“Had she?”
“Had she what?”
“Seen Jessica with some old guy.”
“That’s not the point. I just mean, even if she had, why ruin Jessica’s life with it?”
“Why would that ruin Jessica’s life?”
“The guy was her dad.”
“Let me get this straight: Ginger saw Jessica Lambkin making out with her dad.”
“Jessica’s dad.”
“Her own dad. Jessica Lambkin was making out with the man who sired her.”
“What?”
“The guy whose sperm made her.”
“I know what sire means. Stop being so pretentious.”
“Jessica was French-kissing her own father?”
“That’s what Ginger Mews told everyone,” Sarah said.
“Wow. That’s really horrible.”
“And it wasn’t true. I mean, maybe they were kissing and hugging or something, but they couldn’t have been, you know, making out. But it was one of those stupid things—and once Ginger said it, everyone talked about it so much that whenever you saw Jessica, you were just like, ew. Even if you didn’t think it was true.”
“That’s really stupid. That whole story is just incredibly stupid. You do realize, don’t you, that this is why everyone thinks teenagers are idiots.” I stood and walked over to the trash can at the entrance to the cafeteria.
Goth Sarah followed me and stood there while I dumped my lunch out. “Actually, people think that because when you’re a teenager, your brain isn’t fully developed yet,” she said. “I saw it on PBS. They used to think your brain was, like, finished growing once you weren’t a little kid anymore, but then they realized that this part”—she tapped on her forehead—“right behind your forehead, where you control everything you do—that part isn’t ‘fully matured’ or whatever in teenagers.”
“What’s your point?” I asked. “That we are stupid?” I spat my gum out.
She laughed. “No. I mean, their point on PBS was that the forehead part is like the boss of your brain, and the older it gets, the better you are at judging what you shouldn’t do. Your brain is all exuberant when you’re young, but then it gets you know, adulted out with rules or whatever. Some kind of disgusting white film starts covering your brain as you get older, mummifying your thoughts.”
“ Really? Gross.”
“Not until you’re in your twenties,” Sarah said, grinning joyfully. “So we still have a while with our underdeveloped brains.” I loved Sarah’s fact hoard. She watched a lot of PBS, and more than once I had seen her reading science books in the library and hallways—ones that weren’t assigned.
But I couldn’t resist saying, “If that’s true, then isn’t it wrong to hold a grudge forever just because someone once said some stupid shit about you when you both had infant brains?” I asked.
“Touché!” Sarah said, but now the bell was ringing and she dashed down the hall because as usual she had to go hide her cell phone in her locker, and was going to be late.
Maybe Sarah was right that Ginger had done something bitchy to Jessica Lambkin, but even without the whole brain argument, can you really define a whole person by one cruel thing she does? I ignored her warning, of course, and Ginger came over that afternoon. When we got to my house, it was totally quiet; Sam was with my parents at the Grill, and Chad was living full-time at his dorm now, coming home only to do laundry or have dinner whenever he had nothing better to do. I poured us some raspberry pop in the kitchen, and then Ginger and I took it and some potato chips up to my bedroom, where we sat listening to Bob Dylan.
I wished I had torn down the white curtains with lavender flowers, or changed the matching bedspread to something cooler, although I didn’t know what that would have been. She poked around the room a bit when we first came in, looking at the pictures I had tacked to my bulletin board: me and Sam swimming at Silver Lake; my parents getting married in St. Louis, the arch visible behind them; Chad at his graduation from Huron High, still shaved bald from nationals; Meghan and me at the LPA conference the summer before, with Joel in between us, raising his eyebrows like, “I’m in a picture with two hot girls.”
“Who’s that guy?” Ginger asked, pointing at Joel.
I yawned. “Some guy I met at a conference last summer.”
“Did you fuck him?”
In spite of myself, I felt the blood rush to my head, and hoped it wasn’t visible. I tried to sound nonchalant.
“He wanted to,” I lied. “But I didn’t want to lose it to him.”
Ginger nodded, as if this was not only an appropriate response, but also the answer she knew she’d get. “Guys are pigs,” she said. She came over and lay down across my bed. Because it was low to the floor, she had to fall a long way down, and she looked oddly disproportionate. I shifted my weight in the purple beanbag chair I was sitting on, felt its millions of tiny pellets shift, pour, and regroup. I thought maybe the thing about pigs was something she had heard her mother say. It sounded like that, like something that hadn’t originated in Ginger’s mind or mouth.
Dylan was singing, “I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways.”
I debated whether to be like, “Yeah, I know, I know,” which would have been completely false but maybe cool and unawkward, or ask the real, genuinely curious, “What do you mean, pigs?” I settled on the latter.
“You know, they just use you.”
“For what?”
She laughed, as if I’d been joking. “Sex, of course,” she said.
“But don’t girls have sex because they want to, too?”
“Yeah. But we also want other things, and sex is all that guys want.”
I thought of Chad and Sam. Sam wanted salamanders, and Chad? Time with our dad, and swimming pools and footballs and, from what I could tell about him and his new U of M girlfriend, Alice, back-scratching. I couldn’t bring myself to agree with Ginger, even if it meant we’d never be friends. I stayed quiet.
“You should be careful,” she said.
“Careful of what?”
“Guys at Darcy.”
“Okay,” I said, turning away so she couldn’t see my expression. I was embarrassed, didn’t know what she was warning me of, exactly, but I didn’t like it.
“Hey,” she said. She swung her flamingo legs off my bed and found her purse on the floor where she’d tossed it. She opened the zipper. “You want?” She took something out of a ziplock bag and held it out to me. It was a tiny cigarette, all wrinkly and crazy-looking.
It took me a minute.
“Is that marijuana?”
She laughed. “Yeah,” she said.
I blushed again. “Sure.”
She fished around for a lighter.
“Um, Ginger, maybe we should go out back—I mean, my mom might not like it if she could smell it when she gets back.”
“Sure,” she said. All of a sudden, I wished Sarah were over instead of her. I didn’t have to pretend to be cool in front of Sarah. And I know it’s stupid, but I had never smoked pot, and I was a little worried about whether it would freak me out or make me paranoid or something.
We went out to my backyard, which is mostly trees; they back all the way up to Washtenaw. Chad and Sam and I used to think it was enormous, like acres and acres of land, when we were small. We got CB radios once for Christmas, and played with them for two hundred days in a row, calling to each other from across the backyard. A couple of times we even overheard truckers talking. Once, Chad strung a wire from the tallest tree to the shortest, and put a pulley on it, and we climbed the tree and held on to the pulley and slid down over and over until the pulley snapped while Sam was on it and he fell and broke his arm. I remember he got a red cast. Sam always got hurt. Whenever we roughhoused or went wild after dessert, our mom would be yelling, “Someone’s gonna get hurt! And it’s gonna be Sam.”
Walking out into the backyard with Ginger, I wished I were a little kid again, with Sam and Chad, our mom ye
lling from the deck, “Someone’s gonna get hurt!” I wondered if Chad had ever smoked pot. I guessed so, wished I had asked for advice so I could have been prepared for this. I mean, I had smoked cigarettes once with Meghan, sneaking off behind the hotel at an LPA conference. She had menthol ones and I kind of liked them. I hoped, as Ginger and I climbed the rope ladder into Chad’s old tree house, that the experience of smoking those would make it look like I wasn’t a total infant.
She climbed into the hole in the middle of the tree house floor; I was behind her on the ladder. As soon as my head popped up into the house, I saw the cobwebs and bugs that had taken over the floor. Ginger shuddered and moved herself over to a corner.
“Whatever,” I said, hoping to make her feel as stupid about being squeamish as I did about being inexperienced. I brushed some of the mess away down the hole, and she came out from the corner, where she had been squatting on her tiptoes. She took a lighter out of her pocket, sat down, lit the shriveled cigarette, and took a puff. She appeared to have filled her entire body up with smoke, because she got taller and taller as she inhaled, and held her breath for a long time before she blew out a thin stream of smoke and shrank back down to normal size. Then she handed me the thing. I had a vivid flash of how much better a time I’d be having if Molly and Goth Sarah had come over.
“Go ahead,” Ginger said. I tried to hold it expertly between my fingers, without burning myself. She leaned her head back against the wall of the tree house and I watched her smooth throat, then put the joint in my mouth too far, so it was more like eating it than smoking it. I breathed all the way into my lungs, almost slurping the whole thing right into my windpipe. I could feel something black and feathery shoot into my body, like a hot pile of raked leaves, burning down my throat and into my body. I hated it, began coughing, gagging, trying to get the taste and smell and feeling out of my lungs.
“Oh my god,” Ginger said, looking over at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I hacked out. “Totally good.” I stopped coughing finally, and waited to see what would happen. Maybe I would completely freak out and be unable to speak. I thought I might sit under the table in my parents’ dining room, or eat everything in the kitchen, or my eyes would turn red and veiny and I’d be a complete junkie.
Instead, I felt nothing.
“You want another toke?” Ginger asked.
I shook my head. “No, I’m good,” I said.
Ginger took a few more tokes and then we climbed down.
“Are you high?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” she said.
We walked through the backyard, and she started giggling, so I started to fake giggle, hoping that’s what you did, and she said, “So your brother’s friend called me.”
“Yeah? Santana?”
“ Uh-huh.”
“And?”
“We’re supposed to hang out this Friday night.”
“Wow. Really?”
She gave me a nonchalant look. “Yeah, I mean, he’s okay and everything, but honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, so I waited two days before I said I’d hang out.”
I couldn’t resist. “Because he’s forty and should get a girlfriend his own age?”
She shot me a sideways look. “I just don’t know if I like him. What about you?”
I deflected. “Did you and Santana hook up at the party?”
“Nothing major,” she said, and we hit another impasse. I had no idea whether Ginger and I agreed on what major meant—I mean, I had seen them making out in front of everyone. But I didn’t want to explore the terms. Mainly, I was relieved to know they’d hooked up at all, since that probably meant she hadn’t left with Kyle.
“Did you hook up with anyone?” she asked.
“Not at the party,” I said, blushing. “I was too busy hosting, I guess.”
We went upstairs to my room, and as I closed the door, I heard my mom’s car pull into the driveway, and Sam, pulling the empty garbage cans up the driveway. I climbed onto my little stool to look out the window.
“My mom’s home,” I told Ginger.
She looked at her watch. “Wow,” she said, “she gets home early. My mom works till like nine or ten every night.”
“My dad’s doing dinner at the Grill tonight because Sam had something he had to go to. Do you want to stay for dinner?”
“If it’s okay with your mom,” she said. She giggled again. “I’m hungry!”
I guessed that this must be related to the smoking, so I said, “Yeah, me too!” and she gave me a knowing look, like we had a secret together, and I was glad we’d done it, even though it had sucked and had no effect on me at all. Maybe I was impervious to pot, I thought, maybe it doesn’t work on little people. Then there were keys in the door, shoes in the hallway, voices pouring up the stairs.
“Judy? You home, sweetie?”
I tried to smell my hair and clothes, to see if they smelled like pot, without Ginger noticing. I took a pack of Eclipse out of my pocket and frantically chewed several pieces.
“Don’t worry,” Ginger said. “There’s no way she’ll notice. I mean, it was only one hit and we were outside for a long time after.”
Sam came bounding up the stairs to my room, his coat still on.
“Judy! Do you want to see it?” he shouted to me, pushing the door open. “Oh!” he said when he saw Ginger. He shrank back like a tiny weed. “Sorry, I didn’t know—”
“That’s okay, Sam. Come in—this is Ginger.”
He looked down at the floor, nodding so that his straight hair flopped over his eyes. I could tell he found Ginger pretty, and that this unnerved him. The truth is, Ginger might be the prettiest person I’ve ever met, and either she doesn’t try or she tries so hard that it makes it look like she didn’t even have to try. I mean, she wears almost no makeup, had the kind of skin so clear you can basically see through it to her veins, floppy blond hair, and all small features except for her lips, which are so puffy that they look like some kind of sea monster attacked her and sucked on them until they swelled up. Well, that’s not an attractive way to put it, but the point is, her lips are huge and everyone wants to kiss them because they present themselves so assertively. The result is that Ginger looks like a commercial for whatever she happens to be doing or eating or holding. Now she was selling my bed, sprawled across it like a giant when Sam came in.
“You can show both of us,” Ginger said. She propped herself up on her elbows.
“Show us what?” I asked.
“Whatever you were going to show Judy,” she said to Sam.
I liked her for saying this to him, rather than answering me. It seemed respectful, made Sam feel dignified.
“Oh, that,” he said. “It was just a move.”
He looked up, and I was amazed and alarmed to see that he did, in fact, want to show Ginger and me his “move.”
“Go for it, Sam—show us,” I said.
He took his coat the rest of the way off, revealing a Kanye West T-shirt so absurd and big and aspirational on him that I wanted to wrap him up and protect him from whatever Ginger was about to think. But she was smiling.
Sam began jogging in place and then threw himself down on the rug in my room and tried to spin himself up into a headstand of some sort. It didn’t work out very well, but, perhaps in an effort to save face, he vaulted himself from a triangle kind of yoga pose into a regular headstand and then came crashing down, leapt up, and did some more jogging. I applauded.
He stood there, blushing.
“It doesn’t really work on the carpet,” he said, picking up his jacket.
“No, no,” I said. “We could tell it would be great on a real floor. Very impressive.” But he was looking at Ginger, who had a huge smile on her face.
“That was great,” she said. “You’ll be breaking on stages across America, no doubt. You should audition for So You Think You Can Dance. Or at least go out for D’Arts.” She used a very serious voice
to say this. Sam regarded her for a moment, trying to tell whether she might be mocking him and deciding, from her unblinking performance, that she was not.
At dinner, my mom watched Ginger carefully, with an interest I couldn’t place. She asked lots of polite questions about Darcy, some less polite ones about Ginger’s parents, who, it turned out, were divorced, both remarried, her mom redivorced and her dad living in Texas with a young wife Ginger said she hated. I was totally shocked, had assumed Ginger had an absolute picket fence around some perfect family in a white house. My mom, although not surprised, was also not impressed, and when Ginger left after dessert and a bit of lingering, my mom put on a flat voice that sounded like she was helping me run lines: “It was nice to meet her.”
Then she waited for what she thought was long enough before she asked, “When is Sarah coming over again? Do you two have any plans?”
Adults are so obvious. It’s weird that the teenage brain is considered underdeveloped. Maybe the more we develop the less capable we are of hiding our mostly pathetic motives. Or maybe we just give up, stop trying.
“No,” I finally said. And went up to my room, listened at the vent to see if my mom would tell my dad what I knew she thought of Ginger, that she was a bad influence on me, or that I had “fallen in with a bad crowd.” I was so sick of the idea of being careful. My plan was to feel thrilled about having smoked pot. But instead all I heard was my mom and dad bickering about Christmas and who was staying in what room when everyone visited and whether some people should stay in a hotel and whether Chad would want to come home or stay in his dorm over the holiday. My mom was furious that my dad wasn’t helping figure everything out in advance without being nagged to; my dad was annoyed that she was nagging him. He never thought planning or setting anything up was a big deal. Of course he didn’t have to do the planning or setting up, and maybe that was why. Or maybe if she had nagged him less, he would have taken more initiative.
Listening to them, all I could think was, “Can I please keep my exuberant brain forever?”
7 I was so nervous the night of the senior voice concert that I couldn’t stop asking Chad if teenagers could have heart attacks. My pulse was like 210, pounding in my neck like an alien trying to escape. Chad said teenagers never die of heart attacks.
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