As we left the building, Dan Manke shoved a pinch of dip under his lower lip. “See you later, Fat-Ass.” The steel door slammed shut on my shoulder.
On the other side of a chain-link fence, the softball team, which consisted of Kelsey Parker and her friends, ran around the playing field in shorts, whistled, shouted, laughed, called to one another. It sounded like everyone in the whole world was on a team that I hadn’t been picked for. Corinne was better at softball than any of them. A hideous shriek of laughter seemed directed at me, the fat girl walking alone in the weedy ditch that ran alongside the road. The road ran straight toward the mountain.
I took a detour toward 7-Eleven, hoping in a terrified way that Kurt King would be there — my new jeans and blue shirt had gone completely to waste so far that day — but no one was there except for some junior-high boys. The boys oinked when I pushed out the glass door with a jumbo bag of hot fries, and two bottles of Brisk. I also had gummy worms and a king-size Kit Kat bar that I’d swiped and stuffed into my backpack.
As I unlocked the door to #3, my phone vibrated. It was Kurt King’s number. He said that he would call, and he called. It was like having a boyfriend. I shut the door, walked to the couch, and sat down. I put the drinks and snacks on the coffee table. I looked at the little glowing screen and held the phone to my ear.
“Ashley,” he said. “How you doing, Ashley?”
“All right. I had kind of a bad day.”
“Man, I’m sorry to hear that. A girl like you should never have a bad day. . . .”
“My mom’s really sick,” I said. “She might be dying.”
He was talking to Ashley, and he was talking to me. Ashley and I became the same girl. I laughed at his jokes, and when he said again that a girl like me should never have bad days, something warmed up inside me for the first time since that morning, and I believed him.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, we’d talked for an hour. Our long phone calls were so old-school.
“Where’d you say you lived at?” he said.
After I hung up with Kurt King, I started eating and couldn’t stop.
An hour later, I was curled under the blanket in front of a talk show. The pop, hot fries, gummy worms, and Kit Kat were gone. I felt sleepy and sick.
Cindy walked through the door, turned on all the lights, and set her purse on the kitchen table. Her pink polyester uniform was wilted. She yawned and glanced tiredly around the kitchenette. Even though she had dark lines crisscrossing her face and usually looked cranky, I thought she was beautiful, though I’d never tell her that. I called her Cindy instead of Mom because she was such a failure as a mother type, though she did wash my clothes every Sunday in the cobwebby laundry room.
She was skinny because she didn’t eat. She lived on salads, pretzels, and white wine. She had small hands with pink fingers that were always damp from washing. She was obsessed with her nails. She worked as a receptionist for a discount dentist. Her dream was to become a hygienist because they made tons of money. The dentist required that all his employees let him bleach their teeth. It looked like Cindy had a piece of paper stuck inside her mouth.
Cindy took a deep breath and turned to me; I watched her force herself to do it. “Hi, Leah.” She closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead as if she was taking her own temperature. “Will you get yourself some dinner? I bought groceries yesterday.”
“I’m not hungry.”
She opened the cupboard doors and moved things around. She pulled out her “hope jar” and shook it. It was a mayonnaise jar she’d washed and decorated with sunburst stickers. It was about a third filled with coins, wadded-up dollar bills, and little strips of paper — every good fortune she’d ever gotten out of a cookie. Her boss, Dr. Dingle, had learned how to give Botox injections, and she was saving up. “Have you been in my jar? It’s looking kind of skimpy.”
“No.”
Cindy crossed her arms and walked over to catch the last five minutes of the talk show. When the commercial came on, she turned to me. “Honey, you’ve got to eat something. . . .” Then she saw the empty bag and wrappers, the bottles, and the big plastic cup of melting ice.
“Are you eating this crap again? I told you, no junk food on weekdays! God Almighty, Leah, you’re going to get diabetes. That’s the last thing we need.” She picked up one of the plastic bottles and shook it at me. “Do you know what this stuff does to your teeth? I’m fed up with you! You’re going to end up as big as a whale.”
I covered my head with the velour pillow and breathed my own hot oxygen-depleted air. Cindy had bought the pillow at a garage sale and it smelled like cat pee.
“Please leave me alone. I beg you. I had kind of a horrible day,” I said from beneath the pee pillow.
“Leah, do you think I want to spend my life” — a really loud commercial came on —“worn out from this constant battle? I give up! I’m turning it over to you. It’s in your hands. I can’t save you from yourself. . . . Damn it, Leah! You used half my ice!”
I pulled the pillow off my head, got off the couch, and walked down the short hallway to my room. I shut the door and threw myself down on the dirty sheets and ratty blankets.
I woke up in fuzzy darkness. My phone said it was nine thirty. My mouth was dry, sticky, and sour. Bacteria foamed on my teeth. I pulled off my jeans, crawled back into bed, and called Corinne.
She answered right away. “I thought you’d call earlier.”
“I fell asleep. What is Kristy’s problem? I had to walk to school and got detention.”
“Sorry, Leah. After she picked me up, she drove straight to school. I go, ‘Kristy, what about Leah? Is she sick?’ She says, ‘She’s sick, all right.’ Then I was kind of confused, but after second period, Kristy told me. Saturday night, when you stayed over, her dad told you that her mom had to go to the hospital. She just got out today. Kristy was pissed that you didn’t wait and ask if her mom was OK. You just left.”
I felt sick; I had just left. “I texted her twenty times Sunday. She never texted back. I didn’t know how bad it was when I left. Kristy was asleep. Her dad was asleep. He said they were just making a quick trip to the emergency room. What’s wrong with her mom?”
Corinne said, “She had to have blood transfusions or something — I don’t know. I feel really bad, Leah, but I can’t abandon Kristy. I need to be there for her because of her mom. She tweeted something kind of mean about you, but I’ll get her to delete it.”
Corinne hung up. I got out of bed and opened my door a crack. Cindy was asleep on the couch with her wineglass clutched under her chin. I pulled on my jeans and my shoes, then crept out of my room and tiptoed around her, turning off the TV and slowly detaching the glass from her hand. I covered her with the pink-and-blue blanket. She looked like she was getting a cold — her nostrils were flaky and red.
I locked the apartment door behind me and jogged down the hall and up the stairs. I pushed through the glass entryway door and was free in the cool black night. I’d gotten in the habit of walking in the dark after Cindy passed out.
When I walked in the night, I felt like I was flying. I walked so fast, it was like being a bird gliding over clouds or a fish cutting through dark water. I dodged car lights because if it was the cops, they’d bust me for breaking curfew. If I heard footsteps or saw someone coming toward me, I hid behind a tree or bush in case it was a rapist. I was a kid again. I was playing hide-and-seek with the whole world.
Vargas Avenue was silent, its ugliness transformed into shadows, silvery light, the silhouettes of mysterious people behind yellow-lit shades. The streetlights looked like burning matches sticking out of the sidewalks.
Corinne lived six blocks over from Kristy. Every light in her split-level house was blazing. Corinne’s stepdad sat at the kitchen table drinking beer; her mom was on the laptop. The buzz-cut heads of Corinne’s brothers bobbed through. Derrick, the stepdad, stood up and opened the refrigerator.
The light was off in Cori
nne’s room, but there was a shifting blue glow. “I hope you’re feeling bad,” I whispered. “I hope you’re feeling some guilt.”
Farther down Rocky Mountain Lane, the houses got bigger and had skylights and huge windows facing the mountain. Every house had a trampoline and a tree house with a rainbow roof in the fenced backyard. The houses were lit up like department stores and were stuffed with matching furniture, potted plants, throw pillows, silver refrigerators, vases of dried vines. The women in the department-store houses all had weird geometrical haircuts and the men wore bike shorts. The people lay sacked out in front of their giant TVs. They were wiped out from working at the office park or their two-hour commute back from Denver.
Kristy’s Civic and her dad’s Suburban were parked side by side on the swept black driveway. The grass was cut and edged. The windows were lit from inside by a soft glow as if from firelight.
I sat on the grass next to a piney shrub, lit a cigarette, and stared at Kristy Baker’s perfect house.
All week, Kristy and Corinne blew me off. I sat in study hall with Carl Lancaster. We silently read about acids and bases and practiced molar conversions, then I’d hand him my notebook and he’d check my answers, and I’d check his. We quizzed each other. I got a B+ on the test. Outside of study hall and chemistry, we didn’t talk.
Kurt King called every day, sometimes twice. Usually I answered, but sometimes I was too tired to be Ashley and just listened to his messages. I was like a fish that had been hooked; I felt a constant tug to check my phone, to listen to his voice again and again. When we talked, it was always the same. He’d say, “When can I see you?”
I’d say, “It’s complicated. I have a boyfriend.”
“Forget your boyfriend.”
“But I kind of love him. . . .”
I’d always wondered what it would be like to have a boyfriend. Kurt King felt like my boyfriend. It was complicated. . . .
It was like trying on clothes that you love but can’t afford, clothes that are totally inappropriate. I did that once with Corinne. When we were fourteen, her mom took us shopping in Denver. Corinne and I rode the escalator to the second floor of Macy’s and tried on silvery two-hundred-dollar shirts. We made faces at ourselves and laughed like donkeys, though we were both half-serious about how beautiful we looked. The saleswoman stood outside the dressing room and rapped on the door. “How can I help you, girls?”
Kurt King wanted Ashley. “Girl, you are so beautiful,” he said. “I think I’m fallin’ in love. . . .” But he was talking to me.
I was the girl on the phone, and the girl trying to pull on too-tight size-fourteen jeans, and the beautiful girl in my head, and the girl who got a B+ on her test and was going to be a doctor, and the girl staring at a cracked puke-green ceiling as the refrigerator door opened and wine gushed out of the spigot into the wedding wineglass. Like a girl in a funhouse full of mirrors, but all the faces looking back were different.
In the school hallways, Kristy walked past me as if I didn’t exist. She and Victoria were always shrieking over something. Corinne went along with big sad eyes. Groups of boys, if they were bored, called me Mack Truck, Beached Whale, and the old standby, Fat-Ass. I floated away from it all and thought about what Kurt King had said to me the night before. He said, “I think about you all day, every day.”
At lunch, I sat with the girl in the leather jacket again. Anita Sotelo.
Anita’s eyes were tea-colored with stars of darker brown. Her left eye would squint and her mouth would open a little when she was confronted with stupidity. She had the calmness of an adult. She was skinny and always wore a black jacket and tight black jeans with black Keds knockoffs. She constantly combed her bangs back with her fingers. Sometimes she wore scarves wrapped around her head. She had Screamo band stickers all over her notebooks.
Anita was into manga and anime, and once, freshman year, she came to school dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl. Her friends Iris and Maria seemed to find that perfectly normal. Though there was something incredibly normal about Anita, in spite of her weird habits and appearance.
Iris and Maria both wore eyeliner and string bracelets on their tiny wrists. Iris had blond roots and a face like a cat’s. Maria had sharp canines, looked like a Mexican Katy Perry, and sometimes came to school with a furry tail pinned to the back of her jeans. Maria and Iris finished each other’s sentences and became silent and rigid if anyone popular came within two feet of them. They were obsessed with the TV show My Little Pony.
If I thought about it, I could not believe that I was sitting at this table. I had joined the nerd herd.
Anita picked a carrot off my tray, chewed it, and stared at me. “Why did you even hang around that chick Kristy Baker?”
I took a bite of the mushy chicken-particle sandwich and pretended to give her question some thought. “We’ve been hanging out since seventh grade. . . . We’re old friends, I guess. I really love her mom and dad. They are both super sweet. Her mom has breast cancer.”
I couldn’t explain to Anita that hanging around Kristy was an addiction, sort of like smoking. Kristy had a normal teenage life. Her room was interior-decorated. She had a mom and a dad who adored her. She was skinny, and boys loved her and her long blond hair. It wasn’t my life, but I could be near it. I could be inside the circle, even if I was on the very outside.
Anita raised her eyebrows. “Sad about her mom.” She drew a person with spiky black hair on the back cover of her notebook. She tipped back her head and stuck the pencil between her teeth — the pencil was deeply indented with chew marks.
“Kristy Baker is still an incredible bitch,” she said cheerfully, then set back to work on her drawing. “She’s horrible! You’re friends with the meanest girl I’ve ever met, and we’ve moved nine times and I’ve met thousands of people. . . .”
Iris and Maria cackled about a message Iris had gotten on her phone. Probably something to do with hair dye or anime or My Little Pony fan fiction. It made me sad how they hunched over their lunches, squinting over their shoulders like they were about to be attacked.
Anita looked at Iris’s message, smiled, and returned to her drawing.
“I’m going to either be a screenwriter, an actor, or an anime illustrator,” she said out of nowhere. She didn’t even look up to see if I was listening. “What about you?”
“I want to be a doctor.” It came out in a whisper.
“A what?”
“A doctor.”
“What kind?” She kept drawing.
“Possibly an obstetrician or maybe an oncologist, but that would be really sad. I have no idea, actually. I haven’t . . .”
“Have you wanted to be a doctor for a long time?”
“Yeah, I always wanted to, but like six months ago, I decided to actually try and do it. I have to get a good grade in chemistry if I want to go to med school. . . .”
Anita lifted her face and stared at me. She grabbed my wrist. “That is so cool. That is so, so cool. You got to do it.”
Anita was the first person I’d ever told that I wanted to be a doctor. She acted as if it was possible, real, like the most obvious thing I could do. I felt happy, like bells were ringing inside of me. “When I was in middle school, I always read this book called Human Diseases and Conditions during study hall. I used to watch this doctor show with my mom. We watched every episode twice. And since I was eleven, I’ve gotten my checkups from this woman doctor, and she’s really nice and smart, and she always tells me I remind her of herself when she was my age. I read some books about being a doctor I borrowed from Mr. Calvino, and I just knew that’s what I wanted to do. But I’ve got to get a good grade in chemistry.”
Anita shrugged, dipped her head. “Yeah? So? You got to just do it. Get Carl Lancaster to help you. He’s really good at chemistry.”
Anita acted like this was all very workable and doable, and if I just put the time in, it would definitely happen. I would be a doctor.
“You think I could actuall
y do it?”
“Duh. Obviously, yes! You are super smart.”
“What? No, I’m not,” I said. “By the way, my nickname for Kristy is Yertle. Like Yertle the Turtle? In Dr. Seuss? Yertle is the king turtle, and he sits on a throne of other turtles stacked on top of each other. . . .”
“Yeah, I’m familiar with the story.” Anita shoved her hair behind her ear and studied her picture.
“If I’m really pissed, I call her scrawny bitch.”
The eyebrows again. “That one’s lame, but Yertle’s not bad,” she said. “You’ve got to have a plan, girl. You’re gonna be a doc.”
Kristy, Victoria, and Corinne sashayed by with their arms intertwined. They looked over at us like we were the display of jarred pig fetuses in the biology room. They put their heads together and almost choked on their amusement.
“Hey,” said Anita. “Just ignore them. Ignore them, Leah.”
I tried to ignore them, but the happy ringing inside me faded away.
The next day after study hall, Carl and I walked out of the library together by accident. We stood at the door for a second. He swallowed and started to say something. Before he could, I took off for my locker.
On the bus, Anita said, “I could hang out today.”
I said, “Oh.” Then a minute or two later, “Do you want to come over?” Corinne had been in my apartment a couple of times, but I had never allowed Kristy inside the building.
When we got to my building, Anita walked without any observable disgust through the entryway, down the stairs, and along the hideous orange carpet through all the weird smells. She came into #3 and didn’t stare at the worn-out green carpet, the lumpy couch, Cindy’s teacup collection, the ten-year-old TV, or the battered old Yahtzee box under the coffee table. She didn’t ask to open the gray accordion curtains that covered the basement window above the couch.
I suddenly realized that the shiny beige paint was the color they used in lunatic-asylums and all the little bumps in the paint looked like zits. But Anita stood there like she was in a normal house, and not an apartment that was like a couple of boxes taped together.
Someone I Wanted to Be Page 4