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Chapter One
Volcanoes
In ninth grade, I learned that the world is made of lava. My science teacher, Ms. Armstrong, illustrated this fact with candy corn.
"One, two, three," she counted, crunching each color. "Crust, mantle, core."
I munched the stale, waxy-tasting candy and gawked at the pictures in my earth science textbook. I thought about volcanoes belching, stars exploding. It's a wonder people didn't stumble around, knocking into one another.
I slouched in the front row, drawing stars on my desk. My nearsighted eyes had grown so bad, I was legally blind without contacts. The blackboard shimmered. I squeezed my pencil into my palm, leaving pointy marks that hurt and felt nice at the same time. I clamped my hands extra hard when Ms. Armstrong called my name.
"Fin, are you paying attention?" she asked.
She didn't know the truth: I paid attention to everything.
On the outside, I was quiet and still. Inside, I was churning. Nobody could guess what was happening inside my head. I was trying to control the beat of my wiggling desk, the spaces in the whispers around me, the rhythm of Ms. Armstrong's creaky footsteps. Numbers, with their constant order, would do the trick.
I counted backward: five, four, three, two, one. Every star I drew had an odd number of points, though for some reason this didn't bug me. It was like making a wish. When I finished, I leaned back in my chair, putting a punctuation mark at the end of my ritual.
The desk wobbled figure eights whenever I shifted my weight. You could tell it had been a living thing at one point. I tried guessing its age by counting rings, the tree's fingerprints. Too many students had scratched their current love interests into its planetary whirls. I thought about all those names drilled throughout time. Together, they added up to nothing.
With my pen, I traced my thumb on the desk. After the right hand (which always came first), I would trace the left, making sure my fingers added up to ten. I could feel the thick stare of Ms. Armstrong, aimed in my direction.
"Young lady," Ms. Armstrong said. "All six feet on the floor."
This meant the chair's feet as well as my own. I thought of a rumor I'd heard about a boy who had leaned his chair back too far and fell. He had split his noggin, watermelon style, after plunging to the rock-hard floor of the classroom next door.
That's when she noticed my drawings.
"Who did this?" she asked.
I shrugged.
"Did you deface school property?"
I thought about that word, "de-face." The desk didn't have a face until I gave it one.
"What is this about?" Her eyes swept across my felt-tipped cosmos.
I didn't have a clue.
"Why?" she wanted to know.
Who? What? Why? I strung their letters together like a chain: three, four, three.
I had no answers. But I was smart enough to know that something was wrong with me. Until I figured out what it was, I'd keep quiet.
Ms. Armstrong clucked her tongue. She gave me a note to take home. I folded it five times and stuffed it in my book bag.
During lunch, I was left alone in the classroom. Ms. Armstrong made me wipe down all the desks with Windex—an activity that I converted into a new ritual. I would spray twice, wipe three times, and count again.
In the back were three floor-to-ceiling bulletin boards. Ms. Armstrong had covered them in a giant National Geographic map of the Everglades. Our desks were shaped in a double U to invite class discussion. We had only one skinny window. It was smothered with cactus plants, as if looking there were dangerous.
Outside the boys were playing tennis. Every so often, the ball whacked against the window, which Ms. Armstrong had covered with two strips of duct tape. A giant X. My teacher was a worrier too. She always wore a hat to shield off cancerous solar rays. The class made bets on when she'd take it off. She never took it off.
Whack, whack. One, two. I got up and peeked out the window. For some reason, their idea of tennis involved a lot of running around the court. To them, it was baseball with rackets.
I flicked the light switch a couple times. Something made me go around the room and touch all the corners. It was like being trapped in a box. The only way I could climb out was through counting. I eased myself into Ms. Armstrong's chair, swiveling back and forth . . . one, two . . . one, two . . . making windshield-wiper noises. I was listening hard to the noise in my head.
On her desk I found a photo of her middle-age son puffing on a trombone. Ms. Armstrong said he'd performed for the Queen of England. This didn't mean much to our country. Forever he'd blow a note that nobody could hear. Forever was a long time. Infinity. The only number whose size and shape I couldn't imagine.
In back of the picture frame were two bolts. I touched them once, twice, then unscrewed them. The photo fluttered out. I noticed that one of the corners was torn, as if a giant roach had taken a bite out of it. I considered ripping the other corner, just to make it even. The thought grabbed hold and wouldn't let go. I felt that familiar pressure building inside me. Before I realized it, my fingers were busy shredding. But the bottom half needed to match, so I tore it, too. When I tried to stuff it back inside the frame, it no longer fit, so I tore the entire thing to bits.
I tucked the empty frame in Ms. Armstrong's drawer. I opened my desk and dumped the shreds inside. As I slammed it shut, I noticed faint outlines of . . .
Total Constant Order. Copyright © by Crissa-Jean Chappell. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from Total Constant Order by Crissa-Jean Chappell
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