I Am the Wallpaper

by Mark Peter Hughes

  “Get her out! Get her out!”

  They forced me outside. Then the door slammed in my face.

  The small wooden shelter over the top step wasn’t enough to protect me from the wind and the rain. I tried the handle but the children had locked it. “Open up!” I pounded on the door. Through the window I saw them laughing at me. My cousin Richard yanked down the shade.

  Suddenly all I could see was gray.

  It only took a few more seconds for my dress and hair to get soaked through. I stared at the shade until water dribbled from my bangs and down my face. I closed my eyes. Was there any point in going back inside?

  The rain slapped against the roof. My dress was already cold and heavy.

  Life is suffering, Zen you die.

  I now believe that there are some moments so life-changing that your mind remembers them with almost superhuman clarity, as if everything is running in slow motion. For me, this was one of those Pivotal Life Moments. I was tired of being taken advantage of. I was sick of being unnoticed, unimportant, powerless and invisible. I could almost see myself, standing in front of the door, drenched and dripping. It was like I was my future self watching my present-day self from the outside, listening to her think.

  It was really Zen.

  All at once I understood that this moment could only be bearable if I made it the beginning of a new era in my life. If I went back inside, things would have to change. I felt my future self watching me, waiting for my next decision.

  I needed to consider my next move carefully, so I stood in the rain for a while.

  Eventually, I turned around and slowly and deliberately slogged down the back steps and around the side of the house. As my bubblegum pink shoes squelched through the mud, I made my decision.

  This is what I wrote in my diary that night:

  Sunday, June 29, 1:00 a.m.

  To the older, wiser me,

  You probably still remember this awful day pretty clearly. As of right now my friends and family hardly notice me, or they laugh at me or hate me because they don’t know me. But I have some news for them: the days of the invisible, ordinary, wallpaper Floey Packer are over. Tonight marks the birth of a whole new me.

  One other important note for the future: I will never drink champagne again. Ever.

  I trudged up the long brick stairway to the front door and grasped the handle. The music was still loud enough that I could feel the vibrations through the metal. I took one extra moment to gather my courage, but then I opened the door and stepped inside.

  A whole room full of family and strangers turned to look at the crazy wet girl dripping in the doorway. Even the music paused between songs, almost as though it knew I’d come in. For a few seconds, the party screeched to a halt as everybody noticed me, my sopping wet dress, my shoes covered in mud, my hair flat against my head. They didn’t know it, but my future self, a bold, remarkable new Floey, had arrived.

  Nothing would ever be the same again.

  chapterfour: in which

  children from hell move

  into my house and

  interrupt a life-changing

  personal transformation

  I didn’t see Calvin again that evening. He left and never came back. This is what I wrote in my diary the next morning:

  Sunday, June 29, 8:00 a.m.

  Dear Future Floey,

  Calvin is the only one who truly appreciates me. I will find him again even if it means I have to search every class at Moses Brown and every open-mike poetry night in Rhode Island.

  But first I had a few little obstacles to take care of.

  Since Aunt Sarah’s support group for divorced mothers had signed up for a three-week Alaskan adventure—supposedly to learn something about themselves—we had to transform our house so we could take her kids. Ma said it’d be good for me to get to know my cousins better. “It’ll be fun,” she said, “like being at summer camp.”

  Ha.

  The summer-camp preparations began with my dear mother making me wash the windows, vacuum up the ferret hair and scrub the toilet. Craziest of all, she was going to force me to clean my cousins’ bedrooms (meaning my room and the TV room) every day! I understood making me take care of my own stuff, but why should I have to clean up after them, too? I could point out the obvious unfairness of this until my tongue wore out, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Richard and Tish were going to be our guests, Ma said. If this was a summer camp, I was the camp cleaning lady.

  There is no justice.

  When we were done cleaning, I had to think of a way out of going with Ma to pick up Aunt Sarah and my cousins at their hotel, shuttling them up to Logan Airport in time for Aunt Sarah’s flight and then ferrying the kids back here to start their three-week stay with us. Fortunately, the New Floey Packer was a take-charge kind of girl. Unlike the Old Floey, she wasn’t going to let life just happen around her.

  “Can’t,” I told Ma. “I’m having cramps. Very bad cramps.” This was a trick of Lillian’s. Tried and true.

  A couple of minutes later Ma produced two ibuprofen pills and a glass of water and set them next to my bed. “I called Gary,” she said. “He’ll drive into Boston with me.”

  “He will? That’s almost three hours round-trip. He agreed to that pretty quick.”

  She shrugged and gave me an innocent smile.

  Gary sure was trying hard. You had to feel sorry for him. My mother hadn’t dated anybody since my dad died. She’d told Lillian and me that she probably never would, and that even if she did it would only be after we both grew up and moved away. Poor Gary.

  Anyway, as soon as the door closed, I went to the computer in the little office off the kitchen. The minute I sat down, Frank Sinatra stopped running around in neurotic circles and flung himself into my lap. He was a ferret with social issues but good taste.

  Since it was summer, there was no point in looking up the English department at Moses Brown. Instead, I searched for poetry readings. I typed open-mike poetry and got 150,000 hits. Even when I refined my search to Rhode Island open-mike poetry, there were still too many to be useful.

  So after a few futile minutes I gave up and typed Zen.

  There was another long list of Web sites. I clicked on one of them at random. At the top of the screen was the title Zen Thought of the Day. Today’s thought was: What is the sound of one hand clapping?

  There was no answer, just the question. I stared at it for a few seconds. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean.

  Below the thought of the day was a poem:

  nothing in the cry

  of cicadas suggests they

  are about to die

  —Matsuo Basho 1644–1694

  Five seven five. Haiku.

  Did Calvin write haiku? Probably. That inspired me to make up two of my own:

  Sunday, June 29, 10:20 a.m.

  alone in the house

  unseen among the shadows

  today i’m all new

  so long aunt sarah

  fly far far away from your

  rude ignorant niece

  Would the future Floey Packer be a famous poet? I pictured myself spending hours alone in beautiful fields thinking deep, inspired thoughts. Then, concentrating again on the computer, I clicked on a few other links at random and printed out the pages so I could bring them to my room and read them. But as soon as I sat on my bed the doorbell rang.

  Sunday, June 29, 11:10 a.m.

  That was Azra. She wanted us to go to the secret beach but I have too much going on, so we stayed here. Here are the updates:

  Leslie Dern has apparently become the center of Azra’s universe. Azra’s all excited about being a YMCA day-camp junior counselor this summer, and I guess she found out at training yesterday that Leslie’s doing it too. I’m irked that she signed up without me. It wasn’t my fault Lillian put her wedding on the exact same day as JC training! Suddenly everything with Azra is Leslie-said-this or Leslie-thinks-that. Grrr.

  Wen
and Kim were spotted together riding their bicycles. (Azra heard this from Leslie, of course.) We tried to come up with words that express how much we loathe Kim but we couldn’t think of anything strong enough.

  Azra agrees that Calvin sounds great. She’s super impressed that I tried to teach him to dance. I didn’t tell her about the hand-on-butt incident (too soon, too painful), but I did ask if she thought the fact that he was nervous means he might actually like me. She wasn’t sure. Then I got annoyed when she offered to ask Leslie. Since when did Leslie Dern become an expert?

  Before she left, she gave me Smiley Quahog to cheer me up. She thinks I’m depressed. Ha!

  Smiley Quahog stood on my desk, watching me as I wrote.

  Everybody in our second-grade art class had made a Smiley Quahog. Mrs. Lachapelle had brought in quahog shells from the beach, and every kid got one and glued on a set of plastic eyes, a foam nose and cork feet. Azra had added yellow yarn for hair and a pipe-cleaner arm with a little plastic sword. He was a swashbuckling clam. Mine had disappeared years before, but Azra had kept hers, and she repaired it whenever parts fell off. For years we had been giving Smiley Quahog back and forth to each other as a joke gift.

  I continued:

  Why should Azra being Leslie Dern’s lapdog bother me? It’s not like Leslie is anything special. Being a junior counselor isn’t a big deal either—it’s got to be a boring job, right? I don’t even want to be a JC anymore. In fact, now that I’m becoming new and extraordinary, I’m beginning to see Azra through clearer eyes. The girl is a follower. She lusts after Dean Eagler, just like everybody else. She likes Britney Spears, for God’s sake. And now she’s hanging out with Leslie Dern, the dullest person ever, instead of me. If the two of them were the only people in an otherwise empty room, they’d still have had a hard time standing out.

  But for the New Floey, unremarkable just isn’t good enough anymore.

  Frank Sinatra glared at me disapprovingly when I climbed back on the bed.

  “What are you looking at?”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “What do you know?” I asked. “You’re just a dumb ferret.”

  From the pages I’d printed off the Internet I read about Zen, about how it’s more of an attitude or philosophy toward life than a religion. Zen says everything in the universe is connected in a kind of cosmic way, but we all get so focused on our own little worlds that we lose track of the big picture. Zen masters say that to really understand, we have to stop thinking so hard and just feel. They use little stories or riddles called koans to help open their minds. Koans don’t always make sense, like “What is the color of the wind?” But meditating about them really hard is supposed to help people become enlightened.

  Anyway, that’s what I got out of it.

  To me, the idea was kind of exciting. Didn’t Azra say that thinking too hard was one of my problems? But recognizing a problem is the first step toward solving it, right?

  The New Floey was already well on her way to enlightenment.

  I concentrated on the color of the wind until my eyes felt heavy and I nodded off.

  The sounds of loud running footsteps and shouting woke me. I’d been dreaming that Calvin and I were Zen masters in long yellow robes. We were dancing. In my dream these loud footsteps became the sounds of other dancers clomping around. They weren’t very good dancers, or maybe they were just rude, because the music was soft and slow but their footsteps weren’t.

  I opened my eyes.

  Another pair of eyes stared back at me. They were big and blue and very close to my own face.

  I screamed.

  “What are you doing?” my cousin Tish asked.

  It took me a few seconds to recognize her. Finally, I said, “What are you doing?”

  “Looking at your weasel. He looks old.” Frank Sinatra was curled up on my stomach. He eyed my cousin suspiciously. “Aunt Grace said I could come in and say hello. We’re going to be roommates.”

  I glared at her. Now that I finally had my own room it was so unfair that I, the New Floey Packer, had to share it with anyone, let alone a ten-year-old. This was definitely a setback.

  Tish walked over to the other bed and bounced on the mattress. After a few bounces she said, “It’ll do, I guess.”

  I sat up but didn’t say anything.

  She studied my black-and-white French Kiss and Paris at Dawn posters. “Those are nice. Have you had lots of boyfriends?”

  I almost didn’t answer. Finally I said, “No.”

  “Hmmm, that’s too bad. Someday I’m going to have truckloads of them.” She said that without even a hint of a smile. There was definitely something creepy about this pale, fat girl. She hopped up onto my bed. “This is nice. I wish I had a princess bed like yours.”

  I wasn’t sure what a princess bed was, exactly, but I didn’t like the sound of it. “It’s not a princess bed.”

  She bounced again, and then out of the blue she threw herself backward with her arms spread out and her chubby legs dangling over the edge of the bed. She kicked her feet up and down. The sudden commotion did not please Frank Sinatra. He jumped off the bed and shot behind my chest of drawers.

  “This is going to be great,” she said. “I’ve never shared a bedroom with anyone, especially not somebody like you. Will you tell me what it’s like to be a teenager?”

  “I haven’t been a teenager for all that long. I don’t think I’m the best source of information.”

  “Probably not,” she agreed. “I’d still like you to tell me what you can, though.”

  That’s when I noticed Richard standing in the doorway, watching us. Seeing him again brought back the horrible memory of what I had learned the day before: this kid had seen the birthday picture.

  “Hello, Floey,” he said, smiling nervously at me.

  “Hello, Richard,” I said. “Tell me, where is that photograph?”

  From his face I could see that he knew exactly what I meant.

  Then Tish said, “What’s this?” I turned to see what she was holding. It was my diary. I’d left it on my desk and now she looked like she was going to open it.

  I leapt off the bed. “Don’t touch that!”

  “What is it?”

  “None of your business.”

  She looked hurt but she put it down. “I wasn’t going to rip it or anything.”

  “I bet I know what it is,” Richard said. “I bet it’s a diary.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s any of your business what it is.” I snatched it off the desk. I was obviously going to have to hide it somewhere.

  “Then I must be right!” he said, raising his arms into the air triumphantly.

  That’s when I lost it. I put my face right up close to his and said, “Listen to me. This is my private life and you have invaded it. As long as you have to be here, we need to get a couple of things straight, Richard. First, you stay out of my room. And second, you both better keep your grubby little hands off of my private things! Got it?”

  Richard blinked, his silly grin gone.

  Then I heard my mother’s voice. “Florence Abigail Packer! Is that any way for you to welcome your cousins?”

  I turned and there she was in the doorway, looking even angrier than I was. “But, Ma—!”

  She put her hand up to stop me. “There will be no more such talk in this house, young lady.” And that was that. Once “young lady” comes out, there is nothing I can do. “I’m putting lunch together,” she said, then turned and left us to go back to the kitchen.

  As soon as she was gone, the obnoxious little boy smirked.

  I wanted to pop him one, but I knew I’d never get away with it. Not here and now, anyway. If this was how it was going to be, I would have to deal with him later.

  “Got it, creep?” I whispered, even closer to his face than before.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s your private life and your private things. I got it.”

  Then I left the room as quickly as I could. I had
to get out of there. I went out the back door and walked around to sit on the front steps. I opened my diary again.

  Sunday, June 29, 1:10 p.m.

  My Dear Self Yet to Come,

  I hope you know how lucky you are! How I wish I were already you, because then the next three weeks would already be behind me! Twenty days to go and already I feel like a giant elephant just dropped a big turd on my head.

  And then the phone rang.

  “Floey, it’s for you!”

  In my emotional state, I forgot to ask who it was. That’s why I was caught off guard when it turned out to be Wen. I’d been ignoring him for days.

  “How are you doing, Floey?”

  “Um, great,” I said. “Just great.”

  I hated that I felt uncomfortable talking to him. He was supposed to be one of my two best friends in the world.

  “Long time no hear from,” he said. “You haven’t been returning my calls. You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “I guess I’m just a little depressed.”

  “Really? Why?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Because I was dumped.”

  “You were? How can that be when you’ve never had a boyfriend?”

  “I did,” I said. “I was keeping it quiet. It doesn’t matter now anyway. It turned out this guy didn’t like me the way I liked him.”

  “You’re kidding, Floey. Really? Who was he?”

  I let him wait a few seconds. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too painful.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear about that. I really am. I feel bad for you. Listen, I called because I wanted to say goodbye before I leave.”

  “Leave? Where are you going?”

  “You forgot, didn’t you? I have Wind Ensemble Retreat in Hartford. Remember? The van’s picking me up in half an hour.”

  “Yeah? I guess I did forget. What’s a Wind Ensemble Retreat?”