Borderlands 5 (41 page)

They never really got away from the school, and yet in some fashion they did. They never turned in their last homework assignments, never did their final laps around the gym. In a way, they graduated with bizarre honors.

The fat kid with the kettle drum disappeared on stage during the Christmas concert. One minute he’s banging along to Brahms’
Wiegenlied
, and the next his wide ass just isn’t there anymore. You were playing second trumpet, staring out of the corner of your eye when you watched him go. Nobody else seemed to notice. Later, they said he died of leukemia. Died of Hodgkin’s. Told everybody he got brain damage from the crash out on Route 287, where Bobby Hale flipped his van and hit a tree. Four others dead, one paralyzed, and two walked away with bruises and plenty of psychological damage. One survivor tried to suicide six months later claiming rats lived in her belly.

Maybe they were right. But the skin of that drum just couldn’t take the goddamn pounding anymore.

So now you’re walking past the science labs where you cut open worms, frogs, a piglet, a cow’s eye, and the starving Portuguese orphans who came on the black truck that backed right up to the gym doors. Hustled them out, while the lunch ladies and substitute teachers squawked into megaphones, “Não toque nas paredes limpas. Nós estaremos alimentando-lhe muito peixe logo.”

Don’t touch the clean walls. We will be feeding you much fish shortly.

You see all the brown faces with bad teeth breaking into hideous grins.

“A festa de St. Peter começará dentro da hora. Coloque nas tabelas e tenha uma sesta até que esteja hora de comer.”

The Feast of St. Peter will begin within the hour. Lay down on the tables and have a nap until it is time to eat.

You’re in front of your old locker, wondering if the combination will still work. If the pages you cut from newspapers and magazines are still taped up inside. You touch the cold metal and a sob breaks inside your chest.

“You all right?” someone asks.

Christ, you nearly leap through the top of your own skull. You turn and stare. She could be any of the girls who refused to go out with you back then when it mattered most. She smiles warmly and it sends an electrical thrill knifing through your guts. No more than fifteen, has a studious appearance to her—glasses, ponytail, a skirt and tie as if she was at private school, which she’s not. It throws you for a second. She gives a melancholy grin and asks, “You lost?”

“Sorry.  This your locker?”

“Yeah.”

“Used to be mine about twenty years back. I was reminiscing a little.”

“About a locker?”

“More or less.”

“Okay,” she acquiesces, still waiting. You want to ask her if a fat kid with a kettle drum ever wanders around in the middle of the day. If the eviscerated Portuguese orphans crawl down the halls holding the flaps of their stomachs together with dirty hands crying, “Eu acredito que se encontraram me. Não há muitos peixes aqui.”

I believe they have lied to me. There is not much fish here.

She’s got poison sumac rashes around her knuckles and you almost get homesick looking at them. Perhaps you’ll meet again another two decades from now, both of you roaming about the school, staring at this same locker while some child stares up into mad, sentimental faces.

“I’m gonna be late for class.”

“Oh.  Excuse me,” you say, flitting aside. “Thanks a lot.”

There’s an extra glint her eye as if she’s trying to decide whether to do something or not. She’s on the edge but can’t quite make up her mind. Maybe bring you up for show and tell. Or give you the name of a good therapist. Or slam you out of your socks with a harrowing lie. Scream rape. Or offer herself up for a cockeyed kick, a power trip, something disgusting to tell her girlfriends about later, get everybody laughing—his belly was so big and white as a sheet. His dick was cut and maybe four inches long when I finally got it up, and that took forever. I had to get on top or he would’ve crushed me, and he came in about ten strokes. He cried afterwards. He wanted to marry me. I locked myself in the bathroom and threw up twice.

She opens the locker and you see that the pages and pictures you taped up are still there, yellowed and grimy. You know they’re yours but you can’t recognize them any longer. Newspaper clippings, magazine art, headlines. You try to read the words but she grabs a book and shuts the door again. She takes a breath and her ripening breasts thrust forward. You jump back a step as if she’s just snapped open a switchblade.

“Hey,” she says, “this might sound funny, but—”

“I’ve got to get going.”

“Yeah, well, I was just wondering if—”

You shrink away, wheel about and damn near start scampering off.

You’ve never scampered before and it’s sort of fun. You’ve never even said the word scamper before and now you can’t stop. She follows for a few steps, trying to grab you by the elbow. You shirk away before she can touch you.

“Stop,” you tell her. “Scamper, scamper.” It’s a sound you can’t get out of your head, you fuckin’ nut.  “Scamper.”

“But—”

“I wouldn’t cry afterwards.”

“Hey, listen, you’re—”

You turn a corner, rushing past kids walking in groups, in pairs, everyone with somebody.  “I wouldn’t want to marry you!”

A skinny boy arched like a vulture gets in your way and you plow straight into him. He’s probably a hundred twenty pounds in his white suede sneakers and he lifts off as if from a launching pad. His long hair flails around his ears, little peach fuzz chin curling in flight. He’s got some serious elevation, goes up and flies backwards at least ten feet before he hits the wall outside the cafeteria hard. The doors rock open. You can clearly hear his arm snap in two. He glares at the protruding bone and then glances at you, then back to the jagged jutting ulna and then back to you. The pain won’t hit him for another minute. A fat kid with a kettle drum says, “Holy shit, man.”

You run.

What room is it? What was the number? The utilities closet of seventh period study hall. 306? 308? You lunge into 306 and see shadows writhing in the corner—two teachers screwing around, or two students making out, somebody giving head to the dead, or the smelly orphans still slinking around trying to get their internal organs back.

Eu estarei escrevendo ao congressista local imediatamente. A remoção de meus intestines é certamente uma ação immoral e ilegal. Eu procurarei os danos.

I will be writing to the local congressman immediately. The removal of my intestines is surely an immoral and illegal action. I shall seek damages.

There are shouts and the angry clamor of footsteps. They’re probably carrying torches, they’ve got you surrounded. There will be tear gas soon. Those high-tech laser beam gunsights scrawling over your chest.  You slip into the empty classroom next door.

Oh yes.

Here it is, this is it. You give a satisfied grunt and cut loose with your father’s chortle.

See. Your tortured soul has been in the corner all this time, curled in the agony of common trauma. It glances up as you enter, pale and shaky. It lets out a pained bleat as you reach down. Tears well and dribble. It jitters happily and struggles forward to meet you. You touch and the cool swims up through your spine.

The security guard puts his .45 to your temple, and you give him a slow and knowing grin, a hip wink that says it all.  Of course, it’s D’Angelis.  Your face is reflected in his shining badge and you can hardly believe you’re the same person you were twenty minutes ago, twenty years ago. There was a time you would’ve begged him, or any other maniac, to pull the trigger and get it over with in one quick solution.  But already that existence is drifting away. You’re here to stay.

He nods and holsters the pistol, and both of you walk down the hall eyeing all the little girls.

Your soul is restless and fidgety with strange and ugly needs. You touch the poison on your way out the front door and it warms you.

Things are getting better already.

Annabell

L. LYNN YOUNG

Extremely well written fiction has the ability to be complex while appearing to be quite simple. When we read “Annabell,” we were first impressed by its quiet, but unsettling narrative style. L. Lynn Young has created a story which continues to haunt us with its elemental sadness.

“A strange looking duckling with grey feathers that should have been yellow gazed at a worried mother.”

The Ugly Duckling
, Hans Christian Andersen

M
ommy, may I go now?

I
look at my youngest child, that last of four daughters. The one whose hair is fine and limp, whose nose is misshapen, whose mouth crooks to the right. Whose ears protrude comically. She, the one I named Annabell, is a difficult child, an unfortunate born into an even more unfortunate world. God forgive me, but I sometimes feel that it would’ve been best had she never been born at all.

She is tiny, Annabell. Three years old, but you’d never know it. My second daughter, Christine, who is nine-going-on-ten, refers to her as “Thumbelina.” Christine is pretty, as is Margaret, my first, and Madison, my third. They know Annabell is real; they made her real.

We are often stopped when we’re all out in public together. We are accosted, really. My husband and I must endure the flaming compliments of strangers who interrupt us as we shop, appreciate museums, play in the park. It’s as if we were a walking freak show.

You see, my husband is also pretty. We are clones, a living, breathing representation of some Hitleresque ideal, an anomaly. People we do not know, whom we do not want to know, feel comfortable, as if it is their right to stroke the silken curls of my children and bore their  beady eyes deep like rogue geneticists digging for the secrets of our blessed DNA. They browse, those strangers, and they take, as if by touching and breathing in our very auras, they too may become just as lovely. “Three daughters, huh?” they always say, even though Annabell is hiding in plain sight, clutching my leg. And they shake their heads in disbelief as if we were the only family in all of human history to have produced such a thing. The men sometimes clap my husband on his shoulder and utter variations of, “Boy, have you got trouble,” and my stomach tightens against their leering implications, the imagined accusations that exist only in my own consciousness.

“Four. We have four daughters,” I always add as I pry Annabell from my leg and push her forward for their inspection, the end result of my whole life.

She is met with bewildered looks, a scratching of heads, nervous smiles. They leave in a hurry, but not before giving another pat to my husband’s drooping shoulder, a gentle, sympathetic pat.

Annabell is invisible. She is my favorite.

M
ommy, may I?

I
am so beautiful, I get out of traffic tickets. Doormen waive the admission fee. The guy at the deli sneaks an extra quarter pound of ham to my order. I can drink straight from the bottle and make it look sexy. My neighbor’s eight-year-old boy fell in love with me. I stopped giving him so many hugs after I realized that he was starting to cling a bit too tightly, his bony chest pressing a bit too much against my bosom. I can drink from the bottle and deceive everybody. Sometimes being beautiful is sad.

Like when ugly voodoo-eyed girls shunned me because of my long blonde hair. In order to get a similar effect, they had to resort to fantasy, humid bath towels and thick rubber bands squeezing tight across their foreheads. Like when my only friend, K.B., tried to seduce me while we were hunting for crawfish. Like when I was about to catch the biggest one I had ever seen, but K.B. grabbed my arm and spun me to his wet, wormy mouth. I lost the biggest crawfish I had ever seen, then I went home and cut off my hair.

M
ommy?

B
eauty is not good when One is also submissive. A disciplined tongue locked behind naturally plump, pink lips is a sure sign of conceit. Because One must walk head up, eyes straight ahead, ears closed to the horny catcalls and jealous condemnation, One will surely be pegged as stuck up. Or even worse, a cold-blooded killer.

Stories will be built around and around, tall and lonely like a gigantic tower, and One will not be able to descend to freedom due to the fact that One has chopped her only means of escape into short butchy spikes way before it is fashionable.

No one wants to eat lunch with a killer, even if that killer has been exonerated.

One may have to go through Senior year with a funny walk because when everybody stares and scrutinizes everything One does, One becomes so self-conscious, even the mere act of putting one foot in front of the other is excruciatingly difficult. Senior year may bring back horrible memories, such as how hard eating an ice cream cone can be. But only if One’s perverted stepfather is present, especially if said stepfather is indulging in some Mexican comfort instead of a triple scoop, his dangerous eyes following One’s tongue, eyes full of silent anticipation. One’s ugly mother might turn and stare reproachfully, so it is important not to lick in too provocative a manner. One may realize that it is not possible, so the ice cream will invariably melt under Mother’s hot stare and gather in between One’s fingers, over One’s hand. One must never lap at the mess because that would be pornographic. The only solution is to throw the ice cream cone away.