The Blurry Years

by Eleanor Kriseman

  “So, um, it might be quieter outside,” KJ said. Music had started blaring from the living room, a song with a loud bass that thumped in my chest to a beat I couldn’t quite get the hang of. “It’s a nice night out. You wanna go out there with me?”

  Sometimes my mom would bring home a jug of cheap sangria from Rainbow Mart on her way home from work and we’d drive out to the beach and catch the last hour of sun out the dashboard window, drinking sangria out of Styrofoam cups from the restaurant. “I’d rather have you drinking with me than out partying,” she’d say. “I remember high school boys. You’re much better off drinking with me.”

  I followed KJ out the sliding glass door onto the patio. There were a couple of guys fiddling with the grill, which didn’t seem to be working. A table littered with red cups vibrated from the boom box that sat atop it, its legs wobbling back and forth on the patchy grass. A group of girls sprawled on deck chairs, passing a handle of vodka between them, a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke at their feet.

  KJ jerked his head to the left, motioning at the shed in the corner of the yard. He shrugged, embarrassed. “Just as loud out here, I guess. I just wanted to get out of that house. It’ll be quieter behind the shed.” He took my hand and led me there. “I think you’re real cute,” he said, and I thought about Johnny, something I hadn’t done in a long time. Both of y’all are real cute.

  And then KJ was kissing me, sloppy but gentle. We both tasted like beer. I wasn’t sure what to feel so I froze. He pulled away and said, “I’m sorry. We don’t have to do this. God, I feel like an asshole.” Then he looked down and shook his head, like a dog after a bath. “C’mon, I’ll take you back inside.”

  I didn’t want KJ to be nice. I didn’t want him to take me back inside. I wanted to kiss him more. Sometimes when somebody was nice to me it made me want to cry. Or sometimes it made me want to be mean to them, just to see how much they would let me.

  I put a finger under KJ’s chin and tipped it up again, forcefully. I kissed him and I knew what to do with my lips this time. He pulled away and took a deep breath. “I wasn’t expecting that.” I felt him through his jeans. I was someone else. I fumbled for his zipper. We were still behind the shed, rustling in the weeds while the party raged on around us. I stuck my hand down his boxers. “Wait,” he said, but I pushed him against the shed with my other hand and pinned him to the wall. I wanted to see what he would let me do to him.

  I didn’t want to get drunk with my mom and it wasn’t like she made me but sometimes she’d challenge me and I knew she didn’t want to win. “C’mon,” she’d say. “Finish your cup. Let me pour you another.” Every time she drove us home I clutched the seatbelt to my chest so tightly that I had trouble unfurling my fingers after we made it across the bridge. Her hands were always light on the wheel, tapping along to the radio. She liked it loud, so loud I’d have to yell to get her to hear me. She’d get real close to the bumper of the car in front of us, then look over at me and smile, as if she knew it scared me. She did know.

  And then I was on top of him, in the dirt, all of my weight pressing down on him. He could have flipped me over if he’d tried. I mean, he was tall and he played soccer. He was strong. But I think he was still surprised. I was a girl and I was tall but I was skinny, and not as tall as him, and I was holding him down in the patchy grass of someone else’s backyard where anybody could have seen us if they’d walked around the shed. He looked like he liked the surprise of it. And I liked how it felt to be on top.

  I pushed myself up so I was sitting on him. “We can go back inside, if you want,” he said. I shook my head, grabbed his hand and put it inside my shirt.

  “Take my shirt off,” I said. I was wearing an old tank top and a bra I’d borrowed from my mom. It was black and lacy and I knew it looked good.

  Sometimes it was, “Cal, I have to drive. You finish it.” She knew I would, because if I didn’t, she would. She took me to a meeting with her once, back when she’d tried to quit. I was too young to go to the one for family members by myself. Most of it was sad and boring but I couldn’t help but remember some of the words from the packet they handed me on the way out, the terms they used. Were you an enabler? A hero? A mascot? A scapegoat? I was the only one she had. I was all of them. But I remembered this one sentence like it was burned into my brain. “The enabler often provides excuses for the alcoholic’s behavior.” Like it was my fault.

  “Are you sure?” KJ asked. He looked confused. Like he was getting what he wanted but he didn’t think it was happening. So I took off my top by myself. I let him watch me. I made him watch me.

  “Your turn,” I said, and lifted up the hem of KJ’s shirt. The weeds must have been scratchy against his back but he didn’t say anything, and he lifted his arms obediently for me. I pressed myself against him, and kissed him. Then I bit his lip, hard. He wasn’t saying anything. I had never felt this kind of hardness beneath me before, but I knew what it meant, even though I’d never kissed a guy before tonight I knew what it meant, and I was grinding on top of him and he was saying “we can wait” and then I was undoing his belt and slipping my underwear to the side underneath my skirt and then he was saying something but it was like I was in a different world and I covered his mouth with one hand and slipped him inside of me with the other and he didn’t want to like it but he did and I was moving harder, and the music was loud and nobody knew where we were, and beneath my hand he moaned and then it was over.

  KJ looked at me kind of funny, in my bra and skirt on top of him. He said, “I didn’t know you were like that.” He paused. “It was my first time?” He said it like a question. He looked meaner now. “I just didn’t want to lose it to a slut,” he said, and sat up, shoving me roughly off of him. He wiped himself off on his shirt, then put it back on and walked away.

  My tank top was on the ground. I picked it up, shook it off, put it back on. Liquid seeped through my underwear and dripped down my leg. It hadn’t hurt and I hadn’t bled. I leaned back against the shed. I knew he would tell his friends, leaving out one important detail. That was okay. I would know how to handle them. I would be the one in charge from now on.

  14

  My mom was still working at the Oasis and I was praying she didn’t fuck it up because things were finally going well for me. I was sixteen and still weighed less than the minimum requirement for donating blood. I had the third-highest GPA in my high school class, and I pretended not to care about it but really I did. After KJ had told everyone what had happened at Andie’s party, none of the guys at school wanted anything to do with me, or at least, didn’t want to admit it. That was okay. Sometimes one of the soccer guys would hiss ‘slut’ at me in the hallway but I think they did that to any girl they knew wouldn’t fuck them. I was surprised at all the ways it didn’t make me feel.

  One thing I hadn’t expected was that I was now friends with Andie. In homeroom the Monday after her party, she’d sat down on the side of my desk and rolled her eyes. “So, KJ’s an ass, huh?” she said, and I nodded. “Hey—you never sit with anyone at lunch.” I hadn’t thought anyone had noticed that I sat alone outside unless it was raining, reading and pretending to eat a bag of chips. “Come sit with me and Dawn today,” she said. And that was it.

  It was better than being alone. I’d had enough of being alone.

  I’d also discovered it was easier to make friends when you could drink with them. Friendship, according to the girls I’d gotten to know, seemed to be essentially just a way to share a secret with someone else, obtain absolution for whatever you’d done, and—in turn—receive a piece of gossip equally as dark and shameful as what you’d just divulged. It wasn’t so much of a conversation as it was a mutual confession. So in that way, yes, I had friends. And there were other ways of not being alone.

  My teachers were starting to talk about college now. I’d noticed that they always asked us what we wanted to be—never what we wanted to do—when we ‘grew up,’ as if some of us hadn’t already grown up in
ways more intimate and fucked-up than the rest of our adult lives would be. It seemed as if they believed that all we had to do was follow some formula and within ten years, we’d have jobs—not jobs, careers. The girls, especially, all seemed to be full of plans for the future that were, to me, impossibly grandiose and sad. Just because you could sew a decent apron in home ec didn’t mean you were destined to live in New York City and become a famous fashion designer. I was embarrassed for them. I wasn’t going to be like that. I forced any thoughts I had about the future to the back of my brain, where they shrank amidst the clutter of my immediate wants and desires, the needs of my day-to-day existence. That felt like a more honest way to live, somehow.

  What if you’d already seen so many people living the lives they would have never dreamed for themselves that you didn’t see any reason to believe it would be any different for you? No one wanted to still be a waitress when they were my mom’s age. Someone had to do it. But nobody my age wanted to think that was how they’d end up. What if the way you were living was already as much as you could do?

  I worked three nights a week at a pizza restaurant ten minutes away from our apartment. Every shift I would split a bottle of cheap cabernet—stolen, although we didn’t like to think of it that way, from the boxes of overstock behind the restaurant bar—with a waitress in her early twenties who would take the bottle to the walk-in freezer and split it between two Styrofoam cups. I was the hostess, although the restaurant wasn’t fancy enough to call it that; there, I was the phone girl.

  We were at Andie’s place, getting ready for the night. Andie had invited a couple of guys we’d met at the beach to spend the night at her place. Andie’s mom was out of town. She was always out of town. There were three of us, and three of them.

  “I get the hot one,” Andie said, as if saying it would make it so. I was wearing a sundress. Andie and Dawn wore cutoffs. We scrutinized our own outfits, then each other’s, in the wall mirror by the kitchen. “Is this too much?” I said. I wanted them to say no. I loved that dress. I’d saved up for it—I thought it made me look like I actually had tits. “You can borrow something,” Andie said.

  I changed into cutoffs, borrowed a Van Halen concert tee from Andie’s older brother, soft and full of holes.

  Getting ready with Andie and Dawn was different than getting ready with Starr. Starr had applied makeup like she was painting with acrylics, mixing different colors and liquids on the surface of her skin until it didn’t look like she’d added anything, until all the colors had blended into each other. She was careful, precise, while her hair was feathered and soft.

  Andie and Dawn did nothing to their hair—they both wore it parted in the center, long and sometimes greasy. With makeup, they were definitive, sloppily deliberate, jostling for mirror space. Andie lined her eyes, circling the inner and outer lids over and over again, until they were rimmed in thick, smudgy black liner that felt like paste and smeared slightly throughout the night. She thought her eyes looked beady without it.

  Dawn wore mascara every day, obsessively, and combed out her eyelashes after applying it, then curled them, blow-drying the eyelash curler before using it, wincing slightly when the hot metal touched the paper-thin skin of her eyelids. Dawn looked perpetually wide awake, surprised, doe-like.

  On her lips, she wore clear, shiny gloss that came in a tube she kept in her pocket, which she took out frequently and reapplied incessantly, sometimes to the point where she’d open her mouth to speak and strings of lip gloss would stretch from the top to bottom lip in both corners of her mouth. She was obsessed with looking natural, in the way that a lot of girls with bad skin seem to be. She had the kind of pimples that stayed underneath the surface, bumps that didn’t turn red or come to a head, but just made the surface of her skin uneven. She tried valiantly to combat it, scrubbing her face raw with Noxzema every night and applying layers of foundation every morning, on top of which she dusted powder in an attempt to smooth everything out. Despite this, Dawn was beautiful, but she hated herself and I’d recently learned that this was something men could sense.

  I’d heard my boss talking to one of the drivers about the new girl he was dating a couple months after I’d started working there. “Gotta find a girl with bad skin. I mean, hot, but, bad skin, man, I’m telling you,” he said, hitching up his pants with the hand that wasn’t holding the pizza paddle. “Girls like that don’t think they’re pretty. They’ll do anything.” He laughed to himself, obviously remembering something he’d convinced this girl to do, the lack of confidence that he’d exploited.

  I thought to myself how dangerous it could be to set your value at what you thought you might deserve.

  15

  They liked me at the restaurant because I was young and pretty but I wasn’t dumb, and I worked hard. I did the shit jobs and ran errands for everyone and I covered for myself as well, even when I was drunk out of my mind. Everyone there was drunk or high out of their minds, or both.

  But when the boss did stop by, everybody was on their best behavior. Janet and Amara would hastily slip on the baggy uniform shirts over their tank tops and pull back their hair. We’d pop a breath mint, pour out our Styrofoam cups, cursing if we’d just filled them, or we’d hide them in the walk-in behind a giant jar of tomato sauce. We stood up straight instead of slouching, greeted everyone who walked in. The drivers actually pulled into the lot instead of doing a half-ass parking job on the dirt. We were all intimidated by the boss.

  The boss was a hefty, bearded man who always showed up drunk and wearing safari gear—khakis with lots of pockets, canvas hat, that type of shit. He looked like the picture of Hemingway on the back of my copy of The Sun Also Rises, which we were reading in English class now. His wife had been a frail, pinched woman who died shortly after I began working there. When he hired me, he’d tucked a stray lock of my hair behind my ear and said, “You know, you remind me of my wife when we first met.” I hadn’t said anything but I’d given him what I hoped was a sympathetic look, my eyes wide and sad, my lips curled into an almost smile.

  Occasionally, he’d call me into the office and give me generous raises, saying, “You’re really getting the hang of things around here.” It was a while before I realized nobody else’s pay had gone up two dollars an hour every month during what would turn out to be a particularly slow summer. After I realized this, I did whatever I could to ensure that it kept happening. I kept it a secret but I wasn’t ashamed.

  Sometimes when I got really drunk, I thought about how things had worked out for my mom, nearing forty and working nights at a waterfront restaurant where jackass tourists sat underneath brightly colored umbrellas while their children splashed unattended in a pool that hadn’t been cleaned once since she’d begun working there. A restaurant where leathery old men brushed her ass with their hands as she walked past the bar as a way of requesting a refill. Where the most popular drink was a twenty-ounce margarita with five drops of blue food coloring added at the end. I knew I was working in food service too. But I was smarter than she was. I was an asshole about it, but I was smart.

  When I walked into the guidance counselor’s office for my college consultation, she’d raised her eyebrows. I was wearing cutoffs so old and frayed that the pockets poked out from below the hem. My shirt was from the thrift store across from our apartment complex, black and lacy and sheer. Underneath, I was wearing a red bra. My hair was teased, three days unwashed, and pulled into a big side braid that I’d slept on the night before.

  I wouldn’t get in trouble if I wore clothes like that. I knew my name was on the list of students from ‘unstable home environments’ who had ‘potential.’ If I’d ever bothered to eat school lunch other than once a month when I caved and bought a slice of pizza then threw it up in the bathroom afterward, Andie holding my hair back, it would have only cost me forty cents instead of two dollars. I would have had to do something really bad to actually get in trouble.

  “So, Calliope, have you given any thought to co
llege?” she asked me, pointedly avoiding looking anywhere below my eyes. “With these grades and test scores, you’ve got quite a future. If you want it.”

  I put my feet up on her desk, revealing chipped red nail polish and cork wedges. I was starting to treat every encounter like a potential seduction, even when I didn’t mean to. I raised my eyebrows at her, at once daring her to tell me to take my feet down and to let her know how ludicrous of a suggestion that was. In fact, I used that exact word. “Considering the amount of money college costs, that seems like a somewhat ludicrous suggestion,” I said, crossing one leg over the other.

  “Well, it’s really not,” she said. “For a girl as smart as you, there are many scholarships available. I’m available to help you apply for as many as you want.” She handed me a piece of paper with a list of names and amounts and requirements.

  “This seems like a lot of work,” I said, and shoved it into my purse. She sighed.

  “You’re incredibly bright, Callie,” she said. “This is an opportunity. We’ll find a way to make things work for you.” She pressed her hands down on the stacks of paper on her desk and began to stand up. “I can tell I’m not going to make any progress today, but let me leave you with this. Not everyone is trying to screw you over. And you’re not going to get a better chance to use your intelligence to get you where you want to be than this. So come back when you want to talk some more.” I swung my legs down.