Alexandra Narin

Grooved/Edges

Novel extract

Chapter Two: Class Introductions

[Have you ever been so afraid that you feel more dazed than anxious? Think about it for a minute. Take two minutes if you need. Hold these pages between your hands and let your mind wander until you identify that specific type of fear. Allow yourself to feel it, just a prick. 

Language can be so imprecise that real-world exercises like this can help get words off the page and into our bodies. 

You see, Lovetta’s mother was afraid in a daunted way. But Lovetta’s fear manifested in this type of petrification.] 

For the first time in her short memory Lovetta could not envision what her future held; it wasn’t for a lack of trying. In the days before school started, Lovetta had scanned her body for stories that could give a hint of what was to come, and while she’d found tales of other little girls — like Sara who was orphaned during a war and made an imaginary world in the attic to cope, and the Pevensie sisters who were sent to a country house to escape bombings — none of them went to school. Certainly not the normal public school like the one Lovetta would be attending.

It was a familiar building, one that Lovetta’s mother had always pointed out every time they drove by: “School!” she’d say with that heightened level of enthusiasm in her voice that she usually reserved for doctor’s appointments, declaring the deliciousness of spinach, and socializing with the neighbors.

On occasion, she had quizzed her daughter, trying to get her to participate in the excitement: “What’s that?”

“School?” Lovetta’s tone never took on the same sparkle. She couldn’t believe that the red, soulless building could evoke such an emotion.

  If Lovetta stared at the school’s third-story windows for long enough, she could imagine them transforming into attic windows and, if she followed the design of flowers and vines that were carved into the white archways, they could become the gates to Narnia. Lovetta could live inside all of those stories; she could taste the Turkish delight and feel the barren cold of the orphanage, but when it came to her own first day of school? Her body was still and silent. No images played out against the back of her eyelids.

 [Now, had Lovetta been told about the magic of education, she might have been eagerly awaiting her chance to expand her world. I could be telling you how she yearned to see rooms outside of her home and talk with children her own age. She could have seen it as an opportunity to cherry-pick perspectives. But this is not that story.]

Instead, Lovetta was convinced that she would be better off staying home, and tried to lead her mother to the same conclusion — this strategy worked when Lovetta wanted microwave burritos for dinner and wanted to light real candles for the Festival of Lights, even though it was ‘a fire hazard.’ It was worth a try.              

“Won’t I be behind the other kids?” Lovetta asked.

“Don’t be silly, if anything, you’re more prepared,” was her mother’s response.

The class allocation tests Lovetta had to take that summer certainly showed so.

Maths: 98

Reading Comprehension: 105

Vocabulary: 125

 “How does someone even score over 100 percent on a test?” Lovetta’s mother had exclaimed when they received the test results. She moved the letter closer and then further from her face, as if her eyesight was deceiving her.

 ”It’s percentiles,” Lovetta said. She was focused on the envelope that her mother had discarded onto the dining room table. Right below the perforated edge where her mother had slit the paper open was the school’s emblazoned crest. At the center was a toucan, its eye wide, and its beak large. It looked like it would bite. 

“Just amazing.”

The letter was displayed on the fridge.

Attending kindergarten was non-negotiable.

And so, the morning of the first day of school, Lovetta woke slowly, taking her time. [For Lovetta: imagine a five-year-old but with a forty-five-year old’s brain. She is self-sufficient and punctual. After all, by this age she had already absorbed the tale of the early bird who catches the worm and the cinder-caked girl who almost doomed herself because she lost track of time.]

The blue-morning light filtered through the blinds and warmed the side of Lovetta’s face, but her head felt light, unable to move. Her limbs weak and devoid of blood flow. She reached towards the ceiling for her morning stretch but they just dropped back onto the soft linen. 

All of Lovetta’s circulation was concentrated in her stomach; all her bodies’ energy was needed to pump pump pump blood to the sack where swarms of stories had nestled. Their weight flattened the natural curvature of her spine flattened, and pressed her lower back into the mattress.

The stories climbed over each other, searching for a way out, weaving through her stomach cavity and prodding the walls of her gastrointestinal tract, making her nauseous.

After two snoozes of her alarm, Lovetta sat up in her bed, hands in her lap, watching as a breeze pushed the blinds to and fro, causing sunbeams to dance about the room. It was a morning disco party. If only she could stay and join in. 

So much had gone into preparing for today though. This, ‘new adventure,’ as her mother would say [through tightened lips].  

Lovetta ran her fingertips over her nails; she admired the pale pink polish her mother had brushed on but hated that it was the only unnatural color on her body. Usually, she had doodles covering her skin, where she’d taken a pen along her arms and legs, in the creases by her hips and against the smooth flat ridge of her heel, but that weekend, as Lovetta was taking her last bath before starting school her mother had told her to scrub them all off.

‘People may be confused or concerned about what they represent,’ her mother had said while cleaning the bathroom mirrors. She used Windex. Every wiped spritz immediately fogged up from the bath steam.

Lovetta had glanced at her doodles.

[Lovetta couldn’t always see it, but to be blunt, the doodles weren’t always pretty. Sometimes, they looked more like ink spills than drawings — Lovetta’s expertise was for words, after all — but importantly, these marks were neither the bruises from story consumption, nor the stretch marks that all women grow into. These doodles gave Lovetta agency before she realized she was craving it.]

“I like my drawings.” Lovetta had pulled her knees to her chest, hugging her legs. The doodles were a normal part of daily life, and didn’t Lovetta’s mother encourage them? She certainly supplied copious amounts of art supplies that gave Lovetta options for designs [For the organization of these art supplies, imagine pens of various thickness and colors strewn around the house like nettles on a forest floor: caught in crevasses, and perched on furniture ledges.]

“Oh, love. I like them too.” She had placed the spray bottle down and faced her daughter, “Here, let me tell you what — do you know one of the best parts of school?”

Lovetta hadn’t wanted to talk about school. She didn’t want to talk at all. She’d wanted to get out of the bath then, with the pen marks just beginning to bleed, the designs still salvageable.

All it would take was a quick pat of the towel.

Pat pat pat.

Air dry.

But her mother had looked at her expectantly, and curiosity got the best of her.

Lovetta shook her head. 

“School supplies! Why, we will get you a new set of pens and a wonderful spiral notebook, and then you can doodle in that. You can pick out any pattern you want, and just wait until you see all the options. That always used to be my favorite part of going back to school; a different design for each year. Now it’s your turn. How does that sound?”

It turned out that this plan was also non-negotiable.

Lovetta had picked a white notebook with multicoloured polka dots spiraling out from the center, like a firework trapped on the page. 

When she ran her fingers over the front, the glossy polka dots felt three-dimensional.

That was nice.

The notebook now sat on the top of her dresser along with her first day of school outfit. The corduroy dungarees were neatly folded, and her underwear was tucked underneath. Everything was set. All she had to do was slip her shoes on and she would be ready…even if it could be more complete with some doodles. Just a few accessories, you know.

But Lovetta’s skin was bare and milky. 

Only her nails reeked of artificiality — a sad compensation. 

Her alarm rang for a third time. Lovetta darted to silence it; she could ignore time a little longer. After all, she was awake, wasn’t she? Everything was ready, wasn’t it? Maybe if she delayed just a little longer, her mother would change her mind. Maybe they would be tardy and it wouldn’t be worth it.

If she couldn’t physically make her markings at least she could use these minutes to mentally indulge…Lovetta began mentally tracing the swirls and fractals that she would have inked there. Her concentration was disrupted by seeing a tale slide up her biceps and across her chest. Lovetta thought she was watching Hood move under her unadorned skin, humming, still warm and noticeable from being absorbed the night before. But, of course, this wasn’t the case — Hood was still securely jammed between her teeth. 

Lovetta was merely mistaken, being the age when no child is in tune with their bodies, not even those with unique abilities… The slinking tale was another, roaming her body for a more permanent cranny to settle. 

It was true, at least, that Hood’s warmth spread across Lovetta’s body in a flare that could have been interpreted as inflammation from a body trying to repel the stories that demanded space there, but Lovetta clung to the warmth. Her mother might leave her at the door, and the stories might lack insight into the rest of the day, but Lovetta would always have the words pulsing through her veins and settling in the nooks of her body. 

*****

“This year is unusual, because I am moving from teaching Preschool to Kindergarten, so for those of you who were at Central Elementary last year, I am going to be your teacher again. This is a new change for me and so it is nice to see some familiar faces,” said Mrs. Danvers, Lovetta’s teacher. [For the teacher: picture a pearl-clad, blonde woman whose hair doesn’t dare venture from its carefully constructed bun, then make her less East Coastern; remove the preppy-coloured shirt but leave the Boston accent.]

            Mrs. Danvers hadn’t instructed them to sit down, instead, she spoke from the front of the classroom while the students mulled about the room. It was informal and undefined. Lovetta didn’t even know where she would sit if she wanted to. 

            A new change. A new change. 

            Perhaps it was a blessing that Lovetta got stuck on the phrase as she glanced around the room, because it kept her from panicking over not knowing where she should situate herself. Focusing on her teacher’s words, Lovetta was finally able to take in her surroundings — she had avoided doing so before the teacher began her welcome speech. In fact, Lovetta had stayed in a forward-facing head-fixed position since she and her mother had first entered school grounds. 

            Lovetta’s mother had accompanied her all the way into the classroom despite telling Lovetta that she was going to say goodbye at the flagpole out front [and she had every intention of doing so. In fact, initially, she planned on wishing Lovetta a good day on the other side of the street and watching her daughter make her way across the crosswalk and through the ornate double doors alone. But when they had reached the red building and the crowds of school children, Lovetta looked so much smaller than the rest of them, and surely, they were just older, but then where were Lovetta’s classmates? Lovetta’s mother had just wanted to see. Only for the first day.] 

“I’m sorry, I’m sure it’s embarrassing to have your mom drop you off,” Lovetta’s mother had said under her breath as they walked through the fluorescent lit halls. 

“It’s okay.” What Lovetta meant was, “thank you.” She gripped her mother’s hand tight. 

            A new change. A new change. 

            It was redundant. It made for bad flow. Lovetta couldn’t articulate the grammar behind the phenomenon, she just knew that she had got stuck. 

            A new change. A new change.

            Lovetta’s eyes took in the large white boards along the far side of the wall, and the horse-shoe desk configuration. The room was predominantly lit by overhead lights; only a small strip of windows ran opposite the boards. It was like…her doctor’s office. Her paediatrician. She’d had to visit frequently in the past few months, getting jabs for all sorts of diseases that she had never heard of, but then her mother had told her the stories, of the girl who got chicken pox and had to spend all summer inside, the girl who spread whooping cough and no one wanted to talk to again, the girl who caught something still unknown, asphyxiated and died. 

            It was necessary to be vaccinated before starting school. 

            Before meeting other children.

Getting stuck on her teacher’s words had meant that Lovetta hadn’t even acknowledged her classmates; her mother had promised her that there would be ‘at least two other new students,’ but if that was true, Lovetta couldn’t spot them. Everyone else seemed to know each other. They seemed to know how everything worked too, like, where to put their backpacks — cubbies that lined the left wall — and that they wouldn’t get in trouble for talking while their teacher was. Did the other students like Mrs. Danvers? Did they think that having her again was a good thing or not? 

 Lovetta searched her short-term memory and played back the past few moments. The second-time through Lovetta actually heard the murmurs that had spread across the class as the teacher spoke. 

It seemed like they hadn’t been paying much attention. 

Instead, they exchanged shrieks and giggles. It was a foreign language for Lovetta. Never had she been around this many people her own age. 

A group of three girls near where Lovetta was standing clasped each other’s wrists, examining the handmade bracelets woven there. The girls reminded Lovetta of a cartoon: one with blonde hair, one with red, one with black. Wavy, curly, straight. They spoke to each other in hushed tones, conscientious but at ease. They were fully in their own orbit. 

Not like Lovetta, who stood alone. 

She squeezed her hands together. 

Tears welled in her eyes, and blurred her vision, making the three girls indiscernible; one arm, another, a leg, a torso, they all fused into one body. One enviable being. 

Lovetta felt stiff and immoveable. Thanks to gravity, the stories that resided in her stomach now pressed against her pelvic floor, cramming her hip flexors, and restricting her legs. Still, they were unhelpfully quiet, offering no images, not even a phrase of wisdom. 

Last time, the stories had provided a taste — her mother had botched their dinner, but Lovetta knew from the thick coating on her tongue that salt would fix it. Greater than precious minerals or jewels, salt is always the answer. 

The stories could be helpful like this, so why why why were they failing her now? 

Where were the friends Lovetta was supposed to be making? 

Blanchette, Little Red, had managed to find friends even in a forest; where was Lovetta’s wolf? 

She blinked the tears away.  

The girls walked across the room to a cluster of seats at the back, and Lovetta forced herself to break her gaze — to the row of students stuffing their bags into the cubbies. Most of the bags had logos and doodles that Lovetta didn’t recognise, but wait — that one. A lanky boy held one that was red and shiny plastic, and had a stuffed animal dog poking out the top of it. Clifford the Big Red Dog. 

Lovetta felt a little lighter, her stomach able to expand into a full, deep breath. 

Finally, something was familiar. 

It was a large bag though, was it going to fit in the shelf?

The boy shoved it hard.

The bag squeezed, but he stumbled, almost tripping over a girl next to him. 

She had the same shoes as Lovetta. 

White espadrille sandals.

Was that a good thing?

Their teacher continued talking, and the students moved around the room, making it their own. 

The girl with Lovetta’s shoes joined the bracelet girls. She had brown hair. 

Lovetta glanced away. 

Clifford-Boy sat in the front row. 

A boy in the corner of the room spread a thin layer of liquid glue over his palm. 

The brand’s block lettering was just discernible Elme—  Lovetta had used the same glue when making arts and crafts with her mom, and she knew how a little spot would dry into a second skin that could be peeled off in one movement, if you were careful. Was the boy doing that on purpose?