Songs Without Words Read online

  Knock ’em dead.

  She still couldn’t really believe it. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was so nice: like, he knew she went to his school, he knew she had midterms. It blew her away.

  But what a joke it was now. She had done nothing but smile at him since then. And she didn’t even smile every time she saw him. He probably thought she was crazy. Or that she had some kind of spastic mouth or something. Or, more likely, he had no idea she existed.

  She was sitting with Amanda on a bench in front of the office—a total loser lunch location, but whatever, sometimes it was better just to be yourself, as her mom would say. Amanda had stretched out on the bench and was lying there with her eyes closed—which Lauren would never, not in a million years, do at school. She sat nearby, zipping and unzipping her backpack like an idiot. She was getting her Howards End paper back in English today. She couldn’t imagine why Sarabeth liked that book—Lauren had hated it, which had made the paper agony to write. She would probably get a B and some comment about how it was well organized, as if she’d turned in her dresser drawer. What, she wondered, would it be like to get a D on a paper, or an F? You probably couldn’t get an F if you turned something in, but could you get a D? She imagined Ms. Freiberg approaching her, the stack of graded papers held close to her chest so no one could see anyone else’s grade. The look on her face as she stopped at Lauren’s desk, full of pity and worry. Lauren’s heart pounding. And then the shame. A D would clinch it, clinch everything. It would be like having a giant D on her chest for “dummy,” “dope,” making an announcement like that A in The Scarlet Letter.

  Amanda sat up and gave her a strange look. “What?”

  Lauren turned away. She felt like crying, and she roped it, roped it, roped it back in. She hadn’t even gotten her stupid paper back yet. “Nothing,” she said.

  “What’d you say?”

  “No-thing.”

  Amanda shrugged and reached for her pack. She unzipped the front pocket and took out a foil package. “Want some dry-roasted edamame? They’re rich in isoflavones.”

  “Ew,” Lauren said. Amanda’s mom was always buying weird foods; she’d had anorexia as a teenager and so was overcompensating or one of those words. “No, thanks.”

  “Let’s do something this weekend,” Amanda said. “Do you want to go shopping tomorrow? I totally need shirts.”

  Lauren imagined the mall, imagined herself trudging around, the place all echoey, the smell of the food court. She said, “My mom said I have to do chores tomorrow.” She often pretended her parents were stricter than they were. She sometimes even got pissed at them for what she’d told Amanda they’d said. She knew she was a horrible daughter.

  “Sunday?” Amanda said. “Or next weekend? We could do the Berkeley thing.” She said this super casually, but now Lauren was mad: she’d screwed everyone by blowing off Berkeley last month, and Amanda was pretending it was no big deal? It wasn’t even fair; they could have gone without her.

  Why? everyone kept saying. Why? She hadn’t felt like it, that was why. The only bummer had been missing the visit to Sarabeth. Sarabeth was so completely different from Lauren’s mom—it would’ve been cool to take everyone to her house. Sometimes Lauren imagined what it would be like having Sarabeth for a mother, how she’d be so easy to talk to. In high school, for example, she’d had a killer crush on a guy named Doug—Lauren had overheard her and her mom laughing about it once. Later, Lauren had asked her mom for details—she was just curious—but her mom had gone into her whole Sarabeth-and-her-dead-mother thing, and Lauren had changed the subject. She hated it when her mom talked about Sarabeth’s mother. Or Sarabeth-and-her-mother.

  Lorelei. Sarabeth pretty much never talked about her—the only thing Lauren could remember her saying was that her mother had called Lauren’s mom’s family “the Castleberries” instead of “the Castleberrys.” Lauren wasn’t sure how she did this—with her tone or something—but the idea seemed to be that she was a snob. Lauren had seen a picture of her once, in a shoe box in her mom’s closet, and she didn’t look like a snob at all. She was standing outside Sarabeth’s old house, across the street from where Lauren’s grandparents used to live, and she looked kind of shy. She was small and pretty and dark haired—though her eyes made Lauren want to look away.

  “Yo,” Amanda said. “Earth to Lauren?”

  Lauren looked over. Amanda’s hair was orange in the sunlight, and her freckles really stood out today, especially this big one in the middle of her chin. “What?” Lauren said.

  “Next weekend? You’re sure spaced.”

  “Whatever,” Lauren said, but she was impatient now, because there he was, over by the gym. He’d gotten his hair cut recently, and she still wasn’t used to it. It was geeky but sort of cute. He was so cute. But he was so skinny. If she ever sat on his lap she’d totally squish him. She thought of her ass spreading on his lap—she was disgusting.

  The bell rang, and she packed up, said goodbye to Amanda, and made her way to English. Ms. Freiberg was already at her desk, the papers in a neat stack in front of her. She waited for the tardy bell and stood up. There were still people coming in, but she started talking about how it had been a really good group of papers, people had chosen challenging books, there were some good theses, well supported, although some people, she said, eyes locked on the back wall, had not taken enough time, and they probably already knew who they were.

  She began at the first row of desks. She had the papers in order, so that as she approached each person, that person’s paper was on top of her pile. Lauren’s heart pounded as Ms. Freiberg got closer.

  “Lauren,” she said with a smile, and she handed Lauren her paper.

  Lauren held the paper to her chest before she looked at it. The first page, two comments in red ink; the second, a long note in the right-hand margin; the third, more notes and a couple of words circled; the fourth, a smiley face on the left, near the bottom; and the fifth, the last: three inches of red ink followed by a C minus in a big red circle.

  She sat still, but she was going to cry, she was going to cry in just a second. Then the feeling passed, and the inside of her body was hot, her stomach roiling. She shoved her stuff into her backpack and stood up. Her face was on fire. Ms. Freiberg was at the far side of the classroom, just a few papers left.

  “Lauren?”

  She couldn’t speak. She was standing there in front of the entire class, and it wasn’t impossible that she would puke right now.

  “Are you ill?” Ms. Freiberg said.

  Lauren managed to nod.

  Ms. Freiberg returned to her desk and scribbled something. “Here,” she said, handing Lauren a hall pass. “Go to the nurse, OK?”

  Lauren took the pass and headed for the door, knowing everyone’s eyes were on her. How obvious was it that this was because she’d blown the paper? Completely obvious. Her face was covered with sweat, and when she opened the door and got outside, the cool air was an astonishing relief. She stood there for a moment, trying to slow something, her breathing, the nausea. But she still felt queasy. She shouldered her pack and made her way to the office. She lay on the nurse’s cot and stared at the acoustic panels of the ceiling while the nurse called her mom. The nurse gave her a cool cloth for her forehead while they waited.

  Lauren’s mom was freaked. She came bursting into the nurse’s room in her painting clothes fifteen minutes later, a totally worried look on her face. Lauren wished she’d stayed in class, but now that her mom was here she was definitely going home.

  “What’s wrong?” her mom said.

  “I just started feeling really sick.”

  “To your stomach?”

  Lauren nodded. It wasn’t so bad, actually. In fact, she wasn’t sure she felt sick at all anymore.

  “Do you feel like throwing up?”

  “Mom!”

  “There’s a stomach thing going around,” the nurse said. “I’ve seen a lot of this.”

  “Well,” Lauren’s mom sai
d, “let’s get you home.”

  She went to sign Lauren out, and the nurse took the washcloth and helped Lauren sit up. “It’ll pass in a couple days,” she said. “Maybe faster if it’s food poisoning. What did you have for lunch?”

  “A turkey sandwich.”

  “With mayonnaise?”

  Lauren’s mom was back. “OK, sweetie,” she said, and Lauren’s face got hot again, but she stood and followed her mom out of the office. They walked to the car in silence, her mom casting glances at her every so often. At home she escorted Lauren to her room.

  “Resting will help,” she said. She pulled back the bedspread on Lauren’s bed and plumped the pillows. “We have ginger ale—you could try sipping that.”

  “Whatever,” Lauren said, and her mom gave her a curious look before she left. Lauren got into bed, then felt weird lying in bed in her jeans. She took them off and pulled on some boxers. She was a complete fraud. What was she supposed to do, lie in bed all afternoon? It wasn’t even two o’clock.

  Her mom came back in with a tray. There was a glass of ginger ale and some saltines, and a little flower in a bud vase. “I’ll put these here,” she said, setting the tray on Lauren’s bedside table. “Just see if you can rest, OK?”

  Lauren nodded. She sort of wished her mom would sit with her.

  “Do you want me to bring you a bucket?” her mom said, and Lauren felt her eyes fill.

  “No, thanks.”

  Liz returned to the garage, where she’d been working on the bench when the nurse’s call came. It was so strange; she couldn’t remember the last time Lauren had come home sick in the middle of the day. Maybe she did have food poisoning, since it had come on so fast. In a strange way, Liz sort of liked the idea that she was up there, not feeling well. Not feeling good, as both kids used to say. Mom, I don’t feel good. It had been all she could do not to sit on the side of Lauren’s bed just now, to stroke her shoulder. But Lauren would have no truck with that these days.

  The bench was in the middle of the garage floor. She’d known from the first moment she’d seen it what she’d do: a lively plaid of yellow, green, and blue, topped by a sprinkling of tiny flowers. Fresh, pretty. Springlike. Very different from the things she’d done in the class she’d taken: the footstool she’d sponge-painted dark green over black, the picture frame on which she’d carefully stenciled a winding vine.

  Why had she told Sarabeth she didn’t know how she was going to paint the bench? Maybe because she couldn’t quite believe it would work. Right now it was solid white, with lines of blue paint and other lines of blue painter’s tape running this way and that. Mondrian on a bad day, Sarabeth might say.

  Liz went back to the kitchen for the phone. “How do you feel?” she asked when Brody answered.

  “Fine,” he said rather briskly.

  She hesitated; she hadn’t started this quite right. “Lauren came home sick. Her stomach. I was just wondering if you had anything.”

  “No, no,” he said. “Sorry, I’m fine. Did she throw up?”

  “No, she just said she felt queasy. She’s pretty flushed, too.”

  “Maybe she has a bug.”

  “Evidently.”

  They said goodbye, and she stood still for a moment, listening for sounds from Lauren’s room. Nothing. She headed up the stairs: Lauren was deeply under her covers, eyes closed, fists tucked under her chin. Good, Liz thought. She’s asleep.

  But Lauren was not asleep. She had gone to the bathroom, and the trek across her bedroom floor, and out her door to the wide-open upstairs landing, and on into the cold, tiled bathroom—this had gotten her feeling awful again. Her hideous face in the mirror, and she, she just couldn’t stand anything. She wished she could take some medicine, except what could she take? What was there for this? She wanted to take pills and pills of it. A wave of nausea swept over her, and she made for the toilet, but nothing happened. What if, in front of her parents, she started to rant and rave? What if she couldn’t stop?

  Back in her room, she crawled into the closet and slid the door closed and sobbed. Her pack was out there in the middle of her room, the C-minus paper inside it. What if her parents found out? You got a C minus? What happened?

  She leaned against the wall. There was more room in here now, she’d gotten rid of a ton of stuff, but she sort of wished she hadn’t. There was too much room. She heard something and cracked the closet door, then opened it and dashed for her bed. Just in time: her mom came and stood in the doorway and looked at her. Go away, go away, Lauren thought, and her mom went away.

  A C minus was worse than a D. If she’d gotten a D it would have been like: Oh, you must not have understood the assignment or something. A C minus was You suck.

  She had taken in only about half the comment on the last page, and when she heard her mom close the garage door, she got up and went to her pack. Back in bed with the paper, she read all of Ms. Freiberg’s notes. “It’s interesting,” Ms. Freiberg had written at the very end, “that the paper, in its shortcomings and disorganization, reflects an aspect of one of the book’s most important themes, the contrast between Helen’s passion and Margaret’s reason. You may revise this if you’d like. Please see me—I think I may be able to help.”

  Whatever the fuck Ms. Freiberg meant, there was no way Lauren was revising it. The book sucked, especially the parts about Leonard Bast. What a loser. She lay back down and began crying again. It was awful, she couldn’t stop: she was crying and crying and crying. She rolled over like that might help, but of course it didn’t.

  The phone rang at some point, and a quick glance at the clock told her school was out. Was it Amanda calling? She might be wondering where Lauren was. Lauren half wanted to yell to her mom that she was awake, but it might not be Amanda; Amanda might not even have noticed that she was missing. Amanda was getting friendly with some theater people, and she might be happily hanging out with that dork Christa Baker, talking about drama. If Amanda got all theatery Lauren would be screwed. She could imagine Amanda being one of those tech people, doing lights or sound or painting sets or whatever. Lauren hated plays. She’d taken a theater class when she was ten, and it was the most embarrassing experience she ever had. One day you were supposed to act out being an animal, and Lauren had to go into the middle of the room and pretend to be a penguin in front of all these people. Remembering it, she almost laughed, and for some reason that made her feel worse. Tears streamed down her face.

  Liz had a chicken roasting in the oven when she went upstairs a little before six-thirty. Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans: one of Lauren’s favorite dinners, in case she felt up to eating. Lauren’s door was closed now, and Liz knocked and waited and knocked again.

  “Lauren?” she called. She opened the door, and Lauren jerked up to sitting, her face red and tear streaked, her mouth wrenched downward.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Liz said. She hurried to the bed and sat down, and Lauren fell against her. “Sweetie, what is it?”

  Lauren shook her head, but her body heaved and heaved, and Liz felt tears running into the neckline of her own shirt. She stroked Lauren’s back. “What?” she said, and then, “There, it’s OK, it’s OK.” Something was terribly wrong, and yet how glad she was that Lauren was allowing herself to be held. This body in Liz’s arms: she barely knew it anymore.

  She put her hand down on something crinkly.

  Lauren pulled away, and they both looked down at a pile of papers halfway under Lauren’s pillow. Lauren pushed the papers farther under and scooted back.

  “What’s that?” Liz said.

  “Nothing.”

  Liz looked at Lauren, and suddenly she knew: it was the English paper, the independent reading project paper. Lauren had done badly. Or probably not badly, probably just not as well as she’d hoped. It was there, under her pillow, the paper she’d had to write about the book she’d hated. Liz had tried to tell her that she should read a bit of it before committing, but Lauren could never be warned; she had to hur
tle forward, the consequences be damned. Why was that? Had Liz or Brody modeled recklessness? Or had they, in modeling caution, somehow encouraged the opposite?

  Lauren wiped her sleeve over her face. Her lips were as red as if she’d spent the afternoon kissing. She stared at Liz and sighed. She lifted the pillow and threw it past Liz to the floor. She made a little gesture of pushing the papers toward Liz, and it took all Liz had not to reach for them.

  “Is there something you want to show me?” she said instead.

  Lauren pushed them closer. She stared at Liz. Finally she picked them up and held them out for Liz to take.

  “Your paper?” Liz said, because she’d been right: “Two Sisters in Howards End” read the title on the top page.

  “I failed it,” Lauren said.

  Liz glanced through the pages, taking in the quantity of red ink more than the content. On the last page, below a long comment, there was a big red C minus in a circle.

  “Is this what you’re feeling bad about?”

  Tears streaming again, Lauren nodded.

  “You hoped for a better grade?”

  “Duh,” Lauren said, and she bowed her head and sobbed again.

  Liz hesitated and then put a hand on Lauren’s shoulder. “I think you had high hopes for it. And you worked hard on it.”

  “Mom,” Lauren cried. “I’m probably going to get a C in chemistry!”

  She was struggling in school. That’s what it was. Liz felt the lifting of a huge burden. Lauren was having a hard time with her schoolwork. Academics had always been easy for her, but they weren’t this year.

  Liz said as much, and as she talked Lauren settled into a peaceful kind of listening that suggested she was actually taking in what Liz was saying: that it was especially hard to be challenged when you weren’t used to it, that struggle in one part of life could affect confidence in others.