Juniper Lemon's Happiness Index Read online

  Please, Heather. If I could just know enough to pass it on to the guy (girl)—or maybe give it to you to deliver?—you wouldn’t even have to tell me who it was. This might be the last thing I can do for Cam. You don’t know what that would mean to me.

  Thanks,

  Juniper

  I spend an hour debating whether or not to ask about Lauren in the message. In the end, I decide against it. This is about my sister, not Heather’s; I don’t want any weirdness with Lauren to be a reason for Heather not to answer me.

  I suck it up and hit SEND.

  When I lean back in my chair, it’s already dark out. Guess I’d better do today’s Index card before I forget like yesterday’s.

  Sliding out the box from under my bed, I tick back to 66, pull it, and begin my list of highs and lows for the day:

  66

  Happiness: 3

  Wintergreen (+).

  Dickens humor (+).

  Ms. Jacobson (–).

  Heather: possible YOU lead? (+).

  Then I hold the card out to review.

  66. It’s been sixty-six days since I stopped dating my Index cards, and started numbering them. Or rather—since I numbered them all. I used to date them as I went, but after the accident, “July 5” didn’t feel right for a heading; it suggested that nothing had changed. So I started counting, and labeled every last card in the box to remind myself what had.

  Cam would not be pleased that I’m using the cards to mark the days since her death. She’d see it as the ultimate negative, a kind of counter to what the Index was supposed to even be. Then again, she knew I was no Ms. Optimism; I’ve included negatives in my entries almost as long as I’ve been keeping them. If Camie was queen of the bright side, I’m the un-sugared plum fairy: champion of reality, dosing bad with good. Sometimes unsweetened means raw, but isn’t it more truthful that way?

  I could be counting just negatives.

  All at once I feel worn through—like all the things that don’t show on my face have been gnawing at my bones from inside.

  Returning to the box, I sort back through the cards to put 66 away—only to realize at 64 that I still haven’t filed yesterday’s.

  For the love of—

  I unzip my school bag, heft out the Dickens tome I put it in, and open to the very back.

  Except, when I get to the space between the final pages and the hardback cover, the card I took to school this morning isn’t there.

  It.

  Isn’t.

  There.

  Okay; no problem. I probably just tucked it in somewhere else.

  But a page-by-page inspection, and then a rapid flip-through, and then a shakedown by the spine reveals that not only is 65 nowhere within chapters 58 or 59; it is nowhere inside the book.

  I check my backpack. One by one I fly through my other books, panic clawing up my throat. Nothing. Not in my binders. Planner. Notebooks. When there are no books left I wrench my backpack open wide and plunge my hands into the bottom, groping, and finally lift it by the straps and dump it onto the bed. Pens, pencils, makeup, keys, and a pouch with change tumble out in a heap.

  But no index card.

  I drop the bag with the rest of the mess, reeling.

  Suddenly I’m not very tired anymore.

  Falling

  Once there was a girl who made a wish in anger. She didn’t mean it, but that didn’t matter, because at that very moment a star was falling and heard her and listened.

  When her wish came true, the girl wanted nothing more than to pick up the pieces of that star and glue them together, put it back in the sky. I didn’t want this, she pleaded—first silently, then aloud, and then to any force that might be listening. Take it back.

  But a star could only fall.

  The girl couldn’t unsay the wish, so she tried to make up for it. She did as many good things as she could find to, stacked and piled them high together, tried to climb them like a ladder to the moon. But even on tiptoe, she could never quite reach the place where the star had been. Not that it mattered; even if she replaced it, what was to keep it there?

  A star could only fall.

  She began to dream of falling: not of falling herself, but of holding in hand that which was precious to her and then watching it slip through her fingers. She saw it fall from a cliff edge, down a canyon, off slippery boat rails into the sea. Down, down, down it always plunged into darkness.

  Every time she tried to hold tighter, to dig her nails into the other girl’s hands for purchase—

  But gravity was always stronger.

  A star could only fall.

  - 67 -

  I can’t look for my card the next morning; the cafeteria, where I last took out Great Expectations and I’m certain I must’ve dropped 65, is busy before school and there’d be too many eyes. But when possibilities make me sweat through first period—What if someone like Morgan found it? What if she held it over me, or worse, gabbed, and it got back to Mom somehow? What if Mom blamed me?—I know I have to do something. My name may not appear on the card, but how many have lost a sister lately? It wouldn’t take a genius to trace it back to me. And people talk.

  I can’t let that secret get out.

  Although I don’t get to search for it that morning, between classes I manage to track down Fairfield’s greatest resource.

  “Hello, Juniper.”

  He doesn’t even look up from his laptop when I approach his corner in the cafeteria.

  “Sponge.”

  Lawrence “Sponge” Torres is a local legend. A fellow junior, this formerly home-schooled, neon-spectacled loner has an eagle eye and an inhuman capacity for detail. His talents were discovered when, on Fairfield’s opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream two years back, the kid playing Oberon ran offstage and lost his lunch. That was when Sponge, then just Lawrence, had left his place at the control booth, climbed up on stage, and surprised everyone by filling in and finishing out the show for him.

  “I thought you’d never read the play?” the drama teacher famously asked him after closing curtain.

  “I haven’t,” then-Lawrence answered.

  But he had done sound and lights for several dress rehearsals, and for his absorbent mind, that had been enough.

  “That kid is a sponge,” the same teacher commented when later interviewed about the incident.

  The nickname fit—and stuck.

  Nowadays, Sponge is known for a wider range of abilities: memorization, reading people, seeing everything in a room or a crowded scene at once. He’s a radar for trivia: who is wearing what, what is in whose locker, where people go during lunch and what they most often buy, the number of people or cars in a parking lot. He can place quotes in an instant, tell you your crush’s phone number, or even say whether or not you are lying.

  For these and other reasons, many avoid Lawrence Torres. Like maybe he’ll take in who they’re with or what they’re doing one Wednesday and someday use that to incriminate them. But Sponge doesn’t side with good or evil.

  Mainly, he works for Reese’s Pieces.

  “How’d you know it was me?” I ask.

  “Footsteps,” he says, typing, not lifting his eyes from the screen. “No one else is that purposeful at nine in the morning. Plus, I heard the crinkle. You always come prepared.”

  It isn’t the first time I’ve visited. I once asked Sponge how to spell a hot exchange student’s name on a dare from Lauren, and just last March needed Camie’s locker number so I could deck out the space for her birthday.

  I slide into the seat across from him. “I need to know something.”

  Sponge sticks out his hand. When I deposit the bag I bought on the way over he actually looks up from his screen a moment and smiles. Then he tears the package, tilts a few Pieces into his mouth, and resumes typing. “What can I do for
you, Juniper?”

  “I need to know when school trash and recycling are picked up.”

  The typing stops. Sponge blinks at me. “The trash?”

  “Yes. And recycling. You do know when they’re collected, don’t you?”

  “You mean, like when the janitor empties them?”

  “I mean, when trucks come and empty the dumpsters out back.”

  Sponge narrows his eyes. I can see the analysis pistons at work.

  “Tuesday,” he says. “Tuesday mornings.”

  Finally some luck. That means I have till next week to recover my card.

  I try not to look too relieved. “At what time?”

  Sponge’s eyes remain watchful. “Around five.”

  I nod my thanks, and get up to leave.

  “May I ask why?”

  I stop. Sponge is as good for confidentiality as any doctor or priest, but even so, the whole point of my visit is to prevent anyone from finding out. Especially someone who would remember.

  “It’s personal,” I say.

  Sponge says nothing. Then he just shrugs and throws back a few Pieces, returning to work. I adjust my backpack and turn to go, but after a few steps pivot back.

  “Sponge . . .”

  “Yeah?” He doesn’t look up.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know if . . .” I let the sentence fade, then decide there is nothing to lose. “If my sister was . . . dating anybody, would you? This last year, I mean?” Sponge isn’t infallible, but if anyone might’ve noticed a secret relationship at Fairfield, it’s him.

  “Dating anybody?”

  His expression is strange. Is that a blush on his brown cheek? Oh my god—Sponge is in International Club. So was Cam. What if they hit it off, and—?

  But no; Sponge’s mouth pulls to the side. I decide he is just surprised, and considering.

  And I’m too eager to find YOU.

  After a long pause—so long, I adjust my backpack, check my watch, and am about to write it off:

  “She had flowers in her locker on Valentine’s Day.”

  I plant my feet again. “Flowers?”

  “White ones. Lilies.”

  Camie’s favorite.

  I nod. “Thanks. Let me know if you remember anything else.”

  “Keep the goods coming and I will.” Sponge raises the bag of Reese’s Pieces to me, already half emptied.

  ∞

  Running late from my detour, I move a little faster through Main Hall to my next class. Still, I can’t help scanning the row of lockers where Camie’s used to be, imagining a white bouquet inside one of them and who might’ve left it.

  I am trying to recall which was hers when there’s a gasp behind me.

  It happens so fast, I’m not even sure what comes next: the other gasps, the bang of metal on metal, or the many-grained shhhhhhhhh that scatters forth from somewhere like poured cereal. I spin to look, and by the time the rain settles, everyone is staring at the landslide of Hershey’s Kisses and sugar packets that has just spewed itself onto the floor from an open locker. A last few trickle down and roll off the heap.

  The girl who stands in front of it grows as scarlet as her hair.

  Kody.

  Across the hall, someone snickers. I glance up in time to see Morgan Malloy’s sneer before somebody else laughs, and then those closest join in, and then the whole hall explodes or pretends not to notice, which is worse. Some even applaud.

  The bell rings. The crowd disperses without offering to help.

  When the rest have gone, Kody kneels to pick out her books. Then she stands and squeezes them to her.

  She runs without wiping her face.

  ∞

  I should’ve said something. I should’ve helped Kody, or told Morgan off, or at least done something about the mess while Kody was probably crying her eyes out in the bathroom. Camie would’ve.

  Things I didn’t make right today: +1.

  “Okay, everyone,” Ms. Gilbert calls when she’s finished taking roll for Art I. “Help yourselves to an apron, then come up front.”

  I follow her direction and unfold a smock that looks like a handkerchief a car blew its nose in. This is supposed to keep me from getting messy?

  Ms. Gilbert opens a block of clay. “Now.” She works a string through the slab as though it were a giant stick of butter, lopping off a portion. “Our first unit this term is ceramics. Today we will be doing practice throws—and I emphasize practice, because it tends to take a few before you get the hang of it. But if you stick with it, a month from now I guarantee you’ll have some quality pieces like the ones I pulled from storage to show you today.”

  She gestures at the rows of warehouse shelves behind her. An assortment of ceramic odds and ends fill the first two, a third one bare—probably for future projects.

  “Okay? So let’s get started. Your assignment today is four practices, so the first thing you’ll want to do is divide your block into quarters. Then ball them.”

  She demonstrates with expert quickness, converting her block into four malleable balls before placing the first on the wheel. The wheel begins to turn, and, wetting her hands in a bowl of muddied water, Ms. Gilbert attaches the lump to its surface.

  When she pulls her palms back, they are slick with brown.

  “After that,” she continues as the lump spins and spins, “it’s just a matter of shaping and pulling the clay by guiding it with your hands. Observe.” She makes a wide, angled cup with her palms and lightly braces the spinning mass. Rapidly the clay shoots up, rising through her open grip. Then, before the class can even finish marveling, she presses one wet hand into the other, closing from the top, and funnels the hill she’s made back down. I forget to be grossed out by my smock.

  It’s like magic.

  She combs the mud up and down; makes its girth blossom and shrink; opens a vortex in the middle for a bowl. Lastly, Ms. Gilbert shows us how to stretch the clay until it breaks: wobbles and folds and spins out into a sad, limp ruin.

  Breaking, she tells us, is good: It is the only way to learn.

  Then it’s our turn.

  Following Ms. Gilbert’s example, I place a ball in my wheel’s center and pat it down into a round. Then I wet my hands and start it spinning.

  Schloop.

  The clay is cold. I watch, fascinated, as at my slightest touch, the mud elongates and shrinks, widens and narrows, hollows and spreads itself into a bowl. I cup my hands and squeeze, opening my grasp so the clay will rise through it. The mass moves up, up, stretching beyond my hands into a cup, a vase, a tower—

  There is a sudden sucking sound. The tower withers into flap.

  And then the mud on my hands is red, and the thing slipping through my fingers is a lifeless face.

  “Juniper? Are you all right?”

  I realize I am standing. Ms. Gilbert and the whole class are staring, and I have the vague impression I may have just screamed.

  “I . . .”

  My hands are wet. The room is swimming. Red drips from my palms and fingertips.

  No—brown.

  Clay brown.

  “I think I’d better go to the nurse’s office.”

  ∞

  The first thing I remember is a dry, cracked feeling beneath my nails. Someone had done a quick rub of my hands, wrists, and forearms, but hadn’t been able to reach the deeper places under my fingernails. The edges, I remember, were red. Tulip red. When I saw the color I began to feel the cake of it on my skin, crimson and brown licking up to my elbows, and I knew, even before they told me, what had happened.

  I got up and started scrubbing.

  Now the water runs clear into a white sink, as it did then, and swirls down an indifferent drain. Now, as then, I am still scrubbing long after the color, tears, and soap bubbles have passed.
>
  ∞

  I attempt to withdraw from art.

  “Says here you’ve already changed a class,” says the cloying admin who answers the window during lunch. And it’s true; I switched out choir for French this morning.

  “Yes,” I start to explain. “But—”

  “One class change allowed. After that we call home for confirmation. Would you like me to call now?”

  “Um,” I say.

  She doesn’t.

  But administration does, apparently, get in touch with Ms. Gilbert, because in the middle of history, I get a note from her saying that we can discuss alternatives later, but as for now I remain in her class, I should complete the day’s assignment—and sooner, rather than later.

  After school, she suggests.

  Today.

  ∞

  When final bell sounds, it’s a good fifteen minutes before I can drag myself back to the studio. I can do it, I tell myself. I can be done in half an hour. What is three more throws? Nothing.

  Just don’t think of the accident.

  “Ms. Gilbert?”

  The door is propped open. I find a sign-in sheet taped to it with a note: Out at a meeting, but the studio is open! Leave throws on second shelf please.

  Guess that’s my cue.

  I write my name down and shuffle inside. The place is empty. It’d almost be peaceful, if not for my lost card hanging over me. I wish I could be looking for 65 now—but if I don’t make an effort, Ms. Gilbert will probably call the Lemon house herself. What would Dad think if he knew I’d given up on singing and art?

  With a steeling breath, I return to my station. This time, afraid of seeing red, I have to psych myself up to make my wet hands meet clay again. Even then, it’s a few minutes more before I manage to keep them there.

  Mercifully, when I finally get it, the rest comes easily: I attach my first ball to the wheel. Once it’s fixed, I manipulate my hands so that the flattened round moves up, then down; widens, then narrows; shapes itself around a well I open in the middle with my fingers. On this last maneuver, however, I comb the brim out too far and the lip, already thinned, bursts and the bowl deflates.