Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  “Stupid Emily Dickinson,” Alicia says, heaving her bag over her shoulder. “Bunch of nonsense.”

  “Very intricately stated,” I mutter.

  Alicia grins at me. “Lisa told me that the senior seminar Overhead teaches is fantastic, and they all love her. She said Overhead jokes with them and everything.”

  “Right,” I say. “She just hates us because we’re underclassmen.”

  She switches her bag to the opposite shoulder with a grunt. “They know we only get two days off for Thanksgiving, right? They’re assigning homework like we’re on break for a week.”

  The hallway is a torpedo crossed with a bathroom: the walls, tiled in this ridiculous blue and tan pattern, seem to slope a little tighter as you walk toward the windows by the staircase. Alicia strolls along with me to the office, though she hadn’t said she’s coming, and I haven’t asked her to. She knows about the letters in my backpack.

  Coaches. Dear Coaches. I couldn’t get behind either of these greetings.

  Really, if I weren’t a jackass, I’d just phone them, or even go to tryouts to explain in person about not playing this year. Instead, I wrote a letter.

  Last year, Coach Hoskins and Coach Henry sat in my living room and persuaded me to play ball. A building year, they said. On this little magnetic board they showed me plays, and talked about my teammates, and their goals for all of us. Hoskins had a winning record at some private boys’ school I’d never heard of. His hair parted down the middle in silver halves, and he wore a huge gold ring like a wrestler.

  Henry, black and intense, spent a lot of time nodding and wiping the corners of his mouth. I think he was the reason I finally agreed. He wasn’t coaxing me, or bullying me, or anything. Just sitting there all thoughtful and determined. It was kind of touching.

  So I wrote a letter. If I were Elizabeth Bishop, maybe I could make them see. Explain about the Violent Femmes, and how Bangs tabbed me out a couple of their songs, and the kind of wild joy I feel when I play those songs on my pistachio guitar. I wish I could explain about the wild joy.

  I wish I could tell my coaches that I’m grateful for the season I played for them. My dad always says the invocation at graduations, and school events and stuff. I never know if he volunteers to do it, or if some school official or teacher contacts him. As much as the whole thing embarrasses me—all the kids hissing Is this guy your dad? What’s an invocation? Your dad’s going to pray?—the truth is that I love his blessing. I love that he rests his hand on my forehead to bless me. I love the words. I wish I could tell my coaches how they blessed me.

  “Do you want me to put the letters in their boxes?” Alicia asks.

  I nod.

  She takes the letters from me, and disappears into the office. I know they’ll be angry. Disappointed. I don’t blame them. And I’m sorry. Sorry to be less than they hoped for. Sorry to want something else so badly.

  “It’s done,” Alicia says. She’s looking at the frail shaft of light through the smudged glass doors. Tipped to the right by her backpack, her eyes puffy behind her glasses, her hair chaotic. “Vacation, my ass. I’m so tired of high school. Stand up there and call Emily Dickinson a genius? We are lied to every single day.”

  The warning bell rings and the both of us take off running, terrified of arriving late for our next class.

  Diaphanous. Sheer and light; almost completely transparent or translucent. Adjective. (Kind of girly, this word.)

  Meghan’s dorm room is spare, like imminent military inspection with the potential of KP Duty kind of spare. The surfaces are clear and dust-free. On her half: a desk with two lamps; a bed tortured into pristine smoothness; a footlocker; a stereo; a metal chair; and a bookcase. The other side is exactly the same except the roommate has photographs on her bookcase rather than books. The closet slider-doors are closed, but I know anything behind those doors is as crisp and orderly as the rest of the room.

  Though I’ve been here before, I never noticed how naked the room felt on previous visits. Somehow I imagined us watching movies, and running around swathed in brightly striped comforters. They don’t even have a television on this floor; it’s downstairs in the rec room with the foosball table.

  “Those sheets on Regina’s bed are mine, and they’re clean.” Meghan sits down on her own bed, and smiles at me. “Why do you look so terrified?”

  “What?” I say, and carry my guitar and duffel to Regina’s side of the room. I’m afraid to touch anything.

  “Relax,” she says. “We’re officially on vacation in the dorms: no inspections, no demerits.”

  No demerits! “Oh,” I say, “good.” My guitar fits perfectly under the bed.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.” No one ever really needs to ask me that.

  “How do you feel about Chinese?”

  “Good. I feel good about it.” She laughs at me, when I add, “Sweet and sour pork,” without looking at the menu.

  “Fried rice or plain?”

  “Fried.”

  “You’re so easy,” she says. “Regina studies the damn thing for twenty minutes and then orders the Kung Pao Chicken every time. The phone’s at the end of the hallway; I’ll be right back.”

  Money, I think, after she’s gone. I have like $6 on me. God, I might as well be Nate, the master of gosh-I-forgot-to-bring-my-wallet-but-I’ll-totally-pay-you-back.

  “Twenty minutes,” she tells me from the doorway. “Foosball?”

  “Sure,” I say. I think I’m sweating. I feel a little ill actually. How come I never think of these things beforehand? Why didn’t I bring cash with me?

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I have $6.” It’s the kind of statement that should be tagged: said the child.

  “What?” she says. And then, “Oh, your dad gave me money for dinner.” She crosses the room, all the way to Regina’s side, and reaches her hand out to help me off the bed. “Since my parents don’t get in until late, we’ll have dinner here, and then meet up with everyone tomorrow morning for pancakes.”

  Of course she knows more about what’s going on than I do. “Cool,” I say, like I haven’t been freaking for the last five minutes. “Are you any good at foosball?”

  “I’m alright,” she says, and I know she’s going to kick my ass.

  And she does. In the rec room, a girl in blue Army sweats sits cross-legged on the couch with a bag of Oreos, and CNN blaring from the television. She murmurs, “Hey,” and then ignores us completely. Once the Chinese arrives, we eat it here, lounged on the windowsills, looking down at the tight little courtyard and the men’s dorm across the quad.

  “How many people stayed for Thanksgiving?” I ask.

  “Eight in this dorm,” Meghan says. “I don’t know about the boys.”

  “It’s so quiet.” Whatever she ordered is so fucking hot that my lips are burning. Unfortunately, it’s also delicious, and I keep eating anyway.

  We play best of seven, and I lose every game. She’s good, and fast, and has a murderous focus. While we’ve been here, the CNN headlines have repeated three times, but the girl on the couch keeps watching.

  “Saddam’s psychotic,” she says. She’s not actually speaking to us, but not to herself either. Maybe she’s telling the television. “We’re going to invade.”

  “You think so?” Meghan asks.

  The girl looks up at us, bites a black cookie, and nods. “Totally.”

  “Play me something,” Meghan says. Her hair’s finally long enough for a ponytail, and she’s wearing a blue mask for her pores.

  I brought my acoustic, and tune it now from Regina’s bed. The mattress is so firm that it’s kind of like sitting on a bench. Somehow playing for a girl in a blue mask is easier than playing for a girl without one.

  I play Add It Up by the Violent Femmes, modulating my voice so no one on the floor can complain about the noise. Even though she’s wearing a mask, I keep my eyes on the linoleum squares of the floor, and am doubly shocked when I hea
r applause. There are two more girls in the doorway of the room applauding with Meghan.

  “I love that song,” one says. “Do you know more?”

  I play Gone Daddy Gone, and then some Cure, and Clash, and U2, and they’re all on Meghan’s bed now, leaned against the wall, their socked feet tapping air. Every time I finish a song, they’re already calling for more. I’m nearing the end of my repertoire when Meghan tells me to play one of my own.

  “Fast or slow?” I say, stalling for time.

  “Both,” the other girl says.

  I play the fast, angry one first, and then the plaintive one, and this is the weirdest audience I’ve ever had. One of the girls is lighting matches and holding them in the air during the slow song, and Meghan still has that mask on her face though it’s cracked and freaky now, and the other girl is eating gummi bears, and keeps tossing them to me between songs.

  In the end, they’re ecstatic and assure me that I hardly seemed nervous at all; and I learn they’re both named Heather (Heather Longhair and Heather Shorthair) and know all about me from Meghan’s stories, and have been anxious to meet me. After Meghan scrubs her face—“This stuff is actually starting to hurt. I think my skin may be bleeding.”—we find ourselves back in the rec room playing foosball again. On the same couch in the same position, the girl is still watching CNN, and still eating Oreos—and must be sick of both.

  “How old are you?” Heather Shorthair asks me.

  “I’ll be sixteen in two weeks.”

  “Sixteen?” They say this like maybe I made it up. Everyone but me is in grey Army sweats, and elastic-banded ponytails—even Heather Shorthair has one, high up, Pebblesesque.

  “God, I thought you were at least a senior,” Heather Shorthair says.

  “For sure,” Heather Longhair contributes.

  Meghan scores while they’re busy being incredulous.

  “Shi-it!” they cry.

  And then, Heather Longhair says, “Sixteen was the longest year of my life. I’d decided to be a virgin until I turned seventeen, and it was just crazy hard—those last five months especially. So, like the last night before my birthday, I had sex in the back of this blue station wagon on a blanket at midnight, and thought it was really romantic.”

  They’re all laughing when the girl on the couch says, “Finger fucking doesn’t count, but maybe she had one of those plastic dicks.” She says this like she’s talking to the television again.

  Someone at the foosball table—I can’t tell whom—mutters, “Latent.”

  But Heather Longhair says, “Which did your dad use, his fingers or his dick?”

  And the girl is over the couch, and shrieking, when Meghan and Heather Shorthair grab her arms and throw her back onto the couch. The girl comes at them again, crying this time, and so pissed that she has two veins running down her forehead to her nose which look as though they might rupture.

  This time when they throw her back on the couch, she twists off, pitching the Oreos’ bag onto the floor, and sprints from the room.

  I don’t exactly get what has happened, but I know it’s bad. Meghan, her chest expanding in that concentrated deep way like when the doctor listens to your breathing, turns to the Heathers. “She’s hateful. We all agree on that.” She looks at Heather Longhair. “And she can ruin your career. You’ll help her do it if you carry on like that.”

  Neither Heather says anything; they’re both breathing as heavily as Meghan, and Longhair has glassy eyes.

  Mr. Pang loved our photo-story. Bangs tied the fishing lure to a pipe on the ceiling, and it draped and spun like a proper mobile, and the whole class went on and on about how cool it was. I tell Meghan about our exhibition as we walk across the quad toward the tree-lined sidewalk. The wind blows leaves in that scrabbling way that always makes me jumpy, and even the streetlamps throw sinister shadows, and I’m chattering too fast from nervousness and because Meghan isn’t talking at all.

  The girl with the Oreos said she. Maybe she had one of those plastic dicks.

  Meghan’s mad, or anyway, she’s imitating a bulldozer, and I’m taking extra steps to keep pace. I’m hungry again, and worried that she’ll be exasperated if I tell her, after the fight and drama and everything, that I’m hungry. I should have brought some snacks in my duffel. I never think to bring snacks, or money, apparently. Oreo-girl insinuated Heather Longhair is a lesbian, didn’t she? Pretty much called her a lesbian. Meghan said Oreo-girl could ruin Heather’s career. What’d she mean by that? If Meghan weren’t one notch below postal, I’d ask her.

  Finally, I make myself stop talking, and sprint-walk beside her through the cold night, the stars a jumbled crowd above us. All the buildings on this end of post are administrative: several stories tall, red-bricked, with neat lawns and tidy courtyards. All the military order of rectangles and pruned shrubbery.

  “I want this at any price,” she says. She might be saying this to me, although I haven’t any idea what she means. “But is that right?” she says, and looks at me. Her face obscured by dark. “Do I want this at any price?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  She shakes her head, and then says, “Let’s run. Can you?” And takes off before I answer. Now I’m chasing after her—aware, all at once, that I’m wearing my Converse rather than my running shoes. Why didn’t I think to wear my running shoes? It’s like I’m never prepared for anything.

  Ruse. A trick, stratagem, or artifice. Noun. This word makes me think of pirates, and the crafty methods they use to lure ships—the whole, look-we’re-flying-a-flag-from-a-nation-at-peace-with-you thing—but also, the word’s kind of old-fashioned sounding, isn’t it? I mean, am I going to tell Kelly that I don’t appreciate her ruses, or whatever? Please stop with the ruses, because they’re obvious and immature? I think not.

  Meghan practically has to beat me awake Thanksgiving morning. For a hard, unrelenting surface, Regina’s bed swallowed me whole.

  “You have fifteen minutes to shower and dress,” she says, after a second pillow blow. “Nate’s coming for us.”

  Hair still dripping when I climb into the backseat, I’m thankful to be going home to familiar people, to be sitting in the back of a familiar car, to see Nate’s stupid letterman’s jacket with the tear along the right sleeve. I’m thankful that Meghan has stopped twitching and asking weird questions. I’m thankful to be leaving the dorm, and its drama behind me, even though we’ll be back again tonight.

  “Your parents aren’t down yet,” Nate says by way of greeting. “But I saw your sweet little ride parked in front of the house. Figures the prom queen would have a convertible.”

  “Is he kidding?” I ask.

  “I was the Homecoming Queen,” Meghan says.

  “About the convertible?” I clarify. It’s like I’m speaking Braille to these people.

  “I have a VW Rabbit.”

  I know cars like I know geometry. “And it’s a convertible?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I can’t believe you left that car behind,” Nate says. “Why would you do a thing like that? Isn’t helping me pick up girls important to you?”

  “Why, Nate,” she laughs, “do you need help?”

  When I meet Meghan’s parents, I know exactly how my mother is going to describe them when she phones her own mother this afternoon: Mutt and Jeff. I have no idea who Mutt and Jeff actually are, but from context I can tell you that one is itty-bitty and the other is not. Meghan’s dad is a short dude with an impressive gut—he was a Master Sergeant with two tours of Vietnam—and has that deep, I-pop-men’s-heads-right-off-their-bodies voice, and her mom is spindly and Southern genteel. They drove up from Georgia, in separate cars, to bring Meghan her Rabbit.

  By the time we get to the house, the table’s laid with bacon and pancakes, scrambled eggs and small glasses of juice, and real and fake maple syrup (Nigel will only use Aunt Jemima).

  It’s not that I’m bored so much as exhausted. I need days of sleep to recover. Meghan’s
dad tells mildly inappropriate stories about his tenure in the military, and his therapy clients in Georgia. He’s rosy and has a joyous laugh and this tendency to look you in the eye and nod in this serious, confidential way that’s completely disarming.

  He’s the one who proposes Scrabble. I am lame at Scrabble. The board, I just don’t see it. It’s a private humiliation for me, how bad I am, like not getting chess or crosswords. My mother and Meghan’s mother take their coffee into the kitchen to work on the next meal. I stretch on the couch, and admire the ineffectual fire snapping in the grate behind the glass doors.

  I thought staying in the dorm with Meghan would be the coolest thing ever, and now I don’t even want to go back. She’s mad at me, and I don’t know why. I don’t understand what I’ve done. It’s like Kelly all over again. As I think this, the doorbell rings.

  Nate runs through, calling, “I’ve got it.”

  Kelly comes into the living room, wearing a long dark skirt with her grey cashmere sweater, and holding a huge box of chocolates, and a bottle of sparkling apple cider. She waves quickly at me before Nate leads her through the dining room and into the kitchen, and introduces her, ceremoniously, to Meghan’s parents, while Mom asks if she’d like something hot to drink, or maybe a warmed-up pancake.

  Why didn’t I know Kelly was coming for Thanksgiving? What else don’t I know? They have the Scrabble board out, and everyone gathers around it, trying to determine teams of two. Happily I’m spared having to play, since the teams would be uneven.

  Sleep would help to pass a great deal of the day. Even as this occurs to me, I slip away. Aware, at times, of voices nearby, shudders of wood and flame, and then the doorbell again, at some distance. And then a kiss, peppermint-flavored. This is my favorite part: a peppermint kiss, and I lean into it. My eyes open in the middle of a second kiss, or possibly a third. Jeremy. I am afraid that I have dreamed him, when he pulls me toward him, and kisses me as though I have returned from a long journey.