The minute attention paid to a detail of having a tan line across my back pleases me to no end. I feel a wild surge of gratitude for Leslie that she should take such an interest in me.
I bunch up my towel under my chest and unhook my strap. Leslie rubs cream in the spot that has become socially precious. I close my eyes for a second, enjoying the warmth of the sun and smells from lotion, flowers, and the cinnamon Orbit that Leslie cracks.
The mood is broken by Leslie’s friendly voice. “Guys,” she says. “Have you met Annie’s cousin Stephanie?”
The wall of teenage boys moves, differentiates. I think of bees clustered into a humming mosaic until they finally fly away, yielding views of the individuals. I can tell there are four of them. JKIII is on the far right standing next to Annie, who flips her hair and says, “Omigod, I’m, like, so rude. Guys, this is Stephanie.”
All the eyes turn to me. I’m stuck in a quarter-seal, arching up partially from my stomach with my chest covered up by the towel and my back naked. I’m still warmed by Leslie’s touch and her concern about a potential pale streak across my back, so I’m emboldened enough to be social. “Hi,” I call out as if I’m Nancy Drew sandwiched by her girlfriends, Bess and George, when their collegiate-sweatered boyfriends, Ned, Burt and Dave arrive.
“You have to hear the way she talks,” Annie says. “Stephanie, say—”
“Annie’s old suit,” Eva interrupts, walking around me as if I’m one of those frogs we dissected in science class who’s lying on a little board with its legs and arms pinned down. “I was trying and trying to think of where I’d seen your bathing suit before, then suddenly it came to me. It was Annie’s, like, two years ago.”
Red rushes my face. Eva’s raised eyebrows and satisfied smirk scorch holes in my brain. Desert air rises from my throat and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
JKIII snaps an irritated glance at Eva, then looks back to Annie and says, “Annie, what did you want Stephanie to say?”
A couple of the other guys look at Annie also, waiting to be entertained. I’m stunned with the realization that the guy mind hasn’t even grasped the enormity of my humiliation. That none of them seem to get the direct correlation between wearing a bathing suit someone wore at twelve and being physically immature. I’m giddy with the idea that the guys here just think Eva was interrupting with some boring talk about clothes.
Annie flips hair over one shoulder. “Okay, her best stuff is with r’s. Like, ask her to say, ‘How far is that car?’ ”
Everyone’s eyes are on me as JKIII says, “Say, ‘How far is that car?’ ”
I half roll my eyes to Leslie, who giggles, and then I say, “How faa is that caa?”
Annie squeals, “Don’t you love that?”
A guy standing next to JKIII says, “Say ‘idea.’ ”
I give a little shrug. “Idear.”
He nods vigorously. “I knew it. We went to the Cape two summers ago. They all do that.” He smiles at me and seems pleased, as if I’ve done him proud.
JKIII fist-bumps the guy and says, “Little bro, remembering the Cape.”
The boy, I guess his brother, takes a little bow and Annie jerks her head at him. “This is Brian.”
I give a self-conscious nod. He’s really cute. Not as cute as JKIII, but he has the same bright blue eyes and big smile. He’s just a little shorter and not quite as muscular, and his hair is darker. I figure he’s probably around two years younger than his brother, more like fifteen.
“And this is Andrew.” She flips her hand toward a tall boy with black curly hair, fierce brown eyes, and his arm in a cast. He doesn’t smile, but looks at me hard as if to see if I’m something at which he should also be angry.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey,” he returns. He doesn’t turn away. He keeps staring at me. I can’t stop staring at him. He’s got something in the back of his eyes, something so raging I’d expect to see him in my neighborhood in Boston. He doesn’t seem to belong on this porch of privilege where everyone only needs to care about tans or tennis games. He suddenly snaps his eyes away from me like it’s okay for him to try to find out what I’m hiding, but not for me to see into him.
“And this is Matt,” Annie’s social director voice cuts in. The boy next to Andrew is shorter, with straight brown hair and green eyes. “Bri, Andrew and Matt are all the same grade as us.”
I nod again, vaguely relieved that at least all the guys that I’ll have to see are not older and, thus, exponentially terrifying.
I start to settle back onto my towel to try to relax when I feel Eva’s eyes boring into me again. She’s nothing if not relentless, and I can tell she’s furious that her observation of me wearing Annie’s old suit didn’t unleash an outpouring of derision over my obviously immature body, or, at least, a torrent of covert, smug looks between all the girls.
She’s studying me hard. Her math and science brain is analyzing facts. There is something bothering her. Something about me that’s not adding up. I don’t belong in this world. She can feel the false premise throwing off her calculations, and she won’t rest until she unmasks me. She’s seen the old and unfashionable outfit I wore last night. Now she’s observed that I don’t have a bathing suit of my own.
Suddenly, a light pierces her eyes, like she’s discovered the cure for cancer. Dread spreads through my stomach and I prepare for her next assault.
“Hey, Stephanie,” she purrs, walking up to me. “Why don’t you show us some pictures of your peeps in Boston. Then maybe you can tell them about us and we can all become friends.”
Becoming “friends” means only one thing. She’s demanding to see my Facebook and she’s, of course, noticed that I haven’t once texted or BBM’ed in her presence while the others have done it endlessly in the same time frame.
In an instant, I know, she is hoping to reveal that I don’t have a cool phone or BlackBerry. If I do whip out a phone and pull up my Facebook, she’s hoping I won’t have that many friends and that those I have will be obvious losers. I’m sure she can’t even imagine that I’m not on Facebook. That would be a jackpot for her of unbelievable proportion.
Her idea sparks immediate interest from everyone. I know from overhearing kids at school that everyone is always trying to expand their number of Facebook friends. That it is the ultimate validation of one’s worth as a person to have hundreds of people wanting to read about their every mood and activity. The girls all look eager to check out their eastern competition, and even the boys seem curious to scope out the female inhabitants of my exotically accented city and maybe have a few cyber hookups.
“Great idea,” Annie screams. “We can be friends with some of your friends and then finally meet them in college!”
Someone says that Annie is a “friend ho” and that she’ll do anything to increase her number, which is already up to 438. I don’t even register who said it because I’m quaking with terror. Within seconds, I’m going to be exposed as electronically naked and without the rich social network that they so easily take for granted.
I have to think fast. The girls and guys are looking at me with deep excitement and Eva has a cruel smile curving her lips as if she’s already pictured me disgraced.
I mentally scramble for a strategy. Something. Anything. I have no idea how to navigate out of this. No Mystery of the Fraudulent Facebooker to guide me.
Suddenly, I picture this girl from St. Henry’s High, Maria Giarelli, an eleventh grader who was actually suspended for the last month of school. The high school scandal, of course, leaked into our school and even I heard about it, just by standing around the other kids. Would it really be so bad if I just borrowed a little something from her life?
“Um,” I drop my voice. “Do I really have to go into this in front of the guys?”
This, of course, makes the guys lean in even closer. I sigh heavily, just like Leslie did when she was about to disclose how far she went with Ben in Truth or Dare last night. “I, ah, got shut do
wn.”
“What does that mean?” Eva demands.
“My Facebook got shut down and my phone confiscated for two months.”
There’s a collective intake of breath. I scan the eager faces, which are awaiting the titillating details. Everyone knows there’s pretty much only one reason this ever happens and it always has something to do with sex.
“So, there was this high school party,” I begin.
Smiles crack. Stories about high school parties always promise good stuff about bad behavior. “Some people got sort of wild. And, I, ah, posted the ‘inappropriate photographs. ’ ” I make my voice sound like a really uptight teacher, thinking that’s how Annie would do it.
“Ni-ice,” JKIII says, and the guys join in with appreciative laughter. Annie looks at me like I’m some kind of brilliant, gutsy rebel and Andrew stares in complete fascination.
Eva boils.
“Anyway, some loser, who I never should have confirmed on my Facebook, snitched me off to the nuns at my school, who freaked out. And that’s when they confiscated my phone,” I say.
A few mutters rise over the treachery of the loser snitch. Then Leslie sits up, breaks out a bag of Doritos from her backpack and holds them out to the boys. Andrew says, “Cheese?” and when she says, “But of course,” in kind of a French accent, he sits down next to her on her towel. I don’t look at him, but I can feel him about two inches from my rib cage.
A nervous humming spreads through my body, silent yet expedient, as if my blood is rushing to warn all my nerve endings. I shut my eyes in case anyone peeks in and sees my fear. I can hear Andrew munching on the Doritos when something lands on the center of my back. I force my face into a casual “what’s up” look, then open my eyes and glance over at him. He’s chewing with his mouth open. There are orange crumbs in the corner of his lips, but I’m focused only on his eyes.
“Let’s just leave it there,” he says, referring to what I guess is the Dorito he tossed onto my back. “Then, by the end of the day, we’ll take it off and you’ll have the perfect shape of a chip.”
He confuses me utterly. His words are joking, but in the back of his eyes I see a thin curtain covering muscular, shadowy dancers who move in perfect rhythm together, yet clearly hate each other.
I don’t know what to do about the chip on my back. I have a sense Annie would rise up in fake fury and say, “You’re getting it now” and maybe throw something at him and then run screaming from him when he chased her.
I don’t think I could pull this off. I’d have to have a fun tone of voice, and I’ve never had one before. I might end up looking real pissed off and not just fake-angry. Then he might look at Annie, release the dancers from his eyes and go, “Whoa, men-in-white-coat time. Crazy cousin.”
Besides, even if I could manage the right voice, my bathing suit’s unhooked, and what if I stood up too fast before the hook was secured and the top fell down? I glance over at Leslie to see if she’s going to say something funny, but she’s taking some sandwiches out of her backpack and putting them on a little plate.
“Maybe” pops out of my mouth. “Maybe you can also put a sandwich on my back and a can of Coke so that at the end of the day, I’ll have shapes of a whole lunch there.”
His eyes open a little wider as if he didn’t expect me to say that. He doesn’t look angry at all for a moment. Instead, he cracks up and shows perfect teeth. “How about some fries? We could make a happy face right here.” He touches the center of my back with his finger, making two dots for eyes and a swipe for the smile.
Cool waves run from where his finger touches me, turning into a wild heat that flashes between my legs and makes me unbearably ashamed and exhilarated. I want to run down into the ladies’ locker room, catch my breath and just think about this over and over and over. I need to look in the mirror at my back and see if the places he touched are highlighted with dark brown sparkles.
I laugh nervously and my ears hear a giggle come out of my own mouth that’s like one Annie would do. Then there’s the sound of someone pulling the tab open on a can of soda and at the same time Eva says, “How’s that arm, Andrew?”
There’s a shifting of bodies next to me. Leslie moves closer to my head so that Eva can sit next to Andrew. I watch Eva’s profile as she looks at his cast, as if she could see how the bones are healing beneath it.
“You tell me, doc, how am I doing?” he says.
She rolls her eyes. “I wish you guys would stop calling me that. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
Even from my side view of her I can see the glints of pleasure sparking out of her eyes. The others have gathered around as Leslie lays out more food, and I can tell Eva’s glad they’re all hearing about her tentative reluctance to acknowledge the gifts of her superior intellect. Then her eye-glints stop as Andrew slides the Dorito to the right side of my back and says, “I think it looks better here.”
Eva turns from his arm to glare at me. I feel a new wave of hate coming from her, climbing higher and higher, arching to crash over my head and send me whirling into the deep end of the ocean, with all of them watching from shore.
She reaches across Andrew, making sure her hair brushes against his shoulder, and takes a Dorito. She bites a tiny corner off of it and turns to him. “I mean, who could possibly have decided what they want to do with their lives by now? Although, I guess if you had, like, a special gift, you would know.”
Nobody picks up her cue to mention her special gift for science and math. She nibbles another crumb from the Dorito and her eyes flash over the group. Annie, magically no longer on the diet she decreed we were on at breakfast, is eating some fries someone brought up from the snack bar downstairs. JKIII has picked up a half of one of Leslie’s sandwiches. Eva waits until there is a silence, broken only by the sounds of chewing, then says, “Hey, Stephanie, have you thought about teaching fifth grade or something? It’d be perfect, you know, cuz you’re so small. The kids would feel safe with you.” She giggles. “Couldn’t you just see the kids, you guys? They walk into class the first day, see Stephanie and say, ‘Hey, where’s the teacher?’ ”
She laughs really hard and I have no idea who else is joining in because I feel such a deep rumbling in my brain, I know an earthquake is happening there and all my Warrior Words from the countless hours of my lonely reading are bursting free. They slide down from my brain to my mouth. By the time the words get to my tonsils, they are old friends in battle gear. They are finally ready to come forward. They are ready to help me, waving flags and hoisting Uzis.
“Actually,” I say in a dead calm voice, “I’m being conscripted into what could generally be considered the global, Boston-Irish-Catholic family business. The typical ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny situation. Not that I mind. I’m actually thrilled about one day becoming a senator. I like the idea of fighting for egalitarianism. Could you imagine, Eva, the socioeconomic repercussions of a return to say, primogeniture?”
I keep my eyes opened in concerned inquiry. My heart is pounding. Eva freezes with a Diet Coke to her lips. Though I stare at her, I can see Andrew, Leslie, Annie and JKIII out of the corner of my eye, hazy colors with tanned, startled expressions on top. First, they find out I’m a Facebook rebel and now this. No one says a word, and without looking around, I can feel all the eyes weaving into one big question directed at Eva. She’s the batter up, the big-talking slugger who’s now at the plate.
She lowers her hand, setting her drink down, and looks at me. For a moment I almost feel sorry for her as fear skitters in her eyes like lizards suddenly illuminated by headlights at the side of a desert road. She coughs slightly, then says with as much interested concern as she can muster, “No, uh, no, I can’t.”
I close my eyes, nesting my chin in the soft comfort of my towel. My mind explodes with fragments of words flashing like fireworks, tumbling down onto my eyelids. Sounds of crackling chip bags and rustling bodies float up to my ears, gradually easing the tight band between my shoulder blades.
Through the blind haze of suntan lotion, fries and far-off cigarette smoke, Andrew’s cologne of anger and despair seeps into my body, and I shudder against my towel in terror and longing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Someone is barbecuing. Meat singes the air. There’s a prick of coolness on the breeze as the sun slants low, splintering its light through the high leaves of the trees, which wave slightly, unhurried and uninvolved, above us.
I can’t believe that this is only my second night in L.A. and the fourth day since my mom left. I feel like I’ve lost all concept of real time. Like I’m a time traveler from another world and everything that happened to me in Boston could have been years ago. I focus only on what is happening here. I keep all the Boston thoughts and memories in a little capsule in the middle of my spine, away from my heart and away from my brain, so I don’t have to feel or think about any of it.
I keep thoughts about my mom buried the deepest. About a hundred times a day, images of her ping up into my head. Sometimes they’re good images and sometimes they’re bad. Sometimes she’s brushing my hair and my heart aches for her so much I can’t breathe. Other times, she’s my evil mother, the one of striking fists and raging eyes.
In the same minute, I can have ten images of each kind blasting in my head and battling with each other to find out which is the real her. When these battles wage, I feel exhausted and empty, as if it sucks out all my guts having two fighting mothers inside me.
Sometimes, I think about sneaking a ride to the airport and stowing away on a plane so I can fly back to Boston and comb the streets for her. I feel like I must have a secret power inside because I’m her daughter. That the power would pull her to me, no matter how drunk she was when I found her. That she could even be blindfolded but would rush over when she heard my voice, like a mother cow hearing her calf in the middle of a great herd.
Then I think, Where was my big, secret power when she was standing right in front of me? Where was it when she pried my hands from around her waist and took off into the rain?
Invisible Girl Page 5