Heartshire High

Heartshire High

By Charlotte Leonetti

Copyright © 2017 Charlotte Leonetti

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. All pictures are held by commercial license and may not be duplicated by anyone without express permission.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: After Bunni

Chapter 2: Tears

Chapter 3: Racing

Chapter 4: Send Billy

Chapter 5: Pilar’s Advice

Chapter 6: Pigsty

Chapter 7: A Mad Party

Chapter 8: Red’s

Chapter 9. Mocked

Chapter 10: The Quadrilles

Another Chapter: The Party

Chapter 11: Stolen

Chapter 12: Evidence

All in the golden afternoon

Impatiently I sit;

For all my work, with little skill,

I long today to quit.

While little thoughts will pester me

Until I will submit.

Ah, cruel tome! In such an hour,

Beneath such dreamy weather,

To beg a tale moved to today

From where it once was tethered.

Yet what can one poor girl avail

Against your words together?

Then one idea flashes forth

Its edict to begin it –

In gentler tones another hopes

I’ll keep the nonsense in it! –

And yet another knocks me down

Not more than once a minute.

Anon, to sudden silence won,

In fancy we pursue

The now-girl moving through a land

Of wonders wild and new,

In daily chat with friend or beast –

And most of it is true.

And ever, as the story drained

The wells of fancy dry,

And faintly strove that weary girl

To put the project by,

The rest next time— It is next time!

The story-dwellers cry.

Thus grew the tale of Heartshire High:

Thus slowly, one by one,

Its quaint events were hammered out –

And now the tale is done,

And here I sit, with pen in hand,

And watch the setting sun.

Celia! Take this mystery

And carefully provide it

To all of those who loved the tale

From which we have derived it

So they may pluck each clue as fast

And we can e’er supply it.

Chapter 1: After Bunni

It wasn’t really a journal. I tried keeping a journal, but it would always be one long entry filling the first seven pages, and then just nothing. Too hard. Before we packed up to move, I had a whole shelf of journals. One from first grade, with a puppy on the cover, where I’d just drawn the same pictures of animals over and over, in crazy colors. I’d even colored the puppy purple with a permanent marker I took from my mom. One from my ninth birthday, where I’d written about how I was going to be a ballerina. One my mom had given me the summer after eighth grade, that was all about some fight with some girl that I couldn’t even remember. I’d thrown them out before we left. Now I just kept a notebook, a red one from the drugstore we had stopped at on the car ride here. Each page had the same four lines at the top, then just pictures.

After school, I filled it out.

Weather: sticky

Song: Blue

Mood: lost

Overheard: No one die this time. - Kid with the red hat

I couldn’t stop thinking about what that kid in the red hat had said in homeroom that morning; There’s a rave next month -- we should go again. And like, no one die this time. Where do I live now that still has raves? Isn’t that from like 20 years ago? I didn’t know if he was serious or not, but considering the silence that followed, I was leaning towards ‘yes’. This place was definitely different. Since I’d gotten home from school, the only thing I’d wanted to do was forget the whole day, clear my mind and paint. Usually I would have painted the ocean or mountains, but since we left California to come to this nothing town in the middle of more nothingness, those images just made me lonely. So, I put on my oversized blue jacket and decided to go for a drive in search of some inspiration.

Bye dad, I said to the back of my dad’s head as I walked by.

Mmhmm, he mumbled. This was life with Dad now. Dad-without-mom, Dad whose last parenting moment, as far as I remembered, was in that snapshot of me when I was in first grade, when he was showing me some puppies in the pet store. It was a cute picture; I had pigtails. We didn’t buy a puppy. Thanks, Dad.

Do you want to know where I’m going or anything? I asked from the hallway. In case I like fall down a hole and die?

Have a good time. The news was talking about wildfires or something else uninteresting, but he didn’t look away.

Mom wouldn’t have let me leave the house like this. Or she would have, if she’d been having one of her days, I guess. But when she was being Mom, when she was paying attention, she would have fussed at my messy blond ponytail and offered for the hundredth time to take me shopping for jeans that fit, which I guess meant they’d be tighter than these. But Mom wasn’t too short, and she didn’t have a freakishly long neck that made her look like a bird, and her hair didn’t go all fluffy if it was left down, like poodle ears. In other words, she wasn’t me.

This new town was too small; I felt like every street led me back to the same place. There were some fancy houses on the outside of town, but the part where we lived, next to the school, was dingy and wholly uninteresting. Forget cliffs overlooking the ocean; I couldn’t even get out of sight of the Wal-Mart. So I drove around for an hour, down this street or the next, taking little turns here and there, when I came across a large abandoned lot in between two brick buildings. I pulled into the lot and stepped out of the car. Broken glass and cigarette butts spotted the cracked cement, but as I walked further back, they gave way to a field where the high grass hid huge daisies and bright red poppies.

I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it this morning since it was on my drive to school, but I guessed I had been too nervous. I took out my phone and starting taking photos of things I might want to paint: the sun coming through the white daisies, a green caterpillar chewing on a poppy petal. All the pictures came out too bright, like faded postcards, losing the magic they had in the afternoon sun after being captured. The hot day made me feel very sleepy and stupid, so I just wandered around, kicking a glass bottle and listening to it rattle on the pavement and trying to get a photo where the light was right. I picked up a bottle cap that had been flattened by a car into a little metal sun and put it in my pocket next to a plastic barrette I’d found and forgotten.

As I made my way around to the back of the brick building at the corner of the lot, I noticed that it had been tagged with spraypaint in a few places. There were a few curly arrows pointing toward the back corner, so I walked along, following them. When I came to the side that was only a few feet from a long, chain-link fence, I saw that someone had painted the most fantastical mural along the wall. There were all these imaginary animals, in pastel hues and bright, wild tones, tumbling along the bricks in a party. Turtles with wings and long, lavender panthers and tall neon birds with clothes and claws and capes. I took picture after picture, fascinated. I followed the wall along, even though the walking space between it and the fence got narrower and narrower. There was a deep purple dog painted there, with a quiet face, just looking out from the wall. At first he looked fuzzy, but when I looked closer, I realized that his outline was made of tiny, carefully printed words. As I read them, over and over, I recognized them as the lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

Blue. The song I’d been listening to on repeat in the car all week. The song I’d written in my notebook, which had replaced that journal with the deep purple dog. I had to know who painted this. I had to find her. We were going to be best friends. Someone else who liked art and old music and, I don’t know, spending time alone in fields, which I guess was something I liked now. This awful little town, with its potholed streets and off-brand snacks in the dimly lit gas station, was going to have a silver lining. There was at least one person here who would get me, and we were going to be friends. But how would I ever find her? In the corner it was tagged with a name that looked like Time.

I was finally calm. Or maybe numb. The first day of senior year was supposed to be easy, not a time to start all over again. I walked back along the wall to where the fence started and sat down and focused on the flowers, picking some of the little ones to make a daisy chain. I took a few more pictures as the field started to glow from the setting sun, even the broken glass that speckled the pavement twinkling brightly, and then got back in the car. Blue was still playing on loop through the speakers.

I just let it keep playing on repeat until I pulled into the driveway. Nobody die this time, the kid in homeroom had said. Easier said than done, I felt, looking at the little house. I didn’t want to go inside and dignify it with my presence. I wished I could just keep driving until I got home. But I was home now? To my real home. To mom. Or to some imaginary home where my mom was the good way all the time, and my dad just never existed, and my friends couldn’t be friends anymore without me, and my pictures came out the way I wanted.

I eased the door and snuck through the house like a spy, avoiding the kitchen where I could hear my father on the phone, laughing. Almost giggling. Flirting, like he was trying to be a guy instead of a dad. Barf. As I went up the stairs, the floor creaked under my feet, and I froze, but he didn’t even pause in his conversation. When I made it to the fresh canvas in the corner of my room, I plugged in my earphones, turned my music up, and started painting in the makeshift studio I’d set up.

As I painted, I thought back on the day and how much I hated being in this new place. Now that I thought it out, I determined that yes, the summer before senior year might actually be the absolute worst time to move to a tiny, crappy town where everyone had had the same best friends since they were five. Being the new kid all day was so awkward and pathetic. I guessed I would still be the new kid at graduation. I’d started the day in English, hoping to just drift through unnoticed. Why do teachers think the ‘new kid’ would want to stand in front of everyone and introduce herself? Who would ever want to do that? When did the class ever look at that person and go, Oh really? You’re from another state? Let’s be best friends. Because we’re seven years old? Never. But they all still do it. It’s somehow in the teacher handbook as one of the few things they all agree is a great idea, along with putting one smart kid in each group so that they can do the whole group project while getting made fun of by the people they’re helping, or putting the desks in a circle whenever the day is going to be awful.

But I did it anyway and stood there, trying to look normal, trying to act like it wasn’t humiliating to have everyone stand there and watch me, scrutinizing. When you start at a new school, they should give you a week to just watch from behind the glass, so you know that no one else wears the sneakers that everyone wore at your old school, or that only the stoners have backpacks. Like one of those mirrors in court shows, where no one knows you’re watching. They should give you a week before they put you on display - it would only be fair.

But I got up and gave the little speech for them anyway. "Hi, I’m Celia. (True.) I moved from LA a few days ago because of my dad’s job. (False. My dad got a new job because he was leaving my mom and I had to go with him because my mom ‘can’t do it on her own,’ otherwise known as ‘mentally unfit’ if you ask the court, otherwise known as ‘whacko’. But still a way better parent than my dad, even if sometimes she cries in her bed or doesn’t come home at night. She still cared who my friends were. She still knew what classes I was taking. She knew how to make a meal that wasn’t cereal. Otherwise known as ‘a person who wasn’t perfect.’ Otherwise known as ‘a person.’ Otherwise known as ‘I miss her a lot.’) I enjoy anything art-related and I used to love watching the sunset. (Back when I had friends, and lived in a place where sunsets weren’t obscured by billboards for all-you-can-eat cornbread and lawyers helping you sue if you got in a car accident.) And even though I used to go to the ocean everyday, I have yet to stand up on a surfboard. (True. But apparently, judging by their faces, not funny or interesting at all.) I have an older sister named Ruby who goes to Stanford. (A few impressed nods for this one. Thanks, Ruby. You finally have something to offer. You left, everything fell apart, and now I’ve lost my mom, my friends, my house… my life. But at least you get to pursue your ‘true self’. That’s what’s always been most important, after all: you.)" I rambled on, trying to sound interesting, but everyone was just silent when I finished. They weren’t mean; a few of them smiled at me. But that was it.

By last period, the introduction speech