Rose of No Man's Land

by Michelle Tea

  Donnie started nodding vigorously, tapped his greasy head with the tip of the fork he was eating from. He swallowed a clot of ramen. I did think of that, I did. And then I forgot. It slipped my mind. His tongue shot out like an undersea monster, eyeless and newborn. It scraped the bit of flavor packet from the corner of his lips and retreated. Sorry, kiddo.

  On the television a newly made-over skank mom walked onto the stage in a khaki pants suit and subdued golden jewelry. Everyone cheered. That doesn’t look so hot, either, Ma observed. She was done with me. But I don’t think much would look good on her. What do you think, Don?

  Donnie investigated the controlled chaos of the Sally Jesse Raphael show. The skank mom’s daughter was crying great tears of salty joy at her mom’s new look. I could sort of identify with her, which made me mad.

  Hello! I made my voice extra slicey, to cut through the television haze they’d been marinating in all morning. Hello, I’m A Real Person Here In Your Living Room Who Missed The Last Day Of School For The Entire Year. That’s A Little Anticlimactic, Don’t You Think? And It Would Be Really Cool If You Could Admit That It Was Your Fault.

  Oh, here it comes, the blame game, Ma sighed. Ma loves self-help books. She doesn’t have the attention span to actually finish one, but she gets in deep enough to fish out some groovy new lingo.

  It’s Not A Game, Ma. It’s Real. I Really Missed School. It’s Really Your Fault.

  Ma arranged herself into more of a sitting position, less of a lying position, her fighting stance. Her shimmery nightgown was a deep cranberry, and her long brown hair fell across the lace at the throat and on her shoulders. When I was wicked little, me and Kristy loved to fish all Ma’s slippery shiny nightgowns from her top, most mysterious drawer. The drawer with all the nothing-colored fabrics wound together in the wood, the technical-seeming items like bras with their hooks and straps. All of it stunk up from the tiny pillow of dead flowers buried in the center, a stale, sweet smell. The nightgowns Ma lives in now are the same ones I used to play dress-up with. I have a memory of Kristy swimming in that particular cranberry number, her lips smacked with some sort of matching lipstick, making me walk behind her with the hem of the gown clutched in my hands, lifting it from the grubby floor.

  Well Trish, how about being in the solution instead of the problem, Ma sighed. Can you go to school now? All this time playing the blame game with me, you could be putting on some pants —

  Which, maybe you could do anyway, huh? Donnie cut in, scrunching up his nose like I’m the creep of the house.

  Ma smirked. Now that Donnie butted in on her behalf she was going to act like she won the fight. She’s such a bully. She’s got great eyes. They’re a real spooky green color. People leave you alone when you got eyes sharp like that. It’s a color they give to witches in horror movies, to illustrate their evil powers. Of course I did not get the spooky-eye gene. I got brown. Just Forget It, I spat.

  Your sister was in your room with her camera this morning, Ma told me. I thought she was waking you up. You kids aren’t babies. I didn’t know I needed to check on you all morning. I was still sleeping. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, it’s like I got mono or something. She sunk back into the collapsed pillow that held her head.

  If You Had Mono, I said, We’d All Have Mono.

  Her eyes rounded. Don’t say that! she said. God forbid. You feel tired, Don?

  Nah, Donnie shook his head. Donnie wears a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. They slide down his greasy nose all day long and I have a suspicion he wears them only to look smart. But Donnie doesn’t look smart. You can spot his smartlessness twelve miles away, like a throbbing neon sign.

  Maybe you need a battery clock, Ma suggested. Since the fuses blow.

  They sure do blow, Donnie chuckled and nudged Ma with his bowl. Ma chuckled back. They really are perfect for each other.

  Why don’t you put it on the wish list, Ma suggested. Battery alarm clock. The wish list is a worn and crumpled piece of yellow paper that lives on our fridge. It’s pinned to the metal with a plastic banana magnet. On it is scribbled everything we need. The scribbles take different shapes — the perfectly sculpted handwriting of Kristy; Ma’s faint, looping script; Donnie’s quick jots. They’re marked in pencil and ballpoints and fuzzy markers that bleed through the back of the page. It reads: canisters, DVD player, stepstool, cordless phone, new sheets, towel rack, towels, blender, diffuser, George Foreman grill, humidifier, dehumidifier, security system. Some of the earlier items from years ago have faded away, though Kristy periodically rewrites the whole list in her neat penmanship on a clean piece of paper. The banana magnet is weak, so the wish list frequently falls off the fridge and gets stomped on, kicked under the table, then picked up with food-stained fingers and dropped atop the table, where it gets eggier, more coffee-stained and dusted with ramen flavorings before being hung back on the fridge. The weight of the page slowly drags the banana magnet down the length of the pukey green refrigerator. The fridge is avocado-colored, Ma has told me. A shade that was big in the ’70s, when everyone loved to eat avocados I guess. I have never seen an avocado, but if the fridge is any indication, they can’t be too appetizing.

  I turned and stomped away. I took tiny, hard steps and felt satisfied by the way the rickety house rocked beneath my annoyance. The way this house moves, it’s like a living thing we all live inside. I think about it a lot in that way, especially at night if a wind hits it and it shifts and squeaks. Like it’s restless and trying to communicate. I think that the house is aware of us and likes me best, is on my side, feels sort of sorry for me. I rattled myself into the kitchen and plucked the wish list from where it sagged, knee-level, on the fridge. There were no pens anywhere. I rifled through the junk drawer and came up with a mostly dry purple marker that still smelled faintly of grapes, a souvenir from grade school. I pushed the scratchy tip to the page. Battery powered alarm clock. I stuck it back on the fridge. What a joke. Sometimes an item will miraculously fall off the back of a truck. Sometimes Ma will hit on a Scratcher and we’ll cross something off the list. Last year we got a hot-curler set that Ma and Kristy had seen on TV. It hadn’t even been on the list, it was a spontaneous purchase. There were about fifteen desired objects ahead of my alarm clock. I wasn’t holding my breath.

  In my room I sunk onto my bed but not too hard. Kristy once made a big show of flinging herself onto her bed and wound up busting the frame and the box spring, and now had to sleep on a mattress on the floor. It doesn’t pay to show strong emotions in this house. I eased myself onto my bed even though I’d have preferred a full-body slam, some sort of rough and complete contact. Maybe I should take up a sport, something aggressive like rugby, which I heard is wicked violent, but I don’t think they have that in America. At least not in Mogsfield. I don’t know if Mogsfield has anything aside from cheerleading, actually.

  It’s going to be a long summer.

  Two

  I found out from Kristy that Kim Porciatti tried to kill herself. Kim Porciatti didn’t go to my school, Mogsfield High, and she didn’t go to the vocational school like Kristy, the one called “the Voke.” The vocational school frowns on that nickname because it sounds too trashy. They’re trying to get people to call it “Metro Tech” instead, short for the Eastern Metropolitan Technical Vocational School. That’s the school’s real name but not even people who go there can keep it straight. It sounds like some sort of government institution you could learn to fly planes and fix air conditioners at. As opposed to a run-down high school for pot-smoking hicks learning plumbing and girls with bad hair and no future studying data processing. People get real excited about the Voke at first, because it’s so different from regular schools. Girls who go there say things like, “Oh it’s just like real life,” with this sort of superiority as they exhale a plume of Marlboro Light. But once the novelty wears off you realize you’re actually working a really shitty job you’re not getting paid for. Companies hire the students to process their data for wick
ed cheap. They pay the school, and the students — all girls, in data processing — do the work and never see a dollar. How is that even legal? I guess the really great bit is you’re getting taught how to process data, which is supposed to be a valuable job skill. Except you learn how to do that in like fifteen minutes and then for the next three years that’s all you do. Then you graduate and find a job doing more data processing and you do that until you die, either from natural causes like cancer or some deliberate suicide, whatever comes first. It’s fucking depressing. Plus, learning that someone you know tried to kill herself will put you in a dark space, even if you didn’t particularly like the person.

  Kristy’s shop at the Voke was not data processing, it was cosmetology, which if you ask me is the only reason to go to the Voke, and the reason most every girl does. That shop doesn’t start ’til junior year, though, so you essentially piss away two whole years of your life learning something you have absolutely no interest in, like drafting and design, killing time until junior year. And not every girl gets accepted to the cosmo shop, either, so there are a lot of ruined female lives at the Voke, a lot of bitter data processors. You go in dreaming of being a hairdresser and you leave a dental assistant or a glorified babysitter — “child care technician.” Those girls spend their entire high school life watching the teachers’ kids. For free. For their education.

  Kristy made it into the cosmetology shop because that’s how life goes for her. She tends to get whatever she wants, which is why she’s now going after The Real World, that TV show. She’s positive she can be the teenaged-hairdresser-from-an-impoverished-New-England-town character, and she’s been obsessively putting together her audition tape. Kristy’s got this natural bossy sunniness that makes people think she is more capable then she really is. She’s a know-it-all who actually doesn’t know that much, and one thing I’ve learned from her is that if you say something in the right tone of voice hardly anyone will challenge you. Another thing I’ve learned is that in the event of a challenge you just stand your ground until the other person becomes exasperated, filled with doubt, or plain bored, and poof, you win. Kristy’s great at that. Like that period pill argument. I am certain that the period pill — the one they have those commercials for, with the woman flipping out over something stupid like her shopping cart getting tangled in the other shopping carts — is just a huge dose of Prozac. I’ve given up trying to convince Kristy that it is not some genius new medicine, that it is just another way to sneak more people onto antidepressants. It is irritating to see Kristy gloating like she won the debate, but it’s simpler than fighting about it forever. What the fuck do I care anyway. It’s not like I’m going to take the stupid pill.

  Kristy learned that Kim Porciatti tried to kill herself because she does Bernice O’Leary’s hair and Bernice manages the Ohmigod! store at the mall. It is sort of sad to think that you can be the actual manager of the most popular store at the mall and still you don’t make enough money to get a proper haircut. You have to drive out to the Voke — way out in East Bumfuck, the middle of nowhere, by a swear-to-god lake — and pay a stoned high school student three dollars to cut your hair. It seems unjust. There are two different hair salons at the mall: Jungle Unisex, which is sort of old, with a jungle motif; and Hair Universe, which has an outer space theme and a lot of neon. You’d think that the actual owners of Ohmigod! would pay for their managers to get a fancy haircut since it’s such a big frigging deal to work there. Ohmigod! sells miniskirts and fake-flower hairpins and anorexic-looking sandals. It’s very bright and plays old music from the ’80s and it’s supposed to be really fun, like some sort of disco circus. Everything that isn’t striped is polka-dotted, so it truly seems like a clown place, but it’s very popular anyway. More people are caught shoplifting from Ohmigod! than from any other store at the mall. Which might only mean that the girls who like those clothes are, on the whole, dumber than average and more likely to get caught. Kim Porciatti works at Ohmigod!, which is how I knew who she was in the first place. It’s how I knew she went to Saint Joan, the all-girls high school, and how I knew that everyone thought she was just the greatest. Even if you don’t shop at Ohmigod! — and I don’t, I think those clothes are nauseating plus they’re wicked expensive — you wind up knowing all about everyone who works there and what their business is. It’s the sort of useless information you’re always picking up in life, against your will. Kim Porciatti. I have seen her a handful of times. Her hair is always blond, maybe too bright to be real, and don’t Italians have dark hair, naturally? I’ll have to ask Kristy, who now knows everything there is about hair. Kristy is now officially a hair expert, in addition to an expert on period medications and the mechanics of getting onto a reality television show. Kim is blond and she always has a tan even when the world is nothing but dog-pissy snow and clouds and coldness and scrawny bare trees. It must be that spray-on tan but it looks pretty good on her. I’m trying to be fair about the whole Kim thing. On the one hand it pisses me off the way someone can get this whole little cult around them just because they look good in a fake tan and have a lawyer dad buying them cute shoes and stuffing them into a good all-girl’s high school where their life isn’t destroyed by guys. I mean, what did Kim do to earn all this adoration? You couldn’t even say she worked particularly hard to get hired at Ohmigod! because she was popular already when she applied and that’s exactly why Bernice hired her. And she didn’t need the job in the first place, ’cause her parents have money and she just worked there ’cause it’s cool, like being paid money to hang out in a nightclub with a bonus discount on fancy clothes. It’s just not fair. Like why not decide that MaryAnn Baxter be popular? Why not select her to fall down and hyperventilate over? MaryAnn Baxter has a really fucked-up face. She got between her mom and her dad when they were having a fight and her dad flung something awful into her face. I want to say it was hydrochloric acid because that’s the terrible thing people are always getting splashed in the face with on television, but who knows if hydrochloric acid is even a real thing? MaryAnn Baxter looks like she got hit in the face with pure fire. Her skin is a lot of different colors, like a car that’s been stripped and primed for painting. It’s sort of patchy and in certain places looks melty, like a wax candle. Thick and droopy. If you have half a brain you can probably guess that MaryAnn’s not the most popular person in her high school, which happens also to be my high school. People say mean things to her in the hallway, call her “freak,” write things on her locker. I swear, it’s like an after-school special. Only on an after-school special everyone would learn something, and MaryAnn’s humanity would be exposed and whoever was being an asshole would suddenly get a clue and life would be better. I guarantee that is not going to happen. But if life were fair, MaryAnn would be the popular one. Everyone would want to be around her because she really survived something. Like someone in a movie, she stood up for justice and got horribly wounded but carried on. She would be our hero and we would all want to help her out. Plus there is the curious dizziness that comes with looking at her face for a bit. I had one class with MaryAnn Baxter this last semester and can testify that if you stare at her for too long this certain tingly lightheadedness can overtake you, a sort of drunken feeling. I don’t know why, but it’s true, and why not add that to the list of reasons to be good to her: she is like a strange drug. Maybe if everyone in the world got their periods at the exact same time MaryAnn would be universally accepted for about a minute. But not even, ’cause then there’s still all the guys.

  Bernice O’Leary came to Kristy on her last day of shop, for her regular fluffy hairdo, and she was all bent out of shape because her prize employee Kim Porciatti was unavailable for work and now that schools were letting out it was truly summer inside the mall and there were boxes of overpriced plastic-wrap bikinis waiting to be stocked. And then, said Kristy, Bernice started to tear up. Kristy thought it was the fumes from the perm solution that a student who’d just been smoking pot in the bathroom was liberally
squirting onto the head of an old lady. This student was just dousing the lady and laughing and her eyes were all bloodshot and Kristy was thinking, Jesus, she is wicked high, and then she noticed that Bernice’s eyes were all red too and maybe the perm sauce was getting to her and when she began to ask, Bernice toppled from sniffling into straight-up crying and confessed to Kristy that she didn’t really care about the bikinis, she was just so concerned about poor Kim Porciatti who had actually tried to kill herself.

  She was really upset, Kristy told me.

  Really? It sounds lousy to be skeptical of such a thing, I know, but everyone loves when something like this happens. Anytime someone tries to kill themselves or crashes their car up drunk driving, they’re suddenly everyone’s best friend. And I felt a bit of dread, because everyone was already trying to be Kim Porciatti’s best friend and now that she’d gone and tried to kill herself I knew it would be unbearable. How’d She Do It? I asked.

  I think she cut her arms.

  Which Way? I asked. The Phony Way Or The Real Way?

  Kristy rolled her eyes. Everyone knows about that, she said. I’m sure it was the real way. No one cuts their wrists except cutters.

  Maybe She Was Just A Cutter, I suggested. Maybe Her Parents Caught Her Cutting Herself And Got The Wrong Idea. I sort of liked that theory. I know the whole cutting thing is very trendy right now but still, it gave Kim Porciatti a dark side I hadn’t thought she had. I shared my theory with Kristy.

  Oh, suicide isn’t dark enough for you? she asked. She had an unfriendly look on her face.

  It’s So Showy, I said. A Cry For Help. I had to resist the pressure to feel upset about it. No doubt every high school in the area was about to declare a regional day of grief at the very idea that someone as cute as Kim Porciatti could feel emotional pain. Then I remembered that high school was out now, and such mourning would play out at the mall if anywhere, and I thought it was poor planning on Kim’s part to make such a dramatic statement when no one was really around to take notice.