SEPTEMBER 25, 2009

My mom thinks I am insane for working in the attendance office for a fourth year. But attendance is like band. It is a place to be. Also, I like what you find out when you’re an aide. Such as who has an appointment every week with the orthodontist or the speech therapist. Also who has to go to AA meetings or check in with their probation officer. And, since I work fifth period, right after “B” lunch, and hand out tardy slips, I know who spends lunch getting high or having sex. It is a closed campus except for seniors with permission, so theoretically nothing like that can happen. But, as Twyla used to say, “That’s why God invented bathrooms.” And, in her case, Dumpsters, and prop rooms, and cars with tinted windshields. But then, Twyla was not ever what you’d call discreet.

Thinking about Twyla makes my heart hurt. I remember this one time in seventh grade when she called me up late Friday and asked if I would help her TP her house. Her own house. Twyla had gotten too weird for me by that time. She’d started cutting herself, and talked not about the tattoos she was planning to get, but the sleeves of tattoos she was planning to get. But even if we had still been friends, I wouldn’t have helped her. It made me too sad to think about anyone sneaking into her own front yard and throwing toilet paper around so that it would look like her friends or, even more ridiculous, her boyfriend had wrapped her house. But Twyla went ahead and did it all by herself.

Most parents, the second they saw all that toilet paper drooping out of their trees, would have gotten their kid out of bed in the middle of the night to clean it up. Not Twyla’s mom. Not Dori. She was probably proud of the streamers of toilet paper hanging down from the tall sycamore trees. Probably thought it was a bold declaration of the slob-queen housecleaning style she and my mom bonded over. As if the warped card table left out from a garage sale she’d had months ago, and the deflated husk of an ancient wading pool, and the acrylic painting she’d taped over a broken-out windowpane weren’t enough clues. So the Charmin was just left there to blow in the breeze all weekend.

Sunday night, it rained.

Monday, after school, I did what I always did and waited until the very last minute to get on the bus. Then I acted all distracted, and pretended that I was trying to find something in my backpack and that I didn’t see Twyla, sitting all the way in the back, waving wildly at me. I grabbed the first open seat as close to the front as I could manage. We always passed Twyla’s house on the way home. That day, though, before we even reached her house, a murmur passed through the bus and kids moved over to the windows on the side that faced it.

The rain the night before had made the toilet paper clump together into lumps of gray papier-mâché. Someone—I didn’t turn around to see who—yelled out, “Hey, Twyla, nice job on the wrapping!”

Everyone laughed. They all knew. Or just made the obvious guess that Twyla had wrapped her own house. I laughed with them. I had to. If I hadn’t everyone would have assumed that I had helped Twyla. That I was still her friend. That night was the first time I unlatched the screen on my window and sneaked out of the house. I took the long pole with the hook on the end of it that Mom used to clean the fan in the great room with me, went over to Twyla’s house, and cleared off as much of the TP as I could reach.

I get the same cringing, burning-with-shame feeling I had on the bus passing Twyla’s house when I think about how I’d held up my little bottle of water and waved it at Tyler like it was some secret lover’s signal. It was clear from the way he’d looked right through me that if he’d ever given me a second thought, it was, “What is the deal with that sketchy stalker girl?”

Who cared, though, really? I wanted to get out of band and he helped me do that. That’s all that is important. That’s all I really care about.

It’s Friday. Friday is a big day for the Jims ’n’ Jays crowd—the noontime equivalent of the Wake ’n’ Bake morning tardies—named in honor of their lunch favorites, Slim Jims and joints. Miles Kropp, a guy I’d written lots of slips for, meandered in. We always acted like we didn’t know each other, even though he’d been part of Twyla’s stoner-emo-goth group since sixth grade. His eyes, rimmed in thick black liner, are rabid-bat red. He stands on the other side of the attendance counter, not saying a word.

“Do you need a tardy slip?” I finally ask.

“Hu-u-u-h?” He makes a big deal out of slurring the word and saying it real slow.

I write his name at the top of the slip, the last one on my pad, and ask, “Reason for tardiness?”

“Huh?”

“We’ll just say ‘personal.’ ”

“Yeah. Right. Cool. Per-suh-nul.” He says it in a dreamy, sleepy way. “Like I’m a null person.” His giggle reminds me of Twyla. So does the way he is proud of himself, just like Twyla always was when she was high and expected me to be shocked and outraged but secretly impressed and jealous.

He leaves and the office is empty. Miss Olivia hasn’t gotten back from lunch yet. When she does, she’ll listen to all the attendance messages, then send me out to pick up the kids whose parents have called in asking for them to be excused for doctor’s appointments or to talk to the reps visiting from colleges. Today it is Hendrix and Carnegie Mellon.

I need more tardy slips and am almost out of permissions, so I go to Miss Olivia’s desk. I am the only one she allows near her desk, since it contains the precious slips that she keeps under lock and key. Miss Olivia is obsessed with making sure that no student ever sneaks out of so much as one class. She still talks about a senior two years ago who’d managed to steal her pad of slips and get three of his friends out of class before she traced the stolen slips and got him suspended. For a week.

Miss Olivia’s desk is covered with her massive collection of turtle knickknacks and photos. In the largest of the framed photos she is with her ex-husband and their baby daughter. Her daughter, who is in her early thirties now, has a pink bow taped to the top of her bald head. The ex has one of those eighties haircuts with no sideburns that make it look like the top of his hair isn’t attached, like it is just a hair cloud floating around his head. He looks happy and proud and filled with love. Next to that one is a picture of Miss Olivia’s daughter in a graduation gown with a mortarboard loosely pinned onto her big, curly hair. Miss Olivia stands beside her with the same hair. The father is not in the picture.

Not in the picture.

I guess that’s where the expression comes from.

In the most recent photo, Miss Olivia is holding her asthmatic Chihuahua, Elvis, next to her face and making him wave at the camera. Her hair is thin and flat, the way it grew in after the chemo.

Since she is a giant Pirates football fan, Miss Olivia has a team photo tacked to her wall. But she especially worships Tyler and has a close-up of him pasted in the center of a red football that she cut out of construction paper. I am staring at it when a voice behind me says, “Pink Puke, so this is where you hang out.”

I turn. Tyler Moldenhauer is at the counter.

Tyler Moldenhauer is at the counter.

My brain cannot absorb this information. It shorts out and refuses to send signals to my mouth to make it form words or even to my legs to order them to get me up off my butt and walk to the counter.

“I wondered where you disappeared to.” He leans down and rests his head on the back of his hands, folded on top of the counter. “You work here or are you just stealing turtles?”

“What? Oh.” I glance down at Miss Olivia’s turtle paperweights, turtle Beanie Babies, turtle figurines, turtle paper-clip holder, and turtle mouse pad and snort something that is meant to be a laugh but comes out like I might be about to barf again.

“What are you doin’?” he drawls. While I consider and discard a thousand equally stupid responses, he hoists himself up onto the counter, swings his legs around as smoothly as an Olympic gymnast, and dismounts on my side of the counter. He leans in next to me to study Miss Olivia’s turtle herd and says, “I detect a theme here.”

Sadly, the nerd section of my brain unfreezes before any of the cooler parts and I jump up, babbling, “Why are you even here? The athletic faculty handles all sports absences. You can’t be back here.”

“I can’t? Seems I am, though.” He picks up a sneering turtle with a sign around its neck that reads YOU WANT IT WHEN? “This one here has got to be my favorite.”

“That area is off-limits to students!” The top half of Miss Olivia’s body appears at the counter. Tyler’s back is to her, so she can’t see who is with me. “What is he doing back there?”

Tyler doesn’t turn around. He makes the grumpy turtle sniff his thumb, then fall in love with the nail. I ignore him as he puts Miss Olivia’s turtle on the back of his hand and makes it hump his thumb.

“He’s from the district office,” I say. “He’s fixing your hard drive.”

His back still to Miss Olivia, Tyler drawls in a surprisingly realistic hillbilly accent, “Yes’m, your hard drive has to be recalibrated.” His improv is good except that he is patting Miss Olivia’s fax machine instead of her external hard drive.

“He is not from district. He is a student and he is not allowed.”

Tyler turns around, “Um, I’m sorry, ma’am.”

I wait for Miss Olivia to go into lockdown mode, because no one, not even her pinup boy, is allowed into her forbidden realm. I know that she will summon Miss Chaney, who will then suspend Tyler. And probably put me on probation for not dying to prevent access to the sacred excused-absence slips. But instead of turning into a shrieking lunatic, Miss Olivia bubbles out, “Tyler Moldenhauer, how can I help you? Do you need an excused absence?” She snaps at me, “Get Tyler an excused absence.”

Get Tyler an excused absence?

I begin to understand why varsity players never have to come to the attendance counter. I guess administration doesn’t want anyone seeing the special treatment they get.

“Stay right there, Ty-Mo,” Miss Olivia orders, then chugs around to the entrance at the far end of the office that admits only the officially approved.

“OK, I’m out,” Tyler says. And just like that, like a flea disappearing from one spot, he hoists himself back onto the counter and is gone before Miss Olivia circumnavigates her way around to our station.

She is huffing a little when she reappears. “Where is he? Where did he go? What did he need?” When I don’t answer, she informs me, “Aubrey, that was Tyler Moldenhauer.” Her voice and face are like she just said, Aubrey, that was Jesus.

“OK …” I give a vague nod, acting like I can’t quite place this Tyler Moldenhauer person she speaks of.

“All-state three years in a row? Runs the forty in four-point-five? His junior year he was two thirty-two of three sixty-eight for three thousand ninety-four yards with twenty-seven TDs and only six interceptions? He’s met with recruiters from six Division One colleges already, and I have excused absence requests for him to meet with two more.”

Everything she tells me is obviously a giant deal on Planet Football. But it all just makes me wish that the person she is referring to didn’t have all sorts of numbers attached to him. That he was just an ordinary boy who smelled like the ocean on a cold day.