by Mindy Raf
CHAPTER 9
I’m a terrible listener.
I’m frantically running around the studio, clutching my bleeding thumb in my paint smock and looking for the first aid kit. Oh my God, this smock is so dirty it’s like instant infection. I wonder how much blood I’ve lost already. I read somewhere that fingers and thumbs bleed a lot more because the blood is thinner near your appendages. Or was it the mouth that bleeds more? Wait, then what did I read about appendages?!
I finally find the first aid kit underneath a stack of dusty magazines, and vigorously sterilize and bandage my small wound. Okay, good. That’s good.
I put some work gloves on and move the damaged mirror to another table. I should just give up on my Italy portfolio and go back to my papier-mâché map sculpture for the dance, but that’s not going so well either. I’ve already sketched about a dozen maps from the images I downloaded, but the Wi-Fi signal in the art room is so bad, I might as well have chartered a plane to fly over Africa and taken the pictures myself.
“Heeey … Izzy. You’re baaack … Whatcha working on now?” Miss S.’s whirring voice fills the small studio as she emerges from her junk hall-of-fame office. “And where are you suppoooosed to beee … ?”
“Um … study hall. But I was able to get out early,” I mumble, glancing over at her. Not adding that I told Marcus today was not a good day for studying bio and instead snuck out of the library when Miss Larper was involved in another Steve Drankin and Roopa Sheti trying-to-make-out-quietly-in-the-back crisis.
Behind her glasses, Miss S.’s magnified hazel eyes see right through me. “Okaaay … well …” She starts to head back to her office and then turns and says what she usually says when she sees a student in here who’s supposed to be somewhere else. “I was here, you were here, but weee were never here.”
I smile and bend over my latest map sketch, which after about ten minutes of work actually looks pretty good.
“That looks pretty good.”
Marcus is peering at my table from the doorway.
“Hey.” I shift in my stool to face him, smiling. “What are you doing in here?”
“Well, I figured you might be in here and … I just think … um, it’s important you do well in bio because, well … I grade your quizzes, and right now … you’re not. Doing so well, I mean. And I don’t want what I said yesterday to affect your grades or your studying or anything because—”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s just, if you’re mad about what I said last night, I understand. Still, you should really be prepared because—”
“Oh, no I … I didn’t skip out on our study session because of what you … no I just … I’m really behind on my Italy portfolio and with the dance décor now, I just need more time in here.”
“Oh. Right. Well … okay. Still, though, I just … I wanted to tell you that … well, I felt bad and didn’t want you to think … and I just want to apologize for what I said because see … I wasn’t intending for the thing I said about your sister being pretty to juxtapose with what I said about you guys not looking … alike and well, I just wanted to tell you in case, you know, you thought … um … that I thought that you weren’t—which I don’t, but in case you think that I thought—”
Before I can stop myself, I just start laughing. And then I feel bad, laughing while Marcus is being so nice and trying to apologize. But then he starts laughing too.
“Sorry, was that even English?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say, wheezing.
“Okay, well … what if we went over some stuff while you work in here at least?”
“Yeah,” I say, grateful, “that works for me. Thanks.”
I move a stack of old newspapers I stole from Ina’s sacred papier-mâché pile down to the other side of the table to make room for him.
“Okay, explain the second law of thermodynamics.” He’s leaning over me now and peering at his notes, balancing himself with his hand on the dirty table. He smells sweet. Not like a girl smell or anything, but like fresh sweet, like a bar of fancy soap.
“Okay,” I sigh. “The second law … it’s something to do with disorder always … increasing or something?”
“Well, pretty much. Do you remember the whole ice-cube-in-the-glass example?”
I stare at him blankly.
“Okay, well, basically disorder—entropy—will always increase over time. So say for example you’re really cold and I come over to you and put my hands on your arms like this to warm you up.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and rubs them up and down. “Oh sorry, forgot you’re drawing,” he says, and stops.
“No, that’s okay.” I put my pencil down.
He doesn’t start rubbing again, but he keeps his hands on my shoulders while he continues explaining. It feels nice, and not in a “Yay, I’m learning about thermodynamics” kind of way.
“… well, so the heat from this work is why there’s an increase rather than a decrease of entropy. Make sense?” he asks.
“Yes,” I lie. And it feels like a whole year goes by after he’s done explaining, with him standing behind me, his hands on my shoulders.
“Ew, stop molesting Izzy on school property, Marcus,” Jenna shouts, peeking her head into the room.
Marcus bolts back to his stool. “I’m not— We’re studying. I was explaining—” But Jenna doesn’t let him finish.
“Where have you been all day?” She drops the giant cardboard box she’s holding on top of my stack of notes and newspapers, then dusts her hands on her pants. “Figures I’d find you in here.”
“Yeah, needed to multi-task,” I explain a little guiltily. “Sorry I didn’t come meet you this morning—I wanted to work on a painting.”
“Well, when you have time, can you finish calligraphy-ing these ticket envelopes? There’s like fifty blank ones in there still. Oooh, I love papier-mâché.” Jenna’s eyes widen as she points to my map. “Can I help?
“Yeah, you can ball up paper.” I move the box of dance invites off the newspapers and onto the floor.
“Yay!” Jenna plops down across from us and starts ripping and crumpling bits of paper.
I had planned to wait until rehearsal to talk to Jenna, but now I’m dying to tell her about Blake and ask her about the dance and get it over with. And it’s not like Marcus doesn’t already know. But still, there are details I want to share with Jenna that would just be weird sharing with Marcus too. I decide to wait.
“So, did Marcus tell you about last night?” Jenna asks me, shaking her head.
Marcus and I quickly turn to her, and then to each other.
“About Cathy’s latest plan? She wants to fix me up with the son of some woman from her book club.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t tell her.” Marcus sifts through his flashcards.
“Fixing you up?” I assess my map template, almost ready to cut it out now.
“Yeah. Cathy wants to fix me up with this guy named Jenson. Jenson,” she repeats the name at half speed. “Sorry, Cathy, but Jenna and Jenson? I mean what was she thinking?”
“So we did say the art room!” Meredith rushes inside, her strawberry blond ponytail swinging, a laptop bag over her shoulder. “I was in yearbook. I couldn’t remember if we said art room or yearbook.”
“Oh, sorry!” Marcus jumps off his stool. “No, we did say yearbook, but I totally forgot that I—”
“No worries, we can work here, it’s fine.” Meredith plops her bag down on a table, waves at me, and gives Jenna a small smile.
“Work here on what?” I ask, heading to the back shelves to grab some plywood.
“My photos, remember?” Meredith then turns to Marcus. “Miss S. was saying I should make some sort of mosaic, but we’re gonna mess with them a little, right, Marcus? You’re going have to show me how to—”
“So Jenna and Jenson,” Jenna repeats to Marcus and me as if Meredith never arrived. “What was my mom thinking?”
“What?” Meredith blinks her long
lashes at Jenna. Marcus fills her in.
“Our mom,” he tells her, “she was trying to set Jenna up with a guy named Jenson.”
“Oooh. That’s so funny.” Meredith grins and opens up her laptop.
“Ugh, Jenson.” Jenna shakes her head and crumples a piece of newspaper in her hands as if she’s trying to disintegrate it. “He’s probably one of those annoyingly annoying people who says things like ‘That’s so funny’ instead of actually laughing.”
Meredith snaps her head to Jenna, who turns to Marcus and me as if we should back her up on that observation. Marcus just rummages around in his bag for something, and I turn to Meredith, who remains straight-faced, pretending she didn’t get the jab.
“Are those yours?” I ask her. “Those are really good.” And they are. My eyes catch the slide show of photos loading on her computer.
“Thanks,” Meredith says, her smile returning. “That means a lot coming from you.”
“Oh, well, I’m not a photographer. Wow, you must have taken pictures of almost everyone in our class.”
“Yup, more or less. Oh look, there you are.” Meredith points as the slide show pauses on a picture of me sketching in one of the study alcoves. “That was last year, and the light … I just had to snap it. You looked so pretty.”
Pretty? My hair is in a wonky bun and I have charcoal all over my nose. My mom is right—I do go to school looking like I just rolled out of a cardboard box.
“You’re so photogenic, Izzy,” she adds.
I whoop out a laugh, and then clear my throat. “No. I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. It’s not fair.”
I respond by getting up and heading to the storage closet.
“And you have the best body,” Meredith calls out.
“What?!” I almost drop the mini hand saw I’m carrying back.
“Shut up, don’t act like you don’t know. I’d kill for your boobs. You’d look hot in this top.” She gestures down to the purple scoop-neck she’s wearing.
“I would look … obscene in that top.”
“No way. You would look gooood in this top. You always wear such big stuff. It’s such a complete waste, right? Jenna, don’t you agree?”
“Nope, I like Izzy’s clothes.”
“No, I’m not saying I don’t like her clothes.” Meredith turns back to me. “I’m just saying you have such a hot body, you should show it off more. Right? Marcus, doesn’t Izzy have like the best body?”
Marcus’s head pops up from behind the newspaper stack and he clears what sounds like a Leroy-strength hairball from his throat before saying, “Um … yeah it’s … the best.”
I turn around to clip my template onto the plywood, feeling like the skin on my cheeks could melt marshmallows.
“So, we should probably work on some of your photos before the hour’s up,” Marcus tells Meredith, clearing his throat again and gathering his binder and flashcards. “We should go to yearbook, though—we need their computer.”
“Okay.” Meredith nods, closing up her laptop.
“Sorry Izzy, I forgot that I arranged to—”
“Oh no, go ahead. Bio can wait,” I say in a way that I guess is funny because it makes Marcus laugh. I watch them walk out, the studio door closing behind them with its usual dull crash.
Why is Meredith still being so friendly? I already agreed to our fake sleepover on Saturday, so why is she complimenting me on my boobs, and telling me I’m photogenic? I turn to Jenna, shaking my head, half laughing. “That was weird, right? Meredith being … so nice?”
Jenna just looks up at me, raises one eyebrow, and answers, “Please don’t start wearing tacky scoop-neck shirts.”
I laugh, and then see that she’s taken a break from her newspaper ripping and is now doodling in Robert Stern’s sketchpad.
“Don’t forget to rip that out,” I tell her, and then not being able to keep it in a second longer, I burst out with, “So, don’t you want to hear my news?”
“Oh. Yes, please. Your text this morning was very cryptic. ‘Blake update! Ahhh!’” she reads back to me, laughing, but cutting her eyes back to Robert’s sketchpad.
“Yeah … well …” I can’t suppress my grin as I start carefully sawing through my plywood.
“Ooooh. Wow, wait, I can tell just by looking at your face. You had sex.”
“What? No! What are you— Are you serious?”
“No, I was kidding. Relax, calm down your scrunch face.”
“We kissed, though.”
Jenna snaps her head up to me, and then goes back to her doodling with a “Wow.”
“Yeah. Last night. We kissed in my driveway.” I hear my voice rising in pitch but I can’t help it. “Well, he kissed me. But I kissed him back. We kissed!”
“Wow …” Jenna repeats, ripping out her doodled page. “Is that all?”
I’m not sure what kind of reaction I expected from her, but this wasn’t it. “Um … well yeah. I guess that’s all.”
“I thought it was gonna be something indecent like … you had sex in the attic.”
“Yeah, like I’d have sex with Blake, who’s not even my boyfriend, in my house with my mom a floor away.” I grab some balled-up papers from the pile and start to tape them onto the wood.
“Oooh, I’m Izzy, I’m so perfect I don’t have sex with boys unless they’re my boyfriend-slash-soon to be husband.” She giggles and I throw a ball of newspaper at her. “So are you coming over Saturday night or not? I have to let Cathy know which brownies to make.”
“I can’t, remember? Meredith’s coming over to go to that party.”
“Oh, right,” Jenna says, now making her own scrunch face.
“But I was thinking maybe … of maybe going too, actually.” I add some more paper dimension to my map, trying to match the shape on my laptop screen.
“No way. Really?” Jenna’s features wrinkle further.
“Yeah. And you’re coming with us! You’re always wanting me to go out to parties, so now we can—”
“Yeah no, no thanks.”
“Come on. Why? I know Meredith can be a little—”
“No thanks. Not really into those parties anymore.” Jenna shrugs as if that’s something I should know already.
“What does that mean?” I pull my computer closer, about to zoom in again on my map when something blinks in the corner of the screen. My mom’s left one of her support group chat rooms open again.
“I’m just not interested in hanging out at U of M … after what happened with Amy.”
“Who?” I open up Mom’s support group window and start scrolling through the conversations, scanning for any new vocabulary, or topics that I haven’t seen covered. I’m just a lurker, like Mom. That’s what they call web people who are members of groups who don’t ever chat or post things. Which is why I almost fall off my stool when I see a recent post from LindaSky46.
“Amy, my cousin?” Jenna moves her hands across the tabletop gathering the balls of newspaper into a neat pile. “I’ve definitely mentioned her before. She’s a sophomore.”
“At U of M?”
“Yeah, she transferred in from Wisconsin this year. She was up here last summer getting settled and stuff and I stayed with her a few times. Remember?”
“No, but … I guess I didn’t realize you were hanging out with your cousin. I thought you were going up there with your creative writing class.”
“I was, but I stayed with Amy.”
“Oh. Okay. So …”
And then Jenna starts telling me something about how Amy was set up with this guy by one of her friends, and that she ended up going to this orientation party with him in September and they ended up having sex in a basement. “But she liked him, and she wanted to do it, you know?” Jenna adds.
“Uh-huh,” I say, but I’m not really listening because I’m reading my mom’s post and right now I can hardly speak, let alone translate the sounds coming from Jenna’s mouth into English.
LindaSky46 R
e: Gastroparesis?
Hello All: For the past couple of months I have been experiencing some difficulty in digesting my food and keeping things down. Has anybody else experienced these symptoms after their debulking surgery? Any suggestions and/or information would be ever so helpful. Much luck and love, LindaSky
The past couple of months. Difficulty in digesting my food. I keep scroll-ponging back and forth between those two lines. I need to get up, to pace, but instead I just sit here calmly, hoping it still looks like I’m studying map images.
“… so I was up on campus the weekend she was with the guy, ’cause our writing class had our showcase that night at Motts Café. Remember? I was reading that prose poem I wrote about if Samuel Beckett made Maya Angelou dinner?”
I struggle to get some words out to Jenna. “I’m sorry I couldn’t go to that reading.”
“No, whatever, you had your mom and stuff. Anyway, I stayed with Amy that night, and the next morning she was … crying and stuff …”
What the heck is gastroparesis? Trouble digesting her food? What does that even mean? She’s not supposed to have trouble yet; the whole point of the surgery last summer was to stop the trouble, so she could get stronger.
“… because it was all a big joke … Izzy?”
“Yes. What?”
“It was all a big joke,” Jenna repeats.
“What was a joke?”
“The guy. Liking her. Sleeping with her. Everything, basically. Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, yeah, your cousin Amy, sex, in the basement, joke.” I nod at Jenna, trying to focus.
“Um … yeah, okay. So, it turns out he just had some bet going, some game he was playing with his friends, like sleeping with girls, getting them to do stuff—like this list—checking girls off lists like they’re things that you need to pick up at the store.”
“Oh. Wow.” And I’m looking right at her, but all I see is that post from my mom.
“Yeah, so, I’m still just really disgusted with the whole thing, you know? And I haven’t really wanted to go to any stupid parties up there anymore.”
“Well … yeah, that makes sense … okay.” I nod.
“Okay? That’s your whole response, ‘okay’?”