Skin (20 page)

And it’ll happen regardless of vitiligo. Even if he never finds out, he’ll leave me. Joshua Winer will walk out of
my life sooner or later. And given that we’re only sixteen, probably sooner.

So do I let myself love him or not? If I have any control over it, that is.

The question: Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

I think of Joshua’s finger tapping his temple. His words: “You’re in my head. Always.”

Then I laugh. The answer is so obvious.

Yes, Mr. Tennyson. Damn straight it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

IT’S A TOE DAY. Ms. Martin is talking about connections between our toes and our arches. She says when we make those connections, we’ll have intelligent feet. And this morning Mr. Dupris told us that flamingoes walk on their tiptoes. He sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Everyone groaned, but he wasn’t half-bad. Anyway, it’s true. What we think are flamingoes’ knees, bending backward, are really ankles. Their knees are hidden under their feathers. And what we think are their feet are really their toes. It turns out tons of animals go on tiptoe. Even elephants.

Now I mimic Ms. Martin in stance. I imagine that a
giant hook from the sky is connected by a filament to the center of the top of my skull, and the rest of me falls downward, weighted equally around my long, straight spine. I am one tall
Homo sapiens
on intelligent feet.

“Sit now. Sit in Baddha Konasana.”

We all drop to sitting and look around to see who remembers what pose that is.

“Bottoms of your feet together. Sit tall, with your hands holding your feet and let your knees open to the sides in an act of compassion.”

Someone whispers, “What guy paid her to say that?”

People giggle. But I’m listening closely.

“On an exhalation, relax your eyes and let gratitude allow your top eyelid to meet your bottom lid.”

Compassion and gratitude. Who am I showing compassion to when I open my knees? Someone else, or myself?

Owen said the point of yoga is to still the drunken poisoned monkey inside us. Maybe he’s right; maybe the monkey is easing up a bit. I feel almost calm. I’m focusing on the present. Specifically, on this pose. That was Mamma’s advice. That’s what Ms. Martin always says. The present.

I can sense a change in the room, but I don’t know what it is.

As if by some secret cue, Melanie and Becca stand up and go to the closet where the CD player is. Everyone
opens their eyes at the noise and drops into a more relaxed position, which I find strange, since nothing could be more natural for the body than the pose we were already in.

We all get to our feet and Ms. Martin retreats to a chair at the side of the gym.

The music comes on and Becca’s at the front and we all just do what she does. It’s a singer today, with a honeyed voice. I bet the name of the song is “Afro Blue” because that’s in the refrain. It’s sad and sexy at the same time.

Becca teaches us a routine. I love learning routines. Once you finally get them and you don’t have to scramble to remember what comes next, you can put your energy into finding out how far you can go with each move. You can make the routine yours. Your body takes over. You dance.

I pound the routine into my head.

Then I surrender to my body. And my body does what it should. My arms transfer energy one to the other as though they’re connected through the center of me. I twist my spine so far, I can feel my kidneys sing. Whoosh, and my torso swings down between my straight V legs and I’m looking at the rear wall and reaching for it. This is good. Something is going right. Whatever war my skin is waging against me, my muscles don’t have any part in it. This is good. Really good.

Sweat-drenched, we stagger off to the locker room. I
hold back and wait for the others to shower first. Some of the senior girls strip completely before they step inside the shower curtain. Most girls strip down only to their panties and bra, though, then go inside the shower curtain and hang their undies over the curtain while they wash. No one goes inside the shower curtain fully dressed.

But that’s what I’m going to do. And I figure it’s less likely anyone will notice if I wait till everyone else has had their turn.

I’m wearing tights under my shorts and a shirt that goes down over my elbows. It’s still too warm out for tights, but the splotch on the inside of my thigh is low enough that it showed when I tried on my shorts this morning. So I threw tights into my backpack along with the shorts.

I sit on the bench and look down at my feet, so I won’t be tempted to look in the mirror and search for hints of new spots. Mirror checking threatens to become an obsession.

“You didn’t do so bad today, girls,” says Becca, buttoning up her shirt and addressing all of us as a group. She was the first to finish showering—the queen. She doesn’t mean to act superior, I know. She’s just trying to be encouraging. But she comes off as self-satisfied.

As if she heard my thoughts, Becca jerks her chin toward me. “You like Oscar Brown, Junior, huh, Sep?”

So that’s the name of the jazz singer today. I give a small smile. Then I get up and stick my head in my locker and pretend to be looking for something.

“You were really into it out there.” Her voice is friendly. “I bet Joshua would have liked to see that. You’re becoming a sexpot. Even the way you walk down the halls, it shows.”

I push my head so far into the locker now, it presses against the back wall.

“Well, see you all next week.” I hear Becca’s locker door slam.

I wait a while, then I straighten up, open my math book, and stand in front of my open locker, reading.

The conversation dribbles away to nothing.

“You can shower now, Sep.” It’s Melanie. She’s come over behind me.

The way she says it discourages me. I’m going to wind up getting a reputation as a weirdo about shower behavior even before everyone sees my vitiligo and finds out how truly weird I am.

I close my locker and go over to a shower stall and step inside the curtain, then I strip and turn the water on to the hottest it will go. Steam comes up. School sets the water heater higher than we set it at home. I love the school shower.

I stand a long time with the water beating on my neck and back and butt.

Then I remember Owen. I agreed to walk home with him today. He’s waiting for me.

Quick, I slip on my panties and bra and peek around the curtain.

Melanie’s sitting on the bench looking at me. “You modest?”

I retreat behind the curtain and put on my shirt. It covers the spots on my belly and back and on my upper arm and elbow. But there’s no point in putting on my tights and shorts, because I want to change into my jeans to go home. I hold my tights and shorts in front of my thighs. Okay, this works. No white spots show now, though the one on the back of my hand almost shows; the three red magic marker dots have washed to light pink.

I come out.

Melanie glances up from tying her sandals. They’re the classic kind that lace halfway up your calf. “You did look good again today. Becca wasn’t exaggerating.”

“Thanks.” I look at the tattoo on her ankle and wonder about what Joshua said. “You’re here kind of late.”

“I was waiting for a call from my little brother. He was supposed to tell me where to meet him. It’s our dad’s birthday tonight and we have a plan. But Raymond flaked out
on me. Like usual. He didn’t answer my texts—he didn’t answer my calls—and now he just texted me and said we’ll do it tomorrow, as though birthdays can be pushed around however you want. He can be such a jerk.”

“I get it.” I smile. “I’ve got a little brother, too.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I’m off. Want to walk home together?”

I blink. Am I imagining things or is there something wistful in the way she says it? “I’m already walking home with someone.”

“Joshua?”

“No.” But that feels too abrupt. After all, Becca mentioned Joshua, so it isn’t like Melanie’s being nosy. “Owen.”

“He’s nice.” She rubs the top of her thighs and stands. “Well, another time.”

I walk to my locker and open the door to hide behind it. Melanie’s footsteps retreat and I hear the door open and close. I pull on my jeans and stuff my shorts and tights in my pack and run for the parking lot.

Owen’s standing at the edge of the lot, near the activity bus stop. “So you didn’t forget about me?”

“Sorry. I got involved with a shower.”

He nods. “I thought only guys did that.”

“Owen! I’m shocked.” I slap my hands on my chest dramatically. “What’s gotten into you?”

“How are you liking logarithms?”

“You’re changing the subject. And not artfully. I already had logarithms in trigonometry last year. I just forgot. Sorry I sent you that stupid text last night—every year I seem to have to start at the beginning all over again. It’s discouraging.”

“I’m the same way.”

We cross the street and I realize I’m a ball of tension. I let my arms give a quick shake to release the muscles. “No you’re not, Owen. But I won’t stand in the way of your being nice if you want.”

“I’m not being nice. It’s true. Math is like that. You have to learn things a dozen times before they sink in enough to be part of you.”

I wonder if that’s so. In elementary and middle school the math lessons at the beginning of the year were always review. I resented them. But maybe they weren’t a waste of time after all.

I look around. Melanie must have taken a different route. But what a stupid thought—I don’t even know where she lives.

“Looking for someone?”

I shouldn’t be. I’m not even really friends with Melanie. “What do you know about tattoos, Owen?”

“You thinking of getting one?”

“No. I thought about it, but decided it wouldn’t serve my purposes, after all.”

“‘Wouldn’t serve your purposes,’ huh? You sound mysterious.”

“I’m not.”

“So if you’re not going to get one, why are you talking about them?”

“I just want to know what you know about them.”

“Less than you do. But I do know people often regret them. This counselor at camp when I was just a kid—”

“You mean last year?”

“You want to hear or you want to make fun of me?”

“Sorry. Tell me.”

“She said that her cousin got a tattoo when she was eighteen, of her favorite movie star.”

“That doesn’t sound bad.”

“Exactly. That’s the point. To teenage girls it doesn’t sound bad. And if she had gotten it ten years before, she’d have chosen a spotted dog or a pink dinosaur or something. So how do you think she felt about that movie star ten years later?”

I laugh. “Good point.” I rip a leaf off a bush as we pass. “Ever heard that some tattoos have meaning? I mean, of course they have meaning, but, you know, that some send a kind of message?”

“You’re either being obscure or you’re an idiot, Sep. Tattoos can mean all sorts of things.”

“What about pink triangles?”

“On the ankle? For lesbians?”

So Owen knows, too. I can’t believe it. “How long have you known that, Owen?”

“About those triangles? Since last year. Why?”

“How did you find out?”

“What are you talking about, Sep? They were a big deal. Everyone knew.”

“I didn’t. What if I had gotten a pink triangle on my ankle just by accident?”

“Well, you’d have been screwed.”

“So screwed.”

“Yeah.”

“Major screwed.”

“Yeah.”

“And all by accident. Do you ever think about how many things happen to us just by accident, Owen?”

“Of course. But I don’t dwell on it, Sep. You can’t do anything about accidents.”

We walk a couple of blocks in silence and cut through the woodsy area by the condominiums. Owen slips off his backpack as he walks, reaches in, and hands me a book. Then he puts his backpack on again.

I look at the title.
The Things They Carried
. “What’s this?”

“A gift. I put it in my pack yesterday, after you
apologized. It’s appropriate, because you cussed last time we were together.”

“Is it about cussing?”

“And other things. The Vietnam War.”

“You care about the Vietnam War?”

“If you read it, you will, too. Ordinary people, just a little older than us, wound up halfway around the world shooting at people and getting shot at and trying to figure out what it means.”

“What war means?”

“War. Life. Everything.” Owen’s voice goes suddenly thick with emotion. He hardly ever gets emotional. His dad has diabetes, the bad kind that you get when you’re little, and I was with him once when his dad went into diabetic shock, so I know: Owen is a rock. Or at least he tries to be.

I move closer. “They had the draft then,” I say softly. “Nonno talked about it once, about what a lousy system it was. Italy was different. In Italy every guy did military service after high school, no matter what.”

“That had to suck.”

“Yeah. But it was fair. Nonno was big on being fair.”

“Does anyone sit in his chair yet?”

“Just Rattle.”

“Time,” says Owen. He clears his throat. “Some things take time.”