Only You

school

School wasn't always a place that made me want to throw myself off a ten-story building. School used to be the home base, a fucking vibe. I had a pack of my people, we called ourselves the Crackheads. We would have gone to the dark side of the moon together. Ivy, Kayla, Rivara, Aiden, Alani, Rose, Parker, Eli, Kai. Sometimes I say their names to myself, just to remind myself they really existed, that I wasn't always this way, that once upon a time I let people in. And people let me in.

Of course, that was all before my sister Arden got arrested and life stopped making sense. 

And before I moved to Bedford and built a reputation of the town's Madeline Ashton for myself. 

English is first period. I walk in slightly late, like always. This is primarily so I can get the smell of weed off me as best as I can, and also because I know there will always be a seat reserved for me regardless of how late I come in. The chair in the back corner is always mine. Where I belong. Tucked out of sight. 

No one takes any notice of me as I enter through the back door. I glance at the front of the room as I come in, and see the name 'Ms. Blanchett' written in free flow cursive on the blackboard. 

Then I look at her.

No one would ever have guessed that just three nights prior she had been sitting next to me on a bus going nowhere in the middle of the night, with red eyes and a swear word on her lips. That had been Cate, I guess, Lost Woman Cate. Now she's Ms. Blanchett, tall and slender, commanding the attention of a room full of twelfth graders with a single sweep of her eyes. She's wearing a three piece suit, all black. The top buttons of her blouse are undone. Her straw colored hair is pulled back into a gleaming bun. She's captivated everyone with her voice like liquid silver.

"'Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there there was something tragic'," she says, walking listlessly across the floor. "Can anyone tell me where that's from?"

One or two hands raise tentatively, but I don't bother. Without even taking off my jacket or sitting down, I call out, "The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde."

Ms. Blanchett looks at me, and her blue eyes are so lucid, so boldly arresting, they blur the lines between reality and fantasy. "Thank you, Jude. That's correct."

I give her a little salute, and a corner of her mouth turns up. 

"Excuse me, Ms. Blanchett? Jude didn't raise her hand," one of the girls in the front row whined. "It's not fair to us who did."

I watch her turn her gaze to the girl, and the girl actually shrinks back in her seat. "What's your name?" she asks calmly.

"Karen."

"Karen. And you are seventeen, eighteen years old? Is that right?"

"I'm eighteen, yes."

"Then you are an adult by U.S. law. Forgive me if you disagree, but it doesn't seem to me at all logical to make people of your age adhere to the norms of a second grade classroom," Ms. Blanchett says quietly, yet her voice spills into every corner of the room. "As long as I'm teaching here, there'll be no raising your hand. If you've got a contribution, give it. There'll be no asking permission to use the restroom. You've got to go, then go. You are all adults, or nearly adults, and I expect you to act it."

The room holds the silence like that of a town after a beautiful thunderstorm.