Big Girl Small (6 page)

“—or whether it was what she actually did. Will they be—” My mom must have gone into the bathroom or something, because this was all I heard for the moment, but I kept my ear to the floor.

She came back in the middle of a new sentence. “—safe. I don’t trust—”

“She’s a good judge of character, Peggy,” my dad said. So he was awake.

“I’m not sure,” my mom said, to my annoyance. “I don’t know where she was, or whether it was somewhere we wanted her to be.”

“Then she’s just like kids everywhere.”

“I’m going to ask her to tell me tomorrow—and not just—”

“Don’t, Peggy. She needs space.”

“I know that!” my mom snapped. “Don’t patronize me, or act like I’m not on her side. She’s—you know, she’s—in a different situation from everyone else. I don’t want her to get hurt.”

“I think the possibilities for where she was and what she was doing are fairly limited and safe,” my dad said. I was annoyed in a whole new way.

“Maybe we should ask Chad to talk to her.”

Then there was a long pause, during which I got up and climbed back into bed, wondering whether Chad was on my parents’ side.

I didn’t care that much at that moment, honestly, because I had so much thinking to do about Kyle. I could picture him with absolute precision: his face, somehow soft even with the jaw; his hair, not curly exactly, but not straight, especially where it was a bit too long; his dark green cargo pants and faded T-shirt; his white teeth and his eyes. What color were his eyes? I hadn’t been able to tell, felt urgent about finding out.

People joke all the time about teenage love and how stupid and “not the real thing” it is. My parents even have a reel-to-reel of that horrible song “A Teenager in Love.” But if I ever feel again in my life the way I felt about Kyle, I’ll eat every word I’ve ever written or spoken. There’s no way I’ll ever feel this way again. And I’m glad. I think maybe the very not-realness of teenage love makes it
the only
real thing
. Say what you will if you’re a grown-up, that it’s puppy love when you’re young, that we aren’t going to marry our teenage loves anyway, so they’re just crushes, or that you have to spend years together, peeing with the door open, before love counts as love. But none of that matters. Because what’s
true
about love isn’t a quantity thing—it’s a quality one. And the reason I know that is because I still feel like I’m actually going to die.

The Monday after Chessie’s party, I spent the morning zoning out on a series of announcements at “meeting” from 8:00 to 9:00 and then precalculus from 9:10 to 10:46. Why do high schools always schedule classes in such a weird way? Is it just a way of punctuating further the obvious fact that this is not the real world? A refusal to run on the normal human time schedule, say from 9:00 to 11:00? Or even 9:00 to 10:45? In precalc, I sat, as I always do in every class, in the back row. From there, I could observe my gleeful actor and dancer classmates—the smart ones, I mean—talk about how, oh my god, this year AP bio was going to be so gross and we were going to have to dissect cats, and placements for voice classes were already under way and had you gone yet, and oh my god, mine went, like, so badly, and did you hear they’re not letting any non-seniors into senior voice this year, and blah blah blah. Oh, and have you memorized your monologue for Ms. Minogue because she’s such a bitch, last year she made Sonya Ross sob and run from the room. I stayed quiet, but I could see their logic about AP bio. I mean, last time I’d cut something up, in eighth-grade bio at Tappan Middle School, it hadn’t been anything fluffy, just rubbery pigs. And since human beings have a habit of cutting pigs into bacon-shaped pieces and eating them, there’s less love lost there than there is with domestic pet corpses.

At the mere mention of fetal animal dissection, I remembered Tappan suddenly, with the first nostalgia I’d ever felt for it, that sprawling concrete slab of a building with its unforgivable choice of school mascots: the Trojan. I could feel the energy of its colorless classrooms, rows of gray lockers, pervasive chlorine smell.

Once, in seventh grade, a guy named Joseph peed into a radiator vent in the basement and they had to send everyone home because the entire school smelled so terrible. It was that kind of place, everything connected and infectious. When we dissected those formaldehyde-reeking fetal pigs, my lab partner dropped our pig’s heart onto my lap accidentally and then squealed and screamed like it had been her lap. Or her heart. I’m not squeamish. I picked the thing up and put it back on our table, like it was a piece of gummy candy.

Speaking of Tappan, my little brother, Sam, is there this minute, probably sitting through a math class too, learning fractions or decimals or metric measurements. I feel for him, trapped in middle school for another whole year. Or maybe he’s in jazz band right now. I hope so. Tappan has an eighth-grade jazz band, and Sam went out at the beginning of the year for clarinet. They obviously let in everyone who wants to be in the band, but Sam was super nervous about the whole thing. I remember my mom baked a clarinet-shaped cake at Judy’s Grill, with “Congratulations, Sam” written in frosting, next to the little dots she made for buttons. It even had an almond sliver for the reed. But when Sam saw it, he cried. My parents were as horrified as I’ve ever seen them. So was the manager, Brad. He inspected the cake, as if a rat or roach had just climbed out of it.

My mom, the only competent adult in the room, put her arms around Sam. “Why are you crying, honey?”

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Like what?” my dad asked. “The cake?”

“No, the cake is nice.”

“What don’t you like, Sam?” my mom asked, really slow.

“The clarinet.”

My parents stood there, stunned, groping around.

“Oh,” my dad finally said. Good work, Dad!

“What do you like, Sam?” I asked, rescuing the adults for a change.

“Drums,” he said. “I’ve always only liked drums.”

“I know,” I told him, “let’s eat the cake anyway, and tomorrow you can tell them that you want to try out for drums instead.”

I hope Sam is drumming right now, and not thinking about me, or dissecting animals or numbers. Although numbers can be kind of comforting. I mean, at least there’s a predictability to the way they behave. But Sam hates math. That’s why I always help him with it. I wonder if my mom’s been helping him since I’ve been gone.

I remember that first day of math at D’Arts vividly, even though nothing happened that was worth remembering. Memory is funny that way; it isn’t like a photo album, where high-budget moments get the most play. I mean, what I remember mostly about D’Arts are the textures, the way light looked coming in the windows in the precalc room, or whole days that were just days, when nothing went wrong or right—the day just happened. I remember our teacher, Mr. Luther, clearing his throat that first day and everyone staring gloomily at the board. Maybe part of the reason Mr. Luther’s gestures are memorable is that he was created by a cruel cartoonist. It’s bad enough to have to teach arts students math, but he had a greasy comb-over, and a cloth Izod belt he had refed through four overworked loops in his gray chinos, somehow managing to keep the alligator logo visible. He was as pointy and yellow as a number-two pencil, and I loved him right away, the way one underdog loves another. His affection for calculus was so sad and misplaced in this world that I couldn’t help but want to share it. I tried to give him encouraging looks from the back row without ever actually raising my hand. I couldn’t risk starting the year out like Tracy Flick, even though I knew most of the answers he was looking for.

I only want to be a performer because then I can stand in front of everyone else and be someone else when I do it. In fact, by acting, I can feel what it’s like to be all the people I don’t ever actually get to be. I don’t have to admit anything. Even when I sing, this is true. As long as the words belong to someone else, as long as I’ve made them absolutely polished, they don’t reveal secret things about me. People think they do, but they don’t. And that’s why being on stage makes me feel safe.

I know why math makes Mr. Luther feel safe—because unlike social interactions, or life, or anything big and overwhelming, numbers are manageable. They’re tidy and sensible, not sprawling and panic-inducing. At least at the high school level, math can also be accomplished in private, small steps. It offers both one correct answer and a best method for arriving at it. The funny thing is, there’s a correct answer in words, too. Sentences are like proofs in geometry—if you pick the right words, they lead to the precise point you want to make, whereas if you choose sloppily, you end up making the wrong point, or at least not showing or saying what you meant to. Mr. Luther was unlucky, because he was missing the half of his brain that can translate math into words. He could barely take attendance without flushing and gasping. But as soon as he had his back to us and was writing numbers on the board, he was as graceful as Fred Astaire, swiping at the board and turning occasionally to see if we shared his delight at how well things could turn out once they were in the safe language of chalk-mark clicks and digits.

After class, a pretty black girl next to me, who looked like she’d been dressed by her mom or some daft aunt, introduced herself. I stared at her yellow shirt and red sweater, thought of a traffic light. Her hair was in small braids that looked like they must have taken two years to put in. She had lip gloss on.

“I’m Molly,” she said, “I’ve seen you around school—you’re new too, right?”

“Yeah. I’m Judy.”

“What do you have after this?” She tied the red cardigan around her waist.

“AP English,” I said.

“Me, too. You want to walk over together?”

She started walking and her sweater was sideways and covered only one hip so I noticed that she was wearing blue paisley-print underpants under white pants. I guessed (incorrectly) that this was not a choice she had made on purpose. Now I know she dressed like that as a kind of in-joke with herself. Because Molly’s a huge nerd, and when you first meet her, you can’t imagine that she’s, like, actually very inappropriate, but then it turns out that she is. It’s especially surprising when she says crazy things, because she’s such a goody-goody. I guess she’s one of those people who has a lot of contradictions, so whenever you say something about her, you could kind of say the opposite, too, and have both be true. Of course, most of us are like that. I mean, we contain various versions of ourselves. Anyway, one of the versions of Molly liked to wear preppy white pants and another one liked to make up bizarre rhymes and wear panties that showed through. The preppy one was talking about how she was originally from Atlanta, and how her dad was a lawyer and a professor. I didn’t know why she was telling me this.

“What about you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you do?”

“I’m mostly a writer, actually. I write poems, I guess. Have you done your auditions yet?” She took a Diet Coke out of her bag and unscrewed it and it bubbled all over the place. She leapt backwards to avoid splashing it onto her white pants.

“Was that a demonstration of your dancing?” I asked, and she laughed a loud, unembarrassed laugh.

“Yeah,” she said. “Did I get into senior dance?”

“Absolutely.” I stuck my leg out in front of me, pointed my toes.

“You’re in!” she said, taking a sip of the pop.

“Seriously, though,” I said, “have you gone yet?”

She nodded gravely. “I had both this morning.”

“How’d they go?”

“Pretty good. I didn’t totally mess anything up. I’ll find out this afternoon. So . . .” She looked around awkwardly and I realized, to my dismay, that she had to turn left down the hall, and I was turning right. “I have to stop at my locker,” she said, and gestured to the side of her, and, for some reason, up. Her arm seemed to float toward the ceiling as if pulled by a marionette string. I put the conversation out of its misery by darting down the hall, calling “See you in AP English!” over my shoulder as I went. Having seen her arm move the way it did, I wondered if she’d done well in her auditions and was modest, or whether they’d actually been comically bad.

Every afternoon, they posted the results of all the morning placement auditions outside the auditorium, so everyone could see where they (and everyone else) had placed, and either be celebrated or humiliated. Or neither. Honestly, it was mostly neither. I mean, for the most part, we all got the sections we expected to, but even within those, some were better than others. Everyone wanted to be in Ms. Vanderly’s junior voice, because she sometimes moved people into senior halfway through the year if she liked you enough or you were really good, because she was also in charge of senior voice.

I felt shy when I got to AP English, and found myself wishing Molly hadn’t had to go to her locker. I took a seat, as always, in the last row. Then, out of the corner of my vision, I saw Kyle. He was making his luxurious way through the doorway of the classroom. My heart slammed into my rib cage, rattled the bars. He had his video camera again, trained on Elizabeth Wood, who was talking into it in a totally exaggerated and annoying way, and wearing a skirt so short and plaid that she looked like a porn star doing a parody of a schoolgirl. Kyle was all drowsy and tousled, like he had rolled out of bed five minutes ago. In fact he was rehearsing
Fool
for Love
with Elizabeth, so I knew that he’d been at rehearsal from 6:00 to 8:19, when he had his first class. Maybe he had that carefree sleepy look because he was actually really tired. I guess that’s one cost of stardom—if you’re so hot and talented that you get to play the lead in
Fool for Love
, then you have to wake up at 5:30 to get to school in time to kiss Elizabeth Wood for two hours before your first class. That can probably be exhausting, even for the most vigorous of boys, like Kyle. It’s also possible that he went to bed every night at 7:30, and wasn’t tired at all, but cultivated the lidded look because it was so vulnerable and gorgeous.

Molly came back in, holding a notebook and a new, unopened Diet Coke. She sat in the empty seat to my left. Then Goth Sarah arrived, sat in front of Molly, and turned to us to say hi. I nodded, but was so distracted that by the time I tuned back in, Goth Sarah was talking about how teenagers are always made to be so cute and clever in movies and how she hates that even though she thinks of herself as cute and clever. Molly was nodding attentively. I was furiously busy watching Kyle. I didn’t want to turn my attention away from him to utter a single sentence, even if it would have solidified forever my only potential friendships at D’Arts.