by JoAnna Novak
Miss Troubaugh’s face sharpened with annoyance. “Elliot Egleston, stop acting like a maniac and get over here!”
The doors to the locker rooms opened and, clothed, my classmates emerged.
“Shoot, I’m late!” I disappeared like a blown kiss into the class of 1999.
I was one of them, for a second, part of the school’s clamor. Chairs screeched out from and clattered upside down on top of desks. The talk was relentless: elongated vowels, sentences rollercoasting through ditz voices and stoner sputters and ghetto slang and nerd code and—and and and tonight and tomorrow night and Saturday night and Sunday night, what’s the homework, whose parents are out, when’s that show, who’s got what, it’s the best, the worst, I’ll die. The herd migrated. Lockers slammed like metal pats on the back, and kids loaded their JanSports with notebooks binders pencil cases books workbooks sketchpads art boxes graphing calculators. Was there a conspiracy to break down the adolescent’s spinal integrity one one-hundredth of a vertebra at a time per cubit pound? According to Dr. Phil and Sally Jessy, yes. Sneakers squeaked and clogs clomped. Girls peeped their Leo pics and peered into sequin-trimmed mirrors, accurate as aluminum foil, and pinkied on their gloppy lip gloss and then licked it off. Girls giggled and pouted and squealed; boys goosed them or pinched them or did the old-school bra strap snap or even whispered at them, hey, the same trick they pulled during recitation of the Pledge. The pot-bellied security guard and the turkey-necked security guard pretended they didn’t hear Chase Hampel call Andrea Mizzuski a ho. For good reason: Chase’s mom, a lunch lady, gave away the Otis Spunkmeyer inventory, those soft chocolate cookies—special, because they had chunks instead of chips—and the guards took home for the weekend, called them breakfast, and anyhow, us kids, we were loud, noisy, spoiled brats, but not so strange, not so much more unusual than they—adult men—must have once been, boys with eczema and cowlicks in a good-ole America when no one talked about sex on TV, when kids didn’t joke about the nation’s leader getting BJs or smoking stogies, when who’d even heard of internships or sixty-nine, and us kids: the last thing we needed, according to an older generation of adults senior to our parents, the last thing we needed was more adult breath steaming down our collars or whatever.
Among the masses, I sought specialness. My clients, my girls, I cared, I wanted for them. They were so—ugh! They sucked in their stomachs under angora sweaters and baggy sweatshirts, tying cardigans or flannels around their waists cuz grunge; they chewed off their nails and coated them with Hard Candy or Wet ’n Wild, baby blue or pitch black; they doodled up each other’s arms, slung their necks with friendship necklaces on ball-bead chains from Claire’s, charms bobbing between budding breasts, thin as puzzle pieces, two jagged halves of a perfect heart.
··
I had no one’s necklace. I wanted so badly not to want one.
Butterfly clips spiked the nerdy Nellies’ hair.
Athletes wore sports bras on and off court.
Sopranos arpeggioed down the halls, unabashedly adoring The Sound of Music.
The popular girls were foxes, which is how I knew I was destined to never fit in. Their handsome fathers had names like Jim or Todd or Chris, and flirty mothers who’d given birth—without labial rupturing or anal fissuring, horrors we’d heard in Health—to adorable, just a touch underweight, soon-to-be cliqued girls whose spit glistened more Mr. Bubble than anything secreted by a salivary gland, girls who’d grown up into my classmates, with un-acned foreheads and long legs and Barbie-shaped feet and the ability to look natural in any wash or cut of Guess jeans.
The popular girls sat at a lunch table closest to the emergency exit, as though the APR’s feng shui had positioned them where they would most easily escape fictional threats—bullets, bombs, gas, flames—once they were on the blacktop, underneath the basketball hoops, beyond the parking lot, a good kickball-kick away from Flagg Creek, the femur of water separating our school from the park district’s trails, where, per rumor, Mr. Kasparek, everyone’s favorite Keyboarding teacher, toked.
Yes, the popular girls would get out. Would they take me with them?
I mean, despite their Candies shoes and Limited Too tops and Calvin Klein microfiber bras, they worried about paunches and pooches and saddlebags, too. Upper-arm wings. Under-eye puffiness. Cellulite. Ab flab. That’s why I’d be riding the bus with Rocyo, any minute. Even popular girls worried about their unbridled love of Sour Cream and Onion Pringles, Pizza Goldfish, Double Stuf Oreos, Fruit Roll-Ups, Cherry Clearly Canadian (definitely sugar water). They’d shredded cellophane. Done carbo-damage. Sometimes they dissed one another or stole each other’s boyfriends, but most times they were unfathomably nice, as though nothing in life could warrant one eyedropper of stress. All the popular girls were guilty of was not giving unpopular girls like me a second thought, unless we could be useful to them.
Well.
Six of them paid me five dollars a month.
7 ·· LISA
AFTER, I EAT ANOTHER DREAMSICLE—IT tastes like Starburst Blue Tootsie Rolls French Vanilla Ice Ice Baby heaven. Junior Carlos has one, too, which relieves me, because then I’m not compensating or balancing or rewarding myself or having behaviors. I’m eating because my mouth is hot stale phlegmy. I’m eating because I want to—and I do what I want. I’m not eating just because I burned calories, some—I don’t know how many—being fucked. Obviously, there’s lot about sex I don’t know. Like, should I move more or less when Junior Carlos thrusts? Should I buck like hula hooping and Skip-It? Should I put my hands over his eyes? I say stuff, like, “Oh yes, big bad wolf,” but should I try more? I’ll ask him sometime, but whatever happens in the future, I’m all right now. Perfect baby, he told me, afterwards. I love that—how I sound like someone from a red-hot, seven-guitar, teased-hair power ballad. Perfect baby.
We sit at the island in the kitchen. Our stools are spun so we can see the TV. The conclusion of Clueless plays. It’s always abrupt. This movie should be longer. Sometimes, I feel like everything should be longer. Skateboards skid up and down ramps, wheels clack and whizz. Tai and Travis Birkenstock (I only just this time got that reference—Birkenstock, like the fugly shoes) are happy, together. It reminds me of Stripes, which I watch with my dad, a diehard Bill “Chicago Boy” Murray fan, where the second half is a weird separate entity, a leathery gray arm bulging out of an infant-soft, skin-toned elbow. We’re in Russia now? There’s a tank? No more creamed corn wrestling? What?
I suck the milky sheen off my popsicle stick and chomp the wood. Junior Carlos is still on the orange layer.
“Hey.” Hearing myself is reassuring. I sound chill. I don’t sound like I told off my ex-best friend or had sex with a college freshman or even like I have a cold. I don’t sound like someone thinking about her grandma. I sound like my mantra, embodied: hanging with my boo, doing what I want, reading hokey popsicle stick jokes through my bite marks.
“‘What do you call a chicken with a crown on?’”
A few strings of Junior Carlos’s hair stick to his forehead. His cheeks are flushed. “This movie is already, like, so dated. You know? No one even uses computers, like, at all. This is pre-AOL. Doesn’t that seem like so long ago?”
“What do you call a chicken with a crown on?”
“I don’t know, Lee. But your life is going to start seeming vast one of these days, and then get back to me. King Pollo?”
“All right, Mr. Serious. Chicken a la King.”
Junior Carlos shakes his head and slides off this twisty bar stool upholstered with dusky peach ferns. He decapitates his Dreamsicle. It reminds me of how he pulled his penis out before he came, how he joggled it in one hand while he put a pinky in my vagina, and I felt like a firecracker, praying to erupt, and he flounced hot semen on my stomach and wiped it off with the Last Supper blanket. I’ll have to do wash before my mom gets back from the hospital. My life doesn’t seem vast, just snared, like every action, below the surface, comes with 103 million invisible c
onsequences.
“‘I’m outie, Cher.’ Your mom’s gonna be here any—”
“Where are you going?” I twist in my chair. This would’ve been an oblique workout last year. “Stay. Please please please. My mom’s visiting for like another hour. Last rites. You don’t wanna make me get sad, do you?”
“I mean, of course not. I’d stay all day if I could.”
“You can! You have a car! You don’t have to say goodbye to your dying mother.”
“I have afternoon classes,” he says. He grabs the underside of the bar stool to stop my twists. “And you need rest, baby.”
“I don’t want rest. And no you don’t. You said, Monday Wednesday Friday—”
“My schedule changed.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t you ask how classes are?”
I stare at my chest. Why didn’t you ask me how school is, I think. But I pick a long blonde hair off the black fabric over my left ribs instead.
“I have to clear everything with a fourteen-year-old? Roiiiiiiight.”
“C’mon. Don’t just fuck and duck, Austin Powers.”
“Don’t go postal. I’ve been here, like, a long time. We’ve watched Clueless, we’ve talked, we’ve laughed, we’ve … honestly, I would’ve skipped all that if you’d told me about your grandma, because, as you know, I’m not a tool. I have lame shit to do.”
“My grandma’s not on my mind. Don’t make excuses.” I bat my eyelashes. I am very good at this, even when I’m sick and my head feels mummified in wrapping paper. I was a tap dancer. “Or, or, or—or, if you really, really, really wanna be lame, stay here! Do laundry with me! There, lame squared!”
“Is this because you hate the basement?”
“As if!”
Downstairs I’ve seen two rats. One possum. A gagillion ants. One brown leather photo album containing a picture of my parents naked except for bucket hats and friends of theirs I don’t recognize, who are also naked except for bucket hats. I do hate the basement. But there are limits to what you can ask your older boyfriend to accept.
“If you want me to put the blanket in the wash, I’ll do that for you. I’m that kind of guy, Lisa, remember? Very responsible. Thoughtful. Stand-up. But then I’ve gotta bounce.”
“Don’t!”
Junior Carlos opens his mouth and seals his lips over the remainder of the Dreamsicle. He looks like he’s preparing a joint. Concentrated and borderline bad. He leans close to my face. There is the start of a soul patch on his chin, like church ashes.
“No. No kiss. Do not even think about that.”
I see his stubble swallow. He legit gulps. “Think about what?”
He shows me his mouth, his Bazooka tongue, his burnished silver fillings on the bottom left molars. I’m not really angry with him, but I keep staring, to make him think I might be. Black lagoon darkness. Mouth fog. No hangy ball.
He kisses my forehead. “You know I love how fiery you are, right? I’ll chat you. When I get home from the pool. Feel better by then, will you?”
I jut my bottom lip and stare at my lap. How did he manage to get cum on my pants? It’s yolky. Dirty white. I scratch at it with my nails, but they’re too short.
“Whatever. I might die. Or something. But, yeah, until then.”
“Don’t be overdramatic, L. It’s in bad taste. Talk to your mom if you’re really upset. It might help you two. Don’t you think? Dealin’ with your grandma.”
“It’s my grandma,” I say, sniffing. “I’ll deal how I want.” I stomp behind Junior Carlos, his lost shadow, one step too slow. Maybe I’m the definition of bad taste. He leaves through the garage and I punch the keypad to open the door, and there he goes. He backs his dark-green Bimmer out into the snowy suburban world, all the houses still gemmed with Christmas lights, twinkling as dark settles over their too-much lives.
··
There is laundry forever until you’re dead. Then there’s still laundry. Down here, canvas sailor bags strangled with twine are filled with my grandma’s stuff, carefully, some might say neurotically folded, by my mom (no, Lisa, you can’t help). They line an entire wall next to the water heater. They still smell like her house: baby powder and ammonia and day-old apricot streusel. Butter slumping under a white ceramic bell. Thinking of her with nothing, no clothes, intubated skinny arms and powder sugar hair in that hospital bed, struggling to blink, waiting to die, I get antsy. Panicky. What does she want to say to her parents, dead decades? What does she want to say to her daughter sitting next to her—that she can’t? Or won’t? What does she regret? What does she want? Is there anything she can even do? This is a time when relaxing into starvation would be all right—end of life, when you have no choice, you need nothing, you can’t convince yourself otherwise. When you can relax into the ache. When you’re almost gone.
I shove the Last Supper blanket into the washing machine, my cummy flannel pants.
Then it starts: I hate crying. Burning like microwaved grapes, my eyes, I hold my eyelids open with the backs of my palms, my skin stretching like a sunburn. I focus on the noise. The washing machine is loud. A torrent, an explosion, ten thousand shoes tumbling over a waterfall.
I feel sulky, stupid for being sulky. There’s nothing wrong with Junior Carlos. He left when he needed to leave. I know what Dr. Ogbaa would want me to do:
Confront the truth.
And here it is: I’m scared of my grandma dying. And I’m scared of Elliot not being able to let go. I’m nice; I can be mean over the phone, but what happens on Tuesday when I’m back at school, after MLK Day? I don’t want her roping me into a forever Russian roulette with my own death. No one cares once you’re gone—okay, parents. I’ve never been suicidal, like nabbing razor blades and Ring Pops from Al’s Hardware, but when doctors call not eating a slow suicide, I can’t argue. That’s crystal. The most exciting part of dying is everything-but—key difference between sex and death.
I pour a capful of detergent into the washing machine. It smells like airy ecru dresses, lofting linen on a sunny clothesline. I run upstairs, into the front room, where all the furniture is white. My family only sits here on Christmas day, when we open presents in front of the fake tree, me, my mom, my dad. I throw my body on the couch.
I hold my legs out straight and concentrate my abs. I remember old games Elliot taught me: magical thinking. If my toes reach the mantle, I won’t die. If I hold my stomach in while drinking lemon water, I’ll burn more calories. If I don’t think about my friend from the hospital that died, she’ll come back to life. Poor Georgette. She hated vanilla Ensure and loved Jonathan Taylor Thomas. And I don’t think about her, not usually—it gets too intense. So why should anyone think about me? How long will I think about my grandma?
I stare out the window for ten seconds. One: desperate. Two: I want my mom, to see her huffing up the driveway in her long gray coat and her absurd seal-fur hat. Three: Sigh. Four, five, six, seven, eight: I jog upstairs to the bedrooms—in my striped panties, no bra. Nine: I scream, like I’m about to get hacked to death by Freddy Krueger. Ten: My yell makes my boobs bounce; action beats inertia.
Exhibit A: seventh-grade me. She was action incarnate. Starving required so much energy all meals became negative calories, not just celery. A Rubik’s Cube, every bite, each thought, every notebook margin for tallying numbers and choices. If there’s a God, He’s tempting us on the regular. There are so many choices to get wrong: Do I just jam my feet into my All Stars—or bend and tie the damn double-knot? Will I let the elevator hoist my fat ass? Will I penance-lap the Jewel, after eyeing the sample lady and the yum-plush of a mini bagel schmeared with cream cheese?
Elliot brainwashed me. She’s convinced this is the best life could offer.
I look down the hall, toward my bedroom. Now I sprint like I’m trying to blast through a wall, and on the other side is Junior Carlos with open arms to Kevin-Coster-in-The Bodyguard me into adulthood, huzzah, immortality.
Seve
nth-grade girls are an audience: they love habits—their own, other people’s, the better to compare or steal. They love braiding friendship bracelets, painting nails, and polka dotting them magenta. Color-coding school supplies, decorating lockers, coordinating scrunchies with scrunch-up socks. Loving the same Ginuwine songs, one spoon of pink yogurt for lunch, one bite of one strawberry: your golf-club elbows (sixty-five pounds), your blue lips (sixty-three). So kewt.
I run harder, down the stairs, into the living room. In seventh grade, this loop burnt calories; now it torches my anxiety. Screw the sixth-grade girls of the world: they’ll grow up into the eighth graders, high schoolers, smarmy adults, clubby women, menthol aunts, grandmas. The day before I went in-patient, my grandmother told me I looked better than ever. Women will rain down love on your habits until you’re such a sucker for the praise you drown in compulsion. Until you absent the habit and croak. Then, you’re the kid who moved. The new girl in the afterlife. Um, who?
I crouch behind a curtain. If the mailman walks by, he won’t get an eyeful. I peer out the window. Panting. The Thompson’s, three houses down, still haven’t cleared their driveway from last weekend’s blizzard; their magnolias are porcelain weather vanes. Can you feel everything at once? The trivial and tremendous? I do what I want because I know what I want. I’m so proud of not wanting to be dead.
