My parents were shocked that I wanted to go to Darcy. But I thought it was time for me to break out. I mean, they’ve always been overprotective and suffocating. So I explained that it would be a “perspective broadening” experience for me, and the truth is, I kind of thought it would be exactly that. I mean, I was tired of the same hundred kids I’d known since Angell Elementary, even though there was something safe in staying on with them, even the meanest, like Scott Declan, who has pointed and laughed literally every time he’s seen me. Which is roughly two billion, six hundred and ninety-three million times, since we’ve gone to school together since first grade. You’d think someone like that could eventually get a grip, but apparently not. At least I stopped caring what Scott did or said when I turned eleven. If only I’d realized how delicious that safety was. I thought an escape to a more sophisticated school might benefit me, and that maybe I could become an intellectual powerhouse or Shakespearean actor like Peter Dinklage. Because I love Peter Dinklage. I even have a picture of him from The Station Agent that I keep in my wallet. And like I said earlier, I can really sing. And I can sort of write, at least school essays. I knew they’d let me in anyway, because how cool would it be to have a talented dwarf on their brochure for the rest of time? And even if I was wrong about everything else I ever thought in my whole life, I was right about that.
Mrs. O’Henry, the school counselor, kept smiling at me from the stage during the orientation, and every time she said “Any questions?” she looked right at me all hopefully, like she was just so thrilled to have a real live special-needs victim there for her sensitivity demonstration. I was like the moment she’d been waiting for, except I didn’t ask anything, because, for one thing, I was chewing gum, and you’re not allowed to have gum so I was keeping my mouth closed. For another, I had already signed up for an arts education. I would have to sing and act and probably dance a dwarf jig in front of everyone in town—that would be enough attention for me.
As soon as the meeting ended, I scuttled up to the library on the fourth floor of the building and sat alone, the hunchback in a dollhouse bell tower, clanging away. I arranged my books in a stack on the desk, opened a notebook, took out my favorite pink pen, and wrote “Judy” and “D’Arts.” Then I doodled patterns—tiny schools of fish, stars, and striped hearts—under my name. The silence echoed around me and I wished terribly to be in the car on the way home with my parents, or already at home, or even on the AATA bus up Washtenaw to our house. I clicked my orthopedic heels together, imagining the intersection where Washtenaw meets Stadium, the little dip in the road, the bike path, the left turn, down the hill, past the speaking-in-tongues church, to where our house is. I was climbing out of the car in my mind when I heard the voice. I turned, away from the dream of my brothers playing basketball in the driveway, and as soon as I saw who was talking I thought I’d been catapulted out of reality into that movie Mean Girls, because the girl standing there was so pretty and bitchy-looking that my bones froze and my blood fizzed through my veins like grape pop. She had streaky blond hair that looked all intentionally messed up, and was wearing black yoga pants, flip-flops, and a gray Darcy Arts hoodie sweatshirt, an outfit that looked on her like it had cost thousands of dollars. She was probably five feet ten barefoot. She smiled.
“Um, hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I’m Ginger Mews,” she said, sticking her hand down at me. I looked at it for a minute before shaking it with my stumpy paw. Her fingers were long and thin, but the nails were bitten down below the line, all ragged and scabby. Some of them even looked freshly bloodied. Maybe we could be friends.
“I’m Judy,” I said, and she nodded.
“I know. I’m on the social staff, I mean, you know, the orientation staff. I just came by to welcome you to D’Arts and see if you needed anything, and, oh, to make sure you knew that there’s a party this weekend at Chessie Andrewjeski’s, so, you know, we hope you’ll come.”
“The social staff ?”
“Mmm. We just, you know, welcome new students and stuff.”
We stood there for a minute, while I contemplated what to say. Only the dwarfs? Thank you? Had Mrs. O’Henry sent her after the meeting with my parents, and if so, what had she said to Ginger, “This girl needs your gorgeous, socially well-adjusted help”? I didn’t know where to look, didn’t want to stare up at her like a weird pet or a flower growing wildly toward the sun, but I also didn’t want to just look away, lest she think I was rude. Mainly, I didn’t want her to leave yet.
“You want some pretzels?”
“Sure,” she said, glancing around. Food was forbidden in the library. I took a bag of Rold Gold out of my backpack and passed it to her, so she could reach in and take a polite, obligatory pretzel and stick the dry thing into her mouth. It was a gesture of solidarity, and, after she did it, she pulled a chair over to my carrel and sat. Maybe we would be best friends. Now that she was sitting, eye contact was easier to manage. I relaxed about one octave, imagined asking her to fetch books for me from high-up shelves, watching her lunge into the chairs in my room at home. Maybe we’d have a love montage, sip from a shared shake at Judy’s, my parents swooning in the background.
“So do you have any questions about Darcy?” she asked.
“Do you ever have dwarf-tossing contests?”
It worked. She laughed hard enough that I could see some pretzel packed into her back teeth, and I had another surge of the dream that we would actually be best friends. My hope was so great that sarcasm left me for a moment. Even if it meant I had to sell out my own dignity for all of time by making dwarf jokes, I was happy to do that if it meant Ginger would come over and laugh her huge blond laugh. Plus, at least I would beat everyone else to making whatever jokes were going to be made about me.
“Excuse me!” the librarian suddenly shouted. She was as skinny as a fireplace poker, with puddle-colored hair that looked like it had been poured over her head and then dripped down onto her shoulders. She wore frameless eyeglasses and a plaid cardigan, buttoned all the way up. I wondered if she had gotten the job because she looked so much like a school librarian, or if she looked that way because she had gotten the job. Maybe we all eventually become calcified chunks of our own essence.
“There is absolutely no food allowed in the library, girls,” she told us. “Put that away immediately, or I’ll have to confiscate it!”
Ginger looked at me and rolled her eyes and made a chomping motion with her mouth, tipping the pretzel bag back toward her throat. This time we both laughed. The librarian had gone back to typing away on a huge, ancient computer. It seemed to me that a school with as much money as D’Arts could afford a desktop made this century, but maybe they reserved their funds for Broadway-style props and sets.
“You have AP history now, right?” Ginger asked.
I stuffed the pretzel bag into my book bag. “Yeah.”
“I’ll walk you.” She stood up and shrugged, her long, messy hair falling over her shoulders. I caught a whiff of mint and lavender shampoo. Her life seemed perfect. I guessed she was the happiest person alive. She walked me to AP history and said good-bye at the door.
“You’re not in this class?” I asked, both surprised that she’d come with me just out of niceness and alarmed that I was about to be left alone again.
“I’m in retard history,”she said, and then realized something—I don’t know what exactly—that I might consider myself an actual “retard”? That dwarfs and retards feel empathy for one another so she shouldn’t use language like that around me? Some birds- of-an-off ended-feather-type thing? Anyway, she was like, “Oh my god! I didn’t mean—I just, I’m—” and flushed a horrible, violent pink. She looked beautiful.
I put on my most casual expression ever, even though I don’t like that word. “Don’t worry about it. Please—hey—do you want to, maybe we can—”
I don’t even know what I was going to say—have coffee? Schedule a playdate? Fall in love? Sit at lun
ch together? See each other again? Be best friends? But it didn’t matter, because Mr. Troudeau banged his gavel of a hand on the table and I scurried into a desk like a squirrel, with Ginger already gone down the long hallway. I missed the first half of the lecture, some shit about how making the choice to remember and how we remember and write history makes us who we are—because I was busy making up my mind to go to Chessie Andrewjeski’s party. I would wear my black corduroy miniskirt, pile my hair on top of my head, and make hilarious and sarcastic quips all night, until everyone at D’Arts recognized how much sophisticated fun I was. It would be the new, wildly popular me.
3 This goth girl at D’Arts named Sarah wanted to be my friend as much as I wanted to be Ginger’s. Goth Sarah. She was one of those girls who feels like a freak on the inside and wishes to be one on the outside, so she can express or at least represent her inner self better. It’s like the way some kids cut themselves, so they can feel a physical version of whatever psychological pain they either have or think they have. Sarah wasn’t really super punk or dark; she was kind of watered-down angsty-looking. She was actually conventionally very cute, but had tried to mask it by dying her hair an oily seal black, puncturing every possible surface with hoops and studs, and ripping her fishnets. She looked riddled by bullets, but wore pink lipstick and striped polo jerseys.
I later understood that preppy-goth is a Darcy type, but Sarah was pretty original and seemed full of potentially interesting contradictions. When she smiled in precalc one day, I smiled back and then looked down quickly, in case I had misread her and was grinning ludicrously for no reason. But I wasn’t—she really wanted to be my friend.
Goth Sarah told me once, right before Christmas break, that before she “really got to know me” she’d been amazed I was willing to go to parties. I liked her more after she admitted she thought that. I like those compliments, because they’re true. I never like the kind that are like, “Oh, I didn’t even notice you’re three feet tall, because I’m disability and color-blind and you’re such a great person.” I prefer ones like Sarah gave, of the “You’re so brave to leave the bell tower; I’d never have the balls” variety.
I told her the truth in return, that once I got to Darcy, I started to like parties. Maybe I was just older, or the parties at Huron, the high school where I went for ninth and tenth grade, just sucked. Or maybe Darcy parties were all the same, and therefore safe and predictable. Because once I leapt out of the frying pan into the whole new-school fire, I longed for nonagonizing social situations.
Although that first party, the one at Chessie Andrewjeski’s, was terrifying. That was before I knew anyone except Ginger, and she hardly helped. I remember that night better than almost anything else that’s ever happened in my life, too, because it was the first time I ever saw Kyle Malanack. Sometimes I wonder—if I hadn’t gone, would everything still be this mammoth disaster? I’m sure I would’ve met him eventually anyway; I mean, D’Arts wasn’t that big and he was a huge star there. But maybe if I’d met him some other way, it could have happened differently. If we’d been in the hallway, or the lunchroom, or gym class, if he’d been falling off the climbing ropes, losing a race, too exhausted to swim his final lap. But I met him at Chessie’s. There was nothing special about the scene; it was any party full of teenagers anywhere, except the D’Arts kids were cooler-looking than the ones at my non-performing-arts high. Chessie’s place was out on Scio Church Road and hard to find, so my older brother, Chad, who was a freshman at Michigan, drove me and said he’d have his cell phone on all night. I could call whenever I needed him to pick me up and he’d rush back. If I didn’t have Chad around, I’d be even less well-adjusted, because we don’t have the pedals in our car raised, so I can’t drive yet even though I passed my driver’s test right away the first time. I mean, my parents would have had to drive me. It’s unimaginable. My friends from Huron who can drive said they didn’t want to go to a Darcy party. They were mad at me for changing schools, which is another story, and not that interesting. So I had no friends, no car, and obviously wasn’t going to ask my parents to take me. They don’t allow “parties where the parents aren’t home”—as if there’s such a thing as parties where the parents are home. But even if they had agreed to the party, they probably would have insisted on staying all night, like it was a sequel to my D’Arts orientation or something. I guess Chad’s becoming more like them, because he’s usually mellow and fun, but he was so nervous when he left me at Scio Church Road that he said, “Look, J, I’m just going to pull around the corner for twenty minutes, so if you need me to come back right away, I can. Why don’t you go in and see if it’s okay and then I’ll—”
I cut him off. “I’ll be fine. I have to go to high school on my own, even parties.”
“I’m not saying I’ll come in or anything. I’ll just be down the road where no one can see me, until you call and say it’s okay.” For a moment, I contemplated telling him to come in and pretend to be my gorgeous boyfriend, but it was too Freudian and pathetic. So I got out of the car and went inside.
Chessie Andrewjeski, the girl having the party, was crying. Her parents were out of town, of course, and she had invited only a handful of people but the entire school had shown up, as well as dozens of kids from Huron and Pioneer and Community, the public schools. I felt annoyed that my stupid Huron friends had refused to come, even though there were plenty of people they would have known there, even a few I knew. Chessie was crying half out of genuine unhappiness about trashing her parents’ house and half because of the glee of being a surprise sensation, popular enough to fill an entire suburban farmhouse. There were teenagers scattered everywhere, across the lawn, having sex in the upstairs bedrooms, someone passed out on the back patio, all the doors open, two kegs in the kitchen, and a bucket of punch so alcoholic it smelled like it might blind you. People were dancing wildly in the living room, and all the furniture was pushed up against the walls, everyone crawling over it like animals. The rug was black with grime from people’s shoes and spilled drinks. But if you looked under the “girls gone wild” surface, which was easy for me to do since I was sober and actually below everyone who formed that surface, you could see that it was just a bunch of insecure teenagers guzzling alcohol and Kool-Aid from Dixie cups and freaking out about how “stressed out” they were about SATs and APs and rehearsals and auditions and résumé-padding efforts.
I’m lucky this way; being a dwarf may have ruined my life, but it used to mean I had a good shot at getting into a great college because my Little Sarah Hottentot essay was so potentially prizewinning. I had already used part of it to get my full ride to Darcy, and when I showed it to my AP English teacher, Ms. Doman, even though it wasn’t for her class and wasn’t related in any way—I just wanted to show off —she said it was the best high school writing she’d ever seen and if it wasn’t so original, she’d accuse me of plagiarizing some Nobel Prize–winning author. So that was a good thing that happened at Darcy. Ms. Doman was a good thing.
Kids are always so “stressed out,” even when nothing stressful is happening. My brothers, Chad and Sam, are careful about this; they know that complaining about their glistening lives in front of a dwarf is unseemly, so they almost never fuss. They’re also not bratty and entitled, the way most kids are, especially at Darcy, maybe because the culture of a school that’s anything other than a regular “feeder” encourages colic. You’re so privileged to be there, you feel like you have to complain about something just so you don’t have to think constantly about how lucky you are. It’s a kind of overcompensation, I think, when I’m feeling generous about it. Or, when I’m not, I think maybe it’s just the basic requirement of being a teenager, feeling like you get to have everything be perfect all the time, and when you have an algebra test or a hangnail, the rest of the war-torn, poverty-stricken, deformed world ought to turn its attention to you.
When I first walked in at Chessie’s, I felt less of the simultaneous buzz and chill than I had imagined
I would inspire. Most people were already drunk, and maybe everyone had heard of me already. The ones who were in- the- dwarf-know looked down nonchalantly. One or two who hadn’t been forewarned let a bit of shock flash across their faces. But in most cases, I was impressed with how fast even the most uncouth regained their composure.
These included three guys in the corner, one with puffy muscles that made him look like an inflatable parade float. The others were a sleek swimmer and a curly-haired fatty, all standing together in a corner laughing horribly loud, although whether at me, I couldn’t have said. It did feel like they were looking over at me when they started laughing, but I try not to be paranoid. Reality is bad enough—why exaggerate it? Now I know those three were seniors, Chris Arpent, Alan Sarft, and Tim Malone. Elizabeth Wood, an anorexic junior with dark curly hair who had been cast as Juliet her sophomore year, came over to their group carrying three beers for them, two of them clutched in one hand. She handed the single-clawed one to Chris Arpent, grinning up at him before splashing Alan’s and Tim’s beers onto them.
“Oops! Sorry!” she sang out in a totally ridiculous musical theater way, and then snuggled up to Chris, the muscled action figure in a white button-down shirt and jeans. He had short dark hair and light skin, and his eyes had a bruised, artistic look that some girls, apparently including Elizabeth Wood, really liked. She had huge boobs, and I wondered how that was possible when she probably weighed less than a hundred pounds. Had she had a boob job already? I once read that it’s not a good idea to have cosmetic surgery when you’re still growing, but I know for sure that some of the girls at D’Arts did it. I stared at Elizabeth Wood for a while. Her face was really pretty for someone so thin; she had a miniature mouth, like she was a kewpie doll, and her eyes were far apart from each other, almost on the sides of her head, which gave her an anime quality. In fact, she was incredible-looking. I had heard that she was the girl in the fall production of Fool for Love, the one that started rehearsing in summer. Everyone knew she was going to be famous. I wondered if her parents were worried, and what it felt like to be her, scary or hungry or maybe driven and fabulous. I couldn’t tell. She wore red shiny patent leather heels with jeans, and they were supposed to make her look like a supermodel, but they only kind of did—they also made her look like a six-year-old playing dress-up, or Dorothy, wearing the ruby slippers after she crushes the witch with her house.
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