“Everything,” Luke said at the same time I said, “They do a great roast chicken.”
Whitney wrinkled her nose. “I just can’t ever bring myself to order chicken at a restaurant. And all that arsenic.” Stay-at-home mom who was also a fan of The Dr. Oz Show. My favorite kind!
“Arsenic?” I held my hand to my breast, the concern on my face an indication for her to go on. At Nell’s recommendation, I’d read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. My favorite strategy is to feign inferiority and encourage my enemy’s arrogance.
“Yes!” Whitney seemed very alarmed I didn’t appear to have heard this before. “Farmers feed it to the chickens.” She pursed her lips, disgusted. “It makes them grow faster.”
“That’s horrible,” I gasped. I’d read that same study—the actual study, not the scaremongering translation made viral by the Today show. This place wasn’t serving fucking frozen Perdue chicken breasts. “Well, I will definitely not order the roast chicken then.”
“I’m terrible!” Whitney laughed. “We’ve just met and I’ve already ruined your dinner.” She smacked her forehead with her palm. “I need to stop talking. But when you’re around a one-year-old all day, you just chatter chatter the moment you have some adult company.”
“I’m sure your kids love having you around.” I smiled, like I couldn’t wait for the day that would be me. No way she got that body by any fewer than three hours a day in the gym. No way she was going at this alone. But God help you if you asked about the Dominican nanny. They can make snide little digs about The Women’s Magazine all they want, but rearing children is real work, and you’d better duck if they so much as suspect that you’re dismissing all their real work.
“I’m so lucky I get to be with them every day.” Whitney’s lips were glossy with wine. She rubbed them together and put her chin in her hand. “Did your mother work?”
“She didn’t.” But she should have, Whitney. She should have let go of her little kept-housewife fantasy and contributed to our household. I can’t say it would have made her happier, but we didn’t have the luxury of considering happiness. We were broke, Mom signing up for new credit cards every other month to finance her Bloomingdale’s excursions, while the shoddy Sheetrock walls of our dramatic McMansion went rank with mildew we couldn’t “afford” to have removed. But you’re right, Whitney, she was so lucky she got to be with me every day.
“Mine either,” Whitney said. “It makes such a difference.”
I kept smiling. Like in the last push of a race, if you stop and walk now, you’ll never find your stride again. “Huge difference.”
Whitney tossed her hair gleefully. She loved me. Her shoulder brushed mine and her voice was low and flirty as she said, “Ani, you have to tell us. Are you doing that documentary?”
Luke draped one arm over the back of his chair and fiddled with his silverware. I watched the white slivers of light dance on the low ceiling.
“I’m not supposed to say.”
“Oh, that means you’re doing it.” Whitney swatted my arm. “That’s what they told Andrew to say too—right, Andrew?”
I have this recurring dream, where something bad has happened and I need to dial 911, but I’ve lost all control over my fingers. They keep slipping across the buttons (it’s always an old-fashioned landline I’m dialing from), and every time I realize, You’re having this dream again, but this time you’re going to outsmart it. Just take it slow, I think. You can’t mess this up if you take it slow. Find the nine. Push. The one. Push. The agony of needing some-thing so immediately but the ask has got to be patient. I needed to know immediately why Mr. Larson was doing the documentary. When? Where? What would he say? Would he talk about me? Would he defend me? “I had no idea you were doing it too,” I said. “What do they want from you? Just to weigh in as kind of an observer, or something?”
The arch in Mr. Larson’s lip deepened. “Now, Ani, you know I’m not supposed to say.”
Everyone laughed, and I had to force myself to join in. I opened my mouth to push some more, but Mr. Larson said, “We should get coffee or something and talk about it.”
“Yes!” Whitney chimed in, her excitement so genuine she disabled my own. Any woman who is that keen on her husband getting coffee with another woman, ten years younger to boot, has a rock-solid marriage.
“You should,” Luke added, and I wished he hadn’t said anything at all. Because his endorsement sounded so glaringly insincere following Whitney’s.
Whitney tripped on her way out the door. She caught herself and giggled that she didn’t get out much. That wine had gone straight to her head.
Mr. Larson had ordered an Uber after dessert, and a black SUV was waiting for them at the curb, ready to take them back to their sitcom-set home in Scarsdale. Whitney kissed me on the cheek and sung into the air, “So nice to have met you. Really, what a small world.” Andrew shook Luke’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder. Then Luke stepped away, opening a space for me to slip into and say good-bye. I stood up on my tippy-toes to press my cheek against Andrew’s and feign a kiss. He pressed his hands against my back, and when he felt the bare skin there, he pulled away as though I had electrocuted him.
We watched their car nose into traffic, and I ached for Luke to wrap his arms around me and hold me against his Turnbull & Asser shirt. If he’d done that, he would have felt that I was trembling.
Instead, he just said, “That was weird, huh?” and I smiled my agreement like I hadn’t just spun off my center and knew there was no going back now.
CHAPTER 6
* * *
The morning after Dean’s party I climbed into his Range Rover with Liam and two sophomores from the soccer team. Dean’s license was suspended (there was a fat stack of unpaid parking tickets in the glove compartment), but that didn’t stop him from whipping around town, tires squealing, DMX warning joggers to leap into the brush if they didn’t want to be mowed down on their evening run. Nausea boiled in my stomach when Liam got into the car and blatantly ignored the empty spot right next to me, choosing instead to sit in the front seat next to Dean. I’d tried to talk to him in the kitchen before we left to get breakfast and it hadn’t gone well.
“I don’t really know how I ended up in Dean’s room and I feel like I should say I’m sorry or something because I didn’t want to hook up with—”
“Finny”—Liam laughed at me, my nickname just one more thing of Dean’s he’d co-opted in his effort to assimilate—“come on. You know I don’t care you hooked up with Dean too.”
Dean called to him then, and he brushed by me, and I was glad for the moment alone to collect myself, the tears I forced back finding another channel in my throat, dissolving into a thin salty drip that left me feeling raw and burned in the torturous days that followed. When that finally cleared up, I was left with something much worse. Something that to this day seems to lie in wait, pouncing right at a moment that joy or confidence dares to dance. The memory that I had apologized to my own rapist, and he had laughed at me. You think you’re happy? You think you have anything to be proud of?—it always taunts—Ha! Remember this? That usually sets me right. Reminds me what a piece of shit I am.
When we arrived at Minella’s Diner, Liam also made the point of sitting next to Dean, and not me. For forty-five minutes I feebly laughed at everything the boys said and did, yes, those two pancakes that got stuck together sort of do look like balls—swallowing and swallowing to keep from vomiting into my short stack. It felt like hours before we paid, before it was safe for me to call my parents and tell them, perkily, that I’d grabbed breakfast with Olivia and Hilary in Wayne, and could they come pick me up? Then I sat on the curb between Minella’s and the Chili’s next door, my head cradled between my knees. I could smell something sour in the narrow gap there, and that’s when the paranoia really started to set in. Did I have AIDS? Was I going to get pregnant? I was racked with this feeling like I needed water, only I wasn’t thirsty, had drank an entire pitcher of water at the
diner trying to quench a thirst that wasn’t really physical. Years later, I still experience this same sensation. I’ll slam water, liters of it, my agitation swelling along with my bladder as relief isn’t found at the bottom of the Fiji bottle. I once asked a psychiatrist about it—I always volunteered for our monthly rape-scare story (“A man on the street offered to help me carry my groceries home and then he assaulted me!”), slipping in my own questions and concerns as though they were pertinent to the article, turning it into my own personal therapy session—and she pointed out that thirst is a basic, biological instinct. “If you feel thirsty when you’re not actually thirsty, it could indicate that an important need isn’t being met.”
Forty minutes passed before Mom’s car slowed in front of the Minella’s sign. I waited for her to circle the parking lot and settle to a stop next to me. When I finally opened the door, heard her Celine Dion CD whining and smelled her putrid Bath & Body Works vanilla lotion, I practically crumbled into the front seat. At least there was something comforting in this, her annoying choices in music and grooming, their safe familiarity.
“Is Olivia’s mother here?” Mom asked, and I actually looked at her and realized she was fully made up and ready to socialize.
“No.” I slammed the door shut.
Mom stuck out her lower lip. “How long ago did she leave?”
I put my seat belt on. “I don’t remember.”
“What do you mean you don’t—”
“Just drive!” The hot rage in my voice was as much a surprise to myself as it was to Mom. I covered my mouth with my hand, heaving one silent sob into it.
Mom wrenched the gearshift into reverse. “You’re grounded, TifAni.” She peeled out of the parking lot, her mouth set in that thin, hard line that always terrified me, that I would find myself mirroring in my fights with Luke, realizing I probably looked pretty scary too.
“Grounded?” I laughed sarcastically.
“I’m so sick of this shit attitude! You are so ungrateful. Do you even know how much this school is costing me?” She slapped the steering wheel with an open hand on the word “know.” I began to gag. Mom’s head snapped in my direction. “Have you been drinking?” She took a hard right and swerved into an empty parking lot, slamming the brakes so hard the seat belt stabbed me in the stomach and I finally vomited in my hand. “Not in the BMW!” Mom shrieked, leaning across me and pushing my door open and me along with it. I emptied the contents of my stomach right there in the parking lot of Staples. The beer, the whiskey, Dean’s salty semen—I couldn’t get it out fast enough.
By Monday morning, there was nothing in my stomach but acid, scalding my innards like the surprise whiskey in that late-night round of quarters. I’d been up since 3:00 A.M., when my own heartbeat, pounding like an angry parent’s fist on his teenager’s locked door, woke me. A small, pathetic part of me hoped that what I’d done would just be dismissed as run-of-the-mill party antics. Mark ate a mayonnaise sandwich and TifAni made the rounds with the soccer team! But even then, I wasn’t that naive.
It was subtle—the crowds didn’t part and no one pinned a scarlet letter on the lapel of my shirt. Olivia saw me and pretended she didn’t, and some older girls flew past in a giggling huddle, laughing loudly once they were a safe enough distance away. Yes, they’d been talking about me.
When I walked into homeroom, the Shark clutched the edge of her desk and swung her round bottom out of the seat. She caught my neck in her arms before I could sit down. Everyone in the classroom pretended not to hear, even managed to carry on their conversations, as she said, “Tif, are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay!” It felt like there was dried clay on my face when I smiled.
The Shark squeezed my shoulder. “If you need to talk, I’m here.”
“Okay.” I rolled my eyes at her.
Once I was at my desk, in my seat, dutifully jotting down everything the teacher said in my notebook, I was fine. It was the moment the bell rang, when everyone scattered like bedbugs from the light, that the panic stretched its arms and yawned big, rousing from its fitful sleep. Because then I was roaming the hallways, a wounded soldier on enemy territory, aware of the red light between my eyes, that I was injured and slow, could do nothing but keep moving and pray they’d miss.
Mr. Larson’s classroom was like finding the trenches. Arthur had been salty with me lately, but surely given these extenuating circumstances, he would have some compassion for me. He had to.
Arthur nodded at me as I sat down. A solemn nod, an “I’ll talk to you about what you’ve done in a moment” nod. This somehow made me more nervous than lunch, which was next period. I’d been sitting with the HOs regularly for the last few weeks, and I couldn’t decide which would be worse—showing my face in the cafeteria and claiming my chair at their table only to have them refuse me, or chickening out and going to the library, sealing my expulsion from their company when there was the off chance that if I could prove I had a pair of balls, they might forgive me. Welcome me back, even.
But if Arthur thought this was bad, then it was far, far worse than I originally thought.
When the bell shrieked, I gathered my things slowly. Arthur paused by my side, but before he could say anything, Mr. Larson did. “Tif? Can you stick around a moment?”
“I’ll talk to you later?” I asked Arthur.
He nodded again. “Come over after practice.” Arthur’s mom was the art teacher at the middle school, and together they lived in a ramshackle old Victorian catty-corner to the squash courts, where the headmistress used to reside in the fifties.
I nodded back, even though I knew I couldn’t. I didn’t have time to explain that I was grounded.
The English and Humanities wing settled into its late-morning nap as the students stampeded to the cafeteria for lunch. Mr. Larson leaned against the edge of his desk, crossing one leg over the other, the cuff of his khakis hitching up, revealing one tan, fuzzy ankle.
“TifAni,” he said. “I don’t want to make you upset, but I’ve been hearing some things this morning.”
I waited. I understood, intuitively, not to speak until I knew what he knew.
“I’m on your side here,” he promised. “If you’ve been hurt you need to let someone know. That person doesn’t have to be me, by any means. But someone. An adult.”
I rubbed my palms on the underside of the desk, feeling the relief blossom like a budding flower, sped up to reveal the petals unfurling, multicolored, on a Discovery Channel commercial. He didn’t want to call my parents. He didn’t want to involve the administration. He was giving me the best gift a teenager could ever ask for: autonomy.
I chose my words carefully. “Can I think about it?”
I heard the Spanish teacher, Señora Murtez, in the hallway. “Yes, diet! If they don’t have Dr Pepper then Pepsi!”
Mr. Larson waited until she slammed her door shut. “Have you seen the nurse today?”
“I don’t need to see the nurse,” I mumbled, too embarrassed to tell him about my plan. The R5 train barreled by a Planned Parenthood on my way to Bryn Mawr every day. I just had to get there after school and everything would be fine.
“Whatever you tell her will be confidential.” Mr. Larson jabbed his finger into his chest. “Whatever you tell me will be confidential.”
“I don’t have anything to tell you.” I strained to inject my words with attitude. With all the dark, tortured teenage angst that I actually had now.
Mr. Larson sighed. “TifAni, she can make sure you don’t get pregnant. Let her help you.”
It was like that time my dad came into my room and said he was doing laundry, reaching for a pile of dirty clothes in the corner. I was lying in bed, reading Jane, but when I saw what he was doing I shot upright. “Don’t!”
Too late, he was holding a pair of my underwear stained maroon with period blood. He froze like a bank robber holding a bag of bills and stuttered, “I’ll, uh, get your mother.” I don’t know what she was supposed t
o do. Dad never wanted a daughter, never really wanted kids I don’t think, but probably could have dealt with a boy. He married Mom five months after they met, a few weeks after she found out she was pregnant. “He was furious,” my aunt told me once, her lips purple with Merlot, “but he came from a traditional Italian family and his mother would have had his head if he didn’t do the honorable thing.” Apparently, he perked up when the doctor told them they were having a boy. Anthony, they wanted to name me. I don’t like to imagine the look on Dad’s face when I was actually born, when the doctor chuckled. “Whoops!”
“I’m taking care of it, don’t worry,” I told Mr. Larson. I pushed back my chair and slung my book bag over my shoulder.
Mr. Larson couldn’t even look at me. “TifAni, you are one of my most talented students. You have a very promising future. I would never want to see that compromised.”
“Can I go now?” I put my weight on one hip, and Mr. Larson nodded sadly.
The HOs and the Hairy Legs were piled up at their usual table, which had never been big enough for them. A few outliers always ended up at the adjoining table, their chairs angled at a sharp diagonal so that they could catch every word of the conversation they weren’t really a part of.
“Finny!” To my immense relief, Dean held up his hand up for a high five. “Where have you been?” Those four words—“where have you been?”—chased all but one fear out. Liam was sitting far too close to Olivia, the lunchtime sun brilliant on her slick nose, spotlighting the fray in her beer brown curls. She was someone who, years later, I could have seen as beautiful. A little oil control powder, regular keratin treatments, her whippet limbs made for loose, drapey, bra-adverse pieces by Helmut Lang. I would have hated myself next to her, come to think of it.
“Hey, guys.” I stood at the head of the table, clutching the straps of my book bag like it was a life jacket attached to my back, like I’d float away without it.
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