by Johi Jenkins
After school she normally goes to an empty house and does whatever she feels like doing. Today she lies on her bed in a nearly transparent slip, staring at the ceiling, a phone at her ear. Her room is adorned with all sorts of quasi-matching white furniture, pastel flowers and a unicorn. She’s talking on the phone with a distant cousin to fill the void. The cousin is her only redeemable family member, but they don’t see much of each other because her cousin’s family is very religious, and the mother, Margarette’s aunt, doesn’t approve of Margarette’s mother’s alcoholism.
Her cousin is talking about a book Margarette had never heard of before. It’s a book her aunt described as satanic. That probably meant a boy and a girl kissed before marriage. Margarette takes a brief mental note of the book but forgets the title immediately because she has other more pressing matters in her head.
I just had sex.
She presses down on a large button of a remote control, flipping channels absentmindedly while she replays her intimate moment with Tommy. She stops on a giant monster with an explosion going off in the background. She smiles as she recognizes Godzilla vs. Monster Zero over the storming scenes in front of her mind’s eye.
Someone cackles on the phone and she jerks to the present. At some point Margarette zoned out of the conversation and now tries to catch up without revealing she didn’t pay attention.
“Yeah of course I heard you. Why did he do that?” She rolls onto her back.
The voice on the other end of the phone continues. The TV yells out clashing noises in the background. A sci-fi spacesuit guy on TV named Glenn says, “The enemy is very strong; you’d better do something spectacular.”
Margarette lets go of the phone, letting it rest on the pillow by her head, and the girl on the other end of the phone rattles on near her neck. Her cousin’s voice is so loud through the receiver that Margarette can hear it without pressing it to her ear.
“Oh my Joy, you’re a fricking slut. A big slut…. Simply loose ugly trash,” the girl’s voice rattles.
“I’m not ugly,” Margarette says almost absentmindedly.
“I’m just fricking with you.”
“I’ll call you later, bitch.” Margarette’s voice trails.
“You know I didn’t mean it,” the voice presses.
Margarette rolls her eyes.
Click.
Margarette thumbs through to the very last page of a love story and even through the appendix as a victory lap. She likes romance novels, everything from classic to trashy romances. The trashy ones she only reads when she’s alone. If she went out in public she would put the dust cover from another book over them in order to hide the true content.
Her body suddenly tenses; Margarette looks out the window like a startled cat and focuses on a boy standing at the intersection. He doesn’t see her where she hides behind the second story window, but he is right outside of her house staring at it. She freezes trying not to catch his attention, and frowns wondering why he is there. But she sighs.
Slowly she rotates and her legs drop off the bed. Why put off the inevitable?
Paulie stands on the corner of the tree-lined street after a soft rain. When he got off the bus by Margarette’s house in his socks he got a lot of strange looks from the other passengers. He approaches her house. By the time he gets to the buzzer, Margarette is on the first floor staring through the window next to the door. He steps up to the porch and waits. She tiptoes to the door in her see-through slip and cut-off jean shorts she threw on her way down. Before he hits the button she swings the door open.
“Yep.” Margarette says.
“Hi, Margarette?”
“Yep,” she repeats, proud of herself for having anticipated his greeting.
“I think you have something of mine,” he says.
Margarette looks down at Paulie’s bare feet while he looks at her chest and realizes she’s not wearing a bra. She monitors his wandering eyes but doesn’t care. He is harmless to her. He leans forward, but stays silent.
“Oh… come in.” She walks in and disappears into the poorly-lit home leaving the door wide open. The house is large and has been in the family for generations, so the décor is out of style. When her grandmother died, Margarette’s mother was left with some money; however, she never remarried or worked. She shut down and began to drink. Now the house, though once pretty, is a gloomy place where a girl like Margarette wouldn’t be expected to live.
The place is a mess but Margarette has a million other things to worry about. She has had days to survive evil kids and nights with bouts of insomnia. Her worst fear has always been the emptiness of being home alone; she lives trapped in her worst fear. The fatigue and lack of sleep leads her down a path of bad decisions.
Like Tommy.
Paulie is a small welcome distraction. He is careful to lock the door and follows her up the stairs into her bedroom. She watches him closely like a hunter and its prey. Paulie is nervous; he looks around the room and rests his eyes on a tiny perfume vial on her desk, and picks it up absentmindedly. He smells the fragrance while he watches the light shine through her outfit. She isn’t self-conscious around him. For her it is like walking around naked in front of a plant… if the plant could stare.
“How did you find me?” she asks him.
“School directory.”
“I didn’t think students could get that.”
“They can’t, but I find it’s easier to apologize than to ask for permission.”
She knows his mother works in the school office so she rolls her eyes.
“So, can I?” he asks.
“What, apologize for being creepy?” Margarette asks playfully in turn.
“No…. get my shoes back. You do have them, right?”
“Your shoes….” It’s all clear to her now. The red shoes had definitely not been in the girls’ locker room; Paulie had left them out for her, after he found out somehow that she was shoeless. Otherwise, why would he leave them there? But the big question is: how did he know that she needed shoes? Did he hear from the girls that played the cruel prank on her?
However he found out, Margarette realizes she doesn’t really care; doesn’t really need to know. All that matters is, he left his shoes out for her to wear, and walked here in his socks. She smiles. She had thought about screwing with him, telling him “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but despite being a little creepy, he seems like a nice guy. She opens her closet door and reaches inside for his red shoes where she placed them out of sight from her mother.
As she bends over, the slip rises high enough that Paulie can see her faded jeans. His mouth opens as he watches her, while she acts completely oblivious to his stares. He wonders if she knows he spent the better half of his puberty staring at her in class. Lust isn’t a strong enough word for this particular stalker.
“Okay, thank you for that,” she says as she hands him his shoes.
He straightens his back when her fingertips brush against his arm in the exchange.
“They got dirty,” she says apologetically.
Paulie ignores her comment and asks what has been on his mind for the last few hours. “Hey, what did you do on the football field?”
Margarette shuts her eyes. “This place really is a circle.”
Paulie thinks it is more of a sphere, but holds off from saying it. She only sees him stand there with a blank stare.
“So are we done here?” she asks.
He stumbles over his words and forgets what in the world he was going to say. “Well, what were you doing?”
“I was going to go downstairs.” Without waiting for an answer she leaves her bedroom and heads down the stairs. Paulie hurries to put on his shoes and follows her to the living room. She nudges her chin toward the television, but stops before fully committing to the chin point.
“I’ll leave you be,” he says apologetically.
“You don’t have to leave.” She turns as she did before, leaving him speechless and
standing there. Margarette walks into the den and sits down on the couch. She turns on the TV and flicks the channels.
He chooses to stick around. “Where are your parents?” he asks as he notices the empty house. It smells of cleanser and bleach, but not food.
“Let me know if you see them,” she replies dryly, fanning her hair over the back of the couch.
Paulie sits down at the dining table watching her. His body is turned awkwardly, but he acts like it doesn’t hurt to twist his neck.
“I think I know you,” she says.
“I’m Paulie?” he says, but it comes off as a question because he’s nervous. “My mother works at the school.”
“Oh, yeah,” she pretends she doesn’t know.
“Do you get left here all alone often?” he asks casually.
“Not that often.”
She doesn’t know right away why she lies to him. She even has the feeling that Paulie would understand and be sympathetic if he knew her daily predicament. She still doesn’t want to admit it, though. Maybe she just doesn’t like hearing it, not even from herself; it would make the abandonment more real, somehow. She counters quickly to keep him talking about himself and not about her. “You’re stuck at school too, until your mom goes home,” she points out. “Right?”
“I spend a lot of time in the library,” Paulie says. “Can I ask you something?”
“You just did.”
“Well, can I ask you another question?”
“Beyond the first two?”
“I’m not so sure I should be asking.”
“Well, if you did you should say ‘may I,’ to be polite.” She tries not to smile and continues to play along.
“Ms. Princess Margarette. May I… ask you…? Shoot, I forgot what I was going to say.”
Margarette can’t help but smile, but it’s a little smile because it’s real; she hardly smiles anymore so she’s forgotten how. “So how do you know my name? I guess I should have known that you’d know that.”
“Was that creepy?” Paulie asks.
“Any time you feel like asking that question, the answer is yes. Even when the answer was no, it’s still creepy. Don’t make me lie to you.”
“Oh.”
“Okay… okay, it’s not that creepy. We do go to school together, you know; the same classes and stuff.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, still shaken at her words.
“So what’s the question? You can ask me anything you want. Stop asking permission and just ask, Paulie. Just don’t ask me anything that would make me cry. Today has sucked enough already.”
“You’re better than him.”
“You suck,” she says, regretting her invitation immediately. “I fricking know that. I don’t need to hear it from anyone else. And you don’t have a lot of welcome to wear out.”
“I mean it. You’re better than them. All of them.”
She pauses for a second. Paulie, even with his strangeness, is the only person who has truly been nice to her recently. Her heart warms towards him. She feels comfortable with him, like she can be herself around him. It doesn’t hurt that he’s cute in a nerdy sort of way. And at this moment, she really wants someone to talk to.
Finally she sighs and says, “I thought being with him to get back at them would feel different.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“That you got hurt.”
She doesn’t want to acknowledge his pity. Why should he pity her? “My friends abandoning me hurt a lot more than empty sex,” she says.
“Oh…?”
“My ex-friends, I should say. Whereas Tommy…” she trails off, thinking about Tommy’s hands, warm on her legs. “He wasn’t that bad.”
“I wouldn’t think he would be,” Paulie mumbles.
“You know…” she says, almost to herself. “It was different from what I expected. It happened like I wasn’t even there. I was watching myself sitting there, lying there. My mouth was moving, but I don’t really know what I was saying. I recall what happened in complete silence, not actually hearing the words out loud. Most of it was lies about physical feelings and attraction. Things that I thought I was supposed to say but didn’t really matter.”
Paulie’s whole demeanor has changed. “You had sex with him,” he says.
Margarette is more than surprised. Didn’t he believe she already had, like everyone else at the party? “I did. I thought I might have a crush on him for a second, but it wasn’t much sex… or sex at all. We just fooled around. It took him longer to get his pants down than for us to finish.”
“Margarette…. He doesn’t deserve you,” Paulie says.
“He’ll never have me again is more like it.” Her voice unexpectedly breaks, to her embarrassment.
Paulie looks up pretending he didn’t pick up on anything. “I like the trees outside,” he says. “The flowers are beautiful.”
“They’re magnolias.”
She lets him stay over until the sun starts to set. They talk about other things. Paulie discovers she likes reading novels. As he leaves, he pulls a book with only numbers for a title—7734—out of his backpack. It happens to be a book by the writer her cousin had mentioned.
“Here, you can borrow this,” he offers. He explains it’s about a kid that goes crazy, which wasn’t typically her favorite type of book, but she had nothing else that was new.
Then he leaves, both feeling a little bit better, each having used the other in a strange, sad way.
Margarette finishes the book that night, staying up late, not sleeping much and barely gets to school on time the next morning.
***
School on Tuesday is horrible. She feels she’s grossly stared at and examined by the entire school. It’s like a joke that has gone on entirely too long.
And then it happens. Sometime before noon, the second gust of gossip turns the breeze of a rumor into a full-scale wind storm, and people are discussing her even in the field house. They have mixed up the details of where, but the gist of the story is accurate. Somehow they even know about the red shoes. How incredible that one detail would stick while the where and how fade.
Margarette has no idea how they found out. As far as she knows, only Coach Swane had seen her with Tommy, but he never called her in as he had threatened. She even walked past him in the hall and he didn’t react differently or even acknowledge her. That only left Tommy. That bastard, she thinks. He must have told someone. Hell, probably all of his guy friends.
The real culprit was actually innocent. The day before, Coach Swane had recognized Tommy immediately, as the quasi town celebrity that he was, but not Margarette, because they had been mostly in the shadows. The coach wasn’t a man to spread rumors or keep up with fresh gossip. He figured Tommy had been with his girlfriend, whom he believed to be Sharon. The following day, thinking he was actually doing her a favor, he called Sharon in his office to apologize for yelling the day before, and also to warn her that Tommy should be more careful, that he wasn’t supposed to be in the school grounds. The coach was a nice guy and would give Tommy a pass, but any other teacher would have gotten him in deep trouble.
Really, he thought he was just gaining brownie points with the hot young cheerleader.
At first Sharon dismissed his words as a prank; as if the coach was trying to get her to admit to something she didn’t do. But when she corrected him and explained it wasn’t them, the coach joked sarcastically, “Sure it wasn’t you. Tell Tommy he has an identical twin that he didn’t know about and he’s fooling around with random cheerleaders under the bleachers. Now, you don’t have to look at me like that… you know me; I’m not one to say anything.”
Sharon was not the brightest cheerleader, but when it came to gossip, especially concerning what was hers, she was certainly capable of putting two and two together.
***
Margarette tries to ignore everyone all day. At lunch she sits alone, writing in her notebook. She fills the
notebook pages scribbling questions for Paulie about the book he lent her. Then she tears pages out letting the frilly bits inside the binding spirals fall to the floor. All eyes follow her and jaws drop as she crosses the yard and hands Paulie back his book with the notes tucked inside. Alice and Julie, watching from a distance, almost fall to the floor. They now sit at the table where Sharon normally sits, except that Sharon’s seat is empty today.
The school is electric. The boy and the book had created a third tale that was too much for everyone to resist. Tales of sexual awakening and prostitution fill the halls spiraling out of proportion, but somehow the teachers don’t say anything. Either they didn’t hear the gossip at all or they didn’t know it is about Margarette.
Teachers always know more than they let on. The great Tommy & Sharon affair was ruined. Even the coach finally found out, but then he was more worried that the situation would detract from the next game than what he cared about sexual scandals between students.
Because everyone is talking about it, even Margarette eventually hears about the coach inquisition between whispers in hallways. Her heart lightens at the thought that Tommy had not been the one to tell. Still, she had thought that the coach didn’t see anything. What did he tell Sharon? Margarette would have done anything to have been there when he had that conversation with Sharon about what he thought he saw beneath the bleachers, and yet at the same time she was mortified. Did he really know? Or did he just say that he saw them kissing, and Sharon escalated the incident to harm Margarette’s already wounded image?
All of this because of one little drink. When would the stories about sexual scandals between students ever end?
Paulie is standing outside school when Margarette walks past the office finally on the way home. She’s upset, and for a moment pretends to ignore him even as he walks straight towards her. Sometimes the simplest things he does add to her frustration. But she slows down as she reconsiders; he fills a void in her life with his awkward friendship. He consistently shows interest in her; and besides, none of this is his fault. It’s his interest in her that lifts her spirits a little today; otherwise she would have been completely crushed by the terrible day she’s had and have no one to talk about it in person. She lacks attention from most directions in life, which is probably the main reason she decides to keep him around.