Tall, Thin and Blonde

by Dyan Sheldon

  “What’s the matter?” asked Tanya through a mouthful of chicken salad. “You seem a little down.”

  I looked over at her. Tanya always talked while she ate, so either you couldn’t understand what she was saying or there were bits of food falling out of her mouth while you were trying to have a discussion with her. Usually it didn’t bother me, but today I thought it was gross. “Do you have to talk and eat at the same time?” I snapped.

  “Ooooh!” screeched Tanya, rolling her eyes and pretending to pull away from me. “Not only down, but touchy, too.”

  “Yuk yuk yuk,” I said.

  Tanya was right, though, I was down. And I was touchy, too. At first I’d thought that Amy was just being mean and awful to me because she didn’t like me any more. But now I knew that she did like me. She liked me and she was as upset as I was about the way things had turned out. I kept seeing the look on her face as we stood outside the school. She really was worried about me. She really cared.

  And that was why I’d been silent all through lunch. I’d been watching the Martians through Amy’s eyes. Everything about them was annoying me. The way they looked. The way they spoke. The way they ate. Marva’s opinions. Joan’s patience. Maria’s sweetness. The fact that Sue was always two conversations behind everyone else. How had I let myself get so involved with them? Amy was right. They were oddballs. They were more than oddballs. They were the oddest of oddballs.

  “So?” Tanya persisted. “What’s eating you?”

  I looked away as a piece of lettuce drifted onto her blouse. “It’s nothing,” I lied. “I guess I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”

  “It’s your stupid diet,” said Marva in her loud, grating voice. How could someone with purple hair and half a dozen earrings sound so much like my mom? “You’re not getting the right nutrition, so you’ve got no energy.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, will you, Marv?” said Joan. She leaned towards me, holding out an apple. “Why don’t you take this? You’ve hardly eaten a thing.”

  I held up my hand. “Really, Joan,” I said, trying not to lose my temper, “I’m not hungry.” That at least was true. If Mr Salteri, owner of Pizza Passion, had walked into the cafeteria right then and offered me a free meal at his restaurant, all I could eat plus a doggie bag, I would have said, “No, thank you, Mr Salteri. I don’t feel like pizza or lasagne right now.”

  “How about a brownie?” asked Sue.

  “No,” I repeated. “Really … I’m fine.”

  Maria put her hand on my forehead. “I hope you’re not coming down with something,” she said.

  I pushed her away. “What are you guys?” I snapped. “My mothers?”

  Tanya bounced a balled-up sandwich bag off my head. “No,” she said, “we’re your friends.”

  That afternoon, mainly because I couldn’t think of any way to get out of it, I went over to Marva’s to put the finishing touches to my frog costume. The dissection was scheduled for next Wednesday. D-day, as Chris called it.

  “Well, what do you think?” asked Chris. He was standing behind me, grinning as I stared into the mirror.

  I was looking at myself through Amy’s eyes. I looked ridiculous. I looked like a girl who would never fit in. I looked like a girl who was gullible enough to go along with a crazy scheme that would humiliate her in front of the entire school.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly, “maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.”

  Chris put an arm around me. I had to admit it. He was weird. He was wearing a black turtle neck and baggy old sweat pants, and his hair was hanging loose to his shoulders except for a couple of tiny braids. Forget about not looking like any other boy in the school, he didn’t look like any other boy in the state.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “It’s a great idea. Dignity and dissent! King and Ghandi would be proud of you!”

  I stared at his reflection. He looked really pleased. I couldn’t help wondering if he looked really pleased because he was proud of me, too, or if it was because there was no one else in Red Bay gullible enough to be talked into dressing up like a frog. Because he’d been waiting for three years to get even with Mr Herrera and I was his last chance.

  Chris gave me a squeeze, leaning his head close to mine. “And besides,” he said, “you look terrific. Green’s really your colour.”

  Marva, who was in one corner of the room, practising her yoga, began reciting another of her poems. “‘I’m nobody…’” she boomed. “‘Are you nobody, too? … How dreadful to be somebody, how public, like a frog…’”

  The best thing you could say was that I definitely looked like a frog. A short, slightly pudgy frog. I was wearing the one-piece green jumpsuit and papier-mâché hood that covered my hair, my ears and my forehead. The whole thing had been hand-painted to look realistic enough to suit Chris, which meant realistic enough to suit another frog. And I was going to be a public frog, that was for sure. Amy’s voice whispered in my mind. Humiliate yourself in front of the entire school, it was saying. Have you lost your mind? it was asking. Don’t you care at all what other people think? Are you trying to be as weird as you can? I couldn’t take my eyes off myself. Everyone in the school was going to see me in this stupid costume. Here I was, not wanting to be the centre of attention and I was planning to walk in front of the science building with a sign that said: All Creatures Have Rights! End Unnecessary Experimentation Now! I stared at my large webbed hands. And started thinking about what was the difference between standing up for your beliefs and looking like a fool.

  “Not only am I going to do a piece for the school paper on you,” Chris went on, “but I think they’re going to let me do one for the town paper, too. Isn’t that great?”

  Marva looked over from the corner. “With a picture,” she informed me happily.

  “Great,” I said. “I can’t wait.”

  Chris winked at me in the mirror. “Herrera’s going to be sorry he wouldn’t listen to reason.”

  I couldn’t help wondering if I was going to be sorry I wouldn’t listen to reason, too.

  I turn yellow not blonde

  In August I’d tried to get my mother to let me stay up all night to watch some meteor showers. My mother said no. She’d said I was a growing girl and needed rest. I’d said I was fourteen and almost an adult. My mother’d said that being an adult wasn’t about how late you were allowed to stay up. She’d said it was how you dealt with problems and crises and difficult situations.

  “You mean like the way Dad always goes camping when Grandma and Grandpa come to stay?” I’d asked.

  “Don’t be a wise guy, Jenny,” my mother had said. “You know exactly what I mean. Being an adult is about how you handle yourself in the worst of times.”

  I was in the worst of times. My oldest friend was worried about me. She was afraid that I was ruining my life. She was concerned that I was gullible, that I was making the wrong choices. She knew me better than anyone except my parents, and she was really worried. And I was beginning to be worried, too. What was I doing? What had happened to shy, quiet, low-profile Jenny Kaliski, serious student and future astrophysicist? Here I was, about to go public as a frog and not only probably ruin my brilliant career as a scientist, but totally destroy my social life in high school for ever. I didn’t know what I wanted any more. I had thought I wanted to be me. But who was me? What was me? How could me stand in front of the whole school dressed as Kermit?

  I knew that this was just the sort of difficult situation that called for maturity and wisdom. I knew that this was exactly the sort of problem that demanded reason and logic. So I panicked.

  I got home from Chris and Marva’s that night and went straight to my room. My head hurt, my stomach ached, and I was hot enough to ignite. I took my old teddy bear, Bert, from the shelf, and lay on the bed with him. I cried for a while, but it didn’t make me feel any better. It irritated my contacts so I had to take them out. I took them out and then I cried some more. “What am I going
to do?” I finally asked Bert. “I don’t think I can go through with this.”

  Bert stared back at me with his one plastic eye. I knew what he was thinking. Don’t do it, he was thinking. Don’t humiliate yourself in front of the whole school.

  “But what about my principles?” I asked him. “Chris is right, it’s important to stand up for what I believe.” I snuffled back a couple hundred tears.

  Bert frowned. Are you sure you’re standing up for what you believe? he wanted to know. Are you sure you’re not just fighting Chris’s battle with Mr Herrera for him?

  “Of course I’m sure,” I told him. “Chris couldn’t be using me.”

  No? said Bert.

  “No. He wouldn’t. He likes me.”

  Because you’re gullible, said Bert.

  “No, because we have similar interests. And besides, it was my idea not to dissect the frog in the first place, not Chris’s.”

  Bert’s one eye shone. But it was Chris’s idea to picket the class. It’s Chris who’s encouraged you to make a public spectacle of yourself.

  He was right. It was Chris’s idea. But he wasn’t trying to manipulate me. He was trying to help me. “So I could strike a blow for academic freedom,” I reminded Bert.

  Bert twitched an ear. You mean so Chris County could strike a blow against Mr Herrera.

  “That’s not true,” I said. It was amazing how much like Amy Bert sounded. “It was so that even if I have to bow to power I could do it with dignity.”

  In a frog costume? asked Bert.

  “Oh, good grief,” I groaned. For two entire minutes, I’d forgotten about that. And to think, it was the one part of my protest that I’d come up with all by myself. “How can I do it? I’ll be the laughing stock of the school. Unless, of course, Mr Herrera has me kicked out.” That was the bright side. That Mr Herrera would get me kicked out of school and I would never have to show my face at Red Bay High again. Talk about dawn.

  So don’t, said Burt. Just tell Chris you’ve changed your mind.

  “Tell Chris I’ve changed my mind?” I couldn’t do that either. I couldn’t look him in the eye and say that I didn’t care how many frogs got cut up for nothing. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t give a potato chip for Mars, he could fix up his telescope by himself. I just couldn’t.

  Back and forth I went. Back and forth, back and forth. Life is not a bowl of cherries, I told myself. It’s a seesaw. Even my three-hundred-calorie supper couldn’t lure me out of my room that night. When Chris called I told my mother to tell him I was taking a bath. When Marva called I told my mother to tell her I was asleep. But by the time I really was drifting off to sleep, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to stay in bed. Possibly for ever.

  * * *

  I figured I must be having some sort of mini nervous breakdown from all the pressure I was under. Only I didn’t say that to my mother, of course. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d accept. Headaches, measles, colds, viruses, strained muscles and earaches, those were the things my mother understood. But not breakdowns. If I said, “Mom, I really don’t feel very well, I’m under too much stress,” she’d say, “Jenny, if you’d like to see what fifteen is like, I suggest you get your books and go to school. Now.” So I told my mother I thought I had the flu. The symptoms were the same.

  My mother felt my forehead.

  “Everything aches,” I moaned.

  “You do feel warm,” said my mother. “And you look flushed.”

  “My throat hurts, too.”

  “You’d better stay in bed,” said my mother.

  “If you insist.” I sighed.

  “I insist,” said my mother. “Do you think you’re well enough to be left alone while I go to work?”

  “Do we have any juice?”

  After my mother went to work, I lay on the couch, half-asleep and half-awake. Maybe I was delirious from the fever. Faces kept drifting in and out of my mind. Amy. Chris. Marva. Tanya. Kim. Amber. Rosie Henley. Sue. Maria. Mr Herrera. Frogs. If I could get away from school for a while, I remember thinking, the Martians would forget about me. When I finally went back, I just wouldn’t go back to their table and they probably wouldn’t even notice. I’d be thinner, because I would have lost so much weight during my illness, and I’d buy a pair of stretch jeans and a pair of cowboy boots like the popular girls wore. Amy would see that I had changed my mind, and she’d get Rosie Henley to invite me to her Hallowe’en party after all. I’d go as a cheerleader. I’d wear high-heeled sneakers and a blonde wig. I’d look so sensational in my costume that no one would realize it was me. The girls would all want to be friends with me and the boys would all want to ask me out. I woke up when Percy dropped his doggy bone on my chest.

  What I wanted, I guess, was for everything and everyone to just go away. Just go away, I thought as I shuffled into the kitchen for something to drink. That’s all I ask. Just disappear. In my weakened condition, I had the idea that if I left my problems at home, they would just straighten themselves out. Just as long as I didn’t think about them. Sort of like how Fleming discovered penicillin. All he did was forget to wash the Petri dish. I was going to leave my dirty dishes in the sink for a few days and see what happened. If I was lucky, I figured, they would just disappear. I wouldn’t really have to do one thing or another. It would be done for me. All I had to do was stay at home.

  So I stayed at home. I just lay in bed, sleeping, reading and watching television – and trying not to think about my problems at all.

  It started to work. As I sipped my juice and petted my dog, and ate grapes and crackers, and watched old movies, I found myself wondering what I’d been so worried and confused about. I felt exactly as I always had, like Jenny Kaliski, friend of animals, fan of the cosmos, a girl who liked nothing better than to lie in bed, eating and watching TV. I felt fine. By Tuesday afternoon, when my mother got home, not only was I feeling better, it really was like the rest of the world had gone away.

  But not everyone stayed away.

  Tuesday night, Marva and Joan both called to see why I hadn’t been in school.

  “If you’re going to be out for a couple of days, I can bring you your homework,” said Joan.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I’m not going to be home that long.”

  “Chris says hi and he hopes you don’t feel too awful,” said Marva.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Tell him hi back.”

  I was still too sick to go to school on Wednesday morning. “Maybe a little French toast would make me feel better,” I said to my mother.

  My mother made me French toast, and then she made me fruit salad so I’d have something for later. I ate it while I read the magazines my father had brought me. They weren’t like the magazines I’d bought in the drugstore. They were about things like dinosaurs, leatherback turtles and solar eclipses. I couldn’t put them down.

  Wednesday night, Marva, Maria and Tanya all called.

  Tanya told me fourteen knock-knock jokes in a row, until I was laughing so much I couldn’t breathe. They were really dumb.

  Maria offered to pick up my homework for me.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I’ll probably be back tomorrow.”

  Marva told me some long story about an English actor who was in this big production, and even though he had the flu he went on, and then he died on stage.

  “Are you trying to cheer me up?” I asked.

  “Chris says to tell you that he’s got the telescope ready,” said Marva. “If you want he could bring it over so you could use it while you’re sick.”

  “Tell him thanks,” I said. “But I really don’t feel up to it.”

  Thursday morning, my fever was gone, but I was still feeling weak. “I wouldn’t want to have a relapse,” I told my mother.

  My mother said she wouldn’t want that either.

  Thursday evening, Maria, Tanya and Sue stopped by. Maria brought me my homework. Tanya came to sing me a get well song. Sue had a book on comets she’d thought I might l
ike.

  “What nice girls,” my mother said after they’d left. “Why don’t you ever invite them over?”

  I don’t have to invite them, I thought. They come over anyway.

  Out loud I said, “Really? You don’t think they’re a little odd?”

  “Odd?” my mother repeated.

  Hadn’t she noticed that Tanya was built like a tank? That Maria didn’t talk in front of her? That Sue never talked about what anyone else was talking about?

  “Yeah,” I said, “odd. You know, not like normal teenagers.”

  “They seem normal enough to me,” said my mother.

  On Friday my mother said she didn’t see any reason for me to go to school, since I’d already missed most of the week. “Why take chances?” she asked.

  I couldn’t have agreed more. Even though I was feeling fine. Better than fine, really. I was feeling great. I was happy as a bat in a belfry. The happiest I’d been in ages. I guess I’d been under more stress than I’d thought.

  Friday night, Joan and Marva came by. Joan brought me more homework and a large plastic star that caught the light like a prism to hang by my window. Marva brought a batch of health bars she’d made to help me get my strength back.

  “I didn’t know you’d made so many new friends,” said my mother after they left.

  “We all hang out together,” I said. I helped myself to one of Marva’s cookies. “I don’t suppose you noticed that Joan and Marva are pretty odd too?”

  “Odd?” repeated my mother. “What’s odd about them?”

  “You didn’t notice that Joan dresses like it’s 1953?” I asked.

  My mother shrugged. “I thought it was the style,” said my mother. “I thought she looked very nice.”

  “You didn’t notice that Marva was wearing combat boots and a purple scarf with black bats stencilled on it?” I took another cookie. They weren’t bad, even if they did have wheat germ and stuff like that in them.