by Dyan Sheldon
“You see, that’s where you leave the road when it comes to men,” Savanna informed me as we watched her saviour and his baby disappear around a corner. “You’re way too self-sufficient, Gracie. You think men are the same as us, but they aren’t.”
“You mean, because they have penises and facial hair?”
“No, Gray.” Savanna started down the aisle. “Because they come from, like, a totally different planet. They’re really put off by independent women. They want to feel needed and in control.”
She stepped over a small child who was lying on the floor crying. I carefully pushed the cart around him.
“I thought this was the emancipated, non-sexist twenty-first century,” I called after her.
“And that’s another thing.” She looked at me over her shoulder. With concern. “Did you know that lots of women who are lawyers and professors and stuff like that have to pretend to be waitresses and cab drivers to get a boyfriend? Men don’t like women who are too smart.”
“Why not? They’re afraid of getting a crick in their necks looking up to them?”
“Gracie…” sighed Savanna. “I get the equal pay and any fool can put up a shelf thing, but the point is that you have to face facts. Men have very delicate egos. They have to be protected.”
“Who told you a stupid thing like that?”
“It’s not stupid. It’s a genetic fact. Everybody knows it.” Savanna turned right. “Except you.”
“You’re making it up.”
She was always making things up. Like when she was trying to convince me to buy that sundress in the summer and she told me that orange makes you look taller. Or when she wanted me to take a day off from planting butterflies to go to the pool with her and she told me scientists had proved that swimming makes your breasts bigger. I couldn’t decide if it was a gift or a syndrome.
Savanna was shaking her head. “No, Gracie, I am not making it up. And if you read a women’s magazine for a change instead of always having your nose stuck in some depressing book about how the planet’s dying, you’d know that.” She came to a stop in front of the shelves of pasta. “Oh, God, another earth-shaking decision. What do you think? Spaghetti? Fusilli? Shells?”
“It’s a three-for. Get one of each.”
“What would I do without you?” Savanna beamed. “You’re a genius.”
A genius who’d never been kissed. And didn’t look like she would be any time soon. I figured that at the rate I was going the only way I’d ever have a boyfriend was if I started writing to prisoners.
“So,” I said. “You think that’s the reason no one’s ever asked me out? Because I can get the cereal off the shelf by myself and know what a partial differential equation is?”
She tossed the boxes into the cart. “Well, what do you think it is?”
My height, or lack of it. My body, or lack of it. My lack of flowing, tossable hair. The extra head.
“Oh, please, Gracie. I mean, sure, some guys get turned off by the second head, but it really is not your looks. If there’s anybody should be worried about her looks, it’s not you. I mean, like, ohmigod… If looks were money, Marilouise would be begging on the street with a used paper cup.”
“That’s not true, and you know it.” Marilouise was cute, in a low-key kind of way.
“She has as much sex appeal as a potato,” said Savanna.
“OK, but—”
“She’s fat,” filled in Savanna.
That wasn’t what I was going to say.
“No, she isn’t. I think she has a good figure.” Marilouise had obvious breasts.
“OK, she’s not fat, she’s chubby. But she has those little eyes, like bird poo.”
“They’re nothing like bird poo. They’re the most amazing shade of blue.”
“Blue poo.” Savanna laughed.
I laughed, too. “They’re fantastic, and you know it.”
“OK, so they’re pretty amazing,” Savanna conceded. “But you will agree that she’s dull as flour and dresses like my grandmother.”
I was still laughing. “I’ve never met your grandmother.”
“Consider yourself lucky,” said Savanna. “And anyway, you’re sidetracking me. The point is that you’re like that girl in The Matrix… What’s her name? Trixie.”
“Trinity.”
“Right. Trinity. Only shorter.” She looked thoughtful. “The only thing wrong with you is your negative attitude.”
“Which attitude is that? My psychotic work ethic or my pole-in-the-mudness?”
“Your insecurity. You are what you project, Gracie Mooney. All the magazines say so.” She stopped to shake a finger at me. “And you project mega self-doubt. I mean, not about saving the world or anything like that – you’re very strong and clear about reptiles and pollution – I mean about your looks.”
I didn’t think it showed.
“Really?”
“Absolutely. I mean, for one thing, you have to stop, like, hiding your light under a rainforest. It’s great that you know so much about elementary biology—”
“Evolutionary.”
“Right. The point is, Gracie, that you have more to offer a guy than hours of information on global warming and lizards. You could look really great if you made an effort. It’s time to let the world see the real you.”
“But this is the real me.” Jeans, hiking boots, gecko key ring and all. “I’m not a bright-lights-and-high-heels kind of girl, Sav. I don’t want someone to go out with me because of how I dress.”
“I blame The Professor,” said Savanna. “He’s so old-fashioned.”
Further examples of my father’s “tetanus” grasp on the twenty-first century were the facts that he didn’t own a mobile phone, didn’t drive a car, wouldn’t go into (never mind shop in) a supermarket, and that the music he loved was pretty much all written before the 1960s.
“He’s not old-fashioned,” I explained. Again. “He’s just historically, environmentally and culturally aware.”
“Yeah, maybe, but he’s, like, you know … he’s, like, sooo male.”
That wasn’t a criticism I often heard about my dad. I said most fathers I’d met were pretty male. It was kind of a hazard of the occupation.
Savanna laughed. “You know what I mean, Gray. You can pitch a tent but you can’t put on eyeliner. You haven’t had anyone to help you get in touch with your inner girl.”
My inner girl? It was my outer girl who gave me all the trouble.
“That’s not exactly my dad’s fault, is it?” He wasn’t the one who ran away.
Savanna sighed. “You don’t have to get all defensive, Gray. I’m not criticizing The Professor. It’s just that I think it’s time you established your independence from him.”
“But I am independent. You just said I was too independent.”
“As a female person you are,” said Savanna. “But not as a daughter. You haven’t even started separating from him yet.”
I didn’t want to separate from him. I was all he had.
Savanna sighed. Sympathetically. “All I’m saying is that it’s time you learned how to enjoy being a woman.”
“Which part of being a woman?” I asked. “The cramps and bleeding every month, or the ripping the hair off your legs with wax?”
“The part that doesn’t see herself as short, skinny and flat-chested, so that’s what everyone else sees too.”
“But I am short, skinny and flat-chested.”
“Yeah, but those are just tiny details, Gracie. You have to focus on the big picture.”
“Savanna, no matter how big the picture is, I’m still short, skinny and flat-chested.”
“Oh, please… You’re totally missing the point. And the point, Gracie Mooney, is that you have tons of potential. If you just took a little interest in make-up and stuff… I mean, really, if you were just a couple of inches taller you could be a model.”
I said that I didn’t want to be a model. I’d much rather be Charles Darwin.
It was raining when we came out of the store. People were running for their cars with their jackets pulled over their heads.
“Ohmigod. It never ends, does it?” moaned Savanna. She looked down at her feet. It was November, but she was still wearing her ballet slippers from the summer. “There is no way I’m walking home in these. They’ll dissolve.”
I didn’t see that she had much choice. Since she couldn’t fly and she didn’t have a car. “It’s not that far.”
“It is if you’re barefoot and carrying all these bags.”
She had two.
“Why walk when you can ride?” Savanna put down the shopping and pulled her phone from her backpack.
“Who are you calling?” It could have been the
Marines for all I knew. She was capable of anything.
She grinned. “The cavalry. Who else?”
So, almost the Marines.
She nodded her head back and forth impatiently while it rang. “Archie?” She gave the parking lot a big, summer-day smile. Her voice got all warm and mushy. You know, as if she was talking to a small child. “Oh, Archie, I’m sooo glad I got you. What are you doing? Are you, like, really, really busy?”
“Savanna!” I hissed. “Savanna, you can’t—”
She waved me silent. “Well, I reallyreally hate to bother you, but Gracie thought… We, like, have this mega emergency? We’re at Food First, you know, over by me? And we’ve got all these groceries and it’s raining like in the Bible and— You will? Really? Oh, you are an absolute, total angel. Kisskisskisskisskiss. We’ll see you soon.” She snapped her phone shut and slipped it back into her pocket. “He’s on his way.” This time the big smile was for me. “What did I tell you? They love to help.”
She was definitely one of Those Girls.
Chapter Three
Why I Agree to Go to the Mall
I was late for lunch on Friday.
I hated being late for lunch. It wasn’t as bad as being late for a class with everybody turning to stare at you, grinning snidely and snickering under their breath as if you’d done something a lot worse than overslept or missed the bus, but it was close. I couldn’t stand making an entrance.
You might not think the Crow’s Point High School cafeteria had anything in common with sub-Antarctic islands, but as I opened the door to the lunchroom I felt as if I was walking into a colony of king penguins. It was pretty much an endless mass of very similar-looking bodies and a relentless wall of noise. A king penguin can return to her colony after months away and go straight to her mate or her chick as if she has a map. Which, besides the beak and eating raw fish and stuff like that, is another thing I don’t have in common with them. I kind of hovered in the doorway, looking for Savanna. There were a lot of kids walking around and all of them were taller than I was, so it wasn’t easy without X-ray vision. I was trying not to look right at anyone, but I was sure I could feel heads turn in my direction – their eyes on me like binoculars. I knew exactly what they saw. My sneakers had a hole in the left toe. My socks didn’t match. My haircut was uneven. A button had come off my shirt. There was a pimple starting on my chin. And I wasn’t any taller than I’d been the day before, either. I was just about to forget about lunch and slink off to the library to do some homework when I heard Savanna’s let’s-stop-every-cab-in-the-city whistle. It was one of the three sounds guaranteed to be heard above dozens of feeding teenagers.
“Gracie!” she shrieked. That would be the second sound. “Gracie! Over here!” The third sound would be an air-raid siren.
Savanna was at a table down at the front of the room, near the windows. She was waving Archie’s baseball cap – just in case I was the only person in a ten-mile radius who hadn’t heard her.
The year before, when Savanna and I first became friends, we always ate lunch with Marilouise and a couple of other girls she and Savanna knew from Middle School. But now that Savanna was dating Archie, we ate with him and his friends – Pete, Leroy and Cooper. Savanna called them “our boys”, but they were only mine by default. You know, because I was Savanna’s best friend.
Archie, Leroy and Pete were kind of much of a muchness. They weren’t exactly three peas in a pod, maybe, but they had definitely come off the same plant. They were all likeable, pretty popular, regular white guys. They wore baseball caps and bought their clothes at the mall. And they were into all the usual, typical teenage boy things – like sports, cars, Xbox and loud rock. Archie was the one with the looks, Leroy was the football player and Pete was the clown.
That made Cooper the anomaly. He was about as popular as an elephant at a beach party and as regular as a Galapagos marine iguana. Cooper was sarcastic and argumentative, and was always going off on some tangent no one would have followed even if they could. No matter what everybody else thought, Cooper always thought something different. (Archie said that when Cooper died they were going to put just two words on his gravestone: Disagree strongly.) He was a boy of causes. Boycott this… Support that… He called himself an anarchist, which meant that his heroes were all people no one else had ever heard of. Cooper hated sports, he refused to learn to drive, he did his homework on an ancient manual typewriter and he was into old movies and old music. He wore a brown fedora that looked as if it had come from a black-and-white gangster movie (he loved Jimmy Cagney) and bought all his clothes second-hand (so somebody who wasn’t a big corporation got his money). It wasn’t so much that Cooper wasn’t likeable (I thought he was likeable), it was just that not many people liked him. Because he was so weird. And because he acted like there was something really dumb and funny going on, but he was the only one who knew what it was. The only reason Cooper was part of the group was because he and Archie had been buddies since kindergarten. Which would be another pretty major example of opposites attracting.
As I walked towards the table, Savanna went back to whatever she’d been saying when she saw me hovering in the doorway.
To tell you the truth, I’d kind of liked it better when lunch was just us girls. The guys were OK, but they made it different. Except for Cooper (who had this running game with me that if one of us alluded to an old movie the other had to supply the title, the stars or both), the things they were interested in didn’t interest me. And vice versa. Which meant that I didn’t have that much to say any more. This wasn’t a problem that afflicted Savanna. She always had something to say, whether she thought the boys wanted to hear it or not.
Archie was listening to Savanna while he ate, one arm draped across the back of her chair as if he was holding it down. Leroy, Cooper and Pete all had their backs to me. Pete and Leroy had their heads bent over their trays. Cooper was reading a book while he ate the salad he’d brought from home with miniature chopsticks. Savanna was the only one looking at me.
“Ohmigod, Gracie! Where have you been?” Savanna scooped up her bright red jacket and her backpack from the chair beside her and dumped them on the floor.
There was a monosyllabic rumble of greetings from the boys as I sat down.
“How could you leave me all alone with these guys?” demanded Savanna. “It’s like talking to a wall.” She made one of her long-suffering faces. “I had this, like, nuclear fight with my sister this morning and not one of them was the teensiest little bit sympathetic. I don’t think they were even listening.”
Cooper looked up. “I was listening.” He glanced over at me. “I told her she should’ve gone for the grapefruit in the face routine.”
“Public Enemy.” I answered automatically. “James Cagney and Jean Harlow, but it was Mae Clarke’s face he squashed the grapefruit in.”
That caught the attention of Leroy and Pete.
“Where are they?” Pete was looking around. “Are they still here?”
“Grapefruit?” said Leroy. “Cool. I can definitely dig that.”
Savanna pulled on my arm. “So why are you so late, Gray? I was getting
worried.”
I opened my old Snoopy lunchbox. Wearily. “I just had an encounter of the third kind with Señor Pérez.”
Señor Pérez asked me to stay after class. “Please don’t make a break for the border, Señorita Mooney,” he said when the bell rang. “I’d like to have a word with you.” You could tell it wasn’t going to be a good word.
“Poor Gracie!” Savanna gave me a hug. “He didn’t yell at you, did he?” She knew how much I hated being yelled at.
“No. He was just muy disappointed in my translation.” I smiled. Sourly. “You know, as in: D for disappointed. He said it wasn’t up to the high standards he’s come to expect from me.”
“Phew!” Savanna pretended to wipe sweat from her brow. “I am, like, sooo glad I didn’t take Spanish. I mean, Pérez is such a hardass. Madame Bower is never disappointed. She’s just grateful that we hand in anything.”
Pete winked at me over a forkful of spaghetti. “Welcome to the wonderful world of underachievement.”
Leroy grinned. “Trust me, you get used to it.”
“Anyway, Gracie, it’s not that bad, is it?” Archie leaned around Savanna’s hair so he could see me. “You usually get As, so this isn’t really going to wreck your average or anything. You’ll make it up.”
“I hope so.” I took out my sandwich. “I need an A in Spanish if I’m going to get a scholarship for that project I’m applying for in the summer.” It was an ecological project in Costa Rica. I’d be working with sea turtles, which was like a dream come true. I had my heart set on it. What I didn’t have was the money to pay for it.
“Of course you’ll make it up,” said Savanna. “I mean, remember last year when I messed up in English because Genghis Coen got me so confused I, like, read the wrong book? But I made it up. It’s no big deal.”
She was supposed to read the play Our Town, but instead she’d watched the DVD of this old Gene Kelly movie, On the Town. There wasn’t any singing or dancing in Our Town.
I unwrapped my sandwich. “Señor Pérez wasn’t exactly laughing the way Mr Coen did.” Reliable witnesses said that Mr Coen had tears in his eyes, he was laughing so much. The only tears shed in my talk with Señor Pérez were mine.