Part VII
Creative Differences
Sara Shepard
Playlist: “The Tortured Poets Department”
I.
The message hadn’t been there yesterday, Vi was sure. She knew this because she’d chosen the same seat for detention all week—first row on the right, fourth desk back—and she definitely would have noticed it before.
There were several reasons why she was drawn to the same desk.
One, the seat was hidden from the doorway, meaning people who walked past and looked inside the room were less likely to see her here.
Two, Vi was a stickler for routine and order—it was part of why she currently had a 4.
0 GPA. And three, this was the only desk in the room that didn’t have a wobbly leg.
A wobbling desk, Vi thought, would drive her into an even deeper pit of despair, though this new message she’d discovered was doing a pretty good job of that, too.
Forget Him, the message read in big block letters.
Vi looked around the room, trying to figure out who might have written it. Everyone else in detention was using their desk as a pillow—except for the guy who was lying on the linoleum floor like a corpse, puffy headphones over his ears.
Vi doubted that anyone had any idea that she and Connor Burris used to be a thing until Connor unceremoniously and ruthlessly broke up with her two weeks ago via a twenty-seven-second phone call.
Vi definitely hadn’t mentioned Connor to anyone in detention.
She hadn’t said anything in detention, period.
All week, she had completed her homework quietly and without complaint.
She was a model troublemaker. If Mr. Hill, who oversaw this period, were to give out grades for detention, Vi would definitely get an A.
Whoever had written the message on her desk had done so with a heavy-handed blue ballpoint pen.
Vi ran her finger over the letters; the deeply etched G in Forget made a soothing ASMR-like sound as she traced it with her fingernail.
The school got so annoyed about people defacing stuff, though.
The last thing she wanted was for Mr. Hill to think she’d written it and get in trouble for something else.
“Hmm,” Mr. Hill said when she brought it to his attention.
He pulled his readers down off his forehead, read the words on the desk, looked at her, and then read the words again.
His frown deepened. Vi blushed. She really hoped he wasn’t going to ask her who the message was about.
She had a terrible habit of bursting into enraged tears when someone brought up Connor’s name.
“You should report this, Violet,” Mr. Hill said.
Vi blinked. “Report it where?”
Mr. Hill’s eyes looked huge beneath his magnifying glasses. “You can contact Repairs. They’re in room one twenty-four. They handle this kind of thing. Someone should be there right now.”
II.
The hall pass Mr. Hill gave Vi was a long wooden stick in the shape of a ruler but had no markings of measurement.
Vi liked the way the smooth, flat wood felt in her palms. She did not like, however, that it read Detention Hall Pass, Please Return to Detention Room 303 in giant white block letters.
She hated the idea of someone she knew popping out of AP Bio or AP Calc II, seeing Vi holding said hall pass, asking all the obvious questions, and then spreading it all around school.
It wasn’t that Vi had lied about her detention sentence to Cassidy and Ramona and Lila, her closest friends…
she just, you know, didn’t think it was worth mentioning.
Clearly, Ms. Carlson, the principal, didn’t think it had been worth mentioning, either.
Ms. Carlson said that, while she was quite disappointed in Vi’s choices, she promised not to broadcast to the student body at large what Vi had done.
Moreover, Vi’s poetic decision and outburst, as Ms. Carlson put it, wouldn’t jeopardize her spot on the indoor track team, or her spot in the Model UN.
Nor did she have to quit band or strings, because years ago she’d been too much of a perfectionist to quit either viola or clarinet and the music director had given her permission to play both.
Ms. Carson did say one more thing, though.
“You, Violet, are not a pop star. You cannot just write scathing things about people, whether they hurt you or not, and make them public. On your own time, sure—write away, get your feelings out. But to turn it in during class and then accuse your teacher of not supporting women when he brought it to my attention—”
“I won’t do it again, I promise,” Vi had interrupted, not seeing the point of rehashing things.
Ms. Carlson folded her hands. “Do you want to talk about it? We’ve all experienced breakups. Even me.”
“No.” Vi tried her hardest not to scream.
Vi had never heard of the repairs department.
She’d heard of the maintenance department—Mr. Crudo and his staff loved zipping around on their riding mowers outside.
But Mr. Hill said she could find Repairs in room 124.
That was in the tech hallway, not far from the lunchroom.
Vi made it down a set of stairs, passing a poster with her picture on it—it was of all the school’s National Merit Scholars.
Vi was careful not to look at the poster, though. Connor’s picture was on it, too.
She remembered the day the photo was taken.
Vi had stood next to Connor in the second row because they were the tallest of the six winners.
When the photographer told them to smile, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it tight.
Isn’t this cute, us winning something together?
His fingers touched hers briefly, but then he pulled away and started poking his friend Ashik in the back.
Maybe Vi should have known then.
Vi got to the room marked 124 with a tiny sticker over the door. The door didn’t have a window like most classroom doors did, and the large metal knob was industrial looking. It looked like it might lead to a closet, or maybe a darkroom. But when she knocked, a muffled voice sounded from inside.
“Enter!”
III.
The room was small and dark, but it didn’t smell like developing chemicals, and it didn’t hold any cleaning supplies.
Inside, Vi saw a tall guy with longish brown hair and thick eyebrows sitting at a metal desk.
A green banker’s lamp glowed. The only other thing on the desk besides the lamp was an old-fashioned black typewriter, a machine so old it didn’t even need to be plugged in.
The guy typing on it frowned intensely at something on the piece of paper stuck into the top.
The keys made a clack clack clack. He closed his eyes, breathed in, nodded, and typed some more.
“Help you?” he said, eyes still on his paper.
“Is this…” Vi looked around uneasily. “I was told this is the repairs department? Can I report defacement of school property?”
He removed his hands from the keys and looked her up and down. Even in the dim reddish light, Vi could tell that his eyes were light-colored, either a dreamy green or an otherworldly blue. He had a soft voice, though it wasn’t timid. He sounded kind of officious, actually.
“I…” He bit his lip, just a little.
“I really want it removed,” she interrupted. “I’d also love to know who defaced the desk in the first place, but that’s probably too much to ask.” Then she stepped back. “Shouldn’t an adult be doing this job? Like Mr. Crudo?”
“I’m, um, a student volunteer.”
“Oh.” Vi shifted from foot to foot. She certainly couldn’t knock people’s unusual activities, given her own need to fill a college transcript. “Okay, then.”
He whipped the piece of paper out of the typewriter, placed it on the table, and put a fresh piece inside. “So, what happened?”
Vi’s eyes darted to the paper he’d just removed from the machine. Words spilled down the page two by two, three by three. He’d been writing a poem. Vi sometimes wrote poetry, but she was shy about it. A guy writing poetry…on an old typewriter. That was kind of interesting.
But before she could read it, he turned the paper over and cleared his throat.
“Well, um, there was a message written on this desk that I’m sitting at for the week,” Vi said. “And I was told to report it so it could get fixed. Or cleaned. Gotten rid of.”
“Which room was this?” He started to type.
“Uh, 303,” she muttered, praying he didn’t know what room that was.
No such luck. He stopped typing and looked at her with a furrowed brow. “The detention room? You?”
Vi stiffened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Vi Allerton has in-school detention? I’m gobsmacked.”
Vi felt her face go hot. One, he’d used the word gobsmacked. She loved the word gobsmacked. Connor had also loved the word gobsmacked. A slippery slope, thinking about Connor. She pushed him from her mind.
Two, this guy knew her name. How?
And finally, was he judging her?
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” she said huffily. “Also, how do you know me?”
He saw her huffy voice and raised it with one even huffier.
“Your name is on practically every poster in every hallway, so it’s pretty hard not to know who you are.
Also, I’m in your study hall. Have been all year.
” He tilted his head down to the paper again.
“This message on the desk. What did it say, exactly?”
Sometimes, when Vi stood on a stage playing a solo on her clarinet, she had a sudden sense that her limbs were about to seize up with no warning and she’d just…
collapse. People would crowd around her, trying to figure out what was wrong, but she wouldn’t be able to tell them.
It would be so embarrassing. She worried about that embarrassment more than she did about the malady that brought on the collapse.
All the attention everyone would have to pay her for something that wasn’t positive.
She felt this fear now, at least briefly, because she didn’t want to explain what was written on the desk. On second thought, why did she even care?
“Forget him,” she said airily. “That’s what it said.”