Trying to Float

by Nicolaia Rips

  Try as I might, I could not fight off my fondness for this gang and came to see myself as their protector—a sort of Professor X or Nick Fury, the mother of them all.

  THE SCHNOZ

  A BOY CAME to my middle school from a foreign country.

  He was tall and well-built and spoke with an accent. His parents, who were very well off (a villa in Malta; summers sailing the Mediterranean), wanted their son to experience New York. That boy, to my astonishment, had no interest in the girls everyone else liked; he wanted a girl who had the substance to sustain them through their long romance. In short, he chose me.

  And that is how my life turned around.

  Well, that is how my life would have turned around had this been anything other than one of several stories in my vibrant cloud of fantasies.

  So it was with some interest that I took notice when word spread around the middle school that a good-looking foreign boy had been seen in the principal’s office. His father was the head of a big company and had decided to bring his family to New York for a couple years.

  Roberto, the boy, had a very long and thin nose. But this nose did not detract from his face: it had its own existence, entirely disconnected from the boy himself—a weather vane spinning happily while the rest of the house went on about its business.

  I first met the Schnoz in the school cafeteria. He was surrounded by a crowd of girls. But he was not staring over the crowd of blond heads to find me, the one girl who would give him a long and happy life. No, he was thrilled with the attention of the other girls, and as the weeks passed, he was seen with many of them, sometimes two or three at a time, making them laugh with his accent and crazy gestures and funny stories.

  Almost one month after he’d entered the school, he was dating Penelope Brewster. I can’t even believe that her name is on the pages of my chronicle. But there it is.

  Penelope Brewster was the J. Lo of my middle school. One of the few girls with a postpubescent body, she flaunted her A-cups—the only A’s she would ever receive.

  Her speckled green eyes were carefully rimmed in midnight-­blue eyeliner, and her bubblegum-pink lips were always curved in a signature smirk. It bumped up your social standing just to be seen next to her, and if she knew your name, you were raised even higher. She once sneezed on the Planker, and he was immediately surrounded by a group of jealous boys. No matter what she did, it was worshipfully received.

  If an arrow were shot through the hearts of the most venomous and beautiful women in history, it would surely pierce Penelope Brewster.

  —

  The Schnoz was assigned to my English class, where he was surrounded by Penelope and her friends. One day in class, the teacher announced the names of those who had been selected for the school musical. They were Meredith Penny’s selections, and those were as predictable as indigestion after Passover dinner: Ana Penny (Meredith’s daughter), Penelope Brewster, and their entourage.

  The Schnoz was evidently surprised that the musical was being cast exclusively with his girlfriend and her tone-deaf friends, for he cried out:

  “The slooots?”

  The teacher turned to him.

  “Excuse me, Roberto?”

  “You know . . . a slooots,” the Schnoz repeated.

  She did not know; nor did anyone else.

  “A slooots is a . . . a . . . ” He was having trouble finding the words.

  “Exactly what are you trying to say, Roberto?” the teacher insisted.

  Everyone was now staring at him.

  Suddenly his arms shot forward. Grabbing what appeared to be an imaginary figure, he began frantically jackrabbiting his pelvis back and forth.

  “Roberto,” exclaimed the teacher.

  I jumped in.

  “I believe that what our friend and recent immigrant Roberto is trying to say is ‘slut’ . . . which, if I’m not mistaken, is a woman who . . . ”

  “Ms. Rips, that is enough.”

  But I would not be denied.

  “If Roberto were speaking in his own language, he would have used the word puta.”

  “Si! Puta!” cried the Schnoz, joyfully.

  “That,” I added, “would be spelled p-u—”

  “PUTA! PUTA!” exclaimed the Schnoz, high-fiving the puzzled boys around him.

  Our teacher would endure no more.

  “Class is over!”

  “t . . . that stands for . . .” I continued.

  “Ms. Rips, I shall see you and Roberto after class.”

  But the worst of it did not come after class. No, the “t” for trouble came much later, as word spread of what the Schnoz had said in English class. Penelope Brewster did not appreciate having her boyfriend describe her as a “slooot,” and he would have to be punished. And nothing the Schnoz said could change her mind.

  But ending her romance with the Schnoz, which she did in the lunchroom to make certain everyone knew, was not enough. The Schnoz, who was still confused by what was happening to him, had to be banished from all things popular, and Penelope’s friends were happy to oblige.

  The Schnoz was in popularity free fall. How far and brutal the plunge was revealed only when the Schnoz, after tumbling from one table to another in the lunchroom, landed dazed at table 17, the table of losers, cripples, and malcontents.

  My table.

  MOM VS. MAMA

  MY SCHOOL INSISTED that phones and computers be stored in lockers before classes began and retrieved at the end of the day. Violators were treated severely, so all of us obeyed.

  After a long day of wading through the educational and social mire, I returned to my locker to find it swinging on its hinges. Panicked, I shuffled through its contents (three chocolate bars, a bag of cookies, a sweater) to find that my phone was gone.

  As soon as I reached home, I told my mom. She asked whether I’d reported it to the principal. I hadn’t.

  She did.

  Mom has a lot going on in her mind, which means that she is not always paying attention. So when she does, it’s ­startling—like something dropping out of the rafters onto your dinner plate.

  That was the case here. I saw it in her eyes. She was going to find the person who stole my phone.

  Everything told me that it was a bad idea.

  “Mom, let it go. It was an old phone.”

  Mom hated cowardice and she smelled it here. Now there was no thought of her turning back; she needed to set an example for her daughter.

  I, on the other hand, needed someone to convince her to abandon her mission—someone who was willing to run from a minor skirmish, who always had at hand the most convincing excuses for avoiding a fight; someone who feared paper cuts as others shy from shotguns.

  I needed my father, a self-described “descendant of quitters and quislings.”

  But he was not around, and Mom was already speaking to someone at the phone company.

  With the information she was given, she began to sleuth about, disguising her voice on one call, pretending to be conducting a survey on another, and then (to my amazement) she was on the phone, speaking French, with someone who was connecting her to their “associate” in Barbados.

  My mother got the fellow in Barbados to mention that he had a niece who went to school in New York City. That niece, my mother deduced, had my phone.

  Mom reported the girl’s name to the principal. The principal gave the name to the police.

  A few days later, the police reported that the kid who took my phone was not using it herself, but had stolen it for one of her uncles. The girl and her mother were called to meet with the police and officials at the school.

  The girl, as my luck would have it, was in a group at the school who were led by “Mama,” an older girl with bulging muscles. Mama did not like the fact that one of her own was in trouble, and from that moment on, I was in trouble.<
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  Girls shoved me in the hall, pushed me down a staircase, and threatened to hurt me. I also feared that the girl’s uncle would come after me.

  At a meeting with the principal, Mom threatened to pull me out of school, but the principal agreed to assign a counselor to accompany the girl between classes and to sit with her at lunch. The counselor would attempt to talk through whatever had caused the girl to break into my locker.

  Mama and her gang followed them around the school, attempting to intimidate the counselor. If the counselor left to go to the bathroom, Mama, the girl, or one of their gang would come over to where I was sitting and bang on the table, yelling obscenities.

  The principal offered me his personal assurance that everything was under control: Mama and her gang, the relative and his men, could not harm me. I had, according to the principal, nothing to worry about. He would make sure that I was protected.

  It did not take me long to figure out the principal’s plan, though when I confronted him, he denied it: have me secretly followed at school by a portly fifty-year-old—a man, who, attempting to be inconspicuous (ducking in and out of classrooms, bathrooms, and closets), disguised himself by regularly changing his outfits and hair color.

  As the days passed, the man reached ever deeper into his closet and medicine cabinet. Each week, his costume regressed five or six years and his hair turned noticeably darker, which, after not so long, brought him dangerously close to the style and hair color he had when, many pounds lighter, he himself was in middle school.

  My mom was not happy with all of this, so she, being my real protector, came to school every day to make sure that nothing horrible happened.

  If there is one helpful observation I might share, it is this: if you are trying to find a boyfriend or just a friend, it does not help to have your mother, along with a fifty-five-year-old man dressed in rare clothing and smelling rarer, following you around the hallways.

  Several weeks into this, I was headed down the fourth-floor hallway, followed by Mr. Bean and Mom, when I noticed a group of people coming in the opposite direction. It was the girl who stole my phone, followed by the school counselor, followed by Mama, followed by Mama’s gang.

  The girl and I stopped.

  We exchanged glances as our entourages glared at each other. Suddenly she smiled, perhaps at how ridiculous it all seemed. I smiled back. The feud was over.

  THE DANCE

  THERE WERE TWO places where popular kids gathered outside of school and to which I was desperate to be invited: parties at a classmate’s apartment and a weekly soccer game.

  The game was held on a field far from school in order to make certain that kids like me did not wander by accidentally. The girls would sit on the sideline talking while their boyfriends ran around kicking the ball.

  My chances of getting invited to either were zero.

  Some high school kids came up with the idea of throwing social events for kids like me. They sent out mass invitations on Facebook announcing dance parties for a “select group of people,” giving the invitees the opportunity to meet “others like themselves.” What was not said was that the “select group” were those who could not get invited to a normal party and the “others like themselves” were other unfortunates.

  The topper was that we had to pay to attend the event. The kids who organized the party were in it for the profit, and given how desperate we all were, we did not hesitate to pay.

  The truth is that, though I would have been happy to attend as many of these as possible, my father was against it. As a result, I only went to one.

  The party was at a loft in SoHo, a part of town known for its old factory buildings. When the factories moved out, artists moved in. When developers drove the artists out, the area filled with expensive apartments and chain stores. Some of the old factory spaces have been renovated and are rented for weddings, graduation events, and parties for losers.

  At the party, I recognized a number of kids whom I had not seen since elementary school. They had been unpopular then and were, like myself, still unpopular. A certain embarrassed bonding ensued.

  I was having a fine time until, halfway through the evening, I ran into the last person I would have expected to see at the event—Uhura. The few times I had run into Uhura since elementary school, he had always had the upper hand—finding the cleverest ways of reminding me, and anyone else around us, of my grade school crush on him and the fact that he (broodingly attractive and desirable) had wanted nothing to do with me.

  In our most recent encounters, he had added the suggestion that I was stalking him.

  But now I had him: only pathetic kids came to these parties; Uhura was at the party; therefore, Uhura was . . .

  I didn’t need to complete the logic. He knew, and it was the reason that, having spotted me moving toward him, he was now headed quickly in the opposite direction.

  “Oh, Harry,” I sung out.

  He stopped and turned.

  “Nice to see you, Harry. I hadn’t expected . . . ”

  But Harry was smart, and in those few seconds between the “Oh, Harry” and “Nice to see you,” he had readied an efficient and brutal response.

  “Nicolaia,” he said, “I have a girlfriend. And you?”

  I was knocked against the ropes.

  I jabbed back weakly: “I have a boyfriend.”

  That stopped him.

  “Who is he?” Skepticism glistened on his lips.

  I hadn’t anticipated that one.

  “He’s tall.”

  Uhura was short, so I knew that stung.

  “And handsome,” I punched again before he could recover.

  “Do I know him?” Uhura countered.

  “No. He’s new to the city. A foreigner with . . . uhmm . . . sandy hair and green eyes . . . ”

  This was Build-a-Boyfriend Workshop.

  “There was trouble in his country,” I continued, beginning to enjoy myself. “He and his family had to escape.”

  “They lost everything?”

  I had to end it.

  “Just Grandma.”

  I dropped my head, pretending I was too upset to continue.

  Had Uhura a jot of humanity, the questioning would have stopped there.

  “What about her husband?” he asked, searching for an opening in which to throw his fist. “Did he come to America?”

  “Grandpa? Right. Yes and no.”

  “Yes and no?”

  “He died on the boat.”

  “Of what?”

  Heartbreak? No. Too sentimental. Seasickness? Obviously not.

  I needed something quick. Otherwise, everything would come undone.

  “Myasthenia gravis.”

  A voice from the darkness. Was I hearing things?

  If it was someone, it could only be a person who had known me and my pretend illness and was also smart enough to remember a Latin phrase that she’d heard only once, years before.

  “Harry! Nicolaia!”

  The voice again.

  Uhura and I turned around.

  It was the one person in the universe more distasteful to Uhura than me. The person responsible for sending an entire class of eleven-year-olds, including Uhura, to schools at the other end of the galaxy. And there she was—the evil genius herself.

  Fan.

  Was I ever happier to see anyone?—certainly no one so disturbed. But she glided away before we could speak.

  I turned to Uhura. He too was gone. Outnumbered by his enemies, he had beamed himself back to the starship.

  THE SHAMAN

  THERE WERE THREE problems with the dances at my school, and not one had a solution or, at least, not one I could figure out.

  The first was that most of the kids at my school were girls, which meant that a lot of time was spent dancing with other girls.<
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  The second was the hygiene of the boys.

  Despite certain problems I had with rhythm and my earlier experience with Pippi, I really enjoyed dancing, and the class I most looked forward to in seventh grade was ballroom dancing. My fantasies included Sleeping Beauty and Prince Phillip gliding around the forest, their fingertips touching, his hand gently guiding her minuscule waist. Prince Phillip smelled permanently of Febreze. It turned out to be nothing like I’d imagined; unenjoyable and awkward. I had always suspected that boys were unclean (leapfrog), but now, in such close proximity to their sweaty, nervous bodies, my fears were confirmed. The boys in my class and I were like two boats passing in the night—except that one boat had terrible night vision and kept steering into, and sweating on, the first boat at inopportune times. One of my teachers regularly shouted out at the boys: “It’s called deodorant!” These same boys had a tendency to stare at, well, as the same teacher put it, “Her eyes are up here.”

  Into the center of this dropped Ned Frisco—the third unsolvable problem.

  Ned, who had transferred from another school, was the nephew of the crossing guard, Krysta, one of the most reviled people at the school. Krysta stood on the corner of the street and screamed at those who crossed without her permission. It made no difference whether you were a student, parent, or teacher. You had to ask Krysta before crossing.

  What’s more, Krysta’s decision to usher you across had nothing to do with the traffic. The street could be empty and Krysta would force you to wait for her word. She could often be cruel.

  The first thing we noticed about her nephew, Ned, was that he had a beard. It stretched from the bottom of his overgrown Elvis sideburns to the middle of the wobbly thickness that was his chin and then back up the other side. A thing of alien beauty.

  One last thing about Ned. He believed himself to be irresistible to females. All females. No one was beyond his advances—classmates, obviously, but teachers and mothers as well.

  The place he proved most adventurous was on the dance floor. There were already too few boys in the ballroom dance class, and Ned Frisco made a point of dancing with every girl. He was impossible to avoid. We all waltzed, fox-trotted, and tangoed with him, one hand firmly grasping our nose to avoid the odors from whatever was fermenting in his beard and the other swatting at his hand as it traveled farther than necessary down our backs.