We Were Promised Spotlights

by Lindsay Sproul

  I remembered Heather telling me about it, how she used advice from Cosmo. It was an article called “11 Reasons to Swallow,” and she’d explained it to me at work, why boys found it rude when you didn’t swallow after you gave them a blow job, like it was a rejection. She also said another article suggested covering their bodies in whipped cream, but she’d tried it and said it got sticky and, overall, was terrible advice. I wanted to know if Brad liked being with Heather and if she liked being with him. Also, I wondered if I was bad at sex, if Heather was better than me.

  “I just wondered,” I said, shrugging. “Did she seem happy?”

  “Let’s just be here together,” he said, “and not talk about anyone else.”

  He closed the door behind us, dulling the crash of the waves. As we shivered, as our teeth clattered together, sounding like broken windup toys, he leaned into me. He slid his hand under my shirt, his icy skin touching my back. I thought again of the whipped cream and wondered if Cosmo was full of shit. But then again, it did teach me to get myself off with the showerhead.

  He wanted to kiss me. He reached for the helmet, trying to pull it over my head, but I shoved his arm away.

  “This stays on,” I said.

  “What is it with you and my helmet?” he asked, picking me up by the waist and setting me down, like a glass of wine or a school art project or a porcelain doll, on the small bed. The helmet bumped against the frame, and I blinked at his face, dizzy.

  “I just like the way it feels,” I said.

  It hid me inside myself, where no one could get. It also made me feel powerful, like I could fly planes or beat up a Viking. Girls never got to wear helmets. We had to wear heels. We had to wear thongs.

  My question was answered. We would do it regularly, and it would become normal. We would do it on beds, but also in cars and on boats. We would do it in the sand, on the forest floor, and again and again on his Eddie Bauer sheets. Brad had condoms in his wallet, and I knew in that moment that the unwrapping of one, the hospital smell of the latex, would become part of my life now.

  Again as he entered me, again as it hurt, I went away.

  The boat rocked back and forth in the current, and I imagined myself with Susan, pretending our childhood beds were pirate ships.

  Let’s go find some gold.

  I always knew there was no gold in Hopuonk—at least, not buried in the ground. I closed my eyes behind the helmet, and Brad’s heavy breathing reminded me why I’d wanted to search for gold so much as a kid.

  If you had gold, you could buy a ship, or a plane. You could escape.

  I should have just eaten the lobster.

  The Party

  Just like every year, we ate Thanksgiving dinner at Susan’s house. Her parents thought it was sad that there were only two of us in our family. Unlike us, they had a dining room, with a big antique table they only used on special occasions, and china to match. Susan’s mother sat with an ashtray in front of her, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, ignoring her plate. Susan’s father’s plate was piled high with turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes, gravy seeping around the edges. I thought of the marks on Susan’s back and wanted to shove his plate into his face and smash his nose in.

  Susan and I both had small portions—me, because turkey grossed me out, the stringiness of it, the bones showing, and her because she was always trying to lose weight.

  “Tell us how things are going with Brad,” Mrs. Blackford probed, taking a long drag of her cigarette. Her tone was somewhat accusatory, like I didn’t deserve him as a boyfriend.

  “They’re doing well,” Sandra answered for me, taking a small bite of green bean casserole. Sandra wasn’t a big eater. She picked at things, then set them down. “He had flowers delivered to the house out of the blue,” she added proudly.

  Susan sighed theatrically.

  “You’re so lucky,” she said to me, which put me in a bad mood.

  I looked around the room—at the photographs on the far wall of Susan with her parents over the years in the Sears photo room, at her school photographs collecting dust in their wooden frames. Even in the early nineties, when the backgrounds you could choose from were awful—neon stripes or fake trees—Susan never went through an awkward stage. She always looked perfect. I shuddered, because none of the pictures showed the welts on her back where her father hit her with his belt, nor did they show her mother sitting at the kitchen table, smoking two cigarettes at once. Then I looked at everyone’s plates, and it grossed me out how full they were. There were only five of us.

  “You know, this holiday is pretty messed up,” I said, trying to change the subject. We took field trips to Plimouth Plantation every year in primary school, where you could visit Pilgrim houses and Wampanoag huts, each side separate. On the Pilgrim side, everyone was an actor, staying in character no matter what, with fake-sounding British accents. On the Wampanoag side, everything was serious, and the people who populated the scene were the only actual Wampanoags I’ve ever seen. “They act like everyone got along so well, like the dinner was some giant awesome party, when, really, everything was terrible.”

  “Don’t be negative,” Sandra said mildly, not looking at me. Then, with her eyes on Susan’s father, she said, “The flowers were really beautiful.”

  “You should get flowers for me more often,” said Susan’s mom, also looking at her husband. Other than at Thanksgiving, they were almost never together.

  I saw Sandra exchange a knowing glance with Mr. Blackford, like they were in on some kind of joke together.

  “Brad is the cutest boy in our whole school,” Susan said. “He has been since primary.” That prompted me to remember Thanksgiving back then, when they had half of us dress as Pilgrims for school the day before break, and half of us as Indians. We fought over the Indian costumes, with their feathered hats made out of construction paper, their fringed pants, which we loved in comparison to the white smocks and white triangular hats the Pilgrims wore.

  “Seriously,” I said, getting annoyed at everyone at the table for discussing my life when I didn’t feel like it. “The Pilgrims killed the Indians, and gave them smallpox, and then made the rest of them move away. Everything here is named after them, but I’ve never even met one at the grocery store. They never tell us the whole story. They act like it was just a great party all the time.”

  I was aware that I was talking about myself, that I was also sick of everyone thinking my life was one big awesome party, but no one else seemed to notice.

  Susan’s mom lit another cigarette, which she brandished at us. “Eat your food, girls,” she said, her own fork untouched beside her plate. “There are kids starving in India.”

  This argument never made sense to me.

  “Just mail my plate to them, then,” I said. “Better yet, mail it to the nearest Indian reservation, with an apology note.”

  Susan’s mom glared at me, but Sandra said, “Don’t force her to eat.”

  I brought my fork to my mouth, accidentally dropping a green bean on the floor. When I reached down to pick it up, I saw Sandra’s foot touching Mr. Blackford’s under the table. I blinked, and Sandra’s foot quickly moved back under her chair, like it had been there all along.

  “Are you and Brad going to match your clothes at prom?” Susan asked me, flipping the hair out of her eyes.

  “Prom isn’t until April,” I said. “I have no idea.”

  “You should match,” she said firmly. “Make him get a tie the same color as your dress.”

  I glanced at Sandra, who looked kind of guilty. Surely, it wasn’t because we killed the Indians.

  “This holiday is so racist,” I said, taking a bite out of a dinner roll. I realized I sounded like Corvis.

  I thought about having sex with Brad in Scottie’s father’s boat, and prayed they would change the subject. I couldn’t bear to tell them
how wrong it felt, how badly I didn’t want to end up like Susan’s parents.

  And I still wanted to ask Corvis about scissoring.

  The Hall Pass

  It was the first week of December when Corvis got her acceptance letter from Sarah Lawrence College. I was sitting in Mr. Sheehan’s Algebra II class, next to Susan and Heather, when I heard whispers about it. Corvis wasn’t there, because she didn’t take algebra. She took calculus, obviously.

  None of us in Mr. Sheehan’s class got early decision letters—we were headed to trade school. Or maybe we would just have a baby and get married and live in our parents’ basements.

  I started to imagine it, Sarah Lawrence. It would be beautiful, with stone buildings and professors wearing tortoiseshell eyeglasses and tweed. There would be classrooms where students sat in circles and said what they thought—about the death penalty and abortion and President Clinton, subjects we weren’t supposed to discuss at Hopuonk High—and other things too. Things I didn’t even know existed, like the opinions of French philosophers. I bet they even had opinions about the opinions of French philosophers.

  Corvis had a Darwin fish decal on her car, a statement against the Jesus fish everyone else had. I didn’t know what it stood for, so I looked it up on the internet. I learned that the Jesus fish was called the ichthys, and that the fish with legs was a parody of that. Corvis was arguing against evolutionary creationism with her car. Probably Sarah Lawrence was full of kids with parody bumper stickers, and all of it made me feel stupid, because I had to look everything up on the internet just to figure out what my opinion was.

  The only bumper sticker on my Volvo was a little purple circle that said KISS 108 FM, BOSTON’S #1 HIT MUSIC STATION. It was free, and everyone else had it too.

  At Sarah Lawrence, they probably dyed their hair pink and purple, and pierced things, and their tattoos would be quotes from Shakespeare plays. They would lean back in their seats and exhale deeply before they spoke, and their conversations would have nothing to do with boobs, or highlights, or homecoming crowns.

  I didn’t like reading, or school—at least not Hopuonk High. I didn’t want to take philosophy or sociology classes, but I desperately wanted to exist in a different kind of social space. Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences would probably be another version of Hopuonk High—except I’d have to take even harder, more boring classes.

  “Taylor?” Susan poked me in the ribs with her pencil.

  “What?” I shout-whispered. When I looked over, I saw Heather looking at me, too, her eyes heavily rimmed in black eyeliner.

  “Are you going to Scottie’s party tonight?” Susan asked. It seemed like our lives revolved around parties at Scottie’s house.

  “If I’m alive,” I said absently. Mr. Sheehan shot us a glance of warning and continued scribbling equations on the blackboard.

  I was still failing algebra. My average was a 23 percent. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t care either.

  I had sent in my application to Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences that morning. When I dropped the packet off at the post office, my stomach had sunk.

  What was I doing? What was I going to do?

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said to Mr. Sheehan, who barely looked over at me. He’d already decided that I was an idiot, and he was basically right.

  I grabbed the hall pass from his desk and shoved it under my armpit, because I hated touching it. Who knew where the hell that thing had been?

  Instead of actually going to the bathroom, I kept walking. Straight out the back door to the student parking lot, past the parking lot monitor, who was doing a crossword puzzle. When I reached my rusted-out Volvo, I got inside and sat for a minute, trying to figure out where I was going. Then, I knew. Humming Rock Beach.

  * * *

  —

  I threw the hall pass out the window at a red light and kept all the windows rolled down, even though it was freezing.

  When I got to the seawall, Corvis was there.

  “Hey,” she said, acting unsurprised to see me. She was wearing an L.L.Bean fleece-lined flannel, and the tips of her pointy, elfish ears were bright red.

  “I think I knew you’d be here,” I said, sitting next to her. My coat was in my locker, and the wind went right through my cardigan.

  She lit a cigarette and looked straight ahead at the ocean.

  “Is Sarah Lawrence full of freaks and lesbians?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” she said. She kind of smiled, but more at the ocean than at me.

  “Why aren’t you in calculus?”

  Corvis shrugged. “I already got into college,” she said, “so if I want to look at the ocean instead of going to class sometimes, I guess I can.”

  Corvis continued to look straight ahead, and we both watched a giant wave break against the sand.

  “I think probably you need to leave,” Corvis said. I wasn’t sure if she meant leave the seawall or leave her alone, but then she said, “College isn’t the only way.”

  A pair of horseshoe crabs stumbled across the beach, struggling over the rocks.

  “It’s easier for me,” she said. “I know that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m never in the Mariner,” she said. “Nobody cares what I do or who I fuck. And I’m glad.”

  I looked at her sharply.

  “I mean, sure, Scottie and the others call me names sometimes,” she said, “but it’s because they’re bored. I’m not the kind of person they actually care about.”

  I pulled my knees to my chest, hugging myself.

  Then she looked at me. Her barely-there eyebrows furrowed, and I could see in her face that someday, maybe in her thirties, she might be attractive, in an edgy sort of way. I felt certain that there was some woman in the world who would love her properly, and that she would have the ability to accept this love.

  “You’re beautiful,” she said. It was not a compliment but a statement, almost like she was analyzing a piece of art. “There are places where that doesn’t work against you.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I reached for one of her cigarettes and lit it. A few moments passed, and then I said, “What kinds of places?”

  Corvis shrugged again. She looked away, at the horseshoe crabs. One planted itself on top of a tangle of seaweed; the other was still moving toward the water. “You’ll find them, if you want it enough.”

  “Corvis?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why were you at the gynecologist that day?”

  “Oh,” Corvis said. “Well, I got a Ben Wa ball stuck in my vagina.”

  “A Ben Wa ball?”

  “They’re like these little balls that make your Kegel muscles—”

  “No, I know,” I said. “But . . . stuck?”

  “Totally,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say. This was not the kind of thing that I would admit.

  “I always pee when I laugh too hard,” she said. “I thought they would help, but then . . .”

  “What did you say?” I asked. “I mean, to the doctor.”

  “That I got a Ben Wa ball stuck up my vagina.”

  This completely shocked me. But then again, knowing Corvis, not really.

  “What else would I say?”

  I pictured her buying them, the balls, and I couldn’t believe her bravery. We didn’t have a sex shop, not in Hopuonk, not even anywhere but Boston. Did she go by herself? Did Kristen go with her for moral support? If so, did Kristen get them too?

  I started laughing, thinking about Corvis going into the sex store and asking the person behind the desk for exactly what she wanted and explaining exactly why.

  “Stop laughing!” she cried. “You’re going to make me pee!”

  Susan would never go to a sex shop with
me, and I would never ask her to, even just to see what kinds of things they sold.

  Suddenly, I had a realization: Susan wasn’t funny. Not like Corvis.

  I wouldn’t have much more time with Corvis, to make it right, to be her friend again, to know her.

  “We could do something crazy,” I said. “You know, skip more than just math. Drive to Provincetown.”

  My voice sounded weak, like I was joking.

  “I don’t have bail money,” Corvis said. “I don’t even have tattoo money.”

  “What, are you scared?” I said.

  Corvis shot me a look and stood, brushing the sand off the butt of her frayed blue jeans.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  And then she was gone. She left her calculus textbook behind on the seawall. She didn’t need it anymore.

  The Dairy Queen

  On December 14th, Susan’s dad had a heart attack while he was running on the treadmill in his basement.

  It was a school night, and Brad was at my house when the phone rang, an unusual circumstance, because we usually hung out at his house or in his car. It was almost one o’clock in the morning, and we were sitting on the end of my bed, looking at Stephanie Tanner through the glass of her fish tank. I was getting ready to feed her while Brad rubbed a palm hopefully up and down my thigh.

  “Come over,” Susan said when I answered. Her voice was thick. “Now.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Come over,” she said again. “My dad died.” And then she hung up.

  I held the phone next to my ear for almost a full minute. I wasn’t crying, but I was definitely starting to hyperventilate.

  “What?” Brad asked. “What happened?”

  I dropped the phone slowly, letting it hang on the cord.

  “Susan’s dad died. I have to go.”

  Saying it out loud made it feel real. I didn’t know anyone who died before, and it scared me. I decided I would walk so I could think about it on my way, so I could try to get rid of the relief I felt about the fact that he couldn’t hit Susan anymore. I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to be glad someone was dead.