Chapter Fifteen
Thursday, November 18th
Creative writing club meeting
August knew if his sister kept on her path, she’d be as dead as Mr. Innocent. He had to protect Autumn from her own worst enemy—the person she stared at incessantly in the mirror, the person she photographed as if she was afraid she’d forget what she looked like—herself.
“Before we discuss this story, there’s something I must mention,” Dr. Draper says as she passes a piece of paper around. “This is a short story and poetry contest that the club will be sponsoring. Submissions are due at our January meeting, and then we’ll announce the winners at our February meeting. In addition to a small cash prize, the winning story and poem will be the first two entries in the literary magazine, a magazine which we’ve yet to discuss.”
“I’d be happy to edit it for you, Dr. Draper,” Kirk says. I wonder if he notices I roll my eyes whenever he opens his big mouth or shows off his brown nose.
“Kirk, thank you for the offer, but I think it best that we have one of the juniors or sophomores take on that role so we can build a base for next year.”
Inside, I cry out that famous sports cliché—'Down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier!'
“That’s okay. I don’t have time anyway, with all my college applications,” Kirk says, trying to save pompous face. And my face is smiling at the brain bully getting a little taste.
“What college do you plan on attending, Kirk?” Dr. Draper asks.
I swallow my sighs. I don’t want to hear about Kirk’s college plans or life story. I want to hear what people thought about my story. She’s holding it in her hands, but she won’t let it go as the clock on the wall keeps clicking away. This clock seems to be ticking slower than normal, while my own timepiece is running fast. I finished the story at school this morning because I can barely find time to write with my old responsibilities and my ones with Gabby. Since I’m rarely online, I barely talk to Tim or my other friends. Everybody else thinks I’m a ghost because they never see me, yet they know I’m around. I’m not undead, I’m living, for once.
“Northwestern is a great school,” I hear Candy say. “I thought about applying there, but I really want to go to Columbia. Chicago is the second city. New York is the first.”
“Live from New York, it’s Candy Tanner!” I shout, mostly to laughs.
Candy purses her dry, thin lips as if auditioning for a most annoyed person in the world contest.
“What about you, Carson?” Dr. Draper asks.
I ponder for a second. This is creative writing, so I could spin a fanciful tale of my future, except when thinking about it, I can barely tell the difference anymore between fact and fiction, between dreams and wishful thinking.
“I’m not sure. I might stay here and go to Baker College at first.”
“Good luck with that, Carson. Baker College is so hard to get into,” Kirk says. “The admissions policy is a pulse and a checkbook.”
I hate Kirk. I hate his put-downs, but laugh anyway. Funny is funny.
“What about you, Charlotte?” Dr. Draper asks.
“Oberlin and Drake are our top choices,” she answers while staring at Josh. Unlike the admissions policy of a pulse and checkbook, I know from college guides how hard those schools are to get into and how expensive they are—the very definition of dream schools.
As the other seniors talk about their plans, I’m looking at my Chucks. They remind me of Gabby and me—one black, one white. She wears the same. It’s cool to have an inside joke.
“Comments on our first story?” Silence, except for the sound of a million paper cuts on my skin. When no one speaks up, Dr. Draper clears her throat. “Does anyone want to read aloud?”
Why didn’t she just say, ‘Josh, please descend from the heavens’?
I sit there with a stupid fake smile plastered on my face as Josh reads more from ‘Searching for a Heart’, which he announces is too big and important a story not to be a novel. He says the only problem is he has two other stories he’s working on and can’t decide if those are short stories or another novel. Oh, the hardship and agony of a young genius.
As Josh reads, I do my best to listen out of politeness, even if every ideal image, adroit drop of dialog and fantastically fancy sentence slams against my skull like Thor’s hammer.
After Josh finishes almost twenty minutes later, Charlotte’s first to comment, but slavish praise isn’t a comment. I keep the fake smile plastered on my face as I feel anger deep inside.
After Kirk adds the final layer of icing on Josh’s compliment cake, Dr. Draper starts the next piece—yet another rhyme about razor blades and roses, I suspect from the tortured poetic souls of the freshman girls. I’ve stopped caring what anybody thinks, but I also understand why I write fiction. It seems the only two things I’m good at are lying and failing. I failed as a writer and have so far failed in finding my sister. You lose, you lose.
Dr. Draper finishes the emo ode and starts the discussion, which is lively. I do a fake cough then excuse myself and race my non-athletic body to the journalism office. Some of the yearbook staff are still working, so I find a computer as far away as I can. I use the trick Tim taught me to pass the school’s filter to get to my email and also visit a page I used to visit almost every day for a year—Caitlin’s first shot at fame. Her Facebook page. The activity date stays stuck like some broken clock—and it fits, since in many ways time stopped for all of us on the day before she left. It’s like a snapshot of her life three years ago. Well, being Caitlin, snapshot is the right word.
I don’t even need to log on. Caitlin always had her page set to public—to look at her pictures. In addition to the tagged photos folder, there are three folders—My pix, Friendz and Modeling. There’s not a folder for family, as if we didn’t exist.
Each of the folders contains over one thousand photos, yet even as I page through them, I think how they’ll all be the same. In the pictures, her face has three expressions—her lips kissing the camera, her mouth open to show off her tongue stud or no expression because while her body is revealed, her eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. One photo says it all. Caitlin flanked by two guys on each side. She’s wearing her favorite attention-getting, piss off Dad outfit—a tight gold low-cut top that seems to be in most of the partying photos. In this photo, she’s with a white guy and a black guy in their twenties. Each has a hand pressed against the side of Caitlin’s breasts to produce even more cleavage than usual, although it’s hard to see with the bottle of Grey Goose between her breasts. Her eyes are wild red, not sky blue. But her smile says it all—look at me.
And people did. This photo, like most of the others, has almost a hundred comments. I used to overhear Caitlin on the phone complaining to friends if they didn’t comment on her photos or vids. I’m deep into Caitlin’s past when an email arrives from one of the porn sites I wrote. I gave up the sister angle and tried thinking like a porn producer. It’s all about the money. I asked if the girl in the pictures had any DVDs I could buy. The email tells me the model’s name is Callie Bangs. She’s only in one DVD, but would I like to sign up for her webcam?
I clear the cache and history, and race for my car. I’m heading home, and maybe my sister will be coming home with me someday very soon. This discovery leads not to certainty, but just to more questions. Not just the practical ones about how I’ll contact her or what I’ll say to her, but the hardest question of all. Who will I be talking to—Caitlin Banks or Callie Bangs?