And Other Stories (22 page)

But sometimes I can still have
these moments of total happiness. And I feel as if every time I
pretend to be happy, I’m scaring that real happiness
off.

I rode my bike home from the party.
Randy Nesterhoff offered me a ride, but the car smelled like
Southern Comfort from six feet away. I’m stupid, but at least I’m
selective about it.

•

I don’t know why I’m still writing
this shit down. If I wanted to keep a diary, this wouldn’t be the
way I’d do it. And for sure no one is ever going to see this.
Unlike the masterpiece version, which I turned in Monday morning.
(Got it back today. C-, with my carefully omitted commas written
in, in red. Got to give Ms. G. something to do.)

Maybe what I’m doing, writing this,
is what Piper’s crew do when they’re crammed in front of the girls’
room mirror before first period (and just incidentally, hogging the
sinks). “Eeuw, is that a zit?” “Is my hair too straight?” “I just
got this lip gloss, is it, like, okay?” I’m holding up these words
to my face so I can check myself out. Looking for normal in there
somewhere, or even a good sort of abnormal.

Piper and Co. take that whole “the
few, the proud” thing pretty seriously—their folks are officers, so
they’re sweetly condescending to the base kids whose fathers are
mere grunts, and treat the townies the way the Spanish missionaries
treated the Indians. Make yourselves useful and don’t talk back, or
we’ll shoot you. I’m pleased to say that Piper hasn’t once figured
out a way I can be useful to her.

Bigots are people who say, “I don’t
hate all [fill in the blank] people. Why, some of my best friends
are [ditto].” I’m proud to say I’m not a bigot. None of my friends
are kids from the base.

As far as I know, the only good
thing that ever came off that base was Steve. Mom dated him
(“dated” meaning “slept with”) for nine months, when I was
twelve/thirteen. He didn’t treat me like an adult, exactly. It was
more that I was a real person to him, not someone he had to impress
on the way to impressing Mom. He figured out that I really wanted a
mountain bike, and gave it to me for my birthday.

Then he got transferred. I didn’t
find out for almost a year that he asked Mom to marry him when it
happened. He wanted to take us with him.

Obviously, we didn’t go. Mom had a
huge fight with him instead. Don’t ask me to explain
that.

He’s in Saudi Arabia now. Another
desert.

I think sometimes I should do with
Piper what the Indians did with the missionaries. Be polite but
stupid to her face, and sabotage the hell out of her when she’s not
looking. But I can’t keep my mouth shut. Today she and Kristin Gold
and Amber Janeke were hanging around Piper’s locker, which is
annoyingly close to mine. I passed them on my way to get my
geography book, and Piper said, “Do you smell something?” Smothered
laughter from Kristen and Amber.

So I stopped. “Probably,” I said.
“Your locker door’s open.”

It took her a second to get it. By
that time I had my locker open and my book out. (Being fast on your
locker combination is a survival skill.) I smiled at her, slammed
the door, and hauled it for class. I was so proud of that one that
I raised my hand when Mr. Kuyper asked where Mongolia is.
Adrenaline is a dangerous drug.

And of course, I came back after
class and found the entire contents of my locker on the hall floor.
Note to self: check door after slamming to ensure latching has
occurred.

There are at least two sets of
Rules for Life, as far as I can tell. There are the ones that get
you picked up by the cops or taken to the assistant principal’s
office if you break them: Don’t leave school grounds, don’t spray
paint stop signs, don’t drink, don’t drop firecrackers in the
toilets.

But there’s a different set that
you really can’t break if you don’t want your life to suck
relentlessly. At the head of the list, Rule Number One: Don’t get
noticed. As long as you stay exactly the person everyone thinks
you’re supposed to be, you’re fine. Piper can answer questions and
get A’s on homework because that’s who she’s supposed to be. I’m
supposed to be someone else. Usually I have that person nailed. But
sometimes I lose perspective and do something
inconsistent.

Then I have to put my crap back in
my locker, get my gym shoes out of the toilet, prove to Janelle
that I’m not dissing her party, and give the wrong answer to a
question I shouldn’t have stuck my hand in the air over anyway. But
that’s fair. High school exists to teach you the rules, and I
figure I’m getting a solid B average.

•

Ring
ring!
Life changes. How can you not love
telephones? For better or worse,
ring ring!
and presto, there’s
something different in your ear from what you were doing or
thinking a second ago. Even if it’s about replacement windows or
something.

But it might not be. What if it’s
NASA, and they want you to know the shuttle is making an emergency
landing, and it looks as if touchdown is going to be somewhere
around your bathtub, and you might want to evacuate your
neighborhood?

Raves are not on
the list of approved uses for National Monuments, I bet. But it’s
tough to police a national monument that’s hundreds of thousands of
acres wide, full of blind canyons and dry washes. What makes Joshua
Tree a monument, anyway, like the Lincoln Memorial? And why is it a
national monument
and
a national park? Who decides this
stuff?

Anyway, now Saturday night is
spoken for.

Mom answered the phone, so after I
hung up, she had to know who it was. It’s hard to explain a phone
call from a stranger who asks for you by name, then only has
fifteen seconds of things to say. I told her it was the library,
and a book I’d reserved was in. Thank god she has no idea when the
library closes.

Mom shares the school district’s
expectations for her daughter. I think that’s because the school
district is her most dependable source of information on me. We
aren’t home together much. It makes the library excuse risky,
though, since she has no idea how much I read, and based on my
grades, I shouldn’t know when the library’s open,
either.

“What book?” she
asked.

I was in the middle of dialing Bob
Esquivel. I turned the phone off and tried to look dazed while I
figured out an answer.

I guess Mom and I really haven’t
seen much of each other lately, because I was surprised at how
tired she looks. There are two deep lines between her eyebrows and
this heaviness around the corners of her mouth, as if she’s been
having a bad day for the last 365. When I was really little and Dad
still lived with us, she had cheerleader hair, blonde and thick and
long. When people talk about hair like ripe wheat, I figure that’s
what they mean. Now her hair looks more like dry grass before the
fall wildfires, the life sucked out.

“Just a book for
school,” I said, then, thinking of Mr. Kuyper, “about
China.”

“Don’t they have the
right books in the school library? You’d think they’d have what the
teachers are teaching, for godsake.”

“It’s not like you’re
paying extra, Mom. The library’s free.”

“Nothing’s free.
Those books cost tax money.”

What do you say to that? Better
books than a bomber? Maybe I looked a little too stupid, because
she stomped out to the kitchen.

She cheered up after she found out
there was lasagna in the fridge. It’s weird—cooking is the only
thing I’m supposed to do well that I’m actually good at.

And I cheered up because Bob was
home and up for Saturday night.

I don’t know how they do these
things in cities, but out here, if you want to find the party, it
helps to have a global positioning system. Seriously. Bob
Esquivel’s the only other person in town I know who likes to rave.
He has a GPS and a dirt bike, and a profile like Keanu Reeves. He
graduated last year, and the high school halls are dark and drab
since then. Okay, they were dark and drab before that, but for some
of us, birds sang and the ceiling rained flowers if he met our eyes
as we passed on the way to class. The “us” did not include Janelle,
Nina, and Barb, who thought his hair was too long.

Raving is one of the things I don’t
have in common with those guys. The first rave I ever went to,
Janelle went, too. After fifteen minutes, I was bouncy and
breathless and felt like a little kid who’d just discovered a
fully-equipped secret fort. Janelle hated the music, thought all
the people were freaks, and was afraid to touch anything for fear
of getting AIDS or TB. Janelle believes everything she reads on the
Internet.

Given that I’m not exactly the life
of the party at parties, I suppose it’s weird that I’d drag my ass
into the desert in the dark to hear some DJ spin for a bunch of
X-heads wearing glow-necklaces.

Well, surprise.

The way to get through normal life
is to pretend it isn’t getting to you. If you let on that you’re
hurt, the other animals will turn on you and tear you to pieces.
Don’t attract the attention of predators.

But in the dark in the desert, with
a pile of speakers the size of our house kicking out the groove,
and everyone around me faceless and trancing, it’s different. Then
I can scream loud as I want, and sometimes everyone around me does,
too, as if for once I’m not the only one who wants to scream. I can
stamp as if everything I hate is down there in the dirt and I can
smash it to bits. I can jump up and down and flap my arms like a
nut, just because maybe the DJ will see the top of my head and then
I can imagine the groove is just for me.

Most of all, when I’m out there
banging up against dozens of strangers and sharing their sweat, I’m
alone. Yes, alone. So I’m safe. I’m free.

I should have mentioned the park
earlier. I usually think of this place as being divided into two
cultures, the base and the townies. But it’s really three parts,
and the third one is the park. That’s a whole different
culture.

There’s the
rangers, who live here but not quite
here
—I don’t know how to explain
it. Then there are day visitors, campers, backpackers, rock
climbers, driving through town on Highway 62 in shiny SUVs and
rental cars. Lots of Eddie Bauer and Northface logos on clothes,
lots of bright-colored nylon gear. They stop for breakfast at the
Lucky Lizard or La Boule (the only places in town with real coffee,
and I’m counting our house) and fill ’er up with premium, but
that’s it for their contact with the other two
cultures.

If this were the Middle Ages, we’d
be the peasants, and the Marine base would be the landowners. The
park would be the Church, with its own walls and special rules, and
the monks being contemplative in their monastery. With pilgrims in
really nice wagons.

The Marines ship people out, the
tourists come and leave. But the peasants are forever. The only
escape the park offers is the occasional rave, and that’s like
getting drunk—it’s temporary.

It’s a really good temporary,
though.

•

How can you do something so crappy
to your kid as to move her to a new school in spring of junior
year? I guess the Marines don’t exactly ask first, but wasn’t there
an aunt she could have stayed with?

Naturally, Ms. G. stood her up in
front of the class and introduced her, as if this were third grade.
I don’t remember her name—I was too busy feeling sorry for her, and
being mad at myself for wasting time feeling sorry for
her.

She looked like David Bowie dressed
up like Audrey Hepburn. Little black sheath dress, bangle
bracelets, big sunglasses pushed up into her hair, which is
white-blonde and short and sticks up. Fishnet stockings (tramp!)
and Converse hi-tops (weirdo!). She looked out over the rest of us
with these huge round brown eyes, like a deer who has no idea that
that thing in your hands is a shotgun.

Sure enough, when the bell rang,
Randy Nesterhoff sauntered up to where New Girl was stuffing her
books into the biggest purse in the world. “Man, you don’t have any
tits at all, do you?” he said. His buddies snickered behind
him.

She looked up and kind of blinked
her eyes wider—it’s not easy to describe. “Neither do you,” she
said.

“Yeah, well,
I’m a
guy
.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You are?”
She shouldered the monster purse and walked out. Randy’s crew
laughed and Randy turned purple.

Me, I was revising my opinions
about deer.

The second incident, at lunch, was
even more interesting. Amber and Piper had set up the ballot box
for Junior Formal king and queen at the end of the cafeteria line,
so there was no dodging it.

“Did you vote yet,
Beth?” Amber cooed as I went by with my tray. The way she asked
made it a joke. Only not funny.

“You should vote for
yourself,” Piper added. “Then at least you’d get a
vote.”

Somebody behind me said, “What was
your name again? Piper?”