Big Girl Small

by Rachel Dewoskin

  On the other side of the room, a crowd of people was gathered around a table, flipping quarters into glasses, drinking and shrieking. I saw Ginger among them, and she saw me. She waved, stood up, and made her way over.

  “Judy! I’m glad you came! You want a beer?” she shouted, and then, not waiting for an answer, took off for the keg, leaving me alone again.

  I looked around the room, trying to find a corner I could tuck into, and then settled on the bathroom, where I planned to lock myself in and breathe deeply. By the time I had squeezed through the throngs of legs, I reached up, grabbed the knob, and shoved the door open without knocking. And that’s how I met Kyle Malanack. Peeing.

  He turned.

  “Oh my god,” I said, “I’m sorry—I didn’t—”He readjusted his eyes from where he’d expected me to be to where I was, and smiled.

  He made no move to yank at his zipper, and didn’t seem alarmed that I’d barged in, seen him peeing, or turned out to be the size of a Cabbage Patch Kid.

  “Come on in,” he said, grinning and zipping calmly, slowly. “Here. I’ll even wash my hands before we shake.”

  He turned on the sink while I continued to stand in the open crack of the door, mysteriously unable to move. It was like being electrocuted to the floor. I know that’s melodramatic, but it’s true, too.

  He dried his hands off on a towel and held one down to me in a totally casual way. “I’m Kyle,” he said.

  I stretched a hand up, shook his. “I’m Judy.”

  Kyle’s a person who misses no beats. “So,” he said, “if this were kindergarten, we’d be seated next to each other.”

  Then he picked up an expensive-looking video camera from the sink and started out the door. I wanted to stop him, keep him in the bathroom with me. It was the first time I’d ever had that specific feeling about a guy. It reminded me of being a cavewoman. Maybe if Kyle and I had been prehistoric, hairy people together, I would have wanted to trap him in a cave with me forever. Of course, if I’d been a dwarf and not had my wit and conversation skills to win him over, maybe he would have shoved the boulder out of the way of the cave entrance and escaped. Here’s the thing. Call me stupid, but I loved him. I loved him right away.

  “Actually,” I said, “I think they alphabetize by last name, even when you’re five.”

  He turned his camera on, smiled at me from behind it. “What’s your last name?” he asked. He was filming now, but I decided I’d pretend not to notice.

  “Lohden,” I told him. “My name is Judy Lohden.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” he said.

  “You too,” I said. “But I wonder what made you think of kindergarten?”

  He passed this test, unveiling rows of gleaming teeth in a friendly smile and saying, “Just our names being lined up like that. Why do you ask?”

  I smiled back, trying to hide the fact that I had nothing clever left to say.

  He bailed me out. “By the way, my last name’s Malanack,” he said. “So we’d still be next to each other.” I had heard this last name. He was the guy doing Fool for Love with Elizabeth Wood. Of course. Typical of me to fall in love at first idiotic sight with the prom king.

  He was gone, headed back to the keg. No “Do you go to Darcy?” No “What a party; do you want to be my girlfriend?” I quickly slammed the door shut and bolted it, thinking, if you’re a guy like Kyle Malanack, you don’t care about the lock because you’re so gorgeous and confident that anyone who gets to see you naked and peeing is just lucky. So you figure you’ll keep the possibility and door open for all the people at the party, keep their hopes alive. But I was also thinking—did he not notice? Had someone already warned him? How was it that no surprise at all had registered on his face, that there’d been no dropping of his heartthrob jawbone? I climbed up onto the counter and took a look at myself in the mirror. Not bad. Green eyes, the eyelashes, light hair, and plenty of lip gloss. Maybe he’d actually thought I was cute.

  Back outside the bathroom, Ginger had given the beer she said she’d get me to someone else. I went and got one for myself, and sat drinking it on a couch where I could tuck my legs underneath me and watch and listen for the rest of the night. But Goth Sarah came and sat with me, talked about a book she was reading, apparently about why girls starve themselves. Something about self-loathing. She asked me if I was a feminist.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, and then, just to be polite, added, “Are you?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “I mean, bad guys hijacked that word, and now it’s so horrible! Everyone thinks feminists are, like, shaving our heads and strangling men, but actually, all it means to be a feminist is that you think gender inequality still exists.”

  “Oh.”

  “And it so obviously does.”

  Kyle was leaning against the far wall now, in a semicircle with Ginger, Kim Barksper, and Alan. Chris Arpent was telling a story, standing on one leg and holding an enormous arm out, and everyone was laughing uproariously, except Kyle, who was smiling in a vaguely above-the-fray way. Then Chris snapped his arm in and threw his head back into a long, self-indulgent laugh at whatever the punch line of his own joke had been. I made a promise to myself to laugh more at my own jokes. I mean, if he could be so unapologetic about finding himself funny, then why couldn’t I? Of course, he was great looking and popular. Alan slapped him on the back and I noticed Ginger put her hand on Kyle’s arm, right where the sleeve of his T-shirt was pushed up.

  “Don’t you agree?” Goth Sarah was asking.

  I nodded. “Sure,” I said, but since I had no idea what the last thirty things out of her mouth had been, I couldn’t take it much further than that.

  Fortunately, she didn’t force me to fake specificity. She said, “Only two every year are women—out of five hundred! America is just set up for men. I mean, once you have kids, you kind of have to drop your work.”

  “My mom works,” I said, mildly. “With my dad.”

  “Yeah, mine works too,” she said, “but she wanted to be an artist and then she had us, and well, what are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, you?”

  “I want to start a dance company that tours the world and helps girls and women.”

  Something shy came over Goth Sarah when she told me this, as if the mere mention of a plan she cared about made her vulnerable. I was impressed that she had such a detailed life goal. Usually when that’s true, the person wants to be a movie star or something. I tuned in for real for a minute.

  “That’s cool,” I said, “You’ve thought it through.”

  “Thanks.”

  We were quiet, and then for some reason she was like, “We did a reading of The Vagina Monologues last year after I brought it to Ms. Minogue, and it was like a total scandal.”

  I nodded, even though I have to admit that when Sarah said the V-word, I felt a shudder of embarrassment. I was glad they had done the play the year before so I would never have to utter the word in front of anyone myself. I mean, what were the chances of D’Arts doing it again?

  Kyle was now standing alone with Alan, engaged in what looked like a deep conversation. Alan had straight, chlorinated hair, and was dressed so conservatively he could have been in a J.Crew ad. He was a swimmer, tan, covered with a sheer pelt of blond hair on his arms and legs. His shoulders were so wide and his waist so narrow that he reminded me of a grade school project my kindergarten teacher, Wilma Feinstein, had once made us do. We had to glue shapes together to make a person, and I had used a triangle for the body on mine, accidentally making Alan.

  Goth Sarah was talking about the starving book again. I mouthed the words “I’ll get a copy. It sounds great,” while looking around feverishly, hoping for an escape. Since I had no friends at all, I had a lot of nerve. I don’t mean to make everything about me all the time, but I felt like maybe Goth Sarah was obsessed with issues of body image or something, and assumed I’d be like-minded because my body is different from most people’s. Bu
t I don’t starve or even hate myself, so I thought maybe she’d be disappointed. Or maybe she was one of those girls like K. C. Hart at my old school, who wants everyone to know how unfazed she is, and shows it by befriending a weirdo. Actually, I know now that I was just wrong and insecure and an idiot—Sarah cared about the world, was interested in topics of actual depth. She also gave me more credit for being smart and deep than I deserved.

  Maybe it was just the delirium of watching Kyle Malanack that made me uninterested in anything else, but I wanted Goth Sarah to leave me alone so I could devote all my energy to plotting how I’d convince him to fall in love with me. I’d have settled in that moment for simply figuring out his class schedule so I could change all my classes and be in his. But I kept nodding at Sarah and saying uh-hunh like I was listening while I actually watched Kyle. I thought she wouldn’t notice, which is a lot like thinking no one can tell when you’re falling asleep in class. You know, your eyes start vibrating and your head crashes down and you snap it back up again and say some totally incoherent thing to prove that you weren’t asleep because you actually were and then you think—even though you know better—that no one else noticed. You almost congratulate yourself on whatever stupid thing you managed to say, like, “Wow, that was pretty quick of me, now no one will know I’m actually completely asleep and in a coma.” And everyone in the universe knows that you were sleeping just like when it happens to someone else, you’re like, “Why can’t she stay awake or at least do a better job pretending?” Well that’s how this was; everyone knew I was in love with Kyle. Sarah must have known right away. I couldn’t look away—he was like the best book I’d ever read, keeping me up all night, tearing through pages. He flopped around the party, his bright hair a little too long and falling into his eyes and over his ears while he chatted with everyone. He wasn’t the type to spend too much time with any one person. He drank two beers, hugged Elizabeth Wood and Kim Barksper, roughhoused with Chris Arpent and Tim Malone, sat for a few minutes with Triangular Alan in what seemed to be a meaningful talk, and then, all of a sudden, there was a big commotion out on the lawn. I followed the crowd out, and there were Chris and some other guy I didn’t know, rolling around on each other, kicking and punching and fighting. Kelly Barksper was screaming for them to stop like it was some life-or-death thing or she was auditioning for A Streetcar Named Desire, and Elizabeth Wood was jumping up and down on the porch, saying, “Someone help! Someone help!” Big, beautiful cartoon tears oozed out of her eyes.

  Kyle walked down the porch steps fast, but super calm, too, and everyone parted like the sea for him. He didn’t get excited or shout or do any of the monkey things teenage guys usually do. He just walked right to the middle of Chris and this guy, and kind of lifted Chris off the other guy and moved him out of the circle. He said something no one else could hear, and as soon as Chris heard it, he straightened up, brushed his pants off, and let Kyle lead him away. The other guy, someone from Huron or Pioneer, I don’t know, was still swearing and waving his arms. He looked so stupid that people on the porch started laughing. Then one of his friends, way less cool than Kyle and too late, came over and took him around the house the other way. And that was it. It was pretty amazing, I have to admit, the way Kyle broke that fight up. He was only a junior, and kind of scrappy and skinny, especially compared to Chris, who was huge and a senior. It’s only because Kyle was so cool that all his guy friends were seniors, and he was, like, in charge even though he was the youngest. Kyle and Chris walked toward a parked car and stood for a minute, talking. I watched Kyle’s strong jaw, outlined in the streetlight, as he opened his mouth to call, “Hey, Alan!”

  Alan appeared on the porch, hopped down the stairs, and unlocked the car, and they all got in and drove off. I could feel my body straining, trying to leave my brain behind so it could chase Kyle down the street like a dog. I didn’t want to go back inside and listen or watch anymore, so I called Chad from the lawn and while I waited for him I looked up at the blanket of stars hanging over Ann Arbor. A fall chill was already in the air and it smelled dark like winter: crisp leaves burning and the snow that’s about to come. I like that combination of smells, fire and an impending icy Midwestern season. I don’t think I could ever live anywhere that has constantly nice weather. The stars don’t look as good when it’s not cold. And places that have no transitions make you feel like change isn’t possible. I believe in change, even now, even after everything that’s happened. Maybe because I grew up in a place that can be scalding and freezing both.

  Chad came to get me in so little time that he must have been sitting around the corner in his car all night. I didn’t ask. He pretended he was about to “return” to a Michigan party, and then waited until I was safely inside our house before backing away. My parents were at the table, pretending they always have tea at midnight. Everyone in my family does a lot of pretending on my account. And I pretend not to notice.

  “Oh, hi, honey!” my mom said, all casual.

  “Hi, Judy. Did you have an okay time?” my dad asked.

  I looked at him closely, my sleepy-eyed dad, sitting there with my mom, who had definitely made him stay up waiting for me, because then they could look “natural” at the table, rather than worried. And I loved him very much at that moment.

  “It was good, Dad, thanks.”

  “Great, honey,” he said. “Well, I guess we’ll be turning in.”

  He stood to clear their teacups, but my mom kept her hand wrapped around hers.

  “Who was there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Mom, everyone, I guess.”

  “Have you met lots of new people?”

  I shrugged, opened the cabinet, and took out a package of Oreo cookies. Then I poured some milk and sat down. I took the tops off of three Oreos and stacked them up. I ate the open-faced ones, scraping the filling with my teeth. When I had finished those, I dipped the stacked tops in my milk one at a time.

  “I met a cool girl named Ginger,” I told my mom, “and one named Sarah.”

  This was something for her to hold on to—names. She relaxed and I excused myself and went to my bathroom, brushed my teeth, and looked in the mirror. In my room I put on black cotton pajamas with moons and stars on them and climbed into my bed next to the ratty monkey doll my grandma Mary got me when I was a baby. I named it Bunkey, which my mom says is because I was a genius who could rhyme, but is actually because I thought monkeys were called bunkeys until I was like eleven. I slapped Bunkey’s arm against my face while sucking my thumb so much that the arm fell off and had to be sewn back on two hundred times.

  I tried to sleep and couldn’t. So I got up and put my ear against the radiator in my floor. This is one of the ways I know my parents pretend all the time. Because I can hear bits of the truth through the vents in our house. My mom was talking endlessly about me, as usual, and my dad was either listening or sleeping. I felt for him.

  “—or whether it was what she actually did. Will they be—” My mom must have gone into the bathroom or something, because this was all I heard for the moment, but I kept my ear to the floor.

  She came back in the middle of a new sentence. “—safe. I don’t trust—”

  “She’s a good judge of character, Peggy,” my dad said. So he was awake.

  “I’m not sure,” my mom said, to my annoyance. “I don’t know where she was, or whether it was somewhere we wanted her to be.”

  “Then she’s just like kids everywhere.”

  “I’m going to ask her to tell me tomorrow—and not just—”

  “Don’t, Peggy. She needs space.”

  “I know that!” my mom snapped. “Don’t patronize me, or act like I’m not on her side. She’s—you know, she’s—in a different situation from everyone else. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

  “I think the possibilities for where she was and what she was doing are fairly limited and safe,” my dad said. I was annoyed in a whole new way.

  “Maybe we should ask Cha
d to talk to her.”

  Then there was a long pause, during which I got up and climbed back into bed, wondering whether Chad was on my parents’ side.

  I didn’t care that much at that moment, honestly, because I had so much thinking to do about Kyle. I could picture him with absolute precision: his face, somehow soft even with the jaw; his hair, not curly exactly, but not straight, especially where it was a bit too long; his dark green cargo pants and faded T-shirt; his white teeth and his eyes. What color were his eyes? I hadn’t been able to tell, felt urgent about finding out.

  People joke all the time about teenage love and how stupid and “not the real thing” it is. My parents even have a reel-to-reel of that horrible song “A Teenager in Love.” But if I ever feel again in my life the way I felt about Kyle, I’ll eat every word I’ve ever written or spoken. There’s no way I’ll ever feel this way again. And I’m glad. I think maybe the very not-realness of teenage love makes it the only real thing. Say what you will if you’re a grown-up, that it’s puppy love when you’re young, that we aren’t going to marry our teenage loves anyway, so they’re just crushes, or that you have to spend years together, peeing with the door open, before love counts as love. But none of that matters. Because what’s true about love isn’t a quantity thing—it’s a quality one. And the reason I know that is because I still feel like I’m actually going to die.