Weightless

by Sarah Bannan

  Lauren Brink turned to us: “I may actually die from this heat. This might actually be how I, like, go.”

  We laughed and Nicole pulled her t-shirt up to her face, wiping away the sweat. “I am literally sweating buckets. Literally.”

  Lauren rolled her eyes. “Really? Like literally, literally?” Nicole’s lip might have trembled, we couldn’t tell.

  Jessica Grady put her hand on Nicole’s arm. “Brooke in training,” she whispered. And Nicole laughed, even though we thought this might be true and that probably wasn’t something to laugh about. Another Brooke.

  We looked over at Brooke’s mother, smoking another cig­­arette, drinking yet another Diet Coke. “I don’t even think that woman has sweat glands,” Lauren said. “Or tear ducts.” We smiled, and wondered what it would be like to have Mrs Moore as your mother, your actual mother – not your leader in Girl Scouts or your parent rep at a youth group field trip. Your actual mother. We imagined we wouldn’t like it. At all.

  The only thing that Mrs Moore liked about Brooke, from what we could see – and from what she told our mothers at PTA meetings or in the Winn-Dixie – was Shane Duggan. Shane was popular, beautiful, a good student – not smart, but not dumb; his dad, a former quarterback, a star, had molded Shane in his image. And Shane had been into Brooke for years before she agreed to go out with him. That’s what we heard, or that’s what people said. He was going to be a senior, and over summer vacation, Shane and Brooke had been seen at the movies together – at Salt, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia – and they’d been seen at Wendy’s, sitting in the same side of the booth, sharing a Frosty or something like that. And Shane had been seen picking up Brooke from the country club, where she lifeguarded.

  Nobody could say for sure that they were a couple – they never went to parties together – but people were pretty sure they were having sex, and that was why she’d gone on the Pill, and that was why she’d piled up the weight. Brooke and Gemma had taken the virginity pledge at church the previous year, wore rings on their wedding fingers just to prove it, but once Brooke started hanging out with Shane, everybody was sure that was over. When we were freshmen, a thing had gone around on text about Brooke being a prick tease, and some people said that Shane was only into her to get her to give it up. Whatever, we thought. Pledge or no pledge, Shane Duggan was hot.

  We watched as the eight girls performed together, the Varsity Cheerleading Squad: we had watched them, along with twenty others, the last week of our sophomore year and we had voted, voted for the most talented, yes, but also for the prettiest, for the most popular, for the ones that we knew the very best. And now here they were, representing the best of us, who we wished we could be.

  We clapped and we yelled and the band played the “Fight Song” again and the football team took to the field, behind the cheerleaders. We watched Coach Cox come to the center, with his orange hair, orange cap, ears so big we could see light shining through them. What a dork.

  “We have a real exciting year ahead of us, y’all.” The microphone squealed, we covered our ears, the senior guys booed, the parents grimaced. Coach Cox stepped back and waited and leaned forward again, speaking more softly now. “We’ve got here a real talented bunch of boys, boys I believe in, boys that I’ve known since they were in diapers, boys I saw the first day they threw a football . . . the first day they caught one too.” He paused, looked down at his hands – he wrote on his body always, had done this for years, and tonight it looked like he’d written stuff all the way up his forearms, probably reaching up to his shoulders. “I’d like to thank these boys for their dedication this summer. They’ve played through some mighty hot weather and they haven’t complained. But they need your support over the next few months to keep them strong, to keep them focused. I’d ask all y’all to come to all the games – home and away – and cheer on a team I think can go unbeaten. We only lost two games last year – and I know – I KNOW – we can do it. If we trust in ourselves, if we trust in the Lord, if we stay focused, stay strong. Praise the Lord.”

  Coach Cox stepped back. We clapped, the band beat the drums and we watched as Reverend Davies came to the microphone.

  He put up his hand and we got quiet. An ambulance siren could be heard a few streets away, the sound of cars just barely audible. “Let us pray.”

  And then it began. The prayer, the prayer for the year. In Adamsville, we didn’t pray that we’d graduate, that we’d get along, that we’d get good jobs or get into Ivy League schools. We didn’t pray that some of us would manage to get out of here, that some of us might have a life outside of this town. We prayed for our football team, that they’d go undefeated, that we would get to State. That we would win.

  We were meant to keep our heads bowed as we prayed. And we did, mostly, only it was so hot and the prayer was so long, we couldn’t help but look around, and something drew our eyes to the parking lot, just to the left of the field. We could see somebody emerge from a red car – a Honda? – and begin to walk towards the bleachers. As Reverend Davies spoke, we watched this figure, this girl, move closer and closer to us. Even from a distance, we knew we had never seen her before.

  The prayer finished and people clapped again. The sun was beginning to set. The air was five degrees cooler, maybe more. We picked up our towels, and we headed down to the field – we would say hello to Taylor, if she saw us, and then we would hang around to see where people were going.

  We searched the crowd for that girl – it should be easy to notice something new, we thought, when everything in our town was always the same – but we couldn’t see her. We thought she had disappeared. And then, as we got closer to the field, as we filed down the bleachers, we saw her again: tiny, petite, beautiful. She had brown hair, long and shiny and curled just at the ends. She was wearing jeans – how could she stand the heat? – and a white tank top that was so white it nearly blinded you. Perfect.

  It’s important to remember how weird this was – a new girl coming to our town – how unused to it we all were. And not just us: our parents, the teachers, the coaches – them too. Adamsville wasn’t a place that people came to. It was a place you were from, where you were born, where you were raised, where you stayed. And in spite of this, or because of this, everybody tried really hard to make things work with Carolyn, with her mom, and that’s something that nobody seems to remember or realize or know. We wanted to make things work and we wanted to know her. But it’s a two-way street, you know. It wasn’t just up to us. We couldn’t be the only ones responsible, the only ones to blame.

  The girl looked uncertain, unsteady, staring at her feet, and then she took out a phone and started to type, real fast, like we would. And then Reverend Davies yelled, “Lynn!” She looked up and then she was steady. He walked over to her and she walked towards him and he called out again and this time we heard it right: “Carolyn.” He put his arm around her, and led her down the track.

  We stood still and didn’t talk and we watched her walk, her hair swishing back and forth, her hands in her back pockets. Reverend Davies got a bit ahead of her – they were dodging the band – and she stumbled a little, on what we didn’t know. She disappeared behind Michael Morrison and his tuba and then she reappeared, flip-flop in one of her hands, putting it back onto her foot. Even from where we were, we knew that everything about her was perfect, manicured, groomed. The Reverend looked back and gestured to her again – and he pointed her towards the girls’ locker room. He waited outside. She walked towards the door, running into Ken Phillips, the school’s janitor – we called him Janitor Ken – on her way in. His mop, his broom, his pail of soapy water: we watched all of it tip over to one side as this tiny girl disappeared through the large double doors.

  We’d think about this moment later: the first time we saw her, her flip-flop in one hand, her silky smooth hair, her perfectly small body. Later, when they showed the pictures of her on TV, we thought she looked older, and not in a good way. And her eyes: we especially noticed her eyes.
They looked tired. Tired and sad and bored and fed up and tired.

  But all of that was later, after everything had been said and done. That day, the day on the football field, along the track, we saw Carolyn Lessing for the first time, with a flip-flop in one hand, nervous but smiling. We saw her the way she really was: perfect.

  Chapter 2

  After the band had cleared off, after the football players and the cheerleaders had gone into the locker rooms, we were still standing around in the bleachers, trying to decide where to go.

  “There’s a party at Morris’s.”

  “Nah, that was last night.”

  “Where are people going?”

  “It’s so fucking hot.”

  “I wanna go swimming.”

  “I wanna go eat.”

  “Let’s leave.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  And round and round and round it went, the same conversation as always, the same indecision, nobody to tell us what to do. Looking back, we can see that we cared so much, that we were so conscious of how we were standing, who we were next to, how our hair looked in the light, after the humidity, the sweat. The trick was always to look like you didn’t care, didn’t give a shit. To hide yourself away and present somebody else, somebody who was similar to everybody else without looking like a clone, like a wannabe stalker. It was hard.

  We got into our cars. Lauren had driven us, had just gotten her license, couldn’t stop talking about it, and we followed a couple of the guys – Blake Wyatt and Dylan Hall – and we drove to the Hardee’s parking lot. There were a few cars there when we arrived: other juniors, a couple of seniors. None of the football players were there yet, none of the cheerleaders. We hoped we were in the right place.

  The heat from the day was still trapped in the parking lot, in the asphalt, but the air was bearable now, now that the sky was turning black. We stood outside Lauren’s car, and then walked over to Dylan’s, and then walked back to Lauren’s, pretending we had to get something out of the trunk. We used it as a chance to reapply our base. Humidity sucked.

  We went in and ordered – milkshakes and Diet Cokes and cheese fries and crispy curls. We got it to go, so we could sit in the back of Dylan’s truck, watching whoever came in, trying to look busy.

  Coach Cox and some parents with their elementary-school kids passed us by, and we hid our Marlboro Golds and smiled and waved and made small talk about our parents. “Y’all kids be good,” Coach Cox said, and the parents said something like that, and we yelled back, “’Course we will” and waited ’til they got out of sight before we passed around a bottle of Absolut.

  We wondered if the new girl would come, whether Reverend Davies had forced Gemma to bring her along. We asked the guys if they thought she was hot, and they said they thought she should be a model. This made us flinch, just a little, but we also thought it was true. Even though she was too short, we said, she could still be a model. But just for catalogues. For catalogues, height just didn’t matter – or at least that’s what Tyra Banks said.

  Tiffany Port pulled into the parking lot in her mother’s Suburban, and we looked in the windows and saw Taylor in the passenger seat, like a Skipper doll in the Dream Bus.

  “Look who’s gracing us with her presence.” Lauren let out a puff of smoke. She passed the cigarette to Jessica.

  “Do you think they’re, like, lesbians together or something?” Jessica wasn’t looking at the car, just looking at us, half smiling, half scowling.

  “Definitely,” Nicole said and we laughed, only we weren’t really sure if it was that funny.

  Taylor’s face was illuminated by her phone, and she was talking and laughing, and Tiffany rolled her window down as they approached the drive thru, her long blonde hair flying out the window. Even from where we were standing, we knew it was perfectly straight, impossibly smooth, like Tiffany’s hair had always been. Blake reached into the front seat of his car and honked his horn, but they ignored him: they were bitches that way.

  When we were little, we were friends with Taylor. Tiffanny, too. We went to each other’s birthday parties and we made up stories and we organized yard sales and we designed elaborate imaginary games and we jumped on giant trampolines and we stayed outside playing cartoon tag until it was pitch dark and we laughed until our sides hurt, until we were afraid we might actually explode. And then our parents would call to us and call to us, and after we’d ignored them for forever, then they’d haul us indoors, threatening to ground us as we walked in.

  Taylor Lyon liked the Beatles. She liked Monty Python and could do all the accents. She was funny, and she had the best sleepovers of anybody because her mother was divorced and drank red wine at three in the afternoon and didn’t really care what we did. We watched R-rated movies and called 1-900 numbers and we ate Breyers ice cream straight out of the tub. We loved being with Taylor and she loved being with us, or at least this is what we remember.

  Tiffany was quieter, her voice like a whisper, but she had followed us around, and we remembered spending afternoons at her parents’ gas station – they owned three in Adamsville – and, if we were good, Mr Port would let us check somebody out, scan their cereal boxes and cigarettes. Tiffany was allowed to pump gas sometimes, and if her parents weren’t looking, she’d let us do that too. We never went to Tiffany’s house, not that we could remember, but we didn’t care, so long as we could hang out at the gas station, so long as we could all play together, play like grown-ups.

  Things changed in middle school. Not gradually, like we might have thought, or like our mothers said, but all of a sudden, as soon as we walked into Fairview Middle. All of a sudden things mattered: who had shaved their legs, who had pierced their ears, who had gotten a bra, what our thighs looked in a bathing suit, in skinny jeans. It mattered where you’d been on Friday night, and who you’d talked to at the mall, who you ate lunch with, who you’d texted over the weekend, whose numbers were in your phone, what was on your Myspace.

  Taylor got the first period. She got it at the Adamsville Country Club the summer between sixth and seventh grade, when were at the pool. It was in July – just after the Fourth, ’cause the American flags were still dotting the sides of the deep end. We had been playing Marco Polo and when Taylor jumped out – “Fish Out of Water” – we saw a pink stain forming around her crotch, rising up her yellow Speedo, threatening to wrap around her butt. Taylor didn’t notice, not at first.

  “Oh my god, what is THAT?”

  “Keep your eyes closed!”

  “We’re playing Marco Polo! Stop cheating!”

  “Taylor, you got Kool-Aid on your bathing suit.”

  “That is so not Kool-Aid.”

  And Taylor looked down and we all looked as she looked, swimming in closer to the sides of the pool, hoisting ourselves up to inspect her bathing suit, the stain, the blob, whatever it was. Taylor’s face flushed, and her chest went red too, and she turned toward the locker room. She had only started when the lifeguard blew his whistle and yelled, “No running.” And she blushed again and slowed herself down and walked into the locker room and we watched her take every step. We said it took her five minutes to walk five feet. Tiffany followed her, a few moments later. Like Taylor’s shadow, that’s what Tiffany was. We gave up the game after that, and treaded water in the deep end for an hour, waiting on Taylor to come out, until we finally decided to go. We dried ourselves off and took our bikes home. Jessica Grady says she remembers leaving a note for Taylor, but Lauren Brink says we decided not to. Who knows and who cares? It was so long ago. In any case, Taylor stopped coming to the country club after that. She quit swim team too. And it was then that she got really into cheerleading. Her and Tiffany, together.

  Taylor’s hair calmed down that summer, but we didn’t notice that until we saw her on the first day of seventh grade: she had grown it long and it hung straight and her freckles had softened too. And the baby fat that filled her cheeks, that made even her el
bows a little pudgy, that pushed over the sides of her monokini, that had melted away and suddenly Taylor was thin. Suddenly Taylor was pretty. She was wearing make-up and it wasn’t Revlon or Maybelline or some other crap from Walgreens or CVS or Winn-Dixie. It was department store stuff: Nicole Willis had seen her in the mall at the Clinique counter with her mother the week before school started and she assumed they were buying stuff for her mom, but then Taylor got into the chair at the side of the counter, next to the Skin System charts, next to the Clinique Bonus Time display, and the woman in her white medical coat started to wipe down Taylor’s face with cotton balls. Nicole said hey, but Taylor must not have heard her, because she didn’t say anything back. Mrs Lyon smiled, and Nicole pretended as if she hadn’t seen them either.

  Taylor started seventh grade as a new person. Gemma Davies, Brooke Moore – all of a sudden they were interested in her. And then Taylor hardly spoke to us at all. She brought Tiffany with her, or Tiffany followed her, we weren’t sure. Maybe ’cause Tiffany got boobs before us, or maybe ’cause she knew when not to talk, maybe because of all that, Tiffany was cool enough to be part of Taylor’s new life. Or the coolest of all of us, whatever that meant. We watched them now and we wondered if they remembered these things and we guessed they probably didn’t. It was so long ago. And they looked so different.

  We watched Tiffany as she called her order into the loudspeaker – we wondered if they could even hear her inside, with her mouse-quiet voice, her inaudible whisper. We wondered if Tiffany still worked at the gas station – we hadn’t seen her there in years – wondered if she still liked to wash people’s windshields, if she still liked to count the money in the register. Probably not. Plus, only one of the gas stations was open now. Business was hard, our parents said.