The Baddest Girl on the Planet

by Heather Frese

  Let me tell you about Charlotte’s pretty little town—it was like those coloring books, the ones with the Holly Hobbie girls in their gingham dresses, and they’re always standing in front of these pretty little white churches, or walking around in pretty pretty fields with pretty pretty horses running around. There are bricks for sidewalks and tall trees with green leaves and a covered bridge to walk through, and everybody is nice to everybody else, and everybody says stuff like, “Oh, it is so nice to meet you, honey,” when you get introduced at the Golden Dawn grocery store in neighboring Jefferson. That’s the kind of pretty little town it was. And who do you think happened to live right next door to Miss Charlotte McConnell of Windsor, Ohio? Well, I’ll tell you. It was one Don King, boxing promoter extraordinaire. And who did Don King happen to manage, but the one and only Mr. Mike Tyson.

  Iron Mike.

  Kid Dynamite.

  The Baddest Man on the Planet.

  Every day Charlotte and I and her friends Sarah N. and Sarah M. would go play freeze-tag around the statues on Don King’s front lawn. We played with Don King’s grandchildren, too, so it wasn’t like we were trespassing. We wouldn’t have gotten shot or anything. We weren’t doing anything illegal. Mike Tyson and the other boxers—I know there were others, but I don’t remember their names—trained in tents in the backyard, punching and jabbing and floating and stinging like birds or bees or whatever. We made them stop to watch us do cartwheels. My cartwheels sucked. I never took gymnastics. Charlotte’s, of course, like everything else in her life, were perfect, and she always remembered to point her toes and make wings out of her hands when she finished and stood back upright. But the point is, Mike Tyson never failed to stop jib-jabbing to watch me and applaud, and so I thought he was a pretty nice guy.

  When I got home and school started up, of course I told everyone that Mike Tyson was pretty much my best friend. I may have been slightly prone to exaggeration when I was younger. In the third grade, I told Jessica O’Neal that I had a bionic toe. She believed me for a whole year. Okay, so maybe the toe thing was less of an exaggeration and more of an outright lie, but you get the picture. Mike Tyson called me on the phone with his little-girl-voice and wished me happy birthday. Mike Tyson baked me a batch of fudge brownies with swirls of caramel. Mike Tyson won me a goldfish at the county fair. For a whole year, I was the coolest person in the fourth grade. I was practically famous. Not only had I gone off-island for two whole weeks by myself, but I came back best friends forever with a world-famous sports star. I swear, Misty Garber was on the verge of overlooking our five-year feud just so she could hear me talk about Mike Tyson. I would have forgiven her, too. I would have been just that magnanimous.

  And then, after one full year of basking in Mike Tyson’s glory, it ended. This was fifth grade, and I was still on a Tyson kick. I think what I was saying then was that Mike Tyson might visit me and we’d go out and eat Bubba’s ribs. But what I didn’t know was that earlier that summer, Mike Tyson had raped a girl. I didn’t know this at all. My classmates and I were at lunch, and it was Thursday, pizza day, the first pizza day of the entire school year. And right there in the lunch line in front of everyone, Misty Garber busted out with what she’d been wanting to bust out with all through math, reading, and recess. It went like this: there I stood in my white ruffled skirt, neon pink leggings, and the fuchsia polka-dotted Keds my mother had let me get. She’d come back home by then, but I think she still felt guilty about Bob the Man from Buffalo. We’d gone all the way up to Sound Feet Shoes in Kitty Hawk, and she let me pick out whichever new school shoes I wanted, and even though she told me nothing would go with fuchsia polka dots, she bought them for me nonetheless. I loved those shoes.

  You should’ve heard how jealous Charlotte got. That was before cell phones, and I had to use my allowance to buy a phone card to call and tell her about my shoes. But it was worth it to hear her just about scream because she had to get boring brown loafers and wasn’t even allowed to get the ones with pennies in them. Of course, I knew deep down that she was happy that I had the Best School Shoes in the Universe.

  So there I was, all decked out and feeling pretty grand about life in general and pizza day in particular. This was before I cut my own hair off, so it was sticking at the back of my neck because I was sweating a little in the pizza-smelling cafeteria. That was back before they put air-conditioning in the schools. Misty Garber sauntered up to me and cut in line and said to Stephen Oden, who was standing next to me picking at a scab on his forearm, “Did you know that Evie’s best friend Mike Tyson is a rapist?”

  And if you think kids don’t know what that word means, you’d be wrong.

  I mean, you wouldn’t be exactly wrong. Little kids might not know precisely what it means, but they know enough, and they know that it is B.A.D.

  But Stephen Oden stood up for me, and for a second I wasn’t yet BAD. “What do you know?” he asked Misty. “Did you meet him?” And he punch-punched at her a little.

  Boy, did that ever make Misty mad. Her face got all red under that stupid puffed-up hair of hers, and she sort of stamped her foot, because she is exactly the kind of girl who saunters and stamps her foot, and she said, “My mom saw it in the newspaper, and that means it’s true. He was in prison and everything. He’s probably going back to prison soon.”

  Stephen Oden considered this. Then he just shrugged and went back to picking at his scab.

  That could have been the end of it, but Misty didn’t stop. She kept on telling everyone that Mike Tyson was a rapist, and she’d sort of hiss the word “rapist” so it went “ray-pisssed.” And she said it loud, too. Ray-PISSSED. So by the time I got to the front of the line and the lunch lady put my pizza and corn and chocolate milk on my tray, everybody knew. I wanted to wilt down into my fuchsia polka-dotted Keds.

  The worst part of it was that I didn’t really even know what ray-pisssed meant, so I defended my friend Mike Tyson. I said to Misty, “So what if he’s a rapist? I bet your dad is a rapist, too.” I said this right into Misty Garber’s face. You can bet that did nothing to patch up our feud. “Maybe everyone is a rapist from time to time,” I said, all explanatory-like, to Stephen Oden, who was getting his lunch card punched. “Maybe I like my friends to be rapists,” I said to Ronnie, your very own Ronnie Ballance, as he requested chocolate milk instead of plain even though he had chocolate allergies. (I bet you didn’t know that about him, but it’s true.) I said stuff like that to everyone. I was tired of feeling like wilting down into my Keds. I really was.

  What happened next was that Misty went and got a dictionary after lunch, and she looked up rapist, only she couldn’t find it in there, but she sure found rape, and she read the definition out loud to the whole class. It was right before Mr. Fink came back into the room to teach us about the ancient city of Ur. This is what Misty read, her mouth moving all sanctimonious-like under that stupid puffed-up hair: “Rape,” she said, clearing her throat a little.

  I squirmed in my hard yellow seat and lifted the lid of my desk up and down, up and down. “Nobody cares what you read,” I said. I knew I was lying, but I said it anyway. I guess in a way that was bad.

  Misty cleared her throat again. “N. One.” She said it just like that, too, I’ll never forget. She didn’t make it “noun” or anything. Just “N. One.” She wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack. Then she went, “Forcible seizing and violation; ravishing.” Everybody (because everybody really did care what she was reading) went “oooh” when she said “ravishing.” She made it sound real bad, probably worse than the word really means. RAVishing. Then she said, “Two. Carrying off by force.” That one was kind of boring so people stopped paying quite as much attention, and I slammed my desk down hard to make everyone look at me and giggle instead of listening to Misty. But then, loud as all hell, louder than the rumble of twenty kids talking after pizza-Thursday lunch and before they got down to the most serious business of studying the ancient city of Ur, she said, “Force to have sexual
intercourse.” And she closed the book with a smack and put it back on the shelf, smug as all get-out.

  I think she must have been skipping around to find the most awful of definitions of that word, because I’ve since looked it up and found there’s one in there about a plant grown for fodder and oil, but Misty never once mentioned that, because she knew she was losing her audience. She went straight for the “force to have sexual intercourse.”

  That was the turning point. That’s how I got to be BAD. I thought a bad man was a good man, and I bragged about it to everyone on the planet. Kids don’t let you forget things like being best friends with a rapist.

  And when you’re best friends with a ray-pisssed, people make out like fuchsia polka-dotted Keds are the worst thing in the world, even though the day before they were positively coveting them.

  I walked from my Aunt Fay’s all the way to the Frisco Rod & Gun that night to buy a new phone card to call Charlotte and tell her about my utter humiliation, but instead I ended up talking about other things, Ur mostly, except that I was really too upset to learn anything of value about Ur, so what I did was say, “Ur,” a lot, like I was thinking about what to say next, and Charlotte would say, “What did you study today?” and I would say, “Ur, Ur, Ur … oh yeah, Ur!” And I bragged about my shoes a little bit more. The thing was, Charlotte didn’t know I was now the bad kid, and I wanted to keep it that way. She still, to this very day, nearly nine years later, thinks I’m a nice girl, and I’m quite content to just let her think it.

  The next thing that happened to make me bad happened in the ninth grade. As you’ll see, this also took place because of Mike Tyson. I swear, that effing Mike Tyson just about ruined my life. Imagine high school. By this time I’d cut my hair and grown it out about ten times, but in ninth grade it was shoulder-length and shaggy and cut like Jennifer Aniston’s. I loved it even though it never stayed the way it was supposed to. I was about the same size I was in fifth grade, the same size I am now, which is: small. But I had some knockers at that point. Those I did have, and they were bigger than Charlotte’s. She hadn’t had any come in yet back then and was super-jealous of mine. Most girls were, I have to admit.

  So there I was, all Jennifer Aniston-ed out, walking down the hall on the very first day of school, walking a little bit bouncy so my new boobs jiggled, looking for my locker. Well, I found it, all right. Wouldn’t you know that someone had gotten there early and taped pictures from Mike Tyson’s ear-biting fight with Evander Holyfield all over my locker? Blood and sweat and ear-lobes everywhere. I never did find out who did it, but I have my suspicions. I mean, for crying out loud, the ear-biting happened in June, and it was now August. But like I said, kids don’t let you forget. Everybody in the hallway laughed at me, I’m not even exaggerating, especially the girls. Girls are so mean. I was still pretty upset about it at lunch, so I ate my sandwich real quick and then went out to the baseball dugout just to get away. It was a pretty day, still summer-warm but with a little bit of autumn poking at the air, saying, Let me in, I want to come in. That’s my favorite kind of weather of all time, and I just wanted to be outside in it. Apparently, so did Zack Gray, who was a junior and a Popular Boy. He was already in the baseball dugout, eating an apple and just looking out over the Pamlico.

  Now, you know that Zack Gray is a cute kid; I don’t have to tell you that, Patricia Ballance. And you also know that he and Abigail Krawchuck have been together since sixth grade. Everybody knows that. But you don’t know how Zack Gray looked at me that day in the baseball dugout. How his eyes lingered a second too long on my new boobs.

  “I hate this place,” I told him. I sat down and swung my Jennifer Aniston hair over my face. I might have leaned over a little bit and squeezed my arms together so as to create cleavage, but not in a way that was obvious.

  Zack Gray crunched down on his apple. He chewed slowly. “Why do you hate it?” he asked. A breeze answered the poking little bit of autumn and said, It’s still summer, back off! It blew Zack Gray’s hair around, and I found that too adorable.

  I pushed my own hair back behind my ears, then realized this wasn’t the way it was supposed to look on TV, so I put it back and leaned my elbows on the bench seat. “People are so close-minded.” I said it like I was the oldest, wisest person in the world and the people here made me so tired with their stupidness and immaturity.

  “I know what you mean,” Zack said. He finished his apple, stood up, and threw the core out of the dugout. It landed in some reeds and made a plish sound. He wiped his hands on the butt of his jeans (he had a really cute butt in those jeans) and smiled at me. “Do you know that Abigail thinks she can get pregnant by going to second base?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. I arched my back a little and sat up straight. “People don’t really think that anymore, do they?”

  Zack walked over and sat down beside me. “Abigail does,” he said. He reached out his hand like he was making to touch my left boob. “Gonna get you pregnant,” he said.

  I pretended to be scared and grasped my arms over my chest. This is another move that causes cleavage if you position your arms right, and I positioned my arms right, let me tell you. I liked that Zack Gray. He was fun. “Oh, no, Zack,” I cried, all mock scared. “I’m not on birth control. You’ll have to put a condom on that hand.”

  We laughed and then it was quiet for a second. Then he reached out and really did touch my left boob. “You got pretty, Evie,” he said. He moved his hand all over my left boob. It felt good and I let him do it.

  “Thanks,” I said. My voice sounded funny in my own ears.

  Then he kissed me. I let him do that, too. We kissed until the lunch bell rang and we had to go inside.

  During school, Zack Gray pretended not to know me in the hallway. He walked around holding hands with old Abigail Krawchuck like he had never fondled my left boob at all. He never said hi or broke up with her or anything. He didn’t get to touch my right boob until the next day, when I went out to see if he would be sitting in the dugout again. He was.

  That’s when the girls started to look at me funny, as if they had heard things. I’d walk down the hall and see Misty Garber whispering something to Emma Midgett, and they’d both stop talking when I came close and I just knew they were talking about me. I don’t know why people listened to old Misty Garber in the first place. She only moved here when she was four, whereas my family has been here since some goddamn shipwreck back in the Dark Ages. And even in high school she had that stupid puffed-up hair. I still am none too fond of Misty Garber, if you want to know the truth. I hope she’s having fun selling fishing lures and t-shirts to tourists.

  But I guess the point is I always thought Zack Gray’d break up with Abigail and realize he wanted to date me. But he never did. By then other guys who had respectable girlfriends had heard I was easy, and sometimes I got lonely and let them make out with me, too. Charlotte said I was overcompensating for an insecurity complex, but I don’t know about that. All I know is that boys can be really nice when they want to make out with you. Sometimes, I’d make out with them because it was fun, and sometimes because I liked to see them get all horny, and sometimes because I hated their pretentious girlfriends who wouldn’t talk to me. Sometimes I liked them and hoped they would like me back. I never even had sex with all those other girls’ boyfriends. I just let them feel my boobs and sometimes, well, never mind. Which isn’t so bad if you consider it. And of course I stopped all that when I became a respectable girlfriend for a few weeks, before you made Ronnie stop talking to me.

  If you want to know the truth, Mrs. Patricia Ballance, I was just so sad when Ronnie stopped talking to me eight days before graduation. I remember when he started talking to me, I mean talking to me in a different way than before. You were there, you should probably remember, too, unless you were busy chaperoning. It was after the last performance of Carousel, in which you will recall that your Ronnie played Mr. Bascombe, and since I’d helped paint the sets, I was inv
ited to the after-party at Rocco’s Pizza. I’d just tried a bite of anchovy pizza and decided it was disgusting and spit it into my napkin. Ronnie saw that and grinned at me. It was hot in there, especially with all of us crowded around, and Ronnie still had his stage makeup on, and it was sliding around his face because he was all kinds of sweaty. He looked ridiculous.

  “Fish don’t belong on pizza,” I said.

  Ronnie scooted over closer to me. “What do you call a fish without an eye?” he asked.

  I put down my pizza and pushed my hair behind my ears.

  “What?”

  “Fsssshhhhh,” Ronnie said. Then he laughed.

  Then I started laughing because he was laughing, and then I choked on my Diet Dr. Pepper and Ronnie banged on my back. I looked up after I wiped off my eyes and I saw you staring at me with a funny look around your mouth like maybe you’d have to sterilize Ronnie’s hand for cooties after he’d touched my back, but I didn’t really think anything of it. I was too excited because that was when Ronnie and I started dating. Not really, of course. But that’s when things changed. We started to talk at school, in homeroom and study hall, and then we sat together at lunch, and then he asked me to prom.

  I should have known something big and bad was impending when I showed up at your house to take pictures and you opened the door and said, “Hello, Evie. That’s an interesting dress.” And you got that funny-mouth look again, like my dress was a total harlot outfit, when in reality it was only a very short red gown and not trashy at all. Charlotte said I should get it because red is always classy and will never go out of style, but then again, she’s the kind of girl who can wear a very short red gown and not get looked at like she’s wearing a total harlot outfit because she’s a good girl and has never been bad.