Jailbait (2 page)

For your information, Shirley's going through the Change. Fred told me about it. He says it's a time in a woman's life when she really goes crazy. Great. Something else to look forward to. First Shirley dyed her hair blond—like that looks really natural—and then she got completely obsessed with her weight. After sitting on her butt for forty-nine years, she finally decided to join an exercise place for women called Elaine Powers Figure Salon, and now she practically lives there when she's not playing cards or going clothes shopping or eating lunch with her friends. Shirley was never really fat or even chubby like yours truly. She was just normal-sized before, but now she's about a size two because all she ever puts in her mouth are cigarettes and celery.

“Hey, Bessie, how's my sweet girl? Come say hi. C'mon, girl.” I shrug off my knapsack and coax her over. When she finally gets to the fence, I pull up some grass and let her take it out of my hand.

“How's my best girl, huh, Bessie?” I ask her. She doesn't answer me, of course. But it doesn't matter. I know it sounds silly, but I feel like even though Bessie can't talk, she totally understands me. And it's a good thing too, since nobody else does.

I stand there for a while, petting Bessie and talking to
her. Bessie feels real soft like velvet if you run your hands the right way down her back, and rough like corduroy if you go the wrong way, which I never do. I tell her about my stupid, boring day at school, which is pretty much the same as every other stupid, boring day I've ever had to get through at school: math, science, English, social studies, French, gym, and of course Donald Caruso torturing me at lunch.

“Hey, where's your girlfriend?” he asked when he saw I was sitting by myself. “Oh, I forgot. Your girlfriend moved to Transylvania. You poor, poor thing. All alone in the world.” Donald sniffled and pretended to wipe tears from his eyes, the big idiot. And not only that, he said
girlfriend
in this high, squeaky voice, like Ronnie and I were girlfriends in the boyfriend, girlfriend sense of the word. Which, for your information, we weren't.

I tried to just ignore him, but it's hard because Donald Caruso really gets on my nerves, even though every other girl in my class thinks he's God's gift to women. I don't know how his girlfriend stands him, I really don't. But in a way it makes sense because for some insane reason, Donna Rizzo is completely obsessed with frogs. She has a million frog stickers on her notebooks, she carries all her stuff in a frog backpack, and she wears this frog pin made of green rhinestones every single day. So of course she's in love with Donald Caruso, the ugly frog who she hopes will turn into a handsome prince someday. Though if I were her, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Anyway, I tell Bessie everything while she chews her
grass and listens. “How am I ever going to get through an entire school year, huh, Bessie?” I ask her. She has no idea, and neither do I.

The next day the brown Volkswagen goes by again when I'm walking home from school, and it goes by again the day after that too. Finally on Friday when it drives by, the guy behind the wheel honks at me. It's a friendly honk, those two little beep-beeps you make by tapping the horn with the heel of your hand. Not a long obnoxious honk like this one time when I was walking home and this stupid businessman in a huge blue car slowed down, leaned on his horn, and yelled, “Hey, honey, nice headlights! Shine 'em over here!” Gross. But this is different; this is definitely a friendly honk, I can just tell. So I look up and wave and the guy waves back and then he drives off and I watch his car until it gets to the end of the road and turns left.

And that's it. Pretty exciting, huh? Believe it or not, it is. Which just goes to show you how totally boring life gets around here. A stranger in a brown car waves at me and I get butterflies in my stomach—how pathetic is that? Now I'll have to wait until Monday to see if he honks at me again. Bummer. Most kids would be glad it's Friday, but not me. Weekends are even more boring than weekdays, if that's even possible. There's nothing to do except maybe go shopping with Shirley, and believe me, there's nothing more boring than that.

“Hey, Bessie. Hi, pretty girl.” I make my clicking noise and she comes over to the fence. “That guy waved
at me, did you see that? You think he's my knight in shining armor and he's going to take me away from all this?”

Bessie looks startled, like her feelings are hurt.

“No offense,” I say quickly, because I don't want her to think I want to be taken away from her pasture. I like hanging out with Bessie. When I stand here and pet her back like this, I feel, well, peaceful is the only way to describe it. Not like the rest of my life, where I feel like I'm suffocating and if something doesn't happen in two seconds I'm going to choke or throw up or do something that will make me even less popular than I already am.

And for your information, I'm not a total idiot; I know the chances of having a knight in shining armor come to rescue me are slim to none, but hey, it could happen. Why not? Ever hear of Romeo and Juliet? Strange as this may seem, I do believe in love at first sight. I'm sure you're surprised to hear that because I'm so negative about everything, but you know, most people are just the opposite of what they appear to be. Like clowns who are always trying to make people laugh? If you look really close, you can see how sad they are. And have you ever seen actors when they aren't acting? Like when they're on those afternoon talk shows Shirley always watches after her soap operas. Actors are actually the shyest people you can imagine. I know I come off as pretty tough, but underneath, I'm just a big mush ball.

“Stranger things have happened, right, Bess?” I ask. She chews her cud slowly, like she's thinking it over. I wonder why I'm never bored when I'm out here with Bessie, like I am every other minute of my life. Maybe
it's because Bessie doesn't want anything from me like everyone else does: my teachers, who are always yelling at me to pay attention; Fred, who's forever screaming at me to take out the garbage, which is my job now that Mike's gone; and Shirley, who's constantly nagging me to do something with my hair so it isn't hanging in my eyes, or wear different, nicer clothing, or be a different, nicer person.

Or maybe I like hanging out with Bessie because I'm just plain weird. I'll give you twenty bucks if you can find a tenth grader at Greenwood High who'll argue with you about that. I'm not
weird
weird, like Marlene Pinkus, who wears nothing but pink—her pants, her sweaters, her shoes, her barrettes, even her socks and, though I can't say for sure, probably her underwear. Or Stephen Taubman, another bona fide wacko, who sits in front of me in science class, picks his nose constantly, and saves all his snot in this little metal box for God only knows what reason and I'm not even kidding. I'm just mildly weird, I guess. I'm not like most of the girls in my class, who are into boys and makeup and
Seventeen
magazine and stuff. And I'm not a jock because I throw like a girl, and I'm not a hippie chick because I think tie-dyed clothes are ugly, and I'm not artsy-fartsy like the kids who hang around the art room throwing blobs of clay around on the pottery wheel. My school is definitely full of cliques. I'm just a clique unto myself, I guess.

I hang out with Bessie a little while longer, not saying anything, not doing anything, not wanting anything. Then I take my big butt home.

It's Sunday night, and for some reason, because I'm bored
out of my skull, I guess, or maybe because I'm hoping to see Mr. VW tomorrow, I decide to set my hair like Ronnie showed me one day a few years ago after I got called “frizz bomb” thirty times before first period even started. So after I take my shower, I gather all my hair up on top of my head in a high ponytail, wrap it around a big orange juice can, and pin the whole thing to the top of my head with a million bobby pins. Then, just as I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to sleep like this, Fred calls up the steps for me to come into the kitchen. I ignore him, but after he yells two more times, I put on my bathrobe and go downstairs.

“What's this?” Fred comes up right next to me and peers through the orange juice can on top of my head like it's a telescope. “Land ho! Thar she blows!” he says with a chuckle.

“Ha, ha. Very funny,” I say, stepping away from him. “What do you want?”

“Your brother's on the phone,” he says, gesturing with the top of his bald head toward Shirley, who's sitting at the kitchen table with the receiver pressed against her ear, finishing up her conversation.

“Call us next week and let us know how your classes are going. Oh, and Mike, let me know what color you're decorating your room, and measure the windows so I can send you and your roommate some curtains.”

I can just see Mike rolling his eyes over that one.

“Okay, wait, here's your sister. Hang on.” Shirley hands me the receiver.

“Hey, Mike.”

“Hi, Squirt.” Mike's called me Squirt ever since I was two seconds old. “How's life with the Eunuchs?”

“Far-out. Groovy. Outta sight,” I say, in a tone that conveys just the opposite. “How's college?”

“Like high school with ashtrays,” he answers. “And speaking of ashtrays … Mary Jane just got here. All right! Hang on a second, Squirt.”

“Mary Jane? Mike, not again!” Mary Jane is Mike's code for pot. The smoking kind, not the cooking kind. I hear him say, “Hey, man, pass that doobie over here,” and then someone must crank up his stereo, because all I hear after that is Jimi Hendrix singing “Purple Haze” so loud it's
like he's wailing right in my ear. I play with the phone cord and say “Yeah. Uh-huh,” a few times so the Rents don't get suspicious, until Mike finally gets back on the line.

“Mike, don't you think you should hang out with Mary Jane a little less and study a little more?” I ask in a stage whisper. “Have you even gone to any classes yet?”

“Don't be so uptight, Squirt. Nobody goes to classes the first week.”

“Mike”—I lower my voice even further—“Fred is going to have ten conniptions if you get kicked out again.”

“Don't be such a drag, all right, Squirt? Hey, the brewski just arrived, I gotta split.”

“Wait a second. Mike—” But before I can say anything else, he hangs up.

“Your brother sounds pretty good, doesn't he?” Shirley asks as I put the receiver back in its cradle on the wall. “I think he's going to do well this year. I think he's finally turned over a new leaf.”

Yeah, right. The only leaf Mike's going to turn over is on a marijuana plant.

“Who's this Mary Jane?” Fred asks. “Didn't he have a girlfriend named Mary Jane last year?”

“Uh…” I pretend to think. “I don't remember.”

“I bet she transferred to be with Mike up at Buffalo,” Shirley says. “And who can blame her, really? Mike's a very good-looking guy.”

“He'd be a lot better-looking if he cut off that pony-tail of his,” Fred grumbles.

“Oh, you're just jealous,” Shirley says with a laugh, nodding at Fred's shiny pink scalp.

“Jealous? That's a good one. You think I want to go around looking like a girl? I'd like to take a pair of scissors myself and—”

“Good night, Shirley. Good night, Fred.” It's definitely time to make my great escape.

“Good night, Andrea.” Shirley says, staring at my head. I know she's dying to say something about my hair, but always the queen of tact, she manages to restrain herself.

“Don't you want to watch
World of Disney
with us?” Fred asks.

“No thanks.”

“How about a game of Monopoly?”

“No thanks.”

“Chinese checkers?”

“I don't think so.”

“Scrabble?”

“Fred, I'm really tired,” I say, and then before he can make me another offer I just can't refuse, I turn and run up the stairs.

The next morning when I open my eyes, I'm lying on my back with the orange juice can all smushed to the side, even though I fell asleep on my stomach with my head hanging off the edge of my bed. And when I comb my hair out, it looks a little better than usual, except there's this bumpy ridge right next to my part that isn't exactly attractive. But it's too late to do anything about it, so I throw on some clothes and walk myself to school. And besides, who's going to notice my hair anyway?

Donald Caruso, that's who. The minute I open my locker, he catches sight of me. And he can't just say something nice, like “Andi, you look good today,” which is what a civilized person would do, and leave it at that. No-o-o-o. He has to look me up and down with this stupid smirk on his face and say, “Hey Dee-Dee. I'm so dee-lighted to see you today. You look unusually dee-vine.”

This is how Donald Caruso busts my chops pretty much on a daily basis. Instead of calling me Andi, he calls me Dee-Dee in reference to my oversized knockers, which probably are a size D by now, though I wouldn't know since I haven't bought a new bra in over a year. And it's true, my 38C bras have gotten tight. I think of myself as more like a C-plus, which is how my teachers think of me too, at least according to my report card.

Anyway, I try to ignore Donald, but then of course he sticks his oversized sneaker in my way so I can't shut my locker.