Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  As we leave the classroom, I slam into Jeremy. My books crash to the floor, and I stumble backward into the door.

  “Sorry,” he says, bending to pick up my texts.

  “I didn’t see you.”

  I stand there, watching him collect my stuff. The kids behind me step around us. Monica Prader winks at me.

  “Sorry,” he says again, and hands my books to me. He starts to dash away, but turns and says, “You alright?”

  I can’t think of anything—not a single thing—to say.

  My mother hands me a stack of plates. “Set for six,” she says.

  I set the table, noticing the new unlit candles in the holders, the bouquet of yellow flowers, and figure Kelly for our sixth. She and Nate are inseparable again. This morning, on the walk from homeroom to Graphic Arts, Kelly updated me about the new clothes her mother brought back from New York, and even spun so I could admire her pink silk shirt. Meanwhile, Stacy and I no longer ride the bus. Doug at his worst cannot diminish the bright side of carpooling with Nate: 45 extra minutes in the morning, and strolling into school just as the bell rings.

  “What are we having?” I ask Mom.

  “It’s a surprise,” she says.

  I look around the kitchen—nothing in or on the stove. I check the fridge, pretty barren. “No, for real,” I say. “What are we having?”

  “Pizza?” Nigel asks from the living room.

  “Nope,” Mom says.

  “Subs?” I ask.

  “It’s a surprise,” she repeats.

  “How soon do we get this surprise?”

  “That’s a surprise too,” she says.

  “Man,” Nigel says, “the endless adventure!”

  “I have to babysit at seven,” I say.

  “We’ll eat before seven,” Mom assures me.

  “What will we eat?”

  “Go away,” she says.

  Dad brings home takeout from Little Szechuan. If God eats, I swear to you, he devours nothing but Little Szechuan. The sweet and sour pork, the noodles, the crisp vegetables, the tang and bite! We’re all so happy and surprised, that we don’t register Meghan at first.

  “You’re back,” Nigel yells, scrambling up from his chair to throw his arms around her.

  Blushing, dressed in cords and a sea-foam wool sweater, she looks thinner, older somehow. For the first few minutes, as we gather at the table, pray, and then load our plates, I’m unaccountably furious. I’m so mad that I can’t speak; I haven’t even welcomed her home. In fact, as I think the word home, I get madder still.

  I can’t explain it. I don’t know why I’m angry, or how to stop being angry, but I understand if I don’t say something posthaste, my parents will make remarks, and ask questions, and demand answers. Before I can think of anything, Nate asks about her vacation.

  She tells us about Christmas with the folks in Georgia; sounds like a lot of sleeping in and eating out to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to wish anyone Merry Christmas,” she says. “If it helps at all, I’ve brought back tins of my mother’s almond roca and gingerbread cookies.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Nate says.

  The food tastes different, soggy, or something.

  “How have you been, Cole?” Meghan asks.

  “Good,” I say, nodding. The nodding sells it. Beneath the table, Pepper whines. Nate has been slipping her all of his broccoli.

  “How’s Doggy Life?” Meghan asks.

  “We’re super-busy. Gigs every place.”

  “I can’t wait to hear you,” Meghan says.

  I wish aliens would extract me right from the table. A tractor beam, isn’t that what it’s called? I need a tractor beam to slice through the ceiling, and spotlight the candles and the yellow flowers and the sad remnants of my favorite food, and lift me the fuck out of here.

  “Cole’s in love with Christian now,” Nigel tells everyone.

  I stare at him. I feel the whole room shift.

  “Christian Sorrentino?” my mother asks.

  If I broke my plate over Nigel’s head, what would happen? Grounding? Two weeks without phone privileges? How high would the fine be? “Why are you wearing pajamas?” I ask him. “It’s like 6 o’clock.”

  “No,” Nigel tells my mother. “The other Christian.”

  “The boy with the haircut?” Mom asks.

  “Yeah,” Nigel says. “That one.”

  “Dude,” Nate tells him, “share your own news.”

  “I think I’m done,” I say, standing with my plate. “I have a ton of homework.” I glance at Meghan and add, “I already finished the vocab list you sent.” The statement comes out rougher than I intended—a challenge almost.

  Annie and I build approximate cars with Play-Doh. Happily, Karen crushes them with her little fists almost the moment the cars are formed.

  “Make a cat,” Annie says. And then, a bit later, “Not a cow. Make a cat.”

  “This is a cat.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I ask.

  “It’s a cow.”

  I turn the blue creature around in my hands. “It isn’t.”

  “The ears,” she tells me.

  Karen smashes the green and blue and red together, and hands the lump to me. “House,” she says.

  “No,” Annie says. “A cat.”

  I try again. Annie stands on her chair to observe the sculpting process. “Good,” she says when I hand the cat to her. “Now a house.”

  I sit on the floor next to Annie’s bed while I read stories. Karen plays with my earrings.

  “The peach one,” Annie tells me.

  I read Each Peach Pear Plum three times. They sleep with the hall light on, and the door thrown open. I get extra kisses before I leave them.

  On the Thorns’ couch, both cats tucked against me, I flip through my Biology text, and try to remember which questions we’re supposed to answer. Odds? I could call Bangs. Cole’s in love with Christian now. I object to practically every word in Nigel’s construction. I’m not in love. I’m not in love with Christian. And now? Now is the worst. Now makes me sound slutty.

  Meghan comes back and we get Little Szechuan for dinner. That should be ideal, right? Hours later and I still don’t know if I’m angry with her for leaving, or for coming back. She sat there asking about the band as though she were interested, as though it were important to her. I don’t believe her. I don’t believe her anymore.

  I answer all the Biology questions, and then read about congruent and symmetrical shapes in Geometry. This all sounds familiar. Sometimes I think I’m having math flashbacks. Being a military kid is like doing a slow Houdini: an escape over two or three years. Why can’t I be unaffected? Why can’t I slam into Jeremy and collect his shit and walk off again? No big. Why can’t I screw someone, and then vanish, and then come back and chat about whatever? Why does any of this get to me?

  Overhead wants us to discuss the difference between hero and protagonist. Specifically, we’re supposed to discuss the difference as evidenced by the short story, The Most Dangerous Game.

  “Deep thoughts,” Alicia whispered to me while Overhead wrote our assignment on the board.

  Halfway through the essay, I call Bangs. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Changing guitar strings. What about you, are you home already?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Did you finish Bio?”

  “Yeah, you want the answers?” After he takes them down, I ask, “Are you the protagonist or the hero?”

  “In this story? I’m the sidekick.”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours,” he says.

  “You’re my sidekick?” Should I be insulted? Isn’t he the romantic interest? “How do you figure you’re my sidekick?”

  “Hey, you’re the narrator. What are you asking me for?”

  “I’m the narrator?”

  “Yes,” he says, “and you’re unreliable.”

  I think about thi
s, and then ask, “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you mean the story of this conversation, or the ongoing story of us—our acquaintance or whatever?”

  “I mean all of it. The whole thing.”

  The ginger cat’s tail flicks against my leg. The cats hide until the kids go to bed, and then they emerge to lay claim to me. I’d expected Bangs to say he was the antihero. “If I’m the narrator,” I say, “who’s the writer?”

  “An old lady sitting at a desk in the garret. She writes with a fountain pen.”

  I see her. Hunched over a stack of parchment, her fingers black where she has had to blot the ink. She looks feeble. “She lives on apples,” I say.

  “And a tiny bit of bread and cheese.”

  “Meager.”

  “Yes, a meager bit of bread and cheese.”

  But I don’t want to play anymore. Some impoverished old woman writing any of this horrifies me. “I should go,” I say. “I still have to finish my essay.”

  I employ the five-paragraph essay and write three pages, including an apposite point about antagonist and villain, a sort of cherry on the sundae of my argument, and one sure to irritate my teacher. Overhead hates to be given a bigger answer than she asked for.

  On my walk home, the recorded bugle plays Taps. Eleven o’clock. I’m surprised to find the kitchen light on when I arrive home. Dad, in his whitey tighties and t-shirt, stands beside the fridge, talking on the phone. His hand covers his mouth, and his shoulders draw up as he shakes his head at me. “No, sir,” he tells the phone. And a moment later, “I understand. Absolutely. Yes, sir. We’ll write a memo first thing in the morning, and inform all the students. Yes, General. Good night, sir.”

  Before he replaces the phone in the cradle, he covers his mouth again. You can see the little boy Dad was: the naughty doorbell-ditch kid who terrorized the neighbors up and down 17th Avenue in Spokane. He snickers on and on.

  “What happened?” I say, laughing along with him.

  “You know General Trent’s wife?” Dad asks.

  “The big one with the hats?”

  Dad nods, his eyes rimmed with tears. “She drove through the gate today, and didn’t present her ID card to the sentry.”

  General Trent’s wife has been trouble before. When they first arrived, she made a stink about other cars parking in the General’s spot at the commissary. When Dad told Mom, she said, “A little walk wouldn’t kill her.”

  “She just drove right through?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “What did the guards do?”

  “They dropped the gate,” Dad says. “And pulled their weapons.”

  “They dropped the gate?” I see the gate landing squarely on the hood of the General’s Cadillac.

  Dad, gasping now, nods again. “She crashed right into it. The sentries approached with their pistols drawn, and ordered her out of the car.”

  “Did they shoot her?” I ask in a small voice.

  “No,” Dad says, “but they cuffed her, and called their supervisor.”

  These poor guys are so going to be shipped to Saudi Arabia. “Then what?” I ask.

  “Well, an alert went out, and a dozen MPs swarmed the gate, and they had her in the back of one of the cars when Colonel Reid drove up to the gate and asked what had happened. He cleared the whole thing up in minutes, but the General’s wife is not a forgiving woman.”

  “No,” I say, and feel a great deal of pity for the military police.

  “The sentries are on high alert—under the Provost’s orders—but even if they weren’t, she should have stopped and presented her ID.”

  “I’ll bet she will next time. Was that the General on the phone?”

  “I’m to draft a memo to all military personnel and their families: anyone entering this base will stop at the gate and present an ID card. No exceptions will be made. Not even for wives.”

  “He didn’t say the thing about wives.”

  “He did,” Dad says.

  “Gosh,” I say. “Now I kinda feel sorry for the General’s wife.”

  Several knocks on my door wake me.

  “What?” I mutter.

  “Let me in.”

  I peer at the clock, and then climb from the bed. “It’s 6:15,” I tell Nigel. He wears the hat with earflaps Meghan gave him for Christmas.

  “Come for a run.”

  “Are you insane?”

  From the hook in the bathroom, he grabs my sweats, and tosses them to me. “We’ll just do four miles.”

  Not until I’m brushing my teeth do I remember how much I hate Nigel.

  As we’re stretching in the front yard, I ask, “What was all that about last night?”

  “All what?”

  “At dinner.”

  “Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know it was a secret—you and Christian.”

  “It’s not a secret.”

  “Then what are you mad about?”

  “I’m mad that you told a table full of people that I’m in love with Christian. When I’m not.”

  “Fine, dating him, whatever.”

  “No,” I say. “We’re not dating. We’re not anything. We’re just—” sidekicks, my mind interjects. “We hang out.” Nigel bends to touch the top of his socks. “Since when do you editorialize?” I ask him.

  “I said I was sorry,” he murmurs.

  We lap the parade ground, neither of us speaking. I love morning runs. Occasionally, a car passes with its lights glancing off us. We’re breathing sharp air, each inhalation a prick to the lungs. By the end, I know he’s holding back.

  “Oh god,” I say, pinching the stitch in my side.

  Nigel bounces beside me. “I’ll make oatmeal,” he says. As we walk back to the house, he asks, “So you’re really not dating Christian?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you two were dating.”

  “We’re not.”

  “Well, I thought you were.”

  He looks upset—his posture and tone defensive. “You told Jeremy,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ask about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he ask?”

  “He asked if you were seeing anyone, and I said you were dating Christian.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he figured.”

  “That’s all he said? He figured?”

  Nigel hesitates.

  “Tell me,” I say.

  “He said he figured, a girl like you.”

  A girl like me. I am so over Jersey.

  Viscous. Seriously? This is a word people use in public?

  Diofelli gives us a handout explaining the positions and rules for indoor soccer. “Today,” she says, “we’ll work on dribbling and passing.”

  We stand in lines to dribble, one by one, through orange cones. Our passing drills, also choreographed to orange cones, involve all the other kids passing the ball to me, after which I lead a pass back to them, and they shoot on an empty goal. Still (bright side!), we could be doing gymnastics routines.

  Diofelli blows her whistle, and hollers, “Fifteen minutes to scrimmage.”

  It’s a relief to run. Sonja, a tall black girl with a weave and glorious red fingernails, tells me to play sweeper. She and I take the ball up and score in three passes. On the opposite team, Jeremy plays halfback. I take the ball from him, and Sonja passes to Tom Richardson, who shoots wide.

  I feel a wild thrill. I push myself; play as though this means something. Pass to the girl in the giant glasses, and watch, astonished, as she kicks the ball across the gym to Tom Richardson, who’s open and scores. We’re magic—all of us—enchanted during this scrimmage with focus and delight and killer passes.

  We have an early set tonight—early for us. We’re playing at a teen club called Stoked that wants us from 8 to 10. “They’re afraid they’ll have crowd control problems if we play the second set,” Trevor told us.

&nbs
p; “What’s this club like?” I asked.

  “You’ve never been Stroked?” Trevor asked.

  “Don’t you ever get tired?” I said.

  “A little—after the first couple of hours.”

  I laughed and punched him.

  “We’ll hang out after our set,” Trevor said, “and party.”

  Nigel and Nate and Kelly have all agreed to come. I’m excited about the show. For the first time in weeks, I can’t wait to play. A couple of nights ago, Dad and I were talking about improvisation in music, and he took out one of his old jazz albums—Time Out—and played it for me. The Dave Brubeck Quartet has changed everything, especially the way I think about tempo. Tempo might be fluid. Melody might be experimental. They might vary to reflect urgency or seriousness or comedy. Just because Doggy Life has found a great way to play music, doesn’t mean we can’t seek an even better way, or at least a newer one.

  I’ve been playing my songs differently every time I sit down with my guitar. Adding strums, or breaking a song on the bridge to let the words air a little, or pumping a stop into the crescendo; and when I talked to Ernie about it, he said rather than practice the variations, we should watch me for changes, and let the music happen.

  I can’t wait to let the music happen. And the school day, rather than tormenting me, has sped by. Mrs. Brooks gives us a pop quiz in History, and then lectures some more on Peter the Great, and none of us can get our minds around such a Russia. Czar really is the coolest title ever.

  Do you ever have a day when you marvel at your health, at the way your arms feel when you pull books from your locker, at the glow on a boy’s face when you walk past him and glance back, and for a moment, he loves you? Do you ever feel as though your clothes fit you differently, and better, that your body has changed somehow without your even noticing? A day when everything reminds you: I’m alive!

  In Biology, Bangs hands me a pencil drawing of a girl in knee-high boots, with flaring finned gloves, and hips, and huge soulful eyes. She appears to be riding an electric guitar like an airborne skateboard. Her hair tufts.