Cycler

by Lauren McLaughlin

I wake up with the transformation cleanly behind me, do my Plan B rituals, and take down the handwritten note Jack has taped to the mirror. “Dear Jill,” it reads. “Need more porn.”

  Ick. But I keep reading. “You don’t want my dirty mind wandering where it tends to wander, so do us both a favor and get the warden to bring back the Net. Thanks. Jack.”

  I thought it was mal sharing my bedroom with a smelly boy. Sharing it with a smelly boy who asks me for porn is an extreme dimension of mal.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  “You up?” Mom says.

  I open the door and Mom’s in full work mode: she’s wearing a beige wool-blend pantsuit with regrettably tapered-leg trousers I still have not been able to talk her out of. Her hair is blown and sprayed into strict stasis. But her face brightens into a big warm smile, which creases the corners of her eyes.

  “What day is it?” I say.

  “Sunday,” she says. “I’m taking Pamela’s shift today.”

  I nod, cross off the four previous days on my calendar.

  She ruffles my hair and says, “French toast?”

  I nod.

  When she’s gone, I shower, throw on some jeans and a T-shirt, then head downstairs.

  Normally, Dad eats breakfast in his basement yoga hole, but the smell of maple syrup warming on the stove always brings him up. He lurks in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “Hey, pumpkin,” he says.

  “That’s an unusually festive ensemble,” I say.

  Dad’s fashion sense is disgusting on his best days, but today he’s wearing heavy green slipper socks, turquoise swimming trunks with a giant bleach stain on the right leg and a holey Three Stooges T-shirt somebody gave him for his birthday a thousand years ago.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “Dad, have you been scavenging the Goodwill bag?”

  He curtsies and says, “Waste not, want not.”

  Believe it or not, this passes for joviality in the McTeague household.

  Dad and I pull out our chairs and have a seat under the fluorescent glare of the breakfast nook while Mom pours the syrup into the little Pilgrim gravy boat and joins us.

  “You feeling okay this morning?” he asks.

  “Aces,” I tell him. I spear two slices of French toast and drag them to my plate.

  There’s frost on the little window over the steel kitchen sink, and the trees in the background are gray and bare. A typical crappy day in Winterhead. But inside, things are nice and cozy, with Dad’s ever-present oniony aroma creating an unusual counterpoint to the homey smell of hot butter and maple syrup.

  “So,” I say. “Jack wants you guys to bring back the Internet.”

  Dad drops his fork with a clatter and Mom freezes with the gravy boat mid-pour. They hate when I bring up Jack.

  “Why?” Mom blinks about a thousand times as she says this.

  I’m a fairly creative person, but it is way too early to make something up, so I just come out with it. “He wants porn. He said if he doesn’t get it, his mind will wander somewhere I don’t want it to. Don’t ask me what that means. I don’t want to know.” I pour myself some OJ.

  Dad starts tugging on his beard, then jabs his fork into the platter of French toast and drags a piece back to his plate.

  I look at Mom, whose face has reverted to its normal state of robotic calm.

  “Loan him your father’s,” she says. “He’s got a stack of old Hustlers hidden in a box downstairs. Next to his hockey equipment.”

  I do not look at my dad. I think I will never look at my dad again. But through my peripheral vision, I can see his knuckles whitening around his fork.

  Mom chews her tiny mouthful while smiling that robot smile, as if this were all perfectly normal. Then she pours herself another cup of coffee. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart.” She empties half a packet of Sweet’n Low into her Relax, There’s a Woman on the Job mug. “All boys do it.” She stirs her coffee and takes a dainty sip. “They’re only a baby step above chimps.”

  Dad’s white knuckles release the fork, letting it drop again to the plate.

  Mom slices off a corner of her French toast, pops it in her mouth and winks at me.

  “Mom,” I say. “I am not giving him Dad’s . . . magazines.” I can’t even say the words “porn” and “Dad” in the same sentence.

  “Well, I’m not bringing the Internet back into this house,” Mom says. “Not after last time.”

  “I think Jack learned his lesson after that,” I say. “He’s been good, right?”

  Mom levels a cold gaze at me like I’m being naive, but sometimes I think she enjoys assuming the worst about Jack. About all men, actually.

  “Well, what should we do?” I say. “Jack says he needs it.”

  Mom gives Dad a wide-eyed look like she’s expecting him to come up with an idea, but Dad hasn’t come up with an idea in years. Dad is an idea-free zone. I lower my head and sneak a sideways glance at him. He keeps his eyes on his plate while he stabs a piece of French toast and makes it bleed syrup. When he glances up at Mom, waves of silent hatred propagate between their eyes. Mom’s smile never wavers. She can propagate hate waves while smiling, doing her nails, cooking dinner, you name it.

  After a few seconds of frigid standoff, Mom lays her fork and knife across her plate. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll pick up some magazines after work. Okay?” Though she looks at me while she says this, it’s clearly directed at Dad for being basically a nonentity in this household.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I tell her.

  She waves her hand dismissively, then knocks back the rest of her coffee. “I’ve got to get to the office.” She takes her plate to the sink, dumps the remains in the rubbish, gives it a quick rinse and puts it in the dishwasher—all without a single wasted motion. Then she breezes out of the kitchen as if we have not just discussed pornography over French toast.

  That leaves me and Dad.

  The phone rings and I leap from the table, vowing to engage in a lengthy chat with whomever is on the other end, even if it’s Auntie Billie.

  “Hey, Jill.”

  It’s Ramie, bless her.

  “Guess what?” she says.

  I take the phone out of the kitchen and slump into the beige sofa in the living room. A “guess what” from Ramie could mean anything.

  “I got into FIT,” she says.

  “Nice one!” I say. “Not that I’m surprised, you little genius, you.”

  FIT is the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

  “I wish you were coming with me,” she says.

  “Tell me about it,” I sigh.

  I’d give anything to go away to college, but unfortunately, Plan B will not work in a dorm, so I’m stuck with deeply mal Groton College, which is a Christian college in Winterhead.

  “It’s not too late,” Ramie says. “You could apply for second semester. I could take care of you, drive you to your treatments and stuff. We could be roomies.”

  Yeah, that would work.

  I haven’t ruled out the possibility of transferring to a commutable school in Boston at some point, but Mom thinks I should stay close to home, at least for the first year.

  “Ramie,” I say. “I am going to Groton to find Jesus.”

  “Is he missing?”

  Truthfully, college is not something I like to think about. The future, in general, is a big ball of scary. When I imagine what it will be like when I can no longer reasonably live at home, I tend to break out in hives. Not that I want to be one of those losers who never moves out. It’s just that Mom and I haven’t figured out how to evolve Plan B into Plan C: Independent Living. Mom thinks we should shelve worrying about that for a later date. I’m on board with that.

  “Rames,” I say. “I’m really happy for you.”

  “Thanks,” she says, but it’s dripping with moroseness.

  “Well, don’t spoil the fun, dude. You’re going to FIT and I’ll deeply visit you.”

  “Promise?
”

  “Duh. So anyway. College schmollege, what have you got for me?”

  “Right,” she says. “Phase One of the Tommy Knutson Project is complete.”

  “Shhh. We’re not calling it that,” I remind her. “It’s called Project X.”

  I can hear Dad’s forlorn fork and knife tapping the plate as he finishes his French toast in solitude.

  “Well, I’ve got video,” Ramie says. “Want to come over and practice?”

  “First things first,” I say. “What have you learned about our prime target?”

  “He’s not a drug dealer,” she says.

  “Excellent.”

  “Thought you’d like that,” she says. “Additionally, he was never a prostitute on Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “What?” I almost fall off the sofa. “I never heard that one.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “The guy comes with a complete set of false rumors. I’m skimming this data from a sea of gossip and innuendo.”

  “But you’re sure they’re false?”

  “Absolutely,” she says. “I got most of my reliable intel from some kids in his art class who say they don’t talk to him much anymore.”

  “Why not?” I say.

  “Unknown,” she says. “They got all shruggy and evasive when I asked. I have to say, Jill, the guy does have a quasi-mysterious loner-type vibe.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Could go either way.”

  “You mean, maybe he’s so superior to his fellow students,” I say, “that he has no need of their deeply inferior companionship?”

  “Or,” she says, “he’s on the verge of shooting up the school. Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

  I hear myself swallow. But I deeply do not think Tommy Knutson is that type of loner. His eyes are too kind.

  “Oh,” Ramie says, “and apparently, he had some sort of devastating relationship in New York with an older girl named Tinsley.”

  “Tinsley?”

  “It’s a rich girl’s name,” she says, “which is good news, given what we’re about to turn you into.”

  “Good point.”

  I hear Dad screech his chair and take his plate to the dishwasher.

  “So, you want to come over and practice?” Ramie says.

  “There in fifteen.” I hang up and return the phone to its cradle in the kitchen.

  “Gotta run,” I tell Dad.

  I do not look at him when I say it. By now, I’m pretty much committed to never looking at him again.

  Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Project X (a.k.a. the Tommy Knutson Project) is the second-greatest achievement of the McTeague household (with Plan B holding steady in the number one spot). Ramie and I fine-tuned Project X before Jack’s phase while holed up in my bedroom for a nacho-fueled all-nighter. Mom thought we were cramming for a Spanish test. At least she pretended to think that. She approves of neither Ramie’s existence nor my obsession with Tommy Knutson but has, for some reason, chosen to back off. Most likely, she has me under twenty-four-hour surveillance and is pretending to butt out because Project X centers around her Guide book. You see, we have turned Mom’s book into an action plan. How? By transforming me into a being like no other. According to The Guide, this is supposed to trigger the hunter instinct in men, thus compelling them to propose marriage or, in my case, a date to the prom. And since “being like no other” is a euphemism for “aloof, unattainable snob,” Ramie and I have decided to use as our role model Alexis Oswell, a.k.a. Lexie, the Rich Bitch.

  Lexie is, by a wide margin, the aloofest and unattainablest girl at Winterhead High. All her friends go to private school, but her gazillionaire parents make her go to public school because they have political opinions on the subject. Lexie has never voluntarily spoken to anyone at Winterhead High. Nevertheless, she’s made the guys’ Top Five Most Doable list four years running. So has Ramie. I got honorable mention once, along with twenty other girls.

  So, while I was away getting my “blood transfusions,” Ramie got sneaky with her cell phone camera and recorded Lexie strutting through the hallways of Winterhead High. I suppose I should point out that Ramie does not approve of The Guide. It’s “archaic” and “objectifying” and “antifeminist” and a whole host of other things she assures me I will care about when I achieve her exalted state of enlightenment. She’s only participating in the Tommy Knutson Project—I mean, Project X—because it’s an opportunity to attempt “rebranding,” which is a concept she read about in British Vogue. She said that turning me into Lexie Oswell is like turning the Gap into Chanel. Then she apologized and bought me some expensive mint tea because I am not the Gap.

  When I get to Ramie’s house, she ushers me right upstairs.

  “What happened to Chubby Chic?” I ask her. “You’re wearing skinny jeans again.”

  She sits me down on her ancient lumpy brass bed and grabs her laptop, where she’s downloaded the Alexis Oswell footage. “Yeah,” she says, “I’ve had a rethink of Chubby Chic.” She sits cross-legged next to me on the thick down comforter and clicks her video software. “Turns out Chubby Chic is not as paradigm shifting as I thought, given the overall lardassification of the American public.”

  “Lardassification?”

  She adjusts the screen brightness. “Yeah. My new word of the week. What do you think?”

  I sit cross-legged on the bed. “It’s nice, Rames. Sensitive, you know, to fat people.”

  “Right,” she says. “Good point. Anyway, here is the lovely and talented Alexis Oswell.” She clicks Play with a flourish, and Lexie’s grainy butt and legs begin moving in and out of focus through the crowded hallway near the art room at Winterhead High. “It’s a little jerky,” Ramie says. “A cinematographer I am not.”

  We examine Lexie’s walk from a variety of angles and determine that there are exactly four main elements to her overall presentation:

  1. Shoulders erect

  2. Head tilted back

  3. Eyes focused on the distance

  4. Hips utterly stationary

  That last element is the biggest challenge. I’m sort of bowlegged and my hips tend to sway of their own accord. To achieve Lexie’s snooty, stick-up-the-butt walk, Ramie has to grab on to both of my hips and hold them steady while I shuffle back and forth in front of her bed.

  “Stop swaying!” she says.

  But my hips won’t obey.

  She lets go and says, “Watch me.”

  She stands by the ancient hissing radiator under the frosty window and tries the walk herself.

  “Ramie,” I say. “You walk like a trucker.”

  She stops in front of the antique beveled mirror above her white dresser, backs up and clomps toward it again. “Mal,” she says. “You’re right. I never realized how unfeminine I am.”

  “Yeah, well, your boobs make up for it. Anyway, let’s focus on me here.”

  After several tries, I manage to tame my wayward hips by clenching my buttocks and forcing my feet to point outward like a duck.

  Ramie sprawls on the bed with the laptop at eye level and checks my walk against the Lexie footage.

  “No, no, no,” she says. “You look like Frankenstein. Your upper body is too stiff.”

  I stop at her window and shake out my legs and arms. “I think I’m cramping up. Do I at least have the bottom half down?”

  “Do it again!” she says.

  I take a deep breath, clench my buttocks and duckwalk the three strides to her dresser, watching my reflection the whole way.

  “Actually,” she says, “that’s not bad. You look constipated, but if you loosen up your shoulders and relax your face, it won’t be so mal.”

  Mastering the upper body is much easier and comes with the discovery that “looking down your nose at people” is not a metaphor but an actual posture. With her cell phone, Ramie videos me walking a few short laps; then I join her on the bed and we compare it to the Lexie footage.

  “Pretty good,” she says. “I
feel myself hating you.”

  “Yes,” I say. “But you respect me, don’t you? I intrigue.”

  Ramie raises an eyebrow.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing.” She closes the laptop and sits up.

  I sit up too. “Ramie!”

  She sighs. “You’re not exactly approachable like this.”

  “Do you have Alzheimer’s?” I say. “That’s the whole point. It’s not about being approachable. It’s about becoming a ‘high-status’ woman.”

  “Right,” she says. But there’s doubt in her eyes.

  “Ramie,” I say. “I need you on board with this. If you have concerns, I need to know them now.”

  “Nope,” she says. “I’m on board. You become an uptight snob. Tommy is bound to want you.”

  “Aloof, not uptight.”

  “Right. You become an aloof snob, while I dig for signs that Tommy is growing wild with desire to hunt you.”

  I drop my head into my hands.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “But you have to admit this is a pretty non-sane philosophy.”

  “Who cares?” I tell her. “As long as it works.” I pull myself off the bed and walk over to her assortment of vintage trench coats hung from a row of wooden hooks. Above them is a framed photo of Greta Garbo smoking a cigarette and looking all classy. Talk about a high-status woman.

  “Look,” I tell her. “I’ve tried it the other way, being friendly, being approachable. It’s not getting me a date with Tommy Knutson, is it? Boys are different.”

  “You sound like your mother.”

  “Shut up,” I say. “It’s just a fact, Ramie. It’s science. If we want them to act on their natural male instincts as hunters, we have to play our part as—”

  “Gatherers?” she says.

  “No!” I say. “As prey.” I grab the belt from one of the trench coats and start fiddling with it. “I thought you were on board with this. You got the Lexie footage.”

  Ramie cocks her head as she sizes me up.

  “What?” I say.

  “This isn’t just about getting a prom date, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You heart him.”

  “I do not.” I look down and start winding the belt around my finger. “He’s just a decent prom prospect, you know, being new and kind of a loner.”