Your Worst Student
Text exchange with Abigail during which we brave the awkward aftermath of our sort-of-fight:
A I’m sorry.
Me too. C
A I got valedictorian. Mr. Garcia just told me.
OMG remember me when you’re famous C
A Also I texted my cousin and he just broke up with his girlfriend
A Do you want to take him to prom?
Um C
Not really C
Don’t worry. The universe has my back C
Lol jk it lives to screw with me C
A Poor Chamaroon
A You’re coming over this weekend and we’re making progress on your essay.
A I’m not going to Nicaragua without you.
A You owe me for lying
A I can’t believe you made it seem like your parents were weirdos and that’s why you couldn’t have friends over
A and actually you just didn’t want people to know your dad was sick lmao
ok it sounds crazy when you write it out like that… C
A if you ever want to talk about anything i’m here
thx C
A come over soon for that essay?
maybe C
gotta square some things away with the universe first C
WANTED: A MEDIOCRE PROM DATE
If you’re a very good dancer but not a better dancer than me, you should ask me to prom before it happens in two weeks! I’m a cool girl, like comfortable with myself and stuff, and my dentist once said I was “cute,” so I guess you could say I’m a catch. One time I had four cavities filled without Novocain, and I run a six-minute mile without walking, so I’m also kind of a badass. Not that I’m bragging. My GPA is a lot of C minuses, but my best friend says it’s a blessing to be below average. I like paper flowers as opposed to real ones because real ones always die and that depresses me. My breath smells like an Altoid except when I’m chewing. Please don’t apply to take me to prom if you’d rather look at your cell phone than look at constellations. I am a firm believer in wishes and love and wishes that lead to love. I’m making one right now. I’ve had one boyfriend so far, and he asked not to be mentioned in this ad, but his name is Gene and you should not ask him about me. He’s the one with legs on the track team who once asked me to prom quite publicly and then changed his mind. This is the ad to replace him.
Xs and Os (but not on the first date),
Chamomile
Just in case a prom date falls out of the sky in the next seventeen days, I go to Willa’s Closet on Saturday. It’s been a long morning doing boring things like ordering my cap and gown so that I don’t attend graduation in knee-high combat boots and underwear. I was going to see if my dad wanted to go for a walk now that the weather is better, but he was Skyping his sister about the Brain Degeneration Walk (not a happy conversation, especially since my aunt ended up being there alone). I want to be here with him now, but I don’t really know what that looks like sometimes. Cue a little shopping break.
“You’re back,” the same girl from before says as I open the door. It jingles shut and I breathe in the smell of second-hand stuff, which has a sort of sweet rejected quality to it. “Still looking for a prom dress?”
I sigh. “Who knows.”
“Bad day?”
“Yeah, like twenty on top of each other.”
“Try some shopping therapy,” she suggests, and I look over at the mannequin in the window. She’s still wearing the lacy white dress.
“I wanted that one. I love the lace around the collar and the sleeves. But shopping isn’t going to help me.” I lean on the counter and fiddle with the essential-oil testers.
The salesgirl is looking at me as she runs her finger along the rim of her big hoop earrings. “Would you like to vomit-speak about it?”
I take a large whiff of patchouli, decide I’m not interested in smelling like a hippie’s underarm, and rest my elbows on the counter. “I might fail English ’cause I can’t write a freaking college essay and my boyfriend broke up with me and my dad is dying and I don’t think I can go with everyone to Nicaragua after graduation because, well, lots of reasons that mostly have to do with my dad dying and I just really need a sign from the universe.” My head is too heavy. I make a pillow with my hands to rest my forehead.
“Oh, girl.” She frowns, then gets off her stool. “I’m Izzy.” She extends her hand. “Who are you?”
“Cham.” My voice is muffled by the glass.
“Cool. You’re a senior?” I lift my head and nod. “Don’t worry, it gets better after high school. You don’t have to see the same people every day and be spoon-fed the same bullshit and pretend something like a dance you get a corsage for could possibly be the best night of your life. Once you stop being forced to be a zombie, you stop acting like a zombie. You fucking wake up.”
I blink at her. “But prom is the last dance of high school. It’s not not a big deal. It means we made it.”
She shakes her head. “None of those things actually mean anything. We grow up at weird, unexpected times.” I shift back and forth and she laughs. “Oh no, I hope I didn’t crush your high school dreams. Shit, I was trying to cheer you up. All I mean is don’t sweat it, any of it: prom, graduation, college. It may not seem like there’s anything more important, but trust me. There’s a whole world out there.” She points beyond the display window, with its lacy white dress and pink cowboy boots and open trunk of scarves and pocketbooks that people gave up on.
“I just need a sign,” I say again. “Just one huge sign about what the universe has in store for me or just like how to be a freaking person in the world.”
She laughs. “No matter what sign you get, you still have to make up a story about it. The sign is irrelevant. It’s how you interpret it.”
“I don’t want to interpret anything. I want to be told what to do.” She raises an eyebrow at me. “It’s too confusing. Seriously, my brain is populated by question marks. I just wish I had someone to ask.”
“You and everyone else.” She picks up a cardboard box from the floor and heaves it onto a table, adding little blue circular price stickers to the tank tops and flowy skirts.
I take one last look at the lacy white dress in the window and sigh. “I should go work on my essay so I can eventually go to college and be a member of society slightly more useful than a toilet plunger.”
“Hey! Toilet plungers are crucial at handling our shit.” She grins and makes a joke sound effect, hitting an invisible cymbal in the air. “You don’t want me to launch into my spiel about how college is a big moneymaking machine that obliterates creativity and real thinking and turns us into little capitalist nightmares. I’ll spare you from that.”
I laugh. “Thanks. Honestly, I just want to lock myself in my room or go for a run or make out in bed until the world ends.”
“Ooooh, you didn’t mention you had someone to make out with.”
“I don’t,” I say quickly, backing toward the door. “Just got dumped, remember?”
“And yet,” she says, following me with her pointer in the air, “you said ‘make out’ like you had a little pair of lips in mind. High school’s almost over. Last chance, last chance,” she chants. “Does this person have a prom date?”
“Don’t know, not asking.” I back into the door and it opens with a jingle. “Attempting my college essay now and also scoping out toilet plungers.”
“Do your thing, girl,” Izzy cheers, holding up a hideous vacation T-shirt with pairs of drunk flamingos covering it. She slaps it with a price sticker. “Go after your own shit.”
“Well, well, well,” Abigail says, opening her front door. “Look who came crawling back to me!”
“Oh, shut up, Abigail.” I push her into the house playfully. “I’m not that desperate to get this essay done and go to Nicaragua or whatever.”
“No, of course not.” She takes me into the kitchen and pours me a glass of water. “Come, wet your lips, hydrate yoursel
f in preparation for this amazing essay we are going to write.”
“I don’t know about that.” I take the glass and down the water in four huge gulps.
Abigail pats the countertop. The stools are high and there are six electrical sockets so that she can do her homework without any of her devices dying on her. Some parents really will do anything to see their kid get into college. “Let’s start by looking at your old essay,” she says, her fingers poised over her keyboard. “E-mail it to me real quick.”
“Nope, definitely not.” I shake my head so fast the illuminated apple on her laptop doubles. “Let’s start fresh.”
“You at least have to tell me what it was about so I can know where to go from there.”
“No way.” I trace my finger on the glass, where cool drops of water are starting to condense. “We gotta just start over.”
She glares at me and I glare back at her. My eyes are fully lubricated and good to stay open for the next two and a half minutes if they have to. She blinks first and I cackle. “What did you write about?” I ask.
She points to the postcard on her refrigerator that says ¡Hola from Spain! with two cartoons dancing cheek to cheek. “I wrote about me and Hilary’s trip to Europe over the summer and how it made me want to study Spanish in college or maybe art history and just eat up the world. I could show you if you want.”
She turns her laptop to face me. I rest my chin in my hands and offer to read aloud to her because that at least will guarantee I won’t fall asleep.
“Go for it,” she says, and closes her eyes like the delicious, overconfident ham she is.
“Ahem!” I say, using my empty water glass as a microphone. “‘With just one look upon the garish decorations splayed across the Gaudi House Museum in Barcelona, the clandestine exchanges between patrons experiencing for the first time the eponymous designs, I too suddenly understood the thrill of such outrageous, one-of-a-kind mosaics, and knew that I would not rest until I’d seen the plethora of history and culture Spain had to offer.’”
I look up at her to find she’s smiling. With her eyes closed. “What the hell do all those words mean? And who talks like that?”
“It’s good, right?”
I listen to the dishwasher laboring over the plates and glasses it didn’t get dirty but still somehow has to clean. “I mean, it just doesn’t sound like you at all. When you talk about Spain, you talk about the club you got into and how you drank sangria and danced all night long in tall heels that you’re probably gonna have to see an orthopedic surgeon about but it was so worth it because for once you found people who want to break it down all night just as intensely as you do.”
“Well, duh, but I can’t talk about that.” She flicks me in the forehead. “The point is to come off in a very particular way, like cultured and curious and smart and—oh, come on, Cham, don’t make that face.”
“I’m not making a face,” I say, fixing my face, then breaking into a smile. “Listen, I’m not writing some phony bullshit essay about some life-changing event some rando adults want to hear.”
Abigail slides a bottle of nail polish across the counter and unscrews it. It’s a pinky-bluish-purple shade of iridescent marvelousness. “What do you want to do, then?”
I think for a second. “I want to make the anti-college essay. It’ll be exactly the opposite of that bullshit everyone writes, and instead of writing it, ’cause writing sucks, we will video it.”
“Cute but no. We need an A.”
“I’m serious! This is a good idea! And we can put it on YouTube or whatever, and college admissions people everywhere will have their minds freaking blown.”
“Cham! We have so much work to do—we don’t have time to make a video.”
I hop off the stool and kneel at her feet, clasping my hands together, my lower lip protruding. “Just one little video. I just want one true thing.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I realize how true it is. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get myself to write this damn essay. “Look, we need your old dance costumes, okay? We have to get into the performance of it.”
“Cham…”
“Oh, come on! We made silly videos all the time freshman year, remember? There was that one where we put on black lipstick and pretended to haunt ourselves.”
She laughs. “Yeah, and the one where we cut masks out of cardboard boxes and just did the stupidest shit and put it on Instagram.”
“Yeah! The problem is that in the last year or two everyone’s been so caught up in their extracurriculars and college applications and stupid baloney grades that no one just fucks around anymore.”
I grab a wooden spoon off the counter and smack the steel pot. Its ringing reverberates off every metal surface in the kitchen: the toaster, the refrigerator, the oven, even the claddagh ring on Abigail’s finger with the heart always pointing out.
“I WANT TO FUCK AROUND!” I yell over my own ruckus. “AND THEN I WANT TO TELL THOSE BUTTMUNCH COLLEGE ADMISSIONS PEOPLE ALL ABOUT IT!”
Abigail laughs and shakes her head with her hands over her ears. “You’re a nut,” she yells. “Quit it before I go deaf.”
I put the spoon down. “Come on, we’re doing it.”
“We are not doing it.” She crosses her arms.
“Shut up and get the music,” I tell her. “Oh, and for props we need that black swan feather mask in your room and blue lipstick and cooked spaghetti.”
Her eyes widen. “Um, what the hell are we going to do with all of those things?”
“We’re gonna perform a damn good college essay. We’re gonna perform one with heart,” I say excitedly.
She goes upstairs and I swipe a little of that pinky-bluish-purple shade of iridescent marvelousness on my pinkie finger. I haven’t actually felt excited in a really long time. I was excited about prom and graduation, but that was more of a mental thing. And yeah, I got excited about Gene and hooking up with Gene, but that was a different kind of excitement. What I feel right now is potential: potential to say one true thing, to create one real thing. In a world where everything seems to be a long to-do list where the last thing to do is die, this is a tiny, tiny rebellion. To say what I am, to actually reflect. It’s kind of absolutely thrilling. It’s also an excellent way to procrastinate.
“Got everything,” Abigail says as she clanks down the stairs with her arms full of speakers and costumes. She dumps it onto the floor, and we sift through the stuff together. I settle on the black feather mask with some blue lipstick. Abigail wears metallic wings.
We turn off all the lights except the lamp, which is acting as a spotlight, and I do my lipstick in the reflection of the toaster. I shake out my hands and legs. “We need the perfect song.”
“Your essay, your choice.”
“Okay, when I was a kid, my favorite song was this.” I take out my phone, sync it to the speakers, and turn the song on for her.
“What is it?” “‘Obvious Child.’” “What’s obvious?” “No, the song,” I say, and laugh. “It’s called ‘Obvious Child.’”
“Ooh, I like these drums,” she says.
“They’re good, right?”
“Oooh, yes, I like this a lot. Wait,” she whispers in my ear as we stand side by side, looking into the camera. “What are we going to say? I got so excited to put on a costume and dance that I completely forgot what we should say.”
“Um, it’s gonna come to us,” I say, because suddenly I’m sure of it. “We’re just gonna dance and sing and say exactly what it’s like right now. You know, everything we didn’t put in our essays.”
She replays the song. “I really hope my parents don’t come home.”
“Same.”
The drums start again, and Abigail drops it low on every other thud. I drop it low too, just not nearly as low. While the drums get faster and faster, she adds some shaking of the lower half of her body. I circle around her because I definitely won’t be attempting anything like that.
“Hello, College Admissions Persons
,” I start. “I just want to clear the air because a lot of people are sending you a lot of bullshit right now. Tonight, on the eve of the day before the day that her college essay is due, Chamomile Myles would like you to know about the real her.”
“Why are you talking in the third person?” Abigail giggles.
I blow the camera a blue kiss. “Despite what a million people are saying in their essays to you, what it means to be seventeen is this.”
I point to Abigail and close my eyes and let the music pulse through me and say just exactly what comes to mind. “Seventeen is that message in the bottle you wrote yourself when you were a kid asking, How cool is it with boobs? What weird places have hair now? Are you tall? Seventeen is a lot of nights scrolling through feeds, figuring out who’s luckier than you are. Seventeen is breakfast food at every meal—”
Abigail laughs and hisses, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just go with it, Abigail, come on! Your turn!”
I wave the camera in her face and duck out of view.
She clears her throat, then says tentatively, “Seventeen is driving in a car… and the music is loud enough to make your ears scream.… and nothing isn’t possible in this car with this person and you.” She gets louder. “And the world is not an oyster, it’s a trampoline, and your next jump will launch you to the moon—”
Now I cut in. “Seventeen is a million questions about love, and searching every book and movie for an answer. Seventeen is being very certain you will be nothing like your parents. It’s a text to a random number who’s known you all along, a lot of texts, actually, usually at three AM.”
Abigail laughs. “Seventeen is a dream we’re all awake for.”
“It’s all these reasons to run away from home, but then Mom makes pie, and actually your favorite socks just came out of the wash, and really there is always tomorrow to flee to your freedom.”
Dear Universe Page 18
