No Such Thing as the Real World

by M. T. Anderson

  “That’s…” I stood up. “Damn it.”

  Kenneth was sitting up straight now.

  “You guys enemies or something?”

  I could feel the tears stinging my eyes and had to fight to keep them back.

  “No,” I spat. “We’re sisters.”

  Below, Sarah was finishing her race and Coach was grinning from ear to ear. I could barely hear his voice in the distance, like a radio whose dial was turned way down.

  “That’s a new record for this team,” he was saying. “I knew we could make a star out of you if you finally gave track a try. I never thought I’d convince you, Sarah, but I can tell this is going to be a great year.”

  A great year?

  Leaving Kenneth behind, I walked down from the bleachers onto the field, my legs like Jell-O.

  I will not cry, I promised myself over and over again, but the moment I was next to her, the tears threatened to spill out.

  “What are you doing here?” I choked.

  Sarah looked up as if she were surprised. Who knows…maybe she really was. It was always hard to tell with Sarah. She had a way of widening her eyes with what you believed could only be true shock. Until you saw that same expression over again and over again, and you began to wonder.

  “Coach has been asking me to join since I was a freshman,” she said, “and my tennis elbow has been getting worse, so I said yes. What’s your problem?”

  What was my problem? I wanted to say a thousand things.

  My problem is that you come in like a steamroller, plowing over everything in your path until you get what you want, and if you want to be the star of the track team before you graduate high school, then you’ll do it and I’ll spend the rest of my four years on the team being referred to as Sarah’s sister.

  My problem is that there are at least five other sports you’re good at, but you just happened to choose this one?

  My problem is that you think about no one other than yourself.

  But of course nothing that coherent came out of my mouth.

  “Track is my thing,” I said, sputtering. “You’ve got tennis.”

  Sarah put her hands on her hips. “I don’t get you, Rachel,” she said with the superior tone of voice she always used when we were fighting. “Track isn’t yours. You can’t claim something belongs to you when it doesn’t. I wanted to join track, so I did. It’s got nothing to do with you, so just grow up.”

  This was Sarah’s signature line—the one I’d been hearing since I was born.

  Grow up.

  By now there was a small crowd of people trying to pretend they weren’t watching us, but I knew what they were thinking.

  We need Sarah so we’ll have a winning season. How can Rachel be so selfish?

  I bit my lip and turned away, walking blindly back toward the bleachers, wondering if the snickers I heard were real or imaginary. I’m not sure what I would have done next…maybe I’d have wandered aimlessly off the field and given up on track too. But that’s when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  Kenneth. I’d forgotten all about him.

  “Hey, wait up,” he said, slowing me down.

  Tears were slipping down my cheeks. I couldn’t look at Kenneth, so I didn’t turn around, but I did stop walking and wiped my face with my hands.

  “That was a shitty thing to do,” he said, and I nodded. He was right. I shouldn’t have confronted Sarah. How could I stand in the way of what she wanted?

  “I know,” I whispered. “I…”

  “I mean your sister,” he said. “I didn’t know she was your sister when I asked about her, but I did know who she was,” he confessed. “I asked Marcus Winthrop about her yesterday, and he said she’s the best tennis player this school has ever had. I’d say that leaving the sport you’re great at in order to be great at the same sport your little sister just happens to be awesome at is…well, it’s shitty, that’s all.”

  I barely knew this guy, but it took every ounce of strength not to throw my arms around him. My heart sped up in a way that it had never done before, and my breathing was shallow, but this time it was not from my run.

  Could this be it?

  After years of thinking I couldn’t fall in love the way Sarah did—years of worrying that I was broken—was this finally it?

  Please God, I begged. Let this be it.

  What I didn’t let myself think about was the way Kenneth looked back at the field—at Sarah—long and hard before he walked away with me.

  Sarah

  “Come on, tell me.”

  It was May, and Sarah was sitting cross-legged on my beanbag chair holding a magazine, watching me over the edge of the pages. It was two weeks before her graduation, and everyone she knew must have been busy or else she wouldn’t have been hanging out here, in my room. “You’ve got to like someone,” she said, raising one eyebrow.

  I stopped reorganizing my bookshelf and thought of Kenneth. Pined would be a better word. Longed for. Gazed at from a distance.

  Actually, the distance part wasn’t quite true. He was my best friend, so I saw him up close and personal all the time. I just hadn’t told him how I felt.

  I wasn’t about to tell Sarah first.

  “There’s no one,” I said. “What about you?”

  Sarah sat up straighter and her eyes sparkled.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Actually, the question should have been did she really want to tell me? Apparently, she did.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve met my soul mate.” She leaned back and let the magazine fall open across her chest.

  “I’ve heard that before,” I said, rolling my eyes, but Sarah only threw the magazine at me across the room.

  “This time I mean it,” she said. “His name’s Jordan and I met him at the mall. He’s so amazing, Rachel. Tall, blond, gorgeous. He says we’re meant for each other.”

  “Does he go to Thomas Jefferson?” I asked, trying to think of a single guy named Jordan in Sarah’s senior class.

  “Not exactly,” she said, her face morphing into a mask of innocence.

  I set down the volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that I was about to shelve.

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “He’s older.”

  “How much older?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Sarah, you have got to be kidding me! Mom and Dad will freak out.”

  “Shhhh,” she said, glancing at my bedroom door, which was already shut. “They don’t need to know yet. Promise you won’t tell.” She waited a moment while I took a deep breath, then said, “Rachel, promise.”

  “All right, all right. I promise.”

  Satisfied, Sarah leaned back again.

  “He looks kind of like Brad Pitt,” she said, laughing. “I’m going to go all the way with him.”

  “Sarah!”

  “Quiet!”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re…well…you’re still in high school and he’s…”

  “Oh, grow up, Rachel. Everyone has sex in high school.”

  Did they?

  I hadn’t even kissed anyone yet. Sure, there were the obligatory closed-lipped pecks during spin-the-bottle games at Lisa Maller’s birthday parties, but who counted those? Before long, I’d be sixteen—the first sixteen-year-old since 1930 who could honestly say she’d never been kissed.

  Sarah studied me.

  “You haven’t done anything yet, have you?” she said, secure in the knowledge that she was right. I thought about lying, but one of the annoying things about an older sister is that she can almost always tell when you’re fibbing.

  “I thought we were talking about you,” I said, but now Sarah’s interest was piqued.

  “You haven’t given a guy a blow job?”

  I couldn’t disguise the expression that flashed across my face.

  “God no!”

  Sarah laughed.

  “It
’s not that bad,” she said. “Plenty of people do it.”

  “Well, not me.”

  “French kissed, then?”

  Honestly, French kissing sounded just as gross as blow jobs—all that awful bodily fluid involved—but this time I turned away just as my cheeks caught fire.

  “Oh my Lord, you haven’t? Regular kissing then? Tell me you have kissed somebody, right? You’re going to be a sophomore soon, Rachel. Don’t tell me you haven’t…”

  “Shut up,” I said, picking up the magazine and throwing it back at her. I threw it hard and it smacked her in the face, though I hadn’t meant it to.

  “Bitch,” she said, “why do you have to get so defensive?”

  “Why do you have to act like I’m a freak just because I’m not…you?”

  “Because you’re still such a baby.”

  “At least I’m not out there giving blow jobs to guys at the mall I hardly even know!”

  “You’re such a brat,” Sarah said, breathless. “I told you we’re soul mates.” She got up and pushed me hard with both hands so I fell back against my bookshelf.

  I struggled to my feet and pushed her back.

  Sarah kicked me in the shin.

  Then before I knew it, we were grappling, just like we had as kids, my hands tugging at Sarah’s sweatshirt and her fingers looped in my hair, pulling hard. I let out a yell.

  “I hate you.”

  It was a strangled cry that came from somewhere deep within me, and Sarah let go, backing up and panting hard.

  “You are a freak,” she said. “I can’t wait to graduate and get out of this place. Jordan and I are moving to California and I’m never coming back. I hate it here. I’ve always hated it here. I’m getting out of this hellhole the minute I’ve got my diploma.”

  I was glaring at her with all my might.

  “Do you think I care?” I said, but of course I was lying, and Sarah knew it.

  “Someday you’re going to see what the world is really like, Rachel. It isn’t Mom and Dad and Thomas Jefferson High School, that’s for sure. And it isn’t your nerdy GPA or your stupid Emily Dickinson poetry.”

  She kicked the volume so hard that it slid across my hardwood floor.

  “So what is it then?” I spat.

  Sarah looked at me as if I were the lowest creature on the food chain.

  “You won’t understand until you grow up,” she said. Then she turned and walked out of my room, slamming the door behind her.

  Kenneth

  “Graduation is going to change everything,” Kenneth said, leaning back on the bleachers in our favorite spot. It was the last day of our first week as sophomores, and I was contemplating life without Sarah now that she’d left for college in California, and Kenneth was contemplating life without high school.

  “Everything will be so perfect once we’re finally out of this dump. Did you know there are only 536 school days left until it’s our turn?”

  This was the first of what would be many subsequent announcements.

  “Is that meant to be depressing?” I asked. “Because it sure doesn’t sound encouraging when you put it that way.”

  Kenneth calculated again, his brain working at feverish speed.

  “That’s 12,864 hours of real time and 4,288 hours of school time. Give or take a few snow days and two-hour delays.”

  “You’re insane.”

  Kenneth grinned back at me, and my heart did its familiar somersault.

  “It’s never too early to start the countdown.”

  I wondered if that was true, and my mind flashed back to Sarah again. Counting down toward what? Apparently Kenneth’s mind had also flashed to Sarah, because he put his chin in his hands and frowned.

  “Sarah is so lucky she’s out of here. UC Berkeley is a great school. I would totally consider going there….”

  I groaned. Kenneth was way too smart for Berkeley, and everyone knew it but him. He was meant for Harvard or Yale or MIT.

  “Does she like it so far?” he asked.

  “College?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shrugged.

  “When’s she coming home?”

  “Who knows?” I picked at the frayed edge of my shoelace.

  “Well, does she seem happy now that she’s away? She told me once that she wanted to be…you know…free.”

  He sounded so uncomfortable, I laughed. Kenneth was far too practical to say melodramatic things like she wanted to be free without blushing.

  “I really don’t know,” I said, and that was the truth. Was Sarah happy? She was in perpetual motion, always going someplace or doing something. Madly in love and then tragically heartbroken. In pursuit. Twirling.

  But did that make her happy?

  “I’ve never known,” I said.

  Kenneth nodded. “It will make me happy when I can leave.” He said it so seriously, my eyebrows shot up.

  “Really?” I asked, wondering why the rush. “Then tell me…what are you looking forward to the most?”

  This time it was Kenneth’s turn to laugh. “God, what am I not looking forward to?” he said, but then he stopped and thought about my question. “The demise of sixth-period study hall,” he announced. “That’s what I’m most looking forward to.”

  “Well, you won’t have to wait until graduation for that. You’ll have a new schedule next year.”

  Kenneth frowned. “I meant it symbolically, Rach. As long as we’re in high school, there will always be a sixth-period study hall.” He fixed me with a meaningful stare. “You know what I’m talking about—a class where the teacher looks the other way while guys like Bart Sanders steal the economics report you worked on for a week right before the class where it’s due. Tell me…when does that happen in the real world? No one waits around in the hallway to intimidate adults by stealing their work and calling them ‘faggot.’”

  I supposed he must have a point. That stuff couldn’t continue happening after high school, could it?

  “It’s totally ironic,” Kenneth added, “because guys like them make guys like me unappealing to girls like…well, girls in general, by calling us faggots, and then when we can’t get a date, they think it proves them right.”

  He looked so angry, I reached over and put my hand on his knee. My chest constricted, and I debated the words I was about to say next, not sure I’d have the courage to say them, but finally I blurted them out.

  “We could stop that, you know.”

  “What?”

  “The faggot cycle.”

  Kenneth glanced over at me.

  “How would we do that?”

  “Well, if you had a girlfriend…”

  There was a momentary pause, no longer than a breath, while I waited to see if he would take up my line of thought or pretend he didn’t know what I was talking about. There was a universe of potential contained in a bubble of time, and then it burst.

  “How would I manage that?” he said. “There aren’t exactly girls lining up to date me. That’s the whole point.”

  My heart plummeted into my shoes, and I lifted my hand off his knee. For one moment I was sure my face was completely transparent, but then I slipped my best-friend-Rachel mask back into place.

  “All they need to do is think you have a girlfriend,” I said, keeping my voice extra steady.

  “You mean we’d put on a show?”

  I shrugged casually, as if this were what I’d meant from the start.

  “It wouldn’t take much,” I said, overcompensating with an airy tone. “A little bit of hand holding. Passing some notes. Telling the right people…” I hurried to finish. “You’ve got to admit it would be a relief, wouldn’t it? Not to be in tenth grade and never have had a date?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Yeah,” he admitted at last, “it would be.” He looked at me closely. “You’d do that? Pretend, I mean…”

  I looked at his deep-set eyes and I wanted to say, I wouldn’t have to pretend, but I didn’t.


  “Yeah, of course. That’s what friends are for, right?”

  That afternoon, we walked through the hallways hand-in-hand. Bart Sanders saw us and for once he didn’t say a word to Kenneth before class, but on Monday when I was on my way to my locker, I saw the familiar crowd of guys outside the science room.

  “Butt nugget,” I heard someone say.

  That’s when I knew. No matter how hard we tried, there was no escaping until we’d lived through 535 more days of high school.

  Sarah

  On a Thursday afternoon during my junior year, I came home from school to find my mother sobbing at the kitchen table.

  “Mom, what is it?” I asked, abandoning my backpack and sliding in next to her. She crumpled up the wad of Kleenex in her hand.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s got to be something,” I said. “You’re crying.”

  Mom sighed.

  “It’s your sister,” she said. “She’s dropping out of school.”

  “Sarah’s dropping out of college?”

  Mom nodded.

  “I’ve tried talking to her, but she won’t listen. It’s bad enough she chose a school all the way across the country, but at least she was in school. Any school. Do you know how hard it is to get by without a college degree nowadays?”

  I did, because Mom and Dad had told me a million times.

  “I just want what’s best for her,” Mom said, “but she acts like we’re her enemies. I don’t understand how we could go from being so close to…”

  Mom stopped talking and blew her nose hard.

  “It’s that guy she’s been dating, isn’t it?” Mom said, not a question but a statement. “It’s been what? Off and on for over a year now, hasn’t it? She must think we’re fools if she honestly believes we don’t know after all this time.”

  A laugh escaped Mom’s lips, short and bitter.

  “I’ve known since she graduated. Your child doesn’t go from spending all of her time in your home to spending eighteen out of every twenty-four hours with ‘friends’ unless she’s in a relationship. I’d just hoped it would end before, well…this.” She paused, then looked at me. “What’s his name, anyway?”

  For a moment I considered keeping up Sarah’s charade, but then I sighed.

  “Jared. Or Jake. Something like that.” I paused. “I haven’t met him.”

  Mom nodded, tired. “I told her she could move back home and pay rent, but she says she’s moving in with him out in California. I’d give her an ultimatum, but I know what her answer would be.”