How to Say Goodbye in Robot, Page 2

  Jonah squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

  “Sorry, Jonah,” Anne said. “I had to do it. For old times’ sake.”

  The principal, Mr. Lockwood, took the podium and officially opened the new school year. “Welcome, Canton shtudentsh new and old,” he said through clenched teeth. “Before we begin, let’sh refresh our shpirits with a few vershes of good old Hymn Number Shixhty-Sheven, ‘For Losht Shouls Come Home.’”

  Mr. Lockwood was lanky and fiftyish, with short brown hair and a rectangular head that, from my seat in the auditorium, looked like a block of wood with a face on the front. We rose to our feet. I glanced around for a hymnal, but there weren’t any. No one except for me seemed to need one. All around me the students of Canton began to sing.

  For lambs without a shepherd

  For fish who rivers roam

  For ships without a compass

  We pray Thee bring them home.

  For all of us are wanderers

  Our hearts are full of holes

  We pray Thee lead us homeward

  Embrace Thy poor lost souls.

  At least, that’s what I thought they sang.

  “Be sheated.” We sat.

  I half listened while Mr. Lockjaw—in my mind, he’d become Mr. Lockjaw—spoke about sheasons and beginningsh and shpiritual refreshment, then introduced the new faculty members. I felt keenly aware of the Ghost Boy’s presence beside me. I sensed he was sneaking secret peeks at me, but whenever I looked, he sat stiffnecked, eyes forward.

  After about twenty minutes, my first Canton Assembly was over. A boy with long greasy hair and smudged glasses played a recessional on the baby grand while we filed out row by row.

  “What’s your first class?” Anne Sweeney asked me.

  I looked at my schedule. “French.”

  “Me too! Come on. Allons y!”

  I went with her to be polite, but the whole time I was secretly thinking this girl was a little too perky for eight-thirty in the morning.

  I didn’t say goodbye to Ghost Boy. Which made sense, since I hadn’t said hello.

  At Canton, as at most schools, everything possible was alphabetized. My locker, therefore, sat between Anne’s and Ghost Boy’s, just like my Assembly seat. At ten o’clock I found myself with a free period and no idea what to do with it. I stood in front of my open locker, staring into its tinny darkness. The halls were quiet. No one else seemed to have a free period but me. I decided to pass the time by giving my locker some personality.

  I taped two photos to the back wall of the locker: Mom as Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8, wearing a black Liz Taylor wig and a fur coat over her slip, defiling a mirror with lipstick: No Sale. The look on Mom’s face was furious and indignant. She made a great Liz Taylor. That shot was one of my favorites.

  The other picture was me in the same getup, same pose, playing the same character from the same movie. The main difference between Mom’s Gloria and mine was the facial expression. Mom’s was better. She looked tragically pissed, and I looked like my wig itched.

  At the bottom of my backpack I found an old Bob Decker bumper sticker.

  THE BOB DECKER SHOW

  WLTN AM 1350 ALBANY

  LATE NIGHT TALK—CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH?

  I slapped the sticker on the inside of my locker door.

  There. Locker decorated.

  Ghost Boy shambled along and opened his locker without a word. I saw him peek at me very quickly while he spun the dial on his lock.

  A couple of boys loped by, backpacks dangling from their shoulders. “Help! A g-g-g-ghost!” one of them said. They both cracked up. Jonah glowered under pale eyebrows. Apparently Anne Sweeney had restarted this old joke, and I felt partly responsible. To make up for it, I said, “I think ghostliness is a good quality. I pretend I’m dead all the time.”

  “What?” He stopped rummaging through his locker to look at me full in the face at last.

  “It helps me go to sleep,” I said.

  “That just shows you don’t know anything about death,” Jonah said.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  He hesitated before saying, “I’m a g-g-g-ghost, aren’t I?”

  “I think being dead might be nice. Restful.”

  “Death is not restful. It’s just nothing.”

  “That’s what seems restful to me,” I said. “The nothing. Not being here. Not being anywhere.”

  “But what about the pain?” Jonah said.

  “There might be a tiny nanosecond of pain,” I said. “But after that I imagine it goes away.”

  “Maybe for the dead person,” Jonah said. “But the people left behind—”

  “I don’t mind if they feel pain,” I said. “That’s sort of the point.”

  “The point of what?” He blinked at me.

  “Of imagining myself dead,” I said.

  “Oh.” He paused. “What a waste of time.” He eyed the inside of my locker, taking in the pictures and the bumper sticker. Then he left, walking quickly down the hall toward the library. The sound of his footsteps was real enough, not ghostly at all.

  “Garber sat next to Beatrice in French class today,” Anne Sweeney said at lunch. She’d invited me to sit with her. At first I thought she was being friendly, but I was beginning to suspect she had an ulterior motive, something to do with this Garber guy.

  When they heard Garber, the other girls at our lunch table looked at me with sudden interest. Anne introduced them: Tiza Rahman, Carter Blessing, and Ann Cavendish, or AWAE, which was short for Ann-Without-An-E. Since Anne Sweeney had come to Canton first, in pre-K (versus AWAE’s first grade), she retained the rights to the name Ann/e in any and all versions throughout the universe. Poor AWAE was stuck with an acronym, pronounced ay-way.

  “Garber.” AWAE sighed. “He sat next to you.”

  When I’d gotten to French class, Anne had slipped into a spot in the back between two of her friends, ditching me. There were only two seats left, both in the front row. I took one. “Sorry!” Anne whispered across the room. “I don’t do the front row.”

  As the bell rang, a guy had strolled in and grabbed the last seat, next to me. He was long-haired and pretty, the kind of boy who hovers on the verge of androgyny but never quite crosses the line. He hid his sly, symmetrical features behind a pair of heavy, black-framed glasses, which only emphasized how cute he was. Before he sat down, my internal heat-seekers sensed what was coming my way: deep blue eyes that melted girls like Velveeta in a microwave. I tried to resist those microwave eyes, but sometimes there’s no defense against them. I had a feeling I’d be seeing him weeping over my coffin later that night.

  This was Tom Garber.

  “He likes fresh meat,” Carter said, stirring her yogurt. “Remember when he went after Lucy Moran? She lost it, totally in love, one week into the school year. Tom told me he was only being friendly because she was new.”

  “A week later he started going with Katie Greenberg,” AWAE chimed in. “Lucy went catatonic. She sat around chewing her split ends like a zombie.”

  “Then she started wearing that veil, remember?” Tiza said. “As a sign of mourning. Lockjaw finally told her the veil had to go since it wasn’t part of the uniform.” (Clearly I wasn’t the only one who thought of the principal as Lockjaw.)

  “He let her keep the black armband, though,” AWAE said.

  “She lodged a protest,” Carter told me. “She said the school was infringing on her religious freedom. The Tolerance Committee actually had meetings about it. She’d made up a new religion—the Church of Heartbreak. The CH. We called it ‘the Chuh.’”

  “If she’d been Muslim, they’d have to let her wear the veil,” Tiza said.

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Carter said. “This is a private school. They can do whatever they want.”

  “Lucy’s family was Episcopalian,” Anne said. “The whole thing was ridiculous.”

  Jonah Tate sat down at the next table, alone. He opened his lunch bag and
unwrapped his sandwich. I immediately felt conscious of the snarky tone of our conversation.

  “Eek!” Anne whispered. “A g-g-g-ghost!”

  “Shh!” Tiza said. “That’s really juvenile, Anne. And so over.”

  “I’ve been hearing it all morning,” AWAE said. “Takes me back to seventh grade. The good old days, before everything counted.”

  “Before SATs,” Anne said. “And college—”

  “Please,” Tiza said. “I hated seventh grade. Everybody was so mean then. Ty Travers was always snapping my bra strap.”

  “Whatever happened to Lucy Moran?” I asked. “And the Church of Heartbreak?” I hoped Lucy was still around, with her veil and black armband. She sounded nervous and weird enough to be friends with me.

  “After Christmas, Lucy didn’t come back to school,” Carter said. “No one ever heard from her again. She barely lasted one semester—all because of Tom Garber.”

  “Wow,” I said. That was one powerful boy.

  “I saw her downtown once,” AWAE said. “She goes to the School for the Arts now.”

  “He ruined her,” Carter said.

  “Don’t listen to them, Bea,” Anne said. “Lucy Moran was seventh grade.”

  “Garber hasn’t changed,” Carter warned. “He still likes the newbies. And we haven’t had one in so long.”

  They all stared at me. “Well,” I said, “new or not, I’m sure I’m not his type.”

  Experience told me that not that many guys were into flat-chested sticks with big round lollipop heads and stringy hair, unless by some miracle that was the regional definition of cute. If so, I hadn’t come across that particular region. Mom kept telling me I had to grow into my face, but I knew a euphemism when I heard one.

  “How do you know you’re not his type?” Anne said.

  Tiza scanned me with the laser accuracy of the socially astute and, I assumed, found me wanting. “Don’t push her, Anne. She knows what she’s talking about.”

  At the next table over, Jonah cut his ham sandwich into bite-size pieces and arranged them in geometric patterns in front of him. I felt sure he was eavesdropping on us.

  “We’ll see whether she’s Tom’s type or not,” Anne said. “Like, right now.”

  A mysterious force vacuumed the air out of the lunchroom.

  “Hey, girls,” Tom Garber said. He flashed his teeth and microwaved the entire table as he slo-mo’d by. The light glinting off his glasses temporarily blinded me. “Bonjour, Beatrice.”

  He settled at a table in the back with his friends, a tangle of shaggy, noisy boys. Normal air pressure was restored.

  “He singled you out, Bea,” Anne said.

  “He pronounced your name the French way,” AWAE said.

  “He’s got Newbie Fever,” Carter said.

  A paper jet violated our airspace and landed on top of my turkey sandwich. Written on the wings, in red calligraphy, were the words

  TO: BEATRICE

  FROM: FUTURE BEATRICE

  All our eyes darted in Jonah’s direction.

  “Jonah is a synonym for weird,” Anne said.

  I unfolded the plane.

  “What does it say?” AWAE asked.

  I read the message to myself. There were no explicit instructions to keep the note private, but some instinct kept me from sharing it.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Come on, what’s it say?” Carter prodded.

  “Really. Nothing.” I balled up the airplane and dropped it into my backpack.

  “Jonah has a crush on you,” Tiza said.

  “Jonah doesn’t have crushes on people,” Anne said.

  “He could,” AWAE said. “Why not?”

  Anne shook her head. “He just doesn’t.”

  “He walks among the living,” Carter said. “But he can’t have ghost-human relations.”

  “Who cares, anyway,” AWAE said. “Like it’s a tough decision: Jonah or Tom? How will Beatrice ever choose?” The other girls laughed.

  “Neither of them has a crush on me,” I said.

  “Tom does,” Anne said. “Newbie.”

  When lunch was over, I pressed the wrinkles out of Jonah’s note and reread it.

  TO: BEATRICE

  FROM: FUTURE BEATRICE

  1120 AM. MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. BEATRICE OF THE FUTURE WILL THANK YOU.

  1120 AM. It had to be a radio show. Could be anything. Conservative ranters, sports talk, swing music, advice from the local rabbi…anything.

  I sometimes wonder whether radio geeks have some kind of symbol tattooed on their foreheads, or antennae growing out of their skulls, invisible to everyone except other radio geeks. They seem to find one another with shocking ease. Of course, all Jonah had to do was notice the Bob Decker bumper sticker on my locker.

  1120 AM, midnight.

  Maybe Anne and her friends were right. G-g-g-ghost Boy was a lost cause, beyond the reach of the human world. But what about the Robot World? Robot World had room for misfits of all stripes. We would see.

  CHAPTER 3

  At three-thirty, I slogged home from school through the sticky September air. It was like swimming through Jell-O. I went into the kitchen for a snack. Mom was bumping around upstairs. Dad walked in through the front door, his briefcase overflowing.

  “Hey, kiddo.” He sat down at the kitchen table. “Thought I’d stop in for a couple of hours before my lab tonight. How was school?”

  “Fine.” I paused to wash my hands at the kitchen sink and noticed Mom had hung a new set of curtains in the window: white with red chickens printed on them. She’d had a crazy thing about chickens lately. I turned around, and there was Mom in the doorway in a red-and-white polka-dot bikini. Talk about crazy.

  “You’re home,” she said to Dad. “I thought you had lab tonight.”

  “I do. I just stopped in to see how Bea’s day went. What’s with the suit? You going running in the sprinkler?”

  “I…it’s hot out. This was the coolest thing I could find to wear.”

  She opened the refrigerator. Her ribs made me think of a stray dog. Ribsy. That was the name of a dog in a book I’d loved as a child: Ribsy, by Beverly Cleary. Ribsy and his boy owner, Henry, were friends with Beezus, whose real name was Beatrice, like mine.

  Mom pulled out a plate of cold chicken. “Drumstick, anyone? It’s good luck to eat chicken on the first day of school.”

  “I thought it was good luck to eat chicken the first night in a new house,” I said.

  “That too,” Mom said. “Chicken’s an all-around good-luck food.”

  Dad looked at me like we had a secret together. “Really? Who says?”

  “My grandmother used to say so,” Mom said. “Down in Florida.” She looked funny in her bikini, waving that drumstick around. Like a deranged spokesmodel.

  Dad loosened his tie. “Bea and I manage to wear actual clothes, even in this godforsaken heat.”

  Mom read something on Dad’s face she didn’t like. She dropped the plate of chicken on the counter and her face puckered into the Pinch.

  “I’ll go change.” She ran upstairs.

  “Seems a little funny, wearing a bathing suit in a house where there’s no pool,” Dad said. “And no beach. In the middle of the city. Like walking around in your underwear.” He sat down at the kitchen table. “Have you noticed we’ve been eating a lot of chicken lately? Fix me a cracker or two, will you?”

  I put the chicken away, got crackers and peanut butter, and brought them to the table. Dad and I took turns dipping our knives into the peanut butter jar and smearing our crackers.

  “She’s tired a lot,” I said. “And she cries. Over dumb things.”

  “Moving is stressful,” Dad said. “Second only to death.”

  “I’d think death would be a whole lot worse than moving.” I didn’t really know, since I’d experienced a lot of moving but not much actual death. Just cat death, great-uncle death, gerbil death, and imaginary death.

  “She’ll be all right,
” Dad said. “We’ll stay put for a while now.”

  I wondered if staying put was what she needed. No matter how much we moved or where we lived, Dad had his students and his research and the book he was working on and his fascinating colleagues. Mom and I had each other. Or we used to, until I became a robot and she became crazy.

  Something changed in Ithaca. Mom disappeared some nights—she said she was taking self-improvement classes in things like psychology and creative writing—and left me alone with the TV. “Your dad should be home any minute,” she’d say on her way out the door, but she usually got home first, no matter how late it was.

  If Dad noticed the changes in Mom, they didn’t seem to bother him.

  “So tell me all about school,” Dad said, licking peanut butter off his knife. “One of my colleagues has a daughter in your class. Caroline Sweeney. In the Neuro-Chem Department. I think her daughter’s name is Anne?”

  “She sits next to me in Assembly,” I said.

  “Nice girl?” Dad bit a cracker.

  “I guess.” As Ghost Boy would probably say, n-n-n-not really.

  The floorboards creaked. Dad turned around. Mom lurked in the hallway, listening. Caught, she stepped into the kitchen, swinging the skirt of a red-and-white polka-dot sundress.

  “Is this decent enough for you?” she said.

  “How long were you standing there?” Dad said.

  “I wasn’t standing anywhere,” Mom said. She looked like a kid who’d just been tagged in hide-and-seek and didn’t want to be It.

  “Hey,” I said. “That dress looks just like your bikini.”

  “Polka dots are good luck,” Mom said.

  Dad went back to work at five. For dinner that night, Mom and I ate cottage cheese and watermelon in the kitchen under the beady, watchful eyes of the curtain chickens.