Notes on a Near-Life Experience

by Olivia Birdsall

  WHEN I FIRST DECIDED I WANTED TO MAKE UP MY OWN dances, all the choreography I did had a pattern. I'd start with slow, balletic combinations; then I'd gradually push into something faster, with more hip-hop and jazz steps; then I'd morph into slow movements again, winding down until I stopped. I always thought about how my legs and feet moved and planned that out before I considered how my hands and arms would go. One of my dance teachers pointed it out and worked with me on “expanding” my style of choreography; if she hadn't, I'd still be doing variations of the same dance.

  “How has your week been?” Lisz asks.

  “Good.”

  I realize we are doing the same dance every week, Lisz and I. She asks me questions that I don't like, and I give her answers that don't seem to do much for her. But I can't stop moving in the same direction, with the same steps I've been using. I feel stuck. I am too afraid to move forward; every time I try, things get so difficult, nothing feels safe.

  “Anything you want to discuss?” she asks, with the same level of belief and anticipation and expectation she always has, as if she knows I will crack eventually.

  “Yeah. There's actually a lot I want to discuss.”

  “Really?” She isn't as surprised as I'd like her to be.

  “Yeah, but I don't understand what good it would do me to talk to you. Or to talk at all. How will sitting here talking change anything?”

  Now she seems surprised. I want her to be speechless. Or to tell me that I'm right.

  “What is it that you want to change, Mia?”

  As if there is music playing in my brain, I feel myself following a familiar pattern, snapping back into position.

  “My hair color, maybe. Maybe if I were blond, my life would be more interesting.”

  “Perhaps, but is that the only element of your life you'd like to alter? What else would you like to change?”

  I think about my mom, how fragile she seemed when she tried to talk to me about my dad; about the phone calls from the school and how I hardly ever see Allen at lunch; about Keatie watching the same thing over and over again. I think about myself. I am normal. I am not falling apart the way they are. “I really just want to play spit. Can we do that?”

  “You're close, Mia. I know that you understand and see a lot more than you want to admit. I think those things weigh on you. I think that talking about them will help you to feel less burdened. Can we talk about those things?”

  My throat itches; my jaw tightens.

  “I don't know what I see. Maybe I don't see anything,” I tell her as I pick up a deck of cards and begin to shuffle.

  MY CHURCH HAS WEEKLY ACTIVITIES FOR “THE YOUTH,” SO that we don't turn into delinquents. You know, they want us to have things to do besides smoke pot, shoplift, and have sex, so they have these activities. When I was ten, they planned this thing called the Daddy-Daughter Date for all the ten-and eleven-year-old girls and their dads. I think they had it for the younger girls because by the time you get to junior high and especially high school, there's no way you'd want to go on a date with your dad. Anyway, it was a big deal because my dad worked all the time and was seldom home before ten or eleven O'clock most nights, but he promised me that he was going to come home early especially for my Daddy-Daughter Date.

  I tried on every nice dress and skirt I owned and asked Allen a thousand times which one I should wear.

  “Everything looks fine until you put it on,” he said.

  “I'm serious,” I said, “I want to look nice. It's important. It's for my Daddy-Daughter Date.”

  “Wear that black one, then. Aren't you embarrassed to be going on a date with Dad?”

  “No. Because he's smarter than everyone else's dad and we're having games, so I know we'll win.”

  Allen snickered. “Whatever.”

  The Daddy-Daughter Date started at six-thirty. We'd made invitations and given them out weeks before, so I was sure Dad knew what time we were supposed to be there. Mom did my hair in a French braid, and by six O'clock I was ready to go. I sat stiffly on the couch in the living room, so that my hair and dress wouldn't get messed up, and I watched TV. By six-twenty, I was getting nervous. I called Dad's office to see when he'd left, but the night secretary didn't know. So I continued to wait.

  Dad arrived breathless at six-forty.

  “Dad, we're late,” I said, “let's go.”

  “Mia, I need to take a shower and change, I've been in these clothes all day.”

  “But Da-ad…”

  “I'll be ready in five minutes.”

  I stood outside the bathroom door while my dad showered, shouting instructions at him.

  “They're having these games to see how well we know each other, so I am going to tell you things about me, and you have to remember them.”

  No response.

  “Okay?” I screamed.

  “Okay,” Dad yelled back.

  “My favorite color is lavender. My favorite singer is…”

  I gave him an impossible amount of information to remember, but when I quizzed him, he got almost all the answers right.

  Dad wore a tuxedo on our date. I felt so grown-up and important. We were pretty late to the dinner, but the games didn't start until after we arrived. There were three games; we won two.

  When we drove home, my dad said, “You look lovely, Mia, did I mention that earlier? You were the smartest, most beautiful girl in the room.”

  “Thanks, Dad. You did a really good job on the games. Thanks for coming.”

  At the next stoplight, he leaned over and kissed the top of my head and patted my shoulder.

  Dad bought me a green sweater for my eleventh birthday; I guess by then he'd forgotten my favorite color.

  Thinking about it now, I can't help wondering about what my mom told me about my dad's slipping away/being a ghost. I feel like my dad was definitely there with me that night. All of him.

  I'M LATE GETTING READY FOR SCHOOL, AND ALLEN LEAVES without me, without telling me. He's never done that before, but then again, we have entered an era of doing all kinds of stuff we've never done before. I guess he assumes that I can get a ride to school with Haley. But I can't; she's already at school for tennis practice. Mom's already at work, so I call and ask Dad to take me. He sounds sleepy when he answers the phone.

  “I'll be there in five minutes. Wait out in front.”

  I wait. Twenty minutes later, five minutes into first period, Dad drives up frantically. In a bathrobe. The old blue bathrobe he's worn every morning since before I can remember. I say “before I can remember” because I have seen pictures of my father holding me when I was a baby, and in them he is wearing that blue robe. But he's never worn the bathrobe outside our house before. Okay, I mean, he's walked out to the end of the driveway to pick up the newspaper, but that's as far as he's gone. He's never driven anywhere in the bathrobe. In fact, he used to get mad if we wore our pajamas after ten a.m. on weekends. “I am not raising lazy, undressed sloths,” he'd say.

  “Get in,” he shouts, throwing the door of the car open.

  I manage to jump in before he speeds off. I worry the whole way to school that we are going to die or get pulled over by the police. Dad doesn't say anything about the bathrobe during our drive, he just sings along loudly with the opera playing on the radio. When we arrive at school, he leans over me to open my door.

  “Have a good day,” he sings.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I say.

  “Yup. No problem. Listen, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I'm leaving for Peru tomorrow. I'll be gone for two weeks, so if something like this happens again, I may not be around to help.”

  “What do you mean you're leaving for Peru? For business?” Since when does my dad take vacations without us? Since when does he take off from work for two whole weeks?

  “I joined a hiking club. We're doing the Inca Trail.”

  “Oh.” I am too shocked to say more.

  “Take care, sweetie. And would you mind telling you
r brother and sister, in case I don't get a chance to? And your mother—” He catches himself before he can finish. “Have a good day at school.”

  And he drives off.

  It's strange the way sometimes your life feels like a sitcom or a movie. Like you are watching it but not really living it. Like it's too bizarre or too clichéd to be real. My parents are separated, probably getting a divorce, so my older brother sometimes acts like he's my father, or like he's a mysterious superhero or criminal, and my little sister thinks nothing out of the ordinary is going on—maybe she's just pretending, too, who knows. It seems like a case study from a self-help book, or an episode of the Dr. Phil show—clichéd. My father driving me to school in a bathrobe, like bathwear has suddenly come into fashion or something, that's bizarre.

  I breathe deeply and walk into my history class, expecting some kind of reprimand for being late, but my teacher is too absorbed in what he's saying to comment. He just nods at my seat and keeps talking.

  “Many of our founding fathers had venereal diseases, the most common being syphilis. They weren't the paragons of morality and virtue your books would have you believe they were, at least not in the sense the book implies. They were powerful men of vision, but they were human nonetheless….” Mr. Bingler lectures nonstop for the rest of the period, attempting to dispel all the myths surrounding Colonial American history and various “truths” and myths about half of the presidents since then. I try not to listen. I try not to think about the flaws we discover in people we thought we could count on. It's so much easier to keep things flat and simple, to live in a myth or a fairy tale. Your body can only digest so much new “truth” and information in a day. Being driven to school by a lunatic in a bathrobe who claims to be my father and learning that fat old Ben Franklin, who I've thought of since third grade as the guy with the kite and the key who discovered electricity, was some kind of lady-killer with an STD are already more than I can stomach. I feel like I am going to cry or faint or go completely crazy—start talking to myself or forgetting to put on key articles of clothing before I leave the house. When the laws of the universe all stop working but the world keeps spinning, how do you keep your balance? How do you stop yourself from falling, from flying into oblivion?

  At lunch, I look for Allen, but I don't see him anywhere. His pea green VW bus, which is usually conspicuous in a parking lot full of SUVs and three-year-old BMWs, is nowhere to be seen.

  I REMEMBER WHAT HALEY SAID ABOUT THE FREAK BATHROOMS, the ones none of our friends ever use. Maybe I'm one of the freaks now; maybe I've been one all along. I decide to use one of them, the one in the math building—don't get me wrong, I'm curious about industrial technology, but I've got to pace myself. When I walk through the door, it's like walking into one of those old movies from the eighties about high school, the ones that show girls with too much makeup on smoking in the bathroom while they try to hide their hickeys with cheap cover-up and talk about abortions. Well, it's almost like that. It smells like smoke and there're trashy girls. I rush into an empty stall. While I sit there—too nervous to pee, for some reason—I listen to them talk.

  “I had to call into work for her this morning because she was too wasted to get out of bed. I told them it was food

  poisoning.”

  “They believe you?”

  “Who knows. They acted like they did. They have to. Who else are they gonna find to work that crap job?”

  I sit in the stall, not quite understanding what I'm doing there, trying to breathe, when I find myself in tears. Not just crying quietly, but sobbing, unable to catch my breath, making loud gulping sounds. I haven't cried like this since I broke my femur in a freak trampoline accident. The bathroom goes silent except for my wailing. I imagine the girls looking at each other, trying to figure out who's in here, what's going on. The second-period “bell” sounds, an unnatural electronic buzz.

  “Shit. If I'm marked late again, they'll call my house.”

  I wait in the stall until I hear them leave. When everything is quiet, I unlatch the door and walk over to the sink. I've started to wash my hands, just because it seems gross to leave a bathroom without washing your hands, when I hear a retching sound. Someone is throwing up. I freeze. The toilet flushes and I hear the sound of a door being unlatched. Without thinking, I turn around to look at the puker. It's Kiki Nordgren. She doesn't belong in this bathroom. And she doesn't look sick, the way you should if you've just thrown up.

  I realize I'm staring. I push down the handle of the towel machine and the grating sound reverberates through the bathroom. I dry my hands, looking back once more before I push through the door; she is watching me.

  After school I see Kiki walking to her car with a few of her bratty friends. She looks perfectly healthy. So if she wasn't throwing up because she was sick…

  So even Kiki…

  It seems impossible.

  HE CALLS ME UP, WHISPERING, “OKAY, HE'S HERE, AND I'M going to tell him, but I wanted to tell you first… that I am going to tell him…so that you know.”

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  “Cute. Very cute,” Julian is still whispering.

  “Why are you whispering?” I yell into the phone. I get giddy like this whenever we interact now; I start acting crazy and silly, and I instinctively start bouncing on the balls of my feet. I am trying to learn to rein it in. Usually it takes a good three to five minutes for me to be able to act and communicate like a normal person. Julian is surprisingly normal about my weirdness. But now that I think about it, he usually seems kind of nervous, too, so maybe he doesn't notice how weird I act.

  He begins to speak in his regular tone of voice. “Allen is here and I'm going to tell him that I asked you….”

  “Is it really that big a deal?” I whisper, trying to throw him off.

  “I don't know,” he starts to whisper again, but catches himself. “Quit doing that—the loud and then the whispering. Listen, I just wanted to warn you in case he freaks out and we have to…flee…or something.”

  “Flee? Did you just say ‘flee’? Why are you talking like a spy? And where would we go?…We can't flee….”

  I hear Allen's voice in the background.

  “Who are you talking to? Are you whispering?”

  “Listen,” Julian says, “I gotta go. Bye.” He hangs up the phone.

  I call him right back. He answers on the first ring.

  “What,” he says, “you think I shouldn't tell him?”

  “The marshmallow floats at midnight,” I whisper, and hang up.

  Allen walks through the door twenty minutes later. “Has he, like, ummm, touched you or anything?” he asks.

  “I wish,” I tell him.

  “Gross,” he says. “At least it's not Kiki, though. I told Julian, 'Mia's weird and whatever, but at least she's not all intense like Kiki.' ”

  “Thanks for your support.”

  I find myself humming Broadway show tunes and making up lyrics in my head about how the world knows I'm in love and my brother doesn't think I'm too intense.

  “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO EAT TONIGHT?” KEATIE ASKS.“IT'S

  date night. I want Chinese.”

  “Date night?”

  I'm confused for a moment about who she's referring to, what she means, and I remember. She thinks my parents are going out like they used to, even though Dad moved out.

  “I don't think they're going on dates anymore, Keat.”

  “Why? They especially need dates now so that they can see each other and fall in love.”

  Well, anyway, Dad's in Peru. I can't figure out if Keatie is trying to change what has happened or if she just can't see what has changed.

  ON THE DAYS WHEN I DON'T HAVE DANCE CLASS DURING school, I typically have practice either before or after school, which means that I usually get to see Kiki Nordgren five days of every week. At these practices, Kiki typically does one of the following three things:

  (1) ignores me.

  (2) talks about whoeve
r she's dating in front of me— probably hoping that I'll talk to Allen about it.

  (3) tries to rechoreograph my routines.

  After seeing her in the outcast bathroom, I assumed this would change; I thought maybe Kiki would be nicer to me, so that I wouldn't say anything, or that she'd be even meaner to me because I'd discovered her secret. Truthfully, I hoped she would change somehow, become a nicer person because she had problems or something. Yeah, right.

  At first she was a little different. She still did all the stuff she normally did, but it felt a little forced, kind of awkward. After a few practices, after I didn't say or do anything about what I'd seen, Kiki was her old self again.

  I guess a lot of people started getting asked to the prom around the time Julian asked me, because today at our after-school practice, everyone is talking about the prom. I am friends with most of the girls on the team; some are members of Kiki's legion of brats, but for the most part, the other girls don't really care whether I convinced my brother to break up with Kiki or whether Kiki likes me. Most of them can't remember who was dating who six weeks ago, much less six months ago.

  While we stretch, everyone talks. Mandy has been asked by a guy she doesn't really want to go with; Ana hasn't been asked at all, but Ben, the guy she has a crush on, hasn't asked anyone yet, so she's hoping she still has a chance. I'm dying to tell the entire planet that I'm going to the prom with Julian. I told Mandy and Ana at practice two days after Julian asked me, but no one else knows; I am sort of waiting my turn, waiting for someone to ask me whether I've been asked.

  Kiki Nordgren doesn't have to wait.

  “Kiki, who's asked you so far?” a sophomore in the Cult of Kiki wants to know.

  I hate the way people just assume that more than one guy will ask Kiki.

  “Jake Dowdle and Ryan Walker,” she says. She manages to sound bored by the whole conversation.