Nine Inches

by Tom Perrotta

  “Whoa, hey.” He held up one hand, as if he were stopping traffic. “I’m just trying to be nice here.”

  “And just so you know” — I held up the phone — “I’ve been recording this entire conversation.”

  It took him a few seconds to process what I was telling him. I could see it in his face, that awful moment of clarity.

  “Jesus, Donald. Why would you do that?”

  “Look, I don’t want to get you in trouble. I’m just asking you to leave me alone. Is that so hard to understand?”

  I waited awhile, but I never got an answer. I wasn’t even sure he’d heard the question. He just lowered his head into his hand and started cursing softly, telling himself how fucking stupid he was, how he knew this was gonna happen, how he’d told himself to stop and had kept on doing it anyway, and now he was totally fucked, wasn’t he, muttering this pitiful monologue that followed me all the way down the hallway and out the door.

  A YEAR and a half went by before the next time I got pulled over. Lt. Finnegan was retired by then, forced to leave the department after a bunch of people had complained about his strange behavior. Apparently, I wasn’t the only young guy in town who’d gotten a backrub along with his traffic ticket. It was a minor scandal for a week or two, but they hushed it up somehow, and he managed to leave the force without facing any charges or losing his pension. Last I heard, he was living in Florida.

  Lots of other things had changed, too. I’d become Eddie’s right-hand man at Sustainable, managing the original restaurant while he opened a new one in Rosedale. We were working hard, making good money, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever have the time or the patience to go back to school. Shortly after my nineteenth birthday, I’d moved out of my parents’ house, into a studio apartment across the street from the bike shop. The rent wasn’t too steep, and I needed the privacy now that I’d gotten together with Karen, one of the new waitresses we’d hired after Malina and Jadwiga had gone back to Poland. We got along okay, though she could be kind of moody and relied on me for pretty much her entire social life, not that I had a whole lot to offer in that department. Mostly we just got high and watched TV.

  I’d lost touch with most of my high school friends, but hadn’t made any new ones except for Adam and Eddie. The three of us had gotten pretty tight over the past year, ever since we’d started our weed business. Using Eddie’s money and Adam’s connection, we’d developed quite a sideline, buying in bulk and selling to a handful of carefully selected clients, moving a pound here and a kilo there, lots of profit with what seemed like minimal risk. We transported our product in Sustainable’s delivery cars, hidden in pizza boxes tucked inside insulated pouches. It was my idea, and I was pretty proud of it. You could drive right up to the front door of a dealer’s house, make a cash transaction, and no one would suspect a thing.

  So I wasn’t nervous that night in April, heading over to Rick Yang’s house — he was one of our best customers — with a large onion-and-pepper in one box and a pound of weed in another. I’d done it a dozen times before, never a problem.

  It all went down so fast. I barely had time to register the lights in my rearview mirror when I saw two more cop cars right in front of me, blocking the intersection. I got out with my hands on my head, like they told me to, and the next thing I knew I was lying facedown in the street, with my hands cuffed behind my back.

  It’s funny what goes through your head at a time like that. I didn’t think about my parents, or about Eddie and Adam, or even about Karen. I didn’t wonder about what kind of trouble I was in or consider how my life might have been different if I’d gone to Uganda. What I thought about while they searched the Prius was something I’d almost forgotten, a stupid thing I’d done while applying to college.

  The applications were due on December 31, and I’d left my safeties to the last minute. I was just so sick of the whole process by then — it had consumed almost a year of my life — fed up with answering the same useless questions over and over, tailoring my responses to whoever was doing the asking. It was ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve, and there I was, sitting at my desk, staring at the question Why Fairfield? and I guess I just lost it. Instead of repeating my usual bullshit about a liberal arts education, I went ahead and told the truth: You’re my Safety School, motherfucker! And then I pressed SEND before I had a chance to stop myself. It felt so good I did the same thing for Roger Williams and Temple. I’d never told anyone about it, not even when people were scratching their heads, wondering how it was possible that an honor student like me had been rejected by all three of his safeties.

  That’s what I was thinking about when they found the weed. I was thinking about the kid who’d filled out those applications, remembering how cocky and obnoxious he’d been, so sure of his own worth, and the world’s ability to recognize it. I was lying on the street with my cheek pressed against the blacktop, thinking about what an asshole he was, and how much I missed him.

  GRADE MY TEACHER

  SIXTH PERIOD WAS ENDLESS. VICKI stood by the Smart Board, listening to herself drone on about the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder, but all she could think about was Jessica Grasso, the heavy girl sitting near the back right corner of the room, watching her with a polite, seemingly neutral expression. It was almost as if Jessica grew larger with each passing moment, as if she were being inflated by some invisible pump, expanding like a parade float until she filled the entire room.

  She hates me, Vicki thought, and this knowledge was somehow both sickening and exciting at the same time. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at her.

  Vicki hadn’t known it herself until last night, when she read what the girl had written about her on grademyteacher

  .com. She had stumbled upon the post while conducting a routine self-google, exercising a little due diligence so she didn’t get blindsided like her old friend and former colleague Anna Shamsky, a happily married mother of three who’d lost her job over some twenty-year-old topless photos that had appeared without her knowledge on a website called Memoirs-of-a-Stud.com. The site was the brainchild of an ex-boyfriend of hers — a guy she hadn’t thought about since college — who had decided in a fit of midlife bravado that the world needed to know a little bit about every woman he’d ever slept with (“Anna S. was a sweet innocent sophomore with boobs to die for,” he wrote. “When I was done with her, she could give head like nobody’s beeswax”). The surprisingly steamy photos — Anna’s youthful breasts totally lived up to the hype — had spread like a virus through the entire Gifford High School community before the subject herself even remembered they existed, and by then there was nothing to do but submit her resignation.

  Vicki didn’t have to worry about nude photos — she’d never posed for any, not even when her ex-husband had asked her nicely — but that was just one risk among many in a dangerous world. She told herself she was simply being prudent — in this day and age, googling yourself was just common sense, like using sunscreen or buckling your seatbelt — but she was sometimes aware of a tiny flutter of anticipation as she typed her name into the dialog box, as if the search engine might reveal a new self to her, someone a little more interesting, or at least a little less forgettable, than the rest of the world suspected. She remembered feeling oddly hopeful last night, just seconds before she found herself staring at this:

  OMG my math teacher Vicki Wiggins is an INSANE B*#@&! One day she called me a FAT PIG for eating candy in class. I know I’m no supermodel but guess what she’s even worse! Hav u seen the panty lines when she packs her HUGE BUTT into those ugly beige pants? Hellooo? Ever hear of a thong? Everyone cracks up about it behind her back. She might as well be wearing her extralarge granny pants on the outside. Vicki Wiggins, you are the pig!

  Vicki’s first reaction to this was bewilderment — she honestly had no idea what the writer was talking about — followed by a combination of searing embarrassment (she’d had her doubts about those beige pants) and righteous indignation. In her en
tire career — her entire adult life! — she’d never called anyone a fat pig. She wouldn’t dream of it. As a woman who’d struggled with her own weight, she knew just how hurtful such epithets could be.

  What made it even worse was that she realized she was making a mistake even as she clicked on the link, violating her long-standing policy to stay as far away from grademyteacher.com as possible. It was just too depressing, and she wasn’t even one of the truly unpopular teachers, the unfortunates whose names were flagged with a big red thumbs-down icon — people like Fred Kane, the marble-mouthed biology instructor whose average score was 2.4 out of 10, or Martha Rigby (a mind-boggling 1.8), the ancient English teacher who regularly referred to the author of Great Expectations as Thomas Dickinson. Vicki herself was stuck in the middle of the pack (5.5, to be exact), with fewer than a dozen comments to her name, most of which contained a variant on the phrase “Boring but okay.” By contrast, Lily Frankel, the lively and hip young drama teacher, had received a whopping sixty-two reviews for an overall rating of 9.3, highest on the entire faculty, thereby earning herself a coveted smiley face with sunglasses and a crown.

  Vicki read the post over and over — the author was identified only as “Greensleeves,” a pseudonym that meant nothing to her — wondering what she could have done to provoke such a hateful and dishonest attack. You’d think that if someone despised you enough to call you an insane bitch, you’d have a pretty good idea of who it was, but Vicki’s mind was blank, unable to produce a suspect. It wasn’t until she gave up and went to bed that the answer came to her, almost as if it had been jarred loose by the impact of her head against the pillow.

  SHE’D BEEN circulating through her classroom during a quiz — this was back in February, either right before or right after winter vacation — when she spotted Jessica Grasso munching on a Snickers bar. Some teachers allowed snacks in class, but Vicki wasn’t one of them, and she’d been teaching long enough to know that you had to stick to your guns on stuff like that. Not wanting to embarrass the girl, who’d never given her any trouble, Vicki tapped her on the shoulder and spoke in a barely audible whisper as she held out her hand.

  “Please give me that.”

  Instead of surrendering the contraband, Jessica took another bite. She was a big girl with a pretty face — except for the ridiculous raccoon eyeliner — and sleek dark hair that swept down across her forehead, partially obscuring one eye. She chewed slowly, taking a languorous pleasure in the activity, staring straight at Vicki the whole time.

  “Did you hear me?” Vicki demanded, this time in a normal voice.

  Jessica’s expression remained blank, but Vicki detected a challenge in it nonetheless. She began to feel foolish, standing there with her hand out while the girl gazed right through her. It was possible — she wasn’t clear on this point in retrospect — that Vicki lowered her gaze, taking a moment or two to perform a less-than-charitable assessment of Jessica’s figure.

  “It’s not like you need it,” she said.

  Jessica blinked and shook her head, as if maybe she hadn’t heard right, and Vicki took advantage of her confusion to snatch the candy bar right out of her hand.

  “Hey!” Jessica cried out, loudly enough that several heads snapped in their direction.

  Now it was Vicki’s turn to do the ignoring. She marched back to her desk and dropped the stub of the Snickers into her empty wastebasket, where it landed with an unexpectedly resonant thud. By now, everyone in the room was looking at her.

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” she told them. “Food is not allowed in this room.”

  That was it, the whole ridiculous, deeply forgettable incident. Vicki was more than willing to admit that it wasn’t her finest hour as an educator, but she hadn’t called anyone a fat pig and didn’t think she had anything to apologize for. If anyone was at fault it was Jessica, who’d knowingly broken a rule and then treated a teacher with blatant disrespect. So it was frustrating for Vicki — humiliating, even — to see herself portrayed in a public forum as a nasty woman in unflattering pants, nothing more than a joke to the kids she was trying to help.

  Like a lot of people her age, Vicki had grown accustomed to taking the punishment life dished out. Most of the time she didn’t even bother to complain. But every once in a while she found it necessary to stand up and defend her dignity — her worth as a human being — and this was apparently one of those occasions, because after the bell rang, instead of sitting quietly at her desk and organizing her papers as the students filed out, she found herself moving toward the door with an unusual sense of purpose, arriving just in time to form a barrier between Jessica Grasso and the hallway. She couldn’t deny that she derived some pleasure from the look of confusion on the girl’s face, the slow-dawning knowledge that she’d been busted.

  “Greensleeves,” Vicki told her. “You and I need to talk.”

  THEY SHOULD have had it out there and then, when Vicki had a head of steam and the element of surprise working in her favor, but Jessica was rushing off to a big chem test; apparently Mr. Holquist took points off if you were late, even if you had a pass. She offered to come back right after school let out, but Vicki had to nix that due to a faculty meeting. Not keen on hanging around for an extra hour, Jessica suggested postponing their talk till the morning. Vicki was adamant that it couldn’t wait that long, and after a brief, somewhat hectic negotiation, they settled on Starbucks at four-thirty in the afternoon.

  As soon as she sat down with her cup of green tea, Vicki began to suspect she’d made a mistake in agreeing to meet in the coffee shop, the atmosphere too mellow and unofficial — Joni Mitchell on the sound system, retired men playing chess, young hipsters tapping on their laptops — for the kind of chilly confrontation she’d been rehearsing in her mind. This conviction only deepened when Jessica arrived a few minutes later, waving to Vicki and miming the act of drinking as she took her place on the coffee line. The girl seemed perfectly happy to be there, as if the two of them were regular coffee buddies, and Vicki found herself momentarily disarmed, unable to muster any of the feelings of anger or shame that had made this rendezvous seem so urgent in the first place.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Jessica smiled as she took her seat, her cheeks rosy from the damp April breeze. “My mom made me fold the laundry.”

  “That’s okay. I just got here myself.”

  “Mmmm.” Jessica sipped from her enormous drink, a clear, domed cup full of what looked like a milk shake with whipped cream on top. “This is awesome.”

  “What is it?”

  “Venti caramel Frappuccino.” She held out the cup. “Want some?”

  Vicki was horrified — there must have been a thousand calories in there — but she just smiled politely and shook her head. What Jessica ate and drank outside of class was none of her business.

  “I’m fine with my tea,” Vicki said. “How’d you do on your chemistry test?”

  “Terrible.” Jessica gave a cheerful shrug, as if terrible were a synonym for pretty good. “I suck at science even worse than I suck at math, if you can believe that.”

  “You don’t suck at math. I just don’t think you apply yourself.”

  “That’s exactly what my dad says.”

  “You should listen to him.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. They were honey-colored, and there was an appealing cluster of freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose that Vicki had never noticed before. It’s the makeup, Vicki thought. She’s not wearing that awful makeup. She wished she knew the girl well enough to tell her she was better off without it.

  Something caught Jessica’s eye and she leaned to the left, a look of such longing on her face that Vicki couldn’t help turning to see what had caused it. At a table near the front window, a slender blond woman in a boldly patterned wraparound dress was flirting with a cop, a big-bellied, broad-shouldered man holding a coffee cup in each hand. He said something that made her laugh, then reluctantly took his leave, shuffling
backward out the door so he could keep his eyes on her for as long as possible. When he was gone, the woman smiled to herself and reflexively checked the messages on her cell phone. Vicki felt a sharp stab of envy — something that happened to her several times a day — irrational hatred for the smug woman coupled with an intense desire to be her, or at least to be looked at the way the cop had looked at her.

  “So you read it, huh?”

  Vicki turned around, her mind a beat behind the question. She felt flustered, as if Jessica had caught her in a private moment.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That thing I wrote? That’s why you wanted to talk to me, right?”

  “Yes.” Vicki straightened up, hoping to regain some of her teacherly authority. “I was hurt by it. You said some really awful things about me.”

  Jessica nodded contritely. “I know.”

  “You really need to be more considerate of other people’s feelings.”

  “I didn’t think you’d read it.”

  “Well, I did.” Vicki’s eyes locked on Jessica’s. “I cried myself to sleep last night.”

  “Wow.” Jessica didn’t seem to know what to do with this information, and Vicki wondered if she’d made a mistake in revealing it. “I’m really sorry.”

  “I’m only human,” Vicki continued, a slight tremor entering her voice. “You think I like reading about my big backside on the Internet? You think that makes me feel good about myself?”

  “Well, how do you think I felt?” Jessica shot back. “You called me a fat pig.”

  She said this with such conviction that Vicki couldn’t help wondering if it might actually be true, if she really could have said something so mean and then repressed the memory. But it didn’t make sense. If she’d called Jessica a horrible name like that, she would have remembered. She would have gotten down on her knees and begged for forgiveness.