I woke up from the old nightmare as the car drew to a halt and the engine fell silent. My head pressed against a cushion, sleep dragging on me like an anchor, it took me a while to remember where I was. Not in that motorway service station, but in Colorado with my parents. Moving on. Moving in.
‘What do you think?’ Simon, as my dad preferred to be called, got out of the dodgy old Ford he’d bought in Denver and threw his arm dramatically towards the house. His long grey-streaked brown hair was getting loose from its tie in his enthusiasm to show off our new home. Pointy roof, clapboard walls, and grimy windows—it did not look promising. I half expected the Addams family to lurch out of the front door. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, trying to drive off the gritty fear that remained after one of my dreams.
‘Oh, darling, it’s wonderful.’ Sally, my mum, refused to be daunted—the terrier of happiness, as Simon jokingly called her, seizing it in her teeth and refusing to shake free. She got out of the car. I followed, not sure if it was jetlag I was feeling or dreamlag. The words I had in my head were ‘gloomy’, ‘wreck’, and ‘rotten’; Sally came up with some others.
‘I think it’s going to be brilliant. Look at those shutters—they must be original. And the porch! I’ve always fancied myself a porch kind of person, sitting in my rocker and watching the sun go down.’ Her brown eyes sparkled with anticipation, her curly hair bouncing as she jumped up the steps.
Having lived with them since I was ten, I’d long ago accepted that both my parents were probably off their rockers. They lived in a little fantasy world of their own, where derelict houses were ‘quaint’ and mould ‘atmospheric’. Unlike Sally, I always fancied myself as the ultra-modern kind of person, sitting in a chair that wasn’t a haven for woodworm and a bedroom that didn’t have icicles on the inside of the windows in winter.
But forget the house: the mountains behind were stunning, soaring impossibly high into the clear autumn sky, a dusting of white on their peaks. They rolled along the horizon like a tidal wave frozen in time, caught just as it was about to curl down upon us. Their rocky slopes were tinged with pink in the late afternoon light, but, where shadows fell across the snowfields, they turned a cold slate blue. The woods climbing their sides were already shot through with gold; stands of aspens burned against the dark Douglas firs. I could see a cable car and the clearings that marked the ski runs, all of which looked almost vertical.
These had to be the High Rockies I’d read about when my parents broke the news that we were moving from Richmond-on-Thames to Colorado. They’d been offered a year as artists-in-residence in a new Arts Centre in a little town called Wrickenridge. A local multi-millionaire and admirer of their work had got it into his head that the ski resort west of Denver needed an injection of culture—and my parents, Sally and Simon, were to be it.
When they presented me with the ‘good’ news, I checked the town website and found that Wrickenridge was known for its three hundred inches of snow each year and not much else. There would be skiing—but I’d never been able to afford the school trip to the Alps so that would put me about a million years behind my contemporaries. I was already picturing my humiliation at the first snowy weekend when I stumbled on the nursery slopes and the other teenagers zipped down the black runs.
But my parents loved the idea of painting among the Rockies and I didn’t have the heart to spoil their big adventure. I pretended to be OK with missing out on sixth form college in Richmond with all my friends and instead enrolling in Wrickenridge High. I’d made a place for myself in south-west London in the six years since they’d adopted me; I’d struggled out of terror and silence, overcoming shyness to have my own circle in which I felt popular. I’d shut off the stranger parts of my character—like that colour thing I’d dreamt about. I no longer looked for people’s auras as I had done as a child, ignored it when my control slipped. I’d made myself normal—well, mostly. Now I was being launched into the unknown. I’d seen plenty of films about American schools and was feeling more than a little insecure about my new place of education. Surely normal American teenagers got spots and wore crappy clothes sometimes? I’d never fit in if the movies turned out to be true.
‘OK.’ Simon rubbed his hands on the thighs of his faded jeans, a habit that left every item of clothing he owned smeared with oils. He was dressed in his usual Bohemian scruff while Sally looked quite smart in new trousers and jacket she’d bought for travelling. I fell somewhere between the two: moderately rumpled in my Levis. ‘Let’s go and see inside. Mr Rodenheim said he’d sent the decorators in for us. He promised they’d do the outside as soon as they could get to it.’
So that was why it looked a dump.
Simon opened the front door. It squeaked but didn’t fall off its hinges, which I took as a little victory for us. The decorators had clearly just left—gifting us with their dust sheets, ladders, and pots of paint, walls half done. I poked my nose in the rooms upstairs, finding a turquoise one with a queen bed and a view of the peaks. Had to be mine. Maybe this wouldn’t be so terrible.
I used my fingernail to scratch paint splashes off the old mirror over the chest of drawers. The pale, solemn girl in the reflection did the same, staring at me with her dark blue eyes. She looked ghostly in the half light, her long blonde hair curling in unruly tendrils around her oval face. She looked fragile. Alone. Prisoner in the room through the mirror; an Alice who never made it back through the looking-glass.
I shivered. The dream was still haunting me, tugging me back to the past. I had to stop thinking like this. People—teachers, friends, you name it—had told me I was prone to drifting off in melancholy daydreams. But they didn’t understand that I felt … I don’t know … somehow lacking. I was a mystery to myself—a bundle of fragmented memories and unexplored dark places. My head was full of secrets but I’d lost the map showing me where to find them.
Dropping my hand from the cool glass, I turned away from the mirror and went downstairs. My parents were standing in the kitchen, wrapped up in each other as usual. They had the kind of relationship that was so complete I often wondered how they found space for me.
Sally circled Simon’s waist and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘Not bad. Do you remember our first digs off Earls Court, darling?’
‘Yes. The walls were grey and everything rattled when the tube passed under the house.’ He kissed her froth of short brown hair. ‘This is a palace.’
Sally held her hand out to include me in the moment. I’d trained myself over the last few years not to mistrust their affectionate gestures, so took it. Sally squeezed my knuckles, silently acknowledging what it cost me not to shy away from them. ‘I’m really excited. It’s like Christmas morning.’
She was always a sucker for the stocking thing.
I smiled. ‘I never would have guessed.’
‘Anyone home?’ There was a rap on the porch door and an elderly woman marched in. She had white-flecked black hair, dark brown skin, and triangle earrings that dangled almost to the collar of her gold padded jacket. Loaded down by a casserole dish, she efficiently kicked the door closed with her heel. ‘There you are. I saw you arrive. Welcome to Wrickenridge.’
Sally and Simon exchanged an amused look as the lady made herself at home, putting the dish on the hall table.
‘I’m May Hoffman, your neighbour from across the street. And you are the Brights from England.’
It seemed Mrs Hoffman did not require anyone else to participate in her conversations. Her energy was scary; I caught myself wishing for a tortoise-like ability to creep back into my shell to take cover.
‘Your daughter doesn’t look much like either of you, does she?’ Mrs Hoffman moved a pot of paint aside. ‘I saw you pull up. Did you know your car’s leaking oil? You’ll want to get that fixed. Kingsley at the garage will see to it for you if you say I recommended him. He’ll give you a fair price, but mind he doesn’t charge you for a valet service—that should be complimentary.’
Sally grimaced apologetically at me. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs Hoffman.’
She waved it away. ‘We make a point of being good neighbours here. Have to be—wait until you experience one of our winters and you’ll understand.’ She directed her attention in my direction, her eyes shrewd. ‘Enrolled as an eleventh grader at the high school?’
‘Yes … er … Mrs Hoffman,’ I mumbled.
‘Semester started two days ago, but I expect you know that. My grandson’s in junior year too. I’ll tell him to look after you.’
I had a nightmare vision of a male version of Mrs Hoffman shepherding me around the school. ‘I’m sure that won’t be—’
She cut across me, gesturing to the dish. ‘Thought you might appreciate some home cooking to start you off right in your new kitchen.’ She sniffed. ‘I see Mr Rodenheim finally got round to doing the place up. About time. I told him this house was a disgrace to the neighbourhood. Now, you get some rest, you hear, and I’ll see you when you’ve settled in.’
She was gone before we had a chance to thank her.
‘Well,’ said Simon. ‘That was interesting.’
‘Please fix the oil leak tomorrow,’ Sally mock-begged, holding up her clasped hands to her chest. ‘I couldn’t bear to be here if she finds out you’ve not taken her advice—and she’ll be back.’
‘Like the common cold,’ he agreed.
‘She’s not … um … very British, is she?’ I ventured.
We all laughed—the best christening the house could have had.
That night I unpacked my suitcase into the old chest of drawers Sally had helped me line with wallpaper; it still smelt musty and the drawers stuck, but I liked the faded white paint-job. Distressed, Sally called it. I know how it felt, having spent many years at that end of the emotional spectrum.
I found myself wondering about Mrs Hoffman and this strange town we had come to. It felt so different—alien. Even the air at this altitude wasn’t quite enough and I had the faint buzz of a headache lurking. Beyond my window, framed by the branches of an apple tree growing close to the house, the mountains were dark shapes against the charcoal grey sky of a cloudy night. The peaks sat in judgement over the town, reminding us humans just how insignificant and temporary we were.
I spent a long time choosing what I’d wear on my first day at school, settling on a pair of jeans and a Gap T-shirt, anonymous enough so that I wouldn’t stand out with the other students. Thinking again, I pulled out a snug-fit jumper with a Union Jack worked in gold on the front. Might as well accept what I was.
That was something Simon and Sally had taught me. They knew about the difficulty I had recalling my past and never pushed, saying I would remember if and when I was ready. It was enough for them that I was who I was now; I did not have to apologize for being incomplete. Still, it did not stop me being plain scared of the unknown that was tomorrow.
Feeling a bit of a coward, I accepted Sally’s offer to accompany me to the school office to enrol. Wrickenridge High was about a mile down the hill from our neighbourhood, near the I-70, the main road that connected the town to the other ski resorts in the area. It was a building that had pride in its purpose: the name carved in stone over the double height doors, the grounds well maintained. The hallway was crammed with noticeboards advertising the wide range of activities open to—or maybe expected of—the students. I thought of the sixth form college I could have been attending in England. Tucked away behind the shopping centre in a mixture of Sixties buildings and portakabins, it had been anonymous, not a place you belonged to but passed through. I got the sense that belonging was a big part of the Wrickenridge experience. I wasn’t sure what I felt about that. I supposed it would be OK if I did manage to fit, but bad if I flunked the test of blending in to a new school.
Sally knew I was anxious but chose to act as if I was going to be the most successful student ever known.
‘Look, they’ve got an art club,’ she said brightly. ‘You could try pottery.’
‘I’m useless at that stuff.’
She sucked her teeth, knowing that was the truth. ‘Music then. I see there’s an orchestra. Oh look, and cheerleading! That might be fun.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘You’d look sweet in one of those outfits.’
‘I’m about a foot too short,’ I said, eyeing the giraffe-legged girls that made up the cheerleading team on the team poster.
‘A pocket-sized Venus, that’s what you are. I wish I had your figure.’
‘Sally, will you stop being so embarrassing?’ Why was I even bothering to argue with her? I had no intention of becoming a cheerleader even if height wasn’t an issue.
‘Basketball,’ continued Sally.
I rolled my eyes.
‘Dance.’
It was a joke now.
‘Maths club.’
‘You’d need to club me over the head to get me in that,’ I muttered, making her laugh.
She squeezed my hand briefly. ‘You’ll find your place. Remember, you are special.’
We pushed open the door to the office. The receptionist stood behind the counter, glasses attached to a chain around his neck; they bounced on his pink sweater as he stacked the mail in the teachers’ pigeonholes. He managed this at the same time as drinking from a takeaway coffee cup.
‘Ah, you must be the new girl from England! Come in, come in.’ He beckoned us closer and shook Sally’s hand. ‘Mrs Bright, Joe Delaney. If you wouldn’t mind signing a few forms for me. Sky, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘I’m Mr Joe to the students. I’ve a welcome pack for you here.’ He handed it over. I saw that I already had a school swipe card with my photo. It was the one taken for my passport where I looked like a rabbit caught in headlights. Great. I slung the chain around my head and tucked the card out of sight.
He leant forward confidentially, giving me a whiff of his flowery aftershave. ‘I take it you are not familiar with how we do things here?’
‘No, I’m not,’ I admitted.
Mr Joe spent the next ten minutes patiently explaining what courses I could attend and what grades I needed to graduate.
‘We’ve made a timetable here based on the choices you made when you filled out your application but, remember, nothing is set in stone. If you want to change, just let me know.’ He checked his watch. ‘You’ve missed registration, so I’ll take you straight to your first class.’
Sally gave me a kiss and wished me luck. From here, I was on my own.
Mr Joe frowned at a crowd of loiterers by the late book, scattering them like a collie herding recalcitrant sheep, before leading me towards the history corridor. ‘Sky, that’s a pretty name.’
I didn’t want to tell him that we chose it together only six years ago when I was adopted. I’d not been able to tell anyone my birth name when I was found and hadn’t spoken for years afterwards, so the Social Services had called me Janet—‘Just Janet’, as one foster brother had joked. This had made me hate it more than ever. A new name was meant to help make a new start with the Brights; Janet had been relegated to my middle name.
‘My parents liked it.’ And I hadn’t been old enough to foresee how embarrassing it could be on occasion with my surname.
‘It’s cute, imaginative.’
‘Um, yeah.’ My heart was thumping, palms damp. I was not going to mess up. I was so not going to mess up.
Mr Joe opened the door.
‘Mr Ozawa, here’s the new girl.’
The Japanese-American teacher looked up from his laptop where he’d been running through some notes on the interactive white board. Twenty heads swung in my direction.
Mr Ozawa looked over the top of his little half-moon glasses at me, straight black hair flopping over one lens. He was good-looking in an older guy kind of way. ‘Sky Bright?’
A snigger ran through the class but it wasn’t my fault my parents had not warned me when we picked my name. As usual their heads had been full of fanciful images rather than my future torment at school.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll take it from here, Mr Joe.’
The receptionist gave me an encouraging nudge over the threshold and walked away. ‘Keep smiling, Sky.’
That was so going to happen when I felt like diving for cover under the nearest desk.
Mr Ozawa clicked to the next slide entitled ‘The American civil war’. ‘Take a seat anywhere you like.’
There was only one free that I could see, next to a girl with caramel-toned skin and nails painted red, white, and blue. Her hair was amazing—a mane of gingery brown dreadlocks falling past her shoulders. I gave her a neutral smile as I slid in next to her. She nodded and tapped her talons on the desk while Mr Ozawa passed round a handout. When he turned away, she offered her palm for a brief brush rather than a shake.
‘Tina Monterey.’
‘Sky Bright.’
‘Yeah, I got that.’
Mr Ozawa clapped his hands to gain our attention. ‘OK, guys, you’re the lucky ones who’ve chosen to study nineteenth century American history. However, after ten years of teaching juniors I have no illusions and I expect the vacation has driven all knowledge from your brains. So, let’s start with an easy one. Who can tell me when the Civil War started? And yes, I want the right month.’ His eyes scanned a class of expert head-duckers and came to rest on me.
Bummer.
‘Miss Bright?’
Any American history I had ever known vanished like the Invisible Man taking off his suit, piece by piece, leaving me a blank. ‘Um … you had a civil war?’
The class groaned.
I guess that meant I really should’ve known that.
At recess, I was grateful that Tina didn’t abandon this clueless Brit despite my dismal performance in class. She offered to show me around the school. Many things I came out with made her laugh—not because I was being funny, but because I was being too English, she said.
‘Your accent’s neat. You sound like that actress—you know, the one in the pirate films.’
Did I really sound so posh? I wondered. I’d always thought I was too London for that.
‘You related to the Queen or something?’ Tina teased.
‘Yes, she’s like my second cousin twice removed,’ I said seriously.
Tina’s eyes widened. ‘You’re kidding!’
‘Actually, I am—kidding I mean.’
She laughed and flapped her face with her file. ‘You had me for a moment there; I was getting worried I’d have to curtsey.’
‘Go ahead.’
We helped ourselves to lunch from the canteen and took our trays into the dining hall. One wall was composed entirely of windows, giving a view of the muddy playing fields and woods beyond. The sun was out, silver-plating the peaks a glistening white, so some students were eating outside, gathered in groups arranged roughly by style of clothing. There were four years in this high school, ages ranged from fourteen to eighteen. I was in the eleventh grade, the so-called ‘junior’ year below the senior class of those graduating.
I waved my can of fizzy spring water towards them. ‘So, Tina, who’s who?’
‘The groups?’ She laughed. ‘You know, Sky, I sometimes think we are all victims of our own stereotypes,’ cause we do conform even though I hate to admit it. When you try to be different, you just end up in a group of rebels all doing the same. That’s high school for you.’
A group sounded good: somewhere to take cover. ‘I suppose it was the same back where I came from. Let me guess, those lot are the jocks?’ These had featured in every film I’d seen from Grease to High School Musical and were easy to spot thanks to the team strip for lunchtime practice.
‘Yeah—the sports mad ones. They’re mostly OK—not many fit guys with six-packs, sad to say, just sweaty teenagers. It’s mainly baseball, basketball, hockey, girls’ soccer and football here.’
‘American football—that’s like rugby, isn’t it, except they wear loads of padding?’
‘Is it?’ She shrugged. I guessed then that she was not sporty herself. ‘What do you play?’
‘I can run a bit and have been known to knock a tennis ball about, but that’s it.’
‘I can handle that. Jocks can be so boring, you know? One track minds—and it’s not girls they’re thinking about.’
Three students walked by, discussing gigabytes with serious expressions worthy of Middle East peace negotiators. One twirled a memory stick on a keyring.
‘They’re the geeks—they’re the clever ones who make sure everyone knows it. Almost the same as nerds but with more technology.’
I laughed.
‘To be fair, there are also other bright ones—they’re clever but wear it well. They tend not to hang together in packs like the geeks and the nerds.’
‘Uh huh. Not sure I’ll fit in any of those groups.’
‘Me neither: I’m not dumb, but I’m not Ivy League material. Then there’s the arts type—the musicians and drama people. I kinda fit in there as I like fine art and design.’
‘You should meet my parents then.’
She clicked her nails on her can in a little drum roll of excitement. ‘You mean you’re that family—the ones coming to Mr Rodenheim’s Arts Centre?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Cool. I’d love to meet them.’
A group shuffled past, boys with trousers hanging off their butts like mountain climbers clinging to an overhang with no safety rope.
‘That’s a few of the skater dudes,’ snorted Tina. ‘Enough said. I mustn’t forget the bad boys—you won’t see them hanging round here with us losers—they’re way too cool for us. Probably out in the parking lot right now with their groupies comparing, I dunno what, carburettors or something. That’s if they haven’t been suspended. Who have I left out? We have some misfits.’ She pointed to a little group by the serving hatch. ‘And then we have our very own skiing fraternity, special to the Rockies. In my opinion, that’s the best game in town.’ She must have seen my worried expression because she hastened to reassure me. ‘You can be in more than one—ski as well as be a jock, do the play and get the best grades. No one has to be just one kind of thing.’
‘Except the misfits.’ I glanced over at the group she had indicated. They weren’t really a group, more a collection of oddballs who had no one else to sit beside. One girl was muttering to herself—at least, I saw no evidence of a hands-free headset for her phone. I felt a sudden panic that I would be among them when Tina got tired of me. I’d always felt something of an oddity; it wouldn’t take much to knock me over into the group of the seriously weird.
‘Yeah, don’t mind them. Every school has them.’ She opened her yoghurt. ‘No one makes a big deal about it. So what was your last school like? Hogwarts? Posh kids wearing black gowns?’
‘Um … no.’ I choked on a laugh. If Tina could’ve seen us at lunch in my comprehensive, she would not be reminded of Hogwarts but a zoo as two thousand of us tried to fight our way through to the cramped dining hall in forty-five minutes. ‘We were more like this.’
‘Great. Then you’ll soon feel at home.’
Being new is something I’d had a lot of experience of in my life before Sally and Simon adopted me. In those days I had been shuffled from home to home like a chain letter no one wanted to keep. And now I was back to being a stranger. I felt horribly conspicuous wandering the hallways, map in hand, completely at sea as to how the school functioned, though I guess my obviousness was all in my mind; the other students probably didn’t even notice me. Classrooms and teachers became landmarks to orientate by; Tina a kind of rock I could cling to when I washed up in her area from time to time, but I tried to hide this as I didn’t want to put her off developing friendliness into friendship from fear that I would crowd her. I went hours without talking to anyone and had to force myself to ignore my shyness and make conversation with my classmates. Still, I had the impression I’d arrived too late; the students of Wrickenridge High had had years to form groups and get to know each other. I was on the outside, looking in.
As the school day drew to a close, I wondered if I was always going to be doomed to this feeling that life was a shade out of focus for me, like a poor quality pirated film. Dissatisfied, and a little bit depressed, I made my way out of the main doors to head home. Threading through the crowds pouring out of the building, I got a glimpse of the bad boys Tina had mentioned at lunchtime. Caught in a shaft of sunlight in the car park, there was nothing fuzzy about these guys, though they certainly looked illegal. There were five of them, lounging against their motorbikes: two African-American boys, two white guys, and a dark-haired Hispanic. At any time, any place, you would have identified them immediately as trouble. Their expressions matched—a sneer at the world of education as represented by all us good students dutifully filing out on time. Most pupils gave them a wide berth, like ships avoiding a dangerous stretch of coast; the remainder shot them envious looks, hearing the siren call and tempted to stray too close.
Part of me wished I could do that—stand there, sure of myself, flipping off the rest of the planet for being so uncool. If only I had legs from here to eternity, quick cutting wit, looks to stop people in their tracks. Oh yeah, and being male helped: I could never carry off that hipshot look, thumbs linked in belt loops, kicking the dirt with my toe caps. Was it natural to them, or did they calculate the effect, practising in front of the mirror? I dismissed the thought quickly—that was something losers like me would do; they surely had such inbred coolness they were their own little ice age. The Hispanic fascinated me in particular—his eyes were hidden by shades as he leaned, arms folded, against the saddle of his bike, a king in his court of knights. He didn’t have to struggle with the conviction that he was lacking in any way.
As I watched, he mounted his bike, revving it like a warrior prodding a monstrous steed awake. With brief goodbyes to his companions, he shot out of the car park, other students scattering. I’d give a lot to be on the back of that bike, dismissing the school day as my knight whisked me home. Better yet, be the one driving, the lone superhero, fighting injustice in her skin-tight leather outfit, men swooning in her wake.
A gust of self-mocking laughter stopped my random thoughts. Just listen to yourself! I chided my overheated imagination. Warriors and monsters; superheroes? I’d been reading too much Manga. These boys were a different breed from me. I was not even a blip on their radar. I should be thankful that no one could see inside my head to know just how fanciful I was. My grasp on reality could seem a bit shaky at times as I let my daydreams colour my perceptions. I was plain old Sky; they were gods: that was the way of the world.