by Trish Cook
“Yeah, you have to be pretty seriously suicidal to throw yourself off a high carnival ride,” I said. “I’m more of a ‘cry for help’ kind of guy.”
“Right, I forgot,” Emmy said. Her smile faded almost instantly, and she stared out the window at the endless rows of corn and soybeans.
After a while, I got the hint she wasn’t in a talking mood—at least to me—so I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
THE RIDE TO THE FAIR WAS LONG, FLAT, AND BORING. JUSTIN HAD gotten on the van and made some mean joke about my eating habits again, which only confirmed what I’d already decided: He was no longer flirt-worthy. And now that he was snoring away next to me—what was he, a toddler who nodded off every time he was in a moving vehicle?—it only made me more sure of my lack of feelings for him.
With Justin snoozing, Diana deep into conversation with Tina about Joey Chestnut’s hot dog eating strategies, and Chip and Tracy playing poker in the last seat of the van, I had plenty of time to think. I set my mind on figuring out what I was going to say in my Contemporary American Family class to get my level change approved.
So far, we’d tackled single-parent households, same-sex parenting, the foster care system, and being raised by extended family members. After each topic, the teacher always asked for people who had grown up in that situation to share their thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of the arrangement as they had experienced it.
The kids with single parents said they appreciated how close they were with the parent they lived with, but were mad at the other parent for leaving. The ones with the same-sex parents thought it was a cool way to grow up, but hated how homophobes thought their moms or dads should burn in hell for loving each other. The foster kids liked being part of a family rather than living in a group home but complained about a lack of consistency. The ones living with extended family loved Gram and Gramps or Auntie and Uncle but missed their parents. Next week we were set to talk about adoptive families, so I would definitely be expected to add something major to the discussion. And whatever I said needed to be honest, or no level change and no talking to Joss for who knew how much longer. I couldn’t just bullshit my way through it.
But what was there to say, really? My mom and dad were still together, they were generally cool as far as parents went, no one wanted them to go to hell, and I’d been given support and consistency from the day I’d been adopted. I basically had your run-of-the-mill normal life—no big controversies or traumas—with the added wrinkle that I was the only one in the family who didn’t come from the same DNA. I couldn’t figure out a good way to tell the class how crappy it felt to be the outsider in your own family—even a nice, normal, nonabusive family—without sounding like a whiny little bitch.
I decided writing down some ideas might help me with that one, so I got up and went over to where Jenny was sitting. Her journal was like her best friend, and when other people were busy having conversations, she’d usually just write away in it. I figured the odds were good she’d have it with her even on a van ride to a state fair. But when I asked to borrow a pen and paper, she patted the seat next to her instead.
“If you’re going to tell me to f-off and punch me in the stomach again, I’d rather not,” I told her.
She shook her head and smiled, pointing to the spot again.
“What’s up?” I said, sitting down. I wasn’t expecting anything in response, of course.
She sat and stared at her hands for a solid minute. Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and whispered, “What is it with you two?”
My eyes flew open and I looked around to see if anyone else had witnessed this momentous occasion—Jenny had actually talked! But everyone was still deep into whatever else it was they were doing.
“Who two?” I asked once I’d gotten over my shock.
“You and Justin,” she said softly.
I cocked my head to the side and scrunched up my nose. “Nothing. Why?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes, I thought you liked him but he missed all the cues. Other times, it seemed like he liked you but you’d just blow him off. Like when he got on the van today. So I guess I’m just trying to figure out if there’s anything there, or if it’s my imagination.”
“All in your head. He definitely doesn’t like me,” I assured her. “Mostly, our conversation consists of him busting my chops about the way I eat. And I don’t know … maybe Women and the Media class is getting to me, but I don’t like how he objectifies and commodifies women by watching porn. So I guess that means I don’t like him either.”
Jenny patted my knee. “If you rule out all the guys who like porn as potential dates, I think you’re going to be alone a lot.”
I laughed. “That’s okay. I was already on a planned hiatus from guys until college.”
“That must have been one hell of a breakup,” she said.
“It would have been,” I admitted. “If we were ever official in the first place. Which we weren’t.”
“Care to share?” she asked.
“And admit how stupid I was? Um, probably not.”
I hadn’t told anyone except Joss—not my friends, parents, school administrators, Brittany, no one—the real deal about what had gone down. I’d sworn Joss to secrecy for life, and she’d promised to go to her grave with my dirt. So I couldn’t imagine telling Jenny the whole sordid tale now, not after the lengths I’d gone to cover up my shame.
Too bad that didn’t stop me from reliving the nightmare unrelationship in my mind. It had all started back in September, when I was assigned Mason as my lab partner in chemistry. Mason was basically king of the school, and not someone who would have even known I existed if it hadn’t been for the alphabetical proximity of our last names.
As with most kings, Mason had a queen, and they’d been going out forever—like at least two years. Mason and Lizbeth were destined for all the cutesy senior superlatives: Most Popular, Best Couple, Most Likely to Get Married and Live Happily Ever After With Two Gorgeous Kids and a Golden Retriever, the works. So when Mason asked me to study with him for our first test, I might have been a little intimidated to be hanging out with such a cool senior, but I definitely knew it wasn’t code for “let’s fool around.”
We both aced that exam, which was enough to convince us both that studying together was a smart strategy. And after maybe our third session, the strictly business thing started morphing into something else. I would never have imagined a guy like Mason and I have anything in common, but it turned out there was plenty. We both liked horror flicks, pugs, Harry Potter, and Sudoku. We were obsessed with Scrabble, jalapeño-pineapple pizza, and the smell of vanilla extract. Our siblings were our best friends. By then, I’d almost say we were becoming more than study buddies, albeit buddies who only saw each other in chem class and every so often when we were hitting the books together at my house or his.
And then one night, when we were cramming for our midterm, Mason wasn’t acting like his usual laid-back self. Naturally I asked him what was up.
“I broke up with Lizbeth today,” he said, with a half happy, half sad look on his face. “And she kind of freaked out on me. It was not pretty.”
I felt my heart skip a happy little dance inside my chest, though I tried my best to keep that under wraps. “Well, you guys were together for like, forever, so of course she’s upset. But I’m sure she’ll get over it,” I said, adding quickly. “I mean, not that you’d be easy to get over or anything.”
The minute that last part left my mouth, I wanted to suck the words right back into my lungs. I knew it sounded like I had a crush on Mason, and of course by that time I did. A whopper.
But I shouldn’t have worried. He’d broken into a huge grin. “I was kind of hoping you’d say that, because there’s someone else I like …”
He trailed off and went in for a kiss. It was killer. One of the best moments in my entire life, even now that I knew how shitty it had all ended up. Fireworks went off in every molecule of my body. Parts of me I d
idn’t even know existed tingled.
We made out the rest of the supposed study session and for the first time, got Bs on our tests. I didn’t care in the least. My grade for the semester was still an A, and now I had this great guy to go along with my awesome GPA.
Except I didn’t really have him. At least, not as far as anyone else knew. He’d asked that we keep our “thing”—whatever it was—on the down low because he didn’t want to hurt Lizbeth’s feelings by dumping her and asking me out all in the same day. This indicated to me that Mason was a nice, compassionate person, so I was all too happy to comply. I figured things would work themselves out soon enough.
After a couple of months, though, Lizbeth still hadn’t rebounded. If anything, she was worse than ever. She was kind of disappearing before everyone’s eyes. Her clothes started hanging off her body, she looked gaunt, her eyes were hollow. She wasn’t the golden girl who had been Mason’s girlfriend anymore. She’d gone from beautiful to brittle, from someone to be envied to someone to be pitied. Honestly, it was scary.
“Emmy, we’ll let everybody know about us as soon as Lizbeth gets her shit together,” he told me. “I promise. I just don’t think it’s fair to kick her when she’s down though, you know?”
Again, I was totally on board. I mean, only the world’s most heartless bitch would have rubbed how much Mason and I liked each other in a sick girl’s face. And I wasn’t that kind of girl.
But I didn’t actually know what kind of girl I was anymore either, because I definitely wasn’t acting like my normal self. As our relationship went further underground, our “study sessions” (which were now more like sexy sessions) and bathroom breaks at school (which were just excuses to make out anytime, anyplace we could, from the janitor’s closet to the handicapped bathroom) got hotter and heavier than ever. There was something incredibly exciting about all the hiding and scheming and plotting and planning. It turned absolutely everything in me on, my brain and my body. I should have known I was in trouble, but the whole situation was just so intoxicating I kept going back for more.
And so one night when we were talking before bed like we always did and Mason asked me for a sexy pic, I was totally game.
“Only if you send me one, too,” I’d told him, teasing the fun out to the maximum degree.
Five minutes later, I had one of him in my phone and he had one of me in his. I’d gone into the bathroom, locked the door, took off my shirt, made sure my B-cups were nicely pushed together, and snapped a few dozen topless (from the chin down so only he would know it was me, of course) pics. I picked the hottest one and sent it. He texted me hearts, I texted him a little devil emoticon and a smiley, and we signed off for the night.
I didn’t think much more about it, no less regret it, until I stepped foot in the cafeteria the next day. Apparently when Mason had gone to buy lunch, his friend Danny Schwartz decided to flip through all the pics on Mason’s phone. And that’s when he stumbled on my boob shot.
Everything might have been okay—I mean, my face wasn’t in the shot, I’m not that stupid—but it seemed I’d made a huge tactical error. In my bathroom, my mom had just put up those decorative tin letters they have at Urban Outfitters. Which meant reflected in the mirror of my edgy nude shot was Y-M-M-E. I’d just been outed.
Danny started in on the “me so horny” thing immediately, often adding with a big fat guffaw that he thought my nipples would’ve been slanted instead of round. What’s worse, he started a rumor that I was the reason Lizbeth had gone off the deep end—that I’d been so obsessed with Mason I’d barraged him with nude pictures until he’d broken down and started having sex with me, which Lizbeth then found out about. It was total bullshit, but everyone bought it.
By the end of the day, the entire school thought I was a total slut. I’d gone from nobody knowing or caring who I was to everyone hating me. It might have been bearable if Mason had taken a big stand in my defense, but as far as I could tell he maybe weakly protested the theory the first day and then said pretty much nothing after that.
Bad enough, that still wasn’t rock bottom. The next week, he and Lizbeth got back together. You know I still love you, right? he’d texted me after they went public. But I can’t be responsible for her being so sick anymore, you know? It makes me feel terrible.
What he failed to recognize was what a terrible situation all this left me in. I mean, why wouldn’t people believe I’d been this weird stalker? Mason had never so much as taken me out for a Starbucks. My friends—everyone except Joss—started avoiding me like everyone else in school.
“I seriously don’t believe you did that when you saw how it affected Lizbeth!” one even came right out and said to me.
I protested, asserted my innocence, stood up for myself—and it did absolutely nothing in the end. No one wanted to take the pariah girl’s side. It made me alternately furious and depressed times a thousand. I finally decided revenge was the only way I’d ever get any satisfaction. For Danny, I chose the online attack strategy. For Mason, I chose the same weapon as his girfriend had: Noticeable weight loss. That would teach those motherfuckers to ruin my life.
“Come on, I’d love to hear about the bad relationship that wasn’t. I’m talking to you, right? And that’s hard for me,” Jenny said.
I looked up and saw Tina giving Jenny the thumbs-up. She tried to pretend she had just been running her fingers through her hair when I noticed. Tina wasn’t the most subtle when it came to breakthroughs.
“Why are you talking to me now?” I asked, trying to steer the subject away from the whole Mason debacle and ridiculous Justin question. “I mean, not that I don’t like it. I do. It’s just that you had so many opportunities when we’re in our room and it’s just been dead silence. It would’ve been nice to have someone to talk to before now.”
“My goal is to head home after the next Family Weekend. That gives me just about a month to get to level six. I’ve been stuck on four forever because I haven’t let someone new into my ‘speaking circle’ ”—here she put her fingers up in air quotes—“as the Asslandians like to call it. I have to show I can be ‘proactive’ and ‘empowered,’ you know.”
I gave a little laugh. “Asslandians! Good one!” I said. “I hope you make it.”
Tina turned around, all smiles. “I have a feeling she will, especially after that big step!”
Jenny beamed, but I felt shittier than ever.
I WOKE UP WHEN THE VAN STOPPED. “STATE FAIRGROUNDS, everybody!” Tina called out, and everybody kind of started moving in slow motion. Everybody except Diana, that is.
“Okay, who’s too chickenshit to go on the puke rides? ‘Cause I wanna ride everything, and if you guys are too weak to take it, I’m gonna have to sit next to some black-toothed meth-addicted local yokel, and that does not make me happy because they might try to kidnap me because I’m pretty.”
“Not to mention good-natured,” Chip said, and everybody except Diana laughed.
Diana shot back, “Listen, Frodo. Keep talking and I will put my foot so far up your ass that my toenails will be your teeth.”
At this, Tina blew an airhorn. The sound was excruciating as it bounced around the metal box we were in, and everybody froze and looked at Tina.
“Okay, listen up, guys. I need you to understand something. As you may have gathered, this little trip is not standard procedure at Assland.”
There was stunned silence. Finally Diana said, “You … you called it …”
“I know what I called it, Diana,” Tina said, smiling. “This is in order to emphasize something. We are not on campus. It’s impossible for anybody to monitor what happens here. And I want you to know very well that I understand the temptation to misbehave. That’s why I just did it.”
“Ooo, you said ass,” Tracy said. “Big deal.”
Tina stared at him. “Shit. Fuck. Queef. Happy?”
Emmy snorted. “Did you really just say—”
“Yes. Now listen. I’ve really gone out on
a limb for you guys. Okay? I begged, wheedled, and cajoled the administration into allowing you guys to have some extra privileges, because I really believe that the teamwork you’ve been showing in the past few weeks is a great thing and is really helping all of you. I spent an hour on the phone with each one of your parents getting their approval for this.”
I, for one, was impressed. “Did you actually talk to my dad for an hour?” I wasn’t sure anyone had gotten an hour of his time in the last sixteen years.
Tina looked at me. “I did. He’s very worried about you.”
I didn’t want to be thinking about that asshole on a night when I was supposed to be having fun, so I didn’t go any further with this conversation.
“All I’m saying is this: I have put my own ass on the line for you. And if you screw this up by doing anything even remotely unethical or illegal, then I am most likely finished at this school. Don’t make me look like an idiot for putting myself on the line for you. Okay?”
Everybody nodded, some of us kind of sheepishly.
“I didn’t hear you. I said, Okay?”
“Okay, okay!” everybody said.
“Great. One more thing. Have fun tonight. You guys really have worked hard, and I’m really proud of you.” Tina opened the doors of the van and we all filed out into the parking lot. I took a deep breath.
“Hmm … manure, car exhaust, fried food, and, unless I miss my guess, just a hint of BO,” I said.
“It smells like freedom!” Diana yelled.
At the ticket booth, Tina bought us all plastic wristbands that meant we were good to go for all the rides. She also handed each of us a twenty dollar bill that she informed us all of our parents personally authorized. She furthermore told us we needed to be back at this exact spot three hours from now, and should we fail to appear by three hours and ten minutes from now, she had the state police on speed dial and we would be reported as runaways.
“So,” I said to Chip and Tracy, “what are we gonna go on first?”