Girl on the Ferris Wheel

by Julie Halpern

  “He could like you. It depends on what words he says, too. Was he just asking to borrow a pencil?”

  “Noooo,” I draw out defensively. “I don’t actually remember what he was saying. It wasn’t really anything. I was trying too hard not to listen, frankly. I didn’t really realize until I made him fall on top of a bunch of people in gym class that maybe he was talking to me for reasons, and by then he was too busy hating me for making him fall, for him to probably even consider liking me anymore, so never mind.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Samara glares at me. One can see why I’ve moved into the closet of our bedroom.

  “Forget it, Sam. Go back to your innocent algebra. And keep one eye open when you sleep tonight.” I dole out a helping of evil-eye fingers.

  What is the point of having four brothers and sisters if I can glean no advice from any of them? Being first in the birth order sucks. Does Samara ever acknowledge how I helped her when she got her first period and Mom wasn’t home? No. See if I help her when she has questions about losing her virginity. Although, chances are, she’ll probably get there before me.

  Ava and Asher continue to roll around on the kitchen floor. “You know, it would be a lot more comfortable to attack each other on carpeting,” I suggest, trying to budge my way into the refrigerator for an apple and a mini Babybel cheese. I barely miss slamming Asher’s head into the fridge door and make my way out of the kitchen and up to my room.

  Curled up on my futon, I text Janina.

  ME: I think I may have killed the cute boy from my film class.

  JANINA: So he is cute?

  ME: AND possibly dead

  JANINA: Doubtful. It’s not as easy to die from gym class as you think. What did you do to him?

  ME: This sounds so stupid, but I just looked at him.

  JANINA: I knew you were Carrie!

  ME: That’s what I said!

  JANINA: I was kidding.

  ME: Me too. Of course.

  JANINA: So you looked at him, and he died?

  ME: Well, he fell. On top of a bunch of other people. It was … awkward.

  JANINA: OMG that was you?

  ME: I think so? He turned around, and there was some tripping action and then they all went down.

  JANINA: They all went down, huh?

  ME: Is there a pervert emoji on here?

  JANINA: Ha. Time will tell. If he lives.

  ME: Tell what, exactly?

  JANINA: Don’t pretend that you aren’t adorable and that you don’t have the world’s perkiest butt from walking everywhere.

  ME: My butt is blushing.

  JANINA: I have volleyball. Later.

  I don’t want to get my hopes up. In fact, I hate myself for even thinking of the possibility that someone may have been looking at me in a non-annoyed/disgusted/pitying way. It’s too much reality to think of, so I turn on Goblet of Fire. Then I decide to mix it up a little and put on Order of the Phoenix because I like the way Ron looks longingly at Hermione by the fireplace. I consider whether or not I would like the boy from film and gym class to look at me that way and decide that I would definitely be very okay with that.

  If he doesn’t completely hate me at this point.

  Dmitri

  Reggie Reynolds is a total badass. Short spiky hair; dog chain collar; sleeveless shirts with things like “The Sex Pistols” or “The Dead Boys” on them; and chiseled biceps that make me, as a drummer, kind of jealous. And the best part is Reggie’s a girl.

  We’ve known each other since preschool, and even then she was all attitude. My first memory of Reggie was the day I created a skyscraper out of cardboard bricks. I was admiring my architectural masterpiece when this girl with a mop of black curly hair came screaming toward me on a tricycle. I leapt out of the way just before she crashed into my building, scattering the blocks everywhere. She skidded to a stop—I’m not kidding, she actually drifted the trike—and looked me dead in the eye.

  “Sorry,” she said, “but your little wall was in my way.” What four-year-old talks like that?

  I was not the kind of kid to take things personally (I’m still not), so I laughed. Reggie was so put off her game she was frozen. Her little trick was supposed to make me cry, but that’s not me. After a long pause she laughed, too, and we’ve been friends ever since.

  Reggie does gymnastics, and like those gymnasts you see on TV during the Olympics, her body is freakishly strong. She’s barely five feet tall, and her neck and shoulders are a knot of pure muscle. So are her thighs. From what she tells me—and I believe her—the other gymnasts are afraid of her. “I like the tumbles, jumps, and spins, and it makes me strong. All the other little Debbies like the sequined bodysuits. Sometimes I hide their hair scrunchies just for fun. If I wasn’t so good, I think the coach would kick me off the team.”

  Reggie comes to a lot of our gigs, and we eat lunch together sometimes, but it’s not like that. I have no idea if Reggie is straight or gay. She has the sharpest tongue of anyone I know, and, the thing that matters today, she always seems to be up on everyone else’s business.

  REGGIE: Eliana?

  ME: Yeah. She’s in our grade. We take film class together.

  REGGIE: Wait, is this girl the reason you tried to kill the whole gym class?

  I’m lying on my stomach on the bed in my room, my phone in my hand, my laptop open in front of me. Reggie can’t see me, but I roll my eyes anyway.

  ME: Do you know her?

  REGGIE: Dude. The whole school was talking about that. Seriously. What did you do, try to kiss her and there was a brawl?

  ME: No. I was just looking at her. So do you know her?

  REGGIE: Course I do.

  Good old Reggie. She never disappoints.

  ME: And?

  Reggie waits a long enough time before answering that I wonder if she had to leave.

  REGGIE: Since when do you like girls anyway?

  ME: Since always? I mean, I don’t have time to date, but I’m not gay.

  REGGIE: You sure?

  I know she’s just messing with me.

  ME: Reg …

  REGGIE: All right, all right. What do you want to know for anyway?

  ME: I just do! Are you going to help me or not?

  REGGIE: Relax, lover boy. I’m just tugging your chain. Eliana Hoffman. She has like a hundred brothers and sisters and her dad used to own the video store in the strip mall by the post office. It went out of business about five years after the world started streaming. I guess some people just don’t see the writing on the wall.

  ME: Doesn’t your uncle own a bookstore?

  I don’t get to tweak Reggie often, so I take advantage when I do.

  REGGIE: Shut your face, Digrindakis. Books are different.

  ME: So what else? What’s Eliana into?

  REGGIE: idk … She doesn’t talk to a whole lot of people. Really, she seems like a grade-A nobody. Can’t you find a girl with a little more spunk?

  ME: Who says I’m trying to find a girl at all.

  REGGIE: Hmm.

  ME: Anything else?

  REGGIE: There is one thing. She hangs out with this girl named Janina.

  ME: The really tall girl? I think she’s in our European Studies class.

  REGGIE: If you mean the Amazonian nerd who wastes her time at beauty school and has really big tits, yeah, that’s her.

  Reggie knows I hate it when she talks like that. I guess at the end of the day, I’m kind of a prude. I need to get over that if I’m going to be a rock star.

  REGGIE: Maybe she can help you. Hey, I gotta run. I’m playing Destiny in five and my squad has a massive raid planned. Good luck, Romeo.

  And Reg is gone. She does that, sort of blinks in and out of the frame. Hey! That’s a film metaphor! I’ll have to use that in Mr. Tannis’s class.

  Anyway, maybe I’ll talk to Janina tomorrow. Thankfully European Studies is before film class, which means I can be ready for Eliana. I have no idea what to say, so we’ll
see if I even take that step.

  I close the laptop, put on my earbuds, tell Siri to play Titus Andronicus, and drift off to sleep thinking about Eliana as “To Old Friends and New” wafts into my brain.

  Eliana

  Some mornings I want to pretend my closet is a TARDIS and fly into outer space.

  It starts around five thirty A.M., when the pipes squeak on for my mom’s prework shower. After that, Samara destroys any hope that I will fall back asleep by turning on the outer bedroom light in order to get ready for swim practice. I used to stuff dirty clothes underneath the door crack, but somehow her putting on a bathing suit also requires her crashing into my closet door multiple times until she has sufficiently shimmied the skintight nylon over her body. I envy the ease with which she walks practically naked in public every day. Not that I want to be naked in public, but you get to a point when being in a bathing suit is a whole thing instead of just the outfit you wear in the water. I feel the same way about gymnasts and leotards. Maybe when you’ve participated in a sport since childhood, it doesn’t faze you to wear so little in front of so many eyes. The only sport I’ve ever played professionally (and by professionally, I mean for three meets my freshman year) was badminton. I loved the slow-motion action of the game. I sometimes won. That’s when my friends were still my friends, and we joined stuff together. I still don’t understand how they justify to themselves that we aren’t friends anymore. It’s like they blamed me for my chemical makeup. It’s not my fault things affect me the way they do. At least that’s what my mom tells me. And if meds make me better, isn’t that akin to a disease, like diabetes or high blood pressure? No one breaks up with their friends because of diabetes.

  Friggin’ depression.

  Mornings and nights hit me the worst. At bedtime, it’s dark and my brain turns on me. Mornings are rough because that’s when you remember the things that made the day before difficult. You wake up, and there’s a feeling: Something sucks. Maybe something is going to happen, and you have that sensation in your gut because that’s how things always go. Or maybe something already happened, and sleep erased it for those eight hours or so. Then you wake up, feel okay for five seconds, until it hits you: Things already suck. Today I feel like that. My stomach gurgles with unease as I remember the pileup from gym class and my wussy exit. I know I have to say something in film class because if I don’t, then I’m an even bigger wuss. I am not a fan of confrontation, but I also would rather confront my demons than let them fester.

  Which leads me to think of Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, his bald head and buggy eyes, and I get all wigged out and eject myself from bed at rapid speed. I slam open my closet door, knocking over my sister, on one leg during her swimsuit routine, and she crashes to the floor.

  Is this my new thing?

  “Christ on a cracker!” Samara yells. Samara enjoys swearing like a seventy-five-year-old churchgoing granny.

  “Sorry, dude. Have to pee,” I blabber my apology as I beeline into the bathroom. It wasn’t a lie. Who doesn’t have to pee first thing in the morning? And if she didn’t want me awake, she shouldn’t have pounded into my door in the first place.

  Mornings.

  In the kitchen I pour Alpha-Bits and some blueberries into bowls for me and my two youngest siblings. It’s the only sugary cereal my mom deems acceptable because of the possibility of learning something from the letters outweighing the sugar content. It’s fast and easy, and it tastes only slightly sweeter than wood chips. I barely notice as I hoover it into my mouth and fret over having to make it through periods one and two before I can save myself from internal combustion upon entering film class during period three. My brain whirs as I go through the motions of morning routine: brush my teeth, tell my sibs fifteen times to brush their teeth, ensure my sibs have their lunch money, double-check my backpack for my schoolwork, get the sibs on the bus, walk to school.

  On my way into the school building, I run into Daisy King. Daisy was my closest friend in second through fourth grade and part of the pack of girls I ran with in middle school. She was also the first of the friends to break it off with me after my shitshow that was the middle of freshman year. It’s amazing how three weeks in a mental hospital can make such a difference in a friendship.

  It’s always a battle: Do I stare her down so she acknowledges what a buttress she was? Or do I walk past as though she does not exist to me anymore? She makes it easy by awkwardly (and obviously) pretending she has an important matter on her phone to attend to. Predictable.

  After dropping off my bag at my locker, I meet Janina in our spot in the foyer near the vending machines. It isn’t technically our spot, since half the school buys their breakfast with coins, but it has been one of the nice consistencies in my life since I started high school. Janina eats a bag of peanut M&Ms every day for breakfast. I don’t know if my stomach could handle that, but she swears the peanuts are healthy. She is a goddess, so who am I to question her choice? Today she sports new purple highlights.

  “I like your hair,” I tell her, as she rips the candy bag open with her teeth and drinks in the contents.

  “Thanks,” she spits with a mouthful of chocolate mess. “It was supposed to be red.”

  “Purple looks good.” Everything looks good on Janina.

  “You want me to do it to your hair?” she asks. “I could use the practice.”

  “Maybe. Do you think it would look okay on me?” Color in my hair feels a bit too much like I’m trying to draw attention to myself, which I am not. Maybe she should make me go gray so everyone thinks I’m a little old lady and no one trips over themselves looking after me.

  Janina and I sit down on a bench, waiting out the final moments before the first bell rings. She plays with strands of my hair, muttering colors and numbers and formulas. I bask in the sensation of someone touching my hair. I love the feeling. Even when I was a kid and the school nurse had to do a lice check because two of my siblings had the bugs (I escaped bug-free, thank you very much), I recall the tingling it caused all over my body. Then a kid walked into the nurse’s office and puked four feet away from me, and that basically killed the moment.

  “I’m going to apologize to that guy today,” I mumble dreamily with closed eyes.

  “From gym class?”

  “And film,” I note.

  “Do you really have anything to apologize for? Aside from using your telekinesis to make him trip.”

  “Shut up! We still don’t know that that didn’t happen.”

  “Uh, yeah we do. Because we’re not in a Stephen King novel.”

  “Feels like it sometimes, though, doesn’t it?” I say, as I watch two freshman guys ogle Janina as she plays with my hair. She drops the strands and gives them the finger.

  The bell rings, and we go our separate ways. I spend the next two periods having fake conversations in my head.

  Me: I’m sorry I made you trip. It’s not easy being this beautiful.

  Him: I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Broken bones would be worth it.

  [Mood lighting and romantic music fill the gym. Making out ensues.]

  I let a snicker slip from my mouth and have to cover it with a fake cough. I hope no one notices I’m blushing.

  By the time I get to film class, I’m a wreck of nerves and clammy palms. The second I sit down, I know I need to use the bathroom or I will be shifting uncomfortably in my seat for the next forty minutes. Timed perfectly, in walks the boy. “Dmitri!” calls Ethan, a guy I know and dislike because of his constant mumbling class commentary, and I realize he’s talking to the guy who sits next to me. Dmitri. I didn’t hear that correctly when he first spoke to me. Or maybe I was trying too hard not to listen. I actually thought he might have said “RiRi.” I’m glad he said “Dmitri.” It’s a cool name.

  The bell rings, and Mr. Tannis is talking before Dmitri gets to his seat. Turns out we have a pop quiz, and I have to pee really bad. This is not a pleasant combination. Plus, I can’t very well apologize
to Dmitri if we’re taking a quiz because then Mr. Tannis will think I’m cheating. I painfully make my way through the basic questions about North by Northwest, strutting my film prowess a little bit just so Tannis knows who he’s dealing with. I scribble essay answers at breakneck speed, leaving Tannis to decipher my illegible answers because the content of my bladder is about to make its way onto the floor.

  Dmitri and I noticeably finish at the exact same time, evident by how he follows me up to Mr. Tannis’s desk to turn in his paper. We make eye contact, and I want to talk to him, to apologize and smile, but if I don’t get to the ladies’ room this second I’ll be apologizing for ruining his shoes. “Can I go to the bathroom?” I blurt out to Mr. Tannis, just as Dmitri offers me the cutest smile. Mr. Tannis nods, and I dash out of the classroom and down the hall.

  Smooth moves, Hoffman. I’m sure Dmitri thinks you’re a complete and total toolbox at this point.

  Dmitri

  I watch Eliana leave the classroom, turn to Mr. Tannis, and say, “Oh, yeah, I have to go, too.” Like I’d forgotten and seeing someone else go to the bathroom reminds me. He cocks an eyebrow and kind of smirks as he hands me a hall pass.

  My palms start to sweat as I walk down the hall. Eliana has enough of a head start that I can’t see her.

  I was able to corner her friend Janina last period, and I’m replaying that conversation in my head now. I went right up to her—damn, she really is tall, and her chest really is … also tall—and stuck out my hand.

  “Hi, I’m Dmitri.” For some reason her eyes went wide like something was wrong. Instinctively I checked my fly, but it was zipped. Over her shoulder—okay, actually, around her shoulder—Reggie was just taking her seat. She looked at me and used two cupped hands to make the universal sign for boobs. All the blood in my body must have rushed to my cheeks because I felt like I had a fever.

  After a beat that was way too long, Janina took my hand and shook it. The girl has got a grip. “I’m Janina,” she said.