Big Girl Small (25 page)

Bill saw this happen and turned to me. “He likes you.”

“Right,” I said. “Kids and dogs always
like
me.” I tried not to say this in too mean or sarcastic a voice, not that Bill would have gotten it anyway. He’s too good-spirited to understand me or to imagine that dogs literally think I’m another dog, or a treat or something.

They come up and sniff me like—“What is this fabulous dog-size human I’ve found?” They can kiss me on the lips without having to jump up or even stand on their hind legs. More effortless slobbering and hump for your buck. Kids think I’m a kid at first, and then when they realize I’m not, the possibilities for what I might be instead are endless: hobbit, garden gnome, or adult small enough to be bossed around by them. In any case, it’s loads of fun, and who wouldn’t point? Some kids just want to gloat because even though I’m obviously older, they’re bigger. I’m over it. But if I ever get married and have average-size kids myself, I’m going to show them who’s in charge.

Bill got a cart and started pushing it, and I climbed up onto the bottom shelf of the dairy fridge and pulled out a small carton of milk. He reached down and took it from me gently so he could put it in the cart. I felt exhausted suddenly, like my bone marrow was giving up on me. Living alone was terrible. I mean, this was only the second time I’d ever been grocery shopping without one of my parents. And I hated it. I wanted desperately to go home, to hide in my house, even though maybe there were throngs of cameramen camped out on my lawn, wanting to make my life into more ugly videos. Just the thought of that made me want to sleep. But at the thought of sleep, an image of the bed at the Motel Manor popped into my mind, and fear climbed my spine like the rungs of a cold ladder. Up, up, up. I took a breath, gathered myself, considered asking Bill to lift me into the cart and push me through the store, but it seemed too humiliating. Not in front of Bill, I mean, he wouldn’t have cared, but just everyone else in the store, especially that kid who had pointed, who was right behind us now, screaming for candy.

I felt trapped, too scared to go back to the motel, too scared to go home, too scared to do anything. I felt myself hopping up onto the railing of the cart and holding on while Bill pushed our milk and me to the canned goods aisle. I heard myself ask Bill to get two cans of tuna. He put them in the cart carefully, and while he was doing that, he asked me, “So did he ever call?”

“What?”

“The man in the story,” he said. “The man. Did he call on the phone?”

“Kyle, you mean?”

“Oh. Yes. Maybe Kyle. Did he call?”

I didn’t know what this question meant—whether Bill wanted to know if Kyle had called me back in the day, like after we did it? Or wanted to know if he had called me lately, at the motel or something. His utter inability to understand time as a linear thing was comforting to me. It didn’t matter when Kyle had called, at least not in Bill’s and my universe. That he had called at all, ever, still counted for something here.

So I said, “Yeah. Sometimes he did call.”

“Oh, good. That’s good. That’s good news,” Bill said. “It’s nice, to get calls. It’s nice.”

“You’re right. It is nice. Thanks.”

“Then what happened?”

“To me, you mean?”

“To the man?”

“Well, he did something kind of cruel.”

“Oh.”

“He and his friends took advantage of me. Or maybe his friends took advantage of him and me. I’m not sure. I don’t know if he meant to; I mean, I think it might have been their fault and not his, but I—”

It was the first time Bill had ever cut me off. “Are you all right?” he asked, as if that was more important than whether Kyle had done it on purpose, or by drunk accident, or force of peer pressure or something.

“Yes, I’m all right, thank you. Could you, um . . . ?” We had made our way back in a circle to the produce section, and I pointed at some apples.

Bill took a plastic bag from a spinning roll of them six feet above my head. He put some apples in the bag and then tossed the bag into the high cart so effortlessly he looked like an Olympic athlete.

“Apples,” he said as the apples settled between some tuna cans and relish, and then, “Thank you.”

We walked by the flower freezer, and I picked out a gardenia. I love gardenias, because they smell gorgeous, and even though it was nine dollars, I wanted something alive in my room. Maybe this was a good sign that I wanted to keep living too, at least as long as it takes to find out what will happen to me. Maybe because I don’t want to miss the end of my own story. Or maybe because I don’t want the idiotic pigs on
Celebrity Apprentice
to have the last laugh when I’m hanging off a terrace somewhere.

Bill put the groceries on the counter, and I dug into my bag for my wallet, which I found but then promptly dropped while I was fumbling for bills. My beloved picture of Peter Dinklage fell out. I looked at it there, on the floor, and knew suddenly, in a terrible and certain way, that I would have to leave it there, that I didn’t deserve to carry him around anymore; what would he think of me now, ruining the reputation of the very word
dwarf
? I know it’s silly, because of course no one can represent everyone else, and I’m not every dwarf in the world any more than I’m every teenager or every girl. Not to mention I could have gotten another picture of him from a magazine or online, which is how I got that one, but I felt so ashamed of my life at that moment in the lonely Kroger that I couldn’t bring myself to put the picture back in my wallet. Of course I felt sick deserting my hero there too.

Bill didn’t seem to notice any of my paralysis, just waited patiently while I came back to life, collected everything but the picture, reassembled the contents of my wallet, and handed him forty dollars. He paid, and then carried the groceries all the way back to the motel, where the desk clerk was back and there were several people milling around but no one spoke to us and I kept my eyes pinned to the floor and ran up to my room, vowing never to leave it again. Bill set the bags down outside the door.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Judy.”

“Are you kidding? Thank
you
,” I said. “I mean, for putting everything in the cart and for being so helpful all the time and carrying all my stuff,” I said. “Why don’t you come in? We can have some juice or something.”

He came in and sat politely on the bed. I rinsed out the glass by my bed and the one I’d been using to hold my toothbrush so I’d have two, and poured Red Machine berry juice from one of the Naked bottles into both cups. I offered one to Bill, thinking how glad I was to have met him, even if he was a complete freak.

“Looks like blood!” he said, and took a big swig of the juice.

I was drinking when he said this, and suddenly had hiccups. So I bent over and tried drinking the juice backwards from the top of the cup. Usually that really works, but this time it didn’t, so I kept hiccupping. Bill didn’t say anything about it. Maybe he didn’t notice. We sat there quietly for a while, drinking our blood juice. I thought about how AP biology was happening now without me. I wondered if Mr. Abrahams had seen the video. Probably. My stomach went hurling through space at the thought, which led to the next one, one I’d had so many times it was like breathing: of Mr. Luther watching it, Ms. Doman, Ms. Vanderly. Of how sickening they must have found it, and yet how they went back to Darcy, kept teaching their classes. How everything went on anyway.

I was holding the gardenia I’d bought. “Remember how you asked what happened then?” I said to Bill, hopefully.

“What happened? What happened?” he asked. He sounded nervous.

“No,” I said, “it’s okay. I just meant the story I was telling you. About my high school and that guy, Kyle Malanack?”

“Oh yes. Oh yes. I remember. I know that story. That’s a good one. That’s a good story,” Bill said.

“Thank you. So—what happened was that our play opened. The play we were doing was called
Runaways.
And my friend Meghan—you know, the one who’s also a dwarf ? From California? Well, she was in town for opening night, because even though it was a high school play, for us it was kind of a big deal.”

Bill nodded. His juice was finished and I opened the second bottle I’d bought, poured the blue goo into his glass, thought of Dr. Seuss, the Goo-Goose chewing. Bill smiled, took a sip. I thought he might be hungry, too, so I stood up, left the gardenia on the bed, and got the cheap can opener I’d bought at Kroger, used it to pry the top off some tuna, which I stirred into a bowl. I added an individual package of mayonnaise he had retrieved from the skyscraper of a deli counter. I took out four pieces of bread and two slices of American cheese, twisted open a jar of pickle relish until I felt the pop under the palm of my hand. I was glad my mother wasn’t seeing this; she’s a believer in nutritious food. Of course, she’s never had to live at the Motel Manor or walk down East Michigan to hunt for a meal. I slapped the cheese on the bread, scooped some tuna onto each sandwich, put a spoonful of relish on top of the tuna, and covered it with the second piece of bread. I don’t like the relish stirred in; I like the surprise of a huge clump of it, like pickles on a hamburger. I put the sandwiches on paper plates I’d bought my first day there and had started reusing since I only had six.

I set one in front of Bill. “Your tuna platter, sir,” I joked.

“Thank you. Thank you, tuna and juice,” he said.

I sat back down on the edge of the bed and took a bite of my sandwich. It was pretty good. But then as soon as I started telling Bill the story again, something about eating the tuna sandwich seemed disrespectful. But when I thought about that, I realized it was only insulting to me, since I was the tragic character in the story. And maybe it was a sign that I’m callous and unfeeling about my own history, because I was hungry. So I disrespected myself by eating a tuna sandwich while I told Bill the worst part.

Meghan had talked her parents into buying her a plane ticket to come for the opening of
Runaways,
and to letting her skip three days of school to hang out and visit D’Arts. She was scheduled to arrive the day after Kyle told me about his sister and we got drunk at his house.

I woke up that Saturday morning naked, on Kyle’s basement couch, which had been folded out into a bed. To say I had no idea where I was is an understatement. It took me three full minutes of the kind of panic I thought was reserved for near-death experiences, just to regain actual consciousness. Five minutes into being awake, I felt pretty certain that I was human, that it hadn’t been an alien abduction, that I was in a body that belonged to me. After ten minutes, I looked down at myself, found I was still there, alive, familiar.

“Oh my god, I’m a dwarf,” I said to myself, and almost laughed. I mean, you can’t deny that that’s pretty hilarious. I wish someone other than me had been there to hear it. But even before I could enjoy my ability to make myself laugh during what would turn out to be the worst memory of my life, I had to put my head in my hands. Because it was pounding, screaming. My eyes hurt, shards of amazing pain jabbed at them from inside my brain.

“Where are my clothes?” I wondered. I sat up, and the room spun so horribly that I had to lean over. That made me think I might throw up, so I rested my weight on my arm at the edge of the sofa bed for a moment, and that’s when I saw Alan.

He was asleep on the floor next to the bed, wearing a pair of boxers with prints of dogs on them. He didn’t even have a sleeping bag or anything, just one of the huge couch pillows under his head. It was at that moment that I knew for certain I was going to throw up. I heaved myself off the side of the bed into a standing position, and staggered into the bathroom, where I sat down on the floor again, rested my throbbing head against the side of the bathtub. There were tan bathmats on a tile floor, and matching tan towels hanging so high above me that they looked miles away. The room was wobbling like a canoe, so I sat for a while before crawling over to the toilet and barfing. I felt slightly better. I wished desperately that I had my own car, could not see calling my parents and admitting that I hadn’t slept at Sarah’s, or waking Kyle. I was too dizzy to walk, so I crawled back out into the room where Alan’s nightmare triangular body was still lying on the floor. I dug around like an animal under the sofa bed and finally found some of my clothes. I threw them on, backwards, inside out, not caring, focusing on the pain in my head, trying to ignore everything else I felt and saw. I barely looked at Alan, stood up, shaking a little bit, and climbed as fast as I could up a short flight that led me to Kyle’s palatial foyer. I had to brace myself against the banister twice. My purse was on the bench right at the front door, so I opened it and looked at my cell phone. No missed calls. I put it in my pocket and headed for the front door. I had no plan, but wanted to get out of that house as fast as I could and never see it again. In the reflection of the enormous foyer windows, I could see the living room behind me, and a body asleep on the black leather sofa with silver feet, and felt my stomach turn over again. I tried not to, but couldn’t help myself and turned and looked. It was Chris Arpent. I couldn’t tell whether he had clothes on or not, since he was covered with a throw that had been resting on the back of the couch. One of his hairy legs was sticking out of the blanket, and he looked like a giant, muscley insect. I had some kind of physical memory when I saw that leg, knew that I had seen it before, or touched it even, but that thought too I pushed back into my bones.

I tried to think, but could not. My mind separated from my body in a kind of revolt I’d never experienced, and propelled me to the front door, which I reached up and opened. I scrambled out onto the porch, leaving the door open behind me, hoping an intruder would come in and steal everything in the house, maybe even kill Chris and Alan. I couldn’t quite hope for Kyle’s death. I stood there for a minute, trying to orient myself, the world coming at me the way I guess it does when you don’t know what you did the night before or how long it’s going to take you to recover from whatever it was. The morning light was soft over the trees in the front yard, sprinkling shadows of leaves over the wooden porch and the side of the house. But it felt offensively, impossibly bright. It was very cold. I hobbled down the stairs into the cul-de-sac, wondering where his preppy mom and dad were, whether on vacation or a work trip, why they were both out of town so much, what it felt like to be Kyle, popular and tragic and abandoned.