by Rachel Toor
He can be a bit of a man-slut, that Walter.
The little dude came over and we had one of our boxing matches where I poke him in the belly with my fingers and he puts up his tiny dukes to fend me off. After a couple of rounds he settled next to me on the bed. I petted his head and he started grinding his teeth—it’s called bruxing—and his beautiful black eyes bugged out. He does that when he’s relaxed and happy, like a cat purring.
He got so sleepy he ended up on his back with his feet in the air like a baby, but cuter, way cuter, than a human. I moved him over to the pillow and lay down next to him on the bed. I stared at the ceiling and thought about Miles. He was smart and funny and OMG a tasty morsel if I ever saw one. He had been so nice to me.
I thought about the fact that when he realized I didn’t have enough breath to run and talk, he did all the talking. He saved me the embarrassment of having to say anything about it—just started yammering away, entertaining me, diverting me.
I thought about how, when we were standing next to each other by the table, he had lightly touched me to get my attention when he wanted to point out a particularly funny dress. The place he put his hand—just the top of my shoulder—tingled for the rest of the day. When I thought about it, it tingled again.
Crazy, I know.
I thought about how he had bumped me with his hip at one point, nothing more than a playful tap, but I could feel the warmth of his body, could feel some kind of weird connection.
I thought about his hands. His fingers were long, strong. Just like the rest of him. He was narrow, not broad and bulky like that old Kyle, but lean and hard.
And, oh. His legs. His butt.
I thought about how he did this thing with his mouth, kind of like chattering his teeth except it wasn’t cold. It was, I realized, a lot like Walter’s bruxing. On someone else I might have found it odd, but when Miles did it, he seemed quirky and cute.
I thought about how happy it made me when he smiled. I thought about his mouth.
I surprised myself by thinking about what it would be like to kiss that mouth.
Would I even know how to kiss him, if I ever got the chance?
I thought about that until, an hour and seventeen minutes after I called her, Jenni appeared in my room.
“You call that ‘right now’?” I said, and pointed at the clock. “What if I was bleeding to death? Or choking?”
Jenni’s eyes, perfectly shadowed and mascaraed, looked a little red.
“Sorry,” she said, and dropped her purse on the floor. “Were you?”
“Was I what?”
“Bleeding or choking?”
“No. That’s not the point.”
“I had to clean up at home. There were beer bottles and cigarette butts and frozen pizza crusts all over the living room.”
Her father. Off the wagon.
“And then I had to call Kyle.”
I rolled my eyes. She ignored me even though I pointed to myself rolling my eyes, and continued, “Then I had a cup of coffee in the kitchen with your mom.”
“Are you kidding me? Not only did I make you breakfast”—I offered her the plate of food—“but I summoned you here because I have something kind of good and a little exciting to tell you—in this time of darkness—and you spend hours talking to her? About what?”
“You know,” she said, and shrugged off her sweater, which I recognized as having previously belonged to my mother, “stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Boy stuff,” she said. Her left thumbnail was bitten to the quick. She looked down at it and tucked it into a fist. “Kyle stuff.”
I rolled my eyes again, louder.
She looked at me, popped a big hunk of cheese into her mouth, and said, “See. That’s why I talk to your mom. Now, let’s hear about your ‘something kind of good and a little exciting.’”
6
So I told her.
I told her about first seeing Miles on the boulevard with Potato. When I said the dog who looked like Toto was named Potato, Jenni laughed so hard she had a coughing fit and I couldn’t be mad at her for being late or for consorting with my mother. I told her how I could hardly talk to Miles at first, but that eventually I got more comfortable.
As I expected, she was all excited about the red dresses and the idea of running skirts and wanted to look online for them; maybe she’d make one for me. It might help me feel better about my thighs.
I said, “Yo, dudette, stop. I didn’t get you over here to talk about running skirts.”
She looked at the floor and I noticed a smudge of mascara on her cheek.
I said, “I mean, I’ll get to that. A running skirt would be great. But first I have to tell you about Miles.”
“Miles Harden?” she said.
“What? You know him?”
I practically started to shake.
“No,” she said, in a calm voice that by contrast made me sound hysterical. “I wouldn’t say I know him, but there’s a homeschooled guy named Miles Harden who wins nearly all the local races. Kyle talks about him—says he would be a great running back and could help our guys win the division championship if he enrolled here and was on track and cross-country. But I think a coach went to talk to him two years ago and he said thanks but no thanks.”
“That sounds like him,” I said.
Then I backpedaled and said, “Well, I don’t know him enough to know whether or not that is something he’d say, but it fits with my impression, which is that he’s cool and totally mature and polite and humble and smart and funny—”
“Alice!” Jenni said. “You like him!” And for the first time that day, she looked like herself again. She raised her hands and squealed, which scared Walter, who had been crawling around inside her purse. We looked over at the purse and it was like the belly of a pregnant woman when you can see the baby kick. He kept poking his head up and making the purse twitch and bulge.
“Walter,” I said, in my serious voice. “Walter!” I clapped my hands, which usually got his attention. But he had some kind of project going on in Jenni’s purse and wouldn’t come out. When he finally emerged, we saw what he’d been up to. He was carrying a Hershey’s with Almonds bar.
“Stop, thief!” I said, as he galloped to the bookcase, one of his favorite places to stash food. The top of my Collected Works of William Shakespeare was stained with bits of his collected treats.
“No, little dude,” I said, and dashed after him. “Not yours.”
The bar was heavy for him to carry in his mouth, and he had it by the middle so it extended far on either side of him. He tried to jump up to the top of the paperback books and kept falling back down. I went over and attempted to grab the candy bar from him, but he held on with his hands and his mouth and squeaked—which he rarely does—in protest. He wanted that chocolate.
“Oh, let him have it,” Jenni said. “I keep it for emergencies. Seems like he thinks this is one.”
“No, it’s too much for him,” I said, and tried to yank it loose. He didn’t let go and now I held a chocolate bar with a rat dangling from it. I grabbed him, and he used his hands to push me away.
It’s hard not to be impressed by so much determination in such a small body.
I opened the wrapper, which had distinctive Walter-holes in it, broke off a small piece, and gave it to him. He charged across the room and into the closet. He went behind the door where I wouldn’t be able to see him.
“So,” Jenni said. “Miles. You like him!” She smiled and I could see every single one of her small, perfect white teeth. Her tone of voice and that smile made me answer, “No I don’t,” and revert back to myself at the age when you could call “Not it” by putting your finger on your nose.
Jenni sighed and said, “Okay, you don’t like him. How about if I fill up the tub and you can tell me about how much you don’t like him while I soak?”
Mom bought all these perfumed, milled, flowered, gold-flecked, herb-infused bath soaps and ba
th oils and bath gels and bottles of bubbly things and all-natural sponges and weird plastic scrubbing brushes and left them on the tub for me, she said, but they were really for Jenni, who delighted in using them.
Often when Jenni came over she’d take a soak and I’d sit on the toilet or prop myself against the wall, and we’d talk until she started raisining—which is what we call it when your skin turns into a shriveled piece of dried fruit from being in the bath for too long. Walter liked to investigate the bubbles, and once I let him go for a swim. He pooped—just three little ones—and Jenni banned him from the tub forever.
“Tell me,” she said, submerged in apricot-scented foam.
I had gotten stuck in my head thinking about Miles, when Jenni splashed me with water.
“So are you going to see him again?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Because I didn’t.
7
The reason Jenni made such a big deal about Miles is that I didn’t have much history with boys. Or any history with boys.
This was bothersome, since I’d long ago decided I didn’t want to go to Yale with all those sophisticated kids without ever having had any history beyond, of course, watching every episode of Sex and the City—which I referred to as “educational programming.”
My closest boy encounter happened in eighth grade, with Sam Malouf, now my chief academic rival, when Jenni forced me to go with her to a school dance.
She made me let her put makeup on me. She curled my hair and insisted I wear this flirty dress with boots. When she finished getting me ready, I hardly recognized myself and thought, secretly, I looked good.
Which was nothing compared to what my mom thought. You should have heard her go on and on about how Jenni had brought out my eyes, how she’d really made them pop.
“Oh goody,” I said. “My eyes are popping. Just what I always wanted.”
Twenty seconds after we arrived in the disco-ball-transformed gym, Jenni got asked to dance, and asked again to dance, and I stood around by myself pretending to read the posters that said Kissing a Smoker Is like Licking an Ashtray and Go Wasps! and Wasp Football Schedule tacked up on the bulletin board. I felt silly in the dress and had to stop myself from rubbing my eyes so I didn’t turn into a panda.
And then, Sam Malouf asked me to dance.
I didn’t know how to dance and didn’t know how to say no, so I mumbled, “I guess,” and followed him to the edge of the dance floor. When the song started Sam said, “Oh, man, ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ This is one of the best songs of all time. I can’t believe they’re playing it. They never play it.”
He put his arms around my waist, and I had mine draped over his shoulders, and it was awkward because I was a lot taller than him, and our whole fronts touched, and I could smell his hair product and body wash, and the song, first just a guitar and it felt like one of those coffeehouse soft rock–folk things, then an instrument that sounded like a recorder—the kind of recorder I messed around on when I was little—came in, and Sam pressed close against me and pressed his hands against my back, his breath hot on my neck as he mouthed the words to the song and I tried to figure out what the lyrics were and what they meant and I thought I could feel his heart against my stomach, going like mad, and for a minute I wondered what it would be like if he kissed me because all around us couples were dancing and you could tell some of them were kissing even though they weren’t supposed to.
And then, boing! He had a woody and it was rubbing against my thigh. Thank god that song only starts out slow. When it got faster and people were rock-and-roll dancing I pulled away from him. Sam was embarrassed and I was embarrassed and we looked off in different directions for the forty-seven minutes it took for that song to be over and when it finally was I said, “Gotta go pee. Thanks.” And dashed off into the bathroom and sat and waited for Jenni for another hour or six.
A few weeks later, after I got Walter, I made the mistake of telling Sam Malouf about him. That was also the time it became clear I was better in math. Sam Malouf stopped being nice to me and started calling me Rat Girl.
And that was it. The first and last time I even got close to a boy.
Until I was running in the woods with Miles.
When my heart was beating through my chest and I couldn’t catch my breath, and I was listening to him talk about running and about those races that went on for days and I could smell his soap and my sweat and the woods had that musty melty beginning-of-spring dampness, I thought about kissing him.
I could not stop thinking about kissing him.
8
Each day when I went for a run, I looked for Miles and Potato.
I replayed the conversations we’d had and tried to think of witty, sassy things I could have said. Maybe if I’d washed my hair, or at least taken a shower that morning, or put on makeup (or had my mother or Jenni put makeup on me) or worn something other than Dad’s stupid sweatshirt and the tights that showed off my thunder thighs, he might have liked me.
As the days after the race passed, the moments of excitement disappeared, and instead I got stuck on my endless loop of rejectedness. I regretted being such a loud-mouth when I applied, telling everyone I would be going to Yale. Even though I knew the odds were against me, I never believed I wouldn’t get in.
Walter-the-Man was right. I didn’t have a good reason for choosing Yale, but still, being rejected sucked.
I had Googled the Theodore Roosevelt quote about failure that Walter-the-Man threw out at me. I printed it and hung it on my bathroom mirror, after making a minor correction for gender. It read:
It is not the critic who counts; not the person who points out how the strong person stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends herself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Each time I went into the bathroom, I reread that quote. My thoughts were kind of random. Like:
1. While blow-drying my hair one morning I realized I didn’t know great enthusiasms and great devotions other than wishing that my hair was naturally straight like Jenni’s.
2. It occurred to me I might turn out to be one of those timid souls who never know victory. This thought came when I popped a pimple on my nose that hurt like you would not believe. And then it kept bleeding.
3. I wondered if critics were worth anything. I mean, aren’t book reviewers and movie columnists useful? Was President Roosevelt even right about that?
4. When I came back from a run covered with sweat, I looked at the quote, and then looked at my face in the mirror and wondered where I could find some dust, and maybe some blood to add to the “marred” effect.
5. As I flossed bits of spinach from my teeth on a night when Dad had made spanakopita for dinner I wondered where you could even find the right arena to enter. Did it require an admission ticket?
6. Mostly I thought about failure. There were so many ways to fail. And old Teddy Roosevelt was saying that the main one came from not trying. It made me think that maybe, like the smart rats who knew to avoid poison, I was neophobic, afraid to try new things. And that maybe, for me, this was not a good thing.
9
Even though it was only the beginning of March, and prom wasn’t until May, Jenni had been obsessing about her dress. She came over to show me some sketches.
I said, “You’ve got two months. The Project Runway designers are lucky if they get two days.”
“While I appreciate your confidence in me, Al, you may have noticed I haven’t been selected to com
pete on Project Runway.”
“Yet. Because you haven’t applied. You are so much better than so many of them.”
“Tell me which of these you like.”
She put the black clothbound sketchbook Mom had gotten for her on the bed and flipped through the pages. Walter took that as an invitation: he likes to turn book pages. He put his nose underneath and pushed with his head.
“No!” Jenni said, scaring him so he stood completely still.
“Walter,” I said, in the low warning voice Dad sometimes used with me.
“Sorry,” she said to him. “I need you not to do that.”
He looked apologetic.
Then she said to me, “He’s a little skinny?” It was part statement and part question.
“No,” I said. “He’s perfect, as always.”
I scooped him up and put him on my shoulder. He licked his hands and rubbed them over his face. He gave my neck a few licks and settled down to nest under my hair.
The first dress was a gown, close fitted, a jewel-tone blue, strapless, with a high slit up one leg. It was chic and elegant. It looked like a Carolina Herrera, a designer worn by Blake Lively and Amy Adams and Olivia Munn. I only know this because when Jenni is reading my mom’s recycled People magazines, she points this stuff out to me.
The next few designs were more frilly than what I like—and than what looks good on Jenni, according to her. But she says it’s fun to make something with lots of elements.
“Could use some editing,” I said. Even though I don’t really get what that means, it’s something Tim Gunn says a lot.
“You’re right. Too much going on in these. Too many ideas.”
We came to the last one. It had a deep blue fitted bodice that went straight across, strapless. The bottom part was black, with a bow in the front that didn’t look too Glinda-the-Good-Witch, and it had a bit of ruffles, well, not ruffles, more like folds—pleats, they’re called pleats—and it flared out at the bottom.
“Jenni Jenni Jenni!” Sometimes, when I get excited, I repeat myself.