Sloppy Firsts Read online

  I turned the knob, hoping that my subconscious would kick in and instinctively stop on the correct numbers. It didn’t. Then I furiously tugged on the lock, hoping that it would miraculously pop open. It didn’t. I got all panicky when the warning bell rang and I wasn’t any closer to getting it open. My ears got red-hot and I could feel the sweat trickling into my bra crevice. In desperation, I started spinning out random combinations that seemed like they could work: left 38, right 13, left 9 … left 42, right 23, left 2 … I stopped only when Mr. "Rico Suave" Ricardo popped his head out the door and asked, "Well, Miss Darling, are you going to join the rest of the Ds-through-the-Fs for homeroom this morning?"

  I went to homeroom and proceeded to have a quiet conniption. The only other person who knows my combination is Hope. Not much help.

  So I tried to visualize then analyze the particular situation I was in each time I opened my locker. Was there a pattern? Did I usually carry on a conversation while I turned the knob? Or did I open it in silent concentration? Was my backpack on my shoulders or off?

  By the time homeroom was over, I was out of my head. Not because I couldn’t get my books, but because it was my very own brain malfunction that was preventing me from doing so. We learned in Psych that the "breakdown in selective attention" is one of the first signs of schizophrenia. Does this qualify?

  Then again, menopausal women are known to go a little wacko, so maybe the fact that I haven’t menstruated in almost two months is having a similarly psychotic effect. I’m waaaay late. However, there’s no possible way that I’m pregnant unless (a) I got knocked up by daydreaming about a very naked Paul Parlipiano while I was sitting on the toilet or (b) I’ve been chosen for the Immaculate Conception Part Two: Electric Boog-a-loo.

  Ha. Ha. Ha. Funny.

  This is my attempt at being blasé. I can’t get too freaked about my non-period because stress is probably responsible for it’s tardiness to begin with. But every time I go to the bathroom, I silently pray for a smudge of blood on my skivvies, only to be let down. I feel like I’m in ninth grade again, when I was the last girl I knew waiting for menarche to open the door to the wonderful world of womanhood. Ack.

  Still, if I keep getting more and more bizarre, I don’t think I can blame it all on PMS. I’ll have to persuade my parents to take me to a doc who can give me the get-right-in-the-head meds I need.

  Schizophrenia or no, I needed my books. I had to go down to the office and have the secretary look up the number for me. No way would I admit that I’d forgotten it, though. Not seven months into the school year. On a Friday. I’d rather lie. I’d say that I hadn’t used my locker in ages because it was so far away from all my classes and I hated being tardy. Scotty (it’s always good to name-drop a fellow scholar/athlete in these situations) was nice enough to share his with me, even though it was technically against school rules. But now I needed to get a pair of running shoes (again, evoking the scholar/ athlete thing) that I’d stuffed in there during cross-country season …

  I had the lie set up by the time I got to the office.

  "Well if it isn’t Jess Darling!" chirped Mrs. Newman. "We don’t see your face around here very often."

  School secretaries are always thrilled to see me. It’s the last-name thing. They assume I’m way nicer than I really am.

  "Hi, Mrs. Newman."

  "What can I do you for?"

  Is hokeyness a prerequisite for high-school secretaries?

  "Well, it’s a long story, but I need my locker combination …"

  "Jess, say no more." She started clicking away at the nearest computer.

  "Uh, you don’t need to know why?" I asked. I was a little disappointed. I had my faux facts in order.

  She just kept right on smiling. "Not from you I don’t."

  Even though I didn’t have to, I gave her the whole bogus story anyway. Her only response? "That Scotty Glazer is a nice boy, isn’t he?"

  She wrote the numbers down on a slip of paper and handed them to me. (For future reference: left 45, right 17, left 5.) Then I turned to leave without looking up from the paper and crashed right into … Marcus Flutie! He had just gotten up from the bench behind me. He had been there the whole time. Again.

  "Ain’t you Jess Darlin’?" Marcus drawled, mocking Mrs. Newman. But it came out sounding like a Bible-belting, Ritz-cracker-casserole-making housewife’s comment about a poodle wearing a crocheted sweater: Ain’t you jus’ darlin’!

  Mrs. Newman’s smile disappeared. Marcus ignored her.

  "I know where your locker is, Miss Darlin’," he singsonged, which was true because his is located only about a half-dozen or so away from mine. He knew I had lied. He gave me the two-fingered tsk-tsk. I froze.

  "Leave her alone. Don’t you have enough problems of your own?"

  While Mrs. Newman lectured, Marcus brushed my hair back with his hand, leaned in, and whispered, "I won’t narc on you, Cuz."

  He smelled sweet and woodsy, like cedar shavings. I felt his hand on my neck and his breath on my cheek. Suddenly, I was rubbery and red.

  I stumbled out of there. And when I did, I found myself face-to-face with the last person I wanted to see after something like this happens: Sara. Oh, she would just love to be the one to tell everyone about me and Marcus. Not that there is a Me and Marcus, mind you. But whatever almost-nonexistent thing that exists between us would be too much for Pineville High to handle. That’s exactly why this next scene was so painful:

  Me: [Trying to sound cool.] Oh, hey, Bruiser. What’s up?

  Sara: I’m fine. But what’s up with you? Are you feeling okay? Omigod! You’re bright red. And sweating. And you’re out of breath.

  [She’s viciously suspicious. She searches for clues.]

  Me:Oh, no. I’m fine. I just ran down here to get … uh … something. I … uh … got a little winded.

  Sara: The track star got winded running to the office?

  [Sara shakes her head and purses her lips. She’s onto me.]

  Me: Uh … I … uh …

  [Marcus strolls out of the office and stands between Sara and me.]

  Marcus: Let’s hear you sling the bullshit.

  Me: Uh … I …

  [Marcus crosses his arms, covering up the five smiling faces of the Backstreet Boys, whose images and silver-glitter BSB logo are emblazoned across his chest. He risks ridicule whenever he wears this teenybopper T-shirt, which is quite often. Most people don’t get the joke. I do. In a world where Marilyn Manson can’t shock anyone anymore, Marcus knows that wearing the Backstreet Boys T-shirt is one of the most subversive things that he—being "Krispy Kreme," after all—can do. He thinks it’s funny. It is.]

  Sara: [Shoots Marcus a withering glance.] Omigod! Ugh. Stop bothering us.

  Marcus: [Looking at me.] I’m not bothering you, am I?

  [The T-shirt cotton is thin. The ink-black Chinese character band tattooed around Marcus’s bicep shows through, needing translation, needing to be understood.]

  Me: Uh …

  [Marcus walks away, laughing.]

  Sara: Omigod! What was that all about?

  Me: That freak? I have no idea. He must be high.

  Fortunately, when Sara recounts this strange story—this isolated, unprovoked incident—to everyone we know, she puts herself in a role that is equal to mine.

  "Can you believe that quote Krispy Kreme unquote came up to us all high to spout off some weird-ass shit?" she asks. "Like we care."

  Us. We. Both innocent.

  The thing is, I do care. I don’t know why. But with the Marcus–Heath history and all, I simply can’t tell Hope about what happened today. Not the truth anyway. And that makes me a horrible friend.

  March 1st

  Hope,

  Sorry you always have to go through my mom or dad to get to me. I’m phone phobic since you left. I never pick it up anymore. The reason I don’t pick it up is because the very idea of having a conversation sucks all the life right out of me. It really does. Besides you, I
resent everyone who barges in on the few precious hours of downtime I have between track practice and tossing and turning all night.

  Well, tonight that person was none other than Hy. I shouldn’t have been so shocked. I was the one who gave her my phone number.

  To be honest, I was thinking more about you than her when I did it. See, I was thinking about you at your new school and how hard it’s been for you to make new friends. And how you said you were grateful whenever anyone went out of her way to be nice to you.

  So we talked. She told me all about the circumstances that got her exiled to Pineville. Apparently, Hy used to go to some hoity-toity private school in Manhattan. ("You needed mad bank or mad brains to get in—I had the brains," said Hy.) Midway through her fall term the dean sent a letter saying that the school no longer had funding to continue her scholarship. ("They had to bounce the riffraff to make way for more trustafarians," Hy said.) Her mom couldn’t afford the tuition for the spring term. ("I never knew my dad," said Hy.) But there was no way she was going to put Hy in New York City’s public school system. ("With the chickenheads and thugs," Hy said.) So until her mom transfers to her company’s Jersey branch, Hy is living with her aunt and enrolled at PHS. ("With the Hoochies, Wiggaz, and Hicks," I said.)

  Our convo wasn’t bad or anything. Hy’s history was fairly interesting. But the whole time I was talking to her, I was thinking about how sweet it would be when the clock read 9:27 P.M., which meant twenty minutes were up and I could end the conversation without seeming rude and I could try to get some sleep.

  This is my new hobby. I watch my life depart minute by minute. I anticipate the end of everything and anything—a conversation, a class, track practice, darkness—only to be left with more clock-watching to take its place. I’m continually waiting for something better that never comes. Maybe it would help if I knew what I wanted.

  Until I figure that out, I guess I’m waiting for the end of my sophomore year so summer can start, so I can wait for that to end so I can go back to school and do the waiting game for another two years until I graduate and finally escape to college, where I’m hoping to begin my "real life." Whatever that is.

  I didn’t do this as much when you were here.

  I really missed you tonight. I miss talking to you. Knowing that you get me. And every time I talk to someone else it just reminds me how much they don’t.

  Tick-tockingly yours, J.

  march

  the fourth

  My first spring track meet isn’t for another four weeks and already I wish the whole goddamn season were over.

  Today I snuck out of the house so I could do my four-mile loop around the neighborhood all alone. When I’m out running by myself, without Kiley yelling out splits, or Paul Parlipiano distracting me with his God-like grace, my mind quiets. Clears.

  Forgetting my locker combination was unsettling, sure. And I’m more than a little freaked about my non-period. But the whole Marcus incident had messed with my mind royally. I couldn’t stop thinking about him and what would happen if Sara started making her famous insinuations. You know, I think there’s something going on between—omigod!—Krispy Kreme and the Class Brainiac …

  I really needed a half hour of not thinking about anything.

  My father must have planted a homing device in the soles of my Sauconys because I was no farther than a half-mile from the house when I heard the whizzing wheels of his ten-speed. I should have known. My dad is always in one of two places: In front of his computer or on his bike. And when he’s not off on his solo Lance Armstrong adventures, he’s tailing me.

  "Pick up the pace, Notso!" he yelled. "You think Alexis Ford runs this slow?"

  Alexis Ford goes to Eastland High School. She beat me by four-tenths of a second in the 1600 meters at the freshman championships last year. My father analyzes the video of that race more than the Feds did the Zapruder film when Kennedy was shot. I’m not kidding. It usually goes like this:

  "You lost the race right there," he says.

  "Dad, the gun just went off. We weren’t even twenty-five meters into it."

  Dad rewinds and freezes the tape. "Look right there," he says, pointing at the screen. "See how you had to go all the way into the third lane to get around that girl from Lacey? That was a waste of energy. Energy you needed for the sprint in the final straightaway. That’s why Alexis Ford beat you by four-tenths of a second."

  A few weeks ago Dad spliced together an entire tape of these race-breaking moments to create a video montage I like to call "Notso Darling’s Agony of Defeat, Volume One." I’m supposed to watch and learn and never let them happen again.

  "Look right there," he says. "See how your arms are swinging all over the place? See how you got boxed in?"

  All his coaching is lost on me. The way I see it, there’s only one racing strategy that matters. It’s the one I run by: Get in the lead and don’t let anyone pass you.

  I know that my dad is just excited to have an athlete in the family. Bethany never broke a bead of sweat in her life. And he’s relieved I’m not one of those chunky girls who lumber around the track, hoping to break an eight-minute mile. I’m actually good. That almost makes up for the Little League games and Pee-Wee Basketball tournaments he thought he would attend but never got the chance to.

  He sees these father–daughter jaunts as a way for us to bond, but I resent the interruption. As soon as he starts in, the blank-slate state of my brain gets all mucked up.

  It got so bad today that I had this psycho fantasy: I wished he’d hit me with his bike. I imagined him losing control for a split second, the wheel clipping my leg hard enough to make me lose balance, and me smacking the asphalt. I’d roll into a ball of pain and fury, my hands and legs a mess of blood, skin, and gravel. I’d scream, "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING RIDING SO CLOSE? THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT! WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?" Maybe I’d break a leg or arm. Maybe I’d be out the whole season and my dad would feel too bad to be mad.

  I got so excited by the idea of getting injured that I decided I couldn’t wait for fate. I’d carefully orchestrate the crash. Yes. I’d fake the fall, confident that he wouldn’t ride right over my body, crushing and killing me. No, just a brush, a bump, enough to make him leave me alone. My adrenaline cranked up and I started running faster at the thought of it. And that’s when my dad said, "That’s more like it, Notso!" Instead of making me feel better, like I knew he wanted it to, his praise made me feel worse. And more than ever I wanted him to hit me and end my running career altogether. I knew there were bumpy tree roots up ahead bursting out of the asphalt, so I could logically trip over them and ("That’s it. Keep it up, Notso! You’re flying!") fall into his path and he would hit me. I wouldn’t have to run anymore and hear about Alexis Ford and swinging arms and the Agony of Defeat. I knew it was now or never so I stepped on the sticky-outiest root. My arms flailed and I felt like I was falling in slow motion, all the while anticipating the sting of rubber tire treading ("No!") on my ankle, my shin, my thigh. I was waiting to scream, to yell, to vent, to blame.

  But my dad instinctively swerved out of the way.

  Later, when I was applying hydrogen peroxide to my bloody, banged-up knee and shredded palm, my dad stood in the doorway and lectured me about being more careful.

  "You could have ended the season right there," he said.

  "Yes," I sighed. "But I didn’t."

  My skin still stings.

  the tenth

  A bunch of us went to the annual PHS talent show tonight. We needed a break from the weekend-in-Pineville monotony of hitting the multiplex, chowing at Helga’s Diner, or vegging at Scotty’s. Plus, we needed to give Hy a tasty slice of Pineville culture.

  "I dare you to find a better freak show for a five-dollar admission," I said.

  "Girl, I’m from the city, where the freak shows are free," she said.

  "Wait and see."

  At the end of the night, Hy agreed with me. Neither one of us could understand w
hat compelled these people to willingly humiliate themselves in front of their peers.

  I’ll give you a brief review.

  The show opened with a band rather narcissistically named The Len Levy Four. It was fronted by none other than Len Levy, the boy who broke my eight-year-old heart. He wore about six inches of pancake makeup, as though the audience would be tricked into thinking that somehow the spotlight, or perhaps the very aura of rap/metal greatness itself, had erased the purple lesions from his face. I say this with all bitterness aside, of course.

  So The Len Levy Four launched into a Rage Against the Machine rip-off song. I have to admit that the band itself was pretty tight. But Len was frightening. He’s pretty stiff and robotic in everyday life. Well, jack that up on crack and you’ve got Len’s idea of stage presence. PHS’s answer to Zack de la Rocha marched around his cohorts like a short-circuited cyborg, so fast that the spotlight couldn’t keep up with him.

  Len wasn’t even halfway through the first verse when he yelled, "Pineville!" and attempted a stage dive. Talk about premature ejaculation. Everyone was still sitting in their seats. There wasn’t anyone to catch him. He landed right on his feet and just kind of stood there, stunned that he was on the ground instead of surfing the crowd.

  So then he went the audience-participation route.

  "Pineville!" he yelled into the microphone.

  Then he held it out for the audience to respond in kind. Silence.

  "Pineville!" he yelled even louder.

  This time he was met with howling laughter. The song ended not long thereafter with Len Levy throwing down the mike with a deafening squeal of feedback and storming out of the auditorium.

  Rock and roll.

  Next up was Dori Sipowitz, a die-hard Britney Spears fan if there ever was one. Much like the genuine Lolita diva, Dori’s act was heavy on the choreography and light on the singing, relying on prerecorded vocals and lip-synching. Dori’s mother was sitting right in front of us and screamed, "Sexy, baby! Sexy, sexy, sexy!" as her daughter writhed and gyrated in a pink, sequined catsuit with a belly-baring cutout.