Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  "Well, I’m not cheap. I’m priceless. You said so yourself."

  "When you were four and used to sing that little song."

  "That little song you made me rehearse for hours and hours so you could show me off to your friends."

  "You were darling. They loved it. And so did you. I never saw you turn your back on an audience."

  "Oh really?" said Deeny. Holding the cell phone above her head like castanets, she sashayed out of the kitchen, heading for her room.

  When she got there she flopped back on her bed, feeling sick and lost. It would be different if her parents weren’t right about everything. But they were. She was exactly the loser her father thought she was. And she wasn’t a lady, or darling, and she probably would be cheap, if she could get a guy to look at her at all. But when there are no buyers, what does it matter whether your price is high or low?

  Even though she tried to tune out everything Treadmarks said, he made sure she never forgot for a single day how tragically disappointing she was as a human being. It’s like he couldn’t stand for her to feel good about herself for a single second. An A in a class? "Study hard, kid, it’s a sure thing you’re never gonna have a husband to support you." A new top? "Why didn’t you leave it in the store where it might get bought by somebody who can wear that kind of thing?" At the office on the days she helped out after school, she tried to do everything right but it was never good enough. And if she tried to talk to him, ever, about anything, he’d get this impatient, bored look and about two sentences in he’d say, "Some of us have things to do, Deeny, will you get to the point?"

  It would have been different if she didn’t agree with him. She really did screw up everything she touched. She really was a leper at school. She never got calls from boys. She never even got looks from boys.

  It wasn’t that she had no friends. She had plenty of friends. Well, two. Both losers like her, when she looked at it rationally. When they were together, though, they fed on each other’s insanity and fancied themselves the superior of everyone else at school.

  Rivka, alias Becky, always sneered at the popular girls’ sheeplike insistence on dressing alike and wearing their hair alike and even having the exact same half inch of absolutely smooth, no pudge abdomen showing between their thin little tops and their tightass jeans. Deeny kept it to herself that it was all she could do, when she saw those perfect waistlines, not to pinch her own little three-quarter-inch flab slab just to remind herself that skimpy little tops were only the stuff of dreams for her.

  Lex, on the other hand—who had tried to get them to call her Luthor in fifth grade and Alexis in ninth, to which they had responded by calling her Blecch for an entire month—always mocked them for how airheaded they were. Even the smart ones. Especially the smart ones. Maybe Deeny would enjoy Lex’s wit more if she were actually smarter than the girls whose lack of brains she made fun of, but half the time it was Lex who was wrong, and it just made all three of them look like idiots.

  Yeah, Deeny had friends, all right. The way some people got impetigo.

  Not that she didn’t like them. She liked them fine. She just knew that, socially speaking, she’d be better off alone than hanging out with these two aggressively hostile Jewesses—the term they both insisted on.

  All the way to school on the bus next morning (another mark of Cain on her brow), Deeny rehearsed how she’d get into school another way and absolutely avoid them all day, except when she had classes with them, which was every period except A Cappella, because neither of them could carry a tune in a gas can.

  Yet when she got to school, her mind had wandered onto another subject—her cellphone, as a matter of fact—and it wasn’t till she heard Becky’s greeting—that endlessly cheery "Hey, tush flambee!"—that she remembered that she was supposed to be doing evasive maneuvers.

  What the hell. Her social standing was past saving. And she didn’t care anyway. And besides, she had the phone. Not that she’d ever have the courage to use it.

  So on their way up to the front door, threading their way among the other kids, Becky and Lex talked loudly on purpose so everybody could hear them being crude.

  "Is there something about being Jewish that makes us have huge boobs?" said Lex. "Or is it because our ancestors lived in eastern Europe for so many centuries and all that borscht and potatoes made them cows?"

  "I don’t have huge boobs," said Deeny quietly. "I hardly have any boobs at all."

  "Which makes me wonder if you aren’t secretly a shiksa," said Lex. "I mean, why do you even bother to wear bras?"

  "Because I have nipples," said Deeny grimly, "and if I don’t wear a bra, they chafe."

  "You’ve never heard of undershirts?" said Lex.

  "You two make me sick," said Becky. "These things aren’t accidents. God gives big boobs to the women he wants to send babies to. The boobs bring the boys, the boys bring the babies, God is happy, and we get fat."

  "Is that a new midrash?" asked Lex.

  "So I’m meant to be a nun?" said Deeny. "Why didn’t he go all the way and make me Catholic?"

  "You’ll get them," said Becky. "You’re a late bloomer, that’s all."

  If there was anything Deeny hated worse than when Becky and Lex flaunted their udders, it was when they tried to make her feel better about her unnoticeables. Because she didn’t actually feel bad about them. She looked at what the two of them carried around with them and it looked to her like it was about as convenient has having two more big textbooks to carry to every single class all day.

  So, as they talked about the curse of bigness—while sticking their chests out so far they could barely open their lockers—Deeny fidgeted. Her hand was in her purse. She was turning the cellphone over and over in her fingers. And somewhere along the line, without quite deciding, she pushed the button and the cellphone rang.

  She ignored it for the first ring.

  "These morons who bring cellphones to school," said Becky. "And most of them aren’t even drug dealers, so what’s the point? What kind of emergency is it where someone says, ‘Quick! Call a teenager! Thank God they’re all carrying cellphones now!’"

  Perfect moment, though Deeny. Because she was actually blushing for real, just imagining the embarrassment of pulling out a cellphone in front of Becky at this exact moment. So ... she pulled out the cellphone and pushed the TALK button.

  Of course, all that happened was that the "Test Ring" shut off and the last number called got dialed—but since that number was her home phone, and nobody was there during the day, and her last-century parents didn’t bother with an answering machine, what could go wrong?

  She held the phone to her ear and turned away from the others. As she did, she saw both Becky and Lex do their oh-my-god takes.

  "Not now," Deeny hissed into the phone.

  "Sellout," murmured Becky.

  Deeny knew she was joking.

  "No," said Deeny. "I told you no."

  "She’s dealing," said Lex. "I knew it."

  "It must take every penny she earns at her dad’s office to pay for a cell," said Becky. "How needy can you get?"

  "Maybe her parents are paying."

  "Shakespeare based Shylock on her mother and Simon Legree on her father. I don’t think so."

  "Oh, right, from Shakespeare’s famous play ‘Uncle Hamlet’s Cabin.’"

  As they nattered on, Deeny retreated farther from them and said, very softly—so softly that everyone around her was bound to be listening and hear her—"I told you I can’t talk at school and no, I wasn’t faking." Then she punched END button, turned the phone off, and jammed it back into her purse.

  Becky and Lex were looking at her skeptically. "Oh, right," said Lex. "Like ... faking what? An orgasm?"

  They weren’t buying it.

  But she said nothing. Stuck with the charade. Let her face turn red with embarrassment. Walked to her own locker and opened it—no combination to spin, she had deliberately broken the lock the first day of school and made it a
point never to keep anything in the locker that she cared about keeping. "So the homework elf didn’t come back," she said.

  "Oh, now she’s pretending that she doesn’t want to talk about it," said Becky. "Like she isn’t dying to feed us some line of bull doo about some imaginary boyfriend."

  "There’s no boyfriend," said Deeny.

  "Give me that," said Lex. And before Deeny could register what Lex was doing, she had snatched the purse right off Deeny’s shoulder and in an instant was brandishing the cellphone.

  "Hey, give that back," said Deeny. Immediately, those words made her flash on all the times in grade school when one of the Nazi children—i.e., the popular kids—grabbed something away from her—a sandwich, her homework—and how futile and pathetic Deeny had always sounded, whining, "Hey, give that back, give that back, don’t throw it in there, please, please." Sickened at the memory, she shut her mouth and folded her arms and leaned against her locker to tough it out. Which might have made her look cool if her locker hadn’t been open so that leaning made her fall right in.

  Becky smirked at her as she awkwardly pushed herself back out of the locker. "You know, if you had boobs you couldn’t fall into your locker. At least not sideways."

  "Thanks for the reminder."

  "Redial last number," said Lex as she pushed SEND. She was looking at the little LCD display. So she’d recognize the phone number at once, having called it a thousand times since they met in fourth grade.

  Only Lex didn’t say a thing about the number. And when she held it to her ear, her eyes widened.

  "Sorry," she said. "Wrong number." She pushed END and handed the phone back to Deeny, blushing as she did.

  Deeny hadn’t known that Lex could blush.

  "Well?" demanded Becky.

  "Ask Dinah," said Lex. "Apparently she’s been seeing somebody without telling us."

  Deeny was stunned. Lex was playing along. Unbelievable.

  "Seeing somebody?" said Becky. "Adults who are having affairs ‘see’ somebody. High school girls date. And not somebody, guys."

  "Sounded more like seeing somebody to me," said Lex. "If you don’t believe me, push redial."

  "Not a chance," said Deeny, as Becky reached for the phone. "Real friends don’t spy. Or assume that I’m lying." She meant it—but she had to put a smile on it, because after all, if Lex was playing along, Deeny didn’t want to antagonize her too much. Still, she had to act pissed off because she would be pissed off at Lex taking her phone—and she knew she would be pissed off because she was pissed off.

  "He’s probably twenty-five," said Lex. "Either a garage mechanic or an investment banker—"

  "Oh, like those two professions sound the same," said Becky.

  "Same kind of I-know-everything-and-you’re-as-ignorant-as-fish attitude," said Lex.

  "Well what did he say?"

  "Try, ‘Hello, Deeny.’ Like he had caller i.d."

  "Cellphone numbers don’t show up on caller i.d.," said Becky.

  "So maybe he has a special cellphone whose number he gave only to Deeny," said Lex.

  "Maybe he got Deeny her phone and his is the only one on speed dial," said Becky, really getting into it now. "So she isn’t paying for it at all."

  "But she’s a kept woman now," said Lex, "and so he thinks he owns her, he can call her whenever and wherever he wants, only she longs for her independence, and so she’s going to dump him, but he won’t accept it and starts to stalk her and take pictures of her with spycams and then he puts them out on the internet only with other women’s bodies so they’re really pornographic."

  "Oh, like mine wouldn’t be sexy enough to be pornographic," said Deeny.

  "Oh, it would," said Lex, "except it would only appeal to men who go for boys without weenies."

  "Oh, who is he?" demanded Becky. "Forget all the other stuff, who got you this phone?"

  Deeny noticed how Lex’s joke had now become the "true" story—she’d been given the phone by a boyfriend. And it felt bad to have them actually believe the lie, even if it was exactly the lie she had bought the phone for.

  "I pay for it myself," said Deeny. "Out of my savings. I can only afford the first three payments and then they’ll cancel my account. I got it so I could fake having a boyfriend but I was never going to try to fool you guys."

  "Ha, ha," said Lex.

  "So you’re really not going to tell us?" said Becky.

  "There’s nobody, honest," said Deeny. "I only faked it that time because it pisses me off when you try to console me about wearing size A-minus. Tell her, Lex. You don’t have to play along any longer."

  She had expected Lex to break into a grin and say, "All right, Deeny-bopper."

  Instead, Lex’s face got cold and hard. "Play it that way, stud," said Lex. "I guess you’ll be talking about it with your real friends." And she stalked off.

  Becky rolled her eyes. "I don’t mind if you want to keep it a secret. And Lex won’t stay mad. She never does."

  I’ve only know her three years long than you have, so duh, yes, I know that. "Thanks, Becky," said Deeny. "I’m not going to keep carrying it. It was a dumb idea, anyway." Especially if you two won’t believe me when I tell you the absolute truth.

  Together they headed off to Calculus, which was a hell of a way to start the day, especially because she had no intention of every using a logarithm in her entire life after high school. She was only taking it because the district had passed a new ruling just before her sophomore year that all phrosh and sophs had to take four years of math, and since she had already taken honors Algae Trichinosis her freshman year, it was too late to start out with remedial so her fourth year could be geometry.

  The nice thing about Calculus is that since she had already passed her first semester, now all she needed was a D in the second semester because the college of her choice would already have admitted her before her final grades came in. So she didn’t actually have to pay attention in class. Her mind could wander. And it did.

  How far is Lex going to take this? She had to recognize Deeny’s home phone number. She had to know she was hearing the blat-rest-blat of a ringing telephone, and not a voice. So why was she doing this whole injured-friend routine?

  There was no figuring Lex out when she got some gag going. Like the time Becky had said, "Oh, you talk to much," to her, and for five whole days Lex hadn’t said another word, not one, nada, not even when teachers called on her. It was like she had gone on strike, and by the end Becky was begging her to say something, anything. "Tell me to go eff myself, just say something." That Lex, what a kidder. In an overdone assholical way.

  Didn’t use the phone all the rest of that day. Didn’t even bring it to school the next day because she forgot and left it on the charging stand. Then she brought it on Friday because what the hell, she was paying for it, wasn’t she?

  Pep rally after school. Attendance required. "Enforced pep," said Becky. "What a Nazi concept. Sieg Tigers."

  Lex was still being a butt, making snide remarks about how Deeny had a whole secret life that only her real friends got to know about. And all those perky cheerleaders making brilliant impromptu speeches about how, like, our team does so much better if we, like, really have spirit, they were really irritating, too, especially because so many of the other kids were getting into it and yelling and chanting and cheering, the whole mob mentality thing. And it didn’t help to have Becky mumbling her snide remarks. "You want them to have spirit, try wearing that cute little skirt without panties, that’ll make those boys play hard." Oh, that was funny, Becky, why not laugh so hard you fall off the back of the bleachers.

  So what was there to do, really, except push the button and then rush over to the edge of the bleachers and turn away from everybody and pretend to be having a phone call.

  There was so much noise that she didn’t actually have to make up anything to say. Just mumble mumble mumble, and then laugh, and then smile, and then imagine him saying something kind of dirty, and smirking at what h
e said, and then he says something really dirty, and so she makes a face but it’s plain she really likes hearing it even though she pretends to be mad.

  Twenty-five year old mechanic. Covered with grease but arms so strong he just lifts the car up onto the jack. Or investment banker. Who never wears anything under his suit except his shirt, "In case you only got a little time for me, baby," he says, "I don’t want to waste any of it."

  Yeah, right.

  But don’t let the "yeah, right" show on your face, moron. A laugh. A smile. A little offended. Then delighted. Then ... yeah, they’re looking, not just Lex and Becky, but other kids, too, looking at Deeny, can you imagine that, watching her have a love life, even if it’s only with the beep beep beep of the ring tone at home.

  Only now that she thought about it, there wasn’t a beep beep beep.

  Had one of her parents picked up the phone? Come home early from work maybe, and the phone rang, and they picked it up, only she didn’t hear them saying, "Hello? Hello? Who’s there?" because there was so much noise here at the pep rally.

  She pressed END, stuffed the phone in her purse, and then just sat there, looking out over the basketball court with all the stupid streamers that somebody was going to have to climb up and cut down before the game anyway, so why go to all that trouble in the first place, and I wonder what my parents heard on the phone when they picked it up, was I actually saying stuff out loud about what the investment banker does or doesn’t wear? Even if I was, they couldn’t possibly have heard me. Except that my mouth was right by the mike and they didn’t have a pep rally going on there at home so they probably could hear and she hoped it was her father—let him hear her talking about how maybe somebody wanted sex with his loser daughter, sit on that and spin—

  But if it was Mom....

  Please don’t let it be Mom. Please don’t let her go to the drugstore and buy me condoms or make an appointment for me to go to the doctor and get a prescription for The Pill or The Patch or whatever remedy she decides is right for her little flat-chested princess who has about as much use for birth control as fish have for deodorant.