by Deb Caletti
I never understood why it was somehow superior to be a joiner. Being an introvert is judged in some extreme way, as if you’re lacking some ability to cope because you don’t drink beer and smoke pot in Macy Friedman’s basement. In our society, introversion as an alternate lifestyle gets less respect than any other alternate lifestyle, in my opinion. You could be gay and go to homecoming with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you could go drunk, you could go and ditch your partner middance, but if you didn’t go at all, you were a loser. Introversion is distrusted—it makes people nervous. Maybe it seems like we’ve got secrets. They think the secret is that you’re depressed or something, that’s why you don’t seek their company, when the secret is really that you’re happy and relieved and almost flying at the near-miss escape of not having to be in their company. You’re looked at like you’re seriously lacking, when the only thing you feel lacking in is the ability to be an introvert in peace.
So that’s why it was so strange that I actually wanted to go to school on the Monday after Juliet moved back home with Hayden. I’d never wanted that, and there I was, feeling some sense of rest just doing my regular routine: first period Art with Mr. Wykowski (who always came in smelling like weed, not too different from several guys in his class), second period European History with Mr. Chester and creepy Reilly Ogden staring at me like I was water and he was desert. Bells ringing, locker doors slamming, guys yelling, Fuck! and cheating on tests, what’s-the-point-of-this homework, boredom—compared to being home with my now pregnant sister, it was a haven.
I saw Nicole in third period AP English with Ms. Cassaday, just before lunch. The minute class was over, just after the bell rang and just after Ms. Cassaday said, “Be brilliant, people,” and swirled around in her batik skirt, Nicole grabbed my arm.
“Where were you yesterday? I needed you. Didn’t you get my messages? Kiley was looking all over for you. She wants to break up with Ben but doesn’t know how.”
I didn’t know anything about breaking up. I didn’t know about most of the things people asked my advice about. They just seemed to need to hear something sensible that they could later ignore. “I’m not the one to ask,” I said. “I can’t even get Reilly Ogden to leave me alone. He gave me a note today asking me to the prom.” I passed it over to her.
“‘I’d like to take this opportunity …’,” she read aloud. “Jesus, he’s creepy. Anyway, he’s a junior. You’re a junior,” Nicole said.
“Next year’s. Look at the date.”
“God.” Nicole sighed. “I don’t know why you just don’t tell him to go away.”
I had tried a hundred times, but getting rid of Reilly Ogden was as pointless a task as removing a stubborn permanent stain in your best jeans—a stain like grease or blood which no matter how many times you washed them, was there still. “I have told him,” I said.
“Not in any way that says you mean it. You’re afraid to hurt his feelings; I hear it in your voice. There’s such a thing as too nice.” Nicole’s black curly hair was up in a ponytail, and she wore a skirt, something she hardly ever did because of her weight. Her weight was fine but she didn’t think so and neither did her dad who was always on his bike or running somewhere. He wore those spandex shorts that were as tight as Saran Wrap over a bowl of leftovers, which meant that Nicole was destined to hide her own body in every way she could.
“Hey, you look great today,” I said.
“Really?” I knew from my psychology books that Nicole lacked self-esteem. She was talented and a great writer, especially, but she didn’t believe in herself. It was sad, and I felt sorry for her. We’d been friends since elementary school, best friends, and her dad still thought my name was Sharon.
“You ought to wear skirts more often,” I said.
We walked toward the lunchroom, which was full and noisy and smelled like it always did no matter what was on the menu—some combination of gravy and cut apples, Pine-Sol, and the rubber from tennis shoes. It was enchilada day, I guessed, because Leo Snyder shouted to some other guy on the soccer team, “Pico de gallo is just Mexican for salsa!” and then Renny Williams (who hadn’t legitimately passed a class since elementary school even though his mom was vice-president of the PTA) shouted, “Hey, I still got half a burrito in my car from last night!” and then Leo Snyder said, “Duuum-ass” in a deep, dumb voice and Renny said, “Suck my Pico,” and everyone at his table hooted those laughs meant to make everyone look.
“Hopefully Kiley’s there already. You’ve gotta answer your phone, Missy,” Nicole said to me and flicked my arm with her finger. “I don’t like when you leave me. Don’t leave me ever again, okay? Dad bought himself a new car and Mom went nuts. He says he can’t help her pay her bills anymore and he goes out and buys a new car. You’re the only one who understands.”
“I was busy,” I said. “Showing Juliet’s new husband around.”
“I can’t believe your sister’s having a baby. Wait, there’s Kiley.” Kiley was already at our table, waving us over with both arms. “See? She really needs someone to listen.”
The way I’d coped with my term in high school was to find meaningful work, kind of like a prisoner who gets a job in the prison library. I was the Designated Listener, DL, the one who stayed emotionally sober while everyone else was falling apart, letting their feelings out in a way that was sloppy and off balance and dangerous. It wasn’t just my on-the-fringe friends who sought me out either. Casey Chow cornered me in the girls’ bathroom once when her period was late, even though she never spoke to me when anyone was looking. Olivia Gold confessed to me that she hated her perfect life when we used to ride the bus in middle school. I guess I had the kind of face that looked like an open invitation.
I had read in some of the psychology books about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—that we had these life requirements that ranged from the lowest and most basic ones of food and safety all the way up to the highest level of need, something called self-actualization. Self-actualization was the uppermost point, the nothing-else-to-need-now need, and it included things like morality and problem solving and helping others. I liked to picture myself at the top of the pyramid chart I saw on those pages, imagining, truly or not, that I’d risen through the fat horizontal chunks of Safety and Belonging and Love and Self-esteem and had arrived at the smallest tip of Self-actualization.
It was a fancy rationalization, probably, for saying that being needed sometimes made me feel good. It had a high purpose, anyway. So I listened and advised Kiley to break up with Ben because it wasn’t good to get so serious so young and reminded Nicole that her parents’ problems were out of her control, and then we all tried to tell our friend Jasmine that she should just talk to her parents about quitting orchestra if she hated lugging her cello around so much. This, as Custodian Bill walked around the tables, sweeping around us with his big broom as if we were guests in his house and he was anxious for us to finally leave.
“I can’t believe I almost forgot,” Nicole told us. “I talked to Shy today. Actually talked.” She swirled the tip of her spoon around the bottom of her container of nonfat yogurt.
“He spoke?” Jasmine said. “I can’t fucking believe it.” Jasmine was a tiny girl with shiny black hair, so small and delicate that she was forever given the kids’ menu at restaurants and asked if she were lost in stores. Jasmine swore a lot, but it was always goofy and unconvincing. I was pretty sure she would start drinking and having sex, too, as soon as she got the chance. Not that she wanted to do those things, but only because it might convince people finally that she didn’t need crayons and a picture of a smiling hamburger to color whenever she ate. Jasmine’s parents were so overprotective, they were practically running an in-home prison system and a fine one at that. But they didn’t have to worry, not really. Badness needed the right landscape, a landscape Jasmine would never have. Jasmine with a beer in her hand seemed as silly as a baby with a driver’s license.
“I said, ‘Can you pass those papers down?’ and Shy
said, ‘Sure.’” Nicole grinned at us.
“You always knew he was an intellectual,” I said.
“And he’s obviously got a sense of humor, too, huh?”
“The comic timing … ,” I said.
“We really connected,” Nicole said. “The conversation just flowed.”
“You’re obviously soul mates,” I said. I didn’t tell Nicole about seeing Shy in my neighborhood. I don’t know why, or maybe I did know why. It was one of those times I believed in the subconscious, that it existed, at least, like the books said it did. I just wasn’t so sure it was always doing those things without us knowing. Probably, you and your subconscious only pretended to keep secrets from each other. I pictured the subconscious as this thing the general population had to get us off the hook for the stupid things we did, the same as Catholics had confession.
Another image came up then, a wrong one. Hayden, with his man wrists and capable shoulders. How he held Zeus’s collar in a way that told Zeus he meant what he said. I found a strange comfort in that firm hand. It was something Juliet had better appreciate if she knew what was good for her.
“Don’t look now, but Reilly Ogden is heading our way,” Nicole said.
It was true. Reilly, in his stiff new jeans and Bazooka Joe T-shirt, which was trying its hardest to display a playfulness that Reilly Ogden probably had never felt in his life. He tucked that shirt into his pants with one hand as if he were some old guy who meant business.
We crumpled our lunch bags, got up in a hurry.
“See you around, bitches,” Jasmine said.
Jasmine’s brother, Derek, always gave us a ride home from school even though Jasmine had track. In the parking lot I headed over to his Camaro, with its low back and its two wide white stripes along the hood. I was the first one there and so I waited, careful not to lean against the paint. Derek would have gotten pissed off at that. Derek never said much, but you could tell when he was mad. He was always quiet, but he got more quiet when he was angry. Quiet wasn’t one thing. It had levels.
I watched Mr. Wykowski get into his beater car and wondered what his private life was like other than what we knew, which was that he was a pot-head. This occupied me for about two seconds until I saw Shy cross the parking lot, his backpack over one shoulder, his jeans low and sloopy, and his hair a little over his eyes. He looked over at me and I smiled at him. He waved his hand without raising his arm, just a little lift of his fingers at his side, and then I could see his face change color, from a nice easy tan to a sudden red the shade of a pomegranate.
You sure got that guy all shook up, I heard Hayden’s voice say in my head. But I didn’t have time to think about it, because I saw something else then. Something I knew was important, only I didn’t know why. It was Buddy Wilkes’s El Camino, pulling into the school parking lot. It was an old car, with a cream-colored convertible top that was down in the sun. I didn’t know what Buddy Wilkes was doing in the high school parking lot. He’d graduated three years before and had no business being there—his car gave off some sense of wrongness, of boundaries broken, same as when Wiley Rogers’s older brother came around the school selling drugs, hanging around just off campus by the cemetery across the street.
And then I saw why Buddy Wilkes was there. He pulled right up to the curb by the school’s front doors, where it was painted No Parking red, where only the buses were allowed. The radio was loud enough for me to hear, though he did lean forward and turn it down, his long arm reaching to flick off the sound. Not out of politeness, I realized, but to be heard better. He cupped one hand around his mouth and shouted, “Alicia!”
Alicia Worthen, of course. It made sense why Buddy was there. Alicia was a senior and beautiful. Not just ordinary beautiful, not just cheerleader or popular beautiful, but really beautiful. The kind of beautiful that seemed like it was too much even for Alicia Worthen. She tried to get rid of it, the same as you give away something you have two of—she tied up her chestnut hair and went without makeup on her olive skin. But it was there no matter what she did. Alicia Worthen’s beauty was the determined sort.
I wondered for a moment what kind of pull Buddy Wilkes had over beautiful girls. He went through them fast, like they were paper towels to be used and thrown away. He’d had three girlfriends in one week, I’d heard once. Juliet had been with him the longest, but if she thought he was faithful, she was an idiot.
“Would you hurry it up?” he shouted again, and maybe that was my answer about beautiful girls. Maybe he found that dark place that even they have, that hollow and impossible to understand need to not be good enough.
Nicole arrived then, grabbed my arm. “Jesus, girl, what’s that look on your face?” she said, but before I could answer, Derek arrived too, talking all about how Kevin Frink got caught in the boys’ locker room with a pipe bomb and how he might get expelled. I’d never heard Derek speak quite so many words. Bombs got him pretty excited, I guess. We got into the car, and I watched Alicia get into Buddy’s El Camino as we left the parking lot and turned the corner.
“I just don’t get the need to blow things up,” Nicole said.
“It’s a reordering of your personal universe,” Derek said, causing Nicole to look at me and shrug and for me to shrug back. “A bomb will change things forever.”
Looking back, I would remember his words. You’d have never guessed that Derek, with his C-minus average and motor-oil hands, was some sort of prophet.
Chapter Eight
As soon as I got out of Derek’s car, I saw something unusual on the sidewalk across the street where Goth Girl’s drawing had been. When I’d left messages before, they’d just get washed away with the drawing itself, by the rain or someone’s garden hose, leaving the cement clean and empty as if she’d always been silent. But even from across the street I noticed something different now. The drawing was gone, but my words were still there. A new color had been added. I crossed the street to look.
I knelt down. My heart rose. All around my own message were the tiny, tiny words thank you thank you thank you written in a circle.
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this sudden progress, this new place where Fiona Saint George had now put the two of us. I felt so happy, the kind of happy that makes you want to sing, or kiss, or eat cake. I had reached out and she had reached back and it was fantastic. I looked around to share the great moment with someone, anyone; I would have smiled and waved at Ally Pete-Robbins, even, or scooped up Ginger, but no one was outside. There was only the whick-whick-whick of the Mr. Pete-Robbins’s sprinkler system shooting jets of water in an efficient circle.
I heard a screen door slam, and I was ready with my smile and friendly words for whoever it might be, ready for generosity to bring generosity and more generosity. That’s how good I felt about what had happened. But the whole train of joy and good will stopped with sudden screeching brakes.
It was Clive Weaver. But, oh God, wait. This was not what I was hoping for—not at all. This was some sort of emergency. It was Clive Weaver, and Clive Weaver was naked, completely naked, and heading out toward his mailbox. Gone were his usual blue shorts and white knee socks, shirt tucked in tight. Instead, there was only his round white stomach and dangly, embarrassed penis. Blue veiny legs, and a wide, flat floppy butt. I shielded my own eyes and gasped. Oh God, what was I supposed to do? I peeked to make sure he wasn’t going to dodge out into the street. I could hear that nasty ice-cream man, Joe, with his cheerful truck and tinkly music and glaring eyes, somewhere on the next block. It would be a death or bad accident Clive Weaver didn’t deserve. Death by Creamsicle. Death to the tune of “The Entertainer.”
Through the space between my fingers, I could see that Clive Weaver wore his old man slippers, too, and worse yet, his former mailman helmet, which all gave him the unfortunate look of an old nude guy in search of a mail safari. I felt a little panic. Should I do something? What should I do? The tiny dangly penis was understandably distracting. His slippers scuffed along t
he sidewalk until he reached the mailboxes. His wide white ass sagged in the direction of the street. He opened his box, empty, and he shut it again.
“Fools,” he said loudly.
I was too embarrassed to move. His exposed flesh had stunned me into inaction. Instead, I peeked from a distance and made sure he got back into his house. I hoped he was okay. I wondered if I should tell Mom or call his daughters, something. Then again, he hadn’t continued out to the freeway or anything. He’d just gone to get his mail and had forgotten his clothes. Maybe this happened after a person worked forty-five years for the postal service.
Mom must have left Quill Stationers early, because her car was in the driveway. Hayden’s truck was gone, though. I had no idea what combination of people I might find there, in my formerly predictable house. Inside, though, it was as quiet as it usually was when I got home. No sign of my mother or Zeus. I heard the scrape of a lawn chair against the cement patio, though, through the propped-open kitchen door. Juliet was outside, lying out in the sun in her bikini. She reached one arm down to a squirt bottle of water, sprayed herself down and up as if she were a dry houseplant.
“Hey!” I shouted. “I’m home!”
“Out here,” Juliet shouted back without sitting up.
I dropped my backpack, grabbed a Fresca from the fridge. The whole bottom shelf of our refrigerator had been packed with diet sodas since Dean had come along to blow my mother’s self-confidence to smithereens. I made my feet happy and took off my sandals, headed out to the back. I noticed that Juliet had a Fresca too popped open beside her.
“Oh God, don’t look. I’m so fat,” she said. She looked fine to me: she had only the small mound of stomach us regular people always had. She made no move to cover herself up. That was another difference between us. Juliet was never shy about her body. I loved my body and all that, I just loved it more covered up.
“Clive Weaver was just outside naked,” I said.