Nice Recovery

by Susan Juby

  That is why the morning of the first day of grade seven, for the first time in my life, I agonized over what to wear. In previous years, Giselle’s mom had sewn Giselle and me matching dresses. They were usually flowered and ruffled and made long-legged, long-haired Giselle look like a cross between an angel and an advertisement for laundry detergent. I looked more like a young boy experimenting with his sister’s clothes. This year I was going to strike out on my own, fashion-wise. But what to wear? I was too old for the orange jumpsuit with the pictures of cats and interesting burn holes from stray cigarette ashes. Maybe I could still fit into my suspender pants? No luck. I tried on and discarded everything in my closet. There must have been three entire outfits lying on the bed when I decided on jeans and a white turtleneck. Surely no one could be offended by jeans. Giselle and her sisters were getting a ride with their mom that first day, so I caught the bus, turning over my agenda in my mind.

  The first thing I had to do was to get some more friends. There was safety in numbers. What I needed was one of those peer groups I was always hearing about. Giselle would, as always, slide effortlessly into the nice girl category. I needed my own group.

  On that first day at middle school we were all in the same boat. Everyone was looking for somewhere to fit. But everyone also seemed to know how to meet people, what to say to them, where to stand, and what to do with their hands and face. I didn’t have a clue. So the moment I entered Chandler Park Middle School, I began to study my classmates, who came from elementary schools all over town, as though they were exotic fauna in a zoo. It took me less than a day to figure out who was cool and who wasn’t. The ability to detect such information seems to be encoded in the DNA of the average thirteen-year-old, even one as socially tone-deaf as I.

  The popular kids were too far out of reach. I might be new to most of them, but they terrified me with their good looks, enthusiastic, positive behaviour, and normal, happy families who I suspected did healthy activities such as skiing and hiking together.

  Next I assessed the jocks. I was reasonably athletic. A good horseback rider and a fast runner, especially when someone was after me. But there was a lot of overlap between the popular people and the jocks. Plus, the jocks had special jock clothes and shoes and I couldn’t see going to all the trouble of finding those.

  Giselle and the other nice girls were, well, nice enough. But they didn’t seem like a natural fit either.

  That’s when I noticed the wild ones, the baby delinquents. They were the girls who’d already discovered makeup, most notably black eyeliner, and could wield a curling iron like a Jedi handles a light sabre to produce perfectly feathered hair. They were the boys trying on grade-seven smirks and oversized lumber jackets. The wild ones left school property at recess and lunch. They walked together in small dark knots toward an alley that bordered the playing field. Rumour had it they spent their time in that alley smoking cigarettes and even doing some other stuff. They talked in class, slept in class, and sometimes even got kicked out of class. Some were good-looking and some weren’t, which meant that they had flexible standards (a real bonus, to my mind). By the end of the day, I’d decided that these were my people, or at least they could be if I played my cards right.

  2

  Just Add Alcohol

  THE KEY to fitting into my intended new peer group was learning to look the part. To achieve this goal, I went to the local drugstore and purchased a stick of black eyeliner and a compact containing baby- and midnight-blue eye shadow. I knew better than to put the makeup on at home. My mother didn’t wear cosmetics and didn’t approve of young people who did. When I arrived at school the next morning, I headed straight for the washroom. There, my hand shaking, I applied my new liner. I drew a thick, unsteady line over my top eyelashes and coloured in a thin strip of flesh between my lower lashes and my eyeball. Then I added a generous amount of blue eye shadow: baby-blue on the lower lid and midnight in the crease, baby-blue to the brow. The effect was startling and immediate. My eyes nearly disappeared!

  When I walked down the hallway with my new eye-look, people who’d never noticed me before stared. Giselle dropped her lunch bag but quickly recovered and told me it looked very nice. A few days later people stared even harder because one of my tear ducts got blocked and I developed an eye infection that caused that eye to weep uncontrollably. Still, I felt I was putting out the right signals.

  It took a week or two for people to settle into their groups. A select few kids from my elementary school turned effortlessly popular. A few went jock. I was still waiting to be claimed.

  I nearly passed out with relief when a girl named Darcy walked up to me at the bus stop as I waited there at the end of the second week. I knew who she was. She lived a few blocks from our house and had also gone to Lake Kathlyn Elementary, though she’d never paid any attention to me other than to laugh along with everyone else when people took bets on whether I was a boy or a girl. She’d joined the wild ones as soon as she hit Chandler Park.

  “Hey,” she said.

  I was nervous and my eye infection hurt, but I was thrilled that she was talking to me.

  “Want to come downtown?” she asked.

  Would I! My god. This was it! My big chance!

  I nodded and tried not to let on how excited I was. Social revolutionaries always play it cool.

  During my first hour with Darcy, I saw more crimes committed than in my previous twelve years combined. Darcy had three key skills that I saw as essential to my personal revolution. She (a) knew her way around the arcade, (b) knew all the other wild kids, and (c) could shoplift up to three pairs of pants at a time.

  I didn’t realize what she had been doing in the clothing store we’d stopped at until we got to the arcade and went to the bathroom to attend to our eyeliner. She stood in front of the sink and unbuttoned pair after pair of jeans.

  “Why,” I asked, “did you wear so many pants to school?”

  “I didn’t wear them, you idiot,” she said. “I lifted them. I can sell you a pair if you want. Give you a good deal.”

  I nodded uncertainly and immediately started planning how I’d explain new pants to my mother.

  “Want a cigarette?” she asked.

  Would I! I’d been waiting for the cigarettes to come out.

  Obviously I’d picked exactly the right person to help me transform my life. Robert Johnson couldn’t have had more luck with the devil. Moments later I was smoking my first cigarette.

  After we finished smoking, Darcy led the way out of the bathroom. In the old arcade loitered most of the worst-behaved boys from middle school and even high school. A few of them were playing foosball with the kind of intensity varsity athletes bring to championship games. I began to sweat.

  “Let’s go talk to some guys,” said Darcy, moving fearlessly toward them, as though approaching boys was the most natural thing in the world.

  As we got closer, the boys looked at us, their dark eyes promising and threatening.

  “Hey,” said Darcy.

  “Who’s your friend?” asked a boy with spidery eyelashes and curly hair. I could see the top of a package of cigarettes poking out of his lumberjack shirt. The day before I’d seen him get kicked out of class for fooling around. He was extremely fine.

  “Introduce yourself,” Darcy instructed.

  I smiled weakly but couldn’t seem to make any words come out.

  “Can’t she talk?” asked the boy.

  “Who knows?” said Darcy.

  As quickly as it had appeared, the flicker of interest left the boy’s eyes and I was once again left standing outside the circle of cool.

  I left the arcade alone and walked over to my mom’s office, quietly devastated that I’d blown my first real social opportunity. The next time, I vowed, I’d do better.

  WHEN I WENT BACK to school the next day, I brought along some allowance money that I’d saved up for emergencies. I approached Darcy as she and her friends were leaving the school grounds to smoke thei
r lunch.

  “I brought money,” I told her.

  She stared.

  “For the pants.”

  Suddenly she laughed. “Right on.”

  Ten minutes later I was wearing my new two-sizes-too-small jeans and I had an invitation to hang out with Darcy on Friday night. As I stiff-legged my way from class to class that afternoon, a few of the other wild girls nodded at me. I felt like a jewel thief who’d cracked a not very impregnable safe. I was in.

  Now I just had to get over my fear of strange boys. My extreme shyness around boys was odd because I was able to speak to my brothers and even yell at them just fine. I suspect my mom instilled the fear in me as part of her campaign to keep me from getting pregnant. She wasn’t a mentally ill fundamentalist, like Carrie’s mom. She was more like a severely disillusioned sex-ed counsellor. She’d worked for years handing out social assistance to women who’d made the mistake of getting pregnant out of wedlock. Women who, in some cases, had made the same mistake five or six times with five or six different men.

  Somehow my mother managed to convey to me the impression that pregnancy lurked around every corner, like an airborne infection. In defence of my mother, she never actually said this out loud. But I knew that’s what she meant when she warned me to “be careful” who I hung out with.

  She was also a fanatic on the subject of birth control. Any time the subject of boys and dating came up, she got terrifyingly open. She encouraged me to tell her if I was about to have sex so she could get me some birth control. But she didn’t say it in the calming way of sex education videos or in the hopeful way she used when encouraging my straight brothers to tell her if they thought they were gay. (She was always lobbying for one of them to go gay. As much as a pregnant daughter was a disaster in her mind, a gay son would have been a source of endless pride, probably because of the decreased risk of pregnancy associated with same-sex unions.) Her birth-control openness was tinged with depression and hopelessness. “For god’s sake, before you do anything, just come to me and we’ll get you some protection,” she’d say. “Anything is better than that you get pregnant and end up like one of my clients.” Her handling of the subject was perhaps the most effective form of birth control ever invented.

  There was one other thing that caused me to be abnormally shy around boys—my reading material. Not the wholesome kind that gave me all the wrong ideas about people’s essential niceness, but the other kind. When I was nine or ten, I discovered the stash of books my mom kept locked in her sewing room. One day when she was attempting to sew me a costume for a skating pageant, a traumatic process for both of us, she had to leave the room to answer the phone. I started snooping around her private library. That’s when I found a copy of Henry Miller’s Sexus. I snuck the book out of the sewing room and retreated to my room to read it.

  What I learned from Henry Miller is that boys are sick. Really, really sick. They don’t like women much and are interested in only one thing, which, as far as I could tell from my reading, was doing it doggy style, preferably while swearing at and secretly hating their sex partner. I read the dirty bits of Sexus over and over, letting the horror of Miller’s attitudes toward women and sex seep into my subconscious. By the time I met the wild ones, I was too afraid of boys and their disgusting, pregnancy-inducing tendencies to even say hello. This would have been fine if the plan was to join a convent, but my social revolution involved the goal of turning into a boyfriend-having party girl par excellence. I had to figure out how to get over my shyness.

  DARCY CELEBRATED the occasion of our first night out together by stealing us matching green-and-white-striped shirts, tight enough to show off our total lack of assets. We walked the mile or so into town along Highway 16 in our so-tight-they-hurt jeans. I’d gone over to Darcy’s place, a tidy double-wide mobile home on a one-acre lot near the lake, to get ready. She’d helped me put on some purple eye shadow for a change of pace, and we both wore watermelon-flavoured Bonne Bell lip gloss and circles of pink rouge on our cheeks. The walk was long and the jeans were tight, but I was excited in a way I’d never been before. Every car that passed was a potential adventure. What if there was a rock star in one of them? Like Billy Idol, for instance, or Nick Rhodes. What if the lost rock star picked us up and gave us a ride and realized that we were extremely cool and took us on tour with him? In my mind, that was completely likely.

  My mother had no idea where I was or what I was doing. She thought I was over at Darcy’s simply hanging out. No one could have predicted this was the first of many, many walks to town for me.

  As Darcy and I walked, slowly, due to the fit of our jeans, we talked about boys. Our blond hair, elaborately feathered, didn’t move in the wind, thanks to generous applications of Aqua Net Extra Hold spray.

  “I like John Emerson,” said Darcy. “He’s got nice eyes.”

  I nodded.

  “Ken Vanderveen is hot, too,” said Darcy.

  I nodded again.

  I didn’t know any of the boys well enough to have strong opinions about them. In truth, my fear of getting pregnant or having to do disgusting sexual things meant I avoided even eye contact. But I felt I had to add something or she might get suspicious that I wasn’t mature.

  “I like Danno,” I told her.

  “Who?”

  “You know. Danno. From Hawaii Five-O.”

  Darcy stared like I’d just confessed that I had a crush on a Cabbage Patch doll or Mr. Dress-up.

  “He has blond hair and brown eyes. That’s the best combination,” I explained, lamely.

  A semi-trailer whooshed past, and I felt all my hair lift in one piece in the wake that followed. I breathed deeply of exhaust and waited for Darcy to say something.

  “I meant someone real,” said Darcy.

  “Oh.”

  In my mind, Danno was real. I mean, I knew I couldn’t date him because he was in his thirties and lived in Hawaii and was busy booking criminals, but he was real enough for me. Who knew when I might get over to Hawaii? If I did, I planned to bring a condom. Just in case.

  When we finally reached Main Street, we only made it a block or so before we got picked up by a boy driving a small blue truck. He must have been from the high school. I’d never seen him before.

  He leaned over and spoke through his open driver’s side window.

  “Hey, Darcy,” he said. “There’s a party at the gravel pit tonight. Want to check it out?”

  “Right on,” said Darcy.

  We got into the little truck, which wheezed its way up Main Street and then back down, past the brick storefronts that housed the Post Office and most of the retail outlets in town. At the end of the street we headed down the highway toward the river. Black Sabbath rattled tinnily out of the cheap stereo and made the truck’s windows vibrate. The town looked completely different from the passenger seat of a strange boy’s truck. Beside me sat my new friend who stole pants. My personal revolution had moved into overdrive, I thought with satisfaction.

  At the gravel pit there were only a few dirt bikes parked to the side of a small, nearly invisible fire flickering in the bright early evening. A group of high school boys stood around the flame. One of them caught my eye. He had curly blond hair and brown eyes. He looked like a younger version of Danno.

  “Do you know those guys?” Darcy asked our driver as we sat in the parked truck.

  “Nah,” he said. “Not really.”

  No one spoke for a long minute. The driver pulled a plastic mickey of rum from somewhere deep inside his pants.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  “Right on,” said Darcy.

  The boy handed her the bottle, and she took a deep swallow, gasped once, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and handed it back. He wiggled the mickey in front of me like it was herring and I was a starving halibut.

  “Want some?”

  I looked at the boys outside and this boy inside. I grabbed the bottle and drank. It burned going down and settled uneasily in my sto
mach like a sick snake. I drank again.

  We passed the bottle between us until it was gone. I’ve always wondered how other people experience alcohol, how their bodies interact with it, and how they feel after a few drinks. I’ll tell you how I felt. Like I’d just been cast in the next John Hughes movie as the quirky but adorable female lead, who had coincidentally just been accepted to Harvard on a full scholarship and had recently won a gold medal in a popular sport. I felt lucky. Invincible. Powerful. A few drinks drowned all the fear and anxiety that rang constantly in my ears and blurred my vision. A few drinks turned me so outlandishly confident, exuberant, even, that I had to share the excellence that was me. The little truck could not contain me.

  This explains why moments after we finished the bottle I was striding across the gravel pit toward the group of boys, Darcy running after me in the peculiar gait caused by the very tight pants.

  “You!” I barked at the boy with the curly hair as I marched up to him. “You look like Danno!”

  I stared at him, trying to decide whether to hug him, kiss him, or put him in a headlock.

  He grinned nervously at his friends.

  “Danno’s hot,” I told him. “He can book me anytime. And so can you.” Then I winked, using my non-infected eye.

  The rest of the boys standing around in the circle laughed— approvingly, it seemed to me.

  “You ever hear of ZZ Top?” I demanded.

  The blond boy shrugged and gave a hesitant nod.

  “You know that song, ‘Sharp Dressed Man’? Well, that’s you.”

  The blond boy blushed and looked down at his shirt. He had on a mud-splattered dirt-biking jersey.

  I began to sing, putting a lot of feeling into it. I’d gotten out the first couple of lines and was beginning to do the ZZ Top shuffle when Darcy started dragging me away.

  I was still singing as Darcy pushed me back into the truck.

  “Go,” she told the driver. “Go!”

  As we pulled out, I leaned over Darcy and out the window to belt out a few lines from “Legs,” my other favourite ZZ Top song. The last I saw of them, the boys in the gravel pit were doubled over with laughter.