CHAPTER THREE: Sunny
Many days passed before he saw Donati again. But the opera singer’s words no distraction would rescind.
On the first day of school Dante dressed in clothes he thought would be suitable for catching Sunny’s eye: black boots, dark jeans, a red dress shirt. To complete the ensemble he added a leather jacket, though the early autumn weather remained warm.
Would he even see Sunny this year? That was another issue he wondered about. What if she’d moved away over the summer, or transferred to a different school? Like maybe a juvenile detention center, a cruel thought whispered as he walked down Benedict Avenue. It almost made him trip on the railroad tracks. But no, Sunny wouldn’t be in juvie, not at her age. The academic pundits of Norwalk’s school board might recommend her for home education, but they wouldn’t stick her in juvie.
Leaving the tracks behind, Dante walked uphill to Norwood Avenue. Further down it intersected Christie, the avenue of Norwalk Middle School. A double-laned drive—crowded with cars already—led to its single story facade. Groups of noisy kids gathered around the bike racks. Others stood in the parking lot, saying goodbye to their parents. Dante knew from last year that Sunny’s parents drove her to school in a slick Jaguar sedan. He looked for that sedan now, slowing his gait, but could find nothing remotely close. Nor was anything like it turning at the drive.
She’s gone; you know she’s gone.
Ignoring the thought, Dante approached the main doors of Norwalk Middle School. To him its impression was that of a federal prison, with its low rectangular windows set within beige bricks. High hedges protected the glass, giving the whole building a wall of sorts to peek over like a cat on the hunt. Dante did not care about cats on the hunt. This school couldn’t scare him—not anymore. That was last year. Last year he’d been too afraid to even walk on the first day; he’d asked his dad to drive him instead. Last year was sixth grade, the first year of middle school. New building, new teachers, new rules.
This year he walked right to the main door and yanked it wide. Kids, most of them shorter than he, scurried everywhere. Their voices were like snow on a television screen—blah blah blah, zabba zabba zabba. The buzz of crazed insects. Danta walked through them as best he could, trying not to step on any toes. He already knew his homeroom number—204. It waited at the end of the hall, an open door, a tall, smiling teacher wearing a beard. Dante remembered the teacher’s name as Mr. Wolfe. Or Wolfton or Wolfley, something along those lines. He was watching the kids at their lockers, his round, furry face a selling point: I’m friendly, I’m helpful, you can trust me.
The lockers popped open, slammed closed. A smell of pine cleaner and new books hovered everywhere. Mr. Wolfe spied Dante, said hello. Dante said hello right back.
“Your locker is number sixteen,” the teacher said.
“Thank you, Sir.”
Where is she where is she where is she?
Dante went to his locker. A few more familiar faces from last year said hello. None of them had red hair. None of them were even girls.
Now he was stopped in front of his locker. A black combination dial regarded him blandly. Dante looked back at it. Of course, he had forgotten to get the combination from Mr. Wolfe.
∞
Things did not get any better at 7:30, when homeroom began. Hoping to rub elbows with various members of Sunny’s trouble-making clan, Dante took a seat in back of the room. An empty green chalkboard hung at his shoulder. A row of sleeping Amiga computers, their faces also blank, kept it company. There came the squeak of chairs, the slapping open of notebooks, a few coughs. Students were settling in. Mentally preparing themselves for day one at NMS. Looking from one seat to the next, Dante felt his heart sink lower, lower, lower. None of the girls he saw looked like Sunny. Nope. Sunny just wasn’t here.
“Okay then,” said Mr. Wolfe from in front of the class, “welcome back to anther year.”
Moans and groans greeted this. It made Wolfe laugh.
“Yes, I know how excited you all are. I am Mr. Wolfe, the seventh grade English teacher. Some of you will see me later today. Those of you who won’t have presumably been assigned to Mrs. Durkey.”
More moaning and groaning, some laughter. Mrs. Durkey’s rather unfortunate married name meant that a lot students called her Mrs. Turkey behind her back. Last year, Sunny had called it right to her face.
“Now let’s do the roll call,” Wolfe went on, “shall we?”
Over the next seven minutes he called everyone’s name neatly, soberly, alphabetically. His bearded smile never wavered. Dante’s lip tightened when he got to the D section, but Sunny Desdemona’s name was not cast. A hot, unreasonable anger toward Mr. Wolfe rose in Dante’s gut. For whatever reason, he was sure that Sunny’s name was on the English teacher’s roll card, but just to be mean, he skipped over it. Somehow, he knew Dante wanted her here, needed her here, so he skipped her.
Stupid, the whispering thought said.
And yes, Dante knew it was exactly that, but he couldn’t help wondering.
She’s not even here! Do you see her here?
Someone knocked at the door. Mr. Wolfe went to it, stepped into the hall. Somebody else—another adult—had summoned him, but Dante couldn’t see who it was. The doorframe blocked his view. He tried to listen to their voices, make out what they were saying. There was laughter, something about cafeteria lunches. Then Mr. Wolfe returned to the room.
“Sorry about that,” he told everyone. Dante noticed that now his smile looked awkward, slanted, a little off. “We have a slight change in attendance.” The slanted smile faced the door. “Sunny?”
And in walked the girl of Dante’s dreams.
She wore black. Her skirt and blouse were like midnight struck upon an open blaze, her jewelry the stars, the green of her eyes a furious shimmer set above the chiseled cold features of her face.
Her boots, gold-buckled, clicked daintily across the tiles, until Mr. Wolfe’s desk arrested her progress. “Where would you like me to sit?” she asked, as if the teacher were stupid.
Mr. Wolfe either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Just find an empty desk,” he answered pleasantly.
Turning on her heel, Sunny approached the class. Dante wondered if anyone else noticed her sneer, or the way her nails, lacquered red, fanned at the belt of her skirt like bloodied claws. Click…click…click the buckled boots went on the floor, coming closer and closer to Dante’s desk. The heels must have been an inch high, yet Sunny was still short. A slender sprite with red hair. A deviant pixie.
The girls moved sideways a little to let her pass; the boys turned their eyes away. No one, it seemed, had the courage to look at those icy green eyes. Except Dante.
Perhaps that was why Sunny chose the desk right next to his. In one delicate move, she placed her bottom on the seat, crossed her bare legs, and flashed Dante the deadliest smile he had ever seen.
“Okay if I sit here?” she asked.
Dante could only nod. Her perfume smelled of baked cinnamon, and the sound of her breath felt good enough to drink.
∞
That first week took a long time to get through—much longer than five days. A number of issues contributed to the drag. Unseasonably hot weather, piles of homework, boring teachers. On Wednesday Dante stopped at his locker just before lunch, only to find that its combination no longer worked. Over and over he dialed the correct numbers; over and over, when he pulled the release lever, nothing happened. Hungry and thirsty (especially thirsty—the temperature outside had struck ninety degrees by then), Dante began to despair. If it really wouldn’t open, he would need to go to the office and report the problem.
It really wouldn’t open. Dante went to the office. First the principal’s secretary didn’t believe him, then the principal didn’t believe him. Then the school janitor was called, and everyone went to locker sixteen. The janitor dialed the same numbers Dante had been using for two days now. He pulled the latch. The locker popped right open.
Thursday came and it happened again. Dante twisted the dial to the left, the right, the left, just as he had all week. He pulled the latch. Nothing happened.
“No way,” he moaned.
The hallway was empty. Everyone else had gone to lunch. Dante tried the combination again. When it didn’t work, he punched a dent in the door.
“Having trouble, handsome?” Sunny Desdemona asked from somewhere.
Dante could not have turned faster without swirling his cranial fluid into parfait cream. A quiet row of neighboring lockers met his gaze; a broken pencil lay on the floor. There was nobody and nothing else to see.
“If this happens again,” the principal told him ten minutes later, “I’ll have to issue a demerit.”
“But sir, it never opens when—“
“Stop it, Dante. No more tricks.” Here the principal smiled to show they could still be friends. “Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How did that dent get in the door?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
The locker behaved itself on Friday. Over the weekend Dante went to see the Indians with his dad. It was the team’s penultimate year at old Municipal Stadium. From a pair of box seats behind home plate, they watched the Indians beat the Mariners 5-4. Dante bought a hot dog in the fifth inning. A woman vendor with red hair and green eyes sold it to him. Then Carlos Baerga came to bat. With the count at 3-2, Dante heard a voice from many rows off call his name. He turned—and there stood the vendor at the mouth of an exit tunnel. Her hair blew in a wind that wasn’t there, her teeth shined. And even though the tunnel was dark, her green eyes blazed like the Great Lakes sun.
∞
His locker door got stuck again on Monday. Rather than further distress the school principal about it, Dante decided to go straight to lunch. This was a mistake, though not one he could blame on the locker. The hot weather made sleeping difficult, and he had not been able to crawl out of bed soon enough this morning to brown bag a lunch. Now he faced a long line in the cafeteria listening to nerds talk about computer games.
And there they were: a sweaty row of bespectacled kids standing like section eight soldiers along the east wall. Short kids with bad skin and weird hair, grinning, batting titles like Super Mario Kart and Wolfenstein 3D back and forth. Dante listened to them without much interest, though some reminded him of Timothy, the boy he’d met in this very line last year, and who had not returned from Christmas break.
He spotted Sunny eating with a group of girls and hoped to get a seat decent enough to see her legs under the table.
“What are ya eatin’ today, kid?” a fat kitchen woman asked, knocking him from his reverie.
Dante went with the usual slop: coleslaw, greasy chicken, stale peas. Two minutes later he was sitting directly across from Sunny. The view it gave suggested intervention on a divine scale. She wore a red skirt with a black belt. Her bare legs were crossed. Dante could see the freckles on her knees. He tried to take a bite of coleslaw and missed, splatting it on his shirt.
At that moment Sunny stopped talking to her friends. She looked directly at Dante. A smile tugged the corner of her razor-blade lips. He was about to feign ignorance—to pretend to clean the coleslaw—when he saw the girl’s legs come uncrossed and part just slightly enough to give a brief, innocent glance of black underpants. What little appetite Dante had for food immediately died a disgraceful death. His eyes dropped to his plate. When they found the courage to look at Sunny again, he saw that her attention had gone back to her friends as if nothing at all were unusual.
Calling himself two hundred kinds of idiot, he stood up. With luck there would be just enough time to clean his shirt before classes started again. Except he didn’t want to use the main bathroom next to the cafeteria—there would surely be too many kids in there who would laugh and call him coleslaw boy or slaw shirt for the rest of the year. No need for that, thank you very much.
He checked to see if any teachers were looking, then snuck away from the cafeteria. A short hallway led to another longer, much darker corridor. At the far end lay the girls’ detention room. Trying to look casual, Dante proceeded towards it. With every step the light became dimmer. Painted walls surrendered their cheerfulness, bleeding into beige and brown. NMS’s worst behaved girls—Sunny included—spent a great deal of their time down here. While on detention they were forbidden to leave the wing, even to use the restroom. So of course this wing had a restroom of its own. It stood at the very end of the hall, where the shadows were darkest, and a dead-end trophy case—empty—hung from cobwebbed masonry like a looted coffin.
Dante’s footsteps slowed as he approached it. For some reason he felt it necessary to observe silence. The darkness perhaps commanded it. He looked left into an empty room with chairs put on desks. No girls were on time-out today. There wasn’t even a teacher nearby pretending to work. Only Dante haunted the hall. To the right was a pitch-black passageway. Here was where he needed to go. It led to the bathroom, where there were sinks for washing. Feeling around for a light switch, Dante stepped inside. But it was hard to see. Every light in the wing had been turned off, as if the school had decided to abandon it for demolition. Suddenly Dante imagined a huge explosion, and the black face of a wrecking ball crashing through the concrete. His death would be quick but severe. A screaming chaos.
You’re being stupid again, he thought.
Yes, but…
The face of the wrecking ball would be blank but angry somehow. Determined. And oh, the deafening sound it would make.
His fingers found the switch, clicked it. A weak fluorescent bulb reluctantly came to life. It didn’t take long for Dante to wish it had stayed dead. Rather than push away his demons, it brought them closer. A long mirror that barely looked real hovered in the gloom. It showed him toilet stalls with crooked doors he did not have the courage to open. A row of sinks with rusty pipes. Strange graffiti.
He went to the sinks. There was no soap. He splashed some cold water on his shirt, then tore a towel from a broken dispenser. The stain persisted though. Even in the dark he could see it. His face was a different matter. Here the mirror seemed reluctant to give a clear picture. Subtly, as if old, deft fingers had mistaken his face for a lump of clay, his reflection kept changing. Here came a sickly old man with one foot in the grave, his eyes like sinkholes. Now a boy with hypertrichosis appeared, staring through hair thick as a dog’s. The boy seemed to want out of the mirror. He seemed at any moment ready to change places with Dante.
“Bloody Mary,” Dante said.
An old, grade-school memory flooded his mind. The girls at Pleasant Elementary used to tell stories about a witch who lived in one of the bathroom mirrors. To see her you first had to be alone with the lights off. Then you stood in front of the glass and chanted Bloody Mary five times.
“Bloody Mary,” he said again.
On the fifth chant, the witch would appear…and you would disappear. Or so the story went. Fourth grade girls in 1989 loved to tell it. One girl, Cloris Fanning, was even said to have dared the challenge, and died.
“Bloody Mary.”
The boy in the mirror looked back. He was no longer hairy. Just a boy. Just Dante Torn, twelve years old, a kid in the seventh grade.
“Bloody Mary.”
The bathroom light flickered. Something—a cockroach maybe—made a noise in one of the stalls. A cockroach, yes. Or perhaps the snicker of an old, old woman.
Dante closed his eyes. “Bloody Mary.”
And when he opened them, a girl stood in the mirror. Her eyes were glowing and her face dripped with blood. “BOO!” she screamed.
It was enough to make Dante scream back. Then he nearly fainted against the sinks. The cold tiles turned to ice beneath his feet. He slipped, seizing wildly for something to break his fall. His hand hit the mirror and broke a chip from it.
Now the girl began to laugh. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh some more. The music of her insanity filled the bathroom, getting louder with every step she took towards Dante. Now he noticed her hair—wild tufts of it sticking every which way. And her eyes, which shined like bullets left over from a murder.
And now her face. Of course he could now see her face. She was so close—only one step away, in fact. And still laughing.
At last Dante began to laugh too. “You got me good,” he said. “Sincerely.”
“Yeah!” the girl managed. It seemed she would never get herself under control.
Not that it mattered any more to Dante. He kept right on laughing with her, and had a teacher not finally heard them and arrived to investigate, he and Sunny Desdemona might have gone on laughing through every end of lunch school bell in the known universe.