by E. Lockhart
“Really?” she said. “Really?”
After swim practice on Thursday I was in the B&O, reading The Yellow Wallpaper for Women Writers and cursing Mr. Wallace for insisting we both start and finish it over the weekend,2 when Nora came in, her face swollen and pink. It was Finn’s day off, so he and Meghan were somewhere else, doing couple things.
“Can I sit with you?” Nora asked.
We hadn’t hung out since school started. She was friendly, and we chatted in the halls if we ran into each other, but most of the time she was in Kim and Cricket land.
“Knock yourself out,” I told her. “You okay?”
Nora sniffed and shook her head. “Not really.”
“What happened? Something with Happy?”
“No, Happy’s fine.” She’d been arranging her tall frame on the chair across from me, digging around in her book bag, unwinding a cotton scarf she had around her neck. Now she looked at me and chewed on her thumbnail.
“What, then? Did I do something?” I asked.
“No.”
“Is it about Noel?”
“Roo, please, can you stop asking and just let me tell you?”
My skin felt hot and I nodded silently.
“Kim, Cricket and I were on a three-way call just like an hour ago,” she said. “Kim set it up so we could all talk about yearbook stuff while she had to be home supervising the gardener. I was talking to them on my cell from the photo lab where I was printing. I don’t know where Cricket was, but anyway. We finished the yearbook stuff and I hung up and put the phone down without really looking at it, because I had a picture in the fixer and I realized it had been in there kinda long.”
She stood up and ordered a black coffee from the guy at the counter. Like she didn’t want to go on with the story. But black coffee doesn’t take long to serve, and pretty soon Nora was back sitting across from me.
“So like ten minutes later I went to use the phone again and it had never hung up. I put it to my ear and Kim and Cricket were still talking.” Nora wiped her eyes. “I know it’s a bad thing to do, but I listened, and it didn’t take long to figure out they were talking about me.”
“Ag.”
“Cricket was saying she was sick of hearing about Happy Happy Happy all the time, and Kim was saying I was just so controlling about yearbook, which is really unfair because I’m the editor, I’m supposed to be the boss of it, and she didn’t have to be on it if she didn’t want to.”
“What did you do?”
“Cricket said I was no fun anymore and did I have to wear a stupid jog bra all the time, there was something about the jog bras that just really annoyed her and she couldn’t stand to look at my uniboob one more day.”
It was true. Nora did have the uniboob. But in her defense, she has these really ginormous hooters, and she’s kind of self-conscious about them, so she squashes them down with the jog bra. Summer after freshman year, back when all four of us were friends, Kim and I had written an entry in our group notebook on “The Care and Ownership of Boobs”3 that was in part intended to alert Nora to the uniboob issue that was going on. In fact, Kim and I had had a long discussion over whether to explicitly include information on the uniboob problem, but we had eventually decided to leave it off because we were too scared of hurting Nora’s feelings. We had hoped she would just read the instructions on the care and ownership and reexamine her own boob-related practices.
But she never did.
“Uniboob?” I said innocently. “What uniboob?”
“I don’t know. I mean, how can she be mad at my boobs?” Nora wailed. “They never did anything to her.”
“Your boobs are fantastic,” I told her. Which was true. It was just her bras that were bad. “Maybe they stole attention from her. Maybe she’s jealous of the way all the guys look at your chestal profile.”
“Ugh.” Nora grimaced. “Only guys like Neanderthal Darcy. Not quality guys.”
“Maybe Cricket’s in love with Neanderthal Darcy,” I said. “Did you ever think of that?”
“I still haven’t told you the worst part.”
“Tell me.”
Nora sipped her coffee and shook her head. “First, before I do: Roo, I want to say sorry.”
“What for?”
“For not talking to you over the whole Noel business. For letting a guy come between us. For just—we’ve been friends a really long time and I should have acted different. When I was mad at you, I should have talked it out.”
“Thanks,” I said. It was good to hear her apologize, and I’d really never thought she would. But it did not escape my notice that she was saying all of this to me now, when not only did she have Happy but I had lost Noel. It’s a lot easier to stop being jealous and mad when the girl who supposedly stole your guy is a heartbroken puddle of angst and everyone knows it.
“Yeah, well.” Nora shook her head. “I feel like a third wheel with Cricket and Kim all the time. At lunch, at yearbook, out for coffee. It’s like the two of them have something together that I don’t have, like it doesn’t matter whether I’m there or not, most of the time.”
“Really?”
“My mom says three is just a difficult number,” Nora went on, “but when I hung out with you and Meghan I never felt like a third wheel, ever. I just felt like we were all three friends. Like it was natural.”
“It was,” I said.
“Anyway, the thing I haven’t told you yet is that Cricket said to Kim they should decide on a code word to use with each other when they want to get rid of me.”
“A what?”
“Like, she said they should still be friends with me, but they didn’t want me hanging around with them all the time. So whenever they wanted to ditch me, they’d say ‘jog bra.’ ”
“And Kim agreed?”
Nora nodded. “She talked about how she didn’t want to hurt my feelings but yeah, she was sick of me too. So if, like, they wanted to go to Top Pot Doughnuts after school—”
“Is that where they go now?” I said. Because neither of them had set foot in the B&O since the debacles of sophomore year.
“Yeah. Anyway, if they wanted to go without me, because apparently I’m too controlling and boring and obsessed with my boyfriend, and my boobs are just so annoying Cricket wants to scream, then one would say something like, ‘At crew practice my jog bra was cutting into my side in the worst way.’ Then the other would know that they should both make excuses and leave me behind.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Ag.”
Nora reached over, picked up my fork and helped herself to a bite of my chocolate cheesecake. Just the way she used to. Before all the badness happened.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing. I started crying so I had to hang up the phone in case they heard me. Then I came to find you.”
“We should make a code word for what complete wenches they are,” I said.
“Like what?” Nora sniffed.
“Like mushrooms. I hate mushrooms.”
“I like mushrooms.”
“Okay, then what about soybeans?”
“Ugh.”
“We can see them in the refectory and say things like, ‘Oh, you know what really makes me ill? Soybeans!’ And no one will know what we’re talking about.”
Nora kind of started laughing but then her face crumpled and she was crying. “I can’t believe this happened,” she said. “They’ve been my friends since forever.”
“Mine too,” I said. “Or were.”
“How am I ever going to show my face at Tate again?” sobbed Nora. “Am I supposed to just go there and act like everything’s okay, and smile at them and even sit with them, pretending like we’re friends when I know they want to get rid of me? Or am I supposed to stop hanging around them, since they don’t want me anyway, and act like I just happened to have other people to be with?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or am I suppose
d to be mad at them and not speak to them?” Nora wept. “I don’t know how to even go to school in the morning.”
Of course, this was exactly how I had felt ever since the debacles. Every day, I was walking into a hotbed of hostility and potential cruelty. But I didn’t say that to Nora. What I said was: “I want to try something. Will you come in the bathroom with me?”
The B&O Espresso bathroom is painted dark purple and is not even big enough for one person. If you’re in there on the toilet, you could completely wash your hands at the same time, without ever getting up. (Not that you would.)
I brought a marker, and Nora and I squeezed ourselves in there together. She is five eleven, so my face was practically in her uniboob, but I just went with it. I pulled off a long piece of toilet paper and wrote, in large letters: The Wenchery of Cricket and Kim. Then I gave it to Nora.
She took it and looked down at me. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“We’re flushing it down with the poo,” I told her.
“What?”
“The wenchery of Cricket! Down with the poo.”
“Do you have to say poo?” Nora asked. “You could just say flush it down. You don’t have to mention poo. There’s no poo in there right now anyhow.”
She was right. “We’re flushing it,” I told her. “Because we don’t want it to have power over us. Because we don’t want to be trapped in the yellow wallpaper.”
“What’s flushing it gonna do?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “But my shrink wants me to do it. It’s good for the mental health.”
“But the wenchery is my problem,” said Nora, waving her toilet paper sign. “Not yours.”
Of course the wenchery of Cricket and Kim was a problem for me as well, but she was right. It wasn’t looming large in comparison with my enormous freaking host of other problems. “Doctor Z wants me to flush my broken heart,” I said. “But I don’t think I can.”
“Can you flush the Boneheadedness of Noel?” Nora asked. Which, given that she’d once crushed on him, was really a very nice thing to say.
I shook my head. “The problem isn’t his boneheadedness. The problem is that I’m deranged. Everything would have been okay if I wasn’t such a mental patient.”
“Okay. Seriously. That’s what you have to flush,” said Nora.
“What?” I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Come on, Roo,” Nora was pulling a sheet of toilet paper off the roll. She grabbed my pen.
“What are you writing?” I tried to peek over her tall shoulder.
“Shush. You’re going to thank me.”
Someone knocked on the door of the B&O bathroom. “In a minute!” Nora yelled. “We’re doing therapy homework!”
“Yes!” I called. “It’s more important than urination!”
Nora handed me the toilet paper. In enormous letters she had written: Self-loathing.
“No, no, no,” I said. “I can’t give that up. Who would I be without my self-loathing?” I was being sarcastic, but Nora looked at me seriously.
“You could let it go, Roo. You’re always saying awful stuff about yourself. Like you just called yourself a mental patient.”
“But I am a mental patient.”
“You make it sound like you’re locked up in the asylum.”
“Well,” I joked, “it’s only a matter of time.”
Nora made an exasperated sound. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Okay, but it’s not fair. You’re getting to flush the badness of other people, but I have to flush the badness of myself.”
The knock sounded again on the door of the bathroom. “Just a minute!” called Nora. “Roo. We have to flush now.”
“Fine,” I said. “We rip them up first.”
Nora and I ripped our toilet paper signs into tiny shreds and dropped them into the paint-splattered toilet.
We flushed.
“Good riddance!” I yelled as the paper swirled down.
Then we opened the door to the bathroom and tumbled out of it, laughing hysterically.
Bonsoir, Hutch,
Comment va Paris? I have a mental image of you wearing your fanny pack and a beret, holding a baguette and playing bread air-guitar on the top deck of the Eiffel Tower.
But I know that can’t be how you spend an average day.
Just on Saturdays, right?
Ruby,
The pastry of France kicks the ass of the pastry of America. It kicks it so hard the pastry of America hobbles to the curb whimpering, then scuttles down the street never to be seen again. That is how good the pastry is here.
Maybe you should come out at Thanksgiving break.
Or not. Whatever.
You probably have plans.
Hutch
Hutch,
No money, no Paris. That is the scenario here.
But I am glad you asked.
I would really like to see your bread air-guitar.
1 “We Will Rock You.” By Queen.
2 The Yellow Wallpaper: An 1899 novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about this lady whose doctor husband confines her to an attic room as a rest cure for her mental illness. She’s not supposed to do anything: not read, not write, not play games, not have visitors, nothing. Wallace says this was the nineteenth-century idea of how to treat mental illness, or even just how to deal with difficult women. Lock them up and keep them quiet until they’re ready to act the way society wants them to. Like a giant time-out. Naturally, the heroine of the story goes more and more insane because of this treatment that’s supposedly going to make her better. By the end she thinks the wallpaper in her room is full of trapped women, and she has to strip it from the walls. She never leaves that room again. She just becomes a madman. So, yeah. It is supremely excellent that I don’t live in 1899. First of all, I’d be married already (ag), and second of all, my husband would completely be locking me in the attic.
3 Joint notebook: Entitled The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them.
Secrets of the Panda Bear!
nora sits on the steps outside the Tate Prep gymnasium. She’s dressed in shorts for basketball practice and looks all legs and uniboob under a tank top. Hair in a ponytail. She digs her camera out of her backpack and snaps a picture of Ruby behind the video camera.
Nora: There. You look like a real filmmaker.
Roo: (behind the camera) Thank you.
Nora: Meghan said you were going to ask me the definition of love. So I prepared an answer.
Roo: That’s what I asked her.
Nora: Did you change?
Roo: Now talk of love makes me feel desperate. I’m going to ask you about popularity.
Nora: I’m not in love with Happy.
Roo: You’re not?
Nora: No. I mean, maybe I could be. But not yet. And sometimes there are things he does that make me think: I couldn’t ever.
Roo: What?
Nora: Twice we’ve gone to parties and he’s gotten really wasted. I had to get the keys and drive us home. I don’t think I’m going to fall in love with someone who gets drunk like that.
Roo: Couldn’t you get him to stop?
Nora: Maybe I’ll say something. But then would I fall in love with him if he stopped? I don’t know.
Roo: If he changed for you?
Nora: If he changed for me that would be nice. I guess. But he’d still be the same person under the change. The person who wants to get wasted. Who didn’t think anything about it until his girlfriend said something.
Roo: Is that the answer you prepared?
Nora: (blushing) No. I was going to say, Love is when you have a really amazing piece of cake, and it’s the very last piece, but you let him have it.
Roo: Nora.
Nora: What?
Roo: That’s completely warped.
Nora: It’s a metaphor. You like metaphors. Did I tell you my brother’s coming to town tonight for the weekend? H
e gets in around five.
Roo: I have to turn this camera off.
Nora: He’s always asking about you. Go out with him.
Roo: I can’t find the right button.
Nora: I bet you’d have fun.
(darkness)
Gideon Van Deusen called me up that night. It was Halloween.
Every year, my parents go to this huge costume party Mom’s friend Juana throws in some dance studio she’s connected with. Lots of people in the Seattle arts community go, and my mother always wants to stand out.
This year, she had made go-together costumes: a light socket (her) and a plug (him). Dad stood in the middle of our living room wearing black leggings and a black thermal, his pelvis encased in a white cardboard box with two giant prongs sticking out like insane metal penises.
I was dressed as a bobby-soxer, wearing a vintage fifties dress I already owned but never wore, and saddle shoes I found for four dollars at the Salvation Army. I had curled my hair with Meghan’s curling iron earlier that day and had my bangs pulled off my face with a totally retro hair band. I was planning to go to a soccer muffin party with Meghan, Finn and Nora, but I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I’m not that interested in muffins, and seeing them dressed as Wolverine and Jack Sparrow doesn’t make them any more attractive.
Anyway, Polka-dot trotted in from the bedroom. He eyed Dad’s crotch prongs for only a moment before deciding they were chew toys and clamping his jaws around one of them. “No, Polka! Bad doggie!” Dad cried, swatting at the dog’s nose and trying to move away from the drooling mouth.
The dog held fast.
“Ruby, get him off me!”
It was really not my idea of a pleasant evening to go sticking my hands in my father’s pelvic region. I looked severely at the dog. “Polka. Drop it!”
Polka-dot shook his enormous head side to side, the way he did when he had a good stick in his mouth and wasn’t no how going to drop it. Dad was practically hyperventilating, yelling, “Elaine, Polka’s got my prongs!” but Mom was in the bedroom ignoring him, so I grabbed one of Polka’s ears to stabilize his head and then pressed on the sides of his jaw to get him to loosen his grip on the prong.