by Johi Jenkins
“How do you know? I always get what I want.”
She snaps her head towards him. “What do you think I am, a piece of meat? Do you think you can just have me because you want me?”
He stops the car, confused. “No…? I didn’t mean it like that. I meant, I want this to work so I think it can work.”
“You know that you shouldn’t want anything to do with me.”
“That’s probably why it feels good.”
Smart, but unfeeling. Margarette just responds, “Thanks for dinner.”
“Stop, Margarette. I can’t let you do this.”
“I already did.”
“No. I’m not allowing you to walk across town in this rain. Just get in. I’ll just take you home. I promise I won’t say another thing the whole way.”
She stops. She was starting to get cold, and it would be a long walk. She sighs and walks to his car. He immediately gets out and escorts her to her side, opening the door for her. Then he returns to the driver’s seat, reaches in the back seat for his dry jacket and offers it to her. She refuses it, even as she shivers, but he places it over her knees without touching her and she doesn’t remove it. He doesn’t say a word until the moment they reach her house.
“It was miserable for you, wasn’t it?”
“You said you wouldn’t say anything.” Her voice is dry and raspy. She had waited for him to say something just so that she could call him out on breaking his promise, but had waited for some time.
“Sorry.” He doesn’t justify that they technically made it to her house without a word, and that was the scope of his promise.
She looks up at her house and not a light is on. She exhales her frustration. “I know you didn’t mean for it to be like that.”
“I swear I didn’t.”
“Thanks for the ride. And the jacket.” She hands it back to him.
“Keep it,” he says, trying to give it back, but she doesn’t take it. Instead she exits the car without waiting for him to open the door.
“Good night, Tommy,” she says as she walks away.
“Good night, Margarette,” he calls after her.
Instead of going inside she walks around the house and waits for him to drive away. She is careful to let his car go ahead and then walks in the red of his taillights. Margarette feels like closing more doors and she has an ex-friend to level out.
Alice lives at the end of a row of oak trees a few blocks away. Margarette sneaks up quietly to the tree in front of Alice’s bedroom. At least the heavy rain has stopped for now, even though it still drizzles.
Margarette is still soaked as she climbs up the tree. She knows it is a tree worth climbing and scales it to the second story deck with ease, but doesn’t climb over to the deck like she had done in the past. From afar she watches for Alice to come to the window hoping she is home and alone. But then Julie walks past the window and Margarette considers leaving; she doesn’t want to hear one word from Julie and end her only a chance to reconcile with Alice. She wonders if Julie is about to leave, though. She decides to stick around but she climbs higher and hides behind the large trunk in case Julie happens to look out.
In the back of her mind she holds on to some hope that Alice can explain herself; that Julie was behind it all. She knows it’s a long shot and an even longer wait. But the hope makes her patient. And besides, she has nowhere else to go. She puts her legs up and tucks herself into the middle of a nice thick branch until the dampness seeps into her last layer of skin. A warm tear rolls down from her eye and she begins to weep uncontrollably. There’s nowhere for her to go now. Nowhere for her to be where people care about her without expectations. Her chest feels so empty as if her cold heart has been torn from her with an ice cream scoop. She glides a hand under her eyes and dabs a tear onto her index finger. She presses it to her tongue and tastes the saltiness of her own personal brand of sad.
A door creaks open and she fights to stay quiet.
Julie looks up from the deck, confused by the sounds of a crying tree. She shrugs it off as some mysterious animal in the yard and lights up a smoke. Margarette leans back into the bark as the screen door opens and closes again. She looks down to see Alice join Julie for a smoke.
Julie talks and talks to Alice, but says very little. To Margarette, Julie sounds like a kid in a playground arguing about who owns the swing. She closes her eyes and tunes out the spiteful girl.
Margarette’s attention wanders and she thinks of big cities she would fly off to. Cities nicknamed Knowledge or Cold Town have to be truly wonderful places to live. On TV it always seems like the people who live in big cities lead grand lives in which anything is possible. So far she had only visited Cold Town in the winter. The chill was ridiculous but the lights, the people, the beautiful skyline, and even the stores where she couldn’t afford anything, they all made the cold bearable. The city of Knowledge was forbidden; her parents lived there when she was little but eventually moved back to Coyote Falls, and then her father prohibited her to ever go there again. He used to say that city taught you things you weren’t supposed to know; that from there sprung its nickname. He said that just a year before he left her and her mother, and then went back there to live. She was fourteen or so at the time, and it took a glass full of tears for her to accept that he had forbidden her to go where he went—as if he was telling her never to follow him, without directly saying it.
Deep in thought, she isn’t paying attention to what Alice and Julie are discussing until Julie starts shouting in a southern accent. Then she realizes that the girls are arguing.
Julie moves very close to the tree and Margarette hides her small frame behind the large trunk. Julie ashes her smoke against the top board of the deck rail with a hiss, then pulls on the cigarette, flicks it and looks back at Alice. “Whatever. I gotta pee,” she says, and leaves the deck, slamming the screen door behind her.
Margarette hates that word, pee. It’s not that she really hates the term, but more like she was brought up to think it was wrong to say it. In that her grandmother had trained her well. That or she just hates Julie enough to trigger the judgment. Either way she hates thinking about Julie for an extended period of time or for any reason, but in her absence Margarette finally gains access to sort things out with her friend.
Margarette’s soft voice trickles down from above Alice with a few drops of rain. “Alice,” she faintly whispers.
There is a soft startled breath, then after a pause a puff from below.
“She always sounds like an idiot,” Margarette says.
Alice looks up, shocked. “Margarette? What are you doing in my tree?”
“Why do you hang out with bitches like that?”
“Why don’t you go back to your little nerdy friends?” Alice counters. “I’m sure they’ll take you back now that you’re an outcast again.”
“Oh my Joy, you sound just like her,” Margarette says, rolling her eyes.
“I sound exactly like I should; pissed off at you.”
“What the hell did I do to you to piss you off?”
“You slept with him!”
“I didn’t sleep with anyone.” Which is totally true, she adds to herself. “And even if I did, you don’t even have the right to be upset with me after what you did.”
“I didn’t do anything. It was Julie. Julie’s idea.”
That is what Margarette wanted to hear, but it doesn’t make her feel any better at the moment. “So? You let her! And you left me there, alone and defenseless.”
“I didn’t know until after the fact. I left you alone because you were acting like such a slut.”
“I was drugged, you jerk!”
“But what about afterwards? I told you to stay away from Tommy, and what do you do? You go and sleep with him.”
“I told you I didn’t.”
“Are you saying that wasn’t you the coach saw under the bleachers with Tommy?”
“So what if that was me? I can do whatever I want with whomever
I want. Nobody knows what really happened.”
“So what did happen?” There’s a flicker of hope in Alice’s voice, as if holding on to the small chance that Margarette did not really have sex with Tommy.
Margarette is torn. On the one hand she doesn’t want to further spread the rumors by confirming it, but on the other… she wants to let Alice know that Tommy could, in fact, like a girl like her. She wants to tell Alice how Tommy told her she’s beautiful, and how he wanted her to meet his parents. How he thinks she’s good enough. More than just good enough. He wants her.
But Margarette can’t trust Alice. Knowledge is power, and the less people that know the truth, the better.
So she just shrugs, not quite meeting Alice’s eyes. “We fooled around.”
Alice snorts. “You’re making a slutty little name for yourself.”
“Frick anyone who thinks that. I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and I’m not going to feel bad about it after. Doesn’t every girl deserve to do whatever the frick she wants?”
“What, boning every guy? That’s not right….”
“Sure it is. As long as they’re pretty.” Margarette smiles, acknowledging her superficial side.
Alice looks uncomfortable. She looks behind her at the room, still empty, then back at Margarette. “You’re pretty. You shouldn’t lower yourself like that.”
The words hang in the air while Margarette wonders if she heard correctly. It sounded like a compliment… at least the first part. But the part about lowering herself—that sounds just like Alice this past week.
“What’s lowered? My standards? Ethics? You were the one who said he was above me. Too good for me?”
“Apparently not,” Alice mutters sarcastically.
“Now you’re judging me for not being afraid. Who do you want me to be? Is there even a chance that anything I do can ever be right?”
Alice’s voice is sly and cold. “I was wrong about you.”
“Hell yeah you were. You invited me to a party so that I could screw up and get wasted and then have everyone turn on me. Be that girl that everyone destroys with their filthy tongues. But I didn’t. You may have all had your share of fun gossiping about me, but in the end I’m the same Margarette. And Tommy likes me this way.”
Alice looks away. After a second she says, “You’re wrong. I invited you to the party because I wanted you to be yourself. Be who you were when you were alone with me. Let everyone experience what I had sometimes seen; what you were hiding.”
“And yet when Julie drugged me you didn’t do anything.”
“You seemed to be doing alright. Everyone was looking at you.”
“Yeah, well, I almost got raped, you bitch.”
Alice flinches. “I’m sorry about that,” she whispers.
“I expected that from Julie, but not from you. I thought you and I….”
Alice looks up. “What?”
“I don’t know. I thought we were closer than that,” Margarette admits.
Alice’s lip trembles. “I thought so, too. But then you were flirting with all the boys at the party. They all fawned over you.”
“What’s that got to do with you and me?”
“I thought you and I… I thought we could have a different type of relationship. But you went for the boys. You went for Tommy. You wouldn’t… consider me instead.”
Oh.
There is a long, awkward pause.
“You should’ve known I wouldn’t,” Margarette finally replies. “That’s not how I’m wired. But even if I was… you’re a manipulative bitch most of the time.” She ends lightly, giving Alice a small smile.
Alice’s lips curl up and her mouth responds with her own sharp toothy grin. “Can’t a girl try? You like me. I know it. Admit it to yourself.”
Margarette climbs down from the tree onto a wooden bench at the edge of the deck. The sky glows with a large moon behind her.
“Alice Cherise, you are one dauntless jezebel.”
“Fine, if you’re going to be like….” She pauses when she sees Margarette in the low light of the deck. “Holy hell, you’re soaked. Do you want to change your clothes here?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Margarette sighs. “Look, Alice… I’m flattered. Of course I am. You’re beautiful. So much more than me…. But I don’t see you that way. I wanted so much for you to be my sister.”
“Nothing else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Alice closes her eyes. “You smell like him.”
Margarette rolls hers. “That’s impossible.”
Nature chirps a few bars and a frog croaks in a nearby creek.
Alice lights a smoke with a sharp bend in it and leans against the edge of the tree struggling to keep it lit. “So what do we do now?” she asks.
Margarette thinks about how she was before she started hanging out with Alice, and figures that she is probably better off as a lonely nerd reading books to pass the time. Paulie was right. Margarette doesn’t belong with them.
“You want to pretend we hate each other?” Margarette asks with an uncertain smile.
Alice laughs. “You know the truth, though.” She takes a long drag from her smoke. “What are you going to do about Tommy?”
“Tommy’s so over. I’m never going to let that happen again,” Margarette says.
“Ever…?”
“Forever and ever.”
They smile at each other and for a while nothing is heard but the chirp chirp of the crickets.
Then they see Julie walk into the room and freeze as she sees them outside. She storms outside, her mouth hanging open. But no one says anything. Even the crickets go silent.
Margarette walks past her, secretly winking at Alice, then without a word enters the room, takes the stairs and leaves through the front door.
Chapter 10. The Last Test
Two weeks later on a Sunday, Margarette walks inside her house before her mother finishes closing the garage door.
Her face is flushed and it’s clear she has been crying. She strips off the graduation gown and recalls the horrible day. It was truly tragic, just like every other day of her recent life. When her name was called there was only polite applause for her, probably leftover from the previous name that was called, and it died rather quickly. She looked at her mother who sat with arms crossed, not caring to clap. Margarette only got murmurs as she hurried to line up behind some nameless classmate. As she was handed the pretend diploma, devilish grins and nods of acknowledgement rippled through the mob for the girl that broke up the perfect pair.
Sharon and Tommy’s breakup was a story now told over lunch breaks and water coolers in almost every nook of the miniscule town, and they all blame Margarette, even though she has not been associated with Tommy these past few weeks. Yet that didn’t hurt her as much as her mother’s reaction during the graduation ceremony. Her mother had chosen to remain silent throughout the ordeal. Who doesn’t even clap for their own daughter?
Margarette runs upstairs to hide in her room and think about her life. Four completed years of torture ending in sublime embarrassment. In the back of her mind she had expected Tommy to be there, hidden in the crowd; like he would just pop up and rescue her. Even though she had lain awake for hours planning how she would ignore him if he showed up, she secretly wanted him to be there; the one person who claimed he liked her. But her plan to avoid him and her excuses were left unused. She remained alone.
She wants them all to burn in the hell of being stuck forever in this little town. She knows that somehow she would escape. Somehow, someday.
As she storms into her bedroom something catches her eye. It is a picture of an innocent kitten hanging on the wall with a number circled in a red marker. She stops cold and nothing that happened at school or the auditorium matters anymore. This circle and the feline have stolen her attention completely and she rips it from the wall tearing the hole so that it can never be hung again.
Margarette slumps on the floo
r, her frame shaking frantically. She looks at the calendar again and counts the weeks from the circle. One, two, three, four, five…. Five weeks.
Impossible, she thinks. He wore a condom.
Her period has been late before, but that was mostly when she was younger; and she has never been late by a week. The desperate thought that maybe it is the stress in her life screwing with her body slowly turns into the horrifying thought that maybe she is just screwed.
Her hand grasps at her chest as if squeezing an invisible heart on top of her breasts. She feels warmth inside her rib cage and feels her blood turn into acid in her body. She tightens her abs and visualizes crushing the imaginary child inside her womb. Margarette wants to hate everything and everyone, especially Tommy and his seed, but she thinks of her grandmother and her opinion of hate. Yet the feeling doesn’t wane. Thinking of her grandmother has helped in the past, but doesn’t do anything now. She reminds herself that her grandmother never let her say the word hate, yet the old woman wished damnation in hell to just about anyone and the toaster until the day she passed away.
Margarette’s head spins and the room wobbles as though she was flipping cartwheels. There is a moment where she entertains the thought of killing herself. That would teach them, she thinks, and she lets out a sinister laugh. Teach her mother and the whole damn town she wasn’t allowed to hate. Her death would be a tragedy, but it might keep them from hurting others like they hurt her.
She nurses the thought for only a moment, though. Before she could even figure out how she would best end her life she had let it go.
She isn’t sure what to do or who to ask for help. An infinite number of scenarios play out in her mind until she shuts her eyes. A single tear falls down her cheek and she flushes. She would cry more, but she feels empty and longs for peace. She firmly sets out to believe that this could all be a mistake. Her destination is so simple… to the pharmacy to confirm or deny. She quickly changes out of the simple dress she wore for graduation, pulling on a pair of shorts and a shirt.
In a shattered screech that is hushed at the end, she yells, “Mom!”