Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  We would do this after we’d smoked and stumbled down the stairs, jelly legged and giggly, to raid the kitchen. Mrs. Finnerman held office hours in her classroom until five, then stayed another hour or two to catch up on paperwork, so the place was ours until then. It was the perfect arrangement she didn’t know about.

  Some people lose weight, can’t eat, when they’re stressed. I thought I’d be one of those when everything first happened, but once the acid-flavored anxiety of what would become of me dissolved to reveal what had become of me, the hot new girl already washed up seven weeks into the semester, food had never tasted so good.

  Arthur had figured this out years ago, and he was an enthusiastic partner in crime. Together, we came up with all kinds of concoctions to feed our emotional voids—nuke Nutella and it becomes a hard chocolate cookie. This was pre-Nutella ubiquity, and I’d asked, “What the hell is this?” when I first came across it in the cabinet. “Some weird European shit,” Arthur had said and shrugged, and I’d made a face at it, impressed. Or we’d plop a roll of cookie dough on a baking sheet and shove it in the oven without even breaking it up, roasting it as a log until the outer ends were golden and the inside was raw, eggy mush that we ate with a spoon. All the clothes Mom had bought me at the beginning of the semester were rebelling against me, the opening of my khakis spread like my legs with Peyton’s head between them, refusing to close no matter how hard I ran.

  Today, after we clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, the yearbook tucked underneath Arthur’s arm like my future mother-in-law’s vintage Chanel clutch, Arthur announced that he wanted nachos. He held the doors to the kitchen cabinets out wide, a conductor directing his symphony.

  “You’re a genius,” I said, the corners of my mouth pinching hungrily.

  “You mean a genachos.” Arthur gave me a sassy look over his shoulder, and I laughed so hard my knees buckled. Then I was lying on the tiles of his old kitchen, tiles Mom would have called “fuddy-duddy.” The word “fuddy-duddy” made my sides itch even harder with laughter.

  “TifAni, come on,” Arthur scolded. “You don’t have much time.” He pointed at the display on the stove. It was 5:50.

  The thought of not getting my fix centered me. I climbed to my feet and began to pull toppings from the fridge—a shiny block of orange cheese, blood-red salsa, a watery container of sour cream.

  We arranged our nachos in silence, stoned and sloppily dressing the chips. We took the plate to the linoleum breakfast table and sat, still not speaking, too competitive for the chips with the most cheese. When not one tortilla crumb remained, Arthur got up from the table and retrieved a gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream from the freezer. He found two spoons, staked them through the pastel surface, and placed the carton on the table between us.

  “I’m so fat,” I moaned, exhuming a large chunk of chocolate.

  “Who cares.” Arthur stuck his spoon in his mouth, pulling it out slowly, sucking all the meat off the bone.

  “I bumped into Dean in the hallway today. He said, ‘You really are a wide load, aren’t you?’” I liked the ice cream in the corners best. It melted first, obeyed when I coaxed it around the edge of the carton.

  “Fucking rich white trash.” Arthur stabbed the ice cream with his spoon. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

  I tongued a back molar, chiseling away its thin chocolate coating. “What don’t I know?”

  Arthur furrowed his eyebrows at the ice cream. “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Okay”—I stopped eating for a moment—“now you have to tell me.”

  “Trust me.” Arthur dropped his chin to peer at me over his glasses, and an extra layer of skin gathered in his neck. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Arthur!” I demanded.

  Arthur sighed heavily, like he was sorry he ever brought it up, but I knew he wasn’t. The more sacred a piece of information, the more desperate the gatekeeper is to reveal it, the harder you have to work to relieve her of the burden. That way she doesn’t feel horribly guilty about betraying confidences—what could she do? She was browbeaten into it! I say “she” because it’s an inherently feminine game, and when I look back on all of this now, at the way Arthur was a natural at navigating the ball on the field, I realize it’s much more telling of his sexuality that his own declarations so theatrical, so over the top, that I could never figure out if he was just messing with everyone. Playing the role assigned to him, and brilliantly.

  “I think I deserve to know,” I said, my voice full of meaning. “Of all people.”

  Arthur held up his hands, the universal “stop” sign. He couldn’t take it anymore! “Okay,” he acquiesced. He speared his spoon in the ice cream and flattened his hands on the table, considering how to tell me what he was about to tell me. “There was this kid. Ben Hunter.”

  I remembered the name from the night of the Fall Friday Dance, when I’d snuck away with the HOs and the Hairy Legs to watch them all drink at the Spot. Olivia’s gleeful disgust over seeing Arthur giving Ben a blow job, Peyton’s addendum that Ben had tried to kill himself, his mean conclusion that he hadn’t succeeded. I never really believed the first part of the story, it reeked of an Olivia lie, told to assemble a curious crowd with her in the center. Even so, something stopped me from telling Arthur what I knew. There was a small part of me that believed it could be true, and didn’t want to know if it was. I couldn’t stand the idea that Arthur had been on his knees in the Spot, weirdo number one sucking weirdo number two’s dick. Arthur was my intellectual compass, not another raging, lusty animal in heat. Not like me.

  I pretended I’d never heard the name Ben Hunter before. “Who is he?”

  “Dean made him kill himself. Well”—Arthur pushed his glasses further up his nose, adding another fingerprint to the left lens—“try to kill himself, at least.”

  I abandoned my spoon in the ice cream, so warm and gooey now the handle sunk, slowly, as the green quicksand absorbed the tip. “How? How do you make someone try and kill themselves?”

  Arthur’s eyes went dull. “You torture them for years and then you degrade them by—” He grimaced. “It’s disgusting. Are you sure you want to know?”

  Ice cream gurgled in my throat as I groaned. “Will you just tell me?”

  Arthur sighed, and his linebacker shoulders dropped further down his back. “You know Kelsey Kingsley?” I nodded. We had history together. “She had this graduation party in eighth grade. She lives on, like, three acres—pool, tennis courts, all that, but just a lot of land too. Anyway. Dean and Peyton and some other soccer douche bags showed up. They were already in upper school at this point so that was creepy, but Peyton had some boner for Kelsey. He likes ’em young.” Arthur tipped his chin at me, as though I were a prime example. “They convinced Ben to go with them in the woods, they said they had pot.” Arthur spooned up a golf-ball-size lump of ice cream. His mouth was strung green when he opened it again. “I don’t know why Ben believed them. I never would have. Peyton and those guys? They held Ben down and pulled his shirt up, and Dean—” Arthur swallowed and shivered away a brain freeze.

  “Dean, what?”

  Arthur pressed his fingers to his temples. Exhaled. He raised his eyebrows at me. “Dean took a shit on his chest.”

  I leaned back in my chair and steepled my hands over my mouth. “That’s disgusting.”

  Arthur piled more ice cream onto his spoon. “Told ya. Anyway”—he shrugged—“when they let him go he ran. He was missing for almost twenty-four hours before someone discovered him in the bathroom of some Rite Aid by Suburban Square. He’d bought a razor and—” Arthur flipped his right hand over and mimed slicing the skin open, gritting his teeth as though the pain was real.

  “But he didn’t die?” I realized I was holding my own wrist in my hand, applying pressure to an imaginary wound.

  Arthur shook his head. “People generally don’t cut deep enough to nick the major artery.” He seemed proud of knowing this.

&
nbsp; “So where is he now?”

  “Some institution.” Arthur shrugged. “It was only six months ago, if you think about it.”

  “Do you talk to him?” I asked, watching closely for his reaction.

  Arthur scrunched up his whole face and gave a little shake of his head. “I like the kid, but he has problems.” With that he slid the yearbook to the center of the table, nudging the ice cream carton out of the way. My spoon toppled over and disappeared from view.

  “Let’s play with Dean in honor of Ben,” he suggested, flipping to our favorite page. We’d drawn monkey ears on Dean, written, “Monkey see, monkey die,” above his smiling face. I’d written that, originally, as “Monkey see, monkey do,” but Arthur had crossed out “do” and written “die.”

  We had other regular pages too. Olivia’s received plenty of attention. I’d decorated her nose with black polka dots. Written, “I need Bioré strips.” “And a boob job,” Arthur had added.

  Arthur preferred Peyton over Olivia though. The yearbook was three years old, and we had been in the sixth grade and Peyton in eighth. It was a real accomplishment, but Peyton had been even prettier when he was in middle school. We’d drawn pigtails on either side of his temples, and, even though I’d been the one to do it, I had to blink every time we opened the yearbook to his picture, remind myself that he wasn’t really a girl. “Fuck me in my pretty ass,” Arthur had written. “Choke me while you do it,” he’d added, recently, explaining that one time on a bus ride Peyton had wrapped his scarf around Arthur’s neck and held it there until a purple ring formed. “I had to wear a turtleneck for a fucking month,” Arthur had harrumphed. “And you know how easily I overheat.”

  Arthur drew a thought bubble out of Dean’s mouth: “What is Gentleman Dean Barton thinking today?” Before he could decide, the door opened and we heard Mrs. Finnerman calling out a hello. Arthur snatched the bowl off the table and tucked it into his pocket.

  “In the kitchen, Mom!” he called. “TifAni’s here.”

  I twisted in my seat to see Mrs. Finnerman enter the kitchen, unwrapping a stringy scarf from around her neck. “Hi, honey,” she said to me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Finnerman.” I smiled, hoping it didn’t look lazy and drugged.

  Mrs. Finnerman removed her glasses, fogged over in the transition from the cold to the warm house, and wiped them on the hem of her shirt. “Are you staying for dinner?”

  “Oh, no, I can’t,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “You know you’re welcome anytime, dear.” She put her glasses on, and her eyes were bright behind the Windexed pane. “Anytime.”

  Mr. Larson had warned us it would happen. Two weeks of grammar, immediately following our discussion of Into Thin Air. This announcement had elicited a dramatic groan from the class and a playful grin from Mr. Larson, one I imagined he gave all his dates, right before slipping his hand underneath the blond weight of their hair and leaning in for a soft kiss.

  Given the grueling grammar course I’d suffered through at Mt. St. Theresa’s, this news was disappointing but also, to my surprise, fueled me with a sort of territorial adrenaline. Try me, I’d thought back in September. Gerund phrases, the present participle, noun modifiers—I’d wipe the floor with these amateurs. Now, with Mr. Larson gone and my competitive spirit blunted, I was just grateful for the opportunity to coast.

  The substitute they’d brought in to replace Mr. Larson, Mrs. Hurst, had the body of a ten year-old boy and bought her clothes—khakis and pastel-colored button-downs—at GapKids. From behind, she easily could have been an upper schooler’s annoying little brother. Her daughter was a senior at Bradley, and because she had gotten into Dartmouth early decision and had a large, sharp nose and eyes ringed with purple commas, I’d assumed she was a harmless book nerd. But years of dismissal from pretty girls and boys who weren’t that horny had turned her into a bitter gossip. Her mother, seated at the head of the classroom, one bony ankle draped over the other, had my number from the get-go.

  She started on me the day somebody brought in doughnuts—left over from the yearbook meeting earlier that morning. Mrs. Hurst cut the remaining Krispy Kremes in half, even though there were eleven doughnuts and only nine students, more than enough for everyone to have a whole. I assumed she did it so that we could sample other flavors, and took half of a Boston cream and half of a powdered sugar.

  “TifAni,” Mrs. Hurst clucked disapprovingly. “Geez. Leave some for the rest of the class.”

  Her insults landed softly like that, enough to arouse a cautious titter from some students, hesitant to get involved with social politics. Honors English, which was filled with the children of Ivy League stage mothers, wasn’t her ideal audience (she would have had better luck with the mean degenerates in Chem), but she would take what she could get.

  My friendship with Arthur had not escaped Mrs. Hurst. That combined with the fact that Arthur was the smartest person in the room—head of the table included—and not exactly modest about it, and he may have had an even bigger bull’s-eye on his forehead than I did.

  One morning, a particularly convoluted explanation of the appositive phrase prompted Arthur to scribble his own example on the note the two of us had been passing back and forth, something we did all the time, even in the cafeteria, when we could speak freely. “Mrs. Hurst, the dumb-ass new teacher . . .” I slapped my hand over my mouth to catch my laugh, but a high-pitched sliver escaped. The class froze along with Mrs. Hurst, who took her time looking over her ski pole of a shoulder, her red marker bleeding into the board like a leaky gunshot wound.

  “You know what?” She extended the marker in my direction. “I want you to help me with this.”

  Any other student would have sensed the humiliation that was imminent, would have crossed her spoiled, privileged arms across her chest and refused. Better to take your chances in the dean of students’ office than to receive your punishment in front of your peers. But I was still saddled heavily with that Catholic girl fear, and when a teacher told you to do something, you did it. I felt Arthur’s sidelong glance as I stood and trudged to the front of the classroom, a dead man walking the plank.

  Mrs. Hurst pressed the marker into my hand and stepped away from the board, clearing a space for me to step into.

  “Maybe an example will help?” she offered much too sweetly. “Write this down.”

  I hovered the marker over the board and waited.

  “TifAni.”

  I looked under my raised arm at Mrs. Hurst, waiting for the rest of the phrase.

  “Write that down,” Mrs. Hurst cooed. “TifAni.”

  I wrote my name, dread lining the seams of my stomach.

  As I dotted the “i,” Mrs. Hurst continued, “Comma.”

  I anchored my name with the punctuation and waited for my next set of instructions.

  Mrs. Hurst said, “A cheap mall rat. Comma.”

  Whether the gasp in the classroom was in reaction to what Mrs. Hurst had said or to Arthur’s vicious “Fuck you,” I’m not sure. But then Arthur was standing, coming around the corner of the table and approaching Mrs. Hurst, who was having a pretty tough time maintaining the cunt look on her face with a six-two, three-hundred-pound bull charging at her.

  “Arthur Finnerman sit right back down in your seat this instant.” Mrs. Hurst’s words rambled together, and she shrunk back as Arthur stepped in front of me, a dog protecting his master from an intruder.

  Arthur pointed his finger in Mrs. Hurst’s face, and she gasped. “Who the fuck do you think you are, you dumb bitch?”

  “Arthur.” I put my hand on his arm, finding the skin beneath his polo shirt hot to the touch.

  “Bob!” Mrs. Hurst suddenly shrieked. Then again and again, with manic regularity. “Bobbb! Bobbbbb! Bobbb!”

  Bob Friedman, fellow English teacher across the hallway, burst into the room, looking dazed, an apple bitten down to its core lodged between his thumb and forefinger. “What’s happened?” he gasped through a mouthful of Fuji
.

  “Bob.” Mrs. Hurst took a shaky breath, but she straightened up, emboldened by his skinny presence. “I need your help in escorting Mr. Finnerman to Mr. Wright’s office. He is physically threatening me.”

  Arthur laughed. “You’re one crazy bitch, lady.”

  “Hey!” Mr. Friedman pointed the carcass of his apple at Arthur and strode to the front of the classroom, tripping on a book bag and stumbling the rest of the way there, almost losing his glasses in the process. He pushed them back up the bridge of his nose before hovering his hand above Arthur’s back. We’d all heard the rumors about the annual sexual harassment seminar teachers were required to take. They were terrified to touch us. “Let’s go. Mr. Wright’s office, now.”

  Arthur made a disgusted noise and shrugged off Mr. Friedman’s phantom hand on his back. He stomped out of the room, well ahead of Mr. Friedman.

  “Thank you, Bob,” Mrs. Hurst said, all prim and formal, pulling at the hem of her shirt and puffing out her flat chest. Mr. Friedman nodded and scurried after Arthur.

  Several students were holding their hands over their mouths; two nerds were biting back tears.

  “I apologize for the disturbance,” Mrs. Hurst said, trying to sound stern. But I saw the tremble in her hand as she wiped my name away with the eraser and told me to take my seat. At least she stopped bothering me after that.

  I didn’t see Arthur around school for the rest of the day. After practice, I walked the well-worn path to his house, the leaves on the ground so thin and stale that they just crumbled beneath my sneakers.

  Arthur didn’t come to the door when I knocked. I pounded and pounded, the shutters shaking on the windows, but he wouldn’t answer my call.

  Arthur wasn’t in school the next day either, and I assumed he had been suspended for the rest of the week, but when I sat down at the lunch table, my old lunch table, which was now my permanent home, the Shark’s eyes filled with tears as she whispered to me that Arthur had been expelled.