All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

And so, for a while, Lizzie tried. Maybe her mother was right—what was keeping boys from asking her out was that she didn’t properly turn out her toes and didn’t enunciate her t’s. Maybe the reason her father was so rarely home for dinner was not that he was really busy at work but because he couldn’t stomach watching Lizzie shovel spaghetti Bolognese down with the salad fork.

  Though she diligently attended classes and practiced her posture in front of the mirror at home, it didn’t make a difference. After over a year of lessons in ladydom, Lizzie could properly ask for the salt to be passed but she had gained another eleven pounds and still tripped over her feet and had failed to fill her Saturday nights with dates, or anything, for that matter, besides the occasional MTV marathon with Becky. Instead, she climbed in the SUV with her mother every week and wanted to cry, seeing the grim, determined look on her mother’s face. It was a kind of punishment, she decided. It was obvious to Lizzie that her mother secretly wished she could take her back and replace her with a perfect daughter, some skinny, poised, anemic ballerina.

  Janice, after all, had perfect table manners and perfect diction and didn’t really walk—she levitated through rooms with satisfyingly dainty clicks of her heels. And apparently all this came naturally to her, since she had never taken etiquette classes herself. Unlike Lizzie, she had the tiny bones of a sparrow. It was totally unfair. And everyone loved her. She always had a party to go to, and the phone rang constantly, and even though she was nearing fifty Lizzie sometimes saw men turning to watch her mom on the street. Lizzie only attracted attention from the weirdos.

  “Don’t let Mom force you to take those classes,” Margaret said when Lizzie called to complain. “She made me do it, too. It’s some bizarre thing from growing up poor; she believes these are advantages she’s conferring on you, but what she’s really doing is shoehorning you into some stereotyped fantasy of womanhood. Right? So just stand up to her—tell her to stop reinventing her own childhood through you. Or just sign up for extracurricular activities at school instead. That’s what I did.”

  But Lizzie secretly thought her mother was right. She was ungainly. Her only real friend was Becky, who didn’t have any dates either and sometimes picked her nose when she didn’t think anyone was looking. Instead of hanging out in the parking lot of the Pizza Stone after school, where the cool kids liked to go, Lizzie mostly sat in her bedroom and plucked the hair out of her legs with tweezers. She’d only kissed two boys: one was a captive victim during a spin-the-bottle game at summer camp in seventh grade and the other was Mikey Bronstein, the alto saxophonist from band class, who was sweet but wore thick Coke-bottle glasses and still let his mother pack him crustless bologna sandwiches in brown paper bags for lunch. He’d taken her to a freshman football game, held her hand, and called her his girlfriend. Mortified by his enthusiasm, she’d dumped him within a week.

  Not long after Lizzie tipped the scales at 168 pounds, she arrived downstairs one morning to find an egg-white omelet on the table rather than her usual bowl of Frosted Flakes. “Honey,” Janice said, as Lizzie balked, “don’t you think you would feel better if you lost a little bit of weight?”

  “No,” Lizzie said. “I’ll be miserable no matter what I weigh.” But she knew this wasn’t true; didn’t skinny girls have more fun, get more boyfriends, attract more attention?

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” Janice said. “It’ll be fun. We’ll do it together.” She patted her own thighs, underneath the pleats of her tweed slacks. “I’ve got to do something about my cellulite, too.” And Lizzie imagined living like her mother, who had been on a diet as long as she could remember, who nibbled on green vegetables and cottage cheese rather than French fries and chocolate popcorn in order to maintain her figure, and she wanted to cry. Her future spread out before her, a barren wasteland with all the joy and grease stripped out.

  But maybe if she was skinny, Lizzie thought, she would get attention from boys. Dates. Love. And that would be even better than chocolate popcorn. So she did it. She stopped her lunchtime raids of the vending machines in the cafeteria, cut out the secret trips to McDonald’s that she usually made on the way home from school, and stopped hoarding candy bars under her bed. She ate the tofu salad and skinless chicken and mounds of steamed spinach that her mother prepared without once making a face or holding her nose.

  It was about this time, the fall quarter of her freshman year, that she joined the swim team—initially because it provided an easy way for her to bail on the etiquette and elocution lessons, per Margaret’s advice, and then because she found she actually enjoyed it. And, amazingly, between the exercise and the self-restraint, she found the scale registering lower and lower: 162 pounds, 157, 149. Clothes began to hang off her, and she thought she could actually see cheekbones. Her mother, she could tell, was pleased. Lizzie began to look forward to her mother’s little exhalation of pleasure when the scale registered a drop, pushed harder just to impress her. Even her father noticed the change, dipping his Wall Street Journal one morning to examine her over the top of the business section. “Lookin’ good, pumpkin,” he said before turning the page. It made her week.

  When she hit the twenty-pound mark, Janice lent Lizzie her platinum card and sent her on a shopping spree. Lizzie filled her closet with trendy new things, dumping the baggy cargo pants and oversized T-shirts, the dresses she’d stealthily purchased in the Generous Juniors department, and replacing them with neon-pink halter tops and denim miniskirts. She couldn’t wait for the moment when she could put on something sexy—a fancy cocktail dress, maybe even heels?—and walk out the front door on a date with a cute boy while her parents watched from the kitchen window.

  And it worked: Losing all that weight got her the attention she wanted. That, and much, much more.

  by the spring of her freshman year, it seemed like Lizzie had been dying to lose her virginity forever. She felt it hanging like a yoke around her neck. Girls in her class had been bragging about their sexual conquests for years: starting with Frenching and feel-ups in sixth grade, moving on to blow jobs and fingering (a phrase she found both obscene and banal—some cross between an alien probe and playing the piano) by eighth, and then, once they reached high school, going “all the way.” It happened like clockwork: There would be a party at somebody’s house over the weekend—the parents having disappeared for a vacation in Hawaii, graciously enabling their children to roll a keg into the chaperone-free living room—and on Monday, girls would show up at school with squared shoulders and a fresh familiarity with the male anatomy. (“Oh my God, his penis, like, curved!” “He—so gross—had hair on his back!”) They dropped like flies all freshman year, judging by the conversation in the girls’ locker room. Virginity flew out the window, blossoms of used condoms bloomed in wastepaper baskets all across town, sheets were furtively dumped in spin cycles with extra bleach before Mom and Dad’s town car picked them up at the airport.

  Lizzie wanted it so badly she was almost embarrassed. It wasn’t like she believed that losing her virginity was somehow going to be a ticket to womanhood—just like getting her period for the first time had been more of a messy pain in the ass than the entrée to some feminine sisterhood that Margaret had promised. It was more that she wanted to be in the inner circle, to have those terms—clitoris? smegma? pearl necklace?—mean something to her, too. You either knew or you faked it, and she was tired of faking it, tired of nodding sagely while she listened in, uninvited, to yet another whispered tale of deflowering or requited lust, as if she could totally relate, when in fact she couldn’t. Losing your virginity was the ultimate sign of social success, she decided: It meant that you were the object of desire, that a boy wanted you so badly that he couldn’t control himself. She wondered when her mom had lost her virginity. Surely she hadn’t been a virgin on her wedding day.

  And neither would Lizzie, thanks to Justin Bellstrom, the indisputable star of Millard Fillmore High’s swimming team.

  Her first spring regional swim meet had happen
ed in Sacramento the last week of March. Her mother was playing in the spring tennis tournament at the club, and her father was off on the IPO road show, so Lizzie had gone in the team bus without them, not sure whether she was relieved that they wouldn’t be there embarrassing her or disappointed that they wouldn’t see her swim competitively. And although she didn’t win a blue ribbon at the meet, she did place third in the 100-meter breaststroke time trial. She tried calling her mom on her cell phone to give her this piece of news, but her mother didn’t answer—she was probably on the court. Lizzie didn’t bother leaving a message.

  That was the weekend Justin cruised to first-place in the men’s freestyle. As he stood on the pedestal at the end of the race to receive his award, leering at the cheering crowd, Lizzie thought he looked like one of those Greek gods they were studying in her Ancient History class. Adonis. Maybe Hermes. (Or was that the one with the weird clubfoot?) Anyway: Justin’s sun-bleached waves shone, faintly green from chlorine damage (Justin, famously, refused to wear a swim cap), and she could see the downy hair on his legs, growing thicker toward his crotch. He was wearing a fake gold tooth someone had given him as a joke, and when he smiled his trademark dimpled smile, you could see it glint. When they announced his name, he pumped his fist in the air in victory, then quickly turned, yanked down the top of his Speedo, and mooned the crowd with a pale, bumpy behind. Anyone else, the coach would have benched for that stunt, but not Justin. He could get away with anything.

  As he was climbing off the pedestal, his gaze snagged on Lizzie’s. Shockingly, he winked at her with one big, pink-rimmed eye—wickedly, as if they’d just shared some secret. She could feel her face burning with pleasure. Was it a message? Had his mooning been some kind of display just for her? Had he secretly had a crush on her all this time and she’d just not known it? It seemed so unlikely—Lizzie and Justin Bellstrom? It would never happen. It was as unlikely as a peacock dating an orangutan. But—and here she caught herself—why not? She’d just hit the thirty-one-pound mark on her diet, and maybe he’d noticed the cute new halter top she was wearing. Maybe he’d even noted her performance in the time trials that morning. Stranger things had happened.

  Lizzie decided right then and there that he was the one. She didn’t want to lose her virginity to a nice boy like Mikey Bronstein; she wanted a heartthrob, the kind of boy everyone would look at and admire. Justin was in an entirely different league than she was, which was why, of course, he was perfect. She had visions of herself trading up, leaping a few rungs up the social ladder of Fillmore High. God, wouldn’t Susan Gossett and her friends just die if they saw Lizzie walking down the halls of Fill High arm in arm with Justin!

  Later that night, after several hours of watching pay-per-view movies with Becky in their hotel room, she announced that she was going to the vending machine and left to search the shabby hallways of the Sacramento Wander Inn (doubles only $39 a night), trying to find Justin. The entire hotel had been booked with swimmers from around the state. The coaches either didn’t care about the debauchery or had fallen asleep and weren’t aware of it or had given up and retired to the hotel bar. When she pressed her ear to the doors of various hotel rooms, she thought she could hear faint echoes of orgies taking place inside. In one room, the sounds of shrieking laughter and breaking glass; in another, gunfire from a television; in another, the rhythmic thump of a headboard drilling the wall. The industrial carpet of the hallways was littered with abandoned beer bottles, empty pizza boxes, and the occasional puddle of vomit. She picked her way through gingerly, from the fifth floor through the first, stepping over a passed-out teenage boy in the stairwell, tiptoeing around the groups of whispering girls clustered outside hotel room doors who glanced blankly past her as she squeezed by.

  After half an hour of wandering, she was ready to give up and go back to her own quiet hotel room, where she’d left Becky watching Blind Date on cable. She stood waiting by the elevator, trying not to inhale lest she accidentally get a whiff of the potted fern next to her, into which someone had recently urinated. When the elevator door slid open, there was Justin, prone on the floor with his arm wrapped lasciviously around a pillow. He opened one bloodshot eye and stared at her.

  “Party central, going up,” he said. “Have any beer?”

  The stench of booze wafted through the air and hit her in the face. She inched into the elevator and let the door slide closed, but didn’t press any buttons. Instead, she drummed up the conversational opener she’d been practicing in her head all night. “Congratulations on winning the freestyle,” she began. But standing over him like that made her feel awkwardly large, so she crouched down on her haunches and started again. “I thought that was really funny what you did today. You know, when you won.”

  Justin squinted at her. “What about vodka? Have any of that? Pot? I’ll take anything.”

  “Um, no,” she said, taken aback. She tried to return to the script. “I really like your technique. The way you, um, breathe every fourth stroke?”

  Justin rolled over onto his back and hugged the pillow to his chest. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Lizzie’s stomach sank. “Lizzie,” she said. She stood up and hit the button for her floor. The elevator lurched and began to rise. “Lizzie Miller. I’m on the swim team with you. I do the breaststroke.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Lizzie. Lizzie of the breaststroke. Lizzie of the breasts. Lizzie, know where we can get some beer?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I think I might have some alcohol in my room,” he said. “I just can’t remember where my room is. Do you know where my room is?”

  The elevator slid to a stop, and the doors opened to reveal two kids slurping at each other’s faces. Justin and Lizzie watched for an endless few seconds, the air filled with suggestion and the liquid sound of spit being exchanged, before Lizzie hit the “Door Close” button with her fist. The doors slid shut again, and the elevator rose. She considered her options: he was clearly a mess, but when else would she be alone with Justin Bellstrom?

  “What does your room key say?” she asked.

  Justin propped himself up against the mirrored wall of the elevator. His curls were flattened on one side, with cigarette ash caught in the front. He dug in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a room key with the number 302 on it. He looked up at Lizzie with frank admiration. “Wow, you’re really smart.”

  Lizzie shrugged. “Logic,” she said.

  “Wanna come have a drink?”

  The hair on her forearms prickled up, as if she’d just put her finger in a light socket. Her heart began to race. “Sure,” she said, more nonchalantly than she felt.

  Room 302 was at the end of the corridor. She followed Justin as he reeled down the hallway, bouncing from wall to wall like a pinball and stopping at each door to squint at the number and compare it to his key. He dropped the pillow and left it behind. She picked it up and took a quick whiff. It smelled like scalp. At the door, he fumbled with the key, attempting to insert it upside down. She grabbed it from him and let them in.

  The hotel room was hazy from cigarette smoke, and all the sheets had been ripped from the bed and piled in a heap by the television. His roommate, whoever he was, was gone. Justin crawled over, flung himself facedown on the pile of sheets, and rummaged under the bed. He emerged with a plastic jug of blue liquid and held it up over his head.

  “Victory is mine,” he said.

  “What is that?” Lizzie asked.

  “Everclear. With blueberry Kool-Aid.”

  “Everclear?”

  “Grain alcohol. Hundred and fifty-one proof. This stuff will get you fucked up.” He lifted the bottle and took a swig before handing it to Lizzie. She paused and smelled it—it made the hair in her nose stand on end—before taking a gulp. The alcohol felt like it was peeling a layer off the inside of her throat, and the Kool-Aid left a gummy sugar coating on the inside of her mouth. She choked and dribbled blue juice down the front of her T-shirt.

/>   “Um,” she said. “That’s awful.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it? It’s the bomb.”

  With Justin watching, she gamely took another swig. Already she could feel the heat radiating from her belly up to her chest and out through her fingertips. She had tasted alcohol before—the occasional swig from her parents’ abandoned glasses after dinner, a whole glass of champagne snuck at a bar mitzvah last year—but she had never experienced anything like this. It was, she decided, a pleasant sensation. It made her feel weightless, almost like she was swimming. She took the bottle out of Justin’s hands and swallowed again. She lay back on the pile of sheets next to Justin, and stared up at the pebbled ceiling; someone had managed to stick a wad of gum on it.

  Justin lit a cigarette and took a puff. “Isn’t this lame? I hate this shit.”

  “Cigarettes? Yeah, they’re kinda gross.”

  “Nah. Swim team. I only do it because my mom makes me. She thinks it will get me into a good college. But I hate all this gwoooo…” He burped. “I mean, giving up my weekends. Sacramento sucks, you know? I wanna stay home and party with my friends. Fucking six-in-the-morning wake-up. It’s too much work.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lizzie. The cigarette was making her nauseous and light-headed and she could feel sweat beading up at her temples. “I think it’s fun to be good at something.”

  “Are you good at swimming?”

  “I’m getting better. I guess I’m pretty decent.” She blushed. When she looked up, Justin had rolled onto his side and was examining her intently. He reached out and pulled a strand of her hair over her eyes, so that she was peeking out from behind it.

  “Hey,” he said. “Didn’t you lose a bunch of weight or something?”

  She nodded, finding her tongue incapable of motion. Instead, she took another gulp of the booze, which rendered her limbs immobile, too. The gum on the ceiling was beginning to undulate in a peculiar way.

  Justin crawled closer. She could feel the warmth of his skin through the cotton of her shirt, so near that all she need do was shift her hand an inch and she would make contact. She was petrified. This is the moment of my reinvention, she thought. I can be anyone.