DC Trip

by Sara Benincasa

  “Peighton, you bitch,” Brooklynn said admiringly.

  Sivan and Gertie went into stalls. Sivan just sat there for a few minutes, trying hard not to feel like she was some kind of bug Peighton could squash for her own pleasure. Gertie found that she actually did have to pee. Maybe it was the sound of running water while the other girls washed their hands, but it inspired her.

  Gertie and Sivan emerged from the stalls at the same time, and found Brooklynn, Peighton, and Kaylee staring at them. For a moment, Gertie wondered if the girls were going to try to beat them up or something.

  “Can we help you?” Sivan asked frostily. She tried to get to the sink, but the girls blocked her.

  “You think you’re some kind of genius,” Peighton said. “But you’re not. You’re just gross.”

  “And your friend Rachel is a stupid whore,” Brooklynn said.

  “Yeah,” Kaylee said. “I mean, to both of those things, yes. Yeah.”

  Sivan tried to keep in mind all the principles of nonviolence that her mother and her father and her favorite twentieth-century historical figures had instilled in her. She breathed deeply. The bathroom smelled like stale pee and Lysol. She heard a voice speak up then, and to her surprise, it belonged to Gertie.

  “Just get out of our way,” Gertie said in a low, steady voice. “Get the fuck out of our way.” She pushed past them and stormily began washing her hands.

  The girls looked a little surprised at that one.

  “Whatever,” Brooklynn said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The cuntriad walked away, but not before Kaylee whispered, “I didn’t know Asians swore.”

  “Honey, don’t think too hard about it,” Brooklynn said, as they walked out the door.

  Sivan was silent for a moment after the girls left.

  “What was that about?” she asked, joining Gertie at the sink.

  Gertie frowned.

  “I’ll never get to see Danny Bryan again,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about it before, but I just realized there’s no way I can be a camp counselor this summer. I have to get a full-time real job that pays better so I can contribute to my parents’ college fund. We always agreed that once I was sixteen I would get a job and start saving up. So now it’s too late to tell him how I feel.”

  “Oh, Gertie,” Sivan sighed.

  They both dried their hands and went back to the table. Rachel was nodding vigorously at something Brooklynn was saying.

  “I don’t get it,” Kaylee said as the girls settled down. “Brooklynn just called you a slut to your face. Why aren’t you mad?”

  “Oh, I totally agree,” Rachel said pleasantly. “It’s something I’m working on with a therapist. It’s like a real mental issue I have. And I appreciate you reflecting my behavior back to me, Brooklynn.”

  “She’s not a slut,” Gertie said.

  “No, I definitely am,” Rachel said. “It’s okay. I’m beginning to figure some things out about myself.”

  Brooklynn looked at her suspiciously, and then seemed to relent a little.

  “Well … good,” she said. “You should. Because you can’t just go around being a slut. It’s not cool.”

  “Totally isn’t,” Rachel said. “You’re right. Hey, where’d you get that necklace?”

  Brooklynn was wearing a nameplate necklace.

  “My father bought it for me,” she said haughtily. “He had it specially made by a jeweler on one of his business trips.”

  “I wish I had a necklace like that,” Rachel said. “It’s so pretty.”

  “You could probably get a ‘Rachel’ necklace really easy,” Brooklynn said. “I mean, it’s like a boring name that everybody has.”

  “Your name is so pretty,” Rachel said.

  “I know,” Brooklynn said. “I was supposed to have a twin and we were going to be Brooke and Lynn, but then she like died in the womb in the first trimester because I was taking up all the nourishment or whatever. That’s what the doctor told my mother.” Brooklynn looked pleased by this information.

  “Wow,” Rachel said. “That’s amazing.”

  “I know, right?” Brooklynn said. “I would’ve gotten so much less attention with a sister.” She shivered at the thought.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever (though it was only another forty minutes), everyone finished their meals. Mr. Kenner told Ms. Deats that he would pay for the meal on the school credit card if she would take everyone outside and do a head count, and she said she’d really prefer to pay and let him do the head count since he was so very good at math, and he said actually she was better suited to working with the crowd of kids since she was so concerned about the “whole child,” and that maybe she could manage to count all the whole children, and it was this kind of passive-aggressive thing that reminded more than a few of the students of dinnertime arguments back home.

  “Ugh, I just wish they would shut up,” Brooklynn said as they went on and on. Then she got a funny look on her face.

  “Excuse me,” she said hurriedly, and got up and rushed away. Peighton and Kaylee looked at each other, utterly shocked that Brooklynn had gone off without them. Then, as if right on schedule, they each blanched and pushed back from the table, walking away at a fast clip.

  At just that moment, Ms. Deats and Mr. Kenner settled their dumb fight, or whatever it was. Ms. Deats called for everybody to file out into the parking lot “in a peaceful and orderly fashion,” and for the most part, they obeyed (though Brock Chuddford kept trying to give one of his buddies a wedgie). Then she did a quick head count.

  “We’re three short,” she said. “Who’s missing?”

  “Brooklynn, Peighton, and Kaylee aren’t here, Ms. Deats,” Rachel said, her sweet voice accentuated by just a little bit of concern. “Would you like for us to look for them?”

  “Sure, Rachel,” Ms. Deats said. “But don’t you three go missing. Come back right away, even if you don’t find them.”

  “We will,” Rachel said, and grabbed her two friends, dragging them along.

  “What exactly are we doing?” Gertie asked.

  “You’ll see,” Rachel said with that smile of hers.

  She led her two friends through the restaurant to the bathroom door. Before she entered, she put her ear to the door and listened. A great look of satisfaction spread across her face.

  “You’re welcome,” she said to Sivan and Gertie, and pushed open the door.

  “For what?” Gertie asked, and then nearly gagged at the smell emanating from three of the stalls. The sounds were nearly as bad. Rachel let the door swing shut behind them, and smiled happily.

  The cuntriad was experiencing what might best be described as an explosion of the ass. An “assplosion,” if you will.

  In between farts and bouts of—well, you know—the girls were freaking out.

  “It’s like I’m pissing out my butt!” Kaylee practically shrieked.

  “What the fuck was in my Super Skinny Diet Pizza Nachos?” Brooklynn wailed.

  “Oh my God, I’ve never shit this much in my life,” Peighton moaned.

  Sivan and Gertie looked at Rachel with wide eyes. Wordlessly, she nodded.

  “Shit,” Sivan whispered.

  “Exactly,” Rachel said.

  “Who’s there?” Brooklynn yelped. “Ms. Deats?”

  “Not exactly, sweetie,” Rachel said. “How’s it going in there?”

  “Rachel?” Brooklynn said.

  “Yup. Just slutty old me, sluttin’ it up over here.” Rachel stepped closer to Brooklynn’s stall. “You having fun?”

  Brooklynn was silent for a solid minute, except for heinous farts.

  “It was you!” she finally spat, infuriated. “You did this!”

  “C’mon, B,” Peighton said. “She’s just being a bitch. She couldn’t make us sick.”

  “Don’t fucking contradict me, Peighton!” Brooklynn shouted. “You don’t fucking know what she’s capable of!”

  “We’ll just let Ms. Dea
ts know you’ve got a huge case of the shits,” Rachel said pleasantly, as if discussing the weather. “We’ll make sure everybody knows. You come out whenever you’re done. It might be awhile. So sorry this happened to you girls. Really a shame.”

  “Fuck you!” Brooklynn screamed right before Kaylee let out an enormous fart.

  Rachel glided out of the bathroom, pulling Sivan and Gertie along with her.

  “Rachel,” Sivan whispered. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” Rachel said. “Just picked up a few necessary items at Rite Aid. No big deal.”

  “I’m like, horrified,” Gertie said. “But also impressed. Improrrified?”

  “You’re amazing, Rachel,” Sivan said admiringly. “What made you do that?”

  Rachel looked at Sivan as if the answer were obvious.

  “They were mean to you,” she said. “And to Gertie too. I just got sick of it.” She paused and grinned. “And now I guess they’re sick of it too.”

  She linked arms with her two best friends and walked out of the restaurant. Their heads were high, their backs were straight, and all three of them had the feeling this trip was finally starting to get good.

  An hour later, the sophomores of Flemington High School settled into their hotel rooms. The students were grouped in threes in rooms with double beds. Much grumbling was done regarding which person in each group of three would have the unlucky job of sharing a bed on both nights of the trip. Gertie, Sivan, and Rachel were fine with it; they’d just flip a coin or something to figure it out, and they’d shared beds plenty of times, so it didn’t matter. Peighton, Brooklynn, and Kaylee were too busy taking turns in their hotel bathroom to consider the sleeping situation, although out of pity for them Ms. Deats obtained an extra cot so that each girl could have her own bed that night.

  None of the cuntriad squealed on Rachel. They couldn’t prove it, for one thing, and they would’ve sounded totally bonkers if they’d tried to pin their diarrhea on a girl who’d been so publicly sweet to them in the forgiveness circle and at dinner. But they vowed revenge, of course.

  Ms. Deats brought the cuntriad Gatorade and Saltine crackers and mint tea, all of which she obtained at the Rite Aid. She offered to sit with them in their room and do reiki on them or at least lead them in a wellness meditation, but they vetoed the idea with such fervor that she left them alone, with instructions to call her immediately via the room phone if the situation didn’t improve.

  Over in the room where Gertie, Sivan, and Rachel were staying, a shitstorm of another sort was brewing.

  “No,” Gertie said resolutely, folding her arms. “Absolutely not.”

  “We’re doing it,” Rachel said, her eyes glittering the way they did whenever she was psyched about a plan.

  “We are NOT doing that!” Gertie declared. She actually stamped her foot, which Rachel thought was kind of adorable.

  “Yes, we are,” Rachel said simply. She looked in the mirror and pursed her lips, applying some sexy red lipstick she’d picked up at Rite Aid along with the laxatives and a few other key items. She would’ve been grounded for a week back home if her parents had spotted her with that lipstick.

  “Sivan, tell her,” Gertie said. “Tell her no.”

  Sivan looked at Gertie and shrugged.

  “I dunno,” Sivan said. “I know I wasn’t into it earlier, but when I saw the look on your face when you saw him at the museum … honestly, I know it’s a risk, but it sounds like kind of a cool idea.”

  “Of course it does!” Rachel crowed triumphantly. “It’s an AWESOME idea. Who goes on a trip to D.C. and doesn’t sneak out?”

  “Like, normal people!” Gertie said. “Normal people who don’t want to get expelled from school.”

  “I doubt they’d expel us,” Sivan said thoughtfully. “They’d probably suspend us and make us undergo some kind of counseling. Or maybe we’d do community service.”

  “We already have one strike,” Gertie said. “Sneaking out is worth at least two more strikes. At least. We’d have to go to summer school. It would go on our permanent record. You heard them!”

  “It’s pointless to even think about that, because we’re not going to get caught,” Rachel said confidently. “It’s easy. Ten o’clock is lights out for students. We wait till eleven, after Ms. Deats and Mr. Kenner are asleep. Then we go downstairs and go, well, wherever we want to go! Like, you know, the Henry Hotel.” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively at Gertie.

  “No way!” Gertie said resolutely. “We’re not going to the Henry Hotel. We don’t even know where it is. We don’t even know where we are. And I should just give up on loving Danny Bryan because I’m never going to see him again anyway so what’s even the point of trying to see him in Washington, D.C.?”

  “Okay, so forget Danny Bryan!” Rachel said. “Let’s go somewhere else. Let’s go to, I don’t know, a club or something. It doesn’t even matter, to be honest. We just have to do it.”

  “Why?” Gertie asked. “Why can’t we just stay here and go to sleep and wake up and deal with whatever those awful bitches do to us tomorrow, and just get through this trip?”

  “Oh, they won’t do anything to us tomorrow,” Rachel said. “We’ve defeated them!”

  “You defeated them temporarily,” Gertie said. “And they’ll retaliate. I just have a bad feeling about it.”

  “Would you rather I hadn’t given them explosive diarrhea?” Rachel demanded, slightly insulted.

  The room was quiet for a moment. Then Gertie started cracking up despite herself. Then Rachel did, too, and so did Sivan.

  “Oh my God,” Sivan said. “That’s the best sentence any of us has ever said.”

  “Goes in the quote book for sure,” Gertie said. Back home, they had a quote book (really just a mottled black-and-white Mead notebook) where they wrote down all the best things any one of them ever said. Occasionally at sleepovers they took it out and read stuff from way back in fourth or fifth grade, cracking themselves up at the memories.

  “Imagine how many more quotes we’ll have for the book after we sneak out tonight,” Rachel said.

  “I don’t know… .” Gertie said. “It just doesn’t feel like a good idea.”

  “I think it feels like a great idea,” Rachel said. “And I’m probably somewhat psychic, so we should go with my gut. Also, I sneak away from Jesus camp constantly. It’s how I got fingered for the first time. You remember the story.”

  “How could we forget,” Sivan said dryly. “You’re probably the only girl in history to get fingered by a pastor’s kid in an actual graveyard next to a church camp.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Rachel said. “Christians are horny as fuuuuck. And it wasn’t something that could make a baby, so it doesn’t count.”

  “Are we really going to have this debate again?” Sivan sighed.

  “No, I just mean fingering doesn’t count in the world of my ignorant-ass church,” Rachel said. “I don’t mean it doesn’t count in real life. I know it’s an important part of lesbian sex because I read about it in Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

  “Can we not talk about fingering, please?” Gertie said. “It makes me think about Danny Bryan, and that just makes me mad.”

  “I mean, we were technically talking about lesbian fingering,” Rachel said.

  “Not that fingers have gender,” Sivan said.

  “Can I ever say anything right around you?” Rachel exclaimed. She was only half joking. Sivan put an arm around her and laid her head on her shoulder.

  “I’m just fucking with you,” Sivan said. “You’re fine.”

  “Well, we’re sneaking out,” Rachel said. “That’s it. Because we have to live, and do things, and have adventures, and this is an amazing opportunity. Don’t you want to have stories to tell our grandkids?”

  “Oh, what, like getting fingered in a graveyard?” Gertie said.

  “What, you’d rather tell them about how you went to bed on time every night and got up at the right time ever
y morning and went on a school trip to D.C. where you behaved perfectly and never broke any rules?” Rachel said.

  Gertie thought for a moment. When Rachel put it that way, Gertie sounded pretty damn boring. Not that she didn’t already know that. But maybe Rachel was right. Maybe tonight was an amazing opportunity to do stuff. Gertie wasn’t even sure what the stuff would be, but she knew it could be big stuff. Stuff you remembered. Stuff you told stories about years later, but only to your friends, because you wouldn’t want your kids or grandkids to know you’d acted like a total delinquent in our nation’s capital.

  “I think she’s coming around,” Sivan said with a grin.

  “Fine,” Gertie relented, and Rachel jumped up and down with excitement.

  “Just follow me,” Rachel said. “Everything will be totally fine.”

  Once Alicia had checked on all the girls and seen that they were, if not tucked into bed, at least quiet and dressed in pajamas, she retreated to her room to think.

  Things with Brian were not great, it was true. The day hadn’t gone exactly as she’d wanted. He’d been condescending, and she’d let her temper get the best of her. Worst of all, they’d squabbled in front of the kids. That demonstrated a breakdown in leadership, and if there was one thing Alicia had learned in her teacher training program, it was that the teacher must always provide a calm, centered presence worthy of the children’s trust. She hadn’t felt very calm or centered when she and Brian were disagreeing. She’d felt fired up, and passionate, and really, really bothered by his attitude. He made it clear that he didn’t respect her concept of the whole child, an idea grounded in her holistic approach to learning. She cared about the students—body, mind, and soul. Maybe Brian Kenner just cared about their report cards, but Alicia Deats cared about a lot more.

  Then Alicia paused and looked at herself in the hotel room mirror.

  “It’s okay,” she said to herself. “He’s not really a jerk. He’s just—acting like one, for some reason.” Alicia had learned about “mirror work” during one of her psychology classes at Hampshire, and she found it really helpful (so long as nobody caught her doing it, as her sister had done one Christmas back home).