Weightless

by Sarah Bannan

  Nothing happened for a few days. We thought that things were over, that the drama was finished. Carolyn had had a chance on the Homecoming Court, a chance with Shane – that was all over now. We thought everybody had moved on. We saw her eating lunch alone. And then couldn’t find her in the cafeteria at all. We heard she was eating her lunch in the bathroom and that’s why we were there that day in December, the week before Christmas break. We wanted to bring her back into the cafeteria, back into the school. We thought she might like us. And we wanted to be near her. It doesn’t matter what people said at the time – people wanted to know her.

  When we got into the bathroom, there was no one there. We heard a voice outside, near the door. It was a girl’s, the tone coarse. And we could just barely hear another girl, with a voice that was thinner. Carolyn’s, for sure. Every word she said sounded like a foreign language and you had to hold your breath to hear her.

  The door opened and the louder voice was almost shouting now. We hurried into the stalls. We didn’t know what else to do.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  We held our breath.

  “Running around with other people’s boyfriends?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  The water was turned on.

  “You’re a whore and a slut and the only reason guys even talk to you is ’cause you’re a ho.”

  The water piling up faster, the drain blocked?

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “I don’t have to know you. I’m just saying what everybody already says about you behind your back.”

  Water was hitting the floor. Splashing out, the faucet running hard.

  “I know all the stuff you say about me. I’ve read it all already.”

  “Well, now I’m saying it to your face.”

  Faucet turned off.

  “You’re a bitch.”

  A slap. A ring hit the wall. The hand dryer whirring.

  The bell rang. A flood of air. The sounds of the hallway filled the room.

  We came out of the stalls and we talked about what we had heard. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, but we were happy and relieved and excited it wasn’t us. Later, we talked about how we could have said something – could have told a teacher or our parents, or flushed the toilet or coughed or cleared our throats. But we didn’t do anything. And we didn’t say anything. It wasn’t our business. Not really.

  Alyssa Jennings’s mother was a nurse in the Adamsville Public Hospital and admitted Carolyn that night. Mrs Jennings told Alyssa, said she was to tell no one. But she did tell a few people and, eventually, we all knew. Alyssa would tell us later that she felt guilty about that, that she shouldn’t have said anything, but how could she know? The following year, Alyssa was nicknamed “Perez”: she was a gossip, people said, she had a big mouth, didn’t know when to shut up. She transferred halfway through first semester our senior year.

  Something about pills. Carolyn had taken a “shitload,” according to Blake Wyatt. She vomited in the waiting room, we heard, and had soiled herself in the ambulance. People will do anything to get attention, they said. We heard she ordered them off the internet, and took them with Ecstasy that she’d gotten in New York. The papers said later that she was on a prescription for depression. But that wasn’t what people talked about, nobody seemed to believe that was true. Months afterward, we remembered what Lauren had seen in her bathroom. We wished we had said something, had told an adult. But we didn’t, and people kept talking.

  Shane came into school the day after and nobody asked him about it. He wore his football jersey, orange and black, and his eyes were bright and clear. He gave a presentation in Chemistry – we each had an element, he had strontium. He was five minutes in before he asked to be excused. Mrs White let him, and you could hear him gagging in the halls. When the bell rang, the janitor was cleaning up vomit off the floor.

  We realized later he had cared. We realized later he thought he’d done it. That he’d fucked it up. That it was his fault. It was weird, though. When Carolyn came back to school after Christmas, after the hospital, he ignored her. We watched him pass her in the halls and he wouldn’t lift his head. He stared at the floor or, sometimes, he just turned and walked the other way. We wondered what would have happened if he had just kept doing that – just looking the other way.

  Chapter 18

  Christmas time in Adamsville meant lights. It meant lights on the fast-food restaurants, around the pig outside Dairy Queen, on the edges of the Winn-Dixie, wrapped on the flagpoles in front of school, lining the telephone poles in and out of town. Farmers put lights on the hay bales, they put tinsel on their electric fences, they put wreaths around their scarecrows. And the houses had lights, too: the cheaper the subdivision, the brighter and bigger the lights. Coming down Azalea Avenue, you could be blinded by the flashing white and blue and red and green. Going into a trailer park was a safety hazard.

  And with the lights came objects and figurines, and with that, every subdivision had a theme: candy canes or reindeer or Christmas trees or snowmen or Santa Claus and his sleigh or wrapped-up presents with bows. Manger scenes at every corner – outside the churches, the schools, the Walmart, the Taco Bell. Jesus and Mary and Joseph in plastic and in straw and in papier mâché, in the mall, in the cafeteria, in the middle of the Halls’ farm. And the slogans outside the churches:

  “Jesus is Lord – He is the Reason for the Season.”

  “Don’t forget the Christ in Christmas.”

  “The tomb is empty. No bones about it.”

  “Don’t lose faith. Moses, too, was once a basket case.”

  We dreamed of snow. We saw white blankets covering the fields along the Stripline, white pillows over Stripline Baptist and country club, thick and clean powder dusting the bike paths and parking lots. In our dreams, the town was quiet, small gold lights glittering from the flagpoles and telephone lines. We saw the white ground glowing in the moonlight, cars parked, not moving, the town silent, waiting. No red clay, no signs for the pep rally, no Burger King wrappers on the side of the road. Just white, as far as we could see.

  When it did snow, the little it did, the white powder turned orange from the ground, the snow on the roads went dark gray and black from the cars. It was sludge, messy and disgusting, and it was cleared away over days, sometimes weeks. It was never as white as our dreams. We remembered some of the pictures in Carolyn’s house: Central Park in the snow, the tree at Rockefeller Center, a photograph of her in ski boots outside a red-brick building – her school, we guessed – topped with a layer of white. None of us had ever been to New York or New Jersey or wherever, and some of us had never been out of the state let alone to the north. Sometimes, we thought, it was better not to know any better. We laughed about this, only sometimes it wasn’t that funny, sometimes it wasn’t funny at all.

  That Christmas, we were greedy to know everything about Carolyn’s life, about her places, her people, her food. At the time, it seemed a little sad that she had had to leave her old life behind. Looking back, it hurts to think about it.

  In the weeks before Christmas, when we weren’t studying for mid-terms, or writing our Christmas lists, our conversations revolved around Carolyn: what had happened with Brooke and Gemma, with the clip, with Shane, with the pills, the hospital. We loved her and hated her and followed her, in person and online. We texted each other about her hair – if it had any frizz, if it had a nice wave – and we texted each other about her hands – if they were red and calloused, if they were white and smooth. She changed from day to day and we watched her, but at a distance, where we were safe.

  At school, things went back to normal, kind of. People were still talking about Carolyn, for sure, but there were other things going on, too: the choir did a Christmas show, the Drama Society put on A Christmas Carol, the Audio Visual Club did a screening of Miracle on 34th Street, the marching band did an assembly where they played non-denominational Christmas songs:
anything Christian, really. The cheerleaders had red and green Christmas-themed uniforms that made them look like sexy reindeer and the teachers wore Santa hats and Christmas sweaters. We gave each other gifts or, if we didn’t know somebody that well, we at least gave them a candy cane. Or a red or green York Peppermint Pattie.

  The last Friday before Christmas break, after our mid-terms were over and the class parties were done, we cruised around downtown and looked at the lights. And then we went to the mall and stood around the food court, pretending to buy our Christmas gifts, but, really, trying to see what everybody was doing.

  Muzak blared out into every level. The mall was freezing: they had the air on full blast always, even when it was cold outside. We wore our Puffa coats indoors, no point in taking them off.

  “It’s to make us buy sweaters.”

  “It helps you burn calories.”

  “You’re always cold.”

  “’Cause you’re too skinny.” ’

  “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  “I’m fat.”

  “Oh, please.”

  The mall was all lit up – Christmas trees in every wing, red and green and blue and white lights lining the escalators, the elevators. At the center of it all, on the ground floor, underneath the food court, we could see Santa’s workshop. It looked the same as the Easter Bunny’s rabbit hole, we said, and the Santa was wearing a beard that was too long and too white. We stared at him and the workshop and then we saw Blake Wyatt and Dylan Hall and Jason Nelson on his break from Abercrombie. They looked over at the Santa, looked at each other, and one of them – we couldn’t tell who – yelled out: “PERV.” We were pretty sure that the guy playing Santa was Gemma Davies’s first or second cousin and we were afraid to laugh, just in case.

  We sat outside Sbarro’s and ordered cheese pizza and we took off the cheese and blotted it with our napkins. We would eat frozen yogurt later, topped with Oreos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and M&M’s. We tore our pizza into pieces and ate one mouthful at a time, careful not to look hungry. Somebody got a text: Carolyn L in the mall with HER MOTHER.

  And then we saw her – with some girl, drinking lemonades in front of the Chick-fil-A. They were talking – the other girl was laughing – both so small. They moved a little bit closer to us and we could see that Carolyn’s eyes were black with eyeliner and the girl she was with: it was her mother, Abby. It was the first time we had seen Carolyn since the thing in the hospital. We didn’t know if we should talk to her or what. Wouldn’t want to make her feel awkward.

  “She looks good.”

  “The same, really.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Don’t stare.”

  “I’m not.”

  She must not have seen us, because she didn’t wave or come over. She was carrying a bag from Abercrombie, and a small one from Parisian’s. “Retail therapy,” Lauren said. We watched them walk around the food court, Carolyn’s shoulders slumped, hair covering her face. They walked around and then they stood still and then they walked away, toward the elevator. They didn’t end up eating any food, at least not that we could see, and we wondered if Carolyn was still in recovery and whether or not she felt better or if she would be coming back to swim team. She looked skinnier than before and maybe we were jealous that she could keep on losing weight, and we wondered what it would be like to be so sick or so sad or mad or whatever it was she was, to be sick enough not to want to eat. It would be nice to be free of that, we thought.

  As they walked away we admired the way her boyfriend cardigan fell off her shoulders, the way her distressed jeans hung from her hips – she was a human coat hanger, and we imagined fifty Carolyns hanging in our closets, draping every piece of fabric perfectly.

  We saw Brooke Moore and Gemma Davies walk into Abercrombie later, and we followed them, wanting to know what they were doing, what they were buying, who they were meeting. Lauren had seen Andrew Wright and Gemma Davies in Olive Garden the night before, the two of them sitting across from each other, tapping their phones and picking at a plate of fried cheese. She said that they didn’t even look at each other, not for the whole meal, that they acted like they didn’t know each other or care about each other, like they “were some kind of old couple about to get a divorce or something.” Lauren said she guessed they were breaking up and we wondered if that were true, and we kind of wished it would be, for a reason we didn’t quite know.

  In the store, we tried on distressed skinny jeans and long-sleeve waffle tees in grey and blue. Nicole’s jeans were too tight and she refused to go up to a size four. We told her that clothes here just ran small. We started to try on tops when we heard voices. Brooke’s and Gemma’s, we were sure. They’d gone into the room next to us, talking and swapping clothes.

  “I need an extra, extra small. This is too big.”

  “Yeah, it’s huge on you.”

  “Will it shrink in the wash?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  We held our breath.

  “I hate my abs.”

  “I hate my shoulders.”

  “I ate too many curly fries.”

  “I drank too much over the weekend.”

  A phone beeped. One of theirs. Not ours.

  A groan.

  “I hate that Yankee slut.”

  “I hate her weird accent.”

  “She thinks she’s so fucking hot.”

  “You think?”

  “What are you saying? Don’t you?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just weird what happened with the hospital. The pills.”

  “She’s a drama queen. My mother has a friend who has a friend who works in admissions in the hospital and she said it wasn’t even a big deal.”

  “I just wonder what she takes the pills for.”

  “For being a slut?”

  They laughed.

  “You’re so mean.”

  “Well, she’s a whore.” And they laughed again.

  “Shut up.” And then, in a whisper: “She could be in here.”

  We waited until they left and then we went to the counter and paid for our tops. As the cash register jangled, the store’s alarm went off, and we looked in the mirror at the counter, and we could see Brooke and Gemma walking fast out of the store, heading toward the food court. The woman ringing us up rolled her eyes and ran to the front of the store. She ran past Jason Nelson, who was folding sweaters by the entrance. He didn’t look up and we watched her stick her head out the front, turning from side to side. She flipped a switch and the noise stopped. She looked at Jason. She rolled her eyes again. And she came back to the counter to ring us up.

  When we went back to school after break, Brooke and Gemma were wearing their pale blue cashmere sweaters, form-fitting, with long, long sleeves that stretched to the end of their fingertips – $122 each. We remembered ’cause we had thought about buying them ourselves.

  JANUARY

  Chapter 19

  Nobody was that surprised when Andrew and Carolyn started hooking up. Or at least that’s what everybody said. That thing at the Homecoming Parade had been weird – all the pictures in his phone? – and even though people didn’t say this was why they thought the hook-up was logical, we all knew that’s what people meant. Andrew would go for anything that moved, he wasn’t picky like Shane. Plus, we’d all seen him following Shane and Carolyn around at parties, at the Homecoming Dance, or wherever, so people said either Andrew had a thing for Carolyn, or he really was a faggot for Shane.

  We weren’t totally sure when it started for real – like girlfriend/boyfriend stuff – but we’d seen them together after swimming: standing outside the art room, where Carolyn had started going after practice, staying until the janitors kicked her out. Dylan Hall worked for the AV club and he was next door. He told people that Carolyn and Andrew were making out in the supply closet every Tuesday and Thursday – he had seen Andrew go in too many times for it to
be anything else. Plus, he’d gotten Janitor Ken to confirm things. We weren’t sure that this meant much, but Dylan said it did.

  Taylor told Tiffany and Tiffany told Gemma during PE the first week back from Christmas break. We were doing the President’s Physical Fitness Test and while we stood around waiting to do our chin-ups – the part we dreaded the most – we overheard them.

  “I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Well, that’s what people are saying, is all.”

  “I can’t believe her.”

  “I know. She’s a ho.”

  “I swear, if she comes fucking close to me, I’ll fucking kill her.”

  “Somebody should tell her to fucking back off from other people’s boyfriends.”

  “Shouldn’t she still be in the hospital?”

  “She should be told to go the fuck home.”

  “I can’t fucking believe her. I thought she was nice.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Total slut.”

  Mrs Coker stood by the high bars with a clipboard and she was taking notes and keeping time – if you couldn’t do a chin-up you just had to hang there as long as you could – but she looked up from her stopwatch and stared straight at Gemma and Tiffany. We could only see the side of Gemma’s face: her cheek was a deep pink.

  “I’m going to have to write you girls up for language if you don’t quit.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Later that night, on Facebook, Gemma changed her relationship status to single. She posted on her wall: “CL is a skinny Yankee slut.” 16 people liked that, including Shane Duggan and Brooke Moore. And Taylor Lyon. Nobody posted a comment.

  People said it was a little shady that Carolyn had been with Andrew when he was probably still with Gemma, and the fact that she’d been with Shane right before – that was really shady. If she’d just been with one of them, we said, it might not have been so bad, people might have still thought she was okay. But two of them, right in a row, that seemed different, changed everything. It was harder to see her side.