Rules of My Best Friend's Body

by Matthue Roth

  His dialogue—sorry about this—is a bit expository.

  VILLAIN: For centuries, your family has possessed the CRYSTAL ORBS, that source of man’s PASSION and MAGIC. Now I have FOUND you! You must TURN them over to ME!!

  The two ends of her mouth move in different directions, because I can’t decide which expression to give her, terrified out of her mind, or smiling with the secret thought of the ace up her sleeve.

  The last panel is a quick one, all the space that’s left on the page. Her hand clutches at the magical talisman, on a chain around her neck. It’s the most valuable thing she owns, a pair of glowing marbles that have the power to distort or recreate reality in a your-way-right-away fantasy—and Mitch is about to snatch it.

  Which means, basically the entire picture is of her breasts. Her hand is grabbing at the necklace, which blocks them a little, but it’s off-center, which means that the direct vortex of perspective is centered exactly over her nipple.

  The picture makes me feel a little guilty, and so I try to finish drawing it quickly, without lingering on details or perspective or my memory of the real thing. As a result, it ends up looking rushed, and out of focus, and way too sexual. Her breasts, with no defining bottom curvature, seem to swell up and continue outward forever. The valley between them gives them too much weight, and they seem pendulous, unsightly, threatening to balloon everything else out of the picture.

  To lessen the effect, I pencil vague swishes, curdles of mystical fog that are already starting to pool around the CRYSTAL ORBS. I’ll go back and finish them later, after school, some time when I’m not right in the middle of being inspired. I flip to the next page and drop right into the next picture—no borders, no outlining. A full-page splash.

  This is where I thought I might come in. A drop-punch or a sneak attack. Also in spandex, more generously proportioned, or at least better concealed.

  Only now do I see, I don’t belong there. It wouldn’t be true to the story. I’m not part of the problem, and so I can’t be a part of the solution. Even in something as straightforward as a retro-early-’90s Liefeld-inspired short, a three-page chem-class fisticuffs of one hero vs. another, there are still stories that work and stories that don’t. I don’t even have a place in my own comic.

  Instead I drew this:

  A fierce wind blows up. It swirls around the heroine’s skirt around her knees and her hair around her back. It knocks the bad guy off his feet, and he’s caught in the midpoint of the slow act of falling: legs twisted half-around each other, arms shooting up in a defensive position, hands raised in front of his face.

  For the CRYSTAL ORBS had flown out from their hiding place beneath her shirt, and they were now fully on, amplifiers cranked up to 10, doing everything that, in their brief existence in this story, I had given them the power to do—to completely rearrange reality and, well, fuck shit up.

  Dragons nipped the air around her shoulders. Gryphons raked the air beside her legs. even the wind itself, on its foamy tips, had claws and fangs. Every aspect of nature was at her command. It wasn’t as if she had summoned it. Instead it was like she was this supernatural force, restocking the deck, turning the odds against this supposed attacker, making him the victim instead. The last thing I added had to be a speech bubble, coming from her, small but solid, letting the words alone carry the necessary force:

  “I don’t NEED saving. I’m saving MYSELF.”

  dangerous information

  I didn’t talk to Damon for a while after he showed me his porn. I didn’t call Larissa, either. None of my old friends felt like people I’d want to see or have anything to say to.

  I’d been spoiled by Larissa. When you could open your mouth and anything you could possibly say, she would understand, and she’d be able to hold her own—philosophy. School. Why people are the way they are. Whatever we had together, we really had it.

  Thanksgiving was coming. It was an impending promise of a breath of air. I’d gotten too caught in the rhythm of school and Hebrew School and avoiding my parents, with nothing to fill in the blanks but my art and the screaming in my own head. Things felt empty. There wasn’t really anything left except the things I had to do.

 

  I entered the kitchen, plotting to steal a handful of Cheez Balls before dinner. I found the table empty except for a single sheet of paper. My mother sitting, my father hovering behind her. My mother said, “We got a letter from your Hebrew School.”

  DAD: It said you’ve been missing classes.

  MOM: You were late to some. You didn’t show up to several.

  ME: …

  DAD: Where were you?

  MOM: What were you doing instead of going to class?

  DAD: Do you even have an excuse?

  ME: Maybe the teacher forgot to mark me present.

  MOM: The absences, maybe. But lateness? When were you ever late to anything?

  DAD: Were you with friends?

  MOM: Were you with Larissa?

  DAD: Don’t embarrass him.

  MOM: I just asked.

  ME: I wasn’t anywhere.

  DAD: You had to be somewhere.

  MOM: We know where you weren’t. All we’re asking is where you were.

  ME: …

  DAD: If you don’t want to go—

  MOM: If you aren’t happy in Hebrew School, we want you to tell us. We spend a lot of money for you to go there. If we’re wasting it, just tell us.

  ME: You aren’t wasting it.

  DAD: Do you want to go there?

  ME: I mean, I’m good at Hebrew School. The teachers like me.

  MOM: So why are you cutting classes?

  DAD: But do you want to be there?

  MOM: There are lots of other things you can do. Play an instrument. Do an internship. Volunteer somewhere—

  DAD: You can volunteer!

  MOM: Or if you want to do something for you, you can. There are lots of places you could work in that part of Center City you’re always going to. The point is, Hebrew School isn’t the end-all and be-all of everything. If you don’t want to be there, we can take you out—I’d rather stop wasting the money now than in two and a half years. And we’ll find something else for you to do.

  DAD: You can do anything. You just have to do something.

  *

  It turned out that they hadn’t prepared anything for dinner. My dad got in the car while my mom called for pizza. Their favorite pizza place was fifteen minutes away, and there was always a fifteen-minute wait for pizza, so they split up tasks. My parents were scarily efficient.

  “Hold on.” I ran to the door, met my father there. “You want company?”

  My dad turned to me, astonished. “By company, do you mean you?”

  I shrugged. “If you’re up for it.”

  The reason I hated my parents, I think, is that their lives were literally nothing but routine. They went to the same place every day, woke up and went to bed at the same time, went grocery shopping for the exact same food. Something as alien and unexpected as an avocado would never make its way into their shopping bags. And that was exactly what I was turning into. So what seized me just then, what empowered me to throw myself into the mercy of my father’s passenger seat, was that feeling—a sudden panic of sameness and the knee-jerk reaction against it, like, why not just do something that I never do?

  Even if that thing was riding in a silent car, cruising for pizza with my father, staring at the whitening patches of hair in his close-cropped beard.

  “I envy you,” he said.

  He didn’t hide it or couch it in that fake soft-and-wise voice that he sometimes used. He just said it, like a fact bomb, dropped it on the floor and left it there to smoke.

  “What do you mean? You’re always telling me that I’m doing the wrong thing, and correcting me and telling me I don’t know anything.”

  He regarded the world outside the window with a contemplative nod. “Well, yes, there’s that,” he said. “And that’s all pretty true.
I’ve been alive a lot longer than you, you know, and I’ve had plenty of more time to make all mistakes you did.”

  “Thanks a lot, Popsicle.”

  “But all the possibilities are open to you. Your job—you can pick whatever it is you want to do, or you can do nothing. For now, at least. You’re always running off to here and there, discovering new little things, meeting new people and new girls. I just sometimes wish that had that flexibility.”

  “Ugh. Dad, you are not allowed to meet new girls—”

  “Not like that! I just mean, your life doesn’t have any rules. If it does, you’re the one who makes them. You don’t have half a dozen bosses like me, all of them asking for exactly the opposite thing from you. You just—you can do anything you want.”

  My first thought was of Larissa, and her ban on having anything to do with me. “Not anything,” I grumbled.

  “Why not? Forgive my saying so, but you don’t have anything too pressing right now—no afterschool job, no major investments to protect. If there’s something you’re afraid of doing, why not just do it? The worst that happens is, it doesn’t work.”

  We pulled up to the pizza shop. Without another word, he popped open the door and hopped out—the same as always, stuck in his normal motions of life. Usually I was around when my mom made the call. She always asked me what toppings I wanted, and I had free reign to choose anything. Tonight I’d forgotten and so we wound up ordering plain, no vegetables, no extra anything. Most of the time pizza was a special dinner but tonight, that plainness felt like there was something missing, something lost, as though between the tent of bubbled cheese and the undercurrent of sauce you could taste the rumble of incompleteness, of something forgotten and yet unfinished.

  *

  I called Larissa. I planned to hold out until she said it was okay for us to talk again, or at least gave me some sort of sign or stray sad glance, but that night I felt so low that I needed to. Or it just happened. Or I don’t even remember making the decision or dialing the numbers, I was just on the line, the speaker next to my ear, letting the telephone ring.

  “Hello?” said her mother.

  “Hi, is Larissa there?”

  “Arthur?”

  Why are you calling my daughter?

  “I was just wondering—”

  “She isn’t here, Arthur. She’s out.”

  “Oh.”

  Wham. Wham. Did she really need to tell me twice?

  “She’ll be back home later, I’ll tell her you called—”

  “Thanks, you don’t have to do that.”

  “She might get in late. She’ll probably call you back tomorrow.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll just talk to her later, you don’t have to say anything.”

  “Arthur?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Harcomb?” I remembered to call her Mrs. Harcomb, and not Larissa’s father’s last name. That had to score me some points.

  “Are you trying to ask me not to tell Larissa that you called?”

  “No, Mrs. Harcomb, I’d never say—”

  “She’s out on a date, Arthur. I don’t know if she wants me to tell you that, but you should know.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  WHAM. I felt the daggers plunge into my stomach.

  “I didn’t know that’s where she was tonight, but we’ve been missing each other. I’ve been really busy, you know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did she happen to mention who she was meeting?”

  Larissa’s mother made a sound into the phone that was the guttural equivalent of you obviously don’t know whom you’re dealing with.

  “Listen, Arthur. a) She’s my daughter, and

  “b) it’s really inappropriate for me to be telling you this at all, and

  “c) it’s even more inappropriate for you to be asking.

  “Don’t torture yourself, pal, okay? Just move on.”

  Her Yards accent came out, just an edge of it, toward the end of that. She wasn’t yelling. She was frustrated at me, maybe even angry. I held onto that moment—that one moment of her defenses falling down, and forgetting what she’d built herself into, and reverting into the person she used to be—and I held that. I wanted that to be the moment of this conversation (which, in every other way, was self-defeating and utterly humiliating) that I would remember.

  “That wasn’t what I was asking,” I said, setting up some great excuse, but she’d already hung up.

  *

  Milt had his own way of calling roll in class. It was the same way he talked. Like he was taking volunteers to storm the gates of Hell.

  “Kirshner!”

  “Here.”

  “Matosz!”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Martin!”

  I glanced nervously at Larissa to see what her reaction to Mitch’s name would be. Today she sat all the way on the other side of the room, first row, her eyes glued to the teacher.

  “Martin!” He bellowed again, louder now. Hell was clearing out a fresh seat in its ranks.

  “He’s not here,” piped up a voice from the rear. We turned around. It was Dr. Tolsky, the principal of Hebrew School and also probably the person who’d sent that letter to my parents.

  “Not my problem. He gets a zero for today,” snarled Milt. “No skin off my back. He wouldn’t make it two minutes in the Times war room.”

  “Mr. Levin, Mitch Martin no longer attends this school. He’s withdrawn. He came into my office this morning, said he was sick of hanging out with a bunch of liars and losers, and he can’t see how Hebrew School could possibly be relevant to the rest of his life. And then he jumped in his car and zoomed away.” She said it to us like we were her confidantes, the whole class. As if we wouldn’t be able to believe it either, because we all thought Hebrew School was the most meaningful experience of our lives.

  “So the boy’s got baitzas after all," said Milt, more impressed than Dr. Tolsky was probably aiming for.

  “And if you don’t mind,” she continued, “I’m going to stick around for the duration of your lesson today. There’ve been some complaints that the quality of the writing in our school newspaper is a bit...ah, overly caustic?”

  “Don’t know who would’ve said that,” Milt muttered darkly to himself. “Not like any of these kids ever had to cauterize a thing.”

  “My point exactly.” Dr. Tolsky smiled at him indulgently. She leaned against the doorpost, settling herself in.

  The class was painful. One long 45-minute stretch of Milt trying to play nice and failing miserably, twisting his ever-present grimace into a smile. His voice perpetually sounded like it was wavering between a fake-pleasant falsetto and his usual growl. When it was finally over, Larissa sprung into the hall.

  I shot out after her. My hand reached out, brushing the back of her elbow. She turned around.

  “Can we talk?” I said.

  “My mom told me you called.”

  Her face was narrow and ashen. All my instincts were telling me that now was not a good time. I pressed on. Ordinarily I was a wimp, buried deep in avoidance. I would ignore things that stared me straight in the face. This is what I needed to get over. I couldn’t wuss out now.

  “Yeah. Sorry. I needed to speak to you, and I know you want space, but I was feeling so alone, and nobody else would under—”

  “Okay. Pool?”

  I took one look around this oppressive corridor and agreed.

  Downstairs there was the familiar smell of chlorine, warm on my nose. I watched the comforting ululation of the water’s slow current, distorting the black stripes at the bottom.

  “So, what happened?”

  “I’ve just been feeling really alone lately. Like most of the time I don’t even want to talk to anyone, and when I do—when I have some crisis, or if there’s just a really important idea—I always think of it in terms of how I’d tell you about it.”

  “Mm.” Larissa sounded distant, clipped. She wasn’t even making eye contact.

>   “I was at Damon’s. We were just hanging out, and he put this porn movie on.”

  She waited, not saying anything.

  “I don’t know. I was just in the next room, but I could see everything. I don’t know if he wanted me to watch it with him or what. It was really unpleasant. It was...there were these women, and this guy was making them do all these things to him. I mean—he wasn’t forcing them, but they still didn’t look like they wanted to be there. They were right up there against the camera lens, plastered there. It was awful to watch.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know. It was just, like...is that sex? Because if it is, I don’t want to have it. I don’t want any part in it.”

  She sighed.

  “Arty,” she said. “Please don’t make this about jealousy.”

  “Jealousy?” I honestly didn’t know what she was talking about.

  She looked at me askew. “Didn’t you know, I was out with Damon?”

  “Out?”

  “To a restaurant.”

  “On a date?”

  “Just to dinner.”