Weird Girl and What's His Name

by Meagan Brothers

  “I didn’t think I could make you feel anything for me,” I said, surprised. She was concerned? For me? “Let alone feel upset.”

  “Just because I didn’t have feelings for you like you wanted doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings at all.” For a second there, our eyes locked. Finally, she flicked her cigarette butt to the ground and stomped it. Shrugged toward the field. “Why don’t you go down there and find Rory? It’s halftime.”

  OKAY, SO, YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING WHAT exactly went down between me and Sam—Mrs. Lidell, to you—and why that whole exchange was so awkward and fraught with horribleness. And you’re probably wondering why I was hiding out in the girls’ bathroom instead of hanging out by the sidelines trying to catch Rory’s eye. The answer to the second one is that people were staring at me like I’ve got antennae coming out of my head. Seriously, it was like they’d never seen somebody who ran away from home before. I couldn’t believe I actually wished it was like it used to be, when they all just ignored me and acted like I was invisible. Now it was all staring and “Hey, Lula, glad you’re back” from these assholes who used to call me Weird Girl when they thought I was out of earshot. You jerks aren’t glad I’m back. You could care less. If you knew what kind of tremendous screwup I truly am, you’d wish I’d stayed gone forever.

  And on that note, let’s climb into the wayback machine, and I’ll tell you exactly what went down between me and Sam.

  Not that I’m jumping up and down to revisit last spring. The end of eleventh grade. What a shitty time. But maybe if I tell you where I was, then you’ll understand where I am. Which is in the third stall down on the left. Trying not to cry.

  Samantha Lidell singlehandedly kept eleventh grade from totally sucking. She was the coolest teacher Rory and I ever had. Maybe we were inclined to like her just because she shared a first name with Agent Mulder’s long-lost sister. Maybe it was because she was younger than our other teachers, or maybe it was because she had lived in Paris. Or maybe she was just naturally cool. Like the time I ran into her in the parking lot after school and asked her to bum a smoke. I don’t know why I did it—I hate cigarettes. But Sam Lidell even made smoking seem awesome.

  “I don’t think you’d like these,” she said, not even shocked that I asked. “They’re strong. Gitanes.”

  “Gitanes?”

  “They’re French.”

  “Why do you smoke French cigarettes?” I asked.

  “Because my friends in France send them to me,” she said, exhaling, considering the cigarette between her fingers. “And because they make me feel like Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

  “Who’s Jean-Paul Belmondo?” I asked.

  “Look it up,” she said, giving me her usual half-smile. Mrs. Lidell was always dropping little hints, saying “Oh, you know, it’s just like so-and-so,” then telling us to look it up when we asked who or what so-and-so was. And of course Rory and I always did. It usually turned out that she was talking about some foreign movie or an old band. Sam would—huh, that’s funny. I just realized that when I thought of her in school, as a teacher, I always thought of her as Mrs. Lidell. But when I thought about her any other time, I just thought of her as Sam.

  And I did think of her. Outside of school. You might have noticed my tendency to go a little overboard on the research. I admit it: when I’m into something, whether it’s a movie or a TV show or my own mother’s whereabouts, I go whole-hog. I want every detail I can find. Well, last year, Samantha Lidell was one of my prime interests. Some of the research, like figuring out who her name-drops were, I did with Rory. But some of the research, like looking up her home address, I did by myself.

  I don’t know why I did it, or why I didn’t want to tell Rory. I guess I knew I was crossing a line, somehow. I looked up her address and then, one afternoon, I rode my bike past her house. I just wanted to know where somebody like her lived. I mean, I couldn’t even believe she lived in our town, let alone right there in a regular old split-level on Loblolly Court. It seems kinda crazy and stalker-ish, I know. But I didn’t plan on doing anything else with that information besides my one brief bike-by. It’s not like I was going to . . . I dunno, show up at her house in the middle of the night. Completely uninvited and unannounced.

  I blame Rory.

  Okay, I don’t really blame Rory. I take full responsibility for all of my insane, foolhardy behavior. But maybe what happened between me and Sam would never have happened if Rory had trusted me. If he’d just been honest with me from the start.

  Actually, he was honest, in the beginning. I mean, at least he told me he was gay. He was so upset when he first came out to me, back in tenth grade. So afraid that I’d stop being his friend. Bullshit, I’d said. We’re best friends no matter what. So what if he liked boys? So did I; it was one more thing we had in common. It was a relief to both of us, at first. He could be himself and we could still be friends. We could crush on David Duchovny together. No big deal! But then things got weird. As they often do.

  At first, I felt like, theoretically, sure, I could understand how a person could be gay. It was probably easier being with someone of the same gender, right? Like, sexually and stuff, you’d know how their body worked. And you could share clothes! Thrifty and fun, the whole gay experience. But as far as actually feeling attracted to other girls, I never looked at, like, Mandy Coleman coming down the hall in her cheerleading outfit and felt compelled to yell, Whoa, watch your backs, everybody, hot babe alert! like that paragon of chivalry Mike Landy would.

  To be honest, most of the girls at Hawthorne High seemed terminally uninteresting, obsessed with boyfriends and manicures and Youth Group ski trips. (Not that the boys were that much better, but, even though I wasn’t into jocks, for instance, I could totally see how Sexy Seth Brock got that nickname.) But maybe I was never able to fit in with them because I’d never been very good at being a typical girl, myself. When I was little, Janet still had a job working as a receptionist in a dermatologist’s office. Leo was the one who ended up looking after me, and he didn’t have any idea how to relate. He let me help him paint his model airplanes and watch M*A*S*H reruns and movies like The Magnificent Seven. By the time I started school, I was completely inept at relating to girls, too. Girls liked shopping for clothes and drawing pictures of horses. I could quote freely from Lee Marvin movies and hold my own in a Phil Mickelson-versus-Tiger Woods debate. You’d think I would’ve fit in with the more tomboyish girls, but I was terrible at both soccer and lacrosse. Aside from Tracy at Drama Camp and Jenny Walsh, who was quiet and shy and became my friend because she needed protection from the older girls who smoked under the bleachers after gym class, I was lousy at making female friends.

  Fast-forward to eleventh grade. Enter Samantha Lidell. She smoked French cigarettes and didn’t have a manicure. She kept a picture of Bob Dylan tacked to her office door and she once got in trouble for saying “bullshit” in class. When she was fifteen, her mom bailed on her just like mine did. I found myself thinking about her a lot. Not, you know, sexually or anything. But I’d see something on TV or read something, and get this urge to call her on the phone and ask her what she thought of it. I wanted to tell her things. I kept signing up for tutorials with her so I actually could tell her things. It was kind of freaking me out, the amount of time I spent thinking about her. Was this, like, a gay thing, or was it just that she was the coolest person I had ever met? I tried to suss out how much obsessing over her was too much, and I thought Rory could help, even though I felt too weird about the whole thing to just come right out and say it. I asked him one time, how did he know for sure he was gay, before he even slept with a guy? Was there some kind of tipping point, a moment he knew for certain one way or another?

  “I just knew,” he shrugged.

  “Yeah, but . . . I mean, how did you know? What happens now if you finally do it with a guy, and then you’re like, ‘You know what? I kind of prefer the other.’”

  “Look, you’re still a virgin, right?”
<
br />   “Thanks for bringing it up.”

  “Sorry. What I mean is, you don’t have to have sex to know what you want. Like when we watch Lord of the Rings. You might be a virgin, but you know you’re attracted to men because the person that catches your eye is Viggo Mortensen and not Liv Tyler or Cate Blanchett.”

  “And, let me guess, the person who caught your eye was Orlando Bloom, and that made you suspect something was up?”

  “Well, Hugo Weaving, but, essentially, yeah, that was how I figured it out.”

  “You figured out you were gay from watching Lord of the Rings. Won’t Peter Jackson be surprised.”

  “It wasn’t just that one movie. It’s everything. It’s not just thinking some man is attractive. I feel like . . . it’s just who I am, you know?” Rory shrugged. “I’ve been different my whole life, and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t just the kind of books I read or the characters I identified with, or the movies I watched or the fact that I sucked at soccer. It was something deep down inside . . . I’ve known it was there for a long time. But I’m just now able to say it. Able to say it to you, at least.”

  Hm, okay. The next time we watched Lord of the Rings, I tried checking out Arwen and Galadriel. . . . Nope. Nothing. I couldn’t really picture myself taking an elf out to the Regal 7 on a Friday night. Eowyn was pretty badass, but she was no Aragorn. Great. That was no help. I tried looking at other girls in movies and on TV, but ultimately, no matter how badass they were, no fictional character was as cool as Sam Lidell in real life.

  I tried again with Rory, when we were over at his house, dyeing my hair. I asked him what would happen if he met someone he really liked, but they just happened to be the wrong gender. I thought he could tell me. If I was or I wasn’t. Gay, I mean. Or maybe I really was just trying to make him jealous all along.

  And this is where it gets really wacko. Because even while I was obsessing over Sam Lidell, Rory was the one I thought was my soul mate. What sucks is, I didn’t even realize I had feelings for him until he came out. There I was, trying to be the Supportive Female Buddy, and all the while, my mind had started wandering into restricted areas. Wondering what it would be like to hold him. Kiss him. And various other activities. I even dyed my hair red in an attempt to look more like Gillian Anderson, aka Special Agent Dana Scully, who, according to Rory, was the Greatest Actress Ever to Grace Stage or Screen. I figured, you know. Just in case he might be leaving the heterosexual window open for redheaded girls.

  But all this muddle didn’t reach Maximum Awkwardness until the spring of our junior year. Rory started spending more and more time at his job at Andy’s Books and Coffee. At first, I thought it was good for him. The guy, Andy, took him on all these trips, book-buying and even camping and hiking and stuff. Rory needed a guy like that in his life. A stable, sober adult. A father figure. But Rory was spending more and more time away, and it wasn’t all work-related. He kept making excuses why he couldn’t come over, or why he had to leave early. He was working out all the time, trying to lose weight, and suddenly he decided to try out for the football team, of all things. Sweet, sensitive Rory, on the football team. How many linebackers do you know who wax rhapsodic about Shelley and Keats?

  Then there was the night he came over, a complete wreck. He said he’d been fighting with his mother, but there was no way. He fought with Patty all the time; he was used to it. This time, the kid was a mess. Was he on drugs? I didn’t ask. He got into bed with me and we held each other for the longest time. It was so perfect, and we didn’t even do anything but just lie there together. He was warm and strong and when he fell asleep, he looked so sweet. Like a lion cub. Like a hibernating bear.

  But all of that was just the tip of the Weirdness Iceberg, compared with the day we were studying for our Chemistry midterm. All of a sudden, out of the blue, he asked me if I’d consider being a surrogate mother for him. He assured me that we wouldn’t actually have to have sex. (Gee, thanks, Rory.) No, I’d just be the carrier for his offspring, which he would raise with his Boyfriend To Be Named Later. I tried to play it off, like I’m totally cool with being asked to bear the non-love-child of my best friend and possibly the love of my life. But what I really felt, for the first time ever with Rory right there beside me, was alone.

  Fast-forward to the night I left town. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that night. I biked over to Rory’s to study for Mrs. Lidell’s infamously insurmountable midterm exam. The house was dark—his mother was either gone or passed out. But Rory’s car sat in the driveway. Hmm, odd. I was parking my bike in the garage when, through the small, grimy back window, something caught my eye. Something moving. Even from far away, I knew what I was looking at. A three hundred-pound kid running across a lawn doesn’t really look like anything else.

  I stepped out of the garage just in time to see Rory disappear into the woods. I don’t know why I didn’t call out to him. There was something strange going on here; I felt it. I looked around. Was he running after some animal? No one was following him. Patty the Pickle wasn’t chasing after him with a butcher knife. So what’s going on?

  I hurried to catch up. When I did, I followed at a safe distance. We came to a clearing by the stream that ended up being a backyard. I crouched behind a rhododendron bush and watched Rory walk right up to the house, an A-frame with a kayak tipped on its side on the patio, and a big sliding glass door. Rory knocked on the glass and waited. He knocked again. Maybe he really was doing drugs, and this was his dealer. My heart raced. Maybe that was the reason for all the weirdness, all the excuses. Maybe it was the football team. Maybe he was already high on steroids. Finally I saw a skinny figure on the other side of the glass—it was his boss, Andy. Huh, that’s strange. Why wouldn’t Rory just drive over to his house? Why cut this crazy path in the dark when we were supposed to be studying, anyw—

  Oh. Oh. I watched them kissing. I mean really kissing. And then.

  So much for that father-figure theory.

  Now I knew. This wasn’t a phase Rory was going through. He was sure. And it didn’t matter what color I dyed my hair. Rory and I had been alone in the dark plenty of times. But we had never done that.

  Okay, I whispered to myself. Okay. Now I understood. And understanding felt like an instrument, a vehicle, a machine, some metal bulldozer or something was inside my throat, and then my chest, burrowing a hot hole down to my stomach. Understanding was raking me out, turning me hollow and machinelike. I don’t know why I kept standing there, except that I was suddenly too heavy to move. It was as if hot liquid metal had been poured into my newly hollow, understanding self. And I would be stationed there for all eternity, watching the boy I loved love someone else. I wanted him to love me, but it was too late now. There was no “me” anymore, just this statue. This leaded metal thing. Hollowed and bronze. Real feelings bounced right off. I was Han Solo, frozen in carbonite. My mouth twisting out “No, stop” for the rest of my days.

  I don’t know how I found my way back. It was so dark outside. I ran through the woods, not caring how much noise I made. I got my bike out of Rory’s garage. Everything seemed smudged out of focus. Was I crying? It had been forever since I’d cried over anything. I wasn’t a crier. Hey, where was I going, anyway? Not home. Not back to Janet and Leo’s, to my bedroom without him. Where else could I go? Everything had closed. Jenny Walsh was away at a special school for girls with eating disorders. Maybe her parents would be home. Hi, I don’t know if you remember me, but I used to be friends with your daughter. I know it’s been a while and I look different now. It’s because I’m a statue.

  A car almost hit me twice. I mean, two different cars. Before I finally remembered where to go. By then, I wasn’t crying anymore. It was almost like I was outside myself, acting out some script. I couldn’t believe the things I was doing, but there I was. Doing them.

  “Lula?” Samantha Lidell opened her front door. She was wearing scrub pants, the kind doctors wear, and a faded T-shirt that said PRETENDERS EUROPEAN TOUR. Even h
er pajamas were cool. “Are you all right?”

  I shook my head no, and I was crying again, harder than before. Sam pulled me inside, pulled me into her, hugging me, patting my back, not seeming to care at all that I was getting tears and snot all over her Pretenders T-shirt. I held on to her.

  “Hey. Hey, you’re okay now,” she whispered. “What’s going on? Lula? Are you hurt? What happened?” She pulled back, looking hard at me. She picked a stray leaf out of my hair. “You’re a mess.”

  “Nothing. I’m fine. I just needed—” I gulped, trying out my voice. Broken, but not bad for a statue. “I needed to see you.”

  “Why? What’s going on? Is it your grandparents? Did something happen between you and Rory? Kiddo, hey. Tell me what’s the matter.”

  Where could I start? With Rory and Andy, Rory and me, me and no one, me and my mother, gone, me, alone, just me. Me and her. Mrs. Lidell. Sam.

  “Here, sit down.” She led me into the burgundy living room, to a mod-looking Ikea couch. “Chill for a second. Let me get you a glass of water.”

  She walked off to the kitchen. I sat there, pulling myself together, surveying the scene. Wow, there were all these guitars. And books, too, but that was less of a surprise. The walls were decorated with movie posters, all the titles in French. The TV was paused on an image of George Clooney making one of his “I’m sexy, yet concerned” faces. A pile of our last in-class essays covered half the coffee table, next to a half-full glass of red wine. I couldn’t believe I was here.

  “Drink this.” Mrs. Lidell reappeared, handed me a glass of water and a handful of Kleenex. I sipped the water and blew my nose.

  “Sorry to interrupt your evening. I was, um. In the neighborhood.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I was just waiting up for Mark.” She clicked the TV off. Oh yeah. Mark, her husband, was a Doctor Without Borders. She told me about him once, when I asked her about living in Paris. She met him there, when he was on a layover from helping child amputees in war-torn Iraq. They moved back because he was born here, and he’d always dreamed of coming back to help the poor kids of the rural South. In the meantime, she didn’t even seem to care that I’d looked up her address and shown up here like a total stalker. In fact, she was sitting next to me, rubbing my back in little circles.