The hidden lives of ushers (chapter one)

Mackenzie cooper:


A lot of lives ended on September eleventh, 2001.  Everybody says that we'll always remember exactly where we were when we heard about the two towers.  But I would have remembered, even without a plane going through a skyscraper, exactly where I was on the morning of September eleventh.  I was at home, crying in my room.

On September ninth, 2001, I was in the fifth grade.  I had walked home from the elementary school with a kid named Mike Donau, a kid who had been my best friend my entire life.  And up until about four o' clock on September ninth, he had lived two blocks away.  We did what we'd been doing for the last two years and split ways by the big oak tree on the corner of Green Street and Birch lane. 

And then at five o' clock, we got the call.  Nobody could find Mike.  We looked all over, down by the lake, by the park.  Cops were crawling all over the place, grownups were going around in cars and teenagers were running wild with flashlights.  And the whole neighborhood was in a frenzy. 

The next day, no mother on the block let her kid out of the house.  We all sat in our beds, behind locked doors as the hunt continued.  And suddenly things were looking less hopeful.  They looked, but they knew something was wrong.  We all did.  The night before, a missing kid could have meant that he got mad, or bored, and went out for a walk and maybe got himself lost.  But when he still didn't show up, not even in the next town, hope started to fade.

And then the final nail in the coffin arrived.  A kid working up at a Wal-Mart, at about six o' clock on September tenth said that she'd seen him with a man about ten o' clock the night before.  At nine o' clock that same night, a group of tenth graders saw a strange shape on the edge on the lake.  It was a little boy, the blood from his slashed throat turning the sand under him red.  He was pretty beat up, missing a few teeth, with about seven snapped bones.  But that didn't stop Mrs. Donau from recognizing her son.

The cops started the manhunt that night, looking for clues, calling in the CSI like in a daytime TV movie.  Only this was real.  The cops were going to find out who did it.  They were going to make the killer pay.  But that all just rotted away when the towers fell.  Suddenly, one dead kid wasn't a big deal.  At least not to them. 

Fifth grade was the year that I realized that kids died too.  But anybody who didn't really know mike was suddenly swept up in WTC.  And once people started getting over that, nobody remembered to look for the bastard that killed my friend.  Nobody talked about mike, his family moved away, the whole thing just sort of went away. 

I only tried to talk to my mom about it once, but she shut me up quick.
"it's not healthy to talk about things like that.  What happened happened, and nothing can change that".  And so I just kept it all inside.

I guess that wasn't healthy either, because by the time I hit grade nine, nobody would talk to me.  It was that September, the September of grade nine when I thought things might get a little better. 

There were a total of 10 kids in my fifth period history class, not counting me.  Five of them were too cool to talk to me, all from a different elementary school, a different neighborhood.  A better neighborhood, where nothing bad had happened in forever.  Then there was a kid named Kenny who had an aid and rocked back and forth sometimes.  We pretty much ignored Kenny. 

But the other four were hard to ignore.  There was Caleb Wroth, who's brother Aaron was the talk of the town after he and a kid in our grade named Isaac gunned down three drug dealers and threw two Molotov cocktails into the window of their car. 

Then there was Isaac Dehker.  The lawyers did a good job of pinning the murders on Aaron, but we all knew what he did.  He'd spent the year before in a place called St. Anthony's home for disturbed boys.  There were rumors about what happened there, about what the boys did to each other.  And Isaac's eyes once he got back were a dead giveaway that not one of those rumors was a lie.

Rachelle LeRoy was a foster child; her mom was a whore who popped her out right after she turned thirteen.  She'd only moved in a month beforehand, but they labeled her right away. 

Danny Lynne wasn't really classified as a freak or a reject like the rest of us were.  People mostly felt bad for him, his mom was a bad drinker, and he came in with bruises and bad excuses at least once a week.  A lot of teachers cut him slack and let him get away with stuff that most kids wouldn't have gotten away with.  He had a few friends that came and went, and had a few things going for him.  He just didn't fit in with any set group of kids.

I don't think I was really a freak either.  I hung out with a few girls from my English class, and they were alright.  I wasn't as smart as them though, and they acted too grown up.  It just felt like wail their energy was going toward school and guys and bands, mine was going toward mike.  Everything led back to mike, wanting to talk about mike, wanting to talk to mike.  It was almost an obsession. 

I think it was the third of October.  That's when we got the detention.  Maybe I should have kept better track of my homework.  I did it, I always did it, I just lost it.  And Mrs. Kerchner was "fed up with how unorganized I was".  And then she was out for blood.  She went up to a kid named Alexia next, who ripped the paper out of a binder that looked like it was held together with staples and prayers.  She passed by two more kids who had it, but in no better condition.  And then she came to Isaac.

He sunk into his seated pulled it out of his folder.  It looked like it had been half done on the way to class.
"Is this your best work" she sort of hissed at her. 
"No" he looked her right in the eye
"And why not" she got up in his face, but didn't yell.
"Because I forgot about it until last period."  He didn't sound like he was trying to be a wise ass, be he didn't even try to make up an excuse.  She shook her head, growing more pissed with every kid who didn't have it.  Nobody had it in good condition, but the only ones who flat out didn't have it were that kids that stood out.  Us, and Kenny. 

She wrote a word on the blackboard, the screech of the chalk making me want to pull my hair out.
O-R-G-I-G-N-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N
"do we know what that means?" her voice was just below a shout "I hope so!  Because you're all going to be writing a two page essay on it.  Handwritten, single spaced, due by tomorrow. Cooper, Lynne, Dehker, LeRoy, and Wroth, since I apparently can't trust you to do the work at home, you'll be completing it in detention today.  It's up to you to notify your parents during your lunch period.  Do I understand?  Anybody who doesn't have this essay in by tomorrow can go have a nice sit in the dean's office.  You're in high school now, you need to be adult about your work."

My mom was going to flip.  Well, maybe not.  She was usually cool about stuff like that, I didn't get in trouble too often, and when I did, it was only for little things.  But I knew it would disappoint her, which was worse than making her get pissed off.  At least when she'd yell, you could be mad at her for it.  But when she was disappointed, it was like you'd broken her heart, like she couldn't even look at you or she'd start crying.  And that was the worst.

I barely listened the rest of the class.  I knew that Mrs. Kerchner wasn't a bad lady.  And I knew that I deserved an attention.  But it was easier to hate her and curse her name than it was to tell myself that I'd goofed up.  And so I spent the rest of the class thinking every swear under the sun, trying to focus all my hate on her skull and make it explode all over the room. But deep down I didn't wish her any harm.

The bell rung and life went on.  There was almost a certain beauty to the way a class ended.  A bell commanded your entire day, a sound that didn't know what it meant or why it even existed, and you had to do exactly what it tolled you to.

Lunch was seventh period.  I sat down with the group of girls who I usually sat with, a kid named Mandy Snell was showing off pictures of her cat and the others were huddled around cooing at it.  I hated cats.  In fact, I hated most animals.  I hated when they curled up on me, or tried to lick me.  It was gross.  They ate each other's poo and didn't clean themselves properly after going to the bathroom, to you never knew if there was dried piss in their fur.  What was cute about that?

Then another bell rang, one that you could only hear from the cafeteria.  It meant outdoor recreation.  I usually went, just to get some fresh air.  There was an enormous fence around the yard, so you couldn't do anything other than walk around in a big circle.  It was like in those HBO prison movies where they let all the inmates out and they do exactly what we did, walk around a big half dead field.  There were a few kids playing handball on the brick wall, and a few more had organized a sacking.

If school was a prison, sacking was rape.  Usually a few bigger guys would find a small kid walking around the field with his backpack on.  They'd hold him down and rip it off him.  Then they'd dump all his shit out, turn the backpack inside out, put the shit back in, and zipper it up, and toss it back and forth to one another until the bell rung.  That way the victim was left with two choices: he could stay and put everything back to gather and be late to class, or he could carry the sacked backpack through the halls to his next class where he'd have to fix everything in full view of his classmates.

A few kids gathered around to watch.  I moved in for a closer look.  Adam and Eric were standing over a smaller kid whose name I didn't know.  They finished sacking him, picked up his inside out backpack, and tosses it around.  A few of their friends joined in, until the next bell rang and we all had to get on with life.  They threw it at him like a dodge ball, and ran off into the crowd of kids trying to fight their way through the door. 

The kid brushed himself off, picked up his stuff, and started shuffling toward the building.  I felt sort of bad for him, but I knew that I was only a few steps above him on the social ladder.  And I was low enough that doing anything dumb could get me dragged past the point of no return. 

The kid started moving faster, until he was half running into the crowd.  He disappeared behind a wall of people, only to be shoved out moments later, minus the glasses.  He blindly groped at the concrete, pathetic beyond all logical reason. 

When I walked past him, a few kids had made a game of stomping on his outstretched hand.  And I know that I wanted to say something, that I should have said something, but I didn't.  It was easier to ignore.

I walked through the halls, feeling low and invisible.  I should have at least given the kid his glasses; they were two feet away from me.  But it was almost a security to watch him squirm there.  I might have been low, but I was above him.  I was cool by comparison. 

I hurried off to math, a subject that I was sort of good at.  I was sort of good at a lot of stuff, and pulled mostly B's and low A's from the bulk of my classes.  The only thing that I was pulling a C in was science.  I liked life science, and was looking forward to Chem. and Bio, but earth science was hell, especially since they made every other day a double period.  And it wasn't like I would even need to use half of the stuff that we learned in earth science.  A rock was a rock, to hell with where it came from.  I couldn't give a rat's left nut.  But the damn teacher was psychotic about that sort of stuff.  It was his whole life.  At least with math, there was an unspoken knowledge that the teacher was just looking for the money to get to wherever his dreams needed him to go.  The young teachers were all so full of hope, like this was just a stop on the road to success.  It was laughable. 

My math class was big, almost thirty kids.  And because we lost some sort of lottery type drawing, we had the "inclusion" class, meaning that ten out of the thirty kids came with an aid.  Constant surveillance was hell; you couldn't get away with anything in that class.

After math was double period earth science.  I know that I should have been trying to get my average up in that class, but I couldn't bring myself to do the work, it was maddeningly boring.  We were doing a lab on how to identify rocks, and all I could think was who the hell cares about these rocks.  And then my mind wandered from that to the kid, scrambling for his glasses, squealing like a girl every time somebody stomped on his hand.  In my mind I could see him still scrambling blindly by the door, looking for the glasses that somebody probably kicked onto the grass.  All alone, and not even the teachers would help him.

Maybe I was being too hard on myself, but I just kept swearing quietly, calling myself names for not stopping to help the poor kid.  I could see god looking over me, shaking his head and calling me a bitch.  Between that and the detention, I felt like the worst kid alive.