by Ann Mauren
No one knew the difference in my prospects but me, and Dwight, of course. And nothing was really all that different. Discretionary funds were for people who shopped. I was still depressed and lonely. I still missed my Grandpa. In fact, I would trade every last penny and gem to see his smiling face just one more time, to tell him I loved him and say a proper goodbye.
He always did love surprises. Too bad he couldn’t be here to see my face for the biggest surprise in the history of blindsides.
Chapter 8 – Reticent
The summer was winding to a close. It seemed like an eternity. I reflected back on my summer break and realized with embarrassment that I hadn’t done anything useful or profitable the entire time. Well, on occasion I had done the laundry and the dishes. I guess that’s useful. But this had been the year I was going to get a summer job. Now the only experience I could detail on my resume was that I had conducted research on the nature and effects of psychotic and anti-social behavior.
School would be back in session in less than a week. I was absolutely dreading it. Though I enjoyed learning and the classroom environment, I loathed the times in between. The halls and the lunchroom were crowded and noisy, but still lonely, somehow. It seemed that everyone had friends and plans…I never had either.
Of course, it was my own fault. The year before my mom had brought home “How to Win Friends and Influence People” from the library self-help section, and required that I read it, which I dutifully did. And I did garner some useful relationship skills there. The hardest part for me was lack of confidence in a group dynamic. In a one-on-one situation I could function tolerably. But if ‘people’ were listening, the reticent side of me would invariably take over. The adrenalin would trigger my flawed fight or flight instinct, and coward that I am, that dysfunctional cataplexy (quiet statue) response was involuntary. My insecurities just couldn’t handle the audience. Also, I found that, in general, the people who made good friends weren’t sitting alone waiting for me to make contact. They were already surrounded by interesting, informed, intelligent companions, and had no need for anything less, which my addition would certainly be.
It's amazing how many people you could be friends with if only they'd make the first approach. But nobody ever did, so I viewed everyone from afar. I would observe my schoolmates and form opinions and preferences, identifying the heroes and villains while perfecting the art of peripheral vision observation. But it was all in secret and pointless.
It dawned on me, sort of belatedly, that because I still didn’t have my license (something else I was going to do this summer, but never did) that I would have to catch the bus to school. I’d played the sympathy card the last several months of my junior year, garnering car rides from one or the other parent until school had let out, but I knew it was inconvenient for them, so I considered that gravy train officially derailed. Being a senior bus rider seemed more embarrassing to me now that I had people watching. I wondered what they would think about that. Maybe that I was grounded? No car, no friends, and no life…all summer. Short of catching the library on fire, or engaging in grammatically incorrect graffiti vandalism, I couldn’t imagine a universe where Mom would ever be mad enough at me to shut down my whole summer like that. Of course, giving off the false impression that I was being punished because I’d been bad was exponentially cooler than the truth of the matter: a case of terminal lameness.
I really needed to get my license. I already had a car. My grandpa’s Jeep Cherokee was parked in the third bay of our garage. It had been sitting there patiently waiting for me since wintertime. I had gone with him to the dealership to ‘help’ him pick it out the previous spring. He always joked about the Jeep belonging to me and that he was just borrowing it until I got my license. So I was shocked when my mom showed me the title. She had found it among other neatly filed important documents while she was going through his things after he died. The Jeep had been paid for in cash, and was registered in my name. Apparently it was no joke.
Mom insisted on taking me school shopping; an annual event that I was glad would be over after this year. We began and ended at Old Navy. She wanted to hit every sale in the mall but I assured her that a few new items were all I needed since it didn’t appear I was growing anymore and my collection of new school clothes from last year were still perfectly good. Appealing to her practical side always yielded favorable results, especially when money was on the line.
I enjoyed my last few days of sleeping in and tried to prepare my mind for the new environment ahead of me. This was my second year at this school, so at least I would know my way around. It was large though, with about two thousand students. On the first day of school the traffic out front was a nightmare. The buses were able to go around into a separate buses only entrance. If I had driven, and hadn’t shown up an hour early, I would have been late. So my transportation situation wasn’t completely without its benefits.
I could not have imagined the reversal that awaited me in regards to mobility…and society.
Chapter 9 – Goth
I was inordinately pleased with myself. I had devised a plan to flush out a number of them—perhaps all of them—in the same week. I’d be taking a big risk, of course. As a result of this little series of maneuvers I was certain that security would become far tighter, and that it would be exponentially more difficult to pull something of this nature off in the future, if it were to become necessary, that is.
I had wrestled with myself about the advisability of moving forward with my plans when there wasn’t an emergency or any real reason to do it, other than to satisfy my curiosity and my desire to mess with them…just a little.
Because I was convinced that there was a fairly large team, which must be organized into shifts, I thought it would be most advantageous to perpetrate a double or even a triple header: back to back incidents to expose the various personnel assigned to my detail over the course of several consecutive days. Of paramount importance, though, was the necessity to insure that my actions did not appear to be the result of pre-meditation or planning of any sort. They had to think the breaches were unrelated, and completely their fault. It would ruin everything for all of us if they knew the fault was mine.
My plan had taken form slowly over the course of several weeks as I became acquainted with the most ridiculous looking person I had ever known in real life. Her name was Samantha Sun. She was into the Goth look: a style that suggests horror and mystery. To some it is simply a mode of fashion, to others an entire lifestyle. Either way, a gothic look involves very black clothing and very white makeup with edgy, tough accessories. Samantha also drew upon punk influences, incorporating a little of both to create her own hideously ugly personal style that evoked a frustrating but undeniable morbid fascination on my part.
Sitting next to her in our shared Advanced Program Senior English class provided a much closer view than would have presented itself to me in the natural order of things. People who looked like her frightened and repulsed me. Well, now that I was older, what they really did was irritate me with such backwards attempts to gain attention—something that offended me on multiple levels.
Upon very close scrutiny, it was clear that somewhere deep beneath the layers of densely over done black makeup and jet black hair highlighted with random strings of white and neon pink was a perfectly pretty girl. She had great bone structure. Her eyes made me think she might have some Asian heritage. She was tall and thin, willowy and graceful. Her bulky black clothes (and platform shoes that made her nearly seven feet tall) combined with her heavy, painful looking jewelry all but obscured her true self. I imagined that was the point, though I couldn’t guess why.
I was ashamed of my mental bigotry, assuming that she was stupid, or insecure, or mistakenly vain. I would never, ever say such unkind things aloud, but the fact that nobody around me knew what I was thinking didn’t change the ugly truth that I was being prejudiced and unfair. Who was I to judge this book by her cover? Vowing to amend my ways, I decided t
o see what it would be like to be friends with a person like Samantha. The upside was that it didn’t seem like I would be in anybody’s way trying.
It turned out that Sam was surprisingly smart for someone who looked so stupid. Of course, she was in Advanced English with me, but I didn’t think of that until later. I had framed my introduction by informing her that my middle name was also Samantha, not Velleity, as perhaps it should have been.
When we conversed before and after class, I found her to be engaging and fun with a quick wit and a rather dark sense of humor, which I enjoyed immensely. I think she understood how hard I was trying and seemed pleased to be the object of such effort. She was the only girl my own age that I had ever felt so at ease around, which was ironic considering the normal effect Goth looking people had on me. When I quizzed her on her likes and tastes, she directed me to a whole new world of books, music and movies I never knew I liked. I’d been avoiding entertainment of every sort for a while and it was enjoyable to re-engage that part of myself again, especially with the assistance of a knowledgeable guide.
We only had one class together, and it quickly turned into the highlight of my day. Before long I was invited to join her for lunch, which was a huge thrill for me. The joy was dampened, somewhat, though, when I followed her to our table and realized we would not be eating alone. The dampening had to do with the realization that she was part of a clan, and not my exclusive property. I was sliding helplessly back into reticent mode even before I sat down with them. But Samantha, who must have anticipated such a reaction, was determined to keep me engaged, and interviewed me like a talk show hostess, while the three other Goth girls acted as the studio audience, keenly interested in hearing what I had to say, and laughing at comments I hadn’t intended to be received as funny. Much to my surprise and relief, they all seemed to accept me with a degree of pleasantness and cordiality I would not have expected. Once again, I was very happy to be wrong about things.
One day, a few weeks into our friendship, while we were waiting for class to start, I hinted that I was curious how the Goth look would wear on me, and Sam nearly blasted out of her seat with enthusiasm.
“Oh my God, Ellery! You have to let me do you up! You don’t have to buy anything. You can wear some of my stuff!”
Did they make Goth miniskirts? Anything else of hers would drag the floor on me.
“I’ll do you up and then we’ll go out!”
Sam was elated. I was too. This promised to be hilarious and I could feel that it was going to work like a charm! My watchers would never see this one coming.
It seemed like everyone and her mother (including my mother) was always trying to give me a makeover. So it was ironic and hugely funny to me that the only person to get a shot at it would be my very own ‘Gothy Kay’ image consultant.
I was pleased how it all came together. Samantha was very solicitous and understanding of my reluctance to be seen leaving home in Goth persona. Letting her work out the cloak and dagger aspects of the operation was a stroke of genius. It required neither effort nor explanation on my part. Her motivation was to surprise her Goth girlfriends, while mine was to elude a well paid and highly sophisticated group of surveillance experts, so that I could conduct a little stakeout of my own.
She suggested that we meet her friends at Tinseltown Cineplex on Friday afternoon after class. That was perfect for me. I wanted to get a good look at the chaos I was about to cause and that would have been harder to achieve from a distance at night. The icing on the cake was that a Friday matinee was standard operating procedure for me. The surveillance personnel would be on low alert, maybe even goofing off during the ninety plus minutes of free time.
Hoyt was always home early on Fridays. My mom, on the other hand, usually had to work late at the library on Fridays. I wondered if it was truly mandatory or if it was a ruse to facilitate stepfather and stepdaughter bonding time. It wasn’t necessary. I was as bonded to Hoyt as I was ever going to be. I really liked him. He was smart and soft spoken, calm and courteous. He had no idea what to talk about with a teenage girl, though. That was okay. I felt his pain since I didn’t either.
I think my mom had envisioned our time together as an exchange of communication and the pursuit of common interests. Well, we did spend the time on our interests…just not together. He would drop me off at the movies and then head over to the driving range. This had become a familiar routine for us. Then he would collect me after my movie and take me out to dinner and we would enjoy the illicit consumption of foods we couldn’t eat in front of Mom. For Hoyt it was red meat, and for me it was anything cooked in the deep fryer and Cherry Coke to go with it. Then we’d show up at approximately the same time that she arrived home from work, and she would be happy to see us together and pleased that we had been working on our relationship. And so our allied objectives to foil my mother’s wishes did build a certain sense of comradery between Hoyt and me, and though she would have objected to the means by which it was accomplished, she did ultimately get her way. Though it had felt like work in the beginning, it eventually became a high point of my week, and I think it was for him as well.
I was running slightly late when Hoyt dropped me off at the box office. As I entered the theater it was very dark, and I couldn’t see a thing. Someone grabbed my arm and guided me to the center of the center row. Samantha was already there with her other friends: Splash, Corey and Rachel, by name. I didn’t have classes with any of them. It was good I hadn’t known about them initially, or I might not have tried to make friends with Sam, thinking she already had buddies. I was so grateful for my ignorance in this instance. On account of my newfound friendship with Sam, I decided to extend each girl a measure of credit, despite the fact that they all appeared to be battling as perpetual finalists in some kind of ‘World’s Most Obnoxious and Unsightly Ensemble’ competition.
We watched a recently released action movie that drew a few more people than was normal for this time of day. That was good because it would make it easier to hide in plain sight.
Just before the closing credits, Samantha and I made our way to the restroom, ostensibly to get ahead of the crowd, and hopefully to enter the handicap stall in the back together without being noticed. From her cartoonishly large black bag (inside which I literally could have hidden) she pulled out a wig that had evidently been part of an Elvira costume in better days and the equivalent of a doctor’s lab coat in black. She had also packed her thigh high platform boots, which took me from five feet even to something like five-eight or nine. I should have built in some practice time with those; it was like walking on stilts.
She wrapped a black belt with silver metal studs around my waist and cinched it to the very last hole. It still hung a little loose. Next she got to work on my makeup. First was an expertly applied pale white foundation followed by tracings around my eyes with a kohl pencil that looked like the fat black crayons they use in kindergarten. To this she added a number of heavy strokes of mascara and some insanely blue metallic-sheen lipstick. Next came the clip-on version of Goth jewelry. Good for trying out the look without committing to those pesky multiple body piercings, she explained. It clipped onto my nose and was connected by a stainless steel link chain to a row of studs that extended all the way up the edge of my left ear. Finally she positioned the wig and my new look was complete. I timed the transformation. She had done it in just under five minutes.
The line to the women’s room was winding out the door by now—another movie had let out. Someone who had observed me enter, but who wasn’t paying close attention, might assume that I had been held up by the crowd, or that the six-dollar chilidog I had purchased from the concession stand on my way in this afternoon was now making me pay again on its way out.
Samantha and I proceeded to the sinks. She was gushing. I was astounded. Sam and some other scary looking person were standing there looking back at us. No wonder I never wore makeup! It was like having an out of body experience. I was tall and dark and...weird!<
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“Sam, you’re a genius. A true artist.”
I had to admit it.
“See? It feels awesome, doesn’t it?” she replied.
It really did. I didn’t even need to be embarrassed because no one knew it was me. It was totally liberating. I needed to tone down the happiness because it was at odds with the style.
“Are you ready, gorgeous?” she asked.
“Who me? Uh, yeah, you bet!” I replied, partly jazzed and partly horrified.
We exited the Ladies’ Room and made our way across the lobby to a bench where the others of our species were gathered. They each exhibited an amusing yet predictable amount of surprise and curiosity as we approached. Sam was triumphant as she announced, “Ladies, I’d like you to meet Kit, my cousin from Great Britain.”
The effect of this news was comical to watch as it sunk in. For these girls, the UK was like the holy land of culture and fashion. This revelation of my origin seemed to clear away the logical question I’m sure they had been preparing to ask, namely “Where did you come from?” and replaced it with “Is there a magical wormhole that links Tinseltown and London in the bathroom, and which stall is that…exactly?”
They wanted to know important things like which concerts I had been to at Wembley Stadium and whether I ever saw anybody famous at Heathrow. As if my life in London was spent exclusively hanging around at the airport or waiting for outdoor concerts to begin.
In my best BBC World Service accent I explained that most recently I’d spied the lead singer of Future Sellouts in the British Airways section of Terminal One and that the Worthy Faux concert was absolutely to die for. They had no idea what I was talking about, but it sounded appropriately cool, and they nodded with enthusiasm.
When they asked if Kit was short for anything, Sam retorted “Kitten” and her tone added the “Duh” as punctuation.
