Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

  Olivia had always been gorgeous. Dramatic eyes, a wide smile, and smooth, pale skin. When we were in junior high, Olivia had thick bangs and attended all the boys’ basketball games with me as a fellow statistician. Since then, she’d become cheerleader with a part-time job on the side, leaving her without much time for schooling.

  Five years ago on one of the many bus rides we took together to a junior high basketball game, she pulled a Seventeen magazine out of her bag and turned to a dog-eared page.

  “NATION-WIDE MODELING CONTEST!” It screamed in bold letters. “THIS COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE!”

  “I’m going to enter,” Olivia told me. “Want to see my photos?”

  “Of course,” I answered.

  She unveiled her roll of film from its Rite Aid envelope. I looked through the photos. Olivia, lounging on a gray picnic table with one knee propped.

  Olivia, in a tie-dyed mini-tee and cutoff jeans, lying on the pilling comforter of the bed in the room she shared with her sister.

  Olivia up close, a beauty shot of her bright blue eyes and her bangs teased and sculpted to look like the leaves on a palm tree.

  Olivia looked dwarfed among the emblems of her small house. Still, she was beautiful.

  I looked back at the magazine to some of the faces that had already been chosen for the different categories. Somehow, all those girls had known to have their pictures taken against a blank backdrop.

  I never heard how the contest turned out. Now, five years later, Olivia and I stood side by side again, back in the junior high wing.

  “Thanks, Liv,” I said, taking my eyeliner from her hand.

  “Here, let me.” Olivia leaned close to my face, her mouth barely open as she held her breath and outlined my eyes. When she finished, my eyes looked as dark as they had that Saturday afternoon at mime practice seven years ago, that moment I blended into the other girls with painted faces before I told the biggest lie of my life.

  “There,” Olivia said, pulling away. “Perfection.”

  At the pep rally, the gym beamed with electric orange. Cheese-colored floors, walls, and lights made an antsy crowd buzz in their seats. Seven chairs sat empty along the boundary line beneath the basketball hoop, waiting for seven girls to sit in them, one ankle delicately crossed over the other with her escort standing tall behind her. Each girl cradled a white carnation with a blue ribbon, and each couple stood for a moment beneath the glaring red EXIT sign, waiting to be called.

  The voice booming from the PA system belonged to the speech coach, Mr. Hoskins. As we strolled in, Mr. Hoskins shared lists of our accolades and special interests. Katie is a blue-ribbon winner at the 4-H and loves spending time with friends and family. Bob is a starting running back and likes to take his four-wheeler out on weekends. The personal details had been published in a special issue of the school newspaper that had just been distributed so the audience could view the still pictures while catching the live show.

  What’s your favorite movie?

  Your favorite saying?

  Your favorite food?

  When I filled out the interview sheet a few weeks before, Aaron had helped me with it. My favorite car? Aaron’s car, a white 1989 Ford Tempo. My favorite game? Trivial Pursuit, Aaron’s favorite game. As he looked at the sheet, Aaron let out his two-toned laugh. He thought homecoming was nothing more than a farce, and I desperately wanted to believe him.

  “Tell me,” he said. “What was your reaction to being named to the court?”

  “Gee,” I said, twirling a strand of my hair. “I hope the crown fits.”

  Aaron laughed. “Put it,” he said.

  “I can’t. People will think I’m serious.”

  “Come on.” His smile tempted me. “Put it.”

  So I’d written it down, hoping everyone would be able to tell I’d meant it as a joke. But when Mr. Hoskins proclaimed it over the PA system, it sounded vain. Too big for her britches, I could almost hear the townsfolk whisper before Mr. Hoskins moved on to the next girl.

  Before the pep rally concluded, the coach of the football team stepped up to the mike to give a final igniting hurrah to a team with many more losses than wins. He was impossible to understand.

  Someone started the chant of M-H-S! M-H-S! The chanting trailed off as the hot, liquid crowd poured out of the gymnasium. Trying to sit demurely in my chair at the end of the basketball court, I did my best to fix a pasty smile where my mouth used to be.

  On the evening of the homecoming game, the air was crisp as the sky turned golden mauve at dusk. I could see the setting sun beyond the football field, beyond the warehouses, beyond the distant trees that crowned the only home I’d ever known—a place that wanted to adore a young beauty as much as I wanted to be one. The marching band’s snare drums snickered in the background. I waited with the other six girls near the chain-link fence for our escorts and convertibles to arrive. One by one, we’d take our turns around the track that circled the football field; we’d present ourselves as evidence to the audience that our town, indeed, lived on:

  Look, look at the girls Mercury has made. Seven girls in stockings and heels; seven girls with straight, white smiles; seven girls bracing in the wind.

  Before I got into the car, I saw Aaron turn the corner by the fence and walk down the asphalt. In his arm, he carried a big bouquet of pink roses. He smiled when he handed them to me.

  “Look at you,” he said.

  “I can’t believe you came.”

  “Yeah, well.” He shrugged.

  Even more than the flowers, Aaron’s presence was his true gift to me. I hadn’t known it, but I needed him there. In a stadium packed with people who’d known me since birth, he was the only one who could part the sea of performance I swam in to find me—the real me—still breathing underwater.

  The sunset melted into a steely lavender, the color of my convertible for the evening. The tires crunched over gravel before reaching the rubber track. I’d never been in a convertible before this week, and now I’d ridden in one twice. Sitting in it reminded me of Simon and how we flew down the hill in his jeep, my hair thrashing in the wind. But this car crawled around the field slower than a grandma, sluggish enough for everyone to get a good look. My name appeared in Magic-Marker bubble letters on a piece of poster board plastered to the side of the car, drawn by a girl who hadn’t made it onto the court.

  As we traveled to the far side of the field opposite the home stands, the noise dissipated and the night inked. It dressed my shoulders, my hair. I felt it in my lungs. The sky was cold and my ghostly breath revealed itself. These were the kinds of nights I’d fallen in love with a long time ago. They were why I never missed a football game, and they tempted to steal me away from my spiral staircase. Nights like this I couldn’t imagine ever being anywhere else, in any other autumn, in any other town. Theirs was a beauty that stung.

  The air was a concoction that could only exist here—the smell of rust and distant burning leaves. And it was beautiful. It was nothing but me and this sky, me and this chilling wind. I wanted to face it, bare myself to it. But in just a blink, there were all these people. All these eyes. All this watching. That night I wished for the impossible: to tell the truth and keep the lie, to stay and to leave, to take the town with me, the very thing I wanted to escape.

  I knew there would never be another place as lovely as this one, as bleeding as this one, as fucking evanescent. The word “fuck” was created for a town like this—because it was beautiful and horrid and small and suffocating and contained everything precious to me. When Trent Reznor had written “Closer,” I believed he could have been imagining a night just like this one when he had lived here. That’s what it was to live in this town. It meant leaving this place because it was sick, and I didn’t know how to save it.

  The convertible dropped me off at the center of the home stands where a plywood platform had been built with seven chairs on top for the ladies to sit and watch the game. We posed for a few pictures, took our seats, and w
aited for halftime when the real show would begin.

  My mind numbed and my eyes blurred as the game played out in front of me. Mr. Lotte’s white house sat just a stone’s throw away, on the other side of a stand of old trees, up the road from the only park in Mercury, and too far down the well of my memory for me to conjure it while the delirious crowd around me screamed for the young boys in blue to take what was rightfully theirs.

  Just after Mr. Lotte’s investigation ends and before his hearing begins, my father takes my brother Seth and me to Silver Pulley Park to fly a kite on a Saturday afternoon. After a long winter, the cold has finally broken and the trees shake their bare branches. There is an open, sloping field beside the public pool, just up the road from Mr. Lotte’s white house, which sits at the end of a long, brown driveway that curls like the tail of a cat.

  My father, brother, and I walk to the top of the hill where the ground levels out. We face northeast, toward the courthouse, Mr. Lotte’s house at my back. I wear a pink jacket with a silver zipper, a pair of dark blue jeans. My father and brother stoop to untangle the long, white heap of string, and my father’s fingers knead through it. His shoulders hunch as he kneels on the ground next to his son. A cold wind blows and I turn to look back down the hill toward the line of old maples growing fresh leaves that hide the house where I once waited in the balmy garage for Mr. Lotte to fetch me, sweat sliding down my back. The day it happened, I had come without my sister. She didn’t need summer lessons every week to stay on track.

  It was so hot that day. I wanted to be swimming. I saw particles of dust floating in the air from the light shaft coming in through the filmy window. The garage smelled like gasoline and leather. I stood next to his motorcycle, poised like a black puma on its kickstand. I held my piano books to my chest. The tinkling of muffled piano keys came through the basement door from the girl whose lesson was before mine. Outside the tiny garage window, the tops of the trees stood still. There was no wind like there is on the day my father hands me the blue-and-red kite, diamond shaped, made from vinyl and thin wooden rods. Even in my hands, the kite is so light that its back arches in the breeze, wanting to move with it. It pushes against my palm.

  Seth clutches the end of the string and cracks it like a whip.

  “Come on, Amy! Come on!” he squeals and jumps up and down.

  There’s a good wind, headed south. My father points to the far edge of the field and tells me to run toward it. I hear the soft pound of my sneakers as I run to the field’s end while my brother yells, “Go, Amy! Go!” The ground gives way beneath my feet and I leave imprints in the wet, cool earth. When I reach the edge, I turn around and see my brother and father at the other end, the size of Nativity figurines. The rusty fence around the pool rattles.

  My father instructs me to hold on to the kite as Seth runs in the other direction. I wait, just as I waited until the piano beyond the basement entrance stopped and the door opened. Mr. Lotte appeared, squinting at the light streaming through the glass. He held the door open for the girl, a few years older than me, who hobbled out on crutches. She had a thick white cast on her right leg, covered with graffiti signatures from her softball team, and her one flip-flop smacked against her left foot as she headed for the garage door. I held it open for her and waved to her mother, who got out of their minivan to take her daughter’s book bag and help her inside the car.

  I shut the door and turned around. It was just the two of us then, and I followed him inside. He slid the door shut behind me. How dark it was in the basement, how brown. Not black, not gray. Brown. Fake wood-paneling brown. Piano bench brown. His beard brown. Teabag brown. A single lamp glowed on the top of the piano, its light soft against the pale sheet music, as white as the pale spring sky thinly sheathed with clouds.

  As my brother runs in the opposite direction, the string straightens and tightens. The kite flops from my hands and flutters against the ground. It hops jaggedly like a frog. Then the wind gets a good current beneath it and the kite puffs out its chest and begins its ascent. I clap. My brother squeals. My dad laughs. My father loves the wind, loves to drive with the windows down, to feel it pass through his fingers as he drives on Route 17 to and from town. Owning his own business leaves him with so few moments of release from the constant pressure, especially in a town where mills and jobs are vanishing. Work is scant for everyone. The kite keeps flying up and up and up, pirouetting through the sky. My father smiles and shields his eyes.

  “Look at it,” he yells so I can hear. “Look at that.”

  As I watch my father watching the kite, I know what love is. I do. I love the man who loves being my father. I never want to hurt him, never want him to hurt. I feel for the first time how sad and painful it can be to love someone so much.

  I start walking back through the field toward my brother, toward the row of trees that keep me from seeing Mr. Lotte’s house like no one could see me in his hot basement when I took a seat at the piano bench, the one with a flip-up top under which was a stock of old Christmas primers with staples eating away at the pages. Mr. Lotte made the same sound he always did when sitting beside me. Exhales and sniffs. The bench squawked in protest.

  “Let’s start with the warm-ups,” he said.

  I placed my fingers on the keys; he placed his hand on my back and turned on the black metronome with the flashing light. Tock tock tock tock. The red light blink blink blinked just as a plane does as it makes a diagonal through the blue sky. The blinking wings look like little red stars as our kite floats through the air.

  Tock tock tock tock.

  Don’t I see it everywhere? Blinking wings of planes, radio towers, PRESS RESET buttons on the microwave, the alarm clock, the stove top when the power goes out?

  (For so long I will tell myself, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there. But then, there is.)

  The lazy Saturday afternoon passes and as I walk through the field, I stop at the fence and peer down into the empty pool bed. Inside three teenaged boys are skateboarding down the slope into the deep end, and the rough sound of their wheels scraping against the floor catches in the wind. Black-hooded creatures floating through aquamarine. Wearing their dark colors, flowing so seamlessly, they look like dark birds in an inverted sky.

  Far away, the taut string pulls against my brother’s fingers and makes a sound so small he has to lean forward to hear it. There is an arch in the kite like the arch in my back as Mr. Lotte’s hands wandered, scoured, discovered the landscape of my skin. His hand, sliding from the nape of my neck to the blade of my right shoulder to slip beneath my armpit, in search of some jewel in hopes of being the first to touch it. And he was.

  It would only happen once, because the end was near. It would only happen in the smallest of movements, the lightest of sounds. How very, very slowly he approached forbidden territory, how very, very calculating, so that later I would ask myself, “Did he? No, it can’t be. I must have imagined it.” A hand, innocent and wandering one moment, sinister and focused the next. How very, very quiet he was, the piano sounding its notes and I holding my breath like I held it on a safer summer afternoon when my sister had come along and I waited for her lesson to end. Mrs. Lotte and I leaned toward the television screen at the climax of the afternoon soap opera, squeezing the arms of our chairs, our lips barely parted like the sky parts from the sound of a skateboard skidding against sloping cement and the whoosh of a flying kite that Mr. Lotte can’t see from the mouth of his curled driveway, from the corner of his lonely room, from the sill of his tiny basement window.

  A few minutes before the second quarter ended, the girls on the court gathered at the fifty-yard line, each with her father in tow. That was part of the homecoming tradition. During halftime, the band created a tunnel, and each girl, like a young bride, was escorted down the fifty-yard line by her father while the PA system touted all of her favorite things. Last year’s queen also got one final moment in the spotlight. She was the last to walk down the field be
fore letting go of her crown once the new queen was named.

  I’d been imagining this day since I was in junior high and witnessed my older girl-idols make this walk. Was there anything more regal than parading down a tunnel of gleaming brass trumpets and plumes lifted high? As my father and I promenaded arm in arm—he in a suit and turtleneck for the occasion—I couldn’t bring myself to face the stares. The whole tunnel was constructed from unchosen seniors. As they played the notes to the homecoming ballad, I could feel their eyes travel with me when I passed. This is a sham, I should have told them, but my participation in it proved the opposite. I desperately wanted to be fooled, and not just about homecoming. I was sobering up to the fearful truth, even as I was intoxicated. My lie had protected me from outward harm, while inside I rotted. I had never felt young and beautiful. I had never felt young.

  Every year, the announcer, Mr. Rhodes, got a thrill from holding the crowd hostage on homecoming night. This was his annual opportunity to receive undivided attention, and he knew how to milk it.

  When the band resolved its final chord and the brass trumpets snapped down, the crowd quieted. It was an eerie feeling to watch a rowdy stadium fall silent, as if sound had thrown itself off a steep cliff. I knew people were staring at me, and I stared at the ground as we waited.

  Mr. Rhodes began his yearly spiel.

  And . . .

  This year’s . . .

  New . . .

  1998 . . .

  Mercury High School . . .

  Homecoming Queen is . . .

  Senior . . .

  Miss . . .

  Andrea McCoy!

  The crowd erupted. The rest of the court smiled and clapped as we swarmed around Andrea to congratulate her.

  “It’s all right,” my dad whispered in my ear when I rejoined him. As my father smiled at me, I wanted to hold on to him and never let go. He squeezed my arm. “You don’t want to have to repeat all this next year just to return the crown.”

  The rhinestones in Andrea’s plastic tiara sparkled in the flash of a hundred cameras, and I realized my hands had lost all feeling a long time ago.