Blackbird Read online

  “Hey, you guys.” Skipper walked up and sat down just to one side of my feet and opened his guitar case, blissfully oblivious to the fact that it nearly wrecked me to have him so close.

  “I woke up this morning with this song in my head, and I can’t get it out,” Skipper announced, ear-tuning his guitar, adjusting a couple of strings. I watched his hands plucking at the guitar strings, and I wanted to kiss his fingertips, stroke the backs of his hands. Funny thing: at one time I thought the worst thing that could happen to me would be if Skipper had decided we couldn’t be friends anymore after I told him. But sometimes it seemed like this had to be worse.

  “I need for you to do this song with me,” Skipper said, inclining his head toward me, and sang, “Long ago, a young man sits, and plays his wait-ting game.” His voice was soft and raspy, not really pretty – he’s not a singer. I harmonized on the verses, and on the choruses, I came in on the obligato, the part Joni Mitchell sings on the record.

  While we did the song, the room got about as quiet as the choir room ever gets. Even the Foleys stopped dueling. And when we finished, everybody applauded. Skipper smiled that crazy alley-cat smile of his and said, “Awrite!” and slapped me on the leg. And it hurt. Not that he’d hit me hard, of course. But I so wanted him to touch me, I mean really touch me. Like he touched Kathleen, when she let him. These slappings and punchings, these just-us-guys sort of touchings that Skipper liked to give me, this was worse than nothing.

  “Gotta go.” Skipper quickly repacked his guitar, stood up, and placed the guitar case on the cupboard next to Todd’s. “I just had to do that song,” he said. “See you at the auditions.” And he bounded down the tiers and out the door.

  And I thought, Shit, life really sucks sometimes. And I didn’t realize I’d said “shit” out loud, except Cherie said, “What?” And I said, “Oh, nothing.” And Cherie was about to say something when the Foleys came over, looking like Howdy Doody and his twin sister; each with a Fender six-string acoustic guitar hanging from their neck, looking (as always) as if they’d each been born with a Fender six-string acoustic guitar hanging from their neck.

  And Johnnie Foley says, “Johnnie Ray, let’s do ‘Judy Blue Eyes,’ okay?”

  “It’s almost eight,” I said, “I’ve got to get to French.”

  “Aw, c’mon,” Janie said in that whiny little voice of hers, “you got plenny a time.” And they kicked into the intro, and we sang.

  Johnnie Foley on the bottom, Janie on top, and me in the middle.

  We’d gotten almost all the way through when the warning bell rang, and we all lit out for class.

  Chapter Two

  I pretty much sleepwalked through French; I spent most of the hour just staring out into deep space, thinking about Skipper, imagining reaching under his tank top and stroking his chest, and maintaining a pretty steady erection the whole time. I take to the French language pretty easily, probably because of my French blood; anyway, it’s my easiest class. Madame Fournier loves my accent and, I think, just likes pronouncing my name with all the Frenchiosity at her command (just rolling the “R” all over the place), and for some reason she seems to think I’m the very cat’s ass; so even if she catches me daydreaming (which she has a couple times), she just smiles and says, “Dormezvous, Monsieur Rousseau?”

  When I got to the locker room to strip for second-period gym, I was eager for a workout, ready to work off some of the wild, caroming energy that was threatening to render me a blithering idiot before lunch. Gym has been just about my favorite class this year, which is quite an unusual statement for me, since I’m not what you’d call an athletic person. I have no interest whatsoever in team sports, and even less in the way of aptitude. Zip. Basically, I’d sooner be reading a good book.

  This year, though, for the first time, they’ve offered a weight-training class (which I’m taking), and as I said, it’s my favorite class. Both because I really like the effect that weight-lifting is having on my body, and because Coach Newcomb, who leads the class, is a total hunkus maximus. Big and blond and built-built-built. I fantasize about him quite a lot.

  Anyway, I said my daily prayer at my gym locker that I not get a hard-on, with Danny Corson on one side picking underwear lint out of his foreskin and Joe Cjackowski on the other side bent over tying his shoelaces (he always put his shoes on first). I mean, honestly, every day he stands there, bent way over, in nothing but his finely tailored birthday suit and his tennis shoes, and some days it just seems to take him forever to get those things tied. And me trying to remember my locker combination and maybe even my name, thinking to myself, Please don’t get hard. I’ve seen a couple of guys throw rods in the locker room, and believe me, there’s no better way to get yourself razzed right out of school.

  I threw myself onto the Universal Gym machine like a man possessed, in the hope that pushing myself to utter exhaustion might have a calming effect. I was doing my leg presses, and I was really into it, grunting on the push-out and clanking the weight stack when they hit bottom; and I must have been making something of a racket, because Coach Newcomb strolls over and says, “Hey, Rousseau – take it easy, huh? You’re gonna hurt somebody.”

  Now, we have one of those old-fashioned leg-press machines that you practically lie down in and press the weight stacks straight up. I’d been lifting with my eyes closed, and when I opened them, I found myself staring right up Coach Newcomb’s big legs, up the open legs of his white shorts, where I could see part of his jock. I got so hard so fast my dick nearly got a whiplash.

  What I generally do when I throw a rod at an inconvenient moment (which, when you throw as many as I do, can average out to about every other one), what I do is recite the Twenty-third Psalm to myself, very quickly. Usually, by “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” I’ve gone down enough to where I can make a relatively graceful exit. So I started, “The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want,” closing my eyes again so as not to see Coach walking away (as the Coach is really something to behold, even from the back and even upside down); and I was okay by the time I got to “Yea, though I walk through the valley …” by which time George Watrous was standing over me saying, “Hey Rousseau, you fallin’ asleep down ’ere or what?”

  A workout and a hot shower calmed me down some, but not much. I decided during my usual in-and-quickly-out, keeping-my-eyes-to-myself shower that I was in no shape to deal with Twentieth-Century American History, so I decided not to go.

  I wasn’t planning to ditch class, exactly. I am, I think I should mention, what they call here an Honor Scholar. The Honor Scholars program is one of the maybe three things in the whole school that makes any kind of sense. All it means is that if your GPA is three-five or better (I have a three-point-seven-five), they make you a little laminated card with your picture on it, and they pretty much allow you to decide whether or not you need to go to a particular class or not. So if you’ve got some abominable Bio assignment and you feel it would be better for your overall educational life to work on that rather than go to English Lit and talk about Ethan Frome for the umpteenth time, the English teacher almost has no moral choice but to let you out of his class. Provided, of course, you don’t start flunking out. It’s a very nice deal as school goes. I mean, it’s not as if you can leave school – ours is a closed, repeat, closed campus – and they don’t particularly want to see you roaming aimlessly through the halls. Strictly speaking, you’re supposed to go to the library or to study hall. But, after all, once you’re there, nobody’s breathing down your neck making sure you’re doing what you said you were going to do. I usually read a novel or something, myself.

  So I went down to Mr. Katz’s room and told him I had this grisly English paper that had to get done today, and Katz said okay. Then I bopped on over to the library, flashed my Honor Scholar card, and made for the emptiest table, where Carolann Compton was hunched over some book or other. Carolann is pretty easy to spot, even across a room, since she has a veritable r
iot of naturally curly hair the color of new pennies. We’re talking serious red hair. She was way over to one side of the table, and I was planning to sit way over to the other end and across from her. I whispered, “Carolann,” so as to ask her if I could share her table – just out of courtesy, of course, not as if she owned it or something – and she didn’t seem to hear me, didn’t look up, didn’t budge.

  “Carolann –” I attempted a louder stage whisper. I might as well have been talking to the table.

  “Carol. Ann.” I called her full-out, so of course both librarians looked up and glared a hole into me, and every living creature in the room turned to look, and finally Carolann looks up with this groggy, disoriented look on her face, as if I’d just awakened her from a hundred-year sleep, and says, “Oh. Hello, Johnnie Ray.”

  Now, a lot of people think of Carolann as a certified space cadet, but I’d always liked her. True, she did come off a little moody sometimes – some days she’d be very quiet and introverted, and other days she’d be smiling and joking and even a little bit foul-mouthed.

  And there were times, like this time, when it might take you two or three tries to get her attention, even if you were practically nose to nose with her. But, as I say, I liked her. She was different, and I like different.

  “Mind if I sit over here?” I asked, rather wishing I’d just sat down, period.

  “What? Oh. No. Go ahead.” She looked back down into her book. Then back up. Her mouth opened as if to speak, and then closed again. And she looked back down into the book. Not the most normal behavior, I guess, but sort of par for the course with Carolann. So I pulled out this short story I’d been working on for Mr.

  Galvez’s class. I hadn’t completely lied to Mr. Katz: I did have an English assignment, it just wasn’t due for another four days. This story was based on my experiences with Skipper. I was pretty sure Mr. Galvez would be cool about it – he’s cool about most things. We’d been discussing the concepts of foreshadowing and symbolism in class, so I started out the story with a gray, cloudy morning and a single bird, all by itself on a telephone wire, singing all alone. Which was to symbolize loneliness. I felt like Mr. Galvez would get into it. So I’m just about to get back into writing this story, when suddenly Carolann gets up out of her chair and plants herself right across from me. And she gives out with this loud, obvious “Ahem,” just in case I hadn’t noticed she was there, and says, “Could I talk to you a minute?”

  “Sure.” I wasn’t in the most conducive work mood, anyway. And I got the feeling that this was something kind of important. I don’t know why. Just a feeling. Maybe it was the fact that Carolann’s face was so flushed. She has that funny carnation-pink skin like a lot of redheads have, and at this moment her face was so blotchy and red you’d think someone slapped her around a little.

  “You’re probably going to think this is really weird,” she said. “But I know you can handle it if you just keep an open mind. In fact, you’re maybe the only person in this whole school I would ever dare talk to about this.”

  “About what?” It wasn’t like the Carolann I knew to get this mysterioso about things. Quiet, yes – but never cryptic.

  “I need for you to promise me you won’t repeat this.” And I thought, What is this, anyway? Just as I was going to mention how silly this was quickly becoming, she said, “I know this seems silly. Just humor me, okay? Promise.”

  “Of course,” I said, not sure if I should be nervous or annoyed – or what. “I promise.”

  “All right,” she said, taking in a deep breath and squaring her shoulders as if she were about to swim the English Channel or something. “Come on, Carolann, just spit it out.”

  “Well,” she said, “first of all” – and she lowered her voice even further – “I’m not Carolann.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I’m not Carolann,” she repeated, slowly, as if that said it all and why wasn’t I catching her drift? She just stared into me for a moment – waiting to see if I was getting it, maybe. Then she said, “I’m Crystal.”

  “Crystal.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’ve changed your name.”

  She closed her eyes, pursed her lips, shook her head no, as if suddenly sorry she’d started this conversation. Which was pretty much my feeling at this point.

  “Sometimes when you see me, you really are seeing me, and sometimes when you see me, you’re really seeing Carolann.”

  “What?”

  “No, wait, let me try that again. Sometimes,” she said slowly, measuring her words, “when you see Carolann, you really are seeing Carolann. And sometimes, when you think it’s Carolann, it’s really me. Crystal. See?”

  My mouth fell open. I was pretty sure I was beginning to see.

  “You’re dickin’ me, right? This is a gag, right?” I knew this was no gag. Both because Carolann never joked that I knew of, and just because – well, I just knew.

  “No. No joke.”

  “So, you’re talking, like, split personality, right?” Carolann, that is Crystal, nodded. “You’re talking, like, ‘Three Faces of Eve,’ right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re talking, like, your name is Crystal.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Holy shit.”

  I dropped my face into my hands and just looked at her. This was a hot one.

  “Then you believe me,” she said.

  “Sure.” It never really occurred to me not to believe her.

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” she said, smiling broadly. “I knew you’d understand. I’ve always been pretty sure you were” – she looked toward the ceiling, searching for a word – “oh, I dunno – smart.”

  “Whoa, wait just a minute here. I said I believe you. I never said I understand. I mean, this is a whole new thing for me. Here I thought you were just moody, and come to find out you’re schizophrenic.”

  “I am not schizophrenic,” she hissed. I’d obviously stabbed a sore spot. “I am a victim of M.P.S., multiple personality syndrome.

  Schizophrenia is an entirely different thing, look it up!”

  “Hey, I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I just hate that word, that’s all.” She sighed a long one. “It’s a long story. Basically –”

  And suddenly a strange look crossed her face, as if she were having a dizzy spell. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Carolann wants to talk to you.”

  Curiouser and curiouser. I looked around to see if anybody was listening in.

  “Hi,” she said as if seeing me for the first time that day.

  “Carolann?”

  “Uh-huh. Look, you’re not going to blab this all over school, are you? I didn’t want to tell anybody, but she just had to tell someone.

  You won’t, will you? Blab, I mean.”

  “No,” I said, even though I was already dying to tell Efrem everything. “I already told you – I mean, her. God, this is bizarre.”

  “All right, then. That’s all I wanted to know. I’ll let Crystal back out now.” And she did that little dizzy thing again.

  “We’re back,” she said.

  “You were right. This is definitely weird.”

  “I know. But you can handle it. I know you can.” She smiled a strange, equivocal sort of smile. “Anyway, I was about to explain.”

  And so she did. And what it boiled down to was this: Carolann’s mother – her real mother, that is, she lives with foster parents now – her mother was deeply disturbed psychologically. Truly one step beyond. And she used to do incredibly cruel things to Carolann when she was just a tiny little girl. Beatings. Not spankings or even belt-whippings like Dad used to give me, but real beatings that left little Carolann black-and-blue and wondering what she could possibly have done to deserve all this. I could hardly believe it when Crystal told me about it. That anybody could be like that to a small, helpless child, especially their own. It’s things like that that stopped me believing in God – but that’s a whole o
ther subject.

  Anyway, Carolann’s mother did all manner of terrible things to her. Locked her in closets for days at a time. Hung her upside down from the ceiling. So all of this left little Carolann so completely screwed up that her personality split. As an escape, her doctor says.

  In the wild hope that if her mother didn’t like her as she was, maybe she’d be better off as somebody else.

  “There were six of us for a while there,” she said.

  “Six?”

  “Uh-huh. Let’s see, there was me and Carolann and three other girls – Caroline, Anne, and I forgot the other one’s name; she wasn’t with us for very long. And a little boy named Biff. But he wasn’t around long, either.”

  “So there’s just the two of you now?”

  “Right. And Seymour, our doctor, he says soon it’ll just be one of me again.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Who what?”

  “Who’s it gonna be? When you’re just one person, I mean.”

  “Oh.” She laughed a little. “Well, it’s probably gonna be sort of a mixture of Carolann and me. But I’m trying to convince her to take my name. Crystal. Crystal Blue.”

  She studied my face for a moment. It must have been interesting reading at that point.

  “You don’t think I’m total Twilight Zone, do you?”

  “I –” I wasn’t quite sure what I thought just yet.

  “I knew you didn’t. I knew you were the right person to tell.

  Carolann wasn’t sure, but I knew.”

  “Crystal?” I was sort of trying the name on for size. “How do I know which is which?”

  “Well, that might be a little rough at first. I mean, we are sharing the same body, after all. But we’re really different. We dress different.

  Like Carolann never wears jeans, and she likes those lacy pinafore sort of things that I wouldn’t be caught dead in. And, well, we’re just different, that’s all. Once you’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s two of us, you’ll start to notice things.”