by Jen Larsen
“Poor baby is suffering,” Laura says. “Come here, dopey,” she says, patting the bedspread next to where she’s sprawled out, and he bounces over to her and tries to kill her with kisses.
“I want tonight to be over with already,” I blurt out.
Jolene meets my eyes in the mirror, and Laura sits up.
“It’ll be okay,” Jolene says. “You like parties.” She pats me on the head.
“I know,” I say. “I’m good at parties.”
“You are popular,” Jolene says. “Even though you hate it.”
“I don’t hate it,” I say. I pause. “I just don’t get it.”
“You are nice,” Jolene says, and I laugh. “You are helpful,” she tries again.
“Please stop,” I say.
Laura shrugs. “She ain’t wrong.”
“I don’t like my birthday party,” I say.
“Well, I don’t blame you,” Laura says. “I’ve been thinking about it all day and I don’t know how you can even stand to wait through all this, I mean, even through the year. You could just tell her to back off.” She means my grandmother.
“Or you could take the car,” Jolene suggests. “It would be nice for you to drive a car that wasn’t so old.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t even know if she’s offering me a car this year. I mean, who knows.”
“Maybe it’s a first-class trip around the world,” Laura says. “I bet she thinks that’s fair.”
“Maybe she’ll pay for Harvard,” Jolene says and I am stunned by the flash of elation that lights up my insides, but I snuff it out.
“I don’t want to diet,” I say.
Jolene lifts another lock of hair and combs it smooth. “It’s mean that she thinks you’re fat.”
“That’s not what’s mean,” I say, jerking my head away and spinning in my seat. “You think that’s what’s mean? I’m upset that she’s calling me fat? I’m fat.”
“No you’re not.” She looks stubborn. She crosses her arms over her chest.
I stand up, towering over her. I hold my arms out to either side. “I am fat. I am a fat person. I have a fat body. I like my body how it is.”
She’s looking away from me. “That’s not what I meant.”
We’ve never had this conversation before. The coupons were intangible, undefined irritants; the whole idea of “dieting” a theoretical concept with no actual concrete outcome and basically ignored. The idea of the coupons was terrible, we all agreed, but we have not talked about what it really meant.
Laura says, “Your body isn’t your identity and—”
“Stop!” I cut her off because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Jolene’s head snaps up, and she looks like she wants to say something. Then she looks back down at the flat iron in her hand.
“I should get dressed,” I say.
“Ashley,” Jolene says. She’s not looking at me. She is poking at the buttons on the iron. “I think—I think maybe your grandmother just wants you to be happy. She doesn’t think you’re happy with your body,” Jolene says. She’s still not looking at me. “Being fat.” She curls up a little when she says it.
“Actually,” I say. I hate people who use the word actually to start a sentence but there I am. “Actually, she says other people aren’t happy with me being fat,” I snap.
My stomach rolls over, and then again. I dislike that my stomach is connected so directly to my brain. That my body is connected to my brain, for that matter. That I am being selfish, thinking I am the only one whose body is focused on, dissected, public knowledge. But I don’t know what to say to Jolene except, “Are we almost done?” I think my voice is steady. My hair is slick and glossy. It falls over my shoulders. I don’t want to sit back down. She nods. “Thank you,” I say, and move around her, toward the closet.
The music that fills up the room starts in on the thumping. I hate this song and need to change it. Immediately.
“So you’re sure, really really totally sure, that you don’t want to wear the very amazing sequined skirt that is more amazing than anything else in your wardrobe,” Laura says. She clasps her hands at her chest. Her look is pleading. I like that she has a perfectly round face: round cheeks and round chin and curved mouth. She’s the kind of beautiful that makes people say, “Do you have a boyfriend?” And the kind of fierce that makes them afraid when she snarls at them in answer.
“No,” I snap. “I said no.”
Laura says “Okay!” very cheerful. Very little gets Laura upset. There is always something else to be interested in. She heads for the closet. “I’ll find—this. This is it. I mean, you would look amazing in this. What do you think?” She holds up the dress she’s pulled out of the closet. Stretchy black and short and crisscrossed with zippers and cut low at the neck too.
“Yes,” I say. My grandmother will hate it.
“Yes!” she says. She does a little hop in a circle and then hands me the dress with a flourish. I drop my jeans, pull off my T-shirt, and wiggle into it.
“That is a very good dress,” Jolene says solemnly.
I open the closet door and shoes fall on my head. I pull down the robe and shirts and scarves that are draped over the mirror and try to angle the door so I can see myself full length.
My hair shiny and long. The dress tight and clingy. My legs are my best feature, I know, and the skirt is very short. My chest looks prominent. Prominent is definitely the word for it. My DNA pendant is settled in my cleavage, glinting gold. I lift it, smooth it back down, pat it for luck.
“Are you happy?” Jolene says. “It’s a very good dress.”
“Gold mascara,” Laura says and she leaps over to my dresser, where she’s left her makeup bag. She’s biting her lip while she applies it and I try not to blink. I do not like things near my eyes. It takes forever but finally she steps back. “There,” she says. “You are perfect.”
Before I can change my mind I say, “I’m going to go find Grandmother.”
“To get it over with,” Jolene says.
“To tell her that this is the last time, I hope,” Laura says.
“I tell her that every time, Laura.” I zip up my knee boots and stand in front of the mirror again.
“I hate that she doesn’t listen to you,” Laura says. She’s got her arms folded and she’s chewing her lip.
“She listens,” Jolene says. My grandmother has been taking care of Jolene since we were kids, a calm, efficient barrier between her and the worst of her parents, and apparently listening too.
“She’s trying to help,” I say.
She is trying to help. And it is smart to get this, the conversation, over with now. It is smart to escape this room and this antsy, unhappy irritability that is spilling out around me like I’ve sprung a leak. To go find her and not spend the party worrying. But I am already running out of courage.
CHAPTER 8
At the top of the staircase, in the dark hallway, the roar and ebb of the party seems louder than the ocean. My entire school is here, even kids from the younger grades. They are filling up the hallways. They are bouncing against one another like superheated molecules. Up here nothing has changed yet, and nothing has to change. I can feel my hands just on the verge of trembling. I spread them out in front of me and look at my fingers. They’re not shaking. Not yet.
I’m not afraid of my grandmother. How could I be?
I am not afraid of my grandmother. But here is a confession.
There is always a moment, a flash of time, when I think, This might be the time I give in. This might be the year that I give up trying to push back in this tiny, infinitesimal way. Something will overcome me—greed, or worry that she is right. I will lose my strength. I will forget all my ideas about myself.
That is what I fear.
In my head my imaginary mother, the one who stuck around, says, You couldn’t do that. You wouldn’t.
Standing at the top of the stairs, I can’t hear myself breathing under the crash of the nois
e rising. Then for a second it pauses. A lull. The sound of someone calling my name makes me start downstairs almost automatically, since I’ve been summoned this way so many times before. I’m relieved to be in motion again. Moving forward. I hang on to the railing because my boot heels are high and the runner on the stairs is old and frayed. An arm snakes through the railing and grabs me around an ankle. I almost trip. I flush bright red at the thought that someone might have seen me stumbling down the stairs.
I peer over the railing and see Hector’s face turned up at me. “You look amazing,” Hector shouts. He is smiling up at me and I can’t help smiling back. I thump down the stairs, the party noise getting louder with every step until the noise swallows me. Hector is blocking the bottom of the stairs, stopping me before I’m all the way down. He grabs me around the waist, pressing his face into my chest. He is holding me just a little too tight, but I let him for a moment, put my cheek on top of his curls.
Then I push him back and sidestep around him and down the last few stairs. I shout at him, “Have you seen my grandmother?”
“She’s in the kitchen!” I think he says and I catch my breath. He reaches out to touch my hair and to maybe hug me again. But I am lurching into motion, shouldering my way through the crowd. Everyone is wearing the masks, but I still recognize them. They’re all almost as familiar as the backs of my nontrembling hands. These are people I have known nearly my whole life. They recognize me, reach out, pull me into hugs and back pats and kisses. Ace shouts, “You look awesome!” and fluffy pink Jessica asks if I’ve seen Brandon, and Amy, the scariest volleyball player I have ever met, tells me I clean up pretty good.
I am turning away from Nicholas, who wants to talk to me about the budget for next year’s dance because he was born to be a treasurer, and I bump into Morgan, still recognizable under her scowling half-Batman face. She points at it and yells, “Where’s yours?”
I shrug. She’s showing me her shark teeth, and I grimace back at her. She leans in close, and I wonder if she’s standing on her toes. She still doesn’t quite reach my chest. She shouts, “Oh honey.” She’s looking at my legs. “You forgot your pants,” she says, and then she’s smirking up at me.
I say, “I’m wearing a dress, Morgan,” and step around her. She ruins my triumphant exit, though, the way she ruined my fourth-grade science fair project. Not exactly the same way. She doesn’t “accidentally” lean her elbow on me and break me. She does stop me with a hand on my arm and beckons me to lean down, but I don’t like getting closer to her face. I shake her off and leave her behind.
I make my way through the piles of people and streamers and more people who stop me and kiss me and make me feel like they see me and are happy to see me. They’re all shouting. I keep nodding and smiling and pushing my way through. I hold my hand up to Joseph, the assistant volleyball captain who has made many noises about asking me out. He nods at me enthusiastically as I backtrack around through the dining room and spot my father and half the neighbors in a semicircle. He’s waving his arms around in that way he does, and I dodge back, swinging a circle around to the other kitchen door and at the threshold I stop because there is my tall, slim, elegant grandmother, wearing a red feather boa.
She is wearing a feather boa. Brandon is wearing an identical one. He is making her laugh. The fridge door is standing wide open, too, I notice. Half-filled plastic cups are on every surface, and she never lets cups stand like that. She’s laughing at something he is saying, and her face doesn’t change when she sees me. I see Brandon’s eyes drop to my cleavage and I try not to smirk at him.
I open my mouth. I say, “You guys are certainly laughing!” I close my eyes briefly. It echoes in my head. Instead of looking at their faces I pull a Solo cup off the top of the stack and set it down on the counter.
Brandon says, “Laura said this was going to be fun. I’m glad I came.”
“That’s good,” I say vaguely. I hoist up a soda bottle and try to twist off the cap but my hand is slipping.
“I’ll get that for you,” Brandon says. He reaches for it.
“No,” I say. I try not to glare at him, because I am not twelve years old. “I mean, I got it.” I untwist it myself with one sharp turn. My grandmother puts her hand on Brandon’s shoulder. She says, “Will you excuse us?” She doesn’t shout, but we can hear her perfectly well. Brandon lifts his eyebrows at me. I blink at him. Then she’s leading me out the sliding doors, onto the deck where she gave me that first envelope four years ago. Tonight it is loaded with school people and coolers full of soda. It is that kind of early twilight where it is hard to see anything but shapes. I still have the two-liter bottle of Diet Coke in my hands. It’s slippery with condensation and very cold.
“Is that your private stash?” Marc Alonzo says. I turn on him. He’s wearing a pile of green beads. His mask elastic is snapped across his forehead because he’s wearing it backward. He’s in my history class and on the soccer team, and at my sixth birthday party he peed on the back lawn because he was scared to go into the house by himself. The whole soccer team is there and they’re all holding Solo cups. I’m willing to bet they’re filled with beer, the way they looked shifty when my grandmother slides open the door, but she ignores them.
“Drink up,” I say, and thrust the bottle into the crook of his elbow, and shit, it splashes up over his chest and down his arms. The rest of the soccer team laughs at him. I can’t stop to apologize. I’m turning away because I have to talk to my grandmother. I have to be first in this situation. I have to take control of it. She is already a tall dark shape striding across the deck. Narrow shoulders and a long silver ponytail that glimmers in the deck light. “Goddammit,” I say.
My grandmother does not glance back at me as she continues on around the side of the deck and down the stairs because she knows I’m going to follow her like a baby duck. My classmates are going to talk about this little outburst as soon as I’m gone but I can’t stand there all night hoping to stop them. “Okay,” I say, and sprint after her and of course they start talking as soon as I move out of the puddle of light on the deck.
I follow my grandmother down the steps, across the overgrown lawn to my father’s studio. It was a second garage for rich people, built to look like a barn. We are not rich people, so it has become my father’s space. No one’s allowed to go inside. I recognize the smell of someone smoking weed around the back—probably someone’s parents—and there are Solo cups scattered through the grass.
I have to pick my way across the lawn in my boots and around all the trash. On the brick path I can walk faster but I slow down instead. I realize that the calm and rational speech I had been planning is gone from my head. I have no blue index cards. I could improvise if we were in front of Rhetoric and Debate class, talk on my feet without stammering. But this isn’t Rhetoric and Debate. People don’t make out against trees in Rhetoric and Debate, at least not that I’ve noticed and you’d think I would. Some light is creeping out from under the garage’s window shades. My grandmother is standing on the flagstones in front of the door, and turns to open it.
“I don’t want it,” I say. I’m surprised that I say it out loud. “Whatever you’re offering me this time. I don’t want it. Please don’t give it to me.”
“You don’t know what I’m offering,” she says. “Come inside where it’s quiet.”
“No,” I say.
“Well then,” she says. She slips the envelope out of her pocket, and takes my hand, putting it in my palm and closing my fingers over it. She says, “Open it.”
“No,” I say.
“You don’t know what it is,” she says again.
“What?” I look at the envelope in my hand, and then flap it at her wildly. “Of course I know what it is,” I say. I’m having even more trouble keeping my voice low now. “It’s the same thing every year, Grandmother. You know I don’t want it. I’m not going to use it, so—” I stop because I can hear myself getting shrill. I can feel that temper shimmering
at the back of my mind, insanely. I can’t lose my temper at my grandmother. When you lose your temper, she has always said, you lose credibility.
I swallow and try again, talking softly, urgently, at her very still and very reasonable silhouette. “I appreciate that you worry about me, you know, it’s great. Thank you. But I don’t want to go on a diet.” I thrust my hand out and I can feel myself squinting, trying to see her face in the dark but she’s just quiet, and my hand stays outstretched and we stand there for a moment.
Then she plucks the envelope from my fingers and I am filled with a relief so strong that I almost stagger under it. I can feel her staring at me and I know she’s disappointed but she understands. She’s a practical woman who knows when to press an advantage and when to retreat.
“Thank you,” I say as she takes a step toward the shaded window and holds the envelope up to the light.
Her profile is sharp and her fingers are narrow and quick. She flips the envelope over and slides her finger under the flap. She rips it open with a quick tug.
“Grandmother,” I say.
She slides the card out and holds it out to me. “Ashley,” she says.
The card is yellow in the light from the window, and her handwriting is bold this time, big markered letters.
I step forward without thinking, and step forward again and I’m taking it from her and holding it in the light and I can’t stop myself from looking at it.
Ashley Maria Perkins.
Weight-loss surgery in exchange for four years of tuition at Harvard University.
CHAPTER 9
I’ve dropped the car keys. All the lights back in my grandmother’s house are on and the music is so loud it’s echoing against the trees and I can’t see anything out here and my keys are gone, lost somewhere in the dark. It’s too noisy to think and even if I did have the keys, even if I did have them, there’s a white Toyota with a faded COEXIST bumper sticker boxing in the Volvo. I don’t kick their bumper. I come close, though. I’m grinding my teeth, which is a habit I thought I had dropped forever, and my ears hurt and my grandmother is saying again, “You know I don’t joke, darling.” The card is crumpled in my fist—no, I’m just making a fist. The card has disappeared somewhere. I don’t remember if I dropped it somewhere or threw it away from me into the dark.