Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

  The Mustang fans only grew more frenetic after halftime. I thought the rest of the court would return to their plywood perches to watch the second half of the game, but the platform remained empty.

  I hunted the stands for Aaron so he could remind me who I was apart from all this, but he’d gone. I figured he’d stayed as long as he could stand it, probably until after the announcement. I wished he’d waited for me. I wanted to go sit on the hood of his car in the dark, never mind my suit and heels. His 1989 Ford Tempo, buried somewhere in the mash of cars in the lot, with the two of us on top. That was how this night should have ended.

  I just started to walk, acting like I was headed somewhere. Confetti filled the air and drifted like cinders. People still screamed as the game charged on. For the first time in months, I realized no one was watching me. It both relieved and unmoored me. In a sea of faces I recognized as well as my own, I felt like a stranger. I’d never felt so lost in my life.

  The crowd turned tawdry, and the hoots and rollicks grew harsh as we all fell down the cold throat of another autumn in Mercury. For a moment I thought I could actually feel the world turning, even though I knew that was impossible because I was turning with it.

  After homecoming, I knew what had to be done. No longer would I subject myself to faux desire or cloak myself in the imaginary because I feared what hid beneath it. During my final performance of Bye Bye Birdie, I slipped away during the last act. After sneaking into the public bathroom, I stepped into a stall and locked the door behind me. It was quiet, just like it was the year before when I’d drawn myself old in the same bathroom. I peeled off my leotard and tights, and they pooled at my ankles as I sat naked on the toilet.

  I didn’t have to go to the bathroom. Instead, I tilted my head to the right and rested it against the cool metal of the stall. The waistband of my tights had imprinted a thick red ring around my stomach. The sweat that dripped underneath the searing stage lights dried; a chill slid across my body and up the curve of my spine. Goose bumps. My skin coarsened and blotched.

  I had repeated this ritual every year since I was a freshman member of the chorus, but this time was my last. And tonight was everything. Everything I’d been working for. It was an insular sensation—I didn’t care about the audience or the actors or the pit band. I was the spotlight’s object of affection, and it was mine. Now the time had come for me to release it, this shining light that had befriended me, guarded me, girded me, for as long as I’d needed it.

  The door to the bathroom swung open and I heard the click-clack of high-heeled dancing shoes.

  “Amy?” a voice called. “Amy Jo, are you in here?”

  I said nothing. A silent moment passed before the door opened and shut. Alone again. In a few minutes I’d pull my leotard back on and head toward the stage for my final moment, but for now I waited on the toilet and inhaled. I loved that smell of dirt and sweat that clung to my leotard. It was the smell of work and passion and things that I loved. This was my postcoital high, and I smoked it like a cigarette.

  Life after Mr. Lotte demands a certain kind of subliminal finesse, much like the manner in which a housewife plans a party. After a while, the formula melds to instinct: first you consider your guests, then your surroundings, and very last, yourself. It takes a great deal of effort to appear as if our actions require no effort at all, to clothe ourselves in the finest fabrics and swat away any attention we receive with, “Oh, this old thing?” Life is best when seen as a closet full of sparkling party gowns. It allows us to choose what to put on, what to cast off, and what to keep hidden away.

  We start to orchestrate even the smallest part of our lives, from abandoning the snack line in the cafeteria to bringing our own lunches, packed in a crisply folded paper bag. We don’t want to be seen waiting in line; we don’t want anyone to know we have money in our pockets. We don’t park in tight spaces. We don’t loan out our books, and we never plan too far in advance.

  We avoid situations where we’ll be alone with older men. If a teacher wants to meet with us before or after class, we make sure we sit between him and the door. Every smart girl knows you first scan all the possible exits from a room before you sit down, cross your legs, and smile—even as your heart hammers away in your chest. Let your companion underestimate you, and then you’ll gain the advantage. Interactions now have a currency to them, and if you aren’t gaining shekels of prowess, you’re paying them to someone else. It will take years to buy back all the ones Mr. Lotte took for himself.

  And perhaps that’s the biggest difference between B.L. and A.L. (Before Lotte and After Lotte). We’ve always been good girls, the best, forever eager to hide another’s indiscretion and swallow it as our own. But Mr. Lotte has made us smart girls, too. Not that we’d thank him for it, if we could remember what he did to us. Instead, our actions take orders from a sheathed impulse to change the future because of the unknowable past. Never again will someone get the best of us. We believe in the Trinitarian gospel of good-girl survival:

  1. The most cunning are disguised as the most naïve.

  2. The sexiest word is no.

  3. Speak well of everyone, and assume the worst.

  The downside to our post-Lotte guide to survival is that we always feel as if we’re in trouble. We suffer from guilty consciences, and we’re counting down the hours until someone exposes us for our crimes. Every police car zooming past with glaring lights must be aiming to pull us over, even though we never speed. Every protracted stare from a man must mean he’s deciphered our encrypted secrets. Every late night out is a regret waiting to happen; every letter carries bad news inside its envelope. Every first kiss is a prelude to loneliness.

  This kind of life cannot continue forever. Perfection tamps the smolder of our hearts, and we’re so very tired of the constant chill. One by one, our alarm clocks chime, and the awakening begins.

  Origin Story

  SOMETHING THAT WOULD ALWAYS be true: the young men in Mercury shone like constellations in a vast female sky. They were bright and piercing; we were endless and deep. Together, we drew a map that led toward the future and reminded us of the past. I needed those boys in Mercury not only to lay hold of my own hidden multitudes, but to see anew the place I would always be from. Pete and the myth of youth, Simon and the love of illusion, Aaron and the heart that still beat beneath the quiet wreckage.

  Nine years before the night he brought me the homecoming roses, Aaron and I collided for the first time. On body-drawing day in third grade, our teacher Mrs. Steeple taught us the body was an agent of function, not feeling. The heart pumped the blood and the lungs pushed the air, each with its own circular rhythm. Now go and draw it, she said. Spread out in the barren auditorium, we turned our bodies into art.

  With a crisp, clean sheet of drawing paper beneath me, I lay on my back with my hands splayed out, palms up. The outline of my body felt like a racetrack as my partner Melissa sped around it with a pencil. I liked the sensation of being traced. I felt at home in my body, a feeling I would chase for years to come.

  I tilted my head to the right and saw a boy lying a few feet away from me, his hands outstretched like mine. He was just a regular boy, one who always bought a school lunch and got mud caked on his shoes at recess. Nothing to infatuate me. He closed his eyes as his partner sketched jagged lines around the perimeter of his body. His name was Aaron.

  “Hold still,” Melissa said. She dragged her pencil down the slope of my neck, off the cliff of my shoulder. “Finished,” she said. “My turn.”

  I sat up while Melissa lay down. I traced her carefully, swirling a colored pencil around the corners of her elbows, the curve of her head. I dove into the valley between each of her fingers. Beside us, Aaron traced his partner and scooted around the edges of the paper as he drew. The dark rubber soles of his sneakers squeaked against the floor. His skin was almost as white as his socks. Like the synchronous, ticking minute hands of twin clocks, we revolved around our drawings.

  Next we
drew our organs into the white space of our bodies. I drew a duo of lungs that looked like butterfly wings. My heart looked like an apple. To add some flair, I drew glasses around my green eyes, a mole on my right cheek. A coil of thick bangs across my forehead and a waterfall of brown hair from the crown of my head to my shoulders.

  I sat against the wall to examine the drawing of myself. I hadn’t realized my head was so small. My butterfly wings leaned to the right. Aaron walked toward me, his dark blond hair extra fuzzy from lying on his back. He stood over me with his shoulders slightly hunched. His two front teeth had the tiniest sliver between them.

  I looked up at him. “What?”

  “I saw you picking your nose,” he said.

  “You did not,” I said back.

  “Did, too.” His face remained calm, resolute. It made me mad.

  “Did not!”

  “Did. Too.” The corners of his mouth crept into a smile. “You’re lying.”

  “Go away, Aaron.” I scowled. He laughed and ran away toward a group of boys bouncing a kickball. Their shoes screeched against the vinyl floor and the sound echoed across the auditorium.

  Before the school day ended, we hung our drawings around our classroom, a clothesline of twenty-four white banners attached to the wall with Scotch tape. Each body, flat on its back, inside out. I spied Aaron’s drawing. His irises were emerald green and his smile was a small, upturned parenthesis. His lungs looked like brown kidney beans, his heart a ball of bright red between them.

  Since that day, I came to think of my friendship with Aaron as an item I possessed in a way I no longer possessed my own body, like a reel of film I could thread into an old-fashioned movie projector and watch it play. There was no sound, no need for words, only images in motion.

  I saw him at Coyote’s Pizza in his black half-apron, holding a tray with three plastic red glasses brimming with ice water. I saw him cower in a church pew, crimson-faced because his mother had rested her head on his father’s shoulder during the sermon. I saw him hunch at a desk, penning his first editorial for the school newspaper: “Skipping School: What’s the Big Deal?” I also saw him accept a perfect attendance award at the end of each school year. I saw him clench a guitar pick between his teeth as he pulled his guitar from its case. I saw his practiced thumb flip open the cap of a Zippo. I saw him smile and wave at me from behind the dashboard of his car.

  If I stretched taut the film of us between my fingers and held it up to the light, I could see the two of us move in slow motion. It was 1999, the millennium was closing in, as was the diaspora of everyone I’d ever loved—people I knew so well that I could recite their mother’s maiden names as well as their dead pets. I would never know anyone the way I knew these people, and I would never be known this way, either. In the final months of my youth, Aaron came to embody this paradox: it was possible to drown in both intimacy and anonymity. If I wanted to leave Mercury, I had to go alone. I couldn’t take anyone with me.

  For almost two months after mailing my application, I put all my escape plans on hold while I waited to hear back from Cornell University. I didn’t let myself consider what would happen if I didn’t get accepted. I knew I had two choices as I stared down the mountain of adulthood: dig deeper into Mercury (and my lies and regrets hidden within) or escape, and I had chosen escape. Each day when I arrived at school, I opened my locker to find a picture I’d cut from a pamphlet of Cornell’s clock tower, which stood right next to my hidden spiral staircase.

  As the days passed, I grew worried. I should have heard by mid-December. “Relax,” Aaron told me when he first saw me each morning. Then he repeated it in German class during the day’s final period: “Give it a rest.” I knew he was right. Still, I couldn’t help but jet to the mail pile on the kitchen counter of my house each day after school to see if the letter had come.

  On a dreary day in January, someone came to the door of my calculus class and handed a note to the teacher that summoned me to the main office.

  I gathered my books and headed down the hall, wondering what they could want. Classes were still in session, and the corridor’s silence hung over me. I hadn’t gotten a note excusing me from class since Nora asked me to visit her in Yutes’s office more than two years before. I’d never even gotten a detention. My father’s face flashed in my mind. He spent most days climbing ladders and walking across rooftops. Had he fallen?

  By the time I reached the office, I could barely breathe. When I went in, one of the school secretaries—Mrs. Bonner, a good friend of my mother’s—shut the door behind me.

  “Your father called,” she said.

  “Is it my grandparents?” I asked. “Are they all right?”

  “Everyone’s fine,” she said.

  I exhaled.

  “I have good news,” she said. “Your dad said he just couldn’t wait for you to get home from school, so he opened a letter that came for you from Cornell.”

  My heart stopped. “And?”

  Mrs. Bonner stood up. “You got yourself into an Ivy League school, young lady.”

  Never had the building around me felt so hopeful. “I did?”

  “You did.”

  “I did?”

  “You did!”

  I’d done it, and the thrill I felt was greater than I’d imagined. Joy zipped through my entire body. That inner heat that had lain dormant too long inside me started to blaze. I’d done it. After years of hiding in the spotlight, I had finally found a path that promised to lead me back to myself.

  By March, most of my friends had found their escape routes as well. Many had been accepted at local colleges, some enlisted, and one even gotten into West Point. Though not all would follow through, everyone at least planned to get out of town. Everyone except for Aaron, who didn’t have any plans at all.

  “You’re smart, Aaron,” I told him one morning in journalism class. “You should apply to Slippery Rock. It’s cheap and you could still work at Coyote’s if you want to.”

  The two of us stood side by side in front of a small desk as we arranged the layout for the next issue.

  “Besides,” I continued as I paginated the sheets. “It might be too late already.”

  Aaron’s face was blank. “I can’t pay for it.”

  “My dad said he’d help you apply for financial aid.”

  He frowned. “You talked to your dad about it?”

  I looked up at him. “I thought you could use the help.”

  He didn’t respond, so I kept pushing. A wedge was growing between me and my friend: this place wasn’t enough for me, and he knew it. I was leaving, and I wanted him to leave, too. Then I’d be leaving less of what I loved behind.

  “Come on, Aaron,” I said. “You don’t want to work at Coyote’s for the rest of your life, do you? Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  He pressed his palms into the table and turned his head toward me. “Honestly, I don’t think it matters much where I end up.”

  I hated when he talked about himself that way, as if the end had already been written. But I didn’t want to argue with him anymore. We finished our work in silence as the spring wind shook the trees in Mercury. Paralyzed by the coming ritual of departure, both our hearts were prone to linger where they shouldn’t.

  In April, things in Mercury headed toward a fever pitch, and we awaited the moment after which nothing would ever be the same. There were so few of them, after all. Birth. Death. First love. Leaving home. We’d seen so many before us not disappear, but turn invisible. Every last rite felt too much like death, like whispering final prayers while looking down the barrel of a gun.

  The spring delirium that struck our town came from a different stock than our beloved Friday night football. It didn’t stem from idolatry, but manic boredom, the need for something—anything—to happen, an event we couldn’t predict. Kids so close to graduation were dropping out like flies. Gonna go drive a truck, some of them said. I got my CDL and they’re gonna pay me six hundred bucks a week. Who
could pass up an opportunity to drive into the night, to leave Mercury behind again and again, always to return?

  As spring passed, prank bomb threats bloomed along with the daffodils. The joker took care to cloak his identity; he dialed the main office from pay phones (using, perhaps, the very one in the main hall of the school) and made his conversations quick. All it took was one word—BOMB—and the faculty evacuated the entire school. A paradox: the threat of demolition on the sunniest of days. Something about this tension made me feel green inside, confessional, as if I might be made new within the old skin of this small town.

  These bomb-threat afternoons waned in a divine concoction of lazy idleness and provocative fear. The thought of witnessing the school before us explode into fire and rubble was seductive. It would be majestic and horrible, just right for the class of 1999 to make its exit. The prank caller never had any intention of setting off a bomb, but it didn’t matter. He understood that in Mercury, appearance was paramount. The possibility of a threat was all we needed to get a little buzz.

  On one of these wasted afternoons, Aaron and I sat on the hood of his car, just as we always did, a river of inane conversation flowing between us. Why his hands always smelled like onions, how long it would take to get across town if you scored all green lights, and if it really was possible to reach the center of a Tootsie Pop only by licking it.

  Our conversation flitted among topics, landing on what Ithaca might be like in the fall. Aaron was the only person who knew that I was as scared to leave as much as I wanted to go.

  “There will be so many people,” I said. “I’ve never really had to meet new people before.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Aaron said. “There will be a ton of guys waiting to ask you out.”

  I laughed. “I doubt it.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “I want them to.” I had stopped thinking—why think when the air smelled so clean and this building might blow into so many pieces it could never be put together again? I let the words spill out of me. “So I can reject them.”