Blackbird (6 page)

“Of course,” I said, not sure if I should be nervous or annoyed – or what. “I promise.”

“All right,” she said, taking in a deep breath and squaring her shoulders as if she were about to swim the English Channel or something. “Come on, Carolann, just spit it out.”

“Well,” she said, “first of all” – and she lowered her voice even further – “I’m not Carolann.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I’m not Carolann,” she repeated, slowly, as if that said it all and why wasn’t I catching her drift? She just stared into me for a moment – waiting to see if I was getting it, maybe. Then she said, “I’m Crystal.”

“Crystal.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve changed your name.”

She closed her eyes, pursed her lips, shook her head no, as if suddenly sorry she’d started this conversation. Which was pretty much my feeling at this point.

“Sometimes when you see me, you really
are
seeing me, and sometimes when you see me, you’re really seeing Carolann.”

“What?”

“No, wait, let me try that again. Sometimes,” she said slowly, measuring her words, “when you see Carolann, you really
are
seeing Carolann. And sometimes, when you
think
it’s Carolann, it’s really me. Crystal. See?”

My mouth fell open. I was pretty sure I was beginning to see.

“You’re dickin’ me, right? This is a gag, right?” I knew this was no gag. Both because Carolann never joked that I knew of, and just because – well, I just knew.

“No. No joke.”

“So, you’re talking, like, split personality, right?” Carolann, that is Crystal, nodded. “You’re talking, like, ‘Three Faces of Eve,’ right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re talking, like, your name is Crystal.”

“That’s right.”

“Holy shit.”

I dropped my face into my hands and just looked at her. This was a hot one.

“Then you believe me,” she said.

“Sure.” It never really occurred to me not to believe her.

“Oh, I’m so glad,” she said, smiling broadly. “I knew you’d understand. I’ve always been pretty sure you were” – she looked toward the ceiling, searching for a word – “oh, I dunno – smart.”

“Whoa, wait just a minute here. I said I believe you. I never said I understand. I mean, this is a whole new thing for me. Here I thought you were just moody, and come to find out you’re schizophrenic.”

“I am
not
schizophrenic,” she hissed. I’d obviously stabbed a sore spot. “I am a victim of M.P.S., multiple personality syndrome.

Schizophrenia is an entirely different thing, look it up!”

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. I just hate that word, that’s all.” She sighed a long one. “It’s a long story. Basically –”

And suddenly a strange look crossed her face, as if she were having a dizzy spell. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Carolann wants to talk to you.”

Curiouser and curiouser. I looked around to see if anybody was listening in.

“Hi,” she said as if seeing me for the first time that day.

“Carolann?”

“Uh-huh. Look, you’re not going to blab this all over school, are you? I didn’t want to tell anybody, but
she
just had to tell someone.

You won’t, will you? Blab, I mean.”

“No,” I said, even though I was already dying to tell Efrem everything. “I already told you – I mean, her. God, this is bizarre.”

“All right, then. That’s all I wanted to know. I’ll let Crystal back out now.” And she did that little dizzy thing again.

“We’re back,” she said.

“You were right. This is definitely weird.”

“I know. But you can handle it. I know you can.” She smiled a strange, equivocal sort of smile. “Anyway, I was about to explain.”

And so she did. And what it boiled down to was this: Carolann’s mother – her real mother, that is, she lives with foster parents now – her mother was deeply disturbed psychologically. Truly one step beyond. And she used to do incredibly cruel things to Carolann when she was just a tiny little girl. Beatings. Not spankings or even belt-whippings like Dad used to give me, but real beatings that left little Carolann black-and-blue and wondering what she could possibly have done to deserve all this. I could hardly believe it when Crystal told me about it. That anybody could be like that to a small, helpless child, especially their own. It’s things like that that stopped me believing in God – but that’s a whole other subject.

Anyway, Carolann’s mother did all manner of terrible things to her. Locked her in closets for days at a time. Hung her upside down from the ceiling. So all of this left little Carolann so completely screwed up that her personality split. As an escape, her doctor says.

In the wild hope that if her mother didn’t like her as she was, maybe she’d be better off as somebody else.

“There were six of us for a while there,” she said.

“Six?”

“Uh-huh. Let’s see, there was me and Carolann and three other girls – Caroline, Anne, and I forgot the other one’s name; she wasn’t with us for very long. And a little boy named Biff. But he wasn’t around long, either.”

“So there’s just the two of you now?”

“Right. And Seymour, our doctor, he says soon it’ll just be one of me again.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Who what?”

“Who’s it gonna be? When you’re just one person, I mean.”

“Oh.” She laughed a little. “Well, it’s probably gonna be sort of a mixture of Carolann and me. But I’m trying to convince her to take my name. Crystal. Crystal Blue.”

She studied my face for a moment. It must have been interesting reading at that point.

“You don’t think I’m total Twilight Zone, do you?”

“I –” I wasn’t quite sure what I thought just yet.

“I knew you didn’t. I knew you were the right person to tell.

Carolann wasn’t sure, but I knew.”

“Crystal?” I was sort of trying the name on for size. “How do I know which is which?”

“Well, that might be a little rough at first. I mean, we
are
sharing the same body, after all. But we’re really different. We dress different.

Like Carolann never wears jeans, and she likes those lacy pinafore sort of things that I wouldn’t be caught dead in. And, well, we’re just different, that’s all. Once you’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s two of us, you’ll start to notice things.”

I just sat for a minute, letting some of this stuff digest, before asking, “Whatever became of your mother?”

“She’s dead,” Crystal said, very quickly and evenly. “She hung herself in a closet a couple of years ago. She was between mental institutions at the time.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

She smiled with one side of her mouth.

“I’m not.”

And I thought, Boy – this is gonna be some week.

Chapter Three

I somehow managed to get through the rest of my morning classes – which, considering just how completely scattered my mind was after talking to Carolann and/or Crystal, was nothing short of miraculous. Lunch was almost as bad, because I was itching to tell Efrem about the whole Carolann thing, and I couldn’t. I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a blabbermouth. So I just sat there on the whitewashed wooden porch of the Drama building, thoughts weaving in and out of my head, with Efrem on one side of me reading Jacqueline Susann and making short work of a pepperbelly (which is a split-open bag of Fritos topped with chili and cheese – they’re all the rage around here) and Cherie firmly attached on my other side, not eating – she was dieting, as usual. Skipper Harris and Paul Brecher were squatting on the other end of the porch, doing this Cheech and Chong routine for the six-thousandth time:

“Hey, man, it’s me! Dave! Lemme in!”

“No, man, Dave’s not here!”

“No, man, it’s Dave!”

And so on. Not my personal idea of high comedy – give me
The
Philadelphia Story
anytime – but Paul and Skipper (and a lot of other kids) obviously think these guys are just the limit, and so they’ve memorized all of Cheech and Chong’s albums, and you can’t get the two of them together without them kicking into one of these stoned-out comedy routines. Either that, or they’ll go on for hours and hours about the Kennedy assassination – John Kennedy, that is – the Warren Commission, and how could Oswald have fired from that angle and the whole enchilada. And, frankly, given the choice, I’d just as soon have Cheech and Chong.

So I’m sitting there trying to eat, thinking about Carolann and watching (if not listening to) Skipper, who’s wearing tennies with no socks, and I’m thinking, God Bless, even his
an
kles are sexy, when suddenly Cherie whispers, “I have to talk to you about something,” in this way that I know means This Is Important.

So I said, “Alone?”

“Uh-huh.”

So we get up and take a little walk behind the Drama bungalow, which is way out on the outskirts of the campus, past the football field – we often refer to it as the Leper Colony.

“I’ve been thinking,” Cherie said.

“What about?”

“I think we should make love.”

“Cherie, I believe we’ve been through this.”

“Would you just hear me out, please?”

“All right.” I stopped walking and we leaned up against the chain-link fence standing between us and the street. “Hearing you out.”

“All right.” Cherie crossed her arms over her bosom and stared straight out as if trying her best not to look at me. “You think you’re gay.”

“Cherie, I’m gay. Really.”

“How do you know?” She turned and cocked her head to one side.

“I like guys, Cherie. I’m pretty sure that’s the first warning sign.”

“But you don’t really know,” she insisted.

“Of course I know, Cherie. I mean, this isn’t something I just thought up this morning, like ‘I think I’ll wear my blue shirt, my white tennies, and oh yeah I think I’ll be gay.’ I know I’m gay, Cherie. All I’m waiting for is to get the hell out of this one-horse town and down to L.A., where I can go do something about it.” I did a big shrug. “I’m gay, Cherie. Honest.”

“Okay,” she said, pointing her chubby forefinger at me, “but you’ve never made love with a guy, have you? You’ve never even made out with a guy, have you?”

“Cherie, I’ve never made love with anybody.”

“Exactly. So how can you be sure?”

“Cherie –” I was trying not to become exasperated. I had a lot on my mind, and this was shaping up into one of the silliest conversations I could remember. “I don’t have to make love with a guy to know that’s what I want. And I don’t have to make love with a girl to know that’s just not for me.”

“I disagree.”

“All right then, disagree.”

Suddenly, she slapped me hard on the arm, probably as hard as she could swing, because it really stung.

“Doggone it, what are you afraid of?” she said, her voice as loud as I’d ever heard it. “Afraid you’ll like it?”

“God Bless America!” I rubbed the place where she’d slapped me. “What’s gotten into you, anyway?”

“I’m sorry.” Her voice softened again. “I love you,” she almost whispered.

“I know.” I took her into my arms and held her for a minute.

How could I be sure, she says. Here I was with a pretty, sweet girl in my arms – a pretty, sweet girl with incredible boobs – and it was about as sexual as my meat-loaf sandwich. I got more excited looking at Skipper’s ankles, for crying out loud.

“I can’t turn my back on you two for a minute, can I?” It was Efrem. “C’mon back,” he said. “I’m lonely.” He smiled that great toothy smile of his and headed toward the bungalow.

I took Cherie’s hand and started after him, but she stopped and held me up.

“I’m supposed to go visit my Aunt Lou Ella in Saugus with my folks this weekend. I’ll tell them I’m not feeling well. We’ll have the whole house to ourselves.”

Her eyes looked so intense. I wondered if she had any idea how sad this was making me. She could have any guy she wanted, and here she was casting her pearls before – well, tossing herself at me this way.

And then I thought: Hey, what’ve I got to lose. I was a virgin, after all. I was pretty damn sure I really was gay, even without ever having touched a guy; but either way, I might just enjoy making love with Cherie. In my way, I did love her.

“Okay.”

She squeezed my hand as we walked back to the bungalow.

Cherie insisted upon massaging my shoulders all through Mr.

Stebner’s class (while she was supposed to be separating subjects and predicates and I was supposed to be correcting sentence diagrams) over Mr. Stebner’s periodic requests that she stop it – which, far from relaxing me, kept me as tense as ever. By the time I got to my own English class, my last class of the day (not counting Drama, which isn’t much of a class), I don’t think I’d ever been so glad to get to the end of a school day in my life. Here I had auditions coming up, I was planning to go to bed with Cherie Baker, and Carolann Compton was really two people. And it was only Monday.

Fortunately, Mr. Galvez had decided on a free-writing hour, something he does once or twice a week, where he brings in a record player and plays records – sometimes his choice, sometimes ours – and we just write. Anything we want. See, English 4 isn’t required, so anybody who takes it is probably planning to major in English in college (like I am) or is at least more interested in the subject than the average. So Mr. Galvez seems to have a lot more respect for us than some of the other teachers do. Like, he doesn’t take roll. And if we don’t want to turn in what we write in free writing, we don’t have to. All in all, Mr. Galvez is about the coolest teacher in the whole school.

Anyway, Mr. Galvez put on
The Joker
– Marcie Vandeventer had brought it in – and he sat and did some work or other at his desk, tapping his feet to the music while we wrote. I could hear his leg braces clicking a sort of counterpoint to the beat. Mr. Galvez had very severe polio as a child, so he has heavy metal braces on both legs. He still walks rather slowly and with what looks like some difficulty. Plus, he’s only about five-foot-two, and wears glasses so thick his eyes look huge. But, you know, he’s just about the cheeriest person I know. Best sense of humor. For instance, if you mention him by name in class, he’ll say, “Please – you are speaking of the man I love.”