nano--
(A happy late birthday to Tegonyan. You're twenty, baby, and legal, I guess--but in my heart you'll always be a fresh nineteen. Purr!)
On NaNo 2006:
I just realized that I did promise one or two of you that I would post my NaNo novel up. And seeing that it is a year later and I still haven't done it, I suppose now would be a good time. :) I thought I'd lost it, actually--it was on my thumb drive, and I left that in school last year, never to be found again--but it just showed up in My Documents and bam. It happened to be the updated version, the one last left on my late USB.
I love life.
This beast managed to reach 24,880 words and 43 pages, 12pt font, Times New Roman. Reading back on some bits, I think I'll finish it, just for the sake of the lovely whore I have created within its pages. Purchase is a doll. I'd be her best friend.
And so, the monster sleeps under the cut.
Yeah, I did just say 'the monster sleeps under the cut.'
(All typos, grammatical errors, and weird plot devices so mine. Also, all italics have gone missing in the transition from Word to LJ. Sorry about that, but please guess where they would go. *bows*)
Prologue
Did you know that when stars die, they just explode into nothingness, way out there in the blackness of outer space? Out here, we don’t even get to see it. Twenty years should do it, maybe less, maybe more. So the stars we’re looking at now-bits of whatever the shiny is-they could be dead. They could be the remains, the ashes, of a busted star. Kinda poetic, isn’t it?
-
Stars don’t get obituaries. And I mean stars as in the planetary kind, made of gaseous shiny, that float in the sky (dead or not). Glamourous celebrities, they can get whatever they want. They can get two pages in the best newspaper in whatever country they were born in or died in or had a steaming love affair in-they can get a whole entire spreadsheet of glossy, airbrushed, inflated them, with sickening-sweet memoirs from family members that got paid to be family members, and a timeline of their most memorable scandals.
Supernovas? They happen every day. But they don’t appear in our local newspapers or our mother’s tabloids. Not even one single line of text, or grainy image of their spot of the galaxy. Absolutely nothing.
Sitting on the grass outside her house, I explain this to Purchase, pointing at stars-that-are-actually-airplanes and airplanes-that-are-actually-stars. I tell her I think it’s depressing. When I finish, her eyes close and she falls back on the wet ground, her t-shirt soaking through within seconds.
“They’re just stars,” she mumbles.
I realise then that Purchase is not the girl for me, whether I want her to be or not. Sighing, I retreat back into my own mind, thinking to myself of blasted bits of space and floating stardust. It is all very poetic, and not ‘just stars’. I could have gone on, told her off, walked away. Instead I put my hand on hers and tell her I’d written something that morning.
“Is it good?” But she isn’t really paying attention.
All my stories begin at the very last moment, start in the middle, and end at the beginning, with bits of the far future spread out in between, like the extra fillings in a sandwich. Purchase thinks that’s a stupid way to create something, but then again, all of Purchase’s poems are incredibly inane and about flowers. Every single one of them. And I think that’s a pretty stupid way to write a poem.
I
When You Were Young
I used to tear pages out of library books. In fact, I might still have them lying around my incredibly messy room, if I ever decided to go on an adventure and poke through oodles and oodles of I don’t even know what. But the point is, I would check out books from my library, take them home, read them. I did the normal. Nothing was wrong.
But then when I was finished, I wouldn’t want to give the entire book back to the library. I felt that was unecessary. My incredibly selfish thirteen- or fourteen-year-old self would think of nothing but keeping that delicious book with me (because yes! Dammit, yes! Books are delicious). Alas, however, there remained a portion of me that was good and pure (this has since dissolved by now), and so I really did return those four or five (or twenty or twenty-five) books that I had taken the week before.
Just like jigsaw puzzles, however, there were pieces missing from those books.
As a child I had received various magnet sets from my aunts that contained two hundred-odd, very small pieces. Each piece had a word on it. Just one word, no phrases. I liked to think that the people who made these little magnet pieces were Dictionary Experts-as if they, like the assembly line workers I had learned about in school, had dirty blue linen uniforms with the title embroidered on their left breast. These Dictionary Experts, taking a break from their daily memorisation of Webster’s (because of course that is what they did), would create nuggets to help them become even more smooth at the wordplay trade. The result? Magnets. Loads of millimeter-length sticky bits, with a word per slick, white surface.
With these devices, I would make sentences. Sometimes they made sence, sometimes they didn’t. ‘Lick object heinous movement’, or, ‘Strange paradise eats kitten dead’. I spent hours making nonsensical short short stories. My parents would come in the room and leave, letting me tend to my creative abilities. My proud aunties would giggle in the doorway. And the cat would swallow some, and I’d throw something at it.
But what I’m trying to get at is that the missing pieces to those infamous library books were their pages. I would open all of my checked books at random, do eenie-meenie-miney-mo, and then rip out the page that my mother liked best (according to the rhyme). Then I taped it to the wall. Oftentimes I didn’t care how well I ripped it out; it was just torn asunder, with bind weeping out for mercy at my teenage fingertips. So that is why, on my wall today, the wallpaper is completely covered by vandalised library-book pages, ripped diagonal or sometimes in half.
Why did I do it? I can’t answer this. At night, before I went to bed, I’d read my latest additions, side-by-side. And it would make no sence at all. The first new page would talk about girls in short dresses and pointy boots, the second, about Southern iced tea and sunshiny days in Georgia. I liked this jumble, though: the all-encompassing array of words that blended together, making something that I thought was beautiful, but was really a waste of time.
That was my first teenage obsession with the broken and beautiful. (Now that’s poetic.) Incidentally, there were many more to come.
After that came punctured bicycle wheels that I forced my friends to give me. With these, I tried out my experimental side (a side that is very prevalent today. It may have taken over my sensical side). For weeks on end, our garage would be filled, wall-to-wall, with loose bike tires, hanging from the rafters like suicidal balloons. And what did I do with these sad loose ends? I painted them. I droped goblets of paint on the tops of the tires and then stood still to watch the glob run down the side, only to hesitate at the end and then sl-ow-ly drip onto the cold stone floor. By this, I was amazed. I enjoyed the hesitation of the paint and then the sudden rush as it plummeted down the boomerang-shaped slope, only to find its cruel end at a turn it could not complete. Naturally, my mother was not pleased at all with the state of the garage floor, and my father went to work with multicoloured tires, and sometimes a replica of the Little Dipper on his car hood. Just as I forced used tires to be given to me, I was forced to give them up.
After this, my phases continued. I collected broken glass and strung them up all over the house. I cut intricate designs into my best jeans, and made my mother cry. I filled bottles with wildflowers and then plucked all the petals off, just to see what the flower would do. These hobbies (I called them hobbies, anyway. I vaguely recalled many of my relatives referring to them as crazy habits) began at the tender young age of thirteen and ended at a number of times in my life. In fact, I still sometimes rip little bits off library books, and teach my young cousins how to deflate bicycle tires.
But my infatuation with the corrupt seemed to spawn itself more. I did not know what it was, but I had completely fallen for things-only objects, so far-that started out beautiful and maybe ended up beautiful, but nevertheless had a twisted side to them. I liked the change, I think. Over the years I have tried to come up with reasons, but they all ended up having the same concept, which annoys me. (I do not enjoy mass production, or generalization.)
Sometimes my friends would ask, “Darling, what is the matter?”
And I wouldn’t have anything to say. I’d just go back to my broken glass and painted tires and ripped books, looking for resolution.
II
People are so Flawed
If I failed to mention that there was a gap within my almost masochistic projects, then let me say so now: there was a gap. When I turned fifteen, I looked at the makeshift chandelier hanging in front of my window, made from some stained glass and a couple of unknown bottles, and felt very, very sleepy. I closed my eyes, and went to bed.
The next morning, I did not feel the need to go out and be wild. Wild was suddenly in me, not around me. It was not free running, but at a standstill, right where I existed. And that was enough.
This unexpected gap lasted two years, until the month before I turned seventeen. During this dry run, I studied. I began to write. I learned to play the violin and I tinkered around with the piano, but I preferred the former to the latter. I lost some best friends, gained others. The wildflowers in my bottles wilted and died, drying to a brown, earthy crisp. Library pages turned yellow and the Scotch tape fell off. I was getting older, but not much wiser, I think. Indeed, by the middle of this significant lack I felt restless, but every time I put my mind to something I would never actually go out and do it, or I would, but the project would remain unfinished. So in our yard stood half-planted lemon trees, and in my bathroom the beginnings of a fishtank.
And then one morning-the end of the gap, but I did not know this at the time-I opened my window to air out my room and caught sight of a redhead leaning against the trunk of our weeping willow. I noticed her because it was the dead of winter and she was a redhead, and also because no redheads lived on our block and no one had moved in recently. My eyesight was not the best, but I squinted until I could make out a couple of features: skinny, tall, freckled…and there was a man attached to her.
I backed away from the window. Though I was by no means unaccustomed to such a sight (this was about the time when the media was starting to do everyone in), the scene still startled me. There was this striking redhead pressed up against our tree-in fact, my tree-sucking face. It was disgusting and wonderful at the same time, and I instantly felt that same surge of inspiration I’d felt before, with the pages and the paint and the glass. A brouhaha of words flew through my mind: this redheaded girl, she was windstruck, willow-tied, heartdrenched, a dead star. I was literally all a-flutter with excitement.
Looking back down at the girl, I could see she had distangled herself from the man and was smiling at him and talking. As horrible as I was at lip-reading, I could still make out (and how ironic, that choice of phrasing) the tone of her speech: indifference. She didn’t love him. She was using him! Or maybe it was the other way around? My heart began to thump and my palms to sweat. I thought, this is pathetic. But my dry spell was ending, and so the notion was pushed to the back of my mind as soon as it had been uttered.
The man left. He did not look dismayed, which upset me. Very soon after the girl left, too, sauntering on boots (the heels caught on her tattered jeans) towards the opposite end of my sidewalk. And even though I knew neither of these people, I had an adrenaline-fueled shock: how imperfect their romance was! Who rendevoused with a lover beneath a willow tree, right under someone’s window? It was absurd. Yet I smiled for the rest of the day, as if I knew a big secret that no one else was even slightly aware of.
“People are so flawed,” I told my then-current best friend when I saw her the next day. I said it with such awe and reverence that she was swayed enough to look genuinely curious.
It became so that I was like a child who had walked in on their parents in the middle of the night, covers jostling, mattress squeaking. I simply could not get those two figures out of my head. For one, this was about the time that I had begun to develop my now-endearing passion for redheads. My best friend was a redhead. The girl against the tree was a redhead. I scanned aisles and aisles in all sorts of different stores, looking for a shade of red to dye my hair, but every time I would ask someone’s opinion on it they would pronounce me much too pale for a shade. Or even much too dark, or that it just wasn’t me. And the ragged jeans that the girl had worn captivated me because they were so dirty and her boots had caught my attention because they were so sexy and this old man, he was wearing a suit. I did not wear suits. Not even on Easter.
I thought about them, day and night. I opened my window just to see if they were out there, but they never were. Every time I went out, alone or with friends or family, I would cause myself neck strains just by looking for this elusive girl or this mysterious man. But honestly I much preferred them together, being caustic little sluts against my willow tree.
Sometimes I tried to pin down the exact reason or reasons why I was so enamored with this public couple. I was not oversexed. I did not prefer girls or even boys, much to my frantic mother’s dismay. (She was determined to raise a child with good intentions, whether hetereo- or homosexual. But I was neither.) I did not care much for romance or cliches or the fevered heart-thump that kissing gave my best friends. (Remember that I received this familiar high from dropping large amounts of paint on deflated bike tires.) So was it the artistic willow, the arch of the redhead’s back, and the general workplace-aura of the man that grabbed me? Or the death sentence of their relationship? Or the way that girl’s boots sounded on the frozen pavement, or the permanent crease of that man’s suit? I had thought I was not into order and formality, but perhaps I was. Or wasn’t I? Was the exact cause of my infatuation just because they were, as my old hobbies had been, broken and beautiful? But if that was the case, I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to be new, and have a fresh start at my game.
In essence I forgot about them, that dysfunctional pair whom I loved so very much, even though I didn’t know them or hadn’t even taken a good look at them. But they haunted me, coming into my dreams and sliding into pictures of Venus in my textbook, and materialising in my Algebra teacher’s weekday suits.
III
Olive or Gardenias I
This is about the time I met Purchase.
I was out with a best friend on the tennis courts that our ultra-rich suburban neighborhood offered to the very specific community. It was below zero and we were huddling together near the nets, acting like angsty teenagers on a winter’s afternoon. Which, of course, we were.
“I hate my life,” she sighed into my blood-fused neck.
“Tell me about it,” I mumbled back to her.
And she moaned on and on. Woe is me, I shall never become who I want to be, where is the purpose in life, etc. In short, we were taking Broadway angst to a whole other level, simply because we thought-no, we knew-that we were a whole other level, just because we were seventeen and full of ourselves. Why did our parents suddenly turn on us, from loving figures to strangers who told us to get the fuck off their phone? Because they did not understand us. Why did teachers grow beards and begin to smoke? Because we weren’t enough for them, even though we were. Why was winter so cold? Because Mother Earth hated us.
My little sister wore jumpers and striped stockings with Mary Janes. My parents loved her, her teachers gave her gold stars and she always seemed to be warm and cosy, no matter where she went. I didn’t hate her, but my friends did.
Back on the tennis courts, a light breeze made us both shiver. I pulled the oversized tweed tighter around me, and buried my nose into two rounds of fleece scarf. My best friend, however, had jumped up.
“We should exercise!”
I was about to inform her that we didn’t need exercise.
“Not that we’re, you know, fat.”
I closed my mouth.
“It’s just that I read somewhere that if you run around and stuff when it’s cold, you’ll get warm. ‘Cos you sweat and stuff, you get it?”
The idea did not sound too enthralling to me. For one, I was the type of person who did not play, but watched people play. I did not cheerlead, I cheered on the sidelines (albeit very quietly). I relied on my high metabolism to keep my weight in check, not my own duties of getting up and ‘going’. I was fine in my tweed coat and stolen fleece scarf and three pairs of leggings.
“No,” I answered. “What?”
“Get up,” she insisted, and began advancing towards me.
“No,” I answered again. “What?”
She came over and pulled me up. For a seventeen-year-old, I was very short. Maybe around five-feet-two or three. And as she’d said, neither of us was fat. In fact, if anything, we were both underweight. We were the girls our nurse looked pityingly at, as if she wanted to come over and tell us anorexia wasn’t cool, but knew we weren’t anorexic, we just couldn’t put on weight.
“So what,” I grumbled once I was steady on my feet, “do you want me to do?”
Her fragile little hands set me on the baseline. “Don’t move.”
I watched her through squinted eyes as she ambled over to the other side of the court. She was wearing one of her father’s overcoats, and had about two bulky sweaters underneath it. I vaguely remember thinking of her as a penguin, waddling over to an ice floe.
Finally she had stopped on the opposite baseline, so that we were facing each other at a diagonal angle. She took a moment to adjust her penguin outfit, tugging at bumps and straightening out creeases. I wanted to tell her she looked fat.
“You look fat,” I called, and she glared at me.
“Shut up. There’s no talking in tennis!”
I thought my ears had frozen over. Tennis? Was she kidding?
No, I realised, she wasn’t. In her obese clothing, she titled back, pretended to throw a ball in the air, and then sent it over with a silent whack.
“Hit it!” she screamed frantically, indicating the invisible ball that was careening (I thought) towards me.
Without thinking I positioned myself into a forehand swing and, as I’m sure it went, sent that ball soaring over the net at a pace fit for Wimbledon.
And so we played air tennis. Back and forth we ran, aiming at balls that weren’t really there, sweating profusely out of freezing pores. I leaped to the right side of the court for one of her lucky shots, she aced me once or twice, and I raced to the net for a lightning round of volleys. My leggings were beginning to dampen, and I could see she was short of breath.
We were playing a pro set, eight games. On the sixth, it was my serve. I got into ready position-feet and ball and hand on the side of the handle, not the top-and then promptly froze on the spot.
There was a redhead standing at the corner, behind the fence. My breath caught. She was wearing broken-in jeans and boots.
“What are you doing?” called my best friend, impatient to win the game even though she was losing. “Serve!”
But I couldn’t.
“Hello?” she called again.
I didn’t answer. Behind the trees that lined the sides of the tennis court I saw a flash of red behind the evergreens; a bright spot underneath the monotonous green and grey. Even with my breath held I couldn’t hear her running: it was if the crunchy grass beneath her feet was holding their breaths, too, afraid that if they made even the slightest sound Purchase would bend down with her killer-red lips and eat them out of their safe haven.
Only I didn’t know she was Purchase then. She was just my redhead (all mine), in her sixties’ jeans and secondhand fuck-me boots, running without a sweater on what I believed to be the coldest day in winter so far. I dropped my figurative racket, poised for a serve, and let my nonexistant ball roll into the far reaches of the court.
“What are you looking at?” called the best friend.
We met at the net. I ran fast because I wanted to do something about the adrenaline smoking up my veins and the crazy thrumming of my heart.
“Look at her.” I gestured in the general direction of Purchase, who was now hidden behind the bright branches of the last evergreen in the row. “Do you know her?”
Best friend craned her neck over my tiny frame to check out the redhead. “Oh. Yeah, sure.”
I wanted to slap her in the face for not ever telling me this bit of information, but then had to remind myself that I hadn’t told anyone about the affair. So it wasn’t her fault, it was mine. Dammit! My teeth scraped the inside of my cheeks murderously.
“So, uh,” was my attempt at casual conversation. “What’s her name, then?”
“Olive.”
Her name was Olive.
“Come again?”
“What? I said it’s Olive. Do you not believe me, or something?”
Yeah, actually, I wanted to shout. I don’t believe you. How could such a wonderful creature have the dullest name in the history of the universe? Olive. Like the vegetable, or fruit, or spice-I didn’t even care what it was. I just wanted it to be something other than Olive.
“You mean like, Olive with the pits?”
Best friend looked at me like I’d just eaten my non-corporeal racket. “I don’t know. What should I say? No, it’s Olive like the branch that the dove brought back to Noah’s ark? Or, no, it’s the Olive that makes oil?”
My mouth straightened into a very thin line, and I seemed to sag. “That’s kind of disappointing.”
The thing about my best friend that made her my best friend was that she never, ever questioned anything that I didn’t tell her about beforehand. So when I said I was disappointed about the lack of zing in Purchase’s real name, she didn’t ask me why. She didn’t even give off any hints that she wanted to know. (Later I realised it was because she just didn’t care enough to ask, or because she didn’t want to know any more about my disturbing exploits. She was the girl whom I forced to give me bicycle tires, and whom I made break pretty-coloured bottles with me. I think she might be in therapy now. We lost touch a long time ago.)
She shrugged. “Can’t help you there. Hey, she’s coming this way.”
I swear I wet my pants. “What?”
“Jesus, don’t have a fit or anything. She’s just saying hi.” Best friend waved to an obscure area.
My mind did a couple of backflips, and in two seconds’ time I thought of the following: redheads and dye and weeping willows and arching backs, fuck-me boots, cut and ripped jeans, old men in grey suits, ties with ducks on them, broken glass, stars, and a diagram my psychology teacher had showed me about the levels of love. Infatuation was one of them.
And then, very suddenly, I smelled gardenias.
IV
One is the Lonelist Number that You’ll Ever Do or Gardenias II
On the night before I told Purchase/Olive about stars, I was crashing at her house. Her parents were out-and always were out, as I never met the mother she talked so earnestly about or the father who painted orange blossoms for a living, or the cat with the bobtail-and the house was quiet and dim. No lightbulbs existed in their house, only Japanese paper lanterns with gardenia-scented candles placed carefully inside. Every time I passed one I was afraid that I would bump into it and set it on fire, and this flame would start a chain reaction, so that by the time I realised what I had done the whole house would be up in flames. But it wouldn’t matter, because the smoke would smell of burning flowers.
Much to my unthinkable dismay, Purchase’s house never spontaneously combusted, and even though the paper lanterns were lit all day long, no aromatic candle ever spilt too much wax or precariously tipped over. If I ever asked Purchase about it, she just laughed. It was one of her usual responses to my inquiries.
But to the point: Purchase smelled like gardenias because her house smelled like gardenias. It was an all-year-round, not-ever-stopping kind of thing. I fell in love with that smell like I had tried to fall in love with Purchase. It succeeded where Purchase herself had failed. Today, this comforts me.
I am getting too far ahead.
When I smelled the gardenias my head automatically flipped around. I was so numb from cold and surprise that I didn’t even believe I could move anymore, but I’ve noticed my body has a habit of deceiving me. When I think I want one thing, my body goes just kidding and then asks for another. I thought I was just obsessed with Purchase. But turning around, and getting a look at her, I think now that I may have felt a little differently.
She was tall-about four inches above my head. Her nose was small and button-like, and she had bright brown eyes, like the colour of a cookie just come out of the oven. She had high cheekbones and a small forehead, and bangs that went every-which-way. Her eyebrows were the same shade as her hair and I was thankful for that. Her mouth was tiny, her ears were tiny, but her eyes were large. She could have been pretty if her face was properly proportioned, but as it was, she was decent.
I was disappointed once again.
As soon as I saw her I wanted to blurt out my fateful secret: you were making out in front of my bedroom window! or I’ve been dreaming about you forever, sweetheart, or let me take you home. But of course I couldn’t. I didn’t know her. It would have been ten times more awkward than it already was.
When she noticed I was looking at her (the correct word is staring, but I am choosing to be vague), she turned to me. In fact, she placed her entire back to my best friend. I thought it was the rudest thing anyone could have done.
And I loved her even more for it.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was very girly, like a little girl’s. It frightened me, but I knew somehow that I would have to get used to it. “I’m Olive.”
“Yeah,” I replied, even though I did not know what I was agreeing with. That her name was Olive, certainly not, because I hated that name, and would continue to, for a very very long time.
I told her my name.
“Nice t’meet you,” she said. She mentioned my best friend, and said that it was so crazy that we knew each other, because they’d been preschool friends, and their mothers still knew each other, and this was such a rare chance. And wasn’t I cold?
“No, but aren’t you?” I indicated the holes in her jeans and her thin cotton sweater. But she wasn’t even shivering.
And then she did the weirdest thing: she threw her head back and laughed. Like me asking if she was cold was the funniest thing she had ever heard in her life. She laughed like it was comedy week and she had been holding it all in til Sunday night. It was the first time I would hear her crack up this way. There was one more incident, but I’ll leave that for later.
When she was finished, she had a wide grin on her face. “I could never be cold. I’m cold-blooded.”
She was beginning to freak the shit out of me.
The best friend tried to recapture Purchase’s attention, but her back stayed firm. I was beginning to feel like this redhead was a spotlight and not a person: a standing pin of brightness that focused her attention on whomever deserved it. She was a cold metal watchtower, and was designed to examine my every move. By imagining this then, I proved myself to be very intuitive, because this is eventually what she became.
“I think I should be going,” Purchase said abruptly. In fact it was so abrupt I could have sworn she interuppted herself, mid-sentence. “I feel as if I am interrupting.”
Darling, I wanted to say, you have been the best interruption I’ve ever had. Don’t feel as if you have to stop now.
She blew me a kiss. (I felt like I had to fall over from the sheer force of it, just to make a point.) The most that she did to my best friend was give a parting glance. Then, as shortly as she had come, she was out of sight like a leaf in a tornado.
Best friend and I walked off the tennis courts without a word, and out of each other’s lives the same way. It wasn’t planned: our calls dissipated, our visits became less routine and more businesslike, and suddenly our connection just lost its electricity. She was the last best friend I would ever have, just because after I had met Olive, I knew somehow that I did not need anyone else.
V
St. Abernathy’s Non-Correctional School for Girls
Since my ex-best friend was virtually the only real connection I had with Purchase, I had to devise my own ways of learning more about her. Just as I had been obsessed with the movement of paint on tires and the shine of light on broken glass and fragile bits of paper that told confusing stories, I immersed myself in the Olive Project. Now, I found myself falling for the movement of five-feet-five-inch redheads, the shine of light on the colour red and fragile bits of information that told confusing stories. By choosing unorthodox hobbies for myself, I was unconsciously building my own foundation for a turning point in my life.
Not much different, I liked to tell myself. You’re just moving onto bigger and better things.
And Purchase was definitely bigger and better.
Before my best friend and I broke things off, I asked her if she knew where Olive went to school. In a slightly vague, slightly hurt tone, she told me that the object of my affections (my nicknames for her got mushier and mushier over time, which annoyed both of us, but I couldn’t stop) went to St. Abernathy’s School for Girls.
My first thought: a correctional institute. Doubt filled my stomach and I had to hold onto a tree. The ex left me there, and did not even notice when I ran to catch up with her and ask for directions.
“Oh come on,” she said, throwing her hands up and walking faster. “How do you think I should know?”
What a let down, I thought then, pulling my hood down over my eyes. There goes my reliability.
But I soon found out that I did not need reliability. St. Abernathy’s Non-Correctional School for Girls (and that really was the title) lay three miles north of me. The website boasted of its superiority and creative intellectuality, and showed lush green fields and girls smiling Colgate-white next to all the pretty horses. I was shocked as to how I had never heard it mentioned or seen it in passing.
My mother, pleased at seeing me interested in something normal, offered to drive me there for a tour. In my head I pictured an unfriendly grey building, perhaps brick, with tall fence in front and a thick jumble of pine trees. The headmistress (or matron, I couldn’t decide which one I liked better) was fat and jiggly and had skin flowing out of her too-small pumps. All the girls rolled up their red plaid skirts, did not care to fasten their top two shirt buttons, and smoked in the bathroom. And the teachers were in their fifties or above, had salt-and-pepper buns, wore sixties’ cardigans and had rulers in their garters instead of daggers.
In our dark blue BMW (I have not mentioned my father. But based on our choice of vehicle, I will leave it up to you to decide what kind of job he had, what sort of pay he received and whether or not I saw him often enough to have had a healthy and happy childhood), I rolled the windows down and sunk lower into my already-sunken sports car seat. In the event that I saw Purchase out on those fertile green grounds behind the looming fence, I did not want her to see me. I wanted to blend into the scenery as much as possible. For that reason alone, I was wearing top-to-bottom green. As a result, I looked like a shrub. But I was willing to go through great lengths (for someone I didn’t know. Yes, I understood that. I have heard it too many times; it has nearly become my mantra).
I was still fantasizing about dormitories with bunk beds and recreational hour when we slowed down in front of a gigantic hill covered with poppies.
“Traffic sucks,” I said absentmindedly.
“We’re not in traffic, honey,” my mother answered, a tad worriedly.
I became worried as well, but my euphoria quelled it successfully. “What do you mean? Do we have a flat? Did we run someone over?”
“No, baby. We’re, um…we’re here.”
I swear I almost laughed. “What?”
“The address. 551 Vermont. This is 551 Vermont.”
To my right, the hill looked more like a mental hospital than a school. It seemed as if it had been designed to look like an inviting abode, but the architect went overboard in that aspect. It was bright green, nearly neon. And when I said it was covered in poppies, I mean it was smothered in the flowers. Purple and pink dots covered the mound like an infectious disease. I wondered how many passerbies a day got high off the fumes.
“Mom…” my mouth was dry. Who went to a school where everybody tested positive for opium? More importantly, who went to school inside a volcano made out of grass? “…This can’t be it.”
But my mother had already parked in the grass next to the hill and was turning off the ignition. Panicked, I turned to her as she pulled the key out of the slot and proceeded to open the door.
“Mom, you’re going to have to just say no. I’m sure you were really hip in the old days, but nobody gets high off opium anymore. Anyway, Dad wouldn’t like it if you had to enroll in rehab.”
She looked at me quizically, her suburban bob grinning fiendishly at me through her pearl studs. “Honey, I drove to this school to go into it, not to drive by it. Didn’t you really want to go, too?”
I had. There was no denying it. And while I had said that there was nothing in the way of Purchase and I meeting once more (the original sentence was ‘being together forever’, but I felt ‘meeting once more’ was much more plausible), a hollowed-out hill covered with poppies kind of overpassed the boundary.
Grudgingly I stepped out of our expensive car and into the road. My mother was already ahead of me, humming the oldies to herself as she waltzed to the door (it might have been a rock. But it looked like a door, at any rate). She was really quite pleased that I wanted to tour this school, because
a) She did not know that I was stalking a student enrolled in it,
b) It was normal,
c) I was taking an interest in girls,
d) It was normal.
So I felt I had to at least look interested in the school, even though I would never in my life actually go to it, for numerous technical and emotional reasons. Catching up with my mother, I began to gush about the poppies, when just minutes before I had been repulsed by them. I marveled out loud about the wonderful symmetry of the mound, when in truth I thought it was a stupid thing to inhabit. And, as we opened the door (it really did turn out to be one), I squealed as best that I could at the carved-out entrance hall.
But in reality, it was quite nice. The inside of the mediocre-sized hill was actually much larger than I’d thought, and the foyer was airy and well proportioned. A few schoolgirls were talking at the front desk, which seemed to be carved out of cherrywood, and I noted another reason why I would never attend St. Abernathy’s: I simply did not look the part.
For the several girls chatting near me did not only look like they had just broken out of a state prison, they looked proud of it. One of them had hair that looked like she had asked her dog to bite it off, and another had dyed it a brutal shade of lime green. The others just looked like they got high hourly off whatever was handy (and I found out soon enough that everything was handy on school grounds), and then stole gym socks from the freshmen and stuffed them down the toilets.
I followed my mother (who seemed extremely out of place, given the current circumstances-she was wearing argyle and red lipstick, for Chrissakes) as she walked steadily to the adjacent office. It was cherrywood, identical to the desk, with the words ‘Desk Admin’ written in fancy script on the door. As I passed Delinquent Girls #s 1 and 2, as they shall be known henceforth, they suddenly swiveled around to look down at me with their thick, eyeliner-enhanced glares.
“You’re new,” said DG #1. She had what looked like a cat’s tooth embedded in her left eyebrow. “And you don’t lookit.”
And thank the Lord, I thought to myself. Who the hell would want to look like you? “Not really. I’m not enrolled.”
“Ooh,” the one with the NyQuil-dyed hair smirked. “Thinking of joining a correctional institute, then? Have you done bad things like the rest of us?”
I cowered. Figuratively. And then told a not-so lie.
“No, er…I have a sister.”
I AM STALKING ONE OF YOUR SCHOOLMATES, my mind bellowed.
“A sister?”
I AM STALKING ONE OF YOUR SCHOOLMATES.
“Is she the bad one, then?”
I AM STALKING…
“Um. Oh, yeah. Really bad. Er. State prison. Coupl’a years. You know.”
NyQuil squinted. “Denno her, if she looks like you. Hey, give me your name, then.”
My throat instantly went dry. “Er, okay but first of all, I have a question…”
I didn’t, really.
“…The pamphlets and ads for St. Abernathy’s all show these, like, great fields. Really. Wide and rolling. English countryside, like that. Where are they?”
DG #2 looked at me as if I had gone mad.
“Photoshop,” she said bluntly and simply.
“That makes sense, then,” I began to babble, and backed away from the group of crazies. It was all becoming too much for me. I was never really good at lying. “Techonology nowadays, huh? You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”
NyQuil poked my chest. I threw myself against the wall behind me. “Are those?”
Needless to say, I felt like dying. They were all looking at me, expecting an answer, and they all gave off a distinct aura of hostility-meaning that if I didn’t give a reply they would all rush to pull daggers out of their garters, or throw homemade bombs at me with amazing force. Bolting off was my first thought, but another look at their not-so-slender bodies proved me otherwise. Lying my way through and saying that my breasts weren’t real, and that I knew this awesome clinic downtown, was also out because I was a horrible liar and I didn’t even have much breast to speak of. Then I wondered if my situation would have a movie-like turnout, and my dear Purchase would swing by to the theme from Pulp Fiction, her luscious red hair in braids, saving me from a ruined end.
But none of these things happened. (The loss of the movie ending prompted me to sag a little bit.) Instead, my mother, cashmere sweater humming calmly and pearl earrings smiling daintily, suddenly appeared between NyQuil and DG #2, holding a plaid folder and grinning stark-white. Looking at her and then at the delinquents, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a find-the-difference cartoon. I honestly had never been more embarassed to see her in my life.
“Making friends?” she trilled, looking a little flushed. I could have sworn she was glowing, and I wondered what the Desk Admin had decided to give her in place of the usual mint or lollipop often offered in such events. “The lady at the desk said we could take a tour. Pop in anywhere. Quite nice, I’d say. Almost reckless.”
My mother had never used the word reckless before.
“Shall we go?” she asked.
NyQuil chose this time to pull a packet of Marlboros out of her skirt pocket, and a green-apple shaped lighter out of one of her socks. Casually, she pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and blew out smoke rings with general ease. Months later, when Purchase offered me a cigarette, I would remember these rings and be insanely jealous that all I could do with smoke was inhale it too deeply.
I watched the smoke rings dissipate into the air, one by one. It was almost tragic.
“We shall,” breathed NyQuil after two more rings. It took me a moment to stop watching them float away, and to realise that the three girls who had just been surrounding me threateningly were now choosing to follow around my mother and I. Panicking, I tried in vain to intervene.
“But…but…don’t you have…”
“Class?” DG #2 smiled crudely. “Don’t be silly.”
If only I was being silly, and not just freaking the fuck out. It would have been a much easier thing to handle.
VI
Implosions
As we began to walk our way down the cobblestoned hall, I wondered if we looked as funny a quartret as it seemed to me.
Leading the pack was my mother-a typical suburban housewife, with a college degree in interior design and English literature, decked out in pearls and cashmere and sensible stockings. Next were Delinquent Girls #s 1 and 2, with their animal-tooth earrings that I had no doubt were 100% real and their boys’ shirts and too-shirt skirts. And then, lagging a few steps behind, was NyQuil, with her green hair and lighter-infested socks. And then me: short and tiny, with too-long hair and an expensive, product-of-a-rich-father wool coat. I did not know whether to laugh at the situation or cry because I was being followed around by a bunch of druggies, and also because Purchase was nowhere to be seen.
During the whole tour, I never once thought of asking anyone if they knew an Olive with red hair. The school, though compact looking, seemed to be filled with more students than my own overcrowded education institute. And even if I’d had the perfect oppurtunity, I wouldn’t have asked any of the trio that had tagged along on my school tour. Aside from being upfront, they had the undesirable look of someone who could look right through you and tell exactly what you were up to.
So I had to depend on my eyes alone. Every doorless classroom that we passed, I peered into. The bathrooms were not ignored-not even the men’s (because I knew full well what girls did in the boys’ restroom, as well as the autoshop room, and the teacher’s lounges, and the dark room). I scoured the cafeteria and the gym, and even the small backyard (to get in a mile during physical education, you had to run around it twenty-three times). By the end of the tour, which lasted forty-five minutes, I could safely say that it was, by far, the crappiest school I had ever been to, and that whoever had done the website and the brochures was a Photoshop guru.
We were stopped at a classroom-the art room, NyQuil said between her fifth cigarette. I would have never guessed. It was certainly the cleanest art room I had ever been in, with what looked like sterilized white walls and shining desks and a spotless tiled floor. Plasma-screen computers sat in a quintet in the corner, smoothly wiped and humming away. There was nothing on the walls, and the whiteboard was free of word or picture. The only thing that gave off the slightest notion that we were in an art room was the fact that the tiles we were now walking on were rainbow-coloured.
“I’ve never been in here before,” remarked DG #1. She was tugging on her tooth (the one not attached to her gums).
“Yeah, me neither,” said DG #2. “Cr-azy.”
I didn’t see what was so crazy about it. The whitewashed atmosphere, however, was making me squint. “Why is it so clean?”
“Damned if I know,” grunted NyQuil before she flicked open her apple lighter. “I hear someone’s always in here. And damned if I know why about that, too.” Two smoke rings floated lazily near my ear.
I yawned. “Always in here? Like lives here?”
“I don’t know. I hear about her, though.” The smoke rings vanished into a ceiling vent. “I hear-”
She was cut short by my mother’s cell phone, a very loud regular tingtone that annoyed everybody within a ten-foot radius. Sure enough, DG #1 bared her teeth and NyQuil almost dropped her smoke.
“Sorry, sorry,” quipped my mother, still under the influence of whatever the desk admin had given her (I was sticking to my drug theory, even though my mother would later insist that it was just a peppermint). “I have to get this.” It was probably my father, sitting behind his polished oak desk, or my little sister, coming back from her ballet lessons or flute lessons or horse stables. I myself did not own a cell phone, no matter how much my parents pressured me to.
As soon as she left the classroom and shut the sliding door behind her, I turned back to NyQuil. She was just stubbing out her cigarette on the whiteboard, and some ash crumbled sadly down the surface.
“What were you saying?”
It took her a minute to remember. “Oh. I don’t know. Something like, she’s obsessed with clean.”
My pampered upbringing recognized the feeling. I recalled days when we had maids who spoke no English (“Eva, please clean the table when we’ve finished.” “Que?”), but could wipe away a food disaster in seconds (“Godammit, mother! I did not mean to make the fucking quiche explode!” “Oh, don’t be so angry, dear, Fifi will take care of it. Ne ce’st pas, Fifi?”). I remembered when my mother had breakdowns if I did not clean up my fingerpaint, and my little sister screaming if I had forgotten to close the shower curtain during my bath. And it all drove me wild. I understood clean, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so obsessed with it.
DG #2 jumped over a desk, making it slide on the smooth floor. She stumbled a bit and then laughed at her mistake. “Oopsie,” she smirked, righting the table. “Olive might kill me.”
I positively imploded-I felt every single one of my organs as they burst into a gory, permanent mess. “Olive?”
NyQuil began to laugh, too, and quickly wiped the ash off the whiteboard, rubbing it white again. “Yeah, that’s her. I can’t believe I forgot.”
Head spinning, I tried to break in the conversation. “Redhead?”
DG #1 plunged her hand into NyQuil’s skirt, causing a short uproar, and then retreated with the crumpled pack of Marlboros. “I think so. Isn’t it like, different every month?”
This was certainly news to me, and I tried to digest all that I had learned within the past ten minutes: the art room was not really an art room, but a personal area for Olive, who was not really a redhead and was either stupid or had obsessive compulsive disorder. My anatomy shocked to pieces, I slumped down to the shocking floor in slight defeat.
DG #1 looked at me. “Where’s your mom?”
I pointed to the door. My vocal cords had burned out.
“Oh, goodie. Then it that case...” Through not-so-focused eyes I watched her totter on pointed stilleto heels to the back of the classroom, her hands held out in front of her in case she fell. I remembered her complaining about tiles being tricky to walk on when we were walking in the locker room.
“What are you doing?” demanded DG #2, giggling profusely.
I didn’t see what was so funny.
“Where do you think she is?” DG #1 wondered out loud, the cigarette poised carefully between her fore and middle finger, acting as bait. “I know she wants this. Plus I want to show her off.”
NyQuil burst into laughter. “For chrissakes, she isn’t an animal.”
I heard scratching from the opposite end of the room, then howling. I thought it was a dog, and was about to ask why the fuck there was a dog in an art room that wasn’t stuffed, when I realised that it was just someone laughing and yelling at the same time.
“Who isn’t an animal?” the voice called, in between large gasps of air. “I can’t open the fucking door! Someone open the fucking door.”
All around me, people were laughing. I was almost disgusted, just because I didn’t know what the hell was going on and someone was acting like a dog. DG #1 pressed her ear to the rear door, grinning widely, as if she was in on a joke that no one else understood.
“Whassat?” she said, snickering behind her fuschia-painted fingernails. “Something about the door?”
Whoever was on the other side seemed to be having a jolly good time. It took a moment for them to stop guffawing and to reply to the question. “Yeah! I can’t open the door.” Then came more insane laughter. “Oh my God, this is pathetic. Who’s that anyway? What are you doing in my room?”
It was about now that I began to recognize the voice. The significance started at my toes, which started to twitch at the hollering, and moved up to my stomach, which felt like I had just inhaled a jar of olives, juice and all. And olives had always, ever since I was two, made me feel sick.
NyQuil threw her now-empty package of smokes across the room, so that they skittered across the tiled floor before stopping abruptly. The bellower screamed again, and I watched stars sparkle behind my irises.
“God, she is so loud,” shrieked one of the delinquent girls-I had my eyes closed, intent on watching a tangible feeling spread through my body before it hit my mind and it all went away. “Just let her in already!”
But DG #1-I knew it was she because she sounded faint, she was at the other end of the room-cackled fiendishly in response. “It’s me, Olive.”
The stars and olives and tingling all fused into my cranium, and every single nerve in my body screamed I told you so! I sucked in my breath, feeling the chill on my teeth, making it hurt.
I listened intently as Olive screamed in response. “You fucker! Open the door. And give me a fucking smoke! I need it.”
They all began to do manic laughing again, and I managed a weak smile. I was beginning to wonder where my mother was, just in case she happened to walk into a room full of crackups talking through a door, while on the other side a stoned schoolgirl was screaming obscenities, and there I was, off to the corner, pleasantly obscure for the moment.
“You’re high enough, Olive! Now tell me the combination for this lock,” replied DG #1, sticking the cigarette behind her left ear for safekeeping.
“You fucking well know it,” Olive shouted back, her voice a bit dimmer. I wondered why. “Retard.”
Apparently, DG #1 did not know the lock number, because she flipped off the door angrily and then yelled something unintelligible to me. (It sounded very hostile, however.) Then she began to turn the disc to each number that Olive yelled out in a slightly crazed tone, her voice growing softer and softer still in pitch. Beside me, NyQuil and DG #2 were stifling their giggles into each other’s hands, and once again I felt like vomiting.
I was determined not to look up when I heard the door open and a couple of girls yelling shrilly. Instead, I wondered concernedly where my mother was, as it had been at least twenty minutes since she’d left and she made it a rule not to talk on her phone for more than ten. Had the desk admin found her again, and offered her a hit off the hookah? Or had she been cajoled into buying pot from God-knows-whom? My mother was not the most strong-willed person when it came to drugs-I had found this out one night when looking through the autographs in her high school yearbook. ‘Hey Linda, your acid trips totally beat mine’ and ‘It sucked you stopped dealing and went clean, you fucking pansy’ stuck in my mind the most.
But my eyes had to open eventually. When they did, I was faced with a shock of bright red hair. At the colour my stomach immediately twisted. It’s all fake, fake, fake, dammit!
“Hey, I know you,” smiled Olive, and pushed the tip of my nose like a button. She smelled like herbs. “Cutie.”
NyQuil, who was still howling with laughter, doubled up after she heard this.
“What the fuck is so funny?” I snapped, just as my mother stepped into the room, emanataing the same herb-y smell that Olive was.
“Dear! Don’t say things like that.” Her eyes were out of focus. She was obviously high, and yet she still had enough virtue to scold me for saying the word ‘fuck’. “It’s very crude.”
Words instantly formed in my mind: Don’t call me crude! You’re stoned! But I didn’t dare say it, just in case she was just buzzed and could still understand me. Instead I looked back at Olive, who was still bent forward to look me straight in the eye. I noticed that hers were bright green, with specks of blue. I found this to be, for some reason, comforting.
“Yeah, we’ve met,” I whispered. My larynx was burnt out again “On the tennis courts.”
She was still smiling, and not saying anything. I could count six freckles on her nose and two each on her cheek. Then, very quickly, she bounced backwards and snatched the cigarette away from DG #1’s hands.
“Hey!” she growled, reaching back for it. “You called me a retard! You don’t deserve that.”
“Shut up. I need this.” Then she scrambled down to NyQuil’s socks and, after rummaging through the right one for a couple of seconds, pulled out a banana-yellow lighter.
“Ooh, how very nifty,” squealed my mother.
“Mom, don’t say nifty,” I pleaded.
But Olive laughed, girly and deliberate. “Nifty. How cool. My mom doesn’t say nifty.” She lit her cigarette and then tossed the lighter to me. “Where’s yours?”
I was about to answer that I didn’t smoke, and honestly didn’t plan to, when my mother bothered to reply on my behalf. “I’m afraid she doesn’t smoke, and won’t ever.”
My face burned, but Olive just laughed again. “That’s fine. I kind of wish I didn’t smoke, either.”
Liar glowed on each and every one of the other girls’ faces, their eyes menacing and their looks definitely accusatory, but Olive just blew it away, literally. Watching her smoke became entertainment for me, starting on that day. Her cheeks would puff and decline to a tempo which never altered, and she not only blew smoke rings, they were all different sizes. Big to small, small to big. I was mesmerized.
But, being a mother, she was designed to snap me out of my reveries. “My, my. Look at the time.” She waved around her 100% real Rolex. I bet at least two of the girls wanted to jump her for it, since that was what they had been doing since the sixth grade, according to their spoken history. “We must be going. I do feel a little faint, anyway.”
I wonder why, I thought darkly.
As I stood up to leave on shaky legs, Olive asked if I would be back.
“I didn’t get to see enough of you,” she admitted, slapping away NyQuil’s hands as they tried to reach for her coat pockets. “Your tour probably sucked. I, on the other hand, know where everything is.”
My smile was agreeable as well as shaky. “Oh yeah? Did you make the brochures or something?”
She just winked, and then blew me a good-bye kiss, just like she had at the end of our last meeting. As I walked out the door after my unsteady mother, I made sure to catch it between my palms and rub them all over my face.
On NaNo 2006:
I just realized that I did promise one or two of you that I would post my NaNo novel up. And seeing that it is a year later and I still haven't done it, I suppose now would be a good time. :) I thought I'd lost it, actually--it was on my thumb drive, and I left that in school last year, never to be found again--but it just showed up in My Documents and bam. It happened to be the updated version, the one last left on my late USB.
I love life.
This beast managed to reach 24,880 words and 43 pages, 12pt font, Times New Roman. Reading back on some bits, I think I'll finish it, just for the sake of the lovely whore I have created within its pages. Purchase is a doll. I'd be her best friend.
And so, the monster sleeps under the cut.
Yeah, I did just say 'the monster sleeps under the cut.'
(All typos, grammatical errors, and weird plot devices so mine. Also, all italics have gone missing in the transition from Word to LJ. Sorry about that, but please guess where they would go. *bows*)
Prologue
Did you know that when stars die, they just explode into nothingness, way out there in the blackness of outer space? Out here, we don’t even get to see it. Twenty years should do it, maybe less, maybe more. So the stars we’re looking at now-bits of whatever the shiny is-they could be dead. They could be the remains, the ashes, of a busted star. Kinda poetic, isn’t it?
-
Stars don’t get obituaries. And I mean stars as in the planetary kind, made of gaseous shiny, that float in the sky (dead or not). Glamourous celebrities, they can get whatever they want. They can get two pages in the best newspaper in whatever country they were born in or died in or had a steaming love affair in-they can get a whole entire spreadsheet of glossy, airbrushed, inflated them, with sickening-sweet memoirs from family members that got paid to be family members, and a timeline of their most memorable scandals.
Supernovas? They happen every day. But they don’t appear in our local newspapers or our mother’s tabloids. Not even one single line of text, or grainy image of their spot of the galaxy. Absolutely nothing.
Sitting on the grass outside her house, I explain this to Purchase, pointing at stars-that-are-actually-airplanes and airplanes-that-are-actually-stars. I tell her I think it’s depressing. When I finish, her eyes close and she falls back on the wet ground, her t-shirt soaking through within seconds.
“They’re just stars,” she mumbles.
I realise then that Purchase is not the girl for me, whether I want her to be or not. Sighing, I retreat back into my own mind, thinking to myself of blasted bits of space and floating stardust. It is all very poetic, and not ‘just stars’. I could have gone on, told her off, walked away. Instead I put my hand on hers and tell her I’d written something that morning.
“Is it good?” But she isn’t really paying attention.
All my stories begin at the very last moment, start in the middle, and end at the beginning, with bits of the far future spread out in between, like the extra fillings in a sandwich. Purchase thinks that’s a stupid way to create something, but then again, all of Purchase’s poems are incredibly inane and about flowers. Every single one of them. And I think that’s a pretty stupid way to write a poem.
I
When You Were Young
I used to tear pages out of library books. In fact, I might still have them lying around my incredibly messy room, if I ever decided to go on an adventure and poke through oodles and oodles of I don’t even know what. But the point is, I would check out books from my library, take them home, read them. I did the normal. Nothing was wrong.
But then when I was finished, I wouldn’t want to give the entire book back to the library. I felt that was unecessary. My incredibly selfish thirteen- or fourteen-year-old self would think of nothing but keeping that delicious book with me (because yes! Dammit, yes! Books are delicious). Alas, however, there remained a portion of me that was good and pure (this has since dissolved by now), and so I really did return those four or five (or twenty or twenty-five) books that I had taken the week before.
Just like jigsaw puzzles, however, there were pieces missing from those books.
As a child I had received various magnet sets from my aunts that contained two hundred-odd, very small pieces. Each piece had a word on it. Just one word, no phrases. I liked to think that the people who made these little magnet pieces were Dictionary Experts-as if they, like the assembly line workers I had learned about in school, had dirty blue linen uniforms with the title embroidered on their left breast. These Dictionary Experts, taking a break from their daily memorisation of Webster’s (because of course that is what they did), would create nuggets to help them become even more smooth at the wordplay trade. The result? Magnets. Loads of millimeter-length sticky bits, with a word per slick, white surface.
With these devices, I would make sentences. Sometimes they made sence, sometimes they didn’t. ‘Lick object heinous movement’, or, ‘Strange paradise eats kitten dead’. I spent hours making nonsensical short short stories. My parents would come in the room and leave, letting me tend to my creative abilities. My proud aunties would giggle in the doorway. And the cat would swallow some, and I’d throw something at it.
But what I’m trying to get at is that the missing pieces to those infamous library books were their pages. I would open all of my checked books at random, do eenie-meenie-miney-mo, and then rip out the page that my mother liked best (according to the rhyme). Then I taped it to the wall. Oftentimes I didn’t care how well I ripped it out; it was just torn asunder, with bind weeping out for mercy at my teenage fingertips. So that is why, on my wall today, the wallpaper is completely covered by vandalised library-book pages, ripped diagonal or sometimes in half.
Why did I do it? I can’t answer this. At night, before I went to bed, I’d read my latest additions, side-by-side. And it would make no sence at all. The first new page would talk about girls in short dresses and pointy boots, the second, about Southern iced tea and sunshiny days in Georgia. I liked this jumble, though: the all-encompassing array of words that blended together, making something that I thought was beautiful, but was really a waste of time.
That was my first teenage obsession with the broken and beautiful. (Now that’s poetic.) Incidentally, there were many more to come.
After that came punctured bicycle wheels that I forced my friends to give me. With these, I tried out my experimental side (a side that is very prevalent today. It may have taken over my sensical side). For weeks on end, our garage would be filled, wall-to-wall, with loose bike tires, hanging from the rafters like suicidal balloons. And what did I do with these sad loose ends? I painted them. I droped goblets of paint on the tops of the tires and then stood still to watch the glob run down the side, only to hesitate at the end and then sl-ow-ly drip onto the cold stone floor. By this, I was amazed. I enjoyed the hesitation of the paint and then the sudden rush as it plummeted down the boomerang-shaped slope, only to find its cruel end at a turn it could not complete. Naturally, my mother was not pleased at all with the state of the garage floor, and my father went to work with multicoloured tires, and sometimes a replica of the Little Dipper on his car hood. Just as I forced used tires to be given to me, I was forced to give them up.
After this, my phases continued. I collected broken glass and strung them up all over the house. I cut intricate designs into my best jeans, and made my mother cry. I filled bottles with wildflowers and then plucked all the petals off, just to see what the flower would do. These hobbies (I called them hobbies, anyway. I vaguely recalled many of my relatives referring to them as crazy habits) began at the tender young age of thirteen and ended at a number of times in my life. In fact, I still sometimes rip little bits off library books, and teach my young cousins how to deflate bicycle tires.
But my infatuation with the corrupt seemed to spawn itself more. I did not know what it was, but I had completely fallen for things-only objects, so far-that started out beautiful and maybe ended up beautiful, but nevertheless had a twisted side to them. I liked the change, I think. Over the years I have tried to come up with reasons, but they all ended up having the same concept, which annoys me. (I do not enjoy mass production, or generalization.)
Sometimes my friends would ask, “Darling, what is the matter?”
And I wouldn’t have anything to say. I’d just go back to my broken glass and painted tires and ripped books, looking for resolution.
II
People are so Flawed
If I failed to mention that there was a gap within my almost masochistic projects, then let me say so now: there was a gap. When I turned fifteen, I looked at the makeshift chandelier hanging in front of my window, made from some stained glass and a couple of unknown bottles, and felt very, very sleepy. I closed my eyes, and went to bed.
The next morning, I did not feel the need to go out and be wild. Wild was suddenly in me, not around me. It was not free running, but at a standstill, right where I existed. And that was enough.
This unexpected gap lasted two years, until the month before I turned seventeen. During this dry run, I studied. I began to write. I learned to play the violin and I tinkered around with the piano, but I preferred the former to the latter. I lost some best friends, gained others. The wildflowers in my bottles wilted and died, drying to a brown, earthy crisp. Library pages turned yellow and the Scotch tape fell off. I was getting older, but not much wiser, I think. Indeed, by the middle of this significant lack I felt restless, but every time I put my mind to something I would never actually go out and do it, or I would, but the project would remain unfinished. So in our yard stood half-planted lemon trees, and in my bathroom the beginnings of a fishtank.
And then one morning-the end of the gap, but I did not know this at the time-I opened my window to air out my room and caught sight of a redhead leaning against the trunk of our weeping willow. I noticed her because it was the dead of winter and she was a redhead, and also because no redheads lived on our block and no one had moved in recently. My eyesight was not the best, but I squinted until I could make out a couple of features: skinny, tall, freckled…and there was a man attached to her.
I backed away from the window. Though I was by no means unaccustomed to such a sight (this was about the time when the media was starting to do everyone in), the scene still startled me. There was this striking redhead pressed up against our tree-in fact, my tree-sucking face. It was disgusting and wonderful at the same time, and I instantly felt that same surge of inspiration I’d felt before, with the pages and the paint and the glass. A brouhaha of words flew through my mind: this redheaded girl, she was windstruck, willow-tied, heartdrenched, a dead star. I was literally all a-flutter with excitement.
Looking back down at the girl, I could see she had distangled herself from the man and was smiling at him and talking. As horrible as I was at lip-reading, I could still make out (and how ironic, that choice of phrasing) the tone of her speech: indifference. She didn’t love him. She was using him! Or maybe it was the other way around? My heart began to thump and my palms to sweat. I thought, this is pathetic. But my dry spell was ending, and so the notion was pushed to the back of my mind as soon as it had been uttered.
The man left. He did not look dismayed, which upset me. Very soon after the girl left, too, sauntering on boots (the heels caught on her tattered jeans) towards the opposite end of my sidewalk. And even though I knew neither of these people, I had an adrenaline-fueled shock: how imperfect their romance was! Who rendevoused with a lover beneath a willow tree, right under someone’s window? It was absurd. Yet I smiled for the rest of the day, as if I knew a big secret that no one else was even slightly aware of.
“People are so flawed,” I told my then-current best friend when I saw her the next day. I said it with such awe and reverence that she was swayed enough to look genuinely curious.
It became so that I was like a child who had walked in on their parents in the middle of the night, covers jostling, mattress squeaking. I simply could not get those two figures out of my head. For one, this was about the time that I had begun to develop my now-endearing passion for redheads. My best friend was a redhead. The girl against the tree was a redhead. I scanned aisles and aisles in all sorts of different stores, looking for a shade of red to dye my hair, but every time I would ask someone’s opinion on it they would pronounce me much too pale for a shade. Or even much too dark, or that it just wasn’t me. And the ragged jeans that the girl had worn captivated me because they were so dirty and her boots had caught my attention because they were so sexy and this old man, he was wearing a suit. I did not wear suits. Not even on Easter.
I thought about them, day and night. I opened my window just to see if they were out there, but they never were. Every time I went out, alone or with friends or family, I would cause myself neck strains just by looking for this elusive girl or this mysterious man. But honestly I much preferred them together, being caustic little sluts against my willow tree.
Sometimes I tried to pin down the exact reason or reasons why I was so enamored with this public couple. I was not oversexed. I did not prefer girls or even boys, much to my frantic mother’s dismay. (She was determined to raise a child with good intentions, whether hetereo- or homosexual. But I was neither.) I did not care much for romance or cliches or the fevered heart-thump that kissing gave my best friends. (Remember that I received this familiar high from dropping large amounts of paint on deflated bike tires.) So was it the artistic willow, the arch of the redhead’s back, and the general workplace-aura of the man that grabbed me? Or the death sentence of their relationship? Or the way that girl’s boots sounded on the frozen pavement, or the permanent crease of that man’s suit? I had thought I was not into order and formality, but perhaps I was. Or wasn’t I? Was the exact cause of my infatuation just because they were, as my old hobbies had been, broken and beautiful? But if that was the case, I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to be new, and have a fresh start at my game.
In essence I forgot about them, that dysfunctional pair whom I loved so very much, even though I didn’t know them or hadn’t even taken a good look at them. But they haunted me, coming into my dreams and sliding into pictures of Venus in my textbook, and materialising in my Algebra teacher’s weekday suits.
III
Olive or Gardenias I
This is about the time I met Purchase.
I was out with a best friend on the tennis courts that our ultra-rich suburban neighborhood offered to the very specific community. It was below zero and we were huddling together near the nets, acting like angsty teenagers on a winter’s afternoon. Which, of course, we were.
“I hate my life,” she sighed into my blood-fused neck.
“Tell me about it,” I mumbled back to her.
And she moaned on and on. Woe is me, I shall never become who I want to be, where is the purpose in life, etc. In short, we were taking Broadway angst to a whole other level, simply because we thought-no, we knew-that we were a whole other level, just because we were seventeen and full of ourselves. Why did our parents suddenly turn on us, from loving figures to strangers who told us to get the fuck off their phone? Because they did not understand us. Why did teachers grow beards and begin to smoke? Because we weren’t enough for them, even though we were. Why was winter so cold? Because Mother Earth hated us.
My little sister wore jumpers and striped stockings with Mary Janes. My parents loved her, her teachers gave her gold stars and she always seemed to be warm and cosy, no matter where she went. I didn’t hate her, but my friends did.
Back on the tennis courts, a light breeze made us both shiver. I pulled the oversized tweed tighter around me, and buried my nose into two rounds of fleece scarf. My best friend, however, had jumped up.
“We should exercise!”
I was about to inform her that we didn’t need exercise.
“Not that we’re, you know, fat.”
I closed my mouth.
“It’s just that I read somewhere that if you run around and stuff when it’s cold, you’ll get warm. ‘Cos you sweat and stuff, you get it?”
The idea did not sound too enthralling to me. For one, I was the type of person who did not play, but watched people play. I did not cheerlead, I cheered on the sidelines (albeit very quietly). I relied on my high metabolism to keep my weight in check, not my own duties of getting up and ‘going’. I was fine in my tweed coat and stolen fleece scarf and three pairs of leggings.
“No,” I answered. “What?”
“Get up,” she insisted, and began advancing towards me.
“No,” I answered again. “What?”
She came over and pulled me up. For a seventeen-year-old, I was very short. Maybe around five-feet-two or three. And as she’d said, neither of us was fat. In fact, if anything, we were both underweight. We were the girls our nurse looked pityingly at, as if she wanted to come over and tell us anorexia wasn’t cool, but knew we weren’t anorexic, we just couldn’t put on weight.
“So what,” I grumbled once I was steady on my feet, “do you want me to do?”
Her fragile little hands set me on the baseline. “Don’t move.”
I watched her through squinted eyes as she ambled over to the other side of the court. She was wearing one of her father’s overcoats, and had about two bulky sweaters underneath it. I vaguely remember thinking of her as a penguin, waddling over to an ice floe.
Finally she had stopped on the opposite baseline, so that we were facing each other at a diagonal angle. She took a moment to adjust her penguin outfit, tugging at bumps and straightening out creeases. I wanted to tell her she looked fat.
“You look fat,” I called, and she glared at me.
“Shut up. There’s no talking in tennis!”
I thought my ears had frozen over. Tennis? Was she kidding?
No, I realised, she wasn’t. In her obese clothing, she titled back, pretended to throw a ball in the air, and then sent it over with a silent whack.
“Hit it!” she screamed frantically, indicating the invisible ball that was careening (I thought) towards me.
Without thinking I positioned myself into a forehand swing and, as I’m sure it went, sent that ball soaring over the net at a pace fit for Wimbledon.
And so we played air tennis. Back and forth we ran, aiming at balls that weren’t really there, sweating profusely out of freezing pores. I leaped to the right side of the court for one of her lucky shots, she aced me once or twice, and I raced to the net for a lightning round of volleys. My leggings were beginning to dampen, and I could see she was short of breath.
We were playing a pro set, eight games. On the sixth, it was my serve. I got into ready position-feet and ball and hand on the side of the handle, not the top-and then promptly froze on the spot.
There was a redhead standing at the corner, behind the fence. My breath caught. She was wearing broken-in jeans and boots.
“What are you doing?” called my best friend, impatient to win the game even though she was losing. “Serve!”
But I couldn’t.
“Hello?” she called again.
I didn’t answer. Behind the trees that lined the sides of the tennis court I saw a flash of red behind the evergreens; a bright spot underneath the monotonous green and grey. Even with my breath held I couldn’t hear her running: it was if the crunchy grass beneath her feet was holding their breaths, too, afraid that if they made even the slightest sound Purchase would bend down with her killer-red lips and eat them out of their safe haven.
Only I didn’t know she was Purchase then. She was just my redhead (all mine), in her sixties’ jeans and secondhand fuck-me boots, running without a sweater on what I believed to be the coldest day in winter so far. I dropped my figurative racket, poised for a serve, and let my nonexistant ball roll into the far reaches of the court.
“What are you looking at?” called the best friend.
We met at the net. I ran fast because I wanted to do something about the adrenaline smoking up my veins and the crazy thrumming of my heart.
“Look at her.” I gestured in the general direction of Purchase, who was now hidden behind the bright branches of the last evergreen in the row. “Do you know her?”
Best friend craned her neck over my tiny frame to check out the redhead. “Oh. Yeah, sure.”
I wanted to slap her in the face for not ever telling me this bit of information, but then had to remind myself that I hadn’t told anyone about the affair. So it wasn’t her fault, it was mine. Dammit! My teeth scraped the inside of my cheeks murderously.
“So, uh,” was my attempt at casual conversation. “What’s her name, then?”
“Olive.”
Her name was Olive.
“Come again?”
“What? I said it’s Olive. Do you not believe me, or something?”
Yeah, actually, I wanted to shout. I don’t believe you. How could such a wonderful creature have the dullest name in the history of the universe? Olive. Like the vegetable, or fruit, or spice-I didn’t even care what it was. I just wanted it to be something other than Olive.
“You mean like, Olive with the pits?”
Best friend looked at me like I’d just eaten my non-corporeal racket. “I don’t know. What should I say? No, it’s Olive like the branch that the dove brought back to Noah’s ark? Or, no, it’s the Olive that makes oil?”
My mouth straightened into a very thin line, and I seemed to sag. “That’s kind of disappointing.”
The thing about my best friend that made her my best friend was that she never, ever questioned anything that I didn’t tell her about beforehand. So when I said I was disappointed about the lack of zing in Purchase’s real name, she didn’t ask me why. She didn’t even give off any hints that she wanted to know. (Later I realised it was because she just didn’t care enough to ask, or because she didn’t want to know any more about my disturbing exploits. She was the girl whom I forced to give me bicycle tires, and whom I made break pretty-coloured bottles with me. I think she might be in therapy now. We lost touch a long time ago.)
She shrugged. “Can’t help you there. Hey, she’s coming this way.”
I swear I wet my pants. “What?”
“Jesus, don’t have a fit or anything. She’s just saying hi.” Best friend waved to an obscure area.
My mind did a couple of backflips, and in two seconds’ time I thought of the following: redheads and dye and weeping willows and arching backs, fuck-me boots, cut and ripped jeans, old men in grey suits, ties with ducks on them, broken glass, stars, and a diagram my psychology teacher had showed me about the levels of love. Infatuation was one of them.
And then, very suddenly, I smelled gardenias.
IV
One is the Lonelist Number that You’ll Ever Do or Gardenias II
On the night before I told Purchase/Olive about stars, I was crashing at her house. Her parents were out-and always were out, as I never met the mother she talked so earnestly about or the father who painted orange blossoms for a living, or the cat with the bobtail-and the house was quiet and dim. No lightbulbs existed in their house, only Japanese paper lanterns with gardenia-scented candles placed carefully inside. Every time I passed one I was afraid that I would bump into it and set it on fire, and this flame would start a chain reaction, so that by the time I realised what I had done the whole house would be up in flames. But it wouldn’t matter, because the smoke would smell of burning flowers.
Much to my unthinkable dismay, Purchase’s house never spontaneously combusted, and even though the paper lanterns were lit all day long, no aromatic candle ever spilt too much wax or precariously tipped over. If I ever asked Purchase about it, she just laughed. It was one of her usual responses to my inquiries.
But to the point: Purchase smelled like gardenias because her house smelled like gardenias. It was an all-year-round, not-ever-stopping kind of thing. I fell in love with that smell like I had tried to fall in love with Purchase. It succeeded where Purchase herself had failed. Today, this comforts me.
I am getting too far ahead.
When I smelled the gardenias my head automatically flipped around. I was so numb from cold and surprise that I didn’t even believe I could move anymore, but I’ve noticed my body has a habit of deceiving me. When I think I want one thing, my body goes just kidding and then asks for another. I thought I was just obsessed with Purchase. But turning around, and getting a look at her, I think now that I may have felt a little differently.
She was tall-about four inches above my head. Her nose was small and button-like, and she had bright brown eyes, like the colour of a cookie just come out of the oven. She had high cheekbones and a small forehead, and bangs that went every-which-way. Her eyebrows were the same shade as her hair and I was thankful for that. Her mouth was tiny, her ears were tiny, but her eyes were large. She could have been pretty if her face was properly proportioned, but as it was, she was decent.
I was disappointed once again.
As soon as I saw her I wanted to blurt out my fateful secret: you were making out in front of my bedroom window! or I’ve been dreaming about you forever, sweetheart, or let me take you home. But of course I couldn’t. I didn’t know her. It would have been ten times more awkward than it already was.
When she noticed I was looking at her (the correct word is staring, but I am choosing to be vague), she turned to me. In fact, she placed her entire back to my best friend. I thought it was the rudest thing anyone could have done.
And I loved her even more for it.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was very girly, like a little girl’s. It frightened me, but I knew somehow that I would have to get used to it. “I’m Olive.”
“Yeah,” I replied, even though I did not know what I was agreeing with. That her name was Olive, certainly not, because I hated that name, and would continue to, for a very very long time.
I told her my name.
“Nice t’meet you,” she said. She mentioned my best friend, and said that it was so crazy that we knew each other, because they’d been preschool friends, and their mothers still knew each other, and this was such a rare chance. And wasn’t I cold?
“No, but aren’t you?” I indicated the holes in her jeans and her thin cotton sweater. But she wasn’t even shivering.
And then she did the weirdest thing: she threw her head back and laughed. Like me asking if she was cold was the funniest thing she had ever heard in her life. She laughed like it was comedy week and she had been holding it all in til Sunday night. It was the first time I would hear her crack up this way. There was one more incident, but I’ll leave that for later.
When she was finished, she had a wide grin on her face. “I could never be cold. I’m cold-blooded.”
She was beginning to freak the shit out of me.
The best friend tried to recapture Purchase’s attention, but her back stayed firm. I was beginning to feel like this redhead was a spotlight and not a person: a standing pin of brightness that focused her attention on whomever deserved it. She was a cold metal watchtower, and was designed to examine my every move. By imagining this then, I proved myself to be very intuitive, because this is eventually what she became.
“I think I should be going,” Purchase said abruptly. In fact it was so abrupt I could have sworn she interuppted herself, mid-sentence. “I feel as if I am interrupting.”
Darling, I wanted to say, you have been the best interruption I’ve ever had. Don’t feel as if you have to stop now.
She blew me a kiss. (I felt like I had to fall over from the sheer force of it, just to make a point.) The most that she did to my best friend was give a parting glance. Then, as shortly as she had come, she was out of sight like a leaf in a tornado.
Best friend and I walked off the tennis courts without a word, and out of each other’s lives the same way. It wasn’t planned: our calls dissipated, our visits became less routine and more businesslike, and suddenly our connection just lost its electricity. She was the last best friend I would ever have, just because after I had met Olive, I knew somehow that I did not need anyone else.
V
St. Abernathy’s Non-Correctional School for Girls
Since my ex-best friend was virtually the only real connection I had with Purchase, I had to devise my own ways of learning more about her. Just as I had been obsessed with the movement of paint on tires and the shine of light on broken glass and fragile bits of paper that told confusing stories, I immersed myself in the Olive Project. Now, I found myself falling for the movement of five-feet-five-inch redheads, the shine of light on the colour red and fragile bits of information that told confusing stories. By choosing unorthodox hobbies for myself, I was unconsciously building my own foundation for a turning point in my life.
Not much different, I liked to tell myself. You’re just moving onto bigger and better things.
And Purchase was definitely bigger and better.
Before my best friend and I broke things off, I asked her if she knew where Olive went to school. In a slightly vague, slightly hurt tone, she told me that the object of my affections (my nicknames for her got mushier and mushier over time, which annoyed both of us, but I couldn’t stop) went to St. Abernathy’s School for Girls.
My first thought: a correctional institute. Doubt filled my stomach and I had to hold onto a tree. The ex left me there, and did not even notice when I ran to catch up with her and ask for directions.
“Oh come on,” she said, throwing her hands up and walking faster. “How do you think I should know?”
What a let down, I thought then, pulling my hood down over my eyes. There goes my reliability.
But I soon found out that I did not need reliability. St. Abernathy’s Non-Correctional School for Girls (and that really was the title) lay three miles north of me. The website boasted of its superiority and creative intellectuality, and showed lush green fields and girls smiling Colgate-white next to all the pretty horses. I was shocked as to how I had never heard it mentioned or seen it in passing.
My mother, pleased at seeing me interested in something normal, offered to drive me there for a tour. In my head I pictured an unfriendly grey building, perhaps brick, with tall fence in front and a thick jumble of pine trees. The headmistress (or matron, I couldn’t decide which one I liked better) was fat and jiggly and had skin flowing out of her too-small pumps. All the girls rolled up their red plaid skirts, did not care to fasten their top two shirt buttons, and smoked in the bathroom. And the teachers were in their fifties or above, had salt-and-pepper buns, wore sixties’ cardigans and had rulers in their garters instead of daggers.
In our dark blue BMW (I have not mentioned my father. But based on our choice of vehicle, I will leave it up to you to decide what kind of job he had, what sort of pay he received and whether or not I saw him often enough to have had a healthy and happy childhood), I rolled the windows down and sunk lower into my already-sunken sports car seat. In the event that I saw Purchase out on those fertile green grounds behind the looming fence, I did not want her to see me. I wanted to blend into the scenery as much as possible. For that reason alone, I was wearing top-to-bottom green. As a result, I looked like a shrub. But I was willing to go through great lengths (for someone I didn’t know. Yes, I understood that. I have heard it too many times; it has nearly become my mantra).
I was still fantasizing about dormitories with bunk beds and recreational hour when we slowed down in front of a gigantic hill covered with poppies.
“Traffic sucks,” I said absentmindedly.
“We’re not in traffic, honey,” my mother answered, a tad worriedly.
I became worried as well, but my euphoria quelled it successfully. “What do you mean? Do we have a flat? Did we run someone over?”
“No, baby. We’re, um…we’re here.”
I swear I almost laughed. “What?”
“The address. 551 Vermont. This is 551 Vermont.”
To my right, the hill looked more like a mental hospital than a school. It seemed as if it had been designed to look like an inviting abode, but the architect went overboard in that aspect. It was bright green, nearly neon. And when I said it was covered in poppies, I mean it was smothered in the flowers. Purple and pink dots covered the mound like an infectious disease. I wondered how many passerbies a day got high off the fumes.
“Mom…” my mouth was dry. Who went to a school where everybody tested positive for opium? More importantly, who went to school inside a volcano made out of grass? “…This can’t be it.”
But my mother had already parked in the grass next to the hill and was turning off the ignition. Panicked, I turned to her as she pulled the key out of the slot and proceeded to open the door.
“Mom, you’re going to have to just say no. I’m sure you were really hip in the old days, but nobody gets high off opium anymore. Anyway, Dad wouldn’t like it if you had to enroll in rehab.”
She looked at me quizically, her suburban bob grinning fiendishly at me through her pearl studs. “Honey, I drove to this school to go into it, not to drive by it. Didn’t you really want to go, too?”
I had. There was no denying it. And while I had said that there was nothing in the way of Purchase and I meeting once more (the original sentence was ‘being together forever’, but I felt ‘meeting once more’ was much more plausible), a hollowed-out hill covered with poppies kind of overpassed the boundary.
Grudgingly I stepped out of our expensive car and into the road. My mother was already ahead of me, humming the oldies to herself as she waltzed to the door (it might have been a rock. But it looked like a door, at any rate). She was really quite pleased that I wanted to tour this school, because
a) She did not know that I was stalking a student enrolled in it,
b) It was normal,
c) I was taking an interest in girls,
d) It was normal.
So I felt I had to at least look interested in the school, even though I would never in my life actually go to it, for numerous technical and emotional reasons. Catching up with my mother, I began to gush about the poppies, when just minutes before I had been repulsed by them. I marveled out loud about the wonderful symmetry of the mound, when in truth I thought it was a stupid thing to inhabit. And, as we opened the door (it really did turn out to be one), I squealed as best that I could at the carved-out entrance hall.
But in reality, it was quite nice. The inside of the mediocre-sized hill was actually much larger than I’d thought, and the foyer was airy and well proportioned. A few schoolgirls were talking at the front desk, which seemed to be carved out of cherrywood, and I noted another reason why I would never attend St. Abernathy’s: I simply did not look the part.
For the several girls chatting near me did not only look like they had just broken out of a state prison, they looked proud of it. One of them had hair that looked like she had asked her dog to bite it off, and another had dyed it a brutal shade of lime green. The others just looked like they got high hourly off whatever was handy (and I found out soon enough that everything was handy on school grounds), and then stole gym socks from the freshmen and stuffed them down the toilets.
I followed my mother (who seemed extremely out of place, given the current circumstances-she was wearing argyle and red lipstick, for Chrissakes) as she walked steadily to the adjacent office. It was cherrywood, identical to the desk, with the words ‘Desk Admin’ written in fancy script on the door. As I passed Delinquent Girls #s 1 and 2, as they shall be known henceforth, they suddenly swiveled around to look down at me with their thick, eyeliner-enhanced glares.
“You’re new,” said DG #1. She had what looked like a cat’s tooth embedded in her left eyebrow. “And you don’t lookit.”
And thank the Lord, I thought to myself. Who the hell would want to look like you? “Not really. I’m not enrolled.”
“Ooh,” the one with the NyQuil-dyed hair smirked. “Thinking of joining a correctional institute, then? Have you done bad things like the rest of us?”
I cowered. Figuratively. And then told a not-so lie.
“No, er…I have a sister.”
I AM STALKING ONE OF YOUR SCHOOLMATES, my mind bellowed.
“A sister?”
I AM STALKING ONE OF YOUR SCHOOLMATES.
“Is she the bad one, then?”
I AM STALKING…
“Um. Oh, yeah. Really bad. Er. State prison. Coupl’a years. You know.”
NyQuil squinted. “Denno her, if she looks like you. Hey, give me your name, then.”
My throat instantly went dry. “Er, okay but first of all, I have a question…”
I didn’t, really.
“…The pamphlets and ads for St. Abernathy’s all show these, like, great fields. Really. Wide and rolling. English countryside, like that. Where are they?”
DG #2 looked at me as if I had gone mad.
“Photoshop,” she said bluntly and simply.
“That makes sense, then,” I began to babble, and backed away from the group of crazies. It was all becoming too much for me. I was never really good at lying. “Techonology nowadays, huh? You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”
NyQuil poked my chest. I threw myself against the wall behind me. “Are those?”
Needless to say, I felt like dying. They were all looking at me, expecting an answer, and they all gave off a distinct aura of hostility-meaning that if I didn’t give a reply they would all rush to pull daggers out of their garters, or throw homemade bombs at me with amazing force. Bolting off was my first thought, but another look at their not-so-slender bodies proved me otherwise. Lying my way through and saying that my breasts weren’t real, and that I knew this awesome clinic downtown, was also out because I was a horrible liar and I didn’t even have much breast to speak of. Then I wondered if my situation would have a movie-like turnout, and my dear Purchase would swing by to the theme from Pulp Fiction, her luscious red hair in braids, saving me from a ruined end.
But none of these things happened. (The loss of the movie ending prompted me to sag a little bit.) Instead, my mother, cashmere sweater humming calmly and pearl earrings smiling daintily, suddenly appeared between NyQuil and DG #2, holding a plaid folder and grinning stark-white. Looking at her and then at the delinquents, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a find-the-difference cartoon. I honestly had never been more embarassed to see her in my life.
“Making friends?” she trilled, looking a little flushed. I could have sworn she was glowing, and I wondered what the Desk Admin had decided to give her in place of the usual mint or lollipop often offered in such events. “The lady at the desk said we could take a tour. Pop in anywhere. Quite nice, I’d say. Almost reckless.”
My mother had never used the word reckless before.
“Shall we go?” she asked.
NyQuil chose this time to pull a packet of Marlboros out of her skirt pocket, and a green-apple shaped lighter out of one of her socks. Casually, she pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and blew out smoke rings with general ease. Months later, when Purchase offered me a cigarette, I would remember these rings and be insanely jealous that all I could do with smoke was inhale it too deeply.
I watched the smoke rings dissipate into the air, one by one. It was almost tragic.
“We shall,” breathed NyQuil after two more rings. It took me a moment to stop watching them float away, and to realise that the three girls who had just been surrounding me threateningly were now choosing to follow around my mother and I. Panicking, I tried in vain to intervene.
“But…but…don’t you have…”
“Class?” DG #2 smiled crudely. “Don’t be silly.”
If only I was being silly, and not just freaking the fuck out. It would have been a much easier thing to handle.
VI
Implosions
As we began to walk our way down the cobblestoned hall, I wondered if we looked as funny a quartret as it seemed to me.
Leading the pack was my mother-a typical suburban housewife, with a college degree in interior design and English literature, decked out in pearls and cashmere and sensible stockings. Next were Delinquent Girls #s 1 and 2, with their animal-tooth earrings that I had no doubt were 100% real and their boys’ shirts and too-shirt skirts. And then, lagging a few steps behind, was NyQuil, with her green hair and lighter-infested socks. And then me: short and tiny, with too-long hair and an expensive, product-of-a-rich-father wool coat. I did not know whether to laugh at the situation or cry because I was being followed around by a bunch of druggies, and also because Purchase was nowhere to be seen.
During the whole tour, I never once thought of asking anyone if they knew an Olive with red hair. The school, though compact looking, seemed to be filled with more students than my own overcrowded education institute. And even if I’d had the perfect oppurtunity, I wouldn’t have asked any of the trio that had tagged along on my school tour. Aside from being upfront, they had the undesirable look of someone who could look right through you and tell exactly what you were up to.
So I had to depend on my eyes alone. Every doorless classroom that we passed, I peered into. The bathrooms were not ignored-not even the men’s (because I knew full well what girls did in the boys’ restroom, as well as the autoshop room, and the teacher’s lounges, and the dark room). I scoured the cafeteria and the gym, and even the small backyard (to get in a mile during physical education, you had to run around it twenty-three times). By the end of the tour, which lasted forty-five minutes, I could safely say that it was, by far, the crappiest school I had ever been to, and that whoever had done the website and the brochures was a Photoshop guru.
We were stopped at a classroom-the art room, NyQuil said between her fifth cigarette. I would have never guessed. It was certainly the cleanest art room I had ever been in, with what looked like sterilized white walls and shining desks and a spotless tiled floor. Plasma-screen computers sat in a quintet in the corner, smoothly wiped and humming away. There was nothing on the walls, and the whiteboard was free of word or picture. The only thing that gave off the slightest notion that we were in an art room was the fact that the tiles we were now walking on were rainbow-coloured.
“I’ve never been in here before,” remarked DG #1. She was tugging on her tooth (the one not attached to her gums).
“Yeah, me neither,” said DG #2. “Cr-azy.”
I didn’t see what was so crazy about it. The whitewashed atmosphere, however, was making me squint. “Why is it so clean?”
“Damned if I know,” grunted NyQuil before she flicked open her apple lighter. “I hear someone’s always in here. And damned if I know why about that, too.” Two smoke rings floated lazily near my ear.
I yawned. “Always in here? Like lives here?”
“I don’t know. I hear about her, though.” The smoke rings vanished into a ceiling vent. “I hear-”
She was cut short by my mother’s cell phone, a very loud regular tingtone that annoyed everybody within a ten-foot radius. Sure enough, DG #1 bared her teeth and NyQuil almost dropped her smoke.
“Sorry, sorry,” quipped my mother, still under the influence of whatever the desk admin had given her (I was sticking to my drug theory, even though my mother would later insist that it was just a peppermint). “I have to get this.” It was probably my father, sitting behind his polished oak desk, or my little sister, coming back from her ballet lessons or flute lessons or horse stables. I myself did not own a cell phone, no matter how much my parents pressured me to.
As soon as she left the classroom and shut the sliding door behind her, I turned back to NyQuil. She was just stubbing out her cigarette on the whiteboard, and some ash crumbled sadly down the surface.
“What were you saying?”
It took her a minute to remember. “Oh. I don’t know. Something like, she’s obsessed with clean.”
My pampered upbringing recognized the feeling. I recalled days when we had maids who spoke no English (“Eva, please clean the table when we’ve finished.” “Que?”), but could wipe away a food disaster in seconds (“Godammit, mother! I did not mean to make the fucking quiche explode!” “Oh, don’t be so angry, dear, Fifi will take care of it. Ne ce’st pas, Fifi?”). I remembered when my mother had breakdowns if I did not clean up my fingerpaint, and my little sister screaming if I had forgotten to close the shower curtain during my bath. And it all drove me wild. I understood clean, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so obsessed with it.
DG #2 jumped over a desk, making it slide on the smooth floor. She stumbled a bit and then laughed at her mistake. “Oopsie,” she smirked, righting the table. “Olive might kill me.”
I positively imploded-I felt every single one of my organs as they burst into a gory, permanent mess. “Olive?”
NyQuil began to laugh, too, and quickly wiped the ash off the whiteboard, rubbing it white again. “Yeah, that’s her. I can’t believe I forgot.”
Head spinning, I tried to break in the conversation. “Redhead?”
DG #1 plunged her hand into NyQuil’s skirt, causing a short uproar, and then retreated with the crumpled pack of Marlboros. “I think so. Isn’t it like, different every month?”
This was certainly news to me, and I tried to digest all that I had learned within the past ten minutes: the art room was not really an art room, but a personal area for Olive, who was not really a redhead and was either stupid or had obsessive compulsive disorder. My anatomy shocked to pieces, I slumped down to the shocking floor in slight defeat.
DG #1 looked at me. “Where’s your mom?”
I pointed to the door. My vocal cords had burned out.
“Oh, goodie. Then it that case...” Through not-so-focused eyes I watched her totter on pointed stilleto heels to the back of the classroom, her hands held out in front of her in case she fell. I remembered her complaining about tiles being tricky to walk on when we were walking in the locker room.
“What are you doing?” demanded DG #2, giggling profusely.
I didn’t see what was so funny.
“Where do you think she is?” DG #1 wondered out loud, the cigarette poised carefully between her fore and middle finger, acting as bait. “I know she wants this. Plus I want to show her off.”
NyQuil burst into laughter. “For chrissakes, she isn’t an animal.”
I heard scratching from the opposite end of the room, then howling. I thought it was a dog, and was about to ask why the fuck there was a dog in an art room that wasn’t stuffed, when I realised that it was just someone laughing and yelling at the same time.
“Who isn’t an animal?” the voice called, in between large gasps of air. “I can’t open the fucking door! Someone open the fucking door.”
All around me, people were laughing. I was almost disgusted, just because I didn’t know what the hell was going on and someone was acting like a dog. DG #1 pressed her ear to the rear door, grinning widely, as if she was in on a joke that no one else understood.
“Whassat?” she said, snickering behind her fuschia-painted fingernails. “Something about the door?”
Whoever was on the other side seemed to be having a jolly good time. It took a moment for them to stop guffawing and to reply to the question. “Yeah! I can’t open the door.” Then came more insane laughter. “Oh my God, this is pathetic. Who’s that anyway? What are you doing in my room?”
It was about now that I began to recognize the voice. The significance started at my toes, which started to twitch at the hollering, and moved up to my stomach, which felt like I had just inhaled a jar of olives, juice and all. And olives had always, ever since I was two, made me feel sick.
NyQuil threw her now-empty package of smokes across the room, so that they skittered across the tiled floor before stopping abruptly. The bellower screamed again, and I watched stars sparkle behind my irises.
“God, she is so loud,” shrieked one of the delinquent girls-I had my eyes closed, intent on watching a tangible feeling spread through my body before it hit my mind and it all went away. “Just let her in already!”
But DG #1-I knew it was she because she sounded faint, she was at the other end of the room-cackled fiendishly in response. “It’s me, Olive.”
The stars and olives and tingling all fused into my cranium, and every single nerve in my body screamed I told you so! I sucked in my breath, feeling the chill on my teeth, making it hurt.
I listened intently as Olive screamed in response. “You fucker! Open the door. And give me a fucking smoke! I need it.”
They all began to do manic laughing again, and I managed a weak smile. I was beginning to wonder where my mother was, just in case she happened to walk into a room full of crackups talking through a door, while on the other side a stoned schoolgirl was screaming obscenities, and there I was, off to the corner, pleasantly obscure for the moment.
“You’re high enough, Olive! Now tell me the combination for this lock,” replied DG #1, sticking the cigarette behind her left ear for safekeeping.
“You fucking well know it,” Olive shouted back, her voice a bit dimmer. I wondered why. “Retard.”
Apparently, DG #1 did not know the lock number, because she flipped off the door angrily and then yelled something unintelligible to me. (It sounded very hostile, however.) Then she began to turn the disc to each number that Olive yelled out in a slightly crazed tone, her voice growing softer and softer still in pitch. Beside me, NyQuil and DG #2 were stifling their giggles into each other’s hands, and once again I felt like vomiting.
I was determined not to look up when I heard the door open and a couple of girls yelling shrilly. Instead, I wondered concernedly where my mother was, as it had been at least twenty minutes since she’d left and she made it a rule not to talk on her phone for more than ten. Had the desk admin found her again, and offered her a hit off the hookah? Or had she been cajoled into buying pot from God-knows-whom? My mother was not the most strong-willed person when it came to drugs-I had found this out one night when looking through the autographs in her high school yearbook. ‘Hey Linda, your acid trips totally beat mine’ and ‘It sucked you stopped dealing and went clean, you fucking pansy’ stuck in my mind the most.
But my eyes had to open eventually. When they did, I was faced with a shock of bright red hair. At the colour my stomach immediately twisted. It’s all fake, fake, fake, dammit!
“Hey, I know you,” smiled Olive, and pushed the tip of my nose like a button. She smelled like herbs. “Cutie.”
NyQuil, who was still howling with laughter, doubled up after she heard this.
“What the fuck is so funny?” I snapped, just as my mother stepped into the room, emanataing the same herb-y smell that Olive was.
“Dear! Don’t say things like that.” Her eyes were out of focus. She was obviously high, and yet she still had enough virtue to scold me for saying the word ‘fuck’. “It’s very crude.”
Words instantly formed in my mind: Don’t call me crude! You’re stoned! But I didn’t dare say it, just in case she was just buzzed and could still understand me. Instead I looked back at Olive, who was still bent forward to look me straight in the eye. I noticed that hers were bright green, with specks of blue. I found this to be, for some reason, comforting.
“Yeah, we’ve met,” I whispered. My larynx was burnt out again “On the tennis courts.”
She was still smiling, and not saying anything. I could count six freckles on her nose and two each on her cheek. Then, very quickly, she bounced backwards and snatched the cigarette away from DG #1’s hands.
“Hey!” she growled, reaching back for it. “You called me a retard! You don’t deserve that.”
“Shut up. I need this.” Then she scrambled down to NyQuil’s socks and, after rummaging through the right one for a couple of seconds, pulled out a banana-yellow lighter.
“Ooh, how very nifty,” squealed my mother.
“Mom, don’t say nifty,” I pleaded.
But Olive laughed, girly and deliberate. “Nifty. How cool. My mom doesn’t say nifty.” She lit her cigarette and then tossed the lighter to me. “Where’s yours?”
I was about to answer that I didn’t smoke, and honestly didn’t plan to, when my mother bothered to reply on my behalf. “I’m afraid she doesn’t smoke, and won’t ever.”
My face burned, but Olive just laughed again. “That’s fine. I kind of wish I didn’t smoke, either.”
Liar glowed on each and every one of the other girls’ faces, their eyes menacing and their looks definitely accusatory, but Olive just blew it away, literally. Watching her smoke became entertainment for me, starting on that day. Her cheeks would puff and decline to a tempo which never altered, and she not only blew smoke rings, they were all different sizes. Big to small, small to big. I was mesmerized.
But, being a mother, she was designed to snap me out of my reveries. “My, my. Look at the time.” She waved around her 100% real Rolex. I bet at least two of the girls wanted to jump her for it, since that was what they had been doing since the sixth grade, according to their spoken history. “We must be going. I do feel a little faint, anyway.”
I wonder why, I thought darkly.
As I stood up to leave on shaky legs, Olive asked if I would be back.
“I didn’t get to see enough of you,” she admitted, slapping away NyQuil’s hands as they tried to reach for her coat pockets. “Your tour probably sucked. I, on the other hand, know where everything is.”
My smile was agreeable as well as shaky. “Oh yeah? Did you make the brochures or something?”
She just winked, and then blew me a good-bye kiss, just like she had at the end of our last meeting. As I walked out the door after my unsteady mother, I made sure to catch it between my palms and rub them all over my face.