I Am the Wallpaper

by Mark Peter Hughes

  “Are we, um, interrupting something?”

  That’s when I noticed Azra, Leslie and Kate behind Wen, gaping.

  I was so angry I could have screamed, but I didn’t want to make a big scene. Dean wasn’t worth it. “No, you’re not interrupting anything at all. I was just leaving.” I stepped away from him, but before I got too far I had to turn back. “You have no idea who I am or how I feel!”

  “Life is suffering, man,” he said with a laugh. “Zen you die.”

  I turned away again and pushed past my surprised friends, but that’s when I knocked right into somebody else. It was Miss Halter Top.

  Her drink spilled to the floor. When she recovered and looked up to see who had done this, I wondered for a moment if, when she recognized me, she would really try to fight me this time. Instead, she just narrowed her eyes.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  I scrambled away from her. Thankfully, she didn’t try to follow me. All I wanted was to get away from this place, away from Dean. Now I knew the truth: Dean wasn’t like Elvis at all—he was just some conceited guy I never wanted to see again. But before I could escape, another wall of people blocked my path.

  That’s when Azra, Wen and Leslie caught up with me a second time. All three of them looked worried, even a little angry.

  “Did he do anything to you?” Azra asked.

  “No,” I managed. “I’m fine.”

  “Because if he did …”

  But I didn’t wait to hear. I just wanted to leave.

  “Just get me out of here.”

  chapterthirteen:

  life is suffering

  Monday, July 21, 9:30 a.m.

  Dear F,

  My head hurts.

  It’s going to be another gross, muggy day—I can already feel it. Ma is out whacking a ball around with Gary. Richard and Tish are outside, God only knows where. I’m sitting in bed eating a bowl of cereal. Frank Sinatra is resting against my leg. I’m surprised he’d sit this close. Maybe he misses me. Or maybe he’s just slumming it.

  Oh, great, now he’s cleaning himself.

  While I eat my soggy, tasteless breakfast and the ferret licks his private parts, I’ll just take this moment to consider the sorry state of my life. The past three and a half weeks kind of all blur together in my head. My boyfriend dumped me and didn’t know it, evil children invaded my home, a strange network of eleven-year-old boys put my private thoughts on the Internet and sold an embarrassing picture of me to strangers and last night (was that really only last night?) I was groped by a Neanderthal bass player. Worst of all, I nearly betrayed my very best friend.

  I guess that about sums it up.

  At least I have a pen pal who sends me poetry. That’s kind of nice.

  Wait. On second thought, if Dean knows about the Web site, then it’s not just little boys reading it anymore. Calvin’s inspiration was probably his computer monitor, just like Dean’s was.

  Chalk up another one for the extraordinary, always fascinating New Floey Packer.

  One thing was sure: I had to do something about floeysprivatelife.com.

  I just wasn’t sure what yet.

  When I came out of my room, there was a note from Ma telling me to do the laundry. Richard had made his bed again—the first time in a few days. After I sleepwalked through the bedrooms, I checked the dirty laundry hamper.

  I imagined what Lillian and Helmut were doing at that exact moment: probably relaxing hand in hand under some picture-perfect palm tree. This was the last week of their honeymoon. Friday night they’d arrive back home, and then on Monday they’d move to New York to start their new glamorous lives. After that they’d live happily ever after.

  No, wait. That probably wasn’t true.

  love and happiness

  happily ever after blah

  blah blah blah blah

  The hamper was full, so I heaved it down to the basement and tipped everything onto the floor in front of the washing machine. Mixed in with everything else were the sheets I’d put on Richard’s bed only the day before. He must have made his bed with new clean sheets and then thrown the old ones in the hamper. That was strange.

  Why would he need to wash his sheets so soon?

  But then I noticed that one of the sheets had a big dark circle in the middle.

  It was wet, and it had the unmistakable smell of pee.

  That’s when the door creaked behind me. I jumped.

  After I spun around, the door opened very slowly and Tish gradually appeared. Actually, it wasn’t all of Tish, exactly. Just her head.

  “Floey?”

  “What is it, Tish? You scared me!”

  She peered cautiously around the door. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. After a moment I got pretty frustrated with her.

  “Come on, what is it?”

  “You have to come with me,” she said finally. “We’d better hurry. They might come back.”

  “Who?”

  But she didn’t answer. I followed her up the stairs and into the little office. She switched on the computer.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Billy has a new idea,” she whispered. “He organized a bunch of his friends to carry cameras, digital ones if they have them, to take pictures.”

  “Pictures? Of what?”

  The computer came up, and she opened the browser. “I have to show you. Richard gave me his password.” She kept typing and clicking until finally she opened an e-mail message that had a bunch of attached images.

  “It’s one of these.” She double-clicked on the first one.

  A photograph popped up on the screen. The image was pretty fuzzy, but I knew what it was. It was a picture of me, apparently taken from across Dean’s driveway. I was standing at Dean’s front door.

  “That’s horrible!” I said. “You mean to tell me they had somebody waiting for me in Dean Eagler’s yard?”

  “They’re going to start putting these up as soon as Richard sets up the new page. That’s not the one I was looking for. They sent so many. Everybody’s excited about it.”

  This was starting to get really scary.

  She opened up a bunch of different pictures, one at a time. One showed me hiding my bike under a bush. Another showed me in Dean’s backyard talking to Leslie and Kate. I was barely visible in the dim light.

  “This must be it,” she said finally. She glanced nervously at me before she tapped the mouse.

  The screen filled with the image of two people standing next to a tree. It wasn’t a great shot. Whoever had taken it might have been twenty feet or so away, and shadows from the floodlights made it hard to make out the details. A boy and girl stood very close together. In fact, the girl leaned back against the tree while the boy leaned against her. It was one of the couples making out in Dean’s backyard. At first I didn’t understand, but then I noticed the girl’s short straight dark hair. I knew it well.

  “Hey, that’s Azra!” I said. I’d told Azra to stay at the party, that I wanted to come home alone. “Wow. Who’s the guy?”

  Tish looked at me uneasily, so I stared at the picture again. I couldn’t see his whole face, but he had longish blond hair and a Hawaiian shirt. And black-framed plastic glasses.

  All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe.

  “I thought this might be a big deal to you,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I should show you, but I figured you’d see it after Billy makes Richard write the code. I didn’t want you to find out like that. They’re working this into a special new page. I wanted you to know before it goes up.”

  Now I understood. Azra said that she’d forgiven me about what I’d written in the diary. That we were still friends. That our deal about Wen was the same as ever.

  But Azra was a big faker. Everything she’d said was an act.

  I didn’t know which made me feel worst: that the one boy I really liked had chosen somebody else, that the somebody else was Azra or that my best friend had betrayed m
e.

  “Was I wrong to show you? Are you mad at me?”

  But I couldn’t say anything just then. My throat was tightening up. I didn’t want to cry in front of her, so I left the room as fast as I could.

  “Where are you going?” she called.

  I didn’t answer. I raced outside to get my bicycle.

  On the steps, I ran into Billy with Richard right behind him. Billy stopped and stared. “What the hell happened to your hair?”

  I considered screaming at them, but I stopped myself. I could do better than that, I just needed to think of a way. Plus, I had something else to take care of first.

  I leapt past them, grabbed my bike from under the stairs. In the warm, heavy air, I pumped and sweated my way down the street, past the cemetery and up and down the hilly road into town, toward the YMCA.

  Gray clouds cluttered the sky. By the time I pulled into the YMCA lot the air felt even thicker, like it was about to rain. In the open field behind the chain-link fence, little kids ran around stuffing balls, bats and bases into burlap sacks, dragging them toward the main building.

  There she was. She was carrying one of the bigger sacks.

  I didn’t have time to bike around the fence. The day-campers were moving toward the door so fast that I thought she might get inside before I reached her. That’s why I stopped at the metal chain links, grabbed them and started shouting her name.

  “Azraaa! Azraaaa!”

  The kids turned to look. Azra waved, then dropped her bag by the brick wall and trotted over to me. She looked as hot as I felt.

  “Hey, Floey. What are you doing here? You never came by to see me before.” She sounded friendly, but I could hear something uneasy in her voice. Through the fence that separated us, a wire diamond framed her smiling face. She tilted her head. “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”

  “I know about you and Wen,” I said.

  Her smile faded. I can’t be sure if it was guilt that flashed into her eyes, but whatever it was, it didn’t last long. All of a sudden, to my complete and utter surprise, she burst into tears.

  “Oh, Floey!” she bawled, running up closer to me but covering her face with her hands. “I don’t know what to do!”

  I could only stare. I wasn’t sure what to think.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said from the other side of the fence. “Wen told me he read about our deal and was hurt that we didn’t even consider whether he had feelings about it. And the next thing I knew, he … he kissed me!”

  I could hardly believe my ears. “He did? And you tried to stop him?”

  She shook her head. “I was too surprised! He told me he’s liked me for a long time. He said he didn’t want to hurt you, though. He even said he tried to talk to you about it last night, but I guess I interrupted him. And then he felt uncomfortable.”

  All at once, I couldn’t speak. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, like all the air had been knocked out of me.

  “What could I do, Floey?” she asked, wiping the tears from her face. “You know how much I’ve always liked him. Last night was wonderful and horrible at the same time. I couldn’t sleep. I’m so confused! I want to be with Wen, but I don’t want to lose my best friend!”

  For a moment, even with the storm rising inside me, I felt sorry for her. A part of me wanted somehow to reach through the fence and hold her hand and tell her it was okay.

  But I couldn’t.

  “We had an agreement,” I said finally. “And you threw it away.”

  “But … but he came to me, not the other way around.”

  I pretended not to hear her. “And you’re supposed to be my friend?”

  She stared at me. “I was hoping you’d understand.”

  “Oh, I understand, all right. I understand completely. It was between the two of us, and you decided to toss me aside.”

  She looked hurt. “No. That wasn’t it at all.”

  I let go of the fence, spun my bike around and pushed it a few feet closer to the road. I knew that what I was doing was mean, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  I turned back to face her. “So much for trust.”

  Her mouth dropped. “What?” A moment later her expression hardened and she stepped right up to the fence. She looked ready for a fight. “What do you know about trust? From what I read, it didn’t seem like you thought we even had an agreement.”

  It was my turn to be surprised and hurt.

  I didn’t know what to say. “Didn’t you already forgive me for that?” I asked, realizing for the first time what a terrible thing I was doing. “You said you believed those were just stupid ideas I wrote down, remember? They didn’t mean anything?”

  She shrugged and her red eyes narrowed. “It isn’t my fault that Wen likes me and not you. Besides, after seeing you with Dean Eagler last night, I didn’t think it’d matter to you.”

  That was low, but I ignored her. “So …,” I began, trying to regain control of the conversation. “So you decided to ditch me just like that? What happened to the Three Blind Mice?”

  “I guess we never really knew the real Floey, did we? Maybe we really were blind.” She wiped her eyes and took a couple of steps backward toward the building. “Listen, Miss Dazzling and Charming. I have to go back.”

  That was it. I was too hurt to stop now. When she turned and started walking away I ran back to the fence and shouted through the links. “I can’t believe you, Azra! I guess the minute a person stands out a little from her old crowd, that’s when jealousy comes out, isn’t it? That’s when she finds out who her friends really are! How could you do this to me? Traitor!”

  She turned around. “Yeah? Well, you did it to me first. Maybe when you’re really famous you can have a whole new set of friends.”

  “Maybe you’re right! You ought to know about new friends! Now that you and Leslie are so tight, I guess it’s out with the old and in with the new!”

  “Huh?” She squinted and crossed her arms on her chest. “I guess you don’t realize it, but Leslie’s a great person and she really likes you. But you know what? I don’t like the new, fabulous, famous Floey Packer, okay? I preferred my old, invisible, ordinary friend. I miss her.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the new me. And having an audience can bring out the best in a person.”

  She stared at me and shook her head. “Who are you?” After a moment she turned back again.

  “Don’t walk away from me!” I called. “We’re not done!”

  “Yes, we are,” she said.

  After that, I couldn’t make her come back, no matter what I shouted through the chain links.

  In the moments before the storm, there was nobody on the roads. Nobody to see me fly by, nobody walking around town, no kids playing in any of the front yards.

  I had an eerie feeling I was the last person on earth.

  How could I have thought Wen was interested in me when all along it was Azra? How could I have made such a mistake? And why didn’t he like me? And how could they have done this to me?

  Back in front of my house I could see Richard and Tish watching TV through our big front window. I couldn’t bring myself to go back into the house, so I turned around and headed back in the direction I’d come from.

  puke garbage hateful

  stinking rotten doom vomit

  dead dark cold awful

  Past the park at the end of my road, the air was so thick and hot it felt like I was biking through soup. I turned left in the direction of the secret beach. But that made me think of the Old Naked People. Which made me think of Wen. Which made me even more miserable.

  I tried to clear my mind. I needed to force Wen and Azra out of my head. Lillian would be home soon. Aunt Sarah too.

  Finally I’d be free of my awful cousins. Thank God.

  A raindrop fell on my neck. The clouds hung darker now. This could be the start of a quick summer shower or a big storm. I figured if I pedaled fast I’d probably make it to Gary’s studio before it
really started pouring.

  I pumped harder.

  By the time I’d pedaled up the big hill, the sweat dripped down my forehead into my eyes. Fatter raindrops fell all around me, soaking into my shirt and cooling me a little. I was close to the turnoff for the secret beach now, about halfway back to town, so I didn’t turn around.

  Through the trees I could see the old cottage. I considered turning down the path. Maybe if I talked with the old people I’d feel better. Should I walk right up to their door and knock?

  No. That was crazy.

  Besides, there was no car in the driveway. They were probably renters and long gone now.

  And anyway, Wen and I were probably both wrong about the Old Naked People. What we saw couldn’t have been real love. And even if it was, it had to be a fluke. In either case, who cared? After Calvin and Dean and Wen, I never wanted anything else to do with those kinds of crazy ideas. It was just one disappointment after another. And then there was Azra. But I didn’t really need friends anymore, did I? I was famous now, sort of. Even if it was a solitary life, wouldn’t the Floey of the future choose an extraordinary life over an ordinary one misspent chasing the impossible?

  Yes. She would. Definitely.

  Suddenly, the rain hammered down. It completely soaked my hair and made my clothes heavy. Water dripped into my face, but I didn’t care. Rain doesn’t matter when you can’t get any wetter.

  Or when you don’t care about anything anymore.

  Just then I heard a loud whoosh, like a tidal wave crashing over me. I hadn’t noticed the huge puddle at the bottom of the hill I’d been racing down. A lake of water flew up at me, and suddenly my bike and I were sliding across the sidewalk. But in my mind it was as if the water had come from some other place, floating slowly through the air and drenching me like a gradually rising flood. And then, for a moment, I was at our back door again, standing in the pouring rain, locked out of Lillian’s wedding reception.

  I was obviously having another Pivotal Life Moment. A Zen crisis.