Sharp betrayal lances my stomach. I hate Annie for ousting me and bringing this enemy into our camp. I blame Annie for having Andrew get a crush on Amal.
But really, down deep, I blame myself. I blame myself for being my mother’s daughter. I got drunk. I threw up. I disgraced myself.
Explosive laughter rises from one of the guys who picks up on the Amal-Annie thing. Matt says, “Their names both start with A, all right,” like having a name start with A is the Jeopardy answer to, “Why are these two women both goddesses?”
JKIII asks who wants to go swimming. Annie and Amal say they’ll go, and they laugh when they say it. I hear them clamor toward the steps. I keep my eyes closed.
Music filters up to my ears. Leslie’s iPod is plugged into a dock. Some song is playing about a girl who gets dumped by a guy.
My mind flickers. This is my song. Mine after Andrew walks out on me and our three kids. I see myself standing in the doorway of a humble home with green shutters and a swing set in the backyard, crying, while Andrew walks into the rain and gets into a car driven by Amal and her big boobs.
I sink farther into my towel. Sweat pools in the center of my back. Tears sneak out of my eyes. I pull my T-shirt over my face so I’m in a tiny white tent with only room enough to breathe. I open my eyes. Light comes in but it’s soft. Bad feelings rush into my stomach like they’ve been stuffed into my feet and have finally escaped. More and more tears pour out, and I wish another song would come on.
I do a new trick where I bite on my lip really hard so a little drop of blood comes into my mouth. I think of the pierce in my lip as being half of a snakebite. It almost helps push the bad stuff back into my feet, but then my mother’s face comes roaring up. She’s telling the doctor I broke my arm when I fell down the stairs, and I’m too afraid to tell him about the shiny silver bangles, the red flashing nails and her face squeezed in so much anger that I saw worms pour out of her eyes.
A new song comes on with a fast beat. It’s too hot in my T-shirt tent, and I think my tears have turned to steam.
I hear the crack of chairs on deck and I can tell that Eva, Emily and Leslie are reconfiguring their chairs so that their heads will all be really close together. I’m on the chair right next to them but I’m now so irrelevant, they don’t even care if I hear or not. I’m just like the guy flipping burgers at the snack bar, whom they never see, even when they’re gossiping right in front of him.
Eva’s whisper to the other girls cuts through the sounds of far-off splashing and laughing. “It’s not like her body is that great. I mean, in five years, she’ll be totally fat.”
Dangerous ground, you’d think, to say to Leslie, considering that she is plump herself.
“Totally,” Leslie tosses in. “I mean, I know I’m overweight, so I don’t go parading myself around like she does. She doesn’t even seem to think about it. Like she is just so sexy that no one even notices all her fat.”
So, apparently, the subject of fat is always a safe arrow to sling, just as long as one acknowledges her own imperfections first.
I slip my shirt tent to the side and look at Amal emerging from the water. I hadn’t gotten past the breasts before, but if I look hard enough, I guess I can see a little extra flesh at the thighs and a softness around her middle.
The three of them are just getting started. Emily, the sleepy peach, speaks in the most animated voice I have heard from her yet, as if nothing before has ever been as interesting as the dissection of Amal’s fat.
“Annie said last night that when we were all walking out of the club, Amal took one of the cookies. You know, the ones that they always have out for the guests by the front door?” They all murmur ascent and even I know what they’re talking about, because every day, Carl makes a trip to get a bunch of the free, giant chocolate chip cookies for the group. The guys all stuff a few in their mouths, but the girls only split one, between all of them, talking about sugar, carbs and fat grams even while they’re eating it.
Emily goes on, “Well, Annie said that Amal scarfed a whole cookie down, by herself. Then, she said to Annie, ‘Aren’t you getting one?’ and Annie goes, ‘What, with these thighs?’ And Amal just goes, ‘Well, they’re really good.’ ”
Emily sniffs. “Amal never even said one thing in defense of Annie’s thighs, or one thing bad about her own. Like she obviously really thinks she’s like a supermodel.”
They lean in even closer to each other. More venom spews from their lips. They go on to describe more and more ugly and repulsive aspects of Amal, all of which they have found out through Amal’s supposed new best friend, Annie.
Down below, in the water, Amal shrieks with laughter as she and Annie run away from the boys together, not realizing how false her position in this whole group is, and that if she wasn’t just so formidably beautiful, she would be cast adrift into the deep end, just like I am, with no one to save her from drowning.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The phone is slippery in my hand from sweat. My dad’s voice is thin and jerky like a small woodland animal constantly on the run. I ask him again if I can come home NOW because I have to get ready to start high school in Boston. Where I belong. He doesn’t answer. I can feel him scurrying for cover under an old log or pile of leaves. When he finally speaks, his voice is raspy, as if it’s hard coming back from being an animal and having to turn back into a dad. “Not quite yet,” he says. “But it won’t be real long. Your mother and I are finally talking. Maybe about getting her into a rehab.”
Talking? Rehab? What the hell does all that mean? I clear my throat and give in to the anger. “So, why can’t you guys talk while I’m home?” I demand.
“It’s not that simple,” he says, running back through the woods. “The rehab is a live-in program. Minimum thirty days, but they like you to stay ninety.”
Poison wells in my throat like I’m a human blowgun. Is he kidding? He’s going to leave me stranded in the inner circle of hell for a minimum of thirty days? I open my mouth to release the darts defining his endless inadequacies when I suddenly stop. My mother’s face shrieks into the airspace in front of me. Her face is contorted with contempt. Rage bulges under her cheekbones.
I stand up and look in the mirror. My mother’s furious black eyes snap back at me. My breath draws in sharply. I take in my bunched cheeks and bitter sneer. Vignettes roll of so many moments watching my dad limp along after being lashed by her barbed tongue. I’m frozen in horror of who I’ve become. First the drinking and now this.
Am I going to start hitting next?
All my rage dissipates. “Whatever,” I whisper.
My father tries a fake-robust laugh and says, “I’ve already squared it with Michael and Sarah. Annie’s school sounds amazing.”
“Right,” I spit dryly, unable to resist rearing her head for one last barb. “Amazing.”
I sit at the edge of my bed and stare out the window for what seems like hours. There’s a knock at my bedroom door before Aunt Sarah enters and hands me two uniforms that she says I’ll be wearing to Annie’s school. I didn’t know they wore uniforms in schools that weren’t Catholic. In the public school in my neighborhood, the kids all wear jeans and the girls wear short shirts that show off swatches of their stomachs even in winter. But then, Annie’s school isn’t public. It’s rich-kid private.
Aunt Sarah sits on my bed and explains how Annie’s school normally works. She says the kids have to fill out applications, take tests and have interviews. She tells me I won’t have to do any of that because I’m there under special circumstances and that she doesn’t want me worrying about tuition because she and Uncle Michael have it covered.
The word tuition falls out of her mouth and sits in a prickly lump between us. It’s like when Uncle Michael reminded me that he was paying for my food and stuff. I wasn’t even thinking that anyone would have to spend money for me to go to school because all kids have to go to school and I thought that was just what grown-ups made us do because it was the law
. Now, I’m falling down a mountain with the porcupine of tuition clutching at my throat, sticking needles in my hands when I try to pull it off. Aunt Sarah wants me to know they’re not just putting me up and buying me food; they are spending lots of money to educate me. And there’s no doubt, she wishes she were done with me so she could just focus on her perfect family of popular, attractive kids.
I feel profoundly embarrassed, like I’m a kid on a milk carton that Aunt Sarah heroically rescued from a trash can, only to discover that the parents don’t want it and now she’s going to have to let something of a vague and dirty origin live inside her pristine home. Ever since she had the conversation with Uncle Michael in the gazebo, she watches me all the time, especially if Megan’s around, as if I might try to slip alcohol into her milk or teach her drunken swear words.
I make a vow that I will repay Aunt Sarah and Uncle Michael every penny for my tuition and for all the food I’ve eaten here and the uniforms she’s bought for me.
She keeps looking at me with eyes that take in everything from the scabs on my knuckles to my ragged fingernails. “Thanks so much for everything,” I say, but I have to look down at my hands when I say this because I’m ashamed and sorry that she’s stuck with me.
“Oh, that’s okay, of course,” she says, but it’s really not okay and we both know it.
She closes the door behind her and I hold up the uniform and try to beat back the dread. We start tomorrow. Annie told me that Monday and Tuesday are only for orientation which is a total joke. She’s planning a big sleepover on Monday night so that everyone can gossip about the first day. I already have nothing to say.
Annie ignores me and talks nonstop to Aunt Sarah while she drives us to school. She’s excited that this year she and her friends will rule the school because they’re finally the oldest.
I already spent a year being the oldest—in middle school. Not once did I feel as though I ruled anything.
I can tell that she and Aunt Sarah had another fight when she found out I was starting school with her. I don’t think she ever imagined I’d still be hanging around when her precious school started. When I walked out onto the patio last night, she and her mom abruptly stopped talking and then she asked me some fake question about whether I was ready for the big day.
I feel sick to my stomach. I don’t want to go to this school with uniforms that are an expensive soft wool and not plaid at all like at Catholic school, but maroon with white shirts trimmed in maroon piping. I won’t have a library to hide in here and a Father Patrick who knows I just want to read and be left alone. I’m going to have to sit with other kids in the cafeteria. Kids who act like they like you to your face and then talk about your fat behind your back.
Aunt Sarah pulls up a winding road off of Mulholland. A sign in white letters on a black background says CHAPMAN ACADEMY. She and Annie keep referring to the “campus.” I don’t even know what that is, but as Aunt Sarah pulls up, I see four different buildings with athletic fields, tennis courts, and an actual stable and horse ring.
I feel a surge of panic like a waterfall of acid in my stomach. Annie’s dutifully telling me who I have for chemistry and algebra, but her voice comes at me in muffled clouds. I have a piece of paper with my schedule on it in my hand. It’s already soft, like a baby’s blanket, because I’ve been rubbing it together so much. I want to beg Annie not to leave me, at least not for the first day, but I know if I did, her eyes would become hard and she’d look at me like I was a bug with thick, hairy legs.
“Okay, girls,” Aunt Sarah says. “Have fun.” She pulls her car to the curb. Annie jumps out, not even waiting for me as she pours into the sea of students, all knowing exactly where they’re going.
I hurry to keep up with Annie, whose uniform is hemmed as short as the school regulations allow. She walks quickly, tall and erect, fully aware that the flash of her blond hair and movement of her hips earn her glances from both girls and guys. She walks straight for the building closest to the tennis courts. It’s brick, covered with ivy, like a college building in a movie. There’s a bunch of guys hanging out on the steps. She slows to let me catch up and I know it’s only because she needs to be able to pretend she’s engrossed in conversation so she can pretend to ignore them.
“We have Specter for algebra,” she whispers to me, but her eyes stay on the guys. “He’s, like, so lost.”
I nod, holding down pure terror as I mount the stairs next to her.
Our first class, social studies, has fifteen kids. Mr. Baker has two assistants, one young woman with short, blond, fake-messy hair, who knows a lot of the kids from last year and gives out a lot of fist bumps, and another woman who’s older and wears metal glasses that are too skinny for her face and couldn’t give a fist bump if her life depended on it.
We don’t get any work today. Mr. Baker tells us to get “acclimated.” I think how the nuns would scorn him with his wasted workday and his hip, spiky hair, how they would see right through to his desperate clinging to youth, with his tailored shirt that shows off his muscles but also forces his gut to strain against the fabric.
All seats are assigned by the alphabet. I’m on the opposite side of the room from Annie. I look around at the kids sitting next to me, but they just glide their eyes over me, looking to make eye contact with someone important.
Mr. Baker has passed out what he calls our “syllabus.” We’re supposed to be reading it. I can tell that Annie isn’t, because she’s whispering and giggling. I keep my eyes glued to it, but then all the noise is sucked out of the room and I look up to see Amal the bombshell, who just walked in late.
In Catholic school she would have been in so much trouble, even on the first day. Mr. Baker acts like she’s the guest of honor at his tea party. He personally escorts her to her seat. The other kids all watch her and I notice with horror that Andrew is also in my class, sitting in the far back of my row.
Annie waves to Amal and gives her a huge “Hey,” but I can see, even from where I sit, that Annie didn’t really want such a burning comet in her private Milky Way.
We have the same section, with the same kids, for all our classes. That means I’ll see Annie, Andrew and Amal all day long. I’m beginning to hate the letter A. I don’t know which section Emily, Leslie and the other guys are in; there are three sections in each grade.
I look down at the syllabus but I can’t read a word. Whispers and giggles punch me. I think all the kids must be looking at me. Their laughter sounds cruel, as if they can see how lonely I am and it only makes me more ridiculous. I turn around to look at the clock in the back of the room and I see Andrew shoot a tiny plane at Amal.
Mr. Baker claps his hands together to get our attention and then tells us what he’s going to expect from us this year. His words are muffled and they come at me from a million miles away. It’s hard to breathe in here and I feel as if I might suffocate. There’s a pounding in my head and I know it must echo the heartbeats of Amal and Andrew that pulse with excitement, desperate for the time when they can be alone together.
Annie walks down the hall with the strong steps of ownership, with Amal right beside her. I’m right behind them, because Annie said, “Come on” to me in an irritated voice as we walked out of class because I’m sure Aunt Sarah told her she has to help me the first day. They stop in the middle of the hall when two really cute guys wave and walk toward them. Right before the guys get to them, Annie clutches Amal’s arm and whispers, “They go away every summer. They’re cousins. Only in our grade, but totally gorgeous.”
I’m sure Amal can see that for herself. They both have wavy brown hair, blue eyes and strong-jawed, summer-on-the-sailboat tans. The one on the left says, “Hey,” and they both stop. I’ve caught up with Annie and Amal by now. Annie stands in the middle with Amal and me on either side.
Both guys stare at Amal. “New?” the one who said “hey” asks.
Amal blushes and looks down. “Just moved,” Annie reports. “Bet you wish you stayed here for
the summer,” she adds, making herself unthreatened by Amal’s beauty by becoming an amused commentator.
“I’m Gary,” the one who hasn’t said anything yet says.
“And this is Chandler,” Annie adds, not wanting to slip out of focus during any introductions.
Amal picks her eyes up, but keeps her head down a little. “I’m Amal,” she says.
“She’s from Georgia,” Annie fills in.
“I didn’t know Amal was a southern name,” Gary says.
Amal’s head lifts just a little. “It’s actually Arabic.” She looks down, embarrassed.
Both Gary and Chandler are enormously charmed. Chandler steps a little closer to her and makes his voice come out in sort of a fake whisper. “So, tell me the truth, are you really an Arabian princess?”
“She’s—” Annie starts to offer but Amal cuts her off. “Not even close” comes out in a voice so soft the guys almost have to lean forward to hear.
Gary and Chandler laugh as if this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. Annie has two high spots of color on her cheeks. “Let’s go,” she says brusquely.
“Wait,” Gary says, clearly wanting to prolong the moment. “Who’s this?” and he jerks his head at me.
“She’s not here for very long. My parents just have to take care of her for a while,” Annie says impatiently and starts to plow forward. “Come on, we’re going to be late for class.”
Amal hurries with her. I stumble after them, willing the tears not to fall.
The English teacher’s name is Mrs. Applebaum, but she tells us to call her “Wendy.” At first I hate her. She’s too informal-California like the rest of this horrible city. I miss the nuns who don’t accept nonsense. “Wendy” passes out her syllabus. At first, I don’t even read it because I’m scorning her and everything she stands for. Then I look down and I see the names of the writers sprinkled down the pages like an assembly sent to meet me at the airport, all bearing the smiles of Auntie Em and Uncle Henry when Dorothy wakes up. My tears almost tumble down now, not from loneliness but from happiness. I have read every book on this list. There may be a refuge for me after all.
Invisible Girl Page 11