My Eyes Are Up Here

by Laura Zimmermann

  I’m not sure if I blew a chance at something or if there wasn’t any chance anyway, but if it’s ever only this, I hope I can convince myself it’s enough.

  CHAPTER 43

  Maggie didn’t show up to school this morning. I get the story from Amara and Keely, two other brides, about dress rehearsal last night.

  Apparently, everything was going just fine—or as fine as it could, since five of the brothers can’t dance and four of them can’t sing either. But everybody was in costume for the first time, and it made it all seem better.

  Until the first scene that Maggie and the other girls are in. They came out, one after another, in their gingham dresses and braids (thank you, Lizzie Barnes). Even Keely, whose mousy hair is pretty short, managed to tuck it into little French braids, glued down with a can of hairspray. Lizzie’s own hair grew six inches longer and three shades lighter overnight, thanks to several hundred dollars’ worth of extensions, according to the girls. And then Maggie appeared, stage left. With a ponytail straight out of the top of her head like a whale spout.

  “CUT!” yelled Lizzie. “CUUUUUUUTTTTTTT!” The cast was confused and the pit orchestra went on for several measures before they realized that no one was singing anymore.

  A couple of the boys thought it was funny, but the rest of the cast was mad. They were tired and just wanted to get through the rehearsal.

  There was a mini-conference with Mr. Coles and the other directors, Maggie, and Lizzie. Maggie stomped off and came back a few minutes later in the middle of the next number wearing two acceptable braids. She didn’t say anything to anybody after rehearsal, just left the second it was over.

  Now Amara, Keely, and a few of the other girls are freaking out because Maggie hasn’t shown up to school and tonight is opening night.

  “Oh no. Does Lizzie have to sing all her own lines if Maggie doesn’t show?” says Amara.

  If Amara is legitimately worried, Keely is just pissed. “None of us like Lizzie, but come on. Maggie’s being really stubborn.”

  I snort at this, because if they think Maggie is being really stubborn now, they don’t know Maggie. Really stubborn for Maggie is taking all the ornaments off the Christmas tree every night because her parents bought a Scotch pine instead of a Douglas fir, and that was when she was only six years old. Wearing a ponytail on top of her head because everybody wants her in braids is nothing.

  I text Maggie and she responds immediately.

  on the wya

  opps

  way

  oops

  “She’s coming,” I tell them. “Probably just slept in.”

  Lunch is almost over when Maggie finally shows up. She is striding through a sea of students. She is carrying a pile of books. She is smirking. She is already wearing braids, as required.

  Except that they are neon-green braids.

  CHAPTER 44

  There is not a color in the spectrum that someone at Kennedy hasn’t tried in their hair, sometimes all at the same time, so the bright greenness of Maggie’s head isn’t what draws attention. It’s more the gasping of the musical kids that the rest of the lunch period responds to.

  “Is she going to wear it like that for the play?” Jackson has appeared behind me. I’m too focused on watching Maggie move through the crowd—which looks evenly split between admirers and people who think she’s gone too far—to think about the fact that he is so close that if I leaned back five degrees my back would be pressed against his chest.

  Okay, obviously I am still able to think about that at the same time I am watching Maggie.

  “It doesn’t look like the kind that washes out,” I say. “To get hair that dark to turn into hair that green you have to bleach it first.”

  Jackson lets out a low breath. “Maggie commits.”

  I nod. “Yeah. She does.”

  I don’t get a chance to talk to Maggie and tell her what I think, which is “Really, Mags? You know this is going to cause you more problems than it solves” because the bell rings and people start to drift.

  “See you later,” I say, but Jackson stops me.

  “Are you going to the play tonight?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Are you going with anyone?”

  Technically, the answer is yes, I am going with my mom, Tyler, and the empty seat that is where my dad would be if he didn’t have to go to San Francisco at the last minute. “Well, with my family, but we’ve got an extra ticket. Do you want to go? I mean, if you’re not already meeting people or whatever. You probably are.”

  I’ve seen the kid’s smile before. A hundred times in real life, a thousand times in dream life. But this time it is so easy and happy it’s like I’ve never seen it before. And it is beautiful. He must have had a top-notch orthodontist in Cleveland. Binder-worthy dentistry.

  “I’d love to,” he says.

  The butterfly is beaming, giving me a proud thumbs-up, but I tell her to chill out. She wants this to mean more than it does. It’s not a date—it’s just the school play and we have an extra ticket. She doesn’t believe me, though.

  CHAPTER 45

  I basically agree with Maggie on most of the things she takes a stand on, but I never think it’s worth the fight. She always does. It’s not that I avoid conflict—I fight with Tyler all the time—it’s more like I avoid being uncomfortable when I can. Socially, physically, mentally, whatever. I take the path that keeps me (and Maude and Mavis) under the radar.

  So even though everyone is coming up to me to say things like “What’s going to happen now?” and “Why does your friend have to be such a bitch?” I am trying to stay out of it. It was probably overboard to dye her hair green to piss off the lead of the school musical, but it’s Maggie, and I love Maggie no matter what. But I also don’t want to get involved.

  Right after school I’m on my way to practice when I see Mr. and Mrs. Barnes march through the front doors with Lizzie. Pat Moss, our principal, greets them with a look of solidarity and outrage. They all rush off together like they’re racing up the courthouse steps in a Law & Order episode.

  Maggie is tough, but she is outnumbered.

  I find her mother’s number in my cell.

  “Mrs. Cleave? It’s Greer.”

  “Hey, Greer. What’s up?”

  “You know about Maggie’s hair, right?”

  “The green? Oh yes. It was quite a process.”

  “Well, I think she’s kind of in trouble for it.”

  “Why else would she do it?” She sighs.

  “People are saying they might kick her out of the play.”

  “I’m sure Maggie can handle Mr. Coles.”

  “Right, but it’s not just him. It’s Dr. Moss. And Lizzie Barnes’s parents.”

  “The Barneses? At school?”

  “Yeah. And they look pretty mad.”

  “Those people are the worst.” She practically growls, and it sounds a lot like Maggie, both angry and excited. She runs an organization that protects rivers and lakes from environmental damage. She has to like to fight. She yells something to someone in her office and comes back to me. “I’m on my way. Thanks, Greer.”

  She clicks off and Jessa speeds past me.

  “Walsh! Let’s get moving! Practice starts in four minutes.”

  I don’t move. I have to go to practice, but I don’t want to leave Maggie alone if the Kennedy High School PTA is coming for her.

  Jessa stops. “Walsh? You coming?”

  “Yeah, but something’s up with Maggie.”

  “Like about the green-hair thing?”

  “You heard?”

  “Everybody heard.”

  “I think they’re going to try to kick her out of the play.” I assume that Jessa will tell me to get to practice—after all, it’s not our problem; it’s just a musical, not VOLLEYBALL—but I�
�m wrong.

  “They can’t do that. She’s been practicing all season.” I don’t think they call it a “season,” but she gets the point.

  “Lizzie Barnes just showed up with her parents.”

  Jessa cringes. “They go to my church. They are nasty.”

  This does not make me feel better.

  “Suprenant! SOOOOP!” she screams across the atrium. Sylvie bounces our way. “Tell Coach that me and Walsh will be there late. We’ve gotta do something.” Sylvie heads off to the gym and Jessa turns to me like she’s been waiting for me all day. “Well? Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  She takes off toward the auditorium, where the cast is having a final run-through. It’s hard to keep up with her. “To Cleave, duh. She’s your best friend, right? We can’t leave her to the Barneses.”

  And even though it’s completely corny, I can’t help feeling a rush. The idea that Jessa and me and Maggie and maybe Nasrah and Amara and Sylvie Suprenant and who knows who else are maybe tied together in some way? It feels pretty good. Like even if there’s not an official roster, maybe we’re all some kind of team.

  I stand up a tiny bit straighter and jog behind Jessa toward the auditorium. Maude and Mavis bounce along, excited. Even though they blew the tryouts, they want to be part of this team, too.

  CHAPTER 46

  There was a really hot day in the middle of the summer when Mom was supposed to drive us to the Art Institute to see an exhibition of photos and drawings by people living in the Lagos slums. Maggie read about it and was angry because all the credit went to the artist who organized it, and all the slum residents got were out-of-date digital cameras they couldn’t even charge. I know it seems like in that case we would not go to the exhibit, but we’d been bored for weeks and it seemed like a good excuse to get Mom to drop us in the city while she met with some big company that sends her a lot of clients.

  But Mom’s meeting was cancelled, and she didn’t think Maggie and me scoffing at an art exhibition was enough of a reason to drive into Chicago.

  So we are bored and annoyed and hot, sitting on the front steps with drippy Popsicles, paging through Mom’s re-lo binder.

  “How can your mom recommend Cold Stone Creamery?!”

  “Um, because it’s delicious? And you can mash in candy bars?”

  “Yeah, but it’s a chain. She should be recommending small businesses.”

  “Maggie, we went to Cold Stone last Thursday. You loved it.”

  “That’s only because it was next to the theater.”

  We flip through to the section on Salons and Personal Services. I recognize the names of almost everyone who has ever cut my hair. She also has lists for nails, massages, facials, waxing, and laser hair removal. For some reason, Lasik eye surgery is in this section, too.

  “I would never wax,” Maggie says.

  “Of course not. You don’t even shave them.”

  Maggie slurps a drip from the back of her hand. “Them?”

  “Your legs?”

  She bumps her leg, which is in full hairy glory, into my stubbles. “I didn’t mean legs. Of course not legs. I meant my vajayjay.”

  We both laugh, because Maggie is constantly trying out different vocabulary since her brother complained that she used the word vagina thirty-one times in one day. Vajayjay does not sound right coming from Maggie at all. I tell her so.

  “Cootch?” she tries. “Hoo-haw?”

  “Can we just say ‘bikini area’?”

  Maggie frowns at this. “Fine. I would never let anybody do that to my ‘bikini area.’ Imagine this,” and here she reaches over and yanks a few hairs at the back of my neck, “but down there, all at once, by a stranger, with hot wax.”

  “Ow!” I don’t want to imagine it, but I do. “How hot is the wax?” I’m thinking if it’s like a bath, that part’s not so bad.

  “Never mind the wax. It’s the ripping. I bet there’s a video.” In a matter of seconds she finds a video of a full Hollywood wax. We both jump when they tear the first strip off. “See what I mean? That’s why I just shave.”

  “Wait, you shave there?” I’ve never paid attention to my pubic hair. It just roams wild, like one of those curly wigs Irish dancers wear. I guess if you assume no one is ever going to see you without a gigantic sweatshirt on, you don’t really think about how you present naked. “You don’t even shave your legs! What about not conforming to misogynistic dogma of modern beauty or whatever?”

  “Yeah, but that’s leg hair. I’m talking about pube hair. I’m not going to let it just bush out around my swim bottoms.” She makes an exploding motion with her hands, like if she left it unrestrained, we’d be fighting a puffy pube ball.

  I have a photo on my desk of us at Oak Street Beach in about fifth grade, and now all I can picture is little Maggie in that suit—a one-piece with red, white, and blue anchors—with a big, mangy mushroom cloud of hair poking out the sides. I laugh out loud.

  Maggie gasps like she’s just realized something amazing. “We should call Tahlia! Her health club has huge pool!” I stop laughing and swallow hard. “Want to go swimming?”

  Swimming?

  No, Maggie, I don’t want to swim, because if I walked out onto the pool deck, half the people would lean to their friends and make the same joke about buoyancy.

  I don’t want to swim, because no matter how slowly I walked, every step would make my boobs shake like Godzilla stomping through a flea market.

  Because I can’t flip over to tan my back like the rest of you because I can’t lie on my stomach. And because I’d need to do something about all these loose pubes, now that you’ve got me thinking about them.

  I don’t want to swim because as enormous as Maude is, Mavis is a little bit bigger.

  I don’t want to swim. Because I can’t stand people thinking my body is there for their amusement. Because they’re not interested in the fact that my feet are completely average size or that standardized tests are fun for me or that I’m really not nice to Tyler or that my parents named me according to Jewish tradition even though they don’t believe in anything except matzo balls or that I might be hot, bored, and sweaty and just want to get in the pool like everybody else or that under all this breast tissue, which by the way is denser than fat and therefore not particularly good for buoyancy, is an actual beating human heart.

  No, Maggie, I don’t want to swim because I do not own a swimsuit anymore.

  “No,” I say. “I have my period.” It is a lie.

  Maggie makes a disappointed sound. I don’t know if she remembers that I always get my period right after hers. I don’t know if she notices that I am biting my lip.

  I don’t know if she realizes that even if I had a private pool all to myself, I feel so stupid and ugly I probably wouldn’t swim anyway.

  But I think maybe she does. And I think maybe she knows that I’m not ready to talk about it.

  We stay there for a few minutes, shifting and sweaty. Finally, Maggie says, “Oh! You know what we should do? Have you heard of In the Mind of a Maniac? It’s about psychopaths and serial killers. Let’s see if we can stream it.”

  She wipes the Popsicle drips off the cover of Mom’s binder with her arm, and I follow her into the air-conditioning to watch three seasons in seventy-two hours. I am grateful for the millionth time in my life for Maggie Cleave.

  CHAPTER 47

  A dozen kids are onstage shifting awkwardly while the tech crew crawls around their legs sticking colored bits of tape on the floor. Everybody pretends not to notice the whispery conference between Maggie, Lizzie, Mr. Coles, Dr. Moss, and the Barneses in the center aisle. Maggie’s hair glows like something from a Dr. Seuss book.

  The assistant director, a French teacher, says, “Okay, lez try like zis. Juss a few bars. Zis should geev Aidan a little more space so he doesn’t step on anybody.
”

  It’s hard to hear what’s happening over the commotion onstage, but you can tell they are not letting Maggie talk. Mrs. Barnes is tittering away, her head wagging back and forth like an angry bobblehead. Maggie’s cheeks are turning red.

  Jessa says, “Come on,” and marches down the aisle to stand with her arms folded right behind them.

  Maggie gives us a tiny grateful smile.

  I think of how many times I’ve sat on the sidelines, waiting for Maggie to talk herself into or out of trouble. This is the first time I realize how much it means to her to have me standing there.

  Dr. Moss is saying how selfish it is for one student to try to take all the attention away from the others who have worked so hard. Maggie finally blurts, “That’s exactly my point!”

  “You admit you’re just trying to steal all the attention?” says Mr. Barnes, like he can’t believe the defendant has just confessed in front of the judge.

  “No! My point is that it’s not the Lizzie Barnes Show, so I don’t know why everyone is acting like it is.”

  “Right! It’s a team!” pipes in Jessa. All heads turn to look at us. I was assuming we were just here as silent extras, but Jess is in it.

  “Jessa, what are you doing here?” Dr. Moss puts a hand on her hip.

  “We came for Cleave. It’s five against one.”

  “Oh, oh, I’m not for or against anybody!” says Mr. Coles, waving his hands around like he wants to fan away the idea that he’s on one side or the other. The seven brothers in the play would have called him yella-bellied or lily-livered. Me too.

  Dance practice is falling apart because everyone is trying to listen to the trial down below. The assistant director stops them and the orchestra cuts out at exactly the right moment for everyone to hear Lizzie’s mom say, “But Lizzie should get more attention. She’s the star.”