by Gonzalo Barr
Gloria, Teri, and Francesca later said that I’d gotten the best assignment. Gloria joked about all the research I would have to do. She made quotation marks in the air with her fingers every time she said the word “research.”
We were leaving the classroom when Mariella Poza, class president for two years in a row, favorite to be crowned homecoming queen next year, came up to me and said, “You wanna trade?”
Mariella’s a very tall and thin brunette. Some people think she is the most beautiful girl in the school, so beautiful that they call her Mari Poza, a play on the diminutive form of her name, which sounds like “butterfly” in Spanish. She has a near perfect grade-point average and drives a little red Mercedes sports car that she got for her sixteenth birthday. Her father’s a plastic surgeon. He’s the one who owns the two-story imitation Italian Renaissance palazzo on Brickell with the Venus de Milo fountain out front. His patients fly in on their own private jets from places like Caracas and Mexico City. He’s operated on almost all the telenovela stars. The day Mariella first drove her car to school she caused a commotion. People gathered in the parking lot to look at the car, until Sister Anne came out and shooed them away. I was there, too, and made my way to Mariella, whom I had never met, and told her that she had a nice car and I hoped she enjoyed it. And I meant it. I’m not envious. But Mariella looked through me, like I didn’t exist, and turned to talk to one of the football players, who was standing next to her and using words like “horsepower” and “torque,” relishing the sound of his own voice. Now in Mrs. Eden’s class, Mariella was tapping my shoulder, smiling like we were buddies.
“I said, do you want to trade?” she said. The topic she got was “honesty.”
“No way,” I said.
Her smile disappeared. “Fine,” she said. “Cómetelo,” which literally means “eat it” but more accurately translates as “shove it.” She turned and left.
“Ay, she’s so rude” and “Quéputa,” Gloria and Francesca said at once.
“Pooh-tah times two!” Teri said.
I left the classroom that day thinking that I had the coolest assignment in the world. But that was early last week, before Rolly called me on Friday to break up and Gloria called me yesterday to tell me she’d seen Rolly with Lizette. Since Rolly’s broken up with me, I am not so sure it’s a good idea for me to write about love. Maybe I should have exchanged papers with Mariella and written about honesty, a no-brainer if ever there was one.
How do you write an essay about love, anyway? Do you write about the stuff you’ve experienced firsthand? If so, mine would be a very short paper, no more than a few lines:
Guy and girl meet. Guy and girl laugh, kiss; do everything but have sex. Guy dumps girl because they don’t have sex. Bottom line: if you want love, have sex.
Mrs. Eden says a good essay must state a conclusion. It almost doesn’t matter what the conclusion is, she says, so long as every sentence in the essay supports it. She says it helps to say something extraordinary, something that will catch the attention of the reader.
Bottom line, revised: if you want lots of love, have lots of sex.
Well, why not? If Montaigne could write about B.O. and Swift could write about eating babies, why can’t I write about bartering sex in exchange for love?
Bottom line, revised again: the more people you have sex with, the more people will love you.
Because my parents would kill me, that’s why I can’t write that. They wouldn’t get mad. They wouldn’t nag. They’d just kill me.
7. A LIST OF EVERYTHING I HATED ABOUT ROLLY, COMPILED WITH THE LAUDABLE PURPOSE OF SNIPPING HIM OUT OF MY LIFE
Each time Rolly and I were alone, he slipped his hand in my bra.
Whenever I have a problem that I want to solve or at least understand, I make a list. Making a list helps me, even when the list contains seemingly random and unrelated thoughts.3 My father says that by making lists you give your mind and, specifically, your unconscious a way of associating unrelated ideas and feelings, reconciling what is seemingly unreconcilable. If you figure out the association, or if you let your mind or unconscious figure it out for you, you can discover some pretty interesting stuff about yourself. That’s what my father says, anyway.
At first, I felt self-conscious making lists, like everything I wrote had to have some weight, like it had to matter. One morning, as I was driving to school, I noticed the sunlight flickering through the leaves on the tree branches that arched over the street. I’d seen that before, of course, many, many times. I usually take the same route. It isn’t the shortest or the fastest. It is the prettiest way to go. But that morning, it was like I was seeing the sunlight for the first time. So I wrote about it. Nothing flowery, just the facts—the name of the avenue, how fast I was driving, a description of the trees, the time of the year, how the sunlight flickered as a result of the motion of the leaves and my trajectory below them.
Then I did some research on the Net. I learned what the trees are called, when the city planted them, that they pollinate in October. On another Web page, I learned that flickering sunlight can cause seizures in some epileptics. I also learned that happiness can be caused by little things, like driving under an arch of leafy tree branches. But I had kinda discovered that for myself.
Rolly detested all kinds of music (not just rap or hip-hop, which I could understand, but everything melodic, rhythmic, atonal, or otherwise), so we spent a lot of our time sitting next to each other in silence.
I showed Mrs. Eden the list I made about the flickering sunlight. She held the notebook in her hands. I had never before noticed the way her watchband sank into her flesh, the jewelry she wore, the dullness of the gold, the cheap blanched stones, how round her face was and how doughy her neck. She said I should write some more about my experiences, only the next time I should try to capture the essence of the experience, not only the facts. “The essence,” she said, “is always more than the sum of all the facts. It’s the holy grail of artists.”
I’ve never thought of myself as an artist.
Rolly wore button-down oxford shirts in white or blue, chinos, boxer shorts, argyle socks, and Bass Weejuns. The shirts and chinos were laundered and pressed. Sometimes he looked like a cardboard display for a boys’ clothing store. Even his tee shirts had creases. He kept antiseptic wipes in the glove compartment of his car. He used at least three or four wipes after pumping gas. Then he sniffed his hands. The smell reminded me of my gynecologist.
Anyway, “facts are so numerous,” Mrs. Eden said, “that you can never make a complete inventory.” And even if you could fill a thousand pages about one incident—driving under the arched trees on a cool morning and watching the sunlight flicker through the leaves—a list would not help the reader experience it, which is what reading is all about. “To capture the essence,” she said, “you need only a few well-chosen words.” I should read some good poetry, she said, writing down the names of some poets and poems, the way a doctor scribbles a prescription. “Read a couple of these and we’ll talk about them the next time,” she said.
A few of the poets I recognized because Mrs. Eden hyperventilates about them in class. I wish I liked poetry, but I don’t. Most poetry is nothing more than showing off— The Jerry Springer Show in truncated sentences and unconventional punctuation, arranged to look nice on the printed page. Take the poem that some English guy wrote to an urn. I looked it up: an urn is a pitcher, a vessel, a big flowerpot. You gotta be into some weird stuff to write a poem for a flowerpot. Now there’s someone who deserves to be on Springer.
Rolly hated TV. He didn’t have one in his room.
You can never list everything there is to know about someone, even someone as bound to routine as Rolly. The point is to identify the most important elements of whatever it is you’re describing or the most important qualities of the person you’re trying to describe.
Rolly’s favorite word was “banal,” which he used to describe everything in the known world and which he pronou
nced like the word “canal” as said by a foppish English character actor in a 1940s black-and-white B movie.
Lists are not a cure-all, but they do lend a certain degree of order to the world, like a tidy room: The bed is made. The shoes have been put away.
If you said “white,” Rolly said “black.” If you liked something, he hated it. He argued about everything, took it to “its logical conclusion.”4
So I made a list of reasons why I shouldn’t give Rolly the time of day, even if he came back begging me to let him be my tampon. Writing the list made me feel better. I would snip him out of my life.
Finals were coming up. Then summer. And who knows, like my dorky mother says, there are other fish in the ocean.
8. A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIST
Not everything was bad about Rolly, though—
♡ I loved the way he drew the number nine. He’d start in the middle and make the head first, looping over clockwise to complete the tail.
♡ I loved our talks after school, not the philosophical ones, the others. The ones when he drove us to the causeway and parked on the beach to watch the sailboats and the parasails. There’s a breeze coming off the bay so you could open the windows and kiss to the sound of the water lapping over the rocks.
We talked about our favorite writers—Haruki Murakami for me, any manga for him, so long as it had a bizarre title, like Psycho Briefcase Emperors. We talked about our favorite foods—sushi for me, pizza and cold leftover Chinese fried rice for him. Our favorite music—techno and deep house when I’m up, New Age and Baroque string quartets when I’m down. Silence for him. “There’s too much noise in the world as it is,” he said, turning off the car CD player less than a second after I had turned it on. OK, that was annoying from the start.
♡ I loved our first kiss.
We had finished doing our homework in the libraiy. That’s where we started hanging out together. It was almost 5:00. I didn’t want to drive home then because of the rush-hour traffic, so I told Rolly that I’d stay behind and read for another hour. The libraiy was open until 7:00, anyway.
Rolly said we should take a walk. The school campus was next to the bay, between a hospital and the old Wicker estate abandoned since World War II. A shallow creek separated the school from the estate at one end of the campus. Rolly took me to where the creek opened to the bay and we sat on the seawall and looked out at the water.
I liked the quiet. The people I knew dreaded silence. They had loud music going all the time or talked nonstop or had the loud music going and talked nonstop over it. Sitting next to Rolly, not saying anything, listening to the sound of the dragonflies and the bay water slapping the seawall, made me feel like time had stopped.
Then Rolly leaned over and put his arm over my shoulders. I put my hand on his thigh.5 And when I raised my face, he kissed me.
He kept his eyes closed and tipped his head a few degrees in each direction, the way people do in movies. So I closed my eyes, too.
He leaned closer. I felt the tip of his tongue try to push past my lips, but I wouldn’t open them. Not yet. Instead, I kept thinking about what my Biology teacher said.
An hour later, we were sitting in his car, parked in one of the student lots, still kissing. My lips and my jaw began to hurt, the way your feet hurt when you’re breaking in new shoes. I was ready to go further, so I took his hand and placed it over my left breast. He took my hand and placed it over his you-know-what, which embarrassed me because I had never before put my hand anywhere near a guy’s you-know-what, but I was going to be mature about this.
A custodian tapped on Rolly’s window and told us we had to move because it was 6:00 and he was locking the gate. Now I was really embarrassed. Rolly thanked the man and called him “sir,” and, once he closed his window, whistled all the way to the other end of the lot, where my car was parked. For a few days after that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
9. WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL WITH SEX, ANYWAY?
My parents like to sleep in late on Sunday mornings, so I slip into the kitchen downstairs and get a Coke from the refrigerator and a bag of Brussels cookies out of the cupboard. But for my father’s sweet tooth, we’d be eating nuts and berries. My mother has this silly notion that sodas are bad for you because they’re not natural, like orange or apple juice. If she catches me drinking one, especially for breakfast, she’ll do a Fidel and switch into harangue mode. Castro is renowned for being able to talk nonstop for hours. He has nothing on my mother, though, who can do that and return to the point. “Anything natural is always better for you,” she’ll say. And I’ll counter, “Curare’s natural too.” “You know what I meant,” she’ll say, but it’s too late. She falls for it every time.
Back in my room, I turn on the TV and leave it on mute. I think about what I don’t want to think about, what I’ve been thinking about all morning when I should have been thinking about something else. I can’t believe Rolly would give up what we had together for a sleazy bitch like Lizette. She’s such a phony, too. Her name’s not even Lizette. Her real name is Luz Isabel. But she hates it, so she made up the “Lizette” part. The first day of class each year, we go through the same routine—Lizette correcting the teacher reading off the class roll. “Not Luz,” she says, “It’s Lizette—one zee and two tees.” Mr. Hackett used to make fun of her. He called her Two Tees. I think Luz fits her better, not because it means “light” in Spanish, but because it sounds like what she is. (Har. Har.)
I’ve known Lizette since first grade. A whole bunch of us have been going to the same private schools for years. She’s always been a troublemaker, talking back to teachers, wearing her school uniform way above her knees. In eighth grade, she was caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom. The following year, she started sleeping around. In tenth grade, she was popping ecstasy and drinking vodka. The rumor was that she got pregnant and had an abortion. This year, she claims to know one of the guys who works at Alchemy, the dance club on South Beach. The guy’s supposed to be, like, twenty-two. I don’t talk to Lizette. Teri talks to her, then tells us about it at lunch or when we go out. Lizette knows I can’t stand her. She tells Teri that I’m envious because I can’t get into Alchemy. Like I care.
By now, you must be asking yourself—where are this girl’s parents? Seven years ago, when Lizette was ten, her father committed suicide. He was a bank president or maybe he really owned the bank, as Lizette claims. (You can’t believe anything she says.) One thing is true. I know because it was on TV and everybody, my parents, even the nuns at school, talked about it: Just before they found her father hanging from a tree over a bus stop in Key Biscayne, the police in Miami arrested a former Central American president who had stolen something like a billion dollars from his country’s treasury and fled to a two-story penthouse on Brickell. The ex-president confessed that a great deal of the money had been deposited in Lizette’s father’s bank. All that was in the news. Shortly after, a group of kids waiting for the school bus smelled something rotten, looked up, and discovered her father’s body hanging from a tree branch, a rope tied around his neck, one foot still wearing an expensive Italian loafer.
Lizette’s mother lost everything—the house, the cars. She became a drunk and a Darvocet addict, did some rehab, married a local radio personality, then was in the news again when she burned down his house and brought charges against him for molesting Lizette when she was fourteen. The charges were never proven and the radio personality got off, but my mother said that he had the best criminal lawyer in town. I forget his lawyer’s name right now, but he’s on Court TV all the time.
As a result of her father’s suicide and her mother’s going off the deep end, the nuns at the school feel sorry for Lizette. She always gets detention, no matter the offense, when anyone else would have been suspended. A lot of the time, the nuns and teachers simply look the other way. Which is why she still wears the shortest skirts in the school. And when she climbs the stairs between classes, a gaggle of guys, usually freshman, follow
her half a flight behind.
The rumor is that she’s done most of the guys in our class (probably an exaggeration), that the sex is porno-raunchy (possible), that she’s a nympho (definitely). Which leads me to the next point—
What does Rolly see in Lizette? Even if she gives him all the sex he wants, and he always wanted it, I can’t picture them together. She’s half a head taller than he is. Her hair is a permanent shade of burnt copper with black roots from all the different things she’s done to it. Her eyes can be blue, purple, or feline yellow, depending on which colored contacts she’s wearing. She has the Chinese character for “joy” tattooed below her panty line, which she’s shown to everyone in gym. Lizette doesn’t care if her hose have a run going up the entire length of her leg. And she’s come to class smelling of cigarettes and alcohol. She’s loud, too, like when she blurted out in Health class that she swallows.
Rolly, on the other hand, is sooooo picky. He has a rule about everything. Open his school locker and you’ll find his textbooks arranged in alphabetical order by subject. If Rolly and Lizette were stranded on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific with absolutely no hope of ever being rescued, I picture Rolly running away from her, to the other side of the island.
