To be fair, my parents went through a tricky divorce recently. There wasn’t any abuse or anything like that, but there were lots of entanglements where money was concerned, because Mom and Dad owned a company together, and when things were finally settled, Dad moved all the way to New York just to get some space. Mom tends to see the things that happen to other people through the lens of her own experience, so she couldn’t help comparing what was happening with Mike to her own breakup.
“At least there’s no shared home, or kids to fight over, or financial dependence to figure out.” She spoke very fast, like she was trying to convince me—or maybe to convince herself—that everything would be okay.
She continued, “And it’s only high school. This doesn’t have to change everything. You and Mike and everyone else still have your whole lives ahead of you, right?”
“Right,” I agreed, because it seemed like she wanted me to reassure her. But I didn’t really see why it was less significant because it happened in high school, when we all had our lives ahead of us. If we were talking about anything else—drugs, drinking, sex—it would’ve been a bigger deal because we were only in high school, because we had our whole lives ahead of us, because the things that happened now would impact our futures.
“What does Mike say?” Mom asked, speaking at a normal pace now. Mom always loved Mike. To be fair, everyone loves Mike. But Mom loves any male who comes around the house, because ever since the divorce—and Dad’s subsequent departure across the country—she acts like having a man in the house is a complete novelty to her. Whenever Mike stopped by, she’d ask him to change light bulbs and dust cobwebs she couldn’t reach on her own. I had to explain that Mike wasn’t there to see her. In front of Mike, I’d tell her she was embarrassing herself. (A fact Mike always disputed when Mom could hear—No trouble at all!—and agreed with me about when Mom couldn’t hear—A woman needs a man in the house.)
“I haven’t talked to him yet,” I said.
“Of course not,” Mom agreed, talking fast again. She was probably picturing him sequestered in the principal’s office until this all blew over.
“It’s just such a mess,” I said, and then I hung up because even though I wanted Mom to know what was going on, I didn’t really want her opinion about it, because it’s not like Mom knows anything about anything.
I didn’t tell Mom that Mike wasn’t actually in the principal’s office. Principal Scott’s assistant had pulled him out of homeroom, I assume taking him to the office, where she told him about the accusations—but then they’d let him go back to class. Being accused of hitting your girlfriend is no reason to miss third-period physics lab, right?
I have history third period, but I know Mike has physics. (Everyone in our friend group knows everyone else’s schedules.)
I follow the lunch crowd outside after fourth period. We’re California kids—spending as much time as possible outside is practically written into our DNA. The school has an indoor cafeteria in case of inclement weather, but even when it’s pouring out, it’s mostly empty. We’ll picnic in the halls and in empty classrooms before we’ll eat in the cafeteria. But as long as it’s dry, we crowd onto the tables outside anyway, even though the old wooden benches have splinters so sharp they’ll stab right through your jeans.
I text my best friend that I have to study through lunch—I’ll be in the library, text if you need me. I miss lunch at least a couple times a week—everyone knows that I’m very studious. I have to get straight A’s so I can get into any college I want and follow my dad across the country.
He’s not the only one who wants to get the eff out of Dodge.
Four
The Burnout
“Man, this shit is messed up,” Hiram says, playing with his lighter. I inhale, hold my breath, exhale.
“Yeah, it is,” I agree, though I wonder how Hiram even knows what’s going on. As far as I can tell, he never steps foot inside the school.
Hiram’s fingers brush against mine. I don’t mind. It’s not like I don’t know Hiram has a crush on me. I’m stoned but I’m not stupid.
“What’s it like in there?” Hiram gestures vaguely to the school across the parking lot. I look up and gaze at all the cars. The school building seems farther away than it did before.
We’re in Hiram’s car. I don’t know why he bothers driving to school every day. From what I can tell, he only goes to class about half the time, if that.
But I’m grateful he’s here. I’m not the only one who sneaks off to his car between classes. I wonder if anyone would bother hanging out with him if it weren’t for the chemical incentive. After all, that’s why I started coming here in the first place, months ago.
“It’s not good,” I answer finally. I squint in the yellow April sunlight, wishing I had sunglasses. “Everyone’s on edge, Hiram.”
What a funny name: Hi-Ram.
High Ram.
Hi, Ram.
I run my fingers along the window. I feel like laughing.
“Bad energy, man.” Hiram shudders, like he’s literally shaking off all that badness. Hiram doesn’t ask if I’m on edge. He doesn’t ask how I feel about everything that’s going on. He’s understood, from the first time I knocked on his car window, that I’m not interested in talking about things like that. Instead, he looks at me and taps the car keys, which are in the ignition even though the car isn’t turned on. “You wanna get out of here?”
He’s never offered that before. It was always a very wham, bam, thank you, ma’am sort of exchange.
I look back at the school. Inside, no one is talking about anything but Mike and his girlfriend. Everyone from the geeks to the jocks to the stoners (like me). The teachers and the administrators. The coaches and the guidance counselor.
If I leave, I’ll get a call from the guidance counselor later.
I heard you weren’t in your afternoon classes. We should talk.
I roll my eyes. They feel sandy inside my head. I blink slowly—who knew it was possible to blink so slowly?—and fix my gaze back at the school.
Somewhere inside that building is a boy who beat up his girlfriend. If I weren’t so stoned, maybe I’d be angry that they didn’t expel him on the spot. Screw innocent-until-proven-guilty and all that BS. Doesn’t the victim deserve protection? It’s the twenty-first century.
No, I remind myself. I don’t care. That’s why I came to Hiram’s car in the first place. To not care.
Because here, I’m not that kind of girl. Here, I’m chill, I’m cool. Here, I don’t have to care about anything.
It must be the bad energy, like Hiram said a few seconds ago. (Seconds? Minutes? Who cares?) The bad vibes must be seeping out of that building and heading straight toward me like they’re made of iron and I’m a magnet.
If I take Hiram up on his offer to get out of here, they could suspend me for cutting class.
I could miss a pop quiz and the big fat zero will bring down my GPA.
Colleges would frown at the blot on my transcripts.
Well, maybe I won’t go to college. Hiram isn’t going to college, right? He’s a senior, he’d be waiting for his admissions letters right about now if he’d applied anywhere, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t. Not that we ever talk about that kind of thing. Anyway, he seems a hell of a lot happier than I do.
I’m not, like, a stoner. If my mom knew, if my dad knew, if my best friend knew—they’d be shocked, probably alarmed. Maybe they’d insist on sending me to rehab or something. In fact, maybe I should tell them. Because at least rehab would be a way out of here.
But then I remember that Hiram just offered to get me out of here, even if it’s only for the afternoon.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “Let’s go.”
“You got it,” Hiram says. He turns the key, and his old car roars to life. It literally sounds like a lion, making all that noise
so that the rest of the jungle knows he’s there.
Or knows he’s leaving.
Five
The Girlfriend
I don’t look at my mom. Instead, I stare at my beat-up sneakers just like I did in Principal Scott’s office. I’ll have to throw these shoes away. Every time I look at them from now on, I’ll remember this day.
“There’s nothing to explain,” I answer finally. The question was: Tell me how things went this far. Not like it’s my fault that it happened in the first place, Mom isn’t that insensitive, but more like why did things have to get so bad—black-eye bad—before I said anything.
We’re sitting at the kitchen table, something we pretty much never do because Mom rarely cooks, and even when she does, we eat in the living room with Jeopardy! on in the background. We talked earlier when I was still at school. Then later she texted, offering to leave work and pick me up, but I told her she didn’t have to come in from her job in the city because we’d have plenty of time to talk tonight. But Mom said she was still going to leave her office early because she was too upset to get any work done.
I press my feet into the floor and imagine I can feel the cool white tile through my sneakers. I’m still wearing Mike’s old sweater. I wonder if I have to give it back now. Maybe I was supposed to give it back weeks ago but Mike was too polite to mention it. He can be really polite about things like that.
The weird thing is, I don’t want to give the sweater back. Even now. I love this sweater. I love that it smells like Mike. I love that it feels like being held. I pull the sleeves down over my wrists and ball that material inside my fists.
“Of course there’s something to explain,” Mom insists.
“Like what?”
“Like, how often did this happen?”
I shrug, keeping my gaze focused on the kitchen counters, the stove, the sink—anywhere but Mom’s face. It’s weird that this kitchen can be so messy when no one who lives here cooks. My hands are sweating again, and I slide them under my thighs (again).
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I was keeping track.” That’s not a lie.
“Well, when did it start?” Mom is staring at my eye. I looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror before dinner. The bruise was even darker than it had been this morning. Magenta, maybe.
“I don’t know. A couple months ago.”
What would I have said if Principal Scott had asked the same question? She asked if it had happened before, but not exactly when. I don’t think I could have lied to her the way I just lied to Mom. Because I know exactly when it started. Three months ago. The middle of January. I sat in the bleachers during his track practice—the spring season doesn’t actually start until March—and I shivered in my too-light coat and the drizzling rain, and I cheered for him because I was a supportive girlfriend. We followed NCAA sports, and we’d decided that UCLA’s track team would be a good fit if it turned out they didn’t want him at Stanford.
He fell that day, rolling his ankle. He was so scared that it might cause real damage—bench him for a week or two—but by the next day it was good as new.
Sometime after that night—I don’t remember exactly when—I began watching other couples. I’d stare at them walking down the halls at school hand in hand, just like Mike and I did. Sometimes I find myself gazing at them, wondering what it must be like, to be in love but not to be hit. It’s not like I didn’t know that people weren’t supposed to do this. I knew it wasn’t normal or okay.
I’d think about the fact that before the divorce (long after they’d stopped being in love), my parents fought to the point of shouting—well, mostly Mom had shouted—but my dad never hit my mom in all the years they were together.
And then I’d think: That I know of.
And then I realized all those guys I assumed didn’t hit were just that—limited by that I know of.
And then I’d wonder if all boys hit, and all girls kept their secrets.
Until they didn’t.
“A couple of months?” Mom echoes, covering her mouth with her hand. She looks like she’s going to cry. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
I open my fists and push the sweater sleeves up over my elbows. It’s cold in our white kitchen, but I’m so hot.
“I don’t know.” Instead of looking at her, I concentrate on my fingernails, pressing the cuticles down.
I thought it wasn’t that big a deal. I thought it would stop, eventually. I thought it was worth it if I still got to be with him. It seemed like a small price to pay for how good things were the rest of the time.
Things were good the rest of the time, right? I loved him. He loved me. That’s good, isn’t it?
“Was it always this bad?” Mom gestures to my eye.
I shake my head, and she looks relieved. She doesn’t want to think that I stayed when it was this bad. She wants to think that the minute it crossed the line (what line? Who says where the line is?), I stood up for myself. That’s what any self-respecting girl would do in this day and age. That’s the kind of girl she wants to believe she raised me to be.
And she wants to think that if it had always been this bad, she would’ve seen it sooner.
Tuesday, April 11
Six
The Burnout
In the morning, I consider skipping school entirely, but I can’t risk getting into more trouble. Of course they noticed that I wasn’t there all afternoon yesterday. (They being Principal Scott and the guidance counselor, probably my classmates too.) Principal Scott said I wasn’t in trouble this time—I’d never done it before and with everything that was going on, they knew it was a difficult time for the entire student body—but she encouraged me not to make a habit of it.
It wasn’t like I did anything all that bad with my free afternoon. Hiram drove to the beach and parked. Neither of us made a move to get out of the car. It was April in Northern California, a sunny day after a rainy winter. The waves crashed on the beach. The water didn’t look inviting, but I still kept my seat belt fastened because I was so tempted to dive in.
Hiram whistled. “Mike Parker, man,” he said. “Never liked him.”
I shook my head. “What are you talking about? Everyone likes him.”
“Not me.”
“You barely know him.”
Hiram shrugged. “Guess no one knew him as well as they thought, huh?”
“Everyone loves him,” I said reflexively. I gestured to the air in front of me as though we were looking not at a storm-tossed ocean but the school parking lot, just a stone’s throw from Mike and his friends eating lunch at their usual table outside the school. I shuddered and the image disappeared. School—Mike, his friends, everyone but Hiram—suddenly seemed very far away, like a life I’d merely imagined, or a story I’d heard.
“Even his girlfriend,” I added softly. “She still loves him.”
Hiram looked at me sharply. For a second I thought he was going to take my hand, but he kept his limbs on his side of the car.
“Well, even if that’s true,” Hiram said finally, “he doesn’t love her.”
I shook my head. “Sure he does. Everyone knows he was so in love.”
It was true. All of our classmates stepped aside when Mike walked through the halls, holding hands with the girl he loved so much. Other girls looked on wistfully. Even guys who talked a good game about not wanting to be tied down would occasionally concede that they’d give up their freedom for something as good as that.
Staring at the ocean from the passenger seat of Hiram’s car, I shook my head and swallowed, then slid off my sneakers and put my feet up on the dashboard so that I was curled into a ball. I bent my neck, letting my long hair fall forward so Hiram couldn’t see my face.
“That’s not love,” Hiram said firmly.
“How do you know?” I asked softly.
Through my hair, I saw Hiram shrug. We watched the waves crash, one right after another. I remembered reading somewhere that waves come in sets, but these waves didn’t look nearly so organized. The water looked messy. Falling on top of itself over and over again.
“Maybe it was love,” I tried. My voice sounded small, far away somehow. I pulled my sleeves down over my wrists, but my skin felt suddenly itchy beneath the fabric. So I pushed the sleeves up again and leaned my head back, staring at the car’s ceiling. “But maybe it wasn’t good love.”
“Maybe,” Hiram agreed, then added, “but maybe that’s just as bad as not being love at all.”
We stayed at the beach until it got dark, and then he drove me home. Until then, I hadn’t realized Hiram knew where I lived.
Seven
The Popular Girl
I head toward our usual table outside for lunch the next day. I keep my eyes focused straight ahead so I won’t have to see the Looks from all my classmates.
I got dressed carefully this morning. I know clothes can’t actually speak, but when you’re one of the most popular girls in school, people tend to look at you and now that all this is going on, I knew they’d be looking even more than usual. Besides, I like clothes. They let me express myself without saying a word.
So I’m wearing dark blue jeans with my favorite high-heeled clogs. A bright white T-shirt with the name of an old band (Led Zeppelin) scrawled across the front; I ordered it after I saw it in a picture from Teen Vogue. I leave my long brown hair down, but I’m wearing a pair of sunglasses as a headband even though the fog is thick today and the Weather Channel app on my phone said it might rain later. California cool. California casual. There’s a chill in the air, but I didn’t bring a jacket or sweater with me to school today. I didn’t want to look like I was hiding anything, hiding from anyone.
What Kind of Girl Page 2