Big Girl Small (7 page)

He wasn’t leaving! He wasn’t dropping Elizabeth Wood off, to my monumental relief. He was in the room, and appeared to be staying. I couldn’t believe it. He was in my section, and I imagined in the pro-noid psychosis he inspired in me that he had figured out my schedule and signed up because he wanted so much to follow up on his joke about being seated next to me alphabetically.

He turned from the front of the room, where he’d stopped filming Elizabeth and started bantering with Kim Barksper, the sweeter of the Barksper twins and the only one of the two of them who can resist bringing up four hundred times a day the tedious fact that they were once in a Doublemint gum commercial when they were babies. Kyle saw me. When we had eye contact, I thought my heart might shoot out of my chest like a cannonball.

And then he came and sat next to me. Even Sarah and Molly shifted around on the other side of me. Were they impressed? Surprised? Disturbed? Jealous? I have no idea—the surf was pounding in my ears. I glanced around. Stockard Blumenthal, famous for that absurd name and for apparently blowing Greg Bailey during the movie
King Kong
at Top of the Park the summer before freshman year when they were both, like, not even fourteen, seemed to notice too. Although maybe I’m imagining it, since why would she have cared where Kyle sat? To me, everyone was tuned in to his every move. But maybe she was actually thinking about how unfair it was that people started calling her Jock-hard Blew-them-all instead of Stockard Blumenthal. I mean, what if he was the only guy she’d ever blown? Why Blew- them-all? Especially since she’s still dating Greg Bailey. Maybe they’re trying to make a point. Last year they both got tattoos that said “OATS,” and at first everyone was apparently like, “OATS? What the hell?” And then someone figured out that what it meant was “one and the same,” like they had become two parts of one person. And people said how stupid that was and joked how they were going to break up and have to have laser surgery to have the things removed, but I think it’s kind of romantic. And I bet everyone else probably does too, they’re all just big haters.

Stockard was doing a showy mime routine in the aisle between the desks, and I could see her OATS tattoo on her ankle, but I didn’t care, because Kyle set his camera on the desk and stretched his enormous legs into the space between us. I was suddenly aware of mine, dangling from my chair.

“Judy L.,” he said, “how’re things?”

“Good. You?” His eyes were gray, dark gray, like where the sandbar ends and the water changes to the color of drowning.

“You know. I can’t complain.” He smiled.

My mind raced around like a foaming dog, desperate to come up with something, a joke about our being seated next to each other, something about complaining, anything, anything. There was nothing. A fire started in my brain and burned it blank. Maybe we would get tattoos of each other’s name on our ankles. Or better yet, the backs of our necks. I caught my breath just as the teacher walked in. She was shockingly young and beautiful, wearing dark lipstick and with her straight red hair pulled back into a neat ponytail and held by a silver barrette. She clicked to the front of the classroom, set some books and papers on the podium, and wrote her name on the board: Ms. Doman. Even Stockard sat down and appeared to be paying attention.

“Hi, guys,” Ms. Doman said. “Why don’t you come up and take a syllabus and a course pack?” And with this, she pointed to two stacks of papers in front of her. Syllabus and course pack! I was thrilled, just like everyone else.

Kyle looked over at me, blinked his nighttime eyes. “I’ll get you one,” he said, and galumped up to the front of the room before I could respond. Was this a typical offer? Or had he had the thought that I might not want to stand up in front of everyone and get myself a syllabus? Was he flirting? Was he a real person, or a figment of my low-budget-independent-movie imagination? He tossed the papers on my desk and wedged himself back into his chair. His hair flopped into his eyes and he breathed upward, trying to blow it out of the way.

“I need a haircut,” he told me, and then, before I was required to say something interesting or flirty in response, Ms. Doman cleared her throat. Her white throat. She had on a silver chain with gold and silver circles of various sizes dangling. One of her earrings was a gold circle, and the other was silver. She wore a big diamond on her ring finger. I wondered who her husband was. He must have been thrilled when she said yes. She had light freckles on her cheeks and probably her shoulders and back, too.

“This is AP English and I’m Ms. Doman,” she said. Her voice was warm and bubbly, lower than I’d expected, something like a deep bath. She looked out at us, first surveying and then appearing to have decided something important.

“Before we even touch the administrative aspects of the syllabus and assignments, I want to talk about narrative,” she said, making us all feel adult. “Why are stories important? Why have English classes at Darcy at all?”

Elizabeth Wood raised a fake-baked tan hand and Goth Sarah rolled her eyes. She was jealous, I thought. So was I. You have to be a certain kind of girl to raise your hand first in a class like that, on the first day.

“Because books allow us to have experiences we can’t necessarily have in our own lives?” Elizabeth said.

For when your heart is full of love, you’re nine feet tall
, I thought.

“Indeed. Great. What else? Other reasons?” Ms. Doman asked.

Ms. Doman was one of those teachers who actually cares what students say, who collects answers from lots of people and then responds to them. She’s not looking for the answer she’s already thought of. Goth Sarah spoke without raising her hand. “Because those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” she said.

“Good.” Ms. Doman smiled, but she seemed less impressed than she had been with Elizabeth’s response. Maybe because the whole “doomed to repeat it” thing is a cliché. Or maybe because Sarah hadn’t raised her hand.

“Can you explain a little?” Ms. Doman added.

“I mean, we have to read books or we’ll make mistakes. If we read stories of how other people lived, we can figure out better ways to live. I mean we can look at other people’s lives and not make the same mistakes they made. Or we can, like, use their examples as models for ourselves.” I knew she meant the V-word play, hoped she would stop short of saying it out loud.

“Brilliant,” said Ms. Doman, and I could tell she was thinking: “Wow, this is going better than I even imagined it would.” I was kind of thinking that too, like Sarah had turned out to be smarter than I thought she would. And so had Elizabeth Wood. I had this experience a lot at Darcy, because the truth is, the kids there were pretty smart for the most part. I mean, once we were trapped in classrooms.

“If those are two reasons for reading, then what about writing? Why write?” asked Ms. Doman.

“Immortality,” said some ass-kisser.

“Yes! What else?”

“So you won’t forget something you want to remember,” Molly added.

“Those are related, right?” said Katherine Hassel. “I mean, not forgetting and not being forgotten?”

I noticed none of the guys had spoken.

“They certainly are,” Ms. Doman said. “So, what does it mean to call this class ‘American Lit’?” This was the first I’d heard of that. I thought it was just AP English.

But Ms. Doman was such a good teacher that she taught hers as an American lit class. She thought it was too “institutional” to teach straight AP English. She promised that her class would also prepare us for the AP test; she just wasn’t going to plan the whole syllabus around a stupid standardized test. She taught us contempt for tests, especially standardized ones, and never gave us quizzes. We just wrote papers for her. Ms. Doman wanted to be a college teacher, I think, so she pretended that we were college students and that this was a university class. Everyone adored her; I wasn’t the only one.

“That you teach American writers?” Molly said.

“Okay, but it’s more than that, too. What makes a body of literature American?”

“I think the relationship between culture and literature is two-way,” I said, breaking my Tracy Flick rule, but feeling inspired and like everyone else in the class was a huge nerd, too, so why couldn’t I live it up a little? Plus, right away I had a teacher crush on Ms. Doman and I couldn’t resist showing her as soon as possible that I was smarter than anyone else in the class.

It worked. She looked at me glowingly and then looked down at her grade book, trying to remember my name. “Say what you mean, Judy,” she said, and then, “Do you go by Judy or Judith?”

“Judy is fine,” I said. Everyone in the class was staring at me except Kyle, who was looking at his notebook, and it occurred to me that they were grateful that I had raised my hand to speak, because now they got to stare with impunity, at least for a few minutes. I resisted the urge to smooth my hair down, felt the weight of my legs, tried to hold them still so they wouldn’t swing. I cleared my throat a little, not in a gross way, but just enough to speak without coughing.

“I mean, we define American literature as American because it comes from America. But the idea of what America is comes from our literature. So it’s two-way.”

She smiled openly at me, the way you do at someone you know you’ll fall in love with—a person you agree with more than you agree with anyone else. Maybe like the way I smiled at Kyle when we met at Chessie’s party. I think Ms. Doman knew I’d be her best student, and she wanted me to know she knew. Maybe she wanted me to feel like that was enough, like my life would be okay if I could come up with smart things to say and write in American lit. Or maybe it went further than that; maybe she knew that it wouldn’t be okay, that I’d be eaten alive at Darcy, and that she would love me by then and be heartbroken when it happened.

After class, I had my first D’Arts lunch with Goth Sarah, which was a relief, because even though she spent the whole hour chewing with her mouth open and telling the story of her on-again-off-again thing with a tall, black-haired guy named Eliot Jacobs, it meant I wasn’t alone. I couldn’t tell from the story whether they had done it or not, and thought maybe she wanted me to ask, but I didn’t want to ask and I didn’t want her to ask me if I was still one, so I said as little as possible. I didn’t see Molly; maybe she went off campus to Zingerman’s or something, at D’Arts you were allowed.

When Ginger came into the lunchroom with Amanda Fulton and Chessie Andrewjeski, she didn’t sit with me, but she did wave from across the room and smile. Kyle was on the other side of the cafeteria, taping some stupid thing Alan and Chris were doing, something that involved grabbing each other in headlocks and rubbing each other’s hair. I was happy just to have a clear view of him, and I felt pretty sure that I could feel him turning the camera across the cafeteria every now and then, maybe even including me in a pan of the room.

“He’s coming back right before Thanksgiving,” Goth Sarah was telling me, about Eliot. “His dad was on sabbatical, but now he’s finished and—well, wow—I can’t believe he’s coming back. He’s great. He’s, like, super evolved.”

“So less of an armpit-scratching caveman than other guys?”

She laughed. “Exactly. I hope you guys will like each other. He’s a really open-minded person.”

I arched an eyebrow, wondering about the connection between that and our liking each other.

“Meaning?”

“He’s okay with my, you know, whatever you want to call it—bitchiness,” she said, and looked down, embarrassed.

I was interested. “What do you mean, your bitchiness?”

“Well, you know,” she said, looking flushed. “A lot of people find me, I don’t know, too abrasive or radical or something.” She shrugged, but I could tell she was hurt by whatever it was she perceived that people thought of her. And that it was a question.

“I don’t,” I said. “I find you weakwilled and not enough of a loudmouth.”

She laughed and then, to my astonishment, climbed onto the bench so that she was towering over the room. Everyone looked up. She wadded the Saran wrap from her sandwich into a ball and threw it overhand, hard, across the room. It missed the trashcan by six feet and landed in the middle of the floor, but she yelled, “Three points, woo-hoo!” without any holding back, and threw her arms up in a mock cheer.

Then she climbed back down onto the bench next to me and opened a bag of barbeque soy crisps. Everyone, including me, was still staring.

“Wow. Well, I take back the part about the loud mouth,” I said.

“I knew you’d rethink it,” Goth Sarah said, grinning, and held the salty orange bag open to me. “Want one?” she asked.

I did. I love those things.

4
I’ve made a friend at the Motel Manor, a middle-aged guy named Bill, who has apparently been living here for more than a year. This is the kind of place that rents rooms by the week or month. Sometimes, late at night when there’s no wall of sunshine between me and my terror, I think I’ll be like Bill, just settle down and stay here for the rest of my life. It’s only $106 a week; I could last a long time with the money I took.

I wonder who’s paying for Bill’s room. Maybe he has some money saved up from when he used to go to Alaska every winter to catch fish. That’s what he told me when we first met in the hallway. He seemed harmless in some hard-to-define but certain way, so I stopped to talk to him when he said hi, and he told me he used to go every winter and work on an Alaskan fishing boat and then he would come home and “just live” the rest of the year on the money he’d made, once it wasn’t fishing season anymore. I guess you can make a lot of money if you’re willing to go to Alaska and work on a fishing boat. Although I don’t really understand what it means to “just live,” especially if you do it at the Motel Manor.

Bill is a good friend for me here because he’s too daft to realize that I’m a teenager and shouldn’t be here on my own, or that my story about being between jobs and “down on my luck” can’t possibly be true, that there’s probably a manhunt across the Midwest for a missing dwarf, or that I’m three feet tall. That’s why I like him; in his worldview, I’m as normal as the next person. The truth is, there are so many freaks on this wretched strip of highway that I barely stand out. I like that aspect. And I bought enough cans of SpaghettiOs to live for at least another week before I have to emerge and walk down the street to Kroger.