Sartre said hell is other people, but he obviously never experienced a winter heat wave in the Georgia Lowcountry. Six weeks ago, my best friend and I were drinking cocoa laced with swiped rum, huddled under covers on the couch, oohing over the fat, lacy snowflakes that drifted into frozen piles on the sidewalks. Today, I’m trying to resist fainting from the broiler-like temperatures. In winter.
No wonder there are twelve churches within a five-mile radius of my new house. If this is the kind of fiery heat Georgians deal with on a regular basis, the idea of hellfire must be a terrifyingly real threat.
The sun follows me like the creepy eyes in a fun-house portrait as my sneakers sink into the melting blacktop. I hesitate and stare at my distorted reflection in the glass of the school’s double doors. I’m still attempting to decode the movers’ unintelligible boxing system—yesterday when I opened a box marked Art I found my collection of Daler-Rowney watercolor paints tossed in with an eggbeater and a dozen of my mom’s old yoga DVDs—so my antifrizz balm is still MIA. With it, my hair falls into lopsided curls. Without it, I have to deal with my current situation—a dark cloud of frizz with a life of its own. It probably didn’t help my hair’s general health that I guilted Mom into letting me get the underside stripped, bleached, and dyed bright pink before we left the city. I need a hair tie. Or to get out of the pummeling sunshine before it fries my hair beyond recognition. I seriously love my curls, but I do not love what this crazy humidity is doing to them. Before I left the house this morning I decided that, despite my life going off the rails, I looked smoking hot. Now I look like I just made a quick run to the store and back for one of my aunties on a scorching August afternoon in Santo Domingo, even though all I did was walk across the school parking lot in Georgia. In the middle of winter. The only deliverance from this heat is inside the squat monstrosity that is my new school, Ebenezer High, so I need to make a decision: go inside or die of heatstroke.
“Coño,” I mutter, and it’s like I can feel my father frowning an ocean away. Why is it the only Spanish you ever speak is slang and curses, Aggie?
I shake his words out of my head and take a long look at the place I’m going to call my academic home for the second half of this, my all-important senior year, and I have to wonder if the builders accidentally opened the schematics for a psych ward or a minimum-security prison and didn’t realize their mistake until appalled administrators and teachers showed up postconstruction.
I fill my lungs with a final gulp of suffocatingly hot air, then push into the cool building, cross a lobby showcasing dozens of glittering gold sport trophies, and I’m in a generic front office where a woman with a big smile and bigger hair inputs my information into the computer at a snail’s pace. I heard things are more relaxed south of the Mason-Dixon, but if they’re this relaxed, I may never make it out of the front office.
When my official schedule is finally approved, I’m introduced to the guidance counselor, who leads me into a hallway that smells like yesterday’s cafeteria fries, bleach, and fresh paint. I crane my neck to better take in my new school and wonder if the dingy gray-blue color they’ve chosen for the walls is also a leftover from some institutional torture chamber. I’m used to seeing art displayed on every wall and bright splashes of random colors painted in crevices too small for anything else. This sterility is strangely claustrophobic.
While I’m trying to breathe without the help of a paper bag, I wonder again why I’m even here. My brother, Jasper, told me point-blank that he thought I’d lost my mind the day I announced I was migrating South for the spring term, like some freak-of-nature bird. My father insisted we phone conference half a dozen times so that he could lecture me in Spanish on the merits of a New York City or Parisian education over an education from Georgia—which he insisted was an oxymoron. My abuela says my dad has been manso—very chill—since the day he was born, but talking about my future is the one thing that can make him quillao—super upset. Ollie, my sister