All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  Janice picks up the trowel and stabs at the thistle again. It won’t come up. She drops the trowel and goes at the thistle with her hands instead, yanking at it with all her might. The spiky purple flower snaps off in her hand.

  “Margaret?” she calls out as Margaret walks away.

  Margaret pauses and looks back at her mother, who stares forlornly at the muddy weed in her hand. “Yeah?”

  “Thank you,” says Janice.

  six

  the safest place in the world is the bottom of a swimming pool. Lizzie can hold her breath down here for a whole minute and six seconds, the longest time of anyone at swim camp. Drifting on her back at the bottom of the deep end of the rec center pool, she is weightless, an exotic mermaid in a green Speedo, waiting to be discovered by a dashing scuba diver. Except maybe she would want to lose the swim cap and goggles and nose guard first. She looks up at the sun through the water. The light catches in the waves: Diamonds dance above her. She reaches out in slow motion to grab one, but it vanishes as someone swims by overhead, obscuring the sun.

  She explodes to the surface, gasping for breath.

  The fact that she is a good swimmer still surprises Lizzie. She may have spent countless summers bobbing in the pool and always figured that she was good at floating because of the extra girth around her middle, but it wasn’t until she joined the swim team that she discovered that she actually had a knack for the breaststroke. Maybe it is the extra buoyancy of her weight—she is so much more bulky than most other girls on the team, even after losing thirty-seven pounds—that helps launch her forward through the water with each sweep of her arms. Maybe it’s simply because she needs the win more than they do. But when she races, she almost feels like she is flying, as if one particularly emphatic sweep of her arms might launch her right out of the water and into the air. She’s convinced that if she practices hard enough this summer, she might be able to win in her division at the Junior Nationals meet this October.

  She counts in her head: That’s three months away. Would her dad show up for the meet? If so, would it be okay for her mom and dad to be in the same place at the same time? She has always felt sorry for those girls whose parents’ conspicuous absences at school events reeked of family disaster. She wouldn’t want the other girls on the team to feel sorry for her.

  Lizzie does her freestyle laps automatically, keeping her head down, pleasantly oblivious to what might be going on outside the pool. Her hand hits the pebbled concrete of one end of the pool and she flips in a somersault, planting the wrinkled soles of her feet against the tile and giving herself a shove to slice back through the water. Through the gurgling in her ears, she thinks she hears the shriek of a whistle—is practice over?—but she has the rhythm now, and chooses to ignore it. Plus, if she waits a little while, she won’t have to see all the other girls in the locker room; she’s managed to avoid Susan Gossett for almost two weeks, by coming to practice early and leaving late.

  Lizzie does eight more laps before pausing to take a breath and look around. The pool is empty except for Becky, a slight figure sitting patiently on the edge of the shallow end, splashing her heels in the water. She has already changed into a T-shirt and shorts, and her frizzy red curls are drying in the sun. Once again, Becky has forgotten her sun hat at home. From a distance, it looks like she’s blushing from chin to forehead.

  Lizzie swims over and tickles Becky’s toes. “Hey,” Lizzie says.

  “Hey,” says Becky. “You make me look lazy.”

  “I just like swimming.”

  “You’re getting really fast.”

  Lizzie smiles. “You think so?”

  “Totally. Hey. Wanna go get a milkshake?”

  “Totally,” says Lizzie, pleased to have a reason not to race back home to the quiet house. Although this, in turn, makes her feel guilty: Will her mother be lonely if she doesn’t come home right away? Or is it okay because Margaret is there? Should she call and tell them she’ll be home late? She never did before, but maybe things have changed now. The rules dictating how kids with separated parents should behave are still unclear to her.

  “The Fountain?” asks Becky.

  “Totally,” agrees Lizzie. The Fountain is her favorite: When they give you your milkshake, they also give you the extra in a metal cup, so you get two milkshakes for the price of one. Which, of course, isn’t really on her diet, but whatever. She’s earned it.

  Lizzie changes into shorts and a tank top. They walk down the side streets to the main part of town, flipping through the pages of an Us Weekly and examining the flat bellies of assorted purportedly pregnant starlets. The afternoon is balmy, and Lizzie can feel her sweaty thighs sticking together as she walks.

  The Fountain is mostly empty, since the lunch crowd has vanished and the dinner crowd has yet to arrive. Lizzie and Becky collapse heavily into a green leather booth in the corner, slumping so that they are practically supine. The restaurant is supposed to look like an old-fashioned soda fountain, with a long Formica counter and stools that twirl, but it opened only three years ago, so all the chrome is still shiny and most of the vintage appliances are only for show. Lizzie examines the menu. She briefly considers the Niman Ranch Meatloaf for $19.50 or the Chilean Sea Bass Burger for $28—but instead orders the $8 Valrhona chocolate milkshake.

  Becky sighs, grabs a red curl of hair, and examines the split ends. She sticks it in her mouth, tastes it, and spits it out. “This summer has been so boring,” she says. “If something exciting doesn’t happen soon I think I’ll die.”

  “I know what you mean,” agrees Lizzie, although she realizes, with some surprise, that she is not bored at all. Her usual listless summer state has been replaced by a sense of constant agitation. Even when she sits still it feels like the world is spinning wildly around her. Maybe that’s why she likes swimming so much these days. When she’s in the water the chaos around her seems to slow down, like when the car you’re in accelerates to pass another car on the highway, making it seem to just slide away behind you.

  Becky looks at her nervously. “Have you talked to your dad yet? Since…”

  “No,” says Lizzie, wishing Becky hadn’t asked this. “He’s traveling, I think, for work, you know? So he couldn’t call.” The truth is that before he moved out, her father always used to call when he was on business trips, though he never talked to her, only her mom. He’d just bring home souvenirs for Lizzie—dolls in ceremonial native dresses, miniature replicas of the Empire State Building, stuffed bears dressed in T-shirts in other languages, some still wearing price tags from the duty-free store. She never knew what to do with them, so they just sat on a shelf in her bedroom, collecting dust. Will he still get her gifts, now that he’s leaving? Some kids get even better gifts after their parents divorce. But that’s kind of depressing to think about.

  She is relieved when the milkshakes arrive, piled high with fresh whipped cream and shavings of bittersweet chocolate, so thick that Lizzie can barely get a spoon into the glass. She sucks at her plastic straw as hard as she can, until she is dizzy from the lack of oxygen and her eyes feel like they are going to pop, but the ice cream refuses to ascend the straw.

  She pushes the shake away and gasps for breath. “It’s harder than giving a blow job,” she says.

  Becky turns violet. “Lizzie!” she says. “You shouldn’t say stuff like that.”

  “Jesus, Becky, it was only a joke.” Lizzie stares down into her milkshake. She sticks her finger in the whipped cream and licks it off. “Get a sense of humor.”

  Becky rolls the paper from her straw into a tiny tube, then flattens it out with her thumb. “Can I ask you something, Lizzie?”

  “What?”

  Becky rolls the damp paper up again, wrapping it around her finger. She doesn’t meet Lizzie’s eyes. “Are you a virgin?”

  Lizzie considers the question. She knows that Becky has only kissed a boy once, when they were playing spin the bottle in the corner of a school dance their freshman year and
Johnny Franks Frenched her. The whole next week Becky informed everyone about how gross this encounter had been. It was totally juvenile. Lizzie recalls that she herself has had sex with Johnny Franks, and that Becky not only does not know this but would probably be freaked out if she did know, and she feels as if a canyon a hundred feet wide has opened between them. How did she get to be so much, well, cooler than Becky so quickly? She glances over at Becky, whose pancake-flat chest is concealed by the glitter unicorn on her T-shirt, and is embarrassed for her.

  But she finds that she wants to tell Becky, even if Becky isn’t as impressed with Lizzie’s sexual exploits as she should be. It will be a relief, she thinks. She hasn’t told anyone—certainly not her mother, and her sister hasn’t asked yet, and who else is there? So her secret has just kind of grown inside her, and sometimes she feels like a pressure cooker that’s about to explode its contents all over the walls.

  “No,” she says, sitting back in her seat. “I’m not.”

  Becky nods, still staring at the paper wrapped around her finger. “How long? I mean, how long ago did you lose it?”

  “Three months ago.”

  Lizzie watches Becky gnaw on the inside of her cheek, which is what Becky usually does when boys talk to her at school and she gets scared. “Who did you do it with?” she asks.

  Lizzie sticks her tongue into the whipped cream to delay her answer, and gets it all over her face. She licks it off before responding. “Um. Which time?”

  Becky stares at her, the piece of paper in her hands frozen mid-twist. “So, it isn’t a lie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I heard.” Becky’s voice gets tinier and tinier until it’s almost impossible to hear at all.

  “What did you hear?” Lizzie is growing more nervous as she watches Becky’s jaw working away, the straw paper twisting in her hands, but she’s not sure why.

  “Look, Lizzie,” Becky says pleadingly. “I didn’t want to believe Susan. You know I think she’s a psychobitch. But everyone keeps saying that, you know, you’re sleeping around.”

  “Oh,” says Lizzie, with a sinking feeling. “Like, what exactly are they saying?”

  Becky squirms in her seat. “I don’t want to repeat it.”

  “No, tell me,” says Lizzie, growing seriously concerned.

  Becky mumbles something.

  “What?” says Lizzie.

  “They say that you’ve”—she pauses, winces, and whispers—“done it, with, like, fifty guys already and you’ve become the”—pause, wince, whisper—“school slut and everyone is laughing at you. And that you’re trying to have sex with every guy in our class. That you’d suck any guy’s”—pause, wince, whisper—“thingy if they got you drunk. That all these guys are just using you for sex.” Becky has tears welling up in her eyes. “And I told them that it wasn’t true and they were full of shit, but then someone showed me the scorecard.”

  Lizzie’s last sip of milkshake, descending down her throat, stops and reverses direction. She chokes and gulps at her glass of water, trying to swallow back down the horror that is rising up with the regurgitated ice cream. “What scorecard?” she manages.

  “It’s on the wall in the boys’ locker room at school.”

  “What does it say?”

  Becky shakes her head, and a fat tear drops from her eye and lands in her milkshake, making a crater in the whipped cream. “Maybe you should just look at it yourself,” she whispers.

  Lizzie slumps down until she is lying on her back on the vinyl and closes her eyes. She pretends that she is at the bottom of a swimming pool where even the thrashing of other swimmers on the surface doesn’t cause a ripple. She can breathe water, like a fish, and she’ll never have to come up for air again. From far away, she can hear Becky’s voice, drifting over her like a current. “Lizzie? You know I don’t care, right? I don’t care what people say. You’re my best friend. They’re all lame. Lizzie?”

  Lizzie says nothing. The word “slut” echoes through her head. She repeats it in her mind, punishing herself with the slippery sharp syllables that catch at the back of her tongue and threaten to spill out onto the table. For a long minute, there is no sound except for Becky slurping at her milkshake. Finally, she hears Becky speak again, very quietly.

  “Lizzie? What’s it like?”

  “Like?”

  “You know. Doing it.”

  “It’s like…” She stops, and for a long time she can’t think of anything to say. “It’s just stupid.”

  after they part ways, lizzie walks the mile to millard Fillmore High. Summer school is in and the doors are unlocked, so she wanders through to the gymnasium at the back of the campus. She can hear cheerleaders practicing in the distance and the squeak and thump of a basketball game out on the courts, but no one is in the halls. The smack of her sandals echoes off the polished concrete. The lockers have been freshly painted orange and blue, and the smell of the cheap paint makes her light-headed. She passes her own locker from last year and wonders whether the graffiti she wrote inside it last spring—I Justin—is still there. She hopes they’ve painted over it.

  When she gets to the door of the boys’ locker room, she pauses. Her heart pumps rapidly in her chest at the thought of getting caught in this off-limits territory. But she gathers her nerve and pushes the swinging door open with one hand, standing back so that she won’t accidentally see in, just in case someone is in there.

  “Hello?” she whispers hoarsely, just to double-check, prepared to run away as fast as she can if she gets a response. Her voice echoes off white tile and bounces back to her.

  The boys’ locker room, to her astonishment, is identical in every way to the girls’, except that the bathroom area has urinals as well as toilet stalls. It even smells the same: like bleach and pink granulated hand soap. It is disappointingly, benignly unmasculine.

  The graffiti is scribbled on the tiles on the wall just beside the sinks. It is her name, written in black Sharpie. “I did Lizzie Miller,” it says, in handwriting that slants up the wall. Underneath that there is a list of names, written in different hands, with a date beside each one. “Justin Bellstrom 3/22,” “Max Grouper 4/17,” “Johnny Franks 6/9 & 6/18,” “Brian Cientela 5/24.” There are ten names in all, and she stares at them, horrified: Six names she recognizes with a stab of embarrassment (Did she? Yes. Yes. Yes) and four infuriate her, because they are liars. Mark Weatherlove is in the latter group. What a faker! And she didn’t have sex with Martin Simms, either.

  “Shit,” she says out loud, and the swear word reverberates off the tiles and fills the room, a dozen curses echoing back to rebuke her. She is not an object of desire to the boys of Fillmore High after all, she sees with a sudden sickening clarity. (How could she have missed this before? Did she know but somehow not know?) She is hardly a real girl at all, just a score. No different than a touchdown in a football game.

  As she stands there in the boys’ bathroom, the Lizzie she thought she had become vanishes like a soap bubble in a stiff breeze—gone just like that—leaving her with only the hideous feeling that the last three months, the months she thought had been the best of her entire life, were a horrible mirage.

  She tears a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, pumps a cupful of granulated soap on top, and rubs at the graffiti. Brian Cientela’s name, written in ballpoint pen, smears a little, but they aren’t joking when they call Sharpies permanent. She moistens the towels in the sink and rubs harder, but the paper just deteriorates into pink mush in her hand. Still, she scrubs as hard as she can, until her palm is raw and soapy water runs down the wall and her arm feels like it will fall off from the effort.

  when she arrives home, in the early evening, she goes straight to her room and slams the door. She grabs a lace-trimmed pillow off her bed and throws it at the mirror. It falls to the ground with an unsatisfying wheeze. She kicks it and it punts forward only about three feet. She kicks it once more, hoping to tear a hole in its side, and it bounce
s off the wall. She stands there in the room, looking down at the pillow, which now has a black smear in its center, trying very hard to breathe.

  At her desk, she pulls out a piece of pink stationery with “Elizabeth Miller” embossed across the top. The stationery was a Christmas present from her grandmother in Connecticut four years ago. Her mother had cooed over it and proclaimed it a “very thoughtful gift.” After writing a thank-you note to Grandma on one sheet of the stiff pink paper, she still has 499 sheets left.

  Lizzie grabs her favorite pen, the one with the fuzzy blue troll glued to the top, and composes a letter to Mark Weatherlove.

  “Dear Mark,” she writes, in her best cursive. “You are such a liar. How DARE you write that bullshit in the boys’ locker room. I wouldn’t touch you if you were the last person on earth, and you know it. And your mother is a total slut. Don’t ever talk to me again. NOT yours truly, Lizzie Miller.”

  She seals it and, feeling much better, heads back down the stairs and out the front door. At the end of the driveway she looks both ways to see if anyone is watching—there is no one around—and thrusts the pink envelope into the mailbox.

  When she returns to the house, she hears rustling in the living room and peeks around the door frame. Margaret is splayed out on the couch, legs propped up on a tower of decorative pillows. She is surrounded by computer printouts. Lizzie walks into the room and picks one up. It’s from the Legal Affairs Web site, entitled “Postnuptial Asset Allocation.” Another one reads, “Unitary Appreciation of Nonbinding Marital Property.” A third page is something torn out of Ladies’ Home Journal: “When Divorces Get Ugly: Eleven Women Talk About the Hell They Survived!”

  “Where’s Mom? What’s she cleaning now?” Lizzie asks, flopping down on the couch.

  “Nothing, actually,” says Margaret. “She went upstairs for a nap a few hours ago and asked to be left alone for a while. Honestly, she looked pretty rough. Maybe it’s all the fumes from the Lysol. That stuff is toxic. She should really be buying eco-friendly cleaning supplies, considering how much she uses the stuff. What happened to the cleaning lady?”