Though she’s nicknamed for the magical Harry Potter, six-foot, dreadlocked Harry Kavanaugh doesn’t find any wonder in her daily life at an exclusive girls’ school outside of Washington, DC. In fact she wants nothing more than to chuck her lot and enter the wilds of public school—too bad she didn’t reckon on a trip to the hospital, a runaway, and a renegade or three, which just might show her a different path to everywhere.
Targeted Age Group:: 10-14 plus crossover adult appeal as coming of age
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
On the Way to Everywhere grew out of a dream—in which a girl hunched in a restroom stall and stared out at a giant rabbit—combined with a conversation with a different girl about Nirvana through a locked powder room door. That’s a lot about bathrooms, right?
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
My characters talk to me, and I write down what they say. I can see them as clearly as I can a person standing right in front of me.
Book Sample
1 in the girls’ bathroom
So it seems clear to me now that what happened,what changed my life from ho-hum to here-we-go-hang-on-tight—the suicide bid,the secret vote, heck, even the regional qualification and the potential trip to South America—happened after I found Frannie. Really her name is Frances Bean, you know, like Kurt Cobain’s daughter, but everyone calls her Frannie. She’s a redhead like me, and unlike the rest of the peons here at Barfmore, that’s what I call this prep school from hell due to the outrageously high eating disorder rate, she can look me in the eye, no mean feat when you’re within spitting distance of six feet. Did I mention that she can touch between her eyes with her the tip of her tongue? I am so not kidding. And that’s the least of her talents, though it’s one of the first ones everyone notices, right up there with the epic drooling. But all I can say is that my life was nowhere until I found Frannie. She’s my good luck token. She helped me formulate my plan to bust out and see the real world. When it was time to call it, heads or tails, we stepped up and took the cue. Want to see for yourself? Then let’s enter my life on the fly, be that fly on the wall, the day I started hopping.
I scurry into the bathroom to escape my tormentors and find my arch-nemesis, my half-sister by the treacherous side of our family,prodding a rabbit the size of a small dog. She is smoking and trying without much success to feed it pieces of hotdog bun, a food product she would never eat herself since she makes toothpicks look wide. It sits in the sink, the rabbit, not the bun or the girl. I can’t help myself; I walk closer. No, I’m not drawn to her orbit like seemingly every other person in the world; she’s just in front of the only unclogged toilet stall. I know this at a glance because the doors cover only the most minimal portion of the doorways to be legal. Upperschoolers were taking too many ciggie breaks, so goodbye truly private doors, but when a girl’s gotta go, a girl’s gotta go, regardless of present company. First things first, and then I’ll take care of the rabbit. Animals and I have an understanding. Felicity is not one of those animals. She is immune to my charms, such as they are, as she is to the rules that apply to the rest of us. I edge into the stall, confident that I have avoided contact both physical and eye, and prepare to lower my tights. With no privacy at Barfmore, I have perfected the show-no-skin approach to dressing and to squatting, most activities really, and so I wriggle them down just enough to plop on the seat with the skirt of my much-maligned uniform blocking all views.
That’s when I notice that said views include two boys, boys, of about my age, maybe a little older. I’m not the best judge of age in boys since a number of factors get in my way when trying to estimate. First, my only brother is eons older than I am, so I never experienced his tender youth. Second, my own body hunched over—its usual position due to my ungainly height—resembles nothing so much as it does a toadstool, squat and prone to unattractive colorations around the gills. I blush at even the word blushing. This leads me to try and live a cerebral life and block out all references to bodies, male or female. Third, my only friend is a boy, but he was always so small as to throw off all judgments. Anxious adults routinely asked him the whereabouts of his mother when he was alone until embarrassingly recently. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly given their circumstances, not only is this a girls’ bathroom, but also this is an all-girls’ school. Sure, like most girls’ schools, we have a neighboring boys’school, the brochures handed out at open houses extolling chaste brother-sister bonding, but it’s miles down the road and locked down tighter than boot camp since my brother Jeremy’s days of fun and frolic if rumor is to be believed. More accurately, if my half-sister is to be believed, since she and her cronies discuss these boys only slightly less often than they discuss the relative merits of various shades of eye shadow, which, let me tell you, are more numerous than the fish in the sea. Oh yeah, people have killed off most of the fish, so eye shadow definitely wins.
So back to these particular boys, there are two of them, one to either side in front of the evil one, like good little acolytes,whose name is of course Felicity in contempt of the fact that she is my anti-happiness, and they are sitting on the floor under the sink holding the rabbit, the only one that has hot water with any regularity, looking up at her and technically toward me. Given these conditions I am completely unable topee, which will make the rest of my morning wretched, all squirms and urges that have to be concealed since I don’t have another break until after labs. Something must be done. I begin to howl. Anyone would expect this outburst to flummox Felicity, since I rarely speak but prefer to narrate my goings-on in my head like play-by-play football but with less action, but nothing fazes her,certainly nothing that I do.
“Oh, Harry, pipe down. Did someone flush your Kurt Cobain action figure?” Sarcastic Felicity is apparently as adorable as Smoking Felicity because the two dolts sigh in lovesickness.
And yes, it is Harry as in Harry Potter. When I was six and the first book came out, my brother started calling me Harry instead of Henny, and it somehow stuck. He claims now that it is because like Harry I am taking a while to realize my potential. My mother teaches dance, but she’s a huge reader, escaper of reality that she is, one of the things my family members have in common, and she thinks Harry Potter and JK Rowling are the best things to happen to children’s literature and literature in general in this century. Why, you ask? Because she got people reading again, that’s why. She says she was just right in naming me, too, because I’m going to come in to my own just as Harry did. When I point out that Harry’s first name wasn’t really Henrietta and that I had already been alive and named years before it came out, not to mention that the boy wizard didn’t feel the need to hunch to avoid towering over lampposts, she just taps her head to remind me that I am superior to my body in every way, or at least this is clearly what she prays. My brother chimes in with the information that Harry Potter was already alive, too; the world just didn’t know it yet.
My mother, Imogene Gayle, both names at all times, please, used to dance with Twyla, as in Twyla Tharp for those of you not up on the world of modern dance, I’m sure it was the y’s that clinched it, and so the alumnae worship her, as does the administration. Such is Imogene Gayle’s boundless appeal that she adorns every admissions and fundraising brochure, a fact that must gall Mister and Missus Head and Finance (does he kiss her ass to get more fun or more funds?) to no end, more on them later. Imogene Gayle’s own body is her temple at which she prays daily, but mine is better forgotten about, certainly since to think about it would be to remind her that my body came from hers, a thought that clearly gives her the shudders. Shuddering dressed in fluttering tulle is a sight, I’ll tell you, one that you should envision as a cross between the sugarplum fairy on ecstasy and a willow tree in a hailstorm. Thank God with a capital G that she gave up any dance aspirations for me early on, probably in utero, where I surely clunked around instead of swam just as I do now. Imogene Gayle and I do not resemble mother and daughter in the traditional ways unless you count living in the same house.
My supposed father is the Head of School, big job that it is, so I almost never see him, though we live at the bottom of his driveway, more on that later, too. Not that I ever did, see him, I mean. I am the product of my mother and father’s last hurrah post-divorce,post-his-remarriage to the finance director imported to our beloved nation’s capital area from Texas to tighten things up around here (not his belt, obviously). Lenore Legrand, who surely must have been a hooker in a former or maybe even a present life to get a name like that, spruced my father right out of his tired old marriage to my mother and into a glorious one with her that produced Felicity double-quick. I am guessing that dear Mother used her pull over the school’s aura to rope him into giving her one more go-round for old times’ sake since my brother was already a teenager so her nest would soon be bare. I do have to guess though because Imogen Gayle’s lips are sealed. I sometimes fantasize that she had a wild in-your-face affair with some gorgeous red-headed Tall Man, because seriously anyone would be better than Ira, but I have no proof of that either. I further suppose that when Lenore the wicked stepmother,a category justly named despite its recent defenders, found out about me (nothing stays secret long at Barfmore, the crown jewel of rural Maryland), she chalked the transgression up to a transaction to settle old debts, though she wouldn’t have imagined it would pay such dividends as I aim to provide. Just like Missus Oates, yes, as in “sow your wild,” pronounced in Health, it only takes once.
“Trying to do my business here, Duplicity, if you don’t mind.”
“Like anyone cares, Henny Penny. Go ahead, go, and then get out of here.”
I angle my head over to the crack near the lock and arch one eyebrow at her where she can see me in the mirror. She cannot do this, and it infuriates her. “Why, planning on a foursome before math?”
She strokes the rabbit’s head as she’s speaking; clearly terrified, it gazes at her with the same flat glazed eyes as the two morons under the sink. I could tell her that rabbits don’t like starch, but what is the point, really? This is obviously some sort of prank, one that will only lead to insult for the rabbit and glory for Felicity in her followers’eyes, like she needs any more, unless I intercede. “Crude, just like you. I should—”
I don’t get to find out what she should or could or would, though it often involves bruises or hair loss for one of us, because the door bangs open and in strides Miz Greenlauer, the baroness of biology, to see what all the racket is about. She runs a handover the thatch of hair sprouting with turf-like evenness from her head as if checking the need to mow. “What the frick?” Profanity is strictly forbidden at our little patch of paradise, immediate detention imposed, and a large rabbit and two boys in the girls’ bathroom aren’t enough to override Greenie’s training, which says something about life at Barfmore. She doesn’t even notice me in the stall, okay, the door is technically closed, but which does hurt my feelings since Greenie and I share a mutual admiration of animals that goes way beyond our admiration of humans. I sulk on the toilet seat.
“Oh, Felicity. Who’s your little friend here?”Leave it to Greenie to focus on the animal in the room and ignore the boys entirely. I don’t feel as bad. Maybe she hasn’t actually seen me perched in here; I can’t blame her really. I do put unusual effort into blending with my surroundings, so still in my sleep that my mother used to wake me to see if I was dead.
“I came in to freshen up,” (meaning have a smoke in it-girl speak, though the cigarette in question has disappeared down the drain), “and here it was. Isn’t it darling?” like Felicity would voluntarily hang out with a rabbit or anything that doesn’t hang on her every hair toss and didn’t involve boys. It clearly rocks to be the Head’s daughter and blonde and perfectly petite.
“Just hopped through the window, I suppose?”Greenie waves a hand at the open window, wordlessly miming the five-foot drop outside it. “Poor thing must be starving,” as she herself always is. “Bring him down to my room. We’ll get him fixed up.” She looks down, flicks a hand from the boys to the window, and brings her eyes back to Felicity. This is a common enough response: eyes taken off Felicity even for an instant quickly long for the sight of her again, even Greenie’s. What am I saying? Even my own mother’s eyes stray to Felicity if she is talking to me, say in the library, and Felicity is near, as if wondering how she drew such a short straw in the gene pool since Felicity in fact resembles Mother far more than I in body type and coloring. No, scratch that, it wouldn’t be the library. Felicity is never to be found there. Me, I long for the back view of Felicity, receding far into the distance and then disappearing once and for all, but we can’t always get what we want. “What can we use for a collar and lead? Most adult rabbits would rather walk than be carried.”
From who knows where and who knows where it’s been, Felicity produces a red thong. She loops one leg of this around the rabbit’s neck. From her waist she removes her skinny belt that clearly violates uniform regulations (belts on pants, not on skirts, certainly not to hike said skirts up above the mandated length) and probably cost more than my mother’s pitiful engagement ring from days past and threads it through the thong. Thus outfitted, the threesome leaves the bathroom skipping and singing. Okay, I added the skipping and singing, but only just. That leaves me still on the can, tights bunched at the hem of my skirt, looking at the backs of two boys’ heads.They are of course looking where they saw their loved one last, exiting the room.
“Shouldn’t you be getting to class now, or are you just going to sit there and pant? She’s not coming back, you know,” I sneer. And without a word off they go, out the window, into the world at large.
After I pee and then get myself properly covered, I peek out the door of the bathroom. You wouldn’t think a bathroom would be a safe place to hide from anyone, perhaps the exact opposite really, but I was pretty sure no one had seen me enter since the janitor’s supply cart was in front of the door (a further ploy of Felicity’s?), and anyway it was first music when I dodged in. Now there is no sign of the lacrosse bitches who have made it their business to stalk me simply because I have been assigned to their squad for my PE this term, and they fear I will bring them down, said team having gone all the way to Regionals last year and hopeful of a repeat. My browbeating for my latest transgression took place in the locker room after our last away game. Dolly, Rosie, and Allie, such lovely names for girls with arms like lug wrenches, descended on me in the locker room, where I sat with my face in a towel of ice after being hit with the ball. There was an imprint of the goggles around my eyes, which would surely be black by tomorrow.
“We’ll be the laughingstock of the league!” Dolly’s perfect French braid swings behind her head with the effort of her hissing.“How the fuck did you manage to score in the wrong fucking goal? Didn’t you hear us screaming?”
“You’re always screaming,” I try to sound reasonable through the ice. I peek with one eye, not wanting them to have the element of surprise. The three stooges take turns, so democratic.
“You should be the one screaming,” Rosie, the most gorgeous of the three with her long blonde ringlets, baby blue eyes, and endless legs. Her brow is deeply furrowed with concentration on her hatred.
“But if you do, we’ll fucking kill you,” Allie spits, in words and in action. Her braces screw up the trajectory, and bubbles of saliva drip down the tiled wall beside me. Her freckles stand out against her pale skin when she gets worked up.
I don’t point out the contradiction in their statements. I focus on breathing. This is a mistake because my ribs are surely stabbing me in the heart, at least that’s what it feels like when it’s racing so fast. I’m getting light-headed from hyperventilating. Breathing is a mistake for another reason, since it seems to spur on the cretins.
“Sorry you’re still breathing yet?”
I reposition my head and hope they’ll just tire of my non-response and go away. It takes a while, but it works eventually, or else it’s the smell of the vomit.
“Perfect! We’ll tell Dorsten you’ve got a bug.Make sure it lasts through Saturday’s game. Or else.” On her way out she trips over my goggles, and just for good measure, stomps on them. I hear the adjustment on the strap snap. Better it than an actual rib, right?
Here at Boltmore, named by the esteemed Lady Boltmore, and yes, that was her first name, we compete in team sports each of the three seasons for our physical education. The Lady, as she was called by young and old from a precious age, wanted to foster health of the athletic, artistic, and academic kind in all her girls so we all punt, paint, and ponder regardless of ability. The fact that the lax banshees’ fears are well founded does little to mitigate my psychological pain. I will certainly bring down the team, especially since the coach, Monsignor Dorsten, believes in playing everyone regardless of ability in hopes of discovering some unpolished gem. He did this once ’round about two decades ago, sending a girl named Kiki or Fifi or some such all the way to the Junior Olympics even though she was about three feet tall and weighed no more than your average watermelon, and is still resting on his laurels. I will not be his next success, trust me. Second music has sounded, bells being passé and Mozart for our brain development the norm, so I will undoubtedly rack up another detention. So numerous are my detentions that they have had to move from after school to lunchtime so as not to interfere with my lacrosse practices. Soon I may be on to the next school year, unless I truly put my plan to bust out of here for good into action and make a run for the public school in town, or perhaps there is summer school for detention. Then I could escape the necessity of going to camp, another of my least favorite activities, behind chin-ups but in front of root canals.
As I am ranking my least favorites, I push open the door of my health class and find it strangely silent. I peek through my matted curtain of hair, dreadlocks really though I hadn’t planned that, to find out if everyone is staring at me for some reason or some new reason anyway. No, the room is empty. I mentally scan my semester schedule since I don’t carry any books or bags, the better to be unprepared and thus get myself booted, Tuesday, Day Four, fourth period, yes, health. Why go to class at all, you ask? It would be too obvious if I just bailed or sat home and watched daytime television; then Imogene Gayle would be all over me and my plan like white on rice. No,this way is subtler, go to class, fail anyway. I look at the board and find a note for me. It says this: Harry, if you decide to join us, we are in the assembly room. Oh, right.
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