The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [74]
WHEN MARIA RETURNED to school the following week, she went to her classes and ignored the stares of the students who often regarded her with less sympathy than awe, wanting to involve themselves in the fanfare surrounding such a tragedy. In the past, there had been much she hated about her life—school, her classmates, her summer job—and things she loved: mostly singing, but also her parents, the thought of whom now filled her with guilt and regret as she remembered what she had done to exclude her mother from the trip to New York. It made her feel reluctant to do anything but float through the day somewhat aimlessly, like a fallen leaf in the wind. There were those, she knew, who detected this change in her and tried to console and reassure her. Her aunt and uncle and grandmother spoke to her about God; Kathy Warren, who drove her to the mall and helped her pick out new clothes, encouraged her to sing; Anna Prus, who called from New York, prodded Maria to describe the most mundane details of her day. Maria did not resist these conversations but found herself saying things to please her audience and then doing quite the opposite, such as when she told Kathy and Anna that she was starting to practice when in reality she would sit in her room and absently stare at the Indian-head nickel her father had given to her. It was not a malevolent form of lying—she said these things with a vague intention to follow through—but a resistance to returning to her old self that she ultimately had no desire to overcome.
There were implications to this change at school, where her former, monolithic disdain for her classmates was also something she no longer had the energy to uphold, particularly when she was the center of so much perverse attention. A pudgy girl named Rhonda, who sat next to Maria in the back of her math class, one day invited her out to the smoking area, and Maria shrugged and went along, and didn’t really mind when Rhonda taught her how to inhale and hold the smoke in, so that it made her throat and lungs burn and her stomach queasy. Nor did she refuse when Rhonda—who wore black eyeliner and sometimes smoked her cigarettes through a long filter like rich people in old movies—asked Maria to go to a party that weekend. It wasn’t that Maria particularly liked Rhonda, but she didn’t hate her, either, so it was just easier to tag along and listen to her pronouncements about how most people were stupid, selfish losers. They went to the house of some kid whose parents were away or upstairs, and although Maria didn’t say more than a word to anyone—except a few to Rhonda, who periodically appeared with things to smoke or drink—she liked that nobody hassled her about singing or anything else from her past or (former) future life. She sat on a windowsill, all but invisible in the dark, waiting for the next thing to carry her away.
There was a boy—Joey Finn—who like Rhonda was a freak and sometimes smoked with them after math class. He lived down the street from Maria’s new house and was famous for having convinced his parents to let him install in their basement “den” four couches—one on each wall—a television, a two-hundred-gallon fish tank with a pair of oscars that made short work of goldfish, and a stereo with two speakers, each the size of a small car. Maria started going to Joey’s after school and learned to get high; once she even dropped acid and watched the massive subwoofers morph into faceless lips mouthing the words to The Dark Side of the Moon. Usually there were other kids around, but one day Maria was the only one, and when Finn sat next to her on the couch and started to rub his hand up and down her leg, she didn’t stop him, and soon enough he was kissing her, and even though there was a part of her that didn’t want to kiss him back, his more obvious desire easily outweighed her reluctance, so that she didn’t really mind when he pulled