by Paula Guran
“This is wonderful, Pearl,” said Justine, nodding at the blog page. “What a timely project. I can send it around to people I know, try to get you some more traffic.”
Pearl’s eyes widened. “That. Would be. So great!” She took her computer and sat down at a small table. Soon she was typing at a rapid clip.
Justine rested her elbows on the counter, sucking her cheeks in and out, in and out. All around her, beautiful girls were sitting at the tables and on the floors with their jackets and backpacks spread around them, as if they had parachuted in. Some of them were resting their heads on the table while their friends talked over them. Such tired, languid beauties. She was not afraid of them when they were at rest, when they didn’t look up at her and creep her out with their impossible faces. When they left, they left plates of muffins, poked into infinity crumbs, and full drinks with only the foam licked off. That too was awful. What was with these girls? Were they are all on crash diets?
Pearl, friend to the arts, also wanted to be an actress. She was playing Tzeitel in the high school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof.
Justine attended opening night by herself. Greg was sitting a few seats away. He had said hello to her when he sat down. To her horror, her hand had moved up to pat her hair, as if pulled by a fishing line.
The great thing about high school plays was that almost everyone was exactly physically wrong for their roles. Tevye, a tall boy with girlish wrists, had a fake belly that sagged in his shirt and sometimes swung in the opposite direction of his torso. Pearl played the oldest sister, but she was the smallest. Now Pearl and her two sisters stamped up to the front of the stage and started shrieking the lyrics to “Matchmaker.”
Justine’s stomach began to growl. There hadn’t been time to eat dinner. Fiddler on the Roof had its moments of quiet (buried somewhere in the traditional musical Song Scene transitional-oho-we-just-said-the-first-few-words-of-the-next-song-I-think-it’s-time-to-Sing Song structure) and during those moments, her stomach yowled and moaned.
“Father, I love him!” said one of the sisters.
Justine wrapped her arms around her waist. It didn’t help. If anything it pushed the noises out of her stomach more hastily. Baaaaaaarrrroooooool. Greg made eye contact once. Then he was laughing, staring straight ahead with his lips clamped shut.
During intermission, Justine escaped. She walked down the hallway and out the front doors. Hunched over by the entrance, she dug through her bag for some Tums. Greg stepped out of the building.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Just hungry. I guess that’s obvious.”
“Possibly a little.” They smiled. “They’re doing good so far,” he said.
“Yeah. Pearl’s really talented,” she said. “Who are you here for?”
“My brother,” said Greg. “It sucks. They didn’t give him any lines. They made him play the violin, but he messed that up too. You saw. I don’t know what they were thinking, it’s not like playing the violin is easier than acting. Do you want to go get something to eat? I’m hungry too.”
The auditorium was lit up. You could see down the length of the dark hallway right into the back rows of the auditorium, everything tiny and bright and precious, like a diorama. People were starting to file back in.
Justine said, “I don’t know. Pearl, she has a few more scenes.”
Greg didn’t try to convince her. He just stood there, waiting. It seemed respectful of him, but who knew. He was thin. She couldn’t see any of his body through his clothing, only his shoulders.
Glaaaauuwwwwhoaa, intoned her stomach.
“It’s speaking German,” said Greg. “Or Chinese.”
Like Greg’s appearance, his apartment gave away nothing of himself—all the things superficial that ended up being important. What kind of music do you like, are you a food snob, do you consider yourself well-traveled, how much disposable income do you have, do you care if people who are thirty feet away from you and will never meet you think kindly of you?
Greg’s apartment was neat. He had no books, but there was a stack of DVDs rented from the library, on the coffee table by the couch. There was a gray kitten sleeping on a pet bed in the corner of the living room, curled up like a little slug. Justine admired the kitten as Greg told her darling facts about it, like its name and the fates of its siblings and which items it had destroyed, and then they were kissing and moving toward his bedroom in this clumsy backwards kissing tango. Justine hadn’t had sex with that many people, but she was accustomed to guys who had specific tastes and would try to pretend that they had just thought up those ideas. (Say, what if I were to come on your feet? Wouldn’t that be fun? Cool and different, right?). But Greg in bed was like his anonymous apartment and haircut, as forgettable as someone who might be a kindly serial killer.
Greg sat up afterward and asked Justine if she wanted to take a shower. “With me,” he added.
She blinked and blinked as if it would make Greg disappear.
“Why are you laughing?” he said, laughing. “That’s not weird.”
“I’m not laughing,” she said. “You go ahead. I’ll be in.”
“All right,” he said. “But don’t wait too long. The hot water runs out fast.” He went into the bathroom. She heard the spiky hiss of the shower turning on, and pressed her palms into her stomach. She still had not eaten. Greg had forgotten to offer her food! She had slept with a nineteen-year-old, and forgotten to eat dinner. Now Justine felt the panicky regret that comes after you’ve fucked someone you didn’t intend to fuck, so strong that you would gnaw off your leg to escape from the sex trap, in fact you would do anything to rewind the tape, dick goes out of vagina, THIS NEVER HAPPENED.
It would have been nice to shower with Greg, she knew. The slow, hot Laundromat press of their bodies. But she had already done one type of thing, and she could not allow herself to do the next. What would come after the shower—sitting around in bathrobes, all pruney and sleepy, trying to make conversation?
Oof. Now she was hungrier than ever. She grabbed her clothes, squirming a little when she pulled on her damp underwear, and went into the bathroom. Greg was rubbing soap under his arms. She tapped on the glass. He turned around, grinning, and then pressed his dick up to the glass until it looked like a flatworm, or half of a hot dog. He seemed to think it was pretty funny, and did a dance, squeegeeing his dick around on the shower door.
“Why’d you get dressed?” he said.
Justine began to feel a little bit damned. The bathroom was steamy from Greg’s shower and her feet stuck to the floor, as if she was being pulled down into a sweltering, sweating Hell. “I don’t have time.” She stepped back. “I’m meeting up with Pearl. And getting dinner.”
“Oh no! I forgot you were hungry!” Water ran into Greg’s open mouth.
“No worries! Finish your shower. I’ll see you at work tomorrow, and maybe we shouldn’t mention this to anyone, I feel like they’d put me under arrest or something! Not that this was illegal, though, unless you were lying about your age, ha ha . . . ” She paused. “Sorry,” she finally said, in a loud desperate honk, then escaped. The kitten was sitting on the coffee table licking its smoke-colored legs. It swiped at her with its claws as she went by.
It was fully night, and the streetlights had switched on. The sidewalk was dotted with bushes and sparse trees that, in the dark, seemed too full of intentions and possibilities, and Justine veered to avoid them. Hurrying down the block, Justine felt a wet hand on her shoulder. “Wait,” Greg was saying. He was holding a towel around his waist with one hand and reaching out to her with the other, and then a girl came lurching around the corner, rattling the bushes and crashing into them.
Justine took the girl’s arm and held her up. “Rebecca?” said Justine. Rebecca lifted her head, her mouth slack. Justine brushed Rebecca’s hair off her face, away from her mouth, and said, “What’s—” when Rebecca’s body spasmed. She fell forward on her knees and threw up. There was blood in her
vomit, big dark gleaming garnets of it. It pooled and spread over the sidewalk and dripped into the gutter. Justine and Greg both yelled. Greg ran back to his apartment to call 911, while Justine squatted there next to Rebecca, rubbing her quaking back, watching her puke and puke and puke until the ambulance came.
After asking Justine and Greg some questions, the paramedics took Rebecca away. The ambulance zoomed down the street, rattling and wailing, and the quiet pressed down on them. “Come back for that shower sometime,” Greg said sadly, and left.
Safely nestled in her car, Justine drove to Burger King and bought two cheeseburgers and extra-large fries and tried not to think about puke as she ate the internally scalding fries by the handful. There was an ancient alchemical recipe for gold, which involved stirring melted lead without once thinking the word “hippopotamus.” This was just like that: if she didn’t think about puke or Rebecca or Greg or beauty or hot dogs, she would be fine.
Justine made another quick stop at the twenty-four-hour supermarket to buy flowers for Pearl. Tzeitel had been Pearl’s biggest role yet. As she drove to Pearl’s, feeling gross and grimy, she thought about her ex-boyfriend. He would be glad if he knew what she’d been up to tonight. He was the webmaster at the weekly paper where she had worked. He had broken up with her six months ago, but she knew that he still needed more reasons to not like her, so that he could check the breakup off firmly as a GOOD DECISION. The Greg thing would do it.
But he would never find out. The longer you lived, the more things you did that you could never tell anyone about. The embarrassing, horrible shit didn’t end when you stopped being a teenager. Different people were marooned on different islands inside of you—one person held her breath when she walked past dead pigeons, crushed against the curb like dirty work gloves, and one person thought racist things about a waiter who screwed up her lunch order, and one person lost her job because (wait for it) she pushed her techie ex-boyfriend down five steps in the emergency stairwell of their office building, during an argument. This person did not think about how easily the ex-boyfriend could spin the story as her pushing him down the stairs—implying a whole flight of them—without even needing to lie, exactly, because five steps is still plural-stairs. And in the arena of Downsizing Weekly Paper, a battle between Webmaster and Really Only Semi-Talented Writer is easy to call.
Maybe Justine did wish there had been a whole flight of stairs stretching out behind her ex. But she didn’t want to know about this person who crouched right underneath her surface, a fish under murky ice, frozen but still alive. Every day Justine worked hard to forget this person. She bit a ragged semi-circle from her cheeseburger and swallowed everything down.
Justine texted Pearl from the backyard. Pearl let her in. Justine didn’t like sneaking in through the back door. It made her feel like a secret boyfriend, or even possibly a sex criminal, when all she was doing was visiting her friend. She never knew if she should take off her shoes or not.
“Where were you?” said Pearl.
“It’s a long story,” Justine mumbled. Pearl squinted at her. Time for the truth. “I was going to find something to eat during intermission but I met someone and went over to their place. I’m really, really sorry.”
Pearl gawped. She played at being worldly, but secretly she couldn’t yet believe that you could go home with someone, just like that . . . and emerge unscathed. She had seen too many slasher films and episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to not suspect that all unfamiliar men wanted to peel her skin off and wear it as a bathing suit. She had never dated anyone.
“You had sex!” said Pearl.
“I don’t know.”
“Greg! You had sex with Greg!”
Times like this, Justine wondered if the blood had rushed to her cheeks in tiny dots that spelled out cursive words; she was that easily read. “It was a horrible, awful mistake,” she said. “Please don’t be mad.”
“What? It doesn’t bother me. Greg’s pretty, but he’s too pretty to have a crush on. I don’t need that kind of trouble.”
They just sat there.
Then Pearl said, “You’re, like, a sexy older woman. No reason he wouldn’t go for that.” She wiggled her butt in her papasan chair, like a furious bee inside of a peony, and crossed her arms. “It’s kind of weird, but maybe it doesn’t matter at your age. You don’t seem that much older than him.” Pearl was trying to be kind. Justine appreciated it.
“No. I do. At least to me,” Justine said.
“I was amazing,” Pearl suddenly announced. She was still wearing stage makeup. Up close, her rouge was bright and overwhelming and sick. It was how Justine had pictured scarlet fever might look.
Justine sighed. “I’m sorry. Here, I got you flowers. And a cheeseburger, if you want it.”
Pearl smiled for a moment. “A cold cheeseburger, ew.” But she rolled her eyes as she took the flowers. “Great, flowers. I already got some from my supportive parents! Oh wait, they didn’t come to the fucking play. I got some from my boyfriend! Oh, wait, I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Pearl, did something happen?”
“For college,” said Pearl, “I am moving to a city where all the cute boys have Asian fetishes. For real.” She sighed hopelessly.
“Come on, tell me what’s wrong,” said Justine. Pearl stared at the floor and started scratching the inside of her left elbow, where the skin was already hot pink. “Stop scratching,” Justine said, and put out her hand. Pearl got in one more good scratch and then sat on her hand.
She said, “That’s cool you got laid. I got totally freaking rejected. That’s why I left the cast party early. What if you actually liked Greg, like you cared about him and wanted him to be your boyfriend instead of just using him to see if you could have sex with a teenager. . . .” Justine flinched. “But he didn’t like you back because there were so many better-looking girls swarming around? And maybe he would have liked you if those girls weren’t there? You’re decent-looking, so maybe you don’t know what I mean, and you’re not a teenager anymore, so life doesn’t suck as much. But it happens to me all the time. Because I’m ugly, and everyone else is turning beautiful.”
There was no point in telling Pearl that everything would be fine.
“I think you’re lovely,” said Justine. “These boys just don’t appreciate it yet. You’re going to be glad that you didn’t involve yourself with all these high school shitheads when you get to college. Your whole world’s going to open up.”
“Glad?” said Pearl.
“Bad word,” said Justine quickly. “Sorry. I’ll go to the play again tomorrow. I won’t be a skank during intermission again. We can go get dinner after.”
Pearl kicked the air. “Doesn’t matter. The other performances have been cancelled. Everyone got sick at the cast party. Marla told me. People were throwing up in line for the bathroom. It sounded awful.”
“You’re kidding.” Justine told Pearl about Rebecca. Pearl sat up so straight that her chair yawed and nearly toppled.
“I knew it!” she said. “It’s the pretty girl anemia. I know this sounds sick, but I don’t care—whatever they have, I want it. It’s not just me. You should see what’s going on at school. Everyone’s trying to catch it. They’re hanging out with the pretty girls, trying to touch them. I even saw—” Here Pearl lowered her voice. “Well, I didn’t see it myself, but I heard that someone got someone’s tampon out of that thing, the period box, from the bathroom stall, and they were going to do something with it.” She shuddered.
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” said Justine. The cheeseburger was trapped like a hairball somewhere between her chest and her stomach. It wasn’t going anywhere.
“It might not be true. They were making fun of this one girl who was acting all desperate.”
“It’s sad,” said Justine. “You know, people used to have parties where they’d deliberately catch smallpox from someone, like a mild case so they’d be immune after. But I don’t know what those
girls are doing.”
“Maybe it’s better than being ugly forever.”
“Pearl—you’re so young. Nothing is forever right now. I remember how it felt when I was in high school,” said Justine. She tried not to pull out her high school mastery often, with Pearl.
Pearl rested her hand on her eyes, a snottily mature gesture. “No offense. But you’re being close-minded and acting so incredibly old. I can’t deal with this right now.”
“Fine, I’ll go,” said Justine, standing. “I was only trying to help. Pearl . . . ”
“You actually don’t know anything,” said Pearl.
When Justine left Pearl’s house, she saw that Pearl had already turned off her lights. The whole house was dark now.
A question: was Justine beautiful? It was hard to say. She occupied a certain middle ground. She “cleaned up well,” if “cleaning up” meant applying various paints and powders and unguents to her face until she looked like a high-contrast Photoshop job of herself. But she no longer knew what she looked like. Whenever she drifted while working and her laptop grayed out, she would see herself reflected in the dark LCD, and she could not tell if the screen distorted her face or if that was the face itself.
But there were people enough in the world to tell her what she looked like. Some days it seemed as though everyone in the whole world wanted her to know what she looked like—the way they shouted from cars, beamed her subliminal messages from TV screens and movie theaters and magazines. If only they would all shut the fuck up. If only she had been taught not to listen. It was too late to save herself; she wondered if it was too late to save Pearl.
The next day, Justine woke up late. Her mother had already gone to work, leaving a note on the fridge that read: Tried to wake you up but you were completely dead. Sorry! Oatmeal on the stove. Love, Mom.
