Margarette (Violet) (8 page)

“They’re magnolias.”

She lets him stay over until the sun starts to
set. They talk about other things. Paulie discovers she likes reading novels.
As he leaves, he pulls a book with only numbers for a title—7734—out of his
backpack. It happens to be a book by the writer her cousin had mentioned.

“Here, you can borrow this,” he offers. He
explains it’s about a kid that goes crazy, which wasn’t typically her favorite
type of book, but she had nothing else that was new.

Then he leaves, both feeling a little bit better,
each having used the other in a strange, sad way.

Margarette finishes the book that night, staying
up late, not sleeping much and barely gets to school on time the next morning.

***

School on Tuesday is horrible. She feels she’s
grossly stared at and examined by the entire school. It’s like a joke that has
gone on entirely too long.

And then it happens. Sometime before noon, the
second gust of gossip turns the breeze of a rumor into a full-scale wind storm,
and people are discussing her even in the field house. They have mixed up the
details of where, but the gist of the story is accurate. Somehow they even know
about the red shoes. How incredible that one detail would stick while the where
and how fade.

Margarette has no idea how they found out. As far
as she knows, only Coach Swane had seen her with Tommy, but he never called her
in as he had threatened. She even walked past him in the hall and he didn’t
react differently or even acknowledge her. That only left Tommy.
That bastard
,
she thinks. He must have told someone. Hell, probably all of his guy friends.

The real culprit was actually innocent. The day
before, Coach Swane had recognized Tommy immediately, as the quasi town
celebrity that he was, but not Margarette, because they had been mostly in the
shadows. The coach wasn’t a man to spread rumors or keep up with fresh gossip.
He figured Tommy had been with his girlfriend, whom he believed to be Sharon. The
following day, thinking he was actually doing her a favor, he called Sharon in
his office to apologize for yelling the day before, and also to warn her that
Tommy should be more careful, that he wasn’t supposed to be in the school
grounds. The coach was a nice guy and would give Tommy a pass, but any other
teacher would have gotten him in deep trouble.

Really, he thought he was just gaining brownie
points with the hot young cheerleader.

At first Sharon dismissed his words as a prank; as
if the coach was trying to get her to admit to something she didn’t do. But
when she corrected him and explained it wasn’t them, the coach joked
sarcastically, “Sure it wasn’t you. Tell Tommy he has an identical twin that he
didn’t know about and he’s fooling around with random cheerleaders under the
bleachers. Now, you don’t have to look at me like that… you know me; I’m not
one to say anything.”

Sharon was not the brightest cheerleader, but when
it came to gossip, especially concerning what was hers, she was certainly
capable of putting two and two together.

***

Margarette tries to ignore everyone all day. At
lunch she sits alone, writing in her notebook. She fills the notebook pages
scribbling questions for Paulie about the book he lent her. Then she tears
pages out letting the frilly bits inside the binding spirals fall to the floor.
All eyes follow her and jaws drop as she crosses the yard and hands Paulie back
his book with the notes tucked inside. Alice and Julie, watching from a
distance, almost fall to the floor. They now sit at the table where Sharon
normally sits, except that Sharon’s seat is empty today.

The school is electric. The boy and the book had
created a third tale that was too much for everyone to resist. Tales of sexual
awakening and prostitution fill the halls spiraling out of proportion, but
somehow the teachers don’t say anything. Either they didn’t hear the gossip at
all or they didn’t know it is about Margarette.

Teachers always know more than they let on. The
great
Tommy & Sharon
affair was ruined. Even the coach finally found
out, but then he was more worried that the situation would detract from the next
game than what he cared about sexual scandals between students.

Because everyone is talking about it, even Margarette
eventually hears about the coach inquisition between whispers in hallways. Her
heart lightens at the thought that Tommy had not been the one to tell. Still,
she had thought that the coach didn’t see anything. What did he tell Sharon? Margarette
would have done anything to have been there when he had that conversation with
Sharon about what he thought he saw beneath the bleachers, and yet at the same
time she was mortified. Did he really know? Or did he just say that he saw them
kissing, and Sharon escalated the incident to harm Margarette’s already wounded
image?

All of this because of
one little drink. When would the stories about sexual scandals between students
ever
end?

Paulie is standing outside school when Margarette
walks past the office finally on the way home. She’s upset, and for a moment
pretends to ignore him even as he walks straight towards her. Sometimes the
simplest things he does add to her frustration. But she slows down as she
reconsiders; he fills a void in her life with his awkward friendship. He consistently
shows interest in her; and besides, none of this is his fault. It’s his
interest in her that lifts her spirits a little today; otherwise she would have
been completely crushed by the terrible day she’s had and have no one to talk
about it in person. She lacks attention from most directions in life, which is
probably the main reason she decides to keep him around.

As she approaches him, she only says, “Hey,
Paulie.” She could tell he is excited she said his name.

He reads her expression like a book page. “Come
on, let’s get out of here,” he says kindly.

***

From the day they first started talking, Paulie and
Margarette take the bus together to her house after school. Paulie quickly becomes
a very good friend. He stays with her from 4:15 p.m. until around 7:00 p.m.
almost every day. Some days he has excuses about doing homework together, and
others he plainly says he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. It is sweet, it is sad
and it quickly becomes familiar to her. She looks forward to spending her
evenings with him talking about books and old sci-fi movies.

Friday, though, all she wants is some time to
herself after school ends. She’s about to tell Paulie that she’s walking home
and he can’t follow her when a dramatic movement across the parking lot catches
her eye. She looks up to see Sharon getting into Mikey’s black 4x4 Jeep.

She closes her eyes and looks like she’s in pain.

“What?” Paulie asks, seeing her expression.

“Sharon’s been slutting it up all week, yet no one’s
talking about
her
. I’m the one getting shit for something that happened
once
.”

“Well, it’s her and her friends that are doing the
majority of the gossiping, so that makes sense,” Paulie rationalizes. He makes
a good point that she has absolutely no interest in hearing about.

“Her friends at one point were almost
my
friends. If they hadn’t been obsessed with Tommy, it would be us talking about
her
.”
In some parallel universe
, she adds to herself.

“What? No…. Things don’t just change like that.
You can’t just cross over and become one of them.”

“Why the frick not?”

“That’s the way it is. That’s the way you are. You
don’t really want to be one of them, do you?”

“Like you wouldn’t,” Margarette says. “I would in
a second. I’d sell my soul. I don’t even need a reason why. They all hate me
now—for nothing, because he doesn’t even seem to remember I exist. No one is
safe from them, except those in their group.”

“So that’s why you want to be one of them?” Paulie
asks, with a trace of disbelief in his voice. “To keep them from talking about
you, even if you know they’re not nice girls?”

“Nice? Every one of them is a bitch hypocrite. And
yes, I’d rather be one of them than have to deal with this shit.”

“What would you think of yourself then?” Paulie asks.

She shrinks away, confused, thinking somehow he
called her a bitch and those other words she thought sounded good strung
together. She says, now angrier than before, gritting her teeth, “I don’t know,
but it won’t happen….”

Paulie goes quiet hearing the change in her voice.

Two cheer cadet girls walk up to the pair,
murmuring in a spattered girl talk. Like two snakes sliding through a sleeping
bag, they sneak up on Margarette and Paulie. One with key lime shoes and a
skirt two sizes too small for her frame whispers, “You ask.”

The second, a rather plain girl with bleached
hair, says, “No, you ask.”

“No,
you
,” Green Shoes repeats.

Bleached Hair rolls her eyes. “Fine.”

The blonde girl spins her hair nervously and
Margarette imagines her turning a crank. Then out the trivial comment falls.
“So is it true you like football players?”

Margarette kind of wishes it was Julie. Making
Julie look stupid was almost fun, but berating this little girl wouldn’t make
her feel better. Still, these girls are both sophomores and yet they had the
nerve to make fun of Margarette on school grounds. It just meant the bar had
lowered and the insults could come from anywhere.

“Everyone likes football players. But football
players don’t just like
anyone
,” she says, and walks away cleverly
spinning it, Paulie trailing behind her with an eyebrow raised.

Margarette feels her stomach tighten and wants to
be sick. Tommy hasn’t called, hasn’t come by the school since Monday. Why
should he come see her or even call? It reminds her of how pathetic she feels
inside. She feels ugly and everyone is laughing at her, watching her. They are
horrible.

But she’s strong deep down, exposing nothing to
her haters, and leaves the school grounds without a hint of mortification.
Outside, finally, she squeezes her eyes to release the tear that was lodged
there, and then wipes her eyes with her thumbs. Her quick pass arches the black
smear to the corner of her eye, making her look like an Egyptian queen. It is
hard, things are dark, but the more she thinks about it the more she smiles.
There isn’t much more that they can take from her.

Margarette lets out a soft chuckle. “I don’t fit
in anywhere…. Look, I’ve got to take off, Paulie. I’m going to walk home. Don’t
come by today; I’ve got stuff to do.”

“I got you something,” Paulie says.

“What?” she asks, brightening a little. “You got
me something?”

“A book,” he replies. “
The
book.”

Margarette’s face falls. “I don’t know if I liked
the last one you lent me.”

“This one’s better. This one’s perfect.” Paulie looks
left and right quickly, as if scanning the street for spies. He produces a
package from his backpack. “Don’t tell anyone I gave it to you. The churches
banned it. I had to hide it from my mom.”

“Even Saint Bethel?” Margarette’s curiosity is
piqued. Saint Bethel is the church Margarette’s mother goes to when she tries
to be sober. If they banned the book, Margarette is going to have to read it.
Just to go against the church.

“
All
churches,” Paulie says. There’s a long
pause while Margarette processes this. “All churches,” he repeats. His hand
seems to shake with guilty excitement. “And by the way, it’s the Church
of
Bethel. It’s not a saint. The town of….”

Margarette cuts him off. “I’ll read it.”

She takes the package from him, but doesn’t open
it. Paulie is clearly disappointed, but holds it in.

“If nothing happens and you get bored, put a light
in your window and I’ll stop by,” Paulie adds.

“Cryptic,” Margarette replies with a semi-scowl.

“A signal,” he clarifies.

“Paulie, I don’t…. We’ll see; but if you see me I’ll
be a mess.”

“I’ll stop by,” Paulie insists.

“Eeeehhh…. shh eeehhh…. Well, maybe,” she says,
not committing to an invitation or even a real word that could be construed as
an invite.

“You suck.” His eyes narrow.

“You wish.” She grins.

Margarette opens her front door and cautiously
sticks her head inside her own house.

“Hello?” she calls. “Anyone? Hello, murdering
rapist? Demon? Murdering demon rapist?”

Then she mutters, “Person who rapes demons?”
Wondering where that came from.

When the silence echoes that her house is
demon-free, she goes inside and locks the door behind her. She assesses the
mess in front of her. Her mother has not bothered to come home all week. It isn’t
the first time this has happened, but acknowledging it makes her feel worse.
“Shit,” she says to no one.

She knows Paulie is going to come over anyway,
light or no light, and she doesn’t want to be there when he does. Ordinarily
she wouldn’t want to be alone, but she is very conscious of how un-fun it is to
watch someone else cry. She picks up the phone and dials her cousin to come
pick her up, but she’s greeted by an answering machine and quickly hangs up.

Margarette empties her hamper and cleans the one
bowl, one plate, one knife, fork and spoon in the sink. The house screams
silence after the last clank of the dishes ends and there’s nothing left to
wash. Watching television would only let people know she is home, so she
retreats to her room with the lights off. She thinks about bringing the phone
with her but leaves it downstairs.
Why bother
, she thinks. No one called
her house all week; why would they call her on Friday? She forces the pain of
rejection deep into her chest along with every other caustic agent feeling she keeps
hiding from the world. Why would Tommy call her? And even worse, why does she
even care?

She opens her closet and sees her shoes lying on
the floor, some out of their matching boxes. She takes five seconds to envision
how neat her closet could be, and then shuts the doors without actually fixing
the mess. Too much effort. She changes into her comfortable see-though slip and
lies back on her bed, alternating her mood between desolate and irate with
every other thought.

Margarette is surprised when she hears a car door
shut outside. Her mother’s sister’s kid could not have possibly heard her
psychic scream. She’s only really expecting Paulie. Ah… of course. It must be
Paulie in his mother’s car.

Softly she says, “I fricking hate boys.”

Ding dong
.

She takes her time walking downstairs, but doesn’t
change her outfit. Paulie deserves to suffer seeing her look delectable in her
shorts and see-though slip and only be able to dream about her. She goes over
the first thing she’d say to him; something clever about why she didn’t put a
light on the window. The doorbell rings again. Nothing comes to mind, and she
sighs, her head rocking back.

“Damn it Paulie,” she mutters to herself, “you’re
not supposed to come over. I was going to rearrange my shoes.”
Oh, maybe I
can get him to do it for me
, she thinks.

Margarette turns the lock, cracks the door open and
Tommy smiles at her. She quickly shuts the door in his face and presses her
back against the wall.

“Oh no.” She gasps realizing what she had done cannot
be undone.

Cowering behind the closed door, Margarette’s mind
races her pulse.
What the frick is Tommy doing here
?

She slides down to the floor as she hears his
voice on the other side of the door.

“Hey, Margarette?” Tommy sounds confused.

“Nope, she’s not home,” she calls out.

“Margarette, can you let me in?”

“What do you want with Margarette?”

“I wanted to invite you out for dinner.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What?”

“Your offer for dinner is a lie.”

“No….” Tommy insists. “There is food to be had.”

“Is your phone broken? Ran out of quarters?”
Margarette wishes she could hide the sarcasm out of her voice, but fails.

“What?” Tommy’s voice falters. “No, but I don’t
know your number. No one knows your number.”

Oh. Margarette thinks about that for a second.
“How did you find my house?”

“I followed you home. It’s the first time you
walked home since Monday. I shouldn’t have let you walk home alone….”

Margarette smiles despite herself. “You’re not a
very good stalker.”

She puts on her serious face again and gets up.
She cracks the door, wide enough for one eye. “Listen, I’m going to ask you
three questions. Only answer yes or no.”

She sees Tommy’s smile through the crack in the
door. “I can do that,” he says.

Margarette gives him a one-eye stare down.

“
Yes
,” he corrects himself.

Here goes
. “Did you have sex with Sharon?”

“Yes,” he answers after a pause.

She shuts the door.

“Hello…” he calls surprised. “Hey Margarette… you
said three questions.”

“You got the first question wrong.”

“
How
?”

“You fricked her again.”

“No, I didn’t,” Tommy says. “I haven’t touched her
since I saw her and Mikey.”

Margarette hadn’t realized her heart was beating
faster and faster. “You need to be more clear.”

“But you said…. Wait, I….”

“Okay.” Margarette takes a small breath to steady
herself. She cracks the door again. “Would you really have called me if you
knew my number?”

“Yes.”

“How long would you have waited?”

“Is this the third question?”

“Answer the damn question.”

“Zero.”

She shuts the door again.

He rants muffled behind the closed door. “Look, I
can handle questions four and five. Just say yes to tonight. Have you eaten? I
came here to take you somewhere special. I’ve wanted to talk to you all week. I
wouldn’t have waited if I had known your number or where you live.”

But she’s not listening.
Zero
was the only
good answer. It is a pretty good answer for someone who is stereotypically bad
at math. Ironically, he works at a bank; but then, she knows Tommy’s father got
him the job. Zero… anything else implied that he thought about not calling.
Still, it had been four days of nothing, and she wants him to suffer for that.

She frantically searches for something to put over
herself so she can open the door, but all she can find is a mint green raincoat.
She throws that on.

“Is there a six?” Tommy asks.

She is a little distracted in the raincoat, having
trouble buttoning it, so she mishears what he said behind the door.

“Sex? No.”

“Good,” Tommy answers, thinking she repeated six.

“I mean no. I cannot have sex with you again.”

“What?”

Again she cracks open the door. “I know that’s why
you’re here. I just don’t hate myself enough to continue….” She flushes, barely
able to finish. She realizes he meant the sixth question.

“I just wanted to….” Tommy is apparently caught
off guard. He can tell she’s hiding from him, but doesn’t know why.

Margarette presses further into her folly. “I
know, but it will come to that.”

Tommy looks at her as she continues, and even
though she is behind the door he can see that she’s barely dressed. “Well, how
do I get to know you without seeing you?” he asks her.

“Why do you want to know me?”

“No, I mean, you should see if we like each other.”

Her eyes narrow. “Why, because we had sex under
the bleachers?”

“Well, yeah. I guess.”

“Let me guess. Everyone knows about you and me, so
you think you have a shot. Does that about sum it up?”

Tommy sighs. “No. Not at all. Look, I’m normal.
Totally normal…. Okay, everyone knows I’m not smart or good at anything. The
only reason I was on the football team was my dad is the biggest sponsor. I
spent my last year trying to live up to what he expected or what I was told to
do. Sharon lost interest in me the second she got to know me.”

Margarette rolls her eyes, but even when she looks
away she still has her hand on the door, holding it open.

He continues without altering his course. “She
wanted to go to parties and show off and all I ever wanted to do was stay
home.”

Margarette is taken aback at his sincerity. She
keeps her guard on, though. “You’re not selling me on the idea describing your
ex.”

“What I mean is give me the chance you’d give
anyone else. Don’t think that you know me because of who I am.”

“I think you had your chance,” she says, but her
voice isn’t sharp.

He hears a little sorrow in her voice, and pushes
lightly on the door. It opens without resistance. Margarette tucks into the
wall out of the direct light hoping he wouldn’t see her expression giving away
her true feelings. She wants to talk to him. She wants him to take her out to
dinner. She doesn’t exactly love the idea of him, but she wants him to
want
her.

Tommy steps in and shuts the door. He sees her
outfit and smiles to himself, and stands in front of her.

Her cheeks flush red standing in only the slicker.
She shakes trying to straighten her posture and balls her hands into fists.

“You can’t come in here without my permission,”
she says.

“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to, but I
refuse to leave without changing your mind.”

“Why should I?”

“I like you. And I want to prove it to you.”

She pauses and looks to the side. She’s only
disappointed in herself because she doesn’t really want to kick him out.

“I really think we should start over,” Tommy says,
his voice soft. “Let me ask you out.”

“Like a date?’”

“Sure.”

“Go outside.”

“What?”

“Go outside.”

“Why?”

“So I can lock the door.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you outside and the door locked,”
Margarette says. “I need to think about it.”

“Seriously?”

“Look…. how can I choose with you looking at me?
Can you walk outside for me? In the end I pick. Not you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Get out there and wait,” she says, raising her
voice a little. She turns to push him out and the front of the slicker opens.
He looks down the line of her transparent top and freezes.

“I get to pick,” she repeats even as he gets a
look at her slip.

“Okay…” he says as if mesmerized by her form.

The door slams.

Tommy steps outside out into the light as the bolt
slides through the door. A drop of water falls down the back of his neck and he
yelps in surprise. He shakes the back of his shirt as a movement in the bushes that
separate Margarette’s house with her neighbor’s catches his eye. When he turns
he sees Paulie stepping around the tree in the neighbor’s yard, walking down
the sidewalk. Paulie pretends he’s looking for a different address and continues
past the house.

Margarette stares at the fish eye oval of Tommy
through the eye piece in the door unable to see Paulie walking away.

Why the hell am I thinking about him
? She
asks herself. She shrugs off the raincoat and hangs it back on the coat rack.
She folds her arms, slumping against the wall. She supposedly didn’t care about
Tommy before, yet she was upset all week because he didn’t call. And now he
comes over saying he wants to take her out on a date and she doesn’t know what
she wants.

She feels like a criminal locked in her house, and
Tommy is the warden at her doorstep protecting her garden.
What do I do
?
She wonders. She’s not even sure if she wants to go out with him. But she does
like the fact that he wants to take her to dinner. She should go. She will go.

But how can she act casually around him after
having such carefree sex?
We should start over
, he said. Okay. Ignore
their dirty little deed. This is just a date with a guy. But then she worries
about what to wear, how to act and whether she should start anything sexual with
him.
Too late for that
, she says to herself with a raised eyebrow that
no one sees.

She fights herself about it and realizes that she is
still hiding behind the door. She pushes off the wall and makes up her mind on
the spot. She really does want to go out with him, and have him treat her like
a girl he likes, not just a girl he had sex with. If she doesn’t do it now she’s
going to regret it. So she runs into her bedroom and strips down, tearing
through the piles of clothes on the ground. She finds a pair of tight jeans and
tugs them on with only her sports bra on. Nothing in her room works. Nothing
matches and everything looks stupid on her. She puts things on halfway before
ripping them off and discarding them to the floor.

“How do I fix this? How do I fix this?” she
mutters while moving about the room.

She closes her eyes and tries to empty her mind.
Tommy wants her, and it’s probably for her body. It doesn’t matter what she
wears. He wouldn’t say a word about her outfit if it looked horrible on her. She
reaches under her arm and feels the elastic of her sports bra. Why fix what’s
not broken? Tommy is in a Polo, so why bother? She hates her shoes, her jeans
and everything she has on, but it doesn’t matter, does it? She moves away from
the mirror and decides to wear the last shirt she tried on without thinking
about it.

On the way out she grabs the switchblade off her
desk and extends the blade with a flip of the wrist. She folds it back and puts
it in her pocket—she’s going out, alone, with some guy in his car. He could
take her anywhere. After all, what does she really know about Tommy? He could
be just as dangerous as the guy at the party. Or worse, he could have made that
entire scenario up just to get her on his side and started the rumor himself. Sure,
he’s nice and cute, but that doesn’t make him trustworthy.

The door opens just as the sun sets, and
Margarette steps out into the last ray of light. Tommy is sitting on the steps
of her porch. He looks up at her and smiles.