Someone I Wanted to Be

by Aurelia Wills

  When there was a home game against Arapahoe, I’d watch from the center of the stands. I’d sit there just like the senior girl Stacy Ross, who always wore tight baby-blue turtlenecks. She sat on the bleachers perfumed by Obsession and her own perfection like she was the queen and the whole world and everything in it honeycombed off her.

  During a time-out, Damien Rogers would look up at the crowd and spot me. He’d stare and think, Where do I know that girl from? After the game, he’d push past Kristy to get to me. Because everyone had finally realized that Kristy wasn’t really beautiful. She was just an ordinary kid and way too skinny.

  I was woken by someone shaking my shoulder. “Come on, sweetheart. Sit up.”

  It was the school nurse, who did double duty as the school counselor. She told the kids to call her Shannon. She had freckles, brown eyes, and red hair cut in a seventies shag. She sometimes wore purple mascara. “Open up. Sorry about that, the ear thermometer is broken.”

  Shannon had black circles under her eyes. She was old, at least forty, but everyone said she stayed up late smoking pot. She knew the words to every song in the musical Rent and sang them as she walked through the hallways.

  “OK, open up. . . . Let’s see. . . . You’ve got a slight, a very slight, temp. We can’t get ahold of your mom? Most places allow parents to pick up sick kids. It’s kind of the law.”

  I pushed my hair behind my ears. “My mom works for an asshole.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad! We’ll just skip it, then. I’ll write a note that you should probably stay home tomorrow so you can rest and your body can fight this off. Probably a virus.”

  I sighed and shrugged as if I were disappointed. “I’ll give it to my mom.”

  “Just go back to sleep,” said Shannon. She patted my forehead and left her hand there for twenty blissful seconds. Then she briskly stood up, turned off the lights, and stopped in the doorway. “I’ll wake you when school’s over.”

  A dream catcher slowly turned over the cot. A little gray-and-white feather ruffled in blowing air I couldn’t feel.

  Shannon would be an OK mom, though probably annoying. We’d have hummus and carrot sticks for dinner too many nights, and she’d read my texts when I was asleep, for sure. Cindy could have been a cool mom, but she was too busy drinking wine and painting her nails.

  There was a commotion outside the door. Shannon stuck her head in. “Leah, sorry to bug you, but we need to store some boxes for Mrs. McCleary until the end of school. OK, sir, right in here. Sorry, it’s our sickroom!” A skinny man in blue pants wheeled in some boxes and stacked them in the corner of the room. The boxes appeared to contain slides, test tubes, a couple of new microscopes. Mrs. McCleary was going to be thrilled.

  He paused on his way out and looked down at me. “Got anything catching?”

  “Yep.” I coughed hard so he’d leave. The door shut. I was alone.

  Shannon woke me at 1:50. I hunched on the edge of the cot for a few minutes, then stuck my feet into my shoes and picked up my backpack.

  Anita stood in front of the office counter. She was wearing a Black Veil Brides T-shirt and was balancing a stack of graphic novels against her stomach. When she saw me, she blinked real slowly. She opened her mouth and moved her jaw around like she had a jaw ache. She looked away from me and stared at the giant district calendar that hung behind the secretary’s desk.

  For a second, I couldn’t move or speak. I started to count. If I got to a hundred and twenty and she didn’t look over and say something, I’d leave and never try to talk to her again. One, two, three — I counted silently in my head like I was doing sit-ups. At ninety-three, she turned back to me.

  She looked me over like she was trying to assess whether or not I was human. She’d gotten her nose pierced and had a tiny blue stone in her left nostril. “What are you doing here? You sick?” she said.

  I sniffed, swallowed, tried to think of words to say. Yes. I was sick. My backpack sagged in my arms. I was so sick of myself and life in general that I was about to tip over. “You got your nose pierced.”

  She tossed back her bangs. “Yeah, so? I saved up. My dad said he didn’t care as long as I paid for it. He finally took me down to Dragon’s Lair. He had to sign. They say you won’t feel anything, but it hurt like a son of a bitch. The dude did it really slow. . . .”

  “Doesn’t it cost like fifty bucks?” Anita and I seemed to be having a conversation. I walked out from behind the counter. “Where’d you get the money?”

  “I babysit for two hours every morning before school. My neighbor has to leave for work at five, so I wait in her apartment until the grandma gets there. I just sit there, wake the kids, get them dressed, make them breakfast.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said in a singsong. She looked hard at me for a minute, then ran her fingers through her bangs and squeezed her hair into a ponytail. She looked briskly around the room. “Where the hell are all the office ladies?”

  She turned and headed out, then stopped in the doorway. She said over her shoulder, “You riding the bus?”

  I nodded. We pushed through the steel doors and walked down the cracked sidewalk through the crowd of kids. Neither of us said anything. I followed her up the steps of the bus. Anita sat down in the back and moved over by the window. I sat next to her.

  Anita folded her hands on top of the books, stared out the window, and took a quick breath through her nose. The bus jerked forward. She talked slowly so I would catch every word.

  “You have been acting like a shit. Are we friends or not? Do you consider me a weirdo you don’t want to be seen with? Decide.” She turned and looked at me.

  I slid down in the seat. I was close to throwing up. Something pulsed like neon in my forehead — I could feel it with my hand. I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’ve been a total bitch and a complete asshole. . . .”

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” she said, “but could you lay off the melodrama? Just don’t treat me like garbage.”

  I opened my eyes. “OK. I’m sorry.” I forced myself to turn and look at her. “I am so, so sorry, Anita. You are a really good friend and I’ve just —”

  Mikey Peterson hung over the seat back and stuck his bristly head and wire-covered teeth between us. “Whas up, Anita? Whas up, Fat-Ass?”

  Anita rapped him on the head with her knuckles. “Go back to your kennel, Mikey.”

  “Ow, dang it, Anita, you didn’t have to do that!” He fell back into his seat.

  She slid down. “Oh my God, I think he’s crying,” she whispered. “I’m so tired.” Anita’s eyes were huge; her face was papery. Even her hair looked exhausted.

  “Are you sure you’re not anemic from being vegan? Your nose looks a little red around the stud. You might have . . .”

  “God, quit with the doctor stuff. I’m fine.” She closed her eyes.

  “You are such a good friend.” And she was. The kindest, most interesting, most encouraging friend I’d ever had, and I barely knew her. And I’d ditched her. It made me feel hollow to know what I was capable of.

  “Nah . . .” she said. “Now chill. Just chill, Leah. As long as you don’t start pulling that crap again, we’re cool.”

  Anita opened her eyes and traced the outline of the person on the cover of her book with the tip of her finger. The bus pulled into the street. There were a couple minutes of somewhat uncomfortable silence. She shrugged, as if uninterested. “So, what’s been going on?”

  The bus went over a pothole and I fell into the aisle. Anita pulled me back onto the seat.

  My chemistry textbook in its red book cover poked out the broken zipper of my backpack. On the edge of the cover, in little tiny print, I’d written Carl Lancaster. “Let me think. . . .”

  The bus stopped at a red light. A black Mustang turned in front of the bus toward the school.

  I looked out the back window, but there was another bus behind us.

  “Leah?”

  Anita was re
al, with her black bangs scattered across her forehead, her crooked bottom teeth, and her brown eyes that glowed — there was a person inside, and she saw the person in me. She glittered she was so real. The whole world glittered. Before it had been liquid and dreamy like a movie, and I could slip in and out of it, but the world had crystallized, and everything had become hard and sharp and solid.

  “Leah, what’s wrong?”

  I breathed with difficulty and could barely keep my eyes open. “I’m kind of having a panic attack. This guy just drove past. He keeps calling. . . .”

  “What guy?” she said. “Is it that thirty-year-old?”

  “Yeah.”

  She straightened her shoulders against the back of the seat. “Tell him to piss off. If he tries anything, sock him in the balls.”

  I had a pounding headache in my forehead where the neon had been. I dropped my face into my hands and breathed in the smell of salt and erasers. “Good idea.”

  She shook my shoulder. “Hey, hey, look at me. Listen. Stay away from the dude. Block his calls.”

  “I put my phone in the parking lot where a truck would run over it. I did it so I wouldn’t have to talk to him anymore.”

  Anita winced. “OK. You know, you could have just blocked him.”

  I pulled my backpack onto my knees and hugged it. I pressed my forehead against the seat back in front of us. The seats were covered with vinyl stamped with swirls like fingerprints you could barely see. My throat ached like someone had died. But Anita was alive and humming an old Weezer song next to me.

  I lifted my face. “I love that song.”

  Cindy poked her head into my room. She had green rings under her eyes. “You sure don’t look sick,” she said. She got stressed when I was sick because her health insurance had a high deductible.

  “The nurse said I had a temperature. I’m just going by what the nurse said.”

  “Let me feel!” She scooted between the dresser and the bed in her purple uniform. Her hand was cold and sticky with lotion. “You don’t feel hot to me!” She ran her finger over my upper lip. “Leah, we probably need to wax tonight.”

  “God, don’t touch me!”

  “Oh, pardon me, missy! Well, you are not allowed to snack and watch TV here all day. Get your homework done. If you’re up to it, get out my Zumba DVD. If you do it every day, it does amazing things.”

  I looked up at her bloodshot eyes and the web of tiny veins on her cheeks. “Sure, Mom.”

  She crouched in front of the dresser mirror and touched the top of her hair. “My God, I really need to color my hair. I meant to last night but didn’t get around to it. Is the gray very noticeable?” She watched me in the mirror. I carefully did not look at the inch of gray next to her scalp.

  “You look fine. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I can hardly see it.”

  She smiled and squeezed my toes through the blankets. “I gotta run, sweetie. Say, I’m missing some money from my wallet. I don’t know what I did with it. Let me know if you . . .”

  “You gave me ten dollars last night, Mom.”

  “Of course! That’s right. Keep it, keep it. Fun money! Love you. Get better, munchkin. Maybe we could play a game of Yahtzee when I get home.” She backed out of the room with a smile that looked like it would break her face.

  I lay back in my nest of blankets and slept until a slab of sunlight from between the curtains reached my face. I pulled on my robe and stumbled down the hallway to the kitchenette. I felt like someone had tied weights to my ankles and wrists.

  Cindy had left the paper folded on the kitchen table. She subscribed to the newspaper no matter how broke we were and acted like reading the paper was a sacred middle-class custom.

  I made a cup of instant coffee and turned to the obituary page just to make sure Kristy’s mother hadn’t died. She hadn’t. The obituary page was in the back of the sports section. On the front page of the sports section was a large color photograph of a high-school baseball game. In the corner of the field, in a green-and-white Arapahoe uniform, Damien Rogers stood holding a mitt. I was almost sure it was him, though the face was blurred and the number on the uniform wasn’t visible.

  I cut out the picture and taped it to my wall. The other two pictures had already yellowed, so I pulled them off. Then I tore down the kitten poster and the picture of the puppies tumbling out of a basket. I crushed both posters into balls.

  “In Vietnam they eat puppies,” I said to the room. Mr. Shlukebier told us that in geometry freshman year. Exhausted, I lay back on the bed. I’d just slept twelve hours.

  I put on Bruno Mars, lay down again, and stared up at him. He sang “When I Was Your Man,” and it’s a very sad song, but I couldn’t feel it. The poster was rumpled. It wasn’t Bruno Mars on my cracked green wall — it was just a cheap poster from the store at the Rocky Mountain Mall.

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the light and pulled a pillow over my face.

  It was the fourth inning. The bases were loaded, and Damien Rogers was up to bat. I had a gorgeous tan from sitting in the stands all summer. I was dressed all in white — white tank top, white sunglasses, white jeans, size four — I’d lost a ton of weight from living off of watermelon smoothies. Damien stepped up to the plate, lifted the bat, and . . . I sat there, perfect, sexy, and beautiful . . . a little bored because I’d sat through games all summer. Trying not to get anything on my white pants, kind of difficult because there was bird shit on the bench and I’d already gotten a splotch of watermelon smoothie on one knee. I felt like I might be getting my period. . . .

  I threw off the pillow and rummaged under my bed until I found a half-empty notebook from freshman year. I grabbed a pen, sat up against the green wall, and stared at the white page with its faint blue lines. I thought if I could write it down, it would make sense.

  I stared at the paper and began to see his face. No matter where I hid, Mr. Corduroy was waiting for me.

  I fell asleep for a few more hours, then got up, went into the kitchenette, and opened up a new box of frozen French toast. But what was I doing? I needed to change my life. I needed to have a plan. I needed the motivation to change my life and become the girl Damien Rogers would choose to be his girlfriend. Because even if we had problems in our relationship — for one thing, he would have to accept that I was going to be a doctor — I still thought we could make it work. I put Mr. Corduroy out of my mind — I would figure that out later. Right now, I just needed to lose weight. I had to concentrate.

  Today would be a day for discipline and new habits that would transform my life. I shoved the box back into the freezer with the crumb-covered frost and ate the breakfast printed in a little black box on the back of the diet cereal: a cup of black coffee, ¾ cup of cereal, ½ cup of skim milk, ½ small banana, 1 teaspoon sugar (optional).

  After breakfast, I went out in front of the building and searched the ground for butts with lip-gloss prints that looked like mine. The air was chilly, as if it had blown off the top of the mountain. Orange slabs of sunlight lay on the scrawny grass. I found three bent, half-smoked butts. I lit one, inhaled, and wondered whether you could catch herpes from a cigarette butt. I tried to think of a scientific explanation for why butts tasted so horrible when you relit them.

  The coffee, which I didn’t usually drink, made me jittery. I went back to the apartment, put in Cindy’s Zumba DVD, and pushed the table away from the couch. I swung my arms, marched in place, and swiveled my hips to Latin music.

  “You are beautiful!” the lady on the DVD shouted. Her eyes bulged. She had a ferocious smile. My head crackled and went black. I closed my eyes and lay on the couch until my heart stopped pounding. I was starving.

  I went to the kitchenette for some cheese and crackers and turned the television on to a talk show.

  Running between commercials, I got more cheese and crackers because cheese is protein, and protein is very important. I tried to fill up on fruit and ate all the bananas. I found a can of ravioli, ate it
cold right out of the can, and then had two peanut-butter sandwiches, a whole box of single-serving cookies, and, finally, the French toast soaked in Karo syrup that I’d wanted all along.

  The topic of the second half of the show was “frenemies.” A woman talked shit about her friend, whom she pretty much hated, for twenty minutes, then after the commercial, the host brought the woman’s frenemy out from behind the curtain. Zing. Surprise!

  Cindy burst through the door four hours early. She slammed the door, dropped her purse, squeezed her eyes shut, and pressed her fingertips against her temples.

  “I’ve had a horrible headache. I must have caught your virus. They had to call Renée in. She was so ticked off. . . .” Cindy opened her eyes.

  I felt like a cockroach caught on the kitchen floor when the light is turned on. I had a frozen angel food cake on my stomach and had just torn off a handful. The coffee table was covered with plates, cups, and wrappers. The laughter from the TV suddenly sounded stupid, tinny, and pre recorded.

  “Leah, my God! What am I going to do with you? You’ve been eating all day! You’re going to end up big as a house. You eat a week’s worth of groceries in one day! I can’t afford it! Sweetheart, you’re breaking my heart. I don’t want you to be obese. . . .”

  “Don’t use that word!”

  “It’s a medical term, Leah.”

  A medical term like halitosis and hirsute and flatulence. Ugly scientific words that made people feel like cockroaches. I would never use those medical terms when I was a doctor.

  I swung my legs off the couch and put the cake on a plate. “I’ll clean this up after I shower. Please leave me alone. I’m sorry, but I’m really stressed.”

  “Stressed?” She put her little hand on her forehead and shook her head in wonderment. “Honey, most of your problems are just normal adolescence. The problems you need to think about are the ones you create for yourself ! And they are aplenty!”