by Dana Czapnik
“What about you, Eric? What do you do?” And I say it all mocking and I can’t help but laugh at myself and the absurdity of the whole conversation. I rub my hands over his chest again, and he doesn’t feel like water anymore, he’s something less tactile. A ghost.
“I’m a skater.”
“Like a skateboarder?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you make money doing that?”
“Well, I also tutor kids. Kids like you, I guess.”
“Oh, like an SAT tutor?”
“Ha.” He pinches my cheek. “No, I tutor them in skating.”
“You do not.”
“Yes I do. Mainly middle school kids.”
“Who pays for a skateboarding tutor?”
“Oh, my little innocent friend, there’s a cottage industry in this town for real-life hard-asses. It’s teaching rich kids like you how to do the things that should come naturally to young people, like skateboarding . . . and rebellion. I could teach you a few things, you know?”
“I’m not rich.”
“Of course not.”
Some girl bumps into me, and I’m caught off-balance and shoved right into this guy Eric’s space, spilling whatever gross drink he just bought me all down the back of a man in a fishnet muscle shirt, but he’s making out with some woman whose leg is wrapped around his waist, so he doesn’t notice. “Whoa, you okay?” Eric catches me and holds me for a beat and, suddenly, I find him kissing me. His tongue messy all over my mouth and around my lips. Spit hot and foreign. Somehow we’ve moved onto the dance floor, writhing with the rest of them, though I’m not really dancing, mainly holding onto him for balance as he moves me. My first real kiss. Sweaty on a dance floor, high on E with a guy I never knew existed until fifteen minutes ago. His hands on my waist and ass. He’s squeezing it and pulling me tight toward his crotch. My chest pressed against his. Somehow, suddenly, our mouths find some kind of rhythm together. Our sweat combines. I forget myself. Love’s such an old-fashioned Wo-wo-wo-wo-work this pussy Love’s such an old-fashioned Wo-wo-wo-wo-work this pussy. The chicken cutlets in my bra melt and attach to me. He reaches up and squeezes them. Does that count as being felt up when what he’s feeling isn’t real? I’m given a flash of insight into the promise of adulthood. Both the freedom and the darkness.
I pull away from his kiss and yell, “If love was such an old-fashioned word in the Eighties, it must be nearly obsolete by now.” And he smiles at me in this soft, good-natured way, the way a dog smiles at you, while his head loosely bounces to the beat of the music and he leans into my ear and goes, “Whaaat?” and I shake my head and mouth the word “nothing,” and he smiles at me again and closes his eyes and I watch his face as it dives back into mine.
A big, knuckly hand encircles my arm and yanks me away from Eric, and I look to my left and see that it’s Percy. Eric yells “Hey!” and I can see he’s about to grab at me before he realizes that he’s outmatched and he turns away and disappears into the crowd and gloms onto a different girl. An even more willing participant. With my free hand, I wipe Eric’s spit off my mouth as we make our way through sweaty flesh and out to the other end of the dance floor, near the DJ, under another stained-glass window, this one of baby Jesus in the manger, where there is something that feels like actual oxygen and I can breathe again.
“I was looking all over for you,” Percy shouts at me back at the table. He says it chastisingly, as though he’s responsible for me. The whole interaction confuses me. It feels like he’s jealous. I’m not cute enough for him to be seen with, but no one else can have me either. Like he wants me to himself, but to keep me in a bell jar. I’m not for touching. But why not?
“I just went to get some water and somehow I ended up with that guy on the dance floor.”
“Who are you right now?” he asks.
“I wish I knew.”
“That’s bullshit—you know who you are.”
I sit down on the maroon velvet couch and sink in. Percy sits down next to me. Maroon. Everything is maroon. What a word. Reddish-purple and lost and abandoned.
“I hate this place,” he screams into my ear.
His arm rests on the couch next to me. I trace the veins on the back of his hand with my finger. He pulls it away. Right, right. I’m not supposed to touch him that way.
I look up at the image of Mary Magdalene and she whispers to me, “ ‘Intoxicating’ and ‘toxic’ are the same word.”
“Let’s just go home.” I turn back to Percy.
“Nuh-uh. See that chick over there?” He points to a girl wearing jeans and a studded black corset, with long, straight dark hair and maroon lipstick like mine and John Lennon sunglasses. She’s talking with a group of Kim and Brent’s friends from school. “I’m working on her. I don’t want to leave yet. I’ve never had sex on X.”
“Does she know you’re in high school?”
“She’s in high school, so why should she care?”
“How does she know all those college kids, then?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter? She’s hot.”
That shuts me up good. Percy gets up, leaving me on the couch to go over and talk to her. I bet she can’t dribble a basketball for shit.
Brent’s whip-it friend takes Percy’s place next to me on the couch.
“Lighten up,” he goes, knocking his knee into mine.
“I am light,” I snap at him. He looks at me like I’m Medusa in one of Violet’s paintings, like he might just turn to stone, and he gets up and shakes his head and moves to the other side of the couch, where there is a girl who has probably never had a moment of self-doubt sitting and bobbing her head to the awful, suicide-inducing house music. For a split second, I understand the Goth kids.
It turns out the girl Percy wants is a sophomore at Stuyvesant. By the end of the night, she and Percy are actually dancing—something I’ve never seen him do. He dances off-beat. Awkward. Not his natural state of being. She turns her back and grinds her ass into him, reaching her arm behind her and hanging onto his neck. His eyes closed, he buries his nose in her hair. I sit by myself for a while and rub my hand back and forth and back and forth over the velvet. Back and forth. It feels like the belly of a stretching kitten.
* * *
Percy, the girl he was working, Brent, Kim, and I share a cab, so I get stuck sitting in the front seat. In the cab’s side-view mirror, I see Percy’s girl is straddling him and they’re making out. Percy pulls her face away from his for a moment and runs his fingers through her hair. I feel like vomiting. I pull down the visor and look in the mirror. My face is a mess. All the mascara and eyeliner Kim put on me at the beginning of the night has streaked down my cheeks with sweat. I try to rub it off with my fingers, but it’s too waxy, and my cheeks get all irritated and red. In the tiny, dark mirror, I can see behind my shoulder fractured images of Kim nibbling on Brent’s earlobe. I shouldn’t watch, but again: rubbernecking. When you’re apart from life, all you can do is watch as others live it. Kim pulls the girl off Percy’s face and starts making out with her. I hear Percy’s voice go, “Holy shit.” I slam the visor back into place on the ceiling of the cab and close my eyes. So that’s how it is, Kim? Nervous about undressing in the presence of someone you assumed to be a legitimate lesbian only a few hours ago, but as soon as there are boys around: lesbian-chic freak. Sexual pretender.
Everyone in this world is an asshole.
The cab pulls over. “Get out!” the driver yells in the direction of the back seat. It’s a woman. I hadn’t realized. “Oh, no, that doesn’t happen in my car. Get out,” she screams. “Get out!”
“Hey, you fat cunt,” Brent says, laughing through the money slot. “Take us the fuck home.”
She reaches down by my feet and pulls out a nice wooden Louisville Slugger from between my legs and moves to get out of the cab.
“Okay, okay, bitch, we’re leaving. Fucking dyke.”
I turn and look at the driver and say meekly, “Please, will you ta
ke me home? Please don’t make me wander the streets with those four.”
She takes pity on me. “You got money?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, where you headed?”
“Eighty-Seventh and Amsterdam.”
“Okay, I’ll take you.”
I roll my window down and shout, “Percy!” He turns to look at me, and I see he’s carrying the sophomore from Stuyvesant with the long, dark hair on his back, her arms around his collar. She’s biting his neck.
I shout self-assuredly, though I can feel the muscles in my chin beginning to knot, “I’m going home.”
“Okay,” he says. “Get home safe.”
Brent sees me in the cab and he grabs his crotch and screams “Suck on this till you gag, bitch” to me or the cabbie, I’m not sure who, and Kim throws her head back and laughs and puts her arm around him.
The cabbie leans over me and yells, “You little runt, your dick’s too small for that!”
I would laugh if I were feeling up to it. As we pull away, I hear Percy shout, “Call me tomorrow, Loose. We’ll shoot some hoops.”
“Those friends of yours?” the lady cabbie asks me as the car accelerates.
“Just the one. That guy I was just talking to. The asshole who called you names is his older brother, who everyone hates.”
“Hmm. Beware of the company you keep, little girl.”
“I’m not a little girl.”
“Sorry, you’re right. You’re not. Here, use these.” She reaches over and opens the glove compartment and pulls out a powder-blue box of baby wipes. “For that mess on your face.”
“Thanks.” I drop the visor down again and look at myself in the mirror. I scrub around my eyes. It takes ten baby wipes before one of them comes off my face clean, without any makeup residue on it.
“See?” she says. “So much prettier without that crap.”
We sit in silence for a while, listening to 1010 WINS. A man with a soft, droll voice reports that a woman has accused the president of sexual harassment.
“Oh, god, another one. This guy just can’t control himself.” She sucks in some air through her teeth and shakes her head. “Men are shit, you know that?” She’s wearing black faux-leather driving gloves with holes around her knuckles that expose the top half of her fingers. She’s got short, dark brown hair and a hard-angled face.
“Maybe it’s our fault for letting them get away with too much,” I say softly, thinking of Kim and all the stupid girls who’ve hung on to Percy over the past few years, waiting for him to turn into a boyfriend. And also: myself.
“That’s victim blaming.”
“We’re only victims if we let ourselves be victims.”
“A little more life experience, sweetie, and you’ll find out it’s a bit more complicated. How old are you, anyway?”
“Seventeen,” I say flatly, without a whiff of romance.
“Cheer up, lovely. Whatever terrible thing you think happened tonight, it’s probably nothing. One day you’ll look back on all this and laugh.”
I don’t respond. I hate it when adults try to teach me shit about life. Nobody knows anything about anything at all. The oldest, wisest person on the planet is as clueless as a newborn dog.
The lady cabbie switches the station to Lite FM and starts singing along to the Arthur theme song, which is just fucking perfect. She looks at me all earnest and sings, “If you get caught between the moon and New York City,” and she giggles twice from a gurgling place in her throat. “I know I look like a tough lady full of spit, but I ain’t. I’m a soft woman on the inside. Aren’t we all?” She smiles at me, revealing a missing incisor. “I know it’s crazy, but it’s true—ha-ha, c’mon, lovely. Sing with me. I know you know it. Don’t lie.” And it’s true. I know the lyrics and I love Arthur as much as the next looney tune, and there is some deep lizard-brain part of me that wants to blast it all to hell and start singing along with this insane lady graveyard-shift cabbie and just sob the remainder of my mascara off and get whatever hackneyed life advice she desperately wants to give me about being tough or soft or how to live my life as woman-hear-me-roar crap and all that shit from the Seventies.
Instead I stare out the windshield at the black night sky above the streetlamps and the buildings. Violet once told me a mistake young artists make is ignoring negative space. The space around an object is just as important as the object itself. But it takes a special eye to understand that, to recognize the beauty in the space around the things your eye is drawn to.
Eventually, we get to my block, and I see my stoop. Home is the most comforting four-letter word. So much more so than love. I hand the cabbie some cash and tell her to keep the change, even though it’s a huge tip, because I feel bad about what Brent said.
I thank her and step out onto the street. The air is brittle and presses tight against my lungs. I take my keys out from my bag and hold them to my chest, as though they are some kind of external vital organ. I notice the cab is still there, behind me, the driver watching me. I turn around and look at her as if to say, What?
“I’m just waiting till you’re inside, lovely,” she shouts at me through the passenger-side window.
I roll my eyes at her and instantly regret it.
* * *
In the morning, I don’t remember walking through my lobby and taking the elevator and wafting into my bedroom. I don’t remember washing off the rest of my makeup or taking off Kim’s clothes and putting on my pajamas.
At eleven o’clock, the phone in my room rings, and I reach over to my nightstand to pick it up.
“Hello?” I ask, my mouth filled with imaginary dust.
“You sound like hell,” Percy’s voice says back to me.
“So do you.”
“Now that I know you’re home and you made it okay, how about I come over and raid your parents’ fridge, and then we can go play some ball?”
“Did you have sex with that girl?”
“Whoa, where did that come from?”
“I just wanna know.”
“We fooled around. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jealous?”
Yes. “No.”
“So am I coming over? I’m hungry. We don’t have any food.”
“Did you use a condom? I think I saw a lesion on her neck.”
“That was a birthmark. And yes, I used a condom. Thanks for your concern, asshole.”
I don’t respond.
“Loose, you there?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s normal to be depressed the morning after doing E. Something about your daily allotment of serotonin being depleted. You’ll feel back to normal in a day’s time.”
“Whatever.”
“Are you, like, upset about making out with that busted kid? Don’t worry, it’s okay to lose yourself every once in a while.”
“I don’t want to lose myself. I want to keep myself.”
* * *
Percy comes over and eats all the deli meats and cheese in our fridge and all the bread in the pantry. My mother jokes with him that she’s going to start sending his parents a bill. We pick up a game of basketball in Riverside. He and I play on a team with a couple kids from Tufts home for Thanksgiving. They suck and we lose. Afterward, we play H-O-R-S-E. He wins on a technicality. We grab a slice at Big Nick’s. The day eventually retracts. The feeling of being trapped inside the air bubble of an ice cube subsides. Soon night will hit, and then morning, and then everything will be new again. Full of promise.
Manhattan Academy sits at the center of a stone courtyard. Its architecture from the darkest days of the 1960s, a black-and-brown brick structure with metal bars over all the windows. Screams low-cost government design. Municipal melancholy. A metal detector awaits us at the entrance. Then rent-a-cops to search our bags. Behind them is a painting of Frederick Douglass and a quote in cursive on the concrete block wall. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” The school migh
t as well be another country. We ought to get our passports stamped.
I do a quick search of the small pocket on the inside of my book bag before I get to the front of the line. To my relief, I only feel a few pencil erasers and some crusted coins. I also feel something that could be a little roach, but I don’t want to open my hand to look at it, so I sneak it in between the pages of one of my textbooks and flatten it.
A lady cop half-asses patting me down while she holds an entire conversation with another cop. “He went postal,” she says as she blows a bubble of gum and sucks it back into her mouth. “Have you heard that term?” She’s a thin and tall African American woman. Light skin, dark, straight hair pulled back into a sleek bun, and a tough face. “Was he a postal workah?” the other cop responds. He’s a tall white guy, probably late forties, with one of those depressing mustaches where they shave everything but the thin line of hair over the upper lip, and a rough Staten Island accent. He’s standing next to her with his legs spread and his arms crossed over his chest, rocking back and forth on his heels. I wonder what the students who go to this school think of these two. I can’t picture either one of them being particularly kind. But maybe some kids are happy they’re here. “No. But he snapped, like all those postal workers who lit up their offices,” she says, still chewing gum. They’re talking about the shooting on the LIRR—the guy who just opened fire on commuters for no reason on Tuesday, killed six people. She sends me off and I open my bag for him to look through. He glances at it quickly before signaling for Alexis to step forward. I wait for her as they continue the conversation and inspect her bag. “This city’s a mess,” he says. “Rudy’s gonna clean it up, you’ll see.” Lex looks up at the cop with open disgust. “Got a problem?” he says to her.
“Nope,” she whispers.
“We should drop Staten Island from the state, give it to New Jersey. It makes more sense geographically anyway,” I say as we follow Coach to the locker room. Those of us who care about these things are still resentful. If not for Staten Island, we’d still have Mayor Dinkins.