Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  “Accept what?” I asked, a little stunned by the interruption.

  “You have a big fat crush on MacKenzie,” he said.

  Then he just kept walking and I stood there in the dark, his statement washing over me. Like whoa. Like tsunami. Oh my shit. What if . . .

  What if he was right?

  What if this weird twisted obsession I had with a girl who sat next to me in bio, who I hardly even knew, was all because I had a crush?

  How she smelled, how soft her skin would be, her lips. I mean, her lips.

  What they would feel like, practically edible, probably incredible.

  I still remember how the moon appeared that night, almost full, shining up there in its color that is silver, that is blue, that is yellow all at once.

  It took me a few minutes to catch up with Jonah. I had to search all the benches in the dark and finally I found him there, lying back on one of them like a bed. He was gazing up through the thatched tree branches at the showy moonbeams.

  “I think I’m bisexual,” I told him.

  “You’re just now realizing this?” he asked.

  Jonah had known me so long, he knew me better than I knew myself.

  Sometimes I miss him like an amputee must miss a limb.

  Sometimes I ache so bad I have to grind my teeth or get in an all-hot shower till my skin scalds or pull my hair to think about anything except him.

  He can’t possibly be actually, forever gone.

  A heart blown apart

  Then glued together

  Is never the same.

  But maybe a heart

  Blown apart

  Will be bigger

  From the scars

  That form it together again.

  Etta invites me to her apartment to study for midterms.

  “Sure,” I say with a shrug as we part ways outside the cafeteria. “That’d be cool.”

  Inside, though, I am confetti, I am uncorked champagne. Is this, like, a date? Or are we study buddies? Also, please note that I’m a secret high school student and I’ve never kissed a girl in my life, just dreamed about it. The point here is: I don’t know what she thinks of me, or if she even thinks of me, but I have the MacKenzies for this girl and the fact she invited me over is sunshine to my queer little soul. And a welcome respite from me torturing myself with Jonah again another night. (If you looked at my web history, you’d see Jonah Patterson social media profiles all the way down. Of this, I am not proud.)

  I go to Etta’s on March 13. I take the bus a short distance—she lives on the edge of Isla Vista, near UCSB—and think to myself, if Etta and I got together today, our anniversary would be 3/13. It has a ring to it. Jonah’s and my anniversary was 5/15. Isn’t that something. Ha ha. Totally kidding. I know she’d never like me.

  STOP!

  Out the window, it’s drizzling on golf courses. It’s drizzling on shopping centers. The bus stops and I follow my GPS under an umbrella printed with cupcakes. I get to the gate, where I punch in her number and do a little nervous dance in my rain boots while I wait for her to answer, and it strikes me why this bread-colored box-shaped apartment complex looks so familiar: this is where I snuck in to skinny-dip in the Jacuzzi that night we saw Girl Cheese. This was the last place I was before the first time I almost died.

  This was, essentially, the last place I felt invincible.

  Before I started unraveling and became unlovable.

  My brain is a telegram.

  STOP!

  “Well, you look as adorable as the Morton Salt Girl,” Etta says, opening the gate for me. “With your li’l pigtails and your dress and your umbrella.”

  “Gracias,” I say.

  She’s in slippers, with a bag over her puff of kinky ginger hair like a plastic babushka. She doesn’t seem dressed up. SO, this does not seem like a date.

  That’s fine. Everything’s fine.

  We go inside to her studio and she takes off her babushka, puts a pot on for tea in the corner that is her kitchenette. Because Etta is a year older than me and miles ahead, she rents her own studio, and lives on her own. In fact, she moved to Santa Barbara from Oregon to go to city college and learn to surf, realizing a month in that the ocean was too cold and surfing was boring and grueling. Her apartment walls have more framed pictures and postcards on them than white space. All people—street artists, toothless elderly folk, babies, family portraits. There’s a series of black-and-white photographs of all sorts of eccentric-looking strangers at a bar, laughing, clutching drinks, a woman braiding her long hair, a guy with a brass instrument and a needle-thin mustache.

  “My brother took those,” she says. “He can do everything and do it so well. He’s basically a genius.”

  “Where is this?”

  “A place my parents own. Want to hear something so cute you’ll barf a little? They now own the bar they fell in love in. ‘So an Irishwoman and a Jamaican man walk into a bar . . .’ that’s not a joke. That’s my origin story.”

  “Your parents are still together?”

  She nods.

  “I did barf a little,” I say.

  She pats my back. “Good.”

  Christmas lights strung along the ceilings and paper lanterns hung from the walls give the tiny space a warm glow. There’s a large queen bed covered with a woven blanket with Prince’s face on it. It’s decorated with brightly colored throw pillows that transform it into something sofa-like. There’s a glass bowl with an angelfish in it on a desk. Her closet is open, and she separates her clothes by color; she lines up her shoes.

  She would be horrified at my room—either one of them—the chaos, the ankle-deep mess.

  We take out our books and drink chai and quiz each other about philosophy. I can’t help imagining whether Jonah would be jealous, if he were able to see us. (STOP!) We sit on her floor and make flash cards about existentialism and utilitarianism and a blur of other -isms. Soon she’s sitting there shuffling the cards and our conversation has meandered away from schoolwork and into a gossip about our classmates—the endearing stutter of a woman who sits in the front row, the guy who wears a suit every day and raises his hand so much the professor pretends to ignore him.

  “The Russians have a word for him,” I say. “Pochemuchka. A child who asks too many questions.”

  “You speak Russian?” Etta asks.

  “No, I just collect words with no English translation.”

  “How gorgeous is that? Share them all with me!”

  “In time, grasshopper.”

  Etta’s like that. She sees people’s knowledge and aims to soak it up. I love her thirst. It’s so different than my own cynicism—the dark thoughts I battle that tell me people are unreachable, life is boring, and other mean lies. I am closed. Etta is . . . open.

  After the rain lets up and we’ve guzzled multiple chais and quizzed the crap out of our flash cards, it gets dark outside. Etta convinces me to Lyft to get burritos in Isla Vista. We share a quiet ride with a driver blasting radio commercials and there’s a voice whispering in my head, Hey, look at Journey acting like a grown-up, acting like she’s really a college student and not a high school student, acting like she’s a girl who knows how to like girls, acting like a sane person when she’s really on the edge of crazy. Look at Journey pretending to be pretty and lovable.

  How long, it asks, till she finds out who you really are?

  We order burritos, and Etta holds hers like a baby when she gets it, commending its size, saying that she doesn’t want to eat her baby but it smells so dang good. I eat mine and joke around with her, but really, I’m stiff. When she clutches my forearm to emphasize a point she’s making, when she brushes a fly out of my bangs for me, when she tells me how lovely my lipstick looks, I like it so much it almost makes me sick. I’m scared that she likes me. I’m crushed that she doesn’t. I want to know what Jonah would think of this; his imaginary hurt is so satisfying. OH MY GOD, PLEASE STOP ALREADY. Why do I carry that boy around in my bones like a living
ghost?

  We walk around a bit, students whizzing by on bikes or scooters, shouting in small groups. Students hanging out on apartment balconies, students toting twelvers back to their homes. I dig my heels into my goals. Yes, I think. I’m going to save my dollars. I’m going to move out on my own. Someday, maybe, I’ll even go to a four-year university like all these smarty-pants, either here or elsewhere.

  There’s a coffee shop with people singing karaoke and Etta pulls me inside, linking my arm, daring me to sign up.

  “Karaoke!” she says.

  “Okeydokey,” I say, shrugging.

  I sign up for a Patsy Cline number my mom’s been singing since I was a kid called “I Fall to Pieces.” Etta signs up for Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” apparently just to troll me. We order more chais and find a table near the back and watch as people go up and sing. There is a guy who just recites lyrics like a robot. There is a girl on the edge of crying who cannot get the timing of her song right. There is a ballad sung between a couple so off-key I’m pretty sure they didn’t hit one note between them.

  “I’m in love with them,” Etta whispers to me.

  “I think you’re alone there, friend.”

  More than once, Etta clutches my hand across the table and makes her eyes enormous.

  “You nervous?” she teases me between songs. “Peeing yourself a li’l tiny bit?”

  “Yeah, I’m peeing right now,” I tell her. “All over the place.”

  I mean, there are fifteen strangers here that I will never see again. There is a barista who has a look on their face not unlike the look on my face when I am in dancing pizza mode.

  “What? Not even a little?” she asks, surprised.

  “No, are you?”

  “Honestly?” she says, with wide, lovely eyes. “I’m terrified.”

  They call my name after we sit through four or five songs. I get up, grab the mic, close my eyes, and sing my heart out to “I Fall to Pieces.” I pretend I’m alone. I pretend I’m in front of a million people. Big feelings, take it away. I know every lyric of this song from so many years of my mother singing it. The hurt of Jonah, the longing for Etta, it runs through me thick like honey.

  When I open my eyes, everyone is hooting and clapping. Etta is standing up. I swear her eyes are shining. She must be joking. She’s always joking. She comes and takes the mic from me and we switch places, me back in my seat.

  Up there, Etta is shockingly pretty. The lights give a golden glow to her brown skin, to her explosive ginger hair. But I see something new in her as the cheesy karaoke background song plays and her voice shakes. She struggles to hit the notes, half smiling, no humor in her performance, lyrics about strangers waiting and streetlight people. It goes on and on and on and on. She’s new, this girl, but I recognize her. I see something soft. A rare glimpse of what a shell usually covers.

  “I was terrible,” she says, coming back to the table, her shaking hand with its bitten fingernails. “You were amazing.”

  Amazing. Jonah used to call me amazing. More than once, I sang that song to him. One night his parents were out of town and I snuck out of my room in the middle of the night and snuck into his and I slept with him in his bed. I sang him Patsy Cline songs in his ear and gave him shivers. We planned our future, our wedding on the beach, the countries we’d visit on our honeymoon, we brainstormed baby names. He held me all night long. That night felt like forever.

  STOP.

  I take the bus home, watching the cars.

  I get my first prank call at the hotline.

  “Hi, my butt hurts,” a pipsqueak tween says into the hotline, trying to deepen his voice and failing miserably. I can hear another kid snickering in the background. “Can you help me . . . with my butt?”

  “Sure,” I say super cheerfully. “What’s your address? I’ll be right over.”

  “Uh . . .”

  Both boys bust up laughing. They hang up.

  When Marisol and I were in junior high, we made some prank calls from my mom’s cell phone, pretending to be UPS trying to deliver a pony. The people on the other end of the line were totally convinced it was real and got super pissed, until they called back and realized it was my mom’s phone, and then I got in huge trouble. I was grounded for three weeks, then went on a forty-eight-hour hunger strike. Then my parents called a truce and my sentence was reduced to three days. At the time, it was a tragic battle of wills, a melodrama so intense I packed a bag and contemplated running away. But now I sit here at the hotline, stifling a laugh.

  Davis calls again. Davis, for the love of God, I do not care about your lifelong fear of chickens. I do not care about your lack of special soap, or your eczema, or your elimination diet. Your trip to the dentist does not need to be described to me in vivid detail. You do not need to name every dog you ever remember meeting in life—“Well, there was Wally, he was my friend Dougie’s dog, fleabag, that one, fluffy as a footstool; and then there was Sheriff, he belonged to the preacher from our church and used to bring up the communion bread on Sundays in this little sack in his mouth, holy little thing he was; oh, and then there was Ms. Nelson’s dog, she was our landlord, and she bit everyone in the ankles—the dog, I mean, not the landlord . . .”

  DAVIS. DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF. DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF, DAVIS. This is what I scream inside. And yes, I realize I am going to hell. Don’t worry, I’d never say these things. It’s just so hard to take him seriously when he calls every night and talks about nothing at all for half the night. Instead I offer monosyllabic, not-friendly, not-unfriendly responses.

  “Hmmm. Sssss. Flarg.”

  And I’ve learned to set my alarm, thanks to Lydia. Once we hit ten minutes, Davis is done. “We’ve reached the end of our time together tonight, Davis. Toodles and fare thee well.”

  Now that I’ve been here two months, I’m much more confident. No matter who I’ve gotten, I’ve found an answer, and had to refer to the binder less and less. There have been a couple crises—a teenager freaking out about a positive pregnancy test who I convinced to call Planned Parenthood. A guy who said he wanted to bomb his school and I had to call the police to report it. But mostly it’s been people who, more or less, when it comes down to it, are just like Davis: lonely.

  It’s been weeks since Coco called. When each shift ends, I find myself disappointed. I wonder if she’s okay. I wonder what she’s doing when the moon comes up over the hills and the flat town beneath lights up like a crowd of candles. She’s somewhere out there, not that far away from me, someone oddly close, a girl I maybe shared a class with, or brushed arms with in the hallways.

  What are you doing, dead-feeling girl? Who are you? Where are you now?

  Gary is now my dad’s girlfriend and she comes to dinner at our house to meet us. She requires a “grain- and animal-free” dinner, due to allergies and annoyingness. That’s strike one. Strike two? She’s wearing a parody version of a Yale sweatshirt that is a Kale sweatshirt.

  “Watch out, I’ve heard kale accumulates high levels of thallium, not to mention aluminum and arsenic,” Ruby tells her as we all sit around the table, eating African peanut stew. Actually, Ruby’s not eating anything. She’s been stirring for five minutes straight. I was skeptical because I’ve never had a nut stew before, but this is actually really good.

  “I had no idea,” Gary says, with her eternal smile.

  “Also it tastes bad,” Stevie says.

  “You haven’t tried my kale chips,” Gary says.

  “I’ve tried your kale chips,” Dad says, raising his eyebrows. “And they are de-licious.”

  Somehow, he’s made a comment about kale chips almost . . . gag . . . sexual.

  I hurry up and eat my stew as fast as possible. As I’m washing my bowl, Gary comes up beside me and pats my back like she knows me. She’s so short and so youthful, even if she isn’t all that young. She’s the kind of person who will always seem small and young.

  “Your dad says you’ve been volunteering at a hotl
ine?” she asks.

  “Yeah.” I take her dish and rinse it. She keeps standing there, arms crossed, beaming up at me. Besides her weak kale sweatshirt, she wears jeans and sandals, her feet tan like she’s out in the sun all the time. She probably does yoga, like, on the beach.

  “That is really amazing,” she says. “What a special person you are, to do that.”

  I shrug. “Not really. I had to do community service.”

  Which is true in a very tiny way. I did have to do community service in order to graduate this year. I’m not about to tell her the rest of my story.

  “I called a hotline once,” she says. “Many moons ago.”

  I turn around. “Really?”

  “Yes. I was depressed, because my boyfriend at the time—well, anyway, it’s a long story. I spoke to this lady. She was very nice. I still remember her name: Martha.”

  Gary. What kind of name is that for a girlfriend, anyway? Gary is basically a stranger. I know nothing about her except she works with my dad and makes him act like a moron. She has a sense of style I won’t pretend to understand, and a smile so constant you’d guess it was surgical. But even she’s called the hotline. It zings to know I know nothing about the extent of other people’s suffering.

  This should be comforting, but I go to my room and fight tears. Who knows where these feelings come from? I’ve stopped trying to pretend they are logical. They are ugly, unpredictable, a storm that rocks me recklessly. But at least I know they’re me.

  Even though I don’t go to our high school anymore, I still get the senior email newsletters in my in-box on the first of every month. Whoever it is who puts the email together really enjoys shouty all caps. And April Fools’ jokes, apparently. I about crap my pants when I read ATTENTION: YOU ARE NOT ELIGIBLE TO GRADUATE!!! in the subject line. Then I shout many loud swear words when I see the email opens with April Fools, seniors!!!

  I’m about to reply and ask to be removed from the list because I don’t think I care anymore about prom, graduation activities, or who made it to the Ivies. But a quick scan of the page snags my attention, right there under Student News—Marisol’s name in bold all caps.