by Blake Nelson
But even without calling her, I knew what Carla would do. She’d wear her hair any way she felt like and with Jackie O sunglasses and a scarf and the shortest miniskirt and if anyone said anything to her she would give them her blank stare and they would be totally faced! So what did I wear? I wore my plainest black jeans and a T-shirt and my hair down and sunglasses that I was too scared to wear out of Rebecca’s car. Cybil wore blue jeans and a button-down shirt and Rebecca was the most daring of us all because at least she wore a dress. And walking across the parking lot that first morning, there were all these children getting out of their parents’ cars and they looked so small you were afraid you’d step on one. And everyone always said how school is just babysitting until you’re old enough to work and for the first time it really seemed true.
At this point the only thing at Hillside I really cared about was Mr. Perry and making sure I got into college. I went right in the first day and said hi to him and got my SAT stuff and he smiled at me like here was a girl with potential. But then Cybil told me at lunch that the all-women’s colleges were full of lesbians and I better watch out. And then Greg came and sat with us and he had just come from the parking lot where he had been smoking pot with Matthew. And it was scary because Greg never did drugs and you could see in his eyes how crazy it was making him and how scared he was. So then after lunch Cybil and Matthew got in a fight about Greg. Matthew said it wasn’t his fault and anyway what business was it of hers? But Cybil said it was her business and how she wished it wasn’t, how the last thing she wanted was to be dependent on a bunch of pothead boys.
After school all the seniors were in the parking lot and there was a party at Forest Park and Greg was still stoned and afraid to go home so Cybil and I took him to the party. It was a beautiful day and there was a keg and we all sat on picnic tables and everyone drank beer. And these boys bugged us to come play Frisbee and we tried and I couldn’t even throw it but Cybil of course was a total expert and was whizzing it around and all the boys were so amazed. And we drank some beer and took off our shoes and this one boy tried to talk to me and he said, “You’re friend is pretty good at Frisbee.” I said, “Yeah and she’s also the biggest rock star in Portland.” The boy nodded and looked at Greg and he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
And it was weird being a senior because people were getting their last chance to switch their friends or change their image or adjust their look. Like Rebecca was now Miss Alternative Fashion with her horn-rims and her Chinese slippers. Cybil, on the other hand, was getting blander by the second. At least at school. It was like she was trying to disappear. Matthew looked the same, scraggly and with a tattoo, but now he hung around with Betsy Warren and Marjorie. Marjorie had dyed her hair blond and was doing a sort of druggy glam look and even wore fake eyelashes for half a day before Mrs. Katz told her it was “inappropriate.” And Betsy Warren was still doing bong hits all the time and dealing drugs and getting dreadlocks from never washing her hair. And Greg started wearing these super baggy skater shorts that Cybil gave him. He was still dying his hair and there was now a sophomore boy who dyed his hair all the time and dressed weird and people started calling him “Little Greg.” And then Rebecca got a crush on a junior boy named Tom Petrovich. He was a trendy Monte Carlo type and he was going out with this cute sophomore girl but Rebecca decided she wanted him. So she started asking him out and she had a car and the other girl didn’t and she was a senior and the other girl wasn’t and she would have sex and the other girl wouldn’t and so Rebecca got him pretty easily.
Meanwhile football season was going and everyone said we had such a great team this year and Bobby Wingate was going to be All-State. There was a picture of him in The Oregonian as well as an interview in the school paper, Hillsider, in which he said that Camden had not shown respect to Hillside and it was their mission to make Camden pay the price this year at Homecoming. And then Nathan Roth came over to me one day and told me he wanted me on Hillsider and Mr. Perry had told him to get me and would I come hang out with them and maybe write something if I felt like it? Nathan was one of the brains of our class and he was the new editor of Hillsider. So after school me and Cybil went to the newspaper office and when we walked in everybody stared at Cybil. Unlike the boys at the keg party, they knew who she was. They remembered her shaved head and her fights with Mrs. Renault and they knew she was in Sins of Our Fathers with Matthew. And it wasn’t like they were against her, they just didn’t know how to deal with her exactly and it was awkward and they gave us stuff to proofread and we did it and then we left. And then we went to Taco Time and Cybil said she wasn’t really into Hillsider but she thought I should do it because it seemed pretty cool and anyway it would look good on my college applications.
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And it sort of bugged me how people acted around Cybil. Like sometimes I would hear people talking about her and making up rumors and I started to realize that was their revenge. They were boring and Cybil was cool so they tried to isolate her and starve her socially. And the next morning I put my hair up and wore my fish dress and I made a pact with myself that I would wear my coolest clothes and shoes every day for a week to show my solidarity with Cybil. Of course at school everybody had to say something and tease me but not too much because I was a senior. And when Nathan saw me he looked at my hair but then he said he was sorry that everyone gave us a weird vibe and he still wanted me to work on Hillsider and Cybil too. I didn’t have anything else to do so I went there after school and sat off to one side and proofread some other things and it was pretty weird because I was so dressed up and everyone else was in jeans and sweaters and trying to look newspaper-ish and literary but they played cool tapes so it was okay. And then Nathan read me his editorial about distributing condoms in school and he wanted to know what I thought and I said it seemed sort of boring. He nodded and I said it might still be good, what did I know? But he said I was right and he went to rewrite it and I could hear people whispering about me and I was sorry I said anything.
The next day Cybil came running up to me and Sins of Our Fathers was going to open for The Sidewinders from Texas at Baker Theater. I was like, “Wow!” And then I went to Hillsider and told Nathan and he said I should write an article about it. And I was getting all excited and thinking of what I’d write and then I called Cybil but she was totally against it. She said that she just wanted to get through Hillside with as little waves as possible and it was already hard enough and please please please don’t tell Matthew because he’ll want the publicity and there’d be a big fight.
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So that was that. There was no article in Hillsider but there was a little blurb in The Oregonian about The Sidewinders with one line about “local rockers Sins of Our Fathers,” which upset Matthew since he hated “rockers.” The day of the show Cybil was getting so antsy she skipped the last half of the day. And as soon as school was out I drove to her house and we got dressed and Cybil was really nervous because Baker Theater was huge and a real theater. Then we went to Matthew’s and loaded the stuff and me and Cybil and Fiona drove in Fiona’s smashed-up Toyota. And it was so exciting because The Sidewinders had their huge bus outside and the Baker Theater people looked at us like we were little kids. And then during sound check Cybil sang “Oblivion” to the empty theater and it sounded so incredible even the janitors stopped to watch.
After sound check I tried to leave Cybil alone in their dressing room but she made me stay because she needed me because she felt so alone. So I stayed and then just before they went on we both snuck out to the back of the stage and crawled up the steps and peeked over and it wasn’t super crowded but there was still a lot of people. Cybil said it didn’t matter how big the crowd was, just that it was a professional sound system and a real stage and it would be good practice.
After that I waited out front and they came out and everybody clapped and Cybil looked so great in the little-girl dress we had picked out. She had tons of lipstick and her hair
was parted in the middle now in a sort of Prince Valiant look and her pale skin looked so white next to her red mouth. And then Greg and Fiona started “We Are All Prostitutes” and all the people in the front nodded their heads to the beat but not too much. The people in the back barely watched. And Sins sounded good and it was fun but people didn’t really get into it. They came to see The Sidewinders from Texas and they didn’t care about some band of “local rockers.”
And just when Sins were playing their last song Nathan appeared. He had pushed his way to the front and he grabbed me and told me how great they were and he couldn’t believe Sins of Our Fathers went to his school. And I guess he was trying to look cool in his paisley shirt but he looked pretty dorky and he danced around and headbanged and it was embarrassing. And then afterward he wanted to go to the dressing room so I took him and he shook everyone’s hand and Matthew immediately started schmoozing him. Cybil and Fiona were trying to change and I told them sorry about Nathan and I didn’t know how to get rid of him. Cybil was sort of pissed but Fiona told her she better get used to it. And then Matthew lit a joint and he and Fiona smoked it which made Nathan nervous and he left.
Afterward we drove home with Fiona and I asked Cybil what she thought of Nathan. She didn’t think much. I asked her what people at Hillside would think of the music scene if they knew about it but she was too busy listening to a tape of the show and analyzing all her mistakes. And all I could think about was how bad Cybil would face Hillside if they did an article about her and all she could think about was if she should scream the last verse of “Love Disease” or just sing it normal.
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But even if Cybil didn’t want Sins to be in Hillsider, Matthew did and Nathan did too. They planned this big spread with pictures and interviews but then Cybil found out and said if they did it she’d quit the band. She told me about it at Taco Time, which was so packed with sophomores throwing food and shrieking at each other we could barely discuss it. And after school Nathan came up to me and we talked about the whole Sins controversy and if Cybil had a right to deny Hillside students a story that might be an important cultural message. And I was like, “If she doesn’t want to be in the paper she shouldn’t have to be.” And I knew he wouldn’t do it because Mrs. Schroeder was the faculty adviser and she would never let you embarrass anyone.
Meanwhile, Rebecca was gushing over Tom Petrovich all the time and she was being so obnoxious and making fun of me for being on Hillsider. I was getting sick of her anyway. It seemed like all the seniors were sick of each other but at the same time there was the attitude that this was our senior year and we’d completed some great journey and weren’t we wonderful and didn’t we have all these fond memories and it was so bogus. And people were already getting nostalgic and sappy and when they did senior pictures for yearbook everyone thought up dumb quotes to put with their pictures, like “What a long strange trip it’s been,” or “I came, I saw, I partied!”
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College. That was all I thought about. Getting out of Portland. Getting out of Hillside. And so I kept going to Hillsider and Nathan made me assistant editor so I could put it on my applications. And I took my SATs again even though I did really good the first time. And I always checked in with Mr. Perry and we sent away for applications and my parents were getting excited even though my mother was complaining I dressed up too much and I was trying to look like a model. And at Hillsider this girl Beth would always come sit by me while I read stuff and she would gossip about the other Hillsider people and how all the girls had a crush on Nathan except Amy Brubaker, who hated Nathan because she thought she should be editor. Amy had been Cynthia Carmichael’s main assistant last year when Cynthia was editor and Amy assumed she would be next in line. Now Amy said it was sexism that Nathan got editor because they wouldn’t allow two women editors in a row. And Beth told me about Cynthia Carmichael and how she would write the whole paper herself because she was a total Virgo perfectionist and she didn’t like any of the other people’s stuff and how Nathan was so much better because he just told people to write something and he didn’t care what. Cynthia Carmichael went to Berkeley, which was where Beth wanted to go because it was the most progressive college in the West and she didn’t want to go back east because the people there were too snobbish. She asked me where I wanted to go and I didn’t know and I asked her if it was true that the all-women’s colleges were all lesbians and she was shocked and she said, “Who told you that?”
And even though I didn’t think of myself as being involved in Hillside, I was so busy getting good grades and doing Hillsider and talking to Mr. Perry that I was more of a high school student than ever. And when I went downtown to the library I practically hid inside it and I never went to Scamp’s or to Metro Mall because I didn’t want to see Carla or anybody from the music scene because I was thinking about different stuff now. And some days I would wear my black dress and my pumps and take my umbrella and my trench coat and I would walk around downtown by the secretaries and the business people just to feel what it was like to be a real adult. And I would look around at the buildings and try to imagine real skyscrapers like in San Francisco or New York and what it would be like to be around real cosmopolitan people. Because in Portland no matter how “big city” you felt someone would always walk by with a knife on their belt or a John Deere cap or have the most embarrassing haircut.
And then it was Homecoming and all the underclassmen were getting all excited and it was so weird because if you were a senior it didn’t seem like anything. It was just a joke. Even among the corniest people. I still went to the football game though. I went with Cybil. It was at Camden and we sat in the parents section and wore big coats and hid under our umbrellas. And it was raining and cold and the field was like this big mud pit. And Cybil tried to explain the rules and we watched Bobby Wingate, who never seemed to do anything because he was on the line. Cybil said that was normal and he would still be All-State. And all the time we watched him we talked about how he had seen his friend Jerry get killed by skinheads and even if we hated him that was still pretty intense and maybe that was why he was such a good football player because he knew it was just a stupid game.
Maybe that was why I was such a good high school student, because I knew it was just a stupid game. And in my locker I had a little jewelry box with my bullet from Brad and a guitar pick of Todd’s and on my door I had an old Thriftstore Apocalypse poster from Outer Limits. That was my real life. And then Beth invited me to go for lunch at Arctic Circle, which was a couple blocks down from Taco Time and was right on the border of where Camden students hung out. So we went and it was all Camden students who were just as dumb as Hillside students except for one boy who was cute and sort of preppie and kept looking at us. Beth was yakking away about an article she was writing about what it was really like to be a cheerleader, besides all the glamour and popularity that people saw on the surface. And then the preppie boy came over and he was like, “You guys are from Hillside, aren’t you?” And then he told us we couldn’t hang out at Arctic Circle and I guess he was trying to be funny because then he tried to talk to us. But we just blew him off.
Then after lunch Cybil came running up to my locker and said there was a new club in Portland called K Club. And Matthew had already got them a show on a Saturday night. So after school we drove downtown to check out K Club. It was across the river and in this warehouse building down by the train tracks. And it was raining so we got our umbrellas and walked around and tried to look in the windows and then a guy came out and said, “Can I help you?” Cybil said she was in Sins of Our Fathers and he said, “Cybil, wow, come on in.” So we did and it was all dark and dusty and there was sawdust everywhere and tools and you could see where they were building the stage. The guy’s name was Eric and he told Cybil he was at the church show and what a drag it was when the police came. So we told him about playing in the barn and he had heard about it and he called it “The Legendary Farm Sho
w” and he was really bummed out that he missed it. Then he offered us some beer and we said no thanks and he offered us pot and we said no thanks and so he made tea. And he was playing Color Green on his box and Cybil told him I used to go out with Todd and he was so impressed even though I told him I didn’t really. And he cleared off a board and set up a little table with the teapot and the cups and everything. And he told Cybil how he saw her with Pax at Outer Limits and they talked about bands and shows and I sipped my tea and it was really fun in a mature having-tea sort of way.
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Matthew must have told Nath an about Sins playing at K Club because the next day Nathan wanted me to write something about it or at least get some pictures because everyone at Hillside was talking about Sins of Our Fathers now and they had to do something. But that wasn’t true. The only people who cared about Sins were the Hillsider people and their only interest was to try to be cooler than each other and none of them were very cool to start with so it was like a race of slugs. And Beth asked me what you wear to a Sins of Our Fathers concert and I explained to her that it wasn’t a “concert” it was a “show” and you could wear anything you wanted except if you went near the slamming pit it would probably get ripped off you. That scared her and she said she’d wear a sweatshirt or something that wouldn’t get ruined and I told her if she did that no one would talk to her. And it was very confusing to her so I said, “I can’t explain it, you just have to go a couple times.”
And then Eric K Club called up Cybil and asked her out. We were so shocked because Eric was older and obviously rich if he was starting a club and Cybil didn’t know what to think. So we went to Taco Time and tried to talk about it but all the Hillside children were there so we went to Arctic Circle, which was not quite as bad and at least they were from a different school. Cybil debated it and I tried to be objective even though in my heart I was afraid of her getting a boyfriend because Todd was gone and it didn’t seem like I’d ever get a boyfriend at Hillside. But Eric was very cool and maybe older men were the solution. And anyway I could tell she was curious about him so I told her to go for it. Not that it mattered what I said. And then I thought I should try harder to get a boyfriend for myself, like not a really serious one but just someone to go to movies with or have sex so I would still be in practice when I went to college.
