I think everyone knew I was a virgin, but they didn’t know I had an STD.
The word herpes sounds like the thing it is.
On the car ride home from the gynecologist, I could tell Sandra was proud of me. Having sex meant you were normal. “So you and Brad are really together?”
She could come to LA too, I thought. She could have a diamond-encrusted toothbrush, a sports car made of pure gold, a face that was known by people. I could give those things to her, if Johnny Moon wanted me. I could give those things to her, and to Susan, and they would love me. What could I give her here? A red-faced, crying grandchild? A spare room in a Cape house when she grew too old to bartend—a room swirling with dust and sadness? Clean teeth every six months?
“We’re really together.” Saying it out loud, I felt both regret and relief that I had a cover. I turned the idea over and over in my mind, trying to find a version of my life with Brad that felt okay, but all I came up with was a house with electric heat, and possibly a baby pretty enough for Sandra to love.
Sandra adjusted her sunglasses, checked herself in the rearview mirror. Satisfied with her own face, she glanced at the reflection of mine.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I wondered if you were . . . Never mind.”
I swallowed. “Wondered if I were what?” We passed the old drive-in hamburger joint where the waitresses used to wear roller skates to deliver food to the cars, before it closed down. We passed the depressed downtown of Hopuonk, mostly boarded-up, and a middle-aged Irish couple walking into the drugstore, their matching bright-red hair blowing in the wind.
“If you were a lesbian,” she finally said.
My eyes went wide at the thought that she noticed me enough to catch on.
“Well, Brad’s my boyfriend,” I said.
I thought of the eggs hitting Corvis’s house.
I’d heard lots of lesbians lived in California. The problem was, I didn’t have an escape plan. I’d saved all of my money from Emmylou’s, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I had a car, but I didn’t know where to go in it. An anchor was tied to my ankle, and I gripped the box of birth control like a parachute.
If I stayed in my Hopuonk snow globe, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad, I thought, trying to convince myself. Sandra would be proud of me, and Brad was a good person. We could swim in the ocean and have salty threesomes with Susan. Who else would she marry? Mostly, Brad would watch. I knew she wanted him and not me, but maybe she would take me along with him. Gradually, he could become like the gardener, or a beloved grandfather clock, a permanent but forgotten fixture in the living room—comforting, useless, and pretty.
“I’m going to be so terrible at being a dental hygienist,” I said. “I’m failing algebra. And biology.” I wanted Sandra to know that just because I got queen, things weren’t solved.
Mr. Sheehan pulled me aside after class the other day, a concerned-teacher expression on his face. He told me I probably needed summer school if I wanted to graduate, and he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Oh, I failed algebra too,” Sandra said.
I wanted her to sound more worried. I wanted her to punish me.
“Honey, I’ve heard you getting sick in the bathroom,” Sandra said, staring at the broken stoplight on Main Street, which stayed red for at least ten minutes at a time.
I was ashamed—it was disgusting, how I got sick all the time.
“You’re not already pregnant, are you?” Sandra asked. “Because if you are, we can . . . take care of it.”
“No,” I said. “I just . . . sometimes when I’m really nervous, it makes me sick.”
Sandra’s shoulders settled, and she loosened her grip on the steering wheel.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “It’s okay to do that sometimes. You know, when you’ve overeaten. Just don’t do it too much, okay?”
Oh. That’s what she thought.
“Okay, Sandra,” I said. The magnitude of what she didn’t understand was so big that I couldn’t say anything else.
* * *
—
The thing about it was, Brad wasn’t as bad as I thought he would be. Especially if I imagined us both becoming landscapers.
The first time we hung out alone, Brad and I were lying in his bed, and I let him hold my hand. That part, I didn’t mind so much. I held his back, the birth control swirling around in my body somewhere, protecting me. He had small, delicate hands, and womanish lips.
Both of us had decided to pretend that what happened in Scottie’s bedroom didn’t happen, in the interest of protecting our dignity. I could hear Sandra’s words—if you’re not careful, you’ll lose him—and I desperately wanted to like him back.
“You can hold my hand in school, too, if you want,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
His comforter was Eddie Bauer plaid, his sheets matching. His closet overflowed with lacrosse equipment.
I was wearing the helmet, as both a joke and a barrier.
“I’m failing biology,” I said, trying this fact out on him. “I don’t get what a spleen even does.”
He said, “I know, right?”
“And I don’t want to know, like, at all,” I said. The helmet muffled my voice.
He squeezed my hand. I didn’t hate it.
“I don’t think of myself as a person who really even has a spleen. Or a pancreas,” he said.
A moment passed, and in that moment, I imagined myself without skin, without a body, as only a spine with wings attached, bleached white, beating above the clouds. If that were true, I would not be Taylor Garland. My name would be made of syllables only the wind could pronounce.
“I don’t think I’m going to graduate,” I said, “which means I won’t get into Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, which means I’m literally a moron.”
“It’s okay to be afraid,” he said, and I wondered what his biggest fear was. “I have a D in biology.”
I adjusted the helmet and sat up, facing him.
“I am a Soviet pilot,” I said.
He shoved me.
“I am a deep-sea welder,” I said. “My name is Walter Bronstein. I only eat raw eggs.”
He pinched my waist, and I shoved him away, laughing.
“I am an astronaut,” I said in a serious voice. “My name is Frances Star. My pee floats.”
He yanked the helmet off, and my hair cracked with static. I wanted to grab his lacrosse stick and pretend it was a double-edged sword, but he kissed me. The helmet, along with my fantasies of greatness, rolled under his bed.
I’m a lacrosse player, I imagined saying to Susan. I have a penis. Let me drape my letterman jacket over your shoulders. Let me unzip your spine.
I’m a movie star’s daughter, I imagined next. Let me take you into the greenroom, whatever that is. Let me take you to the top of a sparkling mountain. Let me take you underneath the hot lights. They will photograph us kissing and make a billboard out of it. Which do you like better?
I imagined myself in both places and wondered if my choice to stay or go would affect my spleen or my pancreas. I wanted to put the helmet back on.
In kindergarten, when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said, “A falcon.” I wanted to fly, to beat gravity, so that it didn’t own me.
What is my thing? I wondered. It had to be somewhere inside me, hidden like the room behind Lincoln’s head at Mount Rushmore.
“You’re beautiful,” said Brad, as if answering my thoughts.
Then he kissed the spot where my beak would have been if I were a falcon.
I knew he was too worried about a repeat of what happened at Scottie’s party to try and actually have sex with me now, but I also knew it was coming.
Maybe Brad wouldn’t be the worst person to do it with. I just hoped he
didn’t try to light candles or anything like that. I didn’t think I could handle it if he tried to light candles.
The Groupies
A group of us went to the movies, to see Johnny Moon in his new role as Grigori Rasputin in Mad Monk. Since he filmed a movie here, people sort of took ownership of him and followed what he did, which was mostly romantic comedies and horror movies. This was his first big “serious role.”
The trailer had been playing over and over for weeks on the television in our kitchen. Sandra usually left the room when it came on.
It was opening night, and the theater was full. I couldn’t tell if it was just in my head, but I felt people’s eyes on me.
I sat somewhere near the middle with a box of Sno-Caps, between Susan and Brad. During the trivia, when the lights dimmed, Brad reached over and took my hand. I saw Susan watching. In response, almost like a reflex, she linked her arm through mine, on my other side, and rested her head on my shoulder.
“Who’s Rasputin again?” Susan whispered in my ear.
“A Russian guy,” I whispered back.
After I saw the trailer for the first time, I looked Rasputin up on the internet. He started as a peasant, then became a powerful mystic, close to the royal family. When I imagined meeting Johnny Moon, I wondered if my life would be anything like Rasputin’s rise to fame—you know, without the whole being-murdered thing.
“Yeah, but what did he do?” Susan whispered back.
“He healed people,” I said. “He was magical.”
The lights dimmed. Heather and Scottie were already making out. An old couple next to us glared at them, and for a moment, I felt a warm feeling of belonging. This was why being popular was good—it was nice to be part of the group that people glared at for making out in public, for being too loud, for having too much fun.
“It’s cold in here,” Susan whispered, burying her head further into my neck. My stomach clenched, and I felt warm all over.
Then Johnny Moon’s face appeared on the screen.
Sometimes it felt like nothing in my life was actually mine except for him.
He was really too young for the role, but they needed someone handsome, someone whose face was recognizable enough to impress the public with their makeup work, and to conjure sympathy in the average viewer. The long beard he wore in the film completely disguised his elegant features, and I cried when he healed Alexei Romanov.
Susan fell asleep before the movie was half-over—I felt her warm, steady breath on my skin. It smelled like cheap, plasticky chocolate. I wanted her to stay there forever.
I glanced at Brad, who was rapt by the movie. In the low light of the screen, his eyelashes made shadows on his cheeks. He was beautiful too. I was surrounded by beautiful people. On either side, their legs touched mine.
I looked back at the screen.
Most of the world thinks that Rasputin was assassinated for political reasons, but the details aren’t clear, which I learned when I looked him up. Historians and other people who study political things have different theories. Just like both Johnny Moon and me, Rasputin had a bunch of groupies. I knew that Bridget Murphy, the head of the wannabe group, and her friends were staring at me right now. Rasputin supposedly had sex with lots and lots of teenagers and charged tons of money to heal people. They paid. Many people believed that the reason it took so many tries to kill him was that he really did have healing power, and others thought he was an evil alien.
In the movie, Johnny Moon was shown in Siberia, exiting a church, when a prostitute, a disciple of the monk Iliodor, stabbed him and then shouted, “I have killed the Antichrist!”
Johnny Moon recovered from that, but after the stabbing, he became addicted to opiates. Later on in the film, he was poisoned, beaten, and shot four times, then drowned in a partially frozen river.
I knew this was Hollywood—maybe history was different. Hollywood didn’t bother with autopsies. It only cared about drama.
I couldn’t help but imagine myself with him. With a dad.
During the closing scene, Brad leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You look like him, a little. You guys have the same nose.”
In my dreams that night, and for many nights after, I saw Johnny Moon’s bloodied face and cold, still, fishlike eyes, his bluish body buoyant in the water, surrounded by jagged floating chunks of ice. I woke up with my hands shaking, sweat gathering on the base of my back.
The Plan
The last time I had nightmares, like the ones I’d just started having about Johnny Moon frozen in the river, happened in seventh grade, after Corvis handed me the note.
Do you think about girls the way Susan thinks about Brad?—C
I’d been carrying the note since she gave it to me, trying to figure out what to do with it. The night before, I dreamed that Corvis took my hand and led me to a Victorian castle full of girls, all beautiful, all with long braided hair. I woke sweating, with my hand in my underwear, and I knew I had to do something about it.
The next day, I gathered Susan and Heather in the middle school cafeteria, which smelled like dish soap and french fries.
“Come on,” I said, watching Corvis move forward in the line for sloppy joes. After she got her lunch, she was supposed to join us. She tapped her foot nervously, the sole of her Adidas sneaker jiggling.
We vacated our reserved table. Brad and Scottie and a couple of other boys from the lacrosse team were still sitting there—we were the only girls who sat with boys at lunch in seventh grade.
The rest of the cafeteria was separated by both gender and social status. Sitting with boys showed that we were mature.
The other tables were full of kids just a little bit less pretty, a little bit more gangly, a little more wide-eyed. At one table, everyone wore black and had faces full of acne scars. We called them the Death Brigade. Kristen Duffy was one of them. At another table, there were girls who looked like us from far away, but up close you could see physical flaws that their Abercrombie clothes couldn’t hide. A flat butt, a huge nose, limp hair, or a pear-shaped body. PJ Greenberg sat with them sometimes, but she was trying to move toward sitting with us.
The note was still in my pocket, as heavy as a rock.
When we got inside the closest girls’ bathroom, I shooed out Bridget Murphy—a leading member of PJ Greenberg’s group—who was using a pocket sewing kit to fix a button that had ripped from her shirt.
I grabbed the hall pass Bridget had set on the sink and pushed it into her chest. It was a piece of wood shaped like an atom, which meant she had science.
“Go,” I said, not calling her by name, even though we’d all been in school together since kindergarten.
Bridget looked at me, fear in her eyes.
“I need to fix this,” she said, holding the fabric of her shirt between two fingers. “You can see my bra.”
“We need to be alone,” I said, pushing the hall pass deeper into her chest. “There are thirty million other bathrooms.”
Bridget stared at us.
“Go,” said Heather. “This is secret.”
Bridget grabbed the hall pass, holding it over her exposed chest, and fled.
“Okay,” I said, backing against the door, holding it shut. “Listen.”
“What is it?” Susan asked. I could tell she was getting worried.
“It’s Corvis,” I said.
“What about her?” Heather leaned against the wall, one hand on her hip.
“She’s a lesbo,” I said, trying to sound scandalized.
“What?” Susan’s eyes widened.
“Yep,” I said. “A real live dyke.”
Heather raised her eyebrows. Getting—and keeping—Heather’s interest was a delicious feeling.
I pulled the note out, and read it to them in a dramatic voice.
“See?” I said.
“Well,”
said Heather, “we have to destroy her.” Her voice was matter-of-fact.
“How do you know she’s serious?” Susan asked.
“Have you seen her sneakers?” Heather countered. “Lesbo sneakers. One hundred percent.”
Heather’s reaction was proof of how easy it was to fall off the edge of the popularity cliff. You could lose everything in a second.
“Sleepover tomorrow night,” I said. “My house.”
Heather nodded, sealing it.
“We have to do this quick and dirty,” she said. “Expose her.”
I looked at Susan.
“You in?” I asked.
Susan shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She sighed.
“Fine,” she said. “Okay.”
“Give me that note,” Heather said to me. “I’ll keep it safe.”
I held it to my chest. I wanted to keep it. I wanted to read it over and over again before the sleepover, to hold on to the feeling of being understood, until we ruined it.
“No way,” I said.
“Don’t lose it,” Heather warned.
“Can I go eat my lunch now?” Susan asked.
Heather and I both shot her the same look of disapproval. Caring about eating was not cool.
“Just be there tomorrow night,” I said to Susan. “Seven o’clock. Bring your camera.”
Walking back to the cafeteria, I felt both alive and incredibly guilty. And I wondered how many people had caught a glimpse of Bridget Murphy’s bra.
The Two Worlds
Do you really think I look like Johnny Moon?” I asked Brad the day after we saw Mad Monk.
We sat on his living room sofa, wrapped in a Pendleton blanket. His kindness annoyed me, but I tried to push that away. I looked for things to like about him instead.
We Were Promised Spotlights Page 6