Here are two brown lamps
And Mother dressed in scotch
For the season (whichever it may be)
The weather here never seems right.
"But they are still poems," I said. I stood very still. I thought it would somehow help.
"I have to give you an F, Emily."
"But why?"
"You"re so smart, sometimes I forget how young you really are."
"You"re giving me an F because I"m young?"
He handed me the poems with the F on it. I felt like a dog that just p.i.s.sed all over the carpet.
"I can"t bring you home today," he said. "I have a dentist appointment."
I closed his door behind me. Janice was in the hall, leaning against the lockers.
"What did he want from you?" Janice asked.
"I"m not a bad person just because I don"t understand what a haiku is," I said.
"I know that," Janice said.
"Well Mr. Basketball doesn"t. He"s mad at me."
"Maybe he"s not mad at you."
"Huh?"
"He has a polyp. In his colon."
"I don"t think that"s it."
"It might be."
"Why don"t you go and ask him then?" I asked. "He"s your boyfriend, right?"
"What"s your problem?"
"I don"t have a problem, other than you"ve been lying to me about Mr. Basketball all year now."
"I"m not lying," she said.
"Why don"t you go in and say, "Mr. Basketball, since we are f.u.c.king I need to know if you have a polyp in your colon.""
"That"s too suspicious, Emily."
Janice was in a tight black shirt that said LOOK on the front. There was saliva bunching at the corners of her mouth. For some reason, I wanted to hurt her.
"Janice," I said, "Mr. Basketball touched me."
"Of course," Janice said, shrugging it off, refusing to look surprised. "He touches all of us."
"No," I said. "I mean, he touched me."
"Where?"
"On my leg."
"Here?" she asked, and put her hand around my thigh.
"Yes," I said. "He ran his hand all the way down my thigh and to my foot."
"So what"s the big deal? That"s baby stuff."
"No, you aren"t listening."
"I hear you," she said. "And I"ll tell you what happens next."
I felt the urge to put my hands over my ears but I didn"t.
"First, Emily, you"ll suck his d.i.c.k. And then once he"s hard enough, once it feels like a sausage in your mouth, you have s.e.x until he comes."
"Janice," I said. "Stop it."
"Is this grossing you out, Emily? Because this is s.e.x. This is what he"ll want from you. You arch your back at a forty-five-degree angle and scream."
"No," I said.
"Yes," she said, walking away from me.
"Janice," I said, running after her. "Why do you have to be like this?"
"Like what?"
"I don"t know," I said. "You"re scaring me."
"I"m scaring you?" she asked. "You"re the one who scares us."
"Huh?"
"You lit Richard Trenton on fire, Emily!" she said. "And I defended you. I"ve always defended you! I"ve always said, hey, guys, we all know Richard was the crazy one, Emily was just trying to help Annie. And what do you do in return? You stand there, and you say, "Mr. Basketball touched me." And you know I love him. I love him."
She walked out of school and into the parking lot where the Other Girls were sitting on red and white cars, nibbling on peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly matzoh sandwiches. When I first saw them eating matzoh sandwiches, I asked, "Are you guys Jewish?" Only two of them. Fewer calories.
I chased after Janice.
"My third cousin was a child actress," one of the Other Girls was in the middle of saying. "She was in hair commercials, she was so beautiful. And now she"s in an insane asylum."
"Go figure."
Janice"s eyelids were coated in tragic skid marks of one-dollar eyeliner and red eye shadow she stole from the mall. She licked her finger and used her saliva to smudge her eyeliner into one smooth line.
"I know a guy whose cousin went to an inst.i.tution after he tried to commit suicide," Janice said. "Cost the guy"s parents twenty thousand a year, which doesn"t include the food in the dining hall. And after three years, he was still f.u.c.ked-up, running around in Santa pajamas, talking about t.i.ts and d.i.c.ks and the Apocalypse."
I told Janice I thought it was rude to use words like "t.i.ts" and "d.i.c.ks" to describe the dead or almost-dead.
"Dead or almost-dead, they still have d.i.c.ks, right?" she said. Then, Janice fluffed her hair and asked us about c.l.i.ts and whether I thought hers might be covered in scar tissue-was that why she couldn"t o.r.g.a.s.m anymore with Mr. Basketball? I didn"t know.
"He"s gained, like, ten pounds in the last week," she said. "Maybe that"s why."
I told her maybe we were getting too old to make fun of people just for being fat.
"What I"m too old for is breaking habits," she said, and I worried that this was the only reason we were still friends.
One of the Other Girls announced she was going to ask Mark to the Halloween in Spring.
"You can"t have a date to the Halloween in Spring," I protested. "It"s an after-school dance where we"ll play Spud and suck corn syrup through straws."
"So, you can still have a date," Janice said.
"Yeah," Brittany said. "Exactly."
Janice turned to the Other Girls. She started telling them about the new kind of s.e.x she had been having with Mr. Basketball lately: desk s.e.x. She said that by the end of the year, they were going to have had s.e.x in all the cla.s.srooms. The Other Girls got excited, saying, "If you have s.e.x on my desk, I"ll kill you, Janice." Janice got excited too, and her stories took on the epic quality of a fairy tale, stock characters, predictable endings: of course it"s the middle bowl of porridge, of course the duck is actually a swan, of course Mr. Basketball f.u.c.ks you after school, Janice, of course his p.e.n.i.s is the size of a baseball bat. Of course the baseball bat goes inside you, why else would love hurt so much?
"You"re such a liar!" I screamed. "I want to see you dance with him at the Halloween in Spring."
"Fine," she said, but still wouldn"t look at me. "I will."
18.
At the Halloween in Spring, one of us went dressed as a super-hot kitten. One of us went as the country of France. One of us went as Saran Wrap. One of us went as a banana.
"I can"t believe you came as a banana," one of us said.
"I"m a s.l.u.tty banana," Martha said.
One of us was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Janice was so disappointed.
"Brittany," she said, "jeans are so boring."
Janice thought anyone who didn"t dress up for the Halloween in Spring was a loser who cared too much about being "ridiculous." "I don"t care about being ridiculous!" Janice had cried in the bathroom, wrapping the colored Saran Wrap around her naked chest like a tube top.
As a defense for being costumeless, Brittany held out a bottle of liquor that she stole from her parents.
"Sweet vermouth?" one of us asked. "What is that?"
"Adults put it in martinis," Brittany said, holding the green bottle to her mouth. "It"s really expensive."
One of us pa.s.sed the bottle around, one of us exclaimed, "I can"t believe they drink this," and one of us killed a fly against the wall with a hairpin. This felt like a cleansing.
In the cafeteria, the girls stood on one side of the room and boys on the other. I ate potato chips and sweated hard in my super-hot kitten mask and watched Mr. Basketball by the vending machine flirt with Ms. O"Malley. Another teacher walked over to them, drunk off her flask of vodka that wasn"t as secret as I overheard her telling them it was, and asked who the f.u.c.k the president of England was. "There"s no president of England," Mr. Basketball said. Mr. Basketball and Ms. O"Malley laughed together and I saw myself in the reflection of a vending machine. I looked ridiculous. I wanted to claw my eyes out, rip off my costume.
I watched Mr. Basketball and Ms. O"Malley sip on their Hawaiian Punch martinis out of paper cups, and the other teacher spilled her drink over what a prankster Mr. Basketball was: What do you mean there"s no president of England?
Ms. O"Malley left to bring Janice into the bathroom. "Plastic is not a costume!" she screamed, and tugged her arm.
I walked closer to Mr. Basketball. We stood, not speaking. It felt like a compet.i.tion of who was going to forgive who first, and for what?
"You"re a cat," Mr. Basketball said to me.
"And you"re a clown"s nose," I said.
"That"s me," he said, and touched the red ball at the tip of his nose.
"That"s you?" I asked. "That"s all there is?"