The Lifeboat Clique (7 page)

I FIRST MET ABIGAIL WHEN I KICKED HER IN THE FACE
.

I didn't mean to do it. I wasn't born with face-kicker tendencies like Bruce Lee or a kangaroo. It was a total accident. And there was more to the story than you'd think. But there was always more to the story when it came to Abigail.

My family had just moved from Wisconsin to West LA when I was about to enter the seventh grade, suddenly friendless and angry. The new city filled me with contempt, those countless nail salons and fancy convertibles and shiny round sunglasses. And sushi. How that city loved to cut up fish. And there was no slowness, no realness. I
never saw a kid roll a tire down the street. I never saw an American flag in a front yard or heard the clanking sound its pulley chain makes when the wind blows. I never saw neighbors gathered on a porch. I never even saw an ice cream truck. All the ice cream truck drivers had probably become movie stars or written songs that were used in commercials, and now they were too rich to drive ice cream trucks.

It was a totally different world. In my little protected neighborhood in the Midwest, kids could ride their bikes to one another's houses. Here you had to get a parent to drive you, because LA was spread out and choked with traffic, and no one walked anywhere. Everyone drank weird brands of coffee, and was skinny and perfect. I didn't even trust the flowers. Their colors seemed fake and showy. They paid no attention to the blooming seasons of the Midwest, just bloomed whenever the hell they wanted to. I wanted to slap those flowers.

I missed my friends from Wisconsin terribly, and Skyped and texted them every night, complaining about my terrible luck in moving to this place just because my father lost his teaching job in Oshkosh and now taught at UCLA.

“You'll make new friends,” said Jessica Altvine. She was my most positive friend and therefore my least favorite.

“I don't WANT new friends,” I hotly replied, leaning in to the light of my computer. Jessica's skin had a pink, unflattering tone to it over Skype. “I want my old friends. The ones I grew up with. Not these dopes in this town.”

“Don't worry. You'll make a ton of new friends, and before you know it, you'll be glad you moved there.”

I decided that should I ever return to Wisconsin, I was going to replace Jessica with a more cynical and less pink-toned friend.

“Come on,” my mother said. “Give the West Coast a try. I am.” Indeed, she was trying. And it was hard for her to make friends with a bunch of women who went to Spinning class and talked about cultured goat's milk. My mother totally didn't fit in here, but it was her nature to be a good sport about everything.

“You know your father needed a job,” she said, “so let's make the best of it.”

I didn't want to make the best of it. LA was full of people hungry for something. They didn't grow up with this town wrapped around them. Most of them came here to make something of themselves, and that failure was written all over their faces.

They wanted to be famous. They wanted to be stars. They wanted paparazzi to follow them around, and they wanted to sing or dance or act or just be important. It was
a strange feeling. Like a bunch of shipwrecked sailors competing over one bottle of water.

A prize example was my new gym teacher, Ms. Hanson. She had blindingly white teeth and a fake smile, and her forehead didn't move when she got mad, and she didn't wear a bra, so when she led us in jumping jacks, her breasts would fly around and it was weird and gross. And she was always talking about her “auditions.” About how she had been an extra in the movie
Titanic
when she was twelve years old, and any day now she was going to get her own show or be the star of a movie or move to Broadway or whatever. In the meantime, she was teaching gym class, but she reminded us often that it was only temporary before she got “the call,” which could happen any day. In fact, she kept her cell phone on the bench next to the bleachers, and she'd glance at it often, just in case James Cameron thought,
Who was that sassy twelve-year-old sparkling like a lost diamond out of a cast of thousands who caught my eye? What's she doing? I need her.

The way she looked at us was weird—as though she resented us for being seventh graders and loving things that had nothing to do with overnight success. She squeezed a stress ball when she talked to us, and it made the veins between her knuckles stand out. I thought her prominent knuckle veins might explain Hollywood's lack of interest,
but maybe it all came down to plain bad luck.

I hated gym and I hated Ms. Hanson. The only form of athletics I liked was swimming. Everything about gym class made me miserable. There was even a knotted rope hanging from the ceiling that I knew inevitably we'd have to climb in that tired old cliché repeated since the first asshole decided to string a knotted rope from a gym ceiling and make some ungainly loser climb it. I'd fall to the floor and break my neck, and they'd put my framed picture in the hallway.

I also hated the uniform I had to wear. The T-shirt was too tight, and the shorts were too high in the waist. I tried to get my mother to sign something that said I had asthma and couldn't participate in sports, but she told me she'd had to take gym class and I had to take it, too.

Everyone was supposed to partner up to learn the handstand. How the handstand would serve me later in life was still a mystery, in the same way that how anything would serve me later in life was still a mystery. Ms. Hanson told everyone to “pair up,” which was the cue for all the best friends to run shrieking toward each other and the leftover girls to look around shyly.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a girl with springy red hair coming toward me. I'd noticed her in class. Who could not notice that hair? It went out in all directions and
was parted on the side, and a single barrette had the laughable job of trying to contain it.

When she walked, the barrette flapped and trembled.

She had rosy lips, pale skin, and a splash of freckles, which spread out across her cheeks and then abruptly ended. Her eyes were blue, dark and deep. She had a studied, wise way about her.

“Hey,” she said when she reached me. “Wanna pair up for this dumb-ass exercise?” Her accent startled me. I hadn't run into too many Texans out here.

“Sure, I guess. But I have to warn you, I'm terrible at handstands. And cartwheels. And doing those stretches where your chin touches your knee.”

She nodded. The barrette bobbed. “I'm Abigail.”

“I'm Denver.”

“Don't recollect hearing that name before. I thought you'd be a Jessica. This school is crawling with Jessicas. Of course, back in Texas we had our share. Lotsa Ashleys too. Rancher friend of my dad named his cow Ashley. I don't see the specialness about it myself.”

“My mother wanted to name me after a city. It was that or Paris. She said Cancun was in the mix, but I think she was just trying to be funny.”

“Well, parents trying to be funny are a burden we all bear, ain't it?”

I liked the way she treated the English language so casually and brutally, like swinging a cat around by the tail. And I liked her easy way of making conversation.

Ms. Hanson's stress ball sat on the bench next to her cell phone. Those two objects, banishing anxiety and welcoming fame, were what got her through the day. “Okay,” she announced, “one of you is going to try the handstand, and the other will catch and hold your ankles.”

The class groaned collectively.

“Now, girls,” she said with barely disguised contempt, “this will teach you balance and flexibility.”

“And failure,” I added softly.

Ms. Hanson clapped her hands together, a motion that caused her unharnessed breasts to jiggle briefly. “Let's go, girls. Pick which one is going to do the handstand and which one's going to help.”

“You do the handstand,” Abigail told me. “I'll grab your ankles.”

“Like I said, I'm terrible at this.”

“Just fake it.”

“I hate gym class.”

“Right there with ya.”

We watched as Ms. Hanson demonstrated with a bored-looking girl named Sienna Martin. Yes, that Sienna. She had not yet grown the breasts that would serve her so
well in grope sessions in high school with any guy who moved, and it would take another few years to perfect her bitchiness and master the dark science of her true calling: snubbing those outside her circle and holding back the hair of her drunkenly vomiting friends. But she had the lips. Thin on the top, fuller on the bottom, and always slightly curled, as though the smell of rotting pariah had just come wafting down from the vents.

Here she was now, curl lipped, bored, a bitch in training and as limber as a snake.

“Everyone, watch Sienna,” said Ms. Hanson. We watched as Sienna did a perfect handstand, her top lip fighting gravity to stay snarly, and Ms. Hanson caught her by her ankles.

They stood there frozen for a moment, like a fisherman and her skinny swordfish trophy, and we were not sure what to do. Clap? Take notes? Marvel?

Finally the moment ended. Sienna was released. Her long legs came down again, one after another in perfect succession. She bounced up, as did her bouncy hair, and gave us all a quick, bored, smug glare.

“Now you do it!” Ms. Hanson ordered the rest of us. She glanced back at her phone.

“Here goes nothing,” I said to Abigail.

I backed a few feet away from her, hurled myself at
the floor, and flung my feet up in the air. Predictably my body rebelled, immediately collapsing as momentum carried my legs up and then down the opposite way, my big feet gone rogue and ready to inflict collateral damage. I could do nothing but scream “Get out of the way!” at my new partner, whom I couldn't see because I was facing the opposite wall.

I felt the impact of my feet hitting Abigail's flesh, and I heard her pained little scream. Then we both fell down in a heap.

The girls let out a collective “Ahhhh.”

“Abigail!” I cried as I extracted myself. “Are you all right?”

She didn't answer. She was sitting with one leg beneath her and the other straight out. Her hands covered her face, and she was making gasping sounds. Ms. Hanson wandered over, bored with our catastrophe, which I suppose was completely dwarfed by the trauma of her post-
Titanic
career. “What seems to be the problem?”

“That big girl flipped over on her. That's the problem,” sneered Sienna, folding her stick arms and curling her lip.

Abigail exhaled a breath of pure agony. Her muffled voice came through her fingers. “I think she broke my nose.”

It was hard to tell where her pain began and her accent ended. As it was, they seemed to intersect. Ms. Hanson sighed and rolled her eyes. She clenched and unclenched her absent stress ball. Her breasts had clocked out for the day and were pointing at the floor.

“Let me see,” she said without pity. “Take your hands away.”

Abigail's hands came down, revealing a violently red face and eyes full of tears.

Ms. Hanson studied her nose while I stood there horrified at what I'd done.

“It doesn't look broken. But who knows?” She nodded at me curtly. “Take her to the nurse.”

Everyone was staring at me. I felt like such a dope, having injured a potential new friend in just under two minutes.

I helped Abigail to her feet. “Can you walk?” I whispered stupidly.

More tears came out. She put her hands over her face again and nodded silently.

“Way to go,” said Sienna, and some of the other girls snickered.

I led Abigail out of the gym. As soon as the door closed, she dropped her hands and wiped her face on her sleeve.

“Perfecto,” she said.

Her face was flushed red, but her eyes were dead calm. Her barrette had slid down to the last two inches of her red hair, an innocent victim of the debacle. She stopped, removed her barrette, and then laboriously shoved it back into her hair, buckling it over as many springs as she could gather.

“What is perfecto?” I asked, confused.

“How that went.”

“What do you mean? Is your nose okay?”

“Of course it's okay,” she said as though impatient with the question. “I staged the whole thing.”

I was completely bewildered. “Why?”

“I couldn't stand frigging gym class one more second, that's why.”

“You're not hurt?”

“No.” She began to saunter down the hall. I followed her. “I picked you out because you seemed like the most likely to flop over. I've noticed your big feet and lack of grace.”

“Wait,” I said. “Just wait a second. You just made me look like an idiot in front of the whole class.”

She just kept going, paying me no mind.

I was growing furious. “So everything's okay now, huh? Now that your little plan worked?”

“My little plan
always
works. Now get off your high horse. We're free, ain't we?” She breezed right past the nurse's office and out the double doors that led outside.

The light from harsh LA flooded my eyes and then the doors shut in my face, and I was alone in the hall, fuming. I'd had just about enough of this town and all the dipshit people in it. I burst out into the sunlight, filled with adrenaline and self-righteous anger.

Just ahead was a grassy area and a few plank tables. Abigail was already lounging on top of one of the tables, looking up at the drifting clouds. She glanced at me but said nothing.

“You know what I hate about this town?” I asked. “People like you. People just concerned about themselves. People doing whatever they need to do to get what they want at someone else's expense. You are LA. You are this gross desert with pumped-in water and fake teeth and shitty beaches.”

She seemed unconcerned. “Well, in case you haven't noticed, I am not from this damn town. I am from the great state of Texas, where my friends would have slapped me on the back and said ‘Good job' instead of whining and carrying on like I threw a rattlesnake on your grandma.”