Becky's Kiss (12 page)

The bell rang, and Mr. Marcus got them engaged rather quickly, performing a short read-aloud of the first few pages of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men
,
”
next pointing out the stuff in there similar to the Garden of Eden: the beauty of the forest, the snake in the water, the rude invasion of the human presence. He made them write in their notebooks what he called the “gender contradiction,” as Steinbeck had introduced two guys, George and Lenny, as opposed to a man and a woman. He called this “foreshadowing,” and said he’d give ten bucks to the student who could connect it to what happened later in the text when they got there.

So cool,
Becky thought. She had seen the movie back in Syracuse and knew George was going to kill Lenny in the end. The connection here wasn’t Adam and Eve. It was Cain and Abel. Oh, Mr. Marcus wasn’t just good…he was awesome.

“Paradise,” he said. “What is it really? Can it be defined?” He put the book down on his desk and looked at them all.

“Draw a line in your notebooks, and underneath it, write me a response, from your heart, from your gut. What is your paradise? Don’t worry about grammar, this is a free-write. And don’t stop to adjust for spelling, heck, that’s what spell-checkers are for later. Once cars were invented, we didn’t worry about the condition of the carriage house and the horses inside…c’mon, move!”

He stopped still. Put a finger up and waved it back and forth like an old granny.

“Windshield wiper moment,” he said. That got a laugh. He raised his eyebrows. “Let’s keep it appropriate for the ninth grade classroom, hmm? You can get tropical with a significant other, but I don’t really need to hear the gory details. I think we are all well aware of how all the moving parts work.”

That got a bigger laugh, and everyone, even Tabitha Messersmith, got down to it. Five minutes later, they were told to stop writing, and Marcus had people read their responses out loud. Most of them were those good old fashioned beach get-aways—no work, free food, a lot of “significant others,” without the gory details of course. Some mentioned a specific person, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, Megan Fox, Taylor Laughtner, and a kid named Ted described an endless line of Playboy bunnies.

The girl next to Becky, with the red librarian glasses, stopped waggling her pen to make it look like a piece of spaghetti and said, “The chorus line would make you feel cheap after a while.”

“Not me,” one of the guys said.

“Shut up,” Tabitha Messersmith said back. “She’s right. That’s why we don’t do it in real life, or not often anyway. No one wants to be called a slut.”

“Guys can be sluts and no one cares,” the boy next to her said.

“Pimps rule!” someone said a bit too loud.

“Quiet,” Marcus said. “Let Miss Messersmith continue, please.”

“Yeah, shut up,” she said, eyes narrow. Then, she sat back and bent a paper clip in all sorts of directions, speaking at her fingers as if angry that she wanted to talk, and angrier at herself for being angry. “What I mean is, this whole “significant other” thing doesn’t make sense in the first place. It works for a while, but then you get used to each other…
sick
of each other, just look at our parents.” She dropped the paper clip, glanced up, and ran her fingers down the corners of her lips. “It’s the newness that you love, not the person. And here, when the sick-o, endless line of perfect bimbos gets old, you’ll want the girl or boy next door. When that gets stale, you’ll want someone from a foreign country. When that becomes habit, you want something else.”

“But that’s the point,” Cody Hatcher said. “In the endless line, it’s a different babe every time. And they don’t get old. It’s a magic line. That’s why our parents get sick of each other. They get old and wrinkled and broken down.”

“You
miss
the point!” Joey Chen said, Chinese accent thickening along with his emotion. “Old doesn’t mean old here. It means mundane, expected, status quo.”

Hatcher squinted his eyes and took on an exaggerated, mock accent.

“Sorry…no speakie Engie.”

“You understand me fine,” Joey said. “And next time I shove an eraser up your throat!”

“Enough, both of you,” Marcus said. “Besides having this junior moment when it looks like you two can’t play in the same sandbox, this is impressive. I like the idea that “new,” or rather “different,” is what we desire.” He started walking back and forth before them, and it seemed they were in college, or being addressed by a famous politician. “’Of Mice and Men’
isn’t about men and women. The only female is this tramp no one wants anything to do with, but that’s not finally the point. George and Lenny want paradise, a place of their own, a home, the original American dream, you’ll see.” He paused. “But that’s not the point either, at least not this morning. In fact, we’re not really talking about Steinbeck anymore, are we?” He looked around the room over his glasses, playing the silence. “So let’s go with this,” he continued. “What you’re all telling me here, is that paradise is itself an illusion, because we change, because we want the new, because we’ll never be satisfied.”

“Yeah,” Tabitha said. “Because once we’re satisfied, it’s over and we’re looking for paradise again. We raise the bar.”

Marcus made a loose fist and put a knuckle against his bottom lip.

“So, we’re tragically wired to deny the here and now, no matter how perfect it may be.” He looked up. “Then is there any such thing as happiness?”

“No,” the girl with the red glasses said.

“But what about love?” Becky said. “Isn’t that paradise?”

“More like hell,” a girl across the room said. People snickered and Mr. Marcus interrupted.

“Love is a different animal altogether, taking many forms, and we’ll look at it more closely when we study ‘Romeo and Juliet’
after Christmas. Stick with the idea we’re unpacking. Can we ever be happy? Is there anything in this life that we confront or engage that, without change, can sustain real pleasure over time?

“There’s got to be,” Becky said.

“What then?”

She tried to think about it deeply, but to tell the truth, she was still kind of burning inside about the way Cody Hatcher had imitated Joey’s accent. She was proud of her new friend for standing up to him, but she hadn’t liked the smiling hatred burning back in Hatcher’s stare. And while it was safe for Joey to say it in front of Mr. Marcus, what was he going to do after class? Maybe Hatcher needed a message, something on his terms, something better to think about than cornering Joey Chen later in some remote corner of the shop area or the boy’s bathroom. She folded her arms and sat back.

“Maybe paradise is competition,” she said, “like the big game that we want to win, that we need to win, that we’ve been dreaming about since the age of five and practicing our whole lives for. And maybe it’s only a true paradise if…if somehow, when we lose, we could have been rooting for the other guy in our hearts all along. Then we’d get a second chance, a magical second try, like the loss never happened at all. And the game would go on forever.”

She looked over at Cody Hatcher, and batted her eyelashes.

“But this isn’t paradise, and there’s no two ways about losing, at least not here at Rutledge. Listen to me, Hatcher. I’m pitching batting practice after school today, and I’m going to strike you out in front of everybody. That is, if you don’t chicken out and say that the mark I put on your face is giving you a headache or something.”

The room erupted.

Marcus got everyone back to order and put them on S.S.R.—Sit down, Shut up and Read—until the bell. Unfortunately, he had to quiet the class multiple times for whispering about the coming confrontation.

By the time Becky got to art, half of that class had heard about it in one form or another.

By lunch time, it had spread through the entire school.

Chapter Fifteen

At first, the hobbled table by the Frederick Douglass poster seemed too crowded for Becky to even think about finding a seat, especially with the extra chairs students had slid over, blocking the main aisle and driving the lunch monitors insane. There were popular kids and nerdy kids, Emo kids and Goth kids, straight-edgers shouting stuff to their old stoner friends, and retro-freaks wearing Pink Floyd and Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts. Around the outer edge were assorted members of the girl’s field hockey team wearing their colors and kilts, and behind them, various student council members, preppies, and upper classmen.

Becky approached, and this time she didn’t have to say, “Excuse me.” They made a path for her, and the parting of the Red Sea came to mind, quickly joining the odd connections Mr. Marcus had hinted at in terms of the Garden of Eden. So who was she supposed to be in the middle of these weird, displaced biblical pop-ups? Mary? Jezebel? The Angel of Death? It was surreal. It was a carnival, and in the middle of it sat Shane, Beth, Jill, Justin, and Fluffy, all looking rather bewildered, while Joey was clearly saving Becky a seat, arm draped protectively over the back of her empty chair. Thank goodness Mr. Ladd came over to break up the party, much to the disappointment of the growing crowd.

They booed and laughed and then they moved on. Becky took her seat, and Mr. Ladd paused for a second to eye the friendship group around the table, one at a time, hard and critical. Then he looked off, hands clasped behind his back, chin raised.

“Give ’em heck today, Michigan.”

He walked off, and they all burst out laughing.

Becky flicked her glance over to where Cody Hatcher had been sitting yesterday, and saw that neither he nor any of his no-mind friends were in the vicinity. It should have relieved her, but it didn’t somehow. After turning the tables on him, English class had been uncomfortable enough, and lunch was a different animal altogether. It would have been nice to know the new boundaries up-front.

Fluffy was shaking his head back and forth, making the pom-pom tassels of his gray knit hat ‘boink’ on his lips.

“You’re going to get brain bruise,” Beth said.

“He already
has
brain bruise,” Shane answered. Fluffy stopped, rolled his eyes in the sockets like marbles, and said, “I got an HD TV because I felt the lack of resolution was hurting my ability to solve cases on ‘Law and Order SVU.’”

“Boo,” Jill said. “Try again.”

He closed his eyes, made a face, and said, “I dreamt I ate a ten-pound marshmallow, and when I woke up, my pillow was gone.”

“Boo,” they all said. “Try again.”

He opened his eyes and crossed them.

“A mama tomato, a papa tomato, and a baby tomato were walking down the road, and the baby lagged behind. The papa tomato went back to him, stepped on him, and said, ‘ketch-up.’”

“Boo!” they said louder, “Try again!”

He made a goofy cross of his hands in front of himself at the wrists, grabbed the pom-pom tassels backward, and looked up at the ceiling.

“A boy went to the desk and said to the librarian, ‘Can I have a cheese steak?’ She said to him, ‘This is the
library.
’ So he goes, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then he whispers, ‘Can I have a cheese steak?”

They all laughed, and Jill gave him a shoulder hug. Then she punched his arm. Becky was playing with a straw.

“Guys,” she said. “You can’t tell my parents about the baseball thing, especially my father.”

“Why?” Shane said.

Suddenly she was afraid she was going to cry. Her shoulders did the quick up-down thing, and Beth bailed her out.

“Because he doesn’t understand her, because he hasn’t a clue about women, because he works too hard, and most of all, he’s a man. Does it matter?” She looked around the table. “Becky says, so that’s good enough. Swear on it. Not a word to the parents, no matter what.”

They all put their hands in.

“Swear,” they all said.

When they withdrew, Becky felt she had to say something. In her head, a clumsy “thanks” formed, but instead, she said, “My parents are a bit off the hook. Just warning you. Don’t let them offend you.”

“No one related to you could ever offend me,” Joey said.

“And all parents are freak-a-zoids,” Jill added. “They just have more practice making it seem normal.”

“No,” Becky said. “They’re…” She frowned. “They’re, well…blunt.” She folded her hands and twirled her thumbs. “They’re—“

“Damaged,” Beth finished.

“Aren’t they all?” Justin added.

“Hear, hear,” Jill said. She raised her carton of one-percent. “And while we’re toasting, here’s to Becky Michigan in the gym this afternoon. To the girl with the rifle connected to her shoulder.”

“To the girl,” they all said, drinks held high.

Becky’s drink, orange juice of course, was raised up with the rest of them. She only wished she shared their confidence in “the girl” who, even to herself of late, seemed a stranger.

Chapter Sixteen

Becky got more and more nervous as the day wore on. She heard there were bets going on, pools, and high odds. She was not the favorite but rather the underdog, the fluke to be exposed. And what if they were right? She was going up against a varsity team, some of them eighteen years old and hunting scholarships, most of whom had been hitting baseballs since they could crawl, and she didn’t know anything about
actually playing
the sport, not really. Statistics were one thing, but actually working all the intricate mechanics of pitching in a competitive situation was a different thing altogether. What exactly
had
she done in the cafeteria? She couldn’t even remember what shoulder came first and which arm went where. It had been all instinct and spunk.

And she’d never thrown to a catcher. She’d also never thrown a
baseball
, thank you very much, and though Horseshoe-Head, Coach Rivers, and Principal McGovern were confident in the similarities and minimal differentials between hardballs and oranges, any fool could see this was a long shot.

And then there was the real issue.

What if her feet got tangled up and she stumbled? What if she stepped on a bat and fell on her bum? What if she tripped over a bucket of hardballs and did a face-plant right there on the gym floor?