Famous Two (occasionally the Famous Three if all the boys had cla.s.s together), cutting loose with such acts of subversion as writing their names upside down on their papers, farting on command during cla.s.s, running through the empty girls' locker room and turning on all the showers. And their performance art masterpiece: pretending to be old men that couldn't hear in cla.s.s, turning off imaginary hearing aids when a lecture got boring, hobbling slowly to the bathroom on invisible canes in order to be gone as long as possible.

Cameron asks, "Do either of you guys know a chick named Rosemary Vickers?"

"She's in my science cla.s.s," Geoff says. "Transferred here from England for senior year."

"You talked to her?"

"No, she was telling Katrina. Why, you like her? Want me to find out if she has a boyfriend back over there? Maybe his name's, like, Nigel."

"Nigel... Pemberton," Bryce says in his C-3PO voice. He and Geoff repeat it back and forth, trying to out-British each other.

Cameron cuts in, "I don't like her. I don't even know her. Just wondering."

15.

Lunch: Claire. The hot, noisy cafeteria hums with the smells of cooking meat and B.O. Trays with little milk cartons. Chili con carne ladled over piles of corn chips. The freshman and soph.o.m.ore cliques sit together, already formed. The back table is where the r.e.t.a.r.ds sit, just like in middle school, where teachers have to help them eat and food sc.r.a.ps pile up on the floor. Claire could get in line, get a tray of food and plant herself somewhere. Maybe a group will feel sorry for her eating alone and invite her to join them. Then they can do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next, until she has brand new friends.

No, thank you.

She walks back out, past the boys bouncing a hacky sack off the sides of their feet. Past the girls with their lunches in matching Tupperware containers. Over here, the big swimming pool inside the high fence. Over there, the athletic field, a rectangle of green decorated with white numbers.

Claire enters the library, its yellow and black FALLOUT SHELTER sign above the door. On the wall right inside is a row of school yearbook covers, dating back to 1965. In the 1981 spot: Snoopy and Woodstock, signed by Bryce. He won the cover contest that year and sure strutted around the house like an Olympic gold medalist. He probably traced it anyway.

On second thought, she doesn't want to be in the library either.

She and her friends used to wonder about the weirdos in middle school who ate alone like, you don't have even one friend? Now she's become one of them, a sad phantom on the periphery of everything. She sits on the edge of a planter and eats Mr. Hagen's Snickers bar. Across the gra.s.s from her, a group of older boys in leather jackets, pocket chains, and scuffed jeans stands under a tree, smoking cigarettes.

Isabel from social studies, along with four other girls, walks toward her. Isabel sees Claire and whispers something to the group. They all stare at her as they pa.s.s by. One of them says, "Nice shoes." Claire's tally, halfway through the first day of school, friends: zero, enemies: five.

Bryce and Cameron walk up as she finishes the chocolate. "I thought you wanted me to buy you something," Bryce says.

"Don't worry about it. I had this."

"Well, don't tell Mom I abandoned you and made you eat candy for lunch." He c.o.c.ks his head. "Since when do you wear all that makeup?"

"Who's that?" Claire asks, indicating the gang at the tree.

"Smokers' Tree," Cameron says. "You used to be able to smoke anywhere on campus, but the princ.i.p.al stuck 'em all over there."

Bryce points on the sly. "See that guy in the middle, the one who looks like he's twenty five? That's the Sp.a.w.n of Satan."

"In human form he goes by Ricky Zaplin," Cameron says.

"What's so bad about him?" she asks.

The boys look at each other. Bryce: "Nothing, other than he's terrorized us since elementary school. Loogies, Indian burns. One time he put Cam's head in a "

"Ok, never mind that," Cameron cuts in. "He's also scammed with half the girls here."

"I bet you a thousand bucks he has V.D.," Bryce says.

"You don't have a thousand bucks," Claire replies.

Bryce puts on his caring big brother voice. "Claire, trust me and stay away from him."

16.

Fifth Period Office Aide: Cameron. He fulfills his promise, made junior year, to Ms. Langdon, who gets her hair done at the same salon as his mom. She sits at the main desk, the command post in the counseling office, where typewriters click and phones ring. The whole scene is cast in white light. Cameron will be in charge of delivering the mint green call slips, summoning the unlucky to this place. When he doesn't have call slips he can work on his homework, answer the phone, or eat the M&M's out of the gla.s.s bowl on Ms. Langdon's desk. A perfect senior year credit.

17.

Fifth Period Biology: Claire. The teacher, who looks just like the hanging skeleton in the corner but with a thin coating of rubber skin, tells the cla.s.s to "Please refer to me as Doctor, not Mister, Baca." Claire studies the laminated poster to her right; if you covered the words FEMALE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM, most people would probably guess it's a drawing of some captured alien species. She pretends that's not what she looks like on the inside.

18.

Seventh Period English: Bryce. On his way to first period that morning, Bryce saw a man unloading a guitar case from the trunk of a car. He'd a.s.sumed this was a new music teacher, that grumpy Mr. Klein had finally snapped and killed somebody.

Now that man, Mr. Buckland, pulls out his guitar in front of the cla.s.s and announces that he used to play in a band, and that the two loves of his life are literature and music. He plays the riff from "Smoke on the Water" and in those three minutes has totally won the cla.s.s over.

19.

Seventh Period Photo: Claire. Mr. Duran black hair, white mustache, like he's been guzzling milk gives everyone in cla.s.s a lightweight camera and a roll of film, with instructions to start taking pictures. Claire snaps a shot of her shoes.

"Just so you know, I'm not driving you home every day," Bryce tells Claire as he does exactly that. "I might have something to do or you know."

She checks her reflection in the side mirror, the makeup wiped off in the bathroom after sixth period. During a parental lecture on the topic, Claire once pointed out that her mom wore makeup.

Yes, but that's to social events. And my mother would have never allowed me to put it on when I was in high school.

It hasn't been banned it outright, but best to avoid that possibility.

Claire breathes on her window, plays Tic-Tac-Toe in the condensation.

Once they're back, Bryce goes inside the house and Claire walks down the street. Two cul-de-sacs to the left is an alley covered in Spanish graffiti, weeds, and empty beer bottles (which she stops to take a photo of today). Follow that, cross another street, and end up at the arroyo.

Claire and Meredith have walked home together every year until this one. Meredith rides the bus now, so they agreed to meet here after school and walk home like the old days, even though it's now out of their way to do so. Claire arrives first, sits on the old tree stump in the shade. She and Meredith used to come down here as kids to wander through the thick underbrush looking for fairies or a jackalope (a jackrabbit with antlers, which Bryce swore didn't exist). Then someone started a story about Stinky the Rapist lurking where the trees are thickest, and the area was off limits just like that. Stinky was never caught or even seen, as far as Claire knows.

Meredith arrives with her hair in pigtails and her backpack over both shoulders, like she's come from middle school. They sit together on the stump, their respective five fingernails in matching pink, and debrief the first day.

Meredith's news: Oscar Arranaga had a growth spurt over the summer. "He literally looks like a six foot troll doll."

Rhonda Cordova discovered acne after years of being a perfect princess.

The familiar names keep hitting Claire like slaps. Didn't anyone else from middle school get sent somewhere else? Everything is so unfair.

When it's Claire's turn she says, "My school is awesome," then goes on to list the features and the freedom, focusing on details that will appeal to Meredith. Unfortunately, Sandia has most of the same things even a campus where you can leave at lunchtime if you want.

A breeze swirls around them, bending the tall weeds left, then right. They stand in synch and start walking. Claire stays on her heels, trying to keep the black shoes from getting dirty. Meredith doesn't notice or doesn't ask, so Claire volunteers, "These used to be Dakota's," holding a foot up as a visual aid.

"You're wearing a dead person's shoes?"

"So what? All that stuff you got at those garage sales might've been owned by a dead person." The summer between seventh and eighth grade seemed to be nothing but a series of garage sale visits, the two girls pedaling their bikes from one treasure hunt to the next.

"I guess."

"I also got her Tarot cards."

"Cool, can we play them? You can tell my future, how I'll be rich and famous and marry Scott Baio."

They say their goodbyes until their regular phone call later that night.

Before that phone call, before doing homework, before even hiding the shoes, Claire sits on her bed and cries into Baloo's fur until her allergy makes her eyes puffy and her nose run. She'll compose herself in a while and be ready for dinner, where each family member is expected to share one piece of good news from the day, where Claire will put on a convincing performance about the great beginning of high school.

After dinner, she'll stand in the shower, her box of steam where she can't be seen or heard or bothered. Where if she wishes hard enough, she might dissolve into vapor and be gone.

20.

Cameron has the row to himself aboard the plane. On his tray, a bag of honey roasted peanuts and his Economics textbook.

Up ahead, Bryce's dad sits in the c.o.c.kpit in his pilot uniform. His voice comes out above Cameron's head. "Welcome aboard our plane crash where we're all going to die, folks."

Cameron wakes up. Dark room, quiet house. 1:11 a.m. beams at him in red digital numbers. "Holy s.h.i.+t," he says to the dark.

21.

A week into the school year, Bryce knocks on Claire's bedroom door. It's open house night, which means no parents for at least two hours, which in turn means caffeine and loud music. Cameron is at work and there are times that a job sounds good to Bryce; instead he gets an allowance of ten bucks a week in lieu of working, so that he can "better focus on school." When he's tried the argument that Cameron works and has better grades than he does, the response is always the same: There are a lot of things allowed at that house that won't be happening here.

"Come in!" Claire shouts over Rick Springfield. She's cross-legged on her bed, apparently playing a game of solitaire with Tarot cards.

"You know Mom doesn't want stuff like that in the house," Bryce says. "She'll have a stroke if she sees them."

"She's not gonna see them." Claire flips a card, some picture of a castle getting hit by lightning. "What's up?"

"What's up with you? You, like, live in here these days." He stands with his back to the doll case. Too many eyes on him, too many movies where dolls come to life and kill.

Flip goes another card: a group of people battling with long sticks. "Maybe I don't feel like being social. You should be happy."