Rules of My Best Friend's Body

by Matthue Roth

The person in the other stall was going to ask if I was okay. Maybe from my whimpering, maybe by the way I’d thrown my bag down violently as soon as I came in. I could feel the hesitation. But that hesitation only lasted a moment, and then the person was gone.

  Meanwhile, I used that bathroom as my own private fortress of solitude. I held myself with my arms wrapped around each other. I was shivering. I wanted to throw up.

  The minutes flew by. I heard the rumble of crowds through the hall outside, then silence. I waited. One person came in, and a little while later, another one. Two people arrived at the same time. One clicked his tongue loudly, obviously offended that one of the bathroom stalls dared to be occupied.

  He left, eventually, whoever it was. It took a while before he did, though.

  I tried to clear my head. I swept all my thoughts out, and anger flooded in. I tried to push that out too. I’m not scared of the past. I repeated Larissa’s words to myself over and over like a mantra. I let her stony certainty fill up my stomach and my thoughts. When I went into my Mysticism class, I would need to project my fortitude to those good kids and fluent Hebrew speakers and Russians. I couldn’t be weak and vulnerable. They would leap on me like wild dogs, attack me and rip out my heart. They didn’t deserve to see me weak and vulnerable. What had they done to earn that? Nothing. I was power. I was a Man of Steel.

  “There is a division between our outside and inside selves,” the teacher, Mrs. Szmerling, was saying. “Our bodies are fallible and weak. They have limits. So many things we are simply incapable of doing. But our minds are capable of anything. We can think literally anything in the world. In the Torah we are told, we were created in the image of G-d. How is that possible? G-d doesn’t look like anything. G-d doesn’t have a body. But within ourselves, humans are capable of literally everything.”

  You’re totally right, I thought. We’re capable of everything, good and bad. It’s not that the Torah was completely full of shit. It’s just, the Torah had no idea just how evil people could be.

  I pulled myself together. I pulled on my happy, lying-to-my-parents fave, my Clark Kent disguise. I fully resolved to leave that bathroom, to walk into my class, which by now was undoubtedly well underway, and sit calmly in the final seat in the back, face a veritable mask. If the teacher asked, I would pretend that nothing had happened. It was her fault for asking. What, hadn’t I been there all along?

  As soon as I stepped into the hall, however, the bell rang.

  My Mysticism class—the entire period—was over.

  I stood between two class doors, equidistant from both, far and yet not far enough. I braced, getting ready for the between-classes swarm to hit. That rock in the pit of my stomach rematerialized. What if I encountered Mitch again? Alone was bad enough. One well-placed loud-enough comment from him—which, I realized with an ice of fear, he was more than capable of aiming just right—and every person at this school would hear him embarrassing and ridiculing me. I didn’t know what he’d say. But he’d say it.

  A hand touched my arm, a cloud of warmth as someone yanked my body. Pulling me around, spinning me next to her.

  It was Larissa. Her face was ashen. Her eyes were desperate.

  “I need to get out of here,” she said. “Will you come with? Can you get me out of here?”

  We ran.

  *

  Larissa’s car surrounded us. I rolled up the windows. It was a submarine, the only safe space to be. The rest of the time we were drowning.

  At least you get a car, I always complained at her.

  At least I know how to drive, she always shot back.

  Why would I ever need to learn? I’d say, settling the debate with my own ballsy irony. You already do it well enough for the both of us.

  And there it was, our relationship. She drove the getaway car. I was her motive, a reason to flee. I also thought that maybe I was the brains of the operation, but that inevitably crumbled. I was only book smart. Larissa understood people. She was way more intelligent than me at real life.

  We climbed into the front seat. A couple of teachers noticed us. They were hiding by the fire exit doors, stealing a smoke between classes even though they weren’t supposed to. Mr. Dahill’s mouth flopped open, like he was gunning up to come after us, but Ms. Neiman touched his arm gently, as if to remind him that they weren’t allowed to be out here either. At that moment they seemed so young, framed in the fire doors, like real twentysomethings from a cafe, and how much older than that were they, anyway?, not much, and I wondered how long ago they had to go through the stuff that we were going through, and whether they’d completely forgotten it all. Ms. Neiman did. The way she touched his arm, she must have.

  Larissa coasted us out of the parking lot, and we rattled through the speed bumps. Her knee bumped my knee. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, but she was watching the road. She turned off the sleepy college road to the suburb’s main boulevard. We picked up speed. She signaled right, and we shifted lanes. We inclined. We were going up an on-ramp.

  “Larissa?” I watched her drive, trying to sound curious instead of worried. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  “Relax.” Her eyes were glued to the road with a kind of steely determination that seemed specifically intended to contradict that command. “We’re just picking up some snacks.”

  We left at the next exit. We went maybe a block and a half off the freeway, going eighty the whole time. She entered the parking lot and swung around and took a spot up front, right outside the Wawa doors.

  If you’ve never been to Philadelphia, it’s impossible to describe the full existential magnitude of walking into a Wawa. It was a convenience store, but it was a convenience store the way that a Swiss Army knife was a knife. It was a deli, produce market, bakery, soft pretzel dealership, casual hangout spot, nightclub. Some Wawas were even restaurants, having merged with other fast-food places to create strange mutanty hybrids (the WaTaco, the Wizza Hut). Every sort of person frequented it, from frosted-hair moms to geeks and goths. It was the site of intricate jock mating rituals—most consisted of slurping Slurpees straight from the dispenser. By every natural right, we should have despised it. Yet we found ourselves irresistibly drawn to enter through its doors, drawn to eat its food, drawn to spend hours and entire nights of our lives inside its captivating aisles of premade food. We hung out there for hours without ever buying anything, or even thinking of doing so. It was our home, in a way that our real home had long ago stopped being one.

  We stomped through its golden doors. Larissa touched my elbow. “Get a basket,” she told me.

  Astonished, I followed her command. Even when we bought stuff, it was never more elaborate than a simple meal (chips) and dessert (a donut). We never needed a basket.

  She led the way. We bypassed the aisles of car fresheners and hygiene products and went straight for the jugular—the snack food. She crammed in Krakle bars, Ghirardelli squares, those malted triangle things. “What happened?” I gasped, even though I knew better than to ask. She’d let out these things when she was good and ready to.

  She turned to me, rolling her eyes with as much casual gusto as the night I said would she really be awake at 3 A.M. “Do you really have to ask?” she said.

  The first class that afternoon, Israeli History, was a class they had together. Larissa, playing it cool, sat in the middle of the room, off to one side near the window. Mitch, upon entering, took the opportunity to sit directly next to her.

  He smiled at her. Rows of white teeth, untouched by cavities. He said he’d enjoyed the time they’d spent together last week, and that they should do it again some time.

  Larissa got pale. She, too, felt like she was going to vomit. She replied back, trying to maintain the facade of paying attention but really shaking in her seat, that she did not have a good time, that she valued his friendship and hoped it would continue, but she did not want it to happen again.

  “And Mitch said back—just, calmly, the same way he
always is—he said, ‘What makes you think what you want has anything to do with it?’ The whole period, he was so calm. He was so normal. It was like—it’s like nothing ever happened to him.”

  She said that in an even, steady voice. She was looking at me from opposite sides of a display, snack cakes on her side, chocolate on mine. She dipped below the horizon, reappearing with a handful of Tastykake fruit pies—lemon, cherry, pineapple. Her eyes swam, unfocused. She was about to cry. She tossed them at me. “Put them in the basket, will you?” she told me.

  “But it’s expensive,” I said.

  “I don’t give a damn about the fucking price,” she said. “I’ll pay.”

  I dropped them in the basket. I thought to tell her (but didn’t) there really wasn’t that much—she had about $50 worth of candy bars and chips, and all I had in there was a single pack of Chex Mix.

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want,” I said instead.

  There wasn’t much left to tell. She sat there in shock, like she’d just been punched in the mouth. The teacher had just asked a question, about Josephus and his role in the attack on Masada. She called on Mitch—perhaps because she’d seen him talking and wanted to make a point, or perhaps just because his name was next in the roll book. He answered it perfectly, Larissa said.

  “I think that’s the part that hurt the most,” she said. “That he could just dip right out of our conversation and answer a school question like he’d been thinking about it the whole time. Like he couldn’t even be bothered to devote his entire brain power to terrorizing me.” Her voice shrunk. “I took a test the other night,” she said. “It took me almost the whole week to work up the nerve to buy it, but I did. I’m not pregnant. That’s good news, right? At last I have some good news.” She dropped out of audible speaking range. Now she was starting to cry.

  For the moment, just for now, I didn’t care about being in love with her. I just wanted to be her friend, her servant, her robot. I wanted to be whatever she needed to make herself better.

  The people in the Wawa were watching us. Two cashiers, the guy behind the hoagie counter, a couple of customers. It was close to dinner time. Most people were commuting or already home. Nobody had any need for junk food; they had real lives. My parents would be showing up to Hebrew School soon to pick me up. The days had been getting shorter, the sunset creeping a little earlier each day, until daylight savings time hit last week and twilight started stepping all over the border of the afternoon.

  It was like that today, in the Wawa, as we shopped: Shadows got long, and the windows all filled with an orange and grey and purple tragedy of light, turning us all to stone. The people in the Wawa stared at us, saw Larissa cupping her face, shaking hard, and me looking miserable, and they thought I was the reason why. No, I wanted to protest, weathering the weight of their silent judgment. I wanted to show them the mountain of comfort food I was holding, which seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment. No, it wasn’t me. It was just life. It eats all of us alive.

  back to reality

  The first week or two after it happened we talked constantly. Every day—between classes, after school, and into the night. On the phone, until my mother started casually inquiring whether I was planning on using up my share of minutes for the month all in one night. Then online, until one of us (usually me) was kicked off the computer for the night. Then we would fire messages at each other on our phones—sometimes we typed in our pockets, without looking at the keys, and hoping to G-d that Autocorrect would fix our mistakes and not compound them. Our messages would be short texts and incomplete bursts of sentence that shrunk our conversations down to a couple of vowelless words, compacted almost beyond recognition, but we both knew the sentiment was still there.

  *

  We could have just been sending each other exclamation points and asterisks, for all it mattered. Really, we were sending out smoke signals, flares of light. Just anything to let each of us know that the other was still around.

  I don’t even remember what we talked about, for the most part. Not the rape. Anything but that.

  *

  And then the talking faded. Not because we were avoiding each other, but—from my end at least—because we didn’t need to. We’d send each other messages and spend hours pouring over our volleys, letting the gravity of each word seep in.

  Or maybe she just needed more time alone, and I was just naive? But, no. I don’t think it was that.

  I really didn’t think it was that.

  *

  I took risks. The need to talk to her would grow inside me, well up like water collecting in a bucket, and then spring a leak. Usually I was really good about sneaking into bathrooms or keeping my phone on the down low, but these days more than ever I had a damn-the-torpedoes attitude about someone catching me. Larissa was more important than school. She was more important than getting caught.

  At school there were three separate occasions where I almost got caught writing to Larissa. The first was when I was wearing socks with their elastic worn a little too loose. I jerked my leg to the side while launching myself into my desk, in advisory, the beginning of the morning. It clattered on the floor. I scooped it up before anyone had a chance to see, jammed it in my bag.

  From the other kids came looks of resentment and suspicion. What do you have that I don’t? Nothing, I wanted to tell them. Nothing.

  The second time was another audio message. I thought I was picking up another text, and then the phone just started talking in her voice. Out loud.

  “Today I got to school like half an hour before they unlocked the doors,” she said. “I just needed to tell you exactly what the world looks like then. The sun is just this tiny ball on the treeline, you can blot it out with your finger—”

  I hit silent. I looked around to make sure no one had overheard. I was sitting outside school, in one of those vacant stone jetties in the building’s architecture. They were made for no specific purpose. Last year, when I was a freshman, I used to hide here all the time. Somewhere in my head, I made up a story where the architect who first designated the school building was also a loser who liked to hang out alone, just like I did, and he or she created them for just this purpose. More likely, they were just an excuse to fill up empty space.

  No. No one was around.

  I was safe.

  A day or two later, I snuck out there again and Larissa and I managed to have a real conversation. She was at the end of her lunch period. My gym class had just started. My gym teachers and I had a mutual understanding, sort of: I wouldn’t have to show up, they wouldn’t have to try and make me perform menial tasks that I would waste hours of their time trying to do and completely fail at anyway. I wish I was exaggerating. The first week of class, I spent fifteen minutes dangling on a rope, grasping it with my arms and legs as they yelled at me to climb up it, and all I could do was tell them that my arms and legs would not do it. I didn’t know why. My body just didn’t perform at that level of sophistication.

  “What do you see right now?” Larissa asked me.

  I looked. I pretended my eyes were her eyes and I told her.

  “In front of me, concrete. I’m staring at the ground. Between my shoes, a glob of concrete, with different small stones stuck in a grey concrete soup. They’re all colors, but mostly brown and mustard. If I look up a little, there’s the lawn. In the distance I can see a gym class, probably the gym class I’m supposed to be in—they’re all wearing yellow shirts and gaudy red shorts, even in this weather, like a form of torture in addition to the fashion crimes they’re perpetrating. And a bunch of kids passing closer. They probably have lunch period. Some of them look like they could be cool, but most are just trendazoids.”

  “Who looks cool?” she asked. I heard the ambient noise from her end. I wondered if she was outside too.

  “Carrie Moss. She looks totally strange, but in a way that makes you wonder what she’s up to. She has short hair, like Tinker Bell, but
it’s black. She’s wearing a side backpack with a bunch of stencil graffiti on the flap. Then there’s a guy who’s listening to music on his headphones and thrashing his head madly. Another guy is jogging, but reading a book at the same time.”

  “Talk to them.”

  “No.”

  “Why? At least you get cool kids in your school.” My city public school had 2,600 students, nearly 700 of them in my grade. Larissa’s school had two classrooms for each grade. She saw fewer than one hundred people each day, probably including teachers.

  “Yeah, but it’s not like that. It’s not like you can just talk to someone with no consequences.”

  “What sort of consequences do you need?”

  “Well, what if I confide something amazingly deep and personal in someone, and then I run into them in the bathroom, or I have to sit next to them in Algebra 3-Trig for the next year of my life? Or gym?”

  “That last part’s invalid. You don’t even take gym, Artomaton.”

  “So? I might get a different teacher next year. I might actually have to.”

  “Take a chance. You only live once.”

  “I won’t say the right thing. You know I never do.”

  “You always say the right thing.”