by Sara Wolf
No, wait. Backspace that. Pretend I didn’t say it. Too soon. No pools of water around for miles to confess moodily into.
Fuck, it’s hard being alive.
I inform my best friend Ruby of this as I walk into our usual meeting place - right below Northview High School’s obnoxious neon sign that likes to scream about whatever sweat-soaked grindfest is next on the holiday-adjacent school dance table. We spent all night facetiming and watching movies, our eyebags mirroring each others’.
“It’s hard being alive,” I whine.
“Uh, yeah.” She rubs her eyes blearily. “But I had tofu and quinoa for dinner for the fourth time this week. So suck it up.”
“My mom’s dating.”
“Oof.” Ruby winces, her parrot earrings dangling. “Nevermind. You win.”
We duck beneath the bushes around the school and cross the football field arm-in-arm. This early in the morning it’s quiet, and considering it’s the back entrance, we don’t have to see anyone we don’t want to in the warlike throng of the morning drop-off. Win-win.
“You ever think you’re not gonna make it?” I ask.
“In Hollywood?” Ruby primps her lips. “With this face? No way.”
“No I mean like, past eighteen? Do you ever feel like there’s some big shadow hanging over you constantly? And it’s telling you, like, you’re gonna drop dead the instant you graduate?”
“Oh.” Ruby nods thoughtfully. “Yeah. All the fucking time. But isn’t that just the existential dread of capitalist America forcing us into massive amounts of college debt and a soul-crushing retail job to pay it off?”
Ruby is gorgeous in a dark-haired-dark-eyed-almost-six-foot-tall way, and her dad’s a sociologist, which means not only is she prettier and taller than me, but she’s also smarter than me by sheer osmosis.
“Either that, or I’ve got depression,” I muse.
“Well, if you do, definitely get help,” Ruby insists. “Ophelia Brown went to therapy last year and she turned out fine.”
“She got into crystals, Ruby. That’s not ‘fine’.”
“Hobbies are good for you!”
“She tried to cure the wart on my foot with a rose quartz!” I screech.
“Okay, well,” Ruby sighs, and then says exactly nothing else. My phone suddenly buzzes with a text, and I pull it out. Mom.
‘Hi sweetie :) Do you still have that dress I got you for your birthday?’
My fingers fly. ‘the one with rabbits on it? It’s in my closet’
I nearly stumble on the last few stairs going up the stadium. I pause, my brain rumbling like an old V8 engine. My fingers fly again.
‘y?’
‘Honey, ‘why’ is three letters, did you really need to shorten it?’
‘yes. self expression. teenager. hear me roar.
‘We’re going to dinner tonight,’ she types. ‘You’re meeting Ryan Reynolds’.
‘and all I have is a rabbit dress?!’
‘It looks cute on you. See you tonight! xoxo’
I put the phone back in my pocket and let out my last breath. Ruby waits for me to inhale again, and when it never comes, she thumps me on the back.
“I’m meeting her boyfriend tonight!” I explode, gulping air. “We’re going to dinner!”
“Congrats. Do you wanna borrow my sleeping earplugs? They were a lifesaver when Dad got okcupid.”
Nausea does not stop me from immediately cupping my hands around my mouth and shouting down from the top of the stadium steps; “My best friend’s gonna make me fucking yartz!!!”
My words echo gloriously. Coach Stevens, he of the ‘periods are an excuse’ fame chooses that moment to open his office door at the bottom of the stadium, and we stare at each other. He makes the ‘I’m watching you’ fingers at me, and I make them back, but at the last moment I get a stroke of divine inspiration and flip him the middle finger. He’s fifty and definitely can’t climb fast. Ruby and I dash away howling with laughter.
Once upon a time my horoscope said ‘Dear Taurus, your hubris will be your downfall’, and it might’ve been three years too early, but it was absolutely correct.
Because he is an Adult(™) with Methods(™) and the support of a Power Structure(™) behind him, Coach Stevens tracks me down in the cafeteria during my riveting lunch of chicken fingers and chocolate milk and gives me detention. I try to appeal to his better nature.
“Anybody ever tell you you’re super cool, Mr. Stevens?”
He just stares at me, dead-fish-eyed. Nada. Go for the heartstrings.
“Listen; I’ve got a dinner date tonight. Well not me, uh, it’s my Mom’s. I’m meeting her main squeeze. She hasn’t dated for a whole decade, and if I miss it -”
“No wheedling, Pierce,” Coach frowns, and it makes his bulldog chin wiggle. “Detention. Room C15. After school.”
He tawdles away in his track suit and I shake my chicken-greasy fist after him. “If I miss it and she ends up dating a serial killer because I never met him and warned her, you’re going down as an accomplice!”
Ruby has all the pity in the world for me, but none of the time. She has debate club to get to. And math league after that. She gives me her pack of mini pretzels, though, so I decide not to disown her completely. I make it through the whole hour and a half of detention by sucking the salt off them very quietly. Stevens gives me a final assignment before I’m ‘allowed to go’ and I mightily resist the urge to call his hairline tragic.
He’s making me do detention the real old and real shitty way; I’m sitting at the scratched-up desk in-between writing ‘I will not make rude gestures’ on the paper a hundred times when Mom calls.
“Hi Mom,” I whisper. “Real nice weather we’re having, huh?”
“Are you in detention again, Lilith?”
I buzz my lips. “Pfft, what? No.”
Coach Stevens looks up from his newspaper, his voice booming. “No phones in detention, Pierce.”
“Okay,” I cup the phone closer to my mouth. “Yes - but only a little.”
“How little?” Mom doesn’t sound pleased.
“Like,” I look down at my barely-started paper. “If I risk developing carpal tunnel? Twenty minutes.”
“We’re going to have a talk tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I sigh. Mom’s voice gets a crack in it.
“I just - I just want this night to go well, Lilith.”
Guilt lodges in my heart like an arrow. “I know. I’m sorry. I did that thing again where I didn’t think about anybody else but me.”
“It’s okay,” Mom takes a shuddering inhale. “Just come home soon, alright? I’ll even let you use my hair curler.”
“Roger, echo niner.”
They say the pen is mightier than the sword, and I don’t know about all that, but a pen definitely moves faster than a sword, but no one says that sentence because you can’t smash two of the words together and make ‘penis’ on the back of bathroom stalls. My hand cramps, I start to sweat, my back hurts, and I keep wondering why we still write with our naked little paws at all. Technology is here for a reason - to make life better, not worse.
“Text-to-speech exists, you know, and it’d make both your teaching job and my delinquent job a lot easier.” I say to Mr. Stevens as I turn in my paper. He immediately starts counting my sentences with the back of a sharpie.
“Back in my day, they would’ve made you write twice as much,” He grunts.
“Yes, well. Back in your day, you thought LSD could mind-control. So.”
Mr. Stevens looks up at me with tired disdain, and waves his hand. “Go. Before I change my mind.”
The great thing about me is that I don’t need to be told anything twice. I make a chef kiss at him and dart for the door.
If someone were to say ‘you should join NASCAR’, I would say yes I should, because I’ve had my license for all of six months and I already know how to go very fast, and I know how to take turns well, and most importantly I know doing all that
in Southern California in a fifteen-year-old Volvo is a great way to die and/or get a ticket. I’m solidly chaotic good on the DnD alignment chart, and I’ve had enough run ins with lawful evil today, so I go slow…if a cheetah was defining the word ‘slow’. I nearly flatten the tamale lady with my tire-smoking turn onto our street, but she’s encountered me enough times to know I didn’t mean it. When I screech into the apartment parking lot, Mom’s already in the door waiting, her maroon dress shining beautifully in the sunset light.
“We’ve got twenty minutes before the reservation!” Mom shouts the moment I open the car door. “Hurry!”
Stumbling over the straps of my backpack and untold amounts of old fruit-by-the-foot wrappers, I vault out of the car, up the stairs, and into the apartment, Mom hot on my heels.
“I’ve ironed your dress,” She says breathlessly. “And you can use my work shoes.”
“The loafers?” I lament, peeling off my shirt.
“They’re better than those nasty old converse of yours.”
“Mom, I happen to like those nasty old converse,” I whine with all the vibrato hopping on one foot out of my jeans elicits.
“And I happen to like you looking nice. This is not a discussion, young lady. Loafers or nothing.”
“Nothing,” I choose, wiggling my bare toes, and she sighs, pushing me gently into my room where the dress rests on my bed.
“Get changed. I’ll get the curler warmed up.”
The last thing I want to do is go out. Like, anywhere. I’m the sort of person who thinks walking to the fridge is exhausting, let alone meeting new people and pretending to like them. It’s why I haven’t joined any clubs, or any sports. Ruby’s friendship was a miracle created by a shitty school project. But on the whole, it turns out people are a mega-bummer and it’s mega-hard to be myself around them. I always feel like I’ll just screw it up, and because I’m thinking that so hard, I usually do. If life was a house party, I’d be the person in the kitchen petting the dog for four hours straight. I’m probably allergic to people. Spiritually speaking. But as I’m pulling on the almost-too-small middle-school-era dress with its multitude of tacky pastel bunnies, I hear Mom from the bathroom. Humming. Not sighing over bills, not crying into her pillow thinking I can’t hear, not worrying. She’s humming soft and sweet, and the hard knot of resistance loosens in my chest.
Alright. So. Meeting new people. How hard can that really be?
3
The Man (Or, How one girl found the devil)
I stare at my reflection in the car’s sunvisor mirror. “I look like a clown.”
“You do not look like a clown,” Mom assures me, her eyes on the road as she drives down the highway.
“You’re right. I look like a clown in training.”
“Lilith, please. Have a little confidence. We’re going to go out, eat a nice dinner, meet nice people, and have a nice time.”
“In Nice, France.” I finish for her. “Which is where I will be flying, because after tonight I will need to flee the country.”
“That color is gorgeous on you, honey,” She assures me.
I purse my very pink lips. I’ve used lipstick exactly twice, and I’m thinking there won’t be a third time. “They can see me from space, probably.”
“Honey -”
“Just picture it; they’re all floating around, taking space dumps and eating space lasagna, and then all of a sudden one of them looks out the window and goes ‘Holy shit, is that a zit over in California? Is the Earth going through puberty again? Last time it did that it wiped out the dinosaurs!’.”
Mom gives up and laughs. She, of course, looks beautiful - her chestnut hair pulled back in an elegant bun with little wisps let through. With under-eye concealer and dusky rose lipstick she looks a lot less tired, but it’s the happiness that makes her glow, really - that giddy anticipation that rocks her high-heeled foot on the gas pedal, that has her fingers tapping the steering wheel. Her blue eyes are locked ahead, all crow’s feet and warm curves. The guy ain’t even here yet, and she’s like a kid at Christmas.
And then there’s, well, me; barbie-pink lipstick, a little eyeliner, and a lot of crossed fingers. I’m constantly haunted by the fact my fetus-self let Dad’s genes win over Mom’s, because I could’ve looked so good. I could’ve been adorably petite, with lustrous wavy brunette hair and eyes like a summer sky, but instead I’m a pin-straight dishwater blonde who cut her hair earlobe-short at midnight over summer break with a rusty pair of craft scissors, who’s been 5’10 and a size 12 jeans since fifth grade when my hips and torpedo boobs decided to make their entrance all at once. It wasn’t always easy, dressing. For a long time I tried to make myself small, too-big sweatshirts to hide my titties and my height and my issues, I guess. I didn’t want to be seen. By dudes least of all. A forty-something balding fart commenting on my ‘cute mosquito bites’ at a coffee shop when I was twelve was enough for me to never want to be seen again.
But I digress.
When I was young and still believed in magic, I used to wish on birthday candles for God to make me short and cute like every other girl in my class, instead of intimidating and clumsy, but here we are. Still tall. Still crude. Still rude. Mom gave it her best shot, though, and gave me the slightest touch of her beauty; blue eyes. Not the bright kind, or the piercing kind. Just a watery mix of blue and gray. Usually just call ‘em blue. My eyes Definitely Do Not change with my mood. Except when I’m mad. Then they turn red.
“Mom,” I wipe my lips with a surreptitious tissue at a stoplight. “If my eyes turned red would you still love me?”
“That depends. How red are we talking?”
I give her A Look. She laughs and reaches over to squeeze my knee.
“Kidding. Of course I would. You’re my Lili.”
The nickname from my childhood comes screaming out of the embarrassing dark. “If you call me that in front of your guy, I really am leaving for France.”
“Agreed,” Mom laughs nervously (nervously?), and pulls into the parking lot. We’re in LA proper now, all concrete and curated fan palms, and alarm bells start to ring when I realize we’re going to one of the fanciest Italian restaurants I’ve ever seen, in one of those areas where the rich-ass techie people come to eat. The front door is gilded with the restaurants’ name, and that’s how you know you’re somewhere really fancy - no sign, just a name on the door.
I open it for Mom and we walk in, the smell of fresh bread and tomato OHKO punching me. The tables are in private little alcoves, pristine tablecloths and soft candles and waiters who look like models in tailored slacks and white shirts busying around. Mom leans over and says something to the drop-dead gorgeous tanned hostess who looks like she just came from every music festival ever. I suddenly feel pasty and very musically stupid and slightly gayer than usual. Not that I’ve told Mom about that. Or anybody. Not even Ruby. Part of me thinks everyone will just laugh. Part of me isn’t even sure it’s real. I’m just a fake. Girls are pretty, of course they are. Everyone knows that. It doesn’t mean anything if I think so, too.
Confusing fears aside, the hostess nods with a smile and disappears. I might not know anything about music or looking amazing, but my love for free shit is universally unparalleled and there’s bowl of mints on the pulpit. I attempt to dump half the bowl in my pocket but Mom thwarts me by wiping away something on my cheek.
“His name is William Cunningham.” Mom sees my face crumple with a joke, and cuts me off at the pass. “Be nice.”
“I -” I choke on my own laugh. “I will. For sure. I just can’t stop thinking about a very smart ham. A Cunning Ham.”
Mom stares blankly at me as I devolve into fits.
“W-With a little graduation hat.”
The hostess’s return spares me from Mom’s lecture, and we follow her to the back of the restaurant, to a table with a well-dressed man in it. Is this him? He doesn’t look like a serial killer, but I guess they never do. That’s, like, the point; they always look
like normal guys. This guy ain’t exactly normal - he’s got an impressive mane of salt-and-pepper hair for his age, all of it slicked back nicely. His skin is a smooth gold, his teeth so white I practically see stars when he smiles. He looks like an old-timey movie star, complete with the graceful aging and impeccable suit with a little titty-hankie.
“Hello there,” He smiles at Mom, and she goes five shades of red. He’s got a faint accent that I can’t place - British? He looks over at me with his blue eyes. “And hello to you too. You must be Lilith.”
“Yes. That I. Me mean, nice to - hi.” I blurt. He smells like lemon and offers me his be-Rolex’d hand and my brain stutters as I shake it. “I like your, uh, your thing -” The man looks lost and confused and Mom’s smile is faltering and what’s the fucking word for that thing, anyway, god. “ - your chest-Kleenex.”
He looks down. “Oh, this old pocket square?”
“Pocket square. Right.” I breathe a sigh of relief. “Because I’ve been calling it a titty-hankie in my head.”
There’s a beat, and Mom’s eyes go wide, and oh fuck was I not supposed to say titty? William, thankfully, bursts out laughing.
“That’s the most amusing name for it I’ve ever heard. Pocket handkerchief works just as well. I’m William, but you can call me Will if you like.”
“You can call me Lilith. Just Lilith.”
“It’s a very pretty name, Just Lilith.” Will’s eyes sparkle, and I start to like him a little more. Even with the tacky dad-joke. He motions to the table, and Mom smiles at me ruefully as she takes the chair across from him.
“Thanks.” I sit to Mom’s side. “It means night demon.”
“Or screech owl,” Mom corrects, then looks to Will. “I chose the name because I wanted her to be strong.”
