Weightless

by Sarah Bannan

  Carolyn was near the front of the line – with Shane – and we could see the back of her hair from where we were standing. She wore it down – nobody else did this – and when she moved her head, her hair swooshed and fell: she was a Moroccanoil commercial. And she was so thin. When she put her arm in the air, you could see her shouldercaps – she was like a puppet, one of the freaky ones from Pinnochio, just sockets and bones and white, white skin. She wore flats – how had we not noticed this before? – and Shane held his hand around her waist. His hand, his arm, his body – they made her look even smaller. They were like Disney characters, out of proportion: him giant and strapping, her tiny and wide-eyed.

  Inside the gym, Miss Simpson stood to the side, in front of the proscenium arch, at a podium, a list of names in front of her. She called Shane’s name and then Carolyn’s. And then they disappeared through the doors. The applause echoed through the gym, into the halls: the loudest so far.

  “She’s pretty.”

  “She’s okay.”

  “Her dress looks old.”

  “That’s vintage.”

  “What a slut.”

  “Total whore.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Be nice.”

  “Total fucking slutty whore.”

  We came out in pairs afterward, into a spotlight, just for a second, as our names were called, and our parents and teachers clapped. Sometimes people yelled. For a second, we thought we were famous, that the whole of the world was there, in our gym, watching us, photographing us, preserving us forever. We were young and hopeful and beautiful and fearless, for just a few seconds, and it made us smile, until we heard the murmuring behind us, and we moved to the side of the gym and took our phones and our mirrors and our lip glosses out of our purses, and we checked to make sure everything was in place. We texted each other as soon as we could:

  You looked GREAT J

  She is such a WHORE

  He’s a douche

  Don’t be so meeeeaannnnnnn!

  I heart your dress . . .

  Um? Your flowers??? What happened

  This is sooooooooooo lame-ass

  I hate her guts

  Andrew Wright and Gemma Davies were the last to go through. Our other golden couple. We watched him more than her: he barely smiled, his khakis were a few centimeters too short, his tie wasn’t tied quite right. He pulled Gemma across the stage – they moved faster than anybody else – and then Lead-Out was over. The dance began.

  Glitter everywhere, confetti on the floor. The girls’ restroom reeked of Jimmy Beam and cranberry juice and Dr Pepper and Estée Lauder White Linen. Taylor and Tiffany had been drinking pre-mixed margaritas since the parade and we thought that explained why they were being so friendly, why their eyes were so watery, almost glassy.

  We danced and the cheerleaders were always ridiculously good. Even when they were joking, they looked professional and they hardly sweated. The DJ played songs we knew and we sang along: “Single Ladies,” “Paper Planes,” “Love Lockdown”, “All Summer Long”, “Sweet Home Alabama.” Slow songs came along every three and we left the floor, sat in the bleachers – our dates only wanted to be friends. We watched the couples rock back and forth, back and forth.

  Shane and Carolyn stood far away from everybody else and they danced slow, even to the fast songs. She looked like she was on a string when she moved – like a floating dancer, held up with invisible pulleys, like Peter Pan in the middle-school play. She had done ballet or something, we guessed, or maybe being that skinny made you more graceful. She didn’t sweat or go red – not like she did in the bathroom – and her skin stayed white, and when the light hit it, she sparkled. She didn’t talk to anybody except for Shane and nobody talked to her – even though, at that stage, we still wanted to. She was beautiful and she was perfect. Our corsages were fake overgrown mums with tacky streamers that fell to the floor, with plastic bears sticking out of them. The bigger, the longer: the better. This was the way it had been for our parents, the way it was for us, would be for our own children. But Carolyn’s corsage was small, a mum the size of her fist, and we knew that she must have told Shane to get it that way, no way would he have done that on his own. People liked her for that, we thought, for telling Shane what to do, for doing something cooler, smaller, different. It was only a corsage.

  Brooke Moore never turned up at the dance. It was the first time a girl on the Homecoming Court hadn’t been there. Like, ever. People said she stayed at home watching The Notebook, over and over, and other people said she was masturbating, watching Channing Tatum in Step Up. Some people said she laid on her bed and read out scripture, and other people said she made a voodoo doll of Carolyn. We weren’t sure, couldn’t know, but we did know that she wasn’t there, and that it didn’t seem like anybody missed her. Not really.

  We went to Waffle House after the dance, at around midnight, to talk about what had happened, to stay together as long as we could, to take advantage of our later curfews. We ordered silver dollar pancakes, and chocolate chip ones, and the guys got bacon and eggs too, and everybody drank coffee so we wouldn’t seem drunk when we got home. We spilled maple syrup on the floor and the waitresses and the farmers stared at us, looking like they wanted to tell us off, tell us to go to hell. The whole school was there by 1 a.m. Carolyn and Shane weren’t there, of course, but everybody else was.

  “I bet she’s blowing him.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “A whore.”

  “He wouldn’t go there.”

  “Oh, yeah, he would.”

  “She was wasted.”

  “You’re a douche.”

  “You’re a whore.”

  “Shut up.”

  “She’s hot.”

  “A dyke.”

  “Be nice.”

  “Poor Brooke.”

  “Brooke’s a bitch.”

  “Shut UP!”

  “No, you.”

  After we’d eaten and paid and sat around for forever, we got up to leave. Our hair had come undone, the guys had taken off their ties, we had asked the limos to go home. We walked along the Stripline, and then through the farmland, and back over to the old part of town, carrying our heels in our hands. Our stockings got stained with red clay, the bottom of the guys’ pants were ruined, and some people stopped in the hay bales and made out for a little while, before running to catch up with the others, stopping at the 7-Eleven to get Slurpees and gum and Krispy Kremes.

  A bunch of black kids sat in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, on top of an old Renault. Three guys and two girls – we didn’t see them at first, not until Blake knocked over a can of Sprite on the hood of the car. One of the black guys leaped to his feet and Blake stood still, laughing. One of the girls slid down the front of the car, and put her arm on the guy’s shoulder. “Leave it.”

  We piled into the store and Blake followed, still laughing. We looked back: it was easier to see them once we were inside – they were getting in their car and leaving. We heard later that it was Alicia Cooper and her boyfriend and his cousins – they were from another county. It was hard to see, we couldn’t tell who was who. If we’d known it was her, we’d said, we would have said hello.

  We left the store and kept walking. We took pictures of each other and deleted most of them – we looked gross – and Blake played Rihanna on his iPod as we ran through the Halls’ farmland, heading toward our subdivisions. The sky was just starting to get light – a lighter orange than the red clay – and the guys put their jackets around us, so we wouldn’t get cold. Some of the guys smoked, and somebody had some weed; we took turns taking a hit. We kept running and stopping and running and stopping and we stood around a lot, waiting to go again. It took three or four hours for us to get home.

  Brooke’s house was on our way – one-story, red-brick, lights out. We stopped for a second outside of it and Jason called out her name, laughing. Blake punched him on the shoulder. We told them to calm down and shut up and we starte
d to leave. And somebody – nobody can remember who – noticed the Moores’ mailbox. We looked back at it and we all saw it: Carolyn’s tiny mum tied to the mailbox’s red flag. Somebody took a picture – and then somebody put it up on Facebook early that morning, with a caption: “RIP Brooke Moore. Carolyn Lessing lives.”

  Adams Hot List

  A blog

  A word about the Homecoming dance: Taylor Lyon rocked in Michael Kors, her best dress ever, as far as this blogger is concerned. Brooke Moore looked ever so polished in her sequined floor length, but was (OBV!) let down by her Candid Camera appearance later that night. Rumor has it some Cullman Community boys (former Black Bears, no less) found her throwing up outside her car by the Winn-Dixie and took turns posing with her naked bod. Check out Twitter now (#SloppyMoore) before all the pics are taken down!

  And what of Carolyn Lessing, our favorite boyfriend stealer from the Jersey Shore? Her black vintage Calvin Klein was, of course, to die for, but her bony arms are a little on the sickly side, no? And this in via my email (don’t forget to send all your juicy stories to adamshighhotlist@gmail.com!): Care Bear Lessing was seen in the bathroom doing lines of coke before dragging Duggy Duggs in there for some anal action. You heard it here first, folks!

  Internal Memo

  Richard Overton to all Faculty

  30 November 2010

  Dear Colleagues

  As you know, the Adams High Varsity football team has had a very successful season, and is currently undefeated. The team will travel to Montgomery next week to compete for the State championship. If Adams were to take State, it would be the first time since 1983 for the team to hold this title.

  With this in mind, we would ask for increased support and encouragement for the team from faculty members. As you know, the season is a short one, and it is important that the team is able to devote itself fully to the challenge ahead. Following conversations with Coach Cox, I would ask that mid-terms involving team members be rescheduled to early January in order to avoid any conflict for the players. Equally, if any disciplinary issues are to arise, I should be the first port of call in dealing with these. I do not anticipate that there should be any such problems, but Coach Cox and I thought it was important to reiterate this policy in the lead-up to State.

  Thanking you in advance for your cooperation

  Richard Overton

  DECEMBER

  Chapter 17

  We knew that Carolyn and Shane had had sex. They’d done it at least once, probably twice. The first time – the time we weren’t sure about – was in the men’s restroom in the west wing of Cullman Community College. The second time, it happened in his car – in the parking lot at the Crown Movie Theater off the Stripline. Blake Wyatt worked the box office and, a week after the Homecoming Dance, he sold them tickets to see Unstoppable. When the movie theater closed, and Blake locked up, he saw Shane’s Explorer parked a couple of spaces away from Blake’s mini-van. Shane had token tags: “IMAJOCK” – somebody once tried to paint over the “J” to make it funnier, and you could still see the spray paint.

  Blake said he could hear the engine, cab light was on, windows open a crack, something like Eminem playing and he thought the jeep was shaking from the bass. He said from far away, all he could see was Shane and he wondered where Carolyn had gone and what the fuck Shane was doing. As he got closer he could see Carolyn’s hair. He said he was going to knock on the window and scare them, only when he got closer, when he got a better look through the fogged-up windows, he could see Shane’s belt on the dashboard, Carolyn’s jeans draped over the steering wheel, her bra hanging from the back of the passenger seat. Skin everywhere, Shane’s tanned all over, Carolyn’s so white it was almost blue. Blake stood still, he told us, and he watched Carolyn’s head go down, below the driver’s seat window. Shane’s left hand followed her head and his right hand held on to the steering wheel and his body rose up and fell and rose and fell and shook, and then he laid his head back, against the window. Blake couldn’t see Shane’s face, he was behind him, and after a minute or two, Carolyn came into view again, and Shane held her body and then pressed his on hers, pushing her against the passenger seat door.

  Blake moved to the side, got himself out of the light, and he took out his iPhone and started to record. The image was grainy and he was too far away, but at twenty-two seconds he was able to zoom in – you could see Shane’s back as he pushed himself against Carolyn, fast and slow and fast again. He had a Confederate flag tattooed across his left shoulder blade and it moved as he pushed forward and pulled away. You could see Carolyn’s mouth, her hair covered her face, and you couldn’t tell if she was smiling or frowning or laughing or what.

  At one minute and twenty-seven seconds, you could hear music and we thought it was Chemical Brothers or some Eurotrash crap like that, not Shane’s kind of music at all. Shane leaned back and then Carolyn was on top of him and her skin was shining and white and, in one part, you could see dark marks on her breasts and her arms. Later, we would pause there – at two minutes twenty-four seconds – and try to enlarge the image, to see what we could see.

  We couldn’t tell if the car was shaking or if it was Blake’s hands – the image jumped and you could hear him breathing as he filmed. At three minutes in – or just before that – you could see Carolyn’s ass. She was tiny, and her shoulder blades looked like they could hurt you, cut you. Shane’s arms were bigger than her waist and he was grabbing her so tight he looked like he could throw her out the window if he had wanted to.

  That night, Blake posted the clip on Facebook. And it went Adamsville-viral in a couple of days, and people did voice-overs for Shane and Carolyn – some of them were funny, some were creepy. Somebody tried to do a mash-up with the video and Titanic – that scene in the car? – and it went up on YouTube, but was taken down the same day. They all were. But we circulated it on Facebook and the comment threads got longer and longer. We wanted to tell her to be careful, that she could talk to us, that she should stay away from Shane, from Brooke. But we didn’t tell her anything. We just watched the clip, again and again, and we tried to figure out what it was we saw. Later, it would be evidence in court and they would show seconds of it on the nightly news.

  The next Monday at school, we did sexuality in health class. When Coach Cox put up the picture of the vagina, two guys yelled out Carolyn’s name.

  That same day, while we worked in the office, Blake and Shane were waiting to see Mr Overton. He called them in, and as he ushered them into the office, he patted Shane on the back and asked him if he was gonna take State. Shane grinned. Shane and Blake came out just minutes later, and then Coach Cox knocked on Mr Overton’s door. As Mr Overton called him in, we heard one of them say: “Boys will be boys.” We weren’t sure which one said this, or what exactly it meant, but Blake and Shane weren’t written up in any case. It was a week ’til we played Montgomery at State.

  We got two days off school in December so we could travel to Montgomery for the game. Everybody went, the school hired buses, block-booked hotel rooms. Everything. We all went – only Carolyn didn’t – and we won, 45–35. There was a parade in town the Saturday after everybody got back. Shane, Andrew, all of them – they were heroes.

  It wasn’t long after State that Shane stopped driving Carolyn to school. He and Brooke started holding hands in the halls. We didn’t know if Shane even told Carolyn he was done with her – we imagined he had. Maybe he was embarrassed about the video, maybe he just missed Brooke. She’d lost the weight she’d put on over the summer and then some. In any case, Shane was meeting Brooke at her locker, bringing her to school. She wore his jersey and his school ring. In English class, Brooke complained that it was cold and put on Shane’s letter jacket. It drowned her.

  The week after State, Carolyn came into school with no mascara, no foundation, no lip gloss, no hoodie. She wore a turtleneck – some Lands’ End thing your mother would force on you for Christmas. Her face was pale and blotchy and we said it was
like “Stars Without Make-up!” from US Weekly. “Stars – they’re just like us!” We laughed, only she still looked pretty – maybe prettier even. And in homeroom, she looked out the window and didn’t blink and her eyes looked like they were deep inside her skull, resting on the back of her head, asleep. She stared out the window, long and hard. But she was staring at nothing. The blinds were down.

  In Trig, we heard a voice over the intercom: “Carolyn Lessing to the front office.” She’d been called to the guidance counselor before, we’d lost track of how many times. She picked up her books and headed out the door. A band kid put his foot out – on purpose or not, we weren’t sure – and she tripped and fell. Her books slid across the classroom and some of the girls laughed, only a little. As she grabbed for her notebooks, her sleeves were pushed up. We could see those marks again, purple and black. She could see us looking and pushed her sleeves down, and she gathered her things and got up to leave.

  As she walked out the door, we could hear Mrs Matthew’s voice: “I hear that you’re having a little boy trouble.”

  Minutes – no seconds – after that, a text went round: “Shane and Carolyn are SO OVER.” Before fifth period, everybody knew.