by Sara Ryan
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Isaac hasn’t decorated his room at all. The only things identifying the room as his are the clothes and books on the floor. Suddenly he blushes and kicks a pair of underwear underneath the bed.
Battle and I sit on clear parts of the floor. Katrina sits cross-legged in Isaac’s chair and peers at his computer screen. Isaac hovers close by her.
“I’ve got it,” she says after a few minutes, “you moved your Office Folder into Queries, so nothing will—”
She’s interrupted by the sound of Isaac’s phone ringing.
We stare at it as it rings, all obviously thinking the same thing: that it’s one of his parents. It keeps ringing, and it doesn’t seem like the person on the other end is going to hang up any time soon, so Isaac sighs and grabs the receiver.
“Hello? Oh hi.”
Pause.
“I’ve been busy. This is an intensive program, you know.”
Pause.
“What do you mean, have I met anybody? Of course, I’ve met tons of people—my class alone has twenty-five people in it.”
Katrina raises one eyebrow. “Girlfriend,” she mouths, and Battle nods. We get up.
Isaac says, “Don’t go.” Then he says into the phone, “No, not you. I’ve got some people in my room.” We sit back down.
Pause. Isaac starts to hold the phone some distance away from his ear, although the voice on the other end is not getting any louder. Then he puts his mouth close to the receiver again and says, “Yeah, I know. Yeah. Listen, I can’t talk much longer. I don’t want to run your phone bill up.”
Pause.
“Yeah, I know your dad pays it. I’ve gotta go.”
He hangs up.
“Harsh,” says Katrina.
“It was nobody important,” says Isaac.
“Dang, I guess not,” says Battle.
The phone starts ringing again.
“Let it ring,” says Isaac.
“It must be hard to concentrate on anything right now,” I say, speaking more loudly than usual to be heard over the phone.
“I don’t even know what they’re doing with me and Rebecca,” Isaac says with a kind of outrage in his voice. Then he unplugs the phone.
“Rebecca’s your sister?” I ask.
“Yup. She’s ten. You’d like her,” he says to Katrina. “She’s a lot like you.”
Katrina blushes for no apparent reason. Then she asks, “Are they going to do one of those ‘Dad gets the boy, Mom gets the girl’ things?”
Isaac opens a desk drawer and slams it shut. “They’d better not.”
“One of them might want to move away,” Battle suggests quietly.
Before Isaac can respond, Katrina jumps in. “That’s exactly what happened with my ma, she couldn’t get far enough away from my dad. It sucked having to leave New York, but I was already kind of in the middle of an identity shift, and then when we got to Santa Fe, nobody knew anything about who I was before, so I got to be whoever I felt like being.”
I wonder what Katrina was like before her parents got divorced. I wonder how she dressed. Right now, she’s wearing a white Oxford cloth shirt over a blue glitter tube top, a Catholic-school-uniform-looking green and red plaid skirt, and purple motorcycle boots. And she has glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton earrings.
Meanwhile, Isaac is pondering the new identity idea.
“I’ll be a jock—drink lots of beer and treat women like shit! Oh, wait—to be a jock you have to have athletic ability. Damn.”
We’re laughing. Isaac continues: “I’ll grow my hair out and get a guitar and write sensitive songs about love and death and the fate of the planet. Being completely tone-deaf wouldn’t get in the way, would it?” He pauses to gulp down more Coke, and then goes on: “Now I’ve got it! I’ll wear badly fitting clothes, overeat, carry a really thick book, and hold forth about the continuity problems on last week’s Star Trek! That always gets the chicks.”
“Ooh, baby—the thicker the better!” says Katrina.
Battle and I shriek, and Isaac says, “What’d I tell you?”
“The book! I meant the book! Jeez, you guys!” Katrina grabs a pillow from Isaac’s bed, throws it at him, and misses. He hurls it back, and it hits her right in the head.
“I dunno, Battle—I think we ought to leave,” I say, grinning.
Battle says, “You got that right.” We get up and start for the door.
“Bye, guys!” calls Isaac, scooping up the pillow in preparation for another strike. “Come back any time!” He starts to close the door. Then Katrina pushes past him and says, “Let’s talk more later—right now I need to have a serious discussion with my girls here.”
Isaac’s face falls. I’m the only one who sees it, though. He closes the door.
Katrina starts in on us immediately, although she can’t keep from laughing.
“Very funny, you two. I say one thing—just one thing—”
I say, “Katrina, just face it. He’s hot for you.” Battle nods.
Katrina rolls her eyes. “That is so unlikely. You heard him—I remind him of his friggin’ baby sister! It’d be about as likely as the three of us getting the hots for each other.”
June 27, 11:37 p.m., My Room
“Bye, you guys—see you soon,” I say, and put the receiver down. My ear is warm. I must have been on the phone with Mom and Dad for over an hour.
I don’t remember anything they said.
Or anything I said.
Earlier tonight, I tried to write my objective description for class tomorrow. Ms. Fraser said that we could describe anything: an object, a place, a person—the only requirement was that whatever we chose had to exist in the world somewhere, it couldn’t be made up. It’s supposed to teach us how important it is to be unbiased when you’re describing an artifact.
I always write things out in longhand before I put them on the computer, so the ripped-out page from my notebook is still crumpled into a ball on the bed.
I was just about to tear it up when the phone rang. I pick it up, uncrumple it, and look again at what I wrote.
Battle Hall Davies is sixteen. She lives in North Carolina. She has long blonde hair and eyes the color of leaves in spring. She is 5’7” or 5’8”. She wears jodhpurs and riding boots, not because she has a horse, but because she likes the style. . She has two dogs named Dante and Beatrice.
Most of the time, she speaks slowly, as though each word is important and deserves its own moment. When she speaks fast, it means she’s especially excited, or angry.
She rarely blushes. When she does, it makes me think of early morning, when the light is pale and the sky ever so faintly pink.
When she laughs at something I say, I feel more funny and more smart than I ever have in my life.
She bites the skin around her cuticles, like I do. When I see blood on one of her fingers, I have the crazy urge to press one of my wounded ones up against it, so our blood will mix.
Stop.
This is not objective. This is not good scientific practice.
Infatuation is not good scientific practice.
My hands shake as I read those words again. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I crumple the paper, uncrumple it again, then rip it into tiny pieces.
Realize that now I have to describe something else for tomorrow.
Open viola case. Write lame description of viola. Close viola case.
Realize that I will spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling.
Last year, during Guys and Dolls, I was stage manager. I had to help Rachel, who was playing Sarah, with her costume change before the Havana scene. It was a quick change, so I held her fancy dress while she wiggled out of the skirt and unbuttoned the jacket of her Salvation Army uniform. Standing there in her lacy underwear and bra, she looked like a pinup girl from the forties—the kind of girl who’d be painted on the side of an airplane that shot down Nazis.
She stepped into the fancy dress and pulle
d it up, and I went behind her to zip it. “Oh my god this is tight,” she said. “Does it make me look fat?”
“No,” I said. “You look beautiful.”
She kissed me on the cheek and said, “You’re such a sweetheart, Nic!” before sailing out onto the stage.
Margaret, who’d been putting the props in order, came up behind me and mimicked, “Ooh, you’re thuch a thweetheart!” Then in her real voice: “I saw you staring. You’re just a little thespian lesbian, aren’t you?”
I think I said, “Fuck off,” or something equally brilliant, but the words kept echoing in my head, and I almost missed calling three light cues in a row.
But that’s not the whole story.
I see beautiful Rachel in my head, but then I see shy, smart André—the boy I spent all last year in Geometry trying desperately to attract.
It doesn’t make sense. Thespian lesbian, thespian lesbian. How can I be a thespian lesbian when I filled up a whole notebook with ways to impress André?
Then André’s face turns into Battle’s, and I wish I could stop seeing her, wish I could stop thinking about what it would feel like just to touch her hair or hold her hand.
But I can’t.
field notes:
i tried to press that flower battle brought me from the hike, but it didn’t dry, it just squished like a dead bug. i hope this is not an ominous sign from above.
July 3, 11:30 a.m., Parents’ Weekend Brunch
Sometimes I think the reason I like archaeology so much is that it’s all over. I can analyze artifacts for the rest of my life, and in the grand scheme of things, if I put a clay pot together the wrong way, or decide that something was a weapon when it was actually a hairpiece, it won’t matter. Not to anyone alive.
Dealing with people is messier.
The seating chart, clockwise: me, Battle, her mom, her dad, Katrina’s mom, Katrina, Isaac, Isaac’s mom, Isaac’s dad, my dad, my mom.
(Kevin’s parents couldn’t come, so he’s probably off composing twelve-tone chants. Or playing Hacky Sack. Or both.)
It makes my stomach hurt to see Isaac’s parents. They look alike, two short, dark, lumpy people, more like brother and sister than husband and wife. And they both look exhausted, as though they haven’t slept well for months or even years. They don’t look at each other. They don’t speak to each other, either, unless it’s absolutely necessary.
I look at Battle’s parents, instead. Her dad’s hair is a deeper gold than hers, his eyes are hazel, and his skin is weathered—he could be the illustration for “distinguished” in the dictionary. Actually, he looks exactly like an actor playing a minister in a movie, which I guess isn’t far from the truth, except that presumably, he really does have some kind of calling.
Battle’s mother is perfectly put together. Her makeup is so artful you can hardly tell it’s there, but there’s a kind of sheen and polish to her features. Both of them are dressed as though they’re in church, which of course is not surprising.
What is surprising is Battle.
Her hair is pulled back into the tightest French braid I’ve ever seen, and she’s wearing a staid long pink dress that I’ve never seen before. She keeps peeling the skin from around her fingernails, and she’s paying more attention to her napkin than to anyone at the table.
My parents look like they’ve been on the road for a month, which they have. Dad is wearing jeans and one of his trademark black T-shirts (they don’t show the inkstains), and Mom is wearing what I have christened the Sack Lunch Dress: it’s shapeless and the exact brown of a brown paper bag.
Katrina and her mom look alike, except that Katrina’s mom has a lot of gray in her hair and dresses slightly less flamboyantly.
Before anyone starts talking, Battle’s father bows his head, laces his fingers together, and speaks very quietly for a while. It takes me a minute to realize that he must be saying grace, and then I feel sort of sheepish for being such a heathen. But no one except Battle’s mother seems to be paying any attention to him, so I don’t either.
Our first topic of conversation, courtesy of Isaac’s father, is the ham croquettes.
“This is a slap in the face!” he says.
“Dad, we’ve never kept kosher in our lives,” says Isaac.
“Hey, that means more for the rest of us! They look great!” says Katrina’s mom amiably.
“Probably even better with ranch dressing, Ma.” Katrina takes a croquette.
After a moment, so does Isaac. He eats his croquette with exaggerated relish, and I find myself thinking about the cigarette he tried to smoke for her. At least there’s not a wrong way to eat something.
“Hey, do you think they have cheese sauce for these?” Isaac asks of no one in particular.
“I find fruit salad so refreshing on hot days like this, don’t you?” asks Battle’s mother, passing the chilled bowl to Isaac’s dad, who scowls at it.
“Oh, yes, I do,” says Isaac’s mom, taking the bowl away from her soon-to-be-ex-husband. “Isaac, take some fruit, you never eat enough fruit.” She heaps some onto his plate and adds in an undertone, “He’d have scurvy if it wasn’t for Tang.”
“Didn’t you say you’ve got a younger sister?” Katrina demands. Isaac’s mother says, too cheerfully, “How sweet of you to ask! She’s staying with their aunt—she’s having a hard time just now, you know how it is—do you have brothers and sisters?”
Katrina shakes her head. “They broke the mold.”
My mom says, “Nic’s also an only child.”
“Wow! Well, aren’t we just the poster table for zero population growth! You, too?” Katrina’s mom looks at Battle. Battle opens her mouth, and her mother says, “That’s right.”
Battle shuts her mouth, so abruptly that I can almost hear her teeth click together. Then she pulls the pink elastic band out of her hair and spends the next several minutes carefully obliterating all traces of the French braid.
“Goodness, I wish you wouldn’t do that while people are eating,” says Battle’s mother softly.
Even more softly, Battle says, “There are things I wish you wouldn’t do, too.”
I’m the only one who hears.
“What’s that, dear?”
“I said I’m sorry, it was giving me a headache.”
For a while, everyone eats quickly and silently, as though it’s our last meal.
Then my dad starts telling lame stories about things that have happened while he and Mom have been traveling, and at the same time that I’m wincing and saying, “Oh, Dad,” I’m realizing that his stupid jokes are putting the focus of the table’s attention on him, and because everyone’s focusing on him, it’s diffusing all kinds of tension, and thinking about Dad doing that, on purpose, actually almost makes me want to cry.
After the brunch finally ends, Mom and Dad insist on driving me out to some big used bookstore they found on the way here, so I can pick out a present.
I can’t think of anything I want.
Anything they can buy for me, anyway.
I scan titles, trying desperately to find one that I can pretend to be excited about. The science fiction section is lame. The only mystery that looks good is Death Comes As the End, but I’ve already read it.
The next section after Mystery is Pets. Why? Do all the little old ladies who pick up mysteries then feel compelled to get cat books?
Suddenly I see it—face-out on the shelf, with a photograph on the cover that could have come straight from Battle’s wall. All About Corgis, it says in big friendly type.
“This one,” I say, holding up the book for Mom to see.
“Really? Are you sure? I thought you hated dogs,” Mom says.
“Positive,” I say.
July 3, 8:47 p.m., My Room
field notes:
mom and dad left about an hour ago, and since they’ve been gone, i’ve been sitting on the bed, feeling homesick.
i think it’s because i saw them that i’m homesick now. the siegel in
stitute is its own, more intense world, and the intensity hasn’t left me any time to think about home.
the most intense thing in my life has always (all right, for the last two years, anyway) been theater. i feel so much responsibility for every show. even back when i was just on props crew and the only thing i needed to do was make sure the typewriter case was prepped for act two in glass menagerie, i still felt like if i messed up, the entire show would be a disaster.
the times when i don’t make any mistakes, when the actors are all on, and all the light cues and scene changes are going smoothly, there’s a special quality to the air, like everyone on the show is getting twice as much oxygen with every breath.
but that feeling is nothing next to what i feel now about battle.
and it’s stupid. i can’t believe how mind-bogglingly, earth-shatteringly dumb it is. dumber than my crush on andré, even. at least with andré, i had every reason to suspect that i was of an appropriate gender to be involved with him. it’s so dumb i can’t even cry. all i can do is sit here on the bed with my knees drawn up to my chin, wondering what on earth i’m going to do with a giant stupid book about the kind of dogs she has.
There’s a knock on my door. It’s Katrina. “You’re not doing anything, are you? I didn’t think so. Listen, Mom brought me a ton of new and exciting chemically processed snack products, and I feel the need to share them with my loved ones, so come with me, we’ll get Battle, go back to my room, and have a women-only riot!”
“Okay,” I say, contemplating whether I should bring the dog book with me to give to Battle. It will reveal that I was thinking about her, which could be bad, but on the other hand, she seemed upset before and maybe the book will cheer her up. And it’s a book, not a dozen roses, so it’s not like I would be making some big declaration of love. I put it under my arm and we head to Battle’s room.
“Who is it?” Battle calls through the door. Her voice sounds a little shaky.
“It’s the Procrastination Police! Officer Lancaster and I are here to make sure you don’t get anything done tonight!” Katrina calls back.