In Zanesville (21 page)

I realize who she reminds me of—Amy in
Little Women.
Impetuous, ringletty, and perhaps not too bright, but a relief after the fervency of her sisters. She was the one I most wanted
to be, even though I had the same name as another. Little Amy March grew up while no one was looking, wandered away from wherever
it was they lived, and became an artist, while the one named after me had to stay and be in a worse book later.

“What if I jump out the window?” Gretchen insists, her little hands on my shoulder.

“You’re in a basement, dipshit,” Patti answers, crushing her cup.

Deb Patterson and Cathy Olessen go off, whispering, to sort through 45s and put a stack on the record player. First José Feliciano,
then Smokey Robinson, then Dusty Springfield. The cheerleaders look like they’re doing cheers when they dance, a lot of straight-armed
flailing and kicks, while the girls from Patti’s old school have a more plain and studious style, like the glasses-wearing
kids sprinkled into the
American Bandstand
crowd. This is where it turns out Felicia and I shine—we have our own version of the twist, which involves keeping the elbows
bent, the wrists slack, and staring upward. The key is to think of oneself as a pencil being slowly worn away to a nub, then
back up again.

“Being good isn’t always easy,” Dusty sings.

Maybe it’s just the aspirin, but all the girls seem to be doing whatever I do. I twist down to the floor and fall over on
my back and keep twisting; they all follow. I twist back up and then go into a funky chicken; so do they. When “Crystal Blue
Persuasion” comes on it sounds more psychedelic than it ever has; waves of music, and we’re swimming to it. Kathy Liddelmeyer
stops and stares at the Lava lamp, then starts dancing again, then stops and stares at it some more. Soon we all stop and
stare at it.

The lava is slow and momentous, bulging up bluely and then breaking apart into pale, stoned globs that slowly find one another
again.

“The lava is like a party of people,” I say as the song ends.

Everyone nods. I feel even more disoriented now; the most popular kids in my school won’t stop following a sidekick. There’s
a momentary hiss as the needle glides over to the label, a creak, a click, the clatter of the next record dropping, the sudden
hiss of the needle again.

“Me shell, ma bell, soan lay moan key bone tray byen on somm, tray byen on somm,” Paul sings in a clear, boyish tenor.

What if they were the ones coming over right now, the lads from Liverpool, instead of popular ninth-grade boys? My head feels
fizzy and light, in a good way, and I get an insight into how much fun I could be having right now if I were someone else.

Gretchen Quist seems to be running through the basement without her pants. “I’m peed on!” she cries, flapping her hands. It
looks like she couldn’t get her top unsnapped—a plaid bodysuit, fastened in the crotch—and tried to pee around it, but it
didn’t work. “I’m peed on! I’m Mrs. Piedmont!”

Mrs. Piedmont is a large, torpedo-shaped woman at our school who is referred to, officially and unofficially, as the Roving
Sub.

“Help, Cathy!” Gretchen falls on the rug and lifts her legs. The sight of our dumbest cheerleader, half-naked with her feet
waving in the air like a baby’s, is suddenly, sickeningly hilarious. People are bent over, laughing their guts out.

Cathy Olessen reaches down and unsnaps the bodysuit, gagging with laughter, and then lifts her tainted hand in the air. “Another
person’s pee!” she cries, and staggers into the bathroom.

Gretchen stumbles after her, first tagging Patti and crying, “Everyone at your party is pantsed!” At which point Patti starts
taking off her pants and then her shirt, and then throwing her bra on the hanging lamps. Deb Patterson and Cindy Falk and
Kathy Liddelmeyer and the three girls from the other school take off their bras and toss them on the hanging lamps. Suddenly,
around us people are stripping all the way down, throwing clothes at one another, launching underpants by their elastic around
the room, and crowding into the bathroom, where Gretchen and Cathy are wallowing around in a blue bathtub.

The bathroom is like something out of a magazine, with mirrored tiles, recessed shelves, stacks of blue towels, two toilets,
tall jars of bath salts, a macramé hanger holding an air fern. Why two toilets? I wonder. The mirrored tiles make it seem
like there are naked cheerleaders everywhere, arranging and rearranging themselves, like living wallpaper. It turns out Deb
Patterson is as flat as a boy.

Felicia and I sit side by side on the hamper.

“You have to strip,” Patti explains to us.

Mrs. Piedmont, the Roving Sub, one time accused me of spitting on the floor outside the music room, a foaming hocker that
I couldn’t even look at, let alone produce. She later apologized to me—something a real teacher would never do—when she saw
the culprit lay another one on his way out. “I
don’t know what I was thinking,” she said wearily. “You’re not the type at all.”

But she was wrong, I’m the type to do anything—I’ve stolen from stores, I’ve cheated on tests, I’ve lied, I’ve punched my
sister in the face, and along with Felicia I’ve vandalized property, most recently the car of a man who called the dog pound
on his own dog when it got mange. He lived two doors down from Felicia and actually turned the dog loose and hid its chain
and bowl before calling it in as a stray. The dog just stood there at the man’s back door, oozing and miserable. Felicia and
I told the guy from the pound while he was loading the dog up—using a pole and a muzzle, although the dog was actually friendly—but
the guy didn’t care.

“I get paid either way,” he said.

Felicia spray-painted
ASS
on the driver’s side of the man’s pickup truck, and I spray-painted
HOLE
on the passenger’s side. That was in the early fall, back when we did things before thinking about them, but nothing ever
happened from it; we never got caught.

So I’ll do just about anything, except spit or strip.

“I have my period,” I explain.

“Me too,” Felicia whispers.

“Hey—how come so many people who invented rag products have names ending in
x,
I wonder,” Gretchen muses in her little-girl voice. “Mr. Ko
tex,
Mr. Tam
pax,
like that. All ending in
x
’s.” She looks around slyly.

“Why would men be inventing rag products anyway?” Cindy Falk asks, staring into the medicine cabinet mirror, her eyes wide
as she examines her chin. “Wouldn’t that be so embarrassing—to have a whole factory that just makes
sanitary
napkins?
What if instead of making tractors, your whole town worked at a giant rag plant?”

That’s somewhat of a mindblower. They shift around, thinking.

“What if your own dad was a foreman and brought home all the reject rags for you and your sister to use?” Cathy Olessen says.

“And what about the ob ones, where it’s just a bare plug, no tube?” Gretchen pipes up, and they erupt into hysteria, making
honking noises, holding on to whatever is nearby—a sink, a faucet, the edge of the tub, a hanging towel.

“It’s not
ob,
it’s o.b.,” someone tells her finally.

She blinks, thinking that over. “What does o.b. stand for?”

Silence. Felicia looks at me. I actually have a lot of tampon jokes, even though I’ve been on them for only two days.

“Other butt,” I say.

“She’s funny,” Cindy says coolly, still addressing the mirror. “Why didn’t we know her before?”

“I think she’s in my gym class,” Deb Patterson says, sitting on the rim of the tub with her legs crossed, arms folded across
her nonexistent chest.

No boys allowed, Patterson.

“At first, people think you’re plain,” Kathy Liddelmeyer explains to me, “but then they realize you’re funny.”

“I don’t think she’s plain,” Felicia says.

“Shut up a second,” Patti says, listening.

Everyone freezes. When the record ends, there it is: tap, tap, tap on the sliding glass door.

What we’ve been dreading!

“Go outside and talk to them,” Patti tells Felicia and me, pushing us out of the bathroom. “You’re wearing clothes.”

“But we don’t even know them!” I say.

“Yes, you do,” Patti answers. “Everybody does.”

But they don’t know me! I’m making Felicia talk. The door is hidden behind a long drape; we slide behind it and duck out into
the night air.

Nothing. Just the quiet backyard of her grandmother’s place, a long expanse of grass and patches of snow beyond the brick
patio where we’re standing, various pieces of canvas-covered lawn furniture huddled here and there. Jed Jergestaad, Tommy
Walton, Galen Pierce, and some other dark figures come around from the side of the house.

“Hey,” Jed says in a whisper.

“Hi,” Felicia answers in a whisper.

“Is Patti here?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says. “They’ll be done doing something in a minute.”

We all look away from one another. It’s glittering cold out here, but nobody’s coat is buttoned. Clouds of vapor are silently
exhaled as we wait. Somebody stomps a foot, like a horse.

“Cold,” Felicia whispers.

Jed Jergestaad smiles down at the ground. He’s known for being nice no matter who he’s talking to.

“What do you think they’re doing?” he whispers finally.

Felicia and I look at each other.

“It’s a witch’s tit out here,” Galen Pierce says in a normal voice, and raps on the glass loudly.

The door slides open and the girls appear, one after another, until there is a big, shadowy group on the patio. It looks like
the same number of boys as girls, not counting me. Galen and Patti confer in whispers and then everyone takes off across the
lawn, toward the trees that lead to Prospect Point, where
there’s a fire pit and picnic tables—in the summer the police patrol it, but in the winter there’s a chain across the road.
As people move out, it seems like they’re in pairs already, or maybe I’m just imagining it. Felicia seems to be walking with
Jed. It was a game of musical boys and I’m the one left standing.

I don’t know what to do.

“Felicia,” I whisper.

“What?”

“What are we doing?” I ask.

“Going to Prospect,” she whispers impatiently.

“This is hideous!”

“Why?” she whispers, glancing at Jed, who is walking backward, slowly, waiting for her. Jed Jergestaad! The trees are absorbing
the rest of them, two by two.

“There are ten guys and eleven girls,” I whisper. “I’m the fifth wheel or something.”

“Why?”

“Are you listening?
I just said why.
”

“I mean, are you sure?” she whispers vaguely, already moving away, the outline of her head joining the outline of Jed Jergestaad’s,
and then they’re gone, into the trees, and I’m stumbling along behind.

The only thing I’m sure of right now is that I hate Felicia.

Why oh why did I come to this thing? Even in gym class you have the chance of being picked last. It’s not perfect, but at
least you have a place. Once, in sixth grade, Becky McGill, as thick and squat as a toad, cried, “Her arms are
threads!
” when the teacher made her take me on her team. It was volleyball and had come down to me and Beth Fessler, who chewed her
fingertips to the point where she wasn’t willing to hit the ball with them. I can still see McGill just standing there on
her toad legs, arms folded, jaw set. It wasn’t even that she didn’t like me; she just liked volleyball better.

Clouds keep going over the moon, making it hard to navigate, and people are stumbling and laughing, boy voices and girl voices,
and me way back here, listening to the sound of my own breath as I pant along. As far as I know, it’s never happened in the
history of gym that someone was just not chosen, left to sit out the game in front of everyone because they had useless fingers
or threadlike arms, were plain.

’Tis new to thee.

A cluster of tiny, perfect words, like a little village inside a snow globe.

“Hurry up!” Felicia says, pausing in the dark to whisper-bellow back at me.

Hurry up yourself and plunge down to hell while you’re at it.

“I am,” I whisper-yell.

’Tis new to thee.

There was something else I heard recently, a word or phrase that I wanted to remember, to think of later. This is later, but
I can’t think of it. I need something to hold in my mind, like a doll, just for company. How about those desperate kids in
Kentucky or wherever who carry around clothespins for dolls, or the ones who dress up a withered apple. How about the Unicef
children with their bare feet, how about people who are hit by cars. How about people who simply disappear, like Kevin Prentiss,
leaving everyone wondering what happened to them
?
The roof of the pavilion comes into view at the top of the hill, silhouetted against the cloudy sky.

Inside the pavilion it’s even harder to see. People are sitting on picnic tables or wandering around holding hands. I wander
too, through and out again, on the side that overlooks the Mississippi. There is a dark shape at the fire pit, but I ignore
it and just stare up at the sky. The clouds shift and the moon pushes forward, the river down below glints into view, and
the shape is two people, kissing. After a moment one of them says, “Hi,” and I don’t know if she means me, or not. I keep
looking out at the view.

“Um,
hi,
” the guy says pointedly.

Oh. They want me to leave.

I walk around the side of the pavilion and stand where no one can see me. The river has disappeared again but you can sense
it down there, black ink rushing along. Above, the sky rushes too, clouds opening and closing the eye of the moon.

Moonflame. That was the name of the imaginary pony I had when I was a girl. All black with a white mane and tail. My friend
had one that was all white with a black mane and tail. She called hers Flameglow. That friend copied everything off me, including
arithmetic, but I didn’t care because I was busy copying everything off another girl. If only Moonflame were here! Luekenfelter
actually had a real pony, which I never knew about until she told us at lunch. Kept on Jane’s farm until they built a new
dairy barn. No stalls, just stanchions.