The Adults (11 page)

“Jesus,” Brittany said.

“That’s so sad.”

Some of the girls mistook the suicide as their own tragedy, an excuse to no longer do homework for the month. “I just can’t think,” Martha said to Ms. Nailer, “knowing things like this happen.”

“I just can’t believe it,” another one said.

“To think we were almost right there . . .”

“My mother’s friend killed herself once after a boob job.”

“That’s dumb. Aren’t big breasts supposed to be a reason to
live
?”

Janice explained how her brother Ed was never inspired by his big breasts. Janice and I used to make fun of Ed for being fat when we were younger, before he was paralyzed; it seemed like a good enough reason at the time. I cringed at Janice’s mentioning of this, even though I had once offered him my bra and left a pamphlet on increasing breast cancer awareness in front of his door.

The Other Girls started waiting for Mark at his locker every day right before lunch. Mark and I never looked at each other. We stood at his locker while Mark looked at one of the Other Girls’ perfect faces. Then we walked to Ms. Nailer’s class.

“Nail-her,” Mark finally said. “I’m going to nail-her, get it?”

We nodded our heads, even though I hated him when he acted like Richard, which was happening more and more frequently. But it felt wrong to hold his failings against him. So I nodded my head as though I knew why Mark wanted to fuck an older woman when I was standing right in front of him. I nodded my head because if we were forced to understand anything then it was that all men and women, young or old, were created equal under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

But, still.

“She’s so old,” I said.

“I heard Ms. Nailer slept with Socrates,” one of the girls said, and everybody laughed except Martha, who said, “What’s a Socrates?”

“Don’t be stupid, Martha.”

“They’re an ancient people.”

Mark took the lead. I was glad when Mark walked ahead of me, as my whole life became embarrassing around him now. I was embarrassed when he sat at lunch with us, watching me eat a sandwich. After all of this, I was still here,
just eating a sandwich
!

We passed a sign for the Ebony Club, which had sent the whole school into a recent uproar. Freddy Lawrence, the president, put up fliers around the school to advertise a meeting where black students could discuss being black in a predominantly white school.
Everybody is invited
, it said.
Even White and Jewish People
. Jewish students walked by the signs, offended, exclaiming, “What, are we not white? Are we not black?”

Martha walked by and said, “I don’t get it: Is being Jewish opposite to being white? Is it?”

One of the girls said we should start a white people club.

“Our whole life is a white people club,” one of them said.

“Sometimes, I wish we had a black friend.”

“
Guys
,” one of them said. “I’m black.”

“Shit.”

“Sometimes we forget.”

“It’s not like you’re, like,
black
, you know. I mean, you wear Skechers.”

“And you want to be a pastry chef.”

“And you take French.”

One of the girls pointed to another group of girls by staircase B and said, “Look at those other girls. Just look at them. They’re so freaking tarded.” Martha flinched because she had a brother with Down syndrome and none of us knew how to appreciate imperfection. One of the girls asked, “Is Down syndrome when the cells divide too fast?”

The one who never made eye contact anymore said, “No, tard, that’s what my mom has. Cancer.” Another one asked, “Like, is she dying?” and none of us knew.

After lunch, a teacher always guided the special education students into the cafeteria. They were given napkins and 409 to wipe down the tables.

“It’s so weird,” I said as we watched them divide and pick tables. “It’s like slave labor or something.”

Janice approached a faculty member and said, “This is slave labor. I bet you aren’t even paying them.”

“Paying who?” the teacher asked.

“The retards!”

The teacher shook her head. “They like to have tasks.”

“Yeah, that’s what the plantation owners said too.”

If I was pleased by anything during this portion of my life, it was my fantastic handwriting. I jotted down notes about the Great Depression before dinner while my father talked aimlessly about beef Stroganoff. I made neat lists about government-created labor, like it wasn’t until all the suffering was over that you could appreciate something as an organized system of profit and loss. I got my best grades freshman year and nobody understood this—why now, they asked, why are you acting stable when your house is being disassembled, it’s a sign of a contrary nature, of bad things to come. I heard my mother whisper this over the phone to a psychiatrist she had been trying to get me to visit.

Tragedy was making me a better and a worse person all at once. I said hello to the mailman for the first time. I had ignored him my whole life for reasons unknown to both of us. I suppose it was because the mailman was terrifying to me the way Santa Claus had been a bit terrifying, old hairy men who had private access to my life, both of them regarding my house as just another destination on the map, which, I guess, is exactly what it was, and we were just people who needed something, and every day they checked us off lists, like things, like
wine
and
gouda cheese
and
Emily Marie Vidal
. Because that was who I was. “I’m Emily Marie Vidal,” I sometimes repeated in front of the mirror, developing a strange compulsion to remind myself. “Weird.” Every day, I was still myself, and yet constantly unrecognizable. And sometimes after school when I had nothing to do, I would draw pictures on the driveway in chalk of what I thought my brothers and sisters would look like. Then, one day when the mailman arrived, I picked up my hand and thought, I could be a different person, we could all be different people. “Hello!” I waved to the mailman. “Hello!”

But sometimes the mailman didn’t wave back. Or he didn’t hear me. Or he got so used to not seeing me, I started to look just like the lamppost. I started to feel just like the lamppost, flat and not like a real person at all, unlike Mark’s new girlfriend Alice, who walked out of his house after school, ruffled and flushed and proud of her decisions. She was a happy girl who had been touched by a boy. She was never afraid. She was the last person in our class to change from shorts to jeans when winter came. I stared at her legs in algebra class and waited to see the slow rise of prickles on her skin that the cold weather brought, but her legs remained smooth like glass. Alice was smooth like glass and never regretful of her decisions, but on my lawn, she could not look me in the eye. “What’s the math homework?” she asked.

“Page fifty-four, problems one through ten,” I told her.

“Thanks,” she said, and walked away.

And I began to understand the truth: I would always be alone like this. I had understood the idea in theory, and noticed the absence of siblings at family functions, but when the neighborhood quieted down after the suicide, and the rain fell hard and washed away my drawn family, I felt truly alone for the first time in my life. “Can you guys believe this? Dad is leaving. I can’t believe this,” I said aloud to the blurred stick figures.

W
e were cutting open fetal pigs in biology when the alarms went off. Two days before Christmas break and the school went into lockdown. Lockdown meant that wherever you were, you had to close the door, lock it, and not leave until Dr. Killigan came onto the loudspeaker saying you could. It was our first real lockdown and it was the most thrilling thing that had happened all semester, even though we had practice ones before and I had joked to Janice how absurd it was to practice being locked in a room. “How hard is it? You just sit there. Being locked in.”

“Where’s Ms. Nailer?” Martha asked.

Ms. Nailer was in the bathroom when the alarms went off. She told us she was taking this new medicine for her skin condition that made her pee all the time.

“I’m right here, class!” Leroy Hannah said in a high-pitched voice that resembled Mother Goose’s more than Ms. Nailer’s. He was in the front of the room, wearing Ms. Nailer’s Dior glasses and her green cardigan.

We closed the door, turned the lock.

“Why is this happening?” Martha asked.

“Must be a homo in the building,” Richard said.

“Don’t be so gay, Richard.”

“It’s sooo hot in here.”

“I know. Don’t touch me.”

“Rabbits are weird,” Richard said, tapping on the wired cage. “How they poop little pellets.”

“Yeah but, I mean, so do we,” I said, standing next to him.

“No we don’t,” Richard said. “We poop out long logs.”

“Yes, I understand that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “But I’m sure to the rabbits, their little pellets look like long logs.”

“I wish we could open a window,” Brittany said.

“I wish I could take off my pants,” Annie the Bird or Bear said.

“Should we be scared or something?”

“According to Satan.”

Someone turned off the lights.

“Not funny.”

“Anyone wanna bone?”

When the lights came back on, Leroy Hannah was in the front of the class, pretending to sip coffee out of a beaker. Richard was next to him, announcing to everybody that he was going to give his fetal pig a rhinoplasty. “A nose job,” he clarified.

“Oh, good!” Leroy shouted. “Class, listen up! We are going to make the pig’s nose proportional to the pig’s face!”

Richard picked up a ruler. “Annie!” he shouted. “Come here!’

The class laughed. Annie the Bird or Bear glared at him. “Real fucking funny, dickhead,” she said.

“Annie,” Leroy said, still mimicking Ms. Nailer, “your nose is nearly four inches long. Have you ever considered reconstructive surgery?”

We waited for Annie the Bird or Bear to stand up and slug Leroy across the face. But she didn’t.

“Yes,” she said.

She lay down on one of the empty lab tables.

“So give me a fucking nose job already!” she shouted.

“Uhhh,” Richard said, “technically, it’s a rhinoplasty.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Richard,” Annie the Bird or Bear said. “Just do it.”

“You can’t give ABOB a nose job!” Martha screamed.

“I hate my nose,” Annie the Bird or Bear said. “But my parents are poor so I can’t do anything about it. I can’t live the rest of my life like this. So just
do it
, you pansy ass.”

Richard didn’t move. He looked at me for some reason. He stared. I shook my head. Annie the Bird or Bear sat up and took him by the throat. “Do it, fuck face. Is your father a world-class surgeon or is he not?”

He cleared his throat, straightened out his back, like he was remembering who he was. “Jesus, woman,” he said. “All right, all right.”

The class buzzed.

“Scalpel.”

The fetal pigs lay still all around us.

“First,” Richard said, “since you are alive, we’ll need to sterilize the blade. Anyone remember how to use the Bunsen burners?”

Human Fart did. Human Fart had been Ernest Bingley’s new nickname since he farted the previous week doing sit-ups in gym. When I heard it, I was saddened and relieved all at the same time. It had to happen to someone eventually, and I was glad it wasn’t me, but poor Ernest, even though Ernest would eventually get laid on prom night, go to Columbia, and have a son who invented an electric bike that powered itself off its own energy, but still.

“You can’t bring me into this when you get in trouble,” Human Fart said. “I’m going to be a doctor. I don’t need this shit on my résumé.”

Richard told him to put this shit on his résumé. “This is the shit of résumés,” Richard said.

But Human Fart made them sign a contract. Leroy drafted it, wrote down
Earnest did not light the flame
on the contract.

“It’s E-R-N-E-S-T,” Human Fart said, annoyed.

He lit the flame.

“Smells like gas.”

“Like ass.”

“What if Ms. Nailer comes back?”

“What if Annie dies?”

“Nobody is going to die,” Richard said, holding the blade over the flame. “I’ve done this a million times.”

“Now,” Annie the Bird or Bear said. “I want you to shave off the bump. I want a Grecian nose. I want a one-hundred-degree angle.”

Annie lay back again, her feet hanging off the end of the table. Richard put on the white lab coat Ms. Nailer never wore. Girls tee-heed from behind. Richard grabbed two rulers and took measurements of her face. We couldn’t even speak. Someone yelled at Martha for breathing too loud. I stood in disbelief. This whole time, I had truly believed Annie the Bird or Bear was okay with who she was, as though she had somehow accepted her position in life and was, in that way, above everyone else. But here she was, lying on a table ready to be split. Of course she wanted a Grecian nose. We all did.

Richard began. He hummed while marking her with a purple marker, circling the bump on her nose. He pulled out a flask from his pocket, and everybody gasped, as though he had pulled out a rabbit holding a loaded gun.

“Drink this,” he said to her.

“You’ve had that this whole time?”
one of the Other Girls asked.

Annie the Bird or Bear opened the cap and sniffed like it was poison.

“The Bird’s scared of a little whiskey?” Richard taunted.

“Hell no, I’m not scared,” Annie the Bird or Bear said. “Just making sure it’s real liquor.”

She threw her head back and gulped. She smacked her lips. “Good stuff.”

People passed the flask around. At some point, I took a sip.

“Okay,” Richard said. “Leroy. I need you to hold ABOB’s head against the table. She’s going to move when we break her nose.”

Leroy stood behind her.

“Break my nose?” she cried. Her long red hair was hanging off the sides like a tablecloth.

“Reset it,” Richard clarified.

“No,” she said. “Just shave the top off. That’s all.”