The Fall of Lisa Bellow

by Susan Perabo

  But middle school? A different story. Turned out, what happened in elementary school stayed in elementary school. In sixth grade the playing field lurched to an impossible angle. How did it happen, the summer between fifth and sixth grade, how could it happen so abruptly that a level playing field could tilt so violently, tilt precisely like the Titanic, in a matter of mere hours the night before the first day of sixth grade? Meredith had seen the movie and this was the image she couldn’t get out of her mind: everyone tumbling from the top of the ship down to the bottom, sliding, skidding, careening, frantically grabbing hold of bolted down deckchairs and stair railings. The sliders were clearly the ones who had not anticipated the tilt. Anyone who was going to get off the boat safely had gotten off already. When? In June?

  Too late! The last days of August, sixth grade begins, the great slide happens, the playing field tilts, and Meredith finds herself clinging to the ship, somewhere near the middle, around the shuffleboard courts, say. She is not down at the bottom near the icy water, but she can feel the chill of it below her dangling feet, and she has no idea what’s happened.

  She had not gotten the memo about the iceberg.

  And since then, since literally that first day of sixth grade, over two years ago, she had been trying to get her footing, trying to find her place.

  Now she met her best friends Jules and Kristy at the corner of the parking lot where a herd of school buses belched and hissed. Kristy had been battling a head cold all week and had a tissue pressed to her nose, lest some shiny snot be detected by the snot police. They entered the school through the tall glass doors in the front—there was a security guard, but he was unarmed, and mostly for show. They went to their lockers. This was the most dangerous part of the day, the unstructured time at the lockers. Any social advantage that was to be gained would be gained during these precious few minutes. Of course, the opposite was also true. By the time first period started, you could feel so small, so pointless, that there’d be no chance for recovery. Meredith knew this all too well. Her locker was next to Lisa Bellow’s.

  Since the beginning of the school year Lisa Bellow had had a picture of a boy in her locker, taped on the inside of the door. Meredith could see it out of the corner of her eye while she unloaded her books and supplies into her own locker. In the photograph, the boy was standing on a white sandy beach. He was wearing black board shorts and sunglasses and holding a blue Frisbee. He was tan and had muscular arms, and Meredith might have suspected the picture had been cut from a magazine were it not so clearly a photograph: glossy, catching the light so that, depending on the angle of the locker door, sometimes the glare made it impossible to see the right side of the boy’s body. Lisa had other things taped to her locker door—pictures of her friends, a bumper sticker from Virginia Beach, a birthday card—but the boy on the beach was at eye level, front and center, and some mornings as she turned from her own locker Meredith could not help but stare at it, her eyes drawn to it in a way she couldn’t even explain. It wasn’t like she’d never seen a hot guy before. It was just that everything about the photograph, every grain of sand, every crest of every wave, every finger and toe, was so beautiful.

  Once Lisa caught Meredith staring at the picture. Meredith wasn’t sure, but it was entirely possible that her mouth was open as she stared, not gaping but definitely open, and Lisa rolled her eyes and gave a tiny little huff with her nose before she slammed the locker shut and twirled away, her golden hair a perfectly silky wave of dismissal. The message was clear: not only was Meredith unworthy of looking at the picture of the beautiful boyfriend, but she was also unworthy of any actual verbal response from Lisa. This was no surprise. Despite the proximity of their lockers, Lisa had not spoken a single word to Meredith for the entire year.

  Lisa Bellow and her friends had gotten the memo about the iceberg. It was possible that they had written the memo. It was even conceivable, Meredith had long ago decided, that they had somehow been responsible for the iceberg in the first place. Lisa and her pack, a half dozen girls with all-season-tanned legs and perky little boobs, had outgrown middle school boys by about November of seventh grade. Now, in eighth grade, some of them were dating boys that Evan knew, and Evan was a senior. Lisa and her friends sashayed around Parkway North Middle School, licking their lips to keep them moist and primed for the next cutting comment about somebody’s stringy hair or somebody’s ugly shoes. Once, the year before, Meredith had been sitting at a lunch table talking to her friends and someone called her name and she turned around and from two tables away Lisa Bellow called, “Can you please sit on the middle of your chair so your butt’s not hanging over the side? We’re trying to eat.” Lisa’s table erupted into laughter; even a few girls at Meredith’s table laughed, which was the worst part. She felt herself withering inside, and instead of saying something clever just scooted toward the center of her chair and forever since made sure she was positioned correctly.

  Meredith hated them. Jules and Kristy hated them. Most of the girls hated them. But then why were they the most popular girls in the school? It didn’t make any sense, and Meredith and her friends had spent countless hours analyzing the data. Eventually they realized: the bitches’ power came from their numbers; through some trick, two of them seemed like five, three like ten. This was partly because they clearly worked hard to be indistinguishable from one another, like Stormtroopers, Meredith often thought as she watched them cut a swath down the eighth-grade hall. Though their hair was different shades, they all wore it the same way, and they all wore too much eye makeup, and they all wore black leggings and cold-shoulder tops, and this year they all wore gold gladiator sandals, which Meredith thought were the stupidest shoes she’d ever seen. Lisa was always attached to Becca Nichols or Abby Luckett or Amanda Hammels or one of the aspirant bitches, and they stood apart and sneered at your inadequacies (those known and unknown to you) and rolled their eyes with such unabashed superiority that you really had no earthly choice but to despise them. These were girls, Meredith thought, who could only be loved by their grandparents and maybe—maybe—Jesus.

  And yet, Meredith always thought. And yet. It wasn’t like she herself was any great prize. She was at least ten pounds overweight, and she was forever saying something she thought was funny until the instant it passed her lips, at which point she realized it was idiotic. Also she had been staring at that picture in Lisa’s locker, no denying that, because she stared at things—sometimes boys, but other things, too, for too long, weirdly long, until even her friends were like, um, hello? Also, she didn’t excel at a single thing. Sometimes she lay in bed at night listing her attributes in a calculated, disinterested manner, as if she were not herself but a project she was working on for the science fair. She could say, totally objectively, that she was very good, likely in the top 5 percent, of American thirteen-year-old girls at math. And she was good, likely top 25 percent, of American thirteen-year-old girls at field hockey, clarinet, and bumper pool. Yes, there were other talents: eavesdropping, for one, a cousin to staring but less obvious to outside observers. Catching popcorn or M&M’s in her mouth, especially when tossed by Evan. Picking things up off the bottom of a swimming pool with her toes. And pretending, perhaps her greatest but least useful skill—certainly less useful than retrieving a pair of sunken goggles. But she wasn’t truly exceptional at anything. No special gift set her apart from any of the other ten million thirteen-year-olds in the world. Last year Jules had won an award for an essay about diversity; Evan had been the best catcher in the whole region; even Lisa Bellow was awesome at being a bitch. Still, Meredith always reminded herself when at her lowest, at least there were actual freaking thoughts in her brain, unlike Lisa Bellow and company. At least she wasn’t just pushing out her boobs every second of the day.

  Also, she regularly reminded herself, there were lots of girls who were way less popular than she was. The girls at the very bottom—like the bottom 10 percent—were staying at the very bottom, because they were there for a re
al and universally agreed upon reason, drugged out, silent, or just hopelessly weird. But then there were the girls who made up the huge middle—the lower-middle and the middle-middle and the higher-middle. This was 80 percent of the eighth grade class, which at their school meant about a hundred girls, and the movement within this middle group seemed to shift daily, sometimes hourly. And then of course there were the popular girls, the top 10 percent—Lisa and Abby and Becca and Amanda and the rest.

  On this day, Wednesday the eighth of October, Meredith and Jules and Kristy were on the high end of the middle-middle. They had been friends for years, had stepped and been stepped on, turned and been turned on, but their friendship remained intact, despite Jules’s wandering eye and Kristy’s increasing, sometimes socially debilitating, shyness.

  Meredith did not know exactly what she herself aspired to, socially. She only knew that she aspired.

  •

  Today was Wednesday, which meant the day started with social studies. (“Our whole freaking lives are social studies,” Jules liked to say.) The class was made tolerable almost entirely by the presence of Steven Overbeck, who sat directly behind her and sometimes whispered passages from the earnest social studies textbook in funny accents. For some reason, and it wasn’t only because he was cute, she found this hilarious, and it was always a trial, but a happy trial, to get through the class without bursting out laughing. “And zen,” Steven whispered, “zee Haitian family must take zere clothes down to zee rivah.” Steven, who had only moved to the school a year before, did other things to make her laugh. Her favorite was when he drew elaborate watches on his wrists with his blue Bic pen. Sometimes the watches were fancy and sometimes plain, sometimes studded with jewels and sometimes children’s watches with cartoon characters’ arms pointing to the numbers. Once he drew a watch that was broken, the springs jutting from the face, the numbers scattered across his arm. She thought Steven Overbeck was probably a genius.

  Today the teacher was called away in the middle of the lesson and the room predictably erupted into chaos a split second after her departure. Steven asked if he could draw a watch on her wrist.

  “Um, sure,” she said, before realizing this would mean he actually had to touch her wrist—but too late, he was already scooting his chair around to the side of her desk. With his blue Bic pen he lightly drew a circle on the top of her wrist and she broke out in goose bumps on both arms. She prayed he did not notice.

  “Time is it?” he asked.

  She looked up at the clock. “Eight forty-five.”

  “No,” he said. “What time is it on this watch? Just pick a time. But choose wisely.”

  She smiled. Her face felt weird, a little numb, and she hoped it didn’t look weird. “Why choose wisely?”

  “Because it’s going to be that time all day,” he said. His blond bangs sprouted up in a way that looked intentional—a little boy-band-ish, even—but which she knew was totally accidental, probably the result of a fitful sleep. This added to his appeal.

  “Um. Two fifteen.”

  “Okay. Be sure to look at it exactly at two fifteen,” he said. He drew the straps and then, with only the tips of his fingers, turned her hand over and drew the buckle on the back of her wrist.

  “Nice,” she said. Her heart was hammering, and it continued to hammer throughout the library period. The library period was a fake period during the day, as far as she could tell, that allowed teachers to go to the teachers’ lounge and drink Red Bull. Otherwise she wasn’t sure what the point was. It was like study hall but with no help. It was like reading practice, so the school could announce to the community that it embraced reading.

  “What is that?” Kristy asked at the circular library table, leaning halfway over Meredith to get a better look, Kleenex still anchored in place. It was Kristy who suffered the most, who was sick with worry half the time. Kristy didn’t even like to pee at school. What if someone heard? What if someone said something about the sound her pee made hitting the toilet water? These were the things that weighed on her.

  “Nothing,” Meredith said. “I mean, just—”

  “Did you draw that?”

  “Steven did.”

  Kristy raised her eyebrows. “Oh, reeeeeally?”

  “Stop,” Meredith said, hoping she wouldn’t.

  “So is this official?”

  “Stop! It’s a picture of a watch.”

  “Which he drew on you,” Kristy said.

  An hour later, at lunch, Jules swung in beside her.

  “Did you hear?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Meredith said. “Did I?”

  “Becca Nichols’s sister is pregnant.”

  “Whoa,” Meredith said.

  “She’s sixteen. And she’s going to have it. Six-teen. SIX-teen.”

  Jules spit a piece of gum into her hand and then stuck it on the bottom of the cafeteria table. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “About the gum.”

  “It’s okay,” Meredith said.

  “So Becca’s, like, going to be an aunt.”

  “That’s weird,” Meredith said.

  “Like hoe, like hoe,” Jules said. “I’ll bet you fifty bucks Becca gets pregnant before she’s sixteen. Can you even imagine? We’ll be going off to college and she’ll, like, have a three-year-old.”

  “A girl got pregnant in middle school four years ago,” Meredith said. “She was in Evan’s class. Her name was Kelly something. They were in eighth grade. She was our age.”

  “That’s so gross,” Jules said. “Oh my god, I don’t even want to think about it. Tampons gross me out.”

  “I know,” Meredith said.

  Kristy sat down. “What’s gross?”

  “Everything,” Jules said. “Life.”

  “Did you see her wrist?” Kristy asked. She grabbed Meredith’s wrist and turned it for Jules to see. “Steven’s mark of ownership.”

  “Don’t get pregnant,” Jules said. “Do not get pregnant.”

  In English they were reading All Quiet on the Western Front, which Meredith understood was supposed to be very sad, but was mostly only very boring. When she told Evan she was reading it, he said, “Spoiler alert: he dies,” so now she actually liked the book more because at least there was that to look forward to—which sounded bad, but was only to say that at least she knew something was going to happen, that all the reading wasn’t just going to be for nothing.

  Meredith hated gym more than any other class because she did not like changing with the other girls in the locker room. She would have changed in the bathroom stalls if she could—this was what she did in the summer, at the local pool—but that was not allowed in the school gym locker room. She had tried it once in sixth grade, she and Kristy both, and the gym teacher had come through and shouted at them that the bathroom stalls were not for dressing out, that they were big girls now and could change with everybody else.

  Two years later Meredith still did not feel like a big girl. She and Kristy would locate the emptiest corner of the locker room and serve as each other’s shields—the changer’s body bent, the shielder’s eyes averted. Meredith regarded with a mixture of awe and disgust the girls who stood casually naked before their lockers. Of course Lisa and her pack were among this group, but there were others, too, people she actually liked. She did not understand how they could speak to each other with ease, as if their pubic hair was invisible, as if their breasts were no more to be hidden than their arms. They were like another species to her, obscene in their nonchalance.

  The day ended with math. This was her wheelhouse, and thank god it came at the end of the day, in the nick of time, because math she got. When they did problems on the white board she wrote with confidence, sometimes even a cheereful, uncharacteristic arrogance. She was in Algebra II with only a handful of other students, working well ahead of the rest of the eighth grade. Today they had a test on rational functions. She had studied last night. She was well prepared. “Problem 1: Does the following table represent
an inverse variation function? If so, find the missing value.” She was flying, acing it, sailing through the asymptotes and the x- and y-intercepts. With five minutes left in class and only one problem to go, her pencil point broke, and she stupidly had not brought a backup, so she had to get up and rush to the sharpener. Then the pencil got stuck in the sharpener and she had to wrestle with it and the class looked up at her, unhappily as one, and Mrs. Adolphson’s massive brow furrowed.

  Meredith looked at her wrist and realized she had forgotten to check her “watch” at the appointed hour. She knew it was now well past 2:15. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was 2:40. In just a few minutes she would be headed home. Maybe she would stop at the Deli Barn on the way. Maybe she would reward herself with a large root beer. The promise of this gave her a burst of strength, and with one last violent, class-distracting grind, she was able to twist her battered pencil free.

  2

  When Meredith was a toddler, her big brother Evan was a jubilant first-grader. Young Evan was so jubilant that the first criticism ever leveled at him by a teacher was that he literally whistled while he worked. This had come in kindergarten, just after he’d mastered the skill and was determined to share it with the world. He sat in his miniature chair at his miniature desk in his cheerful sunlit classroom, coloring numbers and letters and dinosaurs and trees and trains. And whistling. He couldn’t stop whistling. His closest neighbors, the others in the rectangle cluster of miniature chairs at their miniature desks, could not concentrate. How to stay in the lines while the boy beside you whistles his way through the entire Lion King soundtrack?

  Claire and Mark had laughed over this after the initial report at the parent/teacher conference. “We’ve clearly failed!” they said. “Our child is too happy!” In spirit only, they exchanged exuberant high-fives for having co-created a perfect child . . . and look, there was another co-creation, four years younger than the first and every bit as perfect!