The first time I set foot in Penrose High School was on January 17th at 7:23 AM, right in the middle of the school year. It was not by choice. I pleaded and begged for some other option, any other option—home schooling, boarding school, a long stint in the Biodome. But no one gives you options when you’re sixteen. They wrap a blindfold around your head and send you down the plank, smiling and waving as you go. Have a nice fall!
My presumptions about Penrose were mostly right on the money. The whole school smelled of gym socks, sweaty and fresh from the foot. The walls were institutional-beige. So were the endless rows of lockers. The intermittent water fountains were labeled with “out of order” signs. A deafening mob of kids swarmed the main hall, shouting and shrieking with laughter. A large, hand-painted banner— “Go Terrors!”—stretched across the ceiling for about five seconds before some ADD-case took a running jump and pulled it to the ground. The first warning bell of the day was so loud it rattled my teeth, and was followed a tenth of a second later by angry voices barking like drill sergeants. “Let’s go, people! Move it! Move it! Get to class! Now! I said NOW!”
In short, public high school.
But there was one thing I was completely unprepared for that day, and it made the thought of a new life at Penrose almost intolerable. While the school itself was incredibly drab, the student body was dazzling. More specifically, the Penrose girls were dazzling. They were so fashionable, you’d think we were in Manhattan or Beverly Hills, and not Colorado Springs. Plus, these girls were well schooled in the art of being girls—coyly tilting their heads, pulling their shoulders back, constantly playing with their hair.
I’ve never been a girly girl. I wear faded jeans, Converse high tops, flat caps, and men’s blazers. While their hair was sleek and straight and shiny, mine was long and curly, pulled into a messy bun. That morning I felt like a funky little misfit at a Seventeen magazine fashion shoot. These girls were beautiful. And I was as beige as the walls.
Jostled on all sides, I hugged my second-hand leather satchel to me and waded through the crowd. It’s true that you never know how much you love something until it’s gone. At that moment, I desperately missed The Manitou Springs Girls’ Academy, the only school I’d ever known. Though it’s exclusive and insanely expensive, having a mom who taught there meant my education was nearly free. I’d known the same girls since the first grade, little hippies and free spirits, not stuck up like most rich girls. It was a place where you could be yourself and wear whatever you liked. I didn’t know that school could be any other way. But in the past couple of years, after the Big Tragedy hit our family, I started pushing my friends away, becoming more of a loner. Then mom got fired in the middle of the year, and I had to go, too.
After drifting up and down the main hall a few times, I finally found my locker: number 113. Definitely bad luck leftovers. I was busy unloading books from my satchel when I heard a nasally voice beside me.
“Is that your locker?”
The guy was short with a carefully-messed-up-then-lacquered hairdo. His long sleeved shirt was tucked into his jeans, like some kind of corporate manager. He worked the combination of the locker next to mine while shooting annoyed glances my way.
“Are you talking to me?”
He yanked open the door and threw his backpack inside. “Yeah, I’m talking to you. Who else would I be talking to? That locker’s been empty all year.”
I took off my coat, an oversized suede thing my dad had worn back in college, and hung it on the grimy hook. The locker smelled like moldy bread and had hard wads of gum stuck to the inside of the door.
“I know,” I said, “I just thought I’d break into it and leave all of my stuff inside.”
The short kid looked at me like I was crazy. “That’s messed up.”
I made a note-to-self: don’t waste good sarcasm on these people. As I was adjusting a small, magnetic mirror on the inside of the door, I felt a tap on my shoulder. The second I turned around, I was blinded by a camera flash.
When the bright dots on my eyes cleared, I saw a tall guy standing beside the locker to my left, fanning a Polaroid picture in the air. He was thin, and dressed in a long black London Fog overcoat and a checkered trilby hat.
“Name, please.” he said with raised eyebrows. He held a sharpie to the bottom of the picture, ready to write. I responded without thinking.
“Paulette Jordan.”
“Paulette…” he repeated, as if testing it out in his mouth. “Cool name.” He wrote it on the bottom of the picture and added it to a stack on the top shelf of his locker. I could feel my cheeks flush with the compliment. They always give me away.
“I was named after Paulette Goddard, the actress who was married to…”
“Charlie Chaplin,” he chimed in, without a bit of smugness. He shrugged out of his overcoat and draped it over his arm like a grown man at a black tie affair. Underneath the coat, he was dressed like a nostalgic old man. He wore vintage tweed trousers with suspenders, a white button-up shirt, and a waistcoat. There was even an old-timey watch on a gold chain tucked into a little pocket in his waistcoat. It was all quirky as hell, but it worked. I smiled, relieved not to be the oddest ball in the school.
He held out his hand. “I’m Rhodes.”
“Nice trilby,” I said, shaking his hand.
His face brightened. “I like a girl who knows her hats.”
Not wanting to stand there looking like the lost new girl, I went back to arranging my books. “Where did you get a Polaroid?” I asked. “They don’t even make that film anymore, do they?”
Rhodes grinned. “My sister found it on Ebay.”
Just then a very glamorous redhead in high heels, jeans, and a tight V-necked sweater clip-clopped up and opened the locker next to Rhodes. She eyed up his clothes with such contempt, you’d think he’d worn them with the express purpose of pissing her off.
“You look like such a freak,” she said.
I winced and looked away, focusing on lining up my pens in a tidy row on the shelf. But Rhodes didn’t seem to care. He looked her up and down with an expression of withering disdain.
“And you look like the poster girl for genital warts.”
The redhead glared at Rhodes, but he’d already forgotten about her. He hung up his coat and grabbed a couple of books from his locker.
“Don’t go changin’.” he said to me with a wink before slipping into the throng of students.
The redhead gazed into a mirror on her locker door and painted red gloss on her lips. They were so plumped up, I wondered if she was already getting collagen injections. Her spider-lashes blinked over to me, slowly eying up my outfit. She shook her head and smoothed her perfect hair.
“Really, babe, what were you thinking?” she said to her reflection. But I knew she was talking to me.
“Screw you.” I closed the locker and headed out to find my first class.
That whole first day I kept my head down and waited for it to be over. The students may have been gorgeous at Penrose, but the academics were pathetic. Instead of hiking the trails of the Front Range to study the flora and fauna, or peeking over the edge of our school roof to perform experiments in gravity, like we did at The Academy, I sat through class after class with bored students and dead-eyed teachers who no longer believed in anything they were saying.
I was only introduced as a new student in one class, and that was just because they’d run out of desks and had to stop everything and borrow a chair from the library. The teacher made me stand at the front while we waited, and everyone just stared at me.
When the chair finally arrived, the teacher put it next to some Goth chick who had sparked out with her head on her arm. Maybe he thought it was the next best thing to having a desk to myself. I’d never seen a real Goth before. She reeked of cigarettes and patchouli.
She had short, raven-black hair that was starting to get greasy at the scalp. Her body was a human canvas of scars. There were short, horizontal cuts stacked all the way up both calves, and long vertical cuts on her shins. On the inside of her wrist there was a hideously inflamed burn, which appeared to be in the shape of a G. The skin was raised and brownish, except where it had bled and was crusting into a deep scarlet.
After a while, I started to wonder if she was okay. Her skin was bloodlessly pale and as hard as I watched her back, there were no signs of breathing. I started to worry that she’d overdosed on drugs or Nyquil, or whatever it is Goths do for fun. No one else, including the teacher, seemed to care. For all I knew, they’d just leave her slumped over the desk until the janitor hauled her off at the end of the day.
“Hey,” I whispered, hesitantly tapping on her back. “Are you okay?”
There was no response, so I shook her arm. She lifted her shockingly pallid face and glared daggers at me. Her eyes were thickly coated in black makeup and her full lips were chapped under black lipstick.
I held up my hands. “Sorry. Sorry.”
With a nasty look she lowered her face back to her arm. I spent the rest of the class staring at the back of her head, and wondering if this was how I would look after a few more years at Penrose.
At lunchtime, I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting alone in the crowded cafeteria, so I sat in the park across the street. It was cold, and the air had the metallic smell of a snowstorm on the way. Dark clouds were gathering around Pikes Peak and moving quickly into town. My coat was too thin, but I didn’t care. I sat on a cold iron bench, watching a pair of crows pick through a garbage can, and thinking of Dad’s favorite expression: This too shall pass.
After a while, I pulled a paperback from my coat pocket—One Hundred Years of Solitude—which I’d been working my way through. I’d once read a novel where a woman carried a copy of Anna Karenina everywhere she went as a kind of code to others like her, the secret society of readers. Ever since I’d kept a book with me at all times, even though I’d almost never run across any kindred spirits.
The warning bell shrieked in the distance, and I fought the urge to leap up and hurry back across the street. Instead I slouched on the bench and watched a group of Goths collect on the cement stairs of the bandstand nearby. Most sat hunched and miserable, smoking and scowling out at no one in particular. They were not exactly concerned about the bell.
I noticed the girl from my math class sitting among them. She was awake now, squinting blankly into space, the cigarette between her fingers burned to ash. I found her fascinating. She defied every expectation of what a girl was supposed to be, hiding her delicate features under vampire makeup like a defaced porcelain statue.
A tall, skinny guy with a row of silver hoops in each eyebrow and a safety pin piercing each cheek turned on an old-school boom box. It erupted into a guttural roar, and several of the Goths began bobbing their heads, as if there were a beat. The girl came to life, dropping the cigarette and getting to her feet. She walked down the steps and across the cement dance floor. For a moment she stood very still, watching the crows peck at a discarded donut. Suddenly, she grabbed one and gripped its feet. The other Goths whooped with approval. The girl walked back up the stairs to the bandstand platform, holding the enormous black bird over her head. It flapped its wings and made frightened caws, which were drowned out by the loud music. The crow bent its head low and nipped at her hands until a thread of blood trickled down her arm. But still the girl stood like a statue, her vacant eyes fixed on the sky.
There was something jolting about that moment, like a zap of electricity that came straight out of the air. The hairs on my arms prickled and stood on end. I shuddered and looked away. The first flurries of snow were drifting down from the sky. I left the park and crossed the street to the school. Before opening the front doors, I turned back to the park. The girl remained frozen on the bandstand, but the crow had stopped flapping its wings, and just sat quietly on her hand, resigned.
For the first time that day I was relieved to lose myself in the crowd. But even after the last class, when my first miserable day of school finally ended, there were still goose bumps on my skin. And I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was coming.