by Dana Czapnik
Coach’s face is above me, blocking out the light from one of the bulbs on the ceiling.
“Adler, you okay? That’s a lot of blood.” His face only inches from mine, I can see the scar on his left eyebrow up close. I can tell the gash probably needed stitches, but since his eyebrow was sliced in the middle of a conference championship game while he was at Kentucky, they probably just put a butterfly Band-Aid on it and sent him back out.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.”
He runs to get me some tissues or cotton balls.
Weatherspoon comes over and reaches her hand down to help me up. I take it. “Sorry. My bad,” she says, tapping my back twice as I stand up.
“It’s cool. It’s cool.” I know how it is. I’ve laid out a few girls. I can’t be upset about a little hit to the face.
She rejoins her teammates hanging out under the basket. For a moment, I admire her. I’ve never played a girl with that much talent before. Such a shame. She’ll play in college for a few years, and then what? Europe? Russia? After a few years of that, maybe assistant coaching at some college. What else is there for girls who can really ball?
I take my place on the line and feel a little dizzy. The ref comes over to me. “You can either take your two shots now or have a teammate take them while you take a medical time-out.”
That isn’t really a question. “Gimme the ball.”
I feel the pain pulsating through my sinuses and my gums. I try to suck the blood back in through my nostrils, but there’s too much of it. I skip my usual free-throw routine and just heave the ball in the general direction of the basket. It bounces off the rim to the right. Weatherspoon catches it and hands it to the ref. I see that some of my blood’s gotten on the ball and, in turn, on the ref’s hand. He blows the whistle and orders me off the court to get patched up, and he races off to get some alcohol swabs for himself.
Coach sends a freshman benchwarmer after me with some cotton balls and a bag of ice. I take them and head to the bathroom. From the corner of my eye, I see my mom start to inch her way toward me to make sure I’m okay but then think better of it. I don’t know who takes my place on the line, but whoever it is misses the shot. I hear the unmistakable sound of a brick behind me. By the time I walk into the bathroom, I can hear the Lions snagging the rebound and their coach yelling, “Slow it down, slow it down,” the telltale sign they’ve been given instructions not to keep running the score up on us. That now they’re playing the game within the game, which is the kind of thing only really great teams ever get the chance to do. But the game is over for me inside, and if we lose by thirty or thirty thousand, it’s all the same.
* * *
No one else is in the bathroom next to the girls’ locker room, which is a shithole. It stinks of mildew and cigarettes. There’s graffiti in pencil and Sharpie all over the place. On the mirror, on the walls, on the front and back of the bathroom stalls. Some of the stalls have doors that are just plain missing, and two of the toilets are stuffed up and not working. I didn’t notice any of this before the game, when we were changing. Too much adrenaline and nervous energy to actually absorb the surroundings.
I stare at myself in the mirror, allowing the blood from my nose to seep into my mouth. I taste the sour-penny copper of it. I clench my teeth and smile. The blood sticks in the gaps and lines my gums, like I have the worst gingivitis in the history of mankind. Straight out of a horror movie. It’s the first time my appearance exactly matches the way I feel: crazy fucking hair. The Manic Panic leaking its maroon dye on my forehead. Probably a broken nose. Scrawny body. Nonexistent tits. Too tall. Towering over everyone—all the teachers, the boys—yet always feeling small. Small as the black wads of gum on the sidewalk. I didn’t do the right things to get into the right kind of school. I don’t dress or act the right way to get the guy. I don’t have the kind of effervescence required to be the girl everyone wants to be friends with. I’m not even the greatest basketball player to make it all worthwhile. And just look at that inadequate face. Who am I, anyway? Who could possibly ever like or love this person? Maybe I’ll be lucky and one day turn into someone beautiful and smart and interesting. Maybe I’ll be the swan or the butterfly or whatever. Unlikely, though. Most likely I’ll be stuck with this for all eternity, and I’m only seventeen and already bored with the meaningless nothing staring back at me.
I notice a verse written in Sharpie on the mirror next to my reflection:
Because the streets is a short stop
Either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot
With my heart rate still elevated, the blood pulses quickly over my lips and off my chin and dribbles into the dirty white sink. It’s so quiet I can hear the heavy drops splash against the porcelain. Those kids in the stands. Their cheering felt like a specific kind of hatred, and I understand it. I’d hate us too. The Biggie rap, the stuffed toilets, the mildew, the crushed-up cigarettes piled on the paper towel dispenser, the metal detectors at the front door, the duct-taped windows with bars on them. What did we think would happen, coming into a huge public school in one of the most busted public school systems in the country? Playing what has to be one of the best teams in the state? Our team from our private school that costs ten grand a year, with a sordid, racist past—even though half our team isn’t even white. Still. The fucking hubris of it.
I take a deep breath and spray the blood from my mouth onto the mirror. I stare at the red liquid-mercury version of myself in this broken looking glass. This reverse Wonderland.
As far as I can tell, New York is a town with two faces, and neither of them is mine.
I wash the mirror off but realize there are no paper towels in the bathroom, so I have to use the bottom of my jersey to wipe it down, and it looks like I’ve just taken a bullet in the gut. I wash my face off and put my head back, trying to get the blood to stop. I put fresh cotton balls in my nose and the ice on my face.
There’s a basketball game still going on in the gym outside the locker room. I can hear the sneakers squeaking and Coach yelling and the girls on the other team clapping their hands and yelping, “Here, here!” signaling they’re open for a pass.
I head back out to the gym with my backpack and basketball bag with the Pendleton insignia that means nothing in my Pendleton warm-ups that mean nothing and don’t even look at the scoreboard that means nothing. I just lie down on the bench and put the ice pack on my face and close my eyes. What do I think about as I lie there, closed-eyed and silent? Nothing.
When the game horn sounds, I gather my bags and walk out of the gym.
I hear Coach yell, “Adler, where are you going? We have to line up for handshakes.”
I ignore him.
I hear my mom calling to me from the bleachers, but I ignore her too.
In the hallway, by the entrance of the school, I hear the pounding of sneakers against linoleum racing to catch up with me.
“Loose, wait up!”
Percy. I don’t answer.
“Why are you storming out? It wasn’t that bad. You played well. You got like eighteen points.”
I stop and stand still, staring straight ahead at the heavy metal public-school doors with thick chains on them.
“Lucille, Lu-seeeel,” he says, smiling and almost laughing. “It’s just a basketball game, ya know. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t even count toward your record. C’mon, let’s go hang out or something.” He tries putting his arm around me, but I shake him off. I push the metal bar and open the door and leave him behind in the hallway, wondering.
It’s freezing outside. All I have on is my warm-ups and a sweaty basketball jersey underneath. I don’t care. I want the misery. Bring on all the misery you can possibly throw at me, world! I want all the goblins and ghosts and zombies of New York to come at me. Give me your best shot! I can’t tell whether I’ll hold you off with every inch of strength I have in me or whether I’ll just let you eat me alive. Somehow, right now, it feels like the same thing.
I must be some sight to see, walking along Broadway. White Pendleton basketball warm-ups splattered with blood. Dried, crusted blood all around my mouth and chin. Two red cotton balls in my nostrils. Steamy, hot breath vaporizing in front of my face. Frizzy purple hair, frozen like Kool-Aid icicles at the ends. A reject from a mental institution. A reject from life. My gait may seem confident and cocksure, like all basketball players’, with calf muscles so taut I can only really walk effectively on my toes. But I feel gritty and alone and stuck inside myself, with no way out.
* * *
I walk to the planetarium. Lie down on the steps. My head on the cool marble, the weight of all that gray matter pressing against the inside of my skull. I look up at the sky. Not a single star visible. Seems unnatural to live in a place where stars only exist on a domed screen in the interior of a museum. Overhead, planes circle lazily, like engineered hawks in the sky. Waiting for the go-ahead to land at JFK or LaGuardia. The red lights blink as they go. I can feel the pressure of them banking over Manhattan as they make their crazy eights. I know what it all looks like from up there. All those lights. Don’t be fooled. There’s darkness too.
A shadow across my face blots out the light of the streetlamps. A man-made eclipse.
“Did you follow me?” I say, feigning annoyance.
“No, I just had this feeling you’d be coming here.”
“I didn’t want to go home.”
“You look like crap. You look like crap rolled in gutter sludge and medical waste.”
“You’re such a gentleman.”
I sit up and pull my physics textbook out of my book bag and look at the binding to see where there might be a little lump. Nestled in between pages 482 and 483 is the flattened roach I had to sneak into the game to avoid getting thrown in the clink by the rent-a-cops. I roll it between my thumb and forefinger and watch as dried little crisps of bud float off and scatter over the worn marble stairs.
“Want a light?” Percy takes a Zippo lighter out of his pocket and rolls the steel until the flint catches. He brings the flame in front of my face, and the heat from the silver bullet gives me a temporary respite from the cold.
“How very Dashiell Hammett of you.”
“Hey, dollface, my thumb’s about to burn off. You taking a hit, or no?”
“No, I’m fine. I don’t actually wanna smoke.” I look down at the sorry excuse for a joint and flick it into the dying shrubs surrounding the flagpole in front.
“Let’s go inside, get out of the cold. We can see how much we weigh on the moon or Jupiter or something. Maybe there’s a Floyd light show.”
We get up and head inside the planetarium. I walk over to the gigantic moon rock and run my fingers over it. The rock has turned smooth from overuse. For a long time, I thought it was real. I mean, for most of my life, maybe until about last year. I know: Sixteen sounds pretty old for a pragmatic girl like me to figure out no one from our six moon landings brought a hundred-ton boulder home and put it in a public building for stupid kids to stick gum on and write their initials inside mini craters with ballpoint pens. But you can’t control when you have the ah-ha moment. That moment when realism replaces romance. You can’t predict when those moments will hit. How many of them do I have left?
Percy’s standing on the scale to see how much he’d weigh on Venus. “I’d weigh 160.4 pounds,” he shouts in my general vicinity.
“You’d weigh nothing. Your body would evaporate on contact.”
“I wonder if that would be a painful death.”
“I’d imagine it’d feel similar to being burned alive, but since you wouldn’t be able to breathe, you’d pass out pretty quick. It would be a very fast death.”
“That’s not a bad way to go. I could think of about a million worse ways to die,” he says. “At least you’d get to see a new horizon on your way out.”
“At least.”
Percy buys us tickets for the 7:00 p.m. light show. I take a seat near the back and slump into my warm-ups and rest my head on the back of the chair. He sits next to me and does the same. We’ve never gone to see the laser light show on a Friday night not stoned. This is a first. And the only time we ever go when we’re stoned is when we can’t think of anything better to do.
They play the whole Dark Side of the Moon album, as they always do because it’s an experience, that album. Meant to be listened to in one sitting. And then “Time” comes on. Which is what I was listening to when I got high for the first time a year ago. I emptied three bongs with Percy, three days in a row, before I felt everything turn slow-motion. We were at his dad’s penthouse on the East Side. His dad was out of the country for a whole month with his new wife and baby somewhere, and Percy had his run of the place, and the apartment basically turned into a warehouse for drug paraphernalia, video-game consoles, and porno flicks on VHS. We smoked in the living room, where double-height windows sprawled out in front of us, and we watched red taillights melt down Madison, making the avenue look like it was sinking under the weight of a flood of neon blood. We moved on to the all-marble bathroom, which was smaller, but still bigger than my living room, and we all sat in the enormous all-glass shower stall because Percy said it would be easier for him and James to hotbox me, and the girl he was hooking up with that week took long, exaggerated hits off her asthma inhaler because she said smoking would cause an asthma flare, but she didn’t want to not be a part of the action, and she laughed at me because I kept saying, “I don’t feel anything yet. Why don’t I feel anything yet?” and Percy kept saying, “I think you’re high, but you don’t realize it,” and I assured him, “No, I still feel the same, just my throat hurts.” And then we moved on to his dad’s bedroom, which had a circular rotating water bed, and the whole ceiling was mirrored, which is really gross when you think about it especially because his dad is old, and Percy put Dark Side of the Moon on the stereo system built into the wall, and then “Time” came on, and it finally hit me. And I laid back on the bed and watched as the four of us rotated in the mirror on the ceiling, which felt like it was some relic from the Playboy Mansion from two decades ago, and I guess like every other kid who has ever listened to Pink Floyd while high, I fell in love with all of it. And even though I know that everyone in America born in the Seventies who has ever tried smoking has had this exact experience, it still felt like it was all mine. The sensation of that electric solo sailing in and out and through brain tissue, Roger Waters’s lyrics turning into something beyond profound. It was a singular experience. And I guess it was also universal. Or at least universal to my generation on my continent. And is that all a generation is? One collective experience and thought that seems wholly unique to its individuals? But we weren’t the first ones to discover Pink Floyd. We didn’t invent that experience, and it seems we haven’t invented anything, we just exist by sucking up the leftover residue of other generations’ inventions and experiences and pretending like they’re unique to us. Percy and his girl were making out, and I watched them in the mirrored ceiling, and in that moment, because I was a novice and pot was still so potent for me then, I didn’t even care, and I turned to James and said slowly, “Do you think hanging on in quiet desperation is the American way?” and he laughed and said, “So it finally kicked in,” and then he looked at my reflection in the ceiling and said, “No, Americans don’t hang on in quiet desperation . . . We’re . . . plucky opportunists . . . we just, like, reinvent and reinvent and reinvent ourselves . . . until there is no self left.” And then, “We gotta put on some Cypress Hill for you . . . that will blow your mind.” But we never did put on any Cypress Hill that night. We just stayed on that bed listening to Floyd, slowly spinning and spinning and spinning.
Now the guitar solo starts playing. Three-dimensional neon-green men dance in front of my face as lights masquerading as stars zoom into hyperdrive. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the science-fiction concept of hyperdrive. Aside from the physical impossibility of moving faster than the speed of light,
the special effect seems to imply that you’re going fast enough for the stars to whizz by you like trees on the side of a highway when you’re doing eighty miles per hour. But the stars that we see in our night sky are no longer there. It’s just that their light is only now reaching us. Most of those stars are just ghosts of stars.
I turn my head to look at Percy’s profile. Through the red-and-blue plastic of my paper 3-D glasses, his face looks a little sallow, sunken. His chin is weak, and he has a Roman nose, the bump of which is somewhat hidden by his own 3-D glasses. He has a large Adam’s apple that some might find to be too large, but not me. There’s something about it—it adds an affable quality to his appearance. He’s significantly better looking from the front than in profile. But still. He clenches his teeth, and I see two tiny tendons flash underneath the thin, gently stubbled skin of his jaw. I want to touch him so bad it hurts me physically.
Somewhere out there, the light of the Earth of right now, of this moment, will reach some alien species’s eyes. But by then we will be long gone. There will be no more Pink Floyd laser light shows at the planetarium on Eighty-First Street or shitty basketball games or swollen noses or beautiful Percys or nowhere-near-as-beautiful Lucys. All that will be left is empty space or a strange pile of rocks or a black hole.
Percy turns to me and whispers, “This kinda sucks, right?” I shrug my shoulders, feeling a wave of dark indifference so powerful I’m afraid I’ll never be able to claw myself free of it. The little green man is doing backflips as Roger Waters sings about lunatics and desperation. And I can’t decide if Pink Floyd means something to me because all of this resigned anger and alienation is an essential human truth or if they just sound really amazing when I’m stoned. Either way, the three-dimensional light show does nothing for me. It’s just another empty distraction.
We leave the planetarium and head back to Percy’s place. I stop off at a phone booth on the way to call my parents, to let them know where I am so they don’t freak out. But when I pick up the receiver and put my quarter in, I have second thoughts. The gods of better judgment tell me to begin to dial their number—just press those cold metal buttons with the digits on them. My mother read a lot of parenting books in the Seventies and decided that the best way to discipline a child is to talk with them about what they’ve done wrong. Never raise your voice. She’s an expert at using the phrase, “Your behavior makes me feel like . . .” My father is the opposite. He’s too hotheaded to discuss anything. He just yells indiscriminately, like a dropped machine gun with the safety off. I can anticipate the whole conversation. I know exactly how it’s going to go. My mom’s going to admonish me for walking out of the game like that by saying, “That’s not the Lucy I know.” And my dad’s gonna get on the phone and shout. And then my mom’s going to plead with him to stop, and I’ll have to stand there for five minutes while they work out their strategy on how to deal with me. And somehow, after my mom’s able to cool my dad down, she’ll appeal to the good in me or the guilt in me or whatever it is, and I’ll acquiesce and do the right thing and go home. I listen for a while to the dial tone until it starts beeping and look at Percy on the other side of the glass, waiting for me, shivering on the sidewalk. I cradle the receiver.