Sarah Frank Reichard lives in Chicago with her husband, Patrick, and an ever-growing collection of pizza stones in lieu of pets. Her poetry, fiction, and interviews have appeared in Chopper Journal, Otium<http://otium.uchicago.edu>, and Prick of the Spindle <http://www.prickofthespindle.com>. She also writes regularly for nerve.com. You can read more of her work at www.sarahreichard.com.

Formerly Exit 8 (March 20, 2009. Issue 15. The DirtyDirty.)

During English last week one of my girl friends stole thirty ping-pong balls from the gymnasium storage locker and hid them in her pants. Then she scaled the left side of the building and threw them at people on the crosswalk. Everyone thought she was a boy until she answered to the name Rachel.

Outside the classroom people rushed around like there was a war on, but the sub made us complete the lesson before we could run to the hallway. Our voices rang and rang. “When our town acquired more land from the company, they kept the usufruct to pick the oranges they had planted ….”

Later, when facilities confirmed the theft, I couldn’t help but think that Ms. Moira, our homeroom teacher, would have known Rachel from Adam immediately. She’d had her eye on us since freshman year when Rachel and I smacked our skulls together one afternoon during the underwater portion of synchronized swimming practice. The next day Rachel couldn’t remember what she’d had for breakfast and didn’t know where her next class was. She’d had to keep going back to homeroom to check.

Ms. Moira was fond of saying that names were fatal mistakes unless you named yourself. In the three years we’d known her, she addressed us as hey you or just you. She’d never called me Imogen to my face, or Rachel to hers.

This time, though, I imagined that Ms. Moira would have run the stairwell to the roof as fast as her complicated pregnancy would allow and said, Rachel, use your words.

But Ms. Moira was long gone, having calibrated her leave from school so that if her baby was stillborn, she could come back to homeroom. She knew our senior class loved her, despite the pink eye, the chronic absent mindedness, and her seriously floor length hair, much longer than a normal person’s.

* * *

By the time we left English, the hallway smelled like burnt toast. Someone had done the experiment in decay where you dangle a slice of bread over a Bunsen burner until it is completely dry and crisp.

I retrieved my lunch from my locker and met up with Jerome and Caleb in the cafeteria. They had a couple of femur bones from the anatomy lab and were jousting with them. No one knew where Rachel was.

“I might have to go find her,” I sighed.

“And skip history?” Caleb asked, as if I didn’t know what our next class was. He licked his bright red lips in a way that depressed me. You could always tell by Caleb’s face what flavor Kool-Aid his stepmom served with breakfast that morning.

Senior year I had a choice of Bio, band, chorus, swimming, or cello. I chose Bio, dope, swimming, doing nothing, and playing paper football with Rachel and the boys, mostly Jerome and Caleb.

Once Jerome and I started going steady, we hung out with Caleb less, which was fine with me. All he talked about anyway was school, his stepmom, and the froyo machine at his brother’s college dining hall.

“History sucks,” Caleb continued. “I’m on the defense team for mock trial. I represent technology and government. How am I supposed to demonstrate through those areas that mankind deserves to exist?”

Caleb was talking about our history assignment. Our teacher had put the human race on trial. Half the class was assigned to defend, the other to prosecute the “ills of mankind,” except that someone had chalked a big K in front of the ills when Mr. Grady wasn’t looking.

“DEMOCRACY!” Jerome suggested fifteen decibels too loud. He knocked Caleb’s bone to the floor and rushed over to hug me. His breath smelled of Moxie, the Maine state beverage. Jerome liked to do cheers with his can and proudly tell you that he was descended from the soda’s inventor, Dr. Augustin Thompson of Union, Maine, forty miles north of our town.

Caleb shook his head. “The prosecution is just going to say nepotism.”

Once we sat down I tried opening one of the oranges I had brought. I liked to break the rind, releasing a sweet mist into the air. Today Jerome was pressing a pint of Duncan Hines pecan frosting against my lower back. Jerome was always bringing surreal things to eat. Peanut butter and sardine sandwiches. Pigs’ knuckles spread with raspberry Fluff. He ate a goldfish on a dare once. Afterwards I thought I could taste fishy water on his tongue.

“Seriously, Jerome,” I said loud enough for the benefit of the whole table. “One thing we are all overlooking here is how needy you are.”

Jerome smiled. “I’m not worried,” he said and grazed my ear with his lips. “Someone tells me it will work out between us.”

He meant Rachel, but I pretended he was talking about Ms. Moira and her baby.

* * *

The turnpike in this state is being widened and all the exits renamed. I passed a series of new green signs that read:

Port Kennebracken
The only town in the world so named
Now exit 25!

Twenty-five was the mileage from the border, which made sense, but I wondered if Ms. Moira would approve. She had a taste for the old and never threw anything away, even warped fourth-grade pottery. Some weeks she wore the same outfit two days running.

I knew Rachel had walked or hitched to formerly exit 8 (now 25!) where the road regresses and the earth drops away, leaving a huge pit of virgin snow. Our crowd converges there around midnight after traffic slows to snowboard and smoke pot with impunity.

On swim days we did things differently. Jerome’s mom had a pool so Rachel and I sometimes practiced our routines there, forcing our eyes open underwater during the verticals, while Jerome made us food with his mom’s catering equipment. Extra-thick smoothies and eggs cooked on slabs of pink Himalayan salt. There was always something sweet for dessert. Before Jerome was born, his mom had started a wildly popular line of chocolates called Despair.

I took my time walking to the exit, working on the surplus of fruit from my bag. Oranges are fat free and sweet so I ate four and buried the rinds deep in the snow.

Rachel has a way of excluding people with her hair. When I caught up with her at the turnpike, she had it down and loose, in her eyes and face. She stood in the ditch, scuffing the ice with the soles of her tongueless sneakers.

“What’s up,” I said. “Jerome is being so annoying, you wouldn’t believe.”

I told her about the frosting, but the effect was underwhelming. Rachel is the kind of person who, before biting into two pieces of bread, doesn’t look to see if there is any peanut butter in between.

“I have a Maglite flashlight in my room, if that would help,” Rachel suggested. “My mom got me the Maglite for emergencies. She said, you could hit people with it and it would hurt.”

“What?” I stuttered. “No, no, it’s not like that at all.”

In synchronized swimming, you’re not supposed to touch the bottom of the pool. You tread water keeping your waist above the surface. Rachel always seemed to boost to the top with little effort. I imagined that she read paperbacks without cracking the spines.

“I know what it’s like,” said Rachel in the same strident tone in which she had asked, three years before in Sex Ed, if urine from a man would give a positive result on a pregnancy test, and can you have sex with a condom on while taking doxycycline? “Liking Jerome because he likes you.” She pulled a jawbreaker from the front pocket of her slicker. “That’s called settling. Like Bakery Foods and her boyfriend.”

Rachel meant Lucy, who everyone called Bakery Foods since she told a story in French class about a two-yolk pastry she selected in a Paris kiosk that turned out to be a couple of nectarine halves.  

“Yeah, well, Lucy’s boyfriend is not that hot,” I said.

“He must have an enormous penis,” Rachel pointed out, trying to unwrap the hard candy without taking her mittens off.

“You mean an enormous personality,” I said.

“No,” said Rachel. She popped the candy in her mouth. “I don’t.”

We stood a moment giggling and adjusting our scarves against the wind. The sun above us was a small thing, shelved high and frivolous, like one of Jerome’s mom’s fancy confections.

A bit of tire skittered across the hardtop and landed in the soft shoulder of the road. Rachel took a running start and kicked it, smearing all the clean snow. The movement brushed the hair from her face. She wore wire-frame glasses cut like an infinity symbol across her close-set eyes, which I recognized suddenly as Ms. Moira’s.

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

Rachel ignored me. “My mom’s all right. She does a pretty good job taking pictures of me when I want her to,” said Rachel, apropos of nothing. “Sometimes I’d like to grow up from scratch. Kid cereal in two percent milk. I’ll have that recovery now. Thanks.” She kicked the tire and licked her jawbreaker in the same motion. “Do you know what I mean?”

Rachel has ruddy skin, a slight stutter when she speaks. Her jaw clacks together the moment she falls asleep, a great slumber party trick, and her nose appears broken, an old softball injury. Her dad died of lung cancer when she was young and for awhile she lived with her elderly grandmother up north while her mom was giving up oxycontin. Rachel was back in Port Kenn since the summer, but it was hard. Half the time her mom didn’t really know what to do about her only daughter, who was bright but wayward, like static in the air before a storm.

Rachel notices things before most people do. Not rain or hot boys but secret things. Menstrual blood welling in the crotch of some girl’s panties. The permanent strawberry mark on my inner thigh. And she’s smart in a savvy, doesn’t-give-a-crap-about-grades way. In middle school she won one of those essay contests where you get a character named after you in the author’s next book.

“Is this us talking about your cutting class to scale the wall?” I asked finally. “Because hi? I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

Rachel shrugged, pulling at the tassels of her hoodie. “Is it worth it, do you think? Being good?”

I looked at her bloodshot eyes. The cause was dope, chlorine, or both. Our parents never knew the difference. “For the record I don’t think we’re that good,” I said, then thought for a minute. “It’s like synchronized swimming. One point off doesn’t mess up the whole thing you’ve built.”

“You just wanted to use a synchronized swimming analogy.”

“Yeah,” I deadpanned. “I got up this morning and thought I really need to make a synchronized swimming analogy.”

Who should drive by then but – I go over this a lot, even now a week later. It just seemed so strange that Ms. Moira should be heading north on the turnpike at that particular moment and slow down to offer us a ride.

“Well, well, well,” Ms. Moira called out, squinting at us through a crack in the window. A curtain of long, buttery hair obscured most of her face and her belly, but we recognized the green station wagon. She eased the car into the breakdown lane about ten feet from us.

“Hey!” We responded in unison.

“I was buying legal pads and pastries thinking which do I need more?” She held up a box of donuts. “I think I made the right choice.”

* * *

Ms. Moira moonlights on weekends as a secretary at a law firm. She often says the word fast, secretree, as though the profession grew inside her, not a little fetus. It used to make people cringe in class when she talked about her artificial insemination (she’d never married), and how she was at risk for certain chromosomal abnormalities that could cause stillbirth.

Actually, I think most of the class just put the possibility out of mind after awhile, the way you forget to realign the fitted sheet until it inevitably slips off the bed.

That was Ms. Moira’s metaphor, something she read once in The New Yorker about the stress of living while knowing about death. She would nod and bound around the room during homeroom, like a centaur with one madras-colored eye, both halves of her moving differently. She encouraged us to come up with our own metaphors for the human condition.

Caleb suggested the froyo machine getting stuck on the chocolate setting. Bakery Foods said that it was more like forgetting you’d put your face mask on until you’d catch a reflection of yourself looking like a ghost and get freaked out for a second. I thought it was more like ordering tea and ruining it by adding both milk and lemon, which I’d done on more than one occasion. Rachel disagreed. She didn’t find any of these moments scary at all, but funny, and suggested short term memory loss.

Ms. Moira had smiled. The phrase was like a code between them. In the days after the head-smacking accident Ms. Moira and Rachel would leave homeroom together. It was a big production. Ms. Moira would begin by lecturing Rachel about consequences, the duties of being a responsible student, no excuses, etc. Rachel would call Ms. Moira “a tool of the ruling class” under her breath, but still loud enough for everyone to hear, and they would take a walk or bathroom break or get a soda from the vending machine in the school’s basement, just the two of them, and come back breathless and perspiring from the trudge up the stairs.

Before Ms. Moira left on pregnancy leave, our homeroom put on a farewell party for her. Rachel and I even got the synchronized swimming team to sponsor the pizza and ice cream, and instead of cake we had Jerome bring in a bunch of Despair. After the chocolates, Ms. Moira hugged Rachel hard, one hand ruffling the hair on her head, the other exploring the pleated edges of her skirt in a feeling way. When she hugged me there was a static shock in her hands that hit me dead in the face like a cattle prod, and my coat button got caught in her hair.

Before the party I had gone to the mall and bought Ms. Moira a small leather wallet for $38 as a goodbye present. It had a clear ID sleeve with slots for credit cards on both sides and a zipper along the seam. I never gave it to her.

* * *

Ms. Moira coached a mutt off the seat next to her by talking baby talk. That was how she got pink eye, we thought, from the dog that didn’t have a name. I suppose the implication was that she was waiting for it to name itself, somehow. We stood planted until she resumed her natural way of speaking, and then we got into the car.

Rachel, who happened to like dogs, sat up front. I sat in back on top of a box of artificial tears. As we drove, I imagined my hand as a giant machete cutting down all the trees. Rachel let the unnamed dog lick her jawbreaker for a minute, before tossing the candy out the window. Clods of birds broke before us, swooping toward the sky. Ms. Moira remarked on the rattle of the train.

“Like babies cooing,” she suggested, though she might have said something else. I couldn’t hear anything beyond the whoosh of the car and low sounds of Rachel’s gabbing about God knows what.

* * *

Something was missing. I couldn’t concentrate. Being in Ms. Moira’s house felt fraudulent, like stuffing your bra with tissue. Rachel headed straight to the pantry as if she’d been there a thousand times before and pulled down a box of cereal. Ms. Moira was waiting with the milk.

“Say when,” she said.

“When,” Rachel answered dully and began eating. Underneath the slicker, she wore a three quarter length shirt that came to her elbow. Her naked wrists rested easily on the table, among a flurry of papers and heavy law books.

An arm’s length away Ms. Moira was working the toaster.

“Would you like anything?” She asked me.

At Jerome’s we’d have eggs cached in their own velvety whites, bacon gnarled up freshly, a piece of his mom’s Despair for dessert. I wasn’t hungry here, though Rachel was. I watched her discover that the toast was stricken with raisins. She frisked the entire piece before taking a gargantuan bite.

Ms. Moira sat with us. She had raisin toast for me, too. I looked at its open face. The grain had been blackened, then thickly soiled with peanut butter. I don’t care what you think of me, the face seemed to say.

“You must be hungry,” Ms. Moira addressed me again. “It’s freezing out.” She touched her deflated belly and hesitated. I knew what she was about to tell us. Rachel pushed her glasses higher on her nose. Ms. Moira’s glasses. Rachel had known for at least a day. I understood that now. My face grew hot and I could feel my mouth crumble into a frown.

No one said anything. Rachel went for more milk. The door of the fridge made a sucking sound as she opened it. Inside, I saw that all the condiments were neatly lined up with their labels showing. I’d always wanted to be the kind of person who stacked her Tupperware, who kept Q-tips and cotton balls in apothecary jars. Except that I wasn’t. I was disorganized and frail and suddenly in the mood for a world of already named things to accept as passively as possible. I wished to sit with the curds of my ruined tea for a long, long time for nothing other than warmth.