I Am the Wallpaper (8 page)

The girl finished her poem, everyone clapped, she sat down and somebody called out for the next reader. An old man with a big beer gut, number seven, stood up and ambled to the front of the room. I don’t really remember his poem—I think it was about being afraid of flying or something like that.

I couldn’t concentrate. I kept imagining myself in the light where the beer-gut man was standing.

“You don’t have to go up there,” Azra whispered. “Look at you. You’re a mess. Relax.”

After the old man, the next one up was a young guy in a cowboy hat. I didn’t really pay much attention to him, either. I hardly even looked at him. I had to force myself to stay in the chair and not run out the door. No matter how panicky I felt, I was determined to make myself go up there when they called my number.

Azra chewed on her straw.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the voice reading the poem. The cowboy spoke with long, slow vowels. His voice was strong and emotional and strangely familiar. In fact, the more I listened to it, the more familiar it sounded. I opened my eyes to get a better look at him.

I couldn’t believe it.

“Oh my God, Azra,” I said. “It’s him.”

“Him who?” she said. But then when she realized who I meant she practically sprained her neck trying to get a look.

“He’s a cowboy? You didn’t tell me he’s a cowboy.”

“Shhh!” I said. I was trying to watch and listen.

Out of his suit, Calvin looked different. He was still cute, but in an uncombed, scruffy, western kind of way. And his poem definitely wasn’t haiku. I have to admit I didn’t understand it, but it was full of loud dramatic parts and it seemed brilliant. It was long, and I remember he
kept shaking his fist in the air and saying,
“Am I in your dream or are you in mine, Mrs. Fauntleroy
?” He said that a bunch of different times. The crowd seemed to love it because after the first few times they laughed and clapped whenever he repeated it. I didn’t know who Mrs. Fauntleroy was, so it didn’t mean anything to me.

Except in a Zen kind of way.

“Am I in your dream or are you in mine, Mrs. Fauntleroy
?”

Even though I didn’t know what it was supposed to be about, his poem really was good, much better than the one about the dead bird. I clapped and cheered along with everybody else.

Azra smiled too, but she was looking around like everyone was crazy.

Then I noticed that there was one other person who seemed particularly interested in what Calvin was saying. In fact, Calvin seemed to be reading directly to her. She was blond and pretty, and she was wearing a halter top and grinning proudly up at him.

Just like me.

Except for the blond and pretty part. And the halter top.

From the way she and Calvin looked at each other, it struck me that this was probably his girlfriend. That idea hit me like a sharp smack to my head. I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Until now, it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might have been interested in anyone but me.

“Am I in your dream or are you in mine, Mrs. Fauntleroy
?”

I took a good look at her. Miss Halter Top really was pretty. Fifteen, maybe even sixteen. Perfect nose.

I hated her.

Calvin’s poem got really dramatic now; his voice got louder and he waved his hand around even more than before. I watched him, my heart breaking.

That’s when he paused in the middle of a sentence and I realized he was looking directly at me.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed, either. It felt like everybody in the whole room turned to see what had stopped Calvin in his tracks. For a second or two, everyone stared at me.

And for one crazy, innocent, stupid moment, I was actually glad. I’m embarrassed to admit that for a split second the idea went through my mind that he might be happy to see me, that we’d talk after our readings and become good friends starting tonight. Eventually, I’d even be able to steal him away from Miss Halter Top. He’d fall madly in love with me—the kind of love you find in fairy tales.

But that fantasy ended when I recognized the horrified expression on his face. He suddenly turned white, with the same look, probably of shame, that he’d had after Lillian, Rebecca and Aunt Sarah had caught him on the sofa with me, hand on butt.

He tried to continue reading, but it wasn’t the same as before. Somehow I’d thrown him completely off. He was quieter now, and he stammered through his own words. A couple of times he even lost his place. As he read the last few lines, he hardly moved his hands, and the final few times he said
“Am I in your dream or are you in mine, Mrs. Fauntleroy
?” it didn’t have the same effect at all.

“My God,” whispered Azra. “You must have made quite an impression on him.”

When he was finally finished everybody clapped, but it was just out of politeness. A few people turned back to me again, probably to see if I was happy about ruining Calvin’s poem. Calvin, on the other hand, didn’t even look in my direction as he plopped himself down next to Miss Halter Top, who kept staring at me. What was going through her mind?

Number nine, an angry-looking woman with a crew cut, stepped up to the microphone.

“What do you want to do, Floey?” Azra asked me. “After this one, there’s only one more and then you.”

But I just stared at Calvin and Miss Halter Top. I was paralyzed.

The blond girl said something to Calvin and then looked back at me. They whispered a few things back and forth, but Calvin still wouldn’t look at me. Finally, Miss Halter Top stood up and pushed her way through the tables toward me.

“Oh my God,” Azra whispered behind her hand. “They’re coming over here!”

A moment later, the girl was sitting at our table next to me. Behind her, Calvin looked really embarrassed.

Miss Halter Top looked me up and down. “So,” she said, “are you the little girl who threw herself at Calvin the other night?” I didn’t know what to say. She tilted her head. “Are you the little slut who tried so hard to steal my boyfriend? Was that you?”

Azra’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. I think she thought the girl might actually want to fight me. The idea had occurred to me, too.

“I … 
no
,” I said. “I didn’t exactly
throw
myself at him. Is that what he said?”

The girl glared at me. “Oh, I can read between the lines.”

“Melanie, leave her alone,” Calvin said. “She’s only twelve.”

“Thirteen,” I corrected him.

She put her clenched fists on the table in front of her. “Why are you here tonight?”

Azra glanced nervously at me.

I stared back at this Melanie. “I was hoping to see Calvin again.”

“I
knew
it!” she said over her shoulder to him. “Well, you saw him, little girl. Now I think you’d better leave.”

Azra moved her chair back, but I shot her a look and she stayed put.

Calvin seemed really uncomfortable. “Come on, Mel … she didn’t do anything wrong.”

Melanie wasn’t bigger than me—we were probably about the same size—but I wondered if she had a lot of experience fighting people.

“Well, I’m not going to leave,” I said finally. “I’m going up to read. I wrote some poems.”

Miss Halter Top stared at me for a long time. I wondered if she was going to throw the table over and lunge at me.

At the front of the room, the angry crew-cut woman was saying something about daffodils.

“All right, then
we’re
leaving.” The girl stood up. “Coming, Calvin?”

“Aw, don’t be like that.…”

She didn’t wait—she headed toward the door. He hesitated, but after a moment he followed her. At the exit he turned back to me one last time and mouthed a single word.
Sorry
.

And then he was gone. As simple as that. I never even got the chance to tell him I liked his poem.

Then a strange mixture of emotions ran through me. First, I felt a gush of relief that I hadn’t been beaten up right in the middle of my first poetry reading. Next, I felt a brief moment of happiness because Miss Halter Top had actually been jealous. Soon after that feeling passed, though, all I felt was disappointment. How could Calvin let that girl treat him like that? And why hadn’t he been happy to see me?

What was wrong with him?

What was wrong with
me?

Azra stared like she was in awe of me. “Floey, are you okay?”

But I was thinking about fairy tales. You know the kind of happily-ever-after love you find in stories? Well, there’s no such thing. It isn’t real. It never really happens.

“Come on,” I said to her. “Let’s go home.”

I heard somebody call out number eleven just as we stepped from the inside darkness of the café to the outside darkness of Thayer Street.

The next morning I read about karma,
dukkha
and impermanence. Zen teaches that karma is kind of like a reward system where you gain points when you do good deeds and lose them when you do anything bad. Dukkha, on the other hand, is chaos and suffering. It can strike anybody at any time, sometimes to make up for past bad karma and sometimes not. Impermanence is important too, because everything is always changing.

This is what I wrote in my diary:

Lillian’s postcards didn’t exactly help my mood. We got two of them that first week. The first card said they were drinking piña coladas in front of the ocean in Cozumel, the first stop in their four-week trip through Mexico. The picture showed a beautiful white beach with grass huts, palm trees and pale blue water. I was jealous. The second card was addressed just to me. The picture was of a row of muscle guys standing together at some kind of outdoor bar. It was a wall of huge, triangular tanned backs and little muscular butts in tiny, brightly colored swimsuits. Lillian had only written a short message: “See anything you’d like to put your hand on?” At the bottom, she’d written: “My best to Calvin! (Oh, and Wen, too!)”

Ha ha.

Richard and Billy spent a ridiculous amount of time playing at the computer. They’d sit there together for hours at a stretch. It was amazing how close they’d become in just a few days. Even when they dragged themselves away from the screen, Richard always seemed to hover around Billy. They played ball games on our street with some of Billy’s neighborhood friends. Since Billy was twice Richard’s size, they were like a planet and a moon, with Richard always somewhere in Billy’s orbit.

Tish, on the other hand, didn’t play much with the boys. She preferred to hover around
me
. That Tuesday morning, for example, when I tried sitting alone in the backyard reading a book (Richard and Billy had anchored themselves
to the computer again), she followed me. The way I figured it, I’d promised my mother I’d stay with my cousins all day, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t ignore them.

Actually, Frank Sinatra was the first one to follow me outside. As I went for the back door, he planted himself right in my way. “I don’t know why I should take you out,” I said to him, “after the way you betrayed me.” But he put on his cutest sad-eyed face. He’s a manipulative ferret. Outside, wearing his harness, he sniffed around in the warm grass a few feet from my lawn chair. “That’s right, traitor,” I said to him. “You better keep your distance.”

The ferret, of course, said nothing. But he didn’t look sorry.

Moments later Tish came out and stood in front of me. My plan to escape my cousins had failed. “Why are you wearing that?” she asked.