And God? There’s one more, kind of important thing…
The pastor claps his hands. “Okay, time’s up. Now it’s time for some friendship healing. Let’s everyone go and make a new friend in Christ tonight. Then we’ll rock out with some singing and finish up the night with chastity pledges. Okay?”
There is an audible rustling of denim as the teens in the room get up and begin to mingle. Lizzie stands and turns to the left, but the blond girl sitting beside her is already absorbed with the girl on her left. She looks to her right and sees a small Asian boy with metal headgear clamped around his head.
“Hi,” she says, but the boy shakes his head frantically. She decides to try again. “My name is Lizzie,” she says. “What’s yours?” But the boy keeps shaking his head. He points at the headgear and rolls his eyes and grunts.
Lizzie hears a voice behind her. “His jaw was wired shut last week,” the voice says. “He had this freaky underbite. They had to break his entire jaw and, like, weld it back into place.”
Lizzie turns to see Mark Weatherlove standing right behind her, his hands shoved into the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt and his shoulders hunched forward protectively, as if anticipating a fist in his face. “Hi,” he says. His voice somehow manages to catch on that one simple syllable and crack, a nails-on-chalkboard sound that makes Lizzie wince. Mark looks quickly down at the industrial carpet.
“Are you still mad at me?” he asks.
Lizzie’s pulse quickens. “I’m not talking to you,” she says.
“What are you doing here?” he replies.
She straightens her back and discovers that from her towering position on her platform sandals, Mark is fully two inches shorter than her, which means that she can actually look down her nose at him. “Learning about the power of prayer,” she says. “Learning what it means to be a good Christian. If you know what I mean. Though I think you don’t. What are you doing here?”
Mark shoves his hands deeper into his pocket. “I dunno,” he says. “My parents make me come. They say it’s a good place to make friends.” He scowls.
“Well, you’re not going to make one here,” she retorts. “You’re a total liar. I never …did it with you. Why did you write that on the wall in the locker room? Did you think it made you, like, cool to do that? ’Cuz it didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know why I did it.”
“Yeah, well, considering that your mom’s a lying bitch who stole my dad and ruined my mom’s life, I guess it’s not surprising that you’re so lame. It must run in the family.” Lizzie is thrilled by the acidity in her voice; she didn’t realize she was this capable of cruelty.
“Yeah,” Mark croaks. “I guess.” He rubs at the corner of his right eye with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, but a tear slides out of the other and lands on the front of his sweatshirt.
Lizzie watches him for a moment, trying hard to sustain her self-righteous anger—why should she feel bad when he’s the one who was such a jerk? But it mostly just feels terrible to watch him cry. Cruelty, she realizes belatedly, is not a very godly trait. Sorry, God, she thinks. Her stomach turns over in response. And suddenly she thinks she can feel everything Pastor Dylan was talking about, all that stuff about forgiveness, and how when God lives inside you He lets you experience love in a way that you never could before. Because there is something purple and swirling inside her, something like empathy, and she sees that she has the power to make the boy standing before her feel better. And it feels pretty good.
Thanks, God, she thinks. And as she says this to Him she realizes what should have been obvious to her weeks ago: Mark’s mother has run off with her father, which means that he, too, has a broken home right now. Did Beverly move out of the house, like her dad did? Who is Mark living with? Who’s taking care of him? Who’s doing the cooking?
All of the pain of her own family situation comes flooding back. She swallows, hard, to keep tears from erupting. “Yeah, well, my dad’s a bastard, too, I guess. Fuck them both.”
Mark looks at her for a long minute, his nostrils flaring as he gulps down shaky puffs of breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Parents suck. Who fuckin’ needs them anyway.”
Lizzie wants to give Mark a hug—he looks so sad and forlorn. She considers the other teens around them, who all seem so simply happy, like they don’t have any problems at all, and then she looks back at Mark. He is probably the only person in the world who could possibly understand how weird her family is right now, and at that thought her own eyes spill over with salty, hot tears. Mark takes a half step toward her, and Lizzie manages a tiny smile.
“Okay,” yells the pastor. Once again, the buzz of activity in the room ceases. “Before we move on, I want you to turn to your new friend in Christ and tell them one thing that you really like about them.”
The spell is broken. Lizzie looks at Mark. “We don’t really have to do this, do we?” she asks.
Mark shuffles backward again and shoves his hands deeper in his sweatshirt pocket. “I dunno,” he says. “God might be mad if we don’t.”
Lizzie sighs. “Okay.” She pauses and looks Mark up and down. Mark’s acne has cleared up a lot, she observes, and when he looks up to meet her gaze, she notices, for the first time, that his eyes are the cool green color of the algae that sometimes grows in the neighbor’s ornamental koi pond. “Okay. I like the color of your eyes,” she blurts. She is surprised to see bright pink flares erupt on Mark’s cheeks.
“Thanks,” he mumbles. He stares at her and says nothing.
“Okay, it’s your turn,” she prompts him.
Mark puts one arm in front of his face and speaks into his sleeve. “Dinkaroolakootanlekulot.”
“What’d you say?” Lizzie asks, instantly on guard. Was that some kind of insult? Did he call her a coot? A slut?
“Um,” he says and steps backward again, so that there is a full arm span between them. His eyes dart around wildly, he clenches and unclenches his fist and then closes his eyes. “Ithinkyou’re-really cute and I like you a lot,” he whispers. And then he turns and bolts for the other side of the room.
Lizzie freezes, unable to move as she watches him flee. When the drums start up, just a few inches from her face, she feels like the hollow pounding is coming from inside her head. She tries to sing along with the band as they belt out a rousing rendition of a song called “Pumpin’ Da Passion” but finds that she can’t focus on the words. She completely tunes out the pastor’s final sermon as Mark’s words run through her head in a loop. “I like you a lot.” No one has ever said that to her before.
When the chastity pledges are passed out, she considers the paper, which promises that she will never have sex again until she gets married. Her skin crawls as she remembers the surprising intimacy of flesh pressed up against flesh. The way boys looked at her in the kitchen. Can she really give this up forever? But then she remembers the electricity in this room around her, the potential of blond girls who smile at you (blond girls who would probably never approve of you having sex with six guys) and God (also not a fan) hanging out in your belly, making it feel warm and gurgly, and boys who tell you that you are cute, and she scrawls her signature. It seems a fair enough trade.
And she only barely remembers, before she leaves for the night, that she came here tonight with something on her mind that she really needed to bring up with God. As the kids around her begin to gather their backpacks and Bibles, and parents congregate outside the door to pick their children up, Lizzie bows her head again and hastily offers up one last prayer.
Hi again, your Lordness, she prays. I got interrupted before—there’s one more thing. Could you please make sure I get my period soon? It was due three days ago, and I haven’t gotten it yet. Actually, I didn’t have it last month either. I thought that maybe it was because I lost all that weight, I read on the Internet that that happens sometimes, but I’m not losing weight anymore—actually, I’m putting weight back on again. So I’m kind of getting ki
nd of freaked out now. Can you, like, do something? I promise never to have sex again, seriously. Okay, thanks, God.
With that taken care of, Lizzie jams her Bliss! Bible under her arm and goes out to the front steps of the church to wait for Zeke and Barbara Bint.
“i’m quitting swim camp,” lizzie announces at breakfast the next day. She turns the page of the comics section and peeks out the corner of her eye in order to gauge her mother’s response.
Janice is on delayed-reaction time. She stands at the stove, poking absently at an egg-white omelet in which she has just deposited a handful of what looks like weeds but which Janice has assured Lizzie are actually herbes de Provence and will be very tasty. With the other hand, she holds open a copy of Paris Match, silently mouthing words to herself as she stirs the coagulating mess. Lizzie wasn’t aware that her mom ever read those stupid French magazines, which always have lame celebrities like Celine Dion on the cover and no pictures of Paris Hilton at all.
“Mom?” Lizzie says.
Janice starts. “What?”
“I’m quitting swim camp,” she says again.
Janice turns and focuses on Lizzie, her eyes wide. “Now, why would you want to do that?” she asks. She drops the magazine by the stove and sits down in the chair next to Lizzie, spatula still in hand. She cups her hand underneath the spatula to ensure that the eggy bits that cling to it won’t fall. Her foot taps at the floor. “You love swimming. You’re such a good swimmer.”
Lizzie shrugs. “I’m bored,” she says.
This is not entirely a lie, because Lizzie is utterly bored. But her boredom has nothing to do with swimming, because she hasn’t actually been to swim camp in well over two weeks, not since she discovered the graffiti in the locker room. She has, instead, gone to the public library every morning to sit in the beanbags in the corner of the children’s book section, devouring Danielle Steel novels and Snickers bars until it’s three in the afternoon and time to go home. In this fashion, she has worked her way through To Love Again and Toxic Bachelors and Second Chance and a half dozen others, learning at least fourteen different euphemisms for the male anatomy (her favorite so far: “tumescent member,” which aptly describes the way Max Grouper’s fat little thing had appeared when they had sex in the guest bedroom while his parents were in Kauai). Sometimes she just sleeps in the beanbag all day; she seems to be exhausted all the time.
At first she thought that her absence from the swim team would be a temporary thing, that she was just skipping a day or two while she worked up her nerve to face Susan Gossett and the rest of the girls again. The day after she found the graffiti, she walked all the way to the front gate of the rec center before losing her nerve and fleeing. The next day she made it only to the end of her street before changing direction. The more she thought about it, the more terrified she became of facing a hostile group of classmates. After all, she had slept with some of their ex-boyfriends, and she could see clearly, now, the contempt they must have felt for her for the last few months. She would hate her, too, if she were them. No wonder Susan Gossett had been so eager to share the news of her father’s affair.
When Becky called a few days ago, asking why she was absent, Lizzie told her that she had come down with a bacterial virus and had been instructed to stay in bed for the rest of the summer. “I’m really contagious,” she told Becky when Becky offered to visit, and thereby sealed her solitary fate. When Becky mailed her a stash of old People magazines and DVDs of Brad Pitt’s entire filmography as a “get well soon” present, Lizzie was miserable. She wasn’t just a slut; she was a liar and a bad friend, too. She prayed to God and asked forgiveness, but that didn’t seem to help much either. Maybe you have to reach a certain threshold of prayer—kind of like a minimum balance in your checking account—before God starts responding?
Her initial plan was to just hide out in the library until the summer ended. But she’s already worked her way through every Danielle Steel novel in the library’s collection and the thought of starting on Judith Krantz brings up waves of ennui. She is getting bored of heaving bosoms and throbbing manhoods. (Would God approve of Judith Krantz? Should she be reading the Bible instead?) Her back is stiff from the beanbag. Whatever her mother might say about being a quitter couldn’t be worse than spending another day in the children’s reading room, which smells like dirty diapers and pea soup.
“Well,” Janice says now. She jumps back up to shake the omelet aggressively. “Do you want to do ballet again instead? I could see if they’ll take you even though the summer courses are half over.”
“I hated ballet,” says Lizzie.
“Ballroom dancing? Language camp?” asks Janice. She pokes and scrapes and jiggles.
Lizzie sighs. She knew this wouldn’t be easy. She realizes, with sudden terror, that if she’s not careful she’ll end up back in elocution and etiquette courses, doomed to a summer with the dread Mrs. Grimley, discussing whether “buffet” is properly pronounced “boo-fay” or “buf-fay.” She shivers.
“Actually,” says Lizzie, “I really want to focus on SAT prep. I picked up some workbooks in the library. You know, if I’m going to get into a good college, I have to start studying the SATs now. To make up for my grades last quarter.”
Janice leaves the stove and presses a warm palm against Lizzie’s forehead. “Well, you don’t have a fever,” she says. “Is this my Lizzie, offering to do extra SAT prep? I didn’t realize you were already so focused. Isn’t it a little soon? Though I’m not going to stop you. Do you want to start visiting colleges? Your father and I could take…” Janice’s jaw freezes. “I mean, maybe your sister and I could help you plan a research trip for this fall.”
“Sure,” says Lizzie, feeling guilty about yet another lie. She hasn’t thought about college at all. “That would be nice.” But the mention of her father seems to have already brought the discussion to a halt. Janice turns the spatula in her hand for a moment, staring at it as if it were a mysterious alien object, and then, with a jolt, jumps up again to check the omelet.
“Shoot,” she says. She pokes at the browned eggy mess. “I didn’t turn it in time. It’s ruined. I’ll make you another.”
“That’s okay,” says Lizzie. “Can I have bacon instead?”
Janice looks at her strangely. “What about your diet?”
“I’m quitting my diet, too,” says Lizzie, emboldened by her victory. And it is to Janice’s credit that she opens her mouth but pauses, and says nothing, before she shuts it again and yanks open the freezer door to retrieve a slab of bacon.
there isn’t all that much more to do at home than there is at the library. Up in her room, Lizzie sits on the lavender pile rug with a pair of tweezers and plucks the hairs, one by one, out of her legs. Today she is focusing on a patch just below her knee, one where the hair has begun to grow back in after its last plucking. She tugs at the baby-fine brown hairs, eyes watering slightly at the pain. A good one is one that comes out with the root still encased in a gooey rim of flesh.
Until last year, this was her favorite pastime, though she dropped the habit once she took up swim team. Now that she has endless hours to fill, it seems a good enough way to kill the day. She knows that this self-abusive hobby would cause assorted school psychiatrists no end of alarm, but she has always found it meditative. Here, with the door closed and her stereo cranked to top volume (“You told me you loved me…. How could I break your pretty little heart?” croons Bobby Masterston, her favorite singer), she can empty her head of the abstract dramas that have no tangible resolution—the fact that her period has yet to arrive, the graffiti that’s still on the wall of the boys’ locker room, the increasingly manic mother in a domestic frenzy downstairs, and the father who seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. The fine point of loneliness that needles at the center of her chest. Each hair extracted is a step toward a finite accomplishment: total denudation. And then it will grow back, so she can do it all over again.
Her bedroom is purpl
e, a half dozen shades of it, from the deep purple velvet curtains over the windows to the purple striped bedspread to the artfully coordinated floral pillows printed with lavender blooms. Lizzie hates purple. Unfortunately, she did not hate purple when she was seven and requested this as the color of her bedroom in their new house. Her mother obliged, and now Lizzie’s House & Garden bedroom thwarts her every attempt to assert her personality upon it. She cannot tape her Brad Pitt posters on the walls, because this might make marks on the purple floral wallpaper. Pushpins are strictly forbidden. Books and CDs are artfully arranged on the bookcases—any errant tomes are reordered every time her mother comes in to clean—and nestle next to the bowl of dried lavender blooms and the unopened SAT prep booklets (just in case her mother checks).
Lizzie is torpid in the grapy maw, so listless that she can’t muster the energy to do anything but pluck the hair from her body. She feels, for the first time in months, fat and lazy—the combination of quitting the team and her secret Snickers habit seems to already have had an effect on the size of her stomach, which is once again creeping over the waistband of her shorts. At least, she hopes that’s why she’s getting fat. The thought that pregnant women also put on weight flickers across her brain. She sucks in her stomach, making the roll of flesh vanish, then tugs a particularly thick black hair out of her knee and examines it. She scrapes at the bits of flesh still attached to the root, then wipes it off on the bedspread. The skin on her knee is pink and raw-looking.
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