S K Y L A R
Mr. Wyatt wanted to talk to me after class. I hoped it was an explanation for the homework he had given us. Listen to music, he had said, get inspired. So no homework? I had a lot of questions and no way of asking them without stepping out of line. I had been one with this line for years.
But class ended and all the other students left, and he granted me no explanation at all.
Instead he asked, "Who did this to you?"
I felt myself frown, "What?"
He pointed at the holes on my tights and then glanced up at my lip, where I felt it warm and sore.
"N-no one," I said, or tried to. It was all the same. He didn't believe me.
"Don't do that."
I furrowed my eyebrows, "Do what?"
"Don't let them get away with it," he said. Maybe he read too many books. Listened to too much music. Got too inspired. I could see the story he had built in his head. In it, I was a loser walking down the halls, small, small, small me, and there they came, big, big, big them, running and laughing down the stairs, away from trouble. Were they not the trouble?
Oops, they said when they raced past me, one on each side, so close, their shoulders bumped me and sent me skidding across the last half a dozen steps. Sorry! they screamed but never stopped.
"I fell down the stairs," I said, and then, "It was an accident."
"What's your name?" He was leaning against his desk, bag in hand, eyes determined on staying on me.
"Skylar," I said. I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I clung to the straps on my backpack. My face felt like a muscle I couldn't relax.
"Skylar," he said, as if testing it out. "If someone did this to you - "
"No one did this to me," I said very fast. "I just tripped. I was rushing to class, and I tripped over myself. I appreciate your concern, I do, but really, I just -"
"Okay, I see," he said then. I didn't think he meant it, or he did, but he saw something entirely different than what I was trying to describe to him, "Right, I'll let you go."
"Thank you," I said, and then, "About the homework. Is there anything specific we should look for in these songs? Like rhyme scheme and rhythm? Or themes - "
He laughed. I felt all the blood gather in my cheeks, like a meeting point in case of emergency.
"No, none of that," he said, still grinning. "I just want you to get inspired."
This man was insane. Or maybe not. Maybe I was missing the point. What was the point? Get inspired. What did that mean? I carried the question with me for the rest of the day like an extra textbook. My back hurt by the time I made it home. I listened to the CD. The question remained. What did it mean? There, I had listened. Was I inspired? Was that it? Could I move on to Calculus?
I didn't feel inspired. When I was eight years old, my aunt got me The Sims game and my dad helped me install it on our family computer. I played for hours on end. I spent nights awake planning. I wrote everything down, the characters I would create, their relationships, their careers, their homes, their stories. Summer came and I wanted to stay in and play. The beach had no calling on me, only the computer. I played for so long, the bottom of the laptop would burn my legs where I had it on my lap on the couch. I would put magazines in the freezer and then use it as a cooling system for both of us.
My parents got rid of the game when school started. I told them I would play only on the weekends, but they weren't too sold on the idea, and by Friday, the game was gone. All my stories, all my houses built from nothing, decorated for hours on end, all my characters, dressed for every occasion, worked on for so long they had all the skills they could have and more. All of it, gone.
They said the game broke. Remember how it used to heat up the computer? Your dad had to uninstall it, honey. It was slowing it down. It was impossible to use. I suspected this was a lie the same way I suspected the stray cat I had bought home the year before hadn't just decided to go back on the streets.
Get inspired, Mr. Wyatt had said. I didn't know how to do that. It turned out I didn't have to. What came out of it was this. In our next class, Mr. Wyatt asked us to write an essay on the question: what would you ask for if the answer was yes?
We had only a couple of days. I finished mine on the bus home that same day, then went home, and did everything else I had to do, since the answer was in fact not yes, not just like that. I had to work for it. Work for it, my parents always told me, effort will never betray you.
After dinner, when they migrated to the couch to watch one of their British period dramas, like they did every night, I collapsed on the armchair by the lampshade with Slaughterhouse V on my lap, the first book on Mr. Wyatt's reading list for this semester.
"I'm so tired," I said over the voices coming from the tv.
"Then go to sleep," my father said, not looking away from the screen. He always said this, the same way he said, try turning it off and on again, every time the computer stopped working, even after my childhood game wasn't there anymore to make it slow.
I did want to go to bed. I wanted to wrap myself in my blankets and lay very still for hours on end. I wanted unconsciousness like a big meal after a marathon but sleep never came as easily as I wanted it to. For hours, my head would keep running, like the wheel of a bike still going long after the cyclist had stopped pedaling.
I laid in bed, and my mind kept going, never easing into a stop. I wanted it to stop. I needed it to. At some point, it had gotten so bad, my parents had gone and bought me sleeping pills. They said they did, but the pills tasted sweet, and I had learned about the placebo effect at school the week after, so I had stopped taking them.