Girl on the Ferris Wheel

by Julie Halpern

  It was a full-on, face-first collision—me and the light post—and it knocked me back on my ass. Hard.

  The entire gaggle erupted into laughter, like doubled-over, crying laughter. There was nothing for me to do but get up, smile, and bow, as if I had planned the whole thing. (I hadn’t.) Then I turned and continued to the bumper cars, my cheeks red, my dignity left in tatters at the base of that pole. It was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to me.

  Until today.

  For the most part, I don’t like gym class. Let’s face it, most rockers are drawn to music because we’re not good at sports. Running day in PE is the only one I sort of like. You run. That’s it. No rope climbing, no volleyball serves, no having to catch things.

  Karl Bloomfield and I started a light jog to warm up, and after a lap we both hit the gas, kind of egging each other on. We’ve been friends since the fourth grade, when Karl moved here from Arizona. The dude still hasn’t gotten used to the cold weather. While the rest of us wore shorts and t-shirts, Karl opted for the school’s green sweats and hoodie. And we’re indoors.

  It felt good to run. The strain of my leg muscles and the rhythm and meter of my normally uncoordinated body working together remind me a lot of drumming. It makes me think I should try out for the track team. (Not really.)

  I’d just started my third lap when I saw her. Eliana. The girl who wouldn’t talk to me in film class.

  Anyway, it didn’t register that it was really her until I ran past her—she was in the jogging lane—so I turned around to make sure it was her, and just as her eyes were going wide when she saw me staring …

  WHAM!

  Karl and I were hitting the turn when I looked back over my shoulder. With my attention behind me, I kept going straight; I veered off my path and ran right into Karl.

  I go down. Karl goes down. The kid behind us—I don’t know his name, but I think he actually is on the track team—goes down. The three people behind them have to stop so short that one of them loses her balance … and she goes down. It’s like a snowstorm-induced, twenty-car pileup on I-35. There are groans, cuss words (mostly at me), and at least one knee scraped badly enough to be bleeding.

  The gym teachers, who were off in a corner talking about whatever gym teachers talk about—I’ll go out on a limb here and guess sports, or, I don’t know, maybe sadomasochism—don’t notice at first. When they do, they come running like a herd of buffalo.

  I look up just in time to see Eliana’s butt disappear into the door that leads to the girls’ locker room. Getting blown off in film class was kind of hard, but knowing she witnessed this cluster, and probably knowing my looking at her was the reason, is a whole new level of embarrassment. Worst of all, I couldn’t help but notice that the butt retreating through the door was kind of cute.

  Why am I thinking about this girl so much?

  Curse you, Yia Yia!!!

  Eliana

  I am such a turd. Like, the world’s largest, stinkiest turd that comes at the worst time, when you’re in a school bathroom and you think you’re by yourself, but then a group of girls comes in and you’re the only one behind closed doors, so when you flush and exit the stall, they know it was you that stunk up the place.

  That’s the kind of turd I am.

  The boy from my film class fell on his butt, and I didn’t even stop to see how he was. I ran and left him in a pile of jocks and gym clothes. What could I have done, though? It wasn’t my fault he fell. Who am I, Carrie? Oh my god. What if I have telekinesis?

  If only.

  He was probably just noticing I forgot to shave my legs. Or what a clompy runner I am. I hope he wasn’t checking out the lack of support this bra gives me during gym class. But who wants to change their bra for gym class? That would require actually getting naked in a room full of other people. I’m still grateful the school phased out showering after gym class to allow for more time in the day for actual education.

  He couldn’t have been looking at me because he likes me. I mean, he doesn’t even know me. What could he see in me? Aside from how hot I look in green polyester. Even if he did like me, which I highly doubt, I’m sure he thinks I’m a complete fartblossom for running and then, you know, running.

  I’m not a girl who makes people trip and fall. Most people tend not to know I exist, which is generally how I like it. I am, however, a girl who can’t help but notice pairs of other teenagers grinding against each other in the hallways. I try not to stare, but I doubt they’d notice if I did. How is it a person can be so intimate with another person in front of everyone? How is it that they have so much confidence that they not only find their ways into relationships but put themselves on display? And how is it that they have any freaking idea what to do in those situations?

  I watch movies. Lots of movies. I have seen people kiss. I have seen people get naked. I have seen people do … other things. But when it comes to real sexy stuff … not so much. I have kissed a boy. One time. It was at this girl Mara Sidell’s bat mitzvah, during the snowball dance. This is the dance for which I both shivered in anticipation and sweated profusely with dread. At the start of the song, kids paired off with a partner and glided around the floor until the DJ called, “Snowball!” That was when you were supposed to kiss your partner. My partner at the time was Adam Schulman, a boy who stood one inch shorter than my already not-very-tall height. He had braces, and our kiss was more like a scraping of metal against enamel. After the kiss, the goal was to switch partners until the DJ called “Snowball” again, and the magic continued. Somehow, there wasn’t a spare partner for me after the initial snowball, although admittedly I didn’t search that hard. Envision the awkwardness of scanning a dance floor for your next lip-crushing victim. Instead, I bolted back to my designated table and played a game on my phone. That is until Adam approached me several songs later and asked if I wanted to see the sculpture in the banquet hall foyer. He pronounced it “foy-yay,” which I thought was wrong at the time but didn’t say anything. It didn’t occur to me that this “foy-yay” visit was a ruse for him to bump his braces into me again. We made out in a corner of the golf club’s lobby until I was sufficiently grossed out and excused myself to pee. I believe my exact exit words were “I have to pee.” I was never attracted to Adam Schulman, and I have no idea why he was the boy who I kissed in the foyer. I suppose because he was the one who asked me. End scene.

  I change out of my gym clothes and stuff them back into my gym locker, the ripeness of the fabric a reminder that I haven’t brought the ensemble home since school started. It would be a shame to stink if, say, a definitely cute boy from one of my classes possibly was looking at me for good reasons rather than the innumerable bad ones I can concoct in my saboteur brain. But that’s a ridiculous thought. Clearly.

  The bell rings, and I check myself in the mirror before my next class. I finger-comb my bangs over my left eye and smooth some cherry-flavored lip balm over my lips. I consider what a foyer make-out session with the boy from film class would be like. Then I realize I’m standing in a gym locker room and berate myself for thinking such thoughts in a public locale.

  Ten feet out the door of the locker room, I run back inside, slam open my gym locker, and grab my gym clothes. Might as well take them home and wash them tonight. Just in case.

  Dmitri

  “Your politics

  Make me sick,

  So I’m gonna kick

  The shit out of you!”

  Okay, maybe not the best lyrics Chad ever wrote, but he’s singing it well.

  More than that, the tune sticks in your head.

  More than that, the groove, if it doesn’t sound too egotistical to say, is crazy good. Drew uses a pick to play bass, which gives it a clicky, trebly vibe, and his lines are so full of melody they sound like they’re intended for a six-string guitar. Because of that, or maybe in spite of it, the bass complements my drumbeat unlike anything I’ve heard before. Kyle’s guitar—distorted, but not so much as to be mu
ddy—fuses with the rhythm section to create this wave of sound that crashes over you again and again.

  In short, it’s a really, really good song.

  At one of our gigs a few months ago, some older guy in a denim jacket—he was like maybe thirty-five or forty, so too old to be wearing a denim jacket—told me we sounded like Hüsker Dü. Truth is, I had no idea who that was, which kind of blew the old dude’s mind.

  “You’ve never heard of Hüsker Dü? Kid, they were Minnesota punk rock royalty!” Chad was eavesdropping on the conversation and jumped in, heaping praise on Hüsker Dü and doing his best to make me feel stupid. When I got home that night I went straight to iTunes and downloaded this album called Candy Apple Grey. I really wanted to hate it—mostly because Chad liked it, but partly because the old dude was a bit sanctimonious (thank you, PSAT prep, for the vocab word)—but holy crap! Those guys were awesome! And while our sound is different, I did get where Old Denim Dude was coming from.

  “My generation

  Has no admiration

  Or veneration

  For your worldview.”

  Chad likes to think he’s political, but really he’s full of hot air. Plus, I’ll bet Chad has never used “veneration” in a sentence in his life. I think he wrote this song entirely with a thesaurus.

  Anyway, Drew, Kyle, and I come to a screeching and simultaneous halt, with me bringing the full force of my stick down on the crash cymbal and then deadening it immediately with my hand. The effect is a musical exclamation point … on steroids. I normally love this trick, but I scraped my palm during the seven-person collision in gym class and it still hurts.

  After a three-beat pause we slam back into the song in unison and Chad starts belting out the chorus.

  Besides the cut on my hand, I have a bruise on my ass that is making drumming harder than usual today. Not to mention the bruise on my ego. Apparently the whole school heard about the PE pileup.

  “How’s it going, Trippy McTripperson?” was Drew’s greeting when I arrived at rehearsal, which cracked Chad up.

  Kyle, who is the nicest of my three bandmates, tried to suppress a smile but didn’t do a very good job. “What happened?” he asked.

  I’m the only guy in Unexpected Turbulence without a girlfriend, something about which I’m frequently teased. How these guys have time for relationships, I just don’t understand. Anyway, I can’t tell them the reason I tripped the entire gym class was because I was ogling a girl. First, they’ll demand to know who she is, and second, they’ll never let me hear the end of it.

  I make up a lie for Kyle about my shoelace being untied. I know. Lame. But I figure it’s such a cliché no one would use it unless it was true.

  While I don’t say a word about Eliana, I haven’t been able to shake the image of her since I took my seat behind the drum kit an hour ago. I think it’s her eyes that get me the most. It’s not that they’re Disney-character big or anything, but they have this incredible depth, like there’s a whole other person hiding behind them. Yeah, it’s definitely her eyes. Or maybe it’s her—

  “Dmitri!” Chad’s voice cuts through my snare drum. It’s only now that I notice the rest of the band has stopped playing and they’re all staring at me.

  “What?”

  “What do you mean ‘what’? You played right through the change, dumbass.”

  Oh my god, Chad’s right. I never do that. Never. The look on Kyle’s face can only be described as shock. “Dimmi, you okay?”

  I nod. I’d rather have them think I got a concussion in PE than know the truth. “I’m fine,” I say, “maybe just a bit dizzy.”

  “You wanna take a break?” Kyle asks.

  “No breaks.” Chad would be the kind of officer to get shot by his own troops in Syria or Afghanistan or wherever we’re at war this week.

  “Shut up, Chad.” I love that Kyle doesn’t put up with Chad’s crap.

  “Up yours, Kyle. The gig is in two weeks. We need to be perfect.”

  The gig Chad’s talking about is our first-ever show at the First Avenue and Seventh Street Entry. It’s the coolest club not only in Minnesota, but really the whole Midwest. Prince made it famous, but bands like the Replacements and U2 played there. (And yes, so did Hüsker Dü. I looked it up.) Chad has been at DEFCON 1 over this gig since he booked it a month ago. The truth is, I agree with him. This gig is, as my Spanish teacher would say, muy importante.

  “No, I’m good. Chad’s right; we need to nail this. Let’s just play.”

  Chad gives Kyle a “told you so” look, which makes me mad at myself for giving Chad an opening to be right about anything. Kyle shrugs and starts the guitar riff to our next song.

  I try to put Eliana out of my mind and focus on drumming. It only partly works. I don’t screw up again at rehearsal, but images of Eliana’s butt—her eyes, I mean her eyes—dance across my mind.

  I either need to give up on this girl, or I need to find a way to get her to notice me. No, that’s not right. She’s definitely noticed me. In fact, that’s the problem. Now I need to get her to want to notice me.

  There’s only one person who can help. I have to talk to Reggie.

  Eliana

  My walk home is particularly slow today. I need time to think. Or maybe I need less time to think. Thinking often brings my mood levels way down, so I attempt a detour. As I walk, I listen to music on my phone to create a sort of soundtrack to my life. If I can get my brain to stop thinking about me things, I can sometimes deter the inevitable drop into bummerville. Sometimes, when I’m overthinking things or just hating on myself even too much for, well, myself, I turn up the volume on my music really loud in hopes of jarring the thoughts right out of my brain. I don’t know if that’s why it works, or if it’s just the shock to my eardrums, but it usually helps me switch brain tracks for a little bit.

  Today I’m surprisingly not thinking in a downward spiral, even though I know it will be Groundhog Day at home (one of my dad’s favorite Bill Murray movie references, where the same day repeats over and over again). I waffle between mortification that I may have caused the PE Accident of the Century and blushing at the potential that I, Eliana Hoffman, may have caused the PE Accident of the Century.

  The other day I reread my seventh-grade diary to see if I always felt so crappy. In it I talk about this boy, Arlo Eggers, from my science class who, every single day, would ask me about my gym shoes. This was way back with my first pair of Chucks, black high-tops that have disintegrated since then. I liked to draw on them with a white paint pen, mostly nerd symbols from TV shows and movies I hoped nobody would understand (but secretly hoped they would so they’d know how cool I was). A direct diary excerpt:

  Arlo asked me about my shoes today. Again. He asks me almost every day about them. Today he pointed at the Supernatural anti-possession symbol and asked, “Are you a Satanist?” I looked at him with a total eye roll. “What do you think?” He smiled so cute, and I almost died but tried to look like I thought he was an idiot. I wish I could make a face that says, “I like how you keep asking me about my shoes. Ask me about them again while we’re naked in the Caribbean.”

  Man, I was a weird middle schooler. Why would I want to be naked with Arlo Eggers in the Caribbean, of all places? Also, what did I think we would be doing while we were naked? Like, just sitting there, getting a tan? I was in seventh freakin’ grade! What a doof. And yet, when I look back at that journal entry (I really should burn it before I die or someone else finds it), I think that maybe he kind of liked me. Yes, he danced with someone else at the mixer (classiest name for a middle school dance ever), and all I did was stand in the corner with Janina and make fun of people. But if I had been a different sort of person, say, one who actually knew how to read the social cues of boys, I would perhaps have played the whole shoe-admiring thing differently.

  And then what?

  Would we have dated in seventh grade? Fallen in love? Gotten married? Ended up naked together in the Caribbean? (Seriously, what th
e hell was that?)

  My point in taking this death-defying walk down memory lane is that I now realize that maybe boys have liked me in the past. (Does the snowball kiss count? Or was it just par for the bat mitzvah course?) And maybe that means a boy could like me again. Like a particular boy who I totally made face-plant into the gym floor.

  God, I’m an idiot.

  I decide to survey the members of my household. Isaac and Samara, my two oldest younger siblings, are dutifully doing their homework at the puzzle table. I think their schoolwork ethic has been drilled into them by our mother, the teacher, but even more so by watching our dad spiral into a jobless, basement-dwelling, online DVD seller. Ava and Asher wrestle on the kitchen floor. Dad is holed up in the basement, per usual.

  The sibs barely acknowledge me as I sit down and deftly fill in two barren sections of the tin-can puzzle. I get right to it. “Let’s say you’re in a new class, and the guy next to you won’t shut up. What do you do?”

  Isaac answers with his obvious “Raise my hand and tell the teacher.”

  “It’s not that kind of talking, Isaac. It’s more like he’s talking to you, and he won’t stop even when you act like you care what the teacher is saying.”

  “So, like, he’s flirting with you?” Samara, all dramatic black hair, black eyes, and black soul, asks incredulously. If she weren’t my sister, I might be afraid of her. I might be a little anyway.

  “If that’s what it sounds like. I’m just trying to get a feel for what a normal person would think if this were happening to them,” I agree pathetically.

  “Meaning, not you.” Samara fills in the gap.

  “I set you up for that one, I realize, but yes.”