Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  The phone wasn’t beeping.

  "Nothing to say?" she said.

  "I thought you wanted it this way," said the man.

  The same man, sounding manlier than ever. And while his words might be the kind of whiny and apologetic thing you’d get from the kind of guy Ms. Reymondo would probably date, his tone was teasing so she knew he wasn’t really asking for validation or something.

  "I was waiting for you to call," said Deeny.

  "You’re the one with the buttons to push," said the man. And then, when Deeny didn’t answer, he said what she was waiting for him to say. "I wish I were there to push them," he said, laughing at himself just a little. "Touch them, anyway. With my fingers, maybe. Or maybe not."

  Deeny blushed and giggled, wondering what buttons he meant, knowing perfectly well, or hoping she knew, or ... something. This was what love felt like, this confusion, wasn’t it? Especially knowing that if Ms. Reymondo could hear the other side of this conversation she’d spot her knickers.

  "Legal age is sixteen," she whispered, "and I’m seventeen, so what’s stopping you?"

  "There’s a limit to what I can do over the phone," he said.

  "My point exactly."

  "It’s a limit we have to live with," he said.

  "So you’re all talk, is that it?"

  "Yes," he said. "That’s it." And then the line went silent.

  Deeny couldn’t believe it. Here she was, practically begging him to show up at her door naked, and he just blows her off and hangs up?

  Ms. Reymondo was standing across the corridor from her when Deeny put the phone back in her purse.

  "Legal age is eighteen," she said.

  "I’m not talking about drinking," said Deeny.

  "Drinking age is twenty-one," said Ms. Reymondo. "The legal age of consent is eighteen in this state."

  "My father’s a lawyer," said Deeny. "And you don’t know squat."

  "It’s my job to know squat," said Ms. Reymondo. "So if this guy is trying to get in your pants, it’s really not up to you to say yes to him. And, by the way, I happen to know your father is definitely not a lawyer. Don’t lie to a counselor who has studied your file."

  "I guess that means you know everything about me. All the yearnings of a teenage heart. You really ‘get’ the youth of today, Ms. Reymondo. We have no secrets from you, because as our friend, you’ve got our files."

  Ms. Reymondo glared at her and walked away, maybe—just maybe—swinging her butt a little bit more than usual. We’re getting a bit huffy, Ms. Reymondo. I don’t think that’s very professional, Ms. Reymondo.

  I am such a bitch. This phone is doing bad things to me. All these years, the only thing keeping me from complete bitchery has been my shyness. With cellphone in hand, the real me comes out and shows that I suck worse than the Nazis have ever thought.

  He doesn’t want to be with me. He only wants to talk to me on the phone.

  ~~~~~

  All that week, there was buzz about her at school. And then the next week, there wasn’t. She’d been moved from one slot to another—from dweebish-Jewgirl to whore-of-older-men—but now that she was safely slotted again, she could be ignored. Even Ms. Reymondo seemed to be taking screw you for an answer. It was just ... over.

  The phone had done all it was supposed to do, and the change in her life amounted to nada. Unless you counted the monthly phone bill.

  I’ll cancel and give the phone back.

  But she didn’t do it. Couldn’t. Because even though she hadn’t pressed TALK since Monday, she didn’t want to cut herself off from the possibility of talking to him again.

  All week she’d had so many ups and downs it scared her a little. She actually had to look up bipolar disorder in order to make sure she didn’t fit their list of symptoms. One minute she’s thinking, He’ll change his mind, he’ll come to me, or he’ll tell me where he is and I’ll go to him. The next minute, He won’t come here because he’s seen me and he could never pretend to be aroused by my body in person. It’s like those phone sex fakes, where it’s some fat fifty-year-old woman in her kitchen cooing in her little sixteen-year-old vixen voice to fifty-year-old men who are paying through the nose to a 900 number to live out their fantasy of having sex with women so young it was almost illegal. Wouldn’t they just gag if they could see who was talking to them.

  He’s just a phone sex line.

  Why would I want a guy like that touching me anyway? His hands creeping around on my body like big fat spiders. His lips slobbering on me and he calls it "kissing" like I wouldn’t just puke on his bald spot.

  He’s not like that. He loves me, and he’s not old, he’s just older than me.

  Older than me, and doesn’t want to be with me.

  Now everybody thinks I’m a whore, and I don’t even get laid.

  On Saturday she was so angry and hurt and confused and ashamed that she actually got up and went to temple with Mother. Treadmarks didn’t even say anything snide as they went—probably because he knew that Mother was feeling triumphant and he didn’t want the fight that would happen if he said something disparaging about religion. But all that happened was, Deeny felt like the worst kind of hypocrite because the reason she was depressed was because she couldn’t commit adultery, and she was busy coveting her neighbor, but couldn’t get him to come over and live up to his promises of sin. What kind of blasphemy was it for her to even be there?

  All the time she was there, and all the way home, she kept looking at every guy and thinking, is it him? Are you the one? And the more ludicrous they were, the better. She almost wanted to go up to a couple of them—the ones who glanced at her a little bit more than the others—and say, "Have you been calling me?" But of course she didn’t, not with her mother there, not with a little shred of sanity still hanging around somewhere in her head, saying, "Oh, right," to all her wackier notions.

  On Monday, she left the cellphone in her drawer. A whole week without it. And Lex and Becky didn’t even notice, or if they did they said nothing about it. It was all over. Just like that.

  Only not really. Because she was in that different slot.

  It was on the bus. Jake Wu, a guy who rode it sometimes and sometimes didn’t. Half Chinese and kind of cute, thin and looked great in clothes, but hey, he was on the bus, so he couldn’t actually be cool, right? And he always hung out with a different crowd, the chess club types, the math club types, sort of the stereotypical oriental-American, intellectual and college-bound and probably going to be an electrical engineer or a physicist.

  And he sat down beside her.

  "I hear you been dating an older guy," he said.

  Like that, no preamble, no hi, not even a decent interval like he had to work up the courage.

  "It’s over," she said. And when she said it, she realized it was true and it made her sad but it also relieved her because it meant she had made the decision and she knew it was the right one.

  "Are you still broken up about it? So I should act, like, sad? Because I’d be faking it."

  Faking it, which would mean he wasn’t sad it was over with her older guy. Too cool. "You don’t have to fake anything," she said.

  "Cool," he said. "So you want to go out with a really mature high school senior?"

  "Why, do you know any?" she asked.

  She could see it right then in his eyes that she’d stung him with that. And it occurred to her that maybe she wasn’t the only person on the planet who felt rejected and was scared all the time whenever she had to face somebody of the opposite sex. And unlike her, he had the guts to do something in spite of being scared.

  Though come to think of it, she had done something, hadn’t she. Even if it was over.

  "I was kidding," she said. "I’d like to go out with a mature high school senior, if you mean you."

  "I meant me," he said.

  "My schedule’s not real crowded right now," said Deeny. "So if you kind of pick a day, I’ll choose a different day to wash my hair and walk the
dog."

  He grinned. "Heck, I was hoping that’s what we could do on our date."

  "Which? Hair or dog?"

  "You got a dog?" he asked.

  "No."

  "Me neither," he said. "My mother has fish but she frowns on me washing them. So ... your hair or mine?"

  She made a show of examining his hair. "Yours is thick and straight and probably looks like this no matter what you do. Whereas mine is a challenge, real problem hair, a complete bitch to deal with. So we’ll wash yours."

  "I see you like to do things the easy way."

  "If that’s an assumption," she said, "my knee knows where your balls are."

  "I assume nothing," he said. "Whereas you assume I’ve got balls."

  "I know you do," she said.

  "Jeans that tight?"

  "It took balls to sit here," she said. "What with me being a leper."

  "Leper hell," he said. "Everybody just figured you were out of reach."

  "I didn’t notice anybody reaching."

  "Cause guys don’t like to fail, so if they thought they’d fail with you, they wouldn’t try."

  "And you’re different?"

  "Yeah," he said. "I asked."

  And here’s the funny thing. He really did pick her up, take her over to his house, where his mother and father looked on as if they had only just discovered that their teenage son was strange, while Deeny washed his hair, then ratted it into a fright wig, and then washed it and combed it out again, with all the snarls and screaming that such an operation entailed.

  "What do you want to know, I’ll tell you everything, only stop the torture!" he cried.

  "I can leave your hair like this."

  "I’m going to shave it all off if you do," he said.

  But she didn’t leave it like that, and he didn’t shave it off, and while she was quite sure that his parents still did not have any place for a Jewess in their plans for their number-one son, she could also tell that they kind of liked it that he had actually had fun.

  It was, in fact, great. Not great for a first date. Just flat-out great.

  Best thing was, next morning Lex and Becky were actually happy for her instead of criticizing him and picking him apart the way the three of them had always picked apart every guy that any other girl was dating. Who knew that they’d be so sensitive when it was one of them who was dating the guy? None of them had ever put it to the test before.

  The only teasing was when Becky said, "Wouldn’t you know, the one without boobs gets the first date."

  "With a Chinese guy," said Lex. "Chinese women don’t have boobs either, so he probably thinks women who got ‘em are, like, alien." That was as close to disparaging as either of them ever got.

  She’d gone on a couple more dates with Jake Wu and her life was actually looking livable when there was another pep rally and she ducked out of it after making sure she’d been seen by the attendance people and instead of going out to the grove, she went around by the buses. It was way early for that, the drivers were still over in a group chatting and smoking and whatever else it was drivers did. But when she got on the bus it didn’t actually register with her that she was alone.

  Not until a couple of Nazis got on and it was obvious that it wasn’t an accident, they had gotten on this particular bus at this particular time because they knew she was there and they knew she was alone.

  "Hey, Deeny," said Truman Hunter. With a name like that he should have been manly, but instead he had kind of a receding chin but everybody knew his folks had a lot of money and it made him cool by default.

  "Hey," said Deeny. And made an instant decision. She stood up. "I guess Becky and Lex are running late so I’m going to ..."

  Truman got right in her face, his body up against hers. Either she had to let him press against her, or sit back down.

  She sat.

  "She changed her mind," said Ryan Wacker. The kind of guy who scared offensive linemen on opposing football teams. Ryan knelt on the seat in front of hers as Truman sat down beside her, pressing her against the wall of the bus.

  "Leave me alone, asshole," she said fiercely.

  "We were just curious about what it was some old guy found so fascinating. We just wanted a look, you know? The magical mystery tour."

  And while he was talking, like they had planned it out—or done it before—Ryan Wacker’s hands flashed out and caught her wrists and pinned them against the back of her seat, while Truman got his hands under her sweater and pushed it up, snagging her bra on the way and pushing it up, too, so her chest was bare in front of them and Truman said, "Well, it can’t have been the boobs, unless she’s got another pair stashed somewhere, cause these are for shit," and Ryan laughed, and Deeny didn’t even think of screaming because she didn’t want anybody to see her like this, to know she had been so humiliated, that it had been so easy to humiliate her. She just wanted them to finish whatever they were going to do and go away.

  Truman got her pants unzipped and unbuttoned, but she braced her legs against the seat in front and squirmed as best she could to keep him from getting her pants down.

  "Look, she’s getting into it," said Truman.

  But Ryan, who had the job of trying to control her, wasn’t amused. His fingers pressed into her wrists until she thought he was going to snap her bones it hurt so bad and he whispered "Hold still sweetheart" like he was her lover. And then it was only seconds till her pants and underpants were down around her ankles and Truman had his hand between her legs and she was crying helplessly and then the bus rocked just a little bit as the driver got on.

  "I don’t know what the hell you kids are doing but not on my bus, got it?"

  He hadn’t finished the sentence before Truman had her sweater pulled back down and all of a sudden he and Ryan were both standing up, blocking the driver’s view of her while she pulled up her pants and rezipped them and then reached under her sweater and pulled her bra back down into place.

  "Friend of ours was crying," said Truman, "and we were trying to make her feel better."

  "I know exactly what you were doing, asshole," said the driver. "And I also know your big asshole buddy is a football player but here’s a clue, boys. You’re just high school tough, and that’s pure pussy to me. I was in the Gulf War killing badass Iraqis with my bare hands when you were still holding Mommy’s hand to go wee-wee in the girls’ bathroom, so please, please try something."

  "You got us wrong," said Ryan.

  Deeny felt Truman’s breath on her face. "Say anything and I’ll f—you with a file," he whispered.

  She turned her face away from him.

  "Call me anytime," he said, loud enough this time for the driver to hear. "I’m always willing to listen."

  "Get away from her, asshole," said the driver. "Now."

  Truman waited just a moment longer, to show how free he was. Then he sauntered down the aisle. It was small satisfaction to Deeny that when they passed him and started down the steps, he planted his foot on Truman’s ass and shoved them both out onto the parking lot.

  Truman bounded up, limping but too mad to let the pain stop him. "You just f—ed yourself, big man, you just lost your job!" Ryan was trying to get him to shut up.

  The driver leaned out the door. "You think that girl is scared of you, but if you try to get me fired, you just see what she says to the board of inquiry. Think she’ll stand by you?"

  Truman looked at her. Ryan looked at her. She thought of Truman with a file in his hands, while Ryan held her against the ground. She thought of how it felt to have him touch her. Look at her naked. Mock her to her face.

  She held up both hands, displaying one finger on each. One for each of them.

  They went away.

  The bus driver came back to her. "You okay?" he asked. "You okay?"

  And she just kept nodding until she could finally control her voice enough to say, "Really, please, I’m fine."

  "They get away with shit like that because they’re in school and dadd
y’s got money, but someday they’re going to go after somebody with a gun and the gun won’t care how much money the family has or how good their lawyers are, because lawyers can’t bring assholes back from the dead, much as they’d like to try."

  "You," said Deeny, "are a poet."

  He grinned. She managed a half-assed smile back.

  And then sat there while other kids piled onto the bus and then emptied back out, stop by stop, until there were only six kids left and it was her stop.

  She went into the house. Nobody was home of course. Nobody to talk to, but she wasn’t going to talk to them anyway. Not to them, not to Lex or Becky, not yet anyway, and not to Jake Wu, not ever to him. Not to anybody.

  Except there she was in her room, naked and wet from the fifteen minutes in the shower, three times soaping herself and rinsing it off and she still felt dirty, there she was naked and it wasn’t her underwear she was getting out of her drawer, it was this, this cellphone, whose batteries were probably run down, yeah just one little bar, not ten seconds worth of battery, but she pressed PHONE OPTIONS, RINGER OPTIONS, RING TONES, TEST and then OK.

  It rang. She held it up to her ear.

  And he answered. "Deeny, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry."

  All she could do was cry. He knew. She didn’t even have to tell him. He knew.

  After a while she could talk, and even though he knew she told him. How it felt. How ugly and dirty.

  "Because it was by force," he said. "It was meant to degrade you. It wouldn’t feel that way with a man you loved. It wouldn’t be that way."

  "You’re only saying that because you wanted to do the same thing, all along, that’s what you wanted."

  "No," he said. "No, Deeny. I only wanted you to have whatever it was you wanted. A lover on the phone, that’s what you wanted, and I could do that, so I did."

  "Who are you? Why do I get you on the phone when I call nothing?"

  "I’m nothing," he said. "I’m ashes. I’m dust. I’m an exhaled breath."

  "What’s your name!" she demanded.

  "My name is Listener," he said. "My name is The One Who Always Cares."

  "Bullshit!" she screamed into the phone, and then repeated it about six times, louder each time until she felt like she was ripping her own throat out from the inside.