by Johi Jenkins
“Oh, you intervened and what, now you’re my hero? Thanks for being human. For keeping people from committing…. This disgusts me.”
“Why were you in there to begin with? Why were you alone?” He stops her cold.
Margarette’s head drops, sad and furious at the same time. “Because I have no fricking friends, okay? I thought I did, but I know no one. No one I can trust or respect on this earth.”
“I’m sorry.”
She starts crying. “I hate this place. I think anywhere would be better than here.”
“Look…. Nothing happened. I don’t think they did anything.”
“I know that,” she says. “Lord I know that, but it happened to take something from me. I feel…. Forgive me for being vulnerable, for feeling empty and betrayed in front of you. At this point I don’t even care what you think of me. I’ve embarrassed myself completely…. I want to go home. All I want is for all of this to end.”
“Look… you’re lucky nothing happened.”
“Lucky?”
“You are…. Lucky that I found you.” His head rocks forward and he smiles at her.
Her voice turns placating. “Sure. I’m lucky. You think I owe you something?” Her tone goes flat.
“Owe? You don’t owe me anything.”
“You say that, but what you’ve shown me… the things you say…. You can’t seriously expect anything from me.”
“I said I don’t.”
The door opens on an awkward silence and May stands still in the doorway. Margarette turns away and is forced to look back at Tommy. She closes her eyes tight and the saltine water wells at the edges of her eyelids and rolls down her cheeks. May walks in and Margarette shows her only her shoulder.
Tommy sighs and sits at a chair in a corner, and puts his hands between his knees. He doesn’t know what he did wrong, but he sits like a dunce in the corner.
“Is everything okay?” May asks. “Tommy…?”
“Yeah. It’s fine,” he says.
“Good. Well, come with me,” she says. It is more than a subtle suggestion. It is an order.
She leads them down a wooden staircase to the kitchen. Margarette then remembers Tommy carrying her up the night before. She feels so empty that her own chest threatens to collapse. Why doesn’t she ever know when to shut up? She feels like she ruined her chances with him.
May starts with simple yet frustrating small talk about school, asking Margarette who she knows. The toast is dry and the butter isn’t really butter. The conversation is less fulfilling than the meal.
Afterwards Margarette says, “Thank you for breakfast.”
“Leaving so soon?” May asks.
“Leave her alone,” Tommy warns his sister.
“Sorry. I need to get home,” Margarette says.
“There’s no need to say anything,” Tommy says.
The ride is mostly silent except for Margarette giving Tommy directions to her house. As they approach her street she quickly changes her mind and alters course. She asks him to drop her off at the Snappy Snack Shack convenience store where she sometimes gets groceries with money that she finds in her mother’s jeans when she does the laundry. He offers to drive her home and help her with the bags, but she assures him that she only needs two things and her house is not far. She waves goodbye as he drives away, but the second he’s out of sight she turns around and walks home.
She lied—she just couldn’t imagine taking him to her house. There’s only a small chance that her mother will be awake when she gets home, but Margarette didn’t want to risk a confrontation in front of Tommy. Why? She asks herself. Then she rolls her eyes in self-reply as she realizes what worries her. Her situation in life and Tommy’s opinion of her suddenly matter to her. What would he think if he met her mother? She’d be so embarrassed.
In the end all her efforts were unnecessary; her mother is still sleeping when Margarette returns home. She smiles to herself thinking that sometimes having a negligent mother pays off. Aside from Tommy and his sister, no one else would ever know that Margarette did not spend the night at her own house.
But what she doesn’t realize is that it doesn’t matter what anyone really knows. It’s what they think they know what gets repeated around. Around and around, maliciously, without a care for the lives it may destroy.
And in the smallest of small dirt towns everyone thinks they know what happened to Margarette. Yet most of them didn’t even know her name until that night.
Margarette is completely oblivious of the words that are exchanged by half the school population that weekend, the many stories that each additional phone call spurs. She only looks forward to school being over in a few weeks—because, again, she finds herself without friends. She cannot forgive Alice and Julie, but in three weeks she won’t have to see them again. And whatever fool she made out of herself after they poisoned her, in three weeks all would be forgotten. Most people had the attention span of a gnat.
She had a knack for being entirely wrong almost all the time.
Chapter 5. Following
Margarette walks with the midday sun in her eyes toward the lunch table outside the school lunchroom. Her ex-friends aren’t there yet; she sits at her usual spot. It’s Monday, and she didn’t hear from them all weekend. She looks up and catches glances of people looking away, as if they had been staring at her while her eyes were elsewhere. Or it could just be your imagination, she thinks.
She drinks cold coffee through a straw that she smuggled in from home and tries not to seem paranoid. Drinking coffee through a straw, room-temperature or otherwise, is an old habit of hers. She started doing it because she heard it protects teeth from staining, but now it isn’t clear whether she does it to protect her teeth or if it’s just that she likes it when the boys notice her sucking through a straw. But now she wonders whether people are staring at her because she looks weird drinking coffee through a straw. No. It’s not that weird.
But when she looks up again, at an entirely different group of students, she catches them intently staring at her. They refuse to break eye contact even when she looks their way for a few seconds then looks back. It’s unnerving; she feels her cheeks flush as she quivers in the sun.
After a while the second bell rings. The other girls never showed, so Margarette decides to go looking for them to confront them. She stands up and gathers her things and walks back inside, towards the lunchroom.
As she approaches the double doors to the main hallway she looks up and two girls with similar pink headbands are staring at her. They flinch almost at the same time as Margarette narrows her eyes at them. They are whispering to each other but it’s obvious they are talking about her.
The first girl whispers, “Is that her?”
The second headband twin smiles and then whispers something back, bringing her hand over her mouth to make double sure Margarette doesn’t hear it.
“What?” Margarette snaps.
The grinning girl drops her hand along with the grin. “Oh, don’t worry about my friend here…” she mutters. “She’s in drama club.”
Margarette looks away at some girl who has Alice’s haircut, thinking it is her missing ex-friend. But after a second the girl turns her head and it’s not Alice. Disappointed, Margarette turns back to yell some more at the girls, but they have already walked away. She only sees their backs and hears their shameless giggles as they walk off.
At that moment she wishes more than anything that she had the power to destroy with her mind. But she mutters in a stoic self-reflection as if invoking a simple curse. “I never get what I want….” Nothing she ever dreamed of came true.
As she walks inside, one of the boys that had been watching her from an overhang, a bent book in his hand, starts following her.
Margarette knows Paulie as a nice guy with an unfortunate kid brother nickname. Paulie. He’s a year younger than Margarette, a junior. Everyone likes his older brother Luke more than him, even though Luke graduated the previous year;
a sort of notoriety that works against him. Plus, his mom works at the school. At least she does mostly clerical work and is not a lunch lady. Paulie catches the door as it shuts behind Margarette and steps lightly in pace with her as she walks through the hall.
Margarette sticks her head around the corner of the hallway and walks to an empty spot by the stairs. A few girls point at her but she doesn’t notice.
Then she hears a throaty cough echo in the empty hallway, and follows the sound with her eyes. She sees Alice and Julie hiding just inside the open doors to the empty gym. Really hiding; it is a place where they don’t usually go. A hush descends as they see her approach. Both girls have their arms crossed, so she crosses hers as well when she stops in front of them. They go on either side of her and look up and down her worn uniform.
On her left, Alice says, “So I hear you’ve been naughty, Margarette.”
On her right, with a twang, Julie answers, “I’d say slutty.”
Margarette says sharply, “Let’s get this straight. If you hadn’t left me… alone… nothing would have happened.”
“I can’t believe you went home with him,” Alice says, and sounds angry.
“She probably did it with all of them,” Julie says in. “Half the football team got laid.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Margarette makes an irritated face. “No one touched me.”
“He didn’t?” Asks Alice.
“That’s not what I heard,” says Julie. “In fact that’s not what anyone’s heard. It’s… all over.”
“No one believes you,” Margarette says.
“Me? People said it. I didn’t have to say shit,” Julie says.
Margarette sneers. “All you say is shit.”
Julie raises her arm and points at her. “You stupid whore.”
“Oh, shut up. Give it a week and everyone will be thinking about the next little scandal. No one cares.”
Alice’s voice booms near Margarette’s ear. “You really didn’t sleep with him?”
Margarette turns to her left and faces a scowling Alice. “Him who? Who even told you that? I didn’t sleep with anyone.”
Alice’s frown relaxes. “I should have known. Tommy would never sleep with you. Don’t go trying to sleep with him. You hear me?”
Margarette’s eyes soften, offended. So everyone thinks she did it with Tommy because he took her, drugged, out of the party. But the real reason it hurts is that Alice thinks that she isn’t good enough for a guy like him. Her hurt quickly turns to anger. “Why not?” she asks sharply.
Alice doesn’t meet her eyes. “Just don’t, okay?”
Margarette’s anger plays out in her imagination as Alice walks past her and exits the gym. When Margarette turns back to Julie, the bitchy girl has her mouth open as if giving an invisible blow job. Julie’s expression changes, surprised by Margarette’s shift to an amused grin; she scoffs and walks off following Alice.
Margarette continues to smile, thinking of the ghost oral. Then she remembers Alice and her smile falters. It felt like Alice was judging her, cheapening her. Why not Tommy? Her palm slides up and down her arm. She feels exposed and vulnerable with no one to talk to.
“What the frick?” Margarette asks out loud, replying to her internal debate. “How dare she?”
In that moment nothing means more to her than proving them wrong. Showing Alice that she can do anything she wants becomes as important as oxygen. Two days ago she wouldn’t have thought she had a shot with Tommy. Even if he flirted she didn’t think she would do it. She was terrified that he would hold her close and whisper that she wasn’t good enough for him. That would crush her. She’d screw up and cry alone, wanting to die of embarrassment.
Those feelings fade from her mind as her numb body manufactures anger and focuses on the two girls telling her what she can’t do. Nothing on earth would ever stop her from trying to prove them wrong.
Prove them wrong.
She barely exits the gym when down the hall Julie’s voice echoes faintly back to her. “Let’s figure out a way to pay that bitch back.”
Margarette grits her teeth and her jawbone buckles under the crushing weight of her fierce expression. Her fingernails dig into her crossed arms. As they uncross her nails leave a mark on her skin.
The stars and moons shift their orbit to avoid this one girl’s path. She internalizes her argument that no woman would ever tell her what to do, when suddenly an image of her mother holding a burning smoke and a cocktail at noon flashes before her eyes. Margarette’s mother always called her Little Margarita… apparently a reference to a desperate pool boy her mother had made love to. What woman can control her now, now that she’s basically alone? No man or woman, nor I, own their own destiny, she thinks, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept what other people tell me I can or can’t do. Doing nothing wouldn’t change a thing. She might as well do something.
Still gritting her teeth, she murmurs, “No one tells me what to do.”
“Were you talking to me?” asks a voice behind her.
Margarette turns around and faces Paulie Sharp hanging out outside the gym. She realizes he must have been standing there through most of the discussion with Alice and Julie.
“Of course not,” she answers curtly, and walks away with a quick strut.
“Wait,” he calls behind her. “What are you… what are you doing?”
He’s taller than she is, so he catches up with her fast. He grabs her by the wrist as she turns into the ladies’ locker room. “Wait,” he presses.
Margarette doesn’t wait and breaks his grasp on her wrist. She enters the locker room and presses her back against the wall. She wants so much to go home. To get some random fatal disease and get a pass from school to leave. But fatal diseases only show up when you don’t want them.
***
The day passes until the end of gym class where she tries to blend in. Inside the women’s shower room each girl wears a swimsuit under their gym outfit, but Margarette wears shorts and a worn sports bra as a top. She hates being poor; she always feels awkward at gym.
But today all she can think about is the best way to get to Tommy and prove Alice and Julie wrong. The idea is a newly forming obsession. She turns the cold water most of the way down and pulls her hair up, letting the hot water run over her shoulders.
What’s the best way to a man? She wonders. How can she get to his heart? Perhaps she could reach under his ribs and rip it out. She smiles thinking about the heart wet in her hands pulsating the rhythm of his beat. Realizing she is holding a frothing bar of soap, her head goes under the hot water again. If she had gone home earlier she wouldn’t have to think about this. She doesn’t feel safe at school. She feels alone. She can pretend not to notice and disappear into her old life. For a moment the idea of escaping is indeed exciting, but she forces those feelings down deep into her chest.
The last two girls walk out the shower and Margarette can hear them giggling in the locker room. She turns off the water; she is now really alone. The drip of the faucet echoes in the emptiness she feels inside.
Drip drip drip.
Margarette is wearing black panties under her pair of gray soaked short shorts and sports bra. They are both wet enough that anyone could see right through them. She looks around, but all the towels are gone, and so are her clothes. Panicking, covering herself with her hands, she tiptoes to her locker. But when she gets there she has to do a double take.
No. It can’t be. Someone replaced her purple combination lock with a metal one. A lump in her stomach grows into a sharp pain. She gulps as the last bell rings. All day all she wanted was to go home; and now, leaving school looks to be much more difficult than ever. Who the hell took her clothes?
Margarette doesn’t know, but Paulie is watching through a sliver of a gap between the main doors. If she had seen him she would have shouted, “You pervert!” and slapped him across the face. And he would have deserved it because indeed he was being one. But she do
esn’t know he is there.
She searches the empty white tiled room and wire cage gym area, hearing the football team filing into the room next to her. Margarette stands behind the common door to the guys’ locker room waiting for a miracle. For her clothes to appear. Anything.
Her eye catches something blue at the bottom of a large plastic hamper a few feet away from her. The container sits in front of the closed door of the laundry room, and her heart starts hammering in her chest as she approaches it. And there it is: a two-piece cobalt blue cheerleading uniform discarded carelessly at the bottom of the otherwise empty hamper.
“Thank you,” she whispers to whoever answered her prayer.
Margarette picks up the blue pieces. She brings them to her nose and sniffs, expecting a nasty smell but ready to wear it anyway. Yet the fabric smells like laundry detergent, as if it had been tossed there clean. She further inspects the outfit. A terrible and treacherous thing to wear; the size is one off and very tiny, but she would squeeze in just about anything right now, even if she has to wear it unzipped.
She pulls the top over her sports bra, the fabric sliding down over her wet chest. Her breasts bounce as she struggles to pull up the cheerleader skirt over her hips. It takes a considerable amount of effort pulling and bouncing to get the damn thing in place. Paulie’s eyes widen and dilate in the light.
Margarette nervously looks around hearing the voices in the next room. The football players are probably getting ready for practice. She leans back and reaches behind her zipping up the skirt awkwardly while dancing in a circle. She realizes her bare feet are touching the gym floor. Any other day it would have been totally disgusting. Today does it really matter? She mentally shrugs.
She hears a door slide shut behind her as the football players march past in the next room, and a cold shiver rolls down her spine. She presses herself against a wall, as if that made any difference. It’s not like they’re going to walk into the girls’ restroom; the common door is normally locked. But a girl wearing a cheerleading outfit one size too small always needs to plan for every scenario.