Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  After we had devotionals and breakfast the next morning, we did some trust exercises: falling backward off a ledge into the arms of the other campers, leaping onto a rope from one platform to swing across to another platform where a kid would grab onto you to make sure you didn’t plunge to your death, that kind of thing. Late in the afternoon, we canoed to another campsite and slept in tents, and rock climbed, and rappelled, and hiked and fished.

  Jeremy asked to be my partner the fourth day for our rock climbing and rappelling adventure. At the time, I was disappointed because this sweet Puerto Rican kid, Sean, had canoed to the island with me, and we’d been partners ever since, but Jeremy asked me first, so he spotted me while I climbed along this rock ledge, and then I spotted him. I really just stood below him, and walked along with my arms out, and hoped he wouldn’t fall backward and crush me. He climbed faster than anyone else, and when the leader saw him, he asked Jeremy if he wanted to climb a higher face. Then we stood and watched Jeremy climb all the way to the top of this sheer wall. He was like Spiderman. He went up so fast it looked simple, but nobody else could climb ten feet up this wall. The rest of us had to walk up the trail on the backside in order to rappel down the face.

  That night at dinner, Jeremy and I cooked chili for everyone, and he talked to me like we’d been buddies for years. And that’s how it was from then on. After the trip, when I started high school, before Jeremy or Nate could drive and we all had to take the bus, we’d get to school forty-five minutes early and Jeremy would sit beside me in the hallway and we’d do our homework, or talk about movies, or talk about nothing at all.

  In the hot bath, I think about Jeremy scaling that wall. I didn’t know then how it would be. That day, watching from below, I admired him: the skill of the only boy who could manage the ascent.

  I’ve just climbed out when someone knocks on the door. Why I answer wearing nothing but a robe I cannot explain, especially since the robe will not stay closed, but I do. I open the door without even asking who it is.

  Jeremy opens his mouth, then takes me in, and closes his mouth again without saying anything.

  “Hey,” I say, and step behind the door like it’s a shield.

  “Hey,” he says. “I was hoping you’d be here.”

  “I am,” I say. I have no idea why I say this. Coming from the bath, I know I look splotchy and drowned. Why did I open the door?

  “Do you want to get some pizza at Carmellini’s?” he asks.

  Carmellini’s is a little place just outside the post, maybe an eight-minute walk. I ought to invite him in, standing in the hallway is terrible, and the neighbors will hear us.

  “Come in,” I say, and open the door wider. “It’ll just take a sec to get dressed.” I haven’t even made the bed, and the room still smells a little like cigarettes. Classy.

  I pull the covers up on the bed, and then grab some clothes from the dresser. He stands just inside the door and looks around. The furniture is mostly this ancient stuff my mother had in her room when she was a kid, but the desk and rocker are oak and simple and not hideous.

  After I blow-dry my hair, I feel all right again, and like myself in my jeans and t-shirt.

  “Did you have fun last night with Kelly?” Jeremy asks, crouched beside my acoustic guitar with his hand stretched out like he might touch the neck.

  I pull him up to kiss him, and he hugs me afterward, and smells my hair. “Strawberries,” he whispers.

  Kids are loose everywhere. Nearly noon on a Sunday, and you hear them screaming up and down the street. Trees and the stone pillar of every doorway are tagged with a corny yellow bow. At Sunday school in September, they handed out a bunch of names of deployed soldiers for us to send care packages to. My soldier is an atheist. I sent him a bunch of Milky Ways and Starbursts and a National Geographic magazine and a letter saying that I hope God watches over him even though he doesn’t believe in God because if God doesn’t watch over him, and he’s killed, he’ll go to hell. He wrote me back right away to thank me for the Milky Ways—they’re his favorite—and to say that he doesn’t believe that hell exists, but he appreciates that I hope God watches over him. For a heathen, he sounds pretty nice; he even said that I’m right and Geometry is pure evil. This time I sent Strawberry Bubblicious and Apple Jolly Ranchers and a book of Calvin & Hobbes and some photographs of grass. He said he’s sick of looking at sand.

  Here in Jersey it’s a beautiful fall day with piled leaves and corny bows and cracks in the asphalt and Jeremy and I walk side by side, our arms touching. He’s wearing a red sweatshirt and jeans and has his hands in his pockets. Because we aren’t in some endless desert, or the woods of Pennsylvania, because it’s wholly improbable, the two of us alone like this at midday on Sunday, I tell him about the party—about playing with Joe’s band, about Kelly and my brother, about the lies I told, and Joe having to bring me home after I got ditched.

  He orders a pepperoni pizza, and while we’re waiting, I finish the story. He hasn’t said anything since I started. We’re drinking vanilla shakes. Jeremy has an appetite just like mine.

  “I wish I’d heard you,” he says finally.

  “Why would Kelly go off with my brother?” I ask.

  “Maybe she was mad.”

  “At me?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she just wanted to. Maybe she wasn’t thinking too much about it.”

  He means maybe she didn’t do it deliberately, but he doesn’t know Kelly like I do. He doesn’t know that she calculates everything she does.

  “You remember that day at camp when we rappelled down the cliff?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you ask to be my partner?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  I shake my head. His red sweatshirt makes his eyes bluer. His eyebrows stand at attention, like he combs them straight up.

  “Do you remember the day we met?” he asks.

  “A pickup game,” I say. “We were playing football.”

  “I’d watched you from my window. You were better than most of the boys.”

  I shrug.

  “On my first play,” he says, “you tackled me so hard I fumbled, do you remember?”

  I laugh. He’s smiling and it seems OK to laugh. Jeremy always answers questions this way. I don’t remember tackling him. I remember the game. Doug put his hand down my pants when he tackled me, and then tried to pretend he hadn’t. On the next play, Nate kneed Doug in the balls, and left him on the ground without apologizing or anything. We all just stood around waiting for him to get up, and then Jeremy came over and asked if he could play.

  A guy brings the pizza out. It’s one of those colossal thin crust pizzas: beautiful and steaming.

  “It’s hot,” he tells us.

  “We’re dating, right?” Jeremy says after he finishes the first slice. “I don’t have to be your boyfriend. I mean, we don’t have to be all serious or anything.” He shovels another piece onto each of our plates. “Next time you play I’d like to be there. I’d really like to see you play.”

  Beleaguered. Beset, harassed. I’m going to use this word all the time. I’m going to beleaguer everyone with this word. (Beset is pretty cool too.) Verb.

  My History teacher totally killed people, like as an assassin for the CIA, or black ops, or whatever. Some U.S. agency employed Mrs. Brooks to take people out. I know it. She’s this tiny lady—five feet tops—with severe short blond hair, expensive sweater/slacks combos, and one of those plastic chalk holders that she knocks against her desk when she calls roll.

  In her classroom, her desk is on a platform above us, and behind her desk is another, higher platform the length of the chalkboard that Joe says was specially constructed for her. I have her for History of Asia. We’ve been studying the Boxer Uprising, and really China has just been so wholly screwed for ages.

  Mrs. Brooks is linking influences (she loves to link influences) when Jay Edwards raises his hand. We all stare at him. Jay pitches for our baseball team, and
is flawless. He’s the only senior in our History class, sits next to me, and grins all the time like life is the most fun ever. Since Allison started dating him, he has come to every field hockey game, and usually brings a bunch of other baseball players. He makes me feel a little swoony, I have to say.

  Brooks beams at him, “Yes, Jay?”

  “Is this going to be on the test?”

  “Yes, Jay.”

  “As an essay?”

  She winks at him before turning back to the chalkboard.

  “I kind of agree with them,” Jay says.

  Brooks twists around, her arm poised to write. “Agree with whom?”

  “The Fist guys.”

  She nods. “Tell me more.”

  “Their country got hijacked. What were they supposed to do?”

  “A lot of their rage was directed at their own countrymen.”

  “Yeah, but they thought they’d been corrupted, you know, by foreign influence. In a way, that was worse than being foreign.”

  My parents would say they were martyred. Those Christians. In fact, they’d say Christians in China are still being martyred. Dad could give you statistics.

  The bell rings.

  “The exam is Monday,” Brooks calls. “Cole, good luck this afternoon.”

  Jay grins at me. “Everybody’s watching. No pressure.”

  Yeah, no pressure: Regional finals against Wall; if we lose this one, we’re out. I wish I could barf, then I’d feel better. Since the game begins at 2 p.m. today, I’m excused from my last class. I’m tempted to flee. I can’t explain why, but I just want out of here.

  My whole Kelly-is-dead-to-me thing kind of misfired. On Monday, during homeroom, she ignored me. She came in and started talking to Leisha, and it was like I didn’t exist. Same thing in Graphic Arts, and then, during lunch, she didn’t show at our table. A couple of times, in the hallway, I’ve seen her holding hands with Nate. (He’s had warts on his fingers since he was seven!) Now I catch rides to school with Jeremy, and sit with Bangs in Biology, and eat lunch with Joe, and big fucking deal because she’s totally unaffected. The party was five days ago and I don’t recognize my life anymore.

  In the locker room, Diofelli comes up to me, shaking her head. “Now you’re wearing a brace? Why didn’t you say you’d pulled it again?”

  “No, Coach Robins had this idea about using a thigh brace.” She stands there watching me fold the brace over itself, before I yank it up to my groin.

  “How’s that working out for you?” she asks, skeptical, her forehead pinched.

  “I think I baby it less.”

  “Well, that’s something.” She shakes her head again. “Look, Peters, just relax out there, can ya? You’ve been tense as hell all week.”

  I’m down the first play. Smeared with mud and slow to rise. No whistle from the refs, though two girls slammed into me, one with her stick, both of them laughing. My shots on goal are wide and sloppy. Behind me, the crowd groans when I miss. The bleachers are full of bullies—Wall brought as many fans as we did, and our cheerleaders rile them.

  While rain sloshes down on our white home jerseys and our carefully hair-sprayed bangs, and some artful makeup jobs, Katy and Dana parrot-call the plays, shout to the halfbacks for support, try to keep us focused in this mess of a field with these goddam Amazon girls determined to trample us.

  The next time they tackle me, I get a stick in my back, and the heavier one says, “Stay down.” I hear the whistle on the play, but I haven’t moved yet. The mud is thick and slippery and clinging to me like little hands. Renee helps me up in time to watch the ref present each girl with a yellow card. Is it terrible that part of me wants to be injured enough to stay down? To be carried off the field? To rest in the nurses’ station until this lousy game is over?

  And if my groin gives, I could get out of basketball too: safe on account of injury, available to play in a band instead. Several times, I drop without any assistance; we all do. We look like crazy, skirted swamp people.

  No one scores during regular play, or the first shoot-out. Play is so rough that seven girls get carded; two with reds have to leave the field. Wall scores twice in the second shoot-out. Though my first shot went wide, like all my attempts this game, my second smacks the goalie in the shoulder and drops in front of the goal. We lose 2–0.

  I can’t actually say what the worst thing about losing is. Everybody came to the game: Jeremy, Meghan, Bangs, Joe, my entire family. Is it worse having witnesses, or getting trampled into the mud, or playing in a sad, rotten way? Or is losing to Wall, and being out of the tournament the worst part? It’s all bad. The last field hockey game I’d ever play at this school, and I totally sucked ass.

  In the locker room, I take longer than I need to pull sweats on, and stow my uniform in a plastic bag. I don’t even bother to scrub the mud off; it’s in my hair and I’ll probably need some kind of chisel. Over the roar of hair dryers, I hear the seniors crying. Nobody has blamed me, but we all know this is my fault: the first game all season I didn’t score.

  Jennifer’s wearing a red lace bra under her white home shirt. She looks like a soggy underwear model as she’s peeling off her jersey. My mother would never countenance a red lace bra. Not under any circumstances, not even when I’m a junior.

  Down the row from me, Kelly sorts through her locker, her head bowed, bruises on her thighs from one of the girls who got red-carded. She won’t look at me. Tragedy in every direction.

  In the parking lot, they’re all standing around our green van, except Nate. Jeremy, Bangs, and Joe are with Meghan by the mounted spare tire.

  Mom says, “Oh Cole,” in that irritating, forlorn way.

  But I only half hear because Meghan walks toward me with a big grin, and winks, “You’ve got a little something all over your face.” And I’m laughing and hugging her and the game’s just another thing that happened, like Kelly at the party. And more than anything, I’m super-hungry.

  Muse. To ruminate or wonder at. Verb. Also, an inspirational chick, like from the Greek. Then it’s a noun.

  Meghan and I have taken control of the couches in the sunroom. Usually the boys dominate this room to play Sega, but not today. It’s cold as fuck, though, with all the windows, and I’m starting to feel a little empty about our victory.

  You know how everyone from Norway always wears sweaters, even when they’re fishing, or whatever, they have these really beautiful sweaters on? Meghan is just like that with the knitted sweaters. Hers are in greens and blues, knitted by her mother, and they fit her perfectly like maybe her mom knitted them right to her. Today she’s wearing one with a rolled collar, and rolled wrists in a sea-foam green that makes her hair seem even blonder.

  “Muse,” she says. Her socked feet on the armrest, she’s propped on four of my mother’s throw pillows.

  “OK, are you kidding me with this one?” I tell her the definitions, and the parts of speech.

  “In my entire class of twenty-five, nobody put anything but noun. We got a long lecture about thoroughness.”

  “Oh?” I raise my eyebrows in an effort not to gloat.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used as a verb,” she says.

  “Let me muse on that.”

  She flings her pen at me. “You’re adorable. Maybe that’s why three cute boys waited for you after the game.”

  I blush, and watch sunlight glint off the crystal figurines on the windowsill. Pepper sleeps with her head tucked against my thigh. In the summer, when I first met Meghan, I asked if she had a boyfriend, and she told me she never dated. She didn’t have time for dating. Her saying that made me feel less serious somehow.

  “Hey,” she says now.

  I look at her.

  “I’m not judging,” she says.

  And suddenly, without preamble, I tell her about the party at Board, and playing with Joe’s band, and all the phone calls with Bangs, and how Jeremy is almost painfully sweet.

  “They want you to join the band ra
ther than play basketball?”

  “There’s no way to do both. Practice and gigs and school, I can’t do all that and basketball too.”

  “Which would you rather do?”

  “Play in the band.”

  “This seems really straightforward, then.”

  “Really?” I say. “How do you figure?”

  “Just tell your parents you’d rather be in a band.”

  So, the truth is, when she makes this statement, the first thing I realize is that I’ve never considered telling my parents I’d rather be in a band. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to decide how to sneak out to practice and gigs—study dates, babysitting, drama club—but it never occurred to me to be frank.

  “You think my parents will let me play in bars?”

  “Well, I think you should anticipate all their objections, and have a ready solution. You know their first concern will be transportation—how will you get to the gigs and practices and home again?”

  “Joe.”

  She nods. “He’s OK with that?”

  “Yeah, he offered.”

  “Will your parents be OK with that?”

  I shrug. “They like Joe.”

  “What about your safety?” she asks. “How will you guarantee that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ll be playing gigs in bars at night, right?”

  “With three guys,” I protest.

  “Teenaged boys,” she says. “How would they fare in a bar fight?”