Ruptured Portals
Bigger than maybe America.
Encouraging Damage; Weekend Gladiators; Ruptured Portals; Smiling Lessons; Premature Burial; Psychic Asbestos; Divine Intervention; Wrong Answers; Secret Admirers; Gifted Kids; Viking Funeral
If you need to eat just be low-key about it,” Angela instructs Kelly as the latter lays her bag lunch against a row of poetry volumes the last checkouts of which, Kelly suspected, predated her existence. “Like you’re eating a bomb.”
Kelly hunches down as Angela pins her against the shelf. Her defeat was foreseen. She’d managed to avoid Angela for the first half of the day, even while knowing Angela’s cavalier attitude toward class attendance and knowledge of the lunch period from which she was intercepted would be no obstacle.
“I didn’t see any text from you this morning when I was getting ready. I was unhappy, but thought maybe you needed some more time. Like as I was driving to school.” Angela’s register switches from stern to haughty. “I had thought my commitment to road safety would offer a fair grace period. And yet, still nothing. So I had to see for myself what, if anything, you’d done, and what I saw posed just more questions.” Angela takes out her phone and swipes several times before showing the screen to Kelly with an image of the bathroom paper towel dispenser defaced, in gold-ink marker, with the phrase “PATTY HAS A SIX.” “I’d like to know what this is.”
Kelly struggles to vocalize. She’d rehearsed an answer based on the question “What happened?” rather than what Angela actually said. A lifetime of linguistic instruction suddenly explodes into ash. “It’s unfinished,” she blurts out.
“I can see that. Note you also forgot to write Patty’s last name. This creates some problems because there are other Patties in this school. Patty Hart, Patti DeFino, Patty Thompson, who’s a boy and slightly problematic.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I had it all figured out the night before and was so determined. But I think I timed it wrong or something. Someone came in. Like a janitor maybe, so I panicked and jumped into a stall. By the time they left the bell rang so I left too.” Kelly heaves a confessional blast of carbon dioxide and pulls an egg salad sandwich from the paper bag, taking small, rapid bites, like a lab rat with a pellet. “Maybe after school I can fix it?”
“It’s been up for four periods now,” Angela says resignedly. “It’d look desperate.” She pauses, looks around the immediate, unpeopled area of the library, and leans within a few inches of Kelly’s face, meeting her eye line. “To tell you the truth, I had kind of an out-of-body kind of thing.”
“Out-of-body experience?” Kelly slows the rate of her bites from a panicked rapidity to a more deliberate, curiosity-accommodating pace.
“So I just gave you my perspective, which is really annoyed and disappointed. Not like ‘put your head metaphorically on a pike’ disappointed, but it’s up there. But speaking outside of myself, I’m actually kind of intrigued. Like, who is Patty? And what is meant by ‘six’ here? Who knows? There is an endless ocean of possibilities.” Angela’s face reverts quite unexpectedly to something approaching ecstasy. Through a clown-like grin she tells Kelly, “it’s like you opened a fucking portal by accident. That’s so like you.”
Kelly emits a wheezing giggle as she opens her packet of peanut butter cookies. “That’s … sure … that’s totally me.”
“And I want you to use that gift to the fullest.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Forget the bathroom. I want you to open more portals. I want every hall upside down with them. Obviously we can’t recreate your magnificent incompetence. But you can maybe channel it, using Patty Mansfield as your canvas.”
“Like … my muse?”
“Whatever works for you. This project could be bigger than us. Bigger than this school. Bigger than maybe America.”
“Hey,” a new voice interjects in their one-sided epiphany. They look at the end of the aisle and find a librarian looking grimly at them and sooshing them before returning automatically to her original agenda.
“Bitch,” Angela whispers.
“You think she’s still mad over what you said about Tabitha?”
“Huh?” Angela remains hushed but emphatic. “All I said was that Tabitha Pervis was the daughter of an assistant, volunteer-level librarian. I was stating a fact. It’s my fault how people respond to the facts that I give them? I’m pretty sure Mrs. Pervis is mad because we’re talking in a library. In a sacred space. Very rude, Kelly.”