The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  “Well, so sorry he likes me,” said Laila.

  It seemed that a glass wall sprung up then between Laila and the rest of us. There was the point that she had been admired by Coach Huggins, which separated her, and there was the point that she embraced that fact, which made the glass thicker. I could see that the others stared through the glass, wanting also to be admired by him, and I felt a glass box close around me, for I was afraid of the way his hand traced the girls’ backs, the way they held still as he did so, drawn into quiet, animal beings. The way that hand somehow transformed the girl underneath it, so that she became unrecognizable.

  I stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  I picked up my dessert. “This tastes horrible. I have to throw it out.”

  I picked up the paper container of red Jell-O and carried it to the trash can. I walked a path far from Coach Huggins, past some members of the drill team, who were practicing a routine for a football game that night. They moved with urgency and authority, practicing together. When I slipped by them, they all burst into laughter. I peered into a crowd of elephant palms, hoping I would find a girl there, in the blue shade, crouched, watching us.

  When my mother dropped me off in the Hebrew school parking lot the following week, the guard was gone.

  I listened to my footsteps on the concrete and was aware that, in the absence of the security guard, I was more alert, but I didn’t know for what.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked Darlene.

  “Budget ran out,” Darlene said. She had just gotten a perm like Barbra Streisand and her hair resembled a thatched hut. She started erasing the board in short, angry swipes.

  “What about the terrorists?”

  She paused.

  “Things have calmed down,” she said, continuing to erase the board.

  “How do you know that?”

  She looked out the window, at what appeared to be nothing. This alarmed me.

  “Did we get a letter back?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “When will we?”

  Darlene sighed, sharply.

  “I don’t know when,” she said.

  My sister’s cough was now such a normal sound in the house that I found myself doing it. My own coughing began one night as a clearing of my throat that I did once, then twice, then every few minutes. It came on like a hammer inside me, pressing against my throat. My mother heard me one morning while I was pouring cornflakes, and she rushed into the kitchen to see if I was choking.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I think,” I said, recognizing her face of concern, usually turned toward my sister. I coughed again.

  “Can you stop?”

  I did, for a few moments, testing myself—then I felt the impulse to cough and did so again. I was causing it but also I wasn’t. My mother said I had to get checked out, too. Our doctor’s first opening was on Thursday at one p.m.

  “We’ll get you back in time for last period,” she said.

  We went to Dr. Solomon, our pediatrician, whose office was in Westwood. The nurses in his office all resembled Miss America contestants and wore the same shade of pink lipstick. Dr. Solomon always called me “Little Pumpkin” for no reason I could fathom, and I did not know how to tell him to stop. He listened to my chest and asked me to breathe.

  “How is school?” he asked. “I predict the pumpkin gets all As.”

  I felt that hammering cough come on. It sounded like, Nnn-ka! He listened.

  “Do you have something in your throat?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth and he peered inside. Then he regarded me as though he just caught the tail end of a joke.

  “Is the pumpkin worried about anything?” he asked.

  That question itself worried me.

  “Take a breath. Relax. Look around you. Enjoy!”

  “What’s going on?” asked my mother.

  “I think this will just go away,” said Dr. Solomon.

  “Is she allergic to something?” my mother asked.

  “The pumpkin could try meditation,” he said. “Some young people I know say this works. Or maybe therapy, if it doesn’t go away.”

  “Physical therapy?” my mother asked, frowning.

  “No, talking,” said Dr. Solomon. “I can give you some referrals if you want.”

  My face burned; how terrible this seemed. I didn’t look at him or my mother as she paid the bill. I coughed in an almost elegant, desperate way.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother said, as she drove me to school.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “But he said you were nervous about something,” she said. “What?”

  His words had shaken my mother; she had hoped I could just take a pill and be done, but now I could see my mother in a new light. Last year, if I had seen her hunched over the steering wheel, biting her lip, I would have thought she was shy, maybe, or determined; now I saw how anxiety filled her face, and I wished she could feel something else.

  “Things,” I said, feeling the coughs occupy my throat.

  My mother tapped her fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Do your friends bother you at all?” she asked.

  I was startled by her insight; “Sometimes.”

  “Just avoid them if they bother you,” she said. “Just walk away.”

  She said this in a matter-of-fact way.

  “Isn’t that simple?” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  It was not, but I felt I should agree, so that something seemed simple for her. “Okay,” I said.

  “Let’s just see what happens,” she said, and I could tell that she was trying to reassure herself. I did not want to cause her more trouble, and I tried to restrain the coughs. My jaw was very tense.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Two,” she said.

  I was missing fifth period. Which was gym. Coach Huggins.

  When her car pulled up at the front, I dropped out, hit the ground, zoomed toward the office. I handed the secretary my note from the doctor. She checked her watch.

  “You missed fourth and fifth period,” she said. “Just get the signature from your teachers and you’re all set.”

  My parents were not superstitious people, but they were afraid I was catching my sister’s allergies, or whatever they were, so they moved me out of the room. They removed everything—carpet, curtains, stuffed animals—so that the room was basically a bare cube. My new room was a large closet that was cleared out so that there was space for my twin bed. I didn’t like being moved but my sister’s coughing kept me up, a low, barking sound, exacerbated by the fear that I was supposed to be doing something about it (though it was unclear what). My own impulse to cough subsided when I was alone in this little room; encased in darkness, I was separate, and I was a little astonished and calmed by the smooth quiet of myself. I was afraid of the cough starting, and sometimes it did, and it kept me up, but sometimes I could just lie in bed and imagine I was assembling into something else, new, invisible. Separated from the world, I felt happy. Sometimes I thought of Tom and his long hair.

  I wanted to become him. Was that what love was, was that what Laila got from sitting on Coach Huggins’s lap? When I sat by Tom, the air trembled, full of glitter. In the dark, I felt the bright living rush of my desire, and I wondered if others could hear my dangerous thoughts. Then I heard footsteps through the walls and hoped they were, perhaps, Tom’s, who was heroically coming to lie beside me in the little room. Or maybe they were the sounds of Ilana running around the house, for she was lost, searching for me, and I would pull her through, Ilana tired from her very long journey, I would tell her yes, she had made it, and she would thank me, glad, finally, glad to be here.

  Laila had been to the beach the previous weekend and came back extremely burnt. To spend the weekend at the beach and come back bright pink was a mark of honor for the surfer group. Her face was bright pink and h
er eyes were slightly puffy. She gleamed, a little reptilian, with aloe vera gel.

  She had gone to the beach with Coach Huggins. When she stopped by his office a few days ago, he asked her to come see him there. He was working out in Venice and she could just say hi sometime. Or, specifically, Saturday at two. If she wasn’t doing anything.

  There was a speeded-up quality in the way she spoke that made our group listen closely to her.

  Laila’s mom was going to a movie with her new boyfriend, and didn’t want Laila to come because it was rated R and she shouldn’t see R movies yet, so Laila took the bus to the beach. She walked down the boardwalk to the outdoor lifting area, a place we made fun of, generally, for the men were sad cartoons of men, she said, so muscled they were shaped like cubes, but there was Coach Huggins, standing in the sun, lifting up weights and lowering them.

  Laila told us that Coach Huggins bought them lemonade and they walked to the beach and laid their towels beside each other. He was funny, she said. He made fun of the mothers walking by, their bathing suits, and then he pulled a towel over their legs and started touching her ankle with his finger, just like this.

  She told each of us to lift our feet up on the lunch bench and then she touched the sides of our feet with her finger in a new, feathery way, and we each laughed, for we did not know how else to respond to this.

  “He did that?” asked Jennifer, her foot jerking out in surprise.

  “It was fun,” Laila said. “Then.”

  She said this quickly, took a quick gulp of chocolate milk.

  “What,” we asked.

  “He had a towel and he spread it over us and it was kind of cozy and we were sitting there and then we were holding hands. I liked holding hands with him. He had this nice, warm hand. And then he lifted my hand over his bathing suit and I was holding it. It was like”—she started laughing for a second, then stopped—“a big root.”

  The air felt as though it had become a different material, perhaps metal. We all looked at each other, pretending we understood what she meant.

  Hannah clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” said Audra, pressing her hands over her ears. “I don’t, I don’t—”

  “I don’t believe it,” Jennifer said.

  But the words were tumbling out of Laila, and she leaned forward and said, “Well, then he said oops and laughed, and then he asked if I wanted more lemonade. I said no. I said I wanted to lie out in the sun for a while, and he left and I decided I wanted to get really burned so I lay there for three hours and then went home.”

  She held out her arm, which was so pink it had to hurt.

  “Hopefully this will turn into a tan,” she said.

  We stared at her. She was bragging, it seemed, but it was an aggressive sort of bragging, in which she wanted to drag us along with her; she was mad at us, for some reason, for not admiring her in the proper way.

  She held out her arm again.

  “Touch it,” she said. “You can see your fingerprints in it.”

  None of us touched her arm.

  “Be right back,” I said.

  I felt a scratchiness in my throat, I wanted something out of me, and I coughed. I didn’t want them to hear, and I didn’t want to be near her. I walked through the cafeteria; the other students, the flamingo plants, the silver eucalyptus standing around the cafeteria smeared by me, a blur. What happened? The junior high seemed to be inhabited by people wearing costumes, and at any moment they could fling them off and reveal other selves, like burned raw trees. I ran to my locker and opened it. The clothes for Ilana were still there, the T-shirt, the flip-flops.

  There was a hand on my shoulder. I swerved around. It was Hannah.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  I shut my locker.

  “Those look too big for you.”

  “I’m holding them for someone.”

  Hannah didn’t move.

  “Who? Some guy?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I have some extra clothes in my locker, too,” she said. This was surprising; Hannah rarely liked to agree with me.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Something,” she said.

  My sister was having a difficult night and came into my little room. I felt her hand on my arm and I sat up in the dark. She took slow breaths, and I could hear the crinkling sound in her chest; it was not what I had within me. Her hair had the fragrance of lavender.

  “I dreamed that you started coughing too,” she said. “We sounded alike. It woke me up.”

  I felt that she was demeaning my own coughing situation. My discomfort was real, too.

  “It was actually kind of a good dream,” she said.

  We were two different people, which was a confusing thing. How could the world be contoured, invisibly, in such different ways for each of us? She had the floaty, calm expression she usually wore onstage when she was landing a triple pirouette or whatever, which I admired, and which I had not seen in a while. I remembered when she was a fast runner. Before she had started coughing, we played vigorous games of tag, running in the purple twilight, turning each other into frozen statues.

  “What else happened?” I asked.

  She said that the air that came out of us made us rise. Then we were walking through the sky. The air felt spongy on our toes, she said, like damp bread, and we were running across it with great speed, and the glossy city sat below us.

  She looked proud, because she had made that dream, and she knew what happened next in it, and I was jealous, as I wished I had dreamed it myself. I grasped her arm.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Those girls at that school. At Ma’alot. The ones they threw the grenade at.”

  She nodded.

  “What do you think they were thinking?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Right before the grenade. When they were in the corner.”

  I didn’t know what I wanted from her. Diane was just fourteen, two years older than I, but all of her ballet training gave her a straight, proud carriage that made her appear older than she was. She touched her tongue and picked a loose hair off it. Then she took a deep, crinkly breath.

  “How to get out,” she said. “I bet that’s what they thought. Where can I go.”

  The next day at lunch, Laila was late in joining us, and Hannah, Audra, Jennifer, and I took our trays to a corner of the cafeteria far from where we usually sat. No one made a decision out loud to do this; we moved through the crowd, passing the steel table where Laila told us of her beach trip with Coach Huggins. The table now seemed sullied; none of us wanted to sit there anymore. No one mentioned Laila, though we were all thinking of her, Jennifer saying, I think maybe she’s over there?, just once, but none of us making any effort to call her over. Instead, we watched her. She was eating a bag of popcorn for lunch. She ate it slowly, looking around. I thought of my mother saying, walk away from the friends if they bother you, and I thought, That is what I am doing, though I didn’t think it was quite what she meant. Not one of us called her over, and not one of us said anything about this.

  Laila made a slow loop near Coach Huggins. He was talking very animatedly to Avery Solon again, but not to Laila. I saw her stand in his orbit for a while, while he laughed at what Avery Solon was saying, and I watched him lift a hand to say hi to Laila, but he did not invite her to talk to him.

  When I finished lunch, I waited until I saw her walk to the bathroom, and then I went to my locker. I carried my tray to the trash can and looked up and Coach Huggins was holding up a hand at me.

  I froze.

  He was eating an orange 50/50 Popsicle. “Hey,” he said, “how’s it going? Sixth period, right?”

  He had never talked to me directly; I tended to stay out of his way. I nodded and tried to st
ep around him, but he shifted slightly, so I stopped.

  “Right, you’re a good runner. A speeding bullet! You’re that girl’s friend,” he said, leaning on the word “girl” so that I understood that he was pretending not to remember Laila’s name. It was a familiar expression, one I had seen on the faces of the boys in my class, which meant that, for a peculiar, flickering moment, Coach Huggins looked as though he were twelve years old.

  I was quiet, watchful; Coach Huggins regarded me.

  “You get a chance at team captain yet?” he said.

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll check that right away. See ya later,” he said, flashed that large smile, and swiftly walked away. Clutching my lunch tray, I understood, with a faint, luminous clarity and a precision that I did not yet trust, that Coach Huggins was trying to cultivate my goodwill.

  In Hebrew school I was saying the V’ahavta, flying through those syllables faster than any words could be reasonably said, plunging into each long line as though it were a clear, rolling wave, lifting me through the room—my mouth was speaking almost by itself, uchtavtam al-mezuzot bain anecha and on and on and then I was at the end of it.

  Darlene said, “Forty-seven point twenty-eight,” and there was a gasp, as I had the fastest time in the classroom by a luxurious two seconds; I was the champion of the V’ahavta.

  “You are the winner!” Darlene said, while the other students groaned.

  Darlene pinned a blue first-place ribbon to my shirt; I fingered the thin rayon strip. Outside the smeary glass windows, a swath of bluish chaparral tumbled down the rough silver hills. I waited for the feeling of invulnerability that was supposed to come over me.

  The next day our group gathered again at the new spot in the cafeteria for lunch. It felt like a regular week; Audra and Hannah ordered enchiladas in the cafeteria, Jennifer said they were gross, and we all scraped the whipped cream swirl off the tops of our cherry Jell-O. The shrieks of the other students rang through the concrete walls of the cafeteria. No one admitted that we were watching for Laila, though we were now afraid to see her. She was absent that day. And then she was absent the next. We talked—carefully—about other events at school, but no one mentioned the story she told us about Coach Huggins, the towel, and the root. We did not know how to discuss this, but after three days of Laila’s absence, we did.