I put my hand to my cheek. Janice was quiet behind me in the doorway. Wet and in the bathtub, my mother looked holy, like somebody else’s mother, like a biblical figure. There was a sudden rush of heat to my head and my mother brushed the wet bangs off her forehead, and for one quick moment, she was my mother again, and I felt calm. Her nudity was familiar. I remembered when I was no more than three and forced to shower with her, I would be at her knees looking up, asking how her breasts were any different from clouds. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve yet said to me,” she had said.
16
Would you be able to drive me home?” I asked Mr. Basketball after school the next day. “Richard has been calling me Emily the Cunt on the bus.”
“Oh,” he said, his feet still up on his desk, seemingly not affected by my mother’s Planet Red lipstick on my mouth. “Of course, of course.”
He picked up his briefcase, and we walked silently to the car. When we got inside, I couldn’t help but search for signs of Janice on the seats. Long brown hairs, or strawberry ChapSticks, a striped sock, a portable comb, a bobby pin, a piece of chewed gum, a corner of her notebook paper, anything. But all I saw was . . .
“What?” Mr. Basketball asked.
A hamburger wrapper. A sweaty wristband.
“Your car is a mess,” I said.
“Two sides to every stone,” he said.
“I’m not saying it’s surprising,” I said, and he laughed, started the engine. The engine was too loud.
“Your poems are getting better,” he said, driving out of the parking lot. “They’ve taken on a sort of dream logic that’s really interesting.”
“I have a wildly active prefrontal cortex,” I said.
I had been waking up screaming. In the nightmare, I was never sure where we were driving, but it was somehow important to get there. Mr. Resnick was sitting next to me in the backseat of the car, dead. But his hair was alive, growing in fact, and I remember knowing for certain that all the hair was going to strangle me by the time I woke up. I kept forgetting he was dead, asking him, “How’s work going?” My parents were in the car too, talking about an electrician with a pedophilia charge. This made everybody laugh for some reason. Except for Mr. Resnick. He was swaying back and forth, and so I asked my father, “Why isn’t he speaking? Don’t you think he should be speaking?”
“Everybody is different,” my father said, and the dream ended.
I told my mother this and she was concerned. She ordered tests. Thousands of my father’s dollars later: “Her prefrontal cortex is wildly active during sleep. It’s like she’s drunk. No inhibitions, too much emotion.”
“Me too,” Mr. Basketball said. Mr. Basketball turned down my street. I did not tell him to turn. He remembered where I lived. “My parents made me go through a lot of sleep tests as a kid. That’s what happens when you grow up in Greenwich.”
He said he had CAT scans after falling on grass, allergy shots because he sneezed at his grandmother’s house once. Later, Mr. Basketball would tell me that his parents paid ninety thousand dollars to store his umbilical cord in a hospital somewhere. It would protect him in case he ever got MS.
“I have dreams that make me feel like I’m awake,” I said. “Or drunk. And awake.”
“Horrible dreams,” he said. “Cinematic all-night conquests that make no sense.”
“Like last night, I was standing under the St. Louis arch. It was on fire, impossibly, and I was responsible for putting it out. But I couldn’t because someone was holding my hand and I couldn’t let go.”
“You know what this means, right?” Mr. Basketball was looking straight ahead, serious about the road. “We’re too smart. Smart people can’t turn their brains off.”
“If we were so smart, shouldn’t we find a way?”
“Why would we want to?” he asked. “We’re smart enough to know that, in the end, that’s not really what we want. Self-awareness is a gift, really. You’ll be happy for it one day.”
“When I’m a better person, maybe.”
“When you can control it, sweetheart,” he said.
We laughed. I wasn’t sure why. I looked out at the road and watched all the familiar areas pass by me. In Mr. Basketball’s car, everything looked smaller and more manageable. I stuck my hand out the window, ready to press myself against the world.
* * *
The next day, I didn’t even have to ask. “If you don’t feel comfortable riding the bus, I don’t mind giving you a ride again,” Mr. Basketball said. “We live so close.”
I agreed.
“Last night,” I said, while we were halfway to my house, driving through the town, “an orange giant picked me up by my overalls and threw me over a stone wall.”
“Last night,” Mr. Basketball said, “I had to play soccer with books for feet. And then all my teeth fell out.”
“The stone wall, turns out, was bordering the edge of the universe. I fell into the sky, which wasn’t really the sky, since it was the space outside of whatever is the universe.”
“They call that hyperspace,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “I was thrown into it.”
“Your dreams are pathetically transparent.”
“Should I be embarrassed? I’m so embarrassed.”
He laughed. I stuck my hand out the window. The air was soft. Spring was coming.
“You should,” he said. “You feel alone. Pushed out of the world, expelled by some godlike figure.”
“And you. Chained to your academics, too stressed to function in real life. Aging.”
I swallowed.
“The overalls,” Mr. Basketball said, not skipping a beat. “That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. The overalls. Very unlike you.”
Did he know me?
“Infantile state?” I asked. “Clothes worn by people who aren’t usually me?”
“Oh, yes yes,” he said. “I can see that now.”
I smiled.
“See, you are smart,” he said.
* * *
The next day after school, Mr. Basketball had a cupcake waiting for me on his desk. He was leaning back in his chair, reading the Fairfield Times: TORN FLAG TOO HIGH TO REMOVE. He had on khakis and his plaid shirt was unbuttoned to show off a T-shirt with a wagon and a warning: I HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY.
“It’s a little late,” he said. “But happy birthday.”
“Thank you,” I said. Even though the cupcake was for me, I felt awkward touching it, as though it still shouldn’t belong to me. Because why would he get me a cupcake? Did he buy the cupcake for me? Did he leave school at some point to get me a cupcake, think about what flavor I might like best, and then pay money for it?
“How old are you, Emily?” he asked.
“Fifteen.”
Ms. O’Malley popped her head in the door. “Johannes,” she said. Her clothes always looked so soft and muted and British. Her long curly hair was like a yellow mane around her face. “Faculty meeting.”
“Your name is Johannes?” I asked when she left.
“It is.”
“Why would your parents name you Johannes?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Did they not want you to have any sort of childhood?” I asked. “Who sees a baby and feels okay calling it Johannes?”
He laughed. “They wanted me to be a lawyer or something like that.”
“Really?”
“Really. That and some hereditary shit. Long-lost grandfather I never met, who died in the war. I’m supposed to carry on his qualities. Be virtuous. Heroic. Johannes.”
“I could never be a Johannes,” I said.
He stood up from his desk, walked toward me.
“You can be anything you want to be,” he said. “For example, I tell some of my friends to call me Jonathan and some to call me Jack.”
We were quiet. He had friends. It was something I never considered before.
“You haven’t eaten the cupcake,” he said.
&
nbsp; “It looks cancerous,” I said, poking the cupcake. “It’s very neon. You eat it and if you don’t die, I’ll try some.”
He laughed. He buttoned his shirt back up to cover the wagon. “I have this faculty meeting. We’re getting a new vending machine. Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”
In his car, I threw an empty Sprite bottle in the backseat, pleased at my power to rearrange his life. His window was cracked where a rock had recently hit it. I picked up a twenty-dollar check from “Grandma.”
“I thought you were rich,” I said.
“My parents are,” he said. “A lot of it doesn’t trickle down. Like I said, they really really wanted me to be a lawyer. They’re still waiting for me to go to law school. I told them not to hold their breath. The day I go to law school, Emily, that’s the day I’ve surely sold my soul. But for now, they say they won’t fund this life of Shakespearean gooblygok. A direct quote. And I look them in the eye and say, ‘Gooblygok? I’m no lawyer, but I know that’s not a word.’ That’s why they don’t give me money, because I say annoying shit like that.”
I didn’t know if it was seeing his grandmother’s curly handwriting or Natalie Merchant that came blasting on the radio, but something made me feel outside myself. I looked down at my legs and they barely looked like mine.
“Do you remember me?” I asked. We had never talked about what happened on my stoop and I was starting to fear I was the only one who remembered that moment.
“Remember you?” he asked. “From two seconds ago when you spoke?”
“No,” I said, laughing. “From October. My porch.”
He sighed. He turned left.
“Yes,” he finally said. “Of course. You had glass in your foot.”
“I did,” I said.
He pulled into my driveway.
“And you didn’t even flinch.”
“Not once,” I said.
“Right there,” he said, pointing to my stoop. “You looked like the saddest, bravest, most alive girl I had ever seen. You were so alive. I can’t explain it. Your face.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He sighed. “When you get to be my age, Emily, that’s the kind of stuff you start noticing. People have two deaths really, their physical death and their emotional death. People just start to emotionally die at some point. Some earlier than others. Take Mr. Heller, for instance, barely alive. But you, you are definitely alive, my dear.”
Mr. Basketball leaned over and opened the passenger door for me. He hovered over my lap for a moment. He was so close, his face was suddenly terrifying. There was a tiny wrinkle in the corner of his eye, a coffee stain on his collar, a patch of dead skin on his temple where he must have forgotten to wash. He slid his hand down to my foot.
“Has it healed properly?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It has.”
I got out of the car and walked slowly into my house so he would know I wasn’t afraid.
“Who was that?” my mother asked when I threw my backpack on the tiles of our kitchen floor.
“Who was who?” I asked. I poured myself some lemonade.
“Who was that man dropping you off?”
“That man?”
“Emily, who was that man?” she said.
I took a long cool sip of my drink.
“That man was the man who dropped me off.”
I put my glass down. The liquid settled in my stomach. I was alive. How exciting. My mother put her hands on her hips. “Fine. Fine. Be that way.”
“Oh relax, Gloria. It was my friend’s dad Maximus.”
I pulled my homework out of my bag. My mother took an orange out of the refrigerator and began to peel it using her hands.
“Listen, Emily,” my mother said, throwing the peel into the garbage. “I just have one thing to say. If a man tries to have sex with you and you don’t want it, do you know what you say?”
I put my hands over my ears.
“Don’t scream,” she said, removing my hands. “That will only make him violent. Just confuse him. That’s what your Nana always told me. She said you start singing something crazy, real crazy, like, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow.’”
My mother was so beautiful. She was biting into an orange and the juice ran down her chin.
“I know that sounds crazy,” she said, wiping her mouth. “But that’s the point. You have to scare him more than he scares you, get it?”
17
I was pleased with your haikus,” Mr. Basketball said in class the next week, handing them back to us. When he stopped by my desk, he said, “See me after class.” “You all seem to understand the beauty behind a haiku and that’s a good thing.”
When the bell rang, I nearly skipped up to his desk.
He explained to me that while the poems I wrote were interesting, they were not haikus.
Emily Vidal’s Haikus:
Mother is always the next morning,
A painted river of Maine
Framed and frozen body of water
Father said he had affiliations with.
Here are two brown lamps
And Mother dressed in scotch
For the season (whichever it may be)
The weather here never seems right.
“But they are still poems,” I said. I stood very still. I thought it would somehow help.
“I have to give you an F, Emily.”
“But why?”
“You’re so smart, sometimes I forget how young you really are.”
“You’re giving me an F because I’m young?”
He handed me the poems with the F on it. I felt like a dog that just pissed all over the carpet.
“I can’t bring you home today,” he said. “I have a dentist appointment.”
I closed his door behind me. Janice was in the hall, leaning against the lockers.
“What did he want from you?” Janice asked.
“I’m not a bad person just because I don’t understand what a haiku is,” I said.
“I know that,” Janice said.
“Well Mr. Basketball doesn’t. He’s mad at me.”
“Maybe he’s not mad at you.”
“Huh?”
“He has a polyp. In his colon.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“It might be.”
“Why don’t you go and ask him then?” I asked. “He’s your boyfriend, right?”
“What’s your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem, other than you’ve been lying to me about Mr. Basketball all year now.”
“I’m not lying,” she said.
“Why don’t you go in and say, ‘Mr. Basketball, since we are fucking I need to know if you have a polyp in your colon.’”
“That’s too suspicious, Emily.”
Janice was in a tight black shirt that said LOOK on the front. There was saliva bunching at the corners of her mouth. For some reason, I wanted to hurt her.
“Janice,” I said, “Mr. Basketball touched me.”
“Of course,” Janice said, shrugging it off, refusing to look surprised. “He touches all of us.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, he touched me.”
“Where?”
“On my leg.”
“Here?” she asked, and put her hand around my thigh.
“Yes,” I said. “He ran his hand all the way down my thigh and to my foot.”
“So what’s the big deal? That’s baby stuff.”
“No, you aren’t listening.”
“I hear you,” she said. “And I’ll tell you what happens next.”
I felt the urge to put my hands over my ears but I didn’t.
“First, Emily, you’ll suck his dick. And then once he’s hard enough, once it feels like a sausage in your mouth, you have sex until he comes.”
“Janice,” I said. “Stop it.”
“Is this grossing you out, Emily? Because this is sex. This is what he’ll want from you. You arch your back at
a forty-five-degree angle and scream.”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, walking away from me.
“Janice,” I said, running after her. “Why do you have to be like this?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”
“I’m scaring you?” she asked. “You’re the one who scares us.”
“Huh?”
“You lit Richard Trenton on fire, Emily!” she said. “And I defended you. I’ve always defended you! I’ve always said, hey, guys, we all know Richard was the crazy one, Emily was just trying to help Annie. And what do you do in return? You stand there, and you say, ‘Mr. Basketball touched me.’ And you know I love him. I love him.”
She walked out of school and into the parking lot where the Other Girls were sitting on red and white cars, nibbling on peanut butter and jelly matzoh sandwiches. When I first saw them eating matzoh sandwiches, I asked, “Are you guys Jewish?” Only two of them. Fewer calories.
I chased after Janice.
“My third cousin was a child actress,” one of the Other Girls was in the middle of saying. “She was in hair commercials, she was so beautiful. And now she’s in an insane asylum.”
“Go figure.”
Janice’s eyelids were coated in tragic skid marks of one-dollar eyeliner and red eye shadow she stole from the mall. She licked her finger and used her saliva to smudge her eyeliner into one smooth line.
“I know a guy whose cousin went to an institution after he tried to commit suicide,” Janice said. “Cost the guy’s parents twenty thousand a year, which doesn’t include the food in the dining hall. And after three years, he was still fucked-up, running around in Santa pajamas, talking about tits and dicks and the Apocalypse.”
I told Janice I thought it was rude to use words like “tits” and “dicks” to describe the dead or almost-dead.
“Dead or almost-dead, they still have dicks, right?” she said. Then, Janice fluffed her hair and asked us about clits and whether I thought hers might be covered in scar tissue—was that why she couldn’t orgasm anymore with Mr. Basketball? I didn’t know.
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