The Smart One (3 page)

Ultimately, I decided to sell off some of my furniture and cram the rest into my parents’ garage, so less than two weeks later I found myself sitting on the hood of my car in front of my childhood home, peering down the street to watch for the moving truck.

It was a sunny morning, and the metal of the car reflected the heat back into my sit-bones in a way that felt almost therapeutic. I leaned back and tilted my face toward the sun, feeling spectacularly young. I was back in time at my parents’ house. There were no responsibilities calling me down off the car. And all I had to do was wait. Wait for the moving truck. Wait for the Waxmans’ realtor to call. And, since I had arranged to have my mail forwarded to me at my parents’ address, wait for the letter from the Las Vegas school district to arrive.

My new cell phone was in my back pocket digging into my butt, so I took it out and placed it next to me. I had finally relented and bought a new phone, despite how furious I’d been at Horizon Wireless. I had vowed to myself I was done with them, but when faced with the fact that I was giving up my apartment, my address and my land line, I simply couldn’t bear relinquishing my cell phone number.

What got me so angry in the first place was that Horizon refused to honor the warranty on my previous cell phone. It had stopped working when the connection for recharging it broke, and since it was only two months old I was confident Horizon would fix it for free or just give me a new one. But when I took it to their store, a technician looked into the little hole where the charger plugs in and told me the repair wasn’t covered under the warranty.

“Why not?” I had asked.

“Physical damage isn’t covered.”

“Well, what kind of damage
is
covered?” I demanded. “
Emotional
damage?”

He shrugged, and I railed, insisting that the phone broke because it had a design flaw, not because it had been dropped or abused in any way, but he remained expressionless. I asked to speak to a manager, and the technician paged Mr. Delp, a young man who bore a striking resemblance to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. I took this as a bad sign. Delp examined the phone and said, “I’m sorry. Physical damage isn’t covered.”

“That seems to be the party line,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Would it help if I told you the phone has been having self-esteem issues ever since the new iPhone came out,” I said, trying to get him off script, “and was so emotionally distraught it tried to take its own life?”

“What?”

I was exasperated. “Look, instead of trying to rip me off, why don’t you just tell me what you can do for me.”

The terrorist doppelganger then proceeded to try to sell me a more expensive phone and a pricier contract with fewer minutes than the one I already had, at which point I calmly explained that the only way I would buy a more expensive
phone and sign a pricier contract with fewer minutes was if it included a two-month stay at the Tuscan Villa of a certain potbellied-pig-loving Hollywood hunk, all the Godiva chocolate truffles I could eat, and a free pass to scratch a key along the car doors of every member of the Horizon Wireless Board of Directors.

He wouldn’t even negotiate.

Sadly, when circumstances forced me to relent and go back to the store, even the pricey offer they made was no longer available, and I was forced to buy a still more expensive phone. I consoled myself with the thought that it had so many features I could probably get it to cook me breakfast and wash my car, if only I could make my way through the instruction manual.

I touched my phone to make sure it was well balanced on the hood of the car. Didn’t want to risk physical damage again, after all. I heard a child’s voice shout, “Haley, slow down!” and looked up to see two helmeted girls on bikes pedal past me. As I watched them turn the corner and ride toward the front of the neighborhood—probably to the schoolyard where there was a huge playground—I remembered how frequently I made that same journey with Kenny Waxman, my next-door neighbor and constant companion for the first decade of my life. We didn’t drift apart until some time in fourth grade, when boys decided that proximity to girls was a threat to their newly discovered masculinity. A few years later I developed breasts, and Kenny rematerialized. Whenever I walked Stephanie, a miniature schnauzer Clare and I named, Kenny seemed to be loitering outside his house. He pretended to see me by accident and would walk the dog with me in a noncommittal way, as if he wasn’t really joining me, but relaying important pieces of information while moving. Walking backward with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of jeans, he’d fill me in on critical school gossip he couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard.

“Berkman’s husband died,” he said one day, referring to one of the eighth grade teachers. “Plowed his T-Bird into a tree.”

“Really?”

“I can’t believe you didn’t know. Everyone was talking about it, even the teachers. Michael Vine said he probably did it on purpose so he wouldn’t have to look at his wife’s ugly face anymore.”

I thought Michael Vine was one of the most obnoxious boys in the eighth grade and said so out loud.

“Yeah, he’s pretty bad. But he’s okay, I guess.”

At thirteen, that kind of contradiction seemed perfectly logical.

“Still,” he added, “too bad about the car, huh?” He smiled and looked at me to see if I’d laugh, which I did. Kenny could be pretty funny.

When we got back from the walk, he said good-bye and started to leave but stopped. He turned to face me, his hands still in his front pockets.

“Are you going to Sandi Silverman’s party?”

I momentarily froze. It was a loaded question and we both knew it. Sandi Silverman was throwing a make-out party. That was one piece of gossip that hadn’t escaped my notice.

Confused and self-conscious, I crouched down to give Stephanie a pat. I’d known this guy my entire life and suddenly a whole new feeling was coating my insides, like that commercial for cough syrup. Only I wasn’t sick. At least I didn’t think I was, though I was getting awfully flushed.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to act casual. “Are you?”

“Yeah, I am.” He moved his head like he was trying to shake his hair out of his eyes, only his hair wasn’t in his eyes. “You should come.”

And so I did. When I entered Sandi Silverman’s living room
in a tight red shirt that outlined the apprentice bumps on my chest, I wasn’t surprised to see Kenny sitting on a sofa across the room. His eyes went from my face to my little breasts and stopped there. Then his expression changed to something I didn’t recognize at the time but would later identify as lust. Kenny was picturing me naked.

He looked back at my face and patted the sofa next to him, signaling me to come over. It occurred to me that he had come to the party early to claim the best make-out spot in the living room.

I looked around. Kids were already going at it in every corner. I knew that if I accepted his invitation to sit down I was saying yes. There probably wouldn’t even be any conversation.

I wanted to kiss Kenny, but I was nervous. I’d only ever kissed two boys before, and that was during a game of spin the bottle over the summer. There’d been no embraces, no petting, and no drum thumping in my chest.

I tucked my hair behind my ears and crossed the room.

“Hi,” I said, sitting down next to him.

“You look nice.” He said it straight to my chest, his eyes narrow. He looked back at my face. “What do you have when you’ve got fifty thousand pounds of bananas in one hand and a hundred gallons of ice cream in the other?”

I shrugged.

“Very big hands.”

It wasn’t funny, so I didn’t laugh. But it struck me that Clare would have. I wondered if I would ever be any good at flirting.

And then he was on top of me. It was so fast I didn’t know what was happening. I expected a movie star kiss, long and languorous and romantic. What I got was a rigid tongue stuck deep in my mouth and a face pressed so hard against mine I could hardly breathe. And with all his weight on top of me,
my lungs were compressed, so what little air I could manage to get in had no place to go. I tried to shift my position, but he had me too tightly pinned. He didn’t respond to taps on his back, so I put my hands on his shoulders and pushed. He was unyielding.

When he finally came up for air and took his mouth off mine, I told him I couldn’t breathe. He looked surprised to hear my voice, almost as if he didn’t expect me to be there. He paused before reacting, like it took the information a few moments to travel up to his brain. Then he picked himself up a few inches and I took a big gasp of air into my lungs.

“Kiss me softer,” I whispered. I didn’t want any of his friends to hear. A boy could get teased endlessly if anyone heard a girl say something like that to him.

He did, and I thought nothing in the world could possibly feel that good. The bulge in his jeans pressed against my crotch, and it was as if everything I’d ever felt in my entire life was concentrated in that one spot below my pubic bone. I wanted it to go on forever.

Then I felt his hand on my stomach, inching its way toward my chest. A kind of panic set in. This was something I wasn’t supposed to let a boy do. Not yet. I was a good girl, a straight-A student. I knew the kind of girls that let boys feel them up at our age. They cut classes and got Fs and giggled incessantly. If you passed by the assistant principal’s office, you usually saw a couple of them slumped in chairs, nonchalant about the trouble they were in.

“Don’t,” I said.

Kenny didn’t listen. His hand edged higher.

“No,” I said, grabbing his wrist. But he fought me, and his hand moved up despite my pushing it back as hard as I could. I was shocked by how much stronger than me he was. No amount of force on my part could keep his hand down,
and then it was there, on my new little breast, squeezing and squeezing as if it could yield juice.

I thrashed and fought, but Kenny was determined. I figured he had made up his mind that he would feel my breast at the party and nothing was going to deter him.

“Stop! Stop!” I said, this time wanting the others to hear. I thought another kid might come to my aid, but the only response was a few giggles and a boy imitating my cries. It sounded like the obnoxious Michael Vine.

How could Kenny do this to me? We had been friends forever. I pictured us sitting on his father’s car talking for hours, and a sickness as pervasive as grief made me go slack. I felt like the couch would dematerialize beneath me and I’d get sucked away. I welcomed it.

Then I heard a shrill laugh from the next room. It sounded like Shelley Mosely, one of the stupidest girls in our class, and a fury rose up in me. I was not Shelley Mosely. I was
not.

I started to struggle again, a new strength adding power to my muscles. I was Popeye and rage was my spinach. I gave Kenny the strongest shove I could and…nothing. He was so much stronger than me that even my supercharged anger wasn’t enough.

That made me even madder. I bit down hard on Kenny’s lower lip and wouldn’t let go, even when I tasted blood. He pinched my arm hard and I released him.

His face loomed over mine with his hand covering his mouth.

“Oo crwazy bitch!” he said, unable to form the sounds with his injured mouth.

“Get off me!”

He said a word I couldn’t understand. It sounded like
pood
, but I later came to realize it was
prude
, which he muttered under his breath the next time we passed in the hallways at school.

I glared back and spit out the vilest name I could think of calling him.

“Rapist.”

And that was it. We established a ritual greeting that would continue through the rest of junior high school and keep our hostility strong.

By the tenth grade, Kenny had drifted into the sleaziest drug clique in our school. Somehow, that made me angrier. All that wasted potential. He was the smartest, funniest boy I knew, and he was burning up his brain cells and his life.

But I moved on and stopped fixating on Kenny Waxman. At least that’s what I was telling myself. Truth was, I had merely channeled all that hurt and anger into pity, making Kenny a pathetic figure. I wondered if his parents were as tortured by his behavior as mine were by Joey’s.

Then, late one Saturday night during my senior year, as I was walking the dog past the Waxmans’ house, a car came screeching to a halt in front of me. Kenny stumbled out, and I heard the driver tell him to fuck himself.

“After I finish with your mother,” Kenny said, and slammed the door shut. The car sped off.

I kept walking and tried to ignore Kenny, but he saw me and called out.

“Bev! I’m so gl-happy to see you.”

His voice was louder than it needed to be. And it sounded strange to hear him say my name. He hadn’t called me anything but
prude
for nearly five years.

“Hello, Kenny.”

He planted his feet far apart for balance. “I’m totally fucked up,” he said.

“I noticed.” Stephanie’s legs started to tremble in the cold night air and I stooped to pick her up.

“Vine’s being a dick.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

Kenny explained that he was supposed to go back to Michael Vine’s house for a few hours until whatever he was on wore off, but they had some big fight. He asked if he could hang out with me for a while.

“Please, Bev. My father’ll kill me if I walk in this messed up.”

The idea of helping Kenny appealed to me. I liked to think my powers of persuasion could convince him to change the course of his life and be more like me. So I said yes, and by the time we crossed the threshold into my house, I already had an image of a new, clean-cut Kenny sitting in the cafeteria with my friends, impressing everyone with his wit. He’d be happy and fulfilled. And naturally, he’d be forever grateful to me, his savior.

“I’ll make coffee,” I said, unclipping Stephanie’s leash.

Kenny let himself drop onto the living room couch. “You are so great, Bev.”

My younger sister, Joey, was spending the night at a friend’s house, and everyone else was upstairs, asleep. So it was just me and Kenny, having coffee together like grown-ups. Or, the way it seemed to me at the time, like one grown-up and one screwed-up teenager.