Margarette (Violet) (5 page)

“I’m sorry.”

She starts crying. “I hate this place. I think
anywhere would be better than here.”

“Look…. Nothing happened. I don’t think they did
anything.”

“I know that,” she says. “
Lord
I know that,
but it happened to take something from me. I feel…. Forgive me for being
vulnerable, for feeling empty and betrayed in front of you. At this point I don’t
even care what you think of me. I’ve embarrassed myself completely…. I want to
go home. All I want is for all of this to end.”

“Look… you’re lucky nothing happened.”

“Lucky?”

“You are…. Lucky that I found you.” His head rocks
forward and he smiles at her.

Her voice turns placating. “Sure. I’m lucky. You
think I owe you something?” Her tone goes flat.

“Owe? You don’t owe me anything.”

“You say that, but what you’ve shown me… the
things you say…. You can’t seriously expect anything from me.”

“I said I don’t.”

The door opens on an awkward silence and May
stands still in the doorway. Margarette turns away and is forced to look back
at Tommy. She closes her eyes tight and the saltine water wells at the edges of
her eyelids and rolls down her cheeks. May walks in and Margarette shows her
only her shoulder.

Tommy sighs and sits at a chair in a corner, and
puts his hands between his knees. He doesn’t know what he did wrong, but he sits
like a dunce in the corner.

“Is everything okay?” May asks. “Tommy…?”

“Yeah. It’s fine,” he says.

“Good. Well, come with me,” she says. It is more
than a subtle suggestion. It is an order.

She leads them down a wooden staircase to the
kitchen. Margarette then remembers Tommy carrying her up the night before. She
feels so empty that her own chest threatens to collapse. Why doesn’t she ever
know when to shut up? She feels like she ruined her chances with him.

May starts with simple yet frustrating small talk
about school, asking Margarette who she knows. The toast is dry and the butter
isn’t really butter. The conversation is less fulfilling than the meal.

Afterwards Margarette says, “Thank you for
breakfast.”

“Leaving so soon?” May asks.

“Leave her alone,” Tommy warns his sister.

“Sorry. I need to get home,” Margarette says.

“There’s no need to say anything,” Tommy says.

The ride is mostly silent except for Margarette
giving Tommy directions to her house. As they approach her street she quickly changes
her mind and alters course. She asks him to drop her off at the Snappy Snack
Shack convenience store where she sometimes gets groceries with money that she
finds in her mother’s jeans when she does the laundry. He offers to drive her
home and help her with the bags, but she assures him that she only needs two
things and her house is not far. She waves goodbye as he drives away, but the
second he’s out of sight she turns around and walks home.

She lied—she just couldn’t imagine taking him to
her house. There’s only a small chance that her mother will be awake when she
gets home, but Margarette didn’t want to risk a confrontation in front of
Tommy.
Why
? She asks herself. Then she rolls her eyes in self-reply as
she realizes what worries her. Her situation in life and Tommy’s opinion of her
suddenly matter to her. What would he think if he met her mother? She’d be so
embarrassed.

In the end all her efforts were unnecessary; her
mother is still sleeping when Margarette returns home. She smiles to herself
thinking that sometimes having a negligent mother pays off. Aside from Tommy
and his sister, no one else would ever know that Margarette did not spend the
night at her own house.

But what she doesn’t realize is that it doesn’t
matter what anyone
really
knows. It’s what they
think
they know
what gets repeated around. Around and around, maliciously, without a care for
the lives it may destroy.

And in the smallest of small dirt towns everyone
thinks they know what happened to Margarette. Yet most of them didn’t even know
her name until that night.

Margarette is completely oblivious of the words
that are exchanged by half the school population that weekend, the many stories
that each additional phone call spurs. She only looks forward to school being
over in a few weeks—because, again, she finds herself without friends. She
cannot forgive Alice and Julie, but in three weeks she won’t have to see them
again. And whatever fool she made out of herself after they poisoned her, in three
weeks all would be forgotten. Most people had the attention span of a gnat.

She had a knack for being
entirely wrong almost all the time.

Margarette walks with the midday sun in her eyes
toward the lunch table outside the school lunchroom. Her ex-friends aren’t
there yet; she sits at her usual spot. It’s Monday, and she didn’t hear from
them all weekend. She looks up and catches glances of people looking away, as
if they had been staring at her while her eyes were elsewhere.
Or it could
just be your imagination
, she thinks.

She drinks cold coffee through a straw that she
smuggled in from home and tries not to seem paranoid. Drinking coffee through a
straw, room-temperature or otherwise, is an old habit of hers. She started
doing it because she heard it protects teeth from staining, but now it isn’t clear
whether she does it to protect her teeth or if it’s just that she likes it when
the boys notice her sucking through a straw. But now she wonders whether people
are staring at her because she looks weird drinking coffee through a straw. No.
It’s not
that
weird.

But when she looks up again, at an entirely
different group of students, she catches them intently staring at her. They
refuse to break eye contact even when she looks their way for a few seconds
then looks back. It’s unnerving; she feels her cheeks flush as she quivers in
the sun.

After a while the second bell rings. The other
girls never showed, so Margarette decides to go looking for them to confront
them. She stands up and gathers her things and walks back inside, towards the
lunchroom.

As she approaches the double doors to the main
hallway she looks up and two girls with similar pink headbands are staring at her.
They flinch almost at the same time as Margarette narrows her eyes at them. They
are whispering to each other but it’s obvious they are talking about her.

The first girl whispers, “
Is that her
?”

The second headband twin smiles and then whispers something
back, bringing her hand over her mouth to make double sure Margarette doesn’t
hear it.

“What?” Margarette snaps.

The grinning girl drops her hand along with the
grin. “Oh, don’t worry about my friend here…” she mutters. “She’s in drama
club.”

Margarette looks away at some girl who has Alice’s
haircut, thinking it is her missing ex-friend. But after a second the girl
turns her head and it’s not Alice. Disappointed, Margarette turns back to yell
some more at the girls, but they have already walked away. She only sees their
backs and hears their shameless giggles as they walk off.

At that moment she wishes more than anything that
she had the power to destroy with her mind. But she mutters in a stoic
self-reflection as if invoking a simple curse. “I never get what I want….” Nothing
she ever dreamed of came true.

As she walks inside, one of the boys that had been
watching her from an overhang, a bent book in his hand, starts following her.

Margarette knows Paulie as a nice guy with an unfortunate
kid brother nickname.
Paulie
. He’s a year younger than Margarette, a
junior. Everyone likes his older brother Luke more than him, even though Luke
graduated the previous year; a sort of notoriety that works against him. Plus,
his mom works at the school. At least she does mostly clerical work and is not
a lunch lady. Paulie catches the door as it shuts behind Margarette and steps
lightly in pace with her as she walks through the hall.

Margarette sticks her head around the corner of
the hallway and walks to an empty spot by the stairs. A few girls point at her
but she doesn’t notice.

Then she hears a throaty cough echo in the empty
hallway, and follows the sound with her eyes. She sees Alice and Julie hiding just
inside the open doors to the empty gym.
Really
hiding; it is a place where
they don’t usually go. A hush descends as they see her approach. Both girls
have their arms crossed, so she crosses hers as well when she stops in front of
them. They go on either side of her and look up and down her worn uniform.

On her left, Alice says, “So I hear you’ve been
naughty, Margarette.”

On her right, with a twang, Julie answers, “I’d
say slutty.”

Margarette says sharply, “Let’s get this straight.
If you hadn’t left me… alone… nothing would have happened.”

“I can’t believe you went home with him,” Alice
says, and sounds angry.

“She probably did it with all of them,” Julie says
in. “Half the football team got laid.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Margarette
makes an irritated face. “No one touched me.”

“He didn’t?” Asks Alice.

“That’s not what I heard,” says Julie. “In fact
that’s not what anyone’s heard. It’s… all over.”

“No one believes you,” Margarette says.

“Me? People said it. I didn’t have to say shit,”
Julie says.

Margarette sneers. “All you say is shit.”

Julie raises her arm and points at her. “You
stupid whore.”

“Oh, shut up. Give it a week and everyone will be
thinking about the next little scandal. No one cares.”

Alice’s voice booms near Margarette’s ear. “You
really didn’t sleep with him?”

Margarette turns to her left and faces a scowling Alice.
“Him who? Who even told you that? I didn’t sleep with anyone.”

Alice’s frown relaxes. “I should have known. Tommy
would never sleep with
you
. Don’t go trying to sleep with him. You hear
me?”

Margarette’s eyes soften, offended. So everyone
thinks she did it with Tommy because he took her, drugged, out of the party.
But the real reason it hurts is that Alice thinks that she isn’t good enough
for a guy like him. Her hurt quickly turns to anger. “Why not?” she asks
sharply.

Alice doesn’t meet her eyes. “Just don’t, okay?”

Margarette’s anger plays out in her imagination as
Alice walks past her and exits the gym. When Margarette turns back to Julie,
the bitchy girl has her mouth open as if giving an invisible blow job. Julie’s
expression changes, surprised by Margarette’s shift to an amused grin; she scoffs
and walks off following Alice.

Margarette continues to smile, thinking of the
ghost oral. Then she remembers Alice and her smile falters. It felt like Alice
was judging her, cheapening her. Why not Tommy? Her palm slides up and down her
arm. She feels exposed and vulnerable with no one to talk to.

“What the frick?” Margarette asks out loud,
replying to her internal debate. “How dare she?”

In that moment nothing means more to her than
proving them wrong. Showing Alice that she can do anything she wants becomes as
important as oxygen. Two days ago she wouldn’t have thought she had a shot with
Tommy. Even if he flirted she didn’t think she would do it. She was terrified
that he would hold her close and whisper that she wasn’t good enough for him.
That would crush her. She’d screw up and cry alone, wanting to die of
embarrassment.

Those feelings fade from her mind as her numb body
manufactures anger and focuses on the two girls telling her what she can’t do.
Nothing on earth would ever stop her from trying to prove them wrong.

Prove them wrong
.

She barely exits the gym when down the hall Julie’s
voice echoes faintly back to her. “Let’s figure out a way to pay that bitch
back.”

Margarette grits her teeth and her jawbone buckles
under the crushing weight of her fierce expression. Her fingernails dig into
her crossed arms. As they uncross her nails leave a mark on her skin.

The stars and moons shift their orbit to avoid
this one girl’s path. She internalizes her argument that no woman would ever
tell her what to do, when suddenly an image of her mother holding a burning smoke
and a cocktail at noon flashes before her eyes. Margarette’s mother always
called her
Little Margarita
… apparently a reference to a desperate pool
boy her mother had made love to. What woman can control her now, now that she’s
basically alone?
No man or woman, nor I, own their own destiny
, she
thinks,
but that doesn’t mean I have to accept what other people tell me I
can or can’t do
. Doing nothing wouldn’t change a thing. She might as well
do something.

Still gritting her teeth, she murmurs, “No one
tells me what to do.”

“Were you talking to me?” asks a voice behind her.

Margarette turns around and faces Paulie Sharp
hanging out outside the gym. She realizes he must have been standing there
through most of the discussion with Alice and Julie.

“Of course not,” she answers curtly, and walks away
with a quick strut.

“Wait,” he calls behind her. “What are you… what
are you doing?”

He’s taller than she is, so he catches up with her
fast. He grabs her by the wrist as she turns into the ladies’ locker room.
“Wait,” he presses.

Margarette doesn’t wait and breaks his grasp on
her wrist. She enters the locker room and presses her back against the wall.
She wants so much to go home. To get some random fatal disease and get a pass
from school to leave. But fatal diseases only show up when you don’t want them.

***

The day passes until the end of gym class where
she tries to blend in. Inside the women’s shower room each girl wears a swimsuit
under their gym outfit, but Margarette wears shorts and a worn sports bra as a
top. She hates being poor; she always feels awkward at gym.

But today all she can think about is the best way
to get to Tommy and prove Alice and Julie wrong. The idea is a newly forming
obsession. She turns the cold water most of the way down and pulls her hair up,
letting the hot water run over her shoulders.

What’s the best way to a man?
She wonders. How
can she get to his heart? Perhaps she could reach under his ribs and rip it
out. She smiles thinking about the heart wet in her hands pulsating the rhythm
of his beat. Realizing she is holding a frothing bar of soap, her head goes
under the hot water again. If she had gone home earlier she wouldn’t have to
think about this. She doesn’t feel safe at school. She feels alone. She can
pretend not to notice and disappear into her old life. For a moment the idea of
escaping is indeed exciting, but she forces those feelings down deep into her
chest.

The last two girls walk out the shower and
Margarette can hear them giggling in the locker room. She turns off the water;
she is now really alone. The drip of the faucet echoes in the emptiness she
feels inside.

Drip drip drip
.

Margarette is wearing black panties under her pair
of gray soaked short shorts and sports bra. They are both wet enough that anyone
could see right through them. She looks around, but all the towels are gone,
and so are her clothes. Panicking, covering herself with her hands, she tiptoes
to her locker. But when she gets there she has to do a double take.

No. It can’t be. Someone replaced her purple
combination lock with a metal one. A lump in her stomach grows into a sharp
pain. She gulps as the last bell rings. All day all she wanted was to go home;
and now, leaving school looks to be much more difficult than ever. Who the hell
took her clothes?

Margarette doesn’t know, but Paulie is watching
through a sliver of a gap between the main doors. If she had seen him she would
have shouted, “You pervert!” and slapped him across the face. And he would have
deserved it because indeed he was being one. But she doesn’t know he is there.

She searches the empty white tiled room and wire
cage gym area, hearing the football team filing into the room next to her.
Margarette stands behind the common door to the guys’ locker room waiting for a
miracle. For her clothes to appear. Anything.

Her eye catches something blue at the bottom of a
large plastic hamper a few feet away from her. The container sits in front of
the closed door of the laundry room, and her heart starts hammering in her
chest as she approaches it. And there it is: a two-piece cobalt blue
cheerleading uniform discarded carelessly at the bottom of the otherwise empty
hamper.

“Thank you,” she whispers to whoever answered her
prayer.

Margarette picks up the blue pieces. She brings
them to her nose and sniffs, expecting a nasty smell but ready to wear it
anyway. Yet the fabric smells like laundry detergent, as if it had been tossed
there clean. She further inspects the outfit. A terrible and treacherous thing
to wear; the size is one off and very tiny, but she would squeeze in just about
anything right now, even if she has to wear it unzipped.

She pulls the top over her sports bra, the fabric sliding
down over her wet chest. Her breasts bounce as she struggles to pull up the
cheerleader skirt over her hips. It takes a considerable amount of effort
pulling and bouncing to get the damn thing in place. Paulie’s eyes widen and
dilate in the light.

Margarette nervously looks around hearing the
voices in the next room. The football players are probably getting ready for
practice. She leans back and reaches behind her zipping up the skirt awkwardly
while dancing in a circle. She realizes her bare feet are touching the gym
floor. Any other day it would have been totally disgusting.
Today does it
really matter
? She mentally shrugs.

She hears a door slide shut behind her as the
football players march past in the next room, and a cold shiver rolls down her
spine. She presses herself against a wall, as if that made any difference. It’s
not like they’re going to walk into the girls’ restroom; the common door is
normally locked. But a girl wearing a cheerleading outfit one size too small
always needs to plan for every scenario.

She shivers long after the entire team has gone by.
When she looks at the main doors again, a pair of red sneakers is sitting just
inside. She runs and hides behind the lockers realizing someone has to be
there, but she sees no one, hears no one. She doesn’t hear anything other than
the dripping faucet.