The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  But at the beginning of ninth grade her biggest problem was that she got dumped. Come September, Hazel and Leila wouldn’t talk to her. In middle school, the three of them were inseparable, they called themselves the Sand Dollars, they wore matching sweatshirts. Leila, leader, petite and cute. Hazel, the funny one, second-in-command. Emily, tagalong, emotional backstop. Three halves of a whole, which meant the math was probably wrong from the start.

  She found a note in her locker on the second day of school. She read it over until she couldn’t make out the letters anymore. The Sand Dollars needed to split up. Three would become two, and they weren’t even Sand Dollars anymore, that was too embarrassing. Leila and Hazel reached their decision that summer when they shared a cabin at Keuka Lake Empowerment Camp for Girls. Basically, they’d moved on, sorry (not sorry?), because camp had taught them to want more out of life, leave behind outdated versions of themselves and quit apologizing, start actualizing, and they’d realized that Emily all along had obstructed their progress as young women, what with Emily’s uncoolness, her weirdo home life, her rando clothes—the girls didn’t cite those things specifically in the letter, but had hinted as much before. So it was implicit that she’d been a charity case until that point—and charity, seemingly, was not an actualizable idea. Anyway, they didn’t expect her to understand, but all was good, though please don’t talk to them about it because that would be too Very Very, and remember that SCHOOL IS COOL, keep in touch, lol, L&H.

  The loss was too big. They’d been inseparable for years, always at one another’s houses. Now, nothing? She couldn’t comprehend it.

  For weeks Emily drifted in and out of classrooms and dazed fogs. Tormented herself with second-guessing, to understand how her best friends had become her enemies. Actually, it was worse, she didn’t even have enemies, she had nothing. And she’d so looked forward to high school, if only a new locker. September became a month of desert days. She ate lunch by herself, meat and cheese roll-ups, and slept a lot, and asked herself questions she couldn’t answer, and was angry, Very Very, but in a way she didn’t know how to actualize.

  She became obsessively concerned for Leila’s and Hazel’s social progress and carefully tracked them around school, prayed they’d be accepted into one of the better cliques.

  For the first time ever, Emily Portis got a C on a test. She was punished by Father with two weeks of chores. She feared worse and focused harder on homework, but there was piles of it, she could hardly breathe. Then, a few weeks later, it wasn’t so bad. Tryouts for cross-country weren’t difficult, they just needed girls. The team had a big sister–little sister program. She got matched with a senior girl who gave her a cookie at practice that said Emily! on the top in white icing. She was so touched, she didn’t eat it, she took it home.

  By October, Emily could see Leila and Hazel in the cafeteria and not be destroyed. Her new comfort didn’t last long. The same month, another freshman, Jessie Baker, picked Emily as her subject for an assignment in torture.

  Jessie was in her algebra class, ash blond and moanful. She’d recently transferred from a Boston magnet school and had quickly figured out the social tiers at CHS and applied, as much as a girl could apply, to be a Zeta, clique of the populars.

  Zetas were by and large older girls and rich. Occasionally they took in first-years, even from the not so rich, like Jessie, but then they’d make those girls hustle a little bit harder for membership. All of this Emily would learn later on. At that point, she knew only that on a Thursday a new note appeared in her locker. She unfolded it, felt her blood stop. Nobody likes you. After that it was math class, murmured teases, a trick note that she thankfully figured out before she embarrassed herself, though within a week the ordeals had progressed to the halls. No bathroom was safe. If Jessie found her alone, especially if she was with another aspirant or even a full-fledged Zeta, a best-case scenario would go:

  “Hi, Emily.”

  “Hey.”

  “I like your sneakers.”

  “Thanks.”

  “They’re boy sneakers.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “Do you know why you don’t have any friends?”

  “I have friends.”

  “Then I won’t tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Nothing. You can ask them yourself.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Never mind.”

  How did they always get under her skin? She wanted to ask her big sister on the cross-country team but was too embarrassed. She wouldn’t go to the bathroom, she didn’t drink water until afternoon. She found satisfaction, in fact, in not going to the bathroom. Though for the rest of the month her stomach hurt.

  By November, the trees’ leaves were down, cross-country practice was cold and dark. The big attack came on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Later, Alex informed her that it had been Jessie’s initiation test for membership, that Jessie needed to demonstrate initiative, do more than throw together an anonymous hate page. So Jessie upped the ante. She narrated a slide show, complete with scribbles, that spread from phone to phone, about how Jessie had loaned Emily her North Face at a Zeta party over the weekend, the rum-slushie party at Piper Samavai’s family’s camp that everyone still talked about, where, behind the wood pile, up in the trees, Emily had jerked off some boy from Leduc and sprayed his junk on the sleeve, and returned Jessie’s jacket just like that, all comed on, like it was no big deal.

  In the pics it did look real enough, sleeve + slime.

  By the next morning, half of the school had seen it. The other half saw it at lunch. Buildings quivered with a visceral thrill, no matter that Emily Portis would be the last person invited to a Zeta party, definitely one girl Jessie never would consent to lend her treasured puffy to.

  After lunch, Ezra Mullan, a senior, let it be known online that the fluids in question were his fluids in the photos, but it was just phlegm, no sperm, no homo, and definitely no “Emily Portis” involved, whoever that was. Poop emoji, thumbs-up emoji, crying-while-laughing emoji. And thus was the severity of events so adequately counterbalanced that everyone could laugh off any icky awkwardness about what took place, because they knew that no one would be called into the principal’s office, because Ezra was cool like that, one of the school’s top-tier African-Americans, aka the Blacks, the popular boys’ equivalent of the Zetas, that consisted almost exclusively of white soccer and lacrosse players who made honor roll while enjoying hip-hop, Genesee Cream Ale, and the materialization of sluttishness.

  CHS did have a handful of black students, but only one of them, the captain of the lacrosse team, belonged to the group. There was also an actual African kid, a senior who’d been adopted from Ethiopia when he was nine, but he was Dark Side, the goth clique, and hardly black at all.

  The point was that, by fourth period, once the rumors had had enough time to flow and travel, practically everyone in school knew a number of new things for fact. That Ezra Mullan got blow jobs from Briana Bittner before soccer games. That Briana was a Zeta chieftain and Jessie’s sponsor for her pledge campaign. That Briana had loaned out Ezra and his loogie-hawking for her newbie’s initiation campaign. And that some freshman girl named Emily Portis was a total slut.

  But all of this was only known to Emily herself after Alex explained it much later. Because the one person who knew nothing, besides the teachers, was Emily. Barely online in the first place, she had no phone, she didn’t text, she never stressed about data usage. No boys begged her for pics, because how could she take them? She might have been homeless, as far as anyone knew. So Emily wasn’t aware that she’d decorated Jessie’s coat. Or that, on occasion, Emily Portis paid twenty dollars for boys to munch out her fuckhole. And qualified for asshole-eater welfare payments, and liked sex best on her period, and once got fingered by Mr. Becker to improve her grade in Algebra. And did bestow discount blow jobs, just five dollars, on any African-Americans who knew that week’s password, which was “yoohoo,” whic
h became #yoohoo, which trended that afternoon within the cacophonous jungle that was life at CHS, online and off.

  Understand that Emily was clueless and embarrassed during a break, and didn’t know why exactly, when she walked past the senior cafeteria and a tableful of boys sang out “Yoohoo!” and the whole room laughed.

  Finally, sixth period, Biology, Mike Komorowski showed her his phone under their bench. Mike was almost more oblivious than she, he just wanted to confirm that his lab partner was, in fact, the Emily Portis whom everyone talked about. She asked to go to the nurse. She ran past half of the school’s classroom doors’ tiny windows, then stayed home the next two days. She thought about ending it all with her mother’s pills. She curled up on the bathroom rug and chewed on her fingertips. She was utterly miserable and wholly confused. Then on Friday came the one and only Alexandra Rosenthal.

  Alex was also on cross-country, but she didn’t really talk to the other girls. Emily knew her as the black-and-white ponytail that bobbed ahead of her in the distance. She’d heard what teammates whispered, that Alex was a girl with no parents, with an older sister who wore an Indian headdress to the mall. That Alex would probably be valedictorian when she graduated, but was also well-known as a pothead. And still somehow routinely placed second or third for their team. So a total weirdo, but kind of untouchable.

  Friday morning, Emily was between classes when Alex yanked her aside in the hall and dragged her outside, to a secluded quadrant by the library.

  She demanded, “Do you have any idea what’s happened in the last couple days?”

  “Sort of,” Emily said. Aggravated to be put on the spot.

  “I didn’t think so. Just listen for a second.”

  So Alex explained what had occurred Monday night, Tuesday day, and also what had taken place since then. Like the night before, when much of the senior and junior classes had showed up at Scotty Metz’s house, whose parents were out of town. Jessie had been there, too, with a flock of aspiring Zetas. Alex spotted them in the TV room while they filmed each other doing lap dances on each other, on view for the enjoyment of upperclassmen.

  “They’ll send a hundred tit pics before they graduate. They’re a joke.”

  Alex knew about the yoohoo incident, of course, and found it beyond grotesque. At the party she’d gone upstairs, and there it was, the infamous North Face, on top of other jackets, pink with fake fur around the hood. She’d stuffed it inside her bag. Found Ezra outside, the same Ezra from the original prank, and asked for his help. The previous year, they’d both done The King and I, nonspeaking roles for extra credit in English class. They used to sneak away from rehearsal together and get stoned. Naturally, she explained, it was simple to talk Ezra into her idea, because as a rule Ezra was up for anything, the stupider the better, which included “ejaculating” on a jacket more than once.

  The two of them took a picture with Jessie’s jacket, re-seminated.

  “Whatever, it wasn’t really come,” Alex said. “The kid got in early to Dartmouth, he’s not an idiot. The point is, as of today, now everyone laughs at her. It’s become its own thing: take a photo with spit on your arm, tag Jessie. She’ll never make Zeta. I almost feel bad.”

  Alex took out her phone, a video. Older boys whom Emily didn’t recognize pointed to white splotches on their clothes, captioned in a scribble, “jessieyoohoo.”

  “But you don’t even know me,” Emily said.

  “I just hate freshmen. With overplucked brows.”

  Then Alex laughed, a laugh that glittered, and lay down in the grass. Her hair made a black-and-white blanket. She grabbed Emily’s wrist, yanked her down like a child. The air smelled of snow. They lay side by side for half a minute, both of them looked at the gray sky, then a hand appeared and rubbed Emily’s ring finger between the bones. She shuddered.

  Alex didn’t let go.

  “I would kill somebody for hands like yours. Also, I love your dress.”

  “I made it,” said Emily. It just came out.

  “Wait, seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that’s so ghetto. Can you make me one?”

  * * *

  Much later, decades later, after the name of Emily Portis sifts to the bottom of the American public consciousness, she will still remember the Night of Speed Metal as the moment when her second life began. October, freshman year, the same month Alex commissioned a boy to spit on a jacket, still a year before she’d met Nick, from that point forward Emily had decided she would forever yield charge of her life to her new best friend, Alex, her magical friend.

  Who insisted Emily read this, watch that, make up for lost time. Sneak out, steal a candy bar, introduce herself to the world of teenagers. Get over the feeling that she was in the wilderness and all alone. It got to a point that Emily wished she could pin their friendship to her sweatshirt. Bewilderingly, she discovered that with Alex she was happy, maybe for the first time yet. She admired her to a point where she began to think about herself not as an “I” but a “we” in her mind, as in We’re so lucky she likes us, and We’re so in love with her, and What does she even see in us? As if her “I” wasn’t big enough to fit all her new experiences, or big enough to justify Alex’s attention.

  But mostly she was happy. Alex had decided to undo her new friend’s sad existence in a hundred ways. Half of her plans were terrifying. Like the chimney game.

  Behind the Claymore town dump was a wood-chip trail, a two-mile hike that led down to an unused service road in the woods that ran next to a burned-out furrow filled with trash, and after another mile there was a creepy old cement tower, three stories tall, that was stained with smoke. Once upon a time, the Claymore Fire Department had used it for training exercises. Now homeless people lived there, people said.

  “And Satanists,” Alex said. “They’re the worst.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, Satanists are the worst.”

  “You are joking.”

  “Still no.”

  Alex had on a yellow maxiskirt. She picked up the hem and walked down into the culvert like someone entering a lake. Emily followed her, she’d follow her anywhere. They’d known each other by that point for three weeks, but it may as well have been three years.

  The inside of the tower was covered in graffiti. Garbage everywhere, ivy vines. The floor was littered with leaves and a ripped sleeping bag. She wanted to run.

  Against one wall was a concrete fireplace, a dark hole thick with cobwebs. Alex bent down, took a deep breath, and shoved her hand straight up the hole.

  Emily shrieked, “What are you doing?”

  Alex stared back, eyes wide, her arm stuck up all the way to the elbow. “One, two, three, four.” By nine, she couldn’t stand it anymore and yanked out her arm.

  “But what if there was a raccoon up there?”

  “That’s the whole point, you wimp.”

  The game was her sister’s invention. Emily lasted three seconds her first time, her hand writhed in the dark. It was horrible. Next time, seven seconds. Afterward they climbed upstairs. Alex pulled out a small pipe and got high. They walked home along the train tracks, went to CVS, ate King Cones while they sat cross-legged on the handicapped ramp.

  They began to spend all their time together. At school, cross-country, weekends whether or not there was a race, they walked together on the beach, down to the docks, and got cappuccinos to go and told each other everything. Alex hitchhiked one time, scored them a ride to Leduc. Hitchhiked! Father would have killed her. But her grades actually improved as a result of all their time together. Alex was determined to be valedictorian, and a lot of times they just did homework side by side, or made rally posters for cross-country meets. They’d watch one of Alex’s favorite horror movies, or some TV show she loved, or just watch YouTube, or read together, or walk around town. And Emily did anything, everything that Alex suggested, despite that she often worried and had to hide it, or felt young in a bad way, afraid that her new fr
iend might see something to make her walk.

  But gradually it seemed unlikely. With Alex, life was to be approached passionately, not too sensitively, not sensitively at all, in fact, seeing how she was stoned so much of the time. Whereas Emily felt so weighed down by her feelings that she was also a touch removed. She vowed to keep her new friend in the dark, from her total dullness, her family, her food rituals. She was already skilled at concealment, it wouldn’t be too hard. She especially made sure she didn’t mention a single thing about home.

  During her first sleepover at Alex’s house, afraid she might say something in her sleep, she zipped her sleeping bag completely around her head and nearly suffocated.

  But in the course of that first afternoon, after the fire tower, outside CVS, on a crazy impulse she showed Alex her sketchbook. It was in her backpack. Only her art teachers had seen it before. Her heart raced, she handed it over. It was like she’d fallen under some powerful spell. Alex didn’t say a word, just leafed through the pages of all her drawings. Dresses, figures, girls in plaid shirts ten times too large.

  Alex pointed to a drawing of a basic sundress, asked if she’d actually made it before. She said yes. Alex asked if she’d make her one.

  She was almost too embarrassed and overjoyed.

  The dress took two weeks, a hundred adjustments. The previous summer she’d started a part-time job at a fabric shop, and Alex would visit when she was closing, they did fittings in the back room. In the end, it came together terribly. It draped like a flag in the rain. She wanted to throw it in the garbage, she was so angry. Naturally she feared, before the inescapable final try-on, that Alex would be disappointed, upset, and then she’d burst into tears, because Alex was the single most authoritative person in the world who’d have the right to say, You have no talent.

  She couldn’t stand the idea of Alex teasing her a little, if only for the discomfort she knew Alex would feel.