What Kind of Girl

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  Junie shakes her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Hiram never would’ve punched Mike if I’d kept quiet. And Mike—no one would’ve known if I hadn’t said anything. If they get expelled, it will be my fault.”

  “If we get expelled, it will be our fault,” Hiram says. “You didn’t make me punch Mike.”

  “Yeah, but you never would’ve if—”

  Hiram cuts me off. “And you definitely didn’t make Mike hurt you. That was his choice, not yours. If he got expelled for cheating on a science test, you wouldn’t blame Mr. Chapnick for making the test too hard, would you?”

  But coming forward was my choice. I put my elbows on the counter and rest my head in my hands. How can I simultaneously feel bad about keeping everything with Mike a secret and feel bad for telling on him?

  “Anyway.” Hiram shrugs. “I haven’t gotten expelled so far.”

  “How is that?” I ask suddenly, looking up and feeling grateful for a new subject to focus on. “I mean, you hardly ever go to class.”

  Hiram shrugs again. “Doesn’t seem to matter much,” he says. “I still got into my first-choice college.”

  “You did?”

  Hiram leans back against the refrigerator and runs his hands over his dark hair. He keeps it cut short, almost a buzz cut. I always liked the way it felt under my fingers. “Columbia.”

  “In New York?”

  I didn’t think he’d be going someplace so far away. Then again, I didn’t think he was going to college at all. It’s not that I don’t think he’s smart. I just didn’t think he cared about those kinds of things.

  “That’s the one.” He winks at me. “My sister’s already there.”

  “You have a sister?”

  All this time sitting in his ugly brown car, and I really don’t know that much about him. I never asked. I don’t mean that he asked about my life, and I never returned the questions. I mean, we never spoke much. Not about anything important. Not from the very first time I knocked on his window that Thursday in January.

  It was two weeks after Mike slapped me. We were still together, and he hadn’t hit me again, though the little hurts had continued. I didn’t know whether or not they counted the same way the slap had, and I was sick and tired of thinking about it. I was sick and tired of thinking about much of anything. At lunch, it was too rainy to sit at our usual table, so we’d gathered in the hall near Mike’s locker. Mike put his arm around me, squeezed me tightly (did that count?), and took a bite of my sandwich. I stood up suddenly.

  “I gotta study,” I explained quickly and rushed off in the direction of the library. I left my lunch for Mike to pick at, telling myself I’d rather he eat it anyway. Fewer calories for me that way.

  But before I got to the library, I turned and headed for the parking lot. There weren’t as many cars as usual, since some of our classmates drove off campus at lunchtime, but Hiram’s car was in its usual spot. I could see him sitting in the front seat, his eyes closed. I wondered if he ever got bored, sitting out here like that.

  I knocked on his window before I could stop myself. Hiram opened his eyes—he hadn’t really been sleeping—and I opened the passenger door and ducked inside. I’d walked here so fast, sat down so fast, that I didn’t think anyone had seen me. After all, this was the last place any of my classmates would have expected me to be.

  Hiram seemed to know what I came for without my having to explain. And he didn’t ask why, though he didn’t seem disinterested either. Instead, he gestured at the school and said, “Sometimes you just need a break from all that, huh?”

  It was my first time, and Hiram patiently explained the mechanics of when to inhale and exhale. He didn’t make fun of me when I coughed, didn’t scold me when I did it wrong. I leaned back against my seat. I’d only been there a few minutes, and already I thought of it as mine. I wondered if I’d ever been so comfortable sitting anywhere else, beside anyone else.

  “Yeah.” I nodded in agreement. “Just taking a break.”

  Now, Hiram grins at me from across the kitchen island as Junie’s mouth drops open. “How’d you get into Columbia? I mean, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but like you said, you hardly ever go to class.”

  For the first time, I realize that maybe Junie says I mean before half her sentences because she’s worried that whoever she’s talking to will be mad about what she has to say.

  “Attendance isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for good grades,” Hiram answers with another shrug.

  Junie looks positively awestruck. She gets straight A’s—I know—but I also know that she studies harder than anyone else. She reaches for some of the food on the kitchen counter, and I realize I’m starving. But if I eat dinner here, I might not be able to throw up afterward. I’ve never thrown up anywhere but home.

  I guess it’s okay if I eat something, right? I threw up last night, and the night before that. I won’t get fat from one meal.

  Will I?

  Hiram continues, “My parents both went there. My sister’s there. And I actually have some pretty good extracurriculars.”

  “You do?” Junie can’t hide her surprise.

  “I volunteer at my dad’s hospital every weekend. One of my letters of rec came from the parent of a patient I used to help out.”

  “Wow,” Junie says. “Okay, but then,” Junie continues in between bites of chips, “why do you drive that crappy car? Can’t your parents afford something nicer?”

  “My parents could,” Hiram concedes. “I can’t.”

  “You paid for your car yourself?”

  Hiram nods. “They pay for school. But that’s it.”

  “Other than the roof over your head.”

  Hiram laughs. “Fair enough.”

  “So that’s why you sell—” Junie stops herself.

  Hiram shakes his head. “I don’t sell. What I gave you was a onetime thing.”

  “It was?” Junie sounds incredulous.

  “My dad’s a doctor. He gets all kinds of free samples, so there are pills stashed in every bathroom in this house. I don’t mean he abuses them or anything,” Hiram adds quickly, “but that’s how we end up with pills that have been discontinued. My dad empties his pockets in one bathroom or another, then forgets which pills went where.” He leans across the countertop like he’s sharing a secret. “And this house has a lot of bathrooms.”

  “What are you two talking about?” I ask. What exactly did Hiram give to Junie?

  Hiram leans back again. “Nothing important,” he says. “Just that my parents are too checked out to notice much about me.”

  Before I can ask anything more, I feel my phone vibrating in my pocket. I can guess who’s calling—my mom is pretty much the only person who still actually calls anymore, except for rare calls from my dad—but I still take a deep breath when I see her number on the screen. “A checked-out parent sounds good right about now.” I sigh. At least talking to her will keep me from eating.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Where are you? I’ve been worried sick.” This isn’t the first time my phone had rung since I had left school this afternoon. It’s just the first time I’ve answered.

  “I’m fine,” I say, even though that doesn’t answer her question.

  “You have no idea how upset I’ve been. After everything you kept from me, how was I supposed to know whether or not you were safe?”

  “I’m sorry,” I offer, though I think it’s kind of ridiculous that I’m apologizing. Sure, I’ve been out of touch for a few hours, but as usual, she making everything about her—how worried she is, how much all of this upsets her, how much it hurts her to know her daughter was hurt, could be hurt again. I shake my head. Shouldn’t she be the one comforting me?

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I’m fine. I’m with Junie. I’ll be home later.”

 
I hang up before she can ask when, before she can try to play mom by assigning a real curfew for the very first time in my life. She never minded when I was out late with Mike.

  “Your mom still bugging the crap out of you?” Junie asks, nodding at my phone. I slide it across the kitchen counter absently. Before Mike and I were together, I complained about my mother to Junie almost daily.

  “Of course,” I answer.

  “Thank goodness I left my phone at school.” Junie sighs. “I mean, I can only imagine what I’d be hearing from my parents right about now. Especially my dad.”

  “Are you kidding?” I ask. “Your parents are the best.” If Junie’s mom was here, she’d put her arms around me and ask what she could do to make me feel better. At Junie’s house, dinner is a homemade affair, eaten at the kitchen table instead of in front of the TV. And Aaron—Junie’s dad—is her biggest fan. He encourages every cause she takes up, and I swear he doesn’t think there’s a person out there good enough for Junie to date.

  “I’m not sure whether my dad would be more disappointed that I cut class, or that I wasn’t the one who punched Mike in front of the whole school,” Junie says finally.

  I nod, remembering the scar I saw on her leg this afternoon. I’m not the only one who has secrets. “I actually think my dad will be sad when he hears I’m not with Mike anymore.”

  “When he hears?” Junie echoes. “You didn’t tell him about—”

  I bite my lip. “I didn’t know how to.”

  “I haven’t told my parents about Tess and me either.”

  “You and Tess?” I ask.

  “We broke up.” Junie says it fast, but I hear her voice catch.

  I shake my head. “Wow, I’m a terrible friend, aren’t I? We’ve spent the whole day together, and I didn’t even ask about her.”

  “It’s okay.” Junie shrugs. “There was plenty of other stuff to talk about.”

  “But I don’t want to be that kind of friend,” I insist.

  “It’s not like we’ve spent all that much time together over the past six months.” Quickly, Junie adds, “I mean, I know it’s not your fault.”

  “It is my fault,” I counter. “Partly, at least. He never said I couldn’t spend time with other people.”

  The truth is, Mike isn’t the only one who wanted to be together all the time. I wait for Junie to reproach me, to point out all the ways I failed as a woman, as a feminist, as a human being. But she keeps quiet.

  “Aren’t you disappointed in me?” I ask, a lump in my throat.

  “For what?”

  For missing him, even now. For staying with him after he hit me. “You never would’ve stayed with someone who hurt you.”

  “I hurt myself,” Junie points out, too thoughtful to contradict me.

  Hiram keeps quiet. He’s good at blending into the background. Maybe that’s how he lasted so long at North Bay without getting into trouble despite cutting class. Maybe the teachers don’t even notice whether he’s there or not. But he didn’t blend this afternoon, when Mike came after me.

  Hiram said that bad love isn’t any better than not being loved at all.

  I reach out and take a chip, dip it in a bowl of guacamole.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter what I eat anymore.” I stuff the food in my mouth. I barely chew, and the chip’s jagged edges scratch my throat as I swallow. “It’s not like Mike will ever want to see me naked again.” Again, I feel like crying. What’s wrong with me?

  “I think you look great,” Hiram says, at the same time that Junie says, “Who cares what Mike thinks?”

  Junie doesn’t notice that I’m blushing under Hiram’s gaze.

  What would Junie think if I told her about Hiram? Maybe she’d think that Mike had every right to hit me since I was cheating on him. I know she’d never say that, but maybe deep down, she’d think it. Nobody’s going to feel sorry—or at least, not as sorry—for the girl who was cheating on her boyfriend.

  Maybe not even Junie.

  Maybe not even me.

  “Kyle lives around here, doesn’t he?” Junie asks suddenly.

  “Yeah.” Hiram nods. “We passed his house on the way up.”

  “He’s hosting Big Night tomorrow, right?”

  Hiram shrugs. “Yeah.”

  Junie turns to me. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” I don’t want to leave yet. I like it in this big glass house that’s so clean, it doesn’t look like anyone actually lives here.

  “Tomorrow. To Big Night.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Junie shakes her head. “Nope. I’ll show Tess that I’m not embarrassed to be in the same room as her, even when she dumped me in front of the whole school.”

  I blink. “She dumped you in front of the whole school?”

  “Yeah, but don’t change the subject.”

  “What’s the subject?”

  “You’re going to walk into Kyle’s house like you own the place. Because Hiram’s right. You didn’t do anything wrong. Mike did.”

  It doesn’t feel like I didn’t do anything wrong. I cheated on Mike. I got Mike into trouble. I’m still keeping secrets.

  “Everyone will be there,” Junie adds. “We’ll be able to spread the word about the protest. Even more people will be on our side after what they saw in the parking lot, right? The way he grabbed you, I mean.”

  But his touch was slow and deliberate. He did that on purpose, making it look gentle, so that people would see a nice guy. I spin Mike’s bracelet around and around on my wrist. He gave it to me, but I’ve always thought of the slim silver bangle as his, not mine.

  “We have to go,” Junie says. “Isn’t this what we’re marching for on Sunday? The right for you to be wherever you want without worrying about him?”

  I notice that Junie doesn’t say I mean nearly as often when she’s excited about a cause. Maybe she needs to work herself up enough that she doesn’t care whether or not she offends anyone. Maybe it’s because she sounds so confident and sure that I don’t feel like crying anymore.

  I say, “Okay, you’re right. We’ll go.”

  Four

  Junie

  I’m not saying I didn’t consider going through the medicine cabinets in one of Hiram’s many bathrooms in search of the same kind of pills I left in the school parking lot. I could’ve used a false sense of well-being, because even though Hiram said it was his house, it sure felt like we were breaking and entering. As far as I could tell—at least in the living room and kitchen, where we spent most of our evening—there was no evidence that Hiram actually lived there. No leftovers from breakfast in the sink. No embarrassing baby photos on the mantel. Instead of a pile of wood inside the fireplace, there was a row of big, perfectly round black rocks. (I guess it was more of a decorative fireplace. Or fireplace as art. Or maybe architecture as art.) There weren’t any pictures on the walls, just all those floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the bay, like whoever designed the house said hanging pictures on the walls would distract from the view. It’s the sort of thing Mom would read about in one of her design magazines, which are her guilty pleasure. She reads them the way other people read tabloid magazines because she knows Dad thinks they’re frivolous.

  Looking around the empty house, I wonder whether Hiram answered my text and showed up early to school because he was lonely. Why else would he cover for me? We’d never even had a real conversation before yesterday. People don’t usually help you just because you ask, do they? (Or in the case of covering for me with Maya, without my even having to ask.)

  Anyhow. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have enjoyed feeling the way I felt this morning. I probably could’ve asked Hiram to give me more pills, but then Maya would’ve definitely known what was going on.

  Telling Maya about Tess made me so nervous. I bet that Maya was thinking Tes
s was right to break up with a basket case like me (now that she knows about the cutting, she knows I’m a basket case), but then I remembered that Maya had confided in me about the bulimia too. And then I remembered what Dr. Kreiter said about how people aren’t thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are, and that made me realize that Maya was probably thinking about her own relationship, about Mike, which made me feel really bad for assuming she would’ve been thinking about my relationship with Tess in the first place, which was a normal (if humiliating) breakup, but nothing compared to what Maya’s going through. And that made me feel bad and anxious all over again, so Dr. Kreiter’s advice totally backfired. Anyway, as tempting as it was, I wasn’t about to go rifling through Hiram’s bathrooms. What if I took the wrong pill and ended up more nervous instead of less nervous?

  But then I had the idea about crashing Big Night, and I felt better. Technically it’s not crashing, since the whole school’s invited, but it’s not like Kyle will want Maya there. Kyle is one of Mike’s best friends. Plus, the whole track team will be there. They can’t drink or stay out late—they’re supposed to get a good night’s rest before the meet—but they always at least make an appearance at Big Night. Which means Tess will be there too, but I’m not going to see Tess. I’m going to support my best friend. What better way to show Mike he doesn’t get to decide where Maya goes and who she goes with than showing up at his best friend’s house like we own the place?

  On the ride home from Hiram’s, Maya tinkers with the radio, landing on one classic rock station after another. I never knew she liked that kind of music, but she sings along as though she’s heard every song a million times before. Meanwhile, I’m trying to remember whether I still have that gray-green T-shirt with the rips in the sleeve or whether I gave it away last time Mom was collecting donations. But maybe I should wear pink tomorrow night, since that’s the color we’re wearing for the protest on Sunday. No! I should wear the tank top that Maya borrowed for Valentine’s Day with Mike this year, or maybe Maya should wear it, actually. I’m about to ask her whether she wants to borrow it again when Hiram puts the car into park in front of my house.