PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Sometimes, I feel like life is trying to swallow me whole. I do my best to flail about and get caught in its throat. More than once I’ve been sure I was hanging onto life’s uvula by my fingernails. Which, of course, just tickles life’s throat until it coughs me back out.

  God, I’m tired of being coated in life’s phlegm.

  But my curiosity was piqued. What girl could Josh possibly think was worth all this trouble?

  2: Arbitrary Principles

  “And Dad’s okay with this?”

  “We’ve discussed it, and decided it’s for the best.” Mom’s eyes betrayed the truth. At some point in their marriage, Dad’s balls dropped off. Instead of arguing with her, he always just let her have her way. He was gone a lot for work, so it was easier to let her make the decisions. If at any time he didn’t agree, he obviously kept it to himself. He hates confrontation. He’s pretty much a coward.

  It wasn’t a total shock to learn he hadn’t fought for my right to consume snack food.

  “So, nothing? Even cereal?” I couldn’t believe it. I had come down for breakfast and found the cereal shelf empty. Our once-welcoming blue kitchen had become a room of horrors.

  “It’s not healthy.” Mom stood at the counter and stirred her coffee slowly. The discarded spoon clattered in the sink before she added, “We’ve been bad parents for letting you continue on this way.”

  No, she was a bad parent for a lot of reasons, but letting me eat was not one of them.

  “So what am I supposed to eat?” I said.

  “There’s fruit in the fridge.” Mom opened the door and pointed towards the bottom drawers. “There’s also healthy food in the freezer. You just microwave them.”

  “Where’d everything else go?” Cereal had not been the only sacrifice to the cellulite gods. The chocolate syrup was gone, and the ice cream toppings. Not to mention pretty much anything else I would eat on purpose.

  I tried to keep my glaring to a minimum.

  “In the trash.” She closed the fridge door. The suction sound of the seal heralded my impending death by starvation. “It’s for the best. You’ll see. No more of this ‘Elchubba’ nonsense.”

  My heart drop-kicked my intestines so hard, I thought I was going to throw up.

  “You . . . you heard that?”

  “Honey, the whole neighborhood heard that.” Her patronizing smile prepared me for what she said next. I heard it so often. “Heaven knows what the neighbors think of us now, allowing our youngest daughter to continue on this way. No, we’re putting a stop to this right now. I vow you will be slim before you go off to college and gain weight again. The Freshmen Ten, you know. Every girl does, and with you . . . well, let’s not think about that.”

  I speak Mom-ese fluently, as what she said is not actually what she meant. It never is. What she really said was, Embarrassingly fat child, I won’t be laughed at behind my back because of you, and until I can get rid of you, I’ll crush you under my overpriced pumps until you submit.

  Which is moderately unfair when you think about it. It’s not like I’m enormous. I can walk through the mall without being stared at. For the most part. I guess it depends on how much makeup I’m wearing. But I’m sure it’s not because I’m a wee bit over Standard American Lingerie Model size.

  A hundred years ago, this wouldn’t be an issue. I would be a frickin’ catch a hundred years ago.

  “Some girls become lesbians in college, too,” I said. Forget survival. I do this far too often for my own safety. “Any plans to keep that from happening?”

  Her blue eyes narrowed, and the terrified voice of reason that normally fed my survival instinct in the back of my head stopped screaming and fainted dead away.

  “Those girls were lesbians before they got there,” Mom said. “A higher education had nothing to do with it. In your case . . . well, let’s just say I’m not sure breeding is such a good idea for you, anyway.”

  Oh, Mom. Your love for me doth bring a blush to mine cheek.

  I shook my head and walked out. It was pointless to argue. “I’m not hungry,” was the last thing I said to her that morning. It was a total lie. I was starving. But I wasn’t in the mood to let her win, so I stomped upstairs to my room and boycotted breakfast.

  All things being equal . . . but they never are, are they? Ice cream doesn’t equal broccoli any more than a broken fingernail equals capital punishment. If she had grounded me from food because she loved me, it still would have pissed me off, but at least it might have meant something. Depriving me of chocolate just because she summoned a half teaspoon of shame from the possibility of what others might think—well, that’s just being a self-involved cow.

  ***

  “Report her for neglect.”

  “I don’t think sugar deprivation will hold up, Aka.”

  Aka Floyd was one of the few people in existence who knew about the unorthodox relationship my mother and I had. As expected, I found him sitting in the lunchroom. He was compulsively early for school, even though he held a part-time job in the evenings at the local grocery store.

  “Still,” Aka said, settling his dark green eyes on me for a beat before dropping his gaze again. “She’s been consumed by the Dark Side. I don’t understand why you put up with it.”

  Yes, he did. I told him plenty of times. It’s that whole ‘freedom isn’t cheap’ thing. Or free. Whatever. There’s a price for freedom. I got that. I didn’t want any government-funded program pit bull sniffing around my life. If they knew everything she put me through over the years, they would take me away and put me into The System. She would get to keep my dad and the house, and I would be living in some hellhole with a bunch of strangers, sharing a bunk bed with a bed-wetter that snores. Like in the movies.

  “I’ll make do,” I said. “It’s not like she grounded me from the internet or took away my cell phone, right?”

  Those were hellish weeks that made me question the very purpose of my existence.

  “I guess.” Aka closed his spiral notebook and tucked it into his bag. He wrote for the school paper, too. If the subject ever came up, I’d tell him he was my best friend. But why pull out the label maker now? “Things to do,” were his parting words as he left me to stew in my own bad luck.

  He reminded me of an old, fat cat. Sometimes a sloth. Not because he was lazy or stupid—far from it, in fact—but because he was just never in a hurry and so completely laid back. He spoke his mind in his deep monotone, then discussed things no further. It was a beautiful blend of disinterest and stoicism. Almost an aloof apathy.

  It often made me wonder who he was trying to impress.

  Determined to avoid my stomach growling in class, I pulled an apple from my bag. I didn’t have much of a choice. The woman had left me a sack lunch instead of lunch money on the kitchen counter. I planned to eat it in our small newspaper office during lunch for the rest of the year. No way was I going to be teased by the other kids for the rabbit food the sack contained. To choose to diet was one thing. To have a diet foisted on me was another.

  The scent of baked goods drifted about the lunchroom, and I was tempted to go beg a lunch lady to let me do dishes or something in exchange for anything with a sinful amount of calories.

  A wall of windows separated the lunchroom from a major artery of the school’s pedestrian traffic. I spotted Josh walking with Ryan and dropped my eyes quickly before we could make eye-contact.

  Ryan Dixon and I loathed each other with equal fire, though I doubted either one of us could single out the event or conversation that had spurned the malice between us. There probably wasn’t even a real reason. We weren’t oil and water. We were oil tossed atop a flame, and took turns being the fire.

  An idea struck me, and my back straightened abruptly. It was a colossal, epiphagasmic idea. Anyone paying attention would have seen a bulb above my head similar to that of the Grinch when he decided to steal Christmas.

  I pulled out my notebook and scribbled down a note for Josh to meet me at
lunch in the newspaper office, then followed him and Ryan down the hall. Ryan headed for the restroom, and I jumped at the opportunity to approach Josh alone at his locker.

  The contents of his locker were no surprise. Various band publicity shots, stickers with guitars or music notes on the inside of the door, and a miniature plastic human skeleton hanging from his coat hook. He was in a band. I think he played bass. I never cared enough to check.

  Josh didn’t see me standing there, which meant he must have zero peripheral vision. To get his attention, I extended the note out and tapped him on the nose with it.

  “Hey, what the . . .” His pale green eyes went wide when he saw me, then he did the nervous spy thing again and pushed his bushy blond hair out of his eyes. He was so twitchy. He would make a terrible drug dealer.

  “Just read it,” I shoved the note in his hand and walked away.

  3: A Deal Is Struck

  I didn’t get why Josh wanted me to write the letter. He was in a band, so therefore had easy access to at least one person who fancied themself a good writer. That is, assuming one of them wrote the band’s lyrics.

  At first it made sense enough, but as the morning wore on, it seemed more likely he would have asked one of his friends instead. Especially considering the degree to which we disliked each other.

  I worried about who it would be for. There were several girls in my school who I didn’t like at all.

  I don’t know why I agreed to do what he asked. I guess the price of my morals might be weighed in calories. But I didn’t think so. It wasn’t for the food. Not really. I loved me some chocolate, but I did have a few drops of pride swimming in my veins.

  It had a lot more to do with principles. It was against my principles to forge a document for someone I didn’t like, and probably to someone I didn’t like.

  But it was more against my principles to let my mother win.

  Fourth period was my school paper elective. The assignments were due the previous Friday, so I eagerly dipped into them to distract myself until Josh arrived during fifth period lunch. Aka’s piece was of the usual embellishments. “. . . agglomerate my thoughts . . . hedonistic throttles . . . cicatrix of euphony . . . idiosyncratic illuminations . . .”

  The boy seriously forgot the demographic of our readership.

  Josh didn’t knock, but he did close the door behind him. Sort of like a criminal on the run from an angry mob. It smelled like he had just reapplied whatever man-scent he wore. The chemical haze assaulted my mouth and tasted like hairspray.

  “What is wrong with you?” I dropped Aka’s latest masterpiece on my desk. “You go to my house in the middle of the night, you twitch more than a ferret on crack in the hall earlier, and now you come barreling in here like you’re . . . I don’t know . . . afraid to be seen in here.”

  Which was just stupid. We were the school paper. He could have been there for any sort of reason at all: birthday notice for a friend, dropping off a photo, putting in an ad for his band, anything.

  “I just don’t want to be caught, all right?” His shoes squeaked against the speckled linoleum squares as he edged himself sideways so he could not be seen through the slender window in the beige door.

  “Caught what? Speaking to the editor of the school paper?”

  “You know what I mean. It’s gotta be a secret.”

  “That your own writing is unintelligible? Josh, that’s not a secret.” I tapped the papers on my desk to straighten them into a neat stack. “In fact, I don’t even see how this little idea of yours will work. My writing is nothing at all like your speaking. This girl must be an idiot, or you are for thinking you’ll fool her. Either way, it’ll never work out. One of you doesn’t deserve the other.”

  “It’s Macey Trindle.”

  I laughed. “I stand corrected. You totally deserve each other.”

  Macey, the daughter of a minister, was a Bible-thumper by day and desperate-for-Daddy’s-attention-bad-girl by night. She was so clichÉ that even clichÉ tried to disown her in embarrassment.

  “Do you want the money or not?”

  “That depends on the difficulty,” I said. “I mean, are we talking sonnets or just how much you like her hair?”

  “Not sonnets, no. That’s lame.”

  “Why don’t you just write her a song? Or have one of your buddies do it?”

  “I don’t want them to know. They don’t like her.”

  “They don’t like anybody.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “That’s not true.” It really wasn’t. I might’ve been a bit rough around the edges or judgmental at times or a little impatient . . . well, it still wasn’t true. “I have plenty of friends.”

  “Who are just like you.” His tone was accusatory. What was wrong with being like me? Okay, probably a lot of things.

  “I beg to differ. Aka is nothing like me.” No truer words ever spoken. “Besides, your friends are just like you. So what? People tend to hang out with people like themselves.”

  “Yeah, well. She’s not like me or you or my friends. She’s special.”

  Wow. I really had to work to keep my clever remarks to myself on that one. “So, what do you want? You’ve got to give me an idea.”

  “Just something . . . nice. A hello letter sort of thing.”

  “Hello letter?” I’m pretty sure hello letters were not covered in Creative Writing. “Can’t you just write down what you want to say and I’ll edit it to where you don’t sound like the illiterate jerk you are?”

  “Who’s paying you.”

  “Fine. The illiterate jerk who’s paying me.” Maybe this wouldn’t work out after all. Josh clearly had no idea what he wanted, and I certainly didn’t want to write nice things about Macey. Or to Macey. Or even near Macey for that matter. The girl could have an unsavory disease.

  “No, I’ve tried.” He had looked uncomfortable, but now he looked worried. His green eyes kept glancing over his shoulder out the window. He tucked his wavy blond hair behind his left ear. “Don’t you think I tried? It just comes out all stupid. How about you write something and I take out all the parts that don’t sound like me?”

  “That would be a blank piece of paper.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  No. Not really. My editing him was a way better idea than him editing me. Boys could be so stupid sometimes.

  “All right. I’ll give it a try, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I held out my hand in anticipation of payment. I wasn’t going to go through a lot of work without being paid first.

  He shook his head. “No, not until you do it.”

  “You were going to pay me last night.” Did I mention boys are stupid? “So give it here.”

  “Well, that was my first offer, and you turned it down. Now we have a new deal. This time you don’t get paid until you write it.”

  My brows arched. Either he was cleverer than I thought, or he was imitating a mobster movie he had seen.

  “Payment for services rendered, right? Not to be rendered.” He had a very pleased smile. It might have taken him hours to come up with the idea. It would be cruel to burst his bubble.

  “Half.” Cruel, but not unlike me. “It’s called a down payment, Mr. Economics.”

  “I don’t have half.” He withdrew his twenty-dollar bill again and showed it to me. “I’ll get change in the lunchroom. Back in a sec.”

  His exit was an abrupt fail. Josh turned too quick and hit his nose on the opened door.

  Macey Trindle. I didn’t get it. She was the poster child for hypocrisy. She was teacher’s pet: the school staff all loved her, even the janitors. She was the Treasurer of the student council. She wasn’t popular—her clothes weren’t trendy enough for that, nor her family important enough—but she had a circle of friends. Do-gooders. People who hadn’t seen what she was really like when they weren’t around. Apparently Josh knew this as well as I did. Probably saw her at one of his band’s gigs.

  If they were even good eno
ugh to have gigs. Hell if I knew. For a writer of a school newspaper, I started to feel pretty uninformed regarding the goings-on of my fellow classmates. I’d have to do some research on Josh and his band. Asking would have been too easy.

  4: The Stalking of Macey Trindle

  I didn’t know enough about Macey to write a letter to her. I didn’t want to know much, but I needed to know eye color, facial scars, if she smelled funny—that sort of thing. I never paid enough attention to her to know these things. I was more interested in behavior and social habits. Since it was supposed to be a letter from a guy, it needed something flattering about the way she looked.

  There is a thin line between observing and stalking. I’ve never seen it, but it’s only logical it exists.

  Macey wasn’t at all exciting to watch. I would see her in the halls, but she kept her eyes on her feet. I lingered near her in the library, but she didn’t do or say anything. She just read her book while her friends whispered and giggled softly amongst themselves at her table.

  At the end of the day, when the yellow herd of kid-carriers stampeded out into the world, I spotted Macey at the back of one of them. She gazed out the window with the expression of someone who wasn’t looking at anything in particular.

  What Josh saw in her was a total mystery. Then again, most things about the guy were, so I didn’t sweat it too much. I’d have to take another approach with Macey. Check online and see if she had a blog or something. With any luck, there would be a picture so I could at least know her eye color. It shouldn’t have been as important as it felt, but after hours of trying to find out, it had become a quest of greatness. I had to know; not because I cared, but because I wanted the answer.

  My house was in walking distance from school. It was red brick on the first floor and had dark green siding around the second floor. The brick chimney on the east side lent to the illusion it was a giant Christmas present. There were wide concrete steps that led up to the dark wooden porch, and a swing hung on thin chains from the ceiling.