Frenemy of the People

by Nora Olsen

  “I can picture that,” said Lexie. “But this football field only has two ends, two genders. The gender binary isn’t real. Did you learn about that on the Internet yet?”

  “Maybe it’s actually a series of wraparound, intersecting football fields,” I suggested. “To accommodate many genders and many combinations.”

  “That’s a remarkable image,” Lexie said.

  It was good she was saying that, right? But then again, maybe it meant she thought I was an idiot and she hadn’t expected me to come up with something remarkable. If smart people are so smart, then why don’t they realize they’re not the only ones who are smart?

  We were driving on Route 22, past the old abandoned Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center. It was a long row of red-brick buildings with mesh over the windows and a neglected and decaying air.

  “That place gives me the creeps,” Lexie said.

  “Me too,” I said. “Think of all the bad things that went on in there. If any place is haunted, it’s got to be that one.”

  “Yeah, they would lock you up for anything back in the day,” Lexie said. “People got institutionalized for being gay.”

  “People with Down syndrome got institutionalized at birth,” I said. “They were locked up on some back ward and treated like garbage and they usually didn’t live too long.” I shivered, and Lexie turned the heat up in her car.

  On that cheerful note, we pulled into the parking lot of the Dover Plains Library. It was a bright, contemporary building as different from the abandoned state hospital as a building could be.

  “Thanks for driving me,” I said. I didn’t know why I had said I had to go to the library. Now my mom or dad would have to drive all the way here to pick me up, and they would be cross. I would have to imply I was doing a school project or something, and I hated lying.

  Lexie leaned across the car and hugged me. “Good luck with the mortgage stuff. Let me know what I can do.”

  Surely Lexie could feel the electricity in the car between us. “See you at school,” I said.

  My heart was pounding like a jackhammer as I walked into the library. Riding in a friend’s car should not cause these heart-attack symptoms.

  I slumped into a chair to think. The reason I was so panicked about being attracted to Lexie was I didn’t understand why I liked her. In fact, I didn’t understand her at all. With Slobberin’ Robert, I started going out with him just because I thought he was really cute, the way his hair fell down across his dark brown eyes and all that. Then we ended up being a terrible match. I never did figure out why he was so moody and uncommunicative. That was a road I never wanted to go down again. Just liking someone was not enough. There were certain things about Lexie I couldn’t get over, like her misspelled tattoo and her harsh attitude. I needed to learn more about Lexie, to see if we were compatible. I wished there was a book about Lexie in the library. What was she all about? I had heard Lexie say she was a radical. That was a polite word for Communist, I was pretty sure.

  I walked over to the help desk. “Hi! I want to read a book by a Communist,” I told the bearded librarian.

  “Any Communist in particular?” he asked.

  “Whoever is the most famous Communist,” I told him.

  “The most famous Communist? I guess that would probably be Lenin,” said the librarian.

  “I’ll take something by him,” I said. I had totally heard of him, so he was definitely famous.

  He pecked at his keyboard. “The only work by Lenin we have in this branch is What Is To Be Done?”

  “Awesome,” I said. I liked that name. It would tell me what to do.

  The librarian led me through the stacks and pulled out a book covered in brown library binding. “Here it is!”

  I looked at the book doubtfully. It looked dense and boring. It even seemed to give off a musty smell.

  “I assume this is for a school project,” he said.

  “Oh no,” I assured him. “My school wouldn’t do any kind of crazy project like that. It’s because there’s a girl I’m interested in, and she’s a Communist. I think.”

  “Ah, okay,” said the librarian. “In that case, let me recommend another book for you.”

  He didn’t even have to look this one up, he just led me straight over to a different area of the stacks and handed me another book. It was called Teens: Being Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transgender—Friendship, Dating, and Relationships.

  “You can read it here if you don’t want to bring it home,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. I could see he was all excited about making a positive impact on a real Teen Who Was Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transgender. I should tell more people that I liked girls if it was going to make them so smiley.

  “Anything else you need?” he asked hopefully. I saw now he was actually a young guy. His Abraham Lincoln beard had thrown me off. He must be some kind of hipster.

  “I guess. My parents are going to pick me up here, and I need a book to make it look like I was getting something for school. Not something queer or by a Communist.”

  Without a word he led me to the school assignments shelf and selected a copy of The Scarlet Letter.

  “Thanks so much,” I said, taking my stack of books over to the counter to check them out. The library was great. They really waited on you hand and foot.

  I texted my dad and asked him if he could pick me up. While I was waiting, I surfed the Internet on a library computer. I found a list of Marxist / Leninist terminology that would surely help me understand what went on in Lexie’s mind. Some of the phrases sounded really entertaining, like lumpenproletariat, enemy of the people, foco revolutionary theory, and capitalist roader.

  My dad finally showed up, looking grim and tired, with lines etched into his face I’d never seen before. I had left The Scarlet Letter on top, but he looked at all the books I had and blanched.

  “Pum’kin, just because we’re having these troubles with the house, I don’t want your life to get all screwed up,” he said hoarsely.

  “Nobody’s life is screwed up,” I told him.

  We drove home in silence.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lexie

  After I spent forty minutes on Clarissa’s Facebook page, looking at every single photo, I decided it was officially time to give up my campaign to forget Clarissa. I deleted my Either You Don’t Love Me or I Don’t Love You Spotify playlist and created a new I Don’t Want To Get Over You playlist. Ovid had let me down, but I didn’t care. I really liked Clarissa. She made me want to take care of her and protect her from all harm. The crap her family was going through with their house was so messed up. I wanted to get my personal revenge on the heartless banks and processors who were ripping off the Kirchendorfers. I had known banks created the subprime mortgage crisis and then received billions in bailouts while homeowners had to default. But it was one thing to read about it in The Occupied Wall Street Journal, and another to know someone it was happening to.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. It was nine thirty and my dad wasn’t home from work yet. I realized there was truly nothing to stop me from acting on my desire for revenge. I remembered a poem that had been in my English book last year called “Factory Windows Are Always Broken” that went like this:

  Factory windows are always broken.

  Other windows are let alone.

  No one throws through the chapel-window

  The bitter, snarling, derisive stone.

  The idea bloomed in my mind like a flower. I had thought about it a lot, but never had the nerve. I dressed in black jeans and a baggy black Rise Against hoodie, inside out so the writing and patches were hidden. I tied a kerchief around my neck cowgirl style. I looked for gloves too, but I couldn’t find any, so I put on winter mittens. I went into the garden where I had a pile of rocks I had been collecting to create a butterfly garden. The idea was to have an arrangement of nectar-providing plants continuously in bloom, with flat rocks for the butterflies to rest
on so they could bask in the sun. So far I hadn’t gotten any further with this project than collecting stones and planting some milkweed. I picked a nice big rock, but not so big I couldn’t throw it.

  I wanted to write a note, but I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. People don’t throw rocks through your window because they love you, so I thought my message would be reasonably clear. Then I took off my mittens so I could Google the closest MegaBank. Last thing I did was mix some dirt from the garden in a pot with water and splash the mud over my car’s plates to obscure the numbers.

  It was a seven-minute drive. I parked in the mini-mall next to the plaza where the MegaBank was. It felt weird to wear mittens in late September when the air was still warm. I walked over the planter that divided the two parking lots from each other, carrying my rock. There wasn’t a single car in the lot, but I pulled the bandanna up over my mouth and nose in case there were security cameras. It was hard to do with mittens on and I started to feel panicked, like I couldn’t breathe properly through the bandanna.

  When I heaved the rock, MegaBank’s plate glass window exploded. There was something fundamentally satisfying about it, but the sound of breaking glass was so loud, I got scared. I ran like a rabbit back to my car. I could see that the remaining glass in the window was cracked into a jagged spiderweb. I couldn’t believe I had actually done it, as if I had thought something would happen between the part where I threw the rock and the part where it hit the window. I had a kind of feeling of unreality, like I had entered a new life.

  It was hard not to speed on my way home. I alternated between triumph and paranoia. Surely the police would knock on my door any minute? I knew what I had done was probably not going to make a difference to MegaBank, but it was better to do something, anything, than to sit around doing sweet nothing.

  My dad still wasn’t home. I washed my license plate, changed into my jammies, and put away all my crime clothes. My dad came home when I was making myself a bedtime cocoa, and I made one for him too, except he put Baileys in his. I took mine to my bedroom, but it took me a couple hours to calm down enough to fall asleep.

  My cell phone woke me up a few hours later. My ringtone was Dillinger Four’s “New Punk Fashions For The Spring Formal.” Which is kind of hard to sleep through. I was having a weird dream about an alien being who had taken over my neighborhood and was forcing people to meld with it. Then a taxi went by and I got into it, and I thought I was going to escape. The ringtone stopped. Gone to voice mail. I slipped back into the dream. Now the taxi driver was asking me to interface with the alien mind. This dream was awful. I was grateful when Dillinger Four started up again, and I groped for the phone.

  Even with the glowing screen it was hard to find the talk button. “Hello?” I said in a husky voice full of sleep.

  “It’s Clarissa,” the voice said.

  “Clarissa?” I said. I didn’t think we had that kind of relationship, where she would call in the middle of the night. I stupidly wondered if it was about me throwing a rock through the bank window.

  “Yeah, you know, the bisexual girl whose house is being foreclosed on?”

  “I know who you are,” I said. I was starting to wake up. “What time is it?”

  “It’s three thirty a.m.,” Clarissa said. “The point is, something bad happened. I had to tell you.”

  “Bad?” Now I was totally awake. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Clarissa said. “It didn’t happen to me. It happened to Slobberin’ Robert.”

  I had an uneasy feeling about this. As a general rule I didn’t really care what happened to Slobberin’ Robert. So this must be something quite bad.

  “He’s not dead,” Clarissa reassured me. “But he was in a terrible car accident. You know Dead Man’s Curve on Route 22 as you’re entering Millerton from the south?”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was a sharp curve right next to a solid wall of rock. The wall was painted in yellow-and-black checkers. You were supposed to slow down to fifteen miles an hour, but no one ever did. Fifteen miles an hour is really slow.

  “He crashed straight into it, going full speed. What the hell was he was doing out there at that hour? There’s not much going on in Millerton at two a.m. on a Wednesday night. It was just him in the car. They took him to Sharon Hospital in Connecticut because it was the closest. Anyway, what I heard is he’s in a coma.”

  “Oh no, that’s awful,” I said. “Poor Slob—I mean, poor Robert.” It seemed wrong to call him Slobberin’ Robert when he was in a coma. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Clarissa said. “One of his legs is totally shattered, like it’s just in bits on the inside. They had to pry him out of the wreck with the Jaws of Life. It was Jenna who told me. Her dad is a doctor there, so he called her. Then she called me because she knew I’d want to know. Because I used to go out with him and everything.”

  My unspoken question hung in the air. And why exactly are you calling me?

  “And I’m calling you, oh, I guess for two reasons. I just needed to tell someone. Talk to someone. I think Jenna called me to be nice. But I’m not sure, to be honest. I wanted to talk to someone who…who…who cares about…Anyway.”

  “I do care about you,” I said. Was this conversation real or part of my alien dream?

  “And the second reason is I think you kind of connected with Slobberin’ Robert.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “We only ever talked about—”

  “Movies and sometimes TV, I know. You told me.”

  “He has lots of friends, the soccer team, the God squad, all those loadies who get high in the parking lot. I’m not even really his friend,” I said. I didn’t want to be his friend because then this would somehow be my fault. I was already starting to feel guilty about the conversation we’d had where he casually told me he liked to drink and drive.

  “But I think you really get him,” Clarissa said. “He seemed very himself with you, very comfortable. Slobberin’ Robert, he’s a funny guy, he is. It’s hard for him to relate to people, I think. Usually he’s putting on some kind of act. He thinks everyone has an agenda. You don’t have an agenda. Unless it’s a Marxist agenda.”

  “I don’t have a Marxist agenda,” I said. “This is weird. I feel like we’re talking about him like he’s dead.”

  “He never wore a seat belt,” Clarissa said. “Same as your ex, Ramone. Listen, I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “It’s totally fine,” I said. I wanted to tell her I’d be happy to hear from her day and night, about anything, but obviously I couldn’t say that.

  “But is this supposed to be like a telephone chain or something?” I asked. “Everyone is going to find out tomorrow.”

  “No, no,” Clarissa said. “I just wanted to tell you. I’ll see you at school.”

  “Okay. I’m really sorry. I hope he’ll be all right. Try to get some sleep, Clarissa.”

  I lay awake, thinking about Slobberin’ Robert. Whoever his real friends were, the kids who cared about him the most, they were probably sleeping peacefully, not knowing that someone they loved was in a coma. Maybe he had aunts and uncles who had known him his whole life, and they didn’t even know yet. But somehow I knew. I was glad those people got to get more sleep, have some more hours before their lives were changed. I felt some kind of weird responsibility, though, as if I was holding a vigil by being awake and knowing about it. It was quite upsetting, but I didn’t think I really had the right to be upset. It was odd, too, that I had gone out to vandalize MegaBank the same night as Slobberin’ Robert got into a smashup.

  I was sure he had been drunk, or high, or both. Slobberin’ Robert must be an unhappy, seriously screwed-up person. Yet it seemed like Clarissa was saying the athlete and the Christian and the druggie were all an act. And the real him liked to talk about screen trivia. It didn’t seem like much of a core for a person to have.

  How could you ever really understand another person? Two weeks a
go I had hated Clarissa Kirchendorfer. Now she seemed like the brightest star in the galaxy. How was it possible to be so wrong about someone? Maybe if there were some kind of translating device, where you could learn people’s inner thoughts, it would be possible to feel sympathy and understanding for anyone.

  Vandalizing the MegaBank branch seemed like a dream. I couldn’t believe it had just been a few hours ago.

  *

  School that day was awful. And not because I hadn’t gotten much sleep. The first thing was an assembly where the principal announced Slobberin’ Robert’s accident to the whole school.

  “This is a terrible tragedy,” the principal said dolefully. “Yet we can be hopeful Robert will recover. This should be an object lesson, a moral parable even, to you, not to drive under the influence.”

  He couldn’t seem to get his tone quite right. Part of me wanted to be mad Slobberin’ Robert’s good name was being besmirched—nobody mentioned any proof he had been drunk or high. But in my heart I was pretty certain he had been.

  A few girls around me started crying. At first I was kind of touched. But then it started to seem like there was something insincere about the flood of tears. Like people were crying for effect. People seemed to be competing about who was the most upset about Slobberin’ Robert. Suddenly everyone was his best friend, and he was the most popular boy in school.

  Some of the teachers gave over part of their classes to letting students share their emotions about Slobberin’ Robert’s accident. I didn’t want to share my emotions; I just wanted to feel them quietly by myself. But my classmates had a lot to say. They seemed to be describing a boy I had never met, a selfless, caring individual whose perfect life had been spoiled by tragedy. A few people were even talking about how Slobberin’ Robert had supported Desi Kirchendorfer’s homecoming campaign. Did you hear how he wanted to be homecoming king with one of the special-ed girls? That is just so amazing.