Ms. Nailer pushed up her yellow Dior glasses. The Other Girls were cross-legged behind their desks, whispering hurtful things about everyone sitting in front of them.
“Annie’s nose is so large, she descended from a rare line of prehistoric bird.”
“Annie the Bird’s ears stick out so bad, from the back, she actually looks more like a bear than a bird.”
“Annie the Bird or Bear hasn’t shaved since the Cambrian Period.”
“Annie the Bird or Bear is so tall, she can fuck all the teachers standing up,” Richard Trenton said, chiming in from across the room.
At Webb High you were either Fuckable or Unfuckable. Anything else you might have been was secondary. There were so many students, nearly two thousand, it was very possible, if not guaranteed, you would know only 50 percent of your graduating class. The only way to survive was to organize everybody into categories, so every five people could be treated as one, four hundred as two. That way, you felt like you knew everybody without actually having to.
Ms. Nailer made us put unpeeled bananas in jars so we could draw pictures of decay in our notebooks for a whole semester. We had to observe the banana turning to mush, and then draw every new maggot that hatched. We had to open the jar every week and describe the scent. Nasty, I wrote on my lab sheet. Even nastier, I wrote a week later.
Annie the Bird or Bear was Richard’s lab partner and she was standing tall and proud, holding their banana jar level with her massive breasts, confident that Richard was not someone who could ever hurt her, even though I figured he was the only person who would. She took pride in her new high school identity the way a superhero uses their defining mutation as a source of power. She made boys bleed in the parking lot. She scared away lunch tables just by sitting down at them, the students scattering like sparrows. She embraced her solitude and used it as a form of freedom. She spread her lunch out on the whole table like she was happy about all the room, made animal sounds down the hallway, bird calls, bear cries, lion roars. Mostly everybody thought this was hilarious; they fell against their lockers, crippled by laughter that spread like a disease as Annie the Bird or Bear walked by, neighing like a dying, vengeful creature.
I could hardly watch. But, of course, I did.
It was September of freshman year, when the earth began to tilt away from the sun, the flowers still upright, the shrubs on their last breath, the bees slowing in flight, making dizzy, drunken loops in the air like parade planes. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING, Ms. Nailer wrote on the board in all caps and drew an arrow pointing to the outside. Her observations, while not mind-blowing, were at least correct. Caterpillars were lined up on my driveway like remains of a drive-by shooting, and when I added their souls to our dinnertime prayer, my mother said, “Emily, enough about the caterpillars.” My mother and father started to maximize the efficiency of our dinnertime appeals to God as though prayer was a science of exclusion. We no longer prayed for a successful town apple festival like we normally did at the start of fall; or for Ms. O’Malley, my thirty-year-old algebra teacher who needed a new heart pump, because she got one; or for my father’s gums to quit receding, because it stopped being funny.
My father was still living with us until he moved to Prague after New Year’s Eve, but if you weren’t listening hard, you wouldn’t even notice. Every night, my father kicked his shoes off and they hit hard against the wall, the bed squeaked as he slid under the sheets across the hall from my mother, and if I was tired enough, I mistook the creaks of his bed for the cracks of his bones. I had nightmares of his skeleton breaking at the joints, and I woke to his spoon clacking against his six A.M. cereal bowl. From my bed, I could hear him put the coffee grinds in the trash can, the bowl in the sink like any good father, and for a moment that was what he sounded like—any good father who cleared his throat and walked out the door to go to work.
But he couldn’t just leave like that, like any good father. One morning before school I jumped out of bed to say, “I saw you, Dad,” to stand wounded and victimized in front of the door until we both remembered everything: my father and Mrs. Resnick with their mouths pressed together; my father and my mother both teary-eyed and pink-faced on the porch in August, blowing their noses and then laughing deep sorrowful laughs, and me listening from my bedroom wanting to shout, It’s not funny!; my father and mother ten years ago at the kitchen counter, my mother spreading stone-ground mustard on wheat bread, my father singing with the bread knife to his lips, me in baggy green jeans shouting, “Make me a turkey sandwich, please!” and my father tapping me on the head, saying, “Poof! You’re a turkey sandwich!”
I ran down the stairs, but by the time I walked into the kitchen, my father was out the door. I looked at the clean table and the orange bowl in the sink and my throat went dry. He was gone. Not even a crumb left on the floor. And when my father was gone, sometimes he didn’t come back for days. Sometimes he went on business trips to California. Sometimes he went to Europe. Sometimes he just went places and I didn’t know where, and I wouldn’t even know he was away on a trip until I woke up at eight in the morning fully rested.
My father’s blazer was hanging on the back of one of the chairs. I grabbed the jacket and ran out the front door as fast as I could. “Dad!” I shouted, but his black car was already at the end of the street. I ran after the car, waved my hands, screaming his name, but he didn’t hear me, and I wondered afterward if I even shouted it at all.
My mother stood in the frame of the wide-open door with a glass of orange juice waiting for me to return.
“What?” I said, mortified.
“Emily,” my mother said, frowning. “Why don’t you stop worrying about your father, okay?”
I threw the jacket back on the kitchen chair, but it slid and fell to the tile. I had no idea what she meant, but she put her hand on my head and said, “Good girl.”
“If Annie the Bird or Bear was an amoeba,” Richard said to a bunch of the Other Girls, “I bet she wouldn’t even reproduce with herself asexually, she’s that ugly.”
“Richard!” Ms. Nailer yelled, finally hearing us, or finally recognizing us, turning away from the chalkboard to look at Richard, and then Annie, and then Richard again. Her white bra was visible through her shirt. She spilled her coffee on the desk, stepped backward, got chalk on her ass, and then laughed like it was an accomplishment that something finally touched her ass. She wasn’t a disciplinarian by nature. Ms. Nailer’s presence in the room offered no more protection than a fruit fly; she just buzzed from one shoulder to the next. Her interests were elsewhere, and she always reminded us that she was only a high school biology teacher as a last resort. She had been in the seventh year of her Ph.D. in body history when her funding ran out.
“This is high school, kids,” Ms. Nailer said, wiping the coffee off her desk with her hand.
I stood hopeful with my banana, waiting for Ms. Nailer to slap us across the faces if that was what it took to put an end to all this misery, to save us from the horrors of each other, from Richard. Richard was constantly taunting Annie the Bird or Bear, created a comic strip of her nose doing absurd things every day, like “ABOB’s Nose Goes to the Grocery Store” or “ABOB’s Nose Goes to the Doctor,” and passed them around the room. Everybody unfolded the paper, smiled, said nothing when he did this.
Ms. Nailer put her hands on her hips and smiled too, as though our cruelty was playful, a game we used to get closer to her.
“You can’t go around making statements like that until you properly understand what you are saying,” Ms. Nailer said. She was a skinny but doughy woman, like someone had ripped the muscles out of her body. “Richard, your comment implies that beauty is some objective thing, when really beauty is an evolving process of natural selection.”
The class was silent.
“What does ‘ugly’ even mean? Can anyone define ugliness? Or beauty, for that matter?” she asked.
Ernest Bingley tried his hardest. “Beauty is the unconscious pleasure of lookin
g at something artistic,” he said.
“Let me teach you all a lesson,” she said. “And this is going to be the most important lesson of your lives.”
We groaned. It was too early in the morning to understand such things.
“Just like everything in science,” she said, writing SCIENCE on the board, “beauty has evolved over time. Beauty is real, but it is also crucial to keep in mind that it is equally an ideal established by the culture in which you exist. Beauty in the eighteen hundreds was much different than what we think beauty is now.”
The Other Girls were fascinated, the first time all year they had visibly reacted to something Ms. Nailer had said. One of them raised her hand and wanted to know what was considered beautiful back in the day. One of them couldn’t imagine a world where Brittany Stone wasn’t the most beautiful girl in school. Brittany Stone said she couldn’t imagine a world where Ms. Nailer was the authority on all matters of beauty. Neither could I really. Every day, I tried to be surprising in my footwear, and Ms. Nailer did not, standing in front of the classroom, fully formed in her ugly suede flats and her two-piece suits that she probably got from Talbots, where we sat on benches outside the fitting rooms in snug tubular dresses that made me feel like a hollow tube of toothpaste, picking our scabs, watching Janice’s mother try on mustard suits that were too broad in the shoulders.
“Back in the day,” Ms. Nailer said, “scientists used a mathematical formula to decide who was beautiful and who was not. There was such a thing called the Facial Angle.”
“Huh?” asked Ambrose, the albino boy who sat in front and answered most of Ms. Nailer’s questions with, “According to Satan.”
“Richard,” Ms. Nailer said. “Please come up here.”
Richard looked around, nervous. He rose from his seat. Ms. Nailer got out two rulers from her desk and Richard halted in front of the class rabbit.
“I’m not going to hit you,” Ms. Nailer said. “Come closer.”
Richard walked toward her. She put two rulers to Richard’s face and measured him vertically and horizontally, the two rulers intersecting at his ear.
“The angle that the two rulers create determines if a person is more human or more primate,” Ms. Nailer said. “This is obviously an imprecise measurement, but I’m getting one hundred degrees!”
“Richard’s a primate?”
“Actually, no,” Ms. Nailer said. “Far from it. One hundred degrees was approximately the angle you will find in the faces of classical Greek art.”
Richard smiled as though he had known it all along. People booed.
“Scientists theorize that people are attracted to other people with similar facial angles. Meaning, Richard is most likely attracted to women who best represent the ideal of classical Greek beauty.”
“That’s racist,” someone said. “Richard’s a racist.”
“It’s not racist,” Ms. Nailer said. “It’s evolution.”
“My dad said evolution is racist.”
“People picked partners based off similar facial angles for thousands of years, but subconsciously. It wasn’t until recently that people started to understand attraction through the lens of science.”
“Measure my face!” Brittany Stone shouted out.
“And my face!” Martha Collins said.
I knew Martha from elementary school, but we stopped being friends in the sixth grade when she asked me if I wanted to play this game called Cats in the House, which required taking off all our clothes, including our socks. When I protested, she said, “You don’t see cats walking around the house with clothes on, do you?”
“I just don’t see why we have to be naked,” I said. I left her house and the shame of it all kept us from speaking for three years, until we ended up in biology together. She was the only person I knew sort of well, and it seemed that when you were a freshman walking into a classroom, you saw only a string of people you couldn’t sit next to for some reason or another: girls who didn’t know you, girls who thought your angular features were obnoxious, or Richard, who spent his whole life battling me for Mark’s full attention and publicly exposed my armpit hair in the fifth grade. He had pointed at my armpit in the lunch line and said, “Ew, look, she’s got armpit hair.” “That’s just dog fur, you idiot,” I had said. Richard laughed at me and shouted, “Emily is growing dog hair.”
“Why don’t you pair up and measure your lab partner’s face?” Ms. Nailer said. “More efficient that way.”
We took out rulers and began to measure. Martha put the ruler to my cheek. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “but your face is three inches on the left side, and two and a half on the other side.”
“What?” I asked, getting hot. “You’re doing it wrong.”
“No,” she said. “I double checked.”
“Holy shit! ABOB’s nose is almost four inches!” Richard announced from the other table. “That’s almost a finger! That’s almost a Twinkie! That’s twice the size of Ernest Bingley’s di—”
“Noses!” Ms. Nailer shouted, and wrote NOSES on the board. I wrote NOSES in my notebook. “If you could believe it, they have their place in history. The black nose, the Jewish nose, the Irish nose, the Italian nose, the syphilitic nose. So many different noses. Right now, the Irish nose is in style, but in the early 1900s? The Irish nose, the tiny stub, meant you were an immigrant, poor, most likely diseased, unable to work. Many Irish people underwent aesthetic surgery to look more ‘American.’”
“I don’t think this is right,” someone said.
“To be honest, I think this is a little bit racist.”
“Shut up,” Richard said to the class. “Just because you aren’t classically beautiful doesn’t mean you have to cry about it.”
“Hey, hey,” Ms. Nailer said. But it was too late. A girl threw an eraser at Richard’s head. Ernest Bingley’s Coke exploded when he opened it. One of the Other Girls tried to free the rabbit but he just sat there in his opened cage. Ms. Nailer saw two girls whispering from desk to desk. She put her hair behind her ears and made nervous jokes about syphilis. One of the Other Girls leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t the point of syphilis that it’s not funny?”
I agreed too quickly.
This was the girl who had smooth firm calves that made the rest of us feel Unfuckable. This was the girl who said she wanted to stay Unfuckable for as long as one could remain Unfuckable. She said it was more Fuckable to look Unfuckable, “like one of those paradoxes.”
“Well, you can probably stay as Unfuckable as you want for as long as you want,” said the girl who ate meals only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and major commercial holidays and never muttered a complimentary, “Just kidding,” after she was cruel the way I did.
Ms. Nailer gave us the vocabulary to turn cruelty into a legitimate science, something we didn’t have to apologize for, a formula we passed along to the school as proof that we had been on to something. Certain people truly were more Fuckable than others! People walked down the hallways and said, “Of course they’re going out, their facial lines are structured the same way.” “Of course they boned, they both have European noses.” “Of course they want to get married, they want to have a symmetrical baby.”
In biology, I watched Richard measure Annie’s nose with a ruler, and Brittany leaned over to me and said, “ABOB’s nose is so long, nobody will ever be able to kiss her.” Boys pulled her long red hair, drew her body on pieces of paper in the backs of classes, and discussed what it would be like to have sex with her in exaggerated, excited ways, but girls were the ones who wouldn’t even look at her as she passed, as we spread secrets about her, like ABOB got her period when she was five, ABOB once had sex with an alligator. She was more similar to a monument than a person, and our insults splattered on her face like pigeon shit. It was impossible, then, to understand how really alive she was.
4
Our new principal Dr. Killigan sat the school down in the auditorium and told us what it meant
to be participants in a Hug-Free School.
“Hugs are supposed to be handshakes from the heart,” he said too closely into the microphone. “But most of the time, these hugs I see taking place in the hallway are not that innocent.”
Dr. Killigan said all the hugs did was cause traffic jams in the hallways when other students needed to get to class. All a hug did was allow boys to press against pairs of breasts. He said, Girls, boys are just using hugs as devices to get to you. He said that if we really gave it some thought, it wasn’t all that logical to press our genitals together as a form of greeting. Asians bow, he said, and why would the Asians do something so random like that, like bow?
“There’s a reason for everything,” Dr. Killigan said.
The auditorium booed, someone shouted out, “Drugs not hugs!” and everybody laughed. I started to get worried. High school was not going very well. Why did Janice immediately gravitate toward the Other Girls? Girls who caked their eyes in grease. Girls who looked good even when they looked like they stuck their face under the hood of a car. Girls who sat on boys in the parking lot like they were nothing more important than a piece of leather, and I’d watch Janice steal Richard’s Yankees hat every single day. She’d hold it behind her back and he’d reach around her body for it. He’d accidentally hit her breast and they’d smile. They would hug. Everyone would hug. Hugging became a new form of rebellion. “Press against me!” people would laugh in the hallways. “Press your genitals to mine!” People would make plans to meet in the stairwells. “Hello, genitals!” they would shout as they greeted each other.
The Adults Page 4