Helen Oyeyemi - The Icarus Girl

Not that she disliked Alison Carr, either. . Everyone in their class, except for Colleen McLain, was OK. Even Andrea Carney was OK — she had taken Jess to the school nurse once when Nam Hong had tripped her up in the playground and she had cut her knee badly. That was the problem — everyone was just OK.

Jess sat down, keeping her back straight, as if someone had attached a hook and string to her skull and was yanking the string taut so that her head went up, as she strove to ignore Colleen and Andrea’s glances prickling on her back.

I have a friend an amazing friend who’s coming to see me soon and she’s better than the two of you put together and she listens to me I talked about a poem with her and I don’t care if you don’t like me and and and. .

“OK, Year Five, settle down, SETTLE DOWN! Get to the tables — we’re going to make some information booklets about Sir Francis Drake now—”

But Miss Patel didn’t get a chance to finish, because just at that moment, Jess bent double and, putting her hands over her eyes, began to scream and scream and scream.

“Jessamy?”

Jess raised her head from her knees and looked around blearily, her eyes still smarting from her tears. She stared at Mr. Heinz, the headmaster. She recognised him from assembly. His dark brown hair was sprinkled with grey, and his tie stood out from his sleek navy-blue suit because it was red with yellow smiley faces on it.

Mr. Heinz drew a chair out from beneath the clean white nurse’s desk, and sat down. He clasped his hands in his lap, then lifted them, linked them together, pushed the lattice made by his joined fingers outwards. Jess silently watched his hands, her own hands creeping to her face to rub at her eyes. It was quiet.

Say something.

He didn’t.

She lost patience.

“Yes, Mr. Heinz?” she asked, wanting him to say whatever it was that he was here to say, show his concern, his dismay, and then go away so that she could be by herself.

“Jessamy,” he began again. “I wanted to ask you — are you happy in your new class? I mean, obviously, I know that sometimes it all gets a little bit stressful and you, you know, erm, vent your feelings and so on, but in general, is it all right there?”

Jess had calculated one weekend that on average she had at least one serious tantrum in school per week. She had laughed with a kind of embarrassment, thinking No wonder my class thinks I’m weird . Was it getting boring?

She remembered how, one day, Colleen McLain had said something pretty horrible. Colleen had been with Andrea and Andrea’s cousin Sonia, and she had said loudly, with several glances to make sure Jessamy was listening, “Maybe Jessamy has all these ‘attacks’ because she can’t make up her mind whether she’s black or white!”

Jess hadn’t known what to think about what Colleen had just said, (I mean, is it true?) but she knew that her mum would have gone mentalist.

So she hadn’t told her.

“Sir,” Jess said finally, in a small, polite voice, “I hate being in that class, but I have to go to school, so I might as well not complain.”

He did not seem surprised by what she said; if he had, she would have thought him an idiot — after all, he must have at least discussed her with Miss Patel, if not noticed all the times that she’d had to go home after a particularly bad tantrum when they couldn’t get her to settle.

Jess realised another thing.

She hated the word “settle.”

Mr. Heinz cleared his throat.

“You could always go back to Year Four,” he said.

Jess almost laughed at him outright, hysteria bubbling in her throat as she remembered his visit to her house to speak to her parents about moving her up to Year Five. Her mother had looked long at her, an assessing sort of look, as if she wasn’t sure whether to object or to be proud that her daughter was going to be advanced “a whole class,” as she put it — as if someone could be moved up by half a class. Offering the plate of biscuits to Mr. Heinz, she had said in a matter-of-fact, somewhat Nigerian manner, that she had no objection to Jessamy’s being moved up a year. After all, it wasn’t irrevocable, was it, and there would be a trial period first. Mr. Heinz had taken a biscuit. Yes, Jessamy would think later, laughing, that her mother had been very Nigerian about it, had hidden her pride. Give her any scenario, and that calm acceptance that Nigerian children might be singled out for anything would emerge: What is that I hear you say? You have randomly and spontaneously decided to elect my daughter as Prime Minister? Well, all I can say is: good choice .

But her father — Jess had watched him turn the lenses of his glasses towards him and stare at them as if they were another pair of eyes looking back. He looked around the living room before speaking, and Jess followed his gaze: he seemed to be taking in the dark-red sofa and chairs, the plum-coloured light filtering out from the lampshade. He fiddled with his glasses again and seemed to be hesitating.

“It’s, erm, not Jess keeping up that I worry about,” he had said, his usually buoyant voice sounding almost muffled. Jess, her mother and Mr. Heinz waited to see what exactly he had been worrying about.

“Erm, well, I just thought maybe she might not actually, you know, like it.”

Sarah Harrison laughed, and so did Mr. Heinz. Jessamy had heard and was glad to hear that her father worried about these things; she was starting to think that no one did. She took a small bite of her bourbon biscuit.

“Well, we did say that nothing’s definite until Jessamy’s tried it out,” Mr. Heinz said. Jess looked at him guardedly — he laughed with his mouth open too wide.

The confidence in Mr. Heinz’s voice seemed to make Daniel Harrison shrink somehow, but Jess, watching from beneath her eyelashes, could not see exactly how or what the change was. Daniel looked at Sarah, who gave him a slight shrug ( They want to make our daughter special; what can we do? ), then he looked at Jessamy. Jessamy took another self-conscious nibble at the biscuit. She did not like to, could not, eat very much in front of strangers.

Then her father looked at Mr. Heinz.

“Let’s try it,” he said, his tone suddenly cheerful. “Where’s the harm? If you don’t like it, you’ll tell us, won’t you, Jess?” he added.

Another one of those choiceless, spiral questions. She had to think carefully, clutching the biscuit in her palm as a talisman against the three faces looking at her. They had suddenly become a group .

What could she do?

Thinking of this, now, Jess put her head down and cried quietly, miserably.

After a few minutes, when Jess had composed herself, the nurse returned her to her class, where she spent the rest of the day going through the motions of being a Year Five pupil, hunched over a stack of coloured paper with scissors, glue, a copy of the book that Miss Patel had been reading from, and some coloured pencils. She vaguely noted that there were three other people at the table with her, but said hardly anything to them, not even when Jonathan Carroll and Nam Hong’s wet-tissue fight ended up hitting her in the face. She gave a nod in acceptance of their apologies and continued snipping and colouring, placing things against the page, making sure that the only thing that she had any control over would look just right. She talked to Tunde Coker, who was also at her table, even less than usual, and steadfastly refused to look at Colleen McLain, who as always finished making her Sir Francis Drake booklet before anyone else.

“Bit slow, aren’t you, Jessamy?” Colleen called out loudly, and Jess pretended not to hear, in fact, did not hear, made it her business only to hear the small clicking sound of Tunde’s pencil breaking as he pressed too hard, and the scratchy, grating sound as he sharpened it up again.