by Meg Wolitzer
“You guys,” Dory said in class on this day, “are keeping yourselves from a powerful reading experience. You have very little to say about the book we just read by Stephen Crane, who was so talented and died tragically young of tuberculosis. That alone should interest you. Yet I am certain you will have tons to say to one another tonight when you get home.”
“That’s not fair, Ms. L,” Jeremy Stegner said, and Dory thought that he was right; it wasn’t fair, she knew that, and she’d been speaking in a hectoring voice. But before she could say anything more, the fire alarm rang, and they all headed outside into the frozen morning, coatless. Dory saw Leanne usher a group of kids to their assigned part of the athletic field. The kids were lively, playful, taking this opportunity to stretch and preen and get a little exercise, forming packs and then breaking off into little clusters. Anything was possible for them; you could see this even at a casual glance during a fire drill. Leanne looked young and exotic, wrapped in some gold-threaded blouse that only she could “get away with,” as people said. The principal, Dory saw, kept glancing in her direction.
Bev Cutler, over by the side, so overweight, stood with her hands pushed deep into her skirt pockets, as if about to scatter seed for birds. Though she was an experienced guidance counselor and in charge of helping the kids plan their futures, it seemed, increasingly, as if she was lost inside her swollen self.
Then, up ahead, Dory saw Robby surrounded by kids, as he always was, especially boys. He caught sight of his wife and waved, smiled, then returned to what he’d been saying to them. He liked holding court, making little speeches to small groups of kids, who always liked to listen. By a frozen tree, out of the side of her vision, Dory noticed one of the school’s teenaged couples shivering and taking solace in their own embrace. Without really looking, she assumed it was Chloe Vincent and Max Holleran, eleventh-graders who, as the entire school knew, had been involved for years. The boy wrapped the girl into himself to keep her warm, and her head was ducked against him. Dory saw, from a distance, the way their breath sifted into the air, and also the flowering of the girl’s golden red hair against the dark field of the boy’s maroon sweater.
Immediately she felt multiple, clarifying shocks: first, that it was Willa, then, that it was someone with Willa in a somewhat sexual state. And then, of course, that it was Eli Heller, the boy Willa barely ever seemed to acknowledge.
Dory was now hot-faced in the cold. She turned to motion to Robby, as if to say, Look. But he had been spirited away. She stood alone beside the school and the emptying field, until one of her students came over and said, “Ms. L, everyone’s going in.”
Later, still agitated and still not even exactly aware of why, she went downstairs to Leanne’s office, two doors down from the pool. LEANNE BANNERJEE, PH.D., read the metal sign on her door. Chlorine congested the little room; distantly, there were splashes and whistles, as teenagers pushed their seal-selves through water. Leanne had a stack of student folders on her lap with color-coded stickers on them. One folder was peppered with the full spectrum of stickers, foretelling a life of specialists and trouble. Dory Lang sat in the chair where the students usually sat, and Leanne leaned forward in her own chair, beneath a poster of a girl cutting herself.
“What’s the deal?” Leanne asked.
“It’s Willa. I saw her with Eli during the fire drill. They were intertwined, let’s call it.”
“Oh,” said Leanne after a second. “Okay.”
“You don’t seem very surprised.” Then Dory added, “Wait. Leanne, you knew?”
The school psychologist pushed back in her chair, as if wanting to escape from her good friend, but there was nowhere for her to go, and she backed into her desk. “I thought you knew too, Dory,” she said. “I just thought you hadn’t mentioned it to me.”
“Well, no, I didn’t know,” Dory said. “Not at all.”
“I knew pretty much immediately.”
“You did?”
“Sure,” said Leanne. “I spend so much time in here telling kids that I know their attractions are completely thrilling. Then, after we get that out of the way, I remind them that they don’t want to screw up their lives like that teenage couple from Elro did a few years ago—the one everybody talks about, who had that baby named Trivet, right? I’m always sitting here, making these deadpan, supposedly nonjudgmental statements like, ‘Oh yes, Jen, it’s very interesting to me that you think blow jobs don’t count as sex. Now how did you reach that conclusion?’ ”
“Jen? Heplauer?” Dory asked.
“I didn’t say that. And they confess things to me that they can barely handle. A ninth-grade girl came into my office the other day and said, ‘I am totally turned on by my best friend, and she’d die if she knew.’ Another kid said he’s been using J Juice every weekend, you know that drug? It’s all over the place. I wouldn’t want to be them for anything. I tell them I understand. That when I was in high school, there were times when I just got so lost in my own problems and couldn’t find anything peaceful to think about. When it all seemed so ugly and hateful and pointless. I tell them how my parents only wanted me to marry a nice Indian boy. At night I’d come home from being with a secret boy who my parents would never have approved of, and I’d be filled with feeling, and I’d go past the living room where they were watching TV and balancing the checkbook. And there would be these atrocities on the news, and I’d feel everything so strongly—the good and the bad—and I was overwhelmed.”
“I’m sorry, Leanne,” Dory broke in, “but I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“I worry about these kids, Dory,” Leanne said. “They are like little baby birds. But if I had a daughter like Willa, who was having her first relationship with someone like Eli, I think I’d feel that I’d done something right. I think I would feel happy.” Both women took a moment to note, tacitly, that Dory did not feel happy. “You’ve got Robby,” Leanne said, “and you’ve both figured out how to be. How to be with just one person. So let Willa have someone too, if she wants that. She’s entitled.”
That night, Dory decided to call Fran and tell her the news. As soon as she began to talk, she could hear that her own voice sounded slightly feverish. “Are you alone?” she asked the drama teacher.
“Of course,” Fran said. “Eli is in his room with the door closed. Story of my life.”
“He’s probably talking to Willa. They’re probably on Farrest together. Listen, Fran,” Dory said. “I bring news from the front. Our kids seem to have developed a special thing between them.”
“Excuse me?”
“They’re involved.”
“What are you talking about, Dory?”
“They’re seeing each other. Boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Fran was silent. “Well, I’m surprised,” she finally said. “I’ve been so busy with the new job that I feel kind of blindsided.” Both women agreed that this was definitely a new stage of life, and then they quickly said goodnight.
Dory had always assumed that when her daughter had a boyfriend, she would confide in her about him. After all, teenagers easily told one another everything. They didn’t have to be force-fed truth serum in order to talk. Maybe a mother could be given a little information once in a while. One evening, when Dory and Willa were alone in the den and the TV was on, Dory managed to say, “I know this is awkward. But you and Eli, if this is relevant—and you don’t have to tell me if it is—I just want to say that I hope you’re protecting yourself. There’s nothing more important.”
Their bare feet were up on the coffee table, and Dory noticed that each of Willa’s toes was painted a slightly different shade; she pictured Eli’s big hand holding a miniature brush, dipping and re-dipping in five different bottles. Willa had finished her homework for the night, and Dory had finished all her grading. Robby was already asleep in his New Deal T-shirt. It was a school night, and all of them were a little knocked out by life, but there were so few times when Dory was alone with her daug
hter anymore, and she wanted them to talk.
Willa just kept watching the screen, and then she said, “Oh God, Mom. You are seriously going to make us have this conversation?”
“You know I can’t make you do anything.”
Willa sighed, aggrieved, then seemed to consider her options. “Without getting into details about my own life,” she finally said, “yes, I do know all about how to ‘protect’ myself. Without you,” she added, stingingly. Then the commercial ended and the TV show came back on, and Willa turned her head back into profile on the couch. That face, the expressive mouth with the teeth slightly pushing through, suggesting their presence even when her lips were closed, wasn’t for her mother any longer.
Dory Lang watched Eli and Willa every day from a distance. In the school hallway she would see a mess of long dark boy-hair and slightly shorter red girl-hair, and sometimes it would suddenly split apart as she or Robby or Fran came down the hall.
“Leave them alone,” Leanne advised when Dory came back downstairs to her office a second time. A ninth-grade girl had just left, sniffling into her bare hand. The one attracted to her friend? Dory wondered. The tiny room felt surprisingly enveloping, and the English teacher looked up to the school psychologist soupily, much the way some of the students did, and she felt just as confused and helpless as any of them. “Let them figure it out,” said Leanne. “If Willa needs something, she’ll ask. You and Robby have been good role models when it comes to all of this. But it’s not about you now. It’s about them.”
5.
The spell would eventually claim Willa Lang that winter, though first, late that fall, she was obviously under a very different spell, and so was Eli Heller, who had stopped talking to Robby about books. Instead, now, Eli only wanted to talk to Willa. In the beginning, when the two of them were alone, he kept returning to one particular topic. “Is there any way you would ever consider taking your shirt off for me?” he asked her. “Any way I could see you like that?”
“You are getting repetitive,” she would say, but she didn’t mind. No one had ever spoken this way to her in her life; no one. “Don’t you have any other interests at all?” she asked. “Maybe a team sport?”
“No,” Eli said, smiling. “Absolutely none.”
Early on, the two of them would occasionally go somewhere and toss the topic around like two philosophers discussing the nature of being. They both considered themselves sexually delayed, at least by the standards of most people around them. Both of them were innocent, their mouths having not yet opened onto the hot surprise of any other mouths, their bodies still unfolded and unrevealed. One day, after they had had several conventional conversations about school, and their parents, and the music they each liked (The Lungs, The Simultaneous Urges), he lightly and teasingly began the first conversation about shirt removal, which had made Willa Lang swallow in shock, then quickly recover. After that, the conversation picked up ad hoc whenever it could. Eli spoke plaintively of his desire to see her with her shirt off, “as a start.”
“I just think it would be amazing,” he said as they sat on a closed dumpster behind the school one windless, early November afternoon. “A rare occurrence. Like seeing an eclipse.”
“Yes, it would be amazing for you,” she said.
“Maybe there would be something in it for you as well.” They were sitting side by side on the rough metal surface; they didn’t know it yet, but both of them would be marked by where they sat, the asses of their jeans rust- and dust-covered. Both of their mothers, doing laundry in a day or two, would say, “Wait, what’s this?” slapping at the denim with a hard hand and seeing orange clouds fly off. Their mothers would have no idea whatsoever. Later on they would—after the fire drill, everyone knew—but not yet. This was still early days, when everything remained for the time being delectable and hidden.
Willa sat with him and tried to figure out how she was supposed to be, how she was meant to talk, and whether she was supposed to laugh a lot, or just listen with a grave expression when he spoke. She knew nothing about what you were meant to do with a boy. Marissa Clayborn, of course, knew everything; Marissa was experienced, having lost her virginity at age fifteen to a boy named Ralph Devereux, the son of family friends from another town. Though quite a few girls in the tenth grade at Elro were no longer virgins either—soccer-playing girls; girls who hung around the art room; members of the pep squad—Marissa was the only one among their circle of girls who had really had significant experience. Both Lucys and Carrie Petito had all “done things,” as they put it, but the things they had done had involved hands roaming among body parts, even southern body parts, though it had gone no further than that. Mouths did not come into the picture, except to kiss and be kissed; condoms were not required. Marissa had been so calm and sophisticated about her significant sexual experiences: catlike, sphinxlike, impressively mature. Willa knew that she herself would never be able to simply accept sex as her birthright the way Marissa had done. For a long time Willa Lang hadn’t even been able to imagine wanting to sleep with someone someday—but now, since she had met Eli, she imagined it all the time.
He wasn’t good-looking, but she still often pictured his hand accidentally bumping against the side of her breast. “Whoops,” he’d say, pulling away, but the hand would leave a thousand reverberations. Once, thinking about it in her bedroom, Willa Lang let out an actual, tiny scream. She wanted to text her friends to say: “guess what? i understand finally.” Willa was a slow study, but she was, apparently, a study. The fact that Eli, too, had had no experience was part of his appeal.
“I never had a girlfriend,” he said now as they sat together. “Back at Cobalt, anyone who wasn’t a jock might as well commit seppuku. The girls were jocks too. Soccer was the big thing. I just kept to myself a lot, and I assumed I’d keep doing that when we moved here too, but as you can see, it hasn’t turned out that way.”
Did this mean he thought she was his girlfriend? Willa really couldn’t say.
“It’s sort of interesting, the way you get to know someone,” Eli went on. “The way, at first, you think they’re one thing, but they turn out to be another. Want to know when you started to change, in my mind?”
“Okay,” Willa said, and she waited.
“It was when you put on The Lungs that night in your room, and we sat there.” She recalled sitting with him, the aching music between them. He’d closed his eyes when he listened, and she’d noticed the length of his eyelashes, and briefly imagined taking a tape measure to them. The song had gone on and on, while distantly, from downstairs, came the sound of their three parents, laughing. “And then I wondered about you,” Eli said. “And later on, your dad said I could come over and talk about books. And whenever I came to your house to see him, there you would be. Just walking around in your flip-flops. I’d hear this thup-thup-thup in the background. Your dad’s great, by the way. Everyone at school says so.”
“Thanks. He is a good guy,” Willa agreed. They sat in quiet celebration of her father and his decency.
“And your mom too,” he added.
“And yours,” she said politely.
“Oh, my mom’s sort of tough,” Eli said. “But she’s passionate about things. She loses it sometimes, but my dad is always amused by her. It’s pretty funny to see them in action.”
“Is it weird not living with him?”
“I’ll live with him in Michigan this summer. I always do.” Eli shrugged. “It’s the peculiar Heller way of doing things, I guess. I got used to it a long time ago.”
The day was mild, the parking lot at the school had emptied, and Willa’s parents and Eli’s mother had all gone home. They watched as some stragglers left, including Paige Straub and Dylan Maleska, the inseparable jockish couple. Paige and Dylan marched together away from the school with matching backpacks on their backs. They stopped at the curb and made out for a few seconds, then continued to walk home. Willa needed Eli to kiss her right then, so she could know what it meant to be
kissed by someone very nice with soft lips and a moving tongue, so she could have that knowledge and then have more. She’d spent her whole life without the kiss of any boy, and she’d never really minded, even as her friends were introduced, one by one, to some of the rituals.
Since Willa had started to know Eli, she realized that until this moment she had always been a little bit bored. Stellar Plains was supposed to be such a great place, but Willa knew otherwise. Where were you supposed to go in this town, exactly? On Friday nights Elro put together an event they called “Just Chillin’.” People sat around in the cafeteria; a couple of boys stood by the panini-maker and played “Freebird” on their electric guitars. A girl no one liked wore mime makeup and juggled oranges while reciting the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. A few teachers, on chaperone duty, stood at the side of the room and looked around at the whole, dismal scene. “Sad, sad, sad,” Mr. Boyd was overheard whispering to Mr. di Canzio.
Equally sad was Greens and Grains, Willa thought, which, when it opened a year earlier, all the moms raved about as if it were an amusement park or a sex club that had set up shop in town. The leafy, rooty vegetables you could buy there all tasted the same when brought home and steamed. As the leaves wilted inside the microwave, the smell released was like a rotting forest that Willa would never want to visit. She imagined this forest as being far different from the green and layered world of Farrest, which she and Eli traveled to sometimes at night from their separate laptops in their separate houses.
Meeting up on Farrest, they’d already touched lightly a few times, his handsome centaur head bumping against the neck of her shrouded ninja. His skin looked furred, both in Farrest and in life, she saw now in the school parking lot when he turned his head a little. Men had fur. She saw Eli each day in the hallway between classes, and he was always by himself. She, of course, was generally with Marissa or Carrie or one of the two Lucys, and she supposed she could have drawn him into their group; but then her friends would have gotten to know him too, and instinctively she didn’t want this to happen.