by Tish Cohen
I think about skipping this Petting Pool thing at lunch. My mood could be damaging to my social life. But once I get caught in the flow of bodies pushing toward the stairwell, it seems to be easier to lose myself in the current than dream up the right hiding place where I can eat my lunch. Besides, I really don’t have much to lose right now.
In the few times I’ve passed by the second-floor landing between classes, I’ve never witnessed anything unusual. Then again, the landings in this stairway are enormous, more like long observation areas or sunrooms, and all four landings are identical. Huge leaded glass windows on three sides, a seriously ancient tufted-leather sofa, and a small forest of tropical plants in tarnished brass urns. Maybe a student or two squatting down to reorganize a binder or tie a shoe, but nothing pool-like. And other than a girl smoothing her hair in a tiny mirror, no petting.
As I make my way up the first flight of stairs, I’m relieved to see clusters of kids squatting on the steps eating lunch. It means that no matter what Carling and Company are up to on the couch, at least there will be plenty of witnesses.
I pass through several layers of social stratum. To actually reach the leather sofa, I first pass the anime girls with their pigtails and platform Mary Janes; the Benadryl kids, whose complexions look all at once rashy and translucent, painful and allergic; and a slew of boys wearing ANTON MATHATHON caps and buttons in support of this afternoon’s Numerical Analysis showdown in the gym. Sad but true—Anton mathletes actually have groupies.
Pushing on—could approaching the Petting Pool really be any worse than sitting with one of these other groups?—I move through the echelons, certain the air is getting thinner as I rise. Like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. By the time I spy the summit—a gap on the couch between Carling and Sloane—I’m light-headed.
Everyone at the Petting Pool oozes a quiet sort of comfort. Like they’ve known each other forever and have never, not once, felt a hairy ball of yarn in their stomachs on the Sunday night before another long week at school. I’ve never had a Sunday night without it, not even in the summer. That ratted ball of wool is programmed to prickle and chafe, my weekly reminder that people like me should probably not make ourselves too comfortable. Anywhere.
So far, things look reasonably tame in terms of roving body parts. Seven or eight kids sitting on a sofa eating lunch. All hands and feet in plain view. Other than Carling, Sloane, and Isabella, I recognize a few faces. Willa, Little Man Griff. Leo Reiser, which does not help my nerves. He seems relaxed, lounging between Carling and Willa. Carling looks up as I approach, smiles, and pats the empty spot between her and Sloane. “There you are. Everybody, this is London. London, this is everybody.”
Hating that my cheeks are probably searing red, I squeeze in next to her. “Hey, everybody.”
A few people mumble hello, clearly surprised. They look from Leo to Carling to me, as if poison darts are about to shoot from someone’s eyes. Isabella leans forward and squints at me. “I’ve wondered for weeks now, London. Where’s your British accent?”
I’ve been preparing for this question ever since Leo picked me up off the sidewalk. “I was born here. It didn’t seem cool to go all Madonna and adopt the accent later in life.”
She doesn’t look convinced. “But how long did you live there?”
“I don’t know. Since about third grade.”
“That’s a long time. You’d think living there”—she pauses to calculate—“eight years would give you some sort of accent.”
I’m about to reply, say something idiotic about my parents correcting it, when Carling swats Isabella in the arm. “What are you, the accent police? Shut up and give me something out of your lunch bag. I forgot mine at home.”
Isabella frowns and digs through her paper sack.
Carling nudges me. “Leo, you’ve met London, haven’t you?” Her voice stretches into a piece of wire at the end, pulled so tight tiny threads of metal snap and fray and crackle. A fresh crop of kids have arrived. Some perch on the sofa arms, others stretch out along the back of the sofa behind our heads or on the rug by our feet. Another three spread themselves across our laps, creating a second layer of humanity. I have a set of male ankles on my lunch bag. At the far end of the couch, someone starts giggling. My stomach starts flipping again.
Leo barely looks up from his pasta. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say back to Leo. The moment I pull a milk carton out of my rumpled lunch bag, a guy on the floor leans back against Carling and me and stretches his arms across our laps, crushing the rest of my lunch.
Carling leans close. “You’re just in time to make first layer. It can get a bit intense at the bottom, but your body parts are much safer if you’re underneath the others.”
I think I know the answer, but I ask anyway. “Safe from what?”
Sloane opens a bottle of sparkling water. “Wandering hands. Someone undid my bra the first day of school—I barely felt it happen.”
“Don’t scare London, Sloaney,” says Carling. “And anyway, it’s only the girls who can undo your bra without you knowing. The guys are way less nimble.”
“A girl undid your bra?” I ask. “Why?”
Sloane shrugs. “It’s pretty relaxed up here. Some kids are straight. Some aren’t. Some bend both ways. Some are multi—doesn’t matter. No one cares.”
A small anteater-shaped robot lurches past my feet, sucking french fries off the floor like a vacuum while making clickety chewing sounds. It’s chased by two sophomore boys who snatch it up just before it tumbles, metallic snout over tail, down the stairs.
“Enough sex talk, it’s so boring,” whines Isabella.
“Sloaney just started a game,” explains Carling. “We’re all going to spill a junior-year secret. What will you be doing this year that you don’t want anyone to know about? Willa, you go first.”
Willa Patel lifts long, elegant fingers to her cheeks in mock embarrassment, though I can’t imagine what a girl like this could possibly fear. Even with her bare face and her hair pulled back into her trademark ponytail, she could easily grace the cover of Vogue. If I pulled my hair back like that, with my colorless lashes and total lack of bone structure, I’d look like an egg.
“Okay,” says Willa. “Thanksgiving weekend I’m flying straight to Dr. Raj in Beverly Hills for a procedure.”
“What kind?” says Carling. She glances to her right to make sure Leo is looking in Willa’s direction, then shifts her weight to allow some guy’s hand to wander down behind her back.
Willa leans forward to show her flawless profile. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Willa’s like a computer. Her flaws aren’t detectable by the naked eye,” says Sloane with a yawn.
A few laughs. Willa reddens. “Hey, none of you was born to my motherboard. Until you’ve passed through her rock-hard loins and had your peripherals examined for flaws before anyone’s had a chance to check your breathing, don’t mock my quest for highly integrated perfection.”
Griff Hogan, with a mouthful of animal crackers, snorts, “Willa, have I not been begging to get between your motherboard’s loins?”
“Shut up, Griff,” says Willa with a sigh. “Tu es un petit cochon.”
Carling says, “Isabella, how about you? Junior-year secret?”
“My cousin’s family is coming to stay next week,” she says, raising her eyebrows as if everyone will get the inference. “For two nights in our teeny-tiny apartment …”
“Ah,” says Sloane. “Is this Utterly Beddable Benjamin?”
“I see where this is going and I, for one, am going to puke,” says Leo.
“I’ve seen Cousin Benjamin,” says Carling. “Illegal union or not, the boy is utterly beddable. Besides”—she winks—“the British royalty did it all the time, didn’t they, London?”
Someone’s limb is snaking around behind my left hip. I tuck my skirt under my thighs and press my legs together. “What … incest?”
“I prefer to think of it as promoting from w
ithin,” Carling says, “but, yes, incest.”
“Might explain why my grandfather makes me call him Mumsy,” I say. “The mind’s the first to go with inbreeding.”
A few kids look amused and, for a moment, the shaggy yarn ball in my stomach disappears. I try not to smile too wide and blow it by looking as though I actually tried to be funny. Better to appear inadvertently witty.
Leo’s eyes are on me and hot flames lick my neck. When I finally risk a quick peek, I find him grinning. Either he approves, or he thinks incest explains a few things about me.
“Okay,” says Carling, “Willa’s going to get even more perfect, Isabella’s going to do her cousin—”
“Not do him!” Isabella giggles. “But I might do a hell of a lot of spying and fantasizing.”
Willa looks around. “Nice one, Isabella. Next? Sloane?”
“I’m going to drop out,” Sloane says.
The air grows quiet. “Seriously?” says Willa.
“Nah.” Sloane slumps lower on the sofa. “My parents threaten to split all the time as it is. Me quitting Ant would drive them to murder. But a girl can dream.”
“You’re the one person who doesn’t need to be here,” says Carling. “You can go to any law school you want and you’ll still go work in your dad’s firm.”
“My point exactly,” says Sloane, staring up at the ceiling. “So why work this hard? Anyway, being a lawyer will be a stepping-stone for me.”
“Our little Sloaney wants to be barefoot and preggers,” Carling says. “So quaint.”
“I do. When I come back to our ten-year reunion, I swear I’ll have four kids.”
“Better get on it then.”
“You should take my place at my dad’s firm, Carling,” Sloane says. “You’re the one who rocks at law.”
Carling says nothing, just roots through Isabella’s lunch again, pulls out some grapes, and starts eating.
Leo leans back and stretches. “I don’t have any schoolyear secrets. I’ll be studying. Eating. Trying to fix the clicking sound in the Aston’s engine.”
With her mouth full, Carling says to me, “Leo has a big thing for European convertibles that don’t run. He looks hotter than hell driving around in them, but he spends an awful lot of time on the side of the road waving down blondes.”
“Relax.” Leo grins lazily. “That girl was old enough to be my mother.”
After flicking her grape stems to the floor, Carling snuggles into Leo’s chest and tugs his shirt out of his pants, which he doesn’t seem to mind one bit. Sliding her hand onto his stomach, she says, “As long as she knows that you”—she pauses and pushes his shirt farther up—“belong to me.”
Leo’s relaxed demeanor vanishes. His face darkens and in one sweeping motion, he knocks her hand from his chest and pulls down his shirt. “What the hell? Cut it out!” He lifts his hips and pushes the wrinkled white cotton back into his pants.
A hush falls over the couch. No one moves. No one speaks. Carling, red-faced now, turns away from him and folds her arms across her chest. “Jesus. You don’t have to freak on my ass.”
It’s like witnessing a wineglass-hitting-the-wall fight between your parents. The unspoken friction is terrifying. Even the Benadryl girls stop talking.
The scars. His anger. It all makes sense. Leo Reiser doesn’t hate me. He hates what I’ve seen. And from his reaction today, I’d be willing to bet even the great Carling Burnack has no idea her boyfriend’s chest and shoulders are covered in the painful mystery of his past.
Sloane breaks the prickly stillness. “Your turn, Sara. Junior-year secret?”
All eyes fall on me and the yarn ball springs to life in my abdomen like it’s being swatted by an angry kitten. Let’s see. I’ve stolen a pair of pants. I walk around every day in other students’ lost clothing. I’ve set my room on fire. Twice. “I’m not very exciting. My dad’ll probably make me clean the grout on the bathroom floor every weekend with that industrial foam cleanser they use in the locker-room showers. You know, the pink stuff that stinks of gasoline? Does that count?”
People eye each other with confusion and I realize my mistake. Regular kids aren’t familiar with janitorial elixirs. Griff speaks first, with a yawn. “Call us if you need some help. I’d show up just for the fumes.”
“My dad’s just a clean freak,” I say, hoping to muddy up the conversation. The urn-burying incident pops into my mind—Charlie out in the rain, knee-deep in sludge and murdered flowers and slain shrubbery, completely unaware of the people around him—and I regret using the word freak. Now I feel disloyal and filthy. The anonymous hand moves around to my waist and I jam my elbow against my side to block it.
“What do your parents do?” asks Isabella with a nervous edge to her voice. “We have a little theory about that kind of thing, don’t we, Carling?”
Carling shrugs and bites into a cookie.
“My mother is a chef,” I say. “In Paris.” I don’t mention she’s there on a two-year work–learn program and is living for free in a friend’s flat.
Sloane brightens up. “Tell her to send Izz something fattening.”
“Shut up, Montauk,” Isabella snaps. “For your information, fasting makes you live longer. It cuts the risk of clogged arteries by forty percent.”
“Not this again.” Carling lets her head drop backward as if she’s unspeakably tired. “Tell them who was in the study, Izz.”
“Mormons.”
Everybody laughs, which only irritates Isabella further. So who does she turn on? Me. “What about your dad, London? What does he do?”
On cue, my uniformed father strolls along the third landing and down the steps, scooping up lunch litter and stuffing it into a huge trash bag, which is practically overflowing with waste. Faced the other way, Dad crushes the garbage down with his foot, and sets about tying the top of the bag together.
What does my father do?
He continues to make knot upon knot in the big black bag until there are eight, ten, maybe fifteen knots. A tornado full of cats couldn’t get out of that sack.
Worse still is what this means. I was stupid to think his OCD might remain safely tucked away at an ugly little apartment building in Brighton. That it would behave itself until he gets home from work. That I could count on it like E = mc2. It was only getting warmed up, perfecting itself, and preparing for its ultimate audience—the most perceptive, precocious, intelligent teenagers in the country: the students of Anton High School.
“Speaking of freaks,” says someone.
What does my father do?
He doesn’t stop his knot-tying until every last flap of plastic has been fastened together and the top of the bag stands up like a drunken bunny ear. He stares at it a moment as if debating undoing the whole thing and starting from scratch and I realize this isn’t really new behavior for him—it’s just the green plastic bag version of the VW’s locks.
“Can anyone spell O-C-D?” says Isabella.
Carling whispers, “Someone should tell him there’s a rehab center down the block.”
“Whacked,” says Griff.
Dad looks up and smiles when he catches my eye. My heart pounds as he starts down the steps and straight toward me with a great green sack of social annihilation bobbing against his leg. This can’t be happening. I’m finally making friends, I’m actually being accepted by these genetically enhanced beings—being treated as one of their own—in this insanely elite school my dad is forcing me to attend, and with this one action, he’s going to snatch it all away.
This OCD is grotesque in its greed. It doesn’t rest until it seeps into every part of our lives and rots it from the inside out. I’m tired of fighting my dad’s condition all by myself. I love my father, but he has no interest in managing his problem. He’s happy to let it pummel him from every which way. Wherever. Whenever. With no real concern what it’s doing to him.
Or me.
I watch, terrified, as Dad waves to me, moving ever closer. Then a well
-timed herd of thundering seniors blocks him from my view. Which gives me a moment to compose my thoughts. Only I can’t. All I see is Rascal in the grotty café just after he saw the old pawnbroker for the first time. He sat there drinking tea and was astonished to overhear two guys at the next table discussing the pawnbroker and how terribly she abused her sister. Treating her like a servant and nearly biting off her finger to the point of amputation. One guy threw up his hands and exclaimed a woman like that was better off dead and there was nothing to be done. What will be will be. It was nature. But the other said nature is to be “shaped and directed.”
Or else.
And I have about three seconds to shape and direct this situation before “or else” happens to me.
Feeling I might be killing more than just the OCD, I drop my granola bar down behind the others just before the cloud of jocks thins out, and vanish from view, fussing around beneath the cushions as I pretend to search for it.
Only when I’m sure my beloved, stubborn father has decided he was mistaken and gone on his way do I resurface, granola bar in hand, fully aware of the shift that has just taken place inside me. I am now, officially, a wretch of a daughter.
Sloane repeats Isabella’s question. “So what does your super-clean father do, Sara?”
I tread water for a moment, sputter on the traitorous grime that’s settled in my lungs, before telling the ugliest lie of my life. “Brain surgeon. My dad likes things clean because he’s a neurosurgeon.”
“That’s how you squeaked in here as a junior? Because your dad’s a surgeon?”
I force a sly grin. “Well, it’s all confidential, but let’s just say he’s tinkered under some very fancy hoods in the Ant community.” Not a total lie. Noah let him help tune up the Bentley last week.
A few kids nod and the conversation shifts away from me.
I can’t believe how easy it was to lose my reality. Ironic, really. I swam down a no-hoper from a town pockmarked with liquor stores and pawnshops, nothing more than the janitor’s daughter, and emerged something else entirely. A girl sparking and flashing with the very finest in genetic material.
